As The Sea Is Now Deep - 6. Chapter 6

As I walked up to the party, it felt like I was boarding a cruise ship. The house floated in the night, a gaudy wedding cake, lit up garishly against the black skies.

Three drunk guys, arms linked and stumbling around, formed a moving Cerberus as I entered the vestibule. A Goth girl with purple Doc Martens was slumped against the wall. She looked me up and down while taking slow drags from a roll-up cigarette. I recognised Pearl Jam throbbing from the living room. There must have been at least sixty people at the party. There were a lot of guys with beards, or at least callow attempts at them. The cool crowd formed the body of a starfish whose arms radiated out from the centre of the house to various acmes of weirdness, the back garden; the pool; up the stairs.

The music was too loud . I inhaled a fog of stale smoke and beer as a tall young man in a trenchcoat thrust a plastic cup of something warm and fizzy in my hand.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“Party on dude!” he whooped. “Haven’t seen you on campus!”

“I’m not at varsity,” I muttered.

“Way out,” he said, not listening, and disappeared into the throng. I took a sip: the beer was warm and bitter; it made me gag.

I craned my neck about, trying to see if Graeme or Liam were somewhere. I hadn’t been able to get hold of them earlier, and I felt lost.

I heard a series of squeals in the distance, a squeal that sounded strangely familiar.

I followed the noise, pushing my way past staggering partygoers and couples shaking their heads to the music. The pool was lit with floating candles and half-submerged leis of frangipani. And, there, in the cyan water, surrounded by flowers, was the goddess. Elaine was in an actual swimsuit this time, shrieking with laughter as a large hairy boy splashed her with water and grabbed her by the waist.

“Bevan! No!”

Bevan guffawed, the sound a bear might make if it could laugh, and launched her towards the deep end. A couple of people sat around the pool, nursing cocktails as their feet dangled in the water. Elaine surfaced and wiped her wet hair out of her eyes. She caught my eye, and I raised my hand in a limp wave towards her.

She squinted, then turned around and swam towards Bevan. I felt betrayed. Maybe she was so drunk that she couldn’t remember. Perhaps she and Bevan would crawl upstairs and have sloppy sex she’d only have a dim memory of the next day. It might be something that might come up years later in therapy, when the big water-bear had raked up double-figures of vodka-soaked girls before marrying a teacher and fathering three strapping boys.

I huffed and sat down at the edge of a deck chair in the corner.

“Cigarette?”

The Goth girl I’d seen at the entrance held out a packet of Gitanes. “I’d roll you one but I’ve run out of half-zware. I only have these.”

“No thanks. What the hell is half-zware?”

“Dutch tobacco. You sure you don't want something?

"I don't want to get cancer."

"Aren’t you a well-behaved one.”

“I’m...”

She leaned towards me, eyes angelic, in stark contrast to the pale demons that possessed her complexion.

“We’re outsiders, you and me. I just come to watch the people.”

“Do you know anybody here?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’ve seen some of them on campus. Something tells me you’re not a varsity student.”

“Is it that obvious?”

She sighed, then held out a black-clawed hand. She brushed a cold finger across my left cheek, and stared at a drying smudge of blood that contaminated her fingertip.

“You nicked yourself shaving, little fish.”

“Little fish?”

“Your shirt.”

I was wearing a T-shirt with a Japanese goldfish print emblazoned on the front.

“You know, if you were in the ocean now you’d be toast. Sharks can smell one in a million parts of blood.”

I bristled a bit, and chugged down more of the beer, a last-ditched attempt to display my masculinity.

“I’m not going to eat you,” she said in a bored voice. “I’m Cassie, by the way. You? Something Biblical, I bet.”

“Jacob,” I said, wide-eyed.

“Why are you here, Jacob?”

“Some girls invited me and my friends. That girl in the pool, Elaine...”

“Oh? She’s in my economics class but not too bright. Though everyone’s stupid these days. How does she know a schoolboy?”

“I'm not..."

“You don’t fool me. I know you’re still at school.”

I wondered how to relate the whole naked swimming malarkey to this kohl-smeared oracle of the underworld, when she spoke again.

“It’s nice out here,” I said instead, looking about, relieved to feel a slight breeze on my face.

“I wouldn’t go into that crowd if someone paid me. And the music’s become… I don’t know. It’s just creeping me out.”

I frowned. Nirvana was on again, the same song I’d been mainlining for a week now.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous

“Don’t you like grunge?”

“I do, but he’s not gonna be around for long.”

Here we are now, entertain us!

“Who?”

“Cobain. Give it a few months.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, stifling a shiver.

“Believe me, don’t believe me, you’ll see. I’ve got some Tarot cards. Would be interesting to read yours.”

All my Catholic genes engaged themselves. I imagined my chromosomes folding into pointy crosses, not the usual flouncy X's we’d seen on rickety 16mm film during biology class.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

I knew of only a few cards in the Major Arcana. When I was nine, I’d thumbed through some of a Rider-Waite deck at the esoteric bookshop on Sullivan Street. The first card I picked was The Tower, followed by The Devil, and then The Hanged Man. I panicked and ran out, reciting Psalm 91 over and over in my head. It took a while to stop obsessing about the picture of the horned man with the glowing eyes.

“It’s just a suggestion,” said Cassie.

A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

I thought back to Grandpa reciting the story of how he and some friends tried playing glassy-glassy during the war. He swore a mirror cracked in the house and they stopped immediately. He’d even written a rhyming couplet about it that for once freaked me out

– Oh what a smiling demon might portend / When you predict a lone soul’s messy end –

“No thanks.”

When the two kids drowned themselves in the lake, there had been a general panic about Satanism. Under every bridge wayward children were said to be holding black masses and sacrificing small animals. We never saw anything. In the whole town only our neighbour’s cat went missing for a few days, found safely in the branches of a plane tree and rescued not by a fireman but an electrician with an extendible aluminium ladder.

“Suit yourself,” said Cassandra. “But I’m always right. And I know you’re worrying about your friends now.”

“Stop that,” I said. “It’s weird.”

“Let me put you out of your misery. There were two other boys I saw earlier that looked as lost as you. Maybe those were your friends?”

“A red-haired guy and a bigger blond one?”

“That would be them,” she said, lighting up one of the Gitanes and blowing the smoke out through her nose so that she looked like a monochrome dragon.

My eyes widened and I got up.

“I wish you'd stay though. You seem more intelligent than all the other morons around here.”

“Um.”

“Come back later, then, if you want.”

I had to get away from this witch, this Queen of Sharks, this Umbriel that orbited Neptune. I was a little comet about to be sucked into her gravity. I had to get out.

“I think I’m going to find them.”

“I saw them go upstairs earlier, if that helps.”

“Thanks.”

“Bye, little fish,” she said, as I walked away. “Be careful now.”

I turned to face her.

“The sea is deep, Jacob. Deeper than you think.”

My hand went to the spot where Cassie had touched me, and the little spot stung. Elaine and Bevan were still horsing around in the pool. As I entered the house the crowd of people was denser now. I squeezed myself into the labyrinth of sweaty bodies. It seemed like an age before I found purchase on the banister and pulled myself up. I was giddy, even though I’d only had one beer.

I felt unsteady as I ascended; each step was like the rung of a ladder. The crowd thinned out by the time I was halfway up, until I turned into a corridor. Two girls, giggling and holding hands, flitted past me.

I walked up and down. “Graeme? Liam?” I called, but even here, my voice had to compete with Kurt Cobain’s. They were playing all of the Nevermind album and they were now at Come As You Are.

There was no answer.

I sighed, feeling deserted. Then I noticed a weak light splash onto the carpet from a door at the end of the corridor, only just ajar.

I walked towards it and hesitated at the threshold.

“Hello?”

I heard a series of guffaws and mumblings.

Screw it, I thought, and walked in.

They were on the bed, kissing. Liam’s shirt was off and Graeme was rutting against him.

“What the fuck?”

“Shit!” Liam yelled and sprang up. He shoved Graeme away so hard that he toppled back and hit his head against the wall, coming to a rest slumped on the carpet.

“Fucking faggot!” Liam hissed and ran out of the room.

I stared at Graeme, who was alternately rubbing the back of his head and staring in stupefied wonder at the blood on his hands.