Island (21 page)

We sit in silence a long time. I do not go out like this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get back. When I have fear I have to wait and watch. What else is there to do?

‘I won’t walk near you. I-I won’t talk to you.’

‘Be quiet.’

‘You can’t just s-sit there–’

The silence yawns. He continues to wait like a dog.

I get up slowly. What difference does it make? Inside or outside, if someone else is there? What difference really? He thinks I’m scared of him. But I’m not. He’s the last thing I’m scared of. ‘Not far.’

‘No. We’ll go to Viking Bay.’ He jumps up,
eager to please, pitiful. ‘The stones there are black and round as bowls.’

I carry my body out of the doorway. He backs away to leave the big edge of space around me that I require.

‘Sh-shall I lock?’ He turns the key, passes it to me at arm’s length. In my pocket, heavy and cold.

He sets off across the garden I can walk behind his rucksack. He walks one two on his legs like a stork there are bands of noise near and far. The thumping and rustle of us – feet, clothes, breathing (nearer, yes, the booming of my heart). The humming of the air full of insects, bees flies midges I don’t know what but the air is moving and buzzing. The zooms of distant sound; traffic? Aeroplanes? Did I speak?

‘Submarines in the sound. They test torpedoes.’ Submarines in the sound, sound of submarines would I hear the whoosh of torpedo under water? Hear the clunk of it hit the thud the explosion, water everywhere broken into shards and leaping fragments glassy in the air?

She is dangerous. She is it. Behind all this clear brittle sharp each layer of sight of sound like glass, each pane of double glazing I go through she is right behind it all. Calum leads the way I would not even get through without him I would have to stand still on that spot where she could target me. Torpedo.

‘N-Nikki?’ He waits and I can move again. We move on step step in time our legs rise and fall. He moves through the bright air nothing is cutting or hurting him. The sounds part as he steps through.

It is crystal, when I step into it it will shatter and cut me but instead
I watch his legs he pushes his feet forward and it doesn’t shatter it parts like water. He can walk along. We can walk along. I can walk. I want it to stop the sea is glittering like knives like razors’ edges. I am afraid. I am breathing and the air is too thin no goodness in it I am breathing and breathing it trying to get it in I am trying I am gasping. I should not have come.

‘S-sit down.’ He sits on a grey stone grave grey stone he pats it sit here gravely. He slides away to the edge. Stopping is as dangerous as moving when you move it could shatter at any minute and lacerate you cut you to a thousand pieces but when you stop – when you stop it all stops. Suspended. Moves in. Comes to your edges, closes in around you, comes right up tight and wraps you suffocatingly close like clingfilm over your face the edge of the world comes right to your edge and clogs your mouth and nostrils and seals you tight as an unopened cellophane packet no air gets in to make it stale you will be vacuum packed and keep for ever in one spot.

‘Breathe slowly. Count. One potato t-two potato three p-potato four, five potato, six potato seven potato more.’ He moves he sits he moves his face, makes the sound to come out and nothing bad comes I can. I can. I can too.

We are sitting quietly, Calum says, ‘You see that ruin over there? Th-that tumbledown cottage?’ I see road it has little specks that glitter sharply: ditch; thistles, sharp crowns of thorns and rose brambles with their triangular thorns I see the hurting things they want to cut to puncture to slash to pierce.

‘S-slowly. Breathe slowly. One potato t-two potato–’

I see a ruin two half-fallen walls the third is higher I see charred roof beams still there and blue polythene is wrapped around one. ‘Yes.’

‘The salt murderess lived
there. Shall I t-tell you the story?’

A mother. See the flashing blades see the points?

‘It’s not scary. It’s got a h-happy ending.’ I think I am hollow I am brittle as those chocolate bunnies at Easter they have bright tinfoil they have dark smiley faces all rich and chocolatey but they have a seam down the middle and you get your fingernail in and the bunny falls in two just like an empty shell. The Little People got here first. Nothing in the middle, nothing to eat, nothing to mend. No meat.

Pressure shatters hollow things. She is willing me to break.

‘C-can I have a cigarette?’ Calum is looking at me I feel my pockets I give him the packet and lighter Sally’s lighter he takes out two he lights them both he gives me one. It is so kind of him. He lights it for me he passes it into my fingers, it is simple kindness. Tears spring to my eyes. Everything is crystal clear, Calum, inhalations of cigarette, the circle of paper at the lighted end turning into ash, a distant tractor, sigh of wind. I hear the faraway honk of geese I hear a baby crying a woman scolding I hear sobbing I hear–

‘Don’t be afraid.’ Calum waves his hands in the air. ‘The island’s f-full of voices.’ We wait. We listen until silence falls like sleep.

‘I’ll tell you her story.’

This is the story he told me. How much can you see by lightning? Everything; one flash; everything. I was distracted (meaning mad; that’s the old meaning, not just inattentive, but mad). I saw the whole story together, beginning and end like a painting the plot and outcome simultaneous, not a story plod-plodding the line from one event to the next.

I can’t paint you a
picture. I can’t show it in a flash. By now I will have forfeited most of your sympathy. Why should you listen to me? You have to be patient. I can only attempt to deliver it as it came to me, which is fragmentarily. If it was food my life would be a trail of half-chewed fragments, it would be a pile of cores and peelings and then a long stretch of saliva strands to the next item, maybe a plain bread roll a nice no-nonsense roll with butter. This is what it’s like. I have not been served a menu in order. Probably you wonder why I don’t tidy it up. Why should you have the regurgitations or the still lives of old leftovers?

Maybe I will. Maybe if I keep on telling it will get tidied in the telling. As Calum’s stories are tidied and smoothed by telling into shapes that fit like sea-pebbles in the palm of your hand. Tided by telling, by the waves of the sea.

Maybe ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was once regurgitated seafood. In the meantime you should be glad because the story Calum told me of the salt murderess is a round dish that you can have all in one like a bowl of soup perhaps, a deep red bowl of bortsch with a pale swirl of soured cream and brilliant green sprinkling of chopped chives on top. At least that’s how it was to me even in extremis as I was at that time. And it’s how it is now, I’ll tell it for you now. I call it
Salt
.

A woman lived here who murdered her children with salt. Joyce. She didn’t come from here. She came from a city. She spent fifteen years in prison, before she came to the Island.

Her children were one and three, both girls. She didn’t set out to murder them. She didn’t think she set out to murder them. No. What happened was this.

The little one didn’t sleep. She simply wouldn’t sleep. In the
evening Joyce started by telling her stories, as she had to the older girl. In the end she was just counting. ‘Four thousand seven hundred and eighty-four. Four thousand seven hundred and eighty-five.’

When the child’s breathing was even and her fluttering eyelids closed, Joyce would stop. Wait. Listen. Then infinitely slowly, put down her right hand on the floor, turn her stiff creaking body to the right, shift her weight onto her knees. She would wait, kneeling on all fours, for the rustling of her clothes and creaking of the floor to subside. Then very slowly, hand against the wall for support, haul her aching self to her feet.

Nine times out of ten, as she inched towards the door, the baby’s eyes and mouth would fly open and a yell would freeze Joyce where she stood.

If the baby did fall asleep, she stayed that way for about an hour. Then she would be up again, rattling the bars of her cot, calling, babbling, crying. If Joyce tried to ignore her and remained slumped on the soggy sofa, the crying became wailing became shrieking and the crone next door began knocking on the wall with her stick and the older girl clutched Joyce’s legs and shouted ‘Naughty! Naughty! Naughty!’ and the walls of the room throbbed in and out with every exhaling shriek and indrawn breath and the band of suffocation tightened over Joyce’s chest.

When the child slept, Joyce slept; sometimes sitting propped against the wall by the cot; sometimes sprawled on the sofa; sometimes curled on the older girl’s narrow bed with the bedclothes twisted into a plait beneath the pair of them.

She gave salt to the older girl to punish her.
It was morning and she was at the sink, quietly washing yesterday’s dishes, running through in her mind what she might be able to do if the baby slept on. After the dishes she might have a bath; she would gather up the dirty clothes and put them in the machine. She would take the bin down and empty it, if the baby slept, maybe even sweep the floor. Outside there was watery sunshine, a gleam of hope on the wet black tarmac.

Then the older girl fell off a chair. She’d been standing on it, leaning forward over the table to reach a crayon that had rolled – went to set her foot back down on the seat and missed it – fell sprawling sideways, pulling the chair over on top of herself, screaming with fright and shock. Instant stereo from the bedroom.

Joyce picks the fallen girl up by the scruff of the neck, plonks her on the righted chair, bawls into her face. ‘Now look what you’ve bloody done!’

The girl sits snivelling; from the bedroom the screams get louder. Joyce buries her face in her arms folded on the work surface; at last raises her eyes and focuses on
salt
. Before she’s thought she’s poured a slug through its Saxa red funnel into her daughter’s mug; half-filled with water, stirred till the cloud’s dispersed.

‘Here.’ Slamming it on the table. ‘Drink that. That’ll teach you.’

The girl sips and puts it down carefully.

‘
Drink it!
’

‘Don’t like it.’

‘I don’t give a fuck what you bloody well like.
Drink it
.’

The little girl picks up the mug and
drinks. When she is half done she starts to retch. Her mother picks her up and takes her to the bathroom, stands her in the bath.

‘Puke there if you’re going to puke.’

The coughing subsides.

‘Now get out of my way.
Get
.’

The girl scrabbles out of the bath and runs to her bed. She gets in and pulls the covers up. Joyce stumbles to her room and grabs the screaming baby.

At first it was a punishment. Something she could make them both do, that they didn’t like. Force the girl to drink it. Put it in the baby’s bottle and let her gulp until she tasted it. Give her something to scream for, that would.

Then she noticed it made them sleep. That first morning, the girl stayed in her bed till noon. If they drank enough to make them vomit it exhausted them and they slept even more. Or it gave them stomach aches and they lay whimpering quietly, squirming in their beds, unable to run around or bellow.

The baby’d drink it without a fuss, mixed in juice. With the older one, she and the girl both knew it was punishment. For making a noise. For spilling something. For being clumsy or untidy or simply in the way. For
being
. And she was big enough to say no, to go without a drink. Joyce slapped her away from the taps and the fridge. When she drank her dirty bathwater Joyce started putting salt in that.

It was never intended to kill them. She didn’t know it
could.
Just wanted to teach them a lesson.

Teaching them a lesson is
for their own good. Joyce had been taught lessons. She’d learned I want doesn’t get and nothing in this world comes free. She’d learned not to get above herself and not to ask for the moon. She’d learned money doesn’t grow on trees. She’d learned life’s a vale of tears. Valuable lessons, needing to be learned by young children. Joyce was helping them to learn. Helping them not to be like herself; so desperately furiously suffocatingly trapped, so caged and raging, so dissatisfied. They were born bad, like her, and she could teach them to be otherwise. Teach them – herself – a lesson.

When the older one had a fit, her body twitching and convulsing like a fish flipped out of water, Joyce watched with tearful sympathy then carried her, calm and floppy, to her bed; tucked her in and kissed her. Poor little kid. So much pain in life. She might as well get used to it now. Joyce was doing her a favour. Poor little mite; now she was beginning to understand the truth of it, life.

When they were both in bed all the time, it was easy. Poor things. It was for their own good. If they learned who was boss now it’d stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives. She mopped up the vomit lovingly. Bought fresh orange to put the salt in.

The baby died first. It had been sleeping a really long time. So long that Joyce herself was calm and refreshed, humming as she made herself a cup of tea, smiling at the TV presenter, only mildly annoyed by the car alarm that went off under the window, loud enough to wake the dead.

It didn’t wake the baby.

The baby was cold to touch. In terror Joyce grabbed her up. Thumped
her on the back, tried to breathe into her mouth, ran to the phone, stabbed 999.

It was only when she was being asked her details in the hospital that they found she had another; back went the ambulance – and back again to the hospital, bearing the older child still breathing, but salted down into a coma from which she never would recover.

The salt murderess. At her trial she cried salt tears and said she was only trying to keep them quiet. Why is it on sale if it’s a poison? she wanted to know. The prosecution said it was a poison so unpleasant that no one would take it unless forced by measures of extreme cruelty. That the physical sufferings it induced included painful muscle cramps and contractions, raging thirst, vomiting, diarrhoea, hallucinations and convulsions.