‘Do you think he’ll come back?’ Neil asks.
‘Well, he won’t get far without his shoes.’ I gesture across the room to the neat pile of the stranger’s belongings: yellow anorak, canvas backpack; battered leather boots.
Boo squirms in my arms, bending her body and angling herself towards the floor, all her surprising strength pushing against me so that I have no choice but to set her down. Her limbs are whirring in a crawling motion before they even touch the floor. In the blink of an eye she has one of the stranger’s boots clutched in her little fat hands. She glances at me across the room – a look of triumph, testing the water. My hands on my hips I admonish her teasingly, theatrically, and she rewards me with a big, toothless grin.
‘Did he tell you where he was going?’ I ask Neil, as I scoop Boo back up from the floor. ‘Where he’s travelling to, I mean?’
Neil shrugs. His glasses have returned to their usual place on the bridge of his nose. It unsettles me the way in which the lenses reflect the light: sometimes they are like mirrors. ‘Said he was looking for his friend.’
‘His friend?’
‘That was all he said. I didn’t want to cross-examine him, Martha, he looked so exhausted.’
I nod my head slowly. ‘Still does.’
‘Did he say much to you? Before I came in?’
‘Not a word.’
Neil knits his brows together and chews on his lower lip, in the way that he does when he is deep in thought. I shift Boo over to him, freeing my hands to turn off the gas ring on the stove, and begin to ladle the porridge into bowls. Boo gurgles, happily sucking on a wooden spoon and paying as little attention to Neil at this moment as he is to her, each occupied with their own thoughts.
‘Where do you think he’s from?’ Neil says, appearing to voice what he is thinking.
I resist the urge to say another world, or the same planet as the Clangers, though I can tell by the exaggerated tone of intrigue in Neil’s voice that he is likely thinking something similar. ‘You could ask him?’
Neil flashes me one of his ironic, knowing smiles.
‘Oh, but that would take away all the mystery.’ Then heaviness descends once more onto his eyebrows – Neil’s jokes are a way to mask a deeper meaning, his own way of comprehending those things that touch his soul. He glances at the empty doorway, then turns to look at Boo, running one of his slender hands over her soft, downy head.
‘Where could he be going to, do you think, Martha?’
I am struck by the note of concern in his voice for a stranger he has barely spoken to. I remember the rush of emotion that had flooded through me when the stranger’s eyes met mine as he cared for Boo beside the fire – a feeling of being subject to something larger than myself – and I blush with faint embarrassment, wondering at the same time whether Neil has perhaps experienced something similar. But I know I cannot put it into words – I know what my mother would say if she were to hear such things said.
I set down the heavy pan, its contents now portioned into bowls.
‘I don’t think he’s going anywhere,’ I say quietly. An open-ended question to Neil and myself. ‘It seems as though he’s…’ I struggle to find the right words. ‘As though he’s thinking of something else. Something only he can understand. I don’t know.’ I shake my head, sighing. ‘You can offer him some porridge anyway, there’s plenty. Is Dennis up yet?’
Neil’s fine hair falls across his face as he bends down to set Boo on the floor. ‘Not heard anything.’ He spoons honey into two of the bowls of porridge, takes them one in each hand.
‘What did you say his name was, Neil?’
‘Malik,’ says Neil, ‘or something like that.’ Then he, too, has vanished from the doorway.
Boo and I share a bowl of porridge, then I stoke up the smouldering fire and set about gathering together our scattered belongings from all corners of Dennis’s house boat. It is gloriously quiet. I can hear only the music of the birds outside and Boo’s low gurgles as she explores various objects that she finds lying around. Looking up I see that she has discovered the stranger’s anorak. She has clamped her toothless jaws around the collar as though testing its durability. I prise it free and rub at the resultant patch of dribble with the sleeve of my jumper – I hope Malik will not notice. My stomach knots with the notion that I have invaded his privacy – I remember the way Boo’s father would react when he felt such a crime had been committed against him, and I shiver, despite the warmth of the fire.
A tremor from the other end of the boat signals that Dennis is up and about at long last. I fold Malik’s coat as neatly as I can and set it back in its place, immediately sweeping Boo up onto my hip as her small, curious hands reach out for it once more. I place my bag, now packed, beside the door on my way out onto the deck. I do not feel as though I have the strength to face Dennis just now. He is friendly enough, yet there is something in his gaze that makes me uncomfortable, something disapproving.
The surface of the canal ripples with a light fall of rain. A gentle morning mist lingers above the surrounding fields, the vestiges of the night’s shroud. Everything is still. How peaceful it must be to travel by the waterways: hot tea on the deck, a fire below, stepping off to open the gates of the locks, watching the water flow. Such a life seems worlds away from our old campervan. A battered tin can that splutters up and down busy roads, the roar of diesel engines in one ear, the flare of angry horns in the other.
Already I am savouring the remembered taste of remoteness that I know will lie at the end of our journey – the ululating quiet of the North Sea and the wind’s cool caress – it is anticipation of this that keeps me going amidst the madness of crowded cities.
The memory of my final visit to Shetland, all those years ago, has never left me. I had just turned eight, or maybe nine – my exact age is unimportant for it is the wildness of that summer that I remember with a trembling heart. The thrilling, calming sense of freedom that I had never imagined a child could feel, so distant from the confines of my stuffy upbringing and the boredom of the regimented, respectable household in which I had my place. Over time I have come to equate that sense of wildness in my soul with the earthy lure of the islands; long have I imagined myself working wool beside the fire with Auntie Jeanie, drawn by the kindness of her heart away from a life that was never mine. My own heart swells with joy at the thought that soon I will see her again. She will fold me in her homely arms and I will be safe.
He will never find us there.
But I must try to push the thought of him from my mind. The marks left by the blows that he dealt me have now mostly faded. If only the memory of him would vanish, too.
I see Neil and the stranger sitting side by side on the bank, beside the mooring rope. They are not speaking together as I approach, stepping lightly off the boat with Boo in my arms and enjoying the feel of the cold, wet grass under my bare feet, but there is no tension within their silence. The stranger is barefoot also, and despite the cool rain he has taken off his jumper and turned the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. My eyes are drawn to the patterns of black lines and dots that adorn his forearms, etched into the brown canvas of his skin. I pull my eyes away – I must not be caught staring.
Neil pulls a face at Boo and is rewarded with her steady, curious gaze.
‘We could do with getting going, Neil,’ I say. My voice sounds small, self-consciously shrill.
‘Dennis up, is he?’ Neil grins; his long legs begin to make the series of exaggerated movements that will get him to his feet. ‘I’ll round up our things.’
Malik follows Neil’s example, though markedly more slowly. There is a weariness to his movements as he rises.
‘Can we…?’ I begin to say, before he has even made it to his feet. ‘…Can we give you a lift anywhere? We have a van.’ I gesture with one hand in the vague direction of our unseen vehicle.
He hesitates as he looks at me. I feel my cheeks flush, yet note that he, too, appears uncomfortable. He glan
ces from me to Neil, to the ground, shifts his feet, swallows. When eventually he speaks, his voice is low and quiet and his accent strange.
‘Can you take me north?’
‘North?’ Neil echoes.
‘As far north as you can.’
For a moment no one says anything, then Neil claps his hands sharply together. ‘You’re in luck, Malik: north is just the direction in which we are headed.’
2
Rasmus
1949
He ran his hands again and again over the contours of Ketty’s swollen belly, felt the life that stirred within, and buried his face in the curtains of hair that poured over her breasts. He ran his hands lower, felt her body shudder at his touch – heard her sigh.
The journey across the ice cap had been a failure, a waste of time, this much he understood now. Nothing had gone wrong, but… that was just it: they had faced no hurdles, come across no challenges over which they would have had to use their audacity and skill just to survive. There could be no need for heroism when all ran smoothly. And if they had faced any difficulties – he thought with a coldness through his veins – how would he have got through it anyway? How could he have broken through the numbness of his soul to become the epitome of a Great Explorer?
He pushed these thoughts away. Felt the texture of the skin blankets on his own bare skin. The warmth of Ketty’s skin against his. The rawness of their encounters and the soon-to-be life that they had created, that had formed and grown in the cave of its mother’s body while he had journeyed over the endless space of the ice cap. Perhaps this had been the real purpose of his journey.
And then the baby – a boy, was born just as the first rays of spring sun were beginning to infuse those long winter days with light. A soft, plump little thing, he was; dark-haired and caramel-skinned, like his mother. Perfect. Perfect… that is, if it weren’t for the strangeness of the child’s eyes. One dark like those of all of his mother’s people; and the other colourless, in the way that a pool of shallow water has no colour – the pupil nothing more than a tiny black dot.
Rasmus was surprised, intrigued – he had heard of such afflictions – yet he could see the unease which the infant’s unfocussed, mismatched stare provoked within the community. Even Qallu would not hold the baby, his sister’s child. There was something apologetic in the way he kept his distance, something cautious and fearful.
‘They are saying the child is cursed,’ he muttered once to Rasmus, but would say no more.
During the lengthy darkness of the nights he remembered the stories that Qallu had told out on the ice cap; they came to him now, compulsively, like moving pictures accompanied by a wash of uncontrollable, unidentifiable emotions. At these times it seemed to him that the child was indeed born of this world of spirits and shape-changers, unstoppable forces intertwined with the wilderness and the ancient ice.
He might have feared for the child’s life had it not been for Ketty’s seemingly unwavering love for her son. She smothered him with kisses, fed him tenderly at her breast, kept him always close to her skin and said nothing of the strangeness that others feared. Avaaraq, too, though she made no comment about her husband’s ambivalence towards his new nephew, welcomed the baby into her home as she would have a child of her own. Qallu remained quiet, kept out of the way, intervening only to snatch his own young son away as he crawled towards the sleeping baby. The child screeched, angry that his path had been thwarted. Avaaraq fetched him from Qallu’s arms, chastised her husband in harsh, hushed tones. And Qallu, meek – with anxious glances at the tiny, sleeping creature – slunk away into the falling darkness. Rasmus heard him return later that night, reeling drunk, and his heart weighed like lead in his chest: he had inflicted this curse on the child. He, a White Man trespassing in a world that was not his own.
3
Martha
Away from the tranquil water, and we are back to the busy roads. The cool water that falls from the sky is smeared into nothingness across the van’s windscreen, blurring our view of the world beyond. Malik looks pale where he sits in the backseat; I steal curious glances at him in the rear view mirror, as he in turn watches the rain-soaked towns slide past through the window. Neil, in the driver’s seat, turns on the radio, but I soon grow tired of the incessant chatter and, catching sight of the pained look on our passenger’s face I turn it off again. We return to the monotone noise of the engine and the rain.
Boo grows restless in my lap, begins to cry for freedom. We have been cooped up in the van for long enough. The road we are on is fairly quiet – Neil will always favour a quieter route over a direct one when he is behind the wheel. I see sheep in the field beside the layby in which we decide to stop: scraggly balls of cotton wool in the rain. Neil turns the key, bringing the engine to a stop, and immediately Malik wrenches open the side door, stumbles out into the undergrowth and throws up in the bushes.
‘I thought he was looking a bit pale.’ Neil’s forehead creases in empathy.
I take Boo out into the fresh air, swathed in a woollen hat and blanket. She points delightedly over the fence at the grazing animals in the field beyond, similarly clad and oblivious to the wet weather. Their peaceful slowness is highlighted by the rush of the cars as they rattle past on the road.
When we return to the van, Neil has opened up the back door and hooked the gas cylinder to the cooker to heat a kettle full of water. Malik is sitting on the back of the van, legs crossed, woollen jumper pulled on. The pattern around the shoulders is colourful, intricate; it could perhaps be Scandinavian, I think as I toy with the idea of knitting one like that for Boo – she will be needing it where we are going, after all.
Malik offers me a wan smile, ever polite as I approach.
‘Feeling any better?’ I ask meekly.
He nods his head, black hair damp with shining rain. ‘Sorry,’ he mutters. ‘Not used to cars.’
He watches Boo as she potters around in the back of the van, crawling on worn corduroy knees and pulling herself up onto her feet, her stubby fingers grasping onto the edge of the bed. I had sewn her dungarees from remnants of the rust-coloured corduroy that I had used for my own pinafore dress – the one that I am wearing now; the one that I worked on during long, lonely days at home while he was at work, trepidation building within me with every kick inside my swelling belly. My stomach twists as I realise that Boo and I are dressed alike. I remember how cruelly he laughed the first time we both wore my creations – put on with so much pride – and said we both looked a sight. He refused to be seen with me until I had changed into something else.
I had worn the dress now as an act of defiance, an acknowledgement of freedom… but my legs still tremble with fear and uncertainty. Perhaps it is too soon to be making such gestures? I will not be free from him until I have placed the wild Atlantic between us.
‘What is her name?’ Malik asks, disturbing my anxious reverie.
‘Boo.’ Her name is soft on my tongue, and the sound of it lifts my spirits from the mire of those recent memories into which I too often sink. She turns her head at the familiar sound of her name, smiles a mischievous smile. She bounces on her knees.
Malik smiles back at her.
‘Boo. I like that.’
We do not stop for long. Neil is eager to get the day’s driving over and done with. I can see by the way he keeps pushing the arch of his glasses with one finger, even when they have not slipped down the bridge of his nose, that he is growing tired and exasperated. Once we are refreshed, he leaps back into the driver’s seat and soon we are underway again. Boo protests loudly at being enclosed once more, but it is not long before she stops kicking and lays her head against my chest, lulled to sleep by the monotonous rattle and hum of the vehicle. The tension in my body evaporates immediately. I glance in the rear view mirror and see that our passenger, too, has laid his head to one side and is fast asleep.
The day wears on. At long last we stop for the night in a layby beside a quiet road. The winter darknes
s quickly descends. It is cramped inside the van with the four of us, and yet – dare I say it – the atmosphere is almost homely, a world lit by meagre candlelight and enclosed by the steady rhythm of the rain against the sides of the van. Other than offering his help with the cooking, our guest remains silent and still where he sits in the worn upholstery of the back seats. But his eyes flicker – one dark, one illuminated in the light – and I can see that his thoughts are busy.
Neil, too, is lost in his thoughts. He empties a tin of baked beans into a pan and places it on the portable stove – the clang of metal against metal. He coaxes a spoon round and round the pan, his eyes obscured by the rising steam that fogs his glasses. Only Boo chatters, periodically feeding at my breast until finally she gives in and closes her eyes for the night.
Neil, Boo and I share the bed as usual; Malik insists he will be fine sleeping across the seats.
I lie awake while Boo feeds quietly once more beside me, between me and Neil. A half-hearted smile creeps over my lips in the darkness as I think of what my mother would say if she knew I was sharing a bed with a man to whom I am not married, though of course – I glance down affectionately at my daughter – it is not the first time I have done so.
We have thought about getting married, Neil and I, to help ourselves and to help each other. I am a single, unmarried mother with nowhere to go and Neil could more likely find a job if he were a married man, as well as enjoy the safety of a reputable guise. Only we would know that our marriage was a sham, and no one would need find out that Neil is not Boo’s father. It was something he suggested himself after the last act of aggression against him as he tried in vain – tears of anger, shame and sadness spilling from beneath his glasses – to scrub the word off the side of the van. Homo, scrawled in red paint, in ugly capital letters. We ended up covering it with a new coat of paint, brushing over the admittance of his sexuality as he had done so many times before.
The Seagulls Laughter Page 16