Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

She revived a little when the suds enveloped her. She found some kind of focus, frowning as I no doubt looped in and out of view. Her slight overbite rested upon her bottom lip: something I’d once found irresistible. Now she just looked afraid.

“It’s been like—” she began, and coughed a thick clot of mucus on to her chin, “—like I’ve been drowning. All this time. Just as I thought I was leaving, going out like a candle, you rescued me.” She collapsed slowly into, the water; her ribs, for a moment, seemed like huge denuded fingers pressing against the flesh from inside, trying to punch their way out.

There was nothing particularly unusual about our relationship to warrant my attempt to contact her. At the time, I was nineteen, she eighteen. We said we loved each other. Although we had no money and still lived with our parents, we believed we were independent, different from anyone else because we were intelligent; we were mature about sex.

We were stupid. We were children.

We holidayed in Wales one summer, borrowing a caravan that belonged to a friend of my father’s. We buried each other in the sand and lost sleep, fucking with impunity. It was exciting, hearing her approach an orgasm without fear of a parent barging in on us. She missed a period.

I wanted to go with her on the day she aborted. I’d traveled to Stockport with her to make the appointment, sitting in a waiting room trying to avoid the female faces around me, watching faded vehicles slew across wet, wasted dual carriageways which reached into the dun fug over Manchester. Louise’s mother went with her when the time came because she paid for the operation. The private clinic was picketed by pro-lifers that day. Louise told me they pleaded with her to reconsider, that they would help to bring up the baby. It fluttered in her womb. Ink blot eye. Fingernails.

When I saw Louise again, she’d gained something which made me nervous for a while, something which shone dully in her eyes as if the surgeons had implanted some strange, ancient wisdom at the time of termination. We talked about it and grew very close; smiles and kisses drew a frosting over the bad area, like icing decorates the mold in a cake. I suppose we believed we were richer for the experience. Louise became clinging; I thought it was love. I never believed that we would be together forever but she didn’t doubt it, as if this trauma provided a bond we must never break. Sometimes I’d lie awake at night feeling like the carcass of a sheep; she, a dark scavenger of emotions, burrowing ever deeper into the heart of me. That I felt guilty for entertaining such thoughts shouldn’t have brought me comfort but it did.

It was like laying down a bundle of kindling when I tucked her into my bed. I left a window open and glanced at London’s center. It seemed strange that I would be working in that glut of noise down there while she slept, a Rapunzel in her tower. I left a note with my number by the bed, in case she should wake up. I had to lean over and smell her mouth.

On the Northern Line, I tried to spot other faces which bore the same kind of expression as Louise. A fusion of vulnerability and assuredness. The look of someone who knows they will be protected and cared for. I couldn’t find anything like it here. Maybe it was London which prescribed a countenance of stone; to progress here, you oughtn’t allow any emotion to slip.

It was a photograph that did it. A black-and-white shot of Louise staring out of my bedroom window, one breast free of a voluminous cardigan, her body painted white with morning sunshine. She wore a sleepy, gluttonous expression: We’d just made love. I’d placed some crumpled cellophane over the lens to soften her image. When the picture fell out of a book, I wondered what she was doing now. It pained me to think that the partners we felt so deeply for can be allowed to drift out of our lives. We were both five years older than the time it had ended. Old enough, responsible enough to face each other on a new footing and be friends…

…Ha.

I thought about her all day. I even tried calling her but all I got was my Duo plus: “Hi, this is Sean, all calls gratefully received, except those from Jeffrey Archer or Noel Edmonds…”

“Lou? Are you there? Pick up the phone.”

I left the office as early as I could and caught the tube back to Belsize Park, having to wait an agonizing time at Camden for the Edgware connection, which was late due to I don’t fucking know—litter on the line, driver claustrophobia, lack of application.

She was still in bed when I got back. I heated a bowl of celery soup in the microwave and fed it to her, remembering too late that she despised celery. And what else? Beetroot? She didn’t seem to mind now though, her belly grateful for anything to mop up the misery in which it was dissolving. The early February sky shuttered out the light in gray grades across my wall; she became more beautiful as darkness mired her features.

She sat up against the headboard, the duvet slipping away from her body. She didn’t attempt to cover herself. I gave her a T-shirt.

“What happened?” I asked, lighting a candle—she wouldn’t have appreciated the harshness of a bare bulb.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like I described earlier. I feel as if I’ve been gnawed away from the inside. For a while, I thought it was cancer.”

I bit down on my suggestion that it still might be; the candle’s uncertain light sucked the gaunt angles of her face and shoulders into chiaroscuro.

“Lie with me,” she said.

My sleep was fitful; I was expecting her to murmur something that would shape the formless panic I was barely managing to fasten inside. I lay awake listening to horses clatter lazily up Primrose Hill Road at five A.M., trying to delve for conversations we’d had, or pregnant pauses stuffed with meaning. All I could remember was the sound of her crying.

I nipped outside at around seven, when she was stirring, to the baker’s for croissants. I picked up a pot of jam and the newspaper, a pint of milk and headed back to the flat. Only gone ten minutes, it was some surprise to find her showered and dressed, lying on the bed and listening to one of my Radiohead albums. “We’ll go out after brekkie,” she said. “You can show me around Camden.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked, unwrapping the croissants and offering her a knife.

“Better.” She broke off a corner of bread and chewed it, dipping her next bit into the virgin surface of the jam, getting crumbs in there. That was something that pissed me off no end when we were together. It didn’t bother me now. Maturity, I suppose. She looked at me slyly, as if she were testing me; I ignored it.

“It’s good to see you, Louise,” I said. “Really.”

“It was a beautiful letter. How could I not answer it?”

“I didn’t necessarily expect to see you on my doorstep… you know, a letter, a phone call or something, to let me know how you were.”

“It was an invocation, Sean.”

“A what?”

“I said, it was an invitation. You called to me, I was on the brink. Your timing was immaculate.” She raised an eyebrow. “It always was.”

Camden was pinned down under a grimy, stifling sky. Drawing breath was like sucking exhaust fumes through a burning electric blanket. She leaned against me as we threaded through its unfriendly streets, funneled into passageways and alleys pumping with sound and people.

“This is wild!” she laughed, the plum gash of her mouth halving the pallid remains of her face, once so fleshy and pinkish; at once she looked both like the most alive and the most enervated person and in Camden that was saying something. She looked synthetic, the skin too tight, as if it might split and waft the smell of plastic toys over me. But her eyes had lost their initial vagueness, fastening on individual blurs of color as it all streamed past us, like a hawk tracking its dinner. The whites were so clear they were almost blue.