Wounded Beast (Gypsy Heroes)

I gazed down at her face. It was animated in a way it had not been since I’d found her floating face down. I became terrified.

‘Vivien, look at me,’ I shouted, but she was so entranced by the vision in front of her that she refused to turn in my direction. I grabbed her chin and turned her face toward me. Her eyes were glassy and empty. They seemed unable to focus on me. She made a small, incoherent sound of displeasure or irritation.

‘The lights. I want to see the lights,’ she mumbled pleadingly.

I released her chin and she turned away immediately to gaze with fascination at the lights only she could see. I looked around desperately at the empty blackness stretching out in all directions around us. And I prayed. And I prayed.

It felt like we had been in the water forever.

My legs were getting tired of treading water, and I could see that she had given up the desire to fight the cold. Not even the lights could interest her anymore. Her eyes were closing. Her body, having imposed increasingly drastic measures to keep functioning, was finally starting to shut down. Her heartbeat was becoming weaker and weaker. If I didn’t do something soon it would stop completely. Then only her brain would be alive. And then even that would die. I had to pull her out of her slump.

I shook her and she opened her eyes weakly.

‘Listen,’ I said with fake excitement. ‘Jake’s coming. I can hear the engine of his boat.’

She seemed to listen. ‘I don’t hear it,’ she mumbled groggily.

‘There’s too much water in your ears,’ I lied.

She smiled weakly, only half-conscious. ‘I’m so happy. He can take me back to my mother,’ she said, and I smiled back, but my smile became a grimace of horror when her heart stopped and she died from the sheer relief of thinking that she had been rescued.

I couldn’t believe it.

I’d heard of people dying from the relief of thinking they’d been rescued, but I had never thought that it would happen to her. I held her body tightly against mine. It was impossible that she was gone. I couldn’t comprehend that something as alive as she could ever succumb to something as ordinary as death. Or that as fierce and possessive as my love was, I couldn’t keep her. I had held on so tightly, with every ounce of my being, and yet she had slipped away, like sand from a clenched fist.

So I shook her limp body. I rubbed her arms and legs. I gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but Vivien was gone. The pain and horror of losing her was unbearable. Words couldn’t enter into my pain. I began to scream. I screamed and screamed like a madman. I cursed, I swore, I sobbed until no sounds would come out of my mouth.

I kissed her cold, blue lips.

‘Oh, Vivien!’

In my head she was wearing a red rose in her hair and whispering, ‘You’re my gypsy hero. You’ll always be my gypsy hero.’

‘Oh, Vivien!’

Once there was a way to get back home again…

—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjOl0fG72ZE

TWENTY-TWO

‘When we pulled their waterlogged bodies out of the water, Dom was nearly as blue as Vivien. He never uttered a single sound, not pain, not grief, not relief. His fingers were so tightly clenched around her corpse it was ages before we could prize them away from her cold flesh. He stared vacantly into the distance. When I called him, he turned slowly and looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. As if we were not flesh and blood.’

Jake stops speaking, and I see him shudder with the terrible memory.

‘I brought him to my house and put him in my bed. He slept for three hours. Then came the profuse diarrhea brought on by the seawater he’d ingested, and the uncontrollable muscle tremors. He became very ill, and Shane and I took care of him. He even missed her funeral. They buried her in her wedding dress, apparently in accordance with her wishes. She had told her mother that if she should die before her wedding she was to be buried in her dress.’

As Jake speaks, a numbing cold is creeping into my body, and I hug myself and force myself to listen to his words.

‘Dom was so ill that for a while we even thought he was going to die. But he didn’t. His body grew stronger, even if his head was totally fucked. For weeks he had such severe nightmares that he would move bedroom furniture around in his sleep and wake up screaming on the floor. He was like a madman. He blamed himself. He couldn’t look at a picture of her with

out getting into an uncontrollable rage. I gathered up all the photos of her and hid them.

‘Then one day I came back and he was making himself an omelet. “Want one?” he asked, and I knew it was going to be all right. We ate together and he thanked me for everything I’d done. Then he left.’

Jake looks at me with somber, sad eyes. ‘Ever since then there has been no other woman in his life. One-night stands, casual flings. No woman, no matter how hard they tried, and believe me when I tell you a lot tried, and very hard too, could get close to him. Until you.’

Jake pauses and takes a sip of whiskey while watching me intently from above the rim of his glass.