The Seagulls Laughter

by Holly Bidgood

  I don’t need your judgement, I said, without raising my head to look at him. Though I spoke quietly, my voice simmered.

  Suit yourself, he said.

  I had clenched my fists, ready for a fight. But when I turned around he was nowhere to be seen.

  I turned off the light before opening the door and stumbled out onto the landing, where I almost ran into a figure standing outside the bathroom door. I stopped dead. At first I thought it might be Eqingaleq, waiting to reprimand me, but as my eyes adjusted to the reclaimed darkness I saw that the figure was a woman. The window at the top of the stairs cast a grey light over the wreaths of her long hair and the curve of her neck. I could not make out her features, as they were only a suggestion in the dim light.

  From her surprised intake of breath as I burst through the door, I knew that she was real, not just a shadow cast by my vibrant, drugged imagination.

  ‘Are you drinking to forget, too?’ I asked irritably, as though she, a stranger, had been privy to my conversation with Eqingaleq in the bathroom. My voice sounded strangely loud and brazen in the heavy, deserted atmosphere that hung around this part of the house.

  I thought that perhaps I saw a small smile prick the corners of her mouth, but it may just have been the play of shadows in the grey darkness.

  ‘What are you drinking to forget?’ she asked me. It was as though her lips did not move. Her voice was low, soft.

  ‘Everything,’ I said.

  I could not see her eyes, only black holes where they ought to be.

  She held up a bottle, it glinted dully in the meagre light from the window.

  ‘Me too,’ she whispered.

  I don’t know how it happened.

  A blur of movement and shadows in the semi-darkness; the feel of the hard mattress beneath me, her skirt hitched up around her waist. I was still wearing my fisherman’s jumper. My lips tasted of alcohol and sweat.

  The background noise of the music, continuous; the raggedness of her breath. The bed groaned beneath us.

  ◆◆◆

  I drifted into consciousness with the first rays of the morning sun. My head pounded as though I had slammed it against a brick wall, my eyes felt gritty and the bright light pained me. Throughout the night I had tossed within lucid dreams: of tides turning, fjords freezing over, the moon chasing the sun round and round in the vast arctic sky. I had run with wolves through the wilderness, flown high above the tundra on coal-black raven’s wings; I had fought bears in human form and carefully combed clean the long, black hair of the Mother of the Sea, strand by strand, over and over again.

  When I awoke, I was alone. My night-time companion, found in the darkness, was nowhere to be seen now that the sun had risen. I scrambled out of bed and peered into the depths of my blanket tent which was still raised at the foot of the bed. Empty. Perhaps I had imagined her after all, an otherworldly creature – a drunken fantasy.

  But where was Eqingaleq?

  Bit by bit I struggled into my jeans, nauseous from the movement of my limbs, then slowly sloped downstairs and into the kitchen. I began heaping spoonsful of coffee into the pot, but stopped as the smell of it only made me feel worse. I noticed that it was mingled with another aroma as well: smoke. I turned around and saw that the back door stood open. I tripped into the garden, blinking in the daylight.

  The first thing that my eyes landed upon was a metal dustbin which had been placed in the middle of the garden. It was on fire, or rather a fire had been kindled within it. Flames licked the edges, smoke spilled out into the early morning air. Michael was standing beside the fire, clad only in jeans and a t-shirt, despite the winter chill. He looked as though he had not slept. His hair, though still lank, was in disarray, and his face was drawn and his eyes shadowed by dark rings. He appeared to be having difficulty holding himself upright, swaying on uncertain legs. I could tell that he was still drunk.

  He looked up at the sound of my approach. His eyes narrowed; the ferocity of his glare took me aback and stopped me in my tracks. I saw that he held a piece of paper in his hands. He followed the line of my gaze, then raised the paper up into the air, above the open dustbin.

  It was one of my watercolour paintings.

  ‘Don’t!’ I cried instinctively.

  He released the paper. It drifted down in graceful arcs and disappeared into the flames. I was struck by the image of the glacial ice melting from the page in streams, then rivers.

  I gaped at him.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I shouted, rising quickly to anger.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, man?’ he screeched, a rising note in his voice. He swore at me, spat in my direction. ‘What’s the matter with you, laying your dirty hands on my sister?’

  Something plummeted within my stomach, as though the ground had flipped on its side and I had been tipped from the face of the earth. All at once I remembered the photographs I had seen in the front room of the house. Photographs of the whole family: Michael, the son, and a daughter too. Was it not her childhood bedroom that I had been sleeping in? She had not been present at the funeral; I had only seen the photographs… Last night, through the darkness and the drink I had not recognised her, and she, it would seem, had not known me.

  I wondered how she had realised – too late – who this stranger was that she had met in the darkness. Given away by my black hair, perhaps? And the colour of my skin. Seeing this, she must have fled at the first sign of the morning light. Just as Sun moves across the wide sky pursued by her brother, Moon, in the aftermath of their mistaken union when each had believed the other to be someone else…

  What had I done?

  The flames licked higher as Michael tossed another, and another of my paintings onto the fire. The sea ice melted, the mountains crumpled, the houses went up in smoke; I could smell the burning of the ravens’ feathers.

  With a howl I threw myself at Michael, wrestled him to the ground. He shrieked, struggled, swore. We fought with tooth and claw until someone pulled me off him. I tore myself from the grip that held me and stumbled out of reach, my breath staggered. I looked up and saw that it was the man with the beak for a nose, dressed in his coat and boots, having presumably just arrived. He did not come after me or try to restrain me again, only stood with his arms hanging limply by his sides, seemingly at a loss.

  Michael was kneeling on the grass, swearing still and trying to stem the stream of blood that spilled from his bruised nose. Judith crouched over him attentively, the hem of her raincoat trailing on the wet grass. She turned to look at me, her gaze imploring, hurt. Not waiting for her to speak, I turned tail and ran.

  I ran into the house and up the stairs to the bedroom. There was no one there. Where was Eqingaleq? I gathered my few belongings and stuffed them into my backpack, then stumbled back down the stairs. I pulled on my anorak, slipped my feet into Michael’s old boots, and throwing open the front door, I ran from the house. The boots were weights around my ankles, sinking my feet to the ground as though I were trying to run through drifts of heavy snow. I did not look back. I could not breathe.

  It had started to rain. I pictured the water falling on the ashes of my paintings, the fire extinguished. Above me, unseen, the moon chased the sun around and around in the clouded sky.

  24

  Rasmus

  His heart was full of her as they plunged into the frozen wilderness of the ice cap, leaving behind the dark coastal mountains.

  The hiss of the sled runners over ice that stretched for mile upon gloriously empty mile in every direction, the dry barking of the huskies as they raced ahead of Qallu’s leather whip. Air so cold that it caught in his throat, tore at the skin of his cheeks. This was freedom.

  He remembered the stories he had heard, of pilots of light aircraft skimming the ice cap, who swore they had seen skin-clad figures of men below, waving spears. Though surely there could be nothing to hunt in such a place. It was a secret world, a place of magic and deliciously twisted fairytales. They sped t
hrough it with speed and ease. Rasmus soon lost track of the days in a satisfying haze of elation and exhaustion.

  And yet, there was a part of his mind that cowered into darkness under the watchful eyes of his beak-nosed companion. In the ethereal light of the slowly-darkening nights, the man he knew as Birdie appeared to morph, little by little, into a creature that he did not recognise. The eyes that filled with shallow water, the dark hair streaked with grey and white, the “beak” that grew sharper still. He seemed a creature of myth who, like a vulture, shadowed Rasmus’s every step with great wings that blocked out the sun, waiting for him to drop down dead to the ground. Every morning Rasmus awoke with his head filled with vivid images of torn flesh and poked-out eye sockets, the vestiges of his troubling dreams.

  He would wake often during the night, and beyond the rustling of his canvas tent in the wind it would seem he could hear the quick footsteps of those mysterious dwellers on the ice cap, the hiss of a spear through the air, whispered voices plotting. Hunters so silent that even the dogs did not wake at their approach, out there in the unsettling twilight that he daren’t look out into for fear of what he might discover. He quaked inside his sleeping bag with all the uneasiness of a trespasser. For that, he realised now, was exactly what he was.

  When they rested or stopped to eat, Qallu would tell stories about spirits who lived underneath the ice – that was why it would creak – or troll-like creatures of the mountains who hunted the unsuspecting hunter. Strange tales, too, of lonely people who, having no one else to talk to, would converse with insects which soon grew into human size. Rasmus could not get these stories out of his head; the horror and desolation of it all flooded his mind until he could no longer think straight.

  He felt the burden in his body, too. There were ridges of ice they encountered on the journey that were sky-reaching mountains over which they must haul the sleds, laden to a dead weight with supplies. And frequent crevasses plunged unseeing into the depths of the ice cap, like open graves, waiting. Birdie was roped into line behind him. He imagined mistiming the jump across, slipping on the crevasse’s brink and teetering into the emptiness below. Or the weight of Birdie on the rope beneath him, dangling, dragging him down to that mysterious place where the ice would close over their heads and it would just be the two of them together, frozen in breath, frozen in time, forever. Or he could cut the rope, watch the man fall to his death…

  Through the haze of his thoughts and dreams, Greenland’s West Coast drew nearer. The reproachful eyes of Birdie burnt his back; Snorri’s furtive, concerned glances Rasmus read only as judgement. And Qallu, the only one who laughed or smiled, the only one who found joy in the journey – of course, he had to, Rasmus thought bitterly, they were paying him after all.

  At long last they reached Christianshaab. Larger than Angmagssalik; to Rasmus’s wilderness-accustomed eyes it seemed almost a city. An unsettling sight, after nearly two months on the ice cap, alone save for the company of those mysterious spirits who had haunted his journey.

  Gangs of excited children accompanied them into the town, running alongside the sled if they could keep up, howling like the dogs. Rasmus shrank into himself under his layers of skin clothing. He was an outsider and a fraud. He had done nothing worthy of note. He wanted to be left alone; he wanted to get out of this new place.

  ◆◆◆

  After two weeks of rest, Rasmus felt no more revitalised than if he had crossed the entire ice cap again in that time. He could not master the weariness in his bones.

  ‘We can charter a plane from here to Godtshaab.’ Snorri’s voice dripped with forced optimism. ‘Fly straight home from there. Sell the dogs, give the money to Qallu in expenses.’

  Birdie snorted. ‘He’d only drink it away.’

  But Rasmus would not hear of taking a shortcut. He listened with mild interest as his own voice – ignoring Birdie’s offhand remark – began to say something about the importance of completing the journey they had set out on and returning the same way over the inland ice; of making sure Qallu – their friend, he emphasised – got home safely, and the dogs, too. He was surprised to note how calm and collected his voice sounded. Inside, however, he quaked with the fear of their journey’s end, the fearful uncertainty of what would await him once he had left behind the unsettling emptiness of the ice.

  25

  Malik

  I walked without knowing where I was headed. The streets all looked the same, though I barely paid my surroundings any attention. My head turned towards the ground – ashamed in the face of her, Sun – I put one foot in front of the other, mechanically, repeatedly, in the hope that they might take me away from this place. Yet with each step I caught a glimpse of the toe of Michael’s old boots, and the chance of escape seemed all the more unlikely, for clad in such a way my feet were not my own.

  I needed to find Eqingaleq. He would not have stayed in the city; of that I was certain. He was a part of my being; he had always been my guide. And since my heart ached with a terrible longing for the open sea, I knew that his must, too. If I could find the sea, I would find Eqingaleq. And, perhaps, if I could find the sea I would know how to get home.

  North. That was the direction in which I needed to travel. Any more, I did not know.

  The hours passed. On and on I walked. After some time, I noticed that the houses were becoming more sparsely spaced, separated by clumps of trees or bleak, muddy fields. I was following a worn road marked with puddles and holes, old and well-used so it seemed, yet at this moment there were no signs of any vehicles. I stopped to listen: nothing, save for the distant, hypnotic rustling of the treetops in the wind. My heart, which had been racing, out of control, since my confrontation with Michael, at long last began to grow calmer. I watched my breath condense in clouds in the cold air. My nausea had dissipated; I could smell the wind. The sky was growing dark, though it was not late in the day, and the clouds were heavy with the promise of rain.

  In Eqingaleq’s absence was a sense of fear and loneliness such as I had never before experienced. Without his guidance I did not know what to do, and without him to lead me I did not know where to go. Hopelessly I continued along the road.

  After another mile or so I came to a canal, and leaving the road behind I followed the path beside the water, which looked empty and still. The dark clouds gathered upon its reflective surface, turning the water to ink. I imagined taking off my shoes and my coat, and disappearing forever into those unknown depths. I had never learned to swim.

  The reflection of white wings glided in amongst the clouds on the water, and painfully my heart skipped a beat. But looking up I saw that it was a swan, solitary and peaceful, its feathers glinting with the sunlight that no longer shone. I saw, too, that I was surrounded by boats. Yellow, red, blue; the water lapped against their painted sides, and the narrow boats rose and fell with the gentle swell, tugging on the ropes that moored them to the banks of the canal.

  I caught sight of a figure – a man – sitting on the grassy bank beside the boat that was nearest to me along the tow path. My heart rate quickened, though I fought the urge to turn around: there was no sense in going back the way I had come, after all. As I approached he looked up, and seeing me he raised the mug that he held in his hand and offered me a smile in greeting. I tried my best to return the smile as I passed by, but only my mouth went through the motions. I knew that it could not be seen in my eyes. I quickly looked away.

  ‘You look as though you could do with some coffee, my friend,’ I heard the young man say behind me.

  Surprised, I turned my eyes once more in his direction and saw that he was looking straight at me. Michael’s old boots brought my feet to a stop; my lips began to open, but no words sprang up to meet them. Instead, for the sake of a response I found myself nodding my head, truthfully. Without another word the young man rose to his feet and with long strides he hopped up onto the back of the boat.

  Too uncertain to follow him and too exhausted to continue on my way I
stood dumbly, watching as the stranger lifted a ceramic pot and poured dark liquid into a mug beside it, before topping up his own mug that he had been clutching in his hand. He jumped back onto the bank, spilling drops of coffee into the canal, and with an encouraging smile he handed me one of the ceramic mugs. Wisps of steam curled into the air; I wrapped my hands around the cup, my fingers tingled with the heat. The aroma of coffee was making me dizzy.

  ‘Qujanaq.’ I thanked him quietly in my own language. My voice sounded hoarse.

  He raised his own cup into the air. ‘Cheers,’ he said. He took a swig, grimaced, and then promptly sat back down on the grassy bank, long legs crossed before him. With his free hand he tucked his shoulder-length hair behind his ear and looked up at me as though he was waiting for something.

  ‘Well, have a seat,’ he said, and gestured to the ground when still I did not move.

  I sat down. Relief flooded through my limbs. I thought about removing Michael’s old boots from my aching feet and throwing them into the canal, but my arms were too heavy to be of any use. I willed them to at least raise the cup of coffee to my lips, and I took a sip, eager to soothe my throat, spread the warmth…

  The taste was vile. As I swallowed it I could not help but pull a face, and the young man let out a short laugh.

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

  For a second time I nodded wordlessly. The man continued to speak, seemingly unperturbed by my silence. ‘Still, a hot drink is a hot drink.’ He raised his mug into the air once more, his voice elevated, as though making a toast at a busy dinner party. ‘And a hot drink on a cold day is a hot drink on a cold day.’

  I sipped some more coffee, did not ask what he meant.

  ‘So, where are you off to today?’ he asked casually, lowering his mug from the toast he had made.