The Covenant
I remember the strangeness of our first weeks on the island but I don’t know how to explain it or whether that strangeness accounted for what happened later on. The bungalow was part of it. It had peeling white window frames, a mustard bathroom suite, a gas stove in the kitchen, and in the hall a plastic runner yellow with age. For the months that we lived there, our cupboards and tables and chairs were crowded into the wide sunny front room like miscellanea in a junk shop, and these things reminded us, along with the locked room at the end of the corridor, that the bungalow did not belong to us nor we to it. But we read about Abraham, about how he was obedient, about the covenant God made with him:
‘Hear me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin! The Lord is with you when you are with him, and if you seek him he will let Himself be found by you; but if you abandon him, he will abandon you.’ Then Moses came and related to the people all the words of the true God, and all the judicial decisions and all the people answered with one voice and said: ‘All the words that the true God has spoken we are willing to do.’ So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people and said: ‘Here is the blood of the covenant that the true God has concluded with you as respects all these words.’
‘The covenant applies to us too,’ my father said. ‘If we are obedient we will be blessed. But we have to give God our best.’
I could see the sense of that, but wondered how we would know God was blessing us. I supposed it would be when my father found work and we found a house.
My father said: ‘We were chosen to come here, the need is great.’
But that I was not so sure of – because hadn’t we also chosen? Hadn’t our need been great?
The island may have been virgin territory as far as our god was concerned but others had got there before Him: the bungalow was full of idols. There was an etiolated plaster Virgin, two wooden crucifixes and a picture of a bedraggled and remarkably tranquil Christ, looking heavenwards, opening his tunic with a delicately curved finger to reveal, in the midst of his deathly-white chest, a bleeding heart ringed with thorns. We discovered the last on the second evening when we turned on the lights in the sitting room. The overhead bulb was dim but in the corner the heart glowed blood red. Coupled with the pathetic, almost coquettish face above, it was both sickly and horrifying. Even my father seemed shocked. Then he laughed, went to the picture, turned it over and pulled out the plug. The heart glowed for a second, then faded; the picture was just a picture again. In relief my mother laughed at herself, but her face was flushed.
There were hundreds of gods in this place, my father said; the island was full of them, gods of the streams and the hills and the trees. We took the bleeding Christ and the other idols to a tin shed that stood at the side of the bungalow beneath the pine trees. He caught my eye as we closed the door on Him and I felt obscurely guilty, as if we were shutting a child in a room and turning out the light.
The first time we went into the town we left Elijah in the kitchen. It was unusual for us to leave him behind and perhaps what happened on that occasion was because we should not have done. It was a breezy day in early April, the country rolling and green and spattered with gorse. There were bungalows along the road, some new houses and one or two old cottages.
‘People don’t have gardens here, they have fields,’ I said. It was true; there were small, mown fields attached to the houses with fences around them, as if there was too much space to be accounted for.
‘Plenty of land, you see,’ my father said.
Halfway there my father stopped to get petrol and when he went to pay he took the small pocket bible we kept in the glove compartment; we saw him open it while he was talking to the garage attendant. The attendant shook his head slightly and turned away as my father spoke. We saw the affable nod my father gave, his hand raised in farewell. He swung into the car as if he had just found a winning lottery ticket.
‘Petrol in!’ he said. ‘On we go.’ Not long after that he began to sing, and we joined him, honking the horn at the chorus.
After another ten minutes the town appeared, shimmering on the far side of an estuary, two steeples pricking sun-clotted clouds. On closer inspection it turned out to be brown and shabby, and with an uncomfortable familiarity like the smell of boiled beef and cabbage in dark passageways. It was a peculiar combination; seafront and wild west, the buildings square, blockish, painted peach, brown, turquoise, dark green, pale blue, purple, burnt orange; the signs on them read McCalls’s Medicine Hall, Centenary Stores, Campbell’s Trading, Joe’s Whisky Bar. I had never seen such ugly buildings nor such odd ones. In the window of a tobacconist’s a raffle was advertised; in the newsagent’s electrical goods were displayed; at a greengrocer’s a cage of chickens squawked just inside the door. Was this what living near the sea did, I wondered: make everything strange and wild and unplaceable?
My father bought a parking ticket from the newsagent’s and we parked on the quay. I had never been to a town on a quay, nor seen a railway on one either, and I had certainly never seen all three together. Beneath iron sleepers the sea breathed in and out. Shielding my eyes with my hand I followed the land as far as I could. At the vanishing point, a finger of rock beckoned. It looked like the heel of a shoe, but my father said it was called the Head. I could just about make out a dark forest there.
My father said he was going to get some money from the bank.
‘Why don’t you start here?’ He gestured at the quay and thrust the pocket bible at my mother, who blinked, then said: ‘Right.’
She and I stood on the quay. A woman with a bag walked by and my mother said: ‘Good morning. Could I share a verse with you from the bible? It has such an inspiring message.’
The woman didn’t stop walking, though she did turn her head. My mother looked around. We approached a man with a stick who waved us away with a scowl. ‘Go ’way with ya!’ he said, and spat on the ground. He seemed to think we were someone else.
My mother laughed. She said: ‘Let’s try up here.’
We walked towards the boats. Their masts towered into louring clouds that rolled away over the glittering water. We walked to the edge of the quay and my mother held onto my jumper, though I asked her not to. The rusty boats stank, their bellies rising and falling with the lazy swell. The hulls were deep throated and hollow, the boards sodden, teeming with lobster pots, buckets and slime-streaked slabs. On board men were killing eels. Their hands were covered in blood and appeared swollen. I watched the bulging fingers straighten the eels, saw the flash of the knife, the skirmish, then the sudden stillness. Heads went below, guts to the side. The split eels, suddenly motionless, showed pink as babies’ gums. There was a perfection to the movement; one eel replaced another, which was itself split in two, different yet the same; the board cleared, the board bloody; the eel one, the eel two. When the men and the eels didn’t change positions at all, the action seemed to replay itself. When they did, when an eel was awkward or the men raised their hands higher, the action seemed infinite.
I felt dazed, my thoughts heavy and slow. I turned to my mother – and that is when I saw the group of children watching from the quayside. They were my own age, twelve perhaps or thirteen, three girls and a boy. One of the girls had pale skin and black hair, and she was watching me, not my mother nor the fishermen. I asked my mother again, in a low voice, not to hold onto my jumper, but she wasn’t listening. She hailed one of the fishermen.
‘Hello! Could we share a verse with you from the bible?’ The man flicked a glance at us but didn’t answer. My mother repeated her question. She looked round to see if there was an easier way to communicate and decided there was not. ‘Did you know,’ she called, ‘that Jesus died for you?’
From the corner of my eye I could see the girl with black hair whispering to another. They weren’t smiling but there was a light in their faces, an avidity, as if they were pleased with themselves. As if they had found something good.
The fisherman said: ‘Sorry,
lady.’
My mother called back: ‘Couldn’t I share this passage with you?’ She beamed as she held the bible aloft. One of the men shook his head very slightly. ‘Well, have a good day,’ she called. They didn’t reply.
As we walked away from the boats she was flushed and still smiling, though the smile was a little fixed. She said: ‘Would you like an ice cream?’
I glanced at the children. ‘Won’t he mind?’ I said, meaning my father.
‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ she said. Her eyes were very bright. It was unlike her.
We passed right by the children and went into a peppermint-green building with darker green squares on the end of it called Sheila’s.
My mother seemed happier. She said: ‘What do you fancy, my love?’ She looked at me. ‘Madeline?’
The door had tinkled. A surge of blood passed through me, first hot, then cold. The children had followed us. They were sitting at a table by the door.
I stared hard at the ice creams. ‘Vanilla,’ I said.
My mother said: ‘Don’t you want something else?’
‘No.’
She looked at me in surprise, as if I had hurt her.
‘Thank you,’ I said in a low voice.
She said: ‘One strawberry and one vanilla, please.’
In the reflection of the ice-cream cabinet I could see the girl with black hair, her gaze fixed on me. Her eyes were blue and her skin was pale. She was pretty, and she was smiling as if I was amusing or a novelty of some kind. My chest felt tight.
My mother handed the cornet to me and I immediately became aware of the way I held it. ‘Thank you’ suddenly seemed a foolish thing to say. I tried to think of some other word but suddenly all words seemed foolish. My mother was about to sit at a table when I said: ‘Let’s go outside.’
I crossed the road without waiting for her and stood by the car. I felt sick, as if I had run a long way. When she reached me my mother said: ‘Don’t ever cross the road without waiting for me again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I still could not bring myself to begin the ice cream.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
We got back into the car. I turned and looked out of the window. The children had come out of the shop. They didn’t have ice creams. They had gone in just to watch me, as if I was some weird animal. When they looked around for me, I ducked down in the back seat. I wished Elijah was there. No one ever laughed at him.
I listened to my mother eat her ice cream. Then she turned around and said: ‘Give it to me,’ and I handed her mine.
We heard a shout and there was my father striding along the quay. His jacket was slung over his shoulder and he was whistling loudly. I saw the children become still when they saw him. He swung himself into the front seat and said: ‘Ice creams.’
My mother nodded.
‘No money,’ he said. ‘The bank’s on strike.’
My mother stopped eating. ‘On strike?’
‘Aye, we’ll have to make do with the cash we brought over.’ His eyes were shining. He didn’t seem to think it was bad news at all.
My mother looked straight ahead. She said: ‘Did you see any work advertised?’
‘No.’
She turned to him.
‘It’ll work out, don’t worry. Did you have any good discussions?’
‘No,’ my mother said, in a deeper voice, flatter, weary, with no hint of pretence. She would usually have lied to him.
‘Well, you tried, that’s the main thing,’ he said. With his hand along the back of her seat, he began to reverse.
The children’s eyes followed me as we pulled out. I lowered my head and studied the pattern of the stitching on the back of my father’s seat, the way one stitch replaced the next, the way the staples held the leather tight. Then the endlessness of it was suddenly too great and I could not look any more.
That afternoon we shopped at a supermarket that we reached through a covered walkway between an electrical and a sports shop. The supermarket was like a warehouse with high white ceilings and crates of unpacked boxes. A song was playing over and over. It went: ‘Better by day, better by night, better buy here to get it right!’ The words were like a chain that kept revolving. They made me think of the stitches, and then I thought of the men killing eels, and if I managed to push one image out of my mind, the others took its place.
My mother bought fruit and vegetables. I noticed that not many of the other people did, that most of the other people looked as if they had just been gardening or come off a farm. The other women weren’t wearing make-up as my mother was, their hair wasn’t blow-dried, and they were wearing jeans and fleeces and T-shirts. I could see one woman’s nipples. At the checkout my mother looked closely at the new coins and the cashier had to find the right change for her. The cashier had rosy cheeks and was as broad as a man. Her hair was brown and wiry and parted at the side like someone from an old film. My mother thanked her warmly but she didn’t smile back and rammed the till closed. I took two bags of shopping from my mother, though she protested, and held onto her hand. I wanted to tell her about the children once we were back at the bungalow but I knew that I wouldn’t. She would try to think of something to say and she would worry.
On the way home my father whistled but did not honk the horn. I couldn’t sing along now and neither could my mother. I glanced at her face in the mirror. It looked as if the props had been removed from it. I tried to read her eyes but they were glazed and empty.
For the next few days my mother and I made a tunnel through the gorse that grew on the bank at the back of the bungalow. We worked for hours, our arms covered in scratches, slashing at the branches that snapped with tiny puffs of dust. On the third day we broke through to the other side where there was a quarry with stony banks, a lake of cobalt water at the bottom. I was glad to be with my mother because then I could watch her. Thwacking away at the gorse, she seemed to be happy, to have forgotten the town, the fact that my father did not have a job and the bank strike. But over the coming weeks she stayed indoors more and more, and I went to the quarry mostly with Elijah, who sat panting, blinking at the sun, while I dug myself into the shale, a peculiar weight in my chest, and let the sun’s light wipe me out. I replayed what had happened in the town. I turned it around in my head and looked for the hidden truth but it was like the water at the bottom of the quarry, which glittered, drew you in, but revealed nothing beneath the surface.
Time spent at the bungalow now felt like a reprieve. I felt sick whenever we went into town. I saw that I was wrong to think life would be bright and balmy on the island, full of the feeling of school holidays and weekends. In some ways it was worse than being in school. Father and Mother had thought I would be better off not mixing any longer with unbelievers. But with my being removed from people completely, I found any contact doubly intense. School had given me a skin of sorts, albeit a painful one. Now I had no skin, or I was shedding the one that I had. We all seemed to be shedding something.
My mother was glowing but restless. She cleaned out cupboards, beat carpets, made a timetable for schoolwork that we never got round to, sewed a new cover for our three-piece suite and painted the wicker furniture on the stoep, forgetting to cover the steps; then had a frantic few hours washing paint off before my father came back.
My father was leaner than I had ever seen him; his hair bristled with purpose, his eyes gleaming. I could smell his skin and his hair when he came in from sawing a fallen pine or from mowing the wild grass at the front of the bungalow with an old mower that tore the grass rather than cut it; I remember the vehemence with which he pushed it, almost tripping as the wheels shot forward. I saw him one day on the stoep with a look on his face that was feral, and when he caught my eye he shifted as if I had disturbed him and said, almost savagely: ‘All right?’ He was wearing a pair of bright blue shorts.
‘Yes,’ I said; I was going to say: ‘Are you?’ but thought better of
it.
He set off around the side of the bungalow, the sinews in his legs taut and athletic, covered in virile blond fuzz.
Every day he went into town to see whether the bank was open, if he could find a house or find work. It wasn’t, he couldn’t, and there was none, but everything was ‘wonderful’, the roads not riddled with potholes but full of ‘character’; people weren’t rude but ‘gave it to you straight’; the water was the best thing he had ever tasted; the young people were respectful – two said ‘Good evening’ to him in town (I thought it might have been sarcastic; something to do with the fact that he was wearing a tweed suit and twirling a stick). To my father the island was still a paradise, and we were as good as on holiday.
It was true that those first two months at the bungalow had the loosely woven feel of a holiday, but it was a disconcerting one: time was dislocated and the story unravelling. Sometimes, when we could make ourselves, my mother and I did schoolwork. It was strange working for her. I wanted to try harder but often I tried less. Perhaps she had the same problem, because as often as we studied Pythagoras, we studied buttercups, as often made pies as pie-charts, as often wrote songs on a guitar with four strings as wrote essays – all while Elijah waited in the open door with his head on his paws, his ears pricking at the merest suggestion that class was over.
Sometimes we went walking. There were things to be learnt outdoors too, my mother said. The lanes were breezy, the mornings long, the skies benign, the clouds rolling. It felt peculiar to be wearing dungarees at eleven in the morning.
‘Will I ever go back to school?’ I said. I meant: go back to life.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘What will I do when I’m grown up?’
‘There are lots of things you could do,’ she said.
I couldn’t think of a single one.
That spring was crisper than any I had known. There were new flowers in dark soil and freshness in the mornings that stirred my stomach. At dusk you could see for miles through bare branches across fields laden with emptiness. There was pink in the sky near the earth. It looked raw, it looked cold, and there was a quiet that spoke of great distances. The land, like us, seemed to be expectant. I would walk back to the bungalow in the evening, and the light would be pink and golden, and the fields already asleep. The distant sounds of cows, the purr of a tractor, the retreating rush of a car or a van on the road made the world seem endlessly spacious and endlessly light. Every so often the treetops surged as if stroked by some invisible hand, the fields kept on rolling and surging; they jostled and shimmered and gave way to each other, hill after hill, rising and falling like swells in the sea, and in the endlessness of it all – in the grasses, in the dizzy activity of butterflies and birds – a chink sometimes opened, and on the brightest of days the world grew suddenly darker and suddenly still.
The Offering Page 5