The Art of Not Breathing (6 page)

My father opens the door as I come up the path, tripping over the weeds, breathless and hot in the face.

“Where have you been?” he yells.

“School,” I say, and squeeze past him into the house.

“Don’t lie to me.”

I try to ignore him, but he pulls me back. His face is taut. There are new creases around his eyes.

“School finished an hour ago. What have you been doing?” He breathes noisily through his nose.

“Nothing. Just walking,” I say. “I’m
allowed
to walk.”

His arm pushes down on my shoulder as he searches my face. “You weren’t at the Point?”

“No,” I say, focusing on a mole on his neck. He doesn’t specifically ask about the harbor.

“Are you sure you’re not taking any drugs? Because if you are—”

“You’re hurting me,” I whine, and wriggle out of his grip.

He looks down the path, confused, and I resist the urge to ask if he’s the one taking drugs.

It’s been months since I last had the dream, maybe even a year. I used to wake up feeling seasick. I would crawl into my parents’ room and slide between them. Mum never asked me what was wrong, but in her sleep she stroked my hair and whispered that I was safe.

When I turned twelve, my father sent me back to my room.

“You’re too old to sleep with us, Elsie,” he said, rising naked from the bed. “Turn the light on if you’re scared, but go back to your room.”

He thought I was afraid of the dark. It never seemed to occur to him that I longed for the dark.

11

ON THURSDAYS MUM GOES TO SEE A THERAPIST CALLED PAUL.
Her appointments are in the afternoon, and she gets back just before we come home from school. We’re not allowed to disturb her. Usually by the time my father gets home from work, she has got up and redone her makeup. Over dinner, she says things like “Oh, silly old me, crying again,” but later, after I’ve gone to bed, I hear her shouting at my father—telling him that he’s insensitive and that he should know by now that she doesn’t mean it when she says she’s okay after a session.

Today, I wait an hour before I take a cup of tea up to her. She is lying splayed out on the bed like a rag doll, holding a scruffy teddy that used to be mine. She doesn’t acknowledge me, so I leave the tea next to her. She never drinks the tea. Usually the mug is still full and cold when I pour it out the window later onto the overgrown garden below. There are a few smashed mugs down there too, and I didn’t put them there.

Dillon and my father are not as patient with Mum as I am. She says that they don’t get as sad about Eddie as she does, although I don’t know if this is true. It could be a bit true. I read in one of her books about coping with grief that the mother always suffers the most because she carried the child. The book didn’t say anything about twins, though. I asked Dillon about this once, and he said that I probably had the strongest bond with Eddie, but he also said it was a bad idea to read books about coping with grief. He said instead of reading, Mum should go to back to work full-time and look after her family properly. She works three days a week as a receptionist at a dental surgery, a job that she discovered while she was at school. Instead of finishing school, she stayed in the job to save up for a pair of knee-high boots. Whenever I ask for pocket money, she tells me that those boots were the last thing she ever bought for herself.

There’s a knack to leaving the house quietly. I have to push the glass into the frame as I open the front door and then push it again from the other side so it doesn’t rattle. No one knows I’ve gone. It’s not a conscious decision to go to the harbor. I start walking, and then my brain fills with thoughts of Tay and the way he smokes—so delicately. If it weren’t for the smoke, you wouldn’t even notice what he was doing. And then I think about the man I saw inside the old clubhouse, and the woman in the silver wetsuit.

It’s dark when I get to the harbor. I climb the steps onto the veranda and they creak. I have to press my face right up to the window to see into the clubhouse. The man with glasses leans on the bar reading a newspaper. His hair’s not quite gray, but it’s light and wispy and the skin on his face is loose. He licks his fingers to turn the pages and pushes his glasses back up his nose every now and again. Eventually he looks up. I duck down under the window ledge, but a second too late.

The door opens. “Freezing out here,” he says, smiling down at me. “Come in if you want.”

“I’m okay here.”

He holds a hand out to pull me up, and I take it because I don’t know what else to do.

“I was making tea.”

He goes behind the bar and pours water from a kettle into two cups. He smiles the whole time and moves his head and shoulders as though he’s listening to some music I can’t hear. The barstool is slippery. I hook my feet around the legs but still feel like I’m sliding off.

“Are you the owner?” I ask him when he passes the tea across.

“I am now,” he says proudly. His teeth are so white, I think he could be a Hollywood actor. “My son and I are going to do it up and turn it into a diving club. It’ll be open to the public—anyone can come in and have something to eat or drink—but we’ll also rent out snorkel and diving gear, run dive trips, and eventually hire out boats. I’ve got big ideas for this wee place. See those boats out there? I’ve bought a few of them—they’re almost rotten, but I’ll replace some of the timber and they’ll be as good as new. We should be ready for business in about a month.”

“Oh,” I say. I stare into my cup at the black tea, wondering if Tay is his son.

“I’m Mick.” He shakes my hand. “What’s your name?” he asks. And then I smile because he doesn’t already know.

“Elsie.” I pronounce it carefully, as though I’m saying it for the first time. I slide myself back on the stool and sit up straight. “Elsie Main.”

“What you doing out here on a Thursday night?” he asks. “Have you lost your friends?”

“I don’t have any friends,” I tell him. “I just have a brother, but I don’t know where he is.”

He tells me he lives in Munlochy. “A quiet wee place.”

Munlochy is a few villages away, back down toward Inverness. That’s where Paul the therapist lives too. There’s nothing there, not even a supermarket.

Behind the bar, there’s a poster of a pale-skinned woman underwater. She’s smiling, and tiny bubbles trail out of the side of her mouth. Her black hair fans out into the water like a silk scarf, and her body is long and curvy in a shiny wetsuit. Her arms are lifted away from her body, like a bird’s wings just before takeoff.

Mick sees what I’m looking at. “That’s Lila Sinclair. She’s the under-twenty-one national freediving champion. Scotland’s deepest girl.” He winks and says quietly, “I taught her myself.”

“She’s pretty,” I say, wishing I had a body like hers.

“It was her in the video you were watching from outside the other day.”

When I don’t reply, he winks at me again. I can’t help but smile. I take a gulp of my tea, and liquid burns my mouth and throat. I know that later the skin on the roof of my mouth will feel rough and I can play with the dangly bits with my tongue.

“Can you swim, Elsie?”

“I used to.” I hope he can’t hear the tremor in my voice.

“If you can swim, then you can dive. The only difference is, you hold your breath and stick your head under.”

The thought makes me feel lightheaded. I thank him for the tea and tell him I have to go.

“Come whenever you want,” he says. “I do a great hot chocolate too.”

As I slide off the stool, I think that I’m not going to make it home without peeing myself. I look around, but I can’t see a sign.

“Erm, is there a toilet here?”

I’m so embarrassed when he takes me behind the bar and through a door that leads to steps down into a storage room.

“We’ve not got the main ones up and working yet,” he says apologetically.

The storage room is cold, and it takes me ages to go. I think about the video of Lila Sinclair, and I feel a mixture of excitement and fear. It’s not that I want to go into the water, but I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be down there and not feel as though I’m drowning. Goose bumps appear on my legs as I sit on the toilet. Maybe I’ll just stay for a hot chocolate to warm up.

When I head back up the stairs, I hear voices and panic that it might be my father. I’m sure he follows me sometimes, because I know he doesn’t trust me. I look to see if there is another way out, but there isn’t. I am doomed. I step through the door, ready to face the music.

There are four boys, all in various states of undress, and Tay is one of them.

“You’ll never beat me!” he says to a boy with extremely curly hair, and then he sees me and goes quiet. His Adam’s apple rises up and down, and he gazes at the floor. His wetsuit is rolled down to his waist, revealing a blue shiny running top, and his feet are bare. He throws a cigarette into his mouth and runs his fingers through his slicked-back wet hair, spraying water everywhere. I wish there were a hole to fall through. I look away from him, and my eyes fall on the tallest boy. He has blond hair like Dillon’s and is bare from the waist up, with muscles so defined, I want to run my fingers over them. He puts a dripping-wet net bag on the table and slaps Mick on the shoulder.

“All right, Dad?”

“This is my son, Danny,” Mick says proudly. “Boys, this is Elsie. Elsie, this is Danny, Rex, Joey, and Tavey.”

“Elsie,” Danny repeats, looking from me to Mick and back to me, suspiciously.

His eyes are strikingly blue, the same color as my mum’s Bombay Sapphire.

“Bit young to be a barmaid, aren’t you?” he asks.

I blush and come out from behind the bar.

“That’s your job,” Mick says to Danny. “There’s a delivery in the storeroom that wants sorting.”

From a shelf behind the bar, Danny grabs a dry T-shirt and slips it over his head. He gives Mick a little head wiggle that I’m sure means “get her out of here.” Then he disappears through the swinging doors. I’ve seen his type before. He’s the kind of guy who thinks he’s better than everyone else. The kind of guy who looks through people like me.

Rex is the one with extremely curly hair. It’s out of control like mine, but his is sandy, not dark. He’s odd looking, with a torso that’s too long for the rest of his body and one arm covered in moles. I can tell he thinks he’s the funny one of the group when he goes to hug me. I duck under his arms. Joey is the smallest out of the four—he also looks like the kindest, with long hair down to his chin, and enormous brown eyes. He’s the only one still wearing his full wetsuit. “Hi,” he says shyly.

Mick puts an arm around Tay.

“Tay’s my best diver,” he says. “He could be Scotland’s deepest boy if he put his mind to it.”

Tay shrugs Mick off and steps forward. “Hello, Elsie. Nice to meet you.”

He’s smirking, like he’s sharing a private joke with someone. My mouth dries out. Even though he’s a few feet away, I feel like I’m right up against him, and I need air. “Excuse me,” I mutter, and push past him and the two other boys to get to the door.

Outside on the veranda, I lick my chapped lips, which are salty from the spray. I wonder if I dreamed our previous meeting in the boathouse. I jump when someone touches me lightly on the shoulder.

“Want one?” Tay is next to me holding a pack of Marlboro Gold. I fumble, trying to grip one of the cigarettes. In the end he takes one and lights it for me. The tiny hairs above his knuckles brush my hand as he passes me the cigarette, and I get goose bumps on my neck.

“I was just leaving,” I manage to say eventually.

“Me too. I’ll walk with you.” He points to the path and walks down the steps and away before I can answer.

“Aren’t you cold? Where are your shoes?” I ask when I catch up with him. I’m almost running to keep up with his long strides.

He looks down at his feet. “Nah, shoes are for losers,” he says. “You give up school yet?”

So I didn’t dream it.

“I’m working on it,” I say, still running, wondering if he’s aware that I can’t keep up.