Short Story: Still Waters
A trip to another land
I’ve been unable to find time to fit in the next chapter of Hydropower again this week, so instead of leaving you with nothing, please enjoy this short story. I wrote it many years ago and tried to get it published, but it turned out to be too long for just about all of the literary magazines I used to submit to. I couldn’t bear to cut it down, so it lingered unpublished instead. Finally, here it is.
STILL WATERS
She was so headstrong, so stubborn, not in the way that might be admired in a female but in a way that made her disagreeable to everyone. Even when she was wrong, she had to be right. Each small thing since the beginning of their journey had been a thing for her to mither and moan over, each small point unsatisfactory in some way. The logic of this trip had been to shut her up for a while, to make her quieten down when she finally had what she wanted, but it had been an utter failure in that respect. The one thing she hated, he realised now, was being happy. Once a single touch of happiness had crossed her path she would be resentful for the rest of their lives together. By god, when they got home he would never see her again. He swore it on every valuable thing he could think of. It soothed him a little when she was sniping at him.
Sharing a holiday with her, cramped in close quarters with no escape except a plane ticket, was never going to be easy. He had known that when he had agreed to it, known it when he had proposed the idea to her, but it was beyond his control. He had thought that he would be able to grit his teeth and muddle through, grin and bear it, grease up his elbows and plough right ahead. The circumstances had conspired against him.
Right by the sea, their cabin was wooden and full of mosquitoes, despite the nets strung up at the doors. There was always a small gap somewhere to allow them in. The climate was hot and sticky, unusual to their Western skin that rebelled and sweated every moment spent in its humid embrace. There were no locks on the doors, not even the bathroom, and not for one moment could either of them truly feel secure inside it. The sounds of the locals casting blessings on the shore, speaking in their foreign tongues and dancing to staccato beats, floated across the air to them. It kept them awake well into the night. Everything about the situation was uncomfortable, and they could not even find any solace in each other.
Things had gone wrong for them, in a bad way, he could accept that. Somehow, though, she could not understand that arguing over it was not going to change the situation. It would have been more forgivable if this had been a break in temperament brought on by stress, but she had simply stayed her waspish self, irritating irrespective of the time or place. How anyone had ever lived with her before, he had no idea, much less become engaged to her or actually enjoyed her company. She only smiled when she was bragging about her superiority, how it had been him who screwed up the arrangements and stranded them out there. It had not been his fault, and she knew that on some level. She just loved winding him up.
It had started with their guide. Dark eyed, short, and shifty, he had not seemed worth any sort of cash, but he was the only one available on such short notice. It was technically illegal to cross the border, after all, and they had known that getting anywhere would cost them money. It had just seemed so unnecessary to spend such a large amount on a man who could only speak a spattering of English, every word of which was probably a lie. For most of the journey, even when they got on the boat, they had very little idea of what was going on.
When they arrived at the beach he had pointed at a wooden hut, erected just above the sand and roofed with dry leaves. “You, here, wait,” he said, and then got on the boat and left. There was not so much as a backwards glance even when he had yelled at the boat to stop, demanding answers.
He supposed that they were expecting an escort, but it had not arrived, and now they were stuck. No way forward, no way back, just waiting out the senseless hours until some form of hope arrived.
He did not see why it had to be him who brought her here in the first place. It was her quest, a ridiculous search for something that probably didn’t even exist, out here in the wilderness where there was never any proof to the myths and stories. She was his brother’s bride; nothing to do with him, not on any large scale, and far beyond his duties. This whole wild goose chase was none of his business or responsibility, and until she had guilt tripped him into finally agreeing he had never even so much of thought of the possibility of coming this far out.
Out of civilisation, out of the boundaries of the law. Who knew what could happen to them if help never came? The owner of the hut they slept in charged by the night, and soon they were going to begin to run out of money. This was no all-inclusive package deal in the Costa del Sol – if they ran out of money they would starve outside, with no way home. He had not signed up for that. Helping her, sure, getting her off his back for a while, but not dying out here.
He had spent the day in and out of the cabin – out as much as he could, away from her. He watched the villagers going about their daily business, preparing for the night’s coming festivities. He wondered if they celebrated every night in the same way, or if it just happened to be a special time of year. Perhaps, he thought with a dash of wry self-pity, they were celebrating the arrival of two dumb rich tourists and their wallets.
The late afternoon brought with it a heavy, sudden rain shower. He bought what few pieces of fruit he could afford from the owner of their cabin and sought shelter from the elements, rainwater dripping from his hair as he stepped into the tiny entrance room. She was in the bedroom, staring at him accusingly, and he ignored it. Dumping his papayas and lychees on the table, he sat down on the old straw sofa that was his bed, a threadbare blanket stretched across it for the least sort of comfort. He was sure he was going to get ill out here. The insects, the weather, the living conditions, even the food was not conducive to the health of a man used to the luxury of the western world. One day he would sleep in his bed at home next to his beautiful girlfriend and look back on these days and imagine that he must be exaggerating the memories.
She got up and prowled into the room, dropping the little journal she clutched so intently day and night. She said she was recording the details of their journey; he could imagine what sort of details she thought were worth writing down. Something about the slight fading of a sneer on his entrance had told him that she was writing about him, about all the things she moaned about on a daily basis, as well as whatever she was holding back. By god, if she was holding something back, he dreaded to think what kind of onslaught she would unleash if given free reign.
‘Is this dinner?’ she snapped, gesturing towards his miserable offering. Nails on chalkboard.
‘It’s all I could get,’ he began, trying to appease her, too weary of the constant complaining to try very hard.
‘How are we supposed to survive on this?’
‘We need to preserve our money, or we won’t survive. You’re not a big girl; you don’t need a Mac and fries. Just eat.’
She sat down with a huff, and started to eat a watermelon. Almost immediately, the juice began to drip down her chin, and she wiped it with the back of her hand. He watched her for a moment, then turned to look out of the window. The rain had left him with a restless itch, cutting off his walk and his time outside, and he was not ready to settle yet.
‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’
He turned back to find her watching him like a vulture eyeing its prey. She had stopped moving, focusing everything into a glare that seemed to condemn him before he opened his mouth.
‘Not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not hungry yet.’
She scoffed at that, as if it was not possible for him to not be hungry. Let her think whatever she wanted to think. He was tired of trying to correct her.
Outside, the rain carried on unashamedly, battering down against the roof and the pavements outside their door, crashing into the mud on either side and meeting the waves with such weight that you could believe the sky was trying to meet the sea. In each drop it happened for a moment, a split second where the water was neither part of one nor fully part of the other. Later it would rise again to the skies and fall countless times, like Sisyphus pushing himself to the heavens so desperately. What was up there that was pushing them down again?
She finished eating, satisfying herself with only half of what he had bought, as he had predicted.
‘You bought too much fruit anyway. You’re wasting our money,’ she scorned, wiping at the corners of her mouth in case any juice had gathered there. He wondered if the fruits turned sour when they touched her skin. He could not imagine her enjoying anything sweet.
‘I’ll eat the rest later,’ He soothed, distantly.
‘I’m going to bed. Don’t keep me up. Tomorrow they might come, early.’
He nodded in vague agreement, though he did not truly share her enthusiasm. For all he knew no one was ever coming again. The guide would wait for them to die and then ship out some other hapless couple. Perhaps the worst part about all this was that their temporary landlord, whose hair seemed to stick in every direction except the one it was supposed to, believed that the two of them were actually together, an item, rather than distant acquaintances.
He ate; she slept. She snored like a man. She was not an old woman, not yet even approaching middle-aged, but she acted sometimes with an immaturity and selfishness that he would not have credited to an eighteen-year-old. If he had told her how loudly and how coarsely she snored, he would have been cursed to the end of the week and back.
The revellers began their chanting on the beach again. He had become so used to it over the past few nights that it almost calmed him. He would have traded it for her snoring a million times. Even when unconscious to the world she managed to irritate him.
Sleep evaded him, a slippery thing that seemed always just out of his reach. No matter how confused his thoughts became, he could not slip fully down, lingering for hours in a drowse. Strange shapes played out in front of his eyes, making him jump, only to realise that they were just the phantoms of the dreams he should have been having.
Sometime in the early hours he started from another half-dream to realise that the sound of the rain had stopped. He rose and slipped outside, to stand on the beach. Those who lived around them had faded back to their own dwellings, either going into huts like theirs or melting into the forest along secret paths. When did a forest become a jungle, he wondered? Which category did this fall under?
The soft sand was damp still, and spattered with deep indentations where individual raindrops had hit the tiny shifting grains most recently, obscuring all of the footprints of anyone who had been out earlier. Only a small number of torches remained lit around the little settlement, the ways empty of human life and even the sound of voices absent from the air for once. He stepped out towards the waves and watched the moonlight playing on them. Everything was so calm, so tranquil that for a while he felt no fear or tiredness or stress. All he could hear was nature, the world around him breathing its own synchronised breaths and taking him with it, pushing him onwards into life. It was strange how quickly the storm had come and gone, and he sat down to watch the stillness of the water. In the morning maybe they would come for him. Even if it was only the boat, he would not let her stay any longer and waste everything they had. He would take her back, or go alone, and leave her to wilt like a houseplant in this humidity.
In the morning, he knew, they would come.
Remember to like and comment on this post if you’re enjoying the ride - every push of a button helps me to grow my audience and shows your appreciation!
For every $50 or £50 I earn from Substack alone, I will release a new chapter early.
Current progress:
$92.67/$100
£22.64/£50
Books
Okay, you've read the Substack posts (and maybe you're a little bit confused if that's where you started). Wondering who all of these characters are? Thinking you need a refresher on past books?
I have a feeling no one's coming to get them ;)