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It is the memory of eels that is causing Carol’s insomnia tonight. It’s 3am and she’s trapped on a train of eels. Locked on a train of lickety-split, slippery-slick remembrance, triggered off by the huge electric eel that so captivated her nephews on their visit to the aquarium today. Not that Electrophorus electricus was really an eel at all, Carol had learned, but a highly-evolved species of knifefish. Nevertheless, it had certainly looked like an eel, lolling around thick-lipped and regally bored in the sterile soup of its impotent power. Whenever the tail twitched, a hot green line had flashed up on a little screen beside the tank, like a madly erratic heartbeat. ‘A discharge of 500 Volts,’ read Carol, ‘is enough to kill a human,’ and her nephews, of an age to be transfixed by anything both dangerous and ugly, had speculated ghoulishly about death by electrocution. The cute tribe of potbellied penguins posturing nearby was no competition for a man-killing knifefish.
Now, however, the boys have been sated with ice-cream and returned reluctantly to parental barracks. Carol lies alone and awake in bed, her thoughts sprawled out in a throbbing green streak across the steady blue hum of the refrigerator. It must be decades since she has had occasion to think about eels: in her mind they are far removed from that exotic beast corralled at the aquarium. Eels are merely fish, fish to be grilled on a moonlit terrace beside a lake in early summer, fish pungently reminiscent of a vacation during which she learned in a single heady day both how to love and how to strip the spine from the smoky flesh of a barbequed eel.
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Carol’s parents, like herself, had been going through one of their more adolescent phases that long-ago summer, although their daughter would scarcely have assessed them thus at the time. Mr. and Mrs. Harris were one of those quietly golden couples who fall in love with each other repeatedly and often - who are mutually obsessed to the point where any children they might produce are merely a fond distraction. Carol is convinced that she and her sister, who arrived an unconventional twelve years later, were both conceived by accident. In adulthood, she envies her parents vividly. Back then, she simply accepted her peripheral status as the natural order of childhood, much in the same way as she accepted the expensive sailing lessons her father chose for her that Italian summer. Carol was a habitually pliant child. She had noticed early on in life that obedience elicited… if not exactly love, then at least the vague warmth of approval. And thus, while her parents passed their days canoodling discretely on the narrow lakeside beaches, Carol found herself wrestled a sailing dingy, diligently if without natural talent, back and forth across the cerulean expanse before them.
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It was during their third and final week at the lake that Carol’s father laid his book face down on his towel and gazed out at the fleet of bright white sails stippling the far horizon. His mind meandered lazily across this idyllic vista to alight, unusually, upon his daughter. ‘Do you know,’ he murmered, nudging his wife softly with a sandy elbow, ‘I think that sailing school was a fine idea. She seems to be enjoying it, doesn’t she? Goes off quite perky-looking every morning? Must be good for her to have some friends her own age, too.’
Carol’s mother marked the page in her own book with a tube of tanning lotion and rolled over languidly to face her husband. (The book was an early Hemingway: she had never understood why other women on summer beaches were forever guzzling soppy romance novels.) ‘Oh absolutely, darling,’ she assured him, ‘it was a fine idea. Most of the other children seem a bit young, mind you, so I don’t know about the making-friends part. Still, she seems quite happy, or as near as I can ever tell, with Carol. In fact… I do wonder if our little girl hasn’t started a bit of crush on that young Robert. You know, darling - the nice-looking boy who works down there as a sailing instructor?’
Mrs. Harris had not, in fact, wondered this at all until she spoke the words. But it suddenly occurred to her that if she was Carol’s age, she might indeed be rather smitten with young Robert. The boy wore tight black Speedos over a deep olive tan, an athlete’s grace and a charming manner of well-raised courtesy. He would be going up to Cambridge in the autumn, he had told her, making small talk one afternoon when she visited the dock to collect her daughter. He rather hoped he might row for the college. Carol’s mother had said how marvelous that sounded. Now, enchanted by the novelty of what she believed to be a maternal insight, she dropped a welter of hints on her unsuspecting daughter during lunch. Carol met them with a gaze of polite confusion over a slice of pinkly-perspiring watermelon and her mother deflated disappointedly. The child could be so odd, she reflected later – so opaque and strangely secretive. One really couldn’t hope to understand her.
Carol, meanwhile, had laid her beach towel at its usual tactful distance from her parents’ impenetrable personal space and was faking an expedient siesta. Her mother could be so odd, she reflected – unpredictable and strangely girlish. One really couldn’t hope to understand her. Nevertheless, Carol was much affected by her mother’s whimsical moods and erratic attempts at kindness; she had always been afflicted by a persistent desire to please her parents. Now, Mrs. Harris apparently thought she should be in love with Robert. Obediently, Carol conjured up what she imagined to be a romantic context (a soft-focus haze borrowed clumsily from television) and placed her sailing tutor experimentally into it. Robert was certainly handsome, she was aware of that much. Aware, too, of the curvy Italian girls with their bright cascades of fire-black hair who hung around at the jetty, eyes down, breasts jutting, throwing birdlike glances up at Robert. In her mind’s eye, Carol mimicked this skillful parody of shyness, tossing a mane of imaginary hair and casting flirtatious eyes out from under it. She allowed them to linger appraisingly on the curious concave muscles which encircled Robert’s waist and plunged obliquely into the black band of his Speedos. She had noticed the same shadows in some of the pictures in the Florence art museum, though her father didn’t look like that in his swimsuit, and she herself didn’t seem to have any muscles there at all.
By now, the lowering sun was turning the lake into a sheet of shiftless silver. Carol explored her feelings scientifically, as if probing at a loose tooth. Robert was beautiful, certainly. His admirers were likewise beautiful. But none of them had much to do with Carol. In fact, if anything, it was the would-be girlfriends who provoked in her a certain troubling frisson. Was it envy? Or desire? Tentatively, she wondered if this meant she might be gay. She would give an awful lot, she thought, to trade her skinny body for the fleshy form of one of those Italian temptresses. They seemed to inhabit a higher species: knifefish, maybe, to Carol’s prosaic eel. Compared to theirs, the thin, pale limbs laid out like chicken sausages on her beach towel looked un-evolved and un-electrified. They held no secrets, harbored none of the subtle shadows cast by female curves. Carol shook them irritably and stood up for one last swim before sunset. She was no longer thinking of Robert or of the musculature that made him resemble a Renaissance nude.
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It is 4am by now. The fridge clicks and modulates its hum from ultramarine to Prussian. In retrospect, Carol would like to blame the accident that occurred the following day on a distracted state of mind from the preceding afternoon. In truth however, she knows that it was just her own nautical ineptitude: her fatal tendency to get distracted by an osprey overhead or a crested grebe in the far distance, allowing an unsecured boom to whip round and club her viciously overboard with a glancing blow to the shoulder.
Her memory records no pain, presumably because raw shock precluded pain. It also fails to record how Robert managed to arrive on the scene almost instantly, though Carol would swear that she flailed around, one-armed, for mere seconds before he was pulling her out again, deftly fastening her empty boat to his own. What she does remember is her own mortification at having made exactly the dumb mistake against which sailing students were constantly cautioned. Robert’s comic impression of a dozy sailor struck by a loose boom never failed to slay the class and he performed it accordingly often. Hearing their scornful laughter, Carol felt her ribs shrink in against her lungs under the heavy, wet shell of her lifejacket.
Robert, however, was neither playing the clown nor laughing at her now. He only wanted to know if she might have concussed herself. Did she feel nauseous or dizzy, he asked, urgently calm, holding her head gently between his hands like an unboiled egg. Robert’s eyes, up close, looked huge and smudged with fear. Trembling and ashamed, Carol glanced away from them, crushing down a sudden surge of tears. For safety, she focused instead on the purpling bruise already blooming on her upper arm: Robert’s hands as he examined it were dark against her skin, all the hairs sun-bleached to an improbable peroxide blonde. And it was his hands, in that tremulous, traumatized moment, which Carol fell in love with. Not their manly appearance but the instinctive tenderness expressed in them, a tenderness so chaste that it now seems almost comical. Yet so intense that every man she ever fell for afterwards would fail her by failing to replicate it.
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Later that day, up at the chalet, Carol played down the whole inglorious drama. Briefly shocked by the luridly bruised arm, her mother applied a bandage but then lost interest before securing it. Her father demanded to know if the sailing school had neglected proper safety training. ‘No!’ cried Carol vehemently, ‘It was my fault, daddy, I was stupid. But it’s nothing serious. Someone… someone rescued me as soon as I fell in,’ she caught herself blushing watermelon-red, ‘and I wasn’t much hurt, anyway. I even sailed the boat back afterwards.’
‘Well that’s my big brave girl,’ approved her father, patting her absently on the unraveling bandage. ‘I think we shall eat out tonight to acknowledge your first-rate bravery. Would you like that, darling?’ ‘Thank you, yes,’ replied Carol before she noticed that he had spoken over head towards her mother, who smiled back indulgently and then, as an afterthought, smiled down at her heroic child as well.
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Carol sighs exhaustedly now in the humming pre-dawn half-light. All this, she thinks, to arrive at that lakeside restaurant with its Proustian barbequed eel.
Reading the menu, her father had suggested this in jest, knowing his daughter to be a conservative, disinterested eater. He had reckoned, however, without the invisible force that had been transforming her internally throughout the afternoon. If he’d been so inclined, he might perhaps have noticed that his daughter seemed even dreamier and more aloof than usual. But Mr. Harris was not so inclined and couldn’t anyway have perceived the thin cushion of helium that Carol currently walked upon. He couldn’t have felt the exquisite prickly newness suffusing her skin, or the radiant stigmata shaped like a man’s two hands pulsing darkly on her bruised left arm. As they’d strolled into town, Carol had fully expected the streetlamps to blaze straight through her, casting dazzling stained-glass shadows over the cobbles. So when her father teased her lightly about what she’d like to eat, he might as well have asked Einstein to balance his checkbook or Picasso, to paint a picket fence. Stooping down from starry heights, Carol said politely that the eel would be lovely, thank you daddy.
Unexpectedly, the eel was lovely, although it paled beside the greater adventure currently fizzing alchemically through her blood. So this was what it felt like! This searing knowledge, this intimate comprehension of what had only yesterday eluded her best effort of imagination. How little it had to do with Robert’s handsomeness; how much with the luminous certainty that he cared about her! Carol shivered, parting blackened skin from juicy flesh with abstracted precision. The candlelit table, the hanging wisteria and the sun-soaked flagstones all sang out in silent celebration of her secret. Even her parents, absorbed in their own private bibulous celebration of one another, were just a lovable irrelevance tonight.
Back in the chalet, Carol shut her bedroom door and lay awake, replaying the morning’s events in stop-motion detail. In a mere few hours’ time she would see him again: she squirmed and hugged herself inside a hot cocoon of cotton sheets. Her skin felt fragile with sudden sophistication and her heart, too vast and vibrant to be safely contained within it. Low-pitched parental voices drifted in through the thin plank wall while outside, cicadas wove their ceaseless web of screaming calm. Carol’s bones buzzed back at them in sympathy. At first, another timbre of rhythmic creaks blended easily into the reassuring tapestry of quietude.
Then all at once, a sound that tore the tapestry: a throaty sob of vivid human pain. Carol stiffened involuntarily. Her reveries derailed themselves as her senses re-attuned to a sharper frequency. The sound repeated itself, growing more drawn out and guttural. It was synchronized with the steady creak of the bed-frame in her parents’ adjoining room.
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Thinking back, Carol marvels at the sheer egotism of her child-self: back then, her parents did not sleep, they were simply awake when she went to bed and awake when she got up the following morning. Certainly, she’d never considered what else they might get up to during the sleep-sealed hours of darkness. Even now, as she listened with growing horror to the noisy obscenity unfolding in the next-door bedroom, Carol formed no clear mental image of it. None of the cold facts of known biology bore any relation to this awful bestial moaning. Nor could she begin to reconcile it with her civilized and civic-minded parents. Hadn’t they taught her that loud and impulsive behaviour of all kinds was frowned on in the grown-up world - a world which valued self-control and unobtrusive manners? Was this what grown-ups all did in filthy secret, under the flimsy sham of public rectitude? Was this what adults did to be in love?
The sobbing rose and blended into a wordless crescendo of weirdly-complicit anguish. Carol cringed, transfixed between her bed-sheets. Clearly she was intruding on some terrifying adult mystery, the mere hearing of which felt sinful. She had no place in this and for once, she did not want one. Nothing else her parents did excluded Carol as absolutely as her own sick fear excluded her from this. That night, on the cusp of a lifetime’s insomnia, Carol lay wide-eyed and soul-scoured long after the protesting bed fell silent. Her pretty fantasies came drifting down from the cool night air, wrecked and sullied, like shards of ash winking out very slowly after a bonfire. Carol felt them brush against her face and shuddered bleakly with revulsion.
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The following day on the sun-glared beach, Mrs. Harris closed her book with a satisfied sigh: Hemingway always made her feel so delectably sorrowful. Her husband dozed beside her in a dignified postprandial coma. Some distance off, her daughter slept as well, or appeared to, although she hadn’t eaten anything at lunch. Come to think of it, Carol hadn’t eaten breakfast either: she had been too busy refusing to go to her sailing lesson. It was most unlike the child to make a sulky scene, mused her mother. She must have been more shaken by that boating accident than she’d admitted. Yet only yesterday Carol had been dismissing it as a mere trifle. Of course, inexplicable reverses could occur overnight in the unconscious mind, Mrs. Harris told herself wisely. She was a great believer in Freud and the power of dreams.
Stranger still had been Carol’s impassioned refusal to pop down to the sailing school and explain that she was giving up her lessons. Her parents had drawn the line at this: it was only common courtesy to account for a sudden absence and besides, that nice young Robert might be worried, Mrs. Harris had reasoned sensibly. Hearing this, Carol had looked so close to tears that her mother relented and promised to go down with her. In fact, she had been forced to do all the talking as well, since Carol hung back with her eyes on her sandals, kicking bits of gravel petulantly into the water. She had barely even looked at Robert, glancing mutely out from behind her bangs in an agony of shyness so painful that it almost resembled shame. Mrs. Harris, suddenly moved, thought she should have explained to her daughter that accidents can happen to anyone and are nothing to be ashamed of. The girl was still so young, after all, and tiny problems always did seem too intense to the very young. Still, the great thing was that they evaporated equally rapidly. Nothing lasted long when you were Carol’s age, mused Mrs. Harris comfortably, rubbing the sand from one foot with the painted toes of the other. That was the saving grace of childhood.
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