Island (27 page)
‘What will they do?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘T-to you.’
‘Well I guess they’ll question me, they’ll question both of us, they’ll probably take me to the mainland and lock me up until they hold a trial.’
‘It sh-should be me.’
‘No. You should be here.’
‘You’re doing it for m-me.’
‘Well will you stay here for
me
?’
There was a pause and then he said, ‘OK.’
We lay on the short grass and looked at the sky, waiting for the tide to go out. Even as we watched the clouds shrank and disappeared, we could see right into the universe.
I saw how big freedom was. All the stars. Gazed at by sailors on distant ships a thousand miles from land. By shepherds in hot empty deserts of black. By astronomers in dim observatories where they watch with sandwiches and flasks, and laugh quietly together over a shared joke the dumb sleeping world will never get. By children
camping for the first time and crawling out of their tents to see that vast shining overhead. By night fishermen watching the light in sky and water, dizzy between heaven and its reflection; by drunkards stumbling from the pub, falling heavily but with surprisingly little pain to the close safe ground, rolling over and noting that the dark is littered with sparks of fire. By lovers who’ve steamed up the car and get out for a last cigarette before driving to their separate homes, who look up and think
this is for us
; by pilots at night and drivers at night and people who duck out of their warm fuggy houses last thing before bed to take their dogs for a pee – and chancing to look up, see the glory of the constellations and planets above. By doctors walking from their cars to the homes of sick people; by tired midwives, closing the doors softly on the murmuring cries of new sparks of life.
We got back to the house at nine. It was a lifetime later but it was as I had left it in the morning. She still lay on the sitting-room floor, nothing had changed, no one had been. I picked up the phone and dialled the police. Then Calum and I went into the kitchen and made ourselves scrambled eggs and a cup of tea.
I saved my confession for the officers on the mainland. They had no trouble believing I did it. My motive was impeccable (always has been hasn’t it?) An open and shut case. Except that for once in my life my plight conjured a degree of sympathy.
TWICE REJECTED DAUGHTER DRIVEN TO BREAKING POINT
was one of the headlines. Her terminal illness and the way
she
had attacked
me
were both taken into account (as was the fact that I had stayed peaceably in her house for the nine preceding days offering her no harm) and the charge against me was manslaughter. My lawyer pleaded self-defence and
diminished responsibility. My remorse was genuine, according to the judge: ‘Must this young woman, whose whole life has in a sense been a punishment for the fact that her mother abandoned her – through no fault of her own – must this young woman endure further punishment at our hands, burdened as she is by terrible remorse?’ He gave me two years. I served a year then got my automatic conditional release. I was in prison in Inverness.
Viking BayAnd there’s nothing
I want to say about that. It was 365 days all 24 hours long. There were 60 minutes in every hour. I had time to think about each thing that had happened, each incident on the island, each conversation with my mother and my brother, each story that Calum told me. There’s a bay just south of her house, Calum called it Viking Bay. I held that in my head a lot of the time, because of its black rim of stones. Because of its waiting. The story he told me there was all about waiting.
Viking Bay faces the north Atlantic. The shoreline is quite black, black boulders and pebbles, and the grass runs down to the edge. There’s barely any height to the ground here, the merest wave would wash right into the field, and the flat sea stretches to the tiny flat islands of land and cloud that float on the distant horizon.
Late one summer a thousand years ago a Viking longboat pulled into this deserted bay. They had set off from Norway making for distant Iceland; Ragnar and his wife Freya and his brother Olaf and their freedmen and their slaves and their furs and their shields and axes was happily married and mead and supplies of
barley and seed and dried fish. But they had run into a storm and then into days and days of fog. Ragnar knew they had lost their way – maybe even sailed in a circle – and on the first day the fog lifted he released the ravens and set a course to follow their flight to land. They moved into warmer air and he recognised the mild current that flows around the north-western parts of Britain. He had been down the Irish coast the previous year, raiding; had brought back rich plunder of goods and slaves, including an Irish girl.
They pulled the boat ashore and turned it over; made fire and food and settled for the night. During the night Freya went into early labour and gave birth to a tiny sickly boy. In the morning the fog closed in again.
All day and night as she lay huddled under the boat with the baby in her arms she listened to fragments of Ragnar’s passing conversations. Arguing with Olaf about what to do: they should leave tonight, sail on for Iceland, before the winter prevented them. But they must wait for the fog to lift. The baby must be killed and buried here, no point in taking a sickly thing on such a journey. Later she heard her husband calling to the Irish slave girl; she heard him questioning the girl and copying some words of her language; she heard them laugh together. She heard the deep voices of the brothers murmuring together as they sat by the fire after their food; she heard the sounds of a man and woman lying together close by. But she did not know if the man was Ragnar.
They were stranded on the island for days, blanketed in fog. On the day it lifted five whales came past the bay and shoals of fish so thick the water glittered with them. The baby boy was feeding well and growing stronger, he had his toehold on life.
The men argued about the wisdom of
sailing on. The island was a safe place to overwinter. To make the northern journey so late in the season was becoming hazardous; better to bide here and sail to Iceland in the spring. There were rich lands to raid nearby and no enemies on the island. Freya listened to her husband and the Irish girl exchanging words and laughter in the Irish tongue. She listened to them gasp and moan at night. She held the small baby between her breasts.
The next day Ragnar split the party: half for Iceland, half to overwinter on the island. In spring he would return for his wife and his son, and the freedmen and slaves he left with them. Sailing with Ragnar were the strongest of the oarsmen and three slave girls including the Irish one.
When they had gone Freya walked the black stones of the bay with her baby in her arms and looked out as the dot of their sail melted into the distance. When they had gone she sat on the rocks and combed her long fair hair with the bone comb Ragnar had carved for her when she was still a girl.
The days began to shorten. It was dark when they woke in the morning. It was dark by mid-afternoon. On some days when the cloud was low and mist hung in the air the darkness never lifted. The dark was a mood which hung in Freya’s heart, it contained the sounds made by her husband and the Irish girl, and the black finality of the stones of the shore. The island was damp and quiet and dark and held permanently in suspension between the black night sky and the inky depths of the sea. She thought her husband would never return.
After the turning point of the winter solstice she walked the west coast of the island every day, eyes fixed on the cold flat sea. The
dark pressed on her, it bowed her head, it infiltrated her and filled her up and was only broken by lightning flashes of vision: her husband and the Irish girl laughing together, her husband turning away from her. In a rage of despair one day she flung the comb he had made her out into the sea. Her son grew strong and healthy.
Early in the spring, before anyone could have expected it, a sail appeared to the west. It was a low dark misty day, it had never been light since the autumn, it seemed they had lived a whole five months by firelight and torchlight, the world closed in to the small dim circle around them that firelight created. Now a bright sail coming out of the darkness, coming straight to them.
She sat on the rocks and watched it grow with both joy and terror in her heart. He had come back to fetch her, he wanted her still. She would step from the black stones into the bright keel of her husband’s boat. But now that she must leave the island its safety and solidity rooted her to the spot. Those black stones demarcating the land from the sea; were they not protection? Against wild formlessness, against the unknown, against swamping waves and engulfing winds and being dissolved into a thousand thousand grains pounding sorrowfully on the shore? Against rekindled love, against the laughing Irish girl, against all the grief in store for her? Underneath the sea, the waves inched the comb in to shore.
When he landed she asked him, ‘How can I be sure of you?’
‘When they put me in my boat with all my prized possessions, my sword and my shield and my drinking horn and my wife–’
‘Ah–’
‘And pour oil over us and set us alight. Then you can be sure of me.’ Flames would leap over their oil-drenched bodies, the long planks would spit and
snap out of place, the vessel would burst on the water red and gold as the setting sun and their black smokes entwined would spiral up to the waiting clouds.
The island was a safe place. It was both prison and freedom. But it was time to move on.
She stepped from the black stones into the bright keel.
They let me out of my cell. I catch the bus and the train and the bus and the ferry, I smile at the old folk and the walkers with their rucksacks. I come to the island and follow the road to Tigh Na Mara. The sky is so huge it makes me dizzy, the blues and greens and soft purple-greys of the mist over the islands and drifts of cloud in the tree tops stop me and make me stare. The air is alive with scents and sounds that stretch back to the furthest horizon, that waver and shift and move constantly like the quivering lungs of a giant animal. I am cradled in a living breathing landscape which melts and reforms into new shapes every time I move. It is infinitely various. There is no danger in it, there are shadows and echoes of long-lost voices but they touch the earth they walk on the water they float through the air like the patterns forming and reforming inside a kaleidoscope, they are in the texture and colours of vision. I breathe them in, they swirl in and out of me, my senses my breath my blood.
My name is Nikki. Sharp, with fangs; angry. Outside all charmed circles all groups friendships families sops. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. When I first came to this island it was flat as a plate.
Something has changed.
I can hear. I can see.
I live with my brother in our
mother’s old house. A social worker visits sporadically to check I haven’t murdered anyone else. The house is dirtier than it was, it has heaps of stones and driftwood and sea treasures and tools and vegetable sacks blocking the hall and heaped in the sitting room. I have the upstairs. I emptied it. I burned her things, Calum helped me. And to begin with I just took up my bed. There’s a little table now I bought from a house sale in the village, and a broken chair Calum found washed up a long time ago that he’s made into a stool. On the windowsill is the little Viking comb, carved by Ragnar a thousand years ago. The soft grey light flows in the windows like balm, sometimes there is a rectangle of bright sunlight on the bare floorboards. I can sit and watch the light shift and change, I can wake in the morning and before I even open my eyes I can feel the gentle mist patient against the pane I can feel the way it bridges the space between my window and the sky I can feel touched and blessed.
Calum is slow chaotic maddening my brother. He tells me stories. He likes my tale of Fir Apple. He plants and tends his garden. Every day he roams the island and brings back treasures from the sea.
Sometimes I see it one way, sometimes another. I can still see who I was. Even, who I will be. Not here in this peace for ever. Not cradled and cocooned in island mists, caressed by island voices, bathed in soft island light for ever. It is a milky womb where I swim blind and protected as a foetus, where I hang suspended perfect and weightless. I am in a still safe place. I am in no hurry for what’s next. While I wait, I rehearse the stories. As a baby floating in its amniotic fluid dreams the dreams of its past and coming lives, I tell Seal Rock, Bull Rock, the Ashplant, the Prayer Stones, Salt, Table Rock, and the Seven Swans. I tell Viking Bay.
I haven’t discovered anything new I have
discovered something old and always known, not lost, not forgotten, not rare, not difficult.
Only unknown to me.
I have discovered a brave new world with voices in it I did not have before. Each voice has stories, each story has voices. They radiate possibilities.
The first story Calum properly told me was Table Rock, as he led me through the fog on my second day on this island. The woman who leaves her child on the rock, the child which is not her husband’s. Now I can tell it over again: Table Rock.