The Girl in the Water. A Grayson J

       He’s hiding something from me. I know he is. He’s hiding something, and it’s going to change everything.

       There’s nothing I can pinpoint; no concrete, indisputable fact that makes this a certainty, but I’m certain all the same.

       He’s lying. And he’s never done that before.

       I’m not sure what to make of it. It could be nothing. Could even be good. Men hide things, usually because they’re cowards, but sometimes because they think we want them to. They consider it wit. Maybe he’s hiding a necklace. Or earrings. Or tickets for a surprise holiday, maybe back to the coast again. He knows I always like the coast, especially in the springtime.

       But I don’t really think it’s any of those, not if I’m honest. My skin is a pepper of fire and suspicion.

       His briefcase is in the walk-in closet of our little bedroom. I know it’s always locked, off limits, but he never holes it away or tries to conceal it. Yet today I found it, unprompted – a pair of synthetically shiny gym shorts slung over the top, as if this would somehow mask its shape. As if I wouldn’t be able to see.

       He’s lying. He’s lying.

       My beautiful man is lying …

       Prologue

      The first body in the water was a woman’s. She was a beautiful creature, despite her unfortunate condition. Her black hair was cropped short. Her cheeks were soft. She had rose-painted lips. Above her body, stranded forever in place, the clouds floated smoothly across the sky.

      The river, by all accounts, received her body with reverence. It seemed, through some wordless comprehension of nature, to know this was the arrangement and would, for a time, continue to be. ‘Everything in its appointed place,’ it seemed to affirm, and that, perhaps, made things a little more right in the world. Or wrong.

      It’s sometimes hard to know the difference.

      The last body in the water would be mine.

      That’s a hard thing to admit, and harder to accept, but it’s the way things go. The vision, crystal and clear. My golden hair, swaying in the motion that water always has near the shore. My clothes untorn. An altogether different appearance in death than that girl. A stripe in my flesh, bleeding crimson into the water around me. My fingertips, as always, with their nails nibbled down to the skin. My blue eyes open.

      It’s an odd thing, to play the observer at one’s own death. Part of me is ashamed, certain I should feel more emotion. There should be anger. Grief. But then, how can I feel those things, really? Of course the shore must be the end. Of course there is water and silence. My story was probably always going to end like this. Like most, the final page was presumably written long before the first, the conclusion the one sturdy fixture towards which everything before it was always going to lead. However they begin, there’s no story that doesn’t finish with the end.

      So I see it. Real. Certain. I float in the water, my light blouse transparent against my body, suggestive in ways that, in life, would be provocative but which in death evokes only pity. I’m dead, and I’m quiet, and I’m screaming. My lips are stalled a lifeless pale, but I’m screaming. Screaming with all the breath that is no longer there.

       1

       Amber

      Every morning, as I stand in the bathroom and gaze into the mirror, my eyes look back and taunt me. The fact that their colour doesn’t match my name has always disappointed me, and it’s like they know this, and are so prominent on my slightly freckled face purely as a way to rub it in.

      They should be amber, and they should be magnificent. Instead I possess the name, feminine and graceful, forever without the matching gaze. Amber on the tongue, but in the eyes, cursed with blue.

      This is overstatement, of course. Something I’m prone to. I don’t genuinely consider my blue eyes a curse, and others have sometimes even found them beautiful. ‘They’re gorgeous, Amber, like twin pools of the sea’ – a splendid compliment, though more than they deserve. They’re not the deep blue of royal porcelain or a navy blazer, but something softer. Just light enough, just bright enough to mark themselves out.

      David loves them, too, and for that alone I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Maybe if my face had been punctuated by some other colour the first time we met, he wouldn’t have noticed me, wouldn’t have collided into ‘hello’ and that catchy smile, and all the romance that followed. Maybe, if I had the amber eyes I’ve always craved, I’d have ended up all alone.

      I shrug, seeing them in the mirror now, and go about my familiar routine. Morning is morning, and every step is practised. The mascara shade is a light brown, harder to find than a person might think, and it complements a soft brush of Clinique’s cleverly named ‘Almost Powder’ in Neutral Fair. Understated, but just enough polish to let me feel like a well-cared-for piece of art, pleasing without being showy, which is what my mother taught me always to aim for. And mothers, as no one but mothers ever suggest, always know best.

      But there’s a headache forming behind my eyes – and I can almost see it in the mirror, too, with the rest that’s visible there. A strange pulsing at the sides of my face, as if the pain has shape and can be caught in the reflection in the glass.

      I blink twice, the blue orbs of my eyes disappearing and then reappearing before me. I can’t dwell on the pain in my head. It has long since become a customary feature of my days, and work starts in forty-five minutes. There’s no use dwelling on what can’t be changed.

      Just keep going. And I do.

      The routine concludes a few minutes later. My face is done, my hair brushed, and my teeth are the glistening off-white of Rembrandt Extra’s best efforts for a heavy coffee and tea drinker.

      My feet, seemingly registering all this even ahead of my brain, are already moving me out of our teal-tiled bathroom towards the kitchen.

      Like they’ve lives of their own.

      By disposition, I’m not a morning eater. A cup of tea, I’ve always thought, is a perfectly complete meal before midday. Add milk and it’s two courses, and entirely satisfying. Recently, though, David has been trying to change my habits of a lifetime.

       Because it’s good for you, Amber. It’s healthier. Trust me, you’ll grow to like it.

      Sweetest