Venus de Milo by Rhiannon Jones

We shouldn’t have come, Vivien thought.

They arrived by boat. Vivien’s sister-in-law, Alison, came every year: beautiful, she said, the food so fresh, sunsets like you’ve never seen. And Vivien, who had not been on holiday since her husband died and had not been on many before then either, agreed to join them.

She would’ve liked to stand on the deck, to grip the railings and breathe the tangy sea air. Instead they sat in hard seats, glimpsed the sea through windows clouded by breath, burned their fingers on polystyrene coffee cups.

Vivien’s daughter, Eleanor, bent over her diary. She had cramped, secretive handwriting: Vivien squinted at the pages while Eleanor was at college.

‘Haven’t you got beautiful hair,’ Alison said to her: ‘it reminds me of when your father was your age,’ though Eleanor’s hair was pale and wavy, as Vivien’s mother’s hair had been.

‘Glad to see you’ve kept the old writing up since we last saw you, Eleanor,’ said Tony.

‘Oh it’s just…’ Eleanor looked embarrassed. ‘Nothing much.’

Vivien made the same joke she always made: ‘She’s writing her memoirs.’

‘Or an expose! Eh!’ joked Tony.

‘I think it’s fantastic,’ said Alison, ‘seeing a young girl – a young woman, I should say – so engrossed in being creative. Not like this one.’ She ruffled Joe’s hair. ‘Always on his phone.’

‘Mum.’

Tony laughed. ‘Look at him: tap-tap-tapping away on that phone. Unbelievable!’

Vivien had been in the supermarket, her hand poised over the low-fat soup options, when Alison shouted ‘Viv!’; and nobody had called her that for such a long time. Alison said how wonderful it was to see her: what a surprise. Wait ‘til she told Tony and Joe! And how was Eleanor? Still writing? Alison felt so guilty, she said, for having lost touch since Steve’s funeral.

The same dark eyes as him, the same strong jaw.

I thought you blamed me, Vivien didn’t say.

They exchanged numbers, and as Alison kissed Vivien’s cheek, she said, ‘You know I always thought of you as the sister I never had.’ Vivien smiled and said, ‘I know.’ Alison’s perfume cloyed; it reminded her of the nervous teenage girls who came to her surgery.

Vivien smiled at Tony, but looked out to the waves. The island was near, the staff shouted words she couldn’t understand: it took so long to travel the seemingly short stretch from here to there until the boat juddered into the port. The queue to disembark was not long but barely moved. As Vivien stepped off the boat, Tony’s hand reached for hers, and the forgotten sensation of her palm against someone else’s transmitted a brief electrical flutter, Tony of all people, before he let go and Vivien steadied herself on dry land again.

‘Oh, Steve would’ve loved this,’ Alison sighed.

‘Once he got over his sea-sickness,’ Vivien said.

She browsed the gift shop while they waited for the taxi. Fridge magnets with the name of the island scratched onto them. Bug-eyed evil eye bracelets. Wind chimes made of seashells. Vivien turned them over in her hands, looked absent-mindedly at their price stickers. Plaster replicas of the Venus de Milo, which had been found baked in mud near here, before it was cleansed and shipped to the Louvre for people to gasp at.

----

It was unlikely anyone would notice, Vivien thought, as she folded the hotel towel.

She stepped into the water, let it throb over her pale feet. The people around her – Greeks and Italians mostly, no one blush-shouldered like her – did not even look at her, a forty-eight-year-old woman who could not swim.

Eleanor swam as neat as a stitch, far ahead where the peninsula pulled further from the land and opened to the sea.

Vivien walked deeper into the inlet. Her mother would have known the names of the rocks on either side, would have been able to tell you how they formed, would have relished the cold water. Vivien, conscious of crabs and slippery algae, conscious of how the elastic of her long-dormant costume cut into her buttocks, walked until the water deepened enough for her to crouch beneath its surface. She screwed her eyes closed and held her nose, then plunged her head in.

She moved onto her back and closed her eyes against the sun, tried to relax, before they snapped open again, on the look-out for rocks, crabs, other swimmers.

The only other adults in this shallow end of the inlet were those tasked with teaching their children to swim. A man pulled his child from the water, held it like a trophy as it kicked its legs and squealed with delight.

She saw Eleanor and Joe walk back towards land. She saw their hands touch.

It was unlikely anyone would notice.

----

Vivien, despite her initial doubt, enjoyed herself. She woke to birdsong and lapping waves, ate breakfast on the balcony while Eleanor slept. As the sun set, crowds held their cameras to the sky; but sunrise was hers.

Afternoon shaded into evening. She took a sip of the wine Alison had chosen and tried to hide her shudder. ‘Your skin has burnt,’ she said to Eleanor. The words left her mouth more harshly than intended. ‘Have you been putting sun lotion on after getting out of the sea?’

Alison’s skin was red from too much sun; her lips dark from too much wine.

‘This is exactly how Steve would’ve wanted it,’ Alison sighed, ‘all of us together.’

Tony steadied her with a hand on her burnt shoulder.

‘It must’ve been hard on you, Ellie,’ she said, ‘losing your dad, God rest his soul, in… that way. He was a good man. If you ever need a – a shoulder to talk to…I’m always here, babe.’

Vivien rearranged her napkin.

‘You know, I always remember,’ Alison said, ‘my first day at secondary school. Some girls starting picking on me. Shoved me into the lockers, they did: I swear my neck has never been the same since.’ She rubbed it as the muscles remembered the jolt. ‘And then another girl comes along, and she said, would you believe it,’ though everyone could believe it, because they were familiar enough with the story to recite it themselves, ‘“Don’t mess with her, she’s Steve Perrin’s little sister!” And do you know, no one gave me a moment’s grief from that day forward. Stevie was always looking out for me. He was like that: family comes before everything.’

There’d been another brother, who’d died when he was a child. A river, a silly game. Alison named Joe after him.

‘Steve was a saint,’ Alison said.

‘A saint,’ Vivien chuckled. ‘I don’t know about - ’

‘We mustn’t speak ill of the dead,’ Alison tutted.

People had said Steve looked like a movie star, the one that never married.

Before he died, he sprayed air freshener around the living room.

He lined up important documents on the sideboard.

He tucked his note into an envelope and sealed it.

‘I don’t think even Steve himself would say he was a saint,’ Vivien smiled.

Alison looked at Tony, who looked at the table. ‘Well I think it’s time we all went to beddy-byes, don’t you?’ She clattered plates and cutlery, refused Vivien’s help. The tide had pulled away; Vivien quivered like the wave-smashed shells beneath.

----

Vivien went to the catacombs to be alone. This was the kind of thing her mother would have liked: when Vivien was a girl, there were no restrictions on what you did with an ancient burial chamber, that was your business, and Vivien’s mother would crawl inside, mud on her knees and hands.

The guide ushered tourists into the catacombs. There was a man with a baby strapped to his front; he stroked its cheek. Vivien wanted to say, It’s easy when they’re young.

That feeling when she saw Joe’s hand touch Eleanor’s. It was like jealousy.

Inside, the guide recited: ‘The catacombs date from the first to the fifth century and are among the…’

It couldn’t be jealousy.

The man kissed his baby’s head. That morning, Vivien had touched the pages of Eleanor’s diary, where the drip of seawater smudged her words.

‘…a burial site but later as a place or worship and a refuge from the Romans…’

It said, Joe kissed me. His mouth tasted like the sea.

‘…perhaps only a small part of a much larger necropolis.’

How could she tell Eleanor she knew? In the two years since Steve died - the year of Eleanor’s anger, the year of her reticence - intimacy felt like a trespass.

----

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ Vivien tried. ‘Or a girlfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Would you tell me if you did?’ Vivien teased.

‘I suppose so.’

It should be easier to talk to her longed-for daughter through the creep of adulthood.

Later, Vivien said, ‘Hasn’t Joe got handsome?’

Eleanor looked up. ‘I suppose so,’ she said.

‘You get on well.’

‘He’s nice,’ Eleanor said.

‘What do you talk about?’

‘Nothing much.’

Vivien felt a burn in her throat. She said, ‘It’s a shame he’s your cousin.’

Eleanor’s head dipped back to her diary. ‘It’s not against the law,’ she said.

‘I know it’s not against the law,’ Vivien began. ‘Wait, it’s not?’

Eleanor’s hair covered her face.

----

Vivien walked for hours, knowing no direction but up, and arrived at a church suspended between the sky and the perfect lapis of the sea. She could see the entire island, right across to the port, which felt so distant yet was only fifteen miles south. She shaded her eyes to take it in.

She walked back through fields, as sweat cooled in her armpits, her shins scratched as she climbed over stiles. Perhaps, she thought, she walked over the very earth where Venus had hidden. Perhaps she trod over soil brushed from the sculpture by men whose hearts pounded.

At the hotel, Eleanor’s arm was swollen and pink.

‘Don’t panic like that,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s just a jellyfish sting. No big deal.’

‘Does it still hurt?’

‘It stings.’

‘You look like you’re struggling. Let me do that.’ Vivien rubbed cream into the white of Eleanor’s arm in a way she had not done since her daughter was small.

‘Tell me if I’m too rough.’

‘I will.’

‘They call them medusas in Spain, you know. I wonder what they call them here.’

‘Look.’ Eleanor traced her forefinger across the welts. The green varnish on her nails was chipped. ‘You can see where its tentacles got me.’

‘Oh gosh.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I think I read once that in Japanese they are called “the moon of the sea”. I like that. But maybe I’m wrong,’ Vivien said, ‘maybe it’s not Japanese. Maybe I got muddled up somewhere.’

The sea licked the path below their window. Stray cats mewed at fishermen.

‘I don’t want to go to dinner with them,’ Eleanor said.

They had always been together, Vivien and Eleanor, in their quiet home, in their private world. There was one day left of the holiday.

‘We don’t have to,’ she said. ‘We can go to the restaurant by the harbour, me and you.’

She would tell Eleanor anything she asked; she’d tell her why it happened the way it did. The moon reflected on the tide like the glint of treasure long buried.

………………..

Rhiannon Jones has had work published by Hobart, Maudlin House, Reflex Press and elsewhere.