The Seagulls Laughter

by Holly Bidgood

  Rasmus watched with wonder as Qallu showed him how to coat the runners of the sled in water, which would then freeze into a smooth layer of ice. So simple: the sled skimmed over the terrain, ice upon ice. During the winter months, Qallu said, the hunters would drive the sled out onto the frozen sea to hunt; but at this time of year the ice was too thin. Instead the men launched kayaks into open stretches of water, eyes peeled for signs of seals, walrus and narwhal.

  Of course, there would be no animals to hunt on the wilderness of the ice cap; still Rasmus longed to learn the hunter’s skills, and Qallu was an eager tutor.

  Rasmus felt more alive than he had ever done. Out there on the ice, beneath an endless sky smeared with pastel colours, his breath came out ragged and his cheeks became chapped from the cold. Snorri was reminded of his Icelandic childhood, he said: when the cold is so intense that time itself seems to freeze and the glory of the present moment goes on forever. When the air is so crisp you can feel it against your skin; when your bones ache and creak as though they are part of the very earth. Rasmus recognised the passion for this place that shone in his friend’s eyes, mirroring the passion in his own soul.

  Birdie’s eyes, however, remained shallow and colourless, as unreadable as ever. Perhaps Rasmus was simply a slave to the workings of his overactive imagination, he thought, but there was just something about the man’s glare that made him think of dark winters, captive creatures, folk tales that he could not remember. Snorri remarked once, when the man was out of earshot, that as the sled had sped over the ice with them astride it for the first time he had seen the perpetual frown lift for a moment from Birdie’s face. He laughed as he said this. But Rasmus did not share the joke. In that moment he felt the weight of clouds above his head; he should not have asked Birdie to join the expedition.

  Nevertheless, Rasmus’s spirits were high. He felt increasingly more at home with each day that passed. He had even taken steps to make their decrepit old hut more hospitable: with Snorri’s help he gave all the surfaces a good scrub and set a pot of coffee on the old stove, hoping to recreate the fresh, welcoming aroma of Qallu’s family home.

  Qallu had given them a small slab of seal blubber to burn in the oil lamp. Rasmus placed the blubber in the crescent-shaped bowl of the lamp and arranged a length of dried grass twine around the rim, as Qallu had instructed. He found the box of matches that he had brought with him, and after a few attempts succeeded in lighting the grass wick. The lamp emitted plumes of smoke into the already suffocating atmosphere of the hut. The three men choked and coughed and fiddled with the lamp, but the wick was soon extinguished as a result of their efforts.

  He must remember to ask Qallu to teach him to light the thing, Rasmus thought. Or perhaps he could ask Ketty. His heart skipped a beat as this thought occurred to him.

  11

  Malik

  As a helpful afterthought to the book she had gifted me, Judith left a voluminous English dictionary on the kitchen table. I discovered the dictionary with some trepidation the following morning. I had risen somewhat later than usual, having passed the night within the warm, dark confines of my makeshift tent, where sleep was not snatched away by the brightness of the dawn and my dreams were permitted to resolve themselves undisturbed. In this way the strange, undulating paths of my unconscious mind were soon blurred by gentle awakening, and I recalled only that I had dreamed of the sea.

  I flicked through the pages of the dictionary whilst devouring my breakfast – also left out for me – but was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of words contained within. There were surely more words in the English language than there were things in the world to name or describe. Did one language really require so many? I closed the book with a sigh, downcast.

  The rain slaked its grey fingers over the windows.

  Minutes later I stood before the open front door, boots upon the threshold, anorak donned in grim anticipation, willing myself to brave the downpour. I was not particularly keen to leave the comfortable shelter of the house, there was no particular place I desired to go; it was only the weight of an unbearable guilt that pushed me in the direction of the streets. Surely I did not deserve to enjoy the luxury of a family home – a family that was not mine and upon whom I had so ungraciously intruded. I watched the rain for a while longer, marvelling at the incredible deluge released so suddenly by the heavens. Like steel it pressed its weight upon the narrow, grey world, yet bounced elastically from the pavements, snaked viscously along the gutters and rivets in the road, and pooled thickly in swamps reflecting the low metal sky. It was soothing, the heavy fall of the rain, muting all the sounds of the city to distant memories, the murky obscurity of times gone by. The weather, when it had the mind to, could still encroach upon and dominate this manmade place. I smiled, for this seemed akin to a victory.

  My feet refused to carry me over the threshold. Instead they took me to the closed door of the room to which the funeral guests had retired, the room which I had not yet entered. For a few long moments I listened with bated breath lest anyone be lurking on the other side, but hearing nothing turned the handle and ventured in.

  There were a few comfortable chairs, a table... nothing to really capture my attention except, that is, for the photographs that hung upon the walls and adorned the available surfaces. For weeks I had kept myself away from this room, from these pictures whose presence had been made known to me by the inquisitive investigations of Eqingaleq. I entered now and examined them, in an attempt to remind myself of the paths that had led me here, the dangers of getting too comfortable, and the reason I deserved to be out in the cold, clawing rain.

  ◆◆◆

  My legs steered me in the direction of the town clearing again. The place was all but deserted. For a short while I sat on the same bench by the flowers, their coloured heads heavy in the downpour. The rain was like cold glass on my back. Eqingaleq watched me, bedraggled, from the nearest shop-fronted shelter, his features contorted into a bemused, irritated frown. Perhaps the rain might wash away the guilt! I had exclaimed in an unreasoned desperation whose apparent fierceness and depth scared me: the great wrongdoing I have committed to good, kind people by the simple act of my coming into this world! Padding wetly in my immediate shadow Eqingaleq’s protestations had fallen on deaf ears.

  In the room of photographs I had beheld, for the first time, an image of my father. It had seemed that a complete stranger looked back at me: I saw no familiarities in his features – save for the angular facial contours displayed also by Michael, though disguised somewhat by his adolescence – indeed the heavy brows and sharp nose were a direct contrast to the gentle openness of my own countenance. It had always been said that I took after my mother – I hoped to God in appearance only. There were no pictures of her amidst the family portraits that I had guiltily perused – why should there be? Until recently I had known no other family; now the family I had newly become acquainted with did not know my mother, except perhaps in hearsay, in anger and in unfortunate issue.

  I imagined a future in which I had refused to follow the path of my fate; an alternate present continued under the mountain’s shifting shadows and the wide fjords of the icy coast. Home: magisterial, ancient, serene, and lonely. There, ever wondering, I would have run like the wild wind, chilled from icy climes, never resting, in search of an answer that remains elusive. Fearful of stagnation I had chosen instead to take to the sea, I reminded myself, to alight on the backs of the white geese. Fate is not a pre-ordained, concreted road; it was up to me whether or not I allowed my bearers to abandon me to the ocean’s relentless waves.

  I did not have to drown.

  I left my perch and my self-pity and, taking shelter with Eqingaleq in one of the shops, shook the salty droplets from my waterlogged wings. Graciously, he said nothing. The water leaked out from my every pore and fibre of being, and as I came back to the surface I caught the most wonderful of aromas. How long it seemed since I had last been greeted by the smell of freshly baked
bread! A tremor of warmth and anticipation ran through me, a strange, almost forgotten nostalgia.

  I brushed the sodden hair from my eyes, and in doing so caught the gaze of a young woman. Dressed in a blue apron, she stood behind a counter laden with an array of loaves, buns, slices... At the sight of this wandering stranger dripping salt water onto her clean floor there passed across her face a look of pity and a comforting smile. She buttered a bread roll and passed it wordlessly to me, poor drowned feathered thing, and my heart ached with gratitude.

  I was too embarrassed to devour the gift in front of her, ravenous as I was; luckily the rain deigned to lift its steel press just for a moment, and I returned to the bench to enjoy every last bite of my long-awaited dinner. Feeling fortified and thus virtuous I threw the remaining crumbs to the splay-footed pigeons that strutted around me in hope of a spare morsel. They had barely closed their beaks around their prize when I felt a rush of air above my head, the fall of the sky and the great beating of wings, and with an ear-splitting cry of triumph there landed at my feet an enormous gull. It stretched out its white wings in warning to the smaller scavengers, its head lowered and its beak poised. It hissed at its opponents and snatched aggressively at the ground and the tiny crumbs that would surely not sustain it for long.

  The shock of the bird’s intrusion had caused me to leap to my feet with a small cry, scramble backwards and clutch like a frightened child at Eqingaleq’s arm. I prayed that the girl in the bakery had not witnessed this display. All hopes of a meal now dashed, my visitor took to the air again, shrieking, laughing, and soon was gone. Gone where, I did not know – but it struck me, as my frenetic heart began to still, that the sea could not lie far from here, for it was to the vast open ocean that my unwelcome friend must return.

  12

  Despite my resolve not to drown in this new place there grew a darkness within my soul that alarmed me. I began to despise myself for the very nature of my blood: a being born into two worlds yet inhabiting none; an outlaw, an outsider, given away by the colour of my skin. Was I a fool for having forsaken my home?

  This world did not move to its own internal rhythm, it was not driven by the sun’s changeable dwelling in the wide sky and the rolling of the tide and seasons; here each day dawned just like the morning previous, and ambled towards its end with an almost painful monotony. Occasionally I caught snatches of beauty, such as the colourful spilling of an unseen dawn or the song of a passing bird, soon swallowed by the noise of the city – suggestions that there grew life even in this most stagnant of places.

  The days were unbearably long, yet so different to the long Arctic summer days during which the sun did not set. I took to staying awake well into the still, early hours of the mornings, for this was when the world, bathed in a thick, unearthly silence, was at its most peaceful, and the inevitable threat of a new day at its most distant. In my tented sanctuary I would find solace, immersed in waking dreams of open wilderness and endless skies: the perpetual quiet of the slow world broken only by the howl of the dogs, the creak of the pack ice, a woman calling to her children under the midnight sun.

  I was adamant that I must not forget who I was or where I had come from. And yet, even at the time of my leaving home I had not known this.

  You were not at peace, Eqingaleq reminded me, time and time again, and in agony I nodded my head. I knew that his rationality could recall that which my wounded, fearful heart had already forgotten.

  I saw no more signs of the sea over the coming weeks. No sight nor sound that might lead me to the venerable, all-knowing mother who dwelled beneath the waves, wreathed in seaweed tendrils as black as her hair. I began to fear that the great, shrieking gull had been nothing more than an omen, a fearful spirit anticipating the coming of one whom I could not call a friend.

  ◆◆◆

  On most days I would exit the house at the earliest opportunity, dreading the sound of a knock at the door or the chime of the bell – the signal that he had come for me, his intentions unclear. Some days, finding myself alone in the house, I would turn the wireless up to nearing full volume, drowning out any unwelcome interruptions along with Eqingaleq’s squealing protestations, and sit for hours at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of strong coffee and listening intently to the flow of language. Late at night, once darkness had fallen, I would crawl into my makeshift tent and by torchlight pore over the book lent to me by Judith – dictionary in hand – until my strained eyes could no longer be kept open. Always I feared the tap-tapping of a sharp beak upon the window: the ominous visitor, goggle-eyes peering through the crack in the curtains through which the meagre candlelight flickered on and off as though it were about to be extinguished. I feared the darkness; I longed instead for the openness of the polar nights, where once I was overlooked only by the broad sky.

  The days, clouded as such by apprehension, slipped by at an alarming speed with little to distinguish each from the other. This cloud tracked my every move. It found me a shaking wreck at the street’s end, terrified of rounding the corner and meeting the unknown, the watery eyes of the gull; it hung over the town clearing, and over my head, scrambling my thoughts and judgement so I could not understand the words of those around me.

  This uncertainty, this fear, could not persevere endlessly; each day I trod the steps of a man condemned, single-minded and silent, clutching at swathes of time that forever slipped from my grasp for the violent shaking of my hands. Yet I was anxious for its end.

  Late one afternoon I arrived back at the house to find that the great, shrieking gull had, this time, followed me home. Pursued by the relentless rain, I had scurried into the house like a half-drowned rat. I left my coat and kamiks – plastered with sodden fallen leaves in red and brown – at the door and sought out some dry clothes upstairs. I roughly dried my hair with a towel before pulling on my old fisherman’s jumper against the chill that had begun to seep into my bones. Finding that I had a strange longing for coffee, something hot to warm me through, I thought I would try my chances in the kitchen.

  I regretted this forwardness immediately, for there he perched, on a chair by the table. Had I heard the slap of his webbed feet on the pavement, or the swoop of his broad wings overhead? Or had he flown before me, not seeking the sea after all, as I had expected? It seemed he had planned to lie in wait, anticipating my arrival – he prepared, I unaware – knowing that I could not turn back. I could not now slam shut the door and run from the house, from the town, the city, the country...

  I reminded myself that I had barely come to know the man; but what was it about those aqueous eyes that filled me with a nameless dread? They were fixed upon me now, where I stood frozen in the doorway. I knew malintent when so plainly I saw it.

  As my eyes flickered around the room I saw that Judith and her son were also present at the kitchen table. But before I had the chance to greet them – politely, as only I knew how – the man’s eyes narrowed and he barked in Danish: ‘What the hell do you want?’

  Eqingaleq put a heavy hand on my shoulder, and squeezed gently. We make what we can of our fated path; I would not be left to drown.

  Striving to keep my voice steady I informed him that I had come in search of a cup of coffee, for I was cold, and thirsty. At the mention of the word kaffe, Judith rose accommodatingly from her chair and bid me take a seat as she fetched me a cup. Luckily, there was an empty chair positioned at the opposite side of the table to the glowering visitor: a barrier between us. I sat down in a dripping silence; each set of eyes in the room was averted from the other in painful deliberation, save for the sharp, beaded pair belonging to the grey-haired man: they were fixed glaringly and unabashedly upon me. It was Judith, however, whom he addressed, in his own language, his voice raised. I caught only the word Eskimo, spat out from between his thin lips like a curse – derogatory, accusing. Heat rose to my cheeks.

  Judith did not reply, only set the steaming mug of coffee on the table before me. I thanked her, and attempted a smile,
though the sickening anxiety that twisted within my ribcage was loathe to allow it.

  The man’s eyes flickered, his beak quivered, but he withheld his apparent mounting rage for just long enough to allow me to reach for the mug with an outstretched hand. Then he whipped it furiously and wordlessly from my grasp, and striding across the kitchen hurled its contents down the sink. Droplets splashed the wall behind. He set the mug back down on the table with some force and took his seat, equality restored: those who by their blood do not deserve the kind gift of coffee must go without.

  My blood beat thickly in my ears, deafening in the tense, uncomfortable silence; the skin between my thumb and forefinger smarted from contact with the hot liquid, spilled in fury. I realised that my hands were shaking, though whether in fear, in pain or in anger I could not tell. Then, to my surprise, it was Michael’s turn to take hold of the offending mug, which he refilled from the coffee pot on the counter, his movements slow and deliberate, his hands steady. All eyes were upon him, then the coffee was before me again and I did not know what to do. As if in response to my thoughts, the boy pushed a plate of biscuits across the table. I sensed the coiled, hot-blooded energy that beat beneath his cool exterior, and feared I would receive similar treatment from him if I did not take one. I took one. Triumph, suppressed, flashed across the boy’s eyes, and the look that passed between him and the beaked man was one of mutual hatred. Yet I did not feel that, in acknowledgement of a common enemy, I had acquired an ally.

  Ignoring her son, the man spoke in a low voice to Judith, while I struggled to sip my coffee with tremulous hands, and tackled the biscuit, trying not to choke. Then –

  ‘You’re trying to learn English!’ he said to me, without warning, and I could not tell whether this remark was meant as a question, an exclamation of surprise or of amusement. I did not like the use of the word “try”. In response to my answer – a single word in the affirmative – he only snorted, and I saw a condescending glint in his eye. ‘You have high hopes for yourself.’