Fen (5 page)

Why you wet? someone said. Kitty switched off the shower.

Williams dropped in the bunting.

There was a joke at that but Kitty didn't hear much of it, only laughed when the rest of them did. She was thinking on the night before. All day she'd thought of it, seeing the words pulsing out from people's lips and not quite getting them; stood for a good twenty seconds at the chips-or-mash question in the lunch queue.

Kitty thought her mother should understand that you couldn't have a fifteen-year-old daughter when you were thirty-one without everybody knowing you'd been one of
those girls who gave it away fast as a hot potato. And you couldn't expect either, Kitty thought, your daughter not to get old enough to do the maths. All the same, it hadn't meant much until she came back early from school the day before, came in quietly, and heard the sound breaking across everything. She turned on the television, the radio, made the microwave buzz twice reheating curry, let the kettle build up a steam. Still: he came down first. Came right into the kitchen and swung the fridge wide before he saw her at the table.

Shit, he said.

Hi, she said. Hello.

Hi, he said. Hello. Hello.

He was greying in the stubble across his face, his eyebrows and the hair triangled at his bare chest, but his head was dark; like a badger, though he was thin, thinner than her mother.

I'm your mother's friend, he said. Holding the side of the fridge.

OK.

We used to live together.

Right.

We lived on a canal boat.

OK.

He left the fridge and went out and she could hear him calling up the stairs. Isabel, Isabel. Isabel.

It had hung over her all that day. Hung over her enough that when the boy none of them knew poked his head
round the corner of the changing-room door, seeing Harriet pretty much without anything on, and let out a low whistle before retreating, it meant more than it ever should have.

She didn't know who he was or care much. Only that nothing could mean nothing that day; the French teacher dropping a cup and breaking it, the hair Kitty found in her mashed potato, the words that came out instead of other words; the writing that was left on the whiteboard.

Mrs Williams came into the changing room and started to yell. Now and then the lights flickered off and then back on again, the girls frozen in the dark to wait, swearing and coughing. Kitty imagined the lights above the pool turned high enough to sap electricity from the whole town.

They lined up in order. She could smell the changing rooms, dank and overused, the chlorine and the sweat under her arms. The others put on their caps, jostled and pushed and laughed. The lights dimmed, dipped, went out again. Between the benches there were slips of nothing space, dimness. When the lights came back on she was certain she saw a shape move, shifting behind the lockers – turned; nothing.

At the head of the line Mrs Williams waved her arms, half salute, half orchestration. When they went out Kitty's mother was there, hands tucked into her armpits, chin lowered. Behind her, almost a silhouette, was the boy
from the changing room. He looked the right age to go to their school, looked like he could be good at maths or English and be awkward at school discos. He looked, also, like he could go to the all-boys' school one town along, share a dormitory with five others and hitch-hike to town, make older boys buy him beer. He looked like he could do all those things or like he did none and never had. Seeing her looking, he moved an eyebrow upwards; she was not certain what that meant.

Her race was last. She rounded her toes over the edge, swung her arms. She barely saw the others diving off, knew, even then, what she would do – a sort of answer to the badger-haired man in the kitchen, or a sort of question to the calculations that amounted from her age against her mother's. Or maybe just to do something, just to do anything. Like those older girls in the changing room who said studiously: I only ever date to fill the time.

She was thinking on it hard enough she came near the back though any other time she would have won and any other time she would have cared on losing. She pulled herself out, felt the water coming off in a sheet and moved her head up. Her mother was there, staring at her.

There's a party, Kitty said to her, moving her eyes over the ridge of her shoulder at the boy. I'll see you at home.

She expected her mother to argue. Where's your towel? she said instead.

In the changing room Kitty drew out dressing, talked enough that a sock took ten minutes and most everybody
was gone by the time she was ready. Took a book to the toilet and sat with her feet resting on the bin. Sat till the lights were turned off.

When she went out he was there. Sat on a bench, hands hanging down, looking at her. It was easy to hunker down and fill that space between his knees with her body like she knew what she was doing.

Was there something other than hair and eye colour that you got from your parents? The shape of his face inclining down her, over her stomach, down her. Was there something more than a way of thinking and walking, a certain accent and easily angering, the type of tea she had, the amount of sugar? Was there repetition also in events, so that things swung round twice and you barely noticed them until, years later, you heard your story spoken through someone else's mouth?

The feel of someone other than her down there was surprising. Not knowing it was his tongue until she felt his hands higher up. Wondering, not having time to feel any horror at the thought, if this was how it was for her mother; on the floor of a changing room still slick from the showers, still half in clothes, still half out of any realisation of being there. As if somehow her growing from that moment had grown the moment into her so she could never have been anywhere, other than there. And then the terrible thought that her mother must know what was happening; the cord which trailed through events, spanning time zones, spanning both ways, must be pulling tight.

He was coming back up her body.

You got a condom?

No, she said.

He shrugged. S'okay.

The unlit pool was dark enough you could not tell ground from water and she heard him going in before she'd felt her way to the edge of it. There was an ache at the base of her, a pressing in.

Come on, he said from somewhere.

She bent her knees, fell forwards, closed her eyes. Held her breath for as long as she could, moving her arms beneath the water, frogging her legs out to either side. Waiting for the heated beat in her chest and then pressing her toes flat to the floor and shrugging up.

His slipstream passed under her, fingers leaving a stream of their own across her calves. Then gone. She swam on. He moved under again a moment later, willowing up this time so she felt the entirety of him against her, seal-like, hands making their own way.

I think this is how my mum lost it, she said before she could stop herself, unnerved by how he felt: made more of water than anything else.

He didn't say anything for a moment, then: In a pool?

Yeah. Maybe.

She told you?

No.

His hands were working beneath the water, strict with purpose, his breath very even.

She lived on a canal boat for a bit.

Cool.

It was cold and mouldy and she wouldn't do it again if you paid her, she said. Then she had me.

He didn't say anything.

There were slugs, she said.

The side of the pool against her back was cold, sudden and hard: she grated the skin off and opened her mouth in pain long enough for him to slide a finger in. She thought then, catching it accidently or on purpose between her teeth, that he must be able to see her. That only she was mole-blind in the dark and grasping. He put his hands beneath her thighs and lifted her. She was more than half out of the water, skin rough with cold, his mouth on her, a growing pressure in his hands.

You ready? he said, sliding her down.

She pushed him with both hands, one on his head to better force him, felt him dip beneath the water and, as he did, she rose above him, grasped backwards. His hand held onto her leg for a moment and then was gone. She pulled herself out; the breath as he swam away from her, whistling disappointment or goodbye.

She walked home along the dark road, tracing through the pattern of what would have happened, of what could have happened: the press of him against her, his breathing giving nothing away and nothing away till there was nothing to give. The imaginings of what her mother had done: the canal boat frozen hard to the riverbank, the
baby growing and growing: her. She pictured him: the badger-haired man, darkening backwards till he was young, too young to have a baby though there it was, swelling beneath his hands.

Ahead there is a red seed of light, sharp enough to cut through to her. She is uncertain what it is.

Some days they were on the roof till dark, sat in stolen deckchairs, talking about where they would go when they got the motor working. Finn trooped to town for Cornettos, Isabel raised her top to show the white strain of stomach to the weak glazed sun, watched the kohl eyes of swans on the opposite bank, the low skim of willows.

They would take the canal boat to Africa, watch its nose dip-diving sea waves, be unrecognisable by the time they got there, wood-brown skin, hair salted white. Always, in Isabel's imaginings, the baby was with them, a sea cub, a traveller forming a lingo all its own. There wasn't room on the boat for more than a few books but they'd swap them at docks and the baby would puzzle them out, quote them, grow a language only they understood. They would not need anyone else. The baby would be expert at slitting fish so the skeletons fell out fully formed; understand the seasons from a finger to the knuckle in the river; know the tunnels whales took.

Then there were nights she woke and felt the thrum of cold beating through the base of the
Marie Cardona
. Finn curled close for warmth, one hand held against the moonrise of her stomach. In those moments he was barely more than a baby himself: quiet sleeper, breathing content, smooth skinned. She lay there, tallying up what he'd left behind.

Some days she woke to him gone. Stoked the fire. Sat in front of it until it chugged enough heat to bring her body back to her. She would not go up to see if she could sight him. He could leave if he wanted, would come back if he needed.

Later there would be the sound of someone on the towpath, the extension of his body as he came down the green-painted steps towards her, grin saying he knew she'd been waiting.

Where you been?

He wouldn't answer; only flexed his fingers onto the globe of her stomach, murmured words Isabel could not hear, as if he and the foetus had some secret they were growing.

Get off, you. She'd nudge him off balance with the ball of her foot, laugh as he fell, extravagantly.

She would and must forgive him anything because he was there. Waking her some days with the lighting of the fire, scrambling eggs in the one burnt pan they had, filling the silence. Once he came back with a bagful of books. Once, when she said she was craving meat, they ate
chicken for a week, and though the sell-by dates told her where he was getting them, she said nothing.

She tried to think of them both sprung fully formed from the walls of the boat: but she sometimes thought of Finn at school. Pitched in with a group of boys. Clever, front of class, arm raised lazily as if offering a favour. Pitching out quotes he'd spent all night learning. He could get marks better than most without much trying. But he did try.

She'd not noticed him much until after the baby was inside her and then she watched him reading, saying phrases out loud to impress her; eating enough for two at lunch and then running it off like a terrier round the field.

She knew what he wanted, though he only ever asked without knowing: the rise of his penis against her leg as he slept, possessive pronouns he used without consideration, his coming there at all. Some days she saw how careful he was, how little he touched her, how he turned away when she undressed or joked forcibly about masturbation or girls at school.

The first time they talked about baby names he said he thought it wouldn't be human when it came and they should take that into consideration.

What? she said, cupping her stomach. What the fuck does that mean?

Finn said he imagined instead, thinking on it, a tiger cub or baby bird or half something and half something else.

Half what and half what? She was more suspicious and aggressive than she meant, as if she thought his words had some sort of power to bring it on. He shrugged, tried her out on homemade beasts for a while until he ran out of animals to mix: horse and squirrel, hamster and eagle, wolf and whale.

She knew what he was saying – that, though they never had, he could not imagine her having sex with anyone other than him. Her not telling him who the foetus's father was only proved to him she never had. She could never be certain how badly he thought these things, how seriously he imagined her that way; virginally surprised on waking to find a swollen stomach, the kick of hoof or paw against her hand.

When winter came she watched their imaginings pick up force, saw how they ballooned up to fill the low-roofed cabin. The baby was coming a fox, mudded brown to start and then reddening out like a firecracker. Wild enough to give them the slip at ports and come home just at the hour of leaving. Kind enough to come with presents tied beneath its chest, swinging round its neck: Moroccan candle-holders, long sticks of incense, bags of spice, live chickens to supply everyday omelettes. Clever enough to sit up with them on quiet sea evenings and debate the spans of evolution, snout narrowing in thought, claw-sharpened fingers tapping.

They would fish on their journey; that's how they would fill their days. Or no, he said, rather they would hunt
whales, beach the great bodies onto stony shores, strip their insides, oil the boat with blubber to keep out the cold, make coats from the tough skin, use everything there was and sell nothing, only chip bowls from teeth; make whale soup, whale stews, use tail fins as kitchen shelves.