Breathing Underwater

For my sisters, Alison and Sue

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prologue

 

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

 

About the Author

Why I Wrote Breathing Underwater

My Favourite Section in Breathing Underwater

Objects from Breathing Underwater

Things to do after reading Breathing Underwater

A room of my own

Also by Julia Green

 

 

 

It starts like this: a sudden storm. Squalls of rain batter my bedroom window, rattling the glass. A shrieking wind shakes the roof slates on the small stone house. A loose slate breaks free, slides and spins down the roof, shatters into tiny pieces on the path below.

I lie in the dark for hours, listening to the storm moan and howl round the house, tugging it as if it's a boat to be torn from its moorings. But the house stands solid, like it's done for nearly a hundred years through storms wilder than this. Finally, at dawn, the wind drops.

Still I can't sleep. I get dressed, go to knock on Joe's bedroom door. The door's ajar. I whisper into the grey light, ‘I'm going down the beach. Coming?'

After a storm, there are always things to find. Over the years, people here have scratched a living out of wrecks and stuff washed up. Joe and me have found all sorts.

Joe's already awake. He pulls on jeans and fleece, stumbles downstairs after me. The back door is unlocked, as always. We pull boots on: the rubber's cold on my bare feet. We go the lane way to Periglis, the most westerly of the beaches. Neither of us says much. I'm amazed Joe's come with me, though I don't tell him that. I'm happy now, running ahead. The storm's brought down whole branches: swathes of leaves and twigs clog up the lane. The air is cool, damp: smells like autumn, though it's summer, still. August.

I'm first at the beach. I jump down on to the rocks at the top, almost slip. Everything's shiny and wet. Mist curls off the sea like smoke. The tide's high, just on the turn. I kick through the piled-up stinking weed, and start making a stack of driftwood we can take home to dry. I stop to stretch out my spine. I watch the sea edging back, revealing small patches of fine silver sand.

A little way out, the water seems to be breaking over something large. A low, dark object, like rock, but there are no rocks just there. I wait, watch. A piece of wrecked boat? A seal, perhaps, or a leatherback turtle, like the one washed up on Bryluen two years ago. Sometimes even whales get stranded after a storm.

The sea, like the sky, is milky grey. Quieter now, sighing
in
,
out
, like breathing. It sucks and rolls the object, draws it back in the running tide. Bit by bit, the sea retreats.

And now I see what it's brought us. Not a seal, or a turtle. Not a beached whale. I gasp, but no sound comes, just a rush of air. There's a bare foot, and then another, in a sodden trainer. Jeans, T-shirt, seaweed hair. The waves roll the heavy figure slightly, pull back. They leave the bloated body belly down on the silver sand and shingle, head twisted awkwardly to one side. I can't stop looking. I stare at the mottled skin of the naked foot, and the bruised cheekbone.

It's weird but I don't feel horror, or fear, or even pity, at that moment. I'm simply curious, seeing something for the first time, like a small child discovering the world.

Joe's behind me. ‘What the – !' He clutches my arm. ‘Christ, Freya!' He wades out through the shallow water, and with the tip of his boot he turns the head slightly, and I see the face. The boy's mouth is slightly open, like a fish. Eyes shut. His skin is puffy, a strange purple and white colour. I take all this in. I can tell he's been dead a while. A stranger. I watch Joe bend right over the body, touch the face and hand. For just that moment, there's no one else but us in the whole world: Joe and me and a drowned boy.

When Joe stands up, there are tears on his face. I stare, surprised. It's so unlike Joe. The boy is no one we know, and so far beyond our help that I don't feel sad, just sort of tender. And the weirdest thing: to me he seems at peace now, rolled over and over by the waves and laid out on the silver sand in the pearly early morning light. Nothing can hurt him any more.

‘Come on. Got to get someone.' Joe tugs my arm, starts running up the beach, back along the path. I take one last look at the boy before I turn and follow Joe.

I'm out of breath, running to catch up. ‘I found him first. I want to tell.'

Joe stops and looks at me, suddenly furious. ‘What's the matter with you? How can you even think like that? A boy
drowned
, Freya!'

 

Back at home, we both tell, interrupting each other. Evie and Gramps phone the police and the coastguard; a police boat comes out from Main Island, and soon the beach is swarming with people. The dead boy's not
ours
– mine and Joe's – any longer.

We find out later that the boy's nineteen, a French fisherman, washed overboard days before the storm. The wind and the waves brought him to us. The chances of that happening?

But people drown all the time. One every seventeen hours, in the UK. People get washed off rocks, there are boating accidents. Years ago, sixteen men from this island drowned in one night in a storm: practically the entire male population. Gramps says that some fishermen don't ever learn to swim, on purpose; that way they'll die more quickly if they go overboard. I can't get my head round that. Joe and I both swim like fish.

Joe sticks up a poster in his room: a map showing all the wrecks around the islands. Thousands.

 

I didn't particularly notice, at the time, how fascinated Joe was with this stuff. He's always had a thing about the sea, danger, stories about disasters. Now I'm beginning to piece things together, I've started to wonder what exactly it meant to Joe, us finding the boy, that morning. Was that where it all started? Or am I making too much of it? Was it just one of those things, a random event, a tragedy for the boy and his family and his friends, somewhere in Brittany, but nothing more significant than that? Not a premonition, not a
foreshadowing
of what came later.

Because that's what you do, when something terrible happens. You go over and over every tiny thing, looking for clues, trying to find a pattern and a way to make sense out of the muddle and hurt. The drowned boy happened the year I was twelve and my brother Joe was fifteen, and a year later, Joe was dead.

One

 

 

I'm on the train, the start of the journey. It's the first time I've been back to the island since Joe's accident, last summer. It's just me, this time. Mum won't come back
ever
, she says, as if seeing again the place where he died will make things worse. How, exactly? The worst has already happened. The ache of it runs through my body like a seam of coal in rock, black and cold and terrible.

Miranda's mum says
you'd never get over the death of your child.
Miranda told me that yesterday, when we were in my old bedroom in the attic, putting the last of my things into boxes. Downstairs, Mum was packing up pictures and ornaments, ready for the move. We went past her on the landing, on our way down to get drinks in the kitchen. She was lifting down the big gold-framed mirror from its place on the wall. She held the mirror in both hands, staring at her own reflection in the spotted glass. I looked at her face, framed in the mirror like a painting:
Grieving Woman: self-portrait.
She'd tied her hair back with a bit of old string. She was wearing the same sleeveless grey linen dress she's worn all week, so now it was all creased and limp.
Ghost-mother
.
She didn't speak. Didn't notice us, even.

‘She still cries at night,' I said to Miranda. ‘Even a year on.'

Miranda's mum's words echo in my head.
Never
. That's the worst one. I don't want to believe that it's always going to be like this: Mum silent and sad and distracted; Dad out, or working all the time. There are lots of different ways grown-ups disappear. It's lonely, being the one left behind.