Carmella stole out of the house before dawn, tiptoeing through it as if it wasn’t hers. Matt, whom she as a forty-seven-year-old woman hated to call her boyfriend but did anyway, was asleep upstairs. She pulled out a rucksack that had lain in wait for months from the cupboard under the stairs and shoved in a couple of water bottles she grabbed from the freezer.

She walked outside. As she descended the steps, she looked at their decay: the wooden sleepers would break soon, having been eaten away by the elements long before she bought this place. She turned and faced the house and felt at a remove from it. She squinted at it to see if she could catch it in a different light that might make a difference, but nothing changed.

She walked down the country road. She remembered so desperately wanting this: the quiet, the animals staring at you puzzled, being dwarfed by a flood of trees, neighbours with well-to-do houses, opulent in their size – a tradeoff for where they were, she could see now. She knew all the reasons why she had left Dublin but none of them seemed to merit this unwavering lane, fenced in by roadside shrubbery designed to keep the sheep in. She headed east – she tutted, does the road even have a name, it’s just a patch of grass and dirt– towards a lake.

It was mild but not cold, so after staring at the lake’s unmoving surface she argued why not, why shouldn’t I? She stripped to her underwear – she wasn’t a monster – and got in. It was more of a pond, really. She’d expected to feel things wriggle under the surface but there was nothing there. All she could feel were her feet sink into the mud at the bottom like a vice. The water didn’t even come up to her waist.

Matt didn’t love her, but that was fine. She wasn’t even sure if she liked him. They probably should’ve kept things more casual but one evening he asked her if she’d go out with him, like a nervous teenager, and she didn’t see any reason not to. He was a good bit younger and seemed to still be ruled by his youth. He could be kind, sure, but he was too concerned with others’ opinions of him. Each joke thrown out to gauge the temperature of the room. Wanting so hard to be liked but being unaware that he often wasn’t very likeable. He fucked well but she was finding that meant less and less to her, especially since he expected her to listen to the things he said. He had a neediness that bordered on vindictiveness, something that he’d slip into when she’d decline his kind offers to stay over. Last night he hadn’t wanted to get a taxi back – purely because he didn’t want to pay, and he knew if he stayed, that like a fool she’d drive him back in the morning - to the nearby town which he pretended was the equivalent of Dublin or Cork. He acted like a city boy but he never was one and deep down, in a very quiet part of him, he knew just how uncool he was and how this world wasn’t built for him.

She thrust her hands under the surface, into the mud, and grasped what she could. She smeared it on her bare arms. It was a day spa, it was luxury. There was a house across a small field and for a moment, she thought her neighbour Cynthia was staring at her, but she remembered that it was empty, on sale for a price her and her dull husband would never get, but they’d wait – they had already left and could afford to. She hated that she knew so much about this village. 

***

Matt woke. He turned over, saw her side was empty and called out. He shook his head, he shouldn’t have bothered, she never stayed anyway, unable to sleep in, unwilling to sleep beside him for longer than she had to. Carmella was always so over everything. It was exhausting and never seemed to have a legitimate reason. Everything was just contemptible and keeping the world at arm’s length just so you can slap it around gets old. He needed to get home – he only had the weekends to finish his apartment. He was doing it up so he could sell it and leave all this behind. She’d lived in Dublin for years and like all Dubliners assumed he wanted to go live there, but he had set his sights higher and told her so. She took it as an insult or seemed to since she refused to elaborate. So it wasn’t until after he’d gotten up, showered, eaten and come back to get his jacket that he saw she’d left a note. Gone for a hike, it read.

He knew that they weren’t good together but there weren’t any other options around. Boredom can blind you to a lot of facts. Sure, the sex was okay, and not much beyond that, but as for the rest of it, he found he’d rather be alone and back at the apartment he’d bought before the recession - and was forced to live in through it - that was now finally worth something. He didn’t want to move to another village, or a city. He wanted to be surrounded by a language he didn’t speak, a culture he didn’t understand. He wanted to become someone else, slowly by osmosis. He wanted a country to seep into him in the way Ireland never had.

He went back downstairs and checked the pantry. The bread was gone. He knew she’d gone to Moran’s Lake to feed the ducks again. Not that there were any, but sometimes birds or small animals passed and took pity on her offerings. He drove the short distance, not even considering to walk, and was confronted by the sight of her in the middle of the lake, covered in mud.

***

For him to see her like this galled her. She flushed, hot with embarrassment, but knew there was little she could do. He wouldn’t understand. She was not sure if she did. Pressed for an explanation, sometimes, she thought, you do things to see where they lead.

He wasn’t surprised to see her caked in mud. And that lack of surprise became more interesting to him than the sight of her. There was a desperation in her, like a rickety rollercoaster at the fair that you knew had claimed the lives and limbs of many, but still rode it anyway. He knew that she wasn’t a bad person.

She wondered if she should get out, if she should say something, if she should start flinging mud at him. Instead, she did nothing. Whilst they stared in silence, for what felt like hours, she could see he wasn’t scared of her. She thought that perhaps he should be but appreciated that he wasn’t.

He lowered his eyes and turned away from her and started to strip. When he was down to his underwear, he got into the pond. He made sure to stay at the other edge, as far away from her as possible. It wasn’t about touching her. He didn’t even look at her eyes. What mattered more was the doing, than how it was received.

As he settled in, for a moment she felt stupid, like his tacit assent of her actions was a quiet mocking, but more so because she wasn’t sure why she was here, why she’d gotten into the pond, why she covered herself in mud. It was instinctive. It was a reflex. A reaction to something she couldn’t quite verbalise. She saw him reach down and come up with mud. He started to lather himself up. Not once did he look at her. He was just there with her, however she wanted to interpret it.

She sunk down into the mucky water, resting her arms along the bank of the pond. Not much of her was actually below the waterline but that didn’t matter. She relaxed. He joined her.

They lay there until the midday sun made them sticky. He got out, walked dripping to his car and pulled out a couple of ratty looking towels from his boot.

“They’re for the dog, but I just washed them.”

“Thanks.”

They dried themselves the best they could and he drove her home. He saw her at Keogh’s a month later – the experience had an alien quality to it, like a photograph had been made to move in three dimensions. As she talked, he could see that she was different now, calmer. He was still the same, thinking he was decent, being so sometimes, but largely unaware of his flaws. She saw him but being mid-conversation catching up with friends on her first night out in forever, she just registered that he was there, and nodded hello.

The property alerts she’d set up a month after buying her place, to see how much similar properties got if she decided to sell, pinged a week later. His apartment went up for sale and, making sure he wasn’t there, she went to view it. It was empty. She called out for him anyway. Just to see how it sounded. She laughed. As soon as she left, she deleted his number from her phone.