Diving Belles (9 page)

A slow, deep voice started to speak over the interview. ‘Visibility moderate or good, occasionally poor,’ it said. ‘Rain and drizzle and then fair.’

The wrecker walked through the kitchen and the voice got even louder. The women’s voices were drowned out completely. ‘Some squally showers,’ the voice said. ‘Wind north-westerly, three or four.’

The static hummed and then roared.

She struggled in her sleep, sinking deeper and then rising back up with a gasp, almost awake. Her sleep was flimsy, broken, as if someone was throwing stones into water. Minutes seemed like hours. Through the wall, the wrecker flailed and hacked up salt.

‘Huh?’ Maddy said. ‘What?’ She turned on to one side and then the other. Russell’s body was too warm so she lifted his arm, rolled away from him and lay at the edge of the bed.

Light from the wrecker’s lamp spilled under the door. Shapes bled into one another, grew. The walls shifted. She could hear noises from downstairs: voices, footsteps, someone laughed, a door opened and closed, outside the window a magnolia tree creaked. The sea rolled over and over.

In the morning, she didn’t know where she was, or, for a second, who she was lying next to.

Another meeting to type. ‘Management,’ Maddy wrote. ‘We’ll go under if this doesn’t work.’ Her eyes felt tired, heavy. Static droned in the background but she carried on typing. She followed the rhythm of the voices, the static washing over her.

After a while, she noticed that the recording had stopped. She took her hands off the keyboard and looked over what she’d written.

‘Viking: visibility moderate to poor. Prevailing winds, moon almost full. Water warming up by degrees. Virgo, Pisces, the little bear. What are they saying on that ship? Two to three, three to four, four to five. Some squally showers. Footprints across the beach. The highest tide in centuries.’

It went on and on for pages. Maddy read it twice then played the recording again. It spoke of tides and empty beaches, of the wind finding ways through solid rock. Maddy could feel herself standing on an empty beach, cold sand under her feet, nothing but water in front of her. She was still listening to it when Russell came in. He put his cool hands on her shoulders. ‘Sea state calm,’ she told him.

Every day, as soon as Russell left for work, Maddy would go into the spare room. The boxes would be open, the wrecker muttering and sifting through them. She would open books, scan the pages, run her finger along pictures and spines swollen with damp.

‘Once upon a time,’ the wrecker would murmur, his voice hollow and mournful.

She would take out paper flowers, board games, hairpins, and lay them out on the carpet in rows. Her mother had collected jars of buttons and Maddy would tip them out and divide them into piles by colour, by shape. She wound and rewound a clock. She took photos out of albums, studied each one, and then carefully slotted them back inside the crinkled plastic. The house aged in each picture – it began to fade, cracks appeared, the roof warped, roots dug themselves into foundations.

She would unfold the threadbare, dusty clothes that she used to dress up in: a crocheted shawl, a fur hat, waders, high heels. She would unwrap jewellery from tissue paper, sort through drill bits and nails. She would look over address books, recipes, newspaper clippings.

The wrecker stacked up lampshades and crockery. ‘Could do with a drink,’ he would say. ‘A lot to get through and the water’s coming.’

Minutes turned into hours. When all the boxes were empty, Maddy would pack them up again, collecting everything together, closing the lids up tight. She would sigh, stay sitting among the boxes. Sand piled up in drifts.

‘False lights,’ the wrecker said, leaning out of the window. He polished his lamp and watched as the sky turned dark blue and other lights appeared, one by one, in the distance. Damp, humid air clamoured around him like birds.

Stones appeared: grey and purple, some with dark veins, some speckled with silver. Pebbles snaked down the hall; there were six smooth stones huddled in the corner of the bathroom, more inside cupboards. Tiny shells came out of the taps and filled the sink.

‘Jesus, Maddy,’ Russell said when he got in from work. He put his bag down and went over to the table. The wrecker had dragged stones across it and there were faint scratches in rings. ‘Why didn’t you stop him? You’ve been here all day.’ He licked his finger and tried to rub out the scratches.

‘I didn’t notice,’ Maddy said. She looked over at the table, at Russell. What was it the wrecker had told her? Something about wading out to sea, listening to crews talking on the trawlers and oil tankers that passed by. He heard them talking in Portuguese, Norwegian.

‘How could you not notice?’ Russell said. ‘He would have dragged them right past you.’ He picked up a stone and dropped it on the floor.

‘It’s not worth anything,’ the wrecker said, glancing at the table. Maddy could hear waves rolling over and seagulls cawing inside his throat.

‘I didn’t notice,’ she said again. She started to get up, to go over to Russell, but there was a heap of stones in her lap. She picked one up; it was cold and fitted perfectly in her hand.

Russell pushed the stones on to the floor. He kicked over the pile of stones in the bathroom. He picked up armfuls of them and took them outside.

Next morning, they were all back in exactly the same places.

‘Prevailing winds, new moon,’ the wrecker said. ‘Temperatures rising.’ Sand heaped under the table and the bed. The damp mark rose on the walls.

‘You should get out of the house,’ Russell told Maddy. ‘When did you last go out?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need to get out.’

‘Another time.’ She sifted through the sand with her fingers.

The news reported that the heat wave could break in the next few days. The wrecker shook his head. ‘More high pressure,’ he said.

No sound from the kitchen. The door was closed. The wrecking light shone faintly underneath and, now and again, it flashed and darkened as the wrecker paced in front of it.

Russell’s favourite film was playing. ‘Sit like this,’ he said to Maddy. He pulled her towards him so she was leaning against his chest. She could feel his heartbeat. It was fluttery and fast and she pressed her ear against it. From there, she could see the water mark on the wall. It had risen again. She needed to watch it, keep a closer eye on it. It always rose the moment she looked away.

Russell shifted on the sofa and kept glancing at the kitchen door. ‘What’s he doing in there?’ he said. ‘I missed that bit. Have they found out where the killer is?’ He leaned forwards, fixed his eyes on the TV. A man was being followed down a dark street. He stopped to light a cigarette. He carried on walking and his footsteps rang out on the pavement. The person behind got closer. He was carrying a gun.

Maybe the damp is rising right now, Maddy thought. She looked over quickly but the line hadn’t moved.

The man with the gun raised his arm.

There was a crash and a sizzling, spitting noise from the kitchen. Acrid smoke swept into the room.

‘Shit,’ Russell said. He jumped up and pulled open the kitchen door.

‘Heat rising and converging,’ the wrecker said. He was hunched over the gas flame holding a charred gull’s feather. Smoke poured off it. The alarm started its piercing wail.

Russell reached forwards and switched off the flame. He opened the window as wide as it would go and fanned the smoke out but it stayed where it was, hovering at waist height. ‘You need to leave,’ he said.

The wrecker stared at the place where the flame had been. ‘The moon has craters and seas,’ he said. ‘Plato, Copernicus, Mare Crisium.’ He smiled slowly.

Russell took a step towards him. ‘You need to leave,’ he said.

The wrecker smiled again. There was a quiet pop and the lights went out. The alarm stopped. The TV went blank. The fridge and freezer shuddered and ground to a halt. Silence spread over the flat. Outside, the street lamps were all still on and there were lights in other windows. The wrecker’s lamp flickered, didn’t cast any shadows.

Maddy leaned against the door frame. She was used to power cuts. They always used to have them. Her parents would get out candles and wind-up torches. The house would be scary at first, all dark spaces to cross and places for things to hide. Once, she heard her parents arguing, maybe she heard a plate hit a wall, but all that was forgotten – the house would glow, creak, rock her to sleep.

The silence deepened and spread. Russell paced in the bedroom. At 3 a.m. the wrecker’s heavy footsteps moved through the flat. He sat on the sofa and the TV and lights clicked on quietly.

The damp mark rose halfway to the ceiling. Water gathered behind the walls, making them buckle like tired knees.

‘This place hasn’t got any weather,’ the wrecker said. ‘Where’s all the mist blowing in? Where’s all the sea mist?’ He looked in the boxes. ‘Where’s all the water?’

Hours passed like minutes and Maddy hardly noticed. ‘Look,’ she said to the wrecker, ‘painted plates.’

He looked at them with his pale eyes. ‘Moon almost full,’ he said, nodding.

The front door opened and Russell came in quietly and went straight into the bedroom. The wardrobe creaked. He went into the bathroom and came back out holding soap and his toothbrush. Maddy watched as he packed up a bag.

‘I can’t put it off,’ Russell said, not meeting her eyes. ‘Mike phoned me at work, asked if I could come and stay. They’ve got the new baby now.’ He put socks in the bag, a torch, a book, a jumper. He packed as if he were nine years old, running away from home for the first time. Her heart felt damp and tired.

‘OK,’ she said. Russell wasn’t allowed to take phone calls at work. The thought came from a long way away; she hardly noticed it. She went into the kitchen and made him a sandwich to take.

‘Thanks,’ Russell said. He packed it carefully. ‘They’ve given me next week off.’

‘OK,’ Maddy said.

‘I’ll ring you,’ Russell told her. He paused halfway through the door, then closed it quietly behind him.

After he had left, she walked slowly around the flat. She touched the walls and the windows and the doors. They were all damp. She left a handprint in the wet window.

‘Full moon,’ the wrecker said. He pointed at the sky. The moon hung there like a floating leaf. ‘Those waves,’ he said. ‘Those tides.’ He stared out of the window. He ran a feather along the sill.

Later, every noise Maddy heard became the front door opening, but it didn’t open. She lay awake. Through the wall, the wrecker drowned again, over and over and over.

The town swayed in the heat. Afternoons turned to dark blue dusk. ‘False lights,’ the wrecker said.

The boxes were packed and unpacked. Tools, saucepans, candles, her father’s old records, scratched and battered. Bird paintings, keys. The waxy smell of potpourri, the mustiness of cushions.

Sometimes the phone rang, but it cut off just before she could get to it.

At night, her old house loomed like a shipwreck. The bare whalebones of the kitchen. Doors and cupboards floated out of the dark. Things shifted – if she walked into one hallway, she ended up in another. They stretched forwards without ending. One stairway became another stairway – front doors switched and opened out on to a porch, a street full of cars, a garden, miles and miles of water.

A bundle of letters. The wrecker rifled through them, the dry pages rustling and then sticking together under his damp fingers. ‘Not worth anything,’ he said. ‘No good.’ He threw them aside, picked up the glass vase, tested its weight and put it on the biggest pile. ‘That bit, not that bit,’ he said, going back over shoes and beads.

Maddy picked the letters up. Her grandmother’s writing, her cousin’s. The pages were brown and thin, well-thumbed. Slotted in the middle, almost hidden, were different letters, typed, addressed to her mother. Maddy read them over. She read them again. She put them back in the box.

The wrecker paced around the flat. ‘Cumulus and cirrus,’ he said. He started to swing his lamp in the window, slowly, for hours.

Another dream: her old house floated upwards on currents of air like a bird. Bricks and stone piled up and then toppled and crashed down and she woke up expecting to see bricks all around her.

The carpet in the hall was soaking. Her feet sunk in and left dents that slowly filled, as if it were a mire or quicksand. Water pooled in the doorway of the spare bedroom. The door frame dripped. The boxes looked darker, their sides bulged and warped.

The wrecker was pacing around the room. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘Where’s all the water?’

Maddy opened the lids and wet cardboard tore off in her hand. The smell of wet cardboard. The smell of wet paper and wool. She looked inside the boxes. They were full of sand and water. Paper was soaked through and torn. Keys had rusted. Sand had worked its way behind the glass of clocks and packed itself into jars. A box gave way and split and water spilled over her feet.