The window. Dusk. Ilse watches the cabs come and go below. Rain slicks the street with the shine of a freshly groomed dog, flashes of chrome yellow bright enough to sting her eyes in the gloom. She blinks, the after images ghosts against her lids. Memories of adventures long gone swiftly crumble like candyfloss to sharp sugar in her mouth, then are gone, nothing but a gritty trail on her tongue. The doorman runs in and out of the rain, Charon steering his charges across the Styx, his grey coat spattered with drops, Dalmatian fresh, barking directions, slamming doors.
It has been raining for days; it never seems to stop. Every gloomy morning Ilse half expects to wake up floating, the furniture bobbing around her, her bed a dinghy. The ring of a navigational buoy would not be out of place. The light is never good but lately it seems as though the city is in a near constant winter fog. Soft grey despondency seeps in through the window, staining everything with its indifference.
The curtain in Ilse’s hand runs like sand against her skin as she pulls it further to one side, time slipping through her fingers, unstoppable. It heaps on the floor unhindered, a tiny island in the sea of the blue shag pile. She is waiting for someone, or thinks she is. Maybe the girl in the coat is just a memory. Her lungs are thick with them, after all, choking her when she wakes, all at sea. Another girl in another town in another time. Maybe.
Every passenger who jumps into a cab takes a little more of the city’s colour with them. The yellow pulses greedily as the cars swallow each one up, practically
slobbering as they devour the life force of their occupants, the chewed up bones and ground down sinew revving their engines as the vehicles screech away into the fog and the night beyond.
Ilse shudders but still watches. She is good at waiting.
As dusk descends her patience is rewarded, just as she knew it would be. The bright red slash of coat sharp against the steadily draining tones of the city is able competition for the hungry cabs, pulling one’s eyes helplessly in the girl’s direction. Every evening she strolls along the street, unhurried, unconcerned colour against the coming of the night, with no need of the voracious taxicabs. Until now the simple fact of her has been comfort enough, but this evening Ilse wants more. She discovers she has an appetite too, ignored for too long, and is suddenly hungry to see her face, to hear her voice, to know where she is going, where she has been, everything and anything. Enough of this fog and the constant waiting. Her feet and hands twitch at the wildly simple idea of throwing the door open, running down the winding stairs, ever down, until she runs out of nondescript carpet, hits the lobby, and makes a break for the outside. A smile touches her mouth as she lives it in her mind, every step, every breath, the sudden lightness of her thoughts lifting her lips, throwing muscles into places they have not been for far too long.
She almost moves. Almost. Her muscles flex and her blood runs a little faster in her too tight veins. Habit, however, is a tireless mistress, and she remains fixed to the spot, to her place in the world. Removed. Afar. Ilse thinks of the other girl as her beacon, wants her to be what snaps her out of the inertia and fear that hold her in this room, her red coat a talisman. Yet now it feels more like an omen and the portent weighs her down anew, anchoring her even more firmly in place, unyielding to temptation, to freedom.
How she came to be here, watching and waiting, is a mystery to Ilse now. She remembers a summer’s day, the sun high in the sky, Charon wishing for a summer shower as he helped her with her bags. The heavy-sweet tang of heat across her skin, the slow trickle of it between her legs, pearling down the small of her back, beneath
her breasts, peppering her upper lip. She can almost taste it now, standing in the cold grey room, the only colour the sea blue ocean of shag.
Ilse sighs and…
At first there is just a smudge, something catching at the corner of her eye – a hair perhaps, a lash – but soon it is tumbling, spiralling, gathering strength as it rushes from the four grey corners of the room. Her earlier hopefulness disappears, swallowed by the familiar foreboding. She wants to close her eyes, to turn away, but she knows the storm will only come with her. There is no hiding unless she can change. It only comes when she rests in a single form for too long, and she does not want to see, does not want the hurly or the burly, wire sharp against her nerves.
How she longs to be on the sidewalk with the girl in the red coat.
Ilse falls to her knees and wills herself to change. It used to be so easy. Everything was. Now she croons to herself softly, singing the song of her mother’s people, of the Ones Who Knew, and slowly she begins to change. Wind rushes in her ears and, although the windows are closed and locked, she can feel a sharp salt breeze licking at her skin. Her hands sink into the carpet, too pale skin seeping into the blue and the blue seeping into too pale skin. She feels herself spreading, welcomes the release of it, feels the same warmth of that long ago summer’s day between her legs. Flushed. The change is always the same, a better lover than her human ones, and, as she watches her skin rippling slowly, sinuously outwards, away from her but still of her, entwining with the fibres, becoming them, she gives herself up to its sweet cherry pleasure.
The wall is close and her body sings to it, welcomes it, meets it, and soon enough she is also brick and paper, paint and render. Convergent boundaries have her reaching further, throwing up mountains, straining for change, burgeoning, yearning, into the curtains, sandy-beach fabric and pebbled stitching at the edge of the azure carpet-sea. Her body cannot meld with the glass, there is too much of the outside in it, but she is happy to surround it, happy to edge up into the ceiling and spread herself across it, her lithosphere drum tight and snug. She gives herself over
to the metamorphosis, every atom heavy with earthly ecstasy, salt thirsty and burning, burning, but safe in the knowledge her human concerns yet thrive – she will still be able to keep watch on the ferryman and the girl in the red coat.
The grey has receded, its incursion a failure.
So, for now, she sleeps.
Waking, Ilse scrabbles for the side of her dinghy, the sharp slap of water on the deck enough to panic her. Using the edge to pull herself up, she takes stock of her situation and cannot help but gasp as she realizes how far out at sea she is; she must have been drifting for days. There is no sound but the water and her thumping heart. Her gasp becomes a thousand breaths long, her head swimming with what must be true. Weakness woven wickedly in her marrow has her fighting to stay sitting. She may have been asleep for time unaccountable, but she is bone-weary, dog-tired. Frustration leaks like oil from her pores, and she tips her head back and howls at the moon above her, baying over and over until she falls back in the dinghy and lays stock still, except for the harried rise and fall of her chest. She stares up at the sky, at the stars patchworking the heavens and pointing her in directions she cannot know.
She is not certain how long she stays there, but eventually she becomes aware that the moon has begun to sink and the light in the east – she assumes it is east for surely that is where the sun always rises, Mr Hemingway – has begun to gather, bleaching the constellations one by one from the sky. What can she do? She has no oars and the dinghy has no motor. She is floating ever onwards with no idea where she has been, where she is, or where she is heading. Or perhaps she is in the same place she has always been and here she will stay, the same old dinghy, the same old waves.
As the sun rises, the warmth touches Ilse’s skin and the familiar heat finally rouses her into sitting again. Homer’s wine dark sea surrounds her, but it is the blue of an old sherry bottle her great-great aunt would sneak her nips from when she was too young to know what it was except forbidden. It laps at the dinghy, soothing her senses as she listens, her limbs heavy as she whispers sweet nothings back.
Yet, the greyness is gathering once more, she can feel it, far off for now but always there, always waiting, and she wants nothing more than to slip into the water’s waiting embrace, to lose herself in its lover’s arms, to reach for oblivion, every sinew straining for release. It is too much temptation and, almost before she knows she is going to do it, Ilse has swung herself over the side of the little red dinghy and is plunging down, down, down, vast feathers of bubbles streaking above her to mark her progress. Her hair dances and leaps in the wash, graceful pirouettes and gymnastic arabesques, folding and floating as she sinks, the salt water brisk against her skin, sharpening her senses, keeping her awake lest she give herself over to the somniferous lament of the deep. Her lover wraps themself around her, claims her, drops and molecules, motes and atoms, washed down the throat of the ocean by Adam’s sweetest ale. Aqua blue.
Ilse smiles at bright yellow tang as they swim boldly close to her, only to be caught up in her descent and down they all go, spiralling and tumbling, until at last, together, they hit the deep coral reef below. A florid cloud of fish mushrooms around her and, furious at the imposition, the little surgeonfish flex their tails, exposing their white spines and, blade sharp, they slash at Ilse from every angle, even as the jagged coral scratches at her legs, bright red blood pearling at every touch, with every move. Ilse realises the water had numbed her but the heat of the ichthyic attack revives her and, as she tries to fight her diminutive aggressors off, even as the greyness seeps into her vision, flowering up from the reef, something of the pain thrills her. She knows she must change but for a moment she relishes feeling so alive at last. Real. Corporeal. Even through the tearing at her flesh, the scorching of her senses, as the grey rises around her, she knows she has seen that
colour before, that tone – scarlet against the fog, red against the night – she remembers… she remembers…
The wardrobe is oddly cool against Ilse’s cheek when she wakes again. She had not expected to wake up there, but beggars cannot always be choosers, so they say. She wonders if the water pushed her up onto the island of the wardrobe, off the reef and onto safer ground. It does not feel much safer, to be sure. Every inch of her stings and Ilse wonders how she will get down without hurting herself. Her skin still bleeds from the tangs and the coral, and her hair is sopping wet. She touches one of the wounds carefully, the bright red leeching onto her fingers, making small puddles on the tips. She touches them to her mouth, her tongue slipping from between her lips to taste. It is salty, not metallic at all, and she savours its warmth, imagining her own bright red being absorbed back into her body, recycling, restoring, the wounds slowly healing shut. It is a drug like no other, a closed system of repair and repeat, and Ilse shuts her eyes tight against the sudden rush of euphoria, it is too much, that threatens to throw her from the wardrobe, her body seized in its exultant, healing grip, muscles spasming as she cries out and slips into a blackness that welcomes her with an adventurer’s hand, a place where wonders rise and fall and rise and fall again.
When she returns to herself and opens her eyes, the bleeding has stopped and the wounds are nothing but red smears on her legs. Her hair is dry and she no longer feels unsafe. Maybe this is her place after all, here on top of the wardrobe. A crow’s nest looking down upon the tiny kingdom of her hotel room. She has always liked heights, liked to climb onto the roof at night as a child and feel the rush of vertigo course through her veins, making her feel more frightened and more alive than anything else she has known since. Back then the fear had always won of course, but knowing she had been that close had seemed enough. She’d never
wanted much, just a taste, had never thought to ask for anything more, yet here she is, in her prison, as though she had taken it all. Still afraid, still half alive. If the moon had been in the sky, she would have howled. Again. Forever.
For now, she swings her legs over the side of the wardrobe and looks down. It is further than she’d thought it would be, a vague sense of that childhood vertigo making her scalp and the backs of her knees tingle, her breath quicken. The grey is encroaching, it has become so much quicker now; perhaps her desire for more has affected it, finally tested its limits and accelerated it. It knows it is losing and this is its last offensive. All or nothing. Excitement flares like a long forgotten beacon and, even as a long ingrained wail of caution warns of dangers to come and reminds her of her fears, Ilse embraces it, allowing it to fuel her. Finally trusting in her true nature, she leaps from the wardrobe… and plunges into the bright blue sea below, her body seal sleek and undulating through the waves. She rolls and flips, dives and then breaks the surface, over and over, barking with the joy of her freedom.
At last, she thinks, at last I am me. And she forgets about the girl in the red coat, forgets about the ferryman and the room as she rolls and flips, dives and breaks the surface over and over, on and on until she is but a speck on the horizon, and then is gone with the setting of the sun.
The room is quiet. The cabs honk their horns as they come and go on the rain-slicked street outside. Charon bears his charges, dashing in and out of the rain, his top hat a grey sail against the tide. The azure blue carpet is still, the curtain tucked in place, and on the bed, pressed and laid out neatly, is a bright red coat.