Notice Me

“Go on then! Jump!” he said, and she did.

Maybe she thought he’d go after her. Maybe it was the champagne. Maybe she would just have done anything, at that point, to get his attention. But there on the bridge, in her expensive, ill-fitting ballgown, with the sun just coming up over Magdalen Tower, she pushed her way through the crowd, and she jumped.

The river was already full of drunken students, splashing and horsing around, in the last bit of fun before final exams kicked in. Two feet deep here, barely enough to break your fall, and that’s if you get lucky and don’t collide with a shopping trolley abandoned after the night’s revelry.

She didn’t get lucky.

Fell awkwardly, hit her head. Passed out and drowned before anyone noticed her there in the water, said the coroner’s report. Misadventure.

Before anyone noticed her there. The words pull at him as he flicks the ash from the end of his cigarette into the murky brown water. He’s standing at the spot they pulled the body from, wondering if it was his fault.

He remembers her big doe eyes, how they followed him from bar to bar, party to party. Notice me, they’d pleaded, see me. He wasn’t the only one she looked at like that, but he was the only one soft enough to feel sorry for her, the only one polite enough not to mock her, or pretend she didn’t exist. So she followed him like a lost little lamb, and when irritation got the better of him, and he snapped out his challenge, she did it. And now she’s dead.

If he stares hard enough at the sluggish brown water, he can convince himself she’s still there under the surface, waiting to be found. The reflections of leaves and odd glints of sunshine gather themselves into a mirage of her drowned face.

He grimaces. Torturing himself. He doesn’t know why. It won’t bring her back, or do anything to make her parents feel better. He saw them, at the college lodge collecting her belongings, doubled over like the centre had been ripped out of them. Something had pushed him to go over to them, do what he could to ease their grief. Guilt, probably.

“Excuse me, Mr Jones? I was a friend of your daughter,” he had lied. “I was with her on the bridge, just before it happened. I just wanted you to know, she was happy.”

The lies had come fluently, soothingly. He’d told them what they needed to hear. Described a long night of fun and too much to drink; a carefree girl, blithe and unaware of anything but the exhilaration of the sunrise and the party atmosphere. Someone who wasn’t their daughter.

Notice me.

He flinches back from the water, the cigarette falling from his fingers. Her voice, clear as the sound of traffic on the bridge above. Shaking his head, he turns his back on the river. Guilty conscience. He came here to remember, some fuzzy idea of making it up to her somehow, but now he realizes the futility of the gesture. Pointless to torment himself, when it can’t help her anyway. Best to leave, before he starts imagining worse.

But he can’t rid the thought of it – her pleading eyes, his own rising frustration, the relief when she’d jumped and the horror at learning what had happened to her, just a few feet below. Not my fault, not my fault, he tells himself over and over, but her voice in his head is louder than his own.

Notice me.

“Jump!” he’d said. One word. It had pushed her to her death just as surely as if he’d shoved her with his hand.

Back in his room, the sun long gone down, he pushes aside the unread text book, the meaningless jotted notes. He fills his toothmug with vodka and gulps it down, then refills and gulps again. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, his mind swims, flounders, then at last, mercifully sinks into sleep.

He wakes in a gloss of sweat, his breath coming in great gasps, his heart hammering. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he sits for a minute, head in hands, waiting for the room to crystallize and pull him out of the nightmare. He reaches for his phone, blinks at the bland white numbers: 5:31am. The thin green curtains are faintly luminous with the first daylight. They sway like river weeds and he blinks and scrubs fists into his eyes to wipe away the dream’s afterburn.

He'd been back there, May morning, with the sun just rising behind Magdalen Tower, only this time he was right down on the river bank, the water lapping at the toes of his formal shoes. Up on the bridge the crowd cheered and swayed, but here, under the stone arch, it was oddly silent. In his dream, nobody jumped from above. The surface of the water was glassy smooth and serene, reflecting the gold of the rising sun.

And then a hand, green as water weed, rose from the river’s edge, grasping his ankle. He gasped as he lost his balance and fell, hitting his head on the wooden walkway hard enough to send him dizzy. The hand pulled hard, dragging him toward the river, and another joined it, clutching his other leg. His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the rough planks, finding none. Slipping and slithering toward the water, he was helpless, screaming voicelessly to the careless revelers on the bridge above.

Notice me!

The dirty brown water closed over his head and his words were lost in panicked bubbles as the hands dragged him down, down, to a depth beyond light and air, and his lungs filled with the heavy liquor of despair.

Remembering, he drinks in a great gasp, struggling back to the surface from the depths of his horror. His hands grasp at his bedsheets as if they’re a rope thrown to save him. Curling his toes into the rough carpet, he tells himself it’s alright, he’s awake, it was only a dream. He picks up a crumpled towel from the floor and heads for the shower.

As the warm water pulses over him his heart slows to something more comfortable. Under his feet the chipped tiles are cold, solid. The last traces of his nightmare melt off him, chasing bubbles down the drain.

It’s a steadier hand he runs over his face, scrubs through his hair. He rinses the lather away and opens his eyes.

He screams.

Skin lurid grey-green under the striplight, knees pulled up under her chin, she stares up at him through huge, glassy eyes. There’s pondweed in her hair. Her dress is matted and torn, caked in mud. The fingernails that pick at it absently are black and rotten, like the lips that twist into a smile as the deep pits of her pupils come to rest on his horrified face.

He staggers back, slips. His head crashes against the wall and he slides down it, leaving a smear of blood that rinses pink and then gathers in a rusty pool around the plughole, deepening.

You can drown in less than 2 inches of water. By the time the cleaner found him at 6am, the shower had backed up over the shallow brick rim and was trickling under the door.