I grit my teeth. Maybe we’ll never forget what’s gone before, never really start again.
‘I had a therapist,’ I tell you, as I look about in the dirt for a stick, ‘who said we could reinvent ourselves each day if we chose.’
‘They obviously never went to jail. Can’t wipe that smear off so easy.’
You pull a long bit of corkwood from the scrub next to you and hand it to me: a perfect bashing branch.
‘So, if not that, you must believe we’re the product of the bad things that have happened to us, that all that stuff moulds and changes us…’
‘Who the fuck cares? We’re here, wherever we’ve come from.’
I start bashing the grasses for snakes. After a few seconds, you grab the stick from me and sling it into the scrub.
‘You’ve made enough noise! Snakes have long packed up.’
‘Yeah, alright,’ I say, stepping past you. ‘Just making sure.’
I peel off my T-shirt and skirt, and slip into the water, picking carefully over the sharper rocks at the edge. Are you looking at me? And what do you feel about my new adult body? I feel a strange sort of power as I turn, let you see. Sinking until the cool water covers my shoulders, I look up to find your eyes still on me.
‘Do you need help getting in?’
You don’t make a move, staring at me, my old skirt still round your waist and your burnt chest shining bare in the moonlight. Is this when you leave me and run? Perhaps I’ll let you. Then I’ll walk out into the desert and lie down in the sand, let the land do with me as it will, let it consume me. At least there’s no cruel intention in death by nature. But you must know there’s no point running, not when the car is dead and the summer desert so hot. You pull the skirt down over your legs and slide in, gasping as the water cools your skin.
‘See?’ I say. ‘Better.’
You float on your back, face up to the myriad stars. I drink you in like I drank this water. Then I turn onto my back too and stare up; no light pollution here. I can’t tell where the reflection in the water ends and where the real sky begins. Floating, dizzy, I try to anchor myself by finding the constellations, naming them out loud. I thought you’d be proud that I’d learnt the names, but you don’t respond. I swim over to you, but you’re still as a corpse.
‘Can you see them?’ I say.
‘Hard to avoid.’ The water ripples as you turn your head.
‘Remember how you taught me all the patterns.’
‘Nah, I didn’t. I don’t know them all.’
‘You do.’
You turn back to the sky. ‘You’re remembering all this shit wrong, Gemma.’
I shake my head. I’m not. And why now:Gemma?The name my parents called me, the name you refused to call me by. You told me that I’d only ever be Gem to you; you said I was your sparkling-bright thing and could never be anything else.
You tip upright and frown. Your feet must be touching the ground because you seem steadier than me. I think of that cave beneath us, somewhere to my right, the spring deep inside, bubbling new energy towards us. You said we couldn’t step into the same river twice, yet here we are in the pool we were in a hundred times back then—and nothing terrible has happened.
‘Are you really trying to go back there?’ you say. ‘Still? My life was ruined because I took you. Don’t you get that?’
‘Course I get it!’
You wade away from me, heaving yourself onto the bank.
‘You think my life wasn’t ruined too?’ I say. ‘By you?’
‘It’s obvious it was.’ You shake your head, shove on the skirt. ‘But it seems as if you want to do it again. Which is all kinds of fucked up!’
You turn to go. Something contracts inside me. This isn’t the way it should be.
‘I don’t want it like before,’ I snap.
‘Then what?’ You fling the shirt across your wet shoulder.