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The Girl in the Water
The Girl in the Water

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The Girl in the Water

Язык: Английский
Год издания: 2019
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A second later, I’m quite certain, it’s gone.

Libra Rosa is hardly the largest bookshop in our part of the world. Even in a society where they’re fast disappearing, the Bay Area still has its share of some of the greats. Green Apple in San Francisco has branches scattered around the city, some covering multiple storeys and bringing in authors and speakers while cultivating book-sharing and the lovely art of the second-hand. Johnson’s in Berkeley caters to the hip. Iconoclasm in Marin fosters the new age, as do a half-dozen others like it. There’s a little bit of something for everyone. The only thing the shops share in common is the Californian-liberal ideal that they should be nothing at all like the high-octane bookstores of New York and ‘the big cities’. They’re quiet little holes-in-the-wall with small-town vibes and a pace deliberately laid-back to suit the pot-happy lethargy of the NorCal literary culture.

Libra Rosa is, among the mix, pretty standard. A tribute to its location in Santa Rosa – an oversized town just fifty-five miles north of San Francisco and the last opportunity for residence that San Fran careerists can reasonably consider for a daily commute – the shop has been shaped by Mitch into his vision of a perfect, if miniature, out-of-town literary tribute to the old Haight-Ashbury days. Rows of new books, stacks of classics, and a small section for the second-hand, with beanbags in corners, vinyl LPs on the wall and an overall atmosphere of being committed to life in 1965. Most of what we sell can be bought on Amazon, but Mitch has ingratiated himself with enough of the local community that the shop has a decent following who come in dribs and drabs throughout the day, never more than a handful at a time, though the addition of the coffee bar and seating area two years ago upped the daily visits a little.

In one corner of the shop, on the far left as one enters and barely visible from the glass frontage onto the street, is the periodicals section. My terrain. I have a small desk surrounded by rotating racks for the newspapers and fixed shelving for the magazines.

Periodicals are even less viable these days than books, given that almost every smartphone in existence carries their content in full colour and with instant access, but keeping up the periodicals corner is something of a hobby horse for Mitch. ‘It’s called print media, and print requires paper and ink.’ God love the man for more than just his kindness. I’m not a technophobe, and I browse the Net with the best of them. But the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times are just never the same on the screen. You need to be able to hold them, get the ink on your fingers. It’s a life experience not to be dismissed.

So I arrive each morning. I unbundle the packs and boxes, which feels almost like working in a proper, big shop in the city – except that I know the mailman who delivers them is called Bruce, a wooly-haired gentleman who’s been on the downtown route for twenty-six years and who delivers our items ‘promptly at the exact time I get here’, and follows the delivery with a twenty-minute linger over a double black coffee, which doesn’t quite seem full octane to me. Nevertheless, I set the papers into their assigned racks, glancing through the magazines as I place them on the old shelves. It’s a job with a slow pace, deliberately as much as a simple function of location, but with an upside: it allows me to read as I go and catch glimpses of the world’s reporting on life outside.

It usually takes me an hour or two, and then I settle into the routines of maintenance, selling, curating. And simply being present, as a shop without attendants is nothing more than a warehouse. Though a shop without customers is, too, and some days we barely pass that test. So I sit at my small desk, smile as guests enter the shop, answer questions when they have them – which on rare occasion are about books or papers, but more often about their children’s recent sporting success or a vague complaint about the state of politics, or another pothole on Main Street – and spend the many quiet moments between browsing the Internet that still has stories to tell even once I’ve read all the day’s papers through.

I have my own computer for that task, and I have to admit that as much as I cherish paper and ink, I do love this thing. The latest model, thinner than my calculator and an elegantly understated shade of what Apple optimistically calls gold. I can’t say that my previous model, whatever it was, had been all that bad; but I do love a shiny new thing, and the shinier the thing that’s new, the darker the memory of what it’s replaced. God bless Apple for keeping the shiny things coming. If I weren’t happily married and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, hadn’t announced himself as being the other way inclined, I could see myself having an extraordinarily torrid affair with that man.

Pinned to the wall beside my desk is a photo of David and me, taken a year and a half ago near Lake Berryessa, and another of David and Sadie both lying on their backs, bellies up, out in the backyard. Two frozen moments of happiness I keep right at eye level. Tacked around them are notes and posters and all the usual fare of a bookseller’s trade; but right in the centre, right at the core: two manifestations of bliss, and both with furry bellies.

I wrap my hands around my tea. One of the boxes from this morning’s delivery has already been cut open by someone else, and I reach over and grab out a copy of the Chronicle. I have a few minutes before I need to get to my chores. Right now, tea and a paper – a morning crafted for happiness.

And I’m at work.

Life is sometimes truly good.

A sip, and the tea is warm on my tongue. With a jostle of the newsprint page the day’s headlines leer up at me in bold black. Single-phrase proclamations, shouting their way into my attention. Speaking of the weather, the traffic, the political climate. Some of it interesting, most of it routine.

Ordinary.

Normal.

That’s usually how it is, just before the world changes.

3

David

Looking back, staring into the past from all that my present has become, I can honestly say that the world we inhabit is a mystery. I’ve never in all my life had to come more to grips with that fact than now. A mystery, and a puzzle.

I met her on Tuesday morning at 8.25 a.m.; I remember the timing exactly. The contours of my watch’s face, the position of its hands, I remember them in the same way poets remember the flowers on hillsides or the scents in the breeze on the days they experience love. Impossible to forget.

I’d been told a little about her. I was familiar with the kinds of details shared about individuals on a printed page, cutting a lifetime of reality down to basic facts: the length and colour of her hair, her height. Weight, at least approximately. As if these things mattered. Yet they were there to be had, and I had them in hand as I first walked in to meet her. Everything a man could possess to go on.

Except her. The experience of her simply couldn’t be compared to what I’d imagined. Or anything I’d ever experienced before. She was altogether more.

The first thing I noticed were her eyes. I’d never encountered eyes like those. I’ll never forget how they first moved me.

I think she knew, even then, that I saw something in them. That the sight of her captivated me. But, despite their potency, their vivid hue, it wasn’t their colour that captivated me. There are only so many colours eyes can take, and I’ve never found the variations to be all that engaging – whatever she or others might think.

It was their intensity. God, staring into them was like beholding a cry that had been given physical form. Her eyes were her plea, and they seemed to hold, just behind the shine of their lenses, an entire world that was screaming to be set free.

And then we spoke, and reality began to fall apart.

4

Amber

The change today came in an instant. My headache had been getting worse, despite the tea. It was still early, but the throbbing at my temples was becoming more than a mere distraction. It’s like this too often, though, and I’d already swallowed two pills to combat the customary. I’d be a Tylenol addict if they didn’t tell me it would melt my liver into goo, so I’m an ibuprofen addict instead, popping two or three at a time throughout the day, for the little good they do me.

I’d downed them in a single swallow, then set about my morning tasks. They hadn’t taken long, and the papers – which I’d already skimmed through – were now racked and the latest editions of the magazines placed prominently on their shelves. The boxes they’d come in were flattened and out back with the recycling, and I’d managed a handful of sales to the business types who wanted a paper to go with their croissant as they headed off to the office.

And then I was alone. The bliss of the job. I’d opened my laptop at a moment when the ebb and flow of the shop had been mostly flow, and called up a familiar selection of news feeds. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m in this little shop in this little city that makes me so keen on keeping up with the news. It hardly matters to me, most of it, but I read it with diligence.

My headache notwithstanding, I refocused my eyes on the computer screen. Minutes, maybe fifteen or twenty, had passed since I’d started my usual scanning, and thus far the online media wasn’t proving itself much more enticing than the day’s print versions I’d already perused.

The headlines were hardly works of art. I know a lot of effort goes into them by the poor saps whose job it is to dream up one-liners that make the boredom-inducing sound enticing. But effort isn’t always enough to breed interest.

STOCKS TRADE DOWN – BROKERS KEEP HOPES UP.

That, in the journalistic world, is apparently what passes for catchy. The down and the up; directional contrapposto. Whoever wrote that got full marks in Journalism 101.

BART TRAIN DELAYS THROW PASSENGER PATIENCE OFF THE RAILS.

This attempt to convey poignantly uninteresting content about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system under the guise of a catchy tagline – it’s an art. Like a record producer fronting an album with one catchy tune and filling the remaining eleven tracks with artless crap. By the time anyone hears them, the’ve already bought the record. (Though I can hear Tim Cook yelling at me now: ‘No one “buys a record” any more, Amber. It’s all about streaming, about personalized subscription!’ then smiling seductively and somehow charging me another $9.99 a month.)

CRACKS IN BRIDGE DIVIDE COUNTY OFFICIALS.

I’d paused at that one, tapping to see the paragraph-length summary. The concrete of a sixty-year-old bridge outside Napa, in our neighbouring county to the east, was suddenly the cause of ‘grave concern’ amongst the county administration (note the adjective ‘grave’ in a story that might involve tragedy: I read enough to know that’s strong copy), despite the fissure in the concrete having been visible for more than three decades.

I tapped my keyboard again, my waning interest spent.

Then, without any deliberate intention, my glance wandered upwards. A few headlines above the one I’d clicked, less than an inch away from scrolling off the top of the screen, a different caption grabbed me.

I can’t identify precisely how it did it – how it affected me. It was a spark, and it launched a fire in my spine that shot through me like badly wired electrics. Before I’d even taken full account of the words, I could feel the voltage in my head change.

I shoved my tea aside with a jolt, slammed the palm of my hand against the spacebar to stop the feed scrolling off the screen, and glued my eyes to the headline. I was barely aware that I had all but stopped breathing. My eyes didn’t want to focus.

The words were simple and unadorned.

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SHORELINE. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

And there it was, that buzzing at the surface of my scalp again. Electrics. An immediate tension in my chest.

There was nothing in the headline that should have caused such a reaction. It presented none of the witty word play of the other titles (wit, I have often observed, is generally disapproved of in writing about death, since almost nobody successfully navigates the line between banter and respectability). It was unfussy. A simple statement of fact.

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SHORELINE. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

I read it again, and again, and gradually became aware that my spine had gone rigid. I’m sure there was a thin film of sweat between my fingertips and the etched glass of the trackpad.

The noise of the bookshop seemed to have vanished, and if there was anyone left in the store, they had become invisible to my attention. My mind, drawn in by this headline for reasons I couldn’t explain, raced through the limited details that could be inferred from such a minuscule amount of text. ‘Foul play’ means possible homicide. Fine. I mean, horrible, of course; but comprehensible.

But my reaction, it was not comprehensible at all. I blinked, and my eyelids left trails as they rose back into their folds.

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON —

The words grabbed hold of me. Assaulted me. Inexplicably, at that instant, I wanted to scream out from the very depths of my belly.

Isn’t that the very strangest thing?

Then, with the shift of no more than a second, the agony fled. The headline was just a headline, clear and crisp on my screen with a stark lack of factual detail, and I was disinterested and dismissive and —

And it was back, as quickly as it had gone. My breath outpaced my pulse, my eyes clamped closed, and in an explosion of the unexplained, I couldn’t even make out the conclusion of my own thoughts. Though for a moment, just for a moment, I thought I heard them telling me that my world was coming to its end.

5

David

I was perched across from her, the day I met the woman that changed my life. I don’t know for how long. It doesn’t matter. I was in my government-issued moulded plastic chair, clipboard in hand, diagonally opposite her position in the little room.

I didn’t know who she really was then when we first began. I only knew what was in the official reports and my stack of references.

‘I’ve read your file, Miss.’ I listened to the doctor’s voice as he spoke directly to her, facing squarely across the metal table between them. ‘What the records say about you is pretty clear.’

He spoke in cold, formal phrases. He was a medical professional, of course, and of many years’ standing. But he was also an officer of the state, and she was not here under circumstances any would consider friendly.

Her expression didn’t change. Her eyes remained motionless. From my position in the shadows at the side of the room, I felt unnerved by her solidity.

‘We both know what’s brought you here,’ my superior added. Dr Marcello was an old hand at this, and I’d heard him make similar beginnings before. I craned my neck, trying to observe some emotion on the woman’s face.

‘Do you realize why you’re in this room, at this moment?’

A common formula of approach. Begin with a querying of the context; find out how much the person in front of you is willing to admit of their position, and proceed from there. With an assistant at the side, from the pharmaceutical wing, taking notes in silence in order to help with the medicinal diagnoses.

Thus far, Dr Marcello was keeping things by the book.

The woman said nothing. She was alone in the room, for all her expression would have suggested. She just stared through the walls into a space I couldn’t see.

‘You’re not here because you asked to be,’ Dr Marcello added, stating the obvious. No one came into that room by choice. Still, the comment might jog her.

Her eyes had begun to drift upwards, as if something on the ceiling was attracting her attention. My superior almost spoke again, but then a sound – nearly imperceptible – emerged from the woman’s lips.

‘Not … by … choice.’

It was the first time I heard her speak.

She was mimicking Dr Marcello’s speech, or so I thought, but still – her voice. Almost. She whispered the words, as if holding back a more personal moment.

I leaned forward in my chair, frustrated by the odd angle that kept me from gazing at her face-on. I tried to make out everything I could. She had short black hair, cropped and fine. Visible softness in her cheeks. Rose gloss on her lips that glistened in the fluorescent light as she whispered.

She was beautiful. It might have been wrong for me to think that way. Inappropriate to institutional objectivity. Too subjective and personal. But she was, and I noticed. Even from an angle, even out of reach. She was beautiful.

Dr Marcello remained impassive.

‘Call you tell me your name?’ he asked, hoping to elicit more words from her with a question that hardly required analysis.

The woman’s eyes fell back from the ceiling, straight into his. And then, to my shock, she swivelled her head and stared straight into mine.

Our first gaze. The moment my life changed.

‘My name,’ she said softly, ‘is Emma Fairfax.’

6

Amber

Somehow, the day has disappeared. I’m not sure how it’s happened. I’ve been in the bookshop since it began, going about my usual routine, and it doesn’t seem it’s lasted that long. Not long enough for end-of-the-workday noises to be emerging from the street outside, or for quick drinks at Trader Tom’s around the corner to be the subject of conversations by colleagues, not quite out of earshot, as the metal blinds are lowered inside the windows. Yet I hear them, just like that, and the clock on my monitor agrees with the voices.

Time, I suppose, gets away from us all, now and then. Einstein may have theorized that time changes relative to speed, but I’m pretty certain it also changes relative to concentration. Focus on something hard enough – as I’d apparently been doing with the news on my screen and the other work of the day – and the clocks slow down. Then you blink a few times, smear away the haze of all that intensity from your eyes, and you find you’re back in the present, situated awkwardly in the skin of the person you’d forgot you’d been a few moments before.

So I refuse to be too surprised by the noises around me, now, of a workday at its end. Nor am I overly disappointed. I love this little den of respite, yes, but I’m not a lonely woman, wedded only to my work to give my day its meaning. I have my corner of the shop, my papers, my computer, my employment that feels half like a retreat. But I also have home.

I have David.

I’m out the door by 5.07 p.m.

Mitch walks behind me. With all that mass, it’s rare he walks in front.

‘You going straight home, or you up for a drink?’

His questions are always pure, though he says them with the kind of raunchily exaggerated tone of voice that suggests we might follow up that drink with a steamy escapade, entwined in each other’s naked skin in a hotel that charges by the hour. But it’s all smoke and sarcasm with Mitch. In reality, he is devoted to Susan, the most doting wife in the world, and he knows I’m well and truly hitched and not looking to break that bond. He’s just a kind man, and one who’s fairly certain alcohol won’t be on the menu when he gets home. Nor, for that matter, any particular act that could be described as an ‘escapade’.

‘Not today, Mitch.’ I smile, pausing to allow him to catch up and lowering a hand onto his wide shoulder. There’s the uncomfortable sensation of moisture rising through the fabric of his shirt. I force myself not to lift my hand away. ‘Thanks for the offer, though.’

‘You sure? Wouldn’t take more than an—’

I switch my grip to a pat. The motion accentuates my headache, which has grown worse throughout the foggy day. ‘I’m sure.’ A bigger smile. ‘Stuff on the mind. But go have one yourself. Susan’s not bound to have a glass of Jack on the counter, is she?’

He heaves a resigned but happy sigh, muttering something indiscernible about pigs and flight, then chortles. ‘Till tomorrow, Amber.’ And he turns, and I blink, and he’s already halfway to his car.

The drive home is, as always, twice as long as the commute in. The roads are packed, the commuter congestion I’d avoided in the morning now at its predictable height. To emphasize the plight, the woman’s voice on the National Public Radio affiliate for the Bay Area suggests there’s no hope for improvement ahead. I settle passively into the time set out before me.

I have a water bottle in the cup holder at my left, its flimsy plastic only slightly sturdier than the interior of the car itself. The myth that water eases headaches is a lie, but it does make popping the ibuprofen easier. Another two are down before I’m fifteen minutes into the drive, leaving their lingering, slightly sweet taste on the back buds of my tongue. It’s too familiar. Advil’s parent company should offer me some sort of loyalty card.

The details of what I’d read during the day peck at my attention as I play tap-dance between the accelerator and the brake.

My spine tingles again with the memory of the headline that had captured my attention. An ice cube projects itself up my back.

This woman in the river.

It had been on the computer, not in print, which meant it was fresh. Probably only became known after the papers had gone to press for the day. I’d looked through them again, just to be sure, but found nothing there.

I’d gone back to the Internet, oddly enthralled, and chased up what few details were available. Age, 40. The woman who’d been found was just a year my elder. Her body had been discovered at approximately 9.45 p.m. by an advocate of late-evening walks who reported his find to the local authorities. It was situated on the Russian River – the 110-mile-long gentle beast that stretches out from near Lake Mendocino, twisting and turning south and west until it joins the Pacific Ocean in Jenner, two hours north of San Francisco. I know the river as well as anyone does who lives in the area, more by simple proximity than first-hand experience. I’ve driven along stretches of its length that run near the highways, that’s about all I can say. At places it appears mighty, at others barely more than a stream.

As I drive, now, I recall the process of searching for these facts on various police websites. It had taken over an hour. Maybe several. The day, as I say, had kind of slipped away from me.

The details, though, continue to cycle through my mind.

A hiker coming upon the body, still floating in a gentle bend in the water.

It wasn’t an overly bloody find, or particularly terrifying or grotesque. This wasn’t a dismemberment or chainsaw attack. What was disturbing was, in fact, the simplicity of the whole situation. The fact that it was almost … scenic. The river water, flowing. The mention of someone out for a casual stroll. ‘Rambling’, as the English would say, which seems appropriate as I drive towards a Californian town called Windsor.

A foolish song I knew as a child tussles at my memory, its tune playful and ridiculously out of concert with the topic of my thoughts.

Rambler, brambler, with rushes at my knees,

Walking, talking, to bushes and to bees …

I shake my head in protest. It seems inappropriate that my mind should wander to such things at this moment. I try to push the tune out of my thoughts.

Beyond the victim’s age, none of her private details – name, residence, so on – have been released to the media, except to indicate that she was a Caucasian female and apparently in good physical condition.

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