Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  After a couple of hours of this desultory note-making and restless observation, I gave up and went out to her. I stood behind her and pressed my warmed hands to her neck, lifting her hair to look for the tender circle of purple that sure enough I found below her nape. I felt an odd, half-familiar twist in my gut as I recalled her hands on my wrists and our limbs squashed together in the water, her body crushed under me; how ready I was to submit to her, to this strange impulse in her. I brushed the bruise gently with my thumb. She made a little moaning sigh. I asked if she was all right. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, as if there was no reason for my asking. ‘What are you up to?’

  I thought I might go for a walk, I said, feeling somehow that I ought to excuse my presence on her beach. Want to come? She looked pleased, I think. She wound her chilly fingers through mine. I bought her gloves but she doesn’t wear them. I chafed her hands; thin, knuckly, green-veined and perished with cold. Her bitten nails. The base of her thumb is a shining knobble of bone, almost arthritic.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, despite the low grey sky, blurring into the rough-hewn marble of the dark sea.

  As we climbed up from the cottage to the main path we came in view of a stolid old soul, cable-knit and capable, plodding along in wellington boots. He paused at a gate in the fence and turned to watch us ascend, glancing over my open but hopelessly stiff shirt collar, my old cords, my impractical shoes, flat and soft-soled leather, perfect for padding the labyrinths of academe but quite useless out here in this treacherous terrain; he soon had the measure of me and let his eyes slide to rest instead, inevitably, on her. Hair plaited and hatted, she looked her age even at a distance; despite the sweaters and scarves that as ever overwhelmed her, she gambolled and twirled, girlish, turning to encourage me to clamber on. We reached the top of the path and looked out to sea, standing beside him; I took a theatrical, chest-slapping, much-needed gulp of air. For something to say, which seemed required, I noted that the sun was coming out – just as it began to creep beneath the clouds again.

  ‘Aye,’ he said.

  Neither party moved off. I had no intention of gaining a companion on this constitutional, but had still to catch my breath. So we stood there together, looking out at the sea.

  ‘Aye, hid’s kinda changey the day,’ he said eventually. ‘Whar is it thee’re stayin’?’

  That’s us just down there, I said.

  ‘Oh, aye, the noust hoose,’ he said. ‘Just theesael, is it?’ he said, squinting slyly at me. Unless it was only the sunshine.

  Yes, just myself, and my wife, I said.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ he said, and fell silent, and she said nothing and watched the sea and ignored his sidelong stare, if she was aware of it. Well, we’d best be getting on, I said, and he nodded and grunted and I put an arm around her shoulder, and she kept looking out, turning her head as I turned her body to the path as if she were a covetous child and I dragging her from the object of her craving; or as if leading her from a horror she couldn’t tear her eyes from.

  I’ve been meaning to ask, I said – Noust hoose? So our cottage seems to be known, although I’ve seen no signs to say so. ‘A noust is a docking place, a boat shelter,’ she explained. ‘A hoose is a house, Richard,’ except she said ‘hyce’, like the Queen, as if for my benefit. ‘A dwelling-place. A residence.’ A gentleman’s home is his castle, I said humbly.

  We reached a cattle grid where the road dipped and as she picked her way daintily across it, lifting her skirts like a lady crossing a puddle, I looked back and saw him, still on the crest of the rise, still watching. Then when I next looked back, he was gone.

  We made our way back down to the sea by the slabby black rocks that enclose each sandy bay; trying to pick a path across the dry places, and the runnels of sand between – the rock is slick like oil and more than once I felt a sickening slip under my sole before righting myself. The flats and crevices between the ridges are strewn with snake-like seaweed, thick, whitish and rust-red fleshy ropes, with a bunching of flat maroon fronds at the head. A massive slew of it, piled up on the white sand, slimed with red and orange like a giant’s plate of giant spaghetti; ‘or like entrails,’ she said. ‘Like some massive thing was gutted here and the innards left to rot.’ A gift for the macabre, she has. My charming wife.

  A little way along the shore, climbing up again to the grassy links that edge it, we came upon a half-ruined house, just like our own cottage in the next bay, built in the same low, layered grey stone, but derelict. Such dwellings are everywhere on the island, in varying states of disrepair; there is no call to demolish them, I suppose, when space is hardly at a premium. Some with only the gable ends to show the shape of the pointed roof that has long since collapsed, the interior long since grassed over, deserted for years by all but the rabbits. They might have been abandoned twenty or two hundred years ago, the landscape closing back in around them. The last of a succession of civilisations to leave their remnants. The Vikings, the Picts, the Norwegians, Christians and heathens have left their stones, too, behind them. The floor of the old church where we renewed our vows. Beds hewn into the walls of houses. She says there is an ancient settlement on the Mainland that lay buried until a storm tore the earth from it, five thousand years after it was abandoned by whoever lived there. And no one knows who they were or what became of them. Round brochs and cairns and burial mounds; old worship, old defences, long-forgotten tombs. Their builders long departed, their bones long laid to rest. What we leave behind us. How solid, the shell of life remaining.

  There were trees, once, on these islands; when they were all cut down, she says, there were none to replace them. And then it grew cold; the people struggled, where once they had prospered; there were centuries of hardship, and they clung on, men such as I imagine her father, strong, tall, grim men from the north, with their coarse hardy crops and their thick-woolled flocks, they held on, and they died or passed through, and others came, and only the stones remained.

  In the cemetery, there are ranks and ranks of the same few families’ graves; children and babies and husbands and wives, the old folk and the taken, the departed Beggs and Odies and Donaldsons. Some worn to a wafer of stone, the slate flaking and bent; the graves like cliff-top markers, facing the sea, the names worn away by the wind, worn to silence. That day we reaffirmed our vows, we walked there; now I think of how she walked up and down, peering at each in turn, as if seeking a trace of herself. Running her fingers over them, feeling for a message in the stone. But it was only the same names, over and over, and none of them the one that she has lately relinquished.

  All of these, besides, long dead, none buried here for a century past, the worshippers long departed to the lowly pebble-dashed building along the road from here. All these lives, ended before modernity, such as it is, ever reached this island; all lived by gaslight and warmed by the peat, and coming to rest at last looking out to sea, to the sea that perhaps returned them lifeless. ‘How many drowned?’ she said. ‘Look: these men. Only thirty, only twenty-eight, only eighteen. Only twenty-one. I wonder how many drowned.’

  Only twenty-one. Can she have any notion what that means? I am unsettled by the darkness, I think, closing in, and the strange day of ill, changing light; I sit alone in silence by the fire, which seems a lonely comfort, a scant human crackle of flame against the rush of wind and the sea.

  This particular ruin on the beach, in fact, was still roofed; and, peering in, it would seem not so very long abandoned. It is easier, somehow, to accommodate those houses long left to the elements, already absorbed into a dateless past. But whoever left this house seemed to have done so only lately, and quite suddenly. Set down his cup of tea on the table, stood, went to the door, closed it behind him and said no, I shan’t come back. Left the dishcloth to stiffen by the sink; left the furniture to swell and moulder in the damp. Steel taps that look like they might still turn; tattered curtains at the cracked window. The scraps left hanging were sun-yellowed, printed with a big, brown and yellow sunflo
wer design on a thick-woven synthetic cloth.

  ‘These remind me of my childhood,’ she said. ‘Everything brown and yellow and green and orange, with prints like this. The last of the seventies, left over. The carpets and the curtains and the cushions and my mum’s dresses, everything.’ I passed no comment. I, too, remember these patterns, these colours; I remember when women like her mother wore dresses made of cloth like those curtains, swinging above the knee. I remember the scratchy thick metal zips at the back, I remember unzipping them. Red wine and Rimbaud … This past I have no use for, since she can have no part there.

  We circled to look into the bedroom: an iron bedstead in the centre of the room stood crooked and unused, without a mattress; but in the corner, a blanket, a sleeping bag. A pillow, perhaps a little mildewed, but somehow I thought it might be warm to the touch, just in the centre where a head had left an indent. An empty can of Tennent’s, bent in two, the logo unfaded. A newspaper; I couldn’t make out the date or the headline, but it was unyellowed, the masthead still tabloid-red. ‘Someone lives here,’ she whispered. Detritus piled up against the peeling, damp-stained walls – litter and driftwood. A pile of sardine tins. I had a momentary vision of a slobbering, monstrous ogre, staring crazed eyes, clasping its dinner in both hands; some grotesque giant shovelling the silver bodies into its mouth in oily handfuls.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ she said: eager, wide-eyed, quite, quite mad. Of course not, I said. I tried to laugh and found I could not. Dread suddenly all over me like cold fish scales, scraping and bristling. Let’s go. They might come back, I said. Let’s go. She looked at me, puzzled by my agitation. She peered in for a minute longer, cupping her hand against the glass, then turned back to me curiously and asked if I was all right. I’m fine, I said. Let’s go. I led her away. It occurred to me that, aside from her horror of the sea, she is quite fearless; and I felt craven beside her, a timorous creature clutching onto her hand.

  She was quiet as we walked home. Her fingers cold and nerveless, as if they might at any moment slip free. The sea-mist was thickening, it was getting dark, and cold with the dampness; the masked sun was already setting, casting a squeamish, greenish light through the pewtery clouds. I feared who we might pass, not wanting to stop, wanting to get her home. I could not dispel the sense that we were followed; by what? By that harmless old man, by the sardine-eating ogre, by the cemetery’s spectres? But we saw no one. As the night draws in, the islanders keep to their cottages, I suppose. Still I find myself sitting up, now, and wondering, who might have been hiding, in the mist, in the dark. And at her eagerness to find out.

  She is calling me.

  Perhaps one last short measure. Perhaps I’ll let her need me a little longer. One last dram and I’ll take the bottle to her.

  Sunday

  An overcast, lowering sky this morning; the clouds have clotted through the night. Something gathering, brooding, out on the sea. A darkness spreading. The edges of my wife blur against the sky.

  I stand at the window, sipping my tepid, burnt, weak brew in my striped pyjama bottoms and dressing-gown. I am quite grey in the mornings before coffee, and I am glad of her kindness – even though she doesn’t drink it, and makes it dreadfully, scorching the grounds. I need it this morning especially. My head aches. I brought it on myself, pressing whisky on her and sousing myself in the process.

  Mrs Odie has at last departed. Her knocking woke us; I had been dreaming, I think, of a ship, sailing on the troubled sea that haunts her. The house became a tiny cabin, buffeted from all sides, a terrible beating against the oak as if heavy tentacles would batter it down. I woke trapped in a tartan tangle to a banging at the door, the beast breaching the barrier; but it was only knocking, a polite knock, amplified by the shock of waking and the subsequent hangover flooding in with the light. Beside me, my wife had pulled the covers over her head, groaning, and was shoving at me gently to get up. I heard the key turn in the lock, threw on my robe and made, I thought, a magisterial entrance to the living room, crying Good morning, Mrs Odie! ‘Oh, ah thought thee were oot,’ she said, ‘excuse me,’ not in the least discomfited or stirred by the sight of my grey-furred chest. Not at all, Mrs Odie, carry on, I said grandly, delirious I think with fatigue. Mrs Odie carried on, taking up her basket and mop, tutting.

  By the time I’d washed and dressed, my wife had dragged herself out of bed. I heard them talking in the kitchen; I feared remonstrance for the mess, and moved closer to listen, to step in and defend her if necessary. But to my surprise, it seemed to me a friendly exchange. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was warm, the quick trill of my wife when she is being sociable, the soft rumble of Mrs Odie’s consonantal roll … a murmur, a mumble, how sudden the weather changes, some cheerful premonition of doom, it sounded like. Something about whisky. ‘Oh, we take just a glass before bed, Mrs Odie!’ said my wife with a tinkly fairy-laugh that made an absurdity of the incontrovertible evidence, the bottles accumulating, the dried-brown stains in every glass, my own ragged visage. A laugh to obliterate reality.

  I thought I heard her say her own surname, her maiden name. Her father’s name. And I recalled how in the night, I thought I heard her say, ‘he drowned’.

  Tell me about him, I asked again, late last night as we sat propped in bed. I poured more whisky and waited; I approached very delicately, very gently.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually, after a long, dark silence; ‘I was little when he left. He’s gone. He sailed away,’ she said vaguely, with a gesture out to sea; a rebuttal. We have circled these waters before now. I know, I said. I’m sorry. Tell me about him.

  I topped up her glass; and as she loosened and langoured, I prised at her, my clamped little clamshell. I was gentle and generous with every measure, soothing with whispers and spirits. I told stories, circuitous, leading her back. The Forsaken Merman, left alone with his children, all of them pining, down and away below. Melusine’s father, the Scots King Elynus.

  Melusine, the daughter of the fairy Pressyne, is raised by her mother on the Isle of Avalon – Elynus is banished for breaking a promise, as they always do in these tales. Once grown, Melusine seeks him out and avenges this betrayal by sealing him in a cave in Northumbria. Whatever became of him, that poor Scotsman now confined to her unshared memories, walled up from the world? Strange, the forms she takes, or that will fit her. Flickering across her as she stands out there at the water – a glint of scale, a glimpse of silver. Did she stand with her father beside her once on that shore? Did he, one day, swim out and never come back? Could this be the sea her father sailed on, the sea that swallowed him under? Because of his absence, she does not like to speak of him; I think she fears she will betray him, with anger or grief or guilt. So I must be delicate and indirect. I fed out these morsels of stories, I hinted and prompted, but she wouldn’t take the bait. I was patient.

  At last she said, ‘He was tall.’ Like you, I said.

  ‘Like me.’ She smiled. A further silence.

  Yes, tall, and? What else? She sighed, very quietly, almost contented. Her green eyelids heavy. I saw her eyes cloud over, and I had to lean in to hear her. ‘He was huge. When I was little. Tall and broad and strong. He lifted me and I felt like Thumbelina, sitting in the palm of his hand.’ Broad, strong, beloved. Vanished.

  I topped up her glass.

  ‘He delivered me, apparently. So the story goes. There was a storm, and we couldn’t get to the Mainland. From wherever we were.’

  Her grey eyes when they first opened looked on his face, turned topsy-turvy; he was the first to ever hold her. ‘He used to read to me,’ she said. ‘I can’t really remember. I had a little box bed and he’d have to duck to sit on the side of it. I remember it was always dark; the wind and the sea outside. Before we moved. But I was just a baby, so maybe I can’t remember that. It must have been light sometimes.’ We were, ourselves, still sitting up in bed, well wrapped against the night, the blind drawn against it; close, but not quite touching. I did
n’t dare disturb her. He taught her to speak, she said. In a low murmur that would not intrude upon her mother’s fragile silence, he whispered words until she learned them, his islander’s lilt, a sound like the sea. First, she says, Dada. I didn’t go so far as to suggest that her father, who abandoned her so callously, was perhaps a rampant egotist, to teach her this above all.

  ‘I needed to know how to get his attention,’ she explained, simply. Didn’t your mother mind, that it was never her you called for? ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I learned that was a bad idea before I even had words for it. No, I always called for him. And very quietly. I was a very quiet child.’ Of course, of course she was. Quiet in a corner, twisting her white hair, calling to him when she had to, quietly. Until, one night, when she called for him, he was gone. And ever since – she does not say so but I see it – there has been that ache of absence, never dulled. She doesn’t say how old she was when he went, or what she remembers of his departure; she offers nothing concrete. Too young perhaps to make any sense of it, old enough only to feel the loss. It is a kind of myth, her memory of him, right up to his mysterious vanishing.

  Have you forgiven him? I asked. Such a look she gave me, then; everything suddenly sharp, her eyes narrowed like an angered cat’s. ‘I didn’t need to forgive him. I loved him.’ And then she drained her glass and when she held it out to me for refilling, she had somehow performed that little spell she has, spun a glamour about herself that is too bright to see past, so that she looked as though she’d never lost anything in her life. As I poured she lay back against the pillows and said, ‘Are we done for today, Sigmund?’

  I hardly slept at all, I drifted through the night half-sleeping, half-dreaming in a drunken reel, turning over and over again what she’d told me; as dawn came I was jerked by a sick lurch as she floundered and flailed and woke. ‘He drowned, he drowned,’ I thought she said, or else I dreamed it; I can’t remember, she told me her dream or she said it in her sleep or I heard her say it, in mine. I reached for her out of my sleep, shook her gently and held her trembling; I raised her up and she surfaced, clinging, soaked through again with cold water. I kissed her face and tasted her sweat or tears or the sea. And I kissed her hands, her fingers, I kissed the damp membrane between them, tenderly; and she grasped my face then, and lifted it to meet hers and held me, transfixed, with her wild eyes; and she pulled her gown over her head, and I bent to kiss her again, seeking out the savour of desire in armpit and elbow and the hollows behind her knees, and she writhed and sighed and wrapped her limbs about me to trap my tongue where she wanted it, until the last salt surge exhausted her. And I lay with my head on her belly and listened to the murmur of her dream like the tide, until I too went under.