by Lydia Syson
‘It’s hideous,’ complained Queenie.
‘It’s their nature,’ said Lizzie. ‘Would you rather starve?’
‘I don’t want to be Queen of the Kermadecs now.’ Her sister pouted.
‘We can’t let the rats rule us. And look how many Sal and Spy have killed today.’
The catching became more efficient still when Billy found and baited an old mooring buoy, rusty, holed in, washed up years ago. Even the most cunning kiore could not leap up to safety once it had thrown itself inside.
By day Pa continued to clear the land, Albert and Billy at his side, replanting what they could. Albert listened to his father’s talk of fleece and foot rot, Leicesters, Lincolns, Longwools, Romneys and Merinos. What was he supposed to say about the new half-breed on the South Island?
The grass seed sprouted, a fine, luminous emerald green, patchy at first, like a young man’s beard, colouring the earth more confidently with every day that passed. Then, one morning, long before there was any hope of it setting seed, Pa found the delicate sward half nibbled away. That was when he took to night-watching, staying up with the dogs and a raging bonfire, guarding and patrolling and occasionally dozing, though never for long. Sometimes Ma would take him a mug of fireweed tea sweetened with ti syrup. His temper grew ever shorter. He tried to make Albert take his turn, but too often the others were woken in the night by Albert’s cry, and hissing leather, and all Pa’s noisy fury at finding his son fast asleep on duty while the rats returned to feast.
‘I’m doing this for you,’ he raged. Another thwack. ‘Do you care so little for your future?’
Albert could only whimper. Lizzie’s heart ached for her father. For all of them. If a second ship had shown up in those dark days, there wasn’t a soul on Monday Island who wouldn’t have begged for passage.
*
A few weeks later, Lizzie noticed a stillness in the air when she went for water. What had happened? What was missing? It was the birds. All that clatter and clamour they’d got used to on the sandbanks and up the cliffs and on the rocks, the fussing and flapping of black burrowers and wideawakes, the clacking chatter that went on all day and sometimes into the night too, all that cacophony had died away, almost from one day to the next. The birds were departing, flying away. The island was emptying. Soon the Peacock family would be alone with the goats and the rats. Winter was coming.
27
LIZZIE STILL OFTEN WAKES SHAKING, THE COLD DAMPNESS of sweated cotton sticking to her back and breasts. In daylight, rare moments of dreamed clarity mockingly return: a falling axe; a cry, hardly human; Albert, shrunken, staggering like the starving puppies, whining with them for Sal, who is nowhere to be seen. Something is always on the verge of happening to Albert, something monumental. She can’t tell what, so she can’t stop it. And dreaming hardly seems adequate a word for these night-frights.
Ada shifts beside her and only pretends to sleep. The barricades are up again. All day her sister, busy with the baby, keeps herself so close to the others that Lizzie cannot prise her away for a moment. Question after question bubbles up and bursts unanswered. Lizzie seethes and weeps inside by turn, so angry and so sad she almost blurts out Ada’s secret to their mother. Mrs Peacock has settled into sternness. Confession would be hard.
Unsettled weather. Queenie looks at both her sisters oddly, and decided to ask Lizzie outright.
‘Have you and Ada argued?’
Lizzie shook her head, wide-eyed with false surprise. Lucky for her, Queenie’s so taken by the wonders of letter-learning, her mind is always elsewhere; looking for print on rusting flour tins, stencilled on packing cases, plastered on trunks, and moulded in iron on the frame of the sewing machine, which is out every day now. Mrs Peacock is making up new shirts for the Islanders with the last of the calico. She won’t have them lounging around ‘half-naked’ on washdays. Wertheim, the machine is called.
‘Worth-heem,’ suggests Queenie.
‘WHIRR-TIME.’ Ma corrects her, and her daughter nods. That makes sense.
She reads the letters on the buttons she finds wrapped in a scrap of cloth on the bobbin shelf of Mrs Peacock’s sewing basket. One button matches the six on the jacket Albert used to wear. IMPROVED – FOUR HOLES. That makes sense too. Four holes would make a better fastening than two. GUARANTEED NOT TO CUT. Ma has to explain. Who would have thought a button could be mistaken for a knife? That it might slice through a thread? Another button reads A. LINNEY. 23 REGENT ST. This confuses Solomona and Kalala too, until Ma explains ST can mean both Saint and Street. She talks briefly of London, of pavements, people, shopfronts, gaslights, glass. Kalala asks if she knows another street in that great city, a Blomfield Street, where there is a museum of idols, where Englishmen and Englishwomen come to wonder at heathen curiosities, but Mrs Peacock shakes her head and pounds the Wertheim’s pedal so she can hear no more questions, and fills her mouth with pins.
Very soon, to Lizzie’s annoyance, Queenie’s reading has overtaken everyone’s. Billy laughs at the strange contortions of her lips. ‘Gwah! Gwah!’ he growls at her before huffing off to the new plantation grounds, asking what good is reading anyway. You can’t eat books.
‘It’s guaranteed, stupid,’ Queenie shouts at his back. ‘It’s like a promise, isn’t it, Ma? Isn’t it, Lizzie?’
Mrs Peacock nods as she lays the baby on her shoulder to rub his back in slow, upward circles.
‘What else can I read, Ma?’ Queenie asks. Her mother assesses her. Joey lets out a belch, opens shocked eyes, and promptly slumps into a drunken slumber. Mrs Peacock disappears into the hut, and swaps the baby for a fat book. Lizzie vaguely remembers the swirling patterns of inky waves on its closed pages.
‘The Family Shakspeare. Lots of stories in here,’ says Ma. ‘Plays.’
‘What’s a play?’ asks Queenie.
‘A story told by actors. In a theatre. They pretend to be the story people.’
Lizzie looks over Queenie’s shoulder at the first page, as she reads aloud.
‘In which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’
‘Here,’ says Ma, flicking pages to a picture. ‘This is where the first play begins.’
‘What’s it called?’ asks Lizzie.
‘The Tempest,’ reads Queenie.
‘It’s about an island,’ Ma tells them. ‘Starts with a storm and a shipwreck. Read it to us, Queenie.’
*
That evening, Lizzie notices more grey hairs in her father’s beard. He is stacking firewood but she hasn’t offered to help. She watches, wonderingly, the stretching sinews of his arms and his movements’ swinging rhythms. He never stops, never rests, never has done. It used to make her proud to think that she, of all the children, had inherited that restless determination. What has it cost him? She detects a kind of wilfulness in his resolve. Something worse than wilfulness, perhaps.
When Pa looks back at her, disturbed by the force of her inspecting gaze, eyebrows raised in a question she can’t answer, Lizzie turns away as if caught stealing. For days she has battled with her instinct to deny what Ada has told her, and her fury at her sister’s new evasions. Fathers were always fast with their fists when it came to sons. Weren’t they? Lizzie is no longer certain. The family has lived so much apart from others. Hard to know what was too much or not enough of anything. In her indifference, in her failure to imagine another way of being, perhaps she had been as cruel as Pa. She ought to feel comforted by Albert’s escape. But she could not yet believe in it. How had he managed it, and how did Ada help, and why on earth wouldn’t she just explain, instead of trying to avoid her all the time? It was infuriating.
At last she corners Ada walking to the spring, while Queenie’s lost in Shakespeare. Their pails clash together, dippers rattling. Lizzie switches sides. Ada and Albert are the only left-handers among the Peacock family, and it roused Pa’s anger whenever he tried to show Albert how to do
anything. Hold it like this, he would say, and Albert would obediently swap hands to copy Pa. But then the swing of his axe faltered, or the blade of his knife slid uselessly away, or his shovel would lose its force. Yet Pa never used to mind how Ada tackled anything. Once Lizzie thought it was because Pa liked her more than Albert. Now she wonders if he doesn’t care because Ada’s just a girl.
‘I keep thinking about Albert,’ Lizzie says. ‘Poor Albert. I see things I didn’t see before. I wish I’d known. I wish I could have stopped him going.’
Ada makes a movement of her lips too harsh to call a smile.
‘But now he’s free …’
‘Yes,’ says Ada.
‘Did you say goodbye to him at least?’
Her sister is slow to answer.
‘Well?’ Lizzie insists, nudging her with an elbow.
‘No,’ she sighs. ‘No. In the end I didn’t see him.’
‘What! Then how do you know he’s gone?’
Ada falls silent. Lizzie burns with frustration. An unpleasant, threatening note edges into her voice, which she can hear but can’t conceal. ‘Ada, you have to tell me what you saw.’
‘Nothing. I don’t know for certain how he managed to escape.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Of course not. I was with you all that time, remember? That’s why I wanted to look for him right away. To be sure. But he was so determined. And no sign of him anywhere. So he must have gone. Either the ship came back for him,’ says Ada. ‘What was she called? The Esperanza. After she left here—’
‘When? In the night?’ Lizzie is instantly dubious, too impatient to wait for Ada’s ‘or’. ‘So where did she pick him up? Not from here, that’s for sure. From Clapperton Bay?’
‘Maybe. If he hid there when Pa first went up to look for him … started another fire?’
‘But we all saw the Esperanza go … we saw what course she took.’
‘You know how clever Albert is. He’ll have worked something out,’ Ada insists. ‘He told me he’d do anything. He said he’d stow away if he had to. Maybe he hid in the gig before it left.’
‘But you didn’t see him?’ Lizzie wants a witness. Proof. You can’t know something you’ve not seen.
‘Of course not. Oh, how I wanted to look, but I kept thinking about Albert staring at me from wherever he was hiding – at the rocks at the head of the beach? – willing me not to turn, not to give him away. So I didn’t. It would have ruined everything.’ Ada’s voice rises defensively.
Everything is ruined, thinks Lizzie bitterly. She thinks back. How preoccupied they had been that day, how busy with things that now seem petty, excitements like the yellow snail-shell necklaces, and the banana roots, and the noisy chickens. She imagines Albert up in the forest, abandoning the goat, disobeying Pa almost for the first time ever, and setting off into the world alone, more alone even than Pa himself when he left England so many years ago.
In her head he darts through the trees, and clambers down the rocks as fast as his lameness will allow, always finding somewhere to hide. And as soon as all the family and sailors and Islanders have left the beach, he climbs into the prow of the beached jolly boat, to tremble under an airless tarp, curled up in darkness, waiting for the boat to slide back into the water. How long did he imagine he could hide before he was sick? Did they haul the boat up with him? Possibilities ribbon away like little eels.
‘And nobody saw him? Nobody at all?’
‘Of course not,’ says Ada. She always had more faith in Albert than anyone else in the family. ‘Because we weren’t expecting to. But he knew the chance might never come again. So he took it.’
Stowaway stories were a favourite in the Pacific. Boys stashed in barrels and trunks and sail-bales and whale carcasses, picked up at one port, by accident or intent, let go at another, halfway around the world, months later. So she had underestimated her brother. Lizzie nods. ‘Good for him. I suppose. If that’s what he wanted. So that’s what you were always talking about?’
All those times they had abandoned Lizzie.
‘The trouble was we could never quite agree. Albert always said Pa would never let us go.’
‘Us?’ says Lizzie, stock still, dropping her pail in shock. ‘Let us go?’
‘I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I always said we should come clean, not sneak away. All out in the open. We could say goodbye, and then everyone would know where we were and there wouldn’t be all this upset and confusion. Poor Ma.’
It hadn’t struck Lizzie for a moment that her sister had ever planned to leave with Albert.
‘You’d both have gone?’ She looks at Ada, gentle Ada, who never used to qualify her kindness, who once upon a time only hurt feelings by accident. Always patient with Queenie, and Billy and Gus – and now Joey – but most of all with Albert, while Lizzie champed and sighed, her stomach knotted with meanness, soured by Ada’s sweetness and her own impatience. Yet Ada would have left them.
‘I had to. I thought Albert needed me. Oh, but I was furious when he left without me … at first I thought I could not hold it in. That I’d have to tell you. But now I understand. He had to take his chance. And some day he will tell us where he is.’
Lizzie doesn’t want to hear this.
‘You didn’t tell me. You didn’t ask how I would feel.’
Her sister’s face is oddly innocent.
‘We had to go. And I thought you wouldn’t care.’
‘Care?’ Lizzie can hardly speak. This discovery has pushed everything else aside.
‘I knew you’d never leave here. Like Pa. I’ve always thought this is really your island, right from the very beginning. You knew about it first. You cared about it most. Albert never wanted this. He never wanted … things. Land. Just to know more, see more. Not to have to pretend to be something he never could be.’
They reach the spring. It’s shady here, and fresh. Almost like being underwater the way light streaks softly through the thick air and makes it dance. Lizzie kneels first among the ferns, pressing her dipper into the wet grass under the rock, letting it slowly fill, and bowing her head while she rearranges everything inside it. All this work has always been for Albert. It’s all Pa cared about. Not him, exactly. But his name. Securing the future for the Peacock family, a tiny empire nobody could ever take away because it belonged to no one, where nobody else could give orders. Peacock land for generations.
But that meant the boys. Albert and Billy, and the sons they would one day have, and the sons those sons would produce in time. Perhaps Pa planned to bring them wives one day, to ship them in with the sheep and make them breed. Lizzie doesn’t know. She realises of course that she has been useful, tough and bold enough to have secured her father’s admiration, but now she recognises that she is also dispensable. This land never would or could be hers. It has taken Albert’s vanishing to make her understand.
‘Albert never belonged here,’ Ada continues.
‘We all wanted to come.’
‘We wanted to leave the hotel. We didn’t all want to stay. Remember the whalers?’
Of course. She would have stayed then, she knew. Even if Ma had gone. She’d have stayed with Pa. Lizzie refills her dipper. This slow trickle of water on metal could be a heavenly sound, but today it sounds forlorn and makes her shiver. Angry and also ashamed, betrayed and guilty both, Lizzie cannot help but shift away when she feels the heat and weight of Ada against her, leaning like an animal seeking silent reassurance. She thinks again and then returns the pressure.
When both buckets are full, Lizzie stares down at the rippling version of her sister’s eyes. They always used to trust each other. They somehow need to start again.
28
WHITE BELLY, WHITER STILL IN MOONLIGHT. SHE flaunts it as she falls back, crashing against dark water in a wild sheet of spray, every ridge and furrow on show. Foam and froth runnel down and down and down. The joy of her. The song of her. I watch, half dreaming, drawn to the bluff by this gigantic slap of
flesh on sea, and I feel myself unravel as this whale pulls longing from me. To me she calls, only me, it seems. She knows I am here this night – high, alone, in darkness. She surely must – for I know her, this mother of all mothers with tooth-marked tail. I saw her first, far away, from my own coral cliff, when I was half the height I am now, half this heaviness, and I have seen her since from my vaka, night fishing. She must return on the ocean path we took here. The thought tightens and twists my unhomed heart.
Up flicks her boat-vast tail. There are the old wounds healed again, familiar scars scratched like writing, ragged, uneven marks grooved into skin as tough as bone. The blackness churns and another beast breaches, a smaller echo of my old friend. Her calf, new this year, now arching backwards, in a slow fall, flippers stretched like wings. Whale and child defy air and water … and look, here comes another – a father? – hooting, honking, snorting, making merry. I laugh with love of seeing my mother-whale again. And weep that I cannot follow her home at will.
Catamarans, Mr Reverend calls our claw-sail boats, our double canoes. Soon before our sailing, I asked him if there are catamarans in the Good Book but he said no, he did not believe so, and then he talks again of fishers of men. I tell him I am a fisher of fish.
A smile.
‘This Mr Peacock …’ I said, thoughts flitting, circling, unwilling to land. ‘There are … catamarans … at his island too?’