Open Water, Caleb Nelson [best summer books txt] 📗

waited for both of you to relax. Your hands shook as she handed you her vulnerability, and you struggled to focus the lens on her features. When the contact sheet returns, the grid of pictures resembles a tussle; two people wrestling with how they feel about one another. The face does not lie. How the eyes widen, the skin around the mouth tightening, or, your favourite from the set, the last shot on the roll of film, where you trained the lens in her direction in a moment where her eyes were on you, not the lens, but you, and all guises slipped away with the ease of a gossamer sheet in the wind.

And as the sun set, you whispered secrets and intimacies into the solitude of the now empty sky. She asked you who you ­were –

‘What a question,’ you said.

‘It’s not that I don’t know you, there are just bits and pieces that need filling in.’

You wonder what it means to know someone, and whether it’s possible to do so wholly. You don’t think so. But perhaps in the not knowing comes the knowing, born of an instinctive trust that you both struggle to elucidate or rationalize. It just is.

From south to north, mainline, Underground, emerging only to submerge. You enter a pub, and they direct you down the stairs, towards a ­bunker-­like basement.

‘What are you drinking?’ you say.

‘We are drinking . . . rum and Coke?’

‘Single or double,’ the woman behind the bar asks.

‘Double,’ she says.

The barwoman gazes at us, two giggly fools at ease, and takes comfort in our joy. The measures she pours are healthy, spilling over the limit, and she gives us a nod, a smile, a small acknowledgement. You look around the basement and remember that being seen is no small joy.

‘I’m gonna go to the toilet before they start,’ she says, heading round a corner.

As she leaves there’s a crackle of feedback from the speakers. Your friend Theo takes the stage, his band quickly joining. He announces himself, and this is a different person from the young man you know. This is a person who is more certain, this is a person who is confident in his honesty. The songs are full of nostalgia, which is to say they are full of mourning; one remembers that which came before, often with a fond sadness, a want to return, despite knowing to return to a memory is to morph it, to warp it. Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain intact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.

She joins you halfway through the third song, and has ditched the patterned kimono she was wearing, now stuffed in her bag. A band of black cotton covers her chest, stomach and clean shoulders exposed. You hand her her drink and she leans back into you, the spread of brown skin pressed against your chest, meeting the slither of flesh where you have unbuttoned your shirt one more than usual. One arm snakes around her, your fingers perched on her collarbone. She eases into you further and you’re in a rhythm, hips slinking slow, moving to memories of moments just passed. You are here and you are not. You are on the balcony, you are on the hill, you are in sunshine, you are in darkness, you are in the open air, you are in the basement, you are in perpetual joy, you are eternally sad. Her short black curls tickle your chin as her head winds this way and that. You wonder how long this moment could stretch for, and how much it could contain: you, her, this crowded basement of singles and couples and groups, the Black woman at the bar who sees you both, who you see too, Theo and his band on stage, nostalgia, melancholy, joy, concrete floors, makeshift walls, applause, a night too warm, introductions, cigarette split, eyes narrow, nicotine, one more drink, one more drink, one more ­drink –

And you’re on a sofa in the pub, sticky leather on skin. Nur­sing what will be your last, she sits beside you, ­cross-­legged, your hand resting against the ridges of her spine.

‘That’s not a platonic hand on my back,’ she says.

‘Oh, my bad,’ you say.

‘No, it’s OK. I like it.’

Maybe it’s because you need to make the journey back to ­south-­east London, maybe it’s because you’re both running out of steam. It could also be that, despite interacting with others, this has been largely an experience shared between the two of you, and a new venue might change these conditions, might cause the thing you are both holding onto to end.

‘Honestly,’ you say, just before your friends dive into another basement, a small group of you having walked from Stoke Newington to Dalston. ‘I think we’re done for tonight. Go enjoy yourselves.’

They don’t need to be told. You split away, considering a taxi.

‘Let’s get some food,’ she says to you.

The chicken shop you choose is cosy, yet sterile, the light harsh. They have opened their glass front, which is a set of enormous sliding doors, the night coming in with no filter.

‘What do you want?’ she asks.

‘Wings and chips. Please.’ She smiles, and orders the same, handing over a plastic note. You hold her close, to say thank you, and she lets lips she had painted purple graze your cheek.

‘Do you wanna eat on the way home,’ she says, squirting chilli sauce over her chips, ‘or sit in here?’ She fans herself, batting away the idea as she says it.

‘It’ll be cooler outside. Let’s find a bench or something, I’ll order an Uber when we’re done.’

The place you perch ends up being the cool concrete of someone’s stairs. You point to a building opposite and tell her how, many years ago, a diminutive, ­softly-­spoken man spoke his joy in a basement full of strangers, playing ­long-­forgotten cuts and songs you grew up with. You tell her this