Ma says she’s coming all the way to the port with me but she leaves halfway. I see her carapace swimming backwards; her eyes locked on mine. My heart starts screaming. Maybe hers does too which is why she can’t come any further. We’ve been put into salty swim crates as we’re going on the great crawfish adventure to the UK. The British want North American signal crawfish with our big red claws in their posh swanky restaurants – with dill like the Swedish. Do they have dill in England?

They load us onto huge boats. I’m lucky to be in quite a chilled crate. Also, I’m not post-molt which some of the others are – one particular crate is a mangle of crawfish in a frenzy of cannibalism. There are so many screaming hearts but then the huge Atlantic waves take over and even the bullies are too sick to eat.

The great adventure isn’t really working out. We go from swimming joyfully in great running creeks to small ponds and tanks with Beatles songs piped through tubes – love love me do on repeat – to make us breed.

Things really aren’t going well. Turns out British folk don’t eat as much crawfish as the Scandinavians so the farmers are left with a ton of crawdads. Friends start being scooped up in buckets and taken away. One of my best mates, disappears in a scoop up which makes my heart start screaming again but a few nights later, he’s back. He’s walked over a mile to come and tell me that the farmers took them to the beautiful English rivers and streams and released them! And they’ve seen the natives! Lovely, beautiful, white-clawed crayfish. The rest of us are so excited that we start planning our great escape.

The ferns start to frenzy. At first, it’s not much: just a tickle whisp of fronds waving to the west in welcome. Beside ourselves with excitement, we strain to get a glimpse of what they can see, but our view is murk green and blocked by a boister of randy ransoms who are delighting in making wood anemones faint with their pungency.

I hardly feel the first ripple but smell the circles gurgle around me and then the water above is beating in time to strong footsteps and I can hear mother squealing at my sisters to go home quick and then the pulse train goes wild. The fern seeds are popping and firework up above the ransoms, unable to contain their excitement as the whole riverbank is suddenly frantic at the arrival of the great American crawfish. Oh sweet cicely!

And then I see him for the first time. He’s not puffing himself up like the others; he’s just standing there looking at me. He starts signalling to me from the riverbank and I gasp. Stunning red claws. I can’t help myself. Our swimmerets beat in greeting. I am utterly lost. Thrill bubbles shoot up my antennae. In that instant, I know that I would change my entire life to be with him. I shall call him Dylan.

Amidst all the manic clicking and flirting, all I can see is this adorable creature with her delicate fluttering antennae. When I see her raise her tiny claws and wave back at me, a hundred Beatles songs all make sense at once. My carapace shifts into another millenia as I see that her the pale rose of the bottom of her claws… WHACK. The yobs surround me, flanked by scaly male ferns – they’ve seen the way I was blushing. The bullies square up – claws threateningly open – warning me not to even think about doing it with one of THEM – the puny white clawed losers.

This is what’s been making the elders jittery for months: the escape of the signal crawfish. They’d heard about this other species being brought over here from the farmers’ sons who come and sit on the banks, on the pretence of fishing but who spend afternoons crushing bluebells and each other in their passion.

And then father hears the fishermen who are always moaning about bloody migrants coming over here saying that the bloody crawdads who came over here aren’t selling ‘cos we’re British not bloody Swedish and we don’t eat bloody poncy crayfish tails so the diversifying farming plan is buggered and so the bloody non-natives are being let out…

“What do you mean? Let. Out?” Mother says.

I’ll never forget her face; it was as white as her claws. Mother always looks like she’s wearing white gloves, well, whiteish, just a little off – like clotted cream late on a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer. Her face has stayed silent since, remembering another time…

The entry of the exotic engineers into the river is nothing short of triumphant. The escape from the farms has been great and now they are here, resplendent. Spines heckled and feisty, our elders lead an army of native crayfish who attack the invaders, the blow-ins, marking our land and boundary. The incomers retreat downstream and start burrowing into banks. The elders are seething; every other word is ‘them’.

I know my brothers go out on the rampage at night, travelling miles for new adventures and new blood and then return to ravage the riverbanks. I hate them for being so bullish. Each night, I lie quietly near the underground tree roots where my rosy-clawed love lives, waiting for her folk to go out for the night so I can swim off in the moonlight with her to find a hidden glen where we can stretch out some hours; our swimmerets singing until dawn. She sadly tells me of the arguments where her elders scream ‘them’ with hatred and are deaf when she tries to explain that it’s not our fault that we are here – humans brought us here in crates from our creeks. I sob and say sorry for the damage that my family are doing to her habitat but she is wild and says her elders and my brothers are all as ignorant as the fishermen. Together, we self soothe, with tummy floats that no-one can touch and smile.

I hear mother shrilling at my father at how they should have seen the danger signs. Red. Signal. But roses are red, and damselflys have beautiful red stomachs – and blood, life blood – the pumpy one – it’s red in some animals, isn’t it… even if our blood is blue?

And I hear my father sobbing and love throat bubbling about how he loves my mother and how he when he saw her for the first time his father said he wasn’t to go near… .

“You weren’t a different species,” mother screams.

Father gazes at my mother’s carapace swimming away – her spines taut with fury.

Mother’s off-white gloves are the last thing I see as my family leave. They bob but do not wave to me. Right at the end, she looks at me, and I can hear her heart screaming too. Our entire habitat has been almost destroyed by the signal crayfish and most of the white claws have taken the chance to move on while what remains of their homes can still float and before the plague brought over spreads. A pierce scream will live forever in my heart and my click will never be more than a whisper tick because of my decision not to go with them. Choice is not always ours. Father is the only one who comes to say goodbye. He too had once made a choice and abandoned his family for love: only he is able to understand.
I make the promise once more to her father. It had already been made when I first met his daughter. We all knew the cost of inter-breeding between species but the words he used could have split the hardest of carapaces. I had never heard such a pitch of clicking: heights of fury and depths of sadness make such discordance. I echoed his clicking: needing him to know how much I loved his daughter and how I would never pass the plague onto her.

So we – us two – have chosen love. And celibacy. We may be different species; but we are both as old as dinosaurs and we are in love. We’ll take whatever time we have. We don’t live with the other signal crayfish in the riverbank. We are put into a refuge that biosecurity builds for us: another consequence of our love. The nice lady from the environment agency whispers to us in moonlight. She reads from her favourite book: the wildlife and countryside act – she likes chapter nine.

Life changes; as does our habitat: our homes and rivers. I remember my mother telling us how she used to swim with toe tickling prawnettes. Their own parents spoke of the freshwater pearl mussels of their childhood; how tiny crayfish used to dance with dragnonflies, trying to spot the shine of a mussel catching a ride on young salmon; how kingfishers used to lie in wait and dive to claw up the mussels and rip them open to devour the mussel; how crayfish used to scour the river banks for fallen pearls. The shrill crys of joy of Margaritifera Margaritifera when they found a pearl.

The pearl mussels have long ago left even the freshest of waters, as have many of the white-clawed crayfish, their habitat torn away by the burrowing incomers, but also by humans with their pollution, their overfarming and chemicals. Great signal crawfish play a part in this change and it saddens me beyond clicks can express to have lost my family but I am in awe of this amazing red clawed love of mine, my Dylan, with his ability to adapt. The lovely lady who reads to us at night has a three-word job in the daytime where she tries to contain damage, protect and conserve the environment. She signs to fisherfolk, their rods and boots: check, clean, dry. We hear some of the mean fishermen, talking about ‘them’, coming here in their boats and I know it’s not just us – but sometimes we don’t have a choice. Sometimes we escape because we can’t take it anymore and sometimes we are brought here. Immigrants and the imported: all in the same boat of hatred; all ‘them’. And aren’t we all incomers on this planet? Aren’t we all invasive species? All we can do is try and protect our shared planet and sing Margaritifera Margaritifera when we find a pearl.

I fish from my surfboard. Nobody else does, except a guy in Brazil who posted clips on YouTube. Like him, I release almost all of my fish, collect dead birthday balloons tangled in the kelp, and try to blend in with the ocean. Just minutes away from the hustle of Los Angeles, lies this tranquil world. I’m a regular in both. 

Splish, splash. My longboard cuts through the little ripples, past the angry breakers and into a safe zone. I sit up straight and balance over the rolling waves, as if on a horseback ride.

On my first cast, the rod flexes like a bow. I feel the headshakes on the other end of the line and answer with my own. I lift gently. The halibut is convinced that this is a game and goes up the invisible steps until I slide him on the board. 

“Are we done?” 

His round eyes stick out like big blueberries from a pancake. I remove the hook, but he lies next to me. For a few seconds we examine each other.

“Go home!” I begin to worry about his lengthy oxygen bath and slide my hand under his flat belly. A tail splash covers my polarized glasses with salty drops. He runs down like a kid skipping steps on the stairs until I can’t see him. 

I paddle into the kelp, and it wraps yellow-brown tentacles around my legs when I sit up. 

“Glad to see you too,” I answer the hug. 

 I check every nook in this patch of kelp with my jig, but nobody is home. 

“Are there any fish here?” I ask a seal who watches my every move. “There is plenty of bait.” 

The seal doesn’t disagree and listens like a patient therapist. Then he lifts his whiskered nose to the sky and disappears under water. 

Dolphins bob up and down along the kelp line. They never stop, they can’t. I feel the urge to move, too, and untangle my legs to glide to a clearing in the aquatic forest. On my next cast, the line slacks. 

If it’s not hung up on the kelp it means…

I start winding like a madman. The hard jerk on the line almost pulls the rod out of my hands, the reel screams in a fight.

A mighty calico bass runs into the kelp stringers with my jig in his jaws. His buddies follow, trying to grab the hooked piece of plastic from him. I see the checkered pattern of his back under the leaves. Fighting the fish through the kelp is impossible and I stop reeling. I pretend to give up and wait for him to relax.  After a minute, the calico thinks he is free and wiggles out into the open water. I swing the rod up and get him on the board before he escapes.

“Today, you are going with me,” I announce.

I twist, trying to grab my fish stringer; it is attached to the board’s leash loop behind me.  It is close, but out of reach. I lay down my rod and slide into the water while keeping the fish above it in a reversal of roles. With catch secured, I replace the shredded plastic bait on my hook. My fingers that retrieved it from the jaws are bleeding. 

On my next cast, I watch the unnatural neon tail of the bait wiggle towards the bottom. I am as tense as my line, anticipating the next strike, when a sudden loud Pffff behind my back almost makes me wet my wetsuit. 

A mountain rises next to me, mist still hanging in the air above it after a blow. It’s black and covered with barnacles. 

What if I was on top of that mountain? I’d probably roll down, covered with krill, wash it off and climb aboard to continue fishing.  I try to reason with myself.  Did I paddle out too far, since the whale is closer to the mainland than I am?

The worried water swirls in odd patterns after the black mountain sinks back into it. I start moving to the shore when it is smooth again.

I stop to catch my breath and my thoughts.  

Am I a calico, who stays in the same neighborhood, teaches kids to ambush anchovies and rub fins with young sheepheads in the kelp? 

Should I follow the whales, who bring their kids from Mexico to Alaska, hoping that no unstoppable tanker will ram them on the way or that no vicious orca will tear the young ones apart. Do they dream of fertile snowmelt-infused water that reflects white mountains? Of endless summer days, when bears become tired of splashing in the shallows, but the flowers I grew up with never close for the night?

A gentle wave pushes me toward the shore. I bend under the weight of the board with a fish hanging on it as I climb to the parking lot.

A couple of urbanites in brim hats and sandals peek at me when I land at a picnic table. I gulp some warm water from a jug that waited in the car and grab a knife and a cutting board.

“Look, that’s how you get your fresh dinner,” one foodie says to another. 

I slide the blade along the calico’s spine.

“What kind of fish is it?” the second hat asks.

“A kelp bass.”

I sling the guts with the tip of my knife and they fly into yellow bloom of a wild mustard. 

“Racoons and seagulls will eat ’em.” I act as a casual brute. I grab the fish skeleton by the tail and swing it past the spectators too.

“What do you use to catch the fish?” 

“Nuclear Chicken.”

 Both frown as if I’m being rude. 

People will believe the most outrageous lie but question and reject the truth. 

“Aren’t you afraid of sharks?” the second hat changes the subject.

“I paid my dues by getting stung by stingrays, twice. A mistake by a great white would be a bit over the top.” I use a prepared answer to a usual question.

“That sting hurts pretty bad, huh?” 

“It’s an anxiety pain. It feels like you are stuck in an L.A. traffic jam, and you need to go to the bathroom really bad. And annoying music blasts from a car next to you.” I try to explain it in familiar terms. 

They grin in agreement.

I wash blood off my hands and sand off my feet with leftover water, toss fillets in a cooler, and plop into my car.

Flashing red and white lights behind the curve of the road signal a stop. I see a gray Mazda with a hood squashed into an accordion, the broken wings of the seagull emblem bleeding green and brown.  Live seagulls squawk with concern. Humans, crouched with stress, yell into their cell phones. As I wait, I roll down the window and gaze into the blue.  In the eternal expanse, a faint fountain rises. 

The whales are moving north.  I’m not.

Matilda is dying. All night we can hear her screaming, a long sound like wind off the surface of floodwater, or oyster shells cracking, but it’s too bad this week to make out it to her, and I get the feeling that it doesn’t really matter, and the rain is just an excuse for something already long decided.

She had a bad time with her foal. I wasn’t allowed to see it, but everyone said it was bad. When it finally came, it was big and soft and full, but Matilda didn’t look right, she looked like she had lost all her insides with the baby and was made up only of skin, like she had left her skin to go do something and was going to return soon and climb back into it. Now she is dying, and I think it is the same as my mother, because everyone is suddenly very quiet and chews much more slowly and keeps their eyes down, and Marcus says that probably it’s a good idea to not even drink bottled water right now, so we are drinking only beer.

It’s hard not to drink the water, though, because the water is everywhere. It’s up to the windows and likes to bring us things: DVDs and microwaves and horseshoes. Once an orange pair of child’s converse, laces tied together. Another time, a whole shelf of bees. Some were even still alive, and Marcus wanted to call the newspaper or something to tell them we found real alive bumblebees, but my father said this was a stupid idea, what would be in it for us anyway, and no one had ever actually cared that much about bumblebees. So Marcus didn’t call anyone, but he kept those five little bees on his bedside table, right up until they died. The bees were probably the best thing that came to us. Also, we are barely ever hungry, because fish from the old ocean come right up to our doorstep now, and they are always already dead.

Matilda and I are the same age technically, fifteen, born only a month apart. We used to lie in the living room together, when she was small enough to still be allowed in the living room, and she would roll around with her hooves in the air and Marcus, who is three years older than me, would throws balls for us to catch and bring back to him across the roof, as if we were made of the same thing. Before I could talk, I think I thought I could talk to her. I would grab the sides of her wide donkey face and press my head hard into hers, and we would talk. They let her sleep in my bed until my father decided it was time for her to have babies. She will probably die tomorrow. It is too bad.

She dies tomorrow. When I wake up, I realize I have been biting my lips in my sleep and there is blood on the pillow, and it is thick like mold. Downstairs, Marcus and my father and Clara who is my father’s wife and Eli who is my very little brother are standing at the window and it is quiet, there is no more crying, and I know she is dead. The water crawls up the side of the house, licks at the bottom of the windows. In its mouth I can see the remains of a woman’s blouse, white with purple flowers, formless. Marcus asks am I okay and I say yes I am okay. Marcus says do I want to see her and my father says no I don’t want to see her and Clara says really I shouldn’t see her and I think I want to see her.

We take the blue boat. The oars rotted away a long time ago so now we use tennis rackets with their holes patched up with jeans and plastic. Marcus remembers when there wasn’t any water. He tells me about cliffs, which I have never seen. They are mountains that end, they just disappear, and then there is space and sky. He still remembers where they start and tells me when we’ve rowed off the mountain. “Now this is sky,” he says.

I’m thinking maybe I don’t actually want to see Matilda, but we are already there. My bones are pressing against the insides of my skin. It is warm and wet outside. The wood on the barn is soft to the touch and the blue Marcus and I painted on its walls one dry summer a long time ago is washing away, making the water look painted, like it was made up. Matilda’s skin is on the floor of the loft. I don’t know where the rest of her is. The foal is standing at the window; she is waiting for us. For some reason I feel better, because it really looks like Matilda isn’t there, and this makes me think that maybe she is somewhere else, and her skin is just a gift she left for us. We gather it – the skin – in cheesecloth and I carry it in my arms, and it is empty and warm. We help the foal into the boat. She is careful and still, as if she is thinking.

“You name her,” Marcus says.

“What?”

“Whatever you want.”

But I can’t think of any name. We bury the skin in an old suitcase at the top of the mountain where it’s still dry, near where my mother is. There are some poppies growing here, and sometimes there are racoons. We cover it in mud and wild grass, next to a bench which has been there for as long as I can remember, unevenly splattered in peeling white paint, and a little gold plaque: For Rose, who sat here every night and watched the ocean. I hope she will be able to find it, when she comes back for it.

This used to be a place called California. Now, it doesn’t have a name. It was very big and very dry, so dry that sometimes there would be no rain for years. My father told me that it had some of the oldest trees in the world, and everyone loved music. There were cities, where people lived. Where we are now used to be a place called Pacifica, which apparently wasn’t really known for anything except one time when a family’s car fell off a mountain cliff and later on everyone found out that the dad had done it on purpose. In California, something was always on fire. There were a great many birds of prey. There was a place called Sacramento, and a lot of serial killers. There were rattlesnakes and strawberry fields and oil in the ocean. I think in some places there were rivers, but they always ended somewhere. There were shores and shores of oysters, and so much empty sky.

One day it rained, and it didn’t stop raining for many months. The drought was broken but the earth couldn’t breathe. The earth started disappearing and the water had nowhere to go but up. The water took everything, and it got very bad, because on top of all the usual things – houses and cars and refrigerators and tree trunks – the water also took the gas and the oil and the fuel. That’s basically how everyone got sick. The sickness was slow. It crept up on us.

There are all other kinds of stories, about what the water does. Stories about salmon with five eyes. Babies with shark teeth. Conjoined jellyfish twins. There are some claims of ducks with plastic webbed feet, but I think this one is made up. The water is bad water. That’s all there really is to know about it.

Marcus says I should name the foal. I can’t think of any name. He says why don’t I just name her Matilda if I’m so hung up on it but I don’t want to do that. I look at her all day long, but I can’t find a name. The sun goes down, and she sleeps in my bed, and I pray that my sleeping might bring something back to me.

The next two days are rain, and we catch it in buckets and boil it. It makes the whole world water, and I sleep and sleep, but still nothing seems to come. When it stops the foal and I go out in the blue boat to see about Matilda. The hill is green with clean water, and there is even some jasmine beginning to show. Also, there is a girl there sitting on Rose’s bench. She has long dark hair that is very wet and the way the light is coming down makes the underside of her skin look blue and moving for a minute, but it changes, and there is no blue anymore. The weirdest thing about it is I’m not surprised to see her. I even rack my brain for some surprise because logically I understand I am meant to be surprised, but I’m not surprised. She is sitting really still, as if waiting for something, and she’s wearing basketball shorts dripping with algae and a yellow tank top that has Betty Boop on it, and pink socks. She turns her head to look at me and her eyes are deep black-blue and there is something wrong with them and I start to feel sick. I keel over until my stomach settles. When I look up, she is pointing at the foal.

“Who’s that?”

“No name yet.”

“You should name her Ana.”

I am suddenly cold. “But that’s my name.”

She nods. “Oh, right!”

“What’s yours?”

She smiles, and her teeth are pointy and straight. “Where did you come from?”

“Same place as you.”

“California?”

“I don’t know who California is.”

We stand there, the foal and I, looking at her, and when I look at her, I feel like I will never be thirsty again.

“Come and sit with me.”

“Okay.” I sit with her, and I think I am sick, my head is all full and moving, but she takes my hand and I am not so sick anymore.

“Do you miss her?” she whispers, and her voice sounds like rocks knocking against waves.

“My mother?”

“Matilda.”

“Yes.” And I don’t know why I ask it, don’t know how I know to ask it: “Is she coming back?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. It depends.”

“On what?”

“On the water.”

I take her home with me. Our knees knock together on the boat, and hers are cold and soft. She runs her hands through the water as if she is not afraid of it, as if it is nothing but blue. She changes into my jeans and shakes hands with my father and tells him she lives underneath our house and then laughs a lot and says she is just kidding. Marcus thinks it is funny, but I can tell things haven’t started off very well. She lets me try and wring out her hair, but it seems there is always more water trapped in it, and it leaves little secret glimmers wherever she goes that Clara hastily cleans up after her.

“Why would you bring water in here?” she hisses at me when the girl has gone to lie down, gesturing widely in her direction as if she herself is water, and for a moment I get confused.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s a bad sign,” Clara says to my father.

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“The water stays with her. It’s a bad sign.”

She eats dinner with us. She tears the bread with her teeth in quick and clean cuts. When Clara brings the salmon out to the table, she starts to cry. She covers her eyes and buries her face in my shoulder and inside me is a rising tide, all warm and bright and tingling. I whisper into the top of her head that she doesn’t have to eat the fish if she doesn’t want to, and she seems to feel better after that.

She is allowed to stay the night, but only if she wraps her hair up in two sets of towels. With them piled on her head, she looks like a queen, or an ancient tree about to fall. In my room, we sit on the bed and now I think her eyes are getting bigger in the dark or something, they suddenly seem to take over her face, like their blue is about to spill over everything, and I remember when I first saw her, how her skin looked like it was moving, like it was made of something rising.

“Did you know my name earlier?” I ask.

She smiles. “Only a little. Wanna see something cool?”

“Okay.”

She takes off one of her socks and stretches open her toes and in between each of them is this kind of layer of skin, almost like jellyfish skin, and it is so blue it is almost black.

“What is that?”

She shrugs. “I was just born with it.”

I am wide-eyed, kind of freaked. “Do you think it’s from the water?”

She laughs, river stones. “Probably.” She looks down at her toes, stretches them open and shut again, and is suddenly not laughing anymore.

“Why are all of you so afraid of the water?”

“What do you mean? Because the water is bad.”

“But why?”

“Because the water killed my mother. The water took everything away from us.”

She is staring at me. “But do you think it was yours to begin with?”

“What was?”

“Everything.”

We fall asleep facing each other and her hands are so close to mine and I stay awake a long time, watching. Her lips are thin and ripple with her breath. I feel like I am floating.

I must fall asleep because suddenly I am awake again and she is not in the bed. She is standing at the window, and on the other side of the window is a big brown bear. Its face is pressed hard against the glass. It must be floating on something, because otherwise I don’t know how it could be there. Her face is pressed against the glass too and her mouth is all scrunched up in concentration, as if she wants to eat the bear.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

“She’s cold.”

“What?”

“She’s cold. She needs to come in. She’s so cold.”

The bear is dripping wet. Water runs down the front of her face and off her nose and pools onto the window. The girl looks like maybe she will start crying.

“We need to let her in.”

“What? No.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s a bear you can’t just let it in!”

“Yes, you can. You just open the window and you let her in.”

“This is insane.”

She turns to face me and tears the towels off her hair and then there is water everywhere. It bleeds down her back and starts to make a pool at her feet, silver in the scattered moonlight.

“Touch the water,” she says, and her voice is cold and calm. Behind her, the bear presses a wet paw on the window, sighs a cloud of warm on the glass, and floats slowly, sadly, away.

“What? Why?”

“Just do it.”

She sinks to her knees as if she is about to start praying, gathers the water up into her hands and drinks it, slow and long, and while she does, she watches me. It drools from the corner of her mouth, spills down her chin. She swallows. It looks like maybe it is sweet, maybe it is good. Someone makes a sound, small like a whimper. I think it is me.

“Drink it.”

“No.”

“I came to get you. I promised to bring you back. Drink it.”

“I don’t understand.”

She drinks more of it, fills her glorious mouth with it, and her skin begins to burn blue, like when I first saw her. And then she is coming closer to me, and her steps are etched in blue, almost all of her is blue, she is disappearing into it. She touches my cheeks, and her hands are wet and cold. She kisses me, and it is like she was always going to. It’s like it has happened before, and the water flows from her mouth into mine and I swallow it, and it is warm from having been inside her, and it is sweet, it is good, beating through my body like a heart.

It takes me too long to realize I have closed my eyes. When I open them, she is out the window. From where I stand, she seems to melt into the water. She opens her mouth, as if about to shout, or sing. And then she is gone, and I am in the pool she left behind her, water breathing at the back of my mouth, alone in a rising blue.

She is not here in the morning. The sky out the window is sagging and gray, and the water is loud and writhing, like it wants something. I have a taste in my mouth, salty, thirsty. Downstairs, Marcus asks where is the girl from yesterday and is her hair still all wet and I say yes, yes. He is standing at the table opening a can of beer and I suddenly want to tell him, I really want to tell him, how thirsty I am. Because I am so thirsty; my bones are stammering with it and my tongue is heavy in my mouth like sand. I am aching with want for water, the backs of my eyes trembling, my hands opening and closing as if they are trying to speak. And I am thinking about Matilda and the warm wet of her breathing on my nose in the early morning, the shelter of her skin, and where can she be now that her skin is empty. And what the water did, how it took her from herself, ate up her insides until all that was left was this little child, standing on shaky legs, haunted always by the memory of her mother, who I know is never coming back.

I open my mouth to tell him, my dry and useless mouth, and I know all at once that I will never tell him. And I don’t know how to explain it but also, I know that I am going, and there is no way around it anymore. I watch Marcus. He is slicing potatoes, his dark hair hanging limp over his eyes.

“I’m going to go see Matilda.”

He looks up at me and then, as if talking to a child: “She’s dead, Ana.”

“I know she’s dead, you idiot, I mean I’m going to where we left her.”

“You can’t. The water is too angry today.”

“It’s not that bad, I’ll be fine. Watch the foal for me.”

“You never named her.”

“You name her. Name her after one of the missing things.”

“Like what? Oak?”

“Oak is good.”

“Coral.”

“Pretty too. Or California, maybe.”

He smirks. “Too on the nose, I think.”

The water really is angry, or maybe just hungry. It has lots of limbs, and they crawl into the boat, grab at my ankles. By now, all my skin is thirsty, and it fills me, irresistible. I keep my hands tight on the oars and try to ignore the blue slowly filling the corners of my eyes, the fish-like flapping of my tongue, so stuck in my mouth.

And she is right where I first found her, on Rose’s bench, like I knew she’d be, only this time she really is blue. She’s coated in it, dripping. Something lies on her lap, limp and grey. I stay in the boat a minute, staring up at her. When she talks, water spills from her mouth, as if it has come from her.

“You’re blue.”

“It’s just leftovers.”

“I drank the water and you left me.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to make you.”

I am getting closer to her now, and I can see that the thing on her lap has a head and a stomach and a tail. It’s a seal. What used to be a seal.

“What are you holding?”

She raises her head, and I am swimming deep in her eyes. “My skin. Yours is waiting for you.” And I understand.

“How long have you been here?”

“A long time.”

“Longer than me?”

“Yes.”

“Than my mother?”

“Maybe.”

“So you were here when California was here?”

She smiles. “There was never such a place.”

“But Matilda didn’t come from the water. She can’t swim.”

“That doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How can it not matter?”

“It just doesn’t. Once everything came from the water. The water made everything.”

She wraps her arms around the sealskin on her lap and holds it. She watches me, eyes dripping blue, water rushing the ends of her hair, the crevices above her collarbones, her hands. There is a whole film of blue over my eyes now, making everything ripple and sway. The sun is going, slipping down the sky. It will be gone soon.

“So?” She says. “Go and get it.”

I do. I use my hands, which look so far away from the rest of me, to uncover the suitcase. I unzip the sides, gather up the soft folds of Matilda, the cave of her skin. It is blue, or maybe that is just how I am seeing it. It trembles to be returned to me. I get the feeling that what I’m holding in my hands is all that is left of another world, lost a long time ago, one I’ll never see. I turn, and the girl is rebecoming herself, legs lost in sealskin, eyes expanding so quickly, turning black like the bottom of the earth. She is not speaking anymore; she is a water thing now. And then, as if I have blinked, a seal resting on a burned-black rock watches me and opens its mouth, revealing teeth sharp as the tops of faraway cliffs. It beckons its head and dissolves into the water, which tumbles and sighs, as if it has been waiting.

And I am alone on the top of a used-to-be mountain, wind shuffling in my ears, Matilda’s skin hollow in my arms. I step into it. Inside, it is warm and beating, and I can feel the space between my eyes get bigger. My body sighs to be broken from itself, to be finally returned to her. Below me, the big blue ocean opens its mouth. I can feel, in its writhing, how much it wants me, and I do what probably I was going to do all along. I give myself to the water. I forget about my breath.

I.

My laboratory is on the basement level with soundproofing and no windows, so it’s only once I leave work that I can see and hear the birds without mediation. It’s funny, when you spend all day running analysis on birdsong, how unfamiliar listening to actual birds can be. Suddenly it’s not just Sample 34B: Erithacus rubecula, it’s that robin, there, in the hedge singing its little heart out. The movement always catches me off-guard, too: such abruptness, nearly invisible to the eye, just a hop and a whirr of the wings and they’re elsewhere. 

My smile fades as I pass the hedgerow and continue my walk back to my rented flat at the edge of town. It’s not that simple, for us. I’ve got a million and one things that I should be doing, and I can’t find the time to be where I need to be. It’s hard enough just to get myself to and from the laboratory, to take care of my own food and sleep, with that constant threat hanging over me. If I don’t publish soon they might take away my funding. My position at the university. Never mind that I’ve made so many breakthroughs; never mind that there is so much more I need to record. Never mind that there are whole lexicons I’ve yet to unlock. Never mind that it’s impossible to tell people about what the birds are saying because everybody seems to think that humans are the only ones speaking. Never mind that without this work I may not be able to stay in this country. Never mind that my mother is ill. 

How ill? I asked when the news came, my voice disappearing into the phone that held our words together across the oceans. She’s not going to last long, my aunt replied. But we’re taking care of her. No need for you to leave, no need for you to return. We know you’re busy. 

I used to dream in the language of my homeland but I have been here so long, in this sea-locked country under skies of cloud, that it is fading. 

My colleague who records whalesong told me that once, the songs of whales would have been audible in all the oceans of the whole planet. But now those songs are depleted, one whale’s call barely reaching the next, whole areas of the ocean silent where once they were blithely, heartbreakingly replete. I wonder how the whales feel, in their quieter oceans. Whether they remember how it used to be. 

Never mind that I do not know how to say what I need to say. The language of birds: a study. In this paper I forget how to talk the language of the scholar. All my words are winging their way to the wrong listeners, in the wrong languages. My dreams do not have words. 

II.

how to speakwhydo yourwhy have you forgotten 

how to speak

how to speak why

how to speakwhydo do your songs

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speno longer carry

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakwhydo yoany meaning

why

how towis there no song

how to speakwhydo yorfrom the sea

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakany more

where are 

how to speakwrthe singers of the sea

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to our family

why do they

how to sno longer sing

how to speakwhydoacross the oceans

how to speakwhydo yourhow to why is the land

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to silent too

what happened to your language

how to speakwhyyou, who are our family too

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to did you lose it

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to speakw to while you carved 

meaningless symbols into stones

how to speakwhyhow to spand dead rushes

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to and dead trees

pulped rags

how to spbright screens in dark rooms

how to speakwhyhow to spno sound, no sense

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to why did you turn

away from us

how to speakwhen did you forget

how to speakwhydo yourhow tohow to talk

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to oh, wingless ones

why will you not listen

how to speakwhydo why are our songs

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to disappearing

will there ever be

how to speaany language

how to speakwhydo youany meaning

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speany song

how to speakwhydo yourhow to speakw to when we’re gone?

III.

At home I turn my laptop back on, set an analysis programme running while I make myself dinner. I drift between the pot on the hob and the laptop on the counter, opening the document that’s meant to be my job-saving publication. I eat mechanically, eyes on the screen. 

The last time that I heard my mother’s voice was three months ago, when she called me to wish me a happy birthday. Are you celebrating? She had asked, her voice right there in my ear. It was slightly husky. I wonder now if that was a sign, if I should have known that she was getting ill. Or was her voice always husky, and I had somehow forgotten? 

I’m just having a quiet one, I told her. When I put the phone down I wandered the flat for hours, not sure where the restlessness came from. I’d intended to watch a film, one of my favourites. But my feet kept on getting me up, walking me through to the kitchen, to the hallway. There was a tingling, an itch, where my shoulders met my back. 

I finish the last of my food and take the plate through to the kitchen to leave it in the sink. I force myself to turn back to the laptop. To analyse the recordings, to trace the lines of connection, the repetitions and the variations and the changing notes. To classify and categorise, to theorise. To remain open to the possibility of being wrong. To listen. 

I open a new tab, and look up the flights. My fingers hover over the keys. I could go to the airport tomorrow, and be at my aunt’s by the evening. Or I could fly the day after, or at the weekend. 

I try to remember what the words are in my mother-tongue for I came as soon as I could. For I’m sorry. For Why don’t we speak the way we used to. 

That night, I dream I am a bird. From the inside, hedges are cosy, exciting places of intersecting branches and safety. I hop and flutter as fast as thought, small brown bird that I am, wings a blur of quickstop motion. 

I open my beak, and let the songs pour forth.     

If you live where I do, where sidewalks are rare, you walk on the asphalt as close to the curb as possible; the curb functions as a public/private boundary. If you look ahead as you walk, it represents a clear distinction between what belongs to someone who has landscaped their property for maximum appeal and the public road. 

The curb was most certainly created by the time and labor of workers in yellow hard hats and bright orange vests. Some parts of the curb show the pristine state of this birth, clean and smooth with a certain grace of presentation, an almost breathless proclamation of Here I Am. When the sun hits just the right way, it radiates a bright, snowy luminance. But this aspect of the curb is intermittent, tucked into the longer undulating ribbon of pale grey Portland cement. At birth, the curb had sharp lines, right-angled corners to hold back the soil, and a gentle curve in the lip that stretched down and out to meet the asphalt road. The light grey darkens with time, weather, and accidents caused by metal moving at high velocity, revealing amalgam as the cement crumbles away. The ribbon is imperfect in this decay, ranging from snarling, ragged-edged chasms to nicks with geometrical precision, from wide, solemn, irregular circles to cuts so deep that they break through and rupture the continuum. Indeed, in some areas, the curb has been lost entirely. Disappeared. Failed.

It’s arduous to keep everything where it should be, keeping the private and public separate. The greatest failure is the emergence of weeds, grasses, and wildflowers from the canyons and cultivated greenery from lawns and gardens, merging into unexpected eruptions of leaves, blooms, and tall stalks. The curb can’t help this. Although given perfection in its birth, it is materially the same as everything around it. The curb was built to stay in place, but it is impossible to prevent the riot of life that keeps taking hold. Every crevice and crack in the facade allows soil to accumulate and seeds to take root. 

It’s even more complicated because the very soil it is meant to contain is shifting and moving, resting on the limestone hills relentlessly and inexorably striving to fall into the Pacific Ocean, which would more than welcome new boulders it could churn into the sand.  

It’s materially exhausting to hold everything in place. 

It is an impossibility, this imaginary vector towards stability, this curb, the line you walk, an imperfect and broken boundary between things. It’s exhausting to hold everything in place. It’s exhausting to hold onto beginnings you can only glimpse. It’s exhausting to believe in something you know is transient but is needed anyway. If you keep looking ahead, you only see that belief, thin, broken, disappearing, but always luminous.

Tonight, I hang a black scarf in front of the transom window in my new home. It looks just like the ribbons women in my mother’s village used to tie to the metal courtyard gates of their homes when someone in the family died. The cheerful shape, painted black and hung below the sad announcement with a photo of the dead, confused me as a child. Even so, I was willing to get used to everything. The strange way these people talked, their angular faces, the cold gazes behind drooping eyelids, the lines of time carved into their weathered, sunburnt skin. They were so different from the city people I left behind. Their primitive rudeness scared me, their simple desires fascinated me. My rosy cheeks and polished manners never belonged there, but that rigid world pulled me in.

My grandmother had the coldest eyes of them all. Sometimes, when I opened my heart to her, I felt she remembered she had one too. For a moment, its warmth would melt the ice of her blue eyes. The same blue as mine. But she would never care about the bees.

The first time a bee flew into my new home, I panicked. I have a mild allergy, and their sting brings sharp, lingering pain. But I soon found out they didn’t notice me, nor the flowers in the vase. In fact, nothing could distract them from their one obsession: the ceiling light in my kitchen.

There they buzzed around it in a desperate dance, bashing their heads against the plastic, spinning like they were possessed. Their buzzing echoed everywhere, I turned off all lights, closed all doors to escape it, and I sat in the darkness praying for the bees to find another entertainment in the night. Then I’d find them on the floor, writhing. I tried to scoop them up, set them on their feet, carry them outside. I was hoping they’d recover, let go of the cursed glow, and return to nature, whose moods shift from winter’s final chill to summer’s early warmth, confusing her faithful children.

In the mornings, I’d find them dead. Lying on the floor, the ceiling, drowned in the sugared water I read I should offer. Their bodies beside the electric candle I lit in the hope of luring them away resembled human corpses in an actual funeral. 

So many deaths brought a strange sense of doom to my solitary life. Bees matter. If they die, we die. I knew that. And their quiet determination to die in my home turned my bleak life into a private apocalypse.

I’m not attached to my life. But I don’t want a front-row seat to the end of the world.

I’m alone. Everyone who cared for me is gone. If I had a husband or a lover, I could ask him to mount a net on the window. I could even do it myself. Someday…

But tonight, I’ve put up the black scarf and I remember the ribbons of mourning.

I never put one up for my grandmother. I was too eager to leave the house where death reigned. I never looked back. Never returned. So death came to find me in this new place, where no memory of her kingdom had been invited.

My grandmother wouldn’t care about the bees. She killed moles with a shovel when they tore up the garden, then burned their bodies by the river. She poisoned the ground to rid it of unwanted growth and wished the death of her dogs when they became useless as guardians. She killed chickens to feed us. She belonged to a generation that didn’t worry about nature’s survival. It fought for its own life. Merciless, like nature itself. 

“Like nature herself,” I would say in my Slavic language. My grandmother’s language in which nature is also a woman. A cruel mother who sends her children to die in service of her order, then, with the same grit, nurtures life once more. 

Who am I to judge her?

I can’t even save a bee.

They were tiny, golden-winged moths. We found them on the walls in the mornings. A visitation. They filled us with a vague sense of generosity. Sharing our house, sharing our home with them. They seemed to like dark places: inside wardrobes, behind furniture, under sofas and armchairs. We guessed their sudden advent was something to do with global warming. And insects were scarce, weren’t they? So, it had to be a good thing. A manifestation of nature. Beautiful in its way.

We tried never to kill anything in those days, cupping daddy longlegs in our hands, waving wasps towards an open window, steering those big garden spiders into a jam jar. We let the birds get to our gooseberries and red currents. Thinking that was fair enough. In the scheme of things. There were worse things to worry about than offering hospitality to a few moths. And they were lovely creatures, resembling stray husks of wheat, as if our house was a granary emptied of its plenty.

I’d just retired and I was trying to get rid of stuff. Liz still had a year to go – and gaol fever. I was shedding books mainly, but old clothes and shoes, too. I noticed that a sports jacket that I used to teach in had started to fray at the cuffs. I might take that to the shop in town where a mother and her daughter carried out clothing alterations. All Seasons. They were both red-haired women. And I’d been a redhead myself before I wasn’t. Now my hair fell off into my lap at the barbers, almost phosphorescent. WTF, as they. Getting older was still a shock at times. A shock of hair. Liz thought that was funny.

Then Liz’s old friend, Shona, came to stay. She recently divorced and feisty as hell if you crossed her after a glass of wine. She was an unreconstructed Glaswegian socialist, which always made us feel slightly guilty, as if what we had now was just the bourgeoise trappings of a neo-liberalist state. Though that didn’t stop her enjoying the wine rack. Callum had been a pain in the arse, so he wasn’t missed and Shona could be very funny on a good day, tilting her specs and telling you how it was. 

So, she examined the jacket and announced that it hadn’t merely frayed. She peered at it through those big glasses she wore. No, no, hell no. It’d been eaten. By moths. She took us through the house, examining the edges of carpets where they laid their eggs, the pin holes under the chairs and settee where the larvae had hatched and eaten their way out, leaving skeins of rolled wool. See? See? There and there. The wee bastards!

We saw, alright. We’d had new wool carpets fitted through the house when we moved in. Now the moths were everywhere and – as Shona impressed upon us – they’ll devour fucking anything. Anything spun from silk, mohair, lambswool. Keratin. Keratin? Human skin and hair. Bits of us which our bodies shed into the house. Which, I must admit, brought us up short. Hoaching, Shona said in her best Jean Brodie accent. Absolutely hoaching. Adding, unconvincingly. I’m afraid. Though she was really just trying to manage the feeling of contentment that trickles through you like cocoa at bedtime at someone else’s misfortune. She’d had the moth and now we had them. If we could benefit from her experience, all well and good. Kismet. A stroke of fate that tickled her sense of schadenfreude.
Overnight, we developed the hearts of killers. We checked the walls each morning where the moths liked to hang out and we exterminated them. They died meekly. We researched them on the Internet and Liz announced that the moth’s official name was tineola bisselliella.

A home wrecker, a clothing muncher, a heart breaker. It had a life cycle, a fondness for dark, humid places. The underside of rugs and carpets. The drawers of cabinets where we kept our pullovers. The interiors of wardrobes where my suits hung. They loved the dark. So they were shy and rarely seen. Like bats or vampires.

We put cedar blocks and lavender among out clothes. Gentle remedies. Shona was unimpressed. Sod that!You need the ultimate weapon with these buggers! We needed hi-tech remedies. Shona came with us to buy those traps that exude the female moth’s pheromones, trapping the lovesick males on a fatally sticky film. There was a reciprocal horror in that. They were destroying our lives, but we got to think of them dying slowly, starving, exhausted, desperate. If a moth can be desperate – it being the quintessentially human emotion we were experiencing. 

We sent off to a specialist supplier for sprays loaded with Moth Kill to treat the house. At the hardware shop, we got moth powder to treat the rugs we’d bought from Turkey. The ‘blonde bombshell’ (Liz’s soubriquet), who ran the shop gave us that knowing look. A look of complicity or maybe shame. 

The moth traps weren’t much good in the end. The moths seemed to have a sixth sense for danger. Or maybe they just didn’t think a wigwam of folded cardboard looked like a night of sexual adventure. When you squashed them on the wall, they left a nasty brown stain that had to be wiped clean. Every morning we checked the carpets for grubs and every morning we found them. Hatching. Hoaching. WTF.

They’d started in the living room and seemed to be ascending, determined angels floating to the upper floors. With Shona in attendance, the grim reaper, we made a start. We moved our bedside cabinets and hoovered, watching as strips of carpet got sucked away from their backing. The moths were in the same league as termites or dry rot. A visitation for some fundamental form of sin, quietly dismantling our house and all the wool and silk and shed skin scales in it. As Shona said: nothing but the best for these bastards! She’d had her house professionally fumigated, but still lived in fear of another visitation. It’s not over till it’s over. Every night was the Feast of the Passover for her. When we waved her off onto the train, she kissed us and sighed. Good luck with the wee problem, eh? And she was gone, leaving us alone and contaminated.

We started the next stage of our fight-back the day after she left, taking out every item of clothing from the house to be shaken and hung in the garden. A strangely exhausting experience, with our neighbours pretending not to look. I threw my teaching jacket away. I threw my uncle Geoff’s 1950’s overcoat away, though you couldn’t tell wear and tear from moth holes there. Finally, we remembered the basket in which we’d stored our winter glovers and bobble hats and found them consumed. That was sickening. We wiped down the edges of the carpets, put on masks and sprayed Moth Kill. Agent Orange in our very own Vietnam. We were fighting for survival. 

We got to a finish on a Friday afternoon. The house stank of chemicals from the sprays. We’d booked a B&B on the east coast for two nights and had our bags packed. We dropped the empty sprays into the re-cycling. Stripped off our face masks, showered, dressed, and got into the car. Liz sniffed, adjusted the rear view mirror and turned on the ignition. Let’s see how they like that! I remembered the flame throwers at Iwo Jima, winkling out Japanese soldiers from dugouts who were dying for their emperor. There was an emperor moth, wasn’t there?

We walked to Craster and Dunstanburgh Castle, exploring the coastal paths. I had my camera and was happy, or at least distracted, taking shots of a new place. We dined out. We queued up for smoked salmon sandwiches, buying Craster kippers to take home. You could smell the smokehouse day and night, fumigating the town. We lay awake picturing the agonies we’d instilled. I thought of Rachel Carson’s, ‘Silent Spring’, a masterwork on the chemical poisoning of the environment. It seemed we might be guilty of more than trying to preserve our home. 

The smell had faded a little when we got back to the house. There were dead moths on all the carpets, lying with folded wings like saints on a sarcophagus. There were grubs too, tiny white embryos that had crawled out to die. We hoovered everywhere. Then we dropped the hoover bags into the bin. Then treated the new hoover bag with moth powder. We’d done our homework, after all. It’s dark and warm and the wee buggers just love it in there. Shona, leaving us a list of precautions before leaving us on the platform. Her lips were compressed in sympathy that just could have been suppressed extasy.

Finally, we paid a visit to the local carpet shop and looked at samples of coir and sisal matting to replace our wool carpets. Then we realised that the house would need decorating whilst we were at it. We found a guy to do that, watching my retirement funds dwindle. We were moving from summer into autumn. We stopped seeing the moths in such numbers. Occasionally one would flutter past us and we’d roll up a newspaper and give chase. We lay awake in a state of existential unease, never knowing if we’d done for them, or if they were lying in wait, ready to hatch from their ninety-day life cycle. We avoided buying any new clothes containing wool. We got Rohan catalogues. We hoovered the mattresses to get rid of skin scales, washed curtains and sofa covers and hung them in the garden where sun was burning off low-lying mist. 

Autumn came in a blaze of beech trees and we seemed to have got the problem under control. Never relax. But we did. Lighting the wood burner, making the house cosy for Christmas when the kids would be home. One day the temperature dropped overnight and we woke to a garden electrified by frost. I opened my wardrobe to find my winter overcoat. A moth fluttered out like a stray snowflake. It settled on my arm as if to tempt me. Jezebel. I flicked it away, then swatted it against the wardrobe doors. It left a familiar brown stain. 

Life began to settle down a little. Liz had gone part-time. Our daughter-in-law, Brenda was pregnant and had about three months to go. Sometimes I slipped over to help Andy paint the house at weekends. Meanwhile, on Friday afternoons, five o’clock became wine o’clock, dialling up our friends on FaceTime, a glass in hand. Checking in on Shona. Aye, I’m alright, hen, no bad. Tilting her glass of wine ironically. Some of our recently retired friends acquired dogs and appeared cradling puppies like babies. Which they were, of course. 

At home, I kept schtum if I saw anything suspicious, quietly consigning stray moths to oblivion. Liz began to feel that they were under control. I could hear her muttering under her breath as she checked the walls and furniture in her reading glasses. Where are you, eh, where the hell? There were positive sign of mothlessness. The dawning of a new era. Taking back control.

I found time to organise my photographic archive on the computer, deleting hundreds of images. I was drowning in our past lives. And here was a box of letters somewhere that bothered me. Letters to each other, letters from our parents when we’d been students. Stuff that I wasn’t particularly keen on our kids seeing. Intimate things, especially now that the idea of actually writing a letter to someone with a fountain pen seemed impossibly stilted. These days you’d post something on Twitter or Instagram. One day, when Liz had gone out for a haircut, I pulled down the loft ladder and ascended into the roof space where we’d dumped the things we had no room for when we last moved house. There was something at the back of my mind. 

The first thing I spotted was my motorcycle jacket and helmet. I’d had a little Honda for a few years when Liz needed the car to get the kids to school. Then there were old trunks, lamp shades, jig saw puzzles, boxes of photographs and children’s games stacked on top of the carpet offcuts we’d put in the attic for insulation. Woollen carpets. Fuck! Moth fodder. I pulled them out one by one, sweating under the low roof, tying them into rolls and driving them to the local waste facility. Liz never went up there, so I decided to say nothing. When she got back with a stylish coiffure cut close into the back of her neck, I was enjoying my first glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She was still a handsome woman.

I kept checking. No moths, thank God. I remembered that they’d seemed to enter the house on the ground floor. Maybe I’d got to the roof space in time. Scorched earth. I didn’t intend to leave them anything to breed in. Like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. It was all in War and Peace. I’d read that as an undergraduate, spending the Michaelmas term burning the crepe soles off my suede boots, getting chilblains in front of the gas fire in my student flat. The old mantles glowing in the Victorian hearth. I’d taken Liz there after meals in the Greek restaurant on Mathew Street. Which reminded me about those letters and what they might contain.

I put that off, of course. It would have meant rooting out those old trunks and finding the bundles that we’d tied up. His and hers. We’d well and truly buried them. You couldn’t help thinking of the stacks of letters in attics all over England. All over Europe. The quaint leftovers of a bygone age. An age of tendresse, of restrained passions that were all the more powerful for being held back before they were acted upon. Before the age of instant gratification, of digital loneliness, online bullying, deepfake images, revenge porn. 

That’s probably nonsense, too. All that hand-written stuff was from another era. An archaeological layer for future generations to pore over. My dad had been a self-employed painter and decorator and a lay preacher. He sent me messages torn from his old invoice books with outbreaks of biblical lyricism when we’d done something wrong: Render unto Caesar when he’d lent me money or Behold the lilies of the field, when I was out of a job. The name of the Grand National winner that arrived two days after the race because of his second-class stamp habit. Prophecies that went to ground like mistimed lightning strikes from a dysfunctional deity. He invented the meme a few decades before the Internet came into being. 

That was all difficult to get to. But I did it in the end. One day, when rain was hammering off the roof and Liz was making marmalade in the kitchen, setting her mother’s jam pan on a rolling boil. I shinned up the ladder to the loft and switched the light on. First, I checked the walls. No moths. The trap had caught a few flies and a couple of wasps on its sticky film. I waited a few minutes, enjoying the stillness, the sound of the rain on the roof tiles, wondering if anything would flutter by, but there was nothing. All quiet. 

There were boxes of photographs up there, all neatly labelled with dates. First, the shots I’d taken with an old Kodak Instamatic camera as a kid, processed at the local chemist in monochrome. Then bigger prints when I had access to a darkroom. The art teacher at the FE college had taught me the process. Friday afternoons were slack in those days and I’d switch on the red light, developing the rolls of film I’d taken with our students. Exploring the town and its industrial history. Shooting at the local shopping centre to capture reflections in reflections, spiegel im spiegel, that sense of infinity. 

There was something oddly erotic about working in darkness under a red light. Feeding the film into the developing tank. Printing back-to-front images from the enlarger. Dunking the paper, tilting the developing trays so the fluid washed over the prints. Inhaling the sour smell of developer and fixative. Then those faint outlines rising. The ghosts of the past emerging into the present, until they were fixed and clipped to washing lines strung across the dark room.

The prints finished when I finally went digital, transitioning via a box of photo CD’s which I’d uploaded to my hard-drive. Now everything was on my computer. No photographic paper to enhance the texture of the images, though I still like to shoot in monochrome. Not that I’d done much recently, just a few images of that weekend on the coast which I’d assembled into a photo essay. Fishing nets and lobster pots, smoke dissipating from the smokery chimney, a tangle of ropes, the salt-encrusted chassis of a tractor driven into the sea for cockling. Dunstanburgh Castle, a monument of mortar and ashlar, almost black against a cloud-strewn sky. 

Once, I’d taken a few glamour shots of Liz without much on. Nothing too risqué. A Saturday afternoon, before we had children. I borrowed some lights from the college and set up the living room with the curtains drawn. I didn’t fancy the kids seeing those now. Liz would have forgotten about them. I found them and put them aside, where I could find them easily. There was something poignant about those early shots of Liz and the children. When she was young and freckled from the sun, and they were small and seemed unbearably innocent. That sense of lost time was Proustian. It was hard to fathom. As Barthes observed, each image seemed to have a punctum, pointing to a future that was already past. No wonder I hadn’t found the courage to sort through them properly.

The letters were another matter. When we went to university, we’d bought those old hooped trunks fastened by a hasp and padlock. You could just about lug them onto a train. Before the days of wheeled luggage. We’d kept hold of mine, a little dusty, my initials stencilled in gold letters on the lid. There it was, stacked under the eaves. There was a bin bag of old cotton sheets on top. I put those to one side and slid the trunk into the open space in the centre of the loft where I could lift the lid. 

The hasp was stiff, but I yanked it open. The trunk was lined with patterned paper, like the wallpaper you imagine in old gas-lit parlours. There was a label inside the lid and there was my name and home address in my dad’s writing. The address I’d lived in all my life before getting a ticket out of there. I’m talking about the days of new red-brick universities and maintenance grants. The days when you went to the Army and Navy store and bought a new donkey jacket to last you over three years of study. Days when you worked late in the library because you were struggling to feed coins into the gas meter. Days when you discovered wine and kebabs and pasta and pizzas. That frisson of excitement and social mobility that came with eating out in a restaurant. Social mobility? We’d no idea what that was, except the universe was definitely expanding.

Those days were days of sexual expectation and adventure, sparked by student parties that went on all night, LP’s dropping onto one of those portable record players that we all had back then. When I graduated, I owed the bank less than a hundred quid and I paid that off in a few weeks working as a gardener for the council, which is another story. I took that year out, wondering what to do with my degree. I met Liz and we ended up staying on in Liverpool, crammed into a bedsit in Toxteth. A stone’s throw from the University and still feeling like students. Then we trained as teachers, together…then…then…then. Bollocks! Get on with it. 

The letters were in a carrier bag at the bottom of the trunk. His and hers, just as I remembered. I could hear the radio going downstairs. I closed the lid of the trunk and sat on it to read them. I’d brought a cup of tea up with me, anticipating a long session, but it had already gone cold and separated into grey spirals. I could hear rain, the pattering of claws when the jackdaws touched down. There was a Velux window up there, covered in soot and streaked with bird shit. I opened it a crack to let in some air.

It’s funny how memory works. Just a glance at the handwriting on the letters reminded me of my mum and dad, though it was a bit harder to work out which friends had written to me back then. It seems odd now, but during that first Christmas holiday after the Michaelmas term, we actually wrote to each other, our new friends, still full of that sense of change. Ironically, if that is irony, some of us were also working on the Christmas post to supplement our grants. I remember offering my mum some housekeeping money from my first wage, but she wouldn’t take it. All that handwriting was stored deep in my memory. Script that leaned to the right or the left, the weird handwriting of my left-handed friend Steve who’d died of oesophageal cancer in his thirties. The girlishly rounded script of my mum. My dad’s copperplate that looked as if he’d scribed it with a chisel. 

In the end, there wasn’t much there, after all. There were a few letters from Liz, written in those long university holidays. I read a couple of them and they were pretty tame. Not because we didn’t have feelings, but because a letter was a letter and had a physical form and anyone could read them without a password or fingerprint access or biometric data. If anything, there was something constrained and a little sad about her letters, as if she didn’t know how to express what she felt, so they got diverted into chatty missives about her job in the supermarket or the soft toy factory or the holiday with her parents and sister in Scarborough when it p….d it down all week. In the end, I put them away again, reassured, but maybe disappointed, too. None one wants to think that the love they once felt was nothing special. I’d better go now, I promised to watch TV with my mum…Liz XXX. 

Liz’s pile of letters was a bit bigger than mine and tied up with a blue ribbon. I assumed that was because she kept up with her friends in those early years after graduation. Then having children to talk about, to compare. Or maybe I’d actually written to her more than she had to me. I untied the ribbon and found a couple of my letters fastened with sealing wax. I remembered how I’d found a stub of it in a kitchen drawer at home and melted a blob onto the envelope. The smell was like incense. My mum had used it for fastening the string on Christmas parcels, tying a knot then adding a dab of wax. It had seemed stylish at the time. We’d read English together and those nineteenth century novels were full of heroines melting sealing wax onto their love letters. A scarlet emblem of enduring love, a sign that the letter hadn’t been opened. A symbol of their virginity, as I once wrote in an essay. A stroke of originality, maybe. It got a tick in the margin from my tutor.

I should probably have taken the letters down to Liz as she was spooning the marmalade into jars to cool. But I tied that ribbon back over the past. Maybe what you remember isn’t so remarkable. Maybe what’s remarkable is how vividly you forget. In amongst the letters from her parents and the letters from me and a few letters from friends was an airmail envelope. It has Liz’s name on it and her address. Elizabeth Lawrence. The writing was upright and the mark above the ‘i’ in Elizabeth was written as a tiny circle rather than a dot. The postmark said España, but was so faded that I couldn’t make out anything else. 

Liz had told me that she and her family had started to take holidays in Spain in the ‘70’s. Her dad was a toolmaker and her mum a school secretary, so between them they were comfortably off, and Liz had no brothers or sisters. There was something in the envelope, but it wasn’t a letter. They’d been to the Costa Brava. Roses. We wouldn’t be seen dead there now. All sea and sangria and incipient melanoma. 

I opened the envelope and took out a photograph. It showed Liz and a boy posing at the seafront, leaning on a white iron railing, the sea glittering behind. It was Liz, younger than I’d ever known her. Her blonde hair was cut short, like a boy’s and she was wearing hooped earrings and a pink blouse with short sleeves. She looked as if she’d been in the sun too long, her skin glowing. 

The boy had tousled brown hair and a sardonic expression that was hard to read. His skin was scorched, his shirt unbuttoned, showing a thin silver chain with a crucifix. He looked at the camera with grey-green eyes and he had his arm around Liz, who was looking up at him. She looked excited. She looked happy to be just where she was at that moment. The sun lit the hairs on the back of her neck as she tilted her head up to him, as if they were about to kiss. It was a good quality image, the kind of thing a beach photographer might take. 

I flipped the photograph over and there was a one-line message on the back. We had it, such love! Carlos. In the bottom right-hand corner was an address and telephone number that had smudged a little. Not ‘have’ but ‘had’. There it was. A sixtieth of a second. A moment in time that had a beginning and a future that reached beyond the image. That happy boy and girl back in the 1970’s. Carlos. He must have grown old. Lived. Died. Who knows? In her mind he must still be a boy. The image had an indefinable quality, the way the camera caresses the young. 

Liz must have met him on holiday. He’d have been lounging on the beach or riding a moped the way Spanish boys do. They’d hung out together, imagining that they were in love. She’d gone on the back of his bike with her arms around him, worrying Stan and Evelyn, her parents. Then she came home and he sent on the snap for some reason. For reasons that were blindingly obvious. I wondered if she’d written back. Or called him from a telephone box at the end of the street as dusk was falling on Worcester, England. Then walked home to her house thinking about him. They looked about sixteen or seventeen in the picture. I wondered if they kissed, walked hand in hand on the beach. If they made love one night in the dunes when the sea was whispering. We had it, such love! Or maybe that was just his clumsy English.

I stared at that photograph for a long time, wondering if there’d been a time when Liz looked at me like that. With excitement, with adoration. I wondered whether our first fumbling moments of love making weren’t the first for her. Carlos. She even mentioned his name to me, once. It had been there all the time, somewhere in my mind. Carlos. I thought of the sun setting over the sea in a blaze of orange and scarlet, of the boy and Liz walking on the beach, his arm around her waist. I sat for a long time, listening to the rain on the slates above my head. Then Liz was calling me down for lunch and I was putting the letters back in order and bundling them into the trunk. 

I climbed down the ladder a little stiffly and went to the kitchen, full of the scent of orange zest. There was salad on the table. Two glasses for the Chablis that Liz was taking from the fridge. Maybe this was our time after all. I took the wine from her, unscrewed the cap and poured it. She took a sip. 

– Mmn, not bad. How did you get on?

– Oh, OK, there wasn’t much there in the end.

Carlos. I knew I could never ask. She turned back to get the salad spoons from a drawer. I put my arms around her from behind and nuzzled her ear, feeling her stiffen, then relax. She smelled of marmalade. I unfastened the strings of her apron and threw it on the working top. 

– Come here, gorgeous!

– You daft bugger!

Liz turned and looked at me, giggling, a little quizzical, a little unsure. I leant in to kiss her. A proper kiss that would show that we could still be tender with each other. We could still be grateful for what we had. 

But her eyes looked past me with a sudden flash of recognition. She lunged forward and struck. Her hand slapping the wall above the fridge. Turning to me with a wry smile of recognition, triumph, resignation. 

– Little bastard!

There on the tip of her finger was a crushed moth, its wings broken, a faint brown stain glistening on the wall. 

The first time I heard the forest breathe, I thought it was the wind. But standing still among ancient redwoods in Northern California, I realized it was something else entirely. The trees exhaled in long, slow murmurs, a sound stitched together from the rustling of leaves, the creaking of trunks, the hum of insects, and the unseen heartbeat of the earth itself. It was the kind of sound you could only hear if you stopped speaking, thinking, and even listening too hard. 

In those days, a decade ago, the world still seemed salvageable. The mornings were misty and cool, the rivers ran strong, and the forests felt invincible. I spent months there, studying plant migration, watching how species shifted slowly upslope, tiny green refugees from the warming lowlands. At the time, it seemed almost natural, a quiet adaptation. We didn’t yet call it what it was: a slow-moving tragedy. 

Today, when I return, the breathing has changed. 

The river runs thin and lazy; algae blooms where swift water once sang. Some trees stand hollowed out by bark beetles that once froze each winter but now thrive year-round. The forest exhales not with strength but with a weary, labored sigh. 

Climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is a living wound on every landscape I have ever loved. As a field ecologist, my job has shifted from documenting the vibrancy of life to chronicling its retreat. 

— 

There is a patch of land near the Salinas River where I often walk. It’s a place caught between two worlds:

agriculture’s sculpted fields and the untamed remnants of oak savanna. Here, heatwaves roll in harder each year. I notice them not just by the temperature but by how the air changes, how even the insects grow quieter. 

One afternoon last summer, as temperatures neared 110°F, I found a jackrabbit lying still under a brittle bush, its sides barely moving. Its fur, the color of dusty silver, blended perfectly with the dying grass. I watched it for a long time, unsure if it was resting or dying. 

There’s a strange guilt that comes with watching the natural world suffer. A feeling of helpless complicity. Our ancestors cleared forests, built cities, and lit fires without understanding the consequences. We, their descendants, know better–yet the machine grinds on. 

The stories we tell ourselves about nature often carry a kind of arrogance: the idea that ecosystems are resilient, that ‘nature heals.’ And it’s true, to an extent. But resilience has its limits. And we are testing them beyond reason. 

— 

In Alaska, I saw the permafrost melt. 

Whole hillsides slumped and buckled as the ice within them turned to water. Forests tilted drunkenly, trees leaning at impossible angles, their roots no longer anchored in what had once been rock-solid ground. Locals called it “drunken forests,” a phrase offered with a sad, bitter humor. 

Everywhere I traveled, the signs multiplied. Coral reefs bleached bone-white. Glaciers wept into rising seas. Birds arrived too early or too late for the insects they relied upon. Monarch butterflies that once clouded the skies in great orange migrations dwindled to lonely handfuls.

And always, the same question pressed against my mind: Can we still turn this around? 

The answer is complicated. Some damage is irreversible. Species extinct, glaciers lost, landscapes transformed beyond recognition. But much–so much–remains worth fighting for. 

— 

Hope, I’ve learned, is not a feeling. It is an action. 

I see it in the volunteers who replant mangrove forests, one seedling at a time. In the communities banding together to build rain gardens that catch and filter stormwater. In farmers experimenting with regenerative practices that pull carbon from the air and store it safely in the soil. 

I see it in young people who march, who vote, who invent new technologies to clean the air and seas. 

The earth does not need us to save it; it will go on, with or without us. What is at stake is our home–the fragile web of life in which we are but one thread. Protecting it is not an act of charity; it is an act of survival. 

— 

Back in the forest, I sit on the gnarled roots of an old redwood and listen. Despite everything, life persists. New ferns unfurl from blackened soil. Bees hum around fireweed blossoms that sprung up after a blaze. A young oak, improbably, grows from a crack in a charred stump. 

The forest breathes, still.

And so must we–not in despair, but in fierce, stubborn love for the only world we’ve ever known. Every action matters. Every degree of warming we prevent, every tree we plant, every policy we fight for. The future is not yet written. 

It rustles in the leaves, whispers in the rivers, waits in the wings of the last butterflies. It is calling to us. Asking who we will choose to be. 

And whether we will listen.

There’s an ibex out by the cliff, ahead of me. There’s a couple actually, hiding in the shadow of the rock. Husband and wife. Well a pair anyway, I’m unsure how traditional the ibex are. I heard them before I saw them, the throaty whine of the male echoed first up the rock, and then across the valley towards me. The brown-grey coats of the animals blend with the limestone cliff behind them and I have to squint to see them. The male, his horns twisting behind his head like a devil, is hopping up, effortlessly, onto a ledge three times his size. His wife follows suit then looks back, as if searching for something. 

I’ve always loved these animals. Mountain goats, or mountain deer, or whatever they are. I’m not a biologist. I grew up a climber, so I relate to them, in a way. I used to love watching the ibex, I’d try to replicate how they climbed. The effortlessness of it. Not too much climbing in Dublin but my brother and sister used to take me here, to the south of Spain, when I was a kid. They taught me the basics and soon I was top-roping, multi-pitching. I wanted to impress them, my brother especially. Climbing really became my whole personality. I was good. To be honest I was more than good, I was at one point looking to be the best trad climber in the world. Not that it’s about that at all, I didn’t give a shite about the records or the competitions or any of that. I just liked to climb. Sending a route clean, or managing to flash one after a day filled with falling. The feeling of rock under my fingers. There was nothing like it. There is nothing like it. 

I haven’t been here, to El Chorro, since I was a teenager. I’m thirty-eight now. Fuck knows how that happened. It actually looks pretty similar. Time has somehow not found this little haven in the hills. The hostel I’m in is nice but there’s a rake of people here, smelly hippies finding themselves, playing shite psytrance at all hours. Van-living flat earthers who think not washing their hair gives them a personality. Maybe I’ve just aged, there’s a new model of climber out and I’m the old brand. I’ve come up this mountain for a bit of solace, anyway. I’m not good with crowds, with people. It’s just me and the ibex up here. 

I used to come here with my siblings. I said that already. We all grew up close, but when I was about twelve my sister had a kid and moved to New Zealand, so it was just me and my brother then. People told me he had issues but I couldn’t see them. I always looked up to him, and even when he stopped climbing he was still my idol. I remember being a bit too young to understand, and him bending a spoon and slapping his forearm. Even after years away from climbing the veins still popped out of his arms, the blood throbbing through his forearms, waiting to get back on the wall. 

I kept climbing, I guess using it as a way to ignore everything else in my life, and soon I was a recognisable face on the scene. I find it baffling how much the scene has changed since then, although maybe I’m just annoyed they don’t recognise me. I really was someone, once, and these guys just look straight through me. All that pity bullshit. I don’t need anyone’s pity. But I do deserve some respect. Like oh, you’ve watched Free Solo? I used to climb with Alex. He would ask me for tips. Not that they’d believe me. Not that it matters.

I moved out to Chamonix, in the Alps, before I finished school. Lived in between there and El Chorro. Who needs their Leaving Cert when they’ve been called the next best climber in the world, right? There was a glacier there, you could work as a ski guide in the winter and a climbing instructor in the summer. Paradise. I say ‘was’ because the glacier’s melted now. You can still go there, but it’s not the same, looking at something that was once this powerful, beautiful thing, and staring at its shell.

The first ibex, the husband, is back. He’s popped his head around the corner, checking on his partner. She’s still looking into the bush, and I can see why now. A little troop of smaller ibex are trotting out of the cover of an olive tree and, one at a time, hopping up the rock after their parents. Seeing this little family of climbers makes me miss those early days with my siblings. The last one, a little baby of a thing, slows as it approaches and looks up at the rock, towering above, too high to climb. I want to pick the poor thing up and put him on the ledge, but I know I can’t do that. 

Not long before the glacier melted, I was home from France, at my brother’s gaff in Stoneybatter. He was dealing by this point, and this man, Daithí, came round to see him. He’d been the guy that had gotten my brother into drugs, and I guess the guy he worked for. I can’t really remember what happened. I remember my brother leaving with a big duffle bag, saying he’d be back in a day or two, and not to worry. Daithí clapped a hand on my shoulder, said he’d look after me, and said it would be grand. I was nineteen, but I’d really done very little with my life except climb, so I was very innocent. He kept feeding me hash  until I felt like I was melting into the sofa. I felt sick but didn’t want to be a dryshite so I kept taking it when offered. 

We started watching Top Gear. This guy then, Daithí, began smoking something else from a little glass pipe, I don’t know what. He got angry when I said I didn’t want any. I was awkward then, antisocial. I didn’t mean to be, I just was. I still am, to be honest. I’d probably be diagnosed with something if I took the tests. He stood up, kept asking what my problem was, why I wasn’t normal. Did I think I was a big man, because I had that article about me in the Irish Times and that article in Men’s Health? My brother had them pinned up on the wall. I’d smoked so much hash by this point I felt like my head was in a cloud, like Daithí was yelling at me in slow motion. 

Like I said, I don’t remember much. Just fragments. The vein in his neck bulging under his swallow tattoo. His little, piggy eyes. His big, swollen knuckles. I heard what happened through the papers, and through a friend of a friend who knew Daithí. Apparently he just flipped. Saw red, he said in court, whatever the fuck that means. Even after I was unconscious he didn’t stop hitting me. He hit me until he couldn’t lift his fists anymore, then began stomping on my head, his big spotless Timberlands darkening with my blood. My brother found me, about forty hours later. The way I was lying, sort of on top of one arm, cut the blood flow off, which is why, so I was told, I lost that arm.

Daithí panicked once he realised the state I was in; he fled to Spain but it was during the whole Hutch-Kinahan war so they extradited him assuming it was related. Apparently they found him walking down the motorway, barefoot and mumbling to himself. He tried to pull the insanity card, fair enough to be honest the fucking psycho, but it didn’t take. He got seven years of which he served four and a half. He’s out now. I hear he’s found God. 

I was in a coma for three weeks, I lost a limb, and I get more or less constant migraines. Oh, and I’m blind in one eye now. The doctors say the migraines and the pain in my stump where my forearm and hand used to be is psychosomatic, which is an enormously unhelpful thing to say. Surely all pain is psychosomatic? 

I tried for a while to keep climbing, and even with just one hand I could manage okay, I could still send a six or even seven A at the Wall or Gravity without too much bother, once I got the hang of it. Real climbing, outdoor climbing, is harder. I can’t belay anyone, even with a GriGri, and the unpredictability of a cliff causes too many problems.

And anyway, with the migraines I can’t climb for long, I often have to lie down, and the pain if I exert myself is unbearable. More than that, it just isn’t the same. I know how good I had been. Could have been. Climbing now with losers like the gang at this hostel, having to ask one of them to help me into my harness, to tie my knots for me, I never thought of myself as arrogant, but it’s not something I can do easily. Watching Alex and the rest of them just blow up, become superstars and I’m what, living in a new build in Carlow town, living off the dole and getting stoned all day? It’s okay. I don’t mean to moan. I don’t need to climb even, it’s nice just to be here, in the mountains, away from it all. Nature. Silence. The ibex.

The little ibex is trying a different route, but it’s not working either. The male stares at his partner, the angry father annoyed they are behind schedule. The patient mother ignores him, staring down at her youngest and willing him up to her. One of the other smaller goats is peeking round the rock now too.

My brother died of an overdose while I was still in hospital. He didn’t leave a note or anything, so we never found out if it was an accident or not. People assumed suicide, out of guilt for me. I don’t know, to be honest. Daithí was at the funeral. My sister didn’t want him there, but my brother told me once that he thought anyone had a right to mourn the dead regardless, so I said he could come. He kept his sunglasses on the whole time and didn’t come to speak to me in the wheelchair. 

It’s actually very green here, at the moment. Mid-April. The locals are saying they keep getting lost, the terrain is unrecognisable. It could almost be the Wicklow mountains it’s so full of life. That’s something. Just when you think we’ve killed anything that can  grow, you see Earth pushing back, finding life out of nothing. It was snowing in Grenada two weeks ago. I don’t know much about the climate really, aside from knowing we’ve destroyed most of it, but I know for every glacier melted in Chamonix, for every destroyed, polluted piece of land in Ireland, for every one-armed climber reaching for nothing but his forties, there is always something out there, worth looking at. A family of endangered ibex, pushing through challenges, overcoming obstacles. Living.

The young goat has turned around, given himself a bigger run up. Springing along in a little up-and-down gallop, he leaps like a child dressed as Batman and manages to clear the rock, just about. Scampers up the rest of it and along to his mother, who turns and leads him to the others, all making their way up the cliff, to endless more impossible climbs that he will have to face. But he’s with his family and he’s where he was born to be, and his size and his fears don’t matter anymore.