The sleek leather interior of our car is profoundly uncomfortable underwater. I look at you. The water is mounting up still. It has come up to the bend in your elbow. We don’t speak anymore. It slows time to stop and breathe. Your eyes are that pale green I find so familiar, but are glazed a little with age. We are both in a state of internal panic but our muscles are suspended in the water now, aching from the struggle of the last few minutes. Our bodies below the water are becoming floating lengths of seaweed, each inch of skin that the water encroaches on heavy and gorgeous with deep green beads. We don’t move now, lips pursed, only looking at one another, facing together, the impossibility of our escape as the car sinks lower still. I want to remember your life, and mine that came from it. Your ability to grow me and my ability to be grown seem complex and beautiful, our living breathing bodies adaptable and hopeless as the water reaches the summit of my breast. Each watercolour shade of your face is a moment stopped in time. I study it. My body is embraced with a wet and slimy second skin. I can’t quite believe the rate at which it has become that shimmering, unclear shadow in the muddied water. This body looks like the shadows of rocks under Welsh river water. Remember when we used to build dams that could carry us from one side to the other?
I watch your breathing. It is tidal in pattern. Your eyebrows are raised slightly in the middle. The hairs have muddy globes resting on them like dew. Your expression must mirror mine. I can see it doing so, if I turn my head downwards. It is reflected back to me, opaque and in sepia tones reminiscent of those photographs of now safe, buried people. I look back to your face - is it your face? I feel unable to tell if what I see is my own eyes watching me from the water, or your eyes fearfully staring back at me. The water has risen now to your chin. It tickles it as if to encourage a smile, sympathetic of our terror, but unable to intervene in its own ascent. Our tears seem to accelerate the inevitability of drowning, adding to the unfathomable fathoms below us. You used to look at me across the swimming pool water - your face as close to mine as it is now - the water only just underneath your eyes as it is now -
At the surface, there are bubbles, and what only looks like a rectangle of colour to a gull’s eye, disappears.
A fat man reclines in his bathtub, flabby forearms resting on his stomach. It blushes in an ugly rash from the hot water. He doesn’t seem to notice though; his small eyes, set hard and deep into his face are closed, his eyelids wrinkled and closed in folds. His chin protrudes over his chest, both rubbing against each other uncomfortably. He hears a gull cry and half opens an eye directed to the window. The bird rests on a turbulent gust of wind for a moment. Looking away he reaches for the tap, in an attempt to bring the water to a more comfortable temperature.
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