Page 13 of The Sirens

12

LUCY

WEDNESDAY, 13 FEbrUARY 2019

Lucy’s chest feels tight. Around her, the room seems to expand and contract. Her pulse drums in her ears, keeping time with the roar and crash of the waves outside.

She resists the urge to throw the diary across the room, as if that will somehow obliterate what she has read. Is Jess – for, unthinkable as it is, this is the only explanation that would make sense – not their father’s daughter?

But she just can’t imagine her mother having an affair. Her parents adore each other, to a degree that Lucy finds embarrassing. They’re old now, older than her friends’ parents – Lucy, a surprise baby, arrived in their early forties – and yet she still sometimes walks in on them canoodling in the kitchen.

She remembers going to get a glass of water one night when she was in high school, finding them swaying gently to a song on the radio, spot-lit by the yellow moon coming through the window. For a moment, before they saw Lucy standing there, they’d looked like a couple from an old film. They’d burst apart, transforming into her greying, middle-aged parents again, but Lucy had felt a wistful ache as she padded back to her room. Even before what happened with Ben, she couldn’t imagine someone loving her like that, wanting to hold her like that. Not with how she looks underneath her clothes.

That’s the other thing.

I could feel the moisture doing its work already: worming its way into my skin, cracking into a hundred silver rivers.

Lucy knows that feeling. It’s as familiar to her as the rise and fall of her chest. Jess has described the symptoms of aquagenic urticaria.

Confusion swirls through her.

She thinks of the clothes Jess favours – the high necklines, the billowing sleeves. The warren of tights and stockings at the bottom of her sister’s cupboard. She had known, on some level, that Jess used clothes as a sort of cloak, a way of separating herself from the rest of the world. But she had always thought her sister swathed her body in fabric to tell people that she was different, that they should stay away.

But now Lucy sees that she was wrong. Jess hadn’t been advertising her difference. She’d been hiding it, even from her own sister.

She thinks back to that weekend in Sydney. All those hours spent together, just the two of them. Had it not occurred to Jess to take Lucy’s hand in hers, to tell her that she understood? To provide some sort of advice, some comfort?

On the contrary, she must have gone out of her way to conceal it.

Lucy looks down at her own body. Her legs are folded in the lotus position, and there’s a lilac sheen spreading from behind her knees, grazing her inner thighs. She learned to set aside vanity a long time ago; learned that too much fabric caused sweating, which made things much, much worse. She dresses in linen and light cotton religiously, wears shorts at every opportunity, just like her parents always told her to.

Her mother’s voice echoes.

No clingy material, Goose, and whatever you do, don’t scratch. Your skin could get infected, and that might make you very sick, sweetheart.

In the trade-off between vanity and health, she had chosen health. It wasn’t acceptance, not really. She had just learned to detach from her body, to see it as merely a tool, the implement of her mind.

It seems like that wasn’t so easy for Jess.

Is that why no one has ever mentioned this crucial fact to her? Because of Jess’s pride, her vanity?

Hot fury blooms in her chest. Lucy had always believed she was the only one in their family with aquagenic urticaria. The invalid, the freak.

She’d felt such shame, even as a small child, when her mother rubbed steroid cream into her scabbed arms and legs, when her father worried about how to cool her down on a hot day, or what to do if it rained. And this whole time, they’d been through it all before, with Jess.

Why had they all lied?

She thinks of the timing of the diary entry: 1998. Over a year before she was born.

If her mother did have an affair, could it have continued right up until Lucy’s birth? Would that explain why she and Jess both have aquagenic urticaria , while neither of their parents do?

But no. She can’t countenance that; she won’t.

She thinks of the baby pictures she’s seen, the ones her parents keep in the faded black album in their bedroom. Lucy, pink-faced in her father’s arms.

Even as a new-born, the resemblance had been clear. Something about the nose, the mouth. And the ears. Of course, the ears! Max’s observation was right: Lucy, Jess and their father all have a slight but distinctive peak to their ear shape. It’s not possible that he isn’t their dad. It’s just not.

Googling it, she sees that there’s considerable disagreement on whether or not the ability to roll one’s tongue is a genetic trait: several articles from respected science journals even describe the theory as ‘debunked’.

She takes a deep, shuddering breath. OK. It’s OK.

Jess was wrong.

She picks up the diary and rereads the entry. Now that her heart has slowed, she can see that, beneath the sophisticated prose, there’s a sort of adolescent hysteria to her sister’s words. A paranoia. Born, perhaps, of sleep deprivation, of the feeling that her body was no longer under her control.

A feeling Lucy understands all too well.

At least she has further evidence that Jess sleepwalks – or that she used to, at any rate.

The warmth of a hand in mine, a cold wind on my skin. A reflected face that wasn’t my own.

Was she dreaming about the Naiad even then? Twenty years before she came to live at Comber Bay? She traces her sister’s handwriting, as if there’s some hidden meaning to be derived from the faded loops and curls of her pen.

There’s something else about the diary entry that disturbs her, niggling at her brain.

Jess’s art teacher, who’d offered to give her extra lessons. Mr Hennessey. The name is familiar somehow – and then she remembers. The library book she’d found while cleaning up her sister’s dining table – the one about surrealism – had last been checked out by someone called C. Hennessey. He must have given it to Jess when she was at school. Why has she kept it all this time?

Lucy frowns. Extra lessons and a book. She supposes that’s not inherently inappropriate. But she still doesn’t like it.