I Am an Island

by Tamsin Calidas

  ‘It’s time we were leaving,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, you see, this is my wife.’ He says it again, only in a way that makes me feel unseen, dirty and worthless. And then, inexplicably, he laughs. ‘At least, that’s what I think she is.’

  I look at him. I try not to show him my pain, but I can feel it pulsing out at him. Tears jump into my eyes. The woman turns and looks at me. She turns back to Rab and smiles softly. And then, all of sudden, she is laughing, too.

  I reach for my coat, desperate to get home. I struggle – it is difficult to put a coat on with one arm in plaster up to the elbow. I cannot see through my tears. Someone comes over to help me. I do not know this stranger. I wish I did, because he is kind. ‘Are you all right?’

  I nod, and then I shake my head. And then I nod again. ‘I’m OK,’ I say. Only the way he looks at me, I know he does not believe me. I do not believe me. It is such a long time since I felt OK, I cannot remember it. It makes me want to cry.

  ‘You look after yourself.’

  And I think, yes, I can do that. I am used to doing that. I am still thinking about the kindness of strangers as I step outside. Two people are standing close in a way that tells you they are not just friends. And then the cold air and the shock hit me simultaneously. They stop my breath, steal the blood from my heart. I walk past them and say loudly, ‘Rab, it’s time to go.’

  I long to feel the warmth of kindness, strong arms wrapped about me. It makes me realise how long my arms have been reaching into empty space.

  In the car, we do not talk. We shout, a year’s fierce silence bellowed loud.

  Anger beats in two hearts that are silent, impotent, raging. In one it stems from an assault of trust. It comes from feeling tiny lives vanish inside me, all their beautiful lights gone out, like sudden-dying stars. I watch this rage. I meet it and then I try to fend it off. I try to hold it even as I shrink from it. And it is confusing to feel that bond still beating between us. A bond is something that belongs to you. It is yours until it breaks.

  When we get to the cottage, Rab furiously pushes ahead of me. He is beyond any rage that I know. Something tells me not to follow, but I do because it is too late to go anywhere else and I cannot drive with my hand in plaster. I go inside because this is still my home.

  There are two doors to open, since the boot room was added outside the kitchen door. I keep my broken left hand shielded. It is weighted by the plaster and falls heavy to my side. Somehow your body knows to do that. It is as if it knows what is coming and instinctively tries to prepare.

  I meet the first door head-on as it cracks hard into my face. I cannot see because it hits me square across my brow. Stunned, I lose my thoughts and breath. I crumple and stumble and, as I trip, I put my right hand out in front of me. I am falling forwards and I cannot stop. All I know is that, as I am falling, the second door is already whistling fast towards me to meet my face again. It slams on to my fingers just before I crash into it. I stagger but I do not hit the floor because I am pinioned to the latch. My fingers are trapped, crushed under the full weight of wood. When I hear a voice howling, I do not recognise it at first as my own. It is a sound that screams not just of bones broken. It is the sound of hurt unleashed.

  As torn, bleeding skin is prised off the door, Rab’s face is pale and livid. He insists it was an accident. His eyes are dark with a fury that scares me, and something else I don’t recognise. When a neighbour arrives at the door, it takes a long time to calm my screams. I cannot speak for the pain of the injury and the realisation of what we have lost. I would like to take flight into that dark empty sky. But now I have two broken hands.

  Sometimes, when the world no longer feels a safe or a beautiful place, we learn to function differently. The mind helps to block memory until we are strong enough to hold it. We call it shock. But sometimes I wonder if it is a kindness we give to ourselves at times of crisis or need. It has been three weeks since that terrible night. I stand alone in the kitchen, my eyes fixed on the door. I have just watched it slam for the very last time. I listen as an exhaust rattles noisily, diesel fumes belching away up the track. My eyes are glazed, disbelieving and glistening with tears. I want to cry because I am glad he is gone.

  It is hard to acknowledge that it is over. But it feels as if it is only the beginning of fresh troubles. I look at my hands. There is nothing I can do with them. My left hand is still solid up to my elbow in plaster, and my right is freshly encased in a rigid three-finger splint. I am still learning the limits of this extreme handicap, and each day shows me more. It is difficult to dress, to wash, to eat or go to the loo. I am thankful that lambing is over but it is beyond me how I will cope on the croft alone. I tell myself not to think that far ahead. It is enough for now just to be standing here, between these four walls, with Maude.

  The quiet is deafening. The silence of a permanent absence somehow has a different quality from a temporary silence. It seems deeper for the lack of tension and anticipation. I fix my eyes on the clock on the wall. I watch its hands moving slowly, minute by minute, from the hour to the half past. Turning to the window, I stand and wait for the boat to leave the island and to tie up on the other side. Then I watch the seconds click by, around and around the dial, until another hour has passed. I pick up the phone and ring to check that the ferry has pulled in. I go outside and look up, cautiously, taking quick lungfuls of the clean, fresh air.

  When I come back in, I am shaking. I call for Maude. It is soothing to feel her next to me. I look again at the clock. After an hour has passed, I ring the station, and am told the train for London has pulled away. I keep staring at the clock. I cannot take my eyes off its face. It feels risky to look away, as if somehow those minutes passing might start ticking backwards. But after another hour, I let go and at last give in to a wave of exhaustion.

  Suddenly, the day feels so simple. When you are tired, you lie down. So, gingerly, I kneel on the floor and then lie down, curled up in a foetal position. It is reassuring to feel the stability of the solid earth holding me. I close my eyes. I tell myself, I will just lie here for a moment. I will get up in a minute. I feel numb, but a calming sense of quiet solitude engulfs me like a great wave of water, falling soft about my body and over my head. I let myself breathe quietly. And then I close my eyes. And gradually my heart stills.

  Some hours later, I become aware that Maude is beside me. I open my eyes and she lays her head next to me. When I look at the clock now, I see that the London train will be pulling into Euston. I blink back my tears. I am too tired to get up off the floor, so we just lie there together, listening to the clock ticking away the hours. I rest my head gently against my dog and study the amber eyes shining back at mine.

  ‘It’s not what we ever hoped for,’ I tell her. ‘But sometimes, life has to work its own way through.’

  We stay there, lying on the floor together. And after a while, sleep overtakes me again. And it is a relief to feel the weight of that silence and to close my eyes.

  ACT II

  * * *

  1

  Hands

  It is late, some time gone midnight. My hand hovers awkwardly over the keyboard. I hold my breath. I almost hang up. Then the screen connects and Cristall is there.

  ‘What’s the matter? Is the pain bad again?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just needed to …’ My voice falters. And I wonder, how do you say that sometimes the long evenings out here in the islands can feel so quiet? That sometimes you just need to hear another voice?

  ‘I just rang to say goodnight,’ I say.

  And then I notice that Cristall is not in bed. She is still fully dressed in her skirt and old blue cardigan, sitting downstairs, alone with her dog. She looks tired, and yet unwilling to go upstairs alone. And that is how I know that she understands why I have called. We look at each other carefully, avoiding direct eye contact. ‘Have you looked up and seen the sky?’ she asks quietly. ‘The moon is so bright tonight. It is hard to sleep sometimes, when the
world is so beautiful outside.’ And then she smiles and holds her arms out wide. ‘Goodnight, dear girl. This hug is for you. Sleep tight.’ She blows me a kiss.

  Now I am glad I phoned. When Cristall smiles, she smiles with her eyes. The kind of smile you feel with your heart. I want to tell her, this is why I called. You are why I called. But suddenly I feel shy. I look down at my broken hands. ‘Goodnight,’ I say, as I try to wave back.

  I never realised how important hands are until I lost the use of mine. Nor the value of friendship. Friendship is, in the end, so simple. It is having someone you can count on, someone you trust, someone who can be all that matters when everything else starts breaking apart. The truth is I am not coping. And I am blinded by fear. I know Cristall knows this, too. The complex fracture in my left hand has not yet healed and the hand still feels dislocated at the wrist. The pain is crippling. It remains encased in a hard, solid cast like a dead limb. I wrap my arm in a woollen shawl. When your bones are broken, you crave something soft against your skin. I hold it close to me like a baby, as if I might rock it gently to sleep.

  I am exhausted and know I must sleep. But even getting ready for bed is a challenge. Sometimes I want to cry with frustration. I feel so helpless and alone. I cannot even undress myself, so every night I lie down fully clothed to try to sleep. But the pain keeps me awake through the early hours and sleep does not come. Later, three orthopaedic consultants will say that it is one of the worst breaks they have ever seen. One is speechless and then angry: ‘I have never seen such a mess before in my life. How can you function like this?’ I worry all the time that if I am not able to sleep, my hands will not be able to heal. Without my hands, I cannot work or support myself. I cannot play the piano, or work creatively, and so it is harder to express myself, too. Without my hands, I cannot do anything.

  I will never forget the day Cristall found me after Rab left. The island was sweltering in a sudden mid-June heat, but inside the kitchen was winter-chilled in spite of the bright sunshine outside. Old stone houses can keep the warmth out and hold the cold in, so that when you step outside, it seems like a different world altogether. That day is a blur to me, but I remember the look on her face as she knelt down beside me on the floor. The touch of her hands as they smoothed my face. The soft wrap of a blanket, its reassuring plaid weight. The close weave and scent of her cardigan, scrunched under my head. Her arms cradled me and rocked me gently like a child. ‘Ssh, it is OK,’ I heard her say. ‘I am here now. You are safe. Don’t cry.’

  I stared at her, eyes wide, uncomprehending. I was not aware of tears. Just of a fatigue beyond anything I have ever felt.

  ‘I am not crying,’ I whispered. She looked at me with such pity in her eyes.

  Some weeks later she asks me: ‘Tell me, how long were you lying there on the floor?’

  And I am puzzled, because I am not sure.

  ‘An hour or two, a day or two, no more than that,’ I say.

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘One minute I lay down, and then you came, and everything was fine.’

  We sit quietly. Because what else can I say? I am not sure of the sequence of events or the precise details of that day, or of those leading up to it. Even now I find it hard to talk about, simply because I am still trying to make sense of it. Sometimes, I want to say, when your life starts to unravel in an overwhelming, inexplicable way, you hold more closely to your own instinct than to linear time. When you are fearful, your body learns to live by a different pulse; it learns to be vigilant. That day, as I looked at the clock and watched each minute pass, all that mattered was knowing that the ferry was pulling away. Time concertinaed and fragmented in ways I cannot fathom. I do not know how to explain this, and so I am silent. I stare out at the sea.

  ‘It hurt me to see you like that,’ Cristall says. ‘It was like the light had gone out of your eyes.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just so tired, I lay down.’

  I wish I could tell her how it was strangely comforting to feel the silence wrap gently round me and hold me. How I knew that if only I could lie still, just breathing and barely moving, time, and this feeling, too, would quietly pass.

  ‘I want you to know that I am here.’ Cristall holds my arm gently. ‘From now on, I’ll be looking out for you, and you’ll be looking out for me.’

  I smile. And then I reach out so that our hands are touching. ‘That’s a deal,’ I say.

  You have to be tough as a woman living here in the islands. You learn not to wear your heart on your sleeve or to show any sign of vulnerability or weakness. The trouble is that you get so used to the strong persona you must inhabit and to protecting that soft heart, you sometimes forget to listen to it beating.

  Every morning I wake feeling lost and alone. I know it is better this way. But I miss the familiar rhythm of the life that we shared. Some days, I even miss the hurt of it. Everywhere I feel Rab’s presence. I hear his voice. I see his face. I try not to think about my broken hands but sometimes they catch me unawares. The memory of seeing my left hand lying inert, swollen, bruised, broken, discoloured on the table before it was bound makes my stomach lurch and sets my teeth on edge. It is hard to avoid your own hands, but that is what I attempt to do. When I go through a doorway, I angle my body at ninety degrees, sideways, as if there is only half of me in the room. I am so scared to knock it, for fear of any more unnecessary pain. I shrink from hard edges. I wear several shawls thrown loose about me, to keep it out of sight and to keep warm. Pain makes you colder than usual. It makes your blood run thin. And I don’t know why, but sometimes seeing my hand makes it hurt even more. So above all, I try not to look down.

  If I do notice it, I close my eyes quickly. If you ignore something for long enough, usually it eases, even if it doesn’t go away. This, though, is an altogether different pain from any I’ve known before. My wrist is twisted within the plaster at such an angle it makes me wonder if it will ever lie straight. The edges of the scaphoid bone, trapezium and radius grate against each other. The wrist feels separate from the hand. There were so many fissures and cracks on the X-ray, it was difficult to see if there was any place left where the pins might go. ‘We can’t take the risk,’ the consultant told me, apologetically. ‘I am sorry, but there was nothing left to pin it to.’

  We looked at each other. Then he looked away. We both knew this was an excuse, a half-truth. The X-ray department was closed the day I fell, and it was one of several minor emergencies where things were missed. We did not mention how two GPs and a team at A&E insisted that it wasn’t broken and sent me away. If the complex fracture had been correctly identified I would have been flown to Glasgow straight away for surgery. ‘It’s just a slight sprain, a bit of light bruising. Nothing that a day or two won’t fix.’ I tried to convince them, but they told me, ‘Come back in a week or two. If it was broken, you wouldn’t be able to speak for the pain.’

  I was sent away with two paracetamol. A week later, when it was flagged as a complex multiple break, it was too late for it to be properly set. These days, I am not sure what to feel. I am relieved that the plaster cast is rigid, but I am terrified it is not rigid enough. I know this because I am painfully aware of the shattered bones moving with every breath I take.

  I clench my teeth and go to the place I have found where you can feel nothing inside. I think this is called learning to dissociate, but I call it swallowing pain. Wherever it is, I am starting to like it there. It is peaceful and quiet, like being underwater, or floating on a dark, silent, cold sea.

  More than anything, I am exhausted. My marriage is over and suddenly I am living alone. I blink in astonishment at the beauty of summer on the island, at the long grasses and thistles growing on the croft whilst I am feeling something inside me start to fall apart. I stay indoors more and more. I lie with my broken hands against my chest. When sleep eventually comes, I welcome it. For a few hours, I am free. Cristall alone is here for me, and so daily life is made possible. I am grateful
for this – for her, for our friendship. Because without it, I do not know how I would cope.

  Each day I listen for the sound of her car, an ancient, dark-blue Peugeot called Bluebell, rattling up to the house. The exhaust is noisy, tied on with baler twine and fencing wire, so you can hear it coming from a distance away. It smells of the diesel that leaves a viscous pool below its undercarriage where she parks.

  I hear her wrestling with the stiff latch. The door suddenly jerks open, even before she has knocked on the glass. Her voice is bright, crisp and clear-sighted. It brings a sudden rush of fresh air into the stifled room. She piles Tupperware boxes on to the countertop, reading off the felt-tip labels stuck on to each lid. ‘Broccoli and stilton. Lentil. Pea and mint. Cheese soufflé. Chestnut and brussels sprout bake. Don’t eat them all at once. These can keep.’ She prises off a lid and pulls up a chair. ‘Now, let’s see how strong you are today,’ she says, tying a tea towel around my neck.

  Gently, she helps me to pick up a spoon. It is difficult. I have no grip or strength in the fingers poking out of the cast. I narrow my eyes, hold my breath and concentrate. Halfway to my mouth, my fingers slip and the thin handle twists. The soup spills everywhere. ‘Take your time,’ she tells me. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ On the third attempt, the spoon falls to the floor. She sighs, exasperated. ‘No point in wasting good food.’ She bends down and picks up the spoon, wipes it and dips it expertly into the steaming bowl. ‘Dear girl. Here, blow on it.’ Then she spoons homemade soup slowly into my mouth. It tastes delicious. I am hungry. ‘See, you need to build up your strength,’ she says, positioning the spoon lengthways in my hand. ‘You’ve got to put this behind you, and with the summer ahead of you, it won’t be long till you’re back on your feet.’

  Later we go to her house. Her bath is lower-slung than my deep cast-iron metal tub, so is easier to step in and out of without hands to balance. She helps me to undress. Buttons are an impossible task, as is lifting a jumper over my head, or sitting down in the bath without stumbling or slipping into the luxurious hot water. And I am astonished, as I always am, sitting there naked and blinking, trying to keep my hands above the water, how difficult simple tasks can be. I think about how friendship is about actions as well as words. About being there when there is no one else to help. About reaching out to someone before they stumble, so they can trust they won’t fall. My friendship with Cristall is all of this, and yet it is so much deeper. It feels like a promise. Often it is like a relationship between mother and daughter, a friendship richer than any I have ever known.