Eqingaleq gripped my elbows and dragged me homewards. She wants me to drown, I moaned, the Mother of the Sea.
He shook his head. You are throwing yourself in where you cannot swim, he said. The more water your wings take in, the harder it will be to fly free. Even she cannot help you then, if you sink straight into her arms.
◆◆◆
‘Good night out, man,’ Michael said to me the following morning over a breakfast that I could not stomach. His eyes were bloodshot. Unsure if this had been intended as a question or an unfounded statement, I merely nodded and regretted my response immediately for the sickness welled again. I closed my eyes. Trying to stay still, I willed the ship to stop rocking and the tide to calm its advance. The sea had been so rough during the night that I had barely slept, and had swallowed only salt water from the storm’s spray. My eyes and throat stung; my body ached all over as though I had been beaten.
The seasickness persisted all week, and I could drink nothing but water and strong tea. When Michael brought out the bottle again one evening, the sounds of a mellow guitar drifting from the record player, I could not touch the stuff despite even the pressures of social convention and the inevitability that I would not be able to finally broach the subject of my father – our father – were I not under its emboldening influence. He did not seem offended, as I had feared, only laughed amicably and assured me that I would yet learn to hold my drink.
Was this the point of it all? I wondered aloud to Eqingaleq once we had retreated into the soothing quiet of my tent: to learn to drink oneself to excess without becoming too ill, perhaps?
Your mother never managed that, he said plainly, and so unexpectedly that I was taken aback.
But that… that was different, surely? I stammered defensively. She was… you know what she was like. This is different. I’m just trying to get by until I know what I have to do next, until I know what it’s all been for.
You remember your mother’s brother? He continued as though he had not heard. He came home one winter night so drunk he couldn’t fit his key into the lock. And they found him the next morning, frozen to death on his front doorstep.
And your point is? I tried to mask my horror at such an unwelcome memory.
Eqingaleq shrugged his bare, lithe shoulders. Just be careful.
I had to bite my tongue to stop the words from flowing out uninhibited; he would not be argued with, and I, in the weaker position, could not hope to win. Yet what simplistic advice! I was on the run from wolves, in search of the sea: I could not simply “take care”, I could not hide and wait for the storm to pass. If I stopped, I would surely drown.
19
Rasmus
‘We’ve delayed too long,’ said Birdie, glaring at Rasmus down the bridge of his long nose. ‘Summer’s almost out – any later in the year and the weather will be against us.’
Although the man did not say it aloud, Rasmus knew that he held him to account. It had not been his conscious decision to stay for so long in Angmagssalik; he felt a stab of panic at the realisation that he simply did not know where the time had gone, and for a second he recognised the taste of a recurring nightmare in which the minutes, the days slipped through his fingers and he could not run fast enough to keep up.
The blubber smoke inside the hut was suffocating him.
He looked over to Snorri for validation, though of course he knew that Birdie was right. The Icelander was sitting on one of the low beds, his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers knitted before his nose. He nodded impassively. ‘If we leave it any longer it will be too close to winter. We’d have to get settled here and wait for the spring.’
Birdie snorted at the suggestion. ‘We leave now or we go home,’ he stated.
Rasmus swallowed the lump of anger that rose up in his throat: that Birdie should think he had the authority to dictate to them what they should or should not do.
‘You’re taking charge now, are you?’ he asked plainly.
‘Don’t get passive aggressive with me, Rasmus,’ Birdie snapped, ‘We all have a say in this. I suppose you’d have us set up sticks here in this godforsaken place for as long as it suited you.’
‘But Qallu has his family,’ Rasmus pointed out, searching for a line of argument that would not render him as the responsible one for any changes of plan. He twisted his hands together. ‘The baby’s not a week old, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to leave –.’ He was interrupted by the unsettling screech of wood scraped against wood as Birdie rose to his feet, pushing his chair back from the table.
‘Qallu will leave when he’s told to leave. Isn’t that what we’re paying him for?’ He stalked across the room to his narrow bed, picked up a book. Propping up his pillow he sat down with his back against it and his legs stretched out languorously over the blankets. He stuck his nose inside the open book and apparently began to read.
For a moment no one spoke.
‘We’re well prepared.’ Birdie’s steely voice could be heard from behind the covers of his book. ‘We can leave tomorrow.’
Rasmus could not bring himself to speak. He could not find the words to express his thoughts; even had he been able to he would not have dared to utter them in present company for fear that he might be ridiculed or patronised. His eyes wandered over to where Birdie sat: it appeared Birdie had put an end to the discussion, his face hidden deliberately behind the book.
With a sigh Rasmus leaned forwards in his seat, clasped his hands together. He had believed that in Qallu he had made a friend, a companion and teacher who would accompany them to the ends of the earth… He had not considered that the promise of a wage might play a part in their relationship, as Birdie had suggested. And what about Ketty? His chest pained him, as though it were clamped in a vice. He had been naïve, he reprimanded himself – to think that here he might have made his home, here amongst strangers.
He heard Snorri speak quietly, it seemed to him alone. ‘We can’t stay here forever.’
It was as though his friend had read his mind. Heavily he nodded his head. His body felt drained, anchored to the chair on which he sat. He could not imagine hauling the weight of it all the way across the ice cap.
20
Malik
The following week, seasickness already forgotten, I accompanied Michael to the bar again. I had found myself consumed by thoughts of the long-haired girl whose acquaintance I had made so briefly the week before, possibly for the reason that this was the only part of the evening that I could recall with any clarity. My bemused mind sought focus, demanded reason – and found it in the pleasing bow of red lips and gentle femininity so alien to my inherent gracelessness, and so desirable.
Although I had made a conscious effort not to unwittingly drink so much before the evening had barely begun, and indeed as it progressed, I soon discovered that even a little of the stuff – for I could not get by without at least a little to calm my nerves and dampen my inhibitions – sent me reeling. My cheeks burned with the heat of the bodies that crowded the room; the girl’s cheeks, too, were flushed with colour. The music rang out so loudly that we could not hope to converse. The mutual attempt to be heard brought our hot cheeks closer together and our hands upon each other’s shoulders, and our lips to each other’s ears until finally, somehow, our lips met. She pressed her young body to mine; I held her close, seeking the comfort and warmth of another human being, and the simplistic pleasure of the sharing of flesh. Her hands cupped my jaw and slid up into my hair, pale, slender fingers running through the blackness of a raven’s wing.
In the stifling heat of the bar, crowded and noisy, I struggled to catch my breath in the seconds that our seeking, desperate lips parted. My head began to swim. I took hold of her hand and in a moment we were outside. The cooling smell of rain hung in the air. She led me away from the bar, wordlessly, down the deserted street and into the semi-darkness of the little park that lay around the corner. We had barely escaped the glare of the street lamps before her feverish lips sou
ght mine once more; her fingers fiddled with the buttons of my borrowed jeans, then she hitched up her short skirt. I lifted her up against the wall behind her and she wrapped her legs around my waist, drew me into her.
For once my mind was free of wandering thoughts, bent instead upon the hedonism of pleasure and the promise of release. It was only when finally, and with a breathless shudder I gave into her, as the heat dissipated and stillness fell, that I became aware of the dampened sound of wolverine paws, heavy upon wet earth. Oblivious, she adjusted her suede skirt, brushed back her hair, her ragged breath now calmed. My heart continued to hammer with the wildness of the shamanic beat. Could I tell her that the wolves were coming? I longed to bury myself in her neck, in her hair, to hold off their advance just for a little longer. I ached to tell her of the fear in my heart and the guilt by which I was hounded, longed to say aloud that I was scared I had lost my way. And yet, despite that which we had just shared, she was a stranger to me. I realised, with a wave of transient, sickening sobriety, that I did not even know her name. Had I given her my own? She had not asked.
When she kissed me again, as we parted at the bar’s open doors, I felt the emptiness within it, within myself.
But was that not what you wanted? Eqingaleq asked of the night’s encounter, his tone neither accusatory nor deprecating. The question was genuine; I could not answer.
The night air did little to cool the shame with which my cheeks burned, though it brought upon me a sudden and agonising sobriety. Such a drunken tryst had brought my daughter into the world, I remembered, on the evening of the day we had piled stones, soil and hollow prayers over the emaciated body of the woman who had once been my mother. The wolves had been present then, too. It terrified me, the consequences that my actions, however impulsive, could cause; the power of life, and – who could know? – even of death.
◆◆◆
The next morning, in desperation, I ransacked the guest bedroom for some sort of a sign as to my supposed purpose, where all seemed chaos. I did not know what it was that I searched for; I felt like a madman, rifling through drawers and peering under furniture as though in the grip of delirium – sleep-deprived and seasick once more.
I surfaced, eventually – gleefully – with a box of watercolour paints and a pad of thick, white paper. Clutching this treasure with both arms I crept fox-like out onto the landing and down the stairs, to be sure that I would meet no other form of life. I brewed a pot of strong tea to quell the nausea, and in the welcoming silence of an empty house took up my usual place at the kitchen table.
The rain beat its slate paws against the window as though trying to break its way through. It seemed as though twilight had already fallen. As soon as my borrowed paintbrush touched the paper this immediate world disappeared, and I was taken instead to the frozen fjords of home: the rain was the beat of the shaman’s drum, the electric lamp over the table the midnight sun of long summer days. Silhouetted figures waved from doors that glowed with the light of blubber lamps, from red, blue, yellow wooden houses backed by fields of endless ice and distant purple-hued mountains. Sometimes the open water lay as still and as clear as glass – reflecting the blue of the sky without end, or the mountains’ rugged heights – its surface decorated briefly by the sleek ripple of the returning hunter’s kayak. Raven-haired women dressed in skins sharpened crescent-shaped knives against stone, their little ones encapsulated, round-cheeked, in their mother’s anorak hoods. A little girl – did her soft, watercolour features seem familiar? – chewed freshly-caught seal meat.
So enraptured was I in my work – and how long it had been since I had last taken up a paintbrush! – I did not hear the gentle opening and closing of the door as Judith returned home. I looked up, the red walls of a house leaking from the tip of the brush, as her shadow fell lightly, and unintended, over the page. I was taken aback by the deepness of her gaze as it rested on the few postcard-sized paintings I had completed, spilling a sadness I had not seen before and a hurt that I could not describe. For a moment she seemed unaware that I watched her, then as she tore her eyes away and met mine she smiled meekly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ I stammered.
‘They’re beautiful.’ With a slight nod she indicated the paintings; the look in her eyes still lingered. I thanked her. ‘Are they… are they people you know?’
‘I don’t know.’ I hesitated, then drew towards me the picture in whose frame could be found the black-haired women sharpening their knives. I rested my finger above the foremost one, over whose shoulder peered chubby infant cheeks. ‘I thought, when I had painted her, that this one could almost be my mother. I like to think so, at least: in happier times.’ As this confession escaped my lips it occurred to me the tactlessness of mentioning, in present company, the woman who had born me.
Judith avoided my gaze. She moved to put on the kettle.
‘She must be very worried about you.’
I looked at her in surprise, having unfoundedly assumed she knew a little of my family history, being a somewhat indirect part of it herself, though all things considered it seemed rather unlikely that my father would have discussed with his wife the life and movements of his extra-marital lover.
‘She’s, err… she’s dead,’ I said, and for a moment feared she might think me callous for the lack of emotion in this simple statement. She only offered her condolences, as would any human being, and I swallowed down the unexpected lump that rose to my throat, and blinked back the hotness that pricked my eyes.
The silence that followed, although filled with the busy sounds of Judith’s tea making, was uncomfortable. I tried to dab more paint onto the red-walled house that took shape beneath my paintbrush, but found that it only made my eyes prickle once more. I set it down with a sigh that Judith apparently did not hear.
She sat down opposite me and slid a fresh cup of tea across the table. I had exchanged precious few words with her over the previous weeks. It is true even that I had avoided her to some extent, certain that she would immediately smell the guilt upon my alcohol-tinged breath. I shuddered to think that she might come to hear about my shameful act of lust with the unnamed girl in the short skirt – though quite why I could not explain.
‘What was she like?’ she asked, as I took the mug of tea.
I faltered, the mug halfway to my lips. The heat had begun to rise to my ears, before I realised that we were still talking of my mother. I could not think how to answer.
‘She was… she was… lost, I think.’ Even in my own language I could not have said more.
Another laden silence rolled between the walls. ‘Was she very beautiful?’
‘Not when she was drunk,’ I said honestly, ‘and she was drunk most of the time.’
Judith looked past me, out of the window, seemingly deep in thought. The rain beat louder against the glass. Eventually she turned her clouded gaze down to my paintings on the table.
‘He should not have brought you here,’ she said, as though speaking to herself. She did not look up from the pictures as she spoke, her voice low, and I saw the endless reaches of the painted glacial wilderness reflected in her eyes.
Why had he brought me here? I longed to ask. But I could not find my tongue.
Eqingaleq, who had been tracing the trail of the raindrops down the window pane with his long, gnarled fingers, looked over, curiously, as the silence rolled thickly into every corner of the room. His hands now stilled, his eyes picked out a path between me and Judith. And back again.
With one hand Judith brushed her greying hair away from her forehead.
‘I don’t know why he… And at a time like this,’ she murmured.
My stomach churned with discomfort. I could not ask her why the man meant her ill, why I had been used as an accessory to an unexplained punishment. At a time like this, when she had just buried her husband.
‘I can leave,’ I suggested bluntly.
Swiftly she raised her head, and her eyes shot up to meet mine. ‘And where would you go?’ she said, knowing that this question had no answer. I was startled by the sharpness that lined her words as she continued: ‘No, Malik, I will not give him that satisfaction. You’ll stay here for now.’
I nodded, speechless. Again Eqingaleq looked between us, from one to the other, following as if to see who would first venture to break the painful silence that swelled like a coastal fog across the table. Both he and I glanced towards Judith as she spoke, changing the subject entirely, presumably in the hope that this brief exchange might be forgotten.
‘Your English is coming along very well,’ she said, and although she smiled only half-heartedly and her eyes did not quite meet mine, I knew the praise was genuine. Long days spent behind the counter in the record shop, eavesdropping on mundane conversations, had proved invaluable practice, as well as being audience to Michael’s many drunken orations on rock music.
Blushing, I opened my mouth to thank her. But before the words could pass my lips she had risen from her chair, and turning away muttered, ‘I won’t keep you any longer from your painting.’ And with that she left the room, closing the door gently behind her.
21
The record player had lapsed into silence. Michael was too drunk to notice. He was sprawled almost horizontally over the beanbag on which he liked to sit, his body as limp as a ragdoll’s, drool running freely from his slack-jawed mouth and his face part-obscured by his hair. The glass from which he had been drinking, now emptied, had slid from his hand and lay on its side on the orange pile rug. For a moment I feared he had slipped into unconsciousness, but as this thought crossed my mind I saw him turn his head, pucker his lips through the curtain of hair and take a drag on the cigarette that he still clutched in his other hand. It had gone out. With the cigarette hanging loosely from his lips he raised himself with difficulty into a sitting position and began fishing around on the carpet for the box of matches, eventually locating it under one of his knees. Having re-lit his cigarette he sank back down on the beanbag, spread-eagled, holding it between his lips as he puffed.
The Seagulls Laughter Page 10