Elver by Sylv Warren

The thin white body of the woman floated face down in the dark water. Her hands drifted weightlessly against the algae-slick brick side of the canal as though feeling for a door on which to knock, a door that was not there. The short crop of bleach-blonde hair was muddied by aquatic weeds, a braid of green snaking down her bare spine and into the discoloured cotton underwear that lay translucent against her skin. On either side of her torso, just visible from above as the water ruffled softly in the night air, were six waxy pink lines that curved around her ribcage. Should there have been a human observer the first impression would have been one of serenity before the reality of the scene set in, so much did the woman look like she belonged to the water. The fox who trotted past, a polystyrene container of cold chips in its jaw, ignored the slow descent of the body into the depths as the rusting metal detritus and silt of the canal bed claimed her as their own. The sun would rise the following morning, the bridge that connected one part of the waterlogged city to itself would busy with commuters and students and tourists, none of whom would stop to look at the light glinting off the placid water because the canals were part of the background noise of the city, things that merely were. 

Six months earlier and the city was being decorated for the holidays. Half-gaudy half-sombre the money was thrown behind fir trees and coloured lights, flyers for carol concerts next to posters for parties and lock-ins. In the alleyway behind a bar Alex and Amelia shared a cigarette, the music still reverberating from behind the closed doors. It was their first stop of the evening, but the twilight fell so early that the night already seemed old. 

Want to pop home before we go to Mike’s? Alex handed over the cigarette, filter ringed with a wet smear of lipstick. 

No, I’m good, unless you particularly need to. Don’t think I could convince myself to leave again. Amelia ground the butt under her heel against the cobbles and watched her friend navigate the stairs that led down to the cloakroom, lingering for a moment in the cold air before heading back to the sweaty heat to get another round. 

The fluorescent light of the off-license heightened the feeling of inebriation. A high-pitched whine from the refrigerator clashed with the discordant music, and the man at the counter looked at the pair with a blank expression, putting the two bottles of cheap red into a plastic bag so thin that the handles left deep indents in Amelia’s palm as they walked towards Mike’s. It was not a large distance, but the city did not operate as a whole. The grandeur of the centre, its golden stone and monumental architecture gave way to the Victorian brick terraces that formed a network of houses where they and all their friends all lived, sharing kitchens and renting rooms that pulsed with a communal spirit of studied casualness. The city switched over a river, as the waterways were a constraint that both defied the developers’ desires and the whims of the university that controlled the money. Walking down the final slope of the bridge they both felt, yet could not articulate, a sense of coming home. 

Do you ever have recurring dreams?

Alex paused to check the road for traffic. No, I don’t think so. I mean not really. I dream about mum’s old house sometimes? Like she still lives there. What have you been dreaming about, no-one just asks that. 

Nothing. Well, not nothing. Eels, I guess you could call it. They’re really endangered. For ages no-one knew where they came from. Freud studied them. 

Freud studied something phallic? Shocking. Are you going to tell me all about eels?

Amelia let out an exhale that didn’t reach laughter. Maybe. No. Sorry, forget it.

Mike greeted them at the door, ushering them through a narrow hallway filled with bicycles and an over-stuffed coat rack. Alex slung her jacket over a saddle, Amelia held her own coat over her chest protectively. We’ve got a new sofa! I mean, from work, it was going to the skip otherwise so…and the sentence was lost in the chatter, bodies pressed together in circles, windows all fogged with the warmth. Alex put the wine on the already-crowded kitchen table and filled two plastic cups from an open bottle, handing one to Amelia before falling into conversation with a spikily androgynous young man, covering the nothing-topics that are talked about after too many drinks. Amelia drifted from room to room, the familiar emptiness of parties settling over her like a pall. She played with the edge of her cup, pushing the rim into itself and letting it spring back until it split, cutting the pad of her thumb. The bright red of her blood mixed salty with the ink-dark alcohol. A woman she didn’t recognise rushed up, all kindness and concern, far more painful in her coddling than the minor injury, but Amelia let herself be led up to the bathroom and for a plaster to be applied, mumbling her apologies for making a scene, and apologising for the apologies as she realised it made her sound more drunk than she thought that she was. 

You make a cute couple, you know, always thought Alex was gorgeous but still it’s funny we’ve never met, anyway I’m Bec. Silence followed. 

We’re just housemates, actually. It’s not like that. Dry-mouthed words.

It was not entirely not like that. Amelia had left the rarefied spires of the city, a place where she had never felt at home, and started work out of necessity. Alex had been working in a different part of the business, charming and gregarious and looking for someone to move into her spare room. After moving in they had found that strange companionship between women, one that Amelia had always been slightly confused by but ultimately drawn to, devotional and intimate yet sexless and platonic. Alex made it seem easy and normal, drifting through life making friends and acquaintances like there was a shop in which you could acquire one for every occasion, the fun party one, the deep conversational one, the ones who you could ask to go for a drink and who would show up without question. Yet Alex and Amelia grew closer than all these people, living in such close proximity. Alex would leave the shower, dripping wet in only a towel and walk around the flat in her pants and a thin cotton tank top, and Amelia wormed her way into Alex’s confidences over quiet nights on the sofa. She learned to accept television she thought was boring, and with the deliberate calculation of intimacy that becomes second nature when the world feels as though it has a rulebook that is locked in the library stacks, she became invaluable. 

Bec’s hand was warm as she stroked it through Amelia’s long loose hair, damp and motherly, but the other was still wrapped around her plastered hand. As parted lips met hers, Amelia was struck by the sight of soap scum in a ring by the bath. She closed her eyes as she felt hands move over her, letting things happen without really feeling attraction, playing the part of being fun and human. 

Get off her. Alex leaning against the doorframe, snarling, vicious, then both of them down the stairs, a heated simmering silence. 

Fuck’s sake Amelia, she’s got a partner, you absolute disgrace, I know you’re above gossip or whatever but you never think, do you? Actually no, you’re worse, you do think but just not about real things. 

She’d rarely seen Alex like this, and never with her. Shame flushed, tears began to form as they walked home through the cold.

The grain of the table between them looked like a spine, and their empty jam jars filled with wine left purple bruises on the wood. Alex dipped into her bag of crisps, crunching with her mouth open, eyelids drooping slightly with drink. Amelia watched the slight sheen from the fat, the specks of salt clinging to the pink fingertips meeting the dark hole of her friend’s mouth. 

You know, if you were hungry you could fucking eat something for a change.

Unexpected anger from under her eyelids, something withering and on the edge of hateful, before remorse and softness: Ah, Meelia, didn’t mean it…meeliemean, I’m really mean, mean drunk… and her head sloped forward gently on to her forearms. The kitchen suddenly felt very quiet. Amelia looked out at the night, an unknowable square of dark through the window, and felt strongly that she must close the blinds, cocoon them both against whatever could be out there. She draped a blanket from the sofa over the sleeping woman, tucking her shirt collar away from her mouth, which already had a small string of drool falling from its corner. 

In the dark Amelia was dreaming of things slithering. Her limbs would fuse with her torso, her legs extending and elongating, rigid gills slicing down her ribcage. She goes from glassy and immaterial, her heart and stomach and intestines all on display, to a deep gunmetal grey. She feels the pull of the sea as strongly as she has ever wanted anything, to fix this body that had always felt so unlike hers, alien since the time of puberty. She wanted to be sinuous, she wanted to be perfect. 

Alex waited outside the bedroom door, wondering whether anyone actually pressed their ears against one like a children’s cartoon and feeling faintly stupid for considering it. To her, that door was sometimes more closed to her than as if it had been deadbolted, nailed shut from the inside, the handle made from stinging nettles and thorns. At other times it was barely there, the closure an invitation of sorts, but today she was paralysed. Get up babes, come on, we only have a few hours of sunlight on this shortest day, I want to go to the market. A muffled noise from somewhere under the covers? Taking the handle, she exerted just enough pressure for the catch to disengage without sound and pressed the wooden panel next to it to muffle any creaks. She stumbled as the door opened properly from the other side, Amelia already dressed and made up, staring impassively with her pale eyes. Down again into the old part of the city, the water icing as it met the banks and the reeds, but not yet to the weight-bearing magic that tends to come in February and turns the place spun-sugar mystical. Alex could feel her breath condensing on her scarf where it came up around her chin, wet and unbearably human. Glancing down at her companion’s hands she saw them white and bloodless. She shoved her own deep into the recesses of her pockets, rolling a sliver of torn receipt into a ball reflexively. 

The market was busy, people stamping their feet past the kitsch storybook mural and decorative tissue lanterns, too many Christmas tunes piping out of the stalls into a harsh mess. The pair pushed through the crowd towards the cheese shop, the queue already wending up past a drab café and stall selling biscuits the size of dinner plates. 

You okay? Very quiet this morning.

Yeah, just tired. Surprised you’re not, honestly.

Alex’s arm felt like a coiled spring, it would only take a moment to playfully shove Amelia on the arm, initiate deliberate contact that could seem casual, could be plausibly construed as friendship, and yet it seemed impossible. Shaking her head slightly, she knew that this was ridiculous, that they had both spent months lounging together in the evenings, what was it that boy last night had said, joined at the hip? 

At the front Alex quickly told the shopkeeper her favourites, weights, watched them get wrapped first in wax paper, then in a rustle of white and blue printed tissue, then nestled in a brown bag with twisted raffia handles like each wedge or round was a precious cargo. 

I’d like that one. Amelia was gesturing with her nose towards a small cylindrical blue, furry rind with deep blue veins. Two slivers were presented on matching wooden sticks, and bile rose in Alex’s throat. It smelled like death, pungent mould against the ooze of the paste, yet Amelia was staring at it as though mesmerised. She paid for it herself and added it to Alex’s bag. 

The eyot was a small strip of reclaimed landfill in the great sweep of the river, gnarled trees forming tunnels of bare branches. In spring it was lush with blossom and dripping with moss, but the winter had withered the island to its barest bones. At its furthest tip, close to the imposing glass fronts of the boat houses, was the horizontal trunk of a tree laid out like a bench, weathered to a smoothness that was almost manmade. In front there was a clear patch of dirt where people would light bonfires and drink; a collective understanding that if rules and bylaws were to be broken it was better to do it consistently, to leave the rest of the eyot wild and untainted. A muntjac skittered into the scrub as Alex walked ahead of Amelia, the mud squelching into the tread of her boots. She felt the quiet like an ache. 

Fuck is an eyot anyway? It felt good to say something, anything. 

It’s a derivative of ‘island’. Like a diminutive. 

How do you even know that?

I looked it up. I wondered as well, when I first came here. I thought it was eye-ott, not ate, and it makes me sad that the big colleges could just stick all of their detritus, their crap, into the river like this. 

You were really unhappy there, weren’t you?

Amelia’s eyes seemed so huge as she looked at Alex, shining on the edge of teary vulnerability, but they hardened almost as quickly. 

Yes. 

Just yes? Jesus, Meels. Giving me nothing. 

Yes, it was horrible. I don’t like thinking about it. I don’t like the professor who asked me to get changed in his room, I don’t like the fact that I did because I didn’t see another choice, I don’t like the casual classism, I don’t like that I was a de facto second class citizen for the school I went to, I hated every minute and every time someone told me that I was lucky because it was aspirational I wanted to die, but you know this because I bitch about it endlessly. So, just yes. 

She was taking out candles and some old newspaper from her bag, kindling a fire with practiced efficiency. Alex balled a few sheets without much enthusiasm, the grey day already ruined. The fire sent sparks glittering into the sky. Amelia had taken out the drinks and laid out food on crumpled paper plates alongside a deck of playing cards. 

We’re the furthest away from the sun we can be, today.

Why does that sound so lonely?

Because it is. But it does mean that from now we’ll be getting closer. This is the nadir.

Mate, can’t we talk about something nicer? 

Alex knew she was like this, sometimes not tethered to the world; she stared at Amelia’s unfocused eyes, looking into the fire as if by staring she could capture some of the warmth and brightness for herself. We could watch a film later? But my choice, you’re not getting away with another Jarman evening again. Something with dumb hot men being dumb and hot. 

This elicited a very faint smile, so Alex continued, outlandish suggestions, a gentle coaxing of her companion away from whatever dark place she was inhabiting. 

How about the water? 

Meels, it’s the middle of winter, not even you…

Standing up, Amelia was stripping off her coat and jumper, peeling off her trousers until she stood, legs turning violet and bumpy in the cold. She stood in her underwear on the curved branch of a tree that leaned out over the water and with a gasp slid in. The water was steel and felt like it against her skin, sharp and punching the air out of her lungs. She took a few desperate strokes out towards the centre of the river then rushed out, breathing hard and scorched red, laughing and alive. Alex studiously looked away from the dripping madness of her friend, the hard edges of her body quivering and strands of hair plastered down her back as she dressed without drying off. They sat back together, closer now to the fire and each other. 

You know, you’re right.

You can say that again, mostly because I love to hear it. 

You know the best thing about this? The solstice? And Amelia’s hands were finally snaking around Alex’s neck, pulling her in for a kiss, drinking her in, and Alex returning the movement, skin cold even under her winterbitten hands, both desperate with the release of desire. 

It’s traditionally a time for new things. 

Your hair smells like woodsmoke.

Shut up. Said with a smile. 

Time had collapsed in on itself and began very gradually to uncoil. They ate their food, drank, fed each other. The deck of cards was forgotten, but had they opened it the first card would have had a face value of two. Together they tamped down the fire and raked the ashes into a pile with their boots. The walk back was hand-in-hand, and they fell into bed almost immediately, stumbling through the hall as if drunk. It was exhilarating and exploratory, finding which ways to touch and move against each other, what caress elicited a gasp, what to say for the first time, Alex kissing Amelia’s neck, shoulders, Amelia moving underneath her, breathing ragged and out of kilter, faces and legs and mouths and limbs entwined and the warmth of their breath as they spoke into each other,  

I want you to shudder underneath me, I want to know how.

You do, I am. I want you to lose control.

I do, I am, I adore you. 

The days grew longer. The pair spent enforced time apart, going back to their respective families for the more traditional holidays, talking consistently through a stream of messages and videos. On their return they merged their bedrooms into one, clothing migrating into a single space. They learned that they folded their shirts differently, and this was somehow exciting and special. They spent long mornings in bed together, cooked their food together, and now the evenings spent close together on the sofa had lost the studied care with which they had built the foundations of this desire. Their friends laughed at them, patting themselves on the back about how they had always known, and the two would laugh privately at the presumptuousness. By the time the daffodils and crocuses sprawled across the verges of the eyot they had entwined their lives so thoroughly they almost seemed like a single entity. 

Alex couldn’t sleep. Next to her, Amelia’s naked body lay stretched out, one arm wrapped over her face. The room smelled faintly of sweat from the night before, and the light that filtered in was watery and insipid. Tracing the visible ribs of her lover, she knew she was afraid. Amelia remained unknowable to an extent, that private part where the darkness lay ever-locked, perhaps even to herself. The door to her old bedroom was still there, still thorn-handled. These are three am thoughts, she reasoned. The alarm clock showed it was closer to six, the red bars of the display glowing disapprovingly. Was this not what had drawn Alex to her on the day she arrived at work, a girl walking in and the room dissolving against that calm, cool certainty? And her seriousness, a foil against her own fire? It was one thing to desire a person like that, but quite another to try to do the domestic act of existing together. She moved her body closer, and in her sleep Amelia turned her head into Alex’s shoulder with a small sigh, and the thoughts scuttled away like so many fluttering birds into the corners of the ceiling. 

I want to cut my hair. 

What?

Alex stood down from the chair she had been using to get the tea towel closer to the now-silent smoke alarm. Amelia was getting oat milk out of the fridge for Alex, the coffee already on the table next to some barely burned toast. 

I like your hair. I mean it’s your body, but…anything drastic?

Maybe. I don’t know. 

Short like mine? We could match.

No, not like yours. Don’t worry. Forget I said anything. 

The days passed, walks to work, customers, emails. Evenings cooking together, bad telly, serious films, washing up. 

The argument was about going out. Alex found herself missing the company of others, the haze of coupledom fought against her need to be with other people, talk, make jokes, feel light-hearted and be the centre of attention in a crowd. When Amelia had refused to go to the party but encouraged Alex to go alone and enjoy herself the sheer reasonableness of the response had filled Alex with a simmering resentment that was only intensified because she was aware that her response was irrational. She could go alone, fine, but that wasn’t the point, the point was something else, slippery and jealous and refusing to be pinned down in her head. She decided to choose her brightest lipstick, a vivid hot pink, went out without her coat to force the spring into being warmer than it was, and the anger fuelled her walk, a fuck-you in every step, each one taking her away from that vortex of insular quietness that was her partner. She felt joy in the physicality of her body, the inner satisfaction that came with the act of creating the carapace of desirability, not just through makeup or style but a way of carrying herself that she had discovered could draw heads in her teenage years. It was partially a practice, a series of conscious choices to create a glamour of Alex, just as she had worked on being charming and personable. It was all an effort, Amelia never understood it was all work. By the time she reached Bec’s her bad mood had dissipated, leaving in its stead a shining and reckless abandon. 

Bec’s rooms, much like her, were smothering. She had the distinction of a full basement studio to herself (behind her back people would murmur cattily about parents supplementing incomes, as the workplace had its own set of snobbish rules about how things were to be done; ask any of them on an off-guard moment whether this was purely envy on their part and they would all have to have said yes) and yet the décor was all wrong. It was heavy on the blush pink, the velour, the cursive font as decoration. Alex privately thought of her as doughy, somehow undercooked. Bec had opened the windows that spilled on to street level, and cool air filled the flat as the music grew louder and faster. Alex let herself get lost in her dancing, spinning in the centre of the room with others, and the world seemed to spin with her. 

Amelia breathed a sigh of relief when the door slammed. She moved quietly, switching off each big light and as she did so the tension liquefied and drained out of the cracks in the walls. She loved, as she would always love, the way Alex felt like the sun to her moon, her easy energy, her brightness. Without her there the flat cooled, and the shade-plant part of Amelia settled into the darkness. Being exposed to too much light caused those species to wither and begin to die. As she undressed she appraised herself critically. She had never felt at home in this body of hers, unruly in ways she disapproved of, and yet she felt the benefits of moulding it to fit what, it seemed, people expected a person to exist as. She examined her bones, kept visible through an iron discipline that balanced on the knife-edge of disorder. She stared into her eyes in the mirror until her entire face blurred and took out the clippers. Her hands struggled with the black plastic guard, the pads of her thumbs becoming red and indented until it buckled off with a clatter. In the mirror the person drew the blades down the centre of her head. The first movement was the hardest, the rasping scratch of breaking keratin and the insistent whine from the blades, but then acting without any real plan, great swathes of hair began to fall to the floor. By the end, her head was covered in a soft mousy fuzz, and under her hands she could feel the contours of her skull. 

Scrabbling with the door, her bag tipped on its hardware and gaping half-open, Alex opened the door sweaty, drunk, and contrite. Somewhere in the vodka-philosophising stage she had realised that she had needed this, but under the pink glow of the club a few of them had ended up in she had missed Amelia’s presence, her sweetbitter oblivious spikiness. Slipping into bed, she ran the tip of her nose between her lover’s shoulder blades and was surprised to feel her move next to her, an exhale as she rolled over and clasped Alex’s face. Their embrace was fierce in the dark, and soon her legs were parted, her mouth slack with pleasure. Amelia worked her way between her thighs, precise and hungry, and Alex drew her up and tasted herself in the kiss. She moved to clasp the curled knot of Amelia’s hair in her fist, leaving a little room so she wouldn’t cause pain even in her drunkenness. She felt her hands touch thin air. Trying again, still disorientated, and with a mounting sense of dread at the wrongness of it all, she finally saw in the shadows her partner’s shorn head, her shining lustful eyes. Alex leant over the side of the bed and vomited. 

She woke to an empty bed. The clock glowed noon, and as she moved her feet to the floor she stepped in her own curdled stomach contents. Forcing herself to go into the kitchen, she fetched bleach and newspaper. The dining table was bare, a solitary mug on the draining board. Checking her phone there were no new messages. Something in the core of her lurched, her entire body trembling, breath and heart discordant with each other. The walls seemed to close in, sweat running down them. She searched for any note, any sign of life, her phone again. Amelia showed as last seen: 10:27. She fired off four texts, unable to hide the desperation. They remained unread. The walls were melting now, and the bundle of sick began to seep from the newspaper into her hand. She threw it in the bin. She wondered whether being conscious of losing her mind meant she retained a shred of sanity, or whether she was merely observing herself from a distance. 

A key in the door, and Amelia returned. It had been fifteen minutes since Alex had woken up, and her response was a dam burst of anger and confusion. In the daylight the shaved head was even more alien. 

Why? Where were you? Why did you do this?

Amelia’s hand rose to her skull. I needed to, it felt right. It felt necessary.

You said you weren’t going to do anything drastic! I trusted you. I love you.

Do you?

Yes, obviously, stop being so fucking calm, don’t you understand how you’ve hurt me? Why didn’t you leave me a message?

I thought you’d still be asleep. I was down at the canal. I got you some orange juice and paracetamol, incidentally. 

Amelia took them out of her bag and placed them on the table in front of Alex, who was hyperventilating. Burying her head in Alex’s hair, she murmured sorries. 

I didn’t mean to scare you.

Are we going to talk about it? Alex gestured at her partner’s head. 

A sigh, and then, It’s complicated. It’ll grow out if you really don’t like it. It just felt like I had to, it’s closer to seeing myself in the mirror. 

I could get used to it, I just wish you’d trusted me enough to warn me, I think I deserved that. 

I did say I was thinking of cutting it. 

That’s not enough of the truth, Meels, and you know it. I don’t like being lied to. 

It got hotter. On a Sunday afternoon walk the seeds of poplar trees drifted in the air like a summer memory of snow. The pair were curled around each other, hands linked and hearts full, their arguments fading into memory. Amelia still dreamed of eels, Alex still wished Amelia could change something fundamental about herself and be a better partner, but there was a sense of serenity that felt solid as long as neither of them looked at it too closely. On another day, where the air shimmered like oil over the tarmac and the scent of disposable barbeques came through all the windows that hadn’t been painted shut by the landlord, Alex lay out on the roof of the flat downstairs’ kitchen, straps of her bikini pulled down. A big, serious novel from Virago was opened face down next to her, and she scrolled idly through her phone. She could hear the sound of the bath filling inside, then a splash of a body entering the water. The air hummed with tinny music and birds, and her eyelashes felt soft on the top of her cheeks. 

Amelia took the tub of vaseline from the cupboard and began to scoop out its contents. The thick jelly felt cool on her hands, and she worked up from her feet, slicking it over every centimetre of exposed skin. On her face it felt sticky, and it gelled down the stubble on her head to a dull sheen. She left greasy prints on the cabinet mirror as she reached to get the second container, meticulous in her application. Sliding into the cold bath, she submerged her eyes and nose, listened to the tinny hum of water in the pipes. Even the muscosal layers of gel did not prevent the flesh rising in bumps.

Meels, I need the loo, come on, unlock the door. 

She felt a flash of anger at Alex, daring to intrude on her own peace. Slowly rising, the water clung to her skin in droplets. She opened the door without speaking and lay back down in the bath, face turned against the wall. 

Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Why is everything so sticky? 

Amelia listened to the stream of urine, a faint ammonia tinge to the air. 

I’m worried about you babe, come out and enjoy the evening? What do you want to cook, or just snacky bits? 

The moment was over. Amelia rose again and unhooked a towel from the back of the door. 

Snacky bits sounds good, I’ll see what we’ve got. 

Alex slept. Amelia moved softly, quietly. She slipped Alex’s lipstick into her trouser pocket, left her phone by the bed.

It was the dead time, late enough for even the most raucous of people to have gone home, early enough that there would not be joggers or shift workers. The bridge into the city remained silent, the birds not yet awake. The canal water was black and oily. Undressing, she placed her jeans and top in one of the pipes that looked like so many portholes above the waterline. On her bare skin she drew thick lines, a trace of Alex to carry with her now she was ready. The lifecycle of the eel had remained a mystery to scientists and philosophers alike for centuries, the genetic switches between stages still unknown. As the water filled her lungs, Amelia felt the totality of her humanness for the first time, a brief electric flicker before she drowned.  

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Sylv Warren is a writer and scientific editor. They would like a cat.