The Islands Page 4

I’ll write a poem about you, he said.

  He could do the little-boy look. He had that grace and simplicity. And he could be sad.

  It might have turned my mother’s head, but not mine. I shrugged. I didn’t like poems. He had left several in our house for safekeeping at various times. They were memorials of his days here, vignettes of our lives, love poems to a family that was not his. I didn’t think they were important. We always lost them.

  He said, You could be a boy or a girl.

  I didn’t know how to understand that. Was it good or bad? What I felt was shame.

  I shook my head.

  Come and put your clothes on. Let’s go home.

  Put your clothes on, he said again.

  I sulked. But I didn’t jump. He nodded once, as though he had read my thoughts. I watched him go below.

  My eyes were heavy. Everything went in phases, slow as water. He pumped the primus. The sharp smell of the paraffin. The pop of the flame. My legs felt too long, like an animal’s. An eland or a gazelle. And we sat at opposite ends of the cockpit. We had bread and cheese and tea. I folded one knee onto the other as my mother did, slanted my legs away. It was a warm, still evening. The breeze that would take us home was slow in coming. He watched me from under his lashes. I felt free and dangerous, as though I had hurt him. When the night breeze finally blew I left that reef full of pleasure and power. I remember standing on the bow of the Iliad with my legs spread, braced to the inner forestay, the wire pressed into my skin. Afterwards my arm and side were flecked with tar where the strands left their mark. The breeze was in my face then. If he had asked me I would have given him everything. It might have been a world, a universe, a way of life—I didn’t know what would be required of me, but I knew it was vast. There were no discernible tracks. The mountain sheep knew the way, those that came to the island. The seabirds on the cliffs knew. The seals, the dolphins, the fin whales. Their sinuous bodies found the seaway without pain. Now I wanted to know more than anything what his body would feel like. What would come next? Where would he go?

  Later Jeannie told me that they had talked about me and that my mother said I was becoming a woman. I said I thought that’s what I had always been, that it just meant I wasn’t a man. But Jeannie instinctively knew that it was something else, something more important and that there was something dangerous in it, that I should be afraid. When I didn’t react she told me it was raining outside and did I want to play draughts? She listed the other games we could play. Ludo, snakes and ladders, dominoes, Junior Scrabble—which Mother was keen on but we were not. I ignored her. I was pretending to be reading, but I knew that Jeannie was right. This would be my last year of freedom. I knew all about schools. I had read The Highland Twins at the Chalet School and Hard Times. There was something cold and hard in the pit of my stomach that must have been dread. Facts, facts, facts—that was the future to which I would never belong.

  She jumped on the bed beside me. She knew what she was doing. She was always the bringer of bad news. She leaned over my shoulder so that her face was against mine. Her skin was dry and hot. Her breath smelled yeasty.

  They’re sending you away, she said. They’re going to send you to school.

  My father never came all that remained of the summer and my mother, as I remember it, never once spoke about him. Nor did she mention school. I came to believe that if I was a good girl nothing more would happen. I could stop the arrow in flight.

  All this happened to us as I remember it, things we had no right to expect, wonders and minor miracles and also terrible things. We children tried to find our way in this world of edges that proliferated into chaos, and I suppose the adults were navigating too. Only the cat knew everything.

  Jeannie

  It’s Grace’s day to look after Em. She and Em are down at the western beach searching for soft-belly crabs under stones to bait hooks with. They have a bucket for them and the bucket is filling with scrabbling green and brown machines. It’s a summer’s day. I’m wandering on the western end of the island looking for bright stones or bits of quartz. I find the bones of a seabird in a wall. I brush the bones out with a feather, they’re so light. They’re chalk fine, so fragile I think they might turn to dust in my hands. I brush them onto my sweater, lay them out on the heather below and begin to put them together again. I feel a terrible sense of loss, as if the bird is mine, a pet or one that was nesting under my window. Birds, like humans, seek out shelter in bad times. We all need a niche in a wall to hide ourselves in, to get well again, or to die. I’m so lost in setting the bones back in place that I miss the clouds building out from the mainland, the distant thunder. When the downpour begins I’m taken completely by surprise and for a time in the noise and the battery of the rain I’m completely flummoxed. Eventually I bundle the bones into my sweater and run for home.

  Richard is there.

  Jane is lying down upstairs.

  He laughs. Look at you, we have to get you out of those clothes, you’ll catch your death of cold.

  He peels them off one by one and wraps me in a towel and I stand there like a stick insect, a gangly, bony, shivering child and he holds me tight and scrubs me. All our towels are ruined by salt. They’re coarse and unbending. I think he scoured my skin away and penetrated to my heart. He could have seen it beating steadily, contentedly, if he had bothered to turn me ’round.

  When I’m dry he kisses me on the top of my head and slaps my bottom. Get into something dry, he says, go on now, you silly child. Words of endearment. Sometimes he calls me that still. Come here to me, silly child.

  When I come out again he’s opened my bundle of bones. He’s spread the sweater on the kitchen table and Grace is there and they’re speculating about the structure and function of the bits and pieces. The bones in their hands. This one fits here. If we put that there then these two go together. Suddenly I hate her. I stand there and watch her taking my place and I have nothing to say. Em comes over to watch too, her thumb in her mouth she studies the bones. The rain outside the window is straight down without wind to slant it, a grey curtain that closes off the entire ocean. The air in the house feels colder and cleaner. I go upstairs and pick up one of Grace’s books. I can’t remember what it was now, she was always reading. I climb onto a chair and open the roof window and put the book outside on the slates. The sea is furious, explosive, frightening. The small cove is full of water even though it should be only half tide. There’s a boiling yellowish scum all along the edges, sticks, seaweed, a glass pot buoy, a milk crate. Rain. The house is drowning in static. The light becomes steel. The blank windows.

  Flakes of memory from a nugget of malachite that is the unknowable past. But none of us has a whole memory anyway, whatever we think. What we hear others tell us permeates our understanding. Their thoughts run like subterranean streams in ours. Never trust anyone who has a simple tale to tell.

  Jeannie loves stones—I’ve heard them say that about me since I was a child. It usually feels like a joke, something complicated implying that I find it hard to love people. But of all the family, I’m the lover, the faithful lover of people. Still, it’s true stone is my passion. When I was a girl I wondered why in certain places the rocks lay flat, in others sloped and in others curved, why some stones are round and others sharp. These are simple questions but the answer is as complicated as the history of the world. Before ever I came to study geology I’d formed my own theories about how the ground under my feet came to be. Once in a secondhand bookshop I found a topological map and saw that a great wave-train of old red sandstone ran along the coast to the west of our island, with spatters of limestone in the troughs; I saw that the tops of this wave-train were the headlands that I could see marching westward into the sunset, and that the troughs were the bays that the sea had hollowed out of the soft limestone. It was years before I confirmed this impression in a textbook and when I did I was disappointed to find that the theory was not my own, but also quietly pleased at having discovered it for myself
.

  I was always fascinated by the tides. Where did they start? Why did the moon change them? Richard knew. He drew diagrams at the kitchen table, circles and sine waves and arrows. The great tide wave of the Atlantic runs from the North Cape of Norway where the Atlantic and Barents Sea meet, past Fastnet Rock to the south of us, and back again every six hours, billions of tons of water grinding against the continents and islands—a wave a hundred feet high was recorded not far from our island and they say it was not unusual This vast swirl of water washes the stones at our door and sweeps the ocean bed clear. We lived, in those days, in an iron-bound coast with deep safe harbors, a morphology shaped by folding and fracture as well as by erosion and hydraulic action; we lived in the presence of big round mountains that rose in the distance, old worn mountains shaped by rain and wind, among the islands and their outlying reefs, their sands and their pebble beaches and raised beaches and the fragile remains of human habitation.

  Tom is leaving the island tomorrow. Tonight there is the preparation. Mainly he travels with only a large rucksack for his clothes, his manuscript, whatever he is working on at the time. He keeps the manuscript in a plastic bag. I remember that it was a faded olive-green Marks and Spencer’s bag. He used to say that Marks and Sparks did the best-quality plastic. Of course it’s raining. His oilskins hang stiff as corpses behind the door, ready for the crossing. Em hides her top half behind them and every once in a while looks out to see if anyone has noticed. When she looks I make a face at her and she smiles that slow, secret smile. Peek-a-boo.

  Recriminations.

  Jane says, I can’t manage on my own. When will you be back? What am I going to do for money? Easy for you to say. Do you have any idea what it’s like?

  Daddy, can I come this time, you promised.

  My sister Grace looks on. I think I can feel her contempt but that’s probably something I’ve invented over the years. Certainly she hated all of that. Flanagan stares from his perch on the window; his insouciant eyes say, However it falls out I’ll be fed.

  Please . . .

  Suddenly I see weeks that are like years stretch out before me. Islands are, more than anything else, places of deprivation. How old am I? Six, seven?

  I want to go, I want to go, you promised.

  I have seen children winding up like that, the mantra of wanting and needing and deserving. In a few minutes it will become a wail. He slaps me. I hear it first and feel it later. It can’t have been very hard, he never used force.

  Jane says nothing. She sits at the table, the mother figure of a demented folk story, her hair tangled, her fingernails outlined in black, her cheesecloth shirt stiff with salt.

  Grace sniggers.

  Em winds into his arms and begins to cry.

  Following her example I cry too.

  I’m sick of here, I wail, I want to go.

  Why don’t you take her, Jane says.

  One of these days . . .

  There’s no time like the present.

  Jesus Christ, this is a madhouse.

  Please, Daddy . . . ?

  He sits Em on a free chair and kisses her on the cheek. He gets up and goes to the door. The door is open because the rain is soft and the night is cloying-warm. The sea is still out there. In the distance we can hear the foghorn on Fastnet Rock.

  He turns suddenly and there is his warmest smile. It radiates everything I ever wanted—love, happiness, comfort, hope. Oh, he was a charmer, he charmed thousands in every corner of the world. I was a child—how could I resist? Come here to me, child, he says. He holds his arms out and I run for them. He wraps them around me.

  What will I bring you from America, he says. Will I bring you a red Indian?

  Laughing and smothered, held tightly in the oily, sheepy smell of his Aran sweater, I hear Grace’s step on the stairs and the door of our room closing.

  Oh, you can win them over when you want to, Jane says, easily done when you’re only here a few weeks in the season. You don’t have to scratch a summer out of this fucking rock. I can’t cope any longer. Put that in your next bloody book. It doesn’t work, Tom. I’m not going to live the way you want.

  I turn in the wheel of his embrace and look at her. I want her to come into the circle too. She is tapping the table with her middle finger, sharp, short raps like a blackbird breaking a mussel shell on a rock. Suddenly she sweeps her hand away and a plate and a cup fly. They break against the wall. She looks at them for a moment, then she begins to rap again.

  The watchtower is another somber flake of green in my box of memories.

  I go there to play a game I call chainies. This game never includes Grace because Grace is outside everything. I don’t know where I learned the game. It was as if games grew naturally from the landscape and their names were inherently exact. I have bits of old china, broken plates and saucers, cups without handles, but also certain beautiful stones and pieces of seaworn glass. I have fragments of those old glass buoys they used to mark lobster pots, the most beautiful green blasted to jade by the action of the sea. Sometimes my chainies are things in a shop. Sometimes I serve tea in them to my menagerie of toys, a bear with one eye, a donkey without a tail, a small monkey. I’ve trodden down something like a hare’s sett inside the ruined walls of the watchtower, the weeds all laid out in the counterclockwise direction I first walked them. There’s no wind in there. Sometimes I hear a gale grumbling over the walls, the sea grinding against the cliff. I see seabirds blown away on the wind’s wings. But inside is my own private calm, a constant storm’s eye, my own world.

  I hear a noise. I turn and look to the entrance but there’s no one there. Then I see her shadow. Em’s shadow. She is perched high on the wall looking down at me. How did she get there? The memory is unsettling. It has no clear beginning or end. Was she there before I arrived? Have I forgotten or repressed some decision to allow her to climb on the forbidden wall? I can’t be certain anymore. It has the logic of a nightmare. In memory I am paralyzed by her presence. She sits beside the window with its musket loop, kicking her heels against the stone. Don’t go any farther, Em. The window is a whirlpool of emptiness: none of us has passed it. Our heads whirl at the thought.

  She doesn’t acknowledge that I see her. She is watching the game. She has her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes are big. A child’s game is a closely defined world. To step outside for an instant is to see the world vaporize like a dying star.

  You’re meant to be with Grace, I say, it’s her day.

  She says nothing, but she inches down on her bottom and runs away.

  But Grace plays games too. She invents one that only she can win. First she promises something: to tell something, because she always knew secrets; to give something; to do something. I always want what she has to offer. Then she explains something difficult or unpleasant that I must do to get it. The pleasure she takes in watching my agonized desire, my bargaining, my reluctant acceptance. Grace’s game is what passes for fate in my childhood. She knows where a robin is nesting. There are three eggs. If I want to see it I have to tell Jane a lie. I spend days trying to invent a lie that I would be able to tell. Then she brings me to see the nest. She always keeps her promise, that’s part of the game. Strands of my black hair and Grace’s fair are wound together with grass and leaves and, in the middle, three perfect eggs the color of sandstone. If you mind Em I’ll show you the hole where the conger comes out.

  That summer there is a great bloom of jellyfish all along the south and west coasts. They wash in on the sand and we bury them above the tide line. They are our aliens, palmfuls of colored glass and string. Grace swims and occasionally emerges with little weals of sting. She will tell me a secret, I forget what now, if I come too. From a distance she looks like she’s floating on a vast sheet of colored glass. I am too frightened. At night they give me bad dreams. They come and go on the tide, the earth’s phlegmy breathing. Then one day they’re gone forever and it is autumn.

  Jane is trying to school us. On one of her tri
ps ashore she picks up a book about the sea. She wants to use the jellyfish to make us learn. It is an admirable theory of education. Among other things she tells us that they have two phases, the polyp and the medusa, and they reproduce by budding; the life cycle is characterized by pulses that give rise to summer blooms like the one coming ashore on our strand. But information comes to us as a kind of pleasant static from another country, inexplicable, a cipher for which we have no key but which is beautiful to contemplate. Gradually I lose my fear. If the bloom returned now I would do it and Grace could tell me the secret she never revealed. Em has fallen in love with the words. She has a little song she sings that goes, Polyp, medusa, bloom, polyp, medusa, bloom. She sings it over and over again. I hear her singing herself to sleep.

  One day a boy comes ashore from a lobsterman’s boat. They have engine trouble. I see them pulling into the western beach, running the bow onto the shingle. It is a dangerous entrance, a sharp reef with a narrow gap. Only a local could find his way in. Together they take the cowling off the outboard and begin taking it apart. They spread an oilskin coat on the shingle and place the pieces on it. Flanagan the cat comes down. Whenever a boat lands he suspects fish. He lounges in the sea pinks watching and dozing. After a time I see that the boy has nothing to do. I go down and ask him if he wants to play. I was a wild child with no idea how to behave with strangers. His father stares at me, but the boy says yes. I’m pleased because he’s a big boy and little girls are in awe of big boys.

  James Casey is his name. His father is Mike Casey. He is known as Little Jimmy, but I can’t call him that. He lives in the village of Rally across the sound.

  I bring the boy to the tower and show him my treasures. I explain the game but I can see that he’s not concentrating. I scold him for not paying attention. He asks me to show him my knickers. I don’t care about knickers but I know the game would never work that way. I refuse and when he tries to catch me I dodge past him easily and up onto the wall. He starts to climb after me. Then he sees the sheer drop on his left-hand side, a hundred feet or more from where we stand to the sea. The water below is clear. He stops climbing.