The Art of Not Breathing (5 page)

After a little while of sitting and remembering, I wonder if anyone at home has noticed that I’m not there. Sometimes I feel invisible, like a wisp of air that tickles the back of someone’s neck before they close the window to block the draft.

I’m about to head home when the panel door creaks open. I hold my breath and move back into the corner. It better not be my dad.

“Hello?” a voice calls from outside.

The voice is young.

“Someone in here?”

Then a face appears. A boy with floppy brown hair and a bit of stubble. He has a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from his mouth.

“Ah, I knew there was someone in here.” He climbs through the panel and walks toward me. My pulse races as I start to gather my things.

“Don’t leave on my account,” he says, and sits beside me, stretching his long legs out along the concrete floor. The bottoms of his black jeans are scuffed, and when I see the sunglasses in his hand, I realize he’s the boy in the hoodie from the boat.

“Who are you?” I ask, hoping the quiver in my voice isn’t too obvious.

He lights up, and it’s not just a cigarette. The space between us fills with a fog, and the fumes get in the back of my throat, sickly and sweet.

“Tavey McKenzie,” he says as he exhales. “Call me Tay. You like to smoke?” He holds the joint out to me, smiling. His arm presses against mine, and my raincoat rustles. I wish I’d taken it off earlier—I’m suddenly really hot and now I can’t seem to move.

I’ve never smoked a joint before, but the other S4s smoke behind the school field all the time. They are much nicer to me in the afternoon, patting me on the shoulder, smiling, and sometimes even offering me a cigarette. I never take one, though. I don’t want to owe anyone.

“Yeah, of course,” I say, and reach out my hand. I think about how I’m going to get out of here.

He doesn’t look like the boys at my school. They have styled and gelled hair; this boy’s hair is messy and long and hangs down over his ears. They have smooth round faces; this boy has a rectangular face with dark stubble. I wouldn’t describe him as good-looking, but he does have nice brown eyes and really long eyelashes that I can’t help but stare at. He reminds me of a boy I saw on a documentary about youth prisons a few months ago. Even though the boy in the prison had been in a fight that ended badly (really badly), I remember feeling sorry for him because I knew he’d been misunderstood. I recognized the furrowed brow of the prison boy—the same furrow I see every morning in the mirror. Tay has this look too, like the world just doesn’t get him.

I suck on the joint and get a faint taste of strawberries. Strawberry lip balm. I wonder if he’s just been kissing his girlfriend. My throat tightens and I try not to choke. Discreetly, I shuffle away from him so we’re no longer touching but watch him out of the corner of my eye. I want to show him I’m not afraid, and that I meet people like him all the time.

“I’m Elsie. Are you a friend of Dillon’s?”

The boy blinks. “Who?”

“Never mind. What’s your name again?”

“Tay,” he says slowly. “You’ve got a bad memory.”

“Like the river?” I ask. “Did you know that an earthquake once reversed the flow of the Mississippi?” I know a lot of rivers, thanks to the encyclopedias that Granny gave Dillon one year. When I was younger I used to read about all the underground rivers around the world and wonder if that’s where Eddie had gone.

“Yeah, like the river,” Tay says, seemingly amused. “And no, I didn’t know that. Thank you for educating me. So you must be the mystery squatter. It’s quite the setup you’ve got here.”

“Have you touched my stuff? This is my spot, you know.”

Even though he seems okay and is named after a river, this is
my
secret place. The joint makes me feel lightheaded, so I pass it back. I quite like the taste of it, though.

Tay tilts his head back and blows smoke rings, which float up and last for ages. I stare at them until my neck aches.

“I think you’ll find this was my spot before yours,” he says when the rings have dispersed. “I’ve just been away for a while.”

“Really? Where’ve you been, then?”

“Just away.”

“You must’ve been away at least a year,” I reply. There was no sign that anyone had been here before me when I discovered this place.

“Over five years. I moved away when I was twelve,” he says.

Five years. Prison, I bet. I wonder what he did. Although twelve is pretty young to go to prison, even a youth one. Maybe it was some kind of boarding school. This is actually good news, though, because he likely won’t know about Eddie.

“I have to admit,” Tay says, “I thought a small child had moved into my hideout.” He holds up an empty sweets bag as evidence.

“I don’t just keep sweets.” I point to the packet of cigarettes on the floor by our feet. Tay seems to find this amusing.

“Nothing wrong with sweets,” he says, and flicks the empty bag behind him. “So, you go to school in Fortrose?”

“Yeah, but I hate it. There are these girls that are always horrible to me.”

“I hated school. Girls were horrible to me, too, so I gave it up,” he says, laughing. “I go to the school of life now.”

“Is there a school of death?”

Tay sits forward and grins at me. His long eyelashes flutter and somehow soften his angular face. His teeth are shiny white and his lips look smooth. I wish I could apply another coat of lipstick.

“School of death? So you can learn to die?” He seems amused. I hope he can’t see how red my cheeks are.

“Maybe,” I mumble, trying to think of something else to say.

“You’re very interesting, Elsie.”

We smoke for a bit. I watch the way he maneuvers the joint to his lips and back down to the floor. I watch him cross and uncross his legs and play with a torn bit of leather on his shoe. He tells me that he once ran all around the Black Isle in a day and got attacked by farm dogs. I tell him that I once hid in a bus shelter during cross-country at school and only joined in for the last lap. He commends me on my initiative but says I should practice running in case farm dogs come after me. I tell him I’m not scared of dogs. I don’t tell him what I am afraid of. When the joint’s finished, he says he has to go.

“We should hang out again soon,” he says. “I’ll swing by.”

He slides gracefully through the panel, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t moved away from him before. I lie down on my back and smoke with my eyes closed, breathing in the tobacco, the cannabis fumes, and the lingering smell of Tay’s aftershave. I no longer care about Ailsa Fitzgerald or that scummy school, or even the flashing images. Eddie is deep inside me, laughing. I remember one of his favorite jokes.

“Why are there fish at the bottom of the sea?” I ask him.

“Because they dropped out of school,” he replies.

9

EDDIE AND I GOT JOKE BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS WHEN WE WERE EIGHT.
Mine was red, Eddie’s was blue—his favorite color at the time—“the color of the ocean!” Eddie loved the water even more than I did. I liked looking at it from the shore because I was afraid of getting tangled in the seaweed, but Eddie always wanted to be in it, have the waves break over his head. He was fearless when it came to the waves.

That Christmas day, we sat on the sofa together to open our presents. I was uncomfortable because Eddie was sitting on my leg, but he was so excited about Christmas, I didn’t want to upset him. So I sat still and let him cover me in ribbons and tinsel. Mum gave us the presents from Granny and we tore off the wrapping paper together. A joke book each. On the front they said
Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds.
I had to read the title to Eddie because he couldn’t read.

“It’s full of sea creeeeeeeatures,” he exclaimed as he flipped through it wide-eyed, looking for dolphins. “Look, look!”

He pointed to every page and illustration and held the book right up to my face so I could see. I remember feeling the shiny paper on my nose and the weight of it when he dropped it on my foot.

We hadn’t seen Granny for a while. She lived somewhere near Loch Lomond on the west coast and apparently we went there lots when we were small, but I don’t remember. Most of the time, she came to us but the visits were becoming less frequent because she was getting too old to travel. The last time we saw her, she visited us here on the Black Isle for Christmas, when Eddie and I were nine. On her last night, she and Mum had a fight. I never knew what it was about, but from the closet Eddie and I hid in, I heard Granny say to her, “I didn’t know I’d raised a wee liar.” On her way out she hugged Dad and told him to visit and bring us kids. He never did, though. She died in January this year, and Mum hasn’t spoken about her since.

The best thing about Granny was that she treated me and Eddie the same, even though we weren’t. I was normal. Normal height, normal(ish) weight, and about average at school. Eddie wasn’t. He was small. He walked like his legs were broken and fell over all the time. He wasn’t “clever enough” to go to my normal school. Sometimes it wasn’t always for the best that Granny treated us as twins, because she’d buy clothes that were too big for Eddie or books that were too difficult for him, but Eddie didn’t seem to mind that much.

“I’m the same as you, Ellie,” he’d say, grinning, wearing a sweater that went down to his knees. Or, “If you read the words first, I’ll read them when I’m ready.” He got that from Granny. She told him that he’d be able to do stuff when he was ready, and she never lied about how old we were either. She didn’t pretend that I was eight and he was six like Mum did.

“Ellie, what’s your joke book about?” Eddie asked when he’d finished showing me his.

I pulled my book out from under the cushion and showed it to him. My foot was tingling.

“Horsies!” he exclaimed. Then he looked at my face and reached out for my hand. “Oh. I am sorry to hear that. You can share mine.”

From across the room my father guffawed.

“Celia, come in here, quick!” he called to Mum, who was in the kitchen cooking something that smelled like gone-off cheese.

She came running through, with oil splattered across her apron. “What is it?”

“Say it again, Eddie,” my father said, clasping his hands.

Eddie looked at me, confused.

“Can you remember what you said about my book?”

“Horsies!”

“No, after that,” I say.

Eddie grinned. “Oh. I
am
sorry to hear that,” he said again, this time sounding even more like Mum when she’s on the phone to friends who’ve “had a terrible time.”

Mum clamped her hand across her mouth and doubled over at the waist.

“Oh, shit,” she cried. “Is that really what I sound like? Colin, why didn’t you tell me I sound so insincere? Shit.”

“Don’t swear, Mum,” said Dillon from behind his encyclopedia. “Mum, did you know that black holes can have a mass of a hundred billion suns?”

Mum didn’t respond to Dillon’s astronomy test and instead asked Eddie about the joke book.

“Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds,”
she read out. “Wow, aren’t you grown-up?”

“It’s about sea creatures,” he said. “But I can’t find any fins in it.”

“Well, never mind—there are plenty of other beautiful sea creatures. Why don’t you tell me a joke?” She wiped the grease from her hands on her apron and leaned on the wall, waiting.

Eddie passed me the book.

“Why did the lobster blush?” I read out.

“I don’t know!” Eddie shouted.

“Because the seaweed.”

He didn’t get it. He started wriggling like he always did when he didn’t understand something.

“Eddie, listen again. The sea
weed,
” I said, splitting the word.

While Eddie bounced about and poked my knee, I saw Mum take off her apron and slide onto my father’s lap. Dillon held his encyclopedia in front of his eyes when they started kissing. I covered Eddie’s eyes, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He just wanted to kiss me.

Eddie knew exactly what I thought about my book without me even saying anything. No one else understood me the way he did. I hadn’t told anyone I was scared of horses, but he knew.

10

THE WATER IS GRAY TODAY, THE SAME COLOR AS THE SKY,
and the waves crash about inside the harbor, battering the fishing boats that line the wall. At least it’s not raining. I clear my throat before I enter the boathouse so that I’m ready to speak if Tay’s inside, and put more Ruby Red on to smooth my lips in case he wants to kiss me.

The boathouse is empty and just as I left it yesterday, except now it feels miserable and gloomy. I’m barely settled under a blanket when a clatter from outside startles me. Then I hear music. Slowly, I creep back through the panel onto the pebbles and realize it’s coming from the clubhouse above me. I crawl out from under the clubhouse and climb the rickety steps up onto the veranda. One of the boards has been taken down from the clubhouse’s windows, and I can see inside. A man wearing glasses moves chairs around. In the far corner a large flat-screen TV shows a woman floating on her back in the sea with a bright red sun behind her. She sinks down under the water, her silver wetsuit making her look like a giant fish. The camera follows her as she drops through the water, going deeper and deeper until she disappears into the abyss. I feel breathless and queasy. I’m watching my dream play out right before me, only I’m wide awake. The music is loud but sounds tinny through the glass, and I feel like I’m the wrong way up. My legs start to give way just as the man turns around.

I run before he sees me.

It’s a mile from the harbor to our house on McKellen Drive. The quickest way is straight down the high street and through the cemetery, but I never take that shortcut. I used to try—I’d stand at the cemetery gate, but my feet would never take me in.

Instead, I turn left just past the police station and take the long route around the back of all the houses. The roads weave in and out of the new subdivisions—great big houses with shiny garages and neat little bay windows. Our house is more like one of the old crumbly ones in Rosemarkie. There aren’t many like this left on our road.