The Last To Drown
An exclusive taste of my upcoming novella - full of Icelandic ghosts, family secrets & disability rep
To celebrate the turn of the year, I thought I’d share an exclusive look at the first chapter of my upcoming novella - the Last To Drown - with you, see if I can lure any of you into the sea to add it to your Goodreads lists! It’s out with Luna Press on the 19th February and is a dark and ghostly story full of Icelandic landscapes and folklore, asking the question what would you sacrifice to win back the lost parts of yourself?
This is the first time I’ve written from the perspective of someone living with chronic pain - I live with it, so it’s nice to escape it on the page most of the time. But I’m glad I did it, there’s something eerily liminal about a mind adrift on pain and painkillers - the borderlands of the real and unreal become a little blurry. Which might make life tricky but it is fun territory as a writer.
Happy reading & please do let me know what you think. Also, if you are tempted, pre-orders are up here for ebook & physical, and it’s on Goodreads too. Thank you!
Chapter One
Tinna’s aunt, near-stranger, near-silent, drove them northwest out of Reykjavik through unfamiliar tunnels that dipped beneath the sea like otters. Like hope, Tinna thought, sitting in the passenger seat. To dive into the dark with the faith that you would emerge undrowned. She watched the ocean claw at the road then retreat again, and wanted the car to stop so that she could walk down to the shore and press her hands into the water, feel the chill of it more immutable than her own self. She was not entirely sure whether she was really here or only dreaming it. Headlights flickered on with each tunnel, then off again as they climbed back up into the air, black rocks, black road, striated daylight.
‘You don’t mind the driving,’ Lilith said eventually, when they’d left Reykjavik far behind for low coast and jagged lava fields, dotted solitary houses lying low and square against the dark earth and patches of old snow. ‘That’s good.’
‘I don’t,’ Tinna agreed slowly. ‘But that might just be the painkillers.’
Lilith eyed her sidelong and sniffed. ‘Do you need them? You’re mostly healed, looks like.’
But that had not been her first reaction, had it?
‘Oh elskan mín,’ she had said, materialising in front of Tinna in the airport where Tinna had faltered, clinging to her cane like a lifeline as tourists parted around her, glancing at Tinna’s face and then pointedly away. Lilith had lifted one hand to touch Tinna’s unscarred cheek and Tinna thought distantly that they must look bad for her aunt to show affection. Even at her wedding, Lilith had embraced her only once, briefly, like they were both made of glass.
‘I’m sorry about Ben,’ Lilith had said next.
And his name moved through Tinna like a storm, like a fist, like always. She shook her head wordlessly and Lilith had dropped her hand.
‘They aren’t for that,’ Tinna said now, too slowly. She lifted her left hand halfway to her face, lowered it, thinking that surely she’d once known every single shade of black on these mountains. The air smelled like a thousand buried memories. Lilith looked at her again and she remembered to finish speaking. ‘They’re for the nerve damage.’
‘Your leg?’ Tinna nodded. ‘The cane helps, does it?’
Tinna touched her fingers to the wooden handle resting by her knee. ‘On bad days.’ Or busy ones, or the ones when she was too frightened of falling to trust the ground beneath her.
Lilith pursed her lips and the car filled with a sibilant wind, the studded tyres raucous then chuntering as they passed from tarmac to slush and back again. Three ravens wheeled away from the road.
‘Are you supposed to be working today? I could have…’
‘Caught the bus?’ Lilith said disparagingly. She changed gear roughly; the car lurched, so did Tinna’s heart. ‘I can take the day off to collect my niece. The timing’s all wrong, but there’s no helping that, I suppose.’
Tinna frowned out at the grey-green land and said after a minute, or two, or three. ‘You should have said not to come. If you’re busy.’
She wasn’t even sure precisely who had first suggested taking Lilith up on the offer scrawled in her condolences card. She only remembered her mother saying she wasn’t well enough, then saying she must wait two more weeks, then that Lilith wouldn’t want her. But Tinna had been drifting through faded memories of black sands and the endless sea, the sharp, Arctic wind winding around her wrists, and had thought, Yes. Yes, if I must be anywhere then perhaps there, in a land made of scars and winter. And when she had returned to the present, to her mother’s pale, angry face, and her brother’s scowl, she hadn’t understood quite what they were fighting over, and she hadn’t cared. Her mother had left, and her brother had grinned at her and said, I spent years wanting to run away back there. Shall we do it now? She can’t stop us anymore and it’ll be good for you.
What about Lilith? Tinna had said, and she’d meant what if Lilith wanted her there as little as their mother did, but Elías had already been checking flights on his phone and had only shrugged.
She said you could come months ago. It was an open invitation so we can just let her know once we’re booked. I’ll fly with you then head back the next day. And because everything else felt mutable and unreal, Tinna had focused on that last thing alone. Not the going, or the questions all rusty with age, but him coming with her when he didn’t need to. Survivor’s guilt, she thought, was not just about surviving but about the burden of your broken self that you place upon others. If she was going to fly across the ocean into her own past, she wanted to do it weightless.
And he must have agreed because she had come alone, and met this barely-known aunt alone, and if not weightless then at least only weighing as much as her pain, and her love, not anyone else’s.
‘I didn’t mean—’ Lilith cut herself off, took one hand off the wheel and shook it lightly as if she had been gripping too hard.
A part of Tinna, a child’s exhausted voice, whispered that she should not have come.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ Lilith said. ‘I’m glad you came back. This is your home.’
But that wasn’t true, was it? It had been once, and then it hadn’t. They passed a weathered pillar of stacked stones like a sentinel beside the road. Tinna turned her head a little to watch it, wondering what such a guardian might be waiting for; who it was protecting, who it was protecting against.
‘Your phone,’ Lilith said after another tunnel, another snaggle-toothed inlet.
‘My—’ Tinna pulled it from her pocket, realising only belatedly that she had heard the chime. It was from Elías.
- Arrived safely? Love to Lilith. How is it being back?
Love, Tinna thought, then pushed the word away.
- Yes, she typed clumsily, left-handed. It’s cold and different and the same.
Then she ran out of words, stared at the screen for several minutes, pressed send and put it away. She was full of things she wanted to say, if only the right person were there to listen.
They reached Snaesfellnes Peninsula just as the sun cleared a louring sky, the sea beside the road turning silver and blue, and a lone waterfall leaping from its mountain’s flank like a ribbon of white hair. Tinna blinked, but time shifted beneath her like a tide and when she opened her eyes, Lilith was turning onto a track. The road slipped on away from them towards empty fields and the soft outline of scattered ruins, there and gone as the truck grumbled over the gravel and the curve of the bay hid them all from view. A black church watched them pass, Tinna’s heart lurched in recognition, and then it too was gone again and the house was there instead, solid and familiar against the backdrop of the shore.
She’d lived here until she was five. Then her mother and Lilith had fought, and they had gone abruptly to London in a snowstorm and silence, but she remembered it perfectly and there was something terrible about that clarity. She’d gladly have lost this memory if it meant regaining her last months with him. But the thought was an anaesthetised open wound, both terrible and numbed, and she climbed carefully from the truck. For a moment she could hear a man weeping but it was only the wind. She turned to look across the hummocked bitter-grass to the edge of the bay, the beach of black sand and black rocks and blue-white waves breaking in permutations of eternity.
‘No going in the water,’ Lilith said from behind her, Tinna’s bags in each hand. ‘Það er bannað.’ It is forbidden.
Tinna frowned faintly, looking from Lilith’s face to the wide secretive sea, curling her left hand around the handle of the cane. She hadn’t been thinking of swimming, but now, obstreperously, wanted to. The sea might understand, she thought—it was restless and universal and lost; it was constantly dying and being reborn.
‘Come inside.’
Tinna obeyed.
‘Do you remember it?’ Lilith said, standing in the lounge with a cloud grey cat wending around her ankles.
‘Yes,’ Tinna said.
‘Your mother said you had forgotten—’
‘Not this,’ Tinna said, feeling the wrongness of it all over again. Pain was dancing up her leg, skittering through the bones of her pelvis and spine. She’d known travelling would be hard but she hadn’t realised quite how much.
‘Just the few months before, is it?’ The cat sat down and curled its tail around its paws, watching Tinna.
Just, Tinna thought. Just the few months before. She looked out of the window to the sea and let the words sink through her like stones.
Her phone rang as she was sitting gingerly on the sofa, and she fumbled with it in her numb right hand before managing to answer.
‘You’ve arrived then,’ her mother said. Tinna nodded very slightly, watching Lilith leave the room. ‘Tinna?’
‘Yes,’ Tinna said, blinked and the cat blinked back, turned her head and the sea shone all silver-greys and implied darkness. ‘It’s just how I remember.’ Which was not true, but she didn’t know what else to say.
‘You’ll be tired. You should rest tomorrow. Stay in bed, do nothing.’
‘Yes,’ Tinna repeated. The idea both seductive and almost fantastical because rest was not restful, it was just a different balance of pains.
‘Fine then. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
The sun set slowly, later by far than back home. As if this bitter-cold, snow-draggled place was performing summertime falsely rather than barely creeping into spring. Westerly, Tinna thought. She had come westerly chasing the falling sun to the edge of a bay at the foot of a volcano, nothing but the echoes of a village and a wary black church to keep company with her family’s house and the sea.
Tinna took more painkillers, then showered while the world tipped gracefully away, then wiped steam from the mirror to study her reflection. She had been told by a nurse and her mother that she would get used to this first moment of looking. But they were wrong; it had never been a shock at all. She was broken. How much stranger it would be to look in the mirror and appear whole. How much stranger if other people looked and saw someone whole. She pressed her numb right fingers to the lines of stitched skin, breathing the sulphur and salt from the shower, listening to Lilith muttering to herself or the cat.
‘I’m for bed,’ Lilith said when Tinna emerged. The cat was in her arms and Tinna thought that something in the way Lilith held it was more about vulnerability than affection. But the impression slipped away again like so much did, which she didn’t mind at all. If she couldn’t remember their last months then she didn’t want to think about anything beyond them.
‘Don’t wander outside. Your mother says you can be absent-minded, and you have trouble sleeping.’
‘Yes,’ Tinna said slowly.
‘Don’t go out.’
‘No.’
‘You could have an accident.’ Lilith winced, scowled. The word brushed against Tinna’s damaged nerves and with this one, like with the ‘just’, she let the drugs carry its weight so she didn’t have to.
‘I’ve books,’ she said.
Lilith stroked the cat’s head then looked up at Tinna again with her face blank as the sea. ‘A friend will come over tomorrow. Gerdie. She’s looking forward to meeting you.’ It wasn’t spoken as a question but there was one there anyway, and if the drugs were not swimming through her veins perhaps Tinna would have been able to fathom it out. But they were, so she couldn’t. She didn’t want to be meeting strangers, but supposed it hardly mattered; her aunt was stranger enough already.
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘Goodnight.’ Lilith nodded, threw a glance out at the sea then turned away.
And Tinna was alone, finally, in the evening half-light. The bay and the sea waited beyond one window and the dark mountains were watching her from the other. She’d been exhausted earlier but now felt beyond that, filled with a haunted restlessness that she knew too well. She tried though. Sitting and wrapping a blanket around herself that rubbed her skin like a cat’s tongue, she even turned the pages of a book seeking distraction. But she’d spent too many nights walking the long corridors of the hospital, and then the dark rooms of her house to fool herself. The sun had slipped behind the great bulk of Snaesfell, and the sky was a deeper indigo than the sea as if the water still held daylight, and all of it, the mountains, the sky, the sea were safer than her own mind.
A walk, she thought, and set her book aside, ran her right hand over the cover like the words might rouse her dead nerves. A walk in the cloudy darkness. She wanted the cold to numb her entirely so that the parts of her which she could feel were rendered the same as the parts she could not. She took her inadequate, southerner’s coat from its hook, left the cane behind and slipped out of the door where the mountains whispered a greeting, the sea replied, the sky above dense and imperturbable. Beneath her feet the stones were sharp and cold as ice and she studied her bare toes, surprised momentarily. Then weighing how much she cared, discovering that she didn’t.
Where the shadowy grass ended, the sea was a net of black and deeper black, its whispering surf the only sound. She turned towards it but then the breeze lifted and she stumbled, knocked askew by the sudden smell of ozone and a memory. His hand on her waist, their bare skins beautified by sunshine and salt, white sand through the water opalescent, his voice still making her heart skip even then, years after they’d met. There had been children laughing away to their right, the breeze off the land scented with sage and dust, the sea like an embrace. He’d looked down at her, his eyes tawny in the sunlight, and she laid her pale hand in his darker one. Come on, he said. What are you waiting for? He’d pulled her deeper and they’d swum out past the gentle breakers. You, she’d said. I was waiting for you, Ben. The sunlight on the sea so searing she’d closed her eyes and swum to him blind.
She opened her eyes. The sea murmured and the cold pressed against her like she was already under this black water so far from that sea, so far from then. ‘I want the rest,’ she whispered to the horizon. ‘I want the last times, I want the worst of it all, I want every second that we had.’ The night waited. ‘Give him back to me,’ she whispered.
It is a form of self-protection, the psychologist had said. We seek to hide from trauma sometimes. Tinna had said, But I want to remember, and the psychologist had smiled. What we want and what we need are not always the same. Give yourself time to heal first. Tinna might have got angry if not for the painkillers muting all her edges. Perhaps that was why the psychologist had said it.
A low voice called from the darkness, hoarse with mourning. and Tinna’s whole body flexed. She almost cried out a response before she realised. ‘Seal,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s just a seal.’ She’d not heard one since her childhood. and it wasn’t her childhood she wanted to be remembering, so she turned sharply away from the sea and walked instead back the way they had arrived. If she kept walking, she thought, perhaps her mind would not play games with memory, it would simply drift and in drifting find lost pieces of itself. She found a track between rocks and hagged fields, half-wishing for her stick and for shoes but not enough to turn around. Then she reached a low stone wall, climbed over that onto harsh grasses and soft moss and was glad she was barefoot. Better this by far than compression tights and hospital floors.
And then the moon slipped its noose of clouds and the sky shimmered darkly, and she realised where her numb feet had brought her.
The black church waited just ahead, its steeple a sharp, starless portion of sky, its graves hunkered in the shadows, half buried. From here and in the dark, she couldn’t see the lych gate or the road so it felt as if she’d arrived in some severed space, interstitial and secret. Standing amidst the graves that had gathered around her, it felt like yet another conjuring of her addled mind. She shook her head and pressed a hand against her scars, her skull, and turned back to the soft lights that she had left on in the house.
Behind her, someone sighed.
She turned quickly, too quickly, painkillers and her numb feet unbalancing her, grasping at a gravestone to keep from falling while she searched for the other person out here in the dark amongst the dead.
But the graveyard was empty. The church watched her, moonlight in its white-lined windows like a cat’s wide eyes. She tightened her hold on the grave, her left hand, the one that could feel, scraping against a ragged line of white lichen like a scar; her own pulse in her fingertips as if the grave held a heart. Then the moon slunk back behind clouds and the church’s eyes closed, the sky and the mountains becoming one single vast mass. Tinna wavered, her mind repeating that exhaled breath over and over, like it mattered. Like it mattered not because she was alone in this fey place, but because she had heard it before. A long breath full of endings.
Oh god, she thought, and let go of the gravestone and turned away. The night swooped around her and it took an age to find a path through the graves to the wall, headstones rearing up before her like a maze. Each one looked the same as the one that had stopped her falling. Ancient, lichen scarred, canted seaward. A few steps, ancient, lichen scarred, canted seaward. She closed her eyes and opened them again; it occurred to her that in the rush and strain of travel she might have taken an extra dose of her medicines.
But finally the graveyard released her and the moon watched her return up the track unsteadily. Then she slept in her aunt’s spare bed, finally, awash with pain and hearing that long sigh in her ear. It was probably the sea ceaselessly murmuring beyond her window, but in her dreams it wasn’t.
Thank you so much for reading. If you want to read on, please pre-order in ebook or physical, or add it on Goodreads. I’d love to hear your thoughts & cannot wait to be able to share this wee book with you all.
Gleðilegt nýtt ár!
Pre-ordered. Though I felt so cold just reading that; I’d better stock up on teabags and blankets!