‘Pretty Lies: I Can See for Miles’ by Mel Anastasiou

Nobody could stay alive under water this long. 

Jenny hung somewhere between the surface and the depths, her struggles squeezed out of her by Moira’s strong hands. She was drowning. Possibly, she was already drowned. She couldn’t remember when she’d last breathed. And, as she’d already established, no one could hang halfway between the seabed and the surface this long.

Although, if her lungs were filled with water, wouldn’t she sink? 

She was so cold that she couldn’t feel the water. Hold on, she told herself. Just a little longer. She’d said those words to Joey in the steaming wreck of the car. Help is coming. And help had come, but by then Joey was already dead in the front seat of the yellow Zed. 

“If it comes too late, can you even call it help?” she whispered. A bubble of air tickled her lips as it escaped, touched her nose, and rose away from her. She wondered whether her next thought might be her last, and so she thought about Joey — about herself and Joey, when they were small and daring, perched facing one another on their next-door windowsills, small feet dangling far above the ground. They used to push their thumbs against their eyelids, calling out the colours they saw exploding in their eyeballs. She saw them now against her lids. She murmured, “I see swirls of colour, red more than anything, red everywhere, and flashing blue …” 

Moira said, “I see white. I always see white, like a wedding veil.”

“White like seagulls.” This was quite a ghost world, where she could speak and hear underwater. Jenny pictured her words floating from her mouth in small silver bubbles, up to the surface of the Sound.

Moira’s hands loosened a little. “Like whitecaps on the water.”

“Like the sides of a great white ship, when you jump off it.” 

“Shut up.” Moira pinched her.

“Or what? Or you’ll drown me?” Jenny’s mouth curled upwards. Maybe irony was the last emotion she would feel. She would float away from life in the arms of an ironic thought, held underwater by a dead woman. If a person could die in the world where dead people lived.

“I love Joey. But I kissed Malcolm. That’s ironic, too.” Jenny’s heart had chosen for her, because her heart had never learned to love anyone but Joey. “I think I kissed Malcolm because he’s alive. It’s harder to love Joey when he’s dead.”

“Love is a mystery,” Moira said. “Your heart chooses, and it’s like a law somebody made. We have to do what it says.”