The Taste of Blue

The porcelain of the bath is cold on my chest, colder than the water on my neck, over my head, over her fingers in my hair. The bathwater is barely blue, so light it’s hard to see, ghostly. Dampened by water, a siren passes with softened urgency.

When my legs start to shake against the bathroom floor, I push upwards but her hand is firm on my head. Behind my eyelids, colours rush into each other, pink and yellow and white, and then all of it goes softly black. My body relaxes, limbs going down.

‘Kori? Kori?’ Fran’s face comes into vision slowly like it is loading. ‘Kori?’ she says again.

The bathmat is damp under my bare spine. I can hear the sound of the bath draining. Fran must’ve pulled the plug out. Done for the night.

‘Your hair curls when it’s wet,’ says Fran, twirling one of her long fingers around a strand. She strokes the side of my face, traces her fingers along my collarbones, between my breasts.

Above me, she is all I can see.

In bed, Fran puts The L Word on the laptop and moves her palm along the inside of my wrist. ‘Four minutes and thirteen seconds,’ she says. She looks pleased with me.

I watch two characters kiss and struggle to remember their names. ‘I passed out,’ I say.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Fran. ‘You’ll do better next time.’ She smiles and moves her head into the space between my neck and shoulder. She points at the laptop. ‘I can never understand their relationship.’

On our first date Fran had asked me what I wanted to do.

‘Don’t know. Don’t know, yet. All sorts of things. All sorts of things I’ll never be able to do.’ Repeating yourself is a bad habit, my dad would’ve said.

‘Like what?’ ‘I swim. There’s a lido near my house and I go there most days. Sometimes I imagine doing that faster. The fastest. In all the seas around the world.’

Fran’s eyes were wide and the red corners of them stretched with her face. ‘You must,’ she had said. ‘I’ll make sure you do. That’s a fucking promise.’ I liked the way she said ‘fucking’, tossing it into the middle of a sentence casually like it had no reason not to be there.

At the lido I swim along the bottom of the pool and feel the tiles against my belly, my thighs. The tiles here are dark, a blue that has more to do with depth than any colour you might find above the surface. This half of the pool is in shade, and the water feels thicker here, richer. You could eat it by the spoonful.

On the other side, light spools down through swimmers. Chunks of water become so white-lit they close to disappear.

I practise holding my breath and watch legs kick and churn above me. Someone overtakes someone else. A bright pink swimming costume flashes on a small body. Before I met Fran, I was one of those swimmers, surface-bound moving back and forth from one end of the lane to another.

Up there you can hear children shouting, each stroke made by each body, a lifeguard’s whistle. Just below the surface it starts to muffle. Such a small amount of water it takes. The only thing you can hear down here is the water moving, and it is very loud and it is very quiet.

That evening, I make tea because Fran has asked me to, as she fills up the bath with cool water. ‘It’s good for you,’ she is saying, shouting through the wall, ‘to follow submersion with drinking something hot.

‘What kind of tea would you like?’ I peer around the doorframe, and she is leaning over the taps, her face flushed and reflected.

‘Do we have any chamomile left?’ she asks. ‘I’d bloody love a chamomile.’ She grins and the piercing on her eyebrow moves upwards.

When I come back in with the tea, Fran holds her arms out towards a bathmat which is brighter than our old one, and thicker. ‘Look what I got for you,’ she says. ‘For us. It can be killer on the knees sometimes.’

I put the cups of tea on the toilet lid and we kneel next to each other. ‘Three, two, one,’ she says. She strokes her hand from the small of my back along my spine as she counts, up my neck, and then she pushes my head down.

That night she sits behind me and kisses my parting as we watch The L Word.

‘You were right,’ I say, ‘about the tea. The heat in my throat afterwards. It felt good.’

‘I’ll always look after you,’ Fran says. ‘You’re special. The average person can hold their breath for ninety seconds. You made five minutes look easy. Special,’ she repeats into my skull.

The first time Fran held me under it wasn’t for long. We were treading water around the silver steps, middle of the day, sun on our shoulders. She was telling me a story about her mother, who had lived a difficult life and been a difficult person because of it.

Then she put her palm on the top of my head and pushed.

I came up gasping, shocked, and she was laughing. She rested her elbows on the edge of the pool and kicked her legs out in front of her. ‘If you want to swim properly, you’ll need to be able to survive longer than that. Some oceans have waves as tall as mountains, did you know that? You’ll need to be able to survive a mountain of water, swim through it breathless. I’ve been reading about it so I can help you. I’m going to help you. Come on. Again.’

I wave Fran off to work, change into my swimming trunks and go to the lido.

At the deep end, I sink. It is cold down here and my ears ache from the pressure, but I acclimatise to both sensations. I float with my face down against the indigo tile and wonder what a blue that dark would taste like. With my tongue out, I wonder how far into the sea you’d have to swim to find it, how much water you’d have to be buried by to get a mouthful of it.

Then the water shifts around me and there is yellow and red and orange on either side of me, and I am being dragged to the surface.

‘You’re safe,’ a woman says to me when we hit air, looping my arms around the orange lifebuoy. Another woman is behind me, her hand on the small of my back as she treads water. ‘You’re safe,’ the first woman says again, and puts her hand towards my face.

I try to fight them off me.

The woman behind me grabs me around the waist and holds me against her. ‘We’ve got you,’ she says. ‘You’re in shock,’ she says.

‘I wasn’t drowning,’ I shout as they wrestle me to the side of the lido, pull me over its lip and haul me onto the side.

People watch us: two elderly ladies standing in the shallow end, beehives wrapped in florals, swimmers in black lycra cold water gear, teenagers touching each other.

Someone wraps me in a towel that isn’t mine. There is a hot drink in my left hand and a lurid sports drink in my right and I am being told to drink both. ‘Heat and sugar,’ says one of the women, bending down next to me.

‘Don’t worry,’ says the other. ‘The cold water can creep up on you. We don’t always know what our bodies can take. Don’t worry.’ Their eyes meet over my head.

‘That must be it,’ I say, and they both look relieved. I run my tongue over my teeth and think about gulping in blue.

When I come to, I am on my side in the bathroom and I belch water across the bathmat.

‘Shit,’ says Fran. ‘There you are.’ Gradually, I can see her feet. She is sitting on the toilet lid and her heels are bouncing up and down. She comes down to the floor and helps me upright, leans me against the tub. It is empty, drained. No evidence of a drowning.

Fran sits next to me. ‘I went too far,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t stop.’ She looks at me with her face really close to mine. ‘You’re okay, though,’ she says. ‘You’re okay.’ She breathes out and her shoulders get lower next to me. Then she moves my face gently towards hers with a wet hand. ‘Can I just ask you, what did it feel like?’ Her eyes are greedy.

‘The beach,’ Fran says, when I ask her why she is packing our towels into a duffel bag. She is trying to apologise. I make a picnic.

We take the train out to Folkestone and set up our umbrella on a sandy bit of beach under a cliff. You can see all the way to France from here, and the waves don’t look mountainous at all. It’s a nice day but cold, a few families out and a dog walker or two.

‘Go for it,’ says Fran, spreading her palm out like she is birthing this watery body for me.

The salt hits me first as I stride out into it. I open my mouth wide and dive into the white edge of a wave.

The bottom of the sea is different to the bottom of a pool. I float under the surface and look at the way the sand shifts. Beige fish move around me. Moss clings to stones, strange to the touch. Distantly, there is the sound of wind and barking and an aeroplane overhead. The water is green here, light-polluted and shallow. I swim further.

It’s as deep as the lido now, and the sand grazes my belly as I slide along it. Above me I can hear the waves breaking.

On and on, and the space between me and the air gets bigger and now it is the waves forming that I can hear. The blue begins to thicken gloriously around me, just the way I had hoped it would. I can feel it between my fingers, holding them apart. I can feel it pulling against the hairs on my legs and my underarms. I can feel its weight on my tongue, coating the back of my mouth.

Tasty, but I know I still have a way to go.

I come up for air one last time and look back. I can see an orange dot on the beach, a horrible fleece Fran’s aunt bought for her that droops down to her knees. The dot is still. Fran will be reading, or eating the best bits of the picnic. She was never one for goodbyes.

I lick my lips, breathe in and swim deep

This piece was first published in Meniscus Journal here.