Elysium. Part Two (13 page)

Twenty minutes later he was finished, and he handed the page back to her.

‘That’s everything? As it was recorded?’

‘That’s everything.’

‘Ok, you can leave me now.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t concentrate with you standing over me waiting for answers.’ Her fingers scooted him away as though he was an irritating dog. ‘Get some sleep or something, go and make Eryn’s life miserable, do whatever it is you do, but do it somewhere other than here.’

‘It’s the middle of the night…’

‘I’ll let myself out when I start to doze off.’

She turned to the table and opened the first book of ciphers, tapping her pen on her teeth as she studied the text.

Semilion watched her for a few moments, anxious to be leaving the job for someone else, and yet content to have fresh eyes working on it. He had been drudging through it for weeks and had made almost no progress. If she proved to be of any use he might take her out of the crèche and offer her a more strategic purpose.

He took the first step slowly, before asking if she needed a drink, but she was already lost in the books, and didn’t hear him when he repeated himself. Already she was making deft notes and flipping through pages as though she would have the task completed before he reached the top of the stairs.

*

The mist clung to the land for longer each day. Dreary dawns and spectral sunsets glowed eerily on the horizon, and already Selina was wishing for the first twitch of spring to touch the ghostly hills.

She was content with her routine and the part she played in the continuation of the community, and the rut of everyday life, a life that became standard and dull, erased all thought of the crumpled letter penned by Richard Kelly. Whatever it had been about was lost for fatigue and daily humdrum, and was only remembered - and even then only vaguely - when she saw Eryn and the torment behind her eyes.

The loss of her father still touched her; he knew she had been boarding an immigrant haul and with her lack of contact he would presume her killed by the U.N.. That was the hardest notion to bear.

She wished to tell her father that she was well and lay, night after night, willing the words into his mind yet knowing it was futile.

They were difficult thoughts to cope with alone, and she had initially turned to Priya for support - none in the village could identify with the totality of loss as she could. The villagers had always been there for one another and, apart from the occasional death, knew little of abandonment, despondency and loneliness, not to mention the loss of identity both she and Priya had experienced. They were no longer daughters or cousins, or members of their former social standing. To those who had loved them in the outside world they were nothing but an assortment of evanescent memories.

Priya proved to be quite the listener, and never refrained from lending an ear when Selina felt low; they would talk deep into the night, and Priya would listen intently, and tell her not to worry, that the life they had found was a better one even if it came with conditions. The words were flat on Priya’s lips, however. She didn’t believe a word of it.

Selina had heard her leave the house countless times in the middle of the night. She probed the village, Selina supposed, looking for means of escape, before returning close to dawn. On the days following her nightly excursions she was always sullen, as though she had expected to have found some promised transport to whisk her away and yet it had never come. On those days Selina didn’t speak of her father, her cousin, or the life they had left behind. She waited until Priya had grown bright again before unloading her fears. It was only on those days that Priya spoke of their new life being a better one – regardless of how cold her words were.

It was a better life, Selina would concede. A quieter life - a life less stressful. The only torment the people had to concern themselves with was the fear that it might end.

She sat on a crest of rocks by Ted’s dilapidated lighthouse at Bull Point, watching a mist rolling down from the cliffs.

She felt eyes on her and turned, Ted was standing in a high window of the lighthouse. He nodded at her and disappeared and it sent a shiver down her. He had been acting strangely since the disappearance of Breaker.

The villagers supposed the poor dog had been sniffing around the cliffs and fallen, though Ted was convinced something untoward had happened to him. ‘He hasn’t never gone missing before,’ he would remind at the beginning of an evening, before raising his voice to little more than blunt accusations when the drink had taken hold of his inhibition.

She couldn’t imagine anyone in the village doing anything malicious to Breaker, she thought as she watched the misty impression of South Wales on the horizon. The dog still reminded her of the one’s she had seen in old newsreels, violent and seemingly the cause of the world’s suffering, though she had grown to accept him as harmless.

Ted had spent long hours convincing her to stroke him behind the ears, to run her hands through his fur, but she couldn’t do it. And when Breaker had once licked her forearm – gooseflesh rippling along her skin at the thought – she had jumped up and almost burst into tears.

Ted had laughed then and coaxed her back into her chair. Poor Ted, she thought. He didn’t laugh any more.

She heard dry mud crunching behind her and neglected to turn. She had grown accustomed to Priya’s quiet footsteps.

‘Hi, Sel,’ Priya said, putting her hand on Selina’s shoulder before aping her position, her knees drawn to her breast.

‘How are things?’ Selina asked, still looking out to the channel.

Priya sighed, ‘Fine, I suppose. I’m missing my life,’

Selina smiled, and wiped away a strand of hair that had blown across her eyes, ‘It’s a better life here,’ she reminded Priya, leaning over and nudging her playfully.

Priya nodded, and Selina thought she saw her smile also, though it was short lived.

‘What’s up?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t just say that it’s a better life here to comfort you. I truly believe it. It’s just... It’s obvious we’re going to feel bitter, or lost, away from everything we’ve grown up around. I’ve spent my life moving around, and now I’m stuck here.’

‘A bird in a cage...’ Selina mused.

‘A mouse in a mousetrap.’ Priya corrected.

‘It’ll change. Over time, won’t it?’ It was a question that didn’t need answering.

‘I know,’ Priya said quietly, ‘I just wish I could forget everything up to the day we met,’ She looked at Selina, who couldn’t meet her gaze. Whether she meant the day they had arrived at Mortehoe or specifically when they had met, Selina didn’t know. After a moment of silence, the wind whipping their hair, Selina felt Priya’s gaze returning to the sea.

‘
How long do you think they can keep this charade up?’ Selina said, changing the subject.

‘
Not much longer, I don’t know how they haven’t been caught already. They’re not exactly masters of elusion, are they?’

‘
What do you mean? They’re strict about keeping their curtains drawn at night and banning smoke during the day. They have those underground stables and the mill! The mill alone is a feat of technological subterfuge in itself.’

Priya shrugged, ’Let’s hope the powers that be don’t think of inspecting the place with any degree of scrutiny.' She moved closer to Selina and leant against her for warmth. ‘They keep on saying they’ve got plans and preparations for such a time but, well... I’m not convinced.’

Selina gave her a long hug and stood. She offered her hand for Priya to follow, but she said she’d like to sit and think for a little while longer. ‘I’ll meet you in the Smuggler’s for a drink later?’

‘
See you then,’ Selina said as she walked away.

She thought about what Priya had said, and flushed to think of the words “I just wish I could forget everything up to the day we met.” It was a rare lapse into sentimentality, and for a moment Selina felt as though Priya needed her. Together they had been shipwreck survivors, had been companions for months, the closest of friends, and yet those few words, placed at the end a million others spoken over the course of their friendship, made concrete for the first time a bond that had never once been voiced. She felt silly and young, like a teenager drunk on freedom, and she bloomed inside as she made her way to the pub.

Jocelyn Sayer passed her on the way, bright in a long red woollen dress. She looked fresh and was surging with happiness, and several children from her class followed her happily.

‘Baron asked me out last night,’ she said, trying to contain a smirk. The children burst into giggles. She explained that the two of them were going to have a candlelit meal on the roof of the pub, and that she and the children were off to Fuscia Wood to pick flowers for her hair.

At that moment Selina heard her name being called. Her ears pricked, not quite certain where the voice had come from. It was Semilion.

Jocelyn turned, looking back the way they had come. He had rounded the corner and was waving to them. ‘Looks as though Mr. Tupper needs you.’

Selina rolled her eyes before heading onwards, her pace quickened until she and Semilion were a few yards from one another.

Breathing hard, he wiped his bald head and said, ‘Selina, it’s Hannah and Morag, they’ve been asking for you. There’s a problem at the mill. The God-damned thing’s about to collapse in on itself!’

Chapter Twenty-Three
.

South-easterly wind.

Seven knots.

Samantha Waesenbach lay a tankard of water beside Boen’s bed. He stared at the ceiling, his left eye lifeless and red.

‘Here you are, darling,’ she said quietly. Boen remained silent. ‘It’s a nice day out, seems as though the summer’s trying to hold on for a few more weeks.’ She spoke as though he was fully reciprocating the conversation, though apart from his tensing when she had entered the room, it seemed as though he hardly noticed she were there.

It had been the same every day since his father had pushed him to the floor and kicked him to unconsciousness.

He had woken with pain searing through him, dew and blood on his face, his ribs and cheek fractured, and a fierce burning in his left eye. His father had left in the boat that he and Eryn had stolen; ordered away by Semilion while his mother and sister fussed over him and dabbed him with ointments and pastes.

Boen had screamed to be left alone, his former drunkenness having all but escaped him, and he was hauled up to the bedroom where someone sedated him before leaving him to hug himself to sleep. He woke again on a different day, the sun on the wall denoting it were morning, and he found himself swathed in bandages and braced with splints. There was nothing to do but dwell on imaginings whilst his bones healed and his hatred subsided.

He spent the long days imagining Eryn sitting beside him, comforting him and her ghostly impression simply being there to pass the time in silence. He conversed with her about their night on Lundy and the stupidity of it, at one point they laughed so hard that he had tears in his eyes and his ribs jarred, reminding him that he was injured. He lay motionless after that, his tears changing to that of frustration.

His sister, Arabella, was the only person he would speak to. She came in the afternoons with a thick soup and pleaded with him to not take out his anger on their mother.

‘She don’t know what to do about him. You know he’s always been like it and Semilion don’t see no wrong in it.’

‘She let him do it,’ Boen said bluntly, though he knew that if he hadn’t received the blows, or if his mother had tried to pull Guliven away, then she would have absorbed them instead.

Everyone was so weak, he considered. His father for succumbing to drink and anger, his mother for cowering in the face of his temper, even himself for allowing it to happen. He found the imaginary Eryn cooing that he had been taken unawares, that his father had crept up on him from behind and pushed him to the floor before he had a chance to react, but he knew in his heart that the result would have been the same however much notice he’d have received. It would simply have been more humiliating to have cowered from him and be punished for being a wimp and a jellyfish, as his father so often liked to call him. The incidents had happened for as long as he could remember. His first memory, although he never knew the cause of the happening, was of his mother crying in another room, her repressed moans turning to screams. He hadn’t seen either of them, but knew without doubt - for all the times it had happened in the intervening years, that his father must have been drinking heavily and taken any or all of his myriad frustrations out upon her.

It had become a way of life in the household, and though it felt as though it had culminated in his being bedridden, blinded in one eye and riddled with fractured bones, his month of constant thought lit an understanding that his life was a long way from culminating in anything. He had an opportunity to change things. He wouldn’t allow himself to look back on his life in decades to come and see nothing but a string of abuse and maltreatment. A torrent had been released in his mind. Like a seed pressed by a rock, the beginning had been tough, but now he had grasped a view of light and was focused on nothing but reaching for it. He considered he should be thanking his father for blinding him. He had never seen more clearly.

*

Eryn’s grounding had come to an end, and her routine of weekly bottle collecting had been grudgingly returned to her.

She stopped at the foot of the Waeshenbach property and laid her sack of bottles in the grass. She was forbidden to step on the land beyond the gateway, and Samantha had dropped their empty bottles and jars unceremoniously in the road for her to collect.She looked up to Boen’s room blankly, wishing she could do something other than stare, and then she crouched and slowly began picking them up.

Her brother had delighted in telling her that Boen’s head had been caved in, that he was crippled and would spend the rest of his life in his bed. She knew he was teasing her grossly, but the stillness of Boen’s bedroom window, the lifelessness of the entire house, made her feel as though there were truth in his words.

She clutched her skirts tightly and thought of what she had caused. All for her wish to find out what had happened to Richard Kelly, whom she was thinking of increasingly less. His grave was now riddled with weeds and would soon be the same as any other in the churchyard. Her memories of him were dampened by the blows she had received and the devastation she had caused by her curiosity. Such a strange thing, she considered, to have felt such passion for Kelly when he was so much older than she. Such a strange thing, to have caused such disruption for a dead man, to get Boen into so much trouble on a whim and a fancy.

She still had the papers she had stolen from the Marisco Tavern, hidden beneath a board at the bottom of her wardrobe. She had looked at them countless times throughout her incarceration, had hoped that she might find some use in them, for Boen’s sake if nothing else, some piece of information that might at least help her understand more the life of Lundy. She had given up on the hope that they served as any kind of clue, they were nothing but sketches of birds, bank details and pages of numbers. It were as though the leaves of several ornithography, calculus and memoir folios had been scattered and gathered haphazardly. They were an irrelevant riddle to her, too detached from her life to be related to one another, and so she looked less and less at the pages of numbers, then less at the pages of correspondence, until finally she only looked at the leaves upon which were drawn birds, and only then because they were pictures of birds, and less because she were attempting to unlock a mystery that had consumed her so completely the previous month.

Her mother had tried to coax from her what she had been doing with Boen. Why had she suddenly been spending so much time with him? She had never shown an interest before. Why had she risked damaging one of Guliven’s boats? Why had she jeopardised the safety of the village?

To these questions Eryn had no other answer than to shrug and say that she didn’t know. She had felt emboldened by breaking from Mortehoe’s chains and crossing the starry sea to Lundy, yet that emancipation had been thrashed out of her by her father’s belt. It had also served to install the very same questions in her mind that her mother now pressed her with. Why had she done it? Why?

When she had worn the very meaning of ‘I don’t know’ to the bone, she withdrew to mere shrugs, an act that did little to sate the increasing frustration of her mother who’s volatile, highly strung temperament had been a source of much whispered conversation amongst the village since time immemorial, never more so on evenings when she could be heard admonishing Eryn. The still of the village would be broken by sudden flares of piercing exclamation, and all in earshot would share looks and pull faces.

Poor Eryn, they thought. Poor girl, they said, and yet no-one went to her aid or even pretended they had heard a thing. When her mother returned to the bar with a bright smile and a joke on her lips, everyone reciprocated the smile and laughed at the revelry. That was as it had always been, they thought. You can’t change things that have always been.

Eryn stood, wrestled the bag of bottles over her shoulder, and remained looking towards Boen’s window for a few moments in the hope there would be some kind of movement from within. A twitching shadow. A glare of light, anything.

Her thoughts were distracted by the sound of George and Seb on the road beyond the hill. They were singing Kelly’s Song, named so because it had been he who had sung it first after a run to Ballycotton.

On hearing the tune she was struck by the memory of first hearing it as though smacked in the cheek. Kelly had sat at the bar and ordered everyone to be quiet, then exclaimed he had brought something home more valuable than the petty novelties they always pestered him for. At the time she had been shocked by his words, and soaked up the exasperated faces about the room. He had sung an old Irish song, ruined by his drunkenness and forgetfulness and yet, over the years, people had taken to it, one of the few outside songs to be cherished by the villagers.

The old winds of home call me back East, my boys,

There’ll be feasting on Geese when I’m there, when at home,

Where the sun meets the dawn with a song and a call,

Back East, back East, hear them all calling me home.

Kelly’s Song, it became known as, it had been sung at his funeral and would forever draw fond memories of him from the recesses of everyone’s minds. Yet Eryn, on hearing it, turned away from it and hastened home, harried.

A month ago she would have waited for George and flirted with him nonchalantly on his arrival, let him give her a piggy-back home and squeeze him overly so as to make sure he noticed. She would have done anything to gain his attention under a weft of indifference. She would play all the games the chemicals in her body provoked her to play, and yet now she wanted nothing more than to remain unnoticed. She felt labelled a freak for consorting with Boen, for consorting secretly with him in the early hours, and would do anything to shed the weight of people’s eyes and gossip.

The words of Kelly’s Song behind her stopped abruptly, and she heard George call her name. She quickened her pace, as much as the weight of the bottles would allow, and instinctively she turned to see George and Seb trundling wheelbarrows laden with sacks. They shared confused frowns as she hastened away. They were perplexed by her retreating from them, and yet to her it was conformation that all in the village considered her as nothing more than a monstrous anomaly.

*

‘What the hell was that about?’ George said, staring after Eryn. ‘Didn’t she realise it was us?’

Seb shrugged and carried on singing Kelly’s Song, then said, ‘You’ve seen how she’s been since last month… right up her own miff. She gets weirder every day, hardly talks to anyone now.’

‘Hmm. Baron don’t say what’s up, either. Says it’s something to do with Boen…’ He nodded over to the Waeshenbach household as they neared it.

‘You don’t reckon the two of them was rutting, do you?’

George laughed. ‘What? Are you joking? Of course not.’ He looked after her, though she had already gone. What had she been doing with him that had got her into so much trouble?

‘What then?’ Seb prodded. ‘Come to think of it I ain’t seen him much either. When did you last see him?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sure I’ve seen him around.’

They both looked up at the residence as they passed by. It seemed cold and uninhabited, though they thought little of it.

‘I’ve got to head down to the Hotel.’ George said. ‘The stuff in the sack on the left is for them.’

‘No problem. I’ll come with you.’

‘George looked at him sardonically. ‘Right. And they’re going to let you in because?’

Seb smirked and said it was worth a try, then waved him adieu and said they would speak later in the Smuggler’s.

George followed a left fork in the road that lead to the overgrown and crumbling Esplanade. The hotel had been built on a low plateau, and from his vantage he could only see the skeletonised slate rooftop, worn away by a century of exposure to the northerly winter storms.

The exterior of the Edwardian hotel still looked grand, even for the erosion that had started to pick at the sandy walls long before The Great Pathogen. The mouldy rendering had fallen away in large clumps over the years, revealing waterlogged brickwork beneath. Nearly all the windows had been blown out in one storm or another, and as he walked past the side of the three-storey building he saw the empty indoor pool, replete with cracked tiles and thick trailers of ivy. There was something about that pool that always sent a shiver up his spine, it was supposed to be a place for people to frolic and play, and yet there was nothing he knew of that looked more melancholy.

He looked down to Woolacombe Beach and saw the dead bodies of the
Tangaroa
that hadn’t been drawn back out to sea. Silt covered them as though they had been dragged into the sand and turned to stone. George looked away, the combination of the deserted hotel and the bodies almost overwhelming.

He negotiated the wheelbarrow around a pile of fallen brickwork, and unlocked a rusting gate before unloading the barrow on the floor and heading inside, one of the sacks dragging through the debris at his feet. The building had been made to look uninhabited; the windows were grey with water-spray and dust, birds nested in the furnishings and coated everything in droppings and feathers. The walls had long lost whatever colour they had last been painted, and the parts that were wallpapered bulged and split while the plaster beneath crumbled.

All around the hotel fell into disrepair, until George stepped into what had once been a kitchen and opened a door leading to the cellar.