Island (26 page)

We sat there for a long time
watching the red and yellow flames, the way they leapt and splashed like water. I thought of him sitting there through the night. Wondering what was going to happen. Listening for footsteps? ‘Didn’t you hear me when I came through earlier?’

‘I – I – thought y-you–’

‘Yes?’

‘You would be mad at me. I was afraid.’ There was a silence filled with crackling and snapping from the fire. ‘I h-hid from you.’

He had come out when I was in the sea. When I was up to my waist he’d started shouting and running after me. Suddenly he moved so violently that the beam rocked. ‘I’m n-not going away.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘From the island.’

‘Nobody’s trying to take you away.’ I thought he meant me.

Despite the heat from the fire now his face was white. I realised he must be in shock. But he was thinking more clearly than I was. Of course they would try to take him away. They would put him in prison. They would take him from his island where he’d finally made himself free and lock him in a box away from sea and sky and flotsam and jetsam of every kind, away from the rocks where ghosts and stories attached, away from the foam-grey faces of the Blue Men, away from the world he knew. Because of the death of that witch.

I started to revive with the warmth. A rush of energy flushed through me, as if something frozen had melted. Calum. They would arrest him.
Put on handcuffs. Lead into a boat, an animal to slaughter. My head was fuzzy but the heat was clearing it, making the mist evaporate, drying me to something clean and sharp. Why should they take Calum? Calum had a life. Calum had a place to be and a thing to do. It was stupid if they took Calum.

I thought about how if he hadn’t come blundering and splashing through the shallows after me I would’ve been drifting to icy nothingness by now. What’d he dragged me out for? I could have taken the blame to the bottom of the sea.
If you’ll never leave me, I’ll never leave you.

My skin was tingling from the extremes of cold and heat. Calum got up. ‘We need more w-wood.’ I followed him away from the fire, up over the crest and down to the shore where driftwood might be lying. I found some splintered bits of pallet. Calum had gone off in the opposite direction.
Not now nor ever.

I dragged my wood to the top of the rise and suddenly felt very hot. Calum was still down at the shoreline loading himself up. I sat to wait; found my tobacco tin reasonably watertight in my pocket and rolled us both a fag. He came staggering up to join me and we sat there beside our firewood, smoking and staring at the tinfoil sea. Gradually there was a creaking noise which got louder until two swans appeared from behind us, flying low, with effort, huge wings creaking at each beat. They swooped down past the shoreline and landed in the sea, scattering water a thousand ways, shattering the mirror. Then they sat quite still while it pieced itself together and reformed round them so perfectly that four swans floated on the sea before us.

‘You know where the s-swans come from?’

I’d never
seen swans on the sea before – nor any swans on the island. The island was practically a bird-free zone. These were huge and snowy in the grey-brown sea; perfectly at home, dipping their beautiful necks under the water, floating in a lazy circle.

Calum told me the story of where the swans came from:

There was once a king on the mainland and he married a shy young girl from the island. He made her his queen. She bore him seven beautiful children, one for each year of their happy marriage, and then she fell ill and died. After a year of grief the king decided to marry again. He chose a widow from the south, a striking beauty, very proud, as different from the island girl as a rock is from a cloud. She was jealous of the first wife’s children, who were tall and strong and handsome and beloved of all who saw them. She herself had a son she was ambitious for, and she was soon pregnant with another child of the king’s. Her stepchildren played with her young son, swinging him between them so his legs flew off the ground, and he squealed with laughter and screamed for more. But the sight of it tormented her because the other woman’s children were taller and finer than her boy, and they were easy and friendly with him instead of submissive and respectful.

She went to see a wise old woman and asked her how she could free herself from the first queen’s offspring. ‘Because one day they’ll have everything and my poor children will have nothing. When the king is gone they’ll lord it over us, commanding both the islands and the seas. They’ll do as they please and we shall be no more than dirt beneath their feet.’ The old woman made up a special potion and advised the queen to pour it into her stepchildren’s porridge one morning when the king was out hunting.

Kindly the queen called to them:
‘Come and eat your porridge, children, before it goes cold. I’ve poured on the cream, just as you like it.’ When the oldest boy had eaten his porridge he stretched out his neck and gave a kind of squawk. His stepmother watched in satisfaction. Then a repulsive ripple seemed to slither along his neck and extend it like a thick-muscled snake so shocking to behold that the queen nearly fainted. The long blind neck stretched itself over his boy’s head like a stocking rolled over a foot and when the shape of his round head was swallowed a sleek white bird head formed in its place with piercing black eyes and strong shapely beak. And he raised his arms which had grown to six foot length each one and with a rustling and a susurration of sudden growth a thousand strong white quills sprouted on each side and the wind as he lifted them was enough to send the breakfast pots crashing to the floor. Slowly he began to beat them and the huge white wings dazzled and unbalanced the wicked queen who fell to the ground in terror and the drumming and creaking of his flight rang deafeningly around the castle until he gained the arched doorway and was gone. And one by one his brothers and sisters followed him, beating through the air and raising such a wind in the castle that it tore hangings from the walls and doors from their hinges and fanned the flames in the hearths so they leapt out to catch at the clothes of the castle inmates. And as the seventh swan soared up high above the castle to the freedom of the heavens, the castle exploded in flames, burning so fiercely that not a single soul inside it escaped. And the swans flew over all the kingdom and were lords of the land and the isles and the kyles, they went where they pleased and obeyed nobody’s law but their own.

Calum and I dragged our sticks down to the ruined cottage, leaving the swans masters of the shoreline.

We made up the fire and
Calum told me where the spring was, the spring the old islanders had used. He had two Pepsi cans he’d rinsed and used before. I went down past the last ruin to the bright green patch in the reedy grass, parted it and knelt to fill my cans. As I came back I saw Calum had moved closer to the fire – he was squatting, hands up to shield his face from the heat, long shanks bent. The patient shape of him made me think of an African.

Nobody except us knew who killed her. She was the only other person who knew and she was dead.

It was like stepping off a cliff. Either you can fly, or you will plummet. You don’t know which.

OK. Go to the edge and look down.

To a bad place. Thick close walls, windowless, airless; a locked door, no escape. The clanks and shouts and cries and whispers and moans and sobs of hundreds of other confined souls; misery seeping in through the crack under the door. No dawn sky to put an end to the night’s horrors, only the flickering of cold fluorescent tubes. A black tunnel of time stretching out ahead; the white dot of its ending invisibly, immeasurably far. The casual brutality of warders and other inmates.

But you were going to walk into the sea.

Consider Calum in a prison. They would push, mock, goad, torment, flay. If he didn’t lose his temper they would break him and if he lost it he would kill someone.

Our mother lying there on her carpet. No longer controlling either of us. I can walk away onto the next boat if I want.

Calum bends his head and runs his hands over his hair and face as if he’s trying
to brush cobwebs away. He glances at me. ‘We c-can stay here.’

‘Here?’

‘Repair one of the c-cottages a bit – I can grow vegetables …’

And catch fish and seagulls’ eggs; and I can spin yarn from nettles and weave shirts for us and we can make beds from swans’ feathers and every time anyone comes to Durris we can hide. No one will guess where we are and the police will be quite happy to blame Phyllis’s death on an unknown passer-by.

I seize at it though. Imagine getting a boat – rowing across to one of the more distant uninhabited islands – getting out of reach of other people – could we? To live like shipwrecked mariners. If we could escape … He’s still looking at me hopefully, waiting for a reply. ‘They’ll come looking for us Calum. They’ll come looking.’

‘But if we h-hide–’

‘They’ll have dogs to sniff us out.’

He straightens his legs and begins to pick his way backwards and forwards across the rubble-strewn floor like an agitated stork. He is wringing his hands. ‘We need some f-food.’ He begins to cry. ‘I d-didn’t even bring any food.’

‘Calum. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.’

I get him to sit down again. And I tell him what we’re going to do. Once you’ve stepped off, it’s easy, blindingly swoopingly soaringly easy. I can fly.

22
Night sky

From that leap followed a
thousand things quite naturally and easily which could never have come to pass if I had not jumped.

Even leading me to ask, could I have done this before? Could I have made this kind of leap when I was younger and saved myself a lot of trouble? But it seems I was never in a place like that before, from which a leap was possible.

Once I was airborne my only worry was that Calum himself might screw things up. We sat by the fire all afternoon until it got dark, while I talked to him. I tried to impress on him that he must do what I said, but he was so shocked and bewildered that I couldn’t tell how much he was taking in. The story was this: I had come to the island in search of my birth mother, I needed to see her to understand why she had rejected me. Once I found her I was scared to reveal my identity because she seemed to think I was dead (as Calum could testify) and I waited a while before I plucked up the courage. When I
told her who I was we were alone together. She accused me of being an impostor; then she told me I was dead; then that she wished I was dead. When I cried (naturally, as you would) she attacked me physically, saying she hated the sight of me. She grabbed up the flat-iron from the fireplace and tried to smash me with it – and in the struggle and terror I got it off her, and knocked her to the ground. When she fell I threw the flat-iron in the fire and ran away as far and as fast as I could. I didn’t know how badly I had hurt her. I was distraught, devastated by her hatred and rejection, terrified about what I might have done to her. Then my brother, calling early in the morning, discovered her – and in utter shock, ran after me. He found me and told me she was dead. I was inconsolable.

Calum listened and stared and nodded as if he was hearing the shocking truth itself. Only once he stopped me, putting his hand on my arm, and whispered, ‘But I-I-I–’

‘No. I did it. Nikki did it. You tell them where you found me. Where did you find me Calum?’

You could have counted to ten before he answered. I could see the thought slowly forming behind his good eye. ‘In th-the water.’

‘In the sea. Yes. What was I doing?’

He stared at me.

‘You have to tell them what you think I was doing, Calum.’

‘W-walking into the sea.’

‘Why d’you think I was doing that?’

Another pause, and he shook his head.

‘What happens when a person walks
out of their depth?’ ‘Drowning.’

‘OK. That’s what you must tell them. You saw me walking into the sea. I was going to drown myself. OK. Because I killed our mother.’

‘B-but–’

‘Yes?’

‘But
were
you?’

‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

He picked at the ground, jabbing out little shards of pottery with a half-burnt stick, turning them over with his long spidery fingers, considering them. ‘You w-won’t do that again.’

‘No.’

‘P-promise.’

‘I promise.’ Not now nor ever.

When I was sure he’d got it, the whole story, I made him go over his own version of the morning’s events; his exhausted sleep after our yesterday’s adventure in the sea, his sudden early morning waking, his walk down to his mother’s, his surprise at finding the front door open (as I had left it in my flight); his view through the open sitting-room door to his mother’s body sprawled upon the floor. The disordered room bearing signs of a struggle. His terrified shock – he called for me and I wasn’t there – he ran from the house in horror.

It was so close to the truth anyway. It was truer than the truth. I had gone there to kill my mother.

When I had finished we went back down
to the crossing place. It was getting towards dusk. I thought of waiting there until they came to find us but we had to eat. Calum said the tide would be low again by eight, we could get back to the island then. There were deep gaps between the clouds and we saw the first stars come out. The size and depth of the sky gave me a giddy rush.