Turquoise

Rose Malone

One day, in 2020, that year of interminable, innumerable days, seventy-two year old Cassie Ferguson fell in love with the colour turquoise. A watery, unnatural colour with the hardness of stone, the fluidity of water. Always a small shock, a minor lightning bolt. She had hitherto thought of herself as an earthed person. More lightning conductor than generator of sparks. A peace-loving, peace-making middle child. 

Lockdown hit her hard. The night the Taoiseach came down the staircase, after the nine o’clock news, looked her in the eye and announced that everyone over seventy was to remain at home, she had been making plans for a mountain walk. On her own. In clear air. Surely nothing could be safer. She was confined to a county. But at least it was a county with hills.

The Taoiseach spoke softly. Compellingly, from the stairs. What was it with staircases? Two flights merging into one. An arrowhead of steps, focusing your vision. It always brought her back to her schooldays, when the nuns had invented a ceremony to mark some religious occasion. Each girl had to descend the staircase, coming alternately from left and right and then taking up a position in the centre to read a prayer, before proceeding to the solidity of the ground floor. She was the smallest in her class and her hair was short, straight, and unruly. Her breasts had not developed and her waist was thick. Her school uniform skirt, Virgin Mary blue, was down to her ankles. She remembered stumbling as she came to the middle of the stairs and a tiny, embarrassed giggle had escaped from her lips. She had felt at once insignificant and as conspicuous as though lit by a floodlight and longed to crawl away somewhere to hide her flaming face. How did such a trivial memory become lodged in her mind? Ever since her covid isolation, such random images had been floating to the surface. She wondered about their physicality. What were they made of? How old were these molecules? How did they come to the surface now, like detritus washed up by a storm?

The Taoiseach marched confidently down the stairs, and, fixing his solemn gaze on her, maintained an expression at once solemn and caring. Stay at home, he said. He didn’t use the word “lockdown”, of course. But it was clear. Don’t come out. Stay safe at home. 

You were to be shut in. The Irish word for it was “dian-ghlásáil”.  Dee-un glassawl.  A mouthful. “Dian” meant hard. “Glásáil” had nothing to do with glass. Nothing so transparent and fragile. Glas, a lock. An image of a huge rusted, metal padlock formed in her consciousness. She sank into the couch. The walls of her small apartment seemed to close in around her. The deep red velvet curtains, the dark wood floor, the richly patterned Indian rug, all the things she had chosen to give her a sense of warmth and security, seemed now to have become unbearably oppressive and restrictive. Her hand shook as she picked up her cup and some of the cold coffee slopped over the map that was still open on the table. It looked like the Dublin hills were about to disappear under a muddy tide. Cataclysmic. It called for something stronger than coffee. She broke her own self-imposed rule about drinking alone (one small glass, preferably with a meal), and opened a bottle of red wine. 

Three glasses in, the phone rang. Her older sister, Sarah. Cassie automatically straightened her shoulders, and tried to look and sound sober. Smiled wryly. Sarah seemed to be suggesting that they should move in together, make up a “bubble.” The two of them and Sarah’s friend, Lianne. She of the deep-voiced gnomic utterances, followed by shrieks of manic laughter. In-jokes flying back and forward between Sarah and Lianne, over Cassie’s head. Fuck that, formed in Cassie’s mind. She immediately erased the words. Sometimes Sarah could hear her thinking. She made an indeterminate, demurring sound. Sarah lived in a new housing complex in County Meath. The flattest land in Ireland. Living with Sarah was unthinkable. Sarah, the eldest child. Used to being the leader, to being obeyed. A text came in on Cassie’s phone, momentarily releasing her from Sarah’s conversation. Her favourite niece, her brother’s child. Hannah. Offering to stock up her groceries. Craven relief. She could tell Sarah she was ok. Would stay where she was. Sarah sighed away her sister’s ingratitude.

The first few days weren’t too bad. A determination to make the best of things. She made a sourdough starter, like everyone else in the country, apparently. Every sentence in her head seemed to begin with “at least.”  At least, she was used to being on her own. At least, she was in her own home, warm and comfortable. At least, her family stayed in touch. At least, Hannah delivered her groceries. At least she had the internet. And Zoom. And she was retired and didn’t have to teach online. She had her own balcony at the back, black earth in containers, ready to receive seeds.

Days passed, merged into weeks. A “new normal” developed. Walking around the room, up to two thousand steps before she felt she was losing her mind. Conversations online. Her hair growing out to a grey bush. Really regretting having painted the kitchen grey last year. Attempting ridiculous yoga positions from the internet, risking dislocating hips and knees.

She woke at five one morning, before dawn. Greyness crept up the sky, thinning the darkness, watering it down. The day stretched greyly before her. She tried going back to sleep to narrow the gulf between now and the time when she could crawl back into her bed cave again. No chance of that. Her pillow rejected her and the duvet kept sliding onto the floor. She gave in and got herself semi-vertical, wandered blindly towards the bathroom. Carefully avoided the mirror. Shrugged into the dressing gown and stumbled down to the kitchen. The second sourdough starter had frothed up and spilled greyly over kitchen counter. The first, heavy loaf of sourdough had become too hard to cut. Its crust was also grey. She looked at her watch. Twenty past five. Her brain refused to compute how many waking hours had to be filled before she could have a glass of wine. How many hours before she’d allow herself to turn on the TV. No point in putting in her hearing aids. Let the world stay blurred for a while longer. How many hours before she could send a text to Hannah, or talk to one of her friends? She made some tea and drank it standing at the front window. Her next-door neighbour, Phyllis, a nurse walked past, masked and gloved, on her way home from night duty. She didn’t wave. Maybe Cassie had become invisible

She sprayed and wiped all the surfaces with disinfectant. Cleaned the doorknobs and light switches. She knew it was an utterly pointless exercise, as no one else had been in the apartment and her hands were red raw from washing. But it passed the time. Twenty minutes. The dawn was getting into its stride. Real light began to gather and glow. She looked out again. A cat walked down the street. A blackbird gave a shrill of alarm. She sucked in a breath and made a decision. She was going to go out. She dragged on an old tracksuit, gathered her hair in a messy bun, found a surgical mask, zipped her keys into an inner pocket. Couldn’t risk being locked out instead of locked in. Hah. Thought about leaving her phone at home so she couldn’t be tracked. Told herself to cop on. She was assaulted by the huge weight of sky, the massed greyness of clouds. Despite her many wrappings, she felt as exposed as if she were naked and kept to the shadows, away from the kerbside. Stayed between the street trees and the garden walls. Almost no traffic out. It was so still she could hear the houses breathing. Nightlights dim in bedrooms, on landings. A huge engine sound signified a double-decker bus taking essential people to work, all equipped with masks and letters of exemption from lockdown. She was dispensable or worse than that, a potential burden on society. 

There was so much air, insinuating its coldness onto her indoor skin. She almost trod on a robin so unused to humans that it didn’t react, just glared at her with its clever, black, shoe-button eye. She tasted the morning, like a communion wafer on her tongue. The park across the main road still held on to darkness in its massed trees. They had leafed out while she was confined, had already lost their heartbreaking early greenness.  Decades of memory lignified in their heartwood. Did the trees know? Cold winters, long summers, deluges, droughts, archived in their bodies. Would they somehow remember these days? The quietness, the cleaner air.

When she went through the park gates, the trees arched over her head and took her into their care.  She heard the engine sound of the park ranger’s truck and melted herself into the tree shadows until his flashing orange light went past, then followed a running trail down to the banks of the river. Feeling the realness of the solid ground under her soles. The comforting tug of gravity.

Then, her own voice, startled.

There it goes. Bullet-streak of iridescence. Unnatural vividness of turquoise/blue, skimming the dark surface. Halcyon.

How could something be a thought and a thing at the same time? How could something be the purest, most vivid colour and at the same time be a mixture of blues and greens? Turquoise. An inadequate word. A blue composed of ultramarine, aqua, viridian, cerulean. The bird turned in mid-air. Became almost ordinary, iridescence gone. She held her breath. It seemed impossible that the kingfisher’s transit could be soundless. Maybe it only seemed so because she had left off her hearing aids. The chorus of birdsong swelled in her brain. She could pick out robin, wren, chiffchaff, thrush. Dissonance of mallard, heron, alarmed blackbird. Susurrus of water streaming to foam over the weir where the golden-green tears of willow failed to mirror themselves. Grey wagtails wove a wreath of colour. Coloured birds had always appeared in her dreams whenever her equilibrium was disturbed.

She seemed incapable of thinking in normal sentences. Everything was vivid shards of the natural world, composing a crazy mosaic in her brain. And then, more turquoise. Damsel flies, bodies turquoise needles, transparent black-spotted wings. Everywhere. Soundless. Appearing disappearing, hovering over the water, over the grasses on the riverbank. The vividness of the experience never felt before. Flying in tandem. Damselfly sex. Memory molecules piled up, never to be lost or neutralised. 

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Sarah. Text about a family trivia quiz. Fuck that. Don’t even think those words. Somehow, Sarah will know. Will Sarah be able to tell where she is? She’ll see the two blue ticks beside the text. No use pretending the message hadn’t come through, hadn’t been seen. She’d reply later when she’d thought of a convincing excuse. Turned off the sound on her phone. Her confidence grew with the strengthening light. It was only six thirty. People would still be cocooned, sleeping, homeschooling. She could count on another half hour or so before the morning joggers came out. The trails were worn to bone-whiteness by those lucky people allowed out to walk. They’d begun to make new pathways. She found a narrow ghost of a track leading down to a tiny beachlet that she’d never seen before, hidden by an overhang of the bank. A fallen tree connected the riverbank to a small island in midstream.. She stood on golden pebbles, gleaming with mica. Looking up, she saw the kingfisher on an overhead tree branch. His iridescence restored. The smallness of him. The river here was dark, almost silent, a strong current visible in the trail of bubbles on the surface, towards the middle. Beside the little beach, the water was shallower and quiet. A backwater. Cassie was terrestrial. Needed the reassurance of the planetary tug on her feet. She’d never been a swimmer, even in heated pools. She hated to be cold. Childhood swimming in cold Irish seas had been a constant struggle with hypothermia and modesty.  

But something about the vividness of the kingfisher and the freshness of the water drew her. She felt the staleness of her indoor life lodged in her clothes, in her body. Her fear of exposure was suddenly transmuted into a need to throw off her layered wrappings and enter into a different dimension. A renewal. A sort of baptism. She was still fearful and looked around to make sure she was unobserved. Only the grey wagtails, flashing their yellow underparts. She made sure to place her phone and keys into the pocket of her trousers, folded them carefully so that the precious lifelines were protected and dry. She shivered as she took off the last of her clothes and looked around again, crossing her arms across her unconfined breasts. She stepped carefully into the water, stumbling a little on the sharp, underwater pebbles. Feeling the solidity sloping away. She walked out until the water was up to her waist, then quickly ducked her shoulders under, gasping at the coldness. It took a great surge of courage to relinquish her contact with earth, but she leaned back and kicked her legs upward, allowing the water to take her. Her hair floated around her like weeds and her breasts flopped to either side of her torso. A sharp inhale and she let her head sink back so that the water covered her face. Light penetrated the delicate skin of her closed eyelids, a golden glow. Eyes opened and she saw a strange, new, Impressionist world. Sunlight blurred and dazzled and the sky came down beside her. Light rippled and dappled into myriad shades of blue, turquoise, viridian, emerald, gold. It was like being at the centre of a jewel. Strange plants with long, waving leaves oscillated around her. The world was a blur and the water-filtered light made everything into a mystery.

Her breath ran out and she lifted her head, gasping. Lost all sense of her position in space and struggled to stand up. Her feet failed to make contact with the bottom and panic seized her. She had floated too far out and felt the inexorable power of the single-minded, sea-seeking river, dragging her away from the shallows. She got her head up and gulped a mixture of air and water, surfaced, spluttering and threshing her limbs. All the light and wonder faded, seemed like a fever dream. All that was left was a desperate, inelegant struggle for survival. She sank and rose, grasping desperately for anything solid, anything that would hold its shape and give her purchase against the unconquerable flow. Something entwined itself in the fingers of her left hand. The one nearer the deep middle of the river. Thin digits. Sparke of turquoise. Caught. Held. 

Ferocious kick. Splutter. Uncontrollable coughing. Thrown around at the will of the water. No knowledge of up or down. Her hand reaching. Grasping air, water, something. Something? Sharp. Wood. Hard fingers? Branch. Haul. Her head came clear of the water. More coughing. Spewing, spitting a whole green river. Exhausted. 

Somehow, she was in another backwater, clinging to a thin branch. Could stand, shaking. Coldness of water grasped her waist but blessed hurt of pebbles underfoot. Another branch was just within reach and allowed her to pull herself onto the bank. Solid. Pure solid wonderful. Mud and dirt. Where she belonged. Lay gasping, fish-belly white. The shiver started at her feet and rattled all her bones and the teeth in her head. Like Adam and Eve cast out, she was suddenly aware of her own nakedness. 

Where was she? Obviously, downstream of the tiny beach where she had entered the water. She looked around for clues. A great beech tree overhead, opening the sweet green of its pleated leaves. A stand of reeds. A flowering cherry, vibrating with thrush-song. Not far from the beach where she had entered on a normal day, when she was dry and clothed, but a marathon for a naked, exhausted half-drowned woman in her seventies. No choice but to do it. She stood slowly and pulled herself along, grasping trees and bushes for support. Grateful for the thinness of air, its lack of resistance. She kept to the shadows as much as possible. Vulnerable as an unshelled snail. She thought she saw shadowy figures among the trees and once heard a burst of wild laughter. Icy sunshine on her skin. Then, damselflies again. Creatures of the liminal space between air and water. She followed the turquoise needle darts which seemed to compose themselves into a composite creature, a slender girl leading her a merry dance. Small silver objects clustered near the roots of trees. Were they real or some kind of dream illusion? She stubbed her toe and realised that they were “silver bullets”, tiny canisters of “laughing gas”, nitrous oxide, drug of choice for local teenagers. Dizziness claimed her again. Too much turquoise and silver in the world. She staggered against the solid grey-brown trunk of a beech tree. Heard the phrase “tree-hugger.” In her head or in real life? Laughter and voices. Male. Physicality. Rubbed her eyes, tried to stabilise her vision. Voice: ‘are y’all right missus?’ Bit of a tremble. Slurring. Her own voice or another? She opened her eyes again and held on to the tree to keep the world from spinning. Definitely real-life voices. She remembered to be afraid. Three lads. And a girl, sitting on the ground, back against an ash tree. Laughing. Wearing an oversize grey hoodie.

‘Help,’ she thought. Maybe even said. Big lad came towards Cassie. She lifted an arm across her breasts and shrank back against the tree. Felt her knees buckle. 

‘Are y’all right, missus?’ he said again. ‘You’re cold,’ he added, unnecessarily. He reached a finger towards her and she shrank back against the tree. As if it could swallow her into its very substance. 

‘What happened to you?’ he said. Cassie looked down at her body and saw that it was streaked with mud and green weed and covered in cuts and abrasions from her struggle in the water and her naked walk on land. She drew in a breath to try to speak, but her shivering was too intense. The lad went to the girl on the ground and tried to take off her hoodie. 

‘Fuck off,’ she said.

‘I only want something to put around yer one,’ he said. ‘She’s going to die.’

The girl took off her hoodie and handed it over. She was wearing a turquoise T-shirt underneath. The bright insects turned into a girl? Cassie managed to get her arms into the sleeves and wrapped it twice around herself. The most comfortable garment she had ever worn. It smelt of sweat and some kind of sweet perfume. She tried and failed to say thank you. The girl pulled herself up and tried to stand. 

‘Heavy,’ she said, pointing to her own legs. She took a few wobbly steps towards Cassie. 

‘Where’s your clothes?’ she asked. 

Cassie managed the word “beach.” 

The girl smiled. ‘I know that place.’  She turned to the lads. ‘Y’know the place,’ she said. ‘Where we can cross on the tree trunk.’ 

‘Yeah, yeah,’ the first lad said. ‘It’s only a bit back there.’ He jerked his head in the direction the girl was pointing. ‘Will I get your stuff?’ 

Cassie managed a shaky nod. Could she trust them? She had little option and they had shown decency towards her, in spite of the drugs. The three lads went off together and the girl sat down again beside the ash tree. She patted the ground beside her. ‘Sit down.’  Cassie slid down and leaned back against the comfort of the solid trunk. The girl rummaged in the pocket of her jeans and took out a balloon. She rooted in the dirt beside the tree and found a silver bullet. She connected a little silver tube to fill the balloon with gas from the canister. 

‘Want a puff?’ she asked.

Cassie took the balloon gingerly in her trembling fingers and sucked hungrily on the gas. A feeling of warmth and happiness spread through her. Her lips formed a smile. 

‘Thank you,’ she tried to say, but her tongue felt huge in her mouth and blocked the words. The utter craziness of her situation seemed hilarious. Half-drowned, half-dressed, depending on half-drugged teenagers that she would normally cross the street to avoid. Laughter bubbled out of her. The girl smiled and took back the balloon and took a puff for herself. She smiled blissfully and closed her eyes. When she opened them, Cassie saw that they were sparkling blue. Blue as damselflies. 

‘I’m Aisling.’ the girl said. Irish for a vision, a dream woman. 

‘Cassie.’ She stretched out her hand. Her arm felt so heavy she could barely lift it. The sound of footsteps signalled the return of the lads. 

‘Here’s yer stuff, missus,’ the first lad said. Everything was there. Phone and keys safe, clothes neatly folded. She was laughing and tearful at the same time. It took enormous concentration and some help from Aisling to get her clothes back on. Her arms and legs tingled and felt heavy with an enormous weariness. Her speech returned enough for her to thank them.

The sound of the park ranger’s truck came loudly to them through the shrubbery. The four teenagers melted away through the trees. 

‘You’ll be all right now, missus,’ Aisling said. 

But will you be ok? Cassie wanted to say. This lone scrap of a girl. In the wilderness. Even if the lads were decent.

She stood behind a tree until the sound of the truck faded then set out towards home. Her limbs still tingled and she dragged herself along, keeping as invisible as possible. She managed to get home and somehow fumbled her way into the apartment. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Sarah. She didn’t dare ignore her again.

‘Isn’t it great?’ Sarah screamed. ‘Did you see the TV? We can go out! It’s advised to stay at home, but we’re allowed out! I’ve already been down the street. Oh, Cassie! I saw a cherry tree. All covered in pink flowers. Like foam. You’ve never seen anything so wonderful!’