The Seagulls Laughter

by Holly Bidgood

  And I believe her.

  There is another bout of giggles from the living room. The sound seems to lighten the atmosphere that has descended with the talk of painful things. My blood runs warm once more.

  ‘But this new lad of yours seems nice,’ Jeanie says.

  ‘Neil’s gay, Jeanie.’ I don’t have the strength to dance tactfully around the truth.

  She falters. ‘Oh.’ Then hastily changes the subject. ‘Your other friend who you’ve brought with you – what’s his name again?’

  I tell her, and she repeats it.

  ‘Unusual, aren’t they, his eyes?’ she adds.

  I nod. I want to tell her that unusual as they may be, there is a look in his eyes that speaks of kindness and… something else I cannot put into words.

  ‘Where is he from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, realising with surprise that I haven’t even asked him this simplest of questions. ‘I think he is running away from something.’ I smile weakly. ‘But then, so are we.’

  Jeanie smiles too. ‘You can all stay as long as you need to.’

  ‘Jeanie –,’ My eyes begin to refill with tears: relief at finally reaching a safe place; fear of being a burden to her.

  She shakes her head, smiling still.

  ‘We could do with some life in this old place again.’

  ◆◆◆

  Malik is visibly embarrassed at being invited to stay in the house. He pulls at the hem of his sleeve, stammers out a few syllables but seems unable to find the right words.

  ‘Don’t be so coy, Malik,’ Neil says between mouthfuls of homemade bread, having already made himself quite at home. ‘You may as well stay until you’ve figured out where it is that you’re going to.’

  No more is said on the subject. Malik, apparently eager to earn his keep, throws himself into any set of tasks that comes his way. He soon has the fire roaring in the open grate, the small sitting room infused with the comforting smell of peat smoke. He is careful not to let Boo too close. I watch, content in this new warmth, as he puts on a playful theatrical performance for her, blowing on his fingers – wriggling them in the air like flickering flames – to show her that the fire is hot and must not be touched. Giggling, she reaches for his hands and blows raspberries on his fingertips, and he collapses with laughter. It is not long before she begins to grow sleepy. Malik disappears into the kitchen and I nurse Boo, sinking in the heat of the fire, my eyelids drooping to the soothing sounds of clanging pots and boiling water. Neil is asleep in an armchair, exhausted from the long drive here.

  Then the evening meal is ready; Boo sleeps and Neil wakes. Jeanie’s husband has returned again from the field, peeling off his wet overalls before he joins us at the table. It is our first proper meal in days. Outside, darkness has fallen, too soon. I am too tired to think. I sit beside Malik, and his presence is comforting.

  5

  Rasmus

  May. The ice that covered the fjord had started to break into untidy fragments, as though the ground itself had fallen away. Rasmus watched from the harbour as the year’s first supply ship approached, long-anticipated, ploughing the new inky waters. The sound of cracking ice echoed like gun shots through the village. The children, assembled at the quay side in shirt sleeves despite the cold, cheered the ship’s arrival. Rasmus’s heart, however, was heavy.

  Both Snorri and Birdie had begun to make preparations to leave. Equipment had been assembled, checked, repaired, discarded; personal possessions had been retrieved from the corners of the hut in which the three men had passed a civil yet cool winter of few words. Neither of his companions gave any acknowledgment that Rasmus might not do the same – he might choose to stay. Yet... could he stay? It seemed as though the decision were not his to make.

  He would return to England, to Manchester’s dreary walls. Here he could draw up as much publicity as possible surrounding the expedition – a pointless endeavour, he felt, given that they had achieved nothing. Nothing. The word tasted bitterly satisfying in his mouth. But with a proper written report (perhaps even a book – he could make it sound romantic, adventurous), a collection of well-arranged photographs and various articles in the right publications, he might at least receive funding for a second trip. Without Snorri this time; and certainly without Birdie. In the meantime, perhaps the dust would settle in Angmagssalik and his child’s “curse” would be forgotten. Then he might return as a friend once more.

  But there was also Judith. His wife. His young, innocent wife, who had trusted him to return to her from the north. Unknowingly, she would welcome back an adulterer. He dug his hand into his pocket for his cigarette case, his beating heart calmed a little with the comforting smell of tobacco as he retrieved the wedding ring from inside, fingered it tentatively – a sacred, terrifying object. He slipped it onto his ring finger, and laughed bitterly at the sudden recollection of his fantasy, while crossing the ice cap, that he would lose the finger to frostbite and the ring be made redundant.

  He would wear it nevertheless, as a reminder that some things are best kept secret. At once his heart hardened with the thought: Birdie would tell Judith, if he were not there to prevent it. He must return. He would not let Birdie win.

  ◆◆◆

  Another baby, a girl this time; she had a different mother, yet he was a father again. Judith fed the baby powdered milk from a bottle – the doctor had told her it was more hygienic, she said. Rasmus did not mind; he enjoyed feeding the baby himself as she stared up at him with wide, blue eyes. Both of them, blue.

  Then, not three years later – gone in the blink of an eye – he became father to another child. A boy. Rasmus pushed the pram along paved, narrow streets; fed the baby artificial milk in the stillness of the nights, and all the while thought about his other son – his first son – the son his wife knew nothing about. What did he look like now? Still just like his mother, probably – and she, as beautiful as ever in the timeless clarity of his memory. Perhaps he had already learned to hunt, to kayak, to fish. Or perhaps he was an outcast, cursed by his mixed heritage – by that one colourless eye.

  There was something comfortable and reassuring in the familiarity of this day-to-day family life, and yet it oppressed him. He wrote articles for the National Geographic; co-authored research papers on Peary, Franklin and others, those heroes of his childhood; made a name for himself in this Western world of Polar exploration.

  And year after year he felt himself suffocate, slowly, under the weight of it all.

  It kept him going, his secret; the life that one day he would return to. One day, when the time was right.

  6

  Martha

  Here, the days are unpredictable. The weather is wild, an unstoppable force of nature. The wind whips around the house like a prowling animal, slamming doors and whistling through cracks in the stone walls. We draw heavy-woven curtains around the window frames, try to keep the fire lit. Jeanie sings sweetly over the howling.

  But there is always work to be done. Jeanie and Alastair are often out in the storms and the gales, tending to the animals or the garden, or repairing damage to the buildings. There is an old croft house across the sheep fields, which Alastair has been renovating. Jeanie mentions one evening that when it is finished it might make a good home for me, Neil and Boo. I know she means well, yet my heart sinks at the thought. I am beginning to doubt that Neil will stay in Shetland for much longer, for he does not seem at home here. Most days, waif-like and intimidated by the wildness of our current home – our new home – he cowers into a comfortable chair by the fire, buried in a book, and will not venture outside.

  Malik, however, needs no encouragement to join in with Alastair and Jeanie’s efforts with the house and the animals. His energy seems limitless; he is growing less pale by the hour. I help in the house where I can – cook and clean, with the baby in tow, for I feel I must earn my keep if I do not wish to live alone in the old croft house. On drier days I walk with Boo wrapped snuggly against my chest in
the sling, down to the post office or the harbour, and watch seagulls wheel, as the winter cold gnaws at my bones, and I think about what it would be like if Malik were to stay, then the croft house would not seem so empty.

  The daylight hours are so few that each day soon passes. As dusk begins to fall I look out over the wild waters and rain-drenched rocks and my heart grows warm with the anticipation of welcoming back those who have been out in the weather’s wrath. Malik peels off his sodden overalls and kicks off his muddy boots before shuffling as close to the fire place as he can. His eyes are animated, his skin browned. He holds his arms out to Boo, squeezes giggles from her, and the geometric patterns on his forearms snake and intertwine in the dancing light of the fire.

  While Boo sleeps Jeanie teaches me to spin the sheep’s fleece into yarn. The wool is soft and greasy between my fingers; I create lumpy string that twists and snaps on the wheel, but I am proud of it. Laughing, I tell Jeanie that I will knit my daughter a hat that will be too itchy for her to wear.

  I count the minutes until Boo wakes again, inevitably. Sometimes she is content to sit on Jeanie’s lap – sometimes Malik’s – rest her head back and watch me at my work. With the rhythmic spin of the wheel and the gentle heat of the fire her eyelids soon begin to droop.

  Sleep does not visit me as easily, however. When the fire has been raked over and the lights all extinguished I lie awake in the bed beside my daughter and my head reels. It was agreed that Malik and Neil would share the twin bedroom, to give me and the baby some space. But I do not want space; I am scared in the dark on my own. I find myself listening out for the creak of the front door opening, heavy footsteps tripping up the stairs, slurred swearing as he invariably trips over one of our daughter’s play things left on the floor: the sounds that I came to dread the most.

  Instead I hear the muffled footsteps and click of the door that indicate Jeanie’s husband, Alastair, getting up to use the bathroom. Sometimes I hear Neil’s laughter from the bedroom, over the wind’s howl, and I wonder what he and Malik could be talking about. I swallow down the lump of jealousy that rises in my throat, remind myself that we are safe at least, my daughter and I – for now.

  ◆◆◆

  She wakes early each morning – too early. She chatters away, bounces on the bed, pulls at my hair and squeals, and I carry her swiftly downstairs so she doesn’t wake those who are still rightly asleep. I wish they would wake up. I wrap myself and Boo in jumpers, turn on electric lights in the winter darkness, but my body aches with cold and tiredness.

  Sometimes, Boo slides ahead of me, backwards down the stairs, smiling and eager as she crawls on the cold stone floor around the doorway and into the kitchen. One morning, after we have been staying in the house for nearly three weeks, I hear her break into a surprised squeal as I am still halfway down the staircase. My imagination reels with absurd ideas, strange surprises that this old house could have thrown up on a still February morning before the dawn. But I see that it is only Malik, though he himself appears as a spectre in the unexpected lamplight.

  He slips his paintbrush into a glass of murky water on the kitchen table and picks an approaching Boo up into his lap, chides her gently in his strange, guttural language as her fingers reach out for the painting he has been working on. I can’t help but look: he has painted the view from outside the house, just as I remember it in the daylight. A swirl of winter colours above a stormy slate sea, the indistinct shapes of birds wheeling over dark cliffs. It is as I remember it, and yet there is something more in the strokes of his paintbrush, an otherworldly beauty that I had not noticed in this place, that I had not looked attentively enough to find. I turn my gaze curiously to the artist and those mismatched eyes that capture the beauty that I cannot even see.

  ‘Alastair found me some paints,’ he says awkwardly as I catch his eye, as though he is apologising.

  ‘I… I didn’t know you could paint,’ I say feebly. Something sinks within my stomach with the thought that perhaps I should have been the one to ask him what I could do to make him feel more at home. Would he like some paints, knitting needles – a book to read? I do not know him at all.

  I lose myself once more in the sweeping curves and contours of his painting.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Malik.’ My voice is quiet. From the corner of my eye I see him look at me and I sense, with a feeling of comfort, that he has taken my praise in earnest.

  ‘I’ll make some tea, shall I?’ Without waiting for an answer, nor meeting his eyes, I turn away and begin to heat up the stove. I collect the cups, prepare the teapot, anything to keep busy. My hands tremble as I try to hold the kettle steady under the stream of water from the tap. It must be the cold, I tell myself.

  Malik slides a piece of clean paper in front of Boo, where she sits on his lap, and lets her make watery scribbles with the paintbrush. He runs the tip of another brush around the shapes and lines that she makes, adds to them, colours blending on the white paper. I cannot help but watch them, absorbed in their private dance. My heart rises with elation, yet is heavy with the memory of things that never were: her father could never relate to her in this way. Perhaps I am to blame: I was the one who fell pregnant; he did not want a child, not yet.

  Boo grows tired of painting just as the kettle comes to the boil. I place the teapot on the table (Malik helpfully moves the paintings out of harm’s way) and, giving Boo a piece of bread and butter to suck on, hoist her up onto my lap as I sit down. Malik says something unintelligible as I slide a cup of tea over to him. I must inadvertently have looked bewildered, for he smiles and repeats the word. ‘It means thank you,’ he adds.

  ‘Tell me again.’

  He speaks more clearly this time, pronouncing each syllable. ‘Qujanaq.’

  I try to move my lips around the guttural sounds, but give up almost immediately, laughing in embarrassment and inwardly chastising myself for making such an exhibition of self-consciousness.

  Malik, however, looks positively thrilled. ‘Try again,’ he encourages, his eyes bright and attentive. ‘Qujanaq.’

  I copy the sounds he makes as he repeats the word after each of my attempts, until eventually his round face breaks into a wide smile.

  ‘There! Now you can speak my language.’

  My lips tingle.

  I hear the creak of floorboards above us – the sound of Jeanie or Alastair moving about in the bedroom. Startled, I jump up to my feet, almost knocking over my cup of tea. I reposition Boo on my left hip, dizzy with the heat that is rising into my cheeks. With my free hand I move a spoon from the table to the sink – keeping busy, preoccupied.

  ‘I can help you,’ Malik says from behind me as I begin to retrieve pots and pans with which to prepare the breakfast.

  Shamefully, I imagine he is perplexed by my sudden flustered display. As am I, in fact.

  ‘No, no.’ I strive to sound natural. ‘You just, err, enjoy your tea.’

  But I feel his hands around Boo, taking the weight of her from my hip. A pan handle slips from my grasp, clatters carelessly against the stove.

  ‘Then I can hold the baby,’ he says. Quite without meaning to I meet his eyes as he takes hold of my gurgling daughter. He smiles.

  ‘You don’t need to do everything, Martha.’

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  I relinquish my grasp, turn away before, I hope, he notices the awkward colour that I know has flushed even more deeply across my cheeks. Jeanie bids us both a good morning as she enters the kitchen. She coos over the baby in Malik’s arms.

  At long last the sun rises in a clouded sky. Once breakfast is finished and the animals fed, we all walk together down the lane to the church. Neil trails behind, reluctant to join, yet persuaded by Alastair’s no-nonsense approach to chide him out of the house. The fresh air, at least, appears to blow some of the lines of anxiety from his face. Jeanie pushes Boo in the pram – a great, clunking thing that Alastair unearthed from the depths of one of the outbuildings. It looks to be older than me.
I had helped Jeanie to clean it up, enjoying the look of joyous recollection on her face as she scrubbed at the enormous metal wheels and blew the dust off the canvas rain hood, telling me stories of when her own children were babies. I see the same look on her face now as she pushes along her great-niece. The chubby, pink-cheeked face of my daughter peers out from under her knitted bonnet, and she periodically rubs a fist into her tired eyes. I lay my hand on the sleeve of Jeanie’s coat, wordlessly asking her to walk a little slower in the hope that Boo might fall asleep before we reach the church. She slows her steps, winks at me discreetly, and my heart glows with the notion that she has understood without words having to pass between us.

  She looks beautiful, I think to myself. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, her grey hair wrapped into an elegant bun sitting at the nape of her neck. Loose strands of hair flutter freely about her forehead, streaming in the wind – wild and free, I imagine, the reflection of her soul. She does not obscure her face with make-up, dye her hair unnatural colours or wear fake nails like my mother. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. My heart swells with anticipation as I recall her promise, that morning, to take me into Lerwick one day to buy some cloth so that I can sew a plaid dress for myself like hers, or a woollen pinafore, and maybe even a checked coat. My spinning, too, is already beginning to improve. Jeanie says I can earn some money from selling the yarn that I spin from the Shetland fleeces, once my work is good enough.

  We park the pram just inside the church doors. Malik lingers behind to help me tuck the blankets around Boo’s peaceful, sleeping body. My bare hands are stiff from the cold; they brush against his as we both strive to make my sleeping daughter comfortable. The warmth of his fingers against mine causes me to shiver inside my coat. He catches my eye, he smiles.