My lungs shriek as I’m pulled under, so heavy, the hagstones and the dress and the mud dragging me down, down. A trail of silvery bubbles leave my mouth and race to the surface of the water just over my head, a night sky full of orange flames. Flares of lightning illuminate the rushes which crowd the bank and hide me from view. My eyes are wide, the flower crown drifting away and floating on the surface like a marker, a buoy. Here lies Mina Ellis, she could not swim. My lungs squeeze and protest as I struggle to free myself from the necklaces and the bindings of the Riddance dress but Bert has tied the knot so tightly my fingers cannot dig beneath it. He has condemned me after all, struggling under the water as sediment rises like great dust clouds around me. I think of Eddie, of Sam. I think, too, of Alice and Vicky and poor Mary, of Simon Pascoe being lifted from the quarry. My lungs are screaming but I’m peaceful, the water bright and cool. Eventually my bones will soften and dissolve into the mud, stirred up by future winds and sticks in children’s hands, the shimmering tails of fish.
FORTY-ONE
The pain is rich and seething, rolling like an undertow. Something is broken inside me. I feel it as I flex my fingers; the roar behind my ribs, lungs crackling like a torn paper bag. My tongue is so swollen that I can’t swallow. There is a hospital smell, bleach and cleaning fluid. It’s clinical, as am I. The needle, the cannula. I sleep. When I wake, there is a hand on my arm, and a voice I recognize says quietly,“Hullo, Mina.”
“Am I dead?” I croak.
She laughs.
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing.”
I have burned a hole in my memories so vast that light has not been able to get in. For a long time the memory of Eddie has been hidden down there, not dormant but growing and swelling like mushrooms in the dark. Fern gives me a tentative smile.
FORTY-TWO
“First things first, you’re in hospital. Good news, huh?”
She holds her hand out to me; the skin of her arm embossed with that network of old scars, a road map in braille. Her skin is warm and soft. She is alive, and that means that by extension, I am, too.Alive.I blink slowly as she pours a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table.
“How long have I been here?”
Owong ave I binere?
“This is day six. You want the headlines?”
I nod. Fern holds the cup to my lips so I can take a sip of water. It tastes stale and warm and plastic, and it is so good she has to stop me gulping the whole lot down.
“Ah-ah,” she says, “you’ll be sick. How’s your tongue?”
“Sore.” I can feel it in my mouth, huge and puffy, throbbing in time with my pulse.
“Well, the good news is that Bert didn’t manage to pull it all the way out. He just tore it. It’ll heal, although you may lose a bit of sensation. He did, however, do some major tissue damage to your throat and he dislocated your poor jaw.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I read your notes, Mina.” She gives me a small, mischievous smile.
“What happened to Bert?”
“First, let’s talk about what happened toyou.You think you’re ready for that?”
I nod.
“You sank. I thought you had to be dead. It was Sam who pulled you out. He waded right in once he realized what was going on, and he lifted you and carried you to the shore like the Swamp Thing. You looked like a fucked-up Ophelia. Your eyes were wide open but you weren’t seeing anything. I thought you were a goner, for sure. Sam checked you for a pulse and when he couldn’t find one he started doing CPR. They reckon that’s what saved your life. He kept you going till the paramedics took over.”
Her eyes are shimmering.
“You were clinically dead. Do you remember anything?”
I shake my head as much as the pain will allow. I remember the pond, the dark water, surface slightly ruffled by the building storm. Everything after that is a blank.
Is it, Mina?
Something stutters, like a short circuit in my brain. A handclap, there and gone in a moment. Eddie, smiling that goofy grinhe did when he knew he was making me laugh. No ice, no oxygen masks hanging from bed frames. No cold, no rain. A warm patch of sunlight and the huge beanbags we had in the attic that smelled musty and old. An open book on his lap,Mysteries of the British Isles,dust motes in his hair.
Eddie had been there.