Saskia's Journey

by Theresa Breslin

  There was a silence for about half a minute and then Alessandra said, ‘I don’t use the attic at all now. I’ve a bit of arthritis and it stops me going up and down stairs a lot. And ever since the roof was damaged I’m not sure how safe the floor is. Probably best to stay out of the attic at the moment, although I know that you used to like to play there.’

  Saskia eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘I did?’

  ‘You don’t remember.’ Her aunt’s voice sounded sad.

  Saskia shook her head. ‘Not at all.’ And then, hesitating, said, ‘Yet something is familiar.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. You came in the summer when you were small. We walked on the beach together every day.’

  ‘How strange,’ said Saskia. ‘I don’t remember that. Except . . . are there twenty outside steps to the top floor?’

  ‘Why yes!’ Alessandra’s face seemed to show genuine delight. ‘You used to count them carefully each time you went up there.’

  ‘Really?’ Saskia shook her head, puzzled. ‘I wonder why I have no memory of being here?’

  ‘Your parents told me that you took very ill the winter after your last visit here. It was when you were still quite young. Perhaps that made you forget.’

  ‘Perhaps . . .’ Saskia thought slowly. She remembered being ill: not the actual illness, but the fact that she had been very, very sick. There was whispering; the doctor, a nurse, nurses that came, and then . . . the arguing. Her parents shouting at each other constantly, and the ceaseless bickering. As she grew older Saskia had pushed all memories of that time away, connecting their arguing with her illness – becoming convinced that her being sick had caused her parents so much stress that they had fallen out and never become friends again. She was more mature now, and knew that if parents argued it was not a child’s fault. Almost half of her friends had parents who were divorced or had difficulties in their marriages, so she felt less personal guilt about it. Her brain, her intellect, told her that her parents’ differences were their problem, but her senses tried to tell her something else. Locked in her head was a feeling that somehow she had soured her mother and father’s love for each other. Logic said that her instinct lied, but it was this instinct that controlled her emotions and her responses. Even now Saskia’s mind swerved away from considering the subject. She looked up at her great-aunt.

  ‘Truly I don’t remember, but now that I’m here it may come back to me.’

  Alessandra’s face had returned to its former look of reserve. She inclined her head a little. ‘We’ll talk more in the morning. Now, I think you should rest.’

  Saskia was so exhausted she barely had the energy to change into her nightclothes. As she fell upon the bed her last waking thought was, why did she have no memories of her time spent in this particular house?

  That night Saskia did remember.

  And as Saskia remembered, she dreamed. Of strange sights and sounds, and of the days on the beach below the house. Gathering seashells and other treasures along the shoreline, bringing them into her great-aunt’s house, sorting out her collections, washing and polishing her ‘gemstones’.

  Familiar now are those sensations. Sand between her fingers and under her feet, bare feet in open sandals. She looks down at her ten baby toes with their pink half-moon nails curled in her little leather sandals. Squirming and pressing down with her heels makes dry sand wedge up between her toes and spill over her feet. The warm gritty granules run out as she walks on towards the water. Smooth driftwood sculpted by the sea is in her hands. Striated stone by the breakwater scrapes her fingers as she pulls away periwinkles and drops them into her bucket. There are heaps of shells at the far end of the beach, cockles and clams and mussels piled near some huge rocks. They are cool, these pale shells resting in the shadow of the cliff overhang. She is choosy and selects with care, one for its colour, another for its shape, smooth or ridged for difference: her collection will have diversity. At the foot of the tallest rock she finds a real treasure – it is a giant whelk, Alessandra tells her, with a great ascending spiral, and below this, a long fluted opening running down one side. Saskia grasps it tightly. It is almost four times the size of her hand, her small fingers cannot curl completely around it, but she holds it pressed into her soft palm. Then she brings it close to her face to study the single caramel-coloured conical whorl, the everdiminishing circular stairway leading to a dizzyingly minute point. This shape, beyond her defining, beyond her imagining, intoxicates her with its intricacies and its secret places. Who lives within? Just around the curve where she cannot see? In her mind she creates a miniature world inhabited by an infinite variety of beings, all at her command. She breathes on the pink shadowed entrance. Today she will be a kindly giant, her breath soft and warm so as not to disturb the tiny inhabitants.

  Then Alessandra stands in Saskia’s dream. Between the child Saskia and the shadowed rocks. Alessandra holds out her hand. ‘The sea is more magical than you or I can believe. There are places in the deep which will always be unknown.’

  Salt water is on Saskia’s face, she can taste it on her tongue, but it is not sea spray.

  Why is she crying?

  It had been the year of the great gales. There had been a storm. A violent reckless storm of no purpose. In the morning they had watched the cauldron sea from the front windows, and then, in the afternoon, had stood in the lee of the sheltering wall of the house. Out on the horizon the clouds had banked high with thunderous rain and the wind had tossed the sea birds and driven them against the cliffs. The rain had come, lancing horizontal, stinging face and hands. Saskia’s mother, headscarf tightly knotted under her chin, had moaned about the downpour. Her father had quickly become bored. Both parents had complained of the wet and cold and gone indoors. Saskia had pleaded to stay outside, and Alessandra had gathered Saskia inside her own great Inverness cape and together they had ventured up onto the road. Leaning into the wind they had walked to where they could see the rooftops of Fhindhaven. Great pounding waves thundered up through the wynds between the old fisher cottages. Below them water had slapped so high and with such force against the rock face that it turned over on itself before crashing back down into the sea. Saskia, screaming in fear and excitement, had buried her face in her great-aunt’s skirt. Alessandra had held her tightly.

  ‘Nae to be frichtened, little quine. Alessandra’s here. Nae to be frichtened.’

  That night part of the roof of her great-aunt’s house had blown away, the wind ripping slates off like cascading dominoes, smashing them against the rocks, hurling them into the ocean below.

  In front of her now Saskia saw the scene the morning after the storm:

  Herself, excited at having been close to danger and triumphant that she had emerged unscathed, charging about the garden among the debris. Smashed tiles, broken plant pots, uprooted bushes were strewn in chaos. Her father had cut his wrist trying to clear up, and now, disturbed and angry, was shouting down at Alessandra from the rooftop where he was attempting to nail back the torn felt.

  ‘I told you last time we were here to get this roof seen to!’

  Her great-aunt, quiet in the face of his fury, hands clasped together in front of her, said nothing.

  Her mother, glancing anxiously from one to the other, watched Alessandra deal with her husband’s rage.

  Saskia’s father descended the ladder, holding his wrist where he had ripped the skin, flung the old piece of felt from him, and yelled, ‘You will have to fix this now, woman!’

  Alessandra waited a moment, said three words. ‘I will not.’

  Later Saskia heard her father say to her mother, ‘Alessandra is your typical perverse female. As soon as I told her that the house roof needed fixing she determined that she wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘You didn’t tell her that it needed fixing.’ Saskia’s mother spoke carefully. ‘You told her to fix it.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘All the difference in the world.’

  They had n
ever again been invited to spend holidays at Cliff House.

  The sea also remembers . . .

  Confirming the spring equinox the sun ascends into the sign of Aries and the coastal waters warm to receive the new hatching. The herring come through the Minch, and on, flowing past the Orkney and Shetland Islands. In many thousands cod begin to gather, lying in by the coast of North America and Iceland. Halibut and sole congregate off south Greenland, haddock and plaice by the heel of Norway. From the rim of the Arctic Circle, extending in a vast widening sweep, the waters of the sea breathe new life, and in the depths of the oceans the paths of ancient glacial rivers ribbon out, pulling their migrants home.

  Something had happened.

  Saskia rolled over in bed and struggled out of her dream. A slurring sound on the floorboards above and then a flittering noise. Caught between falling asleep again and awakening, she again heard the soft movement almost directly above her head.

  Unsure of the location of the bedside lamp, Saskia reached for her torch in the rucksack lying beside the bed and sat up, more curious than frightened. The beam of the torch showed pale amber. Saskia shook it in irritation; she had forgotten to buy batteries. The light wavered, but casting around her showed that there was nothing in the bedroom except herself. Her great-aunt had told her that the house was never still. Window frames rattled, floorboards creaked, and there were any amount of other sounds caused by the proximity of the cliff and how it integrated with the structure of the house. Was the noise she heard of human origin? The only other person in the house was Alessandra, but her great-aunt had said that she did not go up to the second floor, and Saskia had seen her enter her room on the ground floor when they had both gone to bed.

  Saskia waited. The soft noise came again like a footfall in snow.

  These were not normal night-time sounds, Saskia decided, nor the random groaning of an old house. And quickly, before the thought had a chance to grow, she rejected the idea of a ghost. It was more like an animal of some sort. She shivered: hopefully not rats. Saskia listened. Outside was the shush of the water, and then, more quietly than before, the flittering sound. It definitely came from the floor above. Saskia got up, and in doing so banged her knee on the edge of the bed and let out a cry, and then knew for sure that what had made the noise was of this world because it stopped immediately. Again Saskia waited. In the house was utter silence.

  Saskia’s first few months of her gap year backpacking in Nepal had accustomed her to being in the dark, or in unusual places. Silences did not intimidate her and her scientific brain refused to accommodate the supernatural. It was a bird, she decided, one of the many sea birds she had seen on the drive north. Spring was approaching, they’d be building nests on the cliff, one of them must be in the upper room. The whole back wall of the house was embedded into and supported by the cliff, and her bedroom was situated at the rear of the house. She could probably see the nest from her window. With the dim glow of her torch to show her the way she crossed the room and lifted aside the curtain just a little. The cliff face loomed close, etched black and dark grey by a pale moon. Saskia looked down. The tide was in. A strange flickering light reflected from the water below her.

  Quietly Saskia clicked off her torch and walked forward. She let the curtain fall behind her so that she stood in the dark space between it and the window. The light on the water undulated as the waves moved. Saskia raised her eyes to look out to sea. The moon was shadowed but towards the horizon the sky in the northern hemisphere glowed. She knew that during summer so far north the sky never got properly dark, that the sun’s orbit circled low, skirting the earth’s perimeter throughout the night. But it was too early in the year for that. And this light that she could see was not constant, such as dawn light might be. It pulsated with a restlessness that did not seem in keeping with anything man-made.

  Saskia took another step closer to the window glass, when suddenly, spanning the whole arc of her vision, a rippling cascading sheet of burnished colours appeared silently across the dark sky. What rising planet could trail such streams of rainbowed vapour? It came to Saskia slowly that what she was seeing must be the aurora borealis. Merging, dividing, re-merging, a veil of incandescent colour trembled in the heavens, while, with languid graceful energy, shimmering lucent violets and yellows and mauves flowed through the sky, twisting among the stars.

  Entranced, Saskia kneeled down on the floor under the window and gazed at the great chromatic columns, forming and re-forming, dissolving shifting draperies of light. She watched until she grew quite cold, and dawn came around four a.m. And as she watched she forgot everything else: her strange dreams during the earlier part of the night, her fears and unhappiness at home, her vague uneasiness about her memories of this house.

  Forgot, that is, until the next morning when she joined her great-aunt in the kitchen and mentioned that she had seen the aurora borealis.

  ‘Aaah . . .’ said Alessandra. ‘The northern lights.’ She paused in setting out breakfast things. ‘They are very beautiful.’ She opened a cupboard and took down boxes of cereal. ‘They’re sometimes called the “Heavenly Dancers”, and when you watch how they move, you understand why. It’s years since I saw them.’

  Saskia seized the moment. ‘So you weren’t up and about last night?’

  Upon Alessandra’s face came a quick shaded look. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘There was a noise . . . well, I thought I heard a noise . . . In the attic.’

  ‘I may have visited the toilet,’ said Alessandra awkwardly. ‘Sometimes I go in the night, but I don’t always remember if I did or not.’ She laid breakfast dishes on the kitchen table with careful movements, two brown bowls, two spoons, two mugs.

  There was silence in the kitchen. Saskia looked up. Alessandra had stopped in the middle of her task. Her hands hovered. She saw that Saskia had noticed and quickly she clasped them together. After a moment she smiled at Saskia. ‘A bird may be trapped inside the roof. I’m afraid that I’ve not kept the house in as good repair as I should have. I’ll go up to the top floor and . . . make sure that it is secure. Then you can go and explore. You probably want to see if any of your things are still there?’

  ‘My things?’

  ‘It’s where you used to keep your treasures,’ said Alessandra. She poured tea for both of them and then sat down opposite Saskia.

  Her ‘treasures’. Saskia’s mind lingered on the word. It had been in her head recently. In a dream. Last night in her dream. When she was small she had collected things on the beach. She had called them her treasures.

  ‘Last night I had a dream about us,’ said Saskia, ‘you and me, being on the beach together. I was quite young and we were picking up things and putting them in my bucket.’

  ‘Yes, we did that many times. You had a great hoard of objects that you collected.’

  ‘How often did I visit this house?’

  ‘Every year, from when you were a toddler until you were about six or seven.’

  ‘Why don’t I remember anything at all?’ asked Saskia.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alessandra. Her eyes met Saskia’s and slid away. ‘There is no reason I can think of. Perhaps your dream of last night is you beginning to recall your childhood memories.’

  ‘It was so specific,’ said Saskia. ‘I could hear the gulls, smell the sea. And then, in another part of my dream, there was a great gale and you and I were watching the sea on the clifftop above the village. I was terribly pleased because my parents had gone back into the house and I thought I was very brave.’

  For an instant Saskia saw something come alive in her great-aunt’s eyes.

  ‘I too recall that day very well,’ said Alessandra.

  ‘You spoke in a different language,’ said Saskia, ‘telling me not to be scared. You called me a strange name, it sounded like “kwine”.’

  ‘Quine,’ said her great-aunt. ‘It’s Doric, the language of the Northeast. “Quine” is like “queen”, but here it means girl, li
ttle girl, young woman. It was a tremendous hurricane as I recall, out of season, unexpected, and I was excited so I would lapse into the language of my youth. I don’t speak it now . . . at least very little.’

  Saskia frowned and reeled back in her mind the images from last night’s dream. ‘For some reason my father was very angry with you on the morning after the gale. Part of the roof had blown off and he was shouting at you.’

  ‘Yes, he was very annoyed about the state of the roof,’ said Alessandra. ‘He always did get angry when people did not do as he wished.’

  ‘Why did I not remember such an exciting event before now?’

  ‘There are reasons why we forget or choose to forget,’ said Alessandra. ‘Your memories of this house will come back to you in time.’

  ‘You can’t “choose” to forget,’ said Saskia. ‘By definition, that is impossible.’

  ‘I’d forgotten how logically the young argue.’ Alessandra spoke carefully. ‘I suppose what I mean is that your mind has the ability to block out certain things. There are different reasons why people forget. It may be tied with another more unpleasant circumstance, or linked to something that you are avoiding dealing with.’

  ‘Like you avoided dealing with the roof?’ Saskia put her hand to her mouth. The words had come out before she realized how rude they sounded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be so rude.’

  There was a tiny pause, then Alessandra gave a brief smile. ‘I don’t think you rude, Saskia. Perhaps I was “being perverse”. That’s what your father told me at the time. He said I was being perverse.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘No . . . Well yes, I suppose I was. I just didn’t like his manner. I’ve had to live a hard frugal life to keep this house, and I resented his way of advising me.’

  ‘I see it now,’ Saskia spoke slowly. ‘He was ordering you about. But then, he says that you do need to be told what to do, especially now that you are—’ Saskia floundered in embarrassment.