The First Cut

7 Martha

A loud shrieking woke Martha at four o’clock in the morning. She turned over in bed and frowned as she looked at the luminous dial of her watch. The row went on. It sounded very close. Finally, she realized it was the seagulls. They must have found a shoal of fish, or perhaps a cat had spilled the dustbin at the back of one of the fish bars and they had zoomed in on that. It was a terrible noise: the sound of raw hunger and greed. She pictured the gulls ripping dead fish apart, blank white faces speckled with blood.

She sighed and turned over again, pulling the sheets up around her ears. The gulls had woken her from a dream. Maybe she could get back to it. All her dreams were good these days-Technicolor jaunts of indescribable beauty, full of ecstasy and excitement, visits to alien worlds, flying easily through space and time.

They hadn’t always been like that. For a long time she had suffered from terrifying nightmares, dreams of blood and shadows, and then for a while she hadn’t seemed to dream at all. The good dreams only started when the dark cloud in her mind disappeared. At least, she had always thought of it as a cloud, or perhaps a bubble. It was opaque, and whichever way she looked at it, it always deflected the light so that she couldn’t see inside. She knew it was filled with all her agony and anger, yet it refused her entry.

For so long she had walked around on the edge because of that cloud inside her. Always on the verge of violence, despair or madness. But then one day, when she found the right perspective, she saw inside and the darkness dispersed like a monster that vanishes when you discover its true name.

The seagulls were still wailing over their early breakfast when Martha drifted off to sleep again and dreamed about her secret lake. Its waters flowed from the fountain of youth, clear and sparkling in the sun that never stopped shining, and she had to swim through narrow coral caverns to get to it. Only she knew about the lake. Only she could swim so effortlessly so far without the need for breath. And as she swam, the sharp, pinkish coral cut thin red lines across her breasts, stomach and thighs.