Far From Water

for Elizabeth Bishop

I jolt out of this one, and it’s the morning. Nicola is next to me—his broad honey back with its hairs, like alfalfa sprouts, like patches of weed—heaving slightly with his breaths. Is he breathing though, I wonder, and I watch until I know that he is.

I’m broken. Something happened to me in there. Again. Something happens every time. I don’t know what, I can only guess, but I have scratches on my arms and my head is bang bang bang.

‘Eris?’ Nicola’s voice echoes. I see that he has left the bed, that he stands near the door, naked and arched—a harp.

‘Did you do it again?’

He knows I did. Doesn’t he? I told him I wouldn’t, but who can trust me anymore. Not me, not him.

I don’t want to answer.

‘Nico. I’m sorry.’

I have said this word a thousand times. It is my song because I don’t listen to music anymore. There is music where I go, but it’s not like the music here. I can bathe in it, bask in it, and it doesn’t destroy me. When I try to play a song I love in the real world, I start to sob. Sometimes I take a taxi and the radio makes me cry the whole way.

Nicola is kind, though he takes things personally, as any good man should. I am a liar and he thinks it’s because he is not worth the truth.

His dangling penis catches the morning light. I love him more than I thought could be possible.

‘Come here,’ I say, but he doesn’t come.

He turns and I see his bottom clench as he leaves. I hear crashing in the kitchen and it is anger. Was he here while I was there? Did he see me?

I don’t want to ask him.

Maybe we can have sex instead.

We haven’t been having sex much lately, not since I had the hysterectomy. The surgeon said I had to wait eight weeks, the local doctor three months, the nurse said no penetration until the body is ready. Though when is the body ready for penetration? Always, or never? It’s been five months, anyway, and yesterday morning, I pressed myself up against Nicola in the bathroom, me naked and him naked, me about to shower and him just done. He moaned a little bit, in his girly voice, so I kept going and we helped each other orgasm on the tiles. It was colder down there on the floor than I remembered, but we were connected for the rest of the day, our pores opened to each other.

I am a liar and he thinks it’s because he is not worth the truth.

I can’t get pregnant now. The pain of all the lumps inside me has finally gone. I don’t want to grow something else in their place. I couldn’t be a mother anyway—I am disturbed and babies only thrive in peace. Nicola says he doesn’t need to be a father. His sister has five children and lives down the road in a house with a garden of tomatoes.

I get out of bed slowly, my scratched arms reminding me of where I have been. I can’t do this anymore. It’s ruining my life and I keep going back. Wobbly, I get down on my haunches and lie on the carpeted floor. Nico will find me here, and he will be sorry for me. I will be forgiven. Vomit comes, but I don’t let it out. Where does it go?

Nicola is a scientist. His brain flicks between problems and solutions while mine worries into a walnut and swells like a raisin soaked in brine. He can’t be hurt in his occupation because he is brilliant and he knows it.

I have to go to work. I’m a security guard and I work at a crisis accommodation facility—a shelter—where people who are homeless stay when they can’t bear the streets or the streets can’t bear them. Not everyone wants to be there; some people would prefer to be free. None of them want to be there, really, but I do. I’m good at my job, most of the time. I’m not tall or large, though I’ve been told I can be scary. The face communicates how dangerous a person is. Mine says nothing.

I’m good at my job, but I don’t want to go today because I’m ruining my life. I used to work at a casino and that was heartbreaking, watching the people who couldn’t stop, feeding their money straight into the belly. At the shelter, people are funny and wild. They don’t need me to feel sorry for them.

I know things are bad when Nicola is angry. He has come into the room since I have been on the floor and hasn’t given me a glance, though I know he must see me.

‘Nico?’ I ask the ceiling. There are stains up there. ‘Hello?’

We play a game where we say hello again and again, in different rooms, as if we are searching. If I say hello, Nico must say it back.

Still nothing. No movement, no shuffle, no drip. There is no hello. I can’t live in this reality. The stains on the ceiling stink.

‘Hello?’

I hear him now, just the pads of his feet, and I hope he says it back. I can’t bear it if he doesn’t.

‘Hello?’ he asks my body.

I jump up, ready to catch him.

‘Want me to drop you at work?’

So we’re not going to talk about it.

‘Yes please.’

‘Cut, cut,’ he says.

In the shower, getting ready, my wet hair stuck to my back, I realise he must have meant chop, chop. His mother and father came here from Italy, and they never got the phrases quite right.

We drive. Sitting up in the car seat, I feel my body disintegrating. Nico knows not to play music, and so we sit in silence, and he turns the steering wheel now and then, and the engine goes and goes.

It’s ruining my life and I keep going back.

‘Are you upset with me?’ I ask, because I can’t bear to wait until he tells me he is, which might never happen, his feelings wafting between us like a smell.

He pushes his hair back, one hand off the steering wheel, which is okay because he has two of them. Two big beautiful hands like duck feet, like webs. His hair is almost to his shoulders because I beg him not to cut it. When we play, he makes it up in plaits. I watch his body because I don’t know what to say. I can’t say sorry again. It doesn’t mean anything.

‘I need you to stop,’ he says, finally. ‘To actually stop.’ A pause, and then: ‘Or I’ll leave. Like you always do.’

Tears, choke throat, panic chest, beat beat heart, bang bang head. I am going to be sick out the window. If only he understood that it is impossible for me to stop. Or to start, to stay, to stay away.

I love him. I’ve never loved anybody like this, and it was an instant love, as instant as love can be. We met at a bar: I had crawled there through the tunnel. He doesn’t drink much, he didn’t then, and he walked me home.

I had never seen anything as crystal-clear as his aura. He told me about his family, I told him about mine. His perfect teeth were crooked. I praised them, and he told me he had fallen as a teenager from his bike to the ground, upon these teeth, and they had moved in their gums. On the walk home from the bar after midnight, his arm around me was as warm and mild as day.

Nico drops me off out the front and I tell him I love him.

Deep breath—it’s Friday, and on Fridays, the place is hectic. The case managers have left to enjoy their weekends. It’s as if the residents feel abandoned, as if they sense that something is ending, if only for a few days. Or maybe it’s just that the weekend means freedom, and what to do with that freedom is never clear. There are fights and overdoses and raids and deaths on Friday nights. Everyone is angry or agitated or flying, and I always have to let the police in to save someone from themselves or someone else. The cops who arrive are calm, most of the time, though there’s an edge to their voices. Sometimes I wonder if I should have tried to be a policewoman. Then I remember their job is to put people in jail.

A security guard at a crisis accommodation facility has a lot of responsibility. It’s not like security at a pub or a nursing home. I see and hear and smell and touch things every day that most people will never know about. I have to keep standing at the doors of a place where people are trying to stay alive.

The shift goes quickly because one of the regular residents who is in and out and in and out, is back in again, and he talks a lot. I let him, enjoying the sound rather than the content, and how he laughs when he makes a joke—so hard he chokes himself. His name is Sam, and he’s in his forties with two kids he doesn’t get to see often because of his heroin addiction. He works at the traffic lights, squidging car windows and smiling at arseholes so they’ll give him something. He says that when it rains he gets more money. Maybe it’s because people don’t like to see him all wet; a lost dog in their rear-view mirrors. They let him clean their rain-drenched windows so he will leave them to their peace. The world makes no sense.

They let him clean their rain-washed windows so he will leave them to their peace.

I don’t know if Sam laughs a lot because he finds things funny or because he doesn’t. When he chokes on the laugh, his cheeks hollow and he stops breathing, and I imagine him dead on the floor from an overdose. I don’t want him to die. I could try to save him.

At 1am, he tells me about his older child: a daughter called Penny, short for nothing. He hasn’t seen her in over a year. He sends her soft toys in the mail—express post—though she could be a woman by now, he laughs, chokes, palms the wall to steady himself. I want to say something helpful, so I tell him he’ll see her soon. He probably won’t, but he agrees with me. At 2am he leaves because he’s getting sick and needs to score.

I feel sick too, though I know it’s not like heroin sick, which is bone-deep, barbed wire to the veins, black-blood and green-sweat, rancid-butter nausea. My sick is of the mind, entirely. My body simply swelling with anticipation. I wish Sam would come back and talk my ear off again. I imagine him slumped against the wall in his room, lower lip curled.

I could leave work right now, just walk out and go to a bar—climb through that hole and slide down that slide for some oblivion. The ruin I never wanted again will be my salvation. I know what I’ll feel like tomorrow, how Nicola will feel in the room—a disappointed mother. I play the tape forward and I see myself cowering, collapsed, satisfied. Tapes play forward, unless you rewind them—it is inevitable.

I can hear something, but it’s nothing. It’s my mind trying to conjure an escape from itself. I look down and see that Sam has left a bottle behind—a soft old bottle full of red wine. I could just pick it up and have a swig, I don’t care. If I get to stick my head out for this last hour, it will be easier.

This time, I don’t jolt awake. I can’t move, my bones warn me not to use them. I lie and wait until I can, waiting waiting, and then a rush of pain lights up my left wrist. Have I broken it? Have I broken a bone again? I creak open my eyes and see that the curtains are open and it’s light outside. Afternoon light. There is no green morning sheen. The room is warm, maybe, or my skin is radiating heat.

I can’t hear anything because Nicola will be at work and I am alone again. He leaves early most days so he can walk along the river. I don’t leave early for anything anymore. I’m not rostered on again until Tuesday, and the days stretch out in front of me, leering.

I try to move my arm. It catches fire, and I scream out for no reason other than to release some fear. Nausea rises, but I catch it and swallow it down. I can’t vomit in my bed today. 

I wait with Nicola on the chairs in the emergency room foyer. The floor is mucky, and the seats are bent, and the woman sitting next to me keeps sniffing thickly and wiping her nose on her sleeve. I wonder if she is here because her nose won’t stop running. Anything can be an emergency.

Nico won’t hold my hand—at least, he hasn’t tried to—though I’ve broken my wrist, we know that now, and I’m dribbly with painkillers. I haven’t tried to hold his either because I’m scared he will pull away.

The woman sniffs again, and Nicola doesn’t reach for my hand, but we only wait half an hour, and then I am in, behind the curtains, and Nico is told to wait outside.

‘Broken your wrist, have you?’ asks a voice behind me as I wait in the wrong position—standing, staring at the wall.

I turn and the doctor is small and arrestingly beautiful. He smiles and white teeth glow inside his mouth.

‘Is it the one you write with?’

I could tell him I don’t write, not ever. I don’t even type, not really, but he doesn’t need to know that either.

‘You don’t have to keep doing this,’ says the doctor as he rubs his gloved hands together and touches my forearm. ‘Does this hurt? Does this? Does this?’

I nod and ask him what he means.

‘I just mean—you’re not alone.’

I look him straight in the eye while he holds my wrist gently, like a baby bird.

‘Have you broken a bone before?’

‘I’ve broken my leg, twice,’ I admit, knowing I am not getting away with this.

‘Just like Elizabeth Bishop,’ he says, and I don’t know who that is. ‘She had a problem too.’ 

The doctor says goodbye to me before I can reply. It is only nurses after that. He has made sure my bone will heal by wrapping my wrist and making me a sling to hold it. I am not allowed to use it for weeks on end. I won’t sleep well, there will be spikes of pain. The nurses give me tablets and paper for more tablets. Nico drives us home, and he speaks to me gently about nothing as we move through the streets bleeding with lamplight.

Nico drives us home, and he speaks to me gently.

I ask him if he is okay, he says he is. He asks me if I am okay, and I could be honest and say I don’t know, but I’m trying to be stronger. I say I am, except I feel awful. I don’t want to hurt him anymore.

‘You’re hurting yourself,’ he says, and he moves to hold my hand.

As we walk up the stairs to our third-floor flat, I ask him, ‘Do you know who Elizabeth Bishop is?’

‘Yes’, he answers. ‘A poet.’

I google her, on the toilet, later. She lived in Brazil for a long time; she is small and dead, a ghost. 

In the morning, I wake, I roll over: not hungover. I didn’t disappear last night. The relief is bucket and brush, scrubbed clean. My wrist, however, is sore. Two wakes in the night for more painkillers, and I need more again now the sun is outside. The pain is bearable until it reaches its peak and I almost call out for help.

Nicola is not beside me, but there is a book where his body might have been. It’s a small book, called Poems, and when I pick it up, I realise the face on the back cover is familiar to me. Chubby and lumpy, like a cloud, with a puff of hair, lips like a bow and bird eyes. It’s Elizabeth Bishop; Nicola has found her for me. He must have had a copy somewhere; I never notice these things.

After I get myself to the bathroom and painkillers, I climb back into bed with the book, holding it in my good hand. It will tell me something if I let it. Elizabeth Bishop will tell me something.

I close my eyes, flip the pages and inside my head I ask, Are you there?

I open the page to a poem called ‘STRAYED CRAB’ and read—

This is not my home. How did I get so far from water?

And then,

I am the colour of wine

She knows—she knew—how I feel.