by Lydia Syson
Eyebrows twitched up, in, down. The Reverend shook his head, pushed back paper and put down pen.
‘I can’t say for certain. Most unlikely, I’m afraid.’
My mother-whale breaks through the sea once more, and my thoughts journey fast between here and there, now and then, reminding me of a German word Mr Reverend once taught me: Wanderlust. Something like an affliction among my people, he believes, and yet he confessed it was this spirit, this appetency, that brought him to our seas from far away so long ago. Then he offered me Solomona’s place at the Institute.
‘You are so quick to learn,’ he told me then. ‘A natural teacher too. Your English the best by far, I do believe, of all the fellows on the Rock. Stay.’
I have his son Sidney to thank for that, but we did not speak of Sidney. Nor did we speak of my ever-doubting heart. I will never be ready to follow Solomona’s Pioneer path. Instead I seek to please the Reverend with a psalm. ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters …’
And he pick up the words:
‘These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. Yes, you will indeed see wonders of all kinds on your travels, Kalala. And in time you will enjoy the fruits of your toil. Fair enough. God bless you all.’
God bless us all. Bitterness now rises as I think of Sidney with his new friends, all missionary sons, all dressed in black in the English school, learning all I will never learn. I think of them talking together of the savages they used to know.
Our island is emptying. Full ships leave new diseases and body-prints on sleeping mats. Infants without fathers and mothers without sons. The elders shake their heads, and Mr Reverend sermonises, but who can stop this spirit of change, when young men choose to go? When so many places call us, that call comes so loud and clear, and strangers make such promises.
With the world’s wealth comes new friends. I see one walks this way: Lizzie, summoned to the lookout by whalesong too, no doubt. Blanket-wrapped and billowing, she sails towards me, but inside is a thing of skin and bones, body a mast, wrists like sticks. I am certain she comes here, like me, to flee her dreams. I know how restlessly she sleeps. I hear her night-time voice, and how it cries. Towed by hoot and splash, she looks out to sea as she walks, never seeing me. I wait till she is closer, and then I call.
‘Lizzie.’
‘Who’s there?’ she answers, piping. ‘Kalala?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you seen? Have you seen the whales?’
‘Yes. They called me here too.’
I feel her easing as she walks towards me, still watching the water. Our book-sharing has made us comfortable together, in silence and in speech, and we sit again, she beside me, knees tenting, flesh parcelled in wool, our four eyes glistening with wonder. Again and again the double spray appears. Again and again the path of moonlight stretching out towards the sky’s dome is torn to pieces. Silvered shards like a broken looking glass. The fourth new moon to rise since first we came.
‘We are so small,’ she says.
‘The world is very vast.’
‘How can we know if we matter?’ she asks.
‘To the world? We can’t.’
‘Can’t know or can’t matter?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe both.’
All her questions are too large for me. I want to ask Solomona, or Mr Reverend. I want vast, gigantic answers, greater even than the Mission school’s coloured map. But more and more I fear that Mr Reverend and Solomona have only one answer, and it is always the same, and it will never content me. We see what we can see, and what we see we know. And what of what we cannot see? The world is full of infinite, invisible, unknowable mysteries. Where do these great whales go when they are not here or there? God knows, Solomona says. But I would know this too. To what depths do these leviathans vanish? How far does this ocean of islands stretch and how can I keep in my head all that I know or believe to be here?
I think of all the words I know that stand for greatness. Astonishing, magnificent, omnipotent, omnipresent. I think of the different things greatness stands for. One, above all. Lizzie speaks again.
‘And if it is true – if we are of no significance – how can the world be just and fair as we suppose?’
Until she looks at me, I cannot tell if her question is for me, or for herself, or maybe for the ocean. Her mouth and teeth are formed in such a way that she cannot easily close them. Her lips rest always a little open, shining. I used to think she was on the point of speaking, and I would wait for her words. Tonight she waits for mine. Though her sister Queenie is quicker, Lizzie is an eager learner, and she expects me to know bigger things. I fear to disappoint her.
‘This world?’ I say, surprised. ‘It is not this world, only the next, that is just and fair.’
‘The Lord executeth righteousness and judgement for all that are oppressed,’ she says, and looks at me, upper lip curling, questioning.
Solomona read this psalm last Sunday.
‘Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.’ I reply. She shivers. ‘For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass, as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.’
‘Now I feel smaller still,’ Lizzie says. She raises her eyes to the heavens, and sighs, and rests her chin on her blanket-wrapped knees once more. I swallow. This waiting between us is a space I do not know how to fill. The hollow hooting from the ocean becomes loud again. Edge-eyed, I look at Lizzie, and her face is split by an open smile. Another great slap from the ocean, a crash of bubbles, and she laughs, throat throbbing.
‘How do they do it? How do they dare? They think they can fly!’
‘They nearly can.’
‘We saw them last year. I didn’t know if they’d be back.’
A chain of whales has linked us through months and oceans when we knew nothing of each other.
‘Albert heard them first, and Billy saw them. And now here they are again. The same mother, I’m certain. But a new baby. Oh, Kalala, look at that!’ She claps her hands, like Gussie.
Her delight delights me.
‘Look! More … over there,’ I say, and with my hand I softly turn her head so that she sees the plume of glory for herself. The dark shape moving just below the waves.
‘Four! No, look, there are five tonight!’
‘There’ll be more tomorrow, I think.’
‘Do they know we’re here? Do they watch us like we watch them?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. I feel it is so.’
‘I do too,’ she says. A long sigh shudders her body, and I catch its slipstream in my own.
‘They’re going home,’ I tell her. ‘Of course they are happy.’
‘Home? What home does a whale have? And how do you know?’
She’s right. I don’t know.
‘They’re going to my home.’
‘Will they take a message?’ she asks, but she is smiling as if she doesn’t believe they can.
‘I hope.’
She glows as she watches. She hugs herself.
‘Oh how I love them! More than anything, I think. Oh look! Look! She is rising again. How great and grand she is. I’m so happy they are back. Why do we have to be people when we could be whales?’
‘Or goats? Or limpets? Or any creatures without souls?’
‘Limpets? Oh, it would be easy to be a limpet. Can limpets dream? Or do they only dream of sea?’
Then I confess, as much as I am able.
‘I dream of sea,’ I say. ‘But in truth, I dream of ships. Not our kind … these are palagi ships.’
She frowns at me. She sees at once these are not good dreams.
‘I don’t like to dream,’ she says, shoulders hunching once more. ‘I never sleep.’
‘Never?’
Lips pressed hard, she shakes her head.
Her slow words stumble, and her fear returns. I know this fear.
‘Tell me,’ I say. I would not dare ask such a thing by day. But in the dark, even this bright darkness, words can fall more freely. ‘If you wish.’
‘Pictures come,’ she says. ‘So many pictures, one after another, pressing and pushing into my head. They make no sense. When I close my eyes I see things I don’t want to see.’
Yes, I know.
‘I hear things too. Oh, you’ll say it’s just bad dreams … but I know what a dream is. I used to dream of falling. When I was small. Falling and falling and falling. Not every night. Just sometimes. I only remember how it felt now. I never knew where I was, or what had happened just before, or why I was falling. Sometimes Ada would hear me cry, and pick me up from the floor, and put blankets round us both to keep me safe. Or just the rush of it woke me. And slowly I learned to know this feeling, and to know that I could stop the plunging and wing out my dreams, scoop myself up before I reached the bottom – though I never did – and fly away.’
‘Falling and flying?’ These are dreams I also know. And sinking and drowning.
‘Yes. But now everything’s changed … I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. I can’t change what I’m doing because I’m not in the dreams myself, not part of them. Only watching. Always watching, from the outside. Something is happening that I can’t stop, and nobody can hear me, or see me, or help me. That’s why I hate to sleep.’
We sit in silence until the singing starts up again; hooting and whistling, the whales roll and splash. They dance for life and freedom and the open seas and homecoming. I plunge deep into myself for words but I come up for air with empty fingers. I am silenced by a kind of shame in what I see at night, and what I feel. And yet I’d have her know it.
‘You hear weeping in your dreams?’ I ask.
She nods.
‘Oh yes. Weeping and pain. Teeth held tight like a steel trap. Violence. Someone being beaten. I can’t tell who. I can’t stop it.’
She turns from the sea, and dares me with her eyes to tell her more.
‘Wounds,’ I whisper, and my breath sucks quickly in.
‘You know,’ she says. ‘How do you know? About the weeping. And the beating.’
‘And sickness. And pain.’
‘What is it, Kalala? What does it mean? Is it the same for you? Do you know what this means?’
I know what Solomona would say, for once I asked him, most quietly. It means we have to pray. He prays for me to be relieved, and made me promise silence, not to trouble our fellows here with these notions. Imagine, after what has happened here, after a boy disappearing, imagine how Luka and Pineki, even Iakopo and Vilipate, who are steadier sorts of bodies, imagine how their hearts would race at this. Remember, he tells me, quietly, firmly, remember the old ways, remember how evil may be expelled. How they may seek to crush wickedness from my chest. Say nothing. Not to anyone. He begs me. But I have tried to pray, tried so often, and it brings no relief. Breath like breeze, as if Solomona listens from the shadows, I tell her my secret thinking.
‘I believe it is the aitu.’
She kneels and leans forward with urgent eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
Mr Reverend does not like talk like this. Heathen ideas, he says. He would tell me now to forget the aitu, and think only of the one, true spirit. How hard I have tried. So I only whisper the word again to Lizzie, and look about me.
‘Spirits.’
She shifts closer.
‘Like the Holy Spirit?’
Have mercy on me, O Lord, according to thy lovingkindness … blot out my transgressions.
‘No, no. These are not good spirits. Spirits of ancestors, family. Spirits that come when something bad has happened.’
She seizes my arm. Hot breath. Cool, damp fingers. I hardly breathe.
‘You mean ghosts? A kind of haunting?’
‘Perhaps. I believe so. Because every night it is the same for me. A confusion of voices, half known, and the shout of strangers too. The fall of despair in my gut. Throbbing pain and a feeling that I must choke, that I can find no air. I feel the weight of chains on my legs, and I think I will never move again.’
Darkness and foul smells. Always I feel the ache of parting. Sometimes when I wake, I drag myself outside, and vomit until my stomach is void of everything and my head is throbbing and light as air. Aitu. The aitu are taking possession of me. I am ghost-sick.
I feel her fingers tighten, and she shakes her head, and stares.
‘Who are they?’ she asks me.
I have told myself a thousand times that aitu cannot exist. Only in my mind. Aitu are heathen things, and should not bother me. Who are they then? What is it that comes for me here? And although I pray, and make the sign of the cross before I sleep, and I never whistle at night – I do nothing, nothing at all that may court these spirits – yet they prevent my sleeping. And Lizzie’s too. I slide my wrist from her hand, remembering the Reverend’s warning, more harshly repeated by the captain to all our gang, on the deck of the Esperanza. These girls are not for you. Make no trouble if you want to come home again. Not this kind of trouble, I think, but still I must take care.
‘You think that is what makes me dream of Albert?’ she says, paired hands pinned between thighs, her prayers upside down. ‘Is it him? His spirit?’
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
I answer cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’
This single, uncertain word stops her, and unstoppers her.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It can’t be. I will tell you why. It’s not my secret. But you must keep it for me.’
I see she needs to tell me. ‘I will.’
‘Albert isn’t dead. So it cannot be his ghost that haunts me. He’s gone from here, Ada says. Escaped. Stowed away on the Esperanza on the day you landed. That’s why there’s no trace of him.’
Yesterday, when I watched them after supper, it seemed to me that the two big sisters had healed the wounds which divided them. This resurrection has been their bandage.
‘In a few months,’ she continues, ‘when the ship returns with our orders, and your payment, and to take you home, why, then we will have word of him at last, we hope. The captain will tell us where he is.’
‘Did Ada see him go?’ I ask, with care.
‘No. Did you?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone?’
‘We have never seen Albert in all our lives.’
Lizzie will not be daunted.
‘But he was clever, you see. And patient. He had waited so long already, and that day he waited longer … until all of us were looking somewhere else. Then he concealed himself, Ada says, in the boat on the beach. She says this has been his plan, for months. It’s possible, isn’t it? Where else can he be?’
Outrigging hope has kept her sister from capsizing. I want this to be true. I want Lizzie to stay afloat too. I like this girl, bold like Sidney, who lives so full of wonder at the world. But my eyes betray me.
‘You think it’s not possible.’
I cannot lie. ‘Certainly, it would not be easy.’
‘But it is possible.’ She wants to right herself.
‘Perhaps. If that is what Ada believes.’
There. My doubt is in the open. I cannot unsay it, so I push at her thinking another way.
‘Why has she kept this secret? Your sister is not cruel. Why has she let your mother believe her son is dead? Your father too?’
And then Lizzie’s spine slackens.
‘I know. I know … sometimes I fear his vanishing has turned her mind. But when I am with her, it makes sense. There’s no certainty, no proof of anything … And if my father ever knew she had hoped to go with him … even that she knew Albert had planned this day for so many months … You promise you will say nothing, Kalala? Not to Solomona. Not even Queenie. W
ill you swear to me? Until we know for certain.’
She need not ask me. I am sorry to have pressed her this far. It is not for me to judge her father. I have no father of my own to stand beside him. Had I a father living, had our family not lost its backbone, what would he have said to our venturing? Would he have sought to stop us? His face was never in my head to bind me to my island, and I have been raised by other men. But mostly women, for we lack men more and more. I know that fear rules many families, sending judgement into hiding, twisting bonds. I try to calm her clutching hands. I promise, ‘hope to die’, and pass my finger across my throat as she requests, and then softly I remind her that we have forgotten the whales.
The sea looks dark and empty. Then, far, far away, we see the waters part; the breaching of a great body grown small with distance. It disappears. A silence falls over us, and our thoughts gather separately, and grow louder in our skulls, until we must release and join them together.
I think of everything I know of this boy. The boy Lizzie tells me is clever and brave and beautiful. The boy who trembles at his father. Who turns his back on great possessions. This island.
‘And if he doesn’t …? If she never hears?’ I ask.
‘Or if she is wrong and now he sends word another way, from another kind of place entirely? Not to Ada, but to me, because I am guilty. Ada blames me, you see. I never spoke up for Albert. I always took my father’s side. She’s right. I never meant harm or harshness but perhaps I caused it. I have become harsh.’
‘What other place do you mean?’ I ask.
‘These spirits you call …’ Her face warps, remembering. Should I not have spoken of them? Mrs Reverend hates to hear of them even more than her husband. She forbade me to talk of aitu ever with Sidney or Becky. I say the word again to Lizzie, louder and clearer than before. A challenge.
‘Aitu.’
‘Yes. Those. Could it be Albert who comes at night? His spirit? I think I feel him here still, I think he has never left, but how can that be and how can I know?’
I shrug. I open my palms. It is not for me to say. She needs proof.
Lizzie looks differently at me now.