Breathing Underwater Read online

  For my sisters, Alison and Sue

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  About the Author

  Why I Wrote Breathing Underwater

  My Favourite Section in Breathing Underwater

  Objects from Breathing Underwater

  Things to do after reading Breathing Underwater

  A room of my own

  Also by Julia Green

  It starts like this: a sudden storm. Squalls of rain batter my bedroom window, rattling the glass. A shrieking wind shakes the roof slates on the small stone house. A loose slate breaks free, slides and spins down the roof, shatters into tiny pieces on the path below.

  I lie in the dark for hours, listening to the storm moan and howl round the house, tugging it as if it’s a boat to be torn from its moorings. But the house stands solid, like it’s done for nearly a hundred years through storms wilder than this. Finally, at dawn, the wind drops.

  Still I can’t sleep. I get dressed, go to knock on Joe’s bedroom door. The door’s ajar. I whisper into the grey light, ‘I’m going down the beach. Coming?’

  After a storm, there are always things to find. Over the years, people here have scratched a living out of wrecks and stuff washed up. Joe and me have found all sorts.

  Joe’s already awake. He pulls on jeans and fleece, stumbles downstairs after me. The back door is unlocked, as always. We pull boots on: the rubber’s cold on my bare feet. We go the lane way to Periglis, the most westerly of the beaches. Neither of us says much. I’m amazed Joe’s come with me, though I don’t tell him that. I’m happy now, running ahead. The storm’s brought down whole branches: swathes of leaves and twigs clog up the lane. The air is cool, damp: smells like autumn, though it’s summer, still. August.

  I’m first at the beach. I jump down on to the rocks at the top, almost slip. Everything’s shiny and wet. Mist curls off the sea like smoke. The tide’s high, just on the turn. I kick through the piled-up stinking weed, and start making a stack of driftwood we can take home to dry. I stop to stretch out my spine. I watch the sea edging back, revealing small patches of fine silver sand.

  A little way out, the water seems to be breaking over something large. A low, dark object, like rock, but there are no rocks just there. I wait, watch. A piece of wrecked boat? A seal, perhaps, or a leatherback turtle, like the one washed up on Bryluen two years ago. Sometimes even whales get stranded after a storm.

  The sea, like the sky, is milky grey. Quieter now, sighing in, out, like breathing. It sucks and rolls the object, draws it back in the running tide. Bit by bit, the sea retreats.

  And now I see what it’s brought us. Not a seal, or a turtle. Not a beached whale. I gasp, but no sound comes, just a rush of air. There’s a bare foot, and then another, in a sodden trainer. Jeans, T-shirt, seaweed hair. The waves roll the heavy figure slightly, pull back. They leave the bloated body belly down on the silver sand and shingle, head twisted awkwardly to one side. I can’t stop looking. I stare at the mottled skin of the naked foot, and the bruised cheekbone.

  It’s weird but I don’t feel horror, or fear, or even pity, at that moment. I’m simply curious, seeing something for the first time, like a small child discovering the world.

  Joe’s behind me. ‘What the – !’ He clutches my arm. ‘Christ, Freya!’ He wades out through the shallow water, and with the tip of his boot he turns the head slightly, and I see the face. The boy’s mouth is slightly open, like a fish. Eyes shut. His skin is puffy, a strange purple and white colour. I take all this in. I can tell he’s been dead a while. A stranger. I watch Joe bend right over the body, touch the face and hand. For just that moment, there’s no one else but us in the whole world: Joe and me and a drowned boy.

  When Joe stands up, there are tears on his face. I stare, surprised. It’s so unlike Joe. The boy is no one we know, and so far beyond our help that I don’t feel sad, just sort of tender. And the weirdest thing: to me he seems at peace now, rolled over and over by the waves and laid out on the silver sand in the pearly early morning light. Nothing can hurt him any more.

  ‘Come on. Got to get someone.’ Joe tugs my arm, starts running up the beach, back along the path. I take one last look at the boy before I turn and follow Joe.

  I’m out of breath, running to catch up. ‘I found him first. I want to tell.’

  Joe stops and looks at me, suddenly furious. ‘What’s the matter with you? How can you even think like that? A boy drowned, Freya!’

  Back at home, we both tell, interrupting each other. Evie and Gramps phone the police and the coastguard; a police boat comes out from Main Island, and soon the beach is swarming with people. The dead boy’s not ours – mine and Joe’s – any longer.

  We find out later that the boy’s nineteen, a French fisherman, washed overboard days before the storm. The wind and the waves brought him to us. The chances of that happening?

  But people drown all the time. One every seventeen hours, in the UK. People get washed off rocks, there are boating accidents. Years ago, sixteen men from this island drowned in one night in a storm: practically the entire male population. Gramps says that some fishermen don’t ever learn to swim, on purpose; that way they’ll die more quickly if they go overboard. I can’t get my head round that. Joe and I both swim like fish.

  Joe sticks up a poster in his room: a map showing all the wrecks around the islands. Thousands.

  I didn’t particularly notice, at the time, how fascinated Joe was with this stuff. He’s always had a thing about the sea, danger, stories about disasters. Now I’m beginning to piece things together, I’ve started to wonder what exactly it meant to Joe, us finding the boy, that morning. Was that where it all started? Or am I making too much of it? Was it just one of those things, a random event, a tragedy for the boy and his family and his friends, somewhere in Brittany, but nothing more significant than that? Not a premonition, not a foreshadowing of what came later.

  Because that’s what you do, when something terrible happens. You go over and over every tiny thing, looking for clues, trying to find a pattern and a way to make sense out of the muddle and hurt. The drowned boy happened the year I was twelve and my brother Joe was fifteen, and a year later, Joe was dead.

  One

  I’m on the train, the start of the journey. It’s the first time I’ve been back to the island since Joe’s accident, last summer. It’s just me, this time. Mum won’t come back ever, she says, as if seeing again the place where he died will make things worse. How, exactly? The worst has already happened. The ache of it runs through my body like a seam of coal in rock, black and cold and terrible.

  Miranda’s mum says you’d never get over the death of your child. Miranda told me that yesterday, when we were in my old bedroom in the attic, putting the last of my things into boxes. Downstairs, Mum was packing up pictures and ornaments, ready for the move. We went past her on the landing, on our way down to get drinks in the kitchen. She was lifting down the big gold-framed mirror from its place on the wall. She held the mirror in both hands, staring at her own reflection in the spotted glass.
I looked at her face, framed in the mirror like a painting: Grieving Woman: self-portrait. She’d tied her hair back with a bit of old string. She was wearing the same sleeveless grey linen dress she’s worn all week, so now it was all creased and limp. Ghost-mother. She didn’t speak. Didn’t notice us, even.

  ‘She still cries at night,’ I said to Miranda. ‘Even a year on.’

  Miranda’s mum’s words echo in my head. Never. That’s the worst one. I don’t want to believe that it’s always going to be like this: Mum silent and sad and distracted; Dad out, or working all the time. There are lots of different ways grown-ups disappear. It’s lonely, being the one left behind.

  Now Miranda’s in Spain somewhere, with her family, and I’m on my way to the islands, to my favourite place on earth, except that . . . well, it’s just me. By myself.

  ‘Are you sure you should go?’ Miranda said. ‘I know you love it, and everything, but won’t it just be too sad? Bring back all the memories?’

  But I want to remember. That’s the whole point. I want to remember everything, all the tiny details, and I want to work something out. There’s this big horrible question mark hanging over it all, about Joe. Gradually, the question’s got stronger. I reckon it’s what’s eating away at Mum, nibbling her from the inside, turning her into a hollow shell.

  The question is this. Was it an accident, really?

  The train wheels rattle as we go into the first of a series of tunnels through the red cliff. The track goes right next to the sea. As we come out into daylight again, I press my face against the glass. Silvery-blue light reflects off the sea. I want to drink it in, all the light and the colour. For the first time in ages, a little quiver of excitement runs down my spine. Or is it fear?

  I’ve done this journey so many times with Joe, I still can’t quite believe he’s not here now. Lately, I’ve had these . . . well, strange things have been happening. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a shadow, a shape. Or the door opens, but no one’s there. Sometimes there’s a smell, like river water. I haven’t told anyone, not even Miranda. I want to see him so much, and I’m terrified, too. Like, he’s going to speak. Tell me something. And I know that it sounds ridiculous, and it’s impossible, and everything, but I’m scared of what he might tell me.

  The train’s slowed right down to go over the old iron bridge that spans the wide river in a beautiful curve, so high above the river that when you go across it’s almost like flying. If Joe was here, he’d have his head out of the window even though you aren’t allowed, and his hair would be wilder than ever, full of tangles that would stay the entire summer and no one would mind. Evie couldn’t care less what we look like. She’s not your average sort of gran.

  I squeeze past the woman in the seat next to mine, out into the swaying carriage and down to the doors. It’s one of those long-distance trains where the inside doors are automatic, but you can still pull down the windows on the exit doors. That’s what I do. The window sticks, and I have to work it loose, till there’s space for me to stick my head right out, like Joe would’ve done. The wind rushes at my face and makes my eyes water. So much air and space! It’s exhilarating after hours stuck inside the stuffy train.

  The wind tugs and pulls, as if it wants me to come out further: out, out and then down, down, down – gravity, I suppose, pulling me down to earth. Or down to water, rather, because the river’s directly below. For a second I go dizzy. I imagine opening the door, stepping out into air and space and light. I smell estuary mud, salt. Sounds crash back in: creaking train wheels and seagulls screaming, a boat horn; it’s like a picture suddenly coming to life. Everything’s coming sharply into focus.

  That’s when it happens.

  Joe’s voice, in my ear. ‘Careful, Freya!’

  He’s standing right behind me. His hand’s on my arm, holding me back from the too-far-open window. For a brief second, relief floods through me. Everything’s OK. Nothing has happened after all. He’s here. And then a different voice is shouting, and rough hands are pushing past me, yanking up the window.

  ‘Stupid girl! Can’t you read? IT IS DANGEROUS TO LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW.’

  Dazed, I shove past the ticket collector, back into the carriage and my seat. My eyes are blurry with tears. I’m shaking all over.

  Two

  I don’t really believe in ghosts. But something must happen after you die. Otherwise, what is the point? It is impossible for me to believe that Joe has just disappeared completely, in an instant. How could someone so alive and funny and maddening and clever and amazing as Joe just vanish? I have thought about this for a whole year, nearly. So what’s going on? Am I just imagining what I want to believe? Conjuring him up out of my imagination? Or could it be that because I’m somehow open to the possibility, he can actually come back, in one way or another? What exactly did happen, back there at the door?

  I don’t believe in the white spectre-type ghosts you get in stories, but what if ghosts are something else? Like memories, somehow caught and trapped in time, released by being in certain places where the things first happened. Or what if dead people can actually come back in some way, a spirit version of themselves, the same way they come in dreams, when you’re sleeping?

  My heart’s thumping like mad. I’m still holding my breath. I let it out, in a long sigh. The woman next to me stares and I look away, quick, out of the window. Moorland, chimneys, the remnants of derelict tin mines. Deep wooded valleys. Mist, turning to drizzle. Another hour to go. I close my eyes, drift into sleep.

  Bit by bit, we’re edging closer.

  The drizzle has turned to rain. Slanting sheets of it hit the train windows, run in rivers down the glass. The train is a column of light snaking through a grey landscape.

  I get off the train, find my way to the ferry, find a seat where I can leave my bag, and go up on the deck to watch the crew winding in the mooring ropes, pulling up the huge doors. Just before we leave the harbour, a storm warning comes out over the loudspeakers. They give you the option of delaying your journey. Full refund. No one is to stay out on deck. I go back down below.

  The ferry creeps along the coast as far as the tip of the peninsula, then it starts ploughing westwards. The rollers come in one long uninterrupted sweep across the Atlantic: there’s nothing between here and America. The ferry begins to pitch and roll. The engines change note. It’s going to take hours, having to go so slow. The ferry creaks and groans and a deep thud shakes through the whole ship each time an extra big wave hits the bows. Joe would love this. We’ve never come across in a storm before. But Joe isn’t here. When I close my eyes, I can’t even see his face.

  ‘Is it all right?’ A small child’s voice keeps piping from the seat behind me. ‘Is it safe? Are we going to drown?’

  Five hours of it, sick bag on my lap, and I get my first glimpse of land. I’ve been watching for ages, rubbing a space in the misted-up window. Land starts as a faint shadow on the horizon, then another: low dark shapes floating on the water. My heart lifts. I love this moment. More and more shapes appear: clearly rocks now, not shadows, and at last the first proper islands. A cluster of white houses, small fields, an empty rain-swept beach. Almost there.

  The ferry docks at Main Island. I’m on auto-pilot now, I’ve been travelling for so long. Queue to get off. Go along the harbour. Find the small ferries waiting to take passengers to the outer islands. The boat I want, the Spirit, is moored below stone steps, halfway along the harbour wall. Another queue.

  I’ve got my hood up. It’s still raining, though not as hard. I’m still feeling sick, like everyone else. I want to blend in with the crowd, be swept along, unrecognised. But the boat skipper, Dave, knows me instantly. He presses my hand as he helps me on to the boat.

  ‘Freya! Good to have you back. OK? Bit of a wild crossing, I bet!’

  I have to hold back tears. It hits me, suddenly, what it’s going to be like. People knowing. Feeling sorry. Not knowing what to say. It’s hard for everyone; I understand tha
t, I really do. I know why people avoid it altogether, don’t say anything rather than say the wrong thing. There isn’t an easy way through any of this.

  A fair-haired boy is doing the tickets. Not Huw, thank goodness. I make myself breathe properly: in, out, steady. People with rucksacks and tents and stuff pile into the boat. Jokes about the weather; camping. I let the voices wash over my head. Dave starts up the engine and the Spirit chugs slowly out of the sheltered harbour and across Broad Sound to St Ailla.

  Evie is waiting on the jetty, waving wildly as the Spirit edges in. I wave back. I’m last off the boat. Dave and the boy start loading bags and camping stuff on to the tractor-trailer on the jetty, ready to take it to the campsite at Sally’s farm and the holiday houses round the island. It was Huw’s job, last summer.

  The fair-haired boy turns to me. ‘All right?’ he says. ‘Sling your bag on with the others and I’ll bring it up to the house after I’ve done the campsite delivery.’

  So he does know who I am.

  Evie steps forward. ‘Thanks, Matt,’ she says. ‘This is Freya, my granddaughter.’

  Matt smiles. ‘I guessed.’

  He’s got the bluest eyes.

  Evie folds me in a big hug. Just for that moment I want to bury my head in the softness of her body and forget everything.

  ‘Safe and sound, thank goodness,’ Evie says. ‘What a storm!’ She hugs me even tighter. ‘I’m so glad to see you, Freya. You can’t imagine!’

  The rain’s almost stopped. I wait with Evie while Matt gets the tractor started up. We sit on the wall, watching the fog lifting off the water, while everyone else walks up the hill, turns off left to the pub or right to the campsite. Once everyone’s disappeared, I let myself imagine we’re the only people on the whole island.

  The air’s sweet after rain. Waves wash against the stone jetty. The tractor engine hums into the distance. For a moment, there’s silence. Something drops away inside me. It’s like an elastic band twanging free. I can breathe again. I’m here, at my favourite place on earth, where I can really be me.