I Am an Island

by Tamsin Calidas

  I am standing shakily back at the reception desk. The bar is empty. There is no one in sight. I walk past the bar into the small restaurant. A waitress is folding napkins.

  ‘Have you any news? What has happened?’ I ask her, worriedly.

  She looks at me, uncomprehending.

  ‘The car accident.’

  Her eyes widen as she understands. She carefully puts down the napkin she is folding. And then she folds her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, but she didn’t make it.’

  I can see her lips moving and hear the sound of her voice, but I can’t make sense of her words. I stand there, lost, staring into the blinding sun.

  ‘No, that can’t be true. The doctor said she was fine. He told me himself.’ But suddenly, I am panicking. ‘Please, tell me what has happened. I need to know,’ I insist. ‘I am close to her.’

  She shakes her head, very slowly. ‘It is true,’ she says, ‘the old lady died. It is very sad.’ I stare at her, stricken. And then comes that awful moment when it hits you that the world is not as you know it. And that it will never be the same again.

  Behind the waitress, through the glass window, the swallows are whirling, diving, soaring. But now that pale-blue sky hurts my eyes. I am lost, my heart searching for that life I love, careering through a sky raining blue swallows, white sunlight, rushing air.

  I scan her face desperately, but she looks down at her hands and quietly sighs, then returns to folding the linen napkins. She is called Ana and she comes from Romania. I know her casually, in the way people recognise each other but know little of each other’s lives.

  The room closes in. I just stand there, sucking air. Weaving life into death. Silence into sound. Swallow wings and a blue sky. Trying to make it bearable, comprehensible. This is one of those pivotal events you know will always hurt. One of those catastrophes you know you may never understand.

  What is a life? And where does it go, when it is so shockingly, abruptly over? I close my eyes tightly. Every time I open them it hurts to be in the world again. I feel in that blue sky a cruel contradiction, that something so beautiful can bear witness to something so terrible.

  ‘Please,’ I whisper. It is not a question, more a cry for help. As Ana starts to speak to me, horrifying images fill the gaps in my consciousness. I can smell the burning tyres, dark tracks on scorched tarmac carving a hole in my mind. A broken fence, metal flung in sheets over the road and two cars abandoned at awkward angles, like toys tossed aside. One is inverted, like a broken bone piercing through ragged, torn skin, the other is concertinaed into a tree. And then there are the crumpled bodies, shadows slumped over a wheel. Suddenly it hurts to breathe. Some things are too much to imagine.

  I blink, stare out through the window. I know Cristall is out there somewhere. All that is separating us is glass. I can feel her. I can feel her so close, I can sense her breath. She is in the wings of the swallows, wrapping her arms about the sky. I can hear her voice, see the sky blue of her eyes, feel her laugh ringing.

  All I can do is open and close my eyes. I cannot cry. ‘Stay with me,’ I whisper. ‘Please don’t leave.’

  I can feel her in the blinks of light on the window, small fragments of a rainbow. One life exhaling its last beautiful sigh. So I touch that light, place my hand over it, as if I might hold it for ever, but when I lift my hand, it is gone.

  I turn to Ana. My eyes cling to her face. ‘Please help me,’ I whisper.

  Our eyes meet. We are both embarrassed by my naked vulnerability. She has brown eyes. Golden orbits around the iris. They look at me for a long moment, long enough that you know, at some point, one of you will have to consciously look away. I gaze across the distance between us, my eyes pleading, ‘Do you see what I see? Can you feel what I feel?’ She is the one who looks away. We are standing so close together, I can see her pulse beating in the soft hollow at her throat. I think, someone will have kissed her there.

  We sense another’s need and desperation. Why can we not feel another’s pain? Why, when someone dies, unless they are loved by us, can we not feel even a fraction of that grief? Is it because it is too much, our brains too small and our hearts too fragile, to hold more pain than our own?

  Ana shakes her head. She sighs, distracted. Then she glances at her watch. ‘It was a bad smash. The road will be closed for hours.’ She has a beautiful voice. She stares hard at me and then fiddles with a ring on her finger. For a long minute, we both look at her hands. Then she shrugs matter-of-factly. ‘I am sorry. I thought you knew.’

  Moments like this, you need someone, something to hold on to. But there is no one. So your heart just keeps running after what you have lost, as if love alone, and a voice crying out a name, over and over, can bring it back. And so I whisper, ‘Please. Do not go. Stay with me.’

  Ana hands me a glass of water. My hand is shaking. I spill most of it, so I put it down.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘You cannot stand here. Service is about to start.’

  She reaches out then, uncertainly, to put her hand awkwardly on my shoulder. It feels small and unfamiliar. Instinctively, she does not take my hand, so it flutters between us in suspended animation. I feel for her and I feel for me. Two strangers, forced momentarily into intimacy by a random tragedy.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she says quietly. ‘Truly I am.’

  I sit waiting for the ferry. The skipper is early. He sits down next to me but does not look at me. It is strangely comforting to sit in silence, just to feel another body there beside you. He stares at the sea. Then he says, ‘Aye, it’s shocking news.’

  I know that he knows I know. For a moment, we both watch the gulls. And once again, those birds give me an inner strength to ask, ‘Please, tell me everything you know.’ I am desperate to fill in the gaps, even as every cell in my body is screaming that this is not happening, can’t be real. Taking courage from the landscape, I brace myself to listen, all the while fixing my eyes on the water as an extraordinary sunset irradiates the skies. And that light is so exquisite, I am grateful for it. I do not blink, even though it is dazzling, as I hear of the small miracle that Cristall survived the impact, was conscious and able to whisper her name. Only when they cut her free and lifted her out did her body begin to collapse; it was the metal that was holding her together, keeping her breathing. How she died in the helicopter on the way to Glasgow A&E, up with the swallows in that beautiful blue empty air.

  I drive up the island but I cannot see the road through my tears. I stall the old pick-up in the yard and abandon it there, keys still in the ignition. I walk in a slow stagger across the yard. Shock drains you suddenly after its adrenaline high.

  My house is empty but still my hands reach out to hold someone, something. I crouch down and hold the soft green leaves, stems, flowers, plants. And then I kneel and tug at the grass. I rip out huge clumps and hold them up to the sky. I lift my head and call out, my voice lost in the blue as I scream her name. I am sobbing so hard that I cannot recognise my voice. Inside I feel hollow, my pain blowing through the dark ragged hole of my mouth. No words come, but if there are any I want them to be hers, not mine. I know she is still somewhere close by. And so I wrap myself in a blanket and sit under the darkening sky. I listen and cry until I fall asleep, my wet cheek on the grass. Hours later, I have no voice left. And then I am silent. My voice has turned to dust.

  In the morning I wake stiff and cold. It is a beautiful day. When I go inside and wash my face, I do not recognise the haggard reflection in the mirror. I am an apparition, with tufts of white hair at my brow line where there was none before. Later, researching in medical books, I learn that this can happen in extreme instances of acute stress.

  That day, Isla comes to stay with me. I curl up with her on the floor, pressing my nose against her soft ears and inhaling the smell of the wind in her coat. She sighs and licks my cheeks. Her tail thumps – she is waiting to go home. Later, I take her there. I have to find Cristall’s passport, documentation – all the small t
hreads of a life. The family needs it for the procurator fiscal. It is too much to go alone. So we go together, Isla and I. To say goodbye.

  I start crying when we get there and cannot stop. I switch off the engine and sit clutching the steering wheel. Isla licks my cheek then burrows down into the seat and refuses to move. I know she knows. It is difficult for both of us. In the end I put her on a lead. I open the gate, and we walk slowly into the house. It is like walking into a different world. A world that was yesterday. A world now gone.

  Everything is as Cristall left it: a half-drunk cup of coffee, a jumper draped over the back of a chair. The space is so quiet, all its life spirited away. We sit in there for hours. Feeling the heavy weight of furniture without the hand that moves it, that brings it to life.

  It is difficult to look for the documents. I do not want to open drawers or hidden spaces. They belong to a life that is not mine. It is only when we get up to leave that I see a swallow sitting watching us on the inside of the window. I cannot understand how it got in, because the doors and windows are all shut. But it helps to have this small life with us in the absence of another. The bird hops on to the cold stove and looks straight at me with inquisitive, beady eyes. It opens its beak as if it has something to say, but no sound comes out. And then it ruffles its feathers and hops to the back door. I open the glass panels slowly. It looks at me again and then it flies away. When she sees it go, Isla gets up. She walks to the truck and does not look back. And that is when I know she knows Cristall is dead. That this is no longer home.

  The family arrives. We grieve together and alone. We do not bury Cristall but scatter her ashes as she asked, returning her to the wind, mountains and skies.

  Her ash is soft and fine. I try not to breathe: I want her to be free on the wind, not stuck in the hard grief of my lungs. I dip my fingers slowly and take a small handful. It clings and sticks to my fingers so it is hard to let go. It feels strange to hold her in my hand – a life so loved reduced to a grey, soft powder. The ring of her laugh, the bright blue iridescence of her clear eyes. These are her thoughts. Her heart and song. I walk with her and take her into my garden, and to all the favourite places on the island that she so loved.

  There is a secret part of me that wants to keep some of her in my pocket. To sit again with me beside the fire. To play cards, chess, to cook, garden, talk, drink wine. But I do not do this, because I know where she would most like to be. We say goodbye quietly together, Isla, Cristall and me. I do not dig a hole – it is too dark and damp in the soil. Instead, I brush a handful of her ashes gently over the trees and plants we once planted together, years before, as tiny shoots and seeds. Each leaf, each plant, each place is a memory. The rest I scatter into the wind.

  After her house is cleared, I fill my home with her belongings, surrounding myself with all the things she loved. All the clutter, debris, bric-a-brac. Furniture, books, Tupperware boxes, salt and pepper pots. Paintings from her walls. I can barely move for this physical collateral, my home and I both steeped in grief. It seems strange to others, but I need to have her near to me in these things. How we experience grief is unique and intensely personal. Sometimes I think I can hear her in another room, but when I look the room is empty. She is there, but always out of sight.

  You do not get over death. It simply becomes an intrinsic part of your own fabric. Whenever I scent the sticky buds of the balsam poplar, it always makes my heart sing and grieve. And I stop. I look for the swallows. I turn my face into the wind. I say her name in my heart. And slowly, over time, it doesn’t hurt to breathe. And I am able to start to talk of her.

  It is nearly seven years before I find a kind of peace. I meet for coffee with a firefighter, a local man, who talks to me about how he was the first to arrive at the scene of the accident. The first to find her there. He recalls how, as he knelt down, she slowly opened her eyes. The wonder of this. The miracle of life. He tells me how for him that image is still as vivid as it was that day. How she was able to whisper her name. How she smiled, a trembling flutter across her face, as she fought to stay conscious, to stay alive.

  Listening to his words is not easy. Afterwards they find me, even when I am not seeking them. It is so hard when you do not get to say goodbye. It leaves some part of you adrift. You have to find those words of farewell, in silence, alone in your heart.

  I am here. I am there. I want to know. I want to know all and all and all of this, and why it ever happened. And why anything like this ever happens. His kind voice, and the hurt I can see in his eyes as he recounts everything he can remember, makes me so glad that he was there for her. It comforts me to know that she died with kindness and love. It brings me a sense of closure I have been searching for all these years. It helps me to understand that the love you have felt will never leave you.

  6

  Tup

  I am not ready at the door until close to midnight. When I glance at the clock, my jittery fingers start dropping the things I have gathered: ropes, tools, a full-size body bag, gloves and a head torch. Some jobs are better done quietly at night. As the door clicks shut behind me, Maude whines softly, but I steel myself even as my heart flinches, appalled at the thought of what lies waiting for me to unearth. A skein of sweat prickles on the back of my neck and scalp. All my fears and doubts are jostling as my brain desperately seeks an alternative, but my instinct insists: ‘It’s now or never.’

  I snap on the head torch, which flickers a dim, wavering beam, then pick up the shovel, and start walking quickly over the fields. I didn’t plan it this way but I daren’t go back on my new-found resolve. Tonight is Hallowe’en and I am raising my own dead. I am digging up my beloved tup, buried six weeks ago, and then I am going to drive him on the first early boat to the Oban mortuary, and on to the Glasgow veterinary pathologist to find out what killed him.

  It is hard to walk fast when you are carrying unwieldy kit. As I cross the croft, I prang the shovel and its metal edges fall clattering against a rock. It is unsettling how far the sound carries. An owl screeches then silently drifts ahead of me, wings sculling towards the grave. It is a beautiful night with low cloud cover, wisps of scudding light that show the wind is up over the sea. Already there is a dim glow behind the mountains. As the crescent moon rises, these fields will gleam with a crystalline, silver light. And then there will be no place to hide.

  I am dreading the thought of uncovering him, but each time I tell myself, just let it be, my instinct quivers. It is an awful feeling when you are unsure if something that has happened is just an unfortunate accident or a natural occurrence, or if, as my gut hints, a possible injustice or wrongful deed has been done. I want to know, but I am torn. I hesitate to start digging as I wrestle with a growing sense of crisis. Time is of the essence: every minute my tup is under the soil, the natural process of decomposition will make the result of any scientific testing harder to read. Finally I make my decision, and I am strangely relieved as the first cut slices wet into turf. With each thud of earth I edge closer to the grave.

  Before he died my tup was in prime condition, still braw and beautiful after winning a clutch of fluttering rosettes and prizes at the island show, including the coveted Purebred Sheep Champion silver cup. His success followed another auction where my lambs reached top prices in the commercial sales, and were commended amongst 10,000 livestock heads passing through the markets that day. On the island, they are marked for breeding rather than simply sold for meat. This year’s lambs are the first offspring of this huge pedigree. It is incredibly rewarding, having invested my all into this daring venture. They are the finest I have ever bred, with his beautiful conformation and strong, noble head.

  The last time I saw him alive, he was feeding quietly from a bucket. Afterwards he nickered to me, rubbing his beautiful great brow gently against my legs. It was utterly shocking to find him dead the next morning. I stared dismayed at his lifeless body. It was heartbreaking to see his eyes glazed over, unmoving. I tried to close them gently. As I wra
pped my arms about him, my own eyes filled with tears. Yet even in my distress I was puzzled by where I discovered him: face-down in a shallow ditch, hidden out of sight – a narrow space against a fence immediately behind his freshly laid covered stabling. It made no sense to me, because at night he always slept inside with sweet summer hay and a bucket of clean water, sheltered from the wind and weather. It hurt me to see his beautiful head soiled in the mud, so I washed his face. Afterwards, I dug a hole, laid it with fresh straw and buried him. It did not occur to me not to bury him. And I did not tell anyone of his death. You do not think straight when you are in shock.

  All the fight was punched out of me that day. That night, after I covered him over with soil, gently trod it down and arranged the turf over the grave, I wrapped myself in blankets and I sat out on the hill. I stayed up all night, gazing upwards, until the skies lightened. Even though the sky was clear, it was hard to see the stars. Ever since Cristall’s death, I had desperately needed to see those hard blinks of light. I kept searching but that night the darkness was impenetrable.

  The day of the show had been overcast before the rain began to fall. Watching my tup standing, ears pricked and densely muscled after careful feeding, I felt a surge of pride. He was solid at eighty kilos, every ounce a pedigree, and I was nervous and excited to realise that we stood a chance. At last I felt my time had come to join hands with the farming community in solidarity and mutual support. I was determined and hopeful that I would do this without compromising my own voice. It’s time to show what we’re made of, I resolved, as I smoothed his newly clipped fleece with a soft cloth. It was a thrill to feel ready for this challenge. Initially, the atmosphere was bright, but predictably it deteriorated steadily as bottles were emptied, and hooves and boots spattered mud. As the mood shifted, I started to feel uneasy. In the ring, my ‘pet tup’ was mocked, and I was derided for entering him. A woman assisting with scores was angry and refused to wish me luck. ‘You’ve no place here at all,’ she said.