Like Water Like Sea, page 1
From the same author:
this is not about sadness
Also By Mail
breach
When We Speak of Nothing
LIKE WATER LIKE SEA
Olumide Popoola
Abuja – London
CONTENTS
All Water Goes Somewhere
1. The Swimmer
2. The Dancers
3. The Swimmer
4. The Dancers
5. The Swimmer
6. The Dancers
7. The Swimmer
8. The Swimmer
9. The Dancers
10. The Swimmer
11. The Dancers
12. The Swimmer
13. The Dancers
14. The Swimmer
15. The Dancers
16. The Swimmer
17. The Dancers
18. The Swimmer
19. The Climber
20. The Swimmer
21. The Dancers
22. The Swimmer
23. The Dancers
24. The Swimmer
25. The Climber
26. The Dancer
27. The Swimmer
Like Water Like Sea
1. The Swimmer
2. The Swimmer
3. The Swimmer
4. The Swimmer
5. The Climber
6. The Swimmer
7. The Swimmer
8. The Climber
9. The Swimmer
10. The Climber
11. The Swimmer
12. The Swimmer
Everything Makes Mud, Even The Dirt
This
Or this
Probably, most likely, this
Acknowledgements
Support Like Water Like Sea
For Gabrielle, for holding space so tenderly and fierce.
For Natalie, for showing what is possible.
Dive into Nia’s world with a playlist carefully curated by the author.
These songs of womanhood, self-discovery, resilience, liberation, and the enduring power of love form the perfect backdrop for Nia’s journey through grief, love, and life in London.
Scan and listen on Spotify now!
Sometimes we must hold tight to steady ourselves amid the violent tumult of this world—and sometimes we must let go to unmoor ourselves from the stifling order imposed on this world.
– La Marr Jurelle Bruce 1
Sometimes we swim, sometimes we float, other times we are drowning. It’s not always easy to know which is which.
All Water Goes Somewhere
1.
The Swimmer
Looking up from underneath, it made the sun blurry. The water swishing against my face, a thin layer, not enough to enter my nostrils. I was looking for her. I wanted to know what it was like, to be drowning, losing your breathing to suffocation.
Of course, I didn’t last. I didn’t have enough drive to do it, didn’t have enough reasons. You would have to be invested in the idea, digging deep for this to be your final answer. Nothing like that was on my mind. I wasn’t feeling despair. Not in that way. It is hard to take your own life. I think it is against your own body. Such an effort, incredible. I knew that before I jumped into the River Lea with my clothes on. You had to orchestrate the whole thing and pay attention to the variables.
The only thing I had done was leave Mum’s after the not-so-unusual but still weird morning. For some reason I went straight to Hackney thinking, let’s see this thing, drowning.
Mum was stable as we both called it but on the unstable side of that. She had been rummaging through a big cardboard box packed tight with clothes. I thought she was looking for something that belonged to Johari. It was ten years this year. I thought she was reminiscing, going to tell me a story I did or did not know about my dead sister. Instead, she brought out a long cotton skirt. Its pattern pulled me in briefly, blue and pink and red and green. Vertical and horizontal stripes. Flowers and swirls. It looked like something my mother would love. Something she had worn on a trip to Palestine in a completely different lifetime when she really worked not just as a fundraiser but also as a witness, as she said. I would have loved to have known the story of the skirt. The story of the trip, the stuff Mum had been doing when she included really in the telling, but her voice already had that edge to it. I could sense that tone even in the tiniest whisper and knew exactly where she was on the spectrum of a manic episode. It was the same with hospital admissions. I would dream she would die and she would be admitted, without fail, soon after that. Sectioned mostly but sometimes she went of her own accord.
The person who had died was Johari. I hadn’t dreamt about her.
A couple of morning joggers slowed down when they saw me. I looked up, ready to defend myself. They looked like one of those couples who shared their hobbies and found that it made their bond stronger.
It was still too early for most people; Mum and I had found ourselves in the kitchen at 4am. She had woken early and I had not yet slept after leaving Temi in the club. I left two hours later. It couldn’t be late enough for morning activities, I thought. Not on a Sunday morning.
‘Do you need some help?’ The woman of the pair asked.
So much, I thought. But nothing you can sort out for me.
‘I’m OK,’ I replied instead. ‘Just cooling off my high.’
It wasn’t truthful but then I hadn’t said drugs. My eyes hadn’t felt strained or hot or inflamed but the cool water was certainly soothing my eyelids. I was telling some version of the truth. It was promising, nice, the way the early sun was filtered by moving water before it reached my eyes, tiny leaves covering the surface that would slap against the concrete when a barge laboured through the water in the daytime. My long sleeve got covered in moss green. So cooling, the green, the colour.
Temi had talked about someone we knew who had rearranged someone else’s living room.
‘You get it, the woman went out to get some beers and came back to all the lamps rearranged, cushions moved about, armchair in a different spot, papers and books on a shelf instead of the table. All in the space of fifteen minutes. It was a completely different room.’
I looked at her in an ‘and what’ way.
I said, ‘And what?’
‘My friend lost it. She didn’t know how to handle it.’
I had gotten tired, very tired at that moment.
‘Let’s go to the other place,’ Temi had said.
I followed because that’s what I do. I follow Temi and let her let me touch her, only to not hear from her for the following two weeks. And then we find ourselves in an all-nighter that lasts from Thursday evening until Monday morning if I can handle it. Lately, I couldn’t always make it through. Here I was on a Sunday morning, sober, alone, in the river without doing anything, just lying on my back, the water holding me.
The joggers were still looking at me.
‘Really. All okay here. I know it looks weird.’
I lifted my head and showed them my perfectly sound-of-mind face. I had issues, like everyone, but nothing that required institutional enforcement. At least I didn’t think so. I waved and laughed.
‘You wouldn’t believe my night or morning. Honestly, I’m just cooling off.’
‘Oh, okay then.’
They had been spot-running through the whole exchange, one foot touching the ground, the other one lifted, arms moving along, held up close to the torso. I was relieved their outfits didn’t match.
‘We’ll be back this side in half an hour. If…’
‘I won’t be here, don’t worry.’
I hoped not.
That skirt. Mum had waved it around, then draped it over her head, the fabric falling over her shoulders.
‘Remember you used to do that, pretend your hair was moving when it was short.’
It was 5.30am by then.
‘Mum, I was probably three or four.’
‘Yes,’ she’d replied. ‘My skirts were much too long.’
She was laughing in that over-the-top way that you only recognise when you have a parent with serious bipolar. The shrillness that caught people’s attention but they couldn’t quite place. The way it seemed to threaten an unspoken balance. The turned-up-too-high volume, the eyes with something in them that I could never explain.
She pulled the chair close to the table. Inside I went oh-oh.
Two years ago, she had climbed the chair, then the kitchen table, had reached for the plant pots she had on the sill under the kitchen window, had picked up the mint and had thrown it against the opposite wall. Then the basil and the thyme, the heaviest, and the rosemary. I had been at hers because of another club night close to her flat. Not yet with Temi, but with a bunch of friends. A vase with dead flowers had followed. When I’d shouted, ‘Why?’ from the kitchen door, Mum said she was repotting. It was spring.
She had gone on to throw many more things that were above hip level until the neighbours below called the police. It wasn’t that bad, a little loud, but they were always looking for a reason since the day the husband had helped Mum out of the bathtub naked. She had left the flat door open and he had come back from the terrace above, where he had his secret smokes, and seen the light on at 2am. Mum had fallen asleep in the bathtub. They had it in for us since then. When the police came, we asked why she had to be sectioned for throwing a couple of things around in her own flat. But the officer hadn’t
Here we were two years later, another spring and a serious anniversary. I was bracing myself. I needed cooling down, something to keep me mellow.
She didn’t climb the table.
I climbed down the river bank.
Mum had taken the skirt down and sat at the table.
‘We should talk.’
There wasn’t anything I feared more than Mum’s talks. They could be like the repotting. Anything could land on you; anything was up for being dismantled and thrown my way. Things I wasn’t ready to hear, details I couldn’t stomach. I left.
The long sleeves were pulling downward, so were my sweatpants, and the shoes. I had wanted to take them off, my trainers, to spare them from getting dirty. Then I had remembered that here too, anything could come your way; tampons and pads from the sewage that the local water plant released into the river, the regular plastic waste from people too lazy to look for a bin. Fully clothed seemed like the best option, sensible protection for this experiment. I moved my hands, back and forth, the fingers spread a little. The water was too cold to stay for much longer, my lips had started to shiver. I was worried about the joggers. What they would do if I was still here when they got back?
Temi had been rushing us, taking shortcuts I didn’t know, through back streets that smelled.
‘Maybe it was the light.’ There was no telling if she was listening. ‘It could have been the light affecting her, that’s why she moved the lamps. It happens with mania, light sensitivity.’
I stumbled behind her. Her Doc Martens were echoing back from the arches we were under. Her long shirt was hanging over her ripped shorts, moving around her legs where I wanted my hands to be. She stopped suddenly and pulled me close.
‘It’s not that I don’t like you. I like you a lot.’
Inside I was ducking. Were there pots coming my way?
She kissed me and I sucked on her lips until she pulled back.
‘It’s just, you don’t talk. You’re not really...here. You just disappear and hang on. Metaphorically.’
Her eyes fixed on me as she walked backwards, her hands waving
me to follow her. I did.
We felt like grandparents once we were inside the club. Most people were ten years younger but the music was hot. We danced and kissed some more and she whispered something in my ear that I couldn’t hear. When she went to the toilet I ran out and took the bus to Mum’s. My head leaned against the window. I texted Temi, making up an emergency I had to attend to. I would catch her next time. It was the first time I had left before her. It was also the first time Temi had talked to me like that. I had complained about her non-committed ways. I had told my friends about her infrequent libido, if that was what it was, of her having a string of lovers, of her not knowing how to be close. She was stringing me along, she wasn’t serious, she wasn’t out. My friends and I had gone over it again and again, but to Temi I had only ever said, ‘Sure, I’m free, let’s go out.’
Before the skirt, Mum had asked what was wrong. How things were going with that woman. And that she hadn’t expected me that night.
There was water everywhere. The river was full of it.
I climbed back onto the bank and sat on the bench with my knees close to my body, arms wrapped around my shins. It was dripping from everywhere, the water melting into the wood. I could see the joggers coming up. They were smiling when they saw me sit on solid ground.
‘I should probably get home, inside.’
‘Probably.’
They were no longer running but had come to a full stop. The guy took my hand and pulled me off the bench. The woman flanked me on the other side. She picked up my phone, my Oyster card and the keys I had left on the grass before I stepped into the water.
‘It might even be a warm day today.’
‘Yeah, looks like it,’ I replied.
We walked and my trainers made a slurping sound.
‘How was the water,’ she asked. ‘Cold?’
I nodded. We passed the stairs leading up to the bus stop. I didn’t say anything. It felt right, the walking.
2.
The Dancers
Everyone is fragile at thirteen. They were no exception. Two teenagers from different parts of Hackney, finding each other in the same neighbourhood. Their friendship had an abrupt start, sudden and weird. Melvin had just moved into a three-bedroom flat with his parents and brother Ben. Ben was ten years older and not interested in helping Melvin settle into a new area, school, or anything really. He had returned from university because he didn’t feel like finishing the degree in computer science he had started. He was deferring for as long as he could. Most days Ben spent at his girlfriend’s house. Melvin was lonely. The first days at the new school had turned out to be okay but he didn’t have anyone to spend the afternoons with. He was waiting for an opportunity, something to pull him into this new place. He would grab the chance, any chance, as soon as it presented itself.
Only a couple of days into his second week at the new school it came, an opportunity. It came as Johari. Melvin was at the local park, which he had seen from the window of their new flat. There was a lot going on. A small workout area with green-painted outdoor gym equipment. Playgrounds for younger and older kids. The designated bench for those who wanted to enjoy cheap wine and cider at any time of the day. He didn’t quite know where to walk to and stood on a patch of grass to orient himself.
‘Are you new?’
The girl in front of him had long braids that fell out under a baseball cap. Her jeans were very low. Melvin nodded. He looked at her shoulder where her jumper had slid off.
‘Are you doing anything right now?’ she continued.
He shook his head.
Her eyes were hard to make out as the sun was shining on her face. She said, ‘Come,’ and started to walk, not checking whether Melvin would follow. ‘Johari, by the way,’ she continued with the briefest nod backwards as if she was throwing her name over her exposed shoulder. He could catch it if he felt like it. Or leave it. His choice.
‘Melvin,’ he replied, skipping a couple of paces to catch up with her. They stopped when she had led them to a small area behind bushes and trees.
Melvin wondered what they would be doing but before he could speculate Johari kicked off her shoes, stood still on the grass and lifted her head. A melody carried across from nearby.
‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘If you want to.’
She started to move her arms in the air, parallel to each other, fingers pointing upwards. Melvin stumbled behind her as she moved with the melody. There were so many steps he got dizzy. He stopped.
She said again, ‘Follow me, just do what I do.’
Melvin replied, ‘That’s okay, you go ahead,’ but she looked at him, paused for a moment, shook her head, and pulled him back behind her. He tried his best to mimic her movements. After the first song, there was a break. Johari pointed behind the small trees to the brick building.
‘They’re having dance classes there. I’m having them out here.’
‘And you know the steps?’ Melvin asked.
She laughed. It was the first time he heard Johari laugh. It started as a giggle, warm and low. Then she opened her mouth and the volume picked up until her head went back in sync with the sound and he could hear the laughter coming from her belly. It ended in a reversal, the giggle leaving with a loud exhale.
‘I have no clue what they do there but I like the music,’ she said, her belly still moving with amusement.
The steps were all hers.
It wasn’t a thing, being dancers. They never talked about the dancing. It was stress release. It was dealing with life and its fluctuations. Melvin knew this, even at thirteen. It was something that was useful, perhaps needed even, and on that first day they became friends. No elaborate sensing each other out, no questions about shared tastes. A simple ‘Come’ thrown behind her, and it was sealed. The right invitation at the right time. The right person at the right spot to invite on a random day. That is how depth announced itself. In the moments one could easily miss.
