The Storm Keeper's Island

by Catherine Doyle

  It was an explosion of chaos and colour, and Fionn hated every inch of it. He wanted to be back in Dublin with his mother, in their cramped flat, listening to their upstairs neighbours pretend they weren’t harbouring a secret pit bull terrier and deciding what to order from the Chinese.

  They passed an old letter box, inscribed with faded Irish: Tír na nÓg.

  The Land of Youth.

  Ironic, thought Fionn. And then he made a mental note to double-check what the word ‘ironic’ actually meant before he said it out loud in front of Tara.

  The gate let out a low whine as he closed it behind them.

  ‘It’s grim, isn’t it?’ Tara didn’t bother to whisper despite the fact they were now standing in what some people might call a ‘garden’, but which seemed to Fionn more like a salad. ‘And inside is just as depressing.’

  Depressing. That word again.

  Fionn did a slow-motion turn. ‘Why would anyone choose to live here?’

  ‘Well, I suppose this is the only place that would have me.’

  Fionn stopped turning. The blood vessels in his cheeks burst open.

  His grandfather was standing at the entrance to his cottage. He was a giant of a thing – tall and narrow with a shiny bald head, a large face and a nose to fit it. It was the same nose Fionn had been cursing in reflections for as long as he could remember. An oversized pair of round, horn-rimmed glasses sat along the tip, making his eyes seem bigger and wider than they really were. His arms and his legs were impossibly long, but still somehow dwarfed in an oversized tweed suit. He looked like he was all dressed up to go somewhere, only he’d been all dressed up for fifty years and now the suit was falling apart on him.

  His grandfather threw his head back, opened his mouth until Fionn could see all his teeth – the greying and the white – and laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed, until Fionn imagined his laughter was sweeping around him in a tornado, the winds of it playing his heart like a fiddle.

  And then Fionn was laughing too. It was awkward and forced, but if he laughed then he wouldn’t have time to think about how this didn’t feel so much like an adventure but a prison, or how his mother had been left behind inside a faceless building in Dublin surrounded by professional-type people wearing expensive jumpers and fancy spectacles. He laughed to keep these thoughts from turning into something sad and ugly that looked and sounded very much like crying.

  Fionn would not cry in front of Tara.

  This was not going to be a crying sort of holiday. Even if it wasn’t really a holiday at all.

  When the laughter sputtered out, his grandfather took one long, lingering look at him. ‘Well then,’ he said, dipping his chin. ‘At last we meet.’

  He stooped underneath the low door frame and beckoned them inside, his finger crooked like the plume of smoke that had led them up the cliff-side.

  Tara charged up the path, tossing an insult over her shoulder. ‘Congrats, Fionny. You’ve finally found someone as weird as you.’

  ‘Watch out for that bee!’ The weight on Fionn’s heart shifted as Tara yelped and danced her way into the cottage.

  Fionn shut the door and nearly toppled into a coat-rack, where hats and umbrellas hung like props, all covered in a thick layer of dust.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, staring wide-eyed at the shelves that stretched floor-to-ceiling around the small sitting room, continuing into the kitchen, which was visible through a wooden archway.

  Every inch of space in the already cramped cottage belonged to a shelf, and all the shelves were filled with candles.

  Each one was labelled in swirling calligraphy. Autumn Showers and Summer Rain huddled between Foggy Easter and White Christmas, while others like Unexpected Tornado at Josie’s 12th Birthday Party or Sean McCauley’s Runaway Kite were oddly specific. There were labels whittled right down to the briefest window of time, like Flaming Sunrise, February 1997 or Tangerine Twilight, August 2009, and some were vague Irish words like Suaimhneas, which meant ‘Peace’, or Saoirse, which meant ‘Freedom’.

  One candle simply read Fadó Fadó – ‘Long, long ago’. That could be anything. It could mean the Ice Age, or the Bronze Age, or that time in Ireland when all the monks were doodling manuscripts and hiding in big round towers for some reason Fionn couldn’t remember.

  Fionn’s attention was drawn to Angry Skies Over Aphort Beach, a candle that looked as if it had been carved from a raging storm. It was dark grey around the base, the clouds gathering in climbing swirls, until the wax bubbled around the edges, fading into a deep violet. A streak of silver lightning zigzagged through the middle, and the longer Fionn stared at it, the more it seemed like it might leap off the shelf and crackle in the air around him.

  ‘You’ll be having tea then,’ said his grandfather. It wasn’t a question but it brought relief to Fionn. Some things were the same everywhere in Ireland.

  Tara retreated to a corner of the sitting room, searching for a phone charger in her bag, the way a dying man would scour the desert for water.

  Fionn ducked under a beam and wandered into the hallway, where the house tapered off into three more rooms and the walls seemed to bend inward, as though they wanted to tell him a secret. There were candles here too. Some were tiny – the size of his baby finger. Some were rainbow-coloured, and others had grass growing out of them. There were oddly shaped ones too – like raindrops and umbrellas and little moons pocked with craters. There were clouds so round and fluffy Fionn had to poke them to make sure they were made of wax and not vapour.

  Back in the sitting room, a single candle was blazing above the mantelpiece. It was the largest in the cottage – a big waxen slab sitting snugly in a thick glass trough, as deep as Fionn’s misery. It was pale grey, but in the centre, around the wick, the wax was marbled with streaks of blue – turquoise and sapphire and aquamarine. There were lines of sky blue that bled into sea blue and even, Fionn couldn’t help but notice, shades of the colour of his school uniform – puke navy.

  It was the only source of light now that the sun was dipping somewhere behind the tangle of trees outside. Fionn couldn’t place the scent of it, but it tickled something in him.

  It reminded him of sea air, but it didn’t sting his nostrils in the same way. There were other things too. Water? No. Not just water. Fionn clenched his eyes shut. He felt as though the answer was buried somewhere in his bones, and if he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough he might be able to drag it up from the depths of him and wrestle it from the tip of his tongue.

  Rainwater. Yes. But from a storm – something that whirls and rages and slams itself into windowpanes. There was the sea again – right in the heart of it, but it was choppy this time, like froth on a restless wave or –

  ‘Earth to Fionn!’ Tara clapped her hands in front of Fionn’s face and he startled, jumping backwards and knocking a candle from its perch by the head of the armchair. The aroma evaporated at once and Fionn found himself wondering if he had hallucinated it.

  Through the archway, his grandfather was filling mugs with tea. ‘Didn’t your sister tell you I was a candle maker?’

  Fionn glared accusingly at Tara.

  ‘I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk about that stuff outside of Arranmore,’ she said dismissively. ‘And honestly, I don’t think he’ll care that much about the candles. No offence.’

  Fionn’s grandfather reacted like Tara had just thrown a dart at him, his left eye twitching as he watched her flounce off down the hallway in search of a working socket.

  ‘She doesn’t mean to be so terrible,’ said Fionn. ‘Mam says she’ll grow out of it. But it might take a while. She’s only just grown into it.’

  His grandfather clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry, Fionn. I am well used to the frigid wind of teenage apathy.’

  ‘Don’t take it too personally. She’s just never cared much about candles.’ Fionn didn’t finish his thought, which was that he didn’t care about them either, because like goldfish, and math
s and his sister, candles didn’t do anything of note. And also, he wasn’t over a hundred years old, or searching for a last-minute Christmas gift for someone he had completely forgotten about.

  ‘And anyway, I thought you worked on the lifeboats,’ Fionn remembered. This was one of the few things he knew about his grandfather – that like all Boyle men (except for one), Malachy Boyle loved the sea and the sea loved him, that he grew up around the lifeboats and then went to work on them when he turned eighteen. ‘Like Dad did when …’

  When he was alive, he wanted to say, but the words stuck in his throat. There was something about being in the place where his dad died that made the sadness of it seem fresher to Fionn.

  ‘I used to but I prefer to stay indoors now. I am not as young as I once was.’ His grandfather had returned to the mugs, dipping and discarding the tea bags in the sink, before adding a splash of milk to each and handing one to Fionn. ‘You look a wee bit green, lad. Or are you just very patriotic?’

  Fionn followed him into the sitting room. ‘The boat ride here was really choppy. Lots of people were feeling sick.’

  His grandfather gave him a knowing look as they sank into opposite chairs.

  ‘OK … maybe I’m a little … scared of the sea,’ Fionn conceded. He took a too hot sip and nearly spat it back out. ‘I don’t like the waves. Any of it, really.’

  His grandfather continued to watch him, his head cocked to one side. The light from the candle flickered along his skin, casting shadows that crawled across the side of his face.

  ‘Does that make me a bad Boyle?’

  His grandfather hmm’d under his breath, his gaze passing over Fionn and settling on the wall behind him, where a photograph of Fionn’s grandmother smiled down at them. ‘In my experience, there is no fear – however small – to be ashamed of. Your grandmother suffered very acutely from anatidaephobia, did you know that?’

  The moment Fionn heard the word, it flittered away from him like a butterfly. ‘What’s … that?’

  His grandfather steepled his hands in front of his lips. ‘She was afraid of being watched by a duck.’

  Fionn stared at his grandfather. ‘What?’

  ‘Anatidaephobia,’ his grandfather repeated. ‘The fear that, somewhere in the world, a duck is watching you.’

  ‘… What?’ Fionn said again.

  ‘Crippling, crippling thing.’ His grandfather took a noisy sip of tea that seemed to go on and on. ‘It did her in in the end.’

  ‘Mam says she died of a broken heart.’

  His grandfather stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘No. It was the duck, Fionn. I’m almost sure of it.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  His grandfather’s composure flickered, his lips giving way to a grin. He chuckled, and Fionn found himself joining in, relief making the laughter spring out of him a little too loudly.

  His grandfather tapped the side of his mug. ‘Now that and only that is an absurd fear.’

  Fionn sank into his chair, privately relieved that he wasn’t afraid of ducks.

  ‘You’d best get used to the sea though, lad. It’s everywhere up here.’

  Fionn’s smile was faint. ‘I guess that’s the thing about islands, isn’t it?’

  ‘That, and they’re often packed with extraordinarily handsome old men.’

  The silence settled around them, and for a while there was nothing but the dull roar of the ocean and the furious tap-tapping of Tara’s phone as she desperately tried to fashion a social life out of a half-dead island. Fionn’s grandfather watched him in the waning light. He was drumming his fingers along the buttons of his shirt, tapping his own silent rhythm.

  ‘So,’ he said after a while. ‘How are things back in Dublin, Fionn?’

  ‘Not very good. But I suppose you probably know that since Mam’s sent us here …’ Fionn’s gaze was resting on the hearth of the fireplace. Something was beginning to rumble in the back of his mind. ‘She was too tired …’ He trailed off, unwilling to say the rest. She was too tired to be our mam.

  It didn’t seem fair to say it, even if it was the truth and they both knew it. Their mother was just taking a holiday. It was a strange sort of thing, Fionn thought, to take a holiday not from a place, but from people. But it was going to make her better. She was not the shadow behind her eyes.

  His grandfather was still drumming his fingers. ‘I’m sorry, lad. I know you don’t have a choice about being here. You don’t have a choice about any of it …’

  Fionn couldn’t tear his gaze away from the fireplace. There was a thought percolating somewhere in the back of his mind, and it was an important one, drip-dripping out.

  The armchair creaked as his grandfather leaned forward, his elbows resting on top of his knees. ‘But the island is a place like no other, Fionn. You’ll come to see how special it is …’

  Fionn was staring so hard, he was forgetting to blink.

  The fireplace was empty.

  There was no soot, no metal grate, or even a fireguard. The cottage was cool, not bathed in the warm afterglow of a fire.

  Fionn looked up at his grandfather. ‘Grandad, if there’s no fire in the grate, where was the smoke coming from before?’

  His grandfather smiled. It was an odd kind of smile that lifted the hairs on the back of Fionn’s neck. The candle flickered in the sides of his vision, the flame seeming to grow taller and narrower in response to his answer.

  ‘Where did the smoke come from?’ he said again.

  His grandfather laughed, but this time it was a dry, dusty sound. Like it came from somewhere else, not deep in his belly, like before. He rose from his chair, unfolding his long limbs, and wandered back to the kitchen, where half-peeled carrots suddenly demanded his attention.

  Fionn glanced again at the empty grate, uncertainty swimming inside him like a fish.

  Chapter Three

  THE BEASLEY BOY

  ‘Bartley Beasley just stepped off the ferry,’ Tara announced the following morning, when Fionn was shovelling porridge into his mouth. His hair was stuck to his forehead and his eyes were still full of sleep. He had tossed and turned all night, haunted by the faraway sounds of waves crashing against the cliffs. In his dreams, he imagined watery fingers creeping up over the headland and dragging him down into a bottomless ocean.

  ‘Ah, Bartley Beasley …’ said their grandfather, who was chopping a week-old banana into his porridge. ‘How could I forget such unnecessary alliteration?’

  Tara stopped texting long enough to glare at him.

  He chuckled as he ate a banana slice off the end of his knife. ‘Are there any more boisterous Beasleys coming to the island this summer?’

  ‘I heard they’re very bewitching,’ said Fionn.

  His grandfather smirked. ‘How beguiling.’

  ‘If you must know, Bartley has a younger sister,’ said Tara very seriously. ‘It’s her first time visiting Arranmore, so I said I’d help show her around.’

  ‘Will she be barefoot?’ asked Fionn.

  His grandfather sipped his tea, peering at Tara over the rim of his mug. ‘Or perhaps … barnacled?’

  Fionn snorted.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tara, her eyes narrowing in delayed understanding. ‘You’re so funny. Ha ha ha. Well, I hate to disappoint you but her name is Shelby, so you two can stop acting like boneheads.’ She rolled her eyes and got up from the table, whipping her plait over her shoulder and stomping back to their bedroom, muttering things about prejudice and immaturity.

  Fionn’s grandfather had the good sense to look sorry. At least until Tara disappeared, and then he turned to Fionn, and said, ‘Was that very belligerent of us?’

  ‘We’re blameless,’ said Fionn, shaking his head.

  Usually, Fionn knew better than to insult the great Bartley Beasley, the boy Tara was not-so-secretly in love with. The boy who came to Arranmore last summer and gave her a blue-thread bracelet that she never took off. Even to shower. Which was obviously gross. Bartley lived in a b
ig glass mansion in Bray, wore deck shoes instead of trainers, and at fourteen, was already training for the Irish Olympic Swim Team. He had overly gelled hair that swooped upwards in a perfect swirl, so people could be reminded of his richness at all times.

  Bartley Beasley was also the first boy Tara had ever kissed. Fionn wished he could un-know this information, but he had happened upon it accidentally, when he was eavesdropping on one of her phone calls six months ago.

  For these reasons, Fionn considered Bartley to be the worst person of all time. This did not, however, mean he wasn’t insulted when Tara decided to join Bartley and his sister an hour later, without inviting him to come along.

  ‘We have plans, Fionny. We’re going on a secret adventure.’

  ‘I like adventures!’ Fionn tried not to sound desperate.

  Tara merely looked at him, her freshly glossed lips sliding into a frown, her too-yellow jumper making her look like a lemon.

  ‘This is different. And I don’t have time to explain everything right now.’

  Fionn couldn’t bring himself to beg. He couldn’t stand the thought of Tara knowing how badly he wanted it.

  ‘Go and hang out with Grandad.’ She gestured towards the back garden where their grandfather was bent over his workbench, melting wax chippings for new candles. ‘Since you find him so funny.’

  And then she left him alone, surrounded by candles that grouped together in silent judgement, as if to say, See? Even we have friends. Fionn considered this strange, new loneliness and wondered whether it was worse than being back in the flat in Dublin, watching his mother watch television, without really watching it at all.

  He decided that it was.

  So he ran outside, his socks sinking into the overgrown grass, and watched his sister wind her way down the headland, towards adventure. He thought about calling out to her, or putting his shoes on and running after her, but in the end, he just stood there, listening to the seagulls.

  He ignored the rumbling inside him, the feeling that his bones were stretching through his skin, trying to get to the sea.