Diving Belles (21 page)

‘Of course I’m going to do it,’ Tessa said, hurt. ‘Of course I am.’

June couldn’t get her watch off so Tessa unclasped it for her and put it in the bag. June unbuttoned her cardigan and unzipped her skirt. She took off her scarf, slowly, and Tessa glimpsed the scar on her neck, which was small and pale and curved like a mouth.

Tessa took off her underwear quickly and stuffed it in the bag. There. Her mother peeled hers off like it was an old, painful plaster. They didn’t speak. Tessa walked forwards towards the sea.

Suddenly, there was a figure walking in their direction. Tessa clutched her mother’s arm and they walked backwards fast until they got to the first low line of rocks and crouched there, naked and hiding. It was definitely a person, although it might have been a stone jutting out from the water.

June was kneeling, one arm flung across her chest. Her skin looked pale and fragile. Tessa could see the veins in her arms and the veins at the tops of her breasts like faded threads. Her stomach drooped a little and Tessa could see the shape of her ribs. The skin on her shoulders was puckered and sprinkled with freckles. She had lost weight; it seemed to have fallen away from her like a cliff eroding.

They were both crouching as low as they could behind the rock. ‘This is terrible,’ June whispered.

Tessa nodded. There was sand all over her – in the shells of her ears, in between each toe. In fact, it was wonderful. Most of the clouds had been blown away and there were the stars. ‘I think we’re OK now,’ she said.

June waited a while, then slowly got up, rubbing at her knees and palms, which were stippled with sand indents. Tessa had thought that, at night, their bodies would become dark and secret and shadowy, that they would blend into the darkness, but here they both were, pale and glowing like beacons.

The sea was not a flat piece of cloth any more. It was a breathing thing: all legs and arms and lungs. It grabbed at pebbles and fumbled through them, dragging them back. The sand leading up to the sea was thick and wet, more like clay than sand. Each of their steps sank down an inch and then filled with water, as if they had never been there at all.

It was colder this close to the water. Every bit of Tessa’s skin was crying out for her to turn back, to run away to the warmth of the car. She took a deep breath and walked into the sea. Freezing water sloshed round her ankles and up to her knees. She walked in deeper. She had heard it was best once you were in up to your belly, when you started to go numb. She could hear her mother walking in behind her – she heard her make a groaning noise as seaweed wrapped around her legs.

Tessa was getting used to the cold. Small waves slapped into her chest and arms. She waded forwards and soon she was up to her shoulders. She ducked under and swam. Her face was streaming and her hair had turned into a black, slippery rope. Her body sliced easily and lightly through the water.

She resurfaced after a wave and stared across the sea. For a few moments, she had completely forgotten about her mother. Tessa had drifted quite far out and June wasn’t anywhere near by. The wind was picking up and lifting the sea into sharp peaks. She scanned the surface until she saw her mother struggling against the waves. She wasn’t in deep water, but she was flailing around as if she couldn’t keep her feet anchored down. She fell and her bottom rose up like a jellyfish. Tessa swam back until she could wade. She caught June and lifted her so that she was standing.

‘It turns out I can’t swim very well,’ June said, not really looking at her. Her voice was thin and husky. Water bubbled out of her nose and mouth. They were both goosebumped all over. Tessa held her mother’s trembling body upright. Wave after wave swept in, still small, but the force of them kept knocking June backwards. ‘I don’t think it will work, will it?’ she said. The sea had washed off her make-up and it looked like the bones in her face were fighting their way to the surface. ‘I haven’t done it properly, have I?’

Tessa looked down at her mother’s wet face. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She supported her mother’s body and started half walking, half floating her forwards. The water took most of her weight. June shut her eyes and gripped Tessa’s arm as each wave buffeted in. They got into deeper water and then stopped. She clung tighter, but tried to lean forwards. A wave hit her and she spluttered and coughed and hacked up salt. Her arms chopped weakly at the surface. Tessa helped her mother move through the water. Her small body felt weightless, untethered, and Tessa clung to it and held her up and didn’t let go.

Blue Moon

I got down on my hands and knees and snatched at Mrs Tivoli, but she darted under the bookcase and cowered there, pressing her quivering haunches against the wall. Her eyes rolled and she let out a yelping scream that cut into the room and sent tight, cold waves running up and down my skin. ‘Come on, Mrs Tivoli. It’s all right. Just relax.’ She pressed in harder and her fur rasped against the plaster. I looked around and saw that the bedroom door was slightly ajar. You could still hear the faint, slow footsteps of her visitor going down the three flights of stairs towards reception. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, trying to be soothing. ‘You just stay right under there, Mrs Tivoli. Right under there. I’m just going to sit here and wait.’ Then I launched myself towards the door and clicked it shut. Just in time, too, because she was already mid-run at it – her long, muscular legs pushing hard against the floor. She stopped, looked wildly around the room then rubbed over her ear with a shuddering hind leg. I leaned back, trying to think about my next move.

There’s a detailed procedure for handling events of this kind but I have to admit that, at the time, it flew right out of my head. The only step I remembered was to seal off all doors and windows. It’s policy for staff to log all transformations, noting events leading up to the change, possible causes, length of time in metamorphosis – the extra admin is a drag but what job isn’t swamped in bureaucracy these days? This was the first time I’d seen Mrs Tivoli change into a hare, though, and the logbook doesn’t have any entries for her. Some of the other residents do it if the kitchen runs out of ketchup or they miss their favourite programme on the telly, but Mrs Tivoli wasn’t like that. She was usually so composed, so self-contained, as if nothing could faze her at all.

Blue Moon Nursing Home opened just over four years ago. It was the first of its kind, set up to cater for the demographic banned from regular establishments. When news of it went round there was a flurry of applications from all over the world. We got enquiries from Fiji, Cuba, and the Ural Mountains. Locals got priority, though; it paid to be in the right catchment area. We were full from the first day, with a waiting list that could have filled it again three times over. It’s a brand-new place with all the mod cons. Research showed that buildings with a history could have a detrimental effect: residents can be sensitive to lingering voices, emotions and events that embed themselves in walls. The fresh paint, MDF and the rubbery smell of new carpets seem to have a calming effect. It’s one of the reasons they want to come here.

As with any new establishment, it took a while for everyone to get settled. At first, the place was chaos – you couldn’t serve tea without someone turning it into blood or oil, and they were always in and out of each other’s rooms stealing wax and recipes. We kept finding them down at the harbour trying to sell the wind to fishermen in lengths of knotted rope. Our vacuum bags filled up with soil, twigs and fingernails. It was a nightmare cleaning out whatever they’d been mixing in their baths; bleach wouldn’t touch it. We’d scrub for hours, the stuff corroding away six pairs of rubber gloves, hearing faint shrieks coming from the smears.

Although most residents came here planning to retire, they didn’t seem to know how. In the first few months the home was full of anxious or bereaved locals wandering around looking for help and burying scraps of old beef in the garden. We had to curb practising hours to Thursday afternoons and patrol the kitchen to stop anyone filching potatoes and salt. There weren’t clear enough regulations about familiars either and none of us knew what to do with them, so they tore around the corridors and fought each other for territory. After that it was keep it in your room or lose it and mostly they stick to the rules.

I’m on reception but I do a bit of everything: cleaning, food prep, general care. Residents hardly ever get ill, which is one of the perks. I lock up after my evening shifts and make sure everything’s secure. It’s a comforting final task, going round re-enabling the smoke alarms and checking the fire escapes. Most of the time the work here is easy – everyone gets into a routine. The salary makes up for the difficult bits: finding dead men’s hands festering at the backs of cupboards; the smell of fox and badger shit lingering in your throat. People at my old place thought I was mad when I applied here but now most of them are kicking themselves that they didn’t do it when they had the chance.

Reception’s usually quiet except for Thursdays, when I book in their appointments, but even that’s slowing down now. Some have their regulars but people tend to forget about them once they’ve been in here a while. Personal visits are rare. I’d say on average most of them are visited about twice a year, usually by a grateful local, an old neighbour or a nervous relative. When somebody gets a visit pencilled into the book you can feel the jealousy oozing under the doors and soaking into the carpets.

Mrs Tivoli moved into 3B just over a year ago with her catfish, Maria. She insists on being called ‘Mrs’ even though there’s no evidence of a husband and she never talks about one. Still, all the residents have their quirks. I’m inclined to believe it’s because it made her feel less lonely; we’ve all got to deal with it one way or another, but who knows? It’s not our job to go asking questions. Her eyes skip between dark brown, green and grey. She’s short, shorter than me even and I’m no willow. Her silver earrings are longer than her hair, which is thick and bobbed and a deep chestnut colour. She looks about thirty-eight but I’d swear to all sorts of gods that she was at least seventy. Applicants have to state their age before they come to Blue Moon but I’ve always said it’s a waste of time – they don’t have a clue so they just guess. None of them have any official documents. They just keep themselves in as good shape as their powers allow. The girls in the kitchen joke that it’s all right for the residents, they can fix themselves up without touching dye or surgery. Yet, despite what they look like, their bodies and minds are giving in to most of the usual symptoms of old age. At first it’s unnerving, seeing healthy-looking people lowering themselves gingerly into chairs, clutching at banisters and forgetting words and faces, but you get used to it. Mrs Tivoli had a nasty fall which broke her hip just before she moved in and now her legs are trembly and uncertain; she walks with a stick and drops off in her chair after lunch with her head nodding into her cleavage.

She seemed to take some sort of a shine to me right from the start. We do the crossword together during my tea breaks and sometimes she lets me scatter Maria’s colourful food pellets into the water. If I get a bout of thrush she clears it up for me no problem. The staff handbook advises not to get close to residents. It says that they can easily use you, manipulate you, but most of us think that’s a load of rubbish – half of them don’t even know where they are. Mrs Tivoli barely leaves her room. She still has her old things scattered round – a hand mirror made of thick, black glass, a string of wrinkled conkers, lumps of clay going dry at the edges – but they’re slowly getting covered over with other things: marzipan wrappers, glossy magazines, TV remotes and biscuit tins.

A couple of months back, I was tidying her bedroom while she was down at breakfast when I noticed one of the drawers under her wardrobe was open. We don’t go in residents’ cupboards, we only tidy what’s out, but I thought that I might as well straighten up inside just this once. I suppose I didn’t want to go back down to the desk and the silent telephone, my pad of acrostics. I looked around. Maria was staring right at me from her tank. She’s an odd-looking thing: she doesn’t have scales, just this thick skin covered in mucus. I didn’t even know there were fish without scales. Now that she’s getting older, her whiskers droop against the pebbles and her skin is flaking off in soft scabs that rise to the surface of the tank. Mrs Tivoli scoops them out with a tea strainer and keeps them in a jam jar.

‘I’m just dusting,’ I said to her. ‘Nothing to fret about.’ I opened the drawer out a bit further and Maria thrashed her tail like a mop. Inside, there were rows of bottles bedded down in newspaper: cleaned-out milk bottles, those HP sauce bottles with the slim necks, and small gold-capped ones from baking ingredients like vanilla essence and food colouring. They had white labels stuck to them. I flicked the duster around even though there didn’t seem to be a speck of anything in there. Lots of the labels had dates on them; others said things like ‘St Michael’s graveyard’, ‘R. Tavey’, ‘Withheld information’, ‘Mother’. I’ve picked up plenty of bits and bobs since working here; I could name most of the things that Mrs Tivoli keeps in jars on her shelves – arrowroot, yarrow, mandrake, curled mint – but I didn’t have a clue what was in these. The stuff inside looked grey and feathery, like ash from a bonfire but heavier somehow and more liquid. I glanced back at Maria. She was watching me very carefully. I shut the drawer.

I went back to 3B during my afternoon break. Mrs Tivoli was watching the home-shopping channel. ‘Fifty pounds for that piece of junk?’ she said. ‘That’s robbery, daylight robbery.’ I remember thinking that she’d been looking tired for the past few days; she wasn’t eating very much and I’d caught sight of one or two crinkled grey hairs along her centre parting. ‘Look at this.’ She gestured at the screen. A bronzed man was holding up a plastic mixer. ‘Do you know how much he’s selling that for?’