or, in which the fish reveals the whereabouts of the lost children.

Marin

(an extract) 

My body healed up, days marched on, and nights reassuringly appeared as they always had. 

After all, I am a champion fish, a strong fish, a winning fish.

Not such a fast fish perhaps, but a steady fish, a fish which goes the distance. A heads-down, fins-spinning sort of a fish, a fish who leaps at the starter’s gun and  is capable of endless miles, full of baby or not.

I have  trained furiously for the race in which I find myself, but even so, my cheeks are plum coloured and my lungs twin sacs of burning lace . It is a few kilometres long, this race, out over the kelp beds and out towards the dark playground of Bronze Whalers and the other darker, shyer sharks off  Long Reef. Through the roiling surf and out and away, through numerous clouds of jellies which pulse mindlessly like small milky geometries, Tall orange  buoys appear from time to time to guide me, for me to shoulder around in these abstract unmarked trails in the ocean. I have a need to win, a need to overcome something.

I pull myself through salt water, with my hands my feet, my fins. My chest heaves, my face burns and the cracking thump of my heart echoes into the bones of my head. Below me all is blue-inked shadow, above me sky glimpsed as I steal silver loaves of air from the sky and hold them hard in my chest then before exhaling them, fragmented, in molten blobs to spin in my wake.

I must win, but it’s such a long stretch of ocean, a long long distance. I am wearing my face like a mask. At the start it is all fragments of kelp in a turquoise toss of foam, and later, in the dark of the deep somebody is catching a free ride in my wake,  touching my toes as I thunder along. I am unable to shake them off, but they disturb me, lurking there just behind, waiting to chase and pounce.  I steady my breathing and try not to lose my rhythmic stroke-stroke-stroke, my lungs smouldering.

 I have passed into another reality, one in which I am nothing but air and light and salt and movement.

As I look down in to the deep and watch the silver bubbles trail from my endlessly digging hands, I suddenly think of Marin, of silver light and lost pieces of love. Then suddenly, it seems, every one of her little extinguished heartbeats is with me,  surging along on a cloud of light. In fact there are hundreds of them: all of those tiny lights, all the tiny  souls who never made it into the bright light of day are now ere in my sea, like tiny fish, like beams of light, buoying me along. The sun catches them: fragments of light, tiny beating hearts, clouds of bubbles, a bouquet of air. I am swimming on a cloud of souls, here they all are, out here in the kingdom of salt and loneliness, in my aquatic domain: all the love and hope, the energy of all and everything. And I am here, amongst it, stroking the blue with long fingers and strong arms.

I put the love I had for  Marin out into the world, although she never came to be, and like the light from far away stars in distant constellations, that love continues on.

Love ends up somewhere, love ends up here, in the salty indigo depths. In the luminous foam of the waves, in the dancing currents, in the dip and swell of the open sea. In every sparkle on the ocean dwells the love and hope invested in those brief existences, and every one of them forms a deep bloom of happiness upon my heart.

Marin carried me, like a mandala-shaped raft. A raft made from all those little silver specks of love, those beginnings of hope, those hearts now stilled, those tears.

I won the race, although it didn’t matter,

not really.

from "Marin", a short story

By Fiona E.D

2006

Ultrasound

It is difficult to see underwater without some kind of intervention, some kind of separation between eyes and water. Even my shortsighted fish-eyes need help, though most of my childhood was spent gazing at some blurry submarine landscape, and bearing the sting afterwards.

The first time I saw the bottom of the sea I got a fright, and drew saltwater into my lungs with the sudden intake of breath. I coughed a bit, and then went down for more keeping my feet raised in order to push my head down, to stop it floating up and out. I was wearing a huge hard plastic underwater mask, like a piece of cartoon headgear, which flared from my face towards the clear oval of vision in a swathe of sharp green plastic. The world of the sea was suddenly revealed to me, and I saw with a shock that it went on forever and ever and ever.

The huge mask was problematic when swimming in the waves, as one's head was tossed about like a large and bouyant bucket by the ceaseless pull and push. But I have never forgotten the lure of that world stretching out before me, where the pale ocean floor continued forever into infinity, the bright dancing canopy of the ocean overhead. I thought to myself with a thrill of fear: I want to swim forever.

My mother hauled me out by the straps of my swimmers.

*

Around the edge of the rock pool is where the rip leaps in and around, and creates a flurry of sand and small bits of weed. The ever present flock of spotted toadfish seem to exist solely to swim against the in and out of it, turning this way and that in charming unison, their wide spaced goat-like eyes unblinking. When the tide is low, deep turquoise pools are laid open, disempowered and benign, full of stranded toadies, but the tide comes back in and they revert to spinning hollows of light, dark, and fragments tossed about in endlessly moving water. The rocks hunch in their secretive manner, clothed in cloaks of dark red weed knitted by the tide, flecked with sand here and there. Down low it is dim and dark, it is hard to see.

*

I have rinsed the salt from my hair and driven across town, keeping my attention upon the roads, the directions. I am right on time for my appointment, and I sit down on a blue chair and cross my ankles. The hair at the back of my neck is damp:  I realize that I have done nothing but twist it into a wet knot, leaving it uncombed, but  I think also that nobody is really looking since these rooms are part of the Sydney IVF clinic, and everybody preoccupied with their own private hopes and sorrows. I am able to watch, as closely as I wish, the actions of everybody in the room, before I am shown into my own room, with a large screen above the chair, waiting to map me out. It is a larger, clearer screen than any I recall.  The nurse asks a few questions, how many children do I have. 

Two, I answer.

 I am compelled at that moment to explain that I have been through this four times. 

Four times, she says. Four times pregnant but only two children?

Thats right, I answer.

I do not elaborate, thinking instead of the time I saw a heartbeat glinting like a lighthouse, the time I saw those little hands flex and startle, and finally let myself exhale and love. I do not explain seeing that inert shape at fourteen weeks, like a stone at the bottom of a pond, lying still, no beating heart, no trace of light. I keep myself quiet and watch the sea inside of me, up there on the screen and say nothing. The blunt white muzzle of a very clever camera becomes a pair of underwater eyes, revealing my hidden ocean.

The shapes and hollows are aquatic and submarine, with flecks of light and dark shadows. Waves of sound mark the beat of my heart and the tides of my blood, so eerie and strange to see this space unoccupied, like watching the empty flow of the tide after the storm.

The nurse maps my inner fronds, the darker spaces. We listen to my blood, the soft thud of waves, moving in a fluid fashion from place to place. My chest tightens.  My body cannot help but remember the joy, the looking, the finding. Those tiny fingers, all of them with their thumbs in their tiny aquatic mouths, the rolling and the turning. Those two creatures who are so formed and loud and airborne now, those other two that shine endlessly in the quieter stretches of the ocean, silent and bright.

It is strange, to be so uninhabited.

Incredibly, a newborn howls through the partition wall, followed by muted adult voices. I look quizzically at the nurse, who smiles and shakes her head.

That's pretty hard for some people in here, she says. 

The crying is protracted. If it continues, I think, I will begin to lactate.

I lie there with my thickened chest, the shape of a flood of tears forming in my heart. I am remembering something else which often threatens to fall out of the edges. I remember being alone, watching all those hearts, those fingers. I remember greeting them all: my daughter like a small bear, my son who flung his hand up high, that bold soul leaping with arms raised to be the youngest then deciding to remain undersea, and the last one, who stayed incredibly for so long, whom I almost managed to convince that the world was a wonderful place, but who held her breath, and fell asleep on my ocean floor.

I remember it was only me who greeted them. Just me, their mother. I wonder now if I should have insisted, rather than ask, for company and be refused. Too busy, no time, no interest.

It is said to be churlish to bring up such things: that I was always alone.

 But the fact was,  it defined everything. It made me set back my shoulders, bear the solitary acts with as much grace as I could manage.  Nobody else but me even so much as glimpsed the sea inside of me, when there were creatures furled in there. There was no "we loved him" or "we loved her". 

Twas just me.

I'd not thought I had tears left for that, but I was wrong. In this unexpected moment in which I gaze into my own oceanic depths, and listen to the solitary beat of my own blood, this overcomes me.

Of course, there are many courses in life that I have not had to manage. I swim out into the open sea along the furrow next to the pool, the rip carrying me beyond the hunched woolly shoulders of the rock platforms, past the deeper pools and out to where the waves grow high like  sharp blue dorsal fins  trembling in the sun.  I think of Katie, who was deserted with two babies, I think of Mary who was deserted at 36 with none, and of Jane who left empty handed. I think of Anne and her brand new breasts, her harvested eggs waiting in some dark storage for just in case...and I think of the fine babies they might have had for me to hold, to talk to. 

I think of Georgie, whose firstborn leapt from a clifftop aged 17, a few months ago. I think of the hopeful eyes of the women hovering in wait for a scan to tell them that, somewhere in their private watery hollow, new life has been persuaded to take hold. I think of those who will never see anything but emptiness and silence in that  underwater place up there on the screen.

 Everything is relative, I think, as I head out towards the looming dark shape of the headland. I look at the small fronds of seaweed as  I swim,  at all the tiny points of light which trail from my moving hands  as I disappear into the sea inside of me. I hope to myself that all these aquatic maps will, this time, be empty,  and that what they find

is nothing. 
Nothing but everything as it should be.

The sea tries half-heartedly push me under, but I'm not having any of it.I swim on: the points of light are buoying me up. Against the horizon my son hunches over his bright yellow board, gives me a wave.

I swim forever.

Postscript:
I am not having IVF, just a thorough look-over.



Paintings from Body of Water, 2010

in which the fish is herded into shore

When the sea is breathing in such great sucking breaths I do sometimes worry what on earth will be dragged up from the bottom.
Sometimes it is dark, cold water from far below: from  the domain of deep silent creatures whose blood is fixed at icy levels, whose fins fan currents which are viridian green and frosty.  Other times, it is just sand, and the battered fragments of olive brown kelp.

When last the high seas came, huge rolling furrows of might marched in even rows from across the Southern Ocean, roaring and howling, foam dripping from salty lips. The cormorants headed inland and pelicans sought shelter in the lagoon in flocks like squat clergymen, the old geysers with oversunned pelts sat on their bench as always, waiting silently to pick a fight, the words hanging off their chins, waiting for me to slap.  they restrain themselves mostly, as do I as I snap on my little swimming cap, adjust my goggles, daring them to make a stupid comment. Homophobia, misogyny, climate change...


On the first day of the swell I had to do nothing, for as I watched, my eyes round, my mouth open, the sea rose like the great wave off Kanagawa and reached up in an incredible arc, unbroken. Unbroken, it raced up the beach, unbroken it slapped the wall, and reached all the way to the beach house and slapped the old bastards right off the bench and strewing sand all the way up the car park. Up they jumped in fright, scrambling to stand on the wooden bench, drenched and grazed with sand and water. I watched,  laughed silently, and gave the sea a knowing smile which it staunchly pretended not to see.

Never have I seen the like! They talk of that wave still, a week later. I  smile at the memory of looking down the road and seeing the tops of the waves as if they were dancing over the houses like enormous muscular entities, the wind whipping the foam into plumes the size of trees. I swam in the rock pool that same day with my heart thumping like crazy, the sea desperately feeling round in the crevices of rocks with grasping fingers to toss me out or crush my bones. Folks, spying me there in my pink cap cutting through the slabs of storm foam, sure and solid, fancied they might join me, but soon retreated when faced with the walls of water.
I cant help being here, i feel like saying to them, I really can't.
And I know exactly what to do and where to go, where to hide from a thumping, how not to get flung out onto the rocks upon my head.
But i don't. They just shake their heads and scramble out. The Old Geezers laugh at them.

 The next day after that the wind gave up and had a rest, so the sea had nowt to do except jostle and fret, its body muscling and  rolling, curtains of sand rising from the ocean floor and foam like torn lace washing this way and that. Lively water it was too, sizzling with life, with things.  It was this day. the day after the day of the Great Waves, that the dolphins came back.

I had not seen them for a month or two, but here they were, just off the back of the ocean pool, and the pod had grown by at least a third. The biggest one was there, that I call Two-fin, because it appears there are two dorsal fins, or one with a large slash out of the middle.  Two-fin is always in the lead, purposefully leading the others around and around in that strange little love-knotty dance, tighter and tighter they embroider the surface of the sea until they all break free and fling themselves jumping into the air on the crest of a wave. Moving in circles. Revealing themselvs suddenly, amongst the surfers, their huge bodies silhouetted, silent, gliding.

It seems it is winter when you see them most here. They often arrive and circle and hunt for an hour or so and then at some secret sign all head off, leaping back out to sea, out towards North head. One dark winter day when the ocean was stirred much like this week I was in the middle of the beach at sunrise when they appeared. Quietly I put on my goggles and slipped in, alone, feet-first off the sand bank as they were so close to shore, and watched them from underwater, weaving and circling through the weed strewn water.


It is no small thing though, to be in water with such large creatures, face to face. For they are huge, muscled and dark: they are like water made solid, they are silent and full of purpose. One holiday, up  on the North Coast, I swam in the ocean at the unpatrolled beach on which we camp. I am timid of this ocean, as it is warm and busy with creatures large and small. It is unknown, unwatched. I  swam parallel to the beach with long hard strokes, looking below at the shadows in the ridges  of sand, and the occasional stream of whiting pouring along them from time to time,
when  suddenly a huge black shape appeared at my side,
then  another,
 then many.

I was surrounded by dolphins.

The sudden appearance, when one is out to sea, of an animal of equal size in very close proximity, is a terrifying thing. At eye level, you are vulnerable: it is an entirely different psychological perspective than  to be at sitting height, with the relative safety of a piece of floating fibreglass from which to view the world.
They swam at me, around me, not quite touchingme until I realised I was being herded to shore.
They kept urging me into the shallows, swimming closer  and closer around me in a tight and thrashing circle, until I could stand, at a depth I never imagined a dolphin would even swim.  Still they herded me ashore, further, until I stood ankle deep, and then they all turned and headed back to sea.


The beach was deserted and  I had to walk quite some way back, heart thumping, trying to make sense of it all. The fishermen dragging their tinny up at the end of the beach, gutting fish and spangling the sand with scales, remarked that they had seen a shark, which is nothing new.
 It might have been a dolphin, I said, but they squinted at me briefly, shaking their heads.
I paddled out every day after that on a board, desperate for them to come again, but they did not reveal themselves to me again, not face to face, not from my board.


It was not until I had returned home and was watching a news report that I had a fancy as to what my rounding up by dolphins might have meant. A group of swimmers in New Zealand were herded together buy a pod of dolphins, which swam around them in a tight circle and herded them towards shore. They were protecting the swimmers from a large shark which was circling beneath the surface, by screening and bunching them together.

I have always wondered if those dolphins had surrounded me to protect me from an unseen shark.
 I like to think they did, getting me safely to shore. Finding me alone out there, they gathered about and took me home.

***

The local dolphin pod stayed for a week, hunting and circling. Folks sat on the cliffs and paths above to watch them. I tried to swim out and join them, but the sea grabbed me by the head and threw me back, giving me a good slap on the way, so I pretended I had no intention of heading out the back throught he huge dark green channels and over the vast peaks.  I made like I was merely rinsing my hair, making the most dignified exit I could muster, before hearing the sea say to me
leave them be, let them alone
and I stood dripping on the wind blown sand and watched them from there.


***


The wind made a good show of things at night, pushing the sea into submission, blunting the sharp edges, wrinkling the oily slick surfaces with icy vigour. After only four days, the sea had tired, and gave up. So did the wind, sitting back breathless and watching the sea become a hard flat millpond beneath a luminous sky.

I swam in the rockpool with burning skin, concentrating on my stroke, imagining the cold to be fire until I could not feel it anymore. Until my skin had turned to scales, silver and moonlit and impervious to the cold. All I feel is the soft breathing of the sea, shifting next to me, held back by rock.
I swim and swim and swim like a shard of ice.

It is a week since the Great Waves came, and the dolphins have returned to wherever it is that Two-fin always takes them: somewhere just out past the Heads, I imagine. They could be anywhere in my dark and vasty sea: I can never see as far as I would like beneath its shining skin. There is still a sandy
tide-mark and driftwood beneath the bench from when the sea told the Old Geezers to hush their mouths, and smacked them soundly.

I slip in now, and feel how the wind cannot defeat the great body of the ocean: it is warm and clear and full of life. The sun dances in patterns across the ocean floor, and blow as hard as the wind might, it can chill the rock pool, but not the sea.

I head towards the horizon. There is nothing but light, salt, and water.
Nothing but me, and the sea. And somewhere, not too far away, stitching together the endless shadows of the vasty ocean, Two-Fin and the dolphins swim wreaths in their endless dance,
round and round and round.