The Islands Read online

  Gales came and went, of course, because our home was a tiny island in the face of the Atlantic. Seas came to us from other continents. A fetch of a thousand miles is nothing to a storm. There were nights when it seemed the universe was conspiring to drown us all, the air and rain falling on our house as though we lived inside a tin drum. Later, when daylight came, we would look to see if apple trees had come down, if there was seaweed in the branches, blisters of salt spume, if the ditches were littered with things from the water. The sea boiled over the rocks consuming and retiring, consuming and retiring, bright green and white and iron grey, the surface, as far as the grey uncertain horizon, fretted, broken, chaotic. Those were the days I loved.

  But once I remember a yacht going by, water streaming over its leeward deck, hard pressed in a sudden gale, and one of the crew had a long handline out—it was the mackerel season. But they had caught a seagull, or more likely the seagull caught the hook, as happens when the line is towed too fast and the lead hops from wave to wave. And they were towing the terrified bird about fifteen feet from the stern. Eventually they cut the line and the gull tried to fly with the trace and the lead, but he kept losing height and dropping back into the water. The weight of the lead was too much for him. In the end I couldn’t watch. I went away and when I came back the bird was gone and the boat was gone. There was only the wind and brutal sea.

  My mother was a storyteller. She told us tales of the undersea, of people who had fallen in love with the big dark eyes of the seal and the smooth body, people who forgot that their element was air. They were lost to their families and friends, and even when, occasionally, someone found a sea woman in a net and brought her home, the undersea was always drawing her back, especially at the spring tides when the sea was full and round as a belly. She told us these things at night, when everything is more important, and outside the sea snored among the caves and arches and the curlews called. She told the stories from one or other of our beds, with the blankets pulled up to her chin because her toes were always cold, taking each bed in turn. We three children always fought over whose bed was next. She would turn out the light, and sometimes there was moonlight and sometimes there was none. She began every story in the same way: My mother told me. So that we came to believe that only women knew these things. And perhaps we were right. And in addition, we thought that a story so ancient had to be true, at least in ancient times, however changed the world was in ours. I remember the moonlight slanting in across the room, her low soft voice, Em’s breathing. Sometimes Flanagan the cat was there, curled up on the end of the bed.

  But one summer there was a fisherman and he would come and drink whiskey after he had set his pots. He was a tall, handsome man. His face was dried and grained by the sea. His eyes had the wind in them, such a blue as you see on dry hard days. My mother welcomed the company and I think he wanted her, or wanted her presence. He never came when Richard’s yawl was anchored in the bay. He had been ten years in the boats, he said, in the fleets on the North Sea. The cod fisheries were dying. The Grand Banks were empty. He told us of times when he had been sent aloft to chip ice from the mast lest they capsize with the weight of it. More than once I saw him catch my mother’s hand. And she let him do it. She was like that. She was a generous person and touch was a kind of generosity to her. But he came only that one summer. Maybe he died. Or maybe he could not bear to be near her and not have her. Or maybe he went back to sea. He too told stories. He told us that the sound between us and The Calf was haunted. They had all seen a ship there once, in a place where no ship could go because of the shoal. His grandfather had been fishing there another night long ago and whatever he saw or heard he would never say, except that something put a stone in his belly and he failed away, and his skeleton came through his body before he died.

  Em was terrified and fascinated by his stories. Once she said to me that she had seen the bones of the fisherman’s grandfather. She said Jeannie had brought them wrapped in her sweater and Richard had put the man together on the kitchen table. She still had one of the bones, she said, in a secret place. She wouldn’t tell me where it was but I found it easily enough in a hollow in the trunk of an apple tree. There was a brass ring there, too, and a metal toy soldier. I left them where I found them. I wonder if they’re still there or if the tree has healed over. Trees do that. Someday someone will cut it down and find the bone, the ring, and the tin man.

  My mother never prayed, she was the least religious person I have ever met, she had not a fingernail of superstition in her, but on the nights of the worst storms she thought the ghosts of the island and the gods of the ruined hearths of the empty houses had turned on her for her betrayals and they would rear the sea up against her and drown her children and herself. We thought it natural for someone to be so fearful. The storms terrified us, too. But she was a grown woman. She should have known better.

  Whom did she betray? In her grubby flat on the Kingsland Road, in the days when she was quietly planning her escape, she pointed and said, You most of all. Meaning me. And then she named my sisters Jeannie and Em, Richard Wood, herself. She did not mention my father.

  She traveled backwards and forwards to the land in our boat. When we heard the distinctive sound of the Seagull engine, the boat coming round Cuas Point and breasting the seas, we would run down to the pier. We wondered what she might bring.

  She was an eavesdropper and loved repeating things overheard in the town or on the bus. She had a wry sense of humor. She had her favorite sayings: she got a lovely death, is it yourself is in it, she’s out with me over it, he’s great with her this past two years, I’m not myself at all, he gave me the going-on strips. They reappeared later in Richard’s poems and he was praised for his natural ear. We used to carry the things she bought—fresh vegetables, socks, batteries—as if they were some precious treasure, as indeed all things are on an island. But her to-ing and fro-ing had a darker side too. I recognize it now in retrospect. At the time it did not seem so.

  On one trip ashore she found an article in the Irish Times that said science was predicting a new Ice Age. She read it to us that evening. She seemed to think the ice was coming soon. She made a list of warm things we had in the house, woollen vests and sweaters, blankets and coats and bobble hats and mittens and gloves. Then she made a list of things we would need to buy. She was writing at the table and the electricity was out again, but there was enough light in the western sky. She made her list and she wrote it out fair and said we would go to town the next day and draw down whatever my father had put in her bank account and buy the necessaries. Cold would not catch us sleeping, she said, we would be ready. I can see her clearly, writing frantically, rushing around to check that things were where they were supposed to be, talking all the time. Then, for no good reason, she gathered the three of us and sang us a song her mother used to sing. There were three sisters went to school, all around the loney-o, they spied a lady at a pool, down by the greenwood side-o. It was a cruel song and it always frightened us, but we thought of the whole thing as normality, as the way families were, because we had no experience of any other. When the song ended she told me solemnly that when I was inside her she wondered what she would do. She did not want me, she said, but the minute I was born she could hardly imagine how she would do without me. Then she made us all promise that if the Ice Age came again we would struggle together as a family. She believed that children should be told everything, that they should be treated as adults, that we needed as much information as possible to survive. Next morning there was no more talk of going shopping against the cold. It was a close damp morning and the spiders’ nests in the furze were glassy with the night’s rain.

  She was rolling out bread as I came downstairs, watched warily by Flanagan the cat, and she was still humming the song. When she saw me she nipped a piece of dough and held it to me on her finger. It’s for you, Grace, she said, because you’re mine.

  She sang:

  There is a river wide and deep,


  All around the loney-o

  ’Tis there the babe and mother sleep,

  Down by the greenwood side-o.

  We three sisters had separate lives. Jeannie liked to build elaborate cities in the sand. She dammed inlets with stones and tried to hold the sea back, anxiously anticipating the rising tide, rushing here and there to stop a hole. Once at low water springs she built a wall across a narrow inlet and packed it with sand. I think the moment she loved best was the breach, the water tumbling in, the crumbling sand and shifting stones. She used to watch it in a kind of anxious ecstasy. I thought she would grow up to build things.

  In reality Em was the wildest of us all. I see her now chasing the cat around the house, trying to catch his tail. The cat eventually escapes through an open window. Outside it is late afternoon or early evening. There are seals on the rocks. I can hear their barking. My mother never intended to have her, as she often told us. In fact, only Jeannie did not come under that anathema. Em was my accident, she used to say. But neither of us knew how a child could be accidental. Em could walk among the sheep without disturbing them as if she were already a ghost. The cat followed her like a disciple. She brought home an injured blackbird. Look after Em, my mother used to say, and we had to take it in turns, but we were careless and Em was good at hiding. She learned to swim on her own and never told anybody. She might have learned to fly like the shearwaters skimming the waves, but time was against her. She was small enough and her bones were as light as the hollow bones of a bird. I think she was fearless and careless and heedless of everything. I think nothing surprised her. She talked so rarely we never really knew. But sometimes at night she crawled into my bed and slept with her nose between my shoulder blades. In the morning there would be a damp patch in my nightdress. And she slept with her fists bunched as though one day she might need to fight.

  I was the curious one. Once I found my father’s old store of rabbit snares. Although snaring is mentioned in his first book as a time-honored way of getting food, the outcry from what he called the Cruelty to Everything Except Humans Brigade made him remove it from subsequent editions. Anyway, he had never mastered the technique. Truthfully, he was a poor hunter but he was a good gatherer. The snares were little hoops of steel with a seized eye spliced into the strands at one end and a steel peg for anchoring the trap at the other. He may have made them himself. Or the seizing might have been Richard’s work, he did his own splicing. All that summer I hunted. I set them at places where the runs went between stones or bushes. I experimented with height. After a time I stopped handling them with my bare hands because I would leave my smell on them. I found a pair of white nylon gloves in my mother’s drawer. I decided she didn’t need them. I sat on the highest point of the island in the evening when the rabbits came out to play. The frantic movements of a trapped rabbit. The bucking and tearing and slow dying. I skinned them myself, though for a long time I was just hacking and tearing. I only ever managed to cure a single hide. Lying gutted on a plate they looked like dead babies. Their flesh purple under the translucent bitter membrane. Their small mouths. But now I think there was something sexual in the killing and the stripping and in the bare flesh with its hind legs spread.

  Once I was out on the heather looking at my traps and I saw Jeannie watching me. She didn’t know I saw her. She followed me to each trap and watched me kill two rabbits. I got angry when I saw her the second time. I chased her and knocked her down.

  What are you snooping for?

  I wasn’t snooping. I wanted to see how you did it.

  I looked at her. She was excited. We had been running, of course. Perhaps it was that.

  Em never ate them. She frustrated my hunting by finding my traps and stamping on them. Once I caught her trying to free a trapped rabbit. But even she couldn’t find everything. And I forgave her.

  How long did we live there? How did we get there? In some families there are archivists to record the significant events, but in ours there were none. My mother remembered only what she wanted to remember and what she could not forget and my father committed his memories to paper and never wanted to hear about them again. He wrote them in such a way that they became inventions, remote from our experience. We could not recognize ourselves in them, or more accurately, we tried, and failed, to shape ourselves into them. And in time he stopped writing about us because we could no longer be recycled. This is the inevitable consequence of writing things down.

  Certainly, by the time I was old enough to remember things we were already there. I remember that they had a gate across the doorway through which I could see the world. When my sisters came along and I was old enough to come and go I saw that this gate was, in fact, a painted fireguard. Where were my sisters born? It is clear that we did not live on the island all the time. There were times when we lived in the city. My mother told me once that my sisters were both born in the old Mothers’ Hospital in London. I was born there too, she said. It may or may not have been true—she was not entirely reliable at the time. And I never could reconcile it with what I knew of her life. It must have meant she lived in London for ten years or so.

  It’s gone now. Years later, when we lived together in her Kingsland flat, we went out to see the building. It looked like a private house. It had the words The Mothers’ Hospital (Salvation Army) on the front. Why were we born in a Salvation Army hospital? Because that was the way we lived, she said. And that was all she would say. She liked her secrets. The letters, it seems now, were as big as windows. Why did she want to see it? She told me that her three pregnancies were the happiest days of her life. My father was attentive to her, solicitous, and faithful. He was never with anyone else when she was pregnant, and as long as she was breastfeeding he stayed with her. People were so kind. Richard brought her flowers and fruit. When I was born he took her photograph sitting in a pale pink bed jacket, holding me in her arms. There were apples and roses. He still had that photograph, she said, but she had lost her copy. She was always losing things. She said that we should have been happy children, because her happiness was in her milk. We should have been happy, secure, loving people but we were not. She said she could recall each of our faces exactly as we looked up at her from the breast. Each one was different and beautiful and ancient.

  We took the bus out and we went past the stop and got out in Hackney and waited for the next bus back so I saw the place of my birth coming and going and on each occasion all I could think of was my mother’s happiness and fulfillment, how having a child at her breast made her feel useful. It was a hurtful discovery. I was angry because in a way she was betraying what had happened in the meantime, our grief and our silence. But I kept my anger to myself. It would have served no purpose.

  We certainly lived on the island through several springs and summers, and parts, at least, of two winters. We had a boat, an old salmon yawl that took water at a steady pace, steadily sinking all its life. When we got into it there was always water under the boards and sometimes above them. We bailed with Heinz bean cans. The engine was a British Seagull Century longshaft that never failed. It smoked and sounded like a machine gun. Mother went out to the mainland; we rarely went. She went once a week when she could. Sometimes a boatman came out with things we ordered from the shops. When the weather was bad we stayed at home and lived on short rations. Sometimes our money ran out. Or she gave it away. Occasionally we all went ashore. My mother planned these outings. I remember a tinker woman begging on the street. My mother gave her a ten-shilling note—an enormous amount of money. I’m sorry, I have no change. God bless you, lady, it’s too much.

  Or sometimes we made a run for it and moved ashore for the duration. Crouched in our anoraks, our woolly hats, our Wellington boots, our backs turned to the incoming spray and green water, we laughed and thought we were having an adventure. Then we stayed with Richard Wood and watched the rain sweep across the distant rock that was our home. How old was Richard Wood then? He can’t have been more than thirty-five, but he seem
ed to us to be old, as old as the house and its privileges, its ancient arrogant windows. Tiraneering was his house. It means “the land of iron” in Irish. The cat came with us everywhere we went and Richard hated him. I hear him say: I found him asleep in the laundry, He pissed in the kitchen for Jesus’ sake, That fucking cat ate our supper, You pay more attention to the cat than me. And once he had lambs’ kidneys in a bowl on the table and they disappeared—the cat farted urine smells all night. Em laughed at that. Flanagan stinks, she said. But Richard put him outside.

  Sometimes Father brought us with him to London. He had that Kingsland flat where my mother would eventually die. In those days it was practically in Essex, the farthest, bleakest reach of northeast London. There was a pub on the ground floor. The railway station was a hundred yards away. There was a kebab house across the street. It was like the center of the world and we were weary explorers just come from the periphery where we had witnessed marvels too elaborate to tell. We were the sorry end of that peculiar 1960s invention, the jet-set. We were feckless and lived in several places at once, as they did, but our mode of transport was a salmon yawl, a ferry, a train. We were their inverse image.

  At any rate, he was famous by then, having appeared on television as the bestselling author.

  We heard him more than once on the World Service when we could get it, which depended on the disposition of the atmosphere above our heads, whether we could catch what Richard Wood called the sky-wave or not. We imagined him coursing in on a long swell between the grey and the blue skies, above the clouds. We heard our names.

  We thought of him traveling in something very like Richard Wood’s Iliad. Mother said he was a traveling preacher. She said if ever the world was going to change it would not be because we grew our own vegetables. It would be because people walked away from the bosses. I didn’t know who the bosses were.