Trawler by Mel Reeve

Water slides down the pale skin of her arms as she hugs herself, wriggling deeper into the bathtub as though burrowing under a duvet. Blue veins weave a net across her puckered skin, the flesh puckering and pinching into crisscrosses of pale flesh. The cold air of the bathroom is bitter against the heat of the water. A few stray remaining bubbles linger around the edges of her soft hips, and her bent legs seem to end abruptly in the grey water, her feet hidden beneath the surface tension. Her wet, dark hair hangs in lank strands that swirl in the water like hidden weeds. The white of the skin of her scalp is stark against the black mass of waterlogged strands.

She slides down, deeper into the bathtub, and onto her side as she curls up, the hard bulge of her vertebrae peeking through her soft skin.

I take the empty glass from the edge of the bath where she has left it, the faint imprint of her lips visible on the surface, the whorled texture of her lips like a fingerprint. The glass is still a little warm from her grasp.

When I leave, the bathroom door shuts behind me with a click.

Our utility bills have never been so high. I’ve stopped turning the heating on at all to manage the hot water costs. Instead, I dress in thick and heavy layers of second-hand wool with three pairs of fluffy polyester socks, my hands raw and exposed in the open air. I sit in the cold and the quiet in the evenings, the loops of yarn on my crochet hooks hanging like a fisherman’s net. A film of condensation clings to all the windows, and the air feels wet and thick in my lungs when I breathe.

There was a time when we lived as normal people, went to our friend’s weddings in our nicest clothes, drank a few pints at the pub at the weekly quiz with my colleagues, and cosied up on the sofa to watch TV together.

Then she got sick.

The pain used to wake her in the night, the aching in her joints so violent and unbearable that she’d cry out. In the mornings we would wake in silence, I made us coffee while she slowly went through the process of rolling her agonisingly tight shoulder muscles until they loosened up just a fraction and she could hobble out of bed, gladly unstrapping the foot brace on her left foot but wincing as soon as her toes touched the ground. The red marks on her skin from the straps of her brace would linger like jewellery around her fragile ankle bones.

Walking to the shops became too exhausting for her, so I adjusted to caring for us both.

It was ok like that, for a while.

I started to wake in the night, listening to her breathe beside me in a fitful sleep, and wonder what the future held for us both. How would we manage when we got older, and all the other pains and health problems that would entail compounded on her existing ones? We struggled to survive on our combined incomes, and I knew soon the day would come when she’d be unable to keep working. But in the mornings I would be cheerful and firm, helping her into the living room and passing her toast.

After I finished work, I would run her a bath, or watch her slowly walk to the front door wrapped in an enormous coat to head to the swimming pool. Even after she stopped going to Tesco, she managed to keep swimming for a while. I can see her now, moving with complete concentration and the tight ache of pain visible on her face, so determined.

She would return from those evening trips to the local council-owned swimming pool, with its scabby, cracked tiles and stink of chlorine, and she would be refreshed. Her eyes would be heavy with exhaustion and her skin pink as though freshly scrubbed and smelling of chemicals. She would hop into bed with ease, as though things were almost normal.

If the pool was closed, or she didn’t manage to make it, things would be bad again, and quickly. It became harder for her to make the journey there too, her independence slowly trickling away and I stood beside her uselessly trying to help her grasp onto it.

At some point we discovered baths. Hot ones, ideally, so hot they would snatch away her breath as she daintily touched a toe into the steaming water. I would buy different own-brand bubble bath solutions, testing out the luminous liquids to discover what scents she liked best. Bags of mineral salts began to line the bathroom cupboard, spilling like secrets into the hot bathwater.

She would emerge from her bath wrapped in that thin towel with a big hair-dye stain on it, smiling. We would fall asleep with our arms wrapped around each other, and for a change, I would not find myself awake at 3am, staring at the ceiling.

At some point, and I can’t remember exactly when, despite how pivotal that moment must have been, she stopped getting out of the bath.

I see her now in snatches, the walls of the tub dividing us, but the sound of her body moving around in the water has become reassuring and familiar. Her voice floats over to me, seated beside the tub on the bathroom lino, the rare sound of her laughter feeling a little less rare.

I have my routine, I take a break from my work laptop in the kitchen and I knock gently on the bathroom door. I hear her murmur of assent and I kneel beside the tub. I lift out the plug, letting the water drain away. Her skin is wrinkled and clammy from submersion, as though she’s been trapped in a net and the imprint of the fibres has embedded lines into her skin. In the few moments, before I turn the taps on again, I see the lines of pain appearing again on her forehead. I place the plug back in, turn on the taps, and watch them smooth away again.

When I can, I sit beside the tub with my laptop on my knees and we talk. I imagine a mansion we will buy, with a bathtub beside every sofa and bed, so that we can walk through life together, with her safe inside the waters. I dream of a car, with a sensible hot tub-style seat on the passenger side so that we can see the world together. She laughs, bubbles rising from under the water’s surface, and I trail my hand over the side, feeling the slippery clutch of her fingertips against me.

In the beginning, I used to get in with her sometimes too, we’d knit our legs together in a tangle like knotted seaweed on the shoreline, and lace our fingers together like abandoned fishing nets. Her wet hair would rest against my chest, and I’d watch as she breathed slowly and evenly. It made me think of birthing pools, of new life and freedom.

I have come to redefine my understanding of freedom.

I watched you, in the blind animal panic of pain beside me outside, and here I watch you breathing calmly in the oasis of your safe haven.

I know which one feels free to me.

Friends ask after you, and I tell them hints of how we are coping, that you need a bit more support these days. I don’t explain how I speak to you through the shivering surface tension of the water, the skin on your neck wrinkled and in a certain light, seeming to move like gills. We don’t talk about how you gasp for air when you surface, or how the smooth muscle on your arms and legs remains, despite the stillness of your days. These impossibilities are frightening, but most of all I am scared that if I voice them, this tenuous possibility of respite for you will be taken away.

My days drag, I sit and type at my laptop and dream of disappearing into the cold mercury of water with you, floating in an endless sea together. You’d take my hand beneath the surface and show me the way, and together we would swim on. The grey tinge to your skin would seem normal here, your dark pupils less startling in the dimly lit ocean depths. All I want is for you to be okay, to find your path. Even if it meant diving into the freezing North Sea with you, I’d do it in a heartbeat. We survive here though, in the narrow ceramic confines of the bathtub in our third-floor tenement flat. The irony is that it’s an island of sorts, a place of respite and safety in a storm-covered sea, with you just out of reach beneath the surface.

You ask about the outside world, and so I tell you. I take walks in the afternoons and report back the things I see. Sometimes I bring back a stone or a flower, a trinket or a memento of the world you used to be such an active participant in. I sit beside you, the yarn on my crochet hook winding and twisting into thousands of knots like tangled fishing nets.

You hold the objects I bring in from the outside world in your slippery palm and marvel at them, as though they hail from an alien world, and perhaps they do. Your eyes seem feral and animalistic in the low bathroom light, and sometimes when I look at you, I wonder if I really know you.

And then you smile, the pallor of your face from the reflection of the tepid bathwater falls away momentarily and the warmth and familiarity I know returns.

The unravelling begins when a neighbour complains about a leak and asks if we often ‘take a bath’. Shoving my hands into my pockets to avoid twiddling them nervously, and finding a coil of chained yarn, I explain it must simply be from an overflowing tap, and that we’re just not the type to want to ‘take a bath’. I encourage him not to worry.

He calls the landlord anyway.

They attempt to enter the stillness of our rented home a few times, knocking loudly on the door for entry. So I close the curtains and turn off the lights, pretending not to be at home.

I stop answering the phone. It rings emptily until the battery dies, and I let it.

Work becomes more and more impossible, my heart racing if I speak loudly on a call in case the landlord is waiting outside the door. I turn all the lights off and draw the blinds. We sit in a murky darkness, like the black depths of the Mariana Trench but perhaps even lonelier. If only no one could reach us here, if we were beyond the grasping hand of the world outside, safe under impossible pressures.

Instead, I sit with my back against the bathroom door, knotting together my cocoon, watching the dark curls of your hair floating in the effortlessness of water, and see you smiling up at me from beneath the surface. Your teeth show when you laugh, the bubbles rising up and breaking into the cold air of the bathroom but it doesn’t seem to bother you. I feel the slick scales of your skin beneath my fingertips when our hands touch, but I don’t care, I cling on all the same.

Your face is free and comfortable when you look to me, and I know I will do anything it takes to keep you safe in the one place you can survive.

I hear them banging on the door, but I ignore the sound. We are safe here until they come, and I will not be the one to let them in.

Illustration by Laura Darling