Ta Voix

Fairy lights were wrapped around the fencing from top to bottom  for the season. Their twinkling bounced off pools of rain on the pavement, casting blue light  onto the cars parked for free after 6 pm. At first, she thought an ambulance was coming. There was no cause for emergency, but light collecting in puddles seemed dangerous. Electricity and water should never be so close.

She stepped through the topiary archway. A man wearing a black apron swept up stray pine needles and sodden leaves. When he looked up to dump the mulch in a wheelbarrow, he waved to her. She waved back. He set down the broom and smiled at her. She tried to remember what she had bought from him last, if anything. His face wasn’t familiar. Usually, she got advice on plant rearing from men with round-rimmed glasses on YouTube. They told her which plant best showed her fun side and which would survive in her shady bedroom. She walked past the man, looking at her feet. Her tan brogues were dark with rain.

Today, she had come for a cactus. It would sit between the photo of her mother, smiling thinly in a country garden, and her alarm clock. The proximity of its spikes to her alarm’s off switch would make her dark winter mornings so much more exciting. It would contribute the element of peril her natural environment required, she thought, and thus make her a more rounded creature. As things stood, she bored herself beyond tears. She was bored of measuring her waist three times a day, bored of the underground, bored of calling her mother hoping to hear warmth, bored of the aftershave of the men in the office, bored of drinking.

She had tried rummaging through the magazines thrust in her hands outside tube stations for things to relieve the boredom. In one was an article on the liberating experience of pond swimming. It promised that swimming in a pond of women near the homes of Liberal Democrat peers and Booker Prize winners would bring her freedom — a sense of wilderness but also of belonging, and a new appreciation for her body. It seemed better than nothing.

After a particularly stifling week of the summer in which everybody began to believe in climate change, she bought a swimming costume. She put on a long skirt over it, packed a backpack containing a towel and a can of pre-mixed gin and tonic, and boarded the Northern line. If nothing else came of the afternoon, she’d have enough to tell the office receptionist about her weekend to ward off his concerned smiles.

Women milled around the pond’s banks, drying off with stripy towels, laughing and shouting encouragement to swimmers. She put her skirt into the bag and walked towards the decking. Other women were slipping in and out of the pond with ease, as if nothing were more natural. She sat on the decking and took a breath before lowering her body into the water, her feet finding the slippery floor of the pond, sloping down into mulchy dark.

The cold seeped into her bones and prickled the bumps left by shaving her legs dry, foot propped up on the peeling enamel of her sink. The water was a band around her waist, constricting it with its cold. Around her, women splashed and laughed or else cut through the water with athletic precision.

She seemed to be alone in her stillness. Realising this, she pushed off with her feet, feeling them slide on slick algae, and let her torso fall into the water. The cold licked her arms from her bitten nail beds to the collarbone she hoped was protruding with every clumsy stroke she made. She kicked angrily, fighting the cold. Her father had taught her what to do with her head as she swam. When to turn it to the other side, when to take a breath. She couldn’t remember now. In the brief moments when her head was out of the water, she took in the cloudless sky and the more serene swimmers flanking her. Her father had probably told her not to bother with the sky or anyone else, just to swim. To swim and breathe and move.

She turned her head, coughing as the water made its way down her throat. Flakes of weeds slipped through her teeth. She swam on, switching to breaststroke. Slower, safer. She could feel weeds on her feet now, threading themselves between her toes and winding round her ankles, readying themselves to drag her further into the dark with them. The weeds grew heavier as she neared the safety of the pond’s banks, where stripy towels lay and women passed around cereal bars.

Exhausted, she reached the edge of the pond. She leapt out of the water, slapping down on the hot earth. She raised each of her limbs, inspecting them closely. They showed no signs of any plant life, save for the blades of grass now sticking to the damp soles of her feet. She rolled onto her back and breathed heavily.

A woman with a black pixie cut knelt down next to her.

‘First time?’

‘Yeah.’ She forced a smile back. She imagined it probably didn’t travel further than her chapped lips.

‘I thought so. You seemed a bit freaked out just then.’

‘No. Not freaked out. Just, cold.’

The woman laughed and held out a warm hand, ‘I’m Laura.’

She smiled without saying anything.

‘Look, a few of us get together on the third Saturday of the month. We have a good laugh. It’s good to have the company, and the encouragement, you know?’

‘Okay.’ She didn’t know. She sat up and pushed her sodden hair off her shoulders. It slapped her on the back.

‘You’re welcome to join us.’

‘Thank you. I’ve got to go now though. Meeting friends down the hill.’ She lied.

‘Oh, lovely. Well, another time then.’

She padded over to the peg where she had hung her bag. She didn’t bother with the towel and tugged a skirt over her swimsuit. Fat drops of water fell from the thick snaking tendrils of her hair. When she was 15 she had seen Caravaggio’s Medusa in the Uffizi.

‘That’s a masterpiece,’ her mother had said over her shoulder as she looked. ‘Don’t underestimate the importance of what you’re looking at – of how lucky you are.’

‘I’m not,’ she’d replied, meeting her mother’s eye in the glass protecting the work. The gallery’s air conditioning was struggling noisily with the July heat. Everyone fanned themselves with the multilingual maps of the building they had bought for a Euro on their way in. Her mother wandered off, complaining about the number of tourists in the place. She never paused to consider that she was one herself.

The can of gin and tonic rolled around at the bottom of her bag, warm now and wet with condensation. She walked until the weeds had released their grip on her and her bones felt warm again. She stopped when she found a spot far away from any shade cast by trees as possible. She read an article once which said that most of the trees on the Heath were older than people think. Older than her. They’d survive her by a mile.

She laid down on the scratchy grass that hadn’t been green in a fortnight. Worrying, the papers said. She basked like the lizard her mother had scolded her for getting too close to on a trip to Cyprus. She had extended her finger towards its back before she was pulled away and the gecko had run, startled. She opened the gin and tonic and didn’t move until she could feel her face and chest redden and prickle.

The next Monday, she told the receptionist she had swum for hours and that she’d made friends. She told him she had forgotten to put on more sun cream and the pond water reflected the record-breaking rays straight back at her and that was why her cheeks were flushed. He said it was brilliant that she was trying new things, she was putting him to shame. She smiled and took the stairs to her desk.

Now, she wove through the aisles of outdoor plants that were surviving the winter, envying their endurance. Behind them were rows of Christmas trees, stuffed in nets that resembled the ones she had worn in adolescent summers, serving cooked breakfasts to pensioners, who rubbed at scratch cards with two pence coins on plastic tables. When they had finished, they swept the grey rubbings into the congealing ketchup on their plates so as not to make a mess.

Real Christmas trees that smelled of wild and shed needles were a novelty to her. Her mother said that real trees were a bloody waste of money, and in any case, the needles would pierce the dog’s paws. She couldn’t be bothered to change the water, she said. She always did hate plants.

Inside, she chose a cactus. The woman behind the counter tipped the plant into her soil dusted palms to get a look at the price tag on the bottom. It didn’t seem to hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t even prick her thumb if she did hit it tomorrow morning.

‘£4.00 for the plant and £5.50 for the pot, my love.’

She stared at her, smiling.

‘You alright darling?’ the woman asked, packing soil around the cactus to stabilise it like a mother tucking her child into bed.

‘Yeah, sorry. Funny text. Thank you.’ Her phone was in her pocket.

She took out her debit card and tapped it on the reader. But what she really wanted to do was tell her that she loved her. She loved how she had tucked in the cactus and smiled at her as if she had meant it. She wanted to say that despite the sticker on the till that told her she was paid the Living Wage for it, looking after all these plants looked like motherhood to her.

Instead she put her card back in her wallet and said thank you.

‘That’s alright, love. You let me know if you’ve got any issues, yeah?’

The last thing she would do if she couldn’t take care of a cactus would be to tell her. But saying ‘I will’ made her smile and that was what mattered.

The woman’s name was embroidered on her apron in winding green tendrils. Caroline.

‘Thank you, Caroline.’

She kept smiling and put the cactus and its chartreuse pot in a tote bag printed with the logo of a gallery she had never been to. A bubbling sound rose above the noise of the traffic and cackling children. It came from the pond to the right of the dripping archway, slightly too big for the patio. The rain dappled its surface, obscuring the reflections of the twinkling blue. She held her tote bag to her side and bent over. It seemed expensive, encased in whitewashed brick and waist-high. Goldfish darted around in a rush, overlapping and crowding one another.

She crossed the road without checking for traffic. Cars wouldn’t hit her. Her mother always told her not to worry, that drivers didn’t want the paperwork involved after an accident. Along the way, sodden books lined the waist-high walls demarcating the property of well-read homeowners. Paperbacks sat on notes advertising them as being ‘free to a good home’. Her more earnest neighbours included personal recommendations on post-its peeling away from covers. The ink ran onto the book’s leaves, infusing it with goodwill and rendering it illegible .

She paused to pick up a wet Franzen and looked into the window of the house which offered it to the street. The Christmas tree lights were on, flickering tastefully. Handmade ceramic stars embossed with the ridges of children’s thumbprints weighed down its branches with love. She could see tousled tops of heads and silhouetted adults, bathed in the television’s watery blue light, bringing mugs of something hot to their lips.

She nestled the novel beside the cactus in her bag and went home. It would need water. There was a stained-glass jar on the fireplace that she kept specially for watering. Her mother had painted it with her name in green when her primary school held a craft day. A falling leaf dotted the “i” in her name.

The bath taps groaned as they filled the jar with warm, cloudy water. She left the tap running and carried the jar back to her bedroom, water spilling over its lip and leaving dark spots on the floorboards. She tilted the jar until her name was upside down and it was empty. Water overflowed and began to drip from the mantle.

She took off her coat and threw it onto her bed, its navy wool heavy with rain. Her Oyster card and a few coins fell out of its pockets.
She sat on top of the damp coat and untied her laces, kicking her boots to the other side of the room. They knocked over a framed movie poster her last boyfriend gave her. She had never watched the movie. She felt that watching it would ruin the idea of it, which existed only in their conversations. Also, it looked terrible.

She stood up and took off her jumper, then her jeans and socks. When she took her underwear off she was surprised to see blood. Relief was what she thought she might be feeling. She walked to the bathroom. Steam from the full bath fogged up the skylight. Streetlights cast an orange haze across its glass, like a fiery frost.

She stepped in. The water sent licks of heat up her calves. She stood on one leg with her eyes closed and then plunged her body into the heat. The bath spat water over its lips as she upset its surface. She opened her eyes to see her skin redden and tilted her head back until her temples met the rippling water. Further back now, deeper until her lips returned the water’s sharp kiss.

They took her ankles first. Slippery dark strands of green pushed out of the overflow, reaching and curving themselves around her legs. She smiled and leant further back under the water until only her nose was above its flaming surface.

They wound themselves around her thighs, her hips, her waist. They twisted around her arms and pulled her further still until water filled her nostrils.

She could be at home here. She knew that now.