Nicola Griffith - Slow River

“So, tell me how you managed to stay out of the scandal at Belmopan last month.”

Oster’s words suggest he is tolerant of and mildly amused by Stella’s increasingly wild exploits with her set of friends, but Lore can tell—by the way his fingers are pick-picking at the cloth of his shorts and the glances he shoots up at Stella from under his brows when he thinks she is not looking—that he does not understand his daughter any more than he would if he had planted a potato and grown a rose.

“I wasn’t there that night.” She pauses to suck at her bottle. “I was passed out in my room.”

Lore wonders about that. She thinks either Stella drinks less than she pretends to or she is extraordinarily lucky. For while Stella appears to go through the motions—driving recklessly while under the infiuence of various drugs, swimming with sharks while drunk—the accidents she has only ever seem to involve property or the occasional species of wildlife not on the endangered list.

“I assume you have at least six people who are willing to back you up on that,” Oster says, trying for irony, but sounding waspish.

Stella laughs, and Lore wonders if the rest of the family understand how shrewd her sister is. In the last four years of wild behavior, she has never injured herself or another person, nor been the subject of any scandal that would have a negative impact on her character. Media-literate people on five continents probably know her name, but they speak it with a smile and a shake of the head, not with a spitting curse. Lore has always wondered why Stella does nothing with her intelligence and wit but travel from one party to another with as much fanfare as possible. She wonders for the first time whether or not Stella has a purpose, but cannot figure out what it might be.

It is getting hot. The sunlight makes Stella’s upturned bottle sparkle. “I think I’ll take a swim.” She sets the bottle down on the rim of the fountain and stands up. She has unbuttoned half of her dress before Lore realizes she has no clothes on underneath. Oster is a little slower.

“What are you doing?”

“Preparing to climb into this nice cool water with the fish. Who probably have more feeling than some people.” She glances over at Katerine, who pretends not to notice.

“But…” Oster seems to know he has missed something.

Stella pauses, dress halfway off her shoulder. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to see what a fine figure your daughter has?”

Katerine simply ignores them.

“Stella! This is not appropriate—”

Stella laughs, a great, brittle shout. “Appropriate? Since when has this family ever been appropriate?”

Oster is looking confused and Katerine still staring at nothing when Stella lets her dress fall from her shoulders and steps into the fountain. The dress catches on the vodka bottle and as the material sinks, waterlogged, into the fountain, the bottle teeters, then falls towards the pool. Katerine and Oster dive for it at the same time. Lore is not sure who actually catches it, but the bottle comes up out of the water grasped by two tanned and streaming arms. Oster relinquishes it to Katerine. He wades into the fountian and shouts. “What are you doing? I don’t understand you. Why are you doing this?”

But Lore is watching Tok, who is looking at Stella, and his expression is terrible, as though some huge revelation has fisted into his face and crumpled it like tin. He has a twig in his hand and Lore can see how white the skin is where he grips it. She wants to rush over there and cry Tok! Tok! but quite simply dares not. She thinks that if she called him back from whatever horror he has seen he will return without some vital part of himself. She has read many fairy tales, and understands instinctively that those who are dragged places unwillingly must find their own way back. She wonders what place he has found, what he has seen.

But then Oster slips and falls to one knee. He stands up making cross sounds, and sloshes his way back to the edge. “I’m going inside to change,” he says to Stella, who has her face tipped up to the sky and seems to be smiling. “When I get back, I expect you to be sobered up and decent.” He stalks off. “I will not be mocked in my own house…”

Katerine is examining the vodka bottle, seemingly unperturbed. Lore glances back at Tok, who is now sitting still and sad by his pile of twigs. She catches his eye and he shrugs slightly. Lore does not understand, but she knows no one will explain; she does not even know the right question to ask.

When Oster is out of sight, Katerine, still not looking at Stella’s body, says, “Your father has asked you to be decent by the time he returns.”

“Does my body offend you, Mother?” The words are a challenge, but the tone is tremulous, as though Stella has gone much, much further than she intended, and does not know her way back. Katerine turns slowly, deliberately, and looks at Stella.

Lore wonders what Stella sees in her mother’s eyes. Her sister goes utterly blank. She steps from the pool mechanically and reaches for her dress. No one says anything while she fastens her buttons. She looks at the bottle, but Katerine is still holding it. Lore understands that Stella is unwilling to step any closer to her mother to reach for the vodka.

Stella, hair dripping, uncertain whether to reach for the bottle or leave without it, looks like a whipped dog.

“Your father will want to see you here when he gets back,” Katerine says. She smiles, and Stella sits abruptly, leans back against the stone fountain rim, and closes her eyes. Just like that, she absents herself. Gone. Lore has seen Greta do that: just disappear. Tok returns his attention to whatever he is building from sticks.

Katerine lifts the bottle from the stone rim, checks to make sure the cap is secure, then looks at Lore speculatively. “Tell me,” she says, “if Stella had dropped the bottle in the fountain and it was, by some miracle, both uncapped and full, how would you have gone about the remediation of the pond system?”

Water tinkles, the sun beats down, and Tok strips the bark from a twig while Lore tries to work out the approximate flow per minute in gallons from this fountain to the next pond and the next; the effect of about a pint of raw alcohol on the flora and fauna; the breeding rate of carp…

Tok makes some involuntary movement.

“What?” Lore asks.

He sighs. “It’s a trick question, Lore. We were taught that the first thing to remember when faced with—”

“The first thing to remember when faced with a problem,” Katerine interrupts, “is not to make the problem more complicated than it is. With this surface area,” she gestures at the series of ponds, “and this heat, a pint of vodka would evaporate before it did any damage that would not remediate itself naturally in a week or two.”

Lore digs a hole in the turf with her finger. She feels stupid, the idiot younger sister, the one who never knows what’s going on, the one always left out of the joke. But when she looks up, Katerine is smiling at her and it’s a nice smile, not cruel at all.

“You looked like you were working out some pretty complicated reactions. Had you considered and included the lethal-fifty dose for fish?”

“Yes,” Lore admits shyly, “except I don’t know the alcohol concentration L-fifty for freshwater fish so I was going on the figures I read in that report last year on the spill of ethanol in the salmon fishery in Scotland, so—”

“You read that?”

Lore nods cautiously. “I try to read as much as I can.”

Katerine smiles. No, she beams, and Lore cannot remember getting that kind of approval from her mother before. She smiles back, tentatively.

“That Scottish job was complicated by the fact that the ethanol was contaminated by printers’ ink.” Katerine absently fills a plate, hands it to Lore.