Lake of Sorrows

She set her wineglass on the floor, and began scrubbing at her nails with a brush, but gave up after a few seconds. It was no use; her nails would remain black until she left this place. She sometimes felt as though the peat was entering her very pores, filtering in through the microscopic cracks in her skin, filling her up with darkness. She was sick to death of bogs, weary of the people and the bleak rented house. Who would have believed it: two consecutive summers back in the same dreary squat from all those years ago? Somehow she thought her life would add up to something more by now. At least she’d insisted upon her own place—and why not, if Bord na Mona was paying? The crew’s communal way of life, the shared kitchen and toilet, depressed her unutterably, perhaps because she’d lived that way every summer for long enough. Maybe this time next year she’d be someplace where it didn’t rain ten months of the year. She relented for once and let herself imagine sun and heat, white sand, azure water. She knew she ought not to think about it too much. Bad luck.

She wetted her sponge and applied a few drops of body wash, working it into a frothy lather, then slid the rough sponge around the back of her neck and over her chest and shoulders. The image of that second dead body in the bog came back to her, the stillness of it, the spark long extinguished. And with the picture came the knowledge that staying here much longer meant extinguishing her own spark, letting it gutter out in perpetual rain. She wanted to see it burn brightly for as long as possible. She felt nothing but pity and contempt for those who would stifle their own vital energy, from fear of what might happen—or even worse, from some false sense of morality. She knew she was an amoral person, by any definition of the word. The idea of morality held very little meaning for her. If the universe itself was amoral, why should the creatures governed by the rules of that universe be any different? There was no morality in gravity, for instance; it just was. Nor was there any sense or judgment in the way atoms formed into elements. Who was to say that one collection of particles had any more intrinsic value than another mass of particles with one electron more or less? The very coldness of it excited her, the hard, physical substance of the world. The rest was sentimentality masquerading as morality.

She lathered the sponge again, and went back to washing, feeling suddenly aroused by its roughness on her soapy skin. Then the sponge passed over the top of a scar that stretched the length of her back. Various lovers had asked about it, a question that usually meant they felt entitled to intimate knowledge of her. Whenever that happened, she made sure not to see the person again. It was her only rule. She couldn’t bear inquisitiveness in a sexual partner; it seemed a singularly undesirable trait. Only one living person besides herself knew why she avoided dry cleaning shops and couldn’t abide the smell of perchloroethylene.

Long ago, when she was still a child, she’d sought out confession, trying to get rid of that dirty feeling she couldn’t seem to scrub away. The priest had instructed her to tell him everything. She had complied, choking when she had to describe what her stepfather had done. She had remained kneeling, innocently hoping for absolution, even as she heard the breathing on the other side of the curtain grow more labored. It had only dawned on her very gradually that the old priest was getting stirred up listening to her, imagining what was forbidden, taking twisted pleasure in her fear and shame. “My child,” he’d called her. The bastard. The sick fucking wanker. She’d walked out in the middle of her confession. She didn’t believe in goodness or morality anymore. It simply didn’t exist, and people who did believe in it were deluded. She wiped away the single tear that slid down her face, and with it wiped the scene from her memory.