The Other Side

Paul could see it in the woman’s eyes—they’d all heard about the digging. He ditched his basket at the self-checkout machine and made for the exit. He was outside and halfway to his car when the hand clamped around his elbow. Now he was forced to look her in the eye again.

Patti, the mum. Not a face he was ever going to forget. They looked at each other for a long moment before either of them said anything.

Yeah, she knows.

She opened her mouth and he felt sure she was going to ask him about it, but instead she said, “You haven’t been doing well, have you?”

The campus security had stopped him around 2am last weekend, before he’d dug anywhere near deep enough. Weird to be back there again. In theory, those days weren’t that long ago, but now it felt like a different life.

Paul didn’t know how to answer her. He looked down at his arm with a blank expression, as though finding a perfectly healthy arm attached to his shoulder was a discovery of no consequence.

“Don’t you run away from me, Paul. You hear?”

“I won’t,” he said, and he knew he wouldn’t. Patti let him go, panting a little. She was still big, but she’d lost a lot of weight since the funeral. It was most noticeable in the face and the neck, but now she had this lopsided, incomplete shape about her.

“Look—”

“I didn’t mean to run, Mrs. Brine.”

“Have you been going to therapy? Your parents are still paying for it, right?”

Paul nodded. He didn’t like the way Patti was looking at him—that unblinking, searching look in her eyes that made him shift and twitch and angle himself away. He was aware, in that moment, that he had it in him to yell and swear at her if he wanted to. Whatever filter that used to be there, the one that always made him so deferential around other people, seemed to have disappeared.

“Are you going to tell me what happened last weekend?” Patti said, and her voice was low and gentle this time.

Paul didn’t say anything at first. He hadn’t said anything that night either. A few lads had seen him first and called out from the footpath.

What you doing mate that’s actually mad.

Go on son aha.

Paul kept struggling with the tough ground of the campus green. People like that came and went, on their way to or from the kinds of places Paul hadn’t known how to make sense in when he was there. He remembered staying in his room every night and hearing them come and go. Wild lads howling at the moon, girls laughing.

“I don’t know. It was stupid,” Paul said.

Patti offered him a smile. “I bet if you told me, I’d understand better than you’d think,” she said.

Maybe she was right. Maybe the whole thing was fucked. Paul had cried and the onlookers had booed when the shovel was ripped from his hands. He remembered kneeling there in the dirt and hearing something awful come out of his mouth. A pitiful, infantile whine that just kept going and going.

“What was it?” Patti said.

“A gift.”

“A gift for Laura, right?”

Paul nodded. He’d spent a lot of money on it. For the longest time it had sat beside his bed in its original packaging, before he tore through the cardboard last weekend. A manic and inexplicable frenzy that followed blurred days of lying, fetus-like, in his old childhood bed. The campus green was as good a spot as any. He’d driven there under the spell of that same manic adrenaline and stood, as close as he could guess, to where the scuba society had set up their stall during the Freshers’ Fair six years ago. Screaming hot that day. He’d been standing there a while, not saying anything, watching people ask intelligent questions and write their names down on the sign-up sheet.

Oi—are you signing up or are you going to keep standing there like a lemon?

That no-nonsense Mancunian accent.

Patti had the same one, even though Paul didn’t think the two looked much alike.

“Tell you what, Paul,” she said. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight? Can you do that?”

Paul shifted on his feet.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, what if I tell you that you have to come?”

“Your son broke my wrist the last time I was there.”

“He did,” she said.

“So…”

“He won’t do it again, if you behave yourself this time.”

Paul winced at the memory.

“I don’t know—”

“Be at the house for six-thirty. I’m setting a place for you.”

Patti didn’t leave him any chance to respond. She turned on her heel and went back to the station. Paul stared after her for a long time, rooted to where they’d been standing halfway between the station and the pumps. No cars came. It was a quiet, sunless morning and Paul felt he could just stand there taking up space without causing any problems.

The gift was still sitting on the passenger seat of his car. Laura had had an open-ended trip to Mexico booked. Diving in the cenotes. The gift, Paul had long accepted, was more a gesture of atonement than anything else. She’d been talking about the cenotes for years, and when it was just a dream, it hadn’t felt threatening to him. But then she’d told him and he’d been struck night after night with the image of her diving with someone else. Divers much more experienced, much more assertive than him. He imagined faceless, muscular men signaling to her in the bluest depths, in shafts of brilliant light. And afterward, their breathless jubilant conversation back on the surface.

It was stupid. It’s not like diving was their “thing”. Laura had been diving much longer than Paul, with many different people. It was crazy to make it into something it wasn’t. He knew that. He'd known that all along.

Later that evening, Paul hesitated before picking up the gift. There was a nonzero chance it was going to look like some cruel joke. A thin rain was coming down over the driveway to the Brine house and when he knocked on the door, Elliot was the one who answered it. Paul drew a breath as he saw Elliot’s eyes drop down immediately to what he was carrying, and he wondered if he would be leaving the place with another hairline fracture. But the youngest of the Brine siblings just stepped aside to let him in, his jaw locked oddly to one side.

“I’m making tagliatelle with a tomato sauce,” Patti said when they came into the kitchen. Tasha was there too, leaning on the counter. She gave Paul a cold look and he angled away. The table was set for four people. There was no sign of the boyfriend—whatever his name was. Paul wondered if he and Patti had broken up since the funeral.

The truth was, these people were strangers. Paul had never seen them before the funeral and he had no idea what he was going to say to them now. Patti turned away from the stove and that’s when Paul realized they were all staring at what was in his hands.

“Is that…” Patti said. “Is that the gift, Paul?”

Her voice was a lot smaller now than it had been earlier. Paul swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a primary light. The best I could afford.”

He’d actually used his unspent birthday money from last year to buy it, but they didn’t need to know that. Better to keep the focus on Laura than himself.

“I…well I knew that Laura had booked that big trip. To go diving in Mexico. She’d been talking about it for years and she’d always got her equipment second-hand from other divers, or Facebook Marketplace. So I just wanted her to have something professional quality for once. I was going to give it to her before she left.”

Elliot and Tasha looked at their mother.

“I see,” Patti said, nodding.

“Why don’t you sell it?” Tasha asked him.

“Have you thought about selling it, Paul?” Patti said, and her voice was gentle.

Paul sighed.

“I can’t.”

Patti nodded again and didn’t ask him why. She turned back to the stove and started dishing up. When they sat down to eat, they didn’t talk much, and Paul wondered if the whole evening was going to be like this. Maybe it was nothing more than a meal. Paul ate slowly and watched the Brines when they weren’t looking at him. Both of Laura’s half-siblings took after their mother in a way Laura hadn’t. Dark and sullen, with the eyes set wide apart. A way of speaking that was a little more rough around the edges.

Laura’s biological father lived somewhere down south. Paul had no idea what he looked like, but he wondered if Laura had taken after him.

“Are you working?” Patti said after a while.

“Oh, not really.”

Paul stopped eating for a moment. It had been a long time since he’d even thought of looking. After graduation he’d done some admin work for the local council for a summer. Then a string of call center jobs he hated. Then nothing for a long time.

Didn’t seem much point. None of his friends from university seemed to have found jobs related to their degrees. Laura too—she’d never been able to hold anything down. But at least with Laura, it felt like everything was on her terms. It was like she rejected the system, and the opposite felt true in his case.

“So what do you do all day?” Tasha asked then.

Paul shrugged.

“Not much, really.”

Somehow he sensed that he’d said the wrong thing, but he didn’t know why yet. Tasha was a hairdresser, he knew that. And Elliot had some kind of apprenticeship. And they’re both miserable, Laura had told him once. He wondered if they really were miserable. It was hard to know what to be in life. Nothing above water made sense to him.

Down there, on the line, you knew exactly who you had to be.

“So why the fuck did she save you?” Tasha said, putting down her knife and fork.

“I don’t know.”

“What was the point?”

Again, Paul didn’t have an answer. It was meant to be her last dive before Mexico—a flooded slate mine in Wales that Laura had been trying to crack for years. She’d gotten to the first chamber before, and eventually the second, but never the third.

What’s in the third?

Euphoria, she’d said. The underworld. The knowledge that if I can reach it, I can do anything.

Paul sighed. He felt the absence of the old filter again and looked back at Tasha.

“I always had this stupid idea that if I followed her, I’d become someone. Like, the deeper I went, the more real I’d become. Or the further I went, the more was possible. But look what happened. I followed her and now I feel even less than what I was before.”

The way she’d take his hand and place it on the guideline reel.

Just keep hold of Ariadne’s thread…

They passed through the first and second chamber without incident, their dive lights landing on rusting winches and junction boxes, corroded ladders and fungus-stained support beams. The floor razorlike with slate debris and the walls pocked with drill and chisel marks. Laura cut without sound through the black-green water and he followed her down another shaft, past loose chains and ceiling-mounted pulleys, until it got darker and colder, and they were almost at the third chamber—

“You want us to feel sorry for you?” Tasha said.

“No. Not at all. I’m just saying…what she did, she did on instinct. She was calm. Her training took over like clockwork and—”

The shaft narrowed, bending unexpectedly toward the third chamber and that’s where Paul lost contact with the guideline. He hit the roof, thrashing involuntarily, but it was too late—the shaft filled with silt. He turned through a cloud of fine sediment, groping blindly, his primary light glaring in the mineral haze.

And then a hand—pulling him out of the shaft and into the third chamber. The chamber had a small air pocket and they could remove their regulators.

Just concentrate on your breathing—you need to slow it right down.

I burned through a lot of my gas, he spluttered, taking huge mouthfuls of stale air.

Laura gave him one of her gas cylinders and he didn’t question it. He was shaking all over.

You’re gonna go back first. Just follow Ariadne’s thread. I’ll be right behind you.

She put the regulator back in his mouth and they went back into the water. The silt-out was still there, but Laura guided him onto the reel. Then it was a straight shot back the way they came.

He had no sense of when she was no longer following him. For a long time after he surfaced, the only thing he was conscious of was vomiting into the grass and taking deep, shuddering breaths, his whole body trembling.

“May I use the bathroom?” Paul said.

Elliot looked at him and it felt like the first proper interaction they’d had all evening. The first time they’d really looked at each other since the funeral. No one really knew who Paul was at the reception, but he’d felt people watching him all day. Under the pretext of going to the toilet, he’d slipped out of sight and made it into Laura’s room. He’d never seen it before, but it looked like they hadn’t changed anything. Without really thinking through what he was doing, he lay down on the bed and pressed the pillow into his face. Tried to breathe in whatever was left of her there.

He didn’t know how long he’d been laying there like that when Elliot stormed in and pulled him off.

What’s going on in here?

What is this?

The little freak was laying in Laura’s bed!

Presently, Elliot nodded, his cheeks glowing red a little, and Paul got up to go to the bathroom. When he came back, he found Patti standing by the back door.

“I should probably go,” he mumbled.

“Not yet,” Patti said. She lifted up the primary light and handed it back to him. Then she handed him something else—a garden shovel.

“I…”

Patti opened the door to the back garden and nodded toward it.

“Finish what you started, Paul. Then you can go.”

Paul took the shovel and headed out into the dark. He was conscious of Patti lingering in the doorway and turned to look back at her.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t your fault,” she said. “I’m saying for everyone’s sake, don’t waste it.”

She went back inside. Paul stood there for a moment, before continuing into the night. He stopped in the middle of the garden and started digging. The earth here was softer than the campus green. He thought of a birthday card he’d gotten Laura once. Was it last year or the year before? The illustration had two anthropomorphic peas with happy faces and rubber-hose arms and legs, sitting cozily together in hammocklike pod.

It’s us, see? Two peas in a pod.

The truth was, they weren’t anything alike. Laura behaved like she was driven by a motor. She threw herself into new things, cycling through them with extreme intensity before losing interest and latching onto something else. She interrupted herself. She could approach a complete stranger and start taking the piss like she’d known them her whole life.

After a while, Paul heard a footfall on the patio and turned around. Elliot was there with a second shovel. They shared a brief look, and Paul went back to digging. Elliot came up beside him, took a breath, and struck the earth.