Tuesday 7 February 2012

'Bathwater' Part One

A local gallery owner posted this photo on facebook of the Mud Maid from the Lost Gardens of Heligan that I simply had to share with you! I will make it my mission to visit these gardens sometime this year...

Mud Maid 

I want to start posting more of my writing: I've been doing a lot of embroidery lately, trying to pursue other creative endeavours where I can incorporate my love for creative writing and poetry with my growing fondness for fabrics and textiles, but I've put a lot of things on the back burner that I want to start working on again. This following extract is from a short story I wrote last year called 'Bathwater'. The picture of the Mud Maid reminded me of my character Coral as she rises from the water at the end of the story, and also of Ena Harkness from my book The Thicket Dwellers (a lot of my characters seem to end up with growths of vegetation about their body!) I will post the entire story in about four parts. Feedback would be greatly appreciated! :)

Part One 
She slumps slickly underwater. All the rooms have yet to be decorated and furnished, and therefore echo and carry forth the banshee-noise around the house. But the bathroom is the only room where the wallpaper hasn’t been stripped yet by her father, and the large lion-pawed bathtub makes it feel a little less lonely than the rest of the rooms.
     Sounds are muffled underwater, she comes to realise. The loudest sound is the beating of her heart, drumming more furiously now because of the water pressing against her chest. The only other sounds that are clear and true are the shushing sounds of her hair and her dress brushing against her skin and the sides of the bath like comforting mother-whispers as the water swells and sways with her movements. She sees her hair floating above. Strands of it have come away from her head and are floating along the surface like pond skaters. The water isn’t clear: it’s cloudy from the bubble-bath and the white of her cadaverous nightgown, and she can see the underside of the towers of bubbles like crystal castles, though they have reduced in size since she first got in the water. She keeps the nightgown on in the bath. She has a compulsion to be romantic when she’s brooding and imagine she's Ophelia or some such figure from a Waterhouse painting; and she knows her mother wouldn’t like it, should she find out.
     It is to drown out the sounds of her mother screaming, see – why she seeks solace underwater. Caroline has been screaming at her husband since Coral was littler than now, and she has never been able to stop. Timothy has always been a meek man, and would escape with Coral in his arms to the local swimming pool to teach her how to swim, and to find peace. It was in the evening that the screaming would escalate, made more volatile with a daily dose of red wine by the bottle, and so by the time Coral and her dad arrived at the pool the lessons were over and they would have the water for themselves. There were lily pads painted on the floor of the infant’s pool, with large frogs leaping from one to the other, and Coral would try to sit on a lily for as long as she could before her body would float to the surface, and Timothy would sit on another lily and pull faces at her even though Coral couldn’t keep her eyes open for too long, and hated wearing goggles as they would leave marks on her nose for hours after she took them off. Then she’d start swimming lengths; and as her body was still growing into itself, the cartilage around her earholes grew around the cavity to protect it from water damaging the eardrum. Her body was adapting to its environment, becoming more and more like a fish. Her skin grew dry and her hair brittle, but she didn’t care. She loved it because it was silent but for the splash of water that echoed throughout the swimming baths – an indulgent lull that was all the more precious for its impermanence. She loved the solace of the water. She loved how swimming made her forget just about everything, including the technique of swimming itself. That was left to muscle memory...

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