The Dark Light

by Julia Bell

  I go out to her, the full force of the wind a shock after the shelter of the cabin.

  ‘Come inside,’ I shout, grabbing on to her arm. But she shrugs me off.

  ‘Please make it stop,’ she says. Her face is pale as milk; she turns away from me and heaves again. ‘Haven’t you got any tablets or anything?’

  Terry clambers around the edge towards us holding a yellow plastic bucket. ‘You need to sit inside, cariad.’

  When we finally get her inside the cabin, she sits on the floor with the bucket between her knees. When I offer her a drink of water she just shakes her head and tells me to go away.

  Fine then, I think, be like that. I go back outside.

  All there is to look at is the sea: white foam churning under the mist that makes the horizon close in around us. Sometimes in the angles of the waves I’m sure I can see other things: the dark shapes of whales, other boats, shadows that fill me with dread. There is a sudden flutter as we cut through a group of kittiwakes rising and turning on the air ahead of us, then settling back into the water. The engine drones on and on, and in spite of all my waterproofs I am getting cold and damp and the constant cycle of tensing and relaxing is making my stomach churn too.

  Minutes later I’m sat next to Alex on the floor of the boat, heaving into the bucket. Mostly water, but my stomach has finally given in. Alex is lying down, groaning.

  ‘Don’t you have any seasickness medicine?’

  ‘We don’t believe in it.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Medicines are of the world of men. We don’t believe in them.’

  ‘W-what are you on about?’ She sits up. ‘I want to go back. You have to take me back right now!’ But she says this without much conviction because she is struck by another fit of retching.

  Hannah, who seems to be totally unaffected, sits staring out to sea. ‘Live for the Victory!’ she says. ‘Won’t be long now. Look, there it is.’

  In the distance, rising out of the clouds, is the shape of land. The sharp peaks of the Devil’s Seat shrouded in mist, and the cliffs fringed with the white haze of sea spray. Home.

  For a long while the island hangs on the horizon like a vision, not getting any closer, as if the boat is not moving forward but wallowing in the chop. The wind picks up and the rain returns, misting the windows of the cabin so that it’s hard to see anything at all. The light is beginning to dim, although it’s the summer and the sky never gets truly dark. It feels as if we’ve been on this boat for weeks not hours. I lie down on the floor, the metal cool against my hot cheeks. Alex lies next to me, curled up like a baby. Her eyes are tight shut and her cheeks are a kind of pale green. She looks really sick.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. As if it’s my fault that she’s sick.

  ‘How much longer?’ she mumbles.

  ‘Not long,’ I say, and the next time I raise my head from the deck I see the cliffs of New Canaan looming high above us, close enough now to make out the crags and scars of the cliff-face, and the birds – fulmars and gannets and gulls – swirling above us in great numbers.

  I stand up unsteadily. Father is still outside with Terry. Against the cliffs we are tiny. This is the most dangerous part of the journey. The bay is a natural harbour, sheltered by the cliffs on three sides and from the sea by a line of half-submerged rocks; to get in and out a boat has to navigate a narrow channel between the rocks and the cliffs. When the weather is rough it’s almost impossible because the transition from the calm tidal wash of the harbour to the boil of the open sea would take any boat and overwhelm it or fling it against the sharp rocks. Here the sea is at its most dangerous. Sailors call this the Hag’s Cauldron.

  All around us the surf booms, big breakers that are more like the winter sea than anything you’d expect in the summer. I can see the narrow gap in the waves that will take us to the harbour, but the boat seems so unsteady, even at full power, against the sea that pulls us in many different directions at once. The captain keeps the boat steady and aims the prow. A huge wave lifts us up sideways, water crashing down over the side, and for a second I think we won’t make it, but the engine pushes us through and suddenly we’re in the calmer water of the harbour.

  Once we are away from the open sea everything is quieter. The waves ripple rather than crash. Seals loll on the rocks, watching us with eyes like black moons. I can smell them too, the fishy stink of their breath. I open the door of the cabin; the noise has changed from the battering of the open sea to the lap of the water and the chug of the boat’s engine.

  Straight ahead rises a line of trees, stunted willow and hazel and knotted blackthorn. This island is the only one with trees, because of how this sheltered bay gives way to a hollow gorge, worn away by the water that flows constantly from the higher ground. Here in the hollow, small trees flourish away from the scour of the wind and salt. From the top of the Devil’s Seat it looks like a deep gash in the landscape, filled with lush green in the summer, and in the winter a brown tangle of twigs and twisted branches.

  The harbour is bigger than it looks when approached from the sea, stretching around into a narrow estuary, the mouth of the only river on the island. There is a jetty and a boathouse and above that three stone cottages – the harbour dwellings, where Jonathan and Daniel live, and a smokehouse. At the end of the jetty is a wooden board that Jonathan painted that says, Welcome to New Canaan, in big letters. There is no sign of anyone, which is surprising, as usually there are folk waiting when the boat comes in. No lights in the cottages, no smoke rising from the smokehouse. They must all be away at the farmhouse, which is over the ridge and on the other side of the hollow, on the flat plateau of fields we call Moriah.

  Terry ties the boat to the small wooden jetty, but the tide is low so we have to pull ourselves up on to it, which is difficult because I’m still dizzy from the seasickness. Alex climbs up next to me and immediately lies down on her belly.

  ‘Rebekah, come on!’ Father hands me a box. ‘Quickly.’

  Terry wants us to unload fast because he wants to get going straight back to the mainland in the window of the tide.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ They should have known we were coming. I thought Father spoke to Bevins yesterday.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He puts his hands on his hips and scans the shoreline. ‘We haven’t got time to worry about that now.’

  Together we unload. Terry and Father pass boxes to me and Hannah and we lift them up on to the jetty. Some of them are really heavy and my arms are wrenched in their sockets, lifting the tubs of sugar and flour. Alex lies in our way until I kick her.

  ‘Ow.’ She sits up.

  ‘You’re in the way,’ I say. I feel sick too, but this is no time to be indulgent. I dump a heavy box of tinned fruit at her feet.

  ‘I feel dizzy.’

  ‘So do I,’ I say, glaring at her.

  So anxious is Terry to get back home that the moment the last box has been unloaded and Father has leaped out of the boat, he casts off and sets out for the open sea again. Now everything has to be carried along the rickety jetty to the boathouses, box by box.

  Alex stands up and looks at the pile. ‘Where’s my bag?’ she asks, her voice rising.

  I look at the stuff; there’s no sign of her duffel bag. I don’t remember seeing it when we unloaded.

  ‘The green one?’ Father says. ‘I thought that was Terry’s.’

  We all look to the boat, which is already navigating the gap in the rocks into the Hag’s Cauldron, lifted up by the sea like a cork. Too late.

  ‘NO!’ Blood rushes back to her face. ‘That’s all my stuff!’

  She runs to the end of the jetty and waves her arms. ‘Come back!’ She looks ready to throw herself in and swim after the boat. She waves frantically, but it’s too far away now. ‘NO!’ When she turns to us there are tears in her eyes. ‘That was all my stuff!’

  ‘Oh well,’ Father says, a bit too nonchalant. I wonder if he’s done this on purpose. When people come to New
Canaan they are expected to leave their old world behind. ‘You can borrow some clothes from Rebekah. We’ll get Terry to bring it back with the next boat.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  Father shrugs. ‘A couple of months.’

  ‘A couple of months?’ Alex bites her lip as if she has just realized something very serious. She looks as if she might want to kill us. Instead she walks off the jetty and sits on some rocks next to the boathouse. When I walk past her, carrying heavy boxes, I can see her face is wet and red from crying. It’s not my fault. If she’d helped us she might have noticed that her bag was missing. I fight a sudden surge of irritation. Why did she have to come here and make everything awkward and difficult? It’s not fair.

  FIVE

  ALEX

  At first I was so wrecked it was hard to put everything together. I lay on the jetty with my face pressed into the boards and my stomach wanting to come back out of my mouth. The whole world moved up and down like a wave, as if everything was liquid. If I closed my eyes my head spun so fast I thought I was going to throw up again, even though there was nothing left to come up.

  I tried to lie still, aware that they were unloading the boat around me. I focused on the boards of the jetty. The green slime that grew along the waterline, the seaweed that slapped and flopped against the shore, the smell of salt and rot. For a while I didn’t really care where I was; I was just glad not to be out at sea any more, on a boat that dipped like the sickest kind of fairground ride.

  But when the puke feeling started to subside I was taken with another, scarier kind of feeling. There was something wrong with this place, and it wasn’t just the fading light or the way the trees grew right down to the water, their roots like tangled fingers, or the ruined buildings further along the shore, or the peeling, battered sign that said: Welcome to New Canaan. Behold the Lord your God has set the land before you, that looked like it was done by someone who couldn’t write. It was all of these things, and the fact that even though there was no one there I had this really strange impression that I was being watched. And Rebekah was suddenly being mean, even though I could tell from her face she felt as sick as me. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought that coming here was a good idea.

  And then I realized they’d forgotten to unload my stuff and the boat had taken off again with my bag still on it, and I was stuck and I had none of my things, and I looked at Rebekah’s father smirking at me, like he was trying to teach me a lesson, and I wanted to be sick all over again. If my legs weren’t so weak I would have run at him and pushed him in the water and punched him, and I was so angry I could probably have killed him, but instead I started crying, which I hated because it made me feel small and pointless.

  It wasn’t so much my clothes, it was my stuff. The diary with the only photograph of my mother that I own, a blurry Polaroid of her making a peace sign, with a tie-dye scarf wrapped around her head. Some cards that people made me when I left the home. Stuff like that. I needed to have them; they reminded me who I was, and that made me cry even harder, and then it started to rain.

  Rebekah stood next to me and held out a dirty piece of rag. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not crying.’ I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. She was like my little shadow. I couldn’t be anywhere without her looking at me.

  ‘You don’t need to cry here. You’re in the blessed place.’

  ‘What?’ She seriously had to stop with all that God stuff.

  ‘You’re in the place blessed by the Lord.’

  ‘You just said that.’ She sounded like a toy where you press a button and it repeats the same thing. Sometimes I wondered if all religious ideas were like that, just the same words in a different order, repeated over and over until people thought they were true.

  ‘You should be happy. Mr Bevins will help you.’

  ‘Will he get a boat to take me back?’

  She looked a bit disappointed. ‘But you’ve only just got here!’

  ‘I know, and now I want to go home!’

  She folded her arms. ‘You’ve got to give it a chance!’

  ‘Well, you can’t keep me here!’ It was like someone had put pincers around my chest and was squeezing out all of the air. I had to take a deep breath to stop myself from panicking. ‘It’s against the law!’

  Her father heard this and came over to us. He put his hand on my shoulder. It sat there heavily, like a warning.

  ‘We live by God’s laws here,’ he said. ‘No one is keeping you here, except through our Lord Jesus, your saviour.’

  ‘Amen,’ Hannah muttered.

  I didn’t like her. She was sneaky. I’d caught her staring at me, looking disapproving. She’d got the kind of face that looked angry most of the time, except that she really simpered around Rebekah’s father. Probably fancied him or something.

  ‘You can go back on the next boat if that’s what you want. But right now we have to get that –’ he pointed at the pile of boxes on the jetty – ‘into the boathouse before the rain comes.’ He nodded at a dilapidated wooden shack that sat above the shoreline.

  I closed my eyes, hoping that it was a bad dream and when I opened my eyes I’d be back in Essex and everything would be back the way it was supposed to be.

  ‘You’re expected to be part of things here, you know. Every one of us has to do our bit,’ he said.

  ‘I thought all this had all been explained to her,’ Hannah said to Rebekah’s father, impatiently, as if I was not standing right in front of her and could hear exactly what she was saying. I gave her an evil glare.

  It took a long time to carry all the supplies and stash them in the boathouse. Hannah seemed to give me the heaviest boxes to carry, almost on purpose.

  ‘Strong for a girl, aren’t you?’ she said, tightly. I ignored her, but made a mental note to steer clear of her as much as I could while I was there.

  Inside the boathouse was a small wooden dinghy with an outboard motor. Didn’t look up to much, but at least it was there. If the worst came to the worst I supposed I could take off in that, set off a flare or something, get the coastguard to come and rescue me. This thought made being there much easier to bear.

  We stacked everything against the walls, and by the time we’d finished I was sweaty and cold and starving hungry and my arms ached. Now the wind had picked up too, blowing the strengthening rain sideways in stinging lashes. It was getting hard to see in the gloomy twilight. Rebekah’s father lit a couple of paraffin lanterns and gave one to me and Rebekah, and one to Hannah, taking a torch for himself, but the batteries were going and it only gave off a tepid sort of light.

  Up above the boathouse was a small paved road with a row of stone cottages which looked tumbledown and uninhabitable, except they had new roofs made out of corrugated iron. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Beyond the row of houses the path wound up the hill through a wood. It was hard to see where it went in the dark, and where the stones petered out the path became a muddy channel and my feet slipped, and my shoes, already wet, were now squelching and soaked through. I turned back and looked at the sea. An impulse to run to the boathouse and put the boat in the water, to get away, before it was too late, nearly overwhelmed me.

  But there she was again, her moon face even paler in the lamplight. ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘Follow me!’

  I stared at her doubtfully. ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘Of course!’ she said, although she didn’t sound convincing, and her eyes slid away and wouldn’t meet mine. ‘I’m sorry about your stuff.’

  I shrugged as if I didn’t care. But I did, very much; I just didn’t want her to see. I followed her through the mud, my heart in my mouth. The trees gave us some protection from the weather, but it was dark and boggy under the canopy and the spikes of the blackthorn clawed and snagged on my clothes. As we climbed, the trees got sparser, until eventually we were on a heathland where there were sheep wandering, and above the horizon I could see the rotor of a windmill and the roof of a house, and n
ext to it a church, but strangely there were no lights on anywhere. I didn’t like this place. Not one little bit.

  SIX

  REBEKAH

  Once the seasickness has subsided, I’m glad to be home. The familiar smell of the bracken and the heather, the rocks and moss, and the good earth. And I’m looking forward to seeing Mr Bevins, showing him how I survived the mission, how we brought him a new recruit, although I’m a bit hazy on the circumstances. Usually people come with us who want to be part of New Canaan, rather than because they have been brought to us. Father says we are looking after Alex for a while because Ron and Bridget cannot, and that it’s all a part of God’s plan.

  We walk up the hill through the woods to the houses, Alex dawdling behind me, still looking queasy. She’s frightened, although I’ve done my best to reassure her.

  ‘Is it safe?’ she asks.

  What a question! She should know she is safer here than anywhere, away from all the temptation of the world of sin.

  ‘Course!’

  The farmhouse and the church and all the cabins that surround it squat in a hollow that protects them from the worst of the north winds. The farmhouse and the harbour dwellings were the only stone buildings on the island still standing when we moved here. The rest were built from scratch. Wood for the cabins and the kitchen and the church was brought over on boats, and Micah and Father and Mr Bevins and a group of men from the mainland helped to build them. I was only little then. I don’t really remember it, except in strange snapshots: Father hitting his thumb with a hammer so that his nail went black; the clean, pine smell of the church when it was new; the meeting we had to bless the community; and Mother saying to me that we were lucky to live like this, joyful and free at the edge of the world.