Island (22 page)

‘But they drank it!’ wailed the mother.

‘You gave them no alternative.’

The salt murderess was sent to jail, judged to be of perfectly sound mind and a danger to all children.

In prison all children visited her, convulsing up and down the walls of her cell. For fifteen years she lived in a cell where children writhed around her like worms in a fisherman’s bucket. For fifteen years she half lived, numb with pain, blind with too much vision.

And when they let her out of prison she came to live on the Island. A fellow prisoner had talked about it. About the emptiness, and the gleams of light on water. From the prison library Joyce borrowed books on gardening.

She found an empty cottage – that very one we sat by: semi-derelict, forgotten, owned by someone on the mainland.

She lived there lightly, with planks and
polythene sacks across the roof, an untidy plot of onions and potatoes at the back. Walked to the post office each Thursday to collect her giro, buy a few groceries. Never bought salt. Spoke to no one. Sat in the evening and the morning staring out to sea, the sides of her head unpeeled to the horizon, not a wall not a child in sight.

Dreamed by night of glistening saltchildren floating in white from the sea, sculpted and still as bars of soap in the moonlight; saltchildren, a million crystallised tears. They floated gently as ice in the black water, bumping and nudging in to shore. But in the morning when she looked they were gone, there was only the brown seaweed bobbing to the surface, and the occasional grey-backed gull.

Salt preserves and salt destroys. All life sprang from the salt-soup of the sea but her children are dead as rocks and hang as heavy about her heart. It was a madness, an accident, an impossibility. How can there be a thing done, which can never never be undone? How, in a botched and transitory life, can one thing become irrevocable? She sees she is only that: a saltmurderess. All the rest of her life is void. It was all, waiting to become that, and living to regret it. Clouds and sea spume are the colour of salt; sea air keeps the taste of it in her mouth: even here, there is no escape.

Then one frosty salt-grained night there’s scrabbling at her propped-up door; scrabbling and snuffling and shuddering sobs. Head still full of salt-mummies she stumbles to the glassless window and leans out. A young girl is battering weakly on the door, fists upraised, hair salt-silver in the moonlight.

‘Here,’ Joyce calls. Her voice has scarcely worked for sixteen years. The
girl comes blindly to the window – Joyce helps her over the sill, leads her to her matted pile of bedding, wraps her in a blanket. When the girl has snuffled and burrowed herself to sleep, Joyce lies beside her, curling her body around the warm question-mark of the girl’s blanketed back.

It is no mystery where she comes from. She’s the younger daughter of old McCaulin. Who that night had tried with her what he’d been doing with her older sister the past five years. Only the nine-year-old did not lie sickened and still but fought like a cat, scratched him to bleeding and ran two dark miles to the safety of the nearest dwelling: Joyce’s.

And there she stayed. Walking down to get the boat for school, and back in the evening to Joyce’s cottage. When McCaulin was out fishing she fetched her things from his house, and two of his six geese that she said were hers. They kept them in the ruined front room and they made fine watchdogs. She showed Joyce how to collect winkles, and where the blackberries were. They ate no salt.

And when Joyce sat staring out to sea in the evening, the girl coloured in her exercise book on the flat rock beside her; or if it was wet, they sat either side of the driftwood fire, and made up spooky stories.

Joyce never spoke of her children; nor the girl, her father. This was their life. And when Joyce lay curled around her island-daughter’s sleeping back, she had no more dreams of saltchildren, but dreamt instead she was at the prow of a boat, with the warm sun on her face and chest, sailing forward into the light.

18
Birthday cake

After the story we went on down to
the shore at Viking Bay where all the pebbles are black and we looked for things to go in Calum’s rucksack. A child’s broken plastic truck (red and yellow), some polystyrene (white), shreds of torn net (green). While we were on the beach it clouded over, the sharp sunlight was muffled, swathed in clouds. I felt safer. Calum gave me a drink of hot tea out of his thermos. I was very – small. Concentrated. I was a small compact bundle for me to carry around and although susceptible to attack I was slightly protected, I was volatile but wrapped. I was carrying me quietly, concentrating on the black pebbles and the bits of polystyrene.

And when we walked back up the beach and back to the path he told me the Viking Bay story. Which I will tell you later. And we went back to Calum’s house and I was alright, I watched him add today’s finds to his mounds. Then he was taking a sack of onions down
to the shop to sell, he slung them over a bike and wheeled it and I went with him there as well and bought some bread and tomatoes and kippers for my tea. I bought a newspaper to read. Calum bought tobacco and papers, he was excited, it was the first time he’d bought some himself. I was holding it together and I was able to think I remember this quite clearly, thinking I am managing to get back on balance I’m doing well. This may only have been a Fear-wobble not a plunge, I’m going to be all right. It depended on the night I realised that but I was controlling things well. I was OK with Calum, there was a clear space between me and Calum, and nothing like that would ever happen again.

It was quite dark when we got back to her house, Calum didn’t ride his bike, he wheeled it beside me and I was glad of that. The house seemed very dark, as if she’d forgotten to turn on any lights, Calum leaned his bike on the fence and went to the front door. ‘Come this way,’ he said and I followed him. It smelt smoky. And waxy. There was a candle burning in the hall. I thought there’d been a power cut. I followed Calum into the kitchen. There were candles arranged in three rows from end to end of the table, and in the middle a cake. She wasn’t there. Calum was staring at the table.

‘What is it?’

‘I-I forgot.’

‘Forgot what?’

‘It’s Susan’s birthday. My sister who died.’

It was my birthday. October 2nd. It was on my birth certificate. Some years I have forgotten it completely; woken up in late October and thought oh, my birthday’s gone. When I’ve been with people on my
birthday I’ve nearly always not told them. They might wonder why I have no cards and why I haven’t got anyone better to celebrate it with than them I hardly know. They might think I’ve told them in order to get presents off them or to make them feel sorry for me. They might even think I’ve made it up.

The cake was iced white, and in quavery pink letters,
SUSAN.

‘Does she do it every year?’

Calum nodded; he’d sat down and was staring at the candles.

‘What happens?’

‘We just light the c-candles and we sing. Then my mother cuts the cake. I’d better go and see if sh-she–’ he pushed back his chair and went upstairs. Every year a cake is made for me and candles lit and my brother and my mother and presumably at one time my stepfather too all sit down together and think pious thoughts of me.

It was draughty in the kitchen, the candle flames wavered. What was she thinking as she lit them, as she set them out each one in a jamjar lid? ‘This is for you Nikki this is a death wish’? Her hand clasped around the medicine bottle. The whispering shuffle of her feet and rustling clothes snooping through my bedroom or hovering outside my door; watching me, listening upstairs for my movements. I suddenly realised she knew when I went through her sitting room. Her presence filled every room of that house. In the kitchen it was observing me calmly, I was a voodoo doll and she stuck in pin after pin.

The flames against the darkness were hypnotic. I started to blow them out. I realised I could pick one up and hold it to the curtains. Easily. Hold
it to the curtains till they were alight; put another to the thin wooden shelves of the dresser and make them burn. Put one by the table leg, one to the rag rug by the stove. In minutes the place would be blazing. The candles for poor dead Susan would make a funeral pyre for Phyllis MacLeod.

I could get rid of her as easily as that. But what I planned to do would hurt her more.

I blew out all the candles. The kitchen was dark and small, filled with black shadows. No sound from upstairs – no voices, no footsteps. It seemed like it would have been a good gesture to eat a slice of my cake but I felt sick. I went to my room.

When I take Calum away she’ll be alone. No one to love and be needed by; no one to help her or turn to. No reason to cook or clean the house. No reason to be. Like I have been all these years. Alone.

My plan was a plank across the abyss. I could walk along it. I could act.

I raked out the fireplace and lit a fire. I made a pot of tea, and I read the newspaper from cover to cover, turning the pages very carefully so they didn’t rustle. It was after nine when Calum’s footsteps came downstairs; I let him in and he went and crouched over the fire.

‘Her bedroom’s cold. She won’t put on the f-fire. Just the electric blanket.’ I passed him a cigarette. ‘She’s very upset,’ he said, as if I’d asked. ‘I can’t get her to eat anything. She-she’s just lying there crying.’

‘What’re you going to do?’

He stood up then shrugged as if he couldn’t be bothered to talk about it anymore. ‘She’s had two
sleeping tablets. She should go off s-soon.’

‘What’s she so upset about?’

‘She gets depressed about Susan.’

‘What did Susan die of?’ I might as well know, since it was public fact number one. But Calum shook his head. We sat in silence.

‘You know she’s asked me to leave.’

‘What?’

‘She’s asked me to move out.’

He stood up slowly, shaking his head, he looked dazed. ‘B-but this room is – is – mine. It’s not, no one else is–’

‘It’s because she doesn’t want me near you.’ I realised as I said it that maybe she had known – or planned? – what happened yesterday.

He flinched and turned his back to me, looking down into the spitting flames. The driftwood was still damp.

‘Did you tell–’

‘No.’ It wasn’t possible. How could it serve her ends in any way? And it was my fault. Yes, it’s you she controls, Nikki.

No.

Calum raised his hands to his face and held them there, like a child hiding. ‘She can’t make you go away.’

‘I can’t stay in her house if she doesn’t want me to.’ She didn’t make that happen. She couldn’t have known how I would react – even she.

Silence. Something burned through and
collapsed in the fire.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Go back to the mainland.’

Another silence. Different. A drawing, growing, circling silence. He crouched down by the fire again, folding his knees like a grasshopper. ‘She shouldn’t do that. She shouldn’t send you away.’

True enough, dear brother; that she should compound her original crime by repeating it is almost beyond belief.

‘It’s not fair,’ he said.

‘No.’

He was shaking his head as if he couldn’t get rid of flies buzzing around him. ‘She never asked me. She just – acts as if I’m stupid.’ He looked up at me. ‘She treats me like a baby.’

‘Yes.’

He got up again and began to pace from the fireplace to the door with fast jerky steps. ‘She kicks you out. She treats me like a baby.’ His voice rose. ‘It’s not fair. She’s not fair.’

I sat and watched while he walked and talked himself to the point.

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘Tomorrow?’

He didn’t even hesitate. ‘Yes.’

‘We’ll get the seven o’clock ferry. Before she’s up.’

‘Right.’

‘We’ll pack our bags
tonight then. We’ll just go, without telling her.’

‘Yes.’

‘Alright then Calum. I’ll see you in the morning.’ He picked up one of my earrings from the mantelpiece and peered at it, then put it down and went to the door. ‘See how she likes that,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Just see how she likes that.’

When he was gone I locked the doors and switched off the light; pulled the chair up close to the fire. I could see quite clearly what she hoped for: either that I would simply creep away and vanish, terrified by the death-wish of Susan’s funereal birthday cake; or I would be tipped by that into rage, grab the last flaring candle and incinerate her where she lay, delivering her to the death she craved and blighting my own life (even those years in the future, supposedly beyond her reach) by my culpability for her murder.

I cleaned my teeth and got into bed. The firelight made dancing light like the candles in the kitchen had done. I had no Fear.

19
Tempest