“Come in, Miss Blacklock!” said a voice from inside, and the door swung open and Ulla was standing there smiling, wearing a white spa uniform. I stepped inside the little room, looking around me. It was small—but not as narrow as the corridor, and with only Ulla and myself, it felt considerably less crowded. I felt the tightness in my chest ease slightly.
The room was lit with the same flickering electric candles as the stairwell, and there was a raised bed in the center, covered with clear plastic film. A white sheet was folded at the foot.
“Welcome to the spa, Miss Blacklock,” Ulla said. “Today you will be experiencing a mud wrap. Have you had one before?”
I shook my head, mutely.
“It is very pleasurable and very good for detoxing the skin. The first step is to please remove your clothes and lie upon the bed, covering with the sheet.”
“Should I keep my underwear on?” I said, trying to sound as if I went to spas every day.
“No, the mud will stain,” Ulla said firmly. My face must have expressed my feelings, because she bent and took what looked like a piece of crumpled hand towel from a cupboard.
“If you prefer, we provide disposable panties. Some of our guests use them, some do not; it is entirely how you feel comfortable. And now I will leave you to undress. The shower, if you wish it, is through here.”
She indicated a door to the left of the bed, and then backed out of the room with a smile, closing the door softly, and I began to strip off my clothes layer by layer, feeling more and more uncomfortable. I piled them on the chair along with my shoes and then, when I was completely naked, I stepped into the flimsy paper knickers and climbed onto the bed, my bare skin sticking uncomfortably to the plastic, and pulled the white sheet up to my chin.
Almost as soon as I’d done so—quickly enough to make me wonder queasily whether there was some kind of camera in the room—there was a soft knock on the door and I heard Ulla’s voice.
“May I come in, Miss Blacklock?”
“Yes,” I said croakily, and she entered, holding a bowl of what looked like, and presumably was, warm mud.
“If you would like to lie on your front,” Ulla said softly, and I wriggled around. It was surprisingly difficult, with the sticky film clinging to my skin, and I felt the sheet slip, but Ulla deftly tweaked it back into place. She touched something to the side of the door and the room was filled with soft whale sounds and the crash of waves. I had the unsettling image again of the weight of water just the other side of the thin metal hull . . .
“Could you . . .” I said awkwardly, speaking into the bed. “Is there another track?”
“Of course,” Ulla said. She pressed something and the music changed to Tibetan metal bells and wind chimes. “Is that better?”
I nodded, and she said, “Now, if you’re quite ready . . . ?”
The treatment was surprisingly soothing, once I had forced myself to relax a little. I even got used to the feeling of having a complete stranger massaging mud into my mostly naked body. Halfway through I realized, with a jolt, that Ulla was speaking to me.
“Sorry,” I managed sleepily. “What did you say?”
“If you could turn over,” she murmured, and I turned onto my back, the mud slipping and sliding against the plastic. Ulla draped the sheet over my upper body once again and began to massage the fronts of my legs.
She worked her way methodically up my body, and at last smoothed the mud over my forehead, cheeks, and closed eyes, before speaking again, in her low, soothing voice.
“I will wrap you up now, Miss Blacklock, to allow the mud to work, and I will return in about half an hour to help you unwrap and shower. If you need anything, there’s a call button to your right.” She pressed my hand to a button set into the side of the bed. “Is everything quite all right?”
“Quite all right,” I said drowsily. The warmth of the room and the soft chimes of the music were extraordinarily soporific. I was finding it hard to remember everything that had happened the night before. Harder to care. I just wanted to sleep. . . .
I felt the plastic film close around me, and then something heavy and warm on top of that—a towel, I thought. Behind my closed lids, I was aware that the lights of the room had been dimmed.
“I will be just outside,” she said, and I heard the soft click of the door. I stopped fighting the tiredness, and I let the warmth and the darkness close over my head.
I dreamed of the girl, drifting miles below us in the cold, sunless depths of the North Sea. I dreamed of her laughing eyes white and bloated with salt water, of her soft skin, wrinkled and sloughing, of her T-shirt ripped by jagged rocks and disintegrating into rags.
Only her long black hair remained, floating through the water like fronds of dark seaweed, tangling in shells and fishing nets, washing up on the shore in hanks like frayed rope, where it lay, limp, the roar of the crashing waves against the shingle filling my ears.