Hand Me Down World Read Online Free Page B

around her. In the unseen distance she heard another splash. From the boat the coastal lights had been clear. Now she can’t see them any more. The sea is in the way, heaving and dragging her around the buoy. The buoy is difficult to hold. It is too big, too round. She has to settle for hanging onto its anchoring rope and changing hands whenever one arm tires.
    How long was she in the water? What is time under those circumstances? What is an hour? What is ten minutes? Time can be measured in other ways. By the cold. By fear. By the length of time it takes for flesh to turn numb and then to rot and come away from her bones. She began to doubt the words of the crew. Or else something had happened. That was more believable because whatever was supposed to happen rarely did.
    She saw the sun rise and draw itself against the sky. The last of the blinking lights died. The sea bulged up, and the line of Europe turned to mist.
    The Dutchman had taught her to swim like a dog. ‘Dog paddling.’ On her own she had managed only one length. But he’d encouraged her to keep going, to practise. After a month she could do fifty lengths of the pool. Once, to the amusement of a hotel guest who sat the whole time on a recliner with a cocktail, she swam one hundred lengths to win a bet of ten dollars.
    Her shoulders ache, her lips are swollen, her eyes hurt. Her skin wants nothing more to do with her. It has lost the silky touch that guests always liked to comment on. Whenever they stopped to pet her she liked to watch the slow marvel of herself emerge in the eyes and face of a perfect stranger.
    Late afternoon she made up her mind to swim. She has a plastic bag with her containing her hotel uniform and the sticking knife made out of the birdcage wire. She will take the buoy with her.
    The first task is to get the knife out. Despite the hours spent in the sea, her uniform is still dry. Inside the plastic bag she can make out the fold of a sleeve. The knife is rolled up inside her skirt. She has to pick at the knot with the fingers of one hand. Her other hand holds onto the buoy. More than once she lets go of the rope in order to pick the knot with both hands. Each time there is some progress before the sea parts and she sinks. Once when she thought she nearly had it her head was underwater. But that time failed as well and she surfaced—panicked to think her sinking could happen so quickly, so easily, that it could happen with a lapse in concentration. She remembered once seeing a woman chew an umbilical cord off. When she bites the knot off the top of the plastic bag it releases a puff of domestic air, of laundered air.
    She has to get the knife out without getting the uniform wet, and then re-tie the bag, not so tightly this time, or so loosely that the sea would get in.
    It took an age to work through the mooring rope, a strand at a time; when she cut through the last one the buoy jumped away from her and she had to swim after it. Her body wouldn’t do what she wanted it to. It behaved like a board. Every limb felt stiff. Each time she reached the buoy, it moved away at her touch and she had to dog paddle after it. She thought she had lost the buoy, she thought that was it, she had made it this far, so close to land, when her hand came into contact with the trailing rope. Now, at least, she will not sink. The rest will be up to her. With one hand against the buoy and the other clutching the rope she begins to frog kick for the coast.
    She was still kicking as the sun went down. She had the awful feeling of moving away from land not towards it. She kept on though, there was no other option. Then at some point in the night she had the opposite feeling. She could feel herself being drawn towards the shore. There were the lights she’d seen the previous night. It is not as far as she had thought.
    As a child she drew pictures of the sea and the world above. Where the two met she used to draw a shelf that rose like a