Free Vertigo by Joanna Walsh Page A

the chain stores. I’d have wanted especially to investigate the charity shops, knowing that, among the second-hand pleated skirts and polyester blouses I would find … what? I would have visited once a week, twice, perhaps every lunch break from my children’s book job, before I went home to my house on the new estate on the frayed outskirts of town. I would have visited the shops inconspicuously. I would not have talked to the women behind the tills. They would not have known where I came from. Each time I arrived, they would have beamed at a fresh customer.
    I would buy nothing, but I would not lose hope.
    As it is I have packed wrongly. I know that now. I should have brought tights (it’s cold). I should not have brought the new trousers that don’t fit. I didn’t bring anything else.
    The bus enters a large town (or a small city) scattered with sponge-on-stick model trees. Sunset: the trees blur at the edges, change color. From a distance they are solid, square: from close up, a net of branches.
    The driver pulls up the shade with the plastic window revealing the whole road ahead, the game of framing gone. And my daughter, who has been sleeping on my shoulder, wakes up. She shifts and—vast, monumental in sleep—becomes tiny in movement.
    I can see my mother and father waiting at the bus stop. They are very small. My mother is wearing a pastel blouse and pastel slacks and pastel canvas shoes. Her shades are mint, peach, lemon, blueberry, cream. She is dressed as she would like to see her granddaughter dressed: edibly. Still she looks formal, arranged, neat. She cannot shake it.
    I cannot hear what she says to my father. She says, “Forty-five, and she still has to take the bus.”
    The bus stops and out get the sort of people who travel by bus between cities: students, old people—mainly women—and the middle-aged who cannot afford the train and who have never grown old enough to drive. Out we get, and away we go, the young, the old, and the failed girls.

DROWNING
    There is now very little in my mind.
    On the beach in front of the village, which is no more than a stony strip, there are some adults but no children, who are all on the sandy beach opposite, and a graveled path on a sliproad that leads to the hotel. I am wearing only a bikini, but I want to see the hotel. I had not considered that I would have to wear a bikini while walking from the beach to the hotel. I am too old to look good in a bikini and I have not, across the years, paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini for me to look good in a bikini. But, even when young, I never paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini so age is perhaps not the most important factor. I must walk through the streets as though neither age nor attention paid are factors, as this is a holiday village and it is quite normal for women who do not look good in bikinis to walk through its streets. Why should I be any exception?
    I also have no shoes. The tarmac is a warm body beneath my feet.
    The hotel is beautiful, even more beautiful up close than it was from far away. It is white and on its facade its name, which is the name of the village, is a dusty blue. There are three rows of windows on the front, on each, shutters, the same faded blue as the sign I could read from the beach across the estuary, within each, white lace curtains, and along each storey a blue ironwork balcony that spans all three windows.
    The menu of the hotel restaurant is exactly what it should be: not cheap enough to be disappointing, not expensive enough to be intimidating. And there are ways round: menu du jour, prix fixe . I cannot see the food or smell the food but, reading the menu, I know that the food will be good.
    There is no one on the streets. It’s like lunchtime, except it isn’t lunchtime. I’m not sure what time it is or how long it took me to swim the channel. It is colder than it was on the other side of the estuary. In the harbor in front of the hotel, boats