Missed the start? You can read the Prologue here:
PREVIOUSLY in Ocean: The Podcast Narrator Helen, a devoted but maverick teacher, pursues her mission to help her most troubling student Sindi, with life-changing results.
Episode Two: In which Helen is rescued by a stranger and attempts to come to terms with what has happened to her, starting with Romy, a somewhat disconcerting therapist.
Chapter Three
A cigarette lighter smacked alight. A face glimmered into view. A man, soot-faced, glasses broken, blinked behind the flame. I shouted, ‘I’m pregnant. Help me!’
Please let the baby move again. My arms cradled my belly.
‘You’re safe now,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Helen,’ I whispered.
‘I’m James. I saw you falling inside the train. I was on the platform. There’s been an explosion.’ He erupted into spluttering.
‘I don’t understand.’ I said.
‘A bomb went off on the other platform as you were pulling in. Everyone rushed onto your train. But I guess all the electrics are gone. Ow!’ He dropped the lighter which had burned his fingertip, and we were in darkness again. He felt around on the floor and clicked it into life again. ‘I just went back to cigarettes from the vape last week,’ he said. ‘Stroke of luck. Lost my cigarettes though.’
‘Where am I?’ I said, sure then that I was going to die here, in this crack deep in the earth, my last human contact this person whose face I could not make out. I would never see Nicholas again, never see Frank, never hold my baby. The walls flickered, giving echoes to James’s every movement.
He held the lighter up to examine the space we were now in. It was a stone chamber, built quite deep into the tunnel wall, but just wide and high enough for the two of us to crouch in. At the end of the chamber was a shaft, wide enough to crawl into. Cold air wafted thinly down it, and, I thought I heard tinny voices and sirens.
‘We’re in a vent,’ he said. ‘Lucky this station has one. I studied them, years ago. I never thought it would come in handy. You know there are vents from the underground all over London? They look like little buildings on the surface.’ He smiled at me in the shadows.
‘What are you talking about?’ I gasped. I blinked hard, in case he wasn’t real. But there he remained, curiously examining the walls.
‘Sorry, I’m just amazed at the coincidence. I went down quite a nerdy rabbit hole of this stuff years ago. Anything broken? I had to pull you really hard. I thought your arm might come out of its socket.’
I lifted each arm to show him, and myself. Pain seared through every movement: it was the pain of joints crushed, panels of muscle compressed like chipboard into unnatural alliances with other materials. The shouts and screams from the platform sharpened and then faded. I wondered if this little chamber, James himself, were a vision, like people reportedly get before they die, and really I was crushed on that carriage floor, the woman on top of me. But the floor was cold, and I was in pain, and there was no white light of bliss, just the tiny orange segment that wavered as he breathed.
James went on. ‘I was just going into Kings Cross to see something. Last minute. About to get on your train and then — and I saw you. Where were you going?’
‘Home. After work. I live in Greenwich… so I was getting off to go onto the Jubilee line.’
‘I.. couldn’t help anyone else. There wasn’t time.’ He rubbed his eyes behind the glasses.
The flame in James’s hand soared on its tiny mooring towards the oxygen from above. I ran my hands over my belly, wincing where the heel had pressed into me. My dress had the cracked shine of dried blood.
‘Do you think my baby is still alive?’ My voice died to a whisper. ‘I mean it must be, right? You got to me in time’
James put his glasses in his pocket, so broken they were useless. His eyes were bright in the darkness, like an animal’s. ‘Helen, try to focus on what we do now, okay? Imagine we’re in an aircraft. You have to fit your own mask first so that you can help the baby. So, we know you have no broken bones. You’re not bleeding too badly. You’re awake. We are doing well. Here. Have a drink of this. You need to steady yourself.’ He placed an object in my hands. There was a lid: unscrewing it, alcohol wafted over me.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘Talisker! It’s malt…’
‘I don’t know if I should,’ I said.
‘I think we’re beyond government guidelines, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s medicine at this point. You need to feel calm, and warm.’
Eagerly I gulped, and warmth enveloped the cold void inside me.
‘Good. Right. My phone’s gone. Don’t suppose you have yours? We could use the torch on it. There’s not much left in this lighter.’ But I had nothing, no bag, no phone, no coat. My bare feet were cut and sore.
‘I’m sorry…’ I mumbled.
‘Don’t worry.’ On his knees, he examined the opening to the surface, his movements exaggerated by the shadows. ‘We just need to wait till you’re strong enough to get up there. Think you can do it?’
There was absolutely no chance of me getting up that tunnel. Pain was spreading from the wound in my belly. I slumped against the wall. James shuffled back and peered at me. There was a desperate edge to his voice as he said, ‘Take a look at it. That flask in your hand.’
‘What is it?’ I murmured, squinting.
‘You can’t see in this light, but it’s silver, really beautiful. Engraved. It belonged to my father.’
I ran my fingertips over the engraving. It was an intricately detailed sailboat with a single tall mast and elegant lines. He said, ‘There’s an inscription along the bottom: I place my hope in the sea.’
‘I sailed on a boat like that! When I was young. She was called the Innisfree.’ I felt air closing round me as if I was falling asleep.
The lighter flame sputtered out. The darkness enveloped us as cold and final as a vault.
James’s voice echoed close to me. I felt the vibration on my lips.
He said, ‘Helen, tell me about that, the Innisfree, when you were young. Don’t stop. Tell me it all.’
‘I can’t remember… I…’ Leaning now against him, the memory drained from my mind. I rested my head on his chest, and through the charred fabric caught the faint scent of lemons. It transported me for a moment to a garden Frank and I had once visited in Lanzarote, and there was a lemon tree in it, and the lemons were massive and ripe, filling the palm of Frank’s hand. Dreams were coming for me, I knew this. Tears poured down my face. I knew what was going to happen, what had already happened. ‘James, I can’t live without my baby,’ I whispered. In the darkness, I felt James’s hand upon my head. He said nothing, just stroked my hair while I wept.
Frank’s voice: ‘There are cordons everywhere. I ran all the way from the intersection.’
A woman’s voice: ‘You’re James?’
‘No, I’m her husband, Frank. You rang me!’
‘Oh! It’s just that she called out James and woke up very distressed. We gave her some sedatives.’
My dry eyes opened a crack. A bag of saline dripping light. A harsh smell of antiseptic. Frank. My swollen tongue tried and failed to form his name. I was so happy to see him. He would sort out this mess. He would make me feel safe. He was unflappable.
But now I saw that Frank had a thrown together, frantic look. At first I thought it was the sweat of running and nerves, but then the realisation surfaced. I understood his unusual appearance. It was the look of a man who had been interrupted with another woman. I pushed the thought away. In my imagination my hands slid to my belly, as they had in the carriage in those moments before the explosion.
With a sore edge to his voice, Frank said. ‘Is my wife… is she going to be all right?’
The nurse adjusted my drip, right at the edge of my field of vision. Even though I could barely see her, I knew she was staring at my husband. It is perfectly possible to be half-conscious in hospital and simultaneously fully cognisant of the effect of Frank. She was very young and had dyed black hair volumised and arranged into a generous bun at the back of her head, like an air hostess or Jackie Kennedy. ‘Your wife lost a lot of blood when we operated. She has torn muscles in her shoulder, and we think a concussion. She will be all right. But James –Frank – she may be very shocked when she comes round. You should prepare yourself.’
The nurse laid a hand on my husband’s arm. It is entirely possible to receive good news about your survival, and yet to want to grab your nurse and dig your nails into her flesh and whisper something that terrifies. I could not move at all. Only my mind raced, my heart galloping to keep pace. Frank didn’t react to her hand on his arm, nor her standing close to him. To his credit, he could always recognise when had too much on his plate.
‘Do you want to know?’ she asked.
Of course he doesn’t want to know! He’s nodding because… because…
‘A little girl. We couldn’t save her. I’m so sorry.’
My husband put his head in his hands and wept. I watched him sorrowfully through the bars of my eyelashes. Sleep clawed me down again.
Frank said, laying some very expensive chocolates on the nurses’ station, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done.’ It was a week later, I’d been cleaned and tidied, and I was being discharged. They’d have preferred to keep me in, for psyche evaluations. I was a burial mound now and would permit no further exhumation.
Breezily, I’d agreed to some outpatient counselling so that doctors’ brows would stop furrowing and I would be allowed to go. But I knew what was waiting for me could not be exorcised by words or tamed with medication. Already I was a stranger to myself, as if I had been raised by wolves and stumbled back into society. Analyse and weep as we may, everything carries on, the world keeps turning, running on dismay.
The three nurses at the station cooed thanks for the chocolates as one. They were, I was sure, given every brand and type of chocolate in existence multiple times a day, and I hoped our unoriginality didn’t make us seem ungrateful. For I was not ungrateful. I was indeed alive. It was just that this fact was irrelevant now.
The nurses were incarcerated in identical uniforms. Their individuality despite this mesmerised me – one had a paperback of Game Of Thrones splayed to the side, and her hand kept creeping towards it and resting on it, as if it was a tiny hand-pillow; one brought me out in a sweat with her resemblance to my mother; the third, my Jackie O, my ghastly flirt-nurse, was smiling fretfully at Frank as she sashayed out from behind the station and handed me an office file box. It had the clothes I’d been found in, and an ultrasound. I slammed the lid back shut.
She placed a sympathetic hand on my arm. ‘I know it doesn’t seem that way right now, but you have been really lucky. Seventy dead! That’s many more than the July 2005 attacks.’
‘My baby wasn’t lucky,’ I said.
‘Oh, sorry, I wasn’t thinking….’ she said. Frank smiled amiably, said, ‘Thanks again,’ and gently turned us away.
We walked in silence, down the stairs as I could not face the lift. Our shoes squeaked on the floor. I remembered a long time ago when I had taken a three-year old Nicholas on his only visit to my mother. The house had a chilly, sad feel. Nicholas had climbed down from my knee and gone to the front door and waited there like a dog. When I went to bring him back to the sitting room, he whispered, ‘I want to go home.’ I knew that feeling now.
At the exit I pressed the box with its ultrasound into the bin. The automatic doors were iridescent in the winter sun. I took a deep breath and touched them and they sailed open, bathing us in freezing air. Frank squeezed my hand. ‘Now I should warn you,’ he said. ‘Nicholas is extremely excited and he has supervised a whole welcoming party. Balloons. A cake. Can you cope with it?’
‘Does he understand about the baby?’
‘I told him, and he only cares about you.’
‘Okay,’ I said. Frank kept his hand over mine, only moving it to change gear. When at last we pulled up outside the house, with its clutch of balloons on the door, I did not, at first, recognise it as my home.
Chapter Four
Romy, the bereavement counsellor, was straight backed and clear and her clothes crackled like a newly kindled fire. She had a strict parting in her luscious white hair, but a libidinous crown, where the hair bobbed up and would not be contained. Frank drove me to that first appointment, right to the door of her clinic and escorted me inside. ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ he said.
I did want to talk, I was overflowing with everything that was inside me, but what I wanted to talk about were my classroom kids. I was worried about them, especially Sindi, how would they survive until I could get back there? – and also Frank and Nicholas, my unit, that remained, as if the walls of a house had evaporated, leaving the furniture standing untouched. But after a few pleasantries, Romy got down to business.
‘Did you give the baby a name?’
I gaped, aghast. Romy was clearly on a mission and was not going to indulge any flim-flam. That’s not how you get results. I was bereaved and we were going to talk about it. My file lay on a desk behind her. It was very skimpy for one so clearly ambitious. Her question hung between us.
My will softened, becoming gelatinous as an ocean bottom dweller .
‘Cariad,’ I mumbled.
‘Ah! Beloved in Welsh,’ she smiled. ‘I’m half Welsh myself,’
Loathing gnawed through me. (She demands the name, then she appropriates it.)
‘I am not going to cry over the baby,’ I said, summoning up my strength. Then, wanting to shock her with my finality: ‘The baby is dead as a doornail.’
‘Cariad,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Cariad is dead as a doornail.’
The only thing that stopped me slapping her elegant face was the catastrophic weight of my limbs. I felt like I was mid-somersault underwater. Curling over, as if catching myself, a groan squeezed out of me. I burned for Frank, a sudden, visceral desire. If he’d walked in the door I’d have fallen to my knees in front of him, starving, urgent, not caring who saw us. Or was it Nicholas I burned for, my little boy, pale as a fish. I couldn’t remember what he felt like against me anymore. His kicks inside me, always so vivid in my memory, were lost, taken away by the one who came after.
Hard concern rode the plains of Romy’s face. I writhed on my horrible chair several miles beyond the tissue box.
‘Let’s talk about it,’ she said.
‘Talk about what?’
‘Your fury.’
‘I’m not furious.’ But spittle did sail from my lips and I believe land upon her watch-face. She didn’t blink, instead she pointed, with a palely manicured finger at my coat, which I had not taken off. The breathing world was arctic at all times now, no matter the actual temperature, presence of sun or not. The physical universe didn’t follow the old rules anymore. You try surviving a bomb blast and see if you start experiencing reality differently, and wearing inappropriate clothing, I wanted to say but did not.
I looked down. A slip of paper was dangling from my pocket. As we both watched, it slid out onto the table. As if a breast had escaped my bra, I froze.
I glanced at my bag on the floor. It was exploding with more papers.
‘May I?’ Romy reached over and, hesitating minutely, picked the one from the table. It was a letter. Of sorts. I tried to grab it from her, but my arms were lead. She put on a pair of stylish half moon reading glasses and read it aloud:
Dear James
I text myself as if it was you, hundreds of times a day. I’ve exceeded my text allowance, I’ve had to upgrade. And yet it’s not enough. Millions of you are in my brain. You’re the shrapnel of my exploded life right here all over me, inside and out. I am drowning, incinerating in my thoughts of you
Romy looked over the glasses at me, laid the letter down and picked up another:
Dear James
It’s because I met death, and carried death, and permitted death, and failed to prevent death, and saw death and touched death and I know what it is, it’s a blunt blade of desire. It’s a stake through me. I’m made undead by what I have seen. I can’t live without you.
‘Are all of these letters to James?’ she said. Her eyes, magnified to bovine dimensions behind the lenses, were mapped by meandering capillaries. She had a skin tag on her eyelid. I didn’t know why, but I was afraid.
In answer I snatched the letter out of her hands, cradled it to me. I began to cry. I felt sure Romy wanted this, but these were not the tears she would approve of. They were not for the baby. I wasn’t sure what they were for, or perhaps they just were, like the crests of waves, or the dark torso of the wave itself, rising, solidifying, transcending its element to become the striding, ocean-sucking, mountain.
Romy said, as I wept, ‘Sometimes people’s desires are unleashed by disaster, as if decimation of the self reveals the primal creature within.’
I leant in to her, humiliation animating me like electricity in a corpse.
‘I’m a teacher. I’m a mother. I’m a married woman. These letters are for processing my thoughts. Like a diary. You weren’t meant to see them.’
She said, relentlessly burying words in the no man’s land between us, like mines. ‘Helen, everything you’re demonstrating, the anger, the need, the… writing… These are part of the stages of loss. You will pass through them all. You will survive.’
‘I have survived.’ I knew I was frightening her a bit. I was frightening myself too. ‘The baby… the woman who lost the baby… she is just sloughed-off skin.’
She indicated the letters splayed before us. ‘You’re keeping that sloughed off skin very close, aren’t you?’
I’d read my share of self help and psychology books. You don’t leave the traumatised person with nothing to cling to, no privacy or secrets at all. You don’t do that. Romy was irresponsible. She should be struck off. Unbelievable. The vision flashed in my mind of the tribunal where this would happen. I would be called forward: dignified Mrs Bell, who survived a bomb blast, and I would say, full of regret but truth: she left me with nothing to cling to. If I hadn’t had a loving husband and son, I would have, I would have ---
I sat back, wonderingly.
She spoke softly, as if to an animal. ‘It’s wonderful that your husband and son are so strong for you.’
‘It is. They are.’
‘But I think it will help you to talk about James. And ultimately, about Cariad.’
A scene from my childhood swam into my mind. A man we all knew who wandered the streets of Fleetwood, a ‘character’ as we called it then. In his arms he carried armfuls of letters. I realised I was telling Romy this. ‘There were dozens of them, all in their envelopes. He had dirty hair and a stringy beard and stained trousers and no socks, and funny blue shoes with tassels on them that were rubbing his heels raw. I remember those funny shoes, treading carefully, because he couldn’t see his feet, because of all the letters. In the post office one time he queued patiently with them all and he laid them at the window in wobbly towers while he argued with the teller about his Giro. And then… when it was all over he gathered them up and went out again. The point is, he went to the post office with all his letters and the letters were nothing to do with it.’
There was a silence.
‘We should talk about that next week,’ she said. ‘We need to finish there.’
‘I thought as much,’ I snarled, gathering up the letters, stuffing them into my bag, stumbling out like a tramp.
I had written too many letters to James to hide them and they poked up around the sheets and on the floor around the bed. Sometimes a text to myself was not enough; I needed to feel the glide of the ink on paper, though the notes were so hurried that sometimes I simply stabbed through the paper and the whole thing was an illegible mess. Between the two – the texts, which I punched into my bright new phone until my eyes ached, and the notes, I must have churned out a whole book’s worth of words.
To give me space, and probably to escape the fetid bed and the frantic catatonia of his wife, Frank was sleeping on the sofa. But, he could not avoid the letters. They crackled beneath his feet when he came into the bedroom. He read one, while I burned under the covers. I said, from underneath, ‘They don’t mean anything. It’s like a diary.’
It didn’t wash with him anymore than with Romy. He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Are you in love with this guy?’
‘It’s a diary. I’m bereaved.’
‘It doesn’t get you off the hook for absolutely everything, Helen.’
‘I know,’ I said. I owed him more than this. I poked my head out. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you take the ‘Dear James’ off, they could be to anyone. They’re philosophical musings…’ I couldn’t look at him when I said it. The letters included panting sexual references. Some of them were tear stained.
My husband’s mouth hardened into a dissatisfied line. He reached out and stroked my arm. ‘Maybe… put them away. I don’t think Nicholas should see them, do you?’
I heard him leave, through the fiery burn of my embarrassment. His steps were the thoughtful plod of a husband knocked from his orbit.
Some days after this wake up call, this time-up on my outpourings (not that I stopped at all), I was dressed and invigorated beside Frank ready to witness our eleven year old son Nicholas compete in the school swimming gala. I was shivering. Frank had demanded I take off my anorak indoors, and also leave all the letters behind. He was right of course. I liked that my life now was becoming the opposite of the life Romy was pressing me for. Frank didn’t want to talk about my letter writing, about James, about the baby. He was one hundred percent with me on the lucky to be alive aspect of things, and the fortification of the unit.
No matter my disarray, no matter my failure to order the words in my mouth, never mind to place them in some kind of normal social bandwidth, I would not have missed being here, at this municipal swimming pool. Had I been in a coma, I believe Frank would have unplugged me, wheeled me in and propped me up with a flag in my hand.
As I shivered on the hard bench, chlorine flagellating my corneas and gums, something came over me. The urge to pull off my rings – the wedding and engagement rings that I had not taken off in over a decade -- took hold. It was a kind of vertigo. Excitedly, almost as if it belonged to someone else, a lover, a rescuer, James, my right hand crept to my left and touched the metal.
The wedding ring, a thin white gold band, still gleamed as will all metal in the light, even a thread in a boulder, even a chassis consumed by rust. It was in no way dazzling, but I liked the is-what-it-is quality of the unpolished shine. Next to it was the pearl. It had been Frank’s maternal grandmother’s engagement ring. She had caused quite a sensation in the family by having a pearl instead of a diamond, and Frank liked the oceanic connotations of a pearl, as well as the notion of a marriage being like one, created by labour and friction. I adored this ring. The pearl made me want to run my tongue over it, and this I actually did in nervous moments. It was indestructible and impenetrable, and hard against my tongue as a piercing.
I realised I was doing it now, anxiously, on my bench, as Nicholas stood at the pool’s edge with his toes curled around the rim. I was dry mouthed from whatever medication they were filling me with and my saliva was sour and thick and dried almost instantly on my finger like a slug trail. I gazed at our son. Oh, Nicky.
Around him other boys were scrawny as pencils, or with the shadows of muscles beginning. They shuffled and stared, a pubescent line of shyness and ego. Nicky’s solemn face, behind the neon goggles, was turned to us. His lips were pressed together in a determined line. Frank gave him a thumbs up.
My tongue continued its patient fellatio of my finger which had no effect on the rings whatsoever. Dear James I began another letter in my head. I wanted to tell him about my son, the kind of love that was.
The snap of the starting gun, and Nicholas leapt from the side. Frank ricocheted up from the bench. It was hard to see what was happening as the water boiled around the boys. A great bang! as he belly flopped the water and immediately began to swim. My eyes streamed; parental cheers battered round the tiles, none of it fading or drifting away, until it was a savannah-sized gallop around my brain.
I chewed and licked and despaired. I had swollen whilst pregnant and bloated again with all the medication. The calming pleasure of running the pearl over my tongue had turned to a terrible need to be free, as if I was creature chewing its paw from a trap. I didn’t even understand how getting the rings off would make me free, I had simply been taken over by desire, which I could not suppress nor hide.
‘What are you doing?’ Frank turned, white circling his irises.
To tear him from the sight of our son arcing out of the water with a perfectly executed butterfly stroke, I must have looked amazing. My finger stilled between my lips, like a terrible adult baby.
It struck me then, heavily. This was what I had to be free from. My catastrophic failure to be properly human, and being required to answer for it.
I hated my husband then, with a passion as visceral as my desire for him had been.
‘I…’ my finger slipped from my mouth, dragging a string of spit with it.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Frank pressed his forehead to his hand, and my hate twirled on its terrible cloven hooves into sadness. The collapse of his neck, the tired flop of his hair, the fingers supporting his head without conviction, like an unwanted trophy.
The room erupted into a roar that made me clap my hands to my ears and whimper. Everywhere was a tunnel now, sucking the air from me. My body was a dark space in which I cowered. I grabbed my husband’s arm, and hauled myself upright beside him. Frank was clapping and shouting and so I did the same, though it felt like I was crying out for rescue.
Nicholas was closing in on another boy. He was churning through the water like a mill wheel. The other boy was in the next lane.
And I saw it, clear as a revelation. Nicholas grabbed the boy’s ankle. He did it seamlessly, without pausing in his own stroke. It was a yank of unexpected force, disguised in white water. The boy jerked underwater, lost his rhythm, and Nicholas pulled ahead.
I flushed with horror and pride. Oh, the shy criminality of all the children I loved: the kids with their stolen fawn, Sindi with her graffiti and lawless flaunting, and now my son, the swimming cheat. All of these children preparing themselves for a world that pretends to follow rules but doesn’t really.
The boy Nicholas jerked came second, his hand raised in protest the moment he touched the side. But no one had seen anything. My boy.
Then the tannoy, shearing though me like electricity. ‘And in first place… Nicholas Bell!’ Frank whooped, and punched the air. I slipped down into my seat, clapping until my hands hurt. Nicholas’s eyes met mine. His beautiful, dark, uncertain eyes.
Events were moving smoothly on. Boys were being ushered onto the podium. Boys I knew as toddlers. Boys who had grown in the time I had been working, and latterly, locked in my bereavement. I had barely stepped out of the house in weeks, except for my ill fated journeys to Romy. I imagined going into school all the time, I imagined all my kids floundering in their unsuitability for living. It chewed at me.
There he was, our boy, on the highest of the blocks. He was grinning. As the Head put the medal round his neck he stared right at me, a soft, serious look. I clapped harder, wanting to send approval across the heads of parents, across the shaky water, to him. Then it was over. Nicholas, like some kind of strange skinned sea creature clambered from the blocks and disappeared into the changing rooms.
He was quiet in the car, turning over the medal in his hands. He looked small again, younger than his years.
‘Are you proud of me, mummy?’ he asked.
‘Nicky, so proud. You were… amazing.’
‘Yes, son,’ Frank added. ‘That was just brilliant. We should celebrate,’ said Frank, excited at the wheel.
I seemed to have lost all muscle tone. I slumped inside my anorak like a mound of ice cream.
‘What do you think? Takeaway? You choose. And you –’ Frank looked at me tenderly. He mouthed, ‘Well done.’
My finger throbbed inside its metal hoop. I reached behind myself and offered my hand, and Nicholas’s crept into it. I closed my eyes, trying to feel his hand properly, my son, my living son. It was as if I was leading him through a tunnel in the blackness, going forward, though I did not know then into what.
And finally…
I am so grateful for the comments I’ve received so far to Ocean from you!
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Polly x
Episode Two