Musical inspo - Ex Anima's beautiful cover of 'Song to the Siren'


Fully howling at this because I don't even know if it makes sense!?

Oh well.

I knew what I wanted from this chapter and I've been trying to write it for WEEKS and now I'm sick of it so here is a thing.

T.W - child neglect, prostitution, alcoholism


Hear me sing
Swim to me, swim to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am, here I am
Waiting to hold you.


iii.

He meets her in the sea. She comes inevitably. As inevitable as the waves rocking and the change of the weather.

It rains and there are disruptive floods. But he doesn't waste much worry on it. He silences the radio as the weather news is announced on his way to greet her. He has anticipated her with both angst and aching love. He has bought a house and painted and decorated. He has sought and gathered things that he knew she would like. Shimmering seashells and little coloured lights that glow in the darkness. He had fantasised about how he would bring her home and amidst the nightmarish chaos and pain and loneliness of these past months, at least they would have each other, and he would keep them afloat.

But he had not anticipated that it would feel this way.

She is in his arms and it feels instantly wrong. It hits him like the crash of an all-consuming wave. She is in his arms and he knows that it shouldn't, but it feels like a memory.

It is full lips and a set jaw and determined, sparkling eyes. And his face falls.

The memory soon becomes like a fever induced dream. One look at her and a morose mist descends.

Because from every single angle, in every shade of light, she reminds him.

Should he have known from then that the whole thing was cursed?

Because in the weeks that follow, his life is spectacularly ship wrecked. Perhaps he deserves what he gets. She acts as if she were scorned, and he takes it. Punishment, for how he was lured away all that time ago, without even putting up a fight. Perhaps he deserved to be left to drown.

And drown he does. He splutters and flails under her gaze at sea. Sleep and food and time become folklore, peace is shattered and love is lost to an endless storm of despair. If there really was any love to begin with in this dwelling. She asks difficult questions of him without even speaking. A creased, ever reddening face and frantic flailing limbs fight and resist and attack like a relentless, murderous creature from the deep. She will surely kill them all.

She cannot be human.

Sometimes, when he feels numb enough to attempt to soothe her, she looks at him with a furrowed brow that ages her. It is a look that carries blame and hatred.

And it is as if she knows.

She screams and wails and shrieks. It surges through their home like a banshee. She burns holes in the precarious paper boat he had built them to survive in. She haunts the tissue thin dwelling that he had put so much time and effort into, until it is in tatters, pulled apart by the most delicate of lungs. Revealed as the sham it really is.

She browbeats like a pirate, hangs over them like a damned hex, she wails and drowns him like a siren.

She does not want to be loved by him.

And besides, he wonders if he has the strength to love her anyway.

Dizzied, he leaves her. He takes to the streets of Manchester in the rain and takes shallow delight in the coloured glow of the ailing metropolis reflected in the shining pavements. He would consider diving headfirst into the lights, parting his lips and allowing the concrete to replace his breath, were it an option. He wades and treds in and out of bars, smoking as many cigarettes as he can stomach in the hope that his lungs might give out before he has to drag himself back.

As he snaps back his neck to drain his third glass of Haig, he thinks of a soul approaching him at a bar. He thinks of the stain she left on his lips and the smell she left in his sheets and the hollowness she left in his heart. He thinks about the sadness he had always seen in her eyes and how hard he had tried to quell it. He thinks about how good he was becoming at abandonment and how perhaps one day, it would be she, his siren, at the bar next to him, desperately trying to escape a loveless family by filling voids in others. That thought fills him with horror now in a way it never had before. He thinks about the cycle and how badly he was failing at breaking it.

It draws him back to the bedlam of his own making; a clumsy key scratching at the lock, a door shouldered open…

And he squints at the secluded world around him.

This is not the place he had fled from. He had dragged himself out of a raging storm and has returned to the doldrums. It is not a boat but a home. Lights are lit and radiators are on. Food is cooked and waves have diminished.

He finds his co-inhabitant with a sigh. This is not her doing. She is splayed unconscious in a soft chair with a wine bottle at her feet, slugs of purple under her eyes, uncharacteristic, chaotic frizz framing her long blonde curls. He is not surprised. She has always done so little to bail out their perilous vessel. Then why, he puzzles, when they were so at sea, does it now feel like safe, dry land beneath them?

As he precariously ascends the stairs, he wonders if equilibrium is an illusion fabricated by whisky and nicotine. Because he follows a softer light from the landing, down the hallway, and that is where he sees it.

There she is now.

In a room encased in rose-tinted light.

Calm, like he has never seen her.

She is freshly washed and freshly dressed, and still, for once. Ashy tufts of hair are wispy in their cleanliness. Her eyelids are gently closed. Delicate eyelashes dust skin rosy with sleep. Lips he is so used to seeing stretched wide and accompanied by unimaginable din, are slack and loosely parted, sandwiched between full and - for once - well-fed cheeks. She lies on her front. Limbs, no longer flailing or grabbing, are limp as if somehow, for her, the necessity to cling was gone, the fear and the uncertainty and the inconsistency had dissipated in his absence, and her struggle was over. She lies, relieved, atop a liferaft. She floats, he sees, unburdened and unencumbered.

It was as if here, in this moment, she knew she was loved, at last. How fitting, he thinks.

Because his baby daughter lies with her head on the breast of her aunt.

The latter has not spotted him yet; on the landing, from her position on the nursing chair. A heavy head lolled against the headrest, she stares blankly through the open blinds into nothing but a darkened window. The baby's head moves in rhythm with her breeze like breaths. A gentle hand cups a miniscule scalp, soft fingertips threading through cotton-soft hair in comfort. Another strokes rhythmically up and down her tiny back. The memory of those same hands on him feels curiously like an anchor.

The sight could crush him. The collision of two different lifetimes. The discomfort and pain of jarring circumstance; a chance, and then another chance, feels like bone against bone in the worst possible way. And yet. And yet if he were to squint. If he were to restrict his vision to the doorframe of pink coloured light and the room held within it - almost unrecognisable in its tidiness - the people cocooned there, the two of them; he can see a circumstance of his own making, it had manifested only ever as the briefest of twinkles in his eye and now it stung until it almost drew tears.

It could have been them. This could have been theirs.

"The magic Mason touch extends beyond twelve to eighteen year olds, it seems."

Perhaps the days of humour between them were long since gone. That gentler, sunnier time had now been firmly wedged between tension, a dark night encounter and the ruins of a love that could have, should have, endured.

She does not smile. Instead he watches as shock becomes confusion, which eventually becomes hostility. He slurs a feeble response.

"I've missed you, that's all."

She cradles the baby as she gingerly stands. She is thin, he notices, and questions who must be ensuring that she eats, now that he is gone. His eyes drink her in as if she were another glass of whisky; welcomed but perhaps uncalled for. His eyes glaze at the new inches of hair that shine past her shoulders, and the new transparency of her skin, the way it stretches over the bones of her face and hollows out at her cheeks. He sees the way her clothes hang from her frame and her jaw clenches, spoiling for a fight, reminding him of the last time he was this drunk on Haig. The obvious spills from his drunken lips like vomit and she wrinkles her nose in distaste.

"You're unhappy."

"Amanda is."

It is hard to imagine it now. When he is thinking of the soft, tired smile as the only thing she wore, that night in his bed. When it was just them. The taste of whisky on her lips finally overpowered by the taste of him.

"What?"

"You're daughter."

A flurry of blinks and his eyes are drawn to the infant in her arms. Her namesake was a ghost now, of course. A ghost much like the pale and faded woman holding her. Yet it had felt right that she should be named after her mother's sister, who had - as only a child herself - worked in the worst way to free them, and then had given him every second chance he had ever wanted, with one of his children.

He thinks, without daring to breathe, that she is about to do it again.

"She was wet."

The way she delivers these words now; firmly and without feeling shakes him so he almost forgets to listen to their meaning, instead staring back at her, blankly.

"She was wet and dirty and hungry. That is why she was crying."

Still, silence. He cocks his head, jaw slack.

"She was neglected, Eddie. Do you understand?"

He cannot deny the change in the child, the glow that seems to elicit from her now. It were as if the ghostly woman before him had given up her soul to let this baby sleep.

"Melissa isn't looking after her. She isn't coping."

The next words are spat, with a hint of feeling. A hint of envy.

"But then I guess you know that."

She looks at him now as his daughter has looked at him since the day she was born. It is the same wrinkled nose, piercing eyes, flared nostrils. He thinks of the blonde, asleep downstairs, and of the precarious infatuation they have tried to rebuild and he knows there is nothing he can say to soothe the burn it will create within her. She looks now as if her innards are blistering.

"I'm sorry, Rachel."

"So am I…"

He feels the weight of the baby in his arms, and then a faint familiar scent as her aunt drifts away from them both, descends the stairs and quietly closes the front door behind her, leaving her last words echoing in his head.

"Please love her, Eddie. Or else it was all for nothing."

He wakes the next morning in the nursery. Sunlight streaming in, a sleeping child curled on his chest and without a hint of a hangover. He allows his eyelids to remain heavy and for a vulnerable moment, he thinks of Rachel.

Had he not known her so well, had he not felt her words on the day he left her; each one like a stabbing pain to his lungs, he would have mused that perhaps last night was more than just a lucid and cogent dream, brought on by sleep deprivation and an ever-stinging heart. Her voice echoes in his head like a calling into the sea, while his daughter in her silence reminds him the dangers of drifting.

He looks down at the little face against his shirt and presses his lips to her soft forehead, somehow hoping that she and Rachel would have some line of connection; kindred spirits born decades apart, and perhaps Rachel would feel his touch of a morning as she woke.

Perhaps he would only ever see her now in dreams. And perhaps that was for the best.

And yet he cannot help feeling that if her voice were to call to them - either of them - from the depths of an unknown wave, he would unquestionably allow them to sink.