Around the bay, the world is starting up again, all the creatures crawling out of their holes after the storm. Distant specks of colour move in doorways; a flash of grey and white streaks across the narrow beach. Gulls lift, shrieking, into the air. Closer to the water’s edge, much smaller things are scuttling and blooming in the grey tide. Shells clack against each other; spindle-legged critters burrow in the sand.

Ruth can hear the undersea creaking back to life, and the faraway clamour of the village behind it all. She catches the whisper of a shopkeeper who hands extra sweets to a child. On the house. Don’t tell your mother. Ruth hears a bike bell chiming, grainy supermarket pop music, the slap of a gannet hitting the water in pursuit of a fish.

It is too much noise. She closes her eyes, hones her mind like a tuning fork and allows the ringing to take over. The key is to wait until she feels that vibration in the soles of her feet, feels it move through her body like a chord. When everything else has faded to the background she can open her eyes and breathe in the salty air, plan the next movements of her day.

It is always in the wake of such storms that the world feels out of balance. The electricity in the air does something strange to her heartbeat. There is a fizzing, a sense of reality stretching, right before the lightning hits and thunder rolls over the bay. Then the rain comes, and she feels the sea roiling, its thrilling power tossing the boat from left to right. But when the storm is over and the noise from the village resumes, the land always seems so much louder than before. Now she cannot ignore the sound of Meg that carries across the bay, crackling and bright. As if she is within arm’s reach again and nothing at all has changed.

Ruth ducks inside the cabin of the boat and sets the kettle on the tiny stove, strikes a match to the gas and dumps two scoops of tea leaves into the pot. There is a closeness to the air, as if the storm isn’t quite finished. While the kettle boils Ruth tries again to hold the ringing in her body. It becomes easier, rolls through her like waves, and she can allow her focus to wander without fear of interruption from the din on land.

She is older now, more powerful in many ways, but there is no denying that the boat is not the most comfortable place for a woman in the grip of middle age. It helps to be surrounded by water but the bay was only ever a temporary solution, a compromise. She has grown irritable and frustrated as the months have worn on. There is a brittleness in her bones, a tension in her neck and jaw that no stretch, no spell, no tincture can release.

All of that noise in her body is pointing out to sea. The murky stillness of this place, its sluggishness, has always made her weary. She has stayed because of Meg, but summer is fast approaching, and the bay will soon be unbearable: clogged with rubber dinghies and inflatable animals, an oily slick of sunscreen on the water.

They’d laughed at all of it once, the clownish behaviour of those land-dwellers, their shrieking and flailing at the moment icy water hit their skin. Ruth and Meg were above it all. They alone knew the intricacy of that world underneath, the ecosystem that heaved and swam and slithered not so far below them.

*

They had been tangled together like kelp from the age of fourteen: sunburned, electric Meg and her sidekick Ruth the dreamer, up to all manner of sinister things. So said their parents; so their teachers reported when the two girls were found down at the estuary during a school excursion, whispering to something scaly wriggling in the reeds. Neither woman could remember what had happened that day, but whatever it was had fused them together, given them a sense of shared understanding that ran through their friendship like a current.

As their teens wore on, they had spent clear afternoons at the rocky seaside between their houses, trailing down to the water to collect and dry seaweed for braiding. Meg’s long, dark hair was always full of knots, tangled and thick from sea wind and salt. While school pressures gathered like a storm cloud behind them, they taught themselves about tides and currents, algae and coral and the many kinds of weed. They shaved driftwood, collected shards of shell and bone, filled small vials with seawater and stowed them in their wide pockets. When evenings fell and the cold, soaking mist crept further up the beach, they went back to their houses and read to each other over the phone. They learned the words to call forth turtles, fish and seals; to protect themselves from sharks and storms; to heal using the powers of the sea.

*

Ruth pours boiling water into the teapot and watches the leaves animate, bobbing and swirling before settling again on the base. The sweet, grassy scent of chamomile fills the cabin, and she finds herself at the table in front of the waterway map, the noise of the village still chirping at the edges of her thoughts.

The expanse of blue paper has been marked over the years with numbers corresponding to a particularly potent spot, or a place where something extraordinary occurred. Meg had called it the Map of Underneath and scrawled the name across the top in green sharpie. Whale ballets are all marked thickly with a 5—the first sightings had been early in their travels, when they only made note of the huge and the dramatic. But their knowledge gave them access to the hidden things, too: the slow, downward procession of creatures to a carcass on the sea floor; a rapid change in temperature of a current. Any land-dweller with a boat and a decent helping of luck could happen upon a breaching whale, but what the two women saw and felt through the water was what had always set them apart. Soon, it became the small, miraculous instances that they noted carefully on their map. Things others could rarely see.

Now, the thing is puckered with biro marks and tiny gold stars. There is a system: the stars mark the best points to anchor during storms of various kinds, or major lunar events. Ruth feels a swell of sadness in her chest at the idea of heading back out there alone, but the feeling fades as she traces the edge of the blue with her index finger.

Meg does not owe Ruth anything; they are both aware of this. Ruth cannot comprehend Meg’s decision but that doesn’t mean it is the wrong one. It’s just that the change in Meg has blindsided her, that Meg’s willingness to put aside their perfect life for something she calls stable seems so at odds with the woman Ruth has known so deeply since childhood.

Ruth has always been able to sense how long her connection with another person will last. She can tell when she meets somebody which little differences might ultimately send them in opposing directions. But with Meg she was certain they’d be together until the end. With Meg, she never would have thought the land, of all things, would come between them.

The water is still high and choppy. She has maybe an hour before things will settle, and then it will be time to move. Though she has dithered over the decision for days, the storm seems to have brought Ruth a clarity she couldn’t find earlier. She is sure of it now: Meg does not want her to wait.

She tells herself that she isn’t leaving forever; she will be back to visit after summer. With a flash of bitter satisfaction, she imagines Meg sapped and unhappy after a high season spent on land. But maybe that won’t be the case at all. Perhaps, with a daily swim in the bay and the sea views from her front steps of her new cottage, Meg won’t even feel the difference.

*

On hard days, Ruth has puzzled over how they stayed together at all. Ruth was always certain that there was only one kind of life for her, but Meg felt pulled in different directions. Right up until graduation, she had been planning for a very different life. Seeking both wilderness and security, she’d been planning to move into the mountains when school ended, where she would make her living chaperoning the exorbitantly wealthy on their annual hiking trips.

Though they’d both grown up without money, Meg felt furious about her lack of it and would often talk as if she was entitled to her fortune. Ruth, on the other hand, felt nothing but gratitude: for Meg, and for the freedom that stretched out ahead of them both. She felt no real hunger for anything material, not clothing or cars or houses. The only thing Ruth wanted was a boat of her very own, where she could live surrounded by the sea and would hardly ever need to touch the ground.

This was what she dreamed of in the first strange year of adulthood, working weekends at the pharmacy, saving nearly everything she earned. She watched the clock as she refilled the shelves, waited for the moment she could flee the store and hurtle down to the edge of the water. Meg met her at the beach most afternoons, somehow still bright-eyed after a long shift at the bakery. Her job was to wash steel trays and ice the buns, and her fingers would taste like sugar and coconut whenever they brushed the corners of Ruth’s mouth. Everything felt brand new then, their friendship only just blooming into something heavier, electric. For a moment it was frightening, then it began to settle and expand. Neither could imagine now that there had ever been a day when they hadn’t loved each other like this. They were Ruth and Meg, Meg and Ruth. Down by the estuary at age fourteen; tasting each other on the sea wall years later; swimming with dolphins in their middle age. It was the two of them, always, bound by salt.

*

Years on the boat accumulated, and something began to shift in the way Meg spoke about the future. Their conversations turned again and again to the land, moving from meandering hypotheticals to something far more concrete and alarming. These talks only made Ruth more certain that leaving the water was not an option. She explained this to Meg, first patiently and then less so. It did not seem to make much of a difference.

When they moored, Ruth noticed the new interest Meg took in her surroundings. She bent to trail her fingers through soil, slipped her sun-browned hands into shrubs heavy with flowers, sat down abruptly on a grassy bank, slipping off her shoes. I forgot how good it can feel, said Meg, and Ruth felt panic creep cold into her throat. That time, one of the first, she had dismissed Meg with a roll of her eyes and traipsed into the tiny hardware store to pick up their monthly supplies. Through the shop’s grubby front window, she had watched as her beloved lay back on the lush green grass and closed her eyes, face tilted to the sky.

Things worsened. The cabin seemed to shrink around them. There were nights where somebody slept on the bench seat beside the tiny kitchen table, socked feet dangling off the edge. They stayed closer to the shore, Meg pining for more frequent visits. The ringing Ruth had to hold in her body began to verge on painful. She felt a grinding like sand in her joints, a slow creaking as she moved about the cabin.

Sometimes all of that hurt would be soothed by a morning on the water. In the kayak they’d watch seals ducking and rolling in the waves, and Meg would press her toes into the base of Ruth’s spine, an apology of sorts. They would bring the kayak back to the boat and tie it up, then strip naked and throw themselves into the sea. To be submerged felt holy, and the aches and stiffness brought by age and argument seemed to melt away. Ruth had trained herself not to breathe for long stretches—it was more difficult for Meg, but still they moved like the seals as they kissed, salt crackling on their skin as soon as they broke the surface. They dove as deep as their buoyant bodies would allow, watched the tiny particles of ocean life dance in columns of watery light.

*

Now there is nothing left to be done but keep moving, and Ruth knows she can’t delay any longer. The clouds are dispersing, and behind them an orange sun sinks towards the horizon. She moves around the boat making her final preparations: pinning the starred map back up in its place, emptying her mug into the sink.

When everything is put away, in its cupboard or on its hook or fastened down with rope, she lifts the anchor and feels a light dragging coming from the end of the bay. The water has grown still as glass. Someone is tugging at it, smoothing it like a top sheet over the mass of life underneath. Someone—she can feel it more strongly now—is calming the waves for her, easing her way forward. Someone is saying, Now is the time. Saying, I love you; be safe. Ruth sends the thought back over the water; one urgent push that fights against the stillness of the blue. Across the bay and back to Meg, who is channelling all of her energy, swallowing salty tears, sending her love back out to sea.

Image: Alexander Andrews
 

This story was a runner up in the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize.