(Image by DWB of Boo safely regarding the sea)

‘Do you know you nearly drowned?’ the stranger asks.

She replies calmy that she hasn’t nearly drown.

‘Do you understand what drowning means?’

‘Yes, you die when you can’t breathe underwater.’

‘Could you tell me how old you are?’

‘Seven in August.’

‘But you didn’t nearly drown?’

‘No.’

‘Because you can breathe underwater?’

She says she doesn’t understand.

‘Can you breathe underwater?’

She shakes her head.

‘You can’t breathe underwater, Mimi?’

She shakes her head again.

‘You can’t breathe underwater, then.’

Muriel pauses the videotape she’s found while clearing out her recently deceased mother’s house. The tape has a label neatly stencilled in blue ink: MIMI’S –– ––. The rest of the label has been scribbled out with a thick black permanent marker so painstakingly that Muriel can’t decipher it beyond guessing that it must be two short words.

Mimi, that’s how her parents used to call her as a child. Then as an adolescent she’d insisted on Muriel, and so Mimi was gone, seemingly forever. But now, over fifty years later, she hears a stranger on a screen calling her Mimi. She knows it’s her as a child the stranger is talking to, but she’s no recollection of that interrogation taking place.

Muriel dislikes the way the stranger is talking to her. She hates the stranger calling her Mimi, as if she were still a child. And she feels the stranger is forcing Mimi’s words and gestures to mean what she doesn’t want them to say, forcing Mimi to say untruths. The stranger had asked, ‘You can’t breathe underwater?’ Mimi had shaken her head. And from her shaking head, the stranger had concluded that she couldn’t breathe underwater. Although Muriel doesn’t know what Mimi had meant by shaking her head, she’s certain Mimi hadn’t meant she couldn’t breathe underwater. The stranger was playing an either-or game with her.

Had she meant, then, that she could breathe underwater? No. Neither nor. But then what? It was so long ago. Seven in August. Muriel can’t remember the stranger at all, nor can she guess what the stranger might have been possibly referring to. She’d nearly drown? When?

Muriel unpauses the tape.

‘Do you remember what happened at the beach?’

‘I go to the beach a lot with Nana and Grandad.’

‘Do you remember what happened the last time you went to the beach with Nana and Grandad?’

Mimi doesn’t answer.

‘You don’t remember?’ The stranger scribbles in a notebook. ‘You don’t remember anything? The lifeguard? The hospital?’

‘I remember the hospital.’

‘And do you know why you were in hospital?’

‘You go to hospital when you’re sick or pregnant, like when my mum was pregnant with me, she was in hospital.’

‘Were you sick in hospital?’

The sound is lost. Muriel watches Mimi and the stranger, their silent movements.

The video is grainy. At times horizontal white streaks and static flashes fizz on the screen. It is a room. Although the colour is faded and everything is unnaturally tinged with green and magenta, Muriel thinks that on the backwall she can make out large reproductions of what could be drawings by Paul Klee, or at any rate childlike drawings that no child could possibly have drawn.

In the middle ground, Mimi and the stranger sit on two comfortable-looking, padded chairs, facing each other, their profiles to the camera. The camera must have been set at quite a distance from them, since the foreground shows a wide stretch of carpeted floor and in the background, part of the sidewalls are visible. Behind them is an office table with a stack of blank sheets of paper and a large pencil cup filled with crayons and colouring pencils.

The audio returns, squealing and dropping, the voices are muffled and distorted, making it hard for Muriel to be sure what’s being said.

She strains her hearing.

‘Do you like the beach, Mimi?’

‘I like the sea.’

‘And the beach?’

‘The beach is just where there’s no sea.’

‘And you don’t like that?’

‘I like the sea.’

‘But not the beach.’

‘The beach is the not sea.’

‘It’s not the sea, you mean.’

PAUSE

The stranger had posed as an open ear, but had goaded Mimi, trying to lead her speech astray. Mimi had said the beach is the not sea. If Mimi didn’t say that the beach is not the sea, it’s because she didn’t mean to say that the beach is not the sea. Why had the stranger rearranged Mimi’s words. Sticklers for syntax are lousy listeners.

Besides, what had Mimi really said? Had she said ‘the not sea’? Or was it ‘the not see’? It could have been ‘the Knot Sea’ … ‘Not see’, as in ‘I did not see it coming’. What did you not see coming, Mimi? I didn’t see the Knot Sea coming. A tangle of words, language all at sea…

‘You can breathe underwater?’ the stranger had asked. A leading question that had led to Mimi not being able to breathe underwater. It doesn’t have to be that way. Muriel replays the video in her mind, doctoring it.

‘Mimi, can you breathe underwater?’

‘Can I breathe underwater?’

‘Did you nearly drown, Mimi?

‘Stranger, can a drop of water nearly drown?’

‘Mimi, are you a drop of water?’

‘Stranger, can a drop of water breathe underwater?’

‘Okay, Mimi…’

As a young child, during her school summer holidays, Mimi would often stay for several weeks with her paternal grandparents, who lived in a coastal town some distance from where she lived. Her parents must have been working – Muriel can’t remember much from that time – and would come to visit her at weekends.

It was a short walk from her grandparents’ house to the beach. Muriel can hardly remember the house, but she remembers being at the beach. It’s as if she’d really lived outdoors on the beach during those summer weeks and her grandparents’ house had only been some historic house open to visitors, which she’d visited a few times, perhaps because her grandparents had a yearly pass.

Mimi’s parents’ house was nowhere near the sea.

Then at some point – she was still a child but older – she stopped going to her grandparents’ house. She didn’t stay with them during the school summer holidays anymore. Her grandparents would come to stay with them instead and they’d mind her in her parents’ house. Nor does she remember ever visiting her grandparents at their house by the sea when she was older.

Could it be true that she’d never again visited her grandparents who lived by the sea? Muriel has never thought about it before. It strikes her as implausible. She tries to remember, but all she finds are those long days as a young child on the beach, and then beach and sea no longer exist.

PLAY

‘Mimi, do you like drawing?’

‘…’

‘Would you like to draw a picture?’

Mimi bends her neck slightly in what is perhaps a nod of guarded assent.

The stranger stands and brings their chair to the far side of the table. Still standing, the stranger gestures to Mimi to please turn her chair towards the table. Mimi stands and tries to turn the chair but seems unable to. The chair is too heavy for Mimi. The stranger comes around the table and turns the chair for her. Mimi sits down, her back to the camera. The stranger doesn’t return to their chair, but begins to pace slowly in the foreground, in and out of the camera’s field of view, walking in front of Mimi over and over again.

The stranger comes back to the table, takes a sheet of paper from the stack and places it in front of Mimi, slides the pencil cup towards her, then goes back to pacing in front of her.

‘Would you like to hear a story? I’m going to tell you a story. Is that okay with you?’

The stranger continues to pace and is silent for sometime.

… … …

‘Once there was a child named Arwina. It was a long time ago, when people had names such as Morwenna, Sethrith, or Arwina. Maybe her parents called her Winnie. Yes, they called her Winnie. So I’ll call her Winnie too. Winnie lived by the sea. One day, as Winnie was playing by the shore… Mimi, would you like to draw this story? If you want to…’

Mimi picks a few crayons. Since she has her back to the camera, it’s hard to tell whether Mimi is drawing. She’s hunched over the table and her right arm is moving a little.

‘So, Winnie was playing alone on the beach. Her parents had told her she could play on the beach alone as long as she didn’t put so much as a toe in the water.’

Mimi seems to be drawing.

‘That day the sea called out to Winnie. The sea spoke so softly that if anyone else had been there with Winnie, they’d have mistaken the sea’s words for the sound of the surf gliding over the sand. But Winnie could hear what the sea was saying. Winnie was hearing words.’

The stranger keeps pacing and looking over Mimi’s shoulder, trying to keep an even step, as if not to alert Mimi to their spying. But every time the stranger is right behind Mimi, they turn their head towards her and can’t help slowing down a little, and then in an effort to cover their tracks, the stranger overcompensates by taking a hurried step or two. This makes the stranger’s gait jerky, like that of a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer, and it’s hard to believe that Mimi wouldn’t see through it.

‘The sea said, “Come on in, Winnie. I’m your friend.” Winnie took two steps in the water. What harm could there be in that? The sea was cold, but that wasn’t bad. But the shore, who had heard the sea’s words too, said, “Winnie, be careful! Don’t listen to the sea. Remember what your parents told you! The sea is only ankle-deep now, but if you keep walking on, it’ll soon be knee-deep and before you know it, it’ll be up to your waist. And then the sea will pull you under and drown you.” But the sea said that that wasn’t true. Mind you, the shore wasn’t a liar, the sea wanted to make clear. No, the shore just didn’t know the real sea. How could the shore know the real sea? All the shore had ever heard were the tall-tales that land people never tire of spinning, fantastical stories of sea monsters, sunken cities and shipwrecks. “Trust me, Winnie”, said the sea. “How could any of that be true? I’m your friend. Come in deeper. Deeper. How can we play together if you don’t ––e – dee–– d––per –––– – – –’

The stranger’s voice breaks up as the image jitters to a stop for an instant and then is lost to static.

Muriel stares at the screen. She’s sure it’s just a glitch and the stranger will be back before it’s too late. Though she distrusts the stranger, she wants to know what happened to Winnie, she wants to know how the story ends. But now the whir of the VCR, which so far Muriel hadn’t noticed, raises quickly to a strained groan that cuts off abruptly. The ensuing silence is conspicuous, insistent, as if the machine had stopped breathing on purpose to force Muriel to make a kneejerk life-saving attempt.

No, Muriel won’t be pushed around.

She looks away from the screen. She’s in charge. She knows that the VCR has never breathed because it was never able to breathe. So it doesn’t need saving now.

Muriel weighs her options calmly.

She knows what to do.

Muriel presses the eject button and grabs the cassette. But the tape is snagged inside the VCR, and as she pulls out the cassette, the tape begins to unspool in a black tangle, and as she tugs softly at the tape, it makes a sound like an offshore wind worrying at a strand of dried-up kelp.

Muriel listens, captivated, as though by the water’s edge.

Dino Alfier