Watermark by Davina Quinlivan

Something invisible shifts and somersaults through the earth. A snaking vibration. An implosion beneath the grass, travelling along the drainpipes, the flaking bricks, the double-glazed window panes. Thunder under the ground. The world is upside down. There is no rain, only silt and dust, which makes black clouds of the buildings from which it rolls out. A sound, especially one that is unrecognisable, is more like an unknown place than a noise. It is a blind spot. Or, perhaps it is more like a mirage.

My mother thinks she has heard something, but then again she could be mistaken. The memory of the sound itself is already leaving her, its sonorous shape dissolving like a sugar cube on her tongue. My mother is 81 years old and alone in her flat in Exeter. She senses a shift in the ground which nudges her thoughts, pulls at the hairs on the back of her neck. Something is pulling her sideways through the cracks in the door, the corridor, the locked gate, the entrance hall. The passageway near the bins. She should go and see. Go outside. Yet, she remains seated in her armchair. Her eyes follow the movement of a seagull whose cawing noise reminds her she is near some body of water, even if she cannot always remember which one.

Shallow breaths inside her flat, her echo chamber, which is also a ship’s cabin, she thinks, because it shelters her from the moving world outside. Though it is small, it is hers and she is safely nested between its thin walls. The sound of the refrigerator becomes the hum of the ship’s engines, deep under the asphalt, under the remnants of last nights’ take-aways which spill like noisy chatter out of the bins under heavy boughs of wisteria near her courtyard. A friendly face waves as they pass through the courtyard. She raises her right hand and smiles back, framed by her patio door, like a passenger.

The thought of moving is moving itself along, into the air. She follows its trail. Then, her fingers stop halfway over her white hairline, lingering, at the edge of her long-lobed ear, a residual trace of her Burmese heritage. Now, her thumb is near the nape of her neck. Her feet, tucked into slippers, are stiffening, but yet still she feels herself drawn down, or was it upwards. All her things in the flat are absorbing tiny movements, shivers, which tell her something has changed. Then, there is the dripping tap in the bathroom which sings a chorus with the River Exe, as the men outside work the land, dig the rubble, sift through sand.

Between the tap and the river, the air in her lungs and the explosion of dust in the sky, something tells her that she knew that other sound. She had heard it before, but now only her body remembers. So, she remembers.

I never told my mother about the unexploded World War Two bomb which was safely detonated just near her home in Exeter on 27^th February 2021, but I always imagined her in her flat, registering, on some level, the sudden noise, which could be heard throughout the city. Her whole body leaning over, leaning further into the curve of her spine which was already folding over with old age. I saw her eyes narrowing and the line of her nose, head down in concentration. A wrinkling of her mouth.

She is barely aware of the strange sound. It trickles out while the water from the tap trickles in. Still, the odd, muffled sound has brought with it the image of her mother carrying her two younger brothers over the borders in India. Her mother’s eyes, fixed into a determined glare. They are at the patio door. They wait. There are little explosions going off behind them, over and over, across hills shaped like the tops of neem trees. Her youngest brother’s hand holds a ball of coloured cloth, a comforter which now resembles the sprawling shapes of the spongy lichen on the base of the teak trees near the Chindwin river in Burma. Her family borrowed ecosystems, uprooted, they depended on the forest for survival.

She talks to herself, to the TV, whose dumb companionship she accepts, gladly. Sometimes, her words are more like shortened breaths, emptied of most of their sound. Her accented voice carries itself between the walls of her flat and the dripping tap, the faint yawn of the electric fan in the bathroom and the gentle, ring-ringing-pitch of the refrigerator.

She tries to remind herself to ask me about the sound, the sound she cannot name or identify, but she knows she will forget, so she goes on running her fingers through her white hair and checking the buttons on her cardigan, touching the loose fibres of her shawl. Sometimes, I see her doing this through the patio doors. I can see her, but she does not see me. Cardigan-shawl-hair, a rhythm only she knows or understands. Cardigan-shawl-hair: three precious co-ordinates on a map

While I have become everything rooted and solid to my mother, it is impossible not to feel, under this pressure, a sense of becoming dissolved. Parts of me are being surrendered to her and parts of me are being temporarily archived. My mind is shuffling through images I can keep, ideas I think of as I move through cycles of care; these, I store away in golden tissue paper, for another time. ‘I’ll save you, I’ll save you’, I say.

To her, I am a constant, like the dripping tap. She waits for me so that she can hold my right arm, so I give her my arm, and I enter the courtyard outside, keeping her body close as she visits the stores, watching me put things in a shopping basket which, often, she won’t eat, or will forget to use. A lip balm. A pot of yoghurt. I watch her in the aisles of the supermarket in her long coat and winter hat, even in the summer, as I tell her to wait, wait, while I locate other essentials. I glance back and then I glance back again. I see her trying to perform the rituals associated with this habitat, examining the shelves, excusing herself if someone wants to squeeze their trolley past, an old language with its own, familiar gestures. It is not that she is out of place, but rather that she is outside of herself, out of place within herself: there is no clear path ahead except the sound of my voice which moves her forward.

Sensations, treasured memoires, niggling thoughts, comforting desires, are leaving my mother’s body like a black swarm, a murmuration of starlings over barren land; I hear them, I hear them, and I have to let them go. They make beautiful shapes in the sky above our heads: half a song she has remembered, the pinched colour of my aunt’s rouged cheeks as she kissed my mother when they met, the taste of saffron-steeped rice. She, on the other hand, is blind to this shifting movement, the ‘swarm’ collapsing and dissolving into air in the supermarket aisle. I remember things too, like the day I watched hundreds of canaries escape from my father’s aviary in our garden in Hayes; while my mother still searches for my hands, I withdraw from the noise and put another carton of milk in our shopping basket.

We walk back. My fingers are numbing from the weight of the shopping, but I ignore this as we try to get home. I let my mind wander, too, in order to forget the heavy bags which drag my left side down while she clings on to my right arm, always the right side. ‘We’ll get there in the end’. We are in between places now, in our minds, between England and India, Exeter and Hayes in West London, where we once all lived as a family. Together, we sift through shared histories and try to inscribe familiar memories over this new environment in Devon like chalking lines across fields. These images fall behind us now as we walk under the shelter of the cathedral, or the poplar trees up at the university.

She tells me about the ship she lived on when her family migrated to England from India in the 1950s. All the stores on Fore Street in Exeter drop away from view and the faint outline of a ship’s hull looms near the pavement. Our footsteps are passing between the waves. My mother has to stop every few steps so she grabs onto my arm and I ask for more details, more words, but there is nothing to say. She stops at a word and I wait on the borderline of her syllables. I am the only one who understands her Burmese words, which come and go, between the English ones, and when she goes, there will be no more of these accented sounds. Her mind is full of starry skies, one star going out, one at a time. I am collecting the light, carrying the weather inside my mother’s mind. (I put the light somewhere safe, but please don’t ask me to look for that place right now).

She was born in 1940, the Chinese Year of the Dragon, in Rangoon, Burma, and she was schooled in Calcutta, India until the age of 16. Instead of folding napkins, years ago she folded sheets in a laundry in Acton, West London, one of the jobs she took with her mother when she arrived in this country, still a child. I see their movements now, up, and over, up, and over, air smacks another swiping tail: two dragons, perhaps.

When I visit, she tells me she likes the way I walk, quick, quick, like my father, now long gone. She tells me I have nice, long hair. Her neighbours think I am her granddaughter, but I was simply born late, in fact, she gave birth to me when she was the age that I am now (40).

The tap in the bathroom goes on dripping, leaving no trace except for the jade-coloured water marks against the white sink, a waterline. After a while, words seem to attach themselves to the water, or rather a feeling, which also is a measure of time, the worst one, I know, because I ignore it as I try to ignore my mother’s ageing. In many ways, the dripping tap is her ghost at my shoulder.

I try to hide from the sound of the water so I close the door to the bathroom when I leave. I know I should call a plumber, but I don’t have the time. I leave the taps and the jade-coloured marks in the sink. I leave my mother in her flat. Still, there it is: a waterline. I am the only person she sees most days.  Maybe, now I have become the waterline.

I stand on the threshold to her flat and watch myself close the door. This was never really her home, it was the place she lived in for three years before she became too unwell to care for herself. It is a borderline which resembles the sound of a dripping tap.

Once, my mother had refused to go into a brand new ‘Blockbuster’ video store which had arrived on the High Street in Hayes. There was a special opening ceremony with balloons and a replica DeLorean, just like the one from the film Back to the Future. One foot on the pavement and another on the boundary to the store, I was halfway through, but my mother refused to go in. I pulled on her arm. Years later, she would be pulling on my arm while I cared for her, as I supported her ageing body, gripping so hard that her fingers would pinch my skin at my elbows, even underneath my coat.

Outside the store, I squeezed her arm and protested loudly, desperate to enter the building and stand under its glowing screens, movie trailers being played on a loop, which were like a clarion call to me, a movie fan. She tutted and turned on her heel, dragging me backwards and across the pavement, away from the store. ‘This is not a place for us’, she said. She must have read its signage and mistook it for a warning. I did not understand. Perhaps, the store seemed to project a sense of exclusion because she had decided we could not afford what was on offer and we were not entitled to its luxury. She had scraped together money to buy me clothes from local charity shops and cut my hair herself until she could afford a hairdresser. My father never gave her cash unless it was to pay for food because the bills were expensive and there was no money left over after they were paid. Eventually, I persuaded her to go in, but I had learned, in that moment between the pavement and the doorway to the store, that some places could not be easily inhabited, even if the door was open and the signs said ‘welcome’.

Months after the bomb was detonated in Exeter, just up at the university, I found my mother on the floor, halfway tucked under her bedframe. She told me she wanted to go home. ‘Just take me home’, she said.

An invisible bomb had gone off inside my mother’s flat, an explosion which was more real to us than the one they had found while digging up the campus and she was lying in the wake of its chaos. While the tap went on dripping in her bathroom, I listened to the sound of her voice as she spoke to me in Burmese and English, as she has always done, and told her she was home.

***

Davina Quinlivan is the author of Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration (Little Toller Books, 2022) and Possessions (September Publishing, 2026). She is currently an AHRC-funded ‘StoryArcs’ Story Fellow hosted by The University of Exeter and Artistic Lead with ‘Emblaze’, an imprint of ‘Paper Nations’ (Arts Council England), illuminating stories of colour in the South West.

The image at the head of this essay is by the author.