disclaimer: i don't own 'the fall' and if i did i wouldn't ever be smart enough to pull it off. stella gibson is a badass and we don't know anything about her which i think is excellent. allan cubitt, if you ever come across this monstrosity, laugh about me over your lunch break.
Stroke, stroke, breath. Stroke, stroke, breath. Swimming is like cutting onions. She has always thought this as she cuts the water with an arm like a fish knife and protects her eyes with goggles lest the chlorine burn them. Fragile, the eyes, and they are her strongest weapon. Stroke, stroke, breath. And breath and breath. Thirty laps, and now it's time for a shower and then bed. Stella releases the suction on her goggles and the world loses its blue tint. And breath and breath.
She is terrified of drowning, and dreams of it often. Of that day in Cannes in the summer of 1979.
"Daddy, Daddy! Look at me!" They are words Stella will repeat for years. She flies out of the water like a dolphin but doesn't quite complete the move. She wonders, for that fraction of a second when she is up in the hot sea air, if Daddy is watching. Under the water, and back up.
Stella is a good swimmer, better than her brothers. Her hair turns greenish in the spring and summer, and her legs and arms are strong and tanned.
"Look at me, Daddy!" He comes to school to see her dive and race, sometimes.
"Good job, Stella." Never 'love', never 'darling'. Not even when Mummy was alive.
She is thirteen years old and swimming a graceful breast stroke in the undulating sea off the coast of southern France. Above, the sky is so filled with sun that it glows blinding white, and she can feel the burn on her head.
It all happens quite suddenly, like the particular moment when a child learns to ride a bicycle. A large man, playing a water game with a friend, throws an accidental elbow into her face. Sudden deafness, a crack of bone, and a body numb like gums after novocain.
Stella wonders how any water can be this bright and blue as she sinks and looks up. Dancing bubbles from her mouth to the surface, to the gently bouncing sea waves in summertime. Legs everywhere around her, the rouge penis. She sees blood.
This too happens suddenly. She is pulled by two strong male hands under her armpits, dragging her up to the surface.
"Hold on."
Stella is vaguely aware of being scooped into his arms, feeling like lead, and rushed to the beach. Her head lolls back like an infant and the world turns through salt stained blue eyes. Later, she will recall her brother Sam slapping her hard between the shoulder blades and the spurt of salty seawater onto her thighs. Her other brother Leo kissing her cheek once she comes back to herself -throat burning, eyes streaming with tears.
She is terrified of drowning.
Stella wraps her damp hair in a towel and goes to the elevator. It is strange, she realizes as she walks along a deserted corridor, that no one else seems to be staying in this hotel.
Rows of rooms with crisp, clean sheets and unused packs of coffee and sugar. Unopened soap and pristine towels. She finds this absurd, and does not know why.
Her room is just as lonely and spotless as she had left it. After showering, Stella puts on soft pyjama pants and a t-shirt, her favourite brown slippers. It is comforting to wear these things, as they remind her of her equally lonely and perpetually spotless apartment in London. She hopes Maria has fed the kitten this evening.
After readying herself for bed and treating herself to a warped and gruesome bedtime story of crime scene photos and detailed autopsy notes, she finally turns out the little bedside lamp. Her eyes are tired. Tired from the day, tired from swimming, tired of searching for the one detail amidst all these papers that will unlock the key to this case. Music Man. This name, too, is absurd, and Stella smiles, curling into a ball. She disrupts only a corner of the oversized bed, like a lazy cat, unmoving for hours in one precise spot of duvet.
A month earlier she had relived the entire memory of July 17, 1979. Her therapist had asked about it, and Stella had recounted it in a businesslike manner, as she would on the stand in a trial.
"I was thirteen. Swimming. A man knocked his elbow into my face and fractured my nose. I was underwater for thirty seconds, maybe less. After that I don't remember much. It's all very blurry."
"You are a good swimmer." Dr. Wermein had said.
"Yes."
"Did you believe, in that moment, that you would die?"
"No."
Dr. Wemain took a note in his book. Stella had narrowed her investigative eyes. She could read him from a mile away. In denial of a near death experience.
"You think of this memory often, am I correct?"
"I do." Stella had paused, furrowed her brow, troubled. "I dream about it."
His eyes had brightened. "And do these dreams…upset you? Would you call them nightmares?"
"No. I don't think so." Yes.
Her therapist had frowned. "Are you afraid of water, Stella?"
She shook her head no.
Stroke, stroke, breath. Stroke, stroke, breath. Breath, breath.
Breathe.
Swimming mirrors the process of investigation. She chops through work and water with silent, measured confidence -a rhythm so intrinsically woven into her that she doesn't realize her heart has been keeping steady time to it for years.
She battles the viciousness, the most heinous specimens of humanity, with an agile mind; she fights fear with her arms and legs in a great mass of chlorinated water. Intellect meets physical.
Stella dreams.
"Daddy, look at me! Daddy, look at me! Daddy!"
"Mum's dead, Stella. There's nothing you could have done."
"Daddy, where's Mummy?"
"Daddy, look at me! Look at me!"
She is drowning. Her father's face, unremarkable and sad, watches her from above the oddly calm surface of the sea -rippling. Then he smiles at her. Sam is reaching out to her, his fingers flexing. Leonard is calling her name.
"Lulu! Lulu!"
She is drowning. Stella coughs and sees the blood rise up like smoke after a candle is snuffed out. She screams and tastes salt and panic.
"Hold on."
Stella wakes up. She blinks and rubs at her nose, finding the tiny bump on the side of its elegant arch. Her mother's nose.
Her journal.
Underwater…Ocean…
Someone...my ear…
Sandy? Dr. Wermein?
'Hold on.'
She goes back to sleep and dreams of unused packs of hotel coffee, a faceless lover, and the little striped kitten at home.