The Seagulls Laughter

by Holly Bidgood

  ‘Michael,’ I ventured.

  He grunted. I took this as an invitation to continue.

  ‘Will you work at the record shop forever?’

  ‘Nah, man,’ he said around the cigarette, seemingly without moving his lips.

  ‘What will you do?’

  He shrugged his shoulders – as far as I could tell. ‘Summat else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Again, a non-complicit shrug of the shoulders; this time he remained silent. I watched the smoke from the end of his cigarette climb gracefully towards the ceiling before dispersing into the low-lit atmosphere of the room.

  ‘Will you be an explorer like… your father?’ Your father, not ours…

  He gave a loud snort. The suddenness of the sound made me jump, but he did not appear to notice and continued to puff away mutely on his cigarette.

  I tried to imagine Michael visiting the Arctic. I pictured him standing disinterestedly in the throes of a winter blizzard, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his flared jeans dragging in the deepening snow, a sodden cigarette drooping from between his lips. Had I been sober this picture might have caused me to laugh out loud; as it was, in my exhausted and alcohol-tinged stupor I only scowled with confusion. The picture faded and was replaced by the black-and-white image of a bearded man – a white man – dressed in furs. His eyes gazed out from his weatherbeaten face with a look of clarity and contentedness. Although I had seen this man only in a few old photographs, I knew who he was.

  ‘What was he like?’ I heard my voice ask. ‘Was he a good father?’

  His cigarette burnt to a stub, Michael pushed himself up into a sitting position again. His eyes looked vacuous, unfocussed. At first I was not sure if he had heard me, but then he rubbed a hand against his forehead and his shoulders made the usual non-committal gesture. ‘Dunno,’ he mumbled, ‘he was just… Dad, yeah?’

  He hauled himself onto his feet with apparent difficulty and stumbled over to the record player. Moments later the heavy sound of guitars filled the room. Michael retraced his steps and, having lit another cigarette, dropped back down onto the beanbag. He lay prostrate, seemingly lifeless once more apart from the continuous column of smoke that rose from the end of his cigarette.

  ◆◆◆

  Tony scratched the crown of his bald head with thick, stubby fingers as he surveyed the shop. A young man dressed in a plaid shirt was the only customer to be seen this slow morning, leisurely rifling through the records in a corner of the room. I drummed my fingers against the counter. I was bored, and uncomfortable in the heavy silence that lingered over the shop floor, disturbed only by the discreet sound of the record sleeves rubbing against each other as the young man browsed through them. The record player on the counter top had lapsed into silence some time ago; Tony, for some reason, had made no move to turn the record over to the B side or replace it with another, and though I longed for the music’s distraction I dared not do this myself, felt that it was not my place.

  Michael, as far as I knew, was still in bed. Urged by Judith I had knocked on his bedroom door before I left the house, since he had not appeared downstairs for breakfast as usual. Hearing a muffled groan, I had pushed open the door to find him cocooned in his duvet. Only his hair was visible, protruding wildly from the lumps of blanket on the bed. Hesitantly I told him that it was time to go to work. He did not move, only swore hoarsely and mumbled something about not feeling well. I suspected that the amount of alcohol he had consumed the night before likely had something to do with the state he was in, but I did not push the matter further, and left him there in bed.

  It was intensely uncomfortable being alone with Tony in the record shop. I watched him as he slipped yet another cigarette between his thin lips, lit it with a match and began to puff away. His mouth opened and closed like the slack jaws of a fish. The tingle of the bell above the door cut through the atmosphere momentarily, as the only customer made an exit.

  Tony removed the cigarette from his mouth and studied it. It had burned almost to a stub already. The ends of his fingers were patched with yellow-brown nicotine stains.

  ‘You ever see a polar bear, Mal?’ He glanced up at me and grinned widely. I noticed that the corners of his mouth did not seem to turn upwards when he smiled, but continued horizontally in their opposite directions.

  I nodded. Truth be told I had seen a live polar bear only once, a large adult male driven too close to the village in its search for food. It had been shot immediately. Only the most skilled hunters went out in search of bears. Generally, they travelled alone, often over great distances, and could be gone for weeks at a time. When finally the hunter returned the children would run shrieking alongside his sled as it skimmed over the ice of the fjord, the dogs whining, yapping and howling. The bear – if the hunt had been successful – would already have been butchered, but the whole town would gather to see the animal’s great, white hide stretched out on the ground, its eyes gleaming dully from its heavy head. The hunter’s wife would sew him a new pair of trousers from this skin – the hunter’s pride.

  Tony took another drag on his cigarette. ‘Anyone you know ever get eaten by a polar bear?’

  I frowned at him: this was an odd question. I had heard of hunters being mauled when the hunt went wrong, or knocked down dead to the ground by the lethal swipe of a bear’s gigantic paw – after all these animals were wild, dangerous. But specifically eaten?

  ‘Err… no,’ I answered.

  The corners of Tony’s mouth dropped in disappointment. ‘Enough penguins to eat, I suppose.’ He shrugged, stubbed out his cigarette.

  Penguins? I studied his expressions for signs of humour, but found none. I glanced over to Eqingaleq. He raised his eyebrows, his lips twitching slightly at the corners. Would it be inappropriate to put Tony right? I was apprehensive that he might think me rude, relieve me of my job at the shop, perhaps. Although I was not particularly enamoured with my work at the shop, I did not know what I would do without the distraction that it awarded me. I began to mentally formulate a carefully-worded explanation that I hoped he would not find offensive, but my thoughts were interrupted by the sweet sound of the bell above the door signalling that a customer had entered. It must have been a friend of Tony’s, for he greeted the customer wholeheartedly and moved across the room towards the door to speak with him.

  I abandoned the sentence that was forming in my head, aware of the profound feeling of emptiness that spread through my body as I did so.

  When I returned to the house, I sat down at the kitchen table with my watercolour paints and painted the simple image of a swimming polar bear onto the paper. Sleek, graceful, otherworldly; snout reaching up to the surface of the water, limbs akimbo, its body curved with the suggestion of power and gentleness.

  For some time, I sat looking at the bear I had painted, ruminating on what I could have said to Tony, what I could have told him about: the absence of penguins in the Arctic, of course, but there was so much more to be said. The great white bear was not merely a vicious creature to be avoided for fear that it might long for a taste of human flesh; it was a part of the land, the sea and the wilderness, just as the people of the Arctic were and had been for thousands of years. Survival, for both Man and Bear, depended on the understanding of this northerly world, and Man depended on Bear. He must treat Bear with the greatest respect and humility; neither Man nor Bear were cold-hearted killers.

  I doubted that I could have articulated any of this to Tony, had he even shown any interest.

  Later, in the safe space of my blanket tent I fell to sleep with my thoughts still fixed on the painting. I dreamed of running bears, swimming bears, hunting bears. I dreamed of bears in human form – of which the old stories told – who were able to slip in and out of their white-furred skins at will. Finally, I dreamed of one story in particular, of the bear-woman who, seeing the hunters approach, bit her cubs to death so they would not fall into the hands of men; and I woke up in a cold sweat.


  22

  I could hear Judith and the beak-nosed man arguing downstairs.

  It was late evening, the window panes dark and drenched with rain. I had heard him arrive, that ominous tap-tapping at the door; recognised his shrill voice in the hallway, Judith’s low and patient. It was not long before the confrontation escalated and the man’s shrieks permeated the walls by which we were separated and sent my pulse racing. I could not make out what was said but my fearful imagination filled in the details.

  My heart skipped a beat as I heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs. But it must only have been Michael, for the feet stomped in the direction of his bedroom and I heard the door slam with an obstinate thud, followed by the blare of the record player turned up to full volume. The pounding noise of the music unsettled me just as much as the voices it drowned out.

  In search of a distraction I picked up the book I had been reading, but I could still hear the man’s cries in my head, like echoes – the haunt of unwanted memories – and I could not concentrate. As I glanced up from the page, my eyes came to rest on the half-bottle of spirits that I had left Michael’s room with the previous evening. I had not planned to take it: yes, I had been drunk, and somehow the bottle had found its way into my hands as I stumbled back to my own room seeking a pillow on which to lay my reeling head. Michael had not noticed, sprawled semi-conscious on his bean bag, the record player still churning out its music.

  I put the bottle to my lips and grimaced as I took a swig. The first taste was always the most bitter; sooner or later I would fail to notice its flavour, or the way in which it ran like fire down my throat.

  ◆◆◆

  The soles of Michael’s canvas shoes pounded the pavement like the slap of a seal’s flippers against the frozen surface of the sea. Determined strides, his expression sullen, hands thrust moodily into the depths of his jeans pockets. I hurried after him, seeking answers and a distraction from the nausea that had awoken with me that morning as I drifted into painful consciousness beside an empty bottle of spirits.

  Who was the man with the beak instead of a nose? I pressed, addressing the back of Michael’s greasy head as it swung, pendulum-like along the streets grey with morning drizzle. What did he want from Judith? Why did he keep coming back? The boy only grunted in response. His flat feet continued to smack the pavement, and it felt as though my ears bled with the sound. But the alcohol that still surged through my bloodstream spread a determination, a recklessness even, and insistently I repeated my questions.

  As we reached the record shop, Michael withdrew his hands from his pockets and threw open the faded blue door. The bell above it tinkled sweetly as the door slammed into the rack behind it and bounced back on its creaking hinges. Michael turned to face me, gesturing emphatically as he walked backwards across the linoleum floor.

  ‘He’s just some deadbeat, man. Travelled with my dad. You know, like, to Greenland or wherever.’

  My dad, he said, not ours.

  As he reached the counter he stomped behind it and flicked up the lid of the record player. From the small pile of records that had been left next to it he selected one, seemingly without even thinking, and having drawn it roughly from its sleeve almost slammed it into place on the turntable. It was the first time I had seen him treat one of his records with anything less than reverential respect.

  ‘Has a thing for my mum, man,’ he said to the machine as he wrenched at its buttons and dials, ‘it’s obvious, man. It’s sick.’ The record player emitted a screech as he adjusted the needle. ‘As if she’d be interested,’ he muttered, as though to himself. ‘And dad barely even buried.’

  The crackle of white noise filled the shop. Michael flipped down the plastic lid of the record player with a hollow crash, and turning on his heel he stomped off to the kitchen amidst the sudden burst of electric guitars.

  ◆◆◆

  The relentless tread of the pavement had worn a hole in the sole of my sealskin kamiks. Rainwater seeped into the inside of the boot and I shivered from its contact with the bare skin of my foot. When I arrived back at the house I sat for a long while at the kitchen table with the boot in my hand, looking at it. I thought of the wrinkled skin of my late grandmother’s hands, like brown paper; remembered the way in which her increasingly arthritic fingers had held steady as she threaded the bone needle, pulled lengths of sinew through the tough hide, sewed on the minute pieces of brightly-coloured leather in decoration. They had held strong for years, through countless seasons, over ice, snow, rock and arctic tundra. They were not made for the concrete of the city streets, said Eqingaleq as he took a seat beside me.

  I nodded, could not speak. I felt paralysed, powerless. I could not mend the worn sole for I had no sealskin nor sinew thread. I did not have a kayak or harpoon with which to hunt the animal for its skin, nor the tools with which to flense it. I did not even know in which direction I would find the sea and its creatures, or how far I would have to walk, barefoot, until I reached its shores.

  I glanced up at the sound of the door opening. Judith entered, her hair wet from the rain, a string shopping bag in each hand. She stopped as she saw me, and looked at the boot that I cradled in my hands like a dead thing.

  ‘My kamiks,’ I said brokenly. I wanted to tell her – to tell someone – what had happened, what this meant: that the soles of my hand-sewn shoes, like the very soul within my body, had been worn down to almost nothing by the mercilessness of the city. But I could say no more. Overcome, I put my head in my hands and sobbed like a child.

  I would rather have trodden the pavements barefoot than in Michael’s old boots. Several sizes too big for me, I had to pull on an additional pair of thick woollen socks before I could walk in them with any degree of comfort. They were like weights around my ankles; too heavy, I felt, to allow me to outrun the wolves that hounded my thoughts and the clouds that enveloped my senses. As I trudged along the morning’s usual path to the record shop I experienced the strange sensation that my feet were not my own, that they were not under my control. I feared where they might take me.

  As soon as I arrived back at the house that evening, I took the boots off and threw them under the bed. For the rest of the week I feigned illness, unable to bear the thought of slipping my feet into them once more and anchoring myself to the city’s insufferable streets. Instead I remained in the bedroom, curled up defensively inside my blanket tent, feet clad in woollen socks against the pervading chill of the house. I listened for the slam of the front door as Michael left for work; the gentle click as Judith followed a few minutes later, pulling the door to behind her. The house now empty, I took my borrowed box of watercolour paints, paintbrush and paper, and padded downstairs to the kitchen.

  The arctic landscape spilled uninhibited from the end of my paintbrush. As I painted I ran along the rocks that lined the fjord, my feet cushioned by summer moss; paddled a kayak across the still water. I urged semi-wild huskies, howling above the hiss of the sledge runners, over winter’s frozen sea. I melted pans of ice over a blubber-fuelled flame, boiled the water for tea with mattak and stale biscuits.

  Yet all the while I was aware of an indistinct longing within my soul, a sense of incompleteness. And a fear that I could not name.

  I was startled back into the present by the falling shadow of wings upon the paper. The beak-nosed man was standing behind me. I leapt to my feet, the paintbrush still in my hand, and my chair tipped backwards and clattered onto the linoleum floor. I backed away from him around the corner of the table, inwardly cursing Judith, in my fear, for not locking the front door as she left.

  He looked a little surprised at having caused me to jump out of my skin, though this was immediately replaced by a glint of triumph. His eyes moved down to the painting I had been working on.

  ‘Been thinking about that explorer, have you?’ he said, his expression deadpan.

  I looked down at the page and saw that I had painted into the landscape the image of a container ship. It s
ailed noiselessly into the serenity of the fjord, dwarfed by icebergs that glowed pink in the evening sun. A flock of seagulls wheeled and dove around the vessel, brushstrokes in the clear sky. In the distance rugged black mountains coloured by ice; a cluster of red-walled houses upon the rocks of the coast, waiting. It was as though I was seeing the painting for the first time. For some reason it unsettled me.

  I saw the man’s eyes flicker across to the almost-empty glass and bottle of spirits that stood beside the picture. He let out a cruel laugh, his thin lips twisted.

  ‘Your mother’s son!’ he said.

  I did not know how much of the stuff I had drunk, had barely been aware that I was drinking it. My head swam, my heart slammed again and again against my ribcage in indefinable panic. I could not speak. I glanced around the room but could see no sign of Eqingaleq. Where could he have got to; now, when I did not know what to do?

  Looking down the length of his beak, the man examined my completed paintings, spread out upon the table top. He ran his fingers over the contours of the mountains, the curve of the fjord, over the ship picking its way around the icebergs.

  ‘I could never understand his obsession,’ he murmured, as though to himself: ‘such a barren place…’

  He lapsed into silence; still he did not look up.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ I managed to say. My voice sounded pleading. I did not like it.

  He shrugged his shoulders. Dislodged droplets of rain water ran down the front of his coat and dripped from the end of his sleeve, narrowly missing my watercolour paintings. His fingers continued to trace their path over the scenes that I had crafted, the memories I had put down upon the paper, and my intoxicated blood began to boil.