Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  Over breakfast she was a little distant, lapsing into submerged silence as she pulled her toast to bits. She pressed crumbs into her plate with her fingers. She yawned, covering her whole face with a cave of hands; then rubbed her eyebrows and pulled them taut and sat with her head hanging from her hair in her fists. I asked if she’d slept badly. ‘Mmm,’ she said, getting up to boil the kettle. ‘Oh no, did I wake you again?’ I don’t mind, I said. I’m getting used to it. She looked rueful. It has its advantages, anyway, I said – as long as you don’t mind my keeping you awake a little longer. ‘I can hardly object to that, can I?’ she said.

  Were you dreaming? I began, and she interrupted with a groan, leaning against the counter. ‘Ugh … Hangover,’ she said, accusatory. ‘Mrs Odie thinks I’m a lush.’ Oh dear, I said; I thought you seemed to be getting on rather well with her. What were you talking about? Apart from my bad influence, obviously? ‘Nothing much,’ she said. She said they were talking about the weather, she was just being polite. ‘She thinks there’s a storm coming. She says there’s “a skuther blowan on the beach”.’ She cast a glance out of the window. I see, I said. I thought I heard you mention your father, I said casually, were you thinking she might know him? Carefully, carefully I prised at the chink where I’d felt her give way, a little, last night; but sober, she has closed herself up again. I have seen only the barest glimpse, a throb in the dark hollow of her shell. ‘Why would I talk to a complete stranger about my dad?’ she asked, not quite annoyed, but sharp enough to spike me. I must have misheard, I said. ‘No one here would know him,’ she said. ‘I hardly even knew him.’ I persisted, I just thought you said … ‘Please, Richard,’ she said then, and suddenly she looked exhausted, fraught, ‘he went away. Let it go.’

  She doesn’t remember waking, for all my efforts to console her; and now I cannot say if I heard what I thought I heard, or if I dreamed it myself, her saying this, or if, possibly, in her confusion, her bewilderment, still drunk in the sodden aftermath of her nightmare, she let slip the truth.

  Now she has gone out, to clear her head she says. The grey-green opaque light makes me uneasy. That, and her absence. The empty room behind me. The wind in the grate.

  I am supposed to be working. My concentration wanes with every passing day, every troubled night. These paper-thin creatures on the page fail to fascinate as she does, although she is hardly more substantial.

  I find I cannot look away, loath to leave her to the mercy of such a, such a skuther. I am assuming that this lovely word refers to the gusting, hectic, restless winds which have swarmed out of the greyness and are now lifting that silver hair up like a pale flame flickering. And she doesn’t waver although it looks like she might at any moment be lifted and whirled out to sea; she stands her ground, watching. She says there were once women on these islands who could tell a storm coming; who could ride a boat in any weather, who would put out to sea to rescue the sailors they knew would be otherwise doomed, and these women, these storm-witches, were sometimes accused of bringing the storm, of calling it up, and were often hanged for their trouble. I see her fingers twitch.

  Out at the sea’s edge, the water churns over, a static rolling like horses pawing the ground; it comes to her feet in a wash of foam and fret. She is a kind of orphan, a ragged orphan, out there on the beach, as if abandoned. Wilfully abandoned. The forsaken mermen remain in their chariots, observing their daughter, withholding, squinting into the strange glare.

  A darkness out on the water, and over the cliffs. In years gone by, she tells me, men hid in those caves, evading the pressgangs of King George’s navy. Gaping hollow sockets full of eyes in the darkness. The island to the west has smeared into the sea again.

  The height of those waves, now. The wind scatters the sky, growing steadily stronger; it whips a stream up the cliffs in a spray, a plume like smoke, and her hair streaming upwards like that blown-back fall, too, like a fountain.

  I’m heart-sore for wanting her, all the warm hollows of her, all the secret parts I would seek out. Her dreams, all washed through with seawater. Salt in the corners. Crumbs in the bed. Soaked, the sheets. Under the sheeny black surface, the currents that would whirl her down to the deep in her sleep, down to the giant squid and tentacles and stinging things and teeth and tendrils, and only the electric fish-lights to see by, down to the terror that reaches into her from the bottom of that ocean; the dark surface that sometimes glasses her eyes.

  I am restless, fretful; unnerved by something, some echo I can’t catch, a word that eludes me, a trail of brightness at the corner of my eye … Something I’ve forgotten.

  ‘Let it go,’ she said. I will have to get used to this, leaving her alone, when I return to work. Let her be; look away from the window, look to your books.

  To work, for god’s sake.

  The knight-at-arms is left to loiter palely on the cold hillside by his Belle Dame. But in what sense is she without mercy? Because she shows him a world that he cannot inhabit, where she cannot keep him? Wraps him in fantasy and then abandons him to waste and rot? Or simply because she makes him love her, and then leaves? What is the nature of this enchantment? Or is it only madness, or a dream, and if so, whose?

  Whose?

  This is hopeless.

  The sky is closed. No sign of the sun. The house is cold, the blankets damp, it’s too dim to read, really. No; I won’t let it go. I am unwilling to let her alone, this afternoon. How can I hope to get used to it? I will go out to her. Out on the beach, she

  she is gone.

  She can’t have gone far. There isn’t far to go. I keep checking to see if she will emerge from the sky, but no. There is no one else out there, on the cliffs, on the beach.

  Her phone is switched off, or else out of range – nothing unusual in these parts. The seagulls scream, invisible. No birds sing. I shall wait another ten minutes and then go out to find her.

  The same page in front of me still unread. Put it aside. It is too dim to read, really, anyway. Jacket, scarf; ignore the tremor, bundle it into my gloves. A withdrawal symptom, merely. A palsied liver, maybe, but a steady, a faithful, a loyal heart.

  *

  I went down to the beach and stood foot-deep in the squidgy brown kelp, looking from one edge of the bay to the other. No sign of her on the high cliffs, nor on the rocks. I have grown so accustomed to her standing just there that the space she ought to have occupied seemed crudely painted in, as if she’d been excised from the canvas and the hole hurriedly pasted. Where had she gone? Surely not far.

  I found her footprints but they had been sucked away where they met the edge of the wet sand. I stood at the point of their vanishing and looked out; no sign of her, the sea at ebb, dissolving. I ran along the tide line, first one way, then the other, fighting the pull of the sand, not knowing which way to turn or where to look and beginning to panic, and then saw the track emerge again just a few metres off. As if she had walked up from the seabed in her boots, a modern-day Venus borne in on the foam. Then they stopped at the rocks; I could see nothing beyond the ridge. So I climbed after her. I skidded and slipped in my foolish shoes; every step could have splintered a bone. So preoccupied was I with my own precarious progress, placing one foot and then another in spite of the quake in my knees, that it was only when I reached the safe shore of the next bay, only when I had eased myself down onto the sand and rested with a hand propping my weight against the stone, breathing hoarsely, only when I looked up did I see her, standing further up the beach, talking to a stranger at the edge of visibility. She had her back half-turned to me; she hadn’t seen me, and I in turn could not make out her face. He was a crooked figure, with a stick, a dirty blue cap covering his grimy hair; an old sailor, black grease bedded in his wrinkles, toothless, agape.

  It may be that I have embellished this particular grotesque. And yet I see him still, clawing at her with a knotted hand. They parted after a minute or two; but who could say how long they had stood together thus before I saw them, their hea
ds bent together, conspiring? Who knows what tricks he had up his filthy sleeve? Smiling his horrible hole of a smile at the peedie lass with her bonny bright locks? Sick, am I sick of a jealous dread? Can it be that I envy that old man, that ancient man, that old sea-troll? Cramming his toothless face with sardines?

  For it was he, surely, the sardine-eater; off he went, then, to his hovel – looking back at her, surreptitious, to check that she was looking out to sea, and then making his spindly way up the links to the house we’d thought abandoned, back to his mildew and grog, the old sot.

  ‘Richard?’ she said, quite suddenly beside me. I had neither seen nor heard her coming. ‘What are you doing here? Are you all right?’ I came to find you, I said, lamely. With a weak gesture I said, Look at the sun setting, as if that was why I’d sought her out. And the sun obliged my lie, flooding the sea with oxblood, an angry red gash between the dark water and the low cloud.

  ‘I didn’t mean to worry you,’ she said, undeceived. I just wondered where you’d gone, I said. I came to find you, I said again. ‘I wasn’t far,’ she said. She carried a flail of seaweed, one of those that mass in the cracks of the rocks, as if it were a lash with which to whip a Caliban.

  Who was that gentleman? I asked. ‘Which one?’ she said. How many have there been? Just now, I said, the older gentleman. Meaning, older than me. ‘Oh, him. Poor old thing. He asked the time. I don’t know that I’d call him a gentleman.’ Oh no? I said. I am duty-bound to defend your honour if it has been compromised. ‘No, I just mean, I shouldn’t think he’s gentry. Just a man.’ You don’t own a watch, I said. ‘That’s what I told him.’ I said nothing. It seemed to me it had taken a long time for her to impart this information. ‘I think he just wanted someone to talk to.’ I think he’s our sardine-feaster, I said. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He smelled terrible. Of fish and beer, and … other things. Poor old man,’ she said; ‘poor stinky old man.’ How brutal, the casual pity of the young.

  ‘Shall we go home?’ she said. Home? I said. Well, if you’re ready to come back. If you’re quite sure you’ve been out long enough. If you’ve no more social calls to pay. She sighed. ‘I’m sorry I worried you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I moved beyond your frame, Richard.’

  My frame?

  ‘The window,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t stay in the picture, today.’ Was this exasperation? Her voice betrayed nothing, neither irritation nor contrition. I watched her as she wandered down the sand, and followed just behind in a wounded silence.

  I like to look at you, I said, catching up to her. There’s nothing I’d rather look at. Everything else is just backdrop.

  ‘The sunset?’ she said. ‘Or look at the sea.’ On it washed and wished, senseless.

  That being the subject of your own devotion, I said. It sounded petulant, and yet I think I meant to be cruel – can that be? That I meant to be cruel to her?

  ‘I like to watch the sea, yes. I do. And then I come home to you; to your human face.’

  You like the contrast?

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she said. ‘The sea is a grouch today, too. Look at it, all shrugs and sighs.’

  I’m not a grouch, I said, doing my best not to soften.

  ‘Then why is your face that way?’

  I’m sorry, I said. Hang-dog.

  ‘I’m not sure your penitent face is better.’ I hung my head, then, shaggy and grey, chided, chastened, ashamed of my penitent face. And then felt her hands on my skull; felt her draw it down to kiss the crown, a benediction.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Really. I’m sorry you were worried and you didn’t know where I was. I’m a bit sad to be leaving so soon, there’s only a few days left. I lost track of time. I get lost in the sea …’ Please don’t, I said.

  ‘And I do like you looking at me.’

  Do you? I asked.

  ‘Of course. Of course I do,’ she said gently, soothing, smoothing my hair. ‘Do you really adore me so, Richard?’

  Of course. Of course I do.

  ‘Well come on then. Chase me home,’ she said, and took off at a sprint over the wet sand, light-footed and laughing. She puts on lightness like a dancer, changing like the sky over the islands. I tripped and stumbled after, trying not to lose my footing, trying not to lose her in the gloom, thin trousers flapping in the vicious wind.

  She made watery under-poached over-salted eggs as a peace offering and I wolfed them down. She watched me eat. She said, ‘I made you a promise, remember?’ I smiled, lips gummy, grateful, so easily placated. And yet, now that I am alone, I can’t remember quite what it was that she promised, or when, or if she promised anything at all.

  How utterly deep, how impenetrable, how dense the night is here. The wind lashes around us now; it batters at the walls, it wails in the chimney, screeches in the eaves, hammers at the window; it whines and howls out there in the dark and I, in the dark within, listen. The night seems to seep in. From the window, nothing to be seen, neither sea nor sky, only the sound of the waves crashing, the frenzied wind, the cold glass rattling against the tumult. The fire is flaring and guttering. It’s late, and she is in the kitchen, she is singing to herself, singing to the sea, her voice as if borne in from the water. I cannot make out the words; half a hum, half a deep, thrumming song, low and sorrowing, an old hymn; drowned almost in the wind, it comes in snatches, plaintive, distant. There must be fishermen, out in the squall furling and thickening around them, struggling to find their way home; it is a voice to be wrecked on the rocks for. A voice to be charmed to sleep by, a faery’s song, to bring fierce sweet dreams I would not choose to wake from. I miss her terribly, here in my circle of firelight, with her so near to me and out of reach. Now that I am alone, I can only think of that stinky old man on the beach; of prurient Bob and his pretty, wistful son; of the sidelong stranger on the path; of Mr Begg even and his bag of sweets and the old boatman that brought us here; and of all the other men who have known her or met her or even seen her once and of those who will have her when I’m gone. Of her father and all the secrets she hasn’t told me; I haven’t her future or her past either.

  She is in the kitchen singing, and I am listening, striving to preserve these precious pieces of her, which are lost the moment they are sung.

  If I could capture just one scrap of her song.

  Monday

  The gale galloped through the night, all along the coastline, whipping up the sea and massing purple rainclouds on its way inland; it did not cease, all through the darkest hours. I lay awake listening to it whistle and holler, the riot of it over the barren isle, and her quiet breath beside me. They call this wind a skreever, so I’m told, a name for some fiend – and that indeed is how it sounds. Some ancient, rag-winged, shrieking thing, rending and tearing at the scrub-dry heather; the hardy sheep, the stocky furry ponies and the stocky furry cows, all clinging to the earth or huddling in barns and waiting for it to pass over.

  It huffed and puffed around the walls of our little stone house, and clawed about inside, in every corner, searching, a stealthy intruder restlessly riffling pages and poking into every cranny and crack, whickering through every crevice, searching, searching, frantic, thorough, ruthless; dislodging the quiet spiders clutching stubbornly to the rafters and watching as their webs tattered; breathing on the last glow of the embers before skirling up the chimney in a billow of ash. Nothing left unstirred. And she, while it roared and gusted around us, slept on. Curious girl; her first restful night since we came here, when all about, the sea and the sky, so restless.

  I lay awake for hours, on my back, listening, eyes open or closed, I could not tell, an equal darkness within and without. Our bed a berth in a boat, below deck, the sea pressing up at the window and rolling and moiling below us; the fish swimming by the glass indifferent; tiny shrimp coiling and stretching in meaningless Morse code; all the sightless glowing life of the ocean floating past. A Leviathan’s eye, filling the porthole, peering in.

  And in my mind’s eye, fo
r comfort, I studied the ceiling, the fine crack I have come to know that runs through the plaster, the frosted lampshade and the dusty insects lying dead in its bowl, invisible against the opaque glass in daylight but fly-spotting the light when the switch is flipped. I thought how insecure we are, how lost we are in this darkness; and I thought no, not lost, because she is still breathing beside me.

  And I thought of her in the kitchen, slicing bread, quite needlessly wearing the apron that she found hanging on the back of the kitchen door. She puts it on like a costume, for the simplest tasks. It has a pretty red heart stitched on the chest to protect or conceal the mess of valves and chambers beneath. It makes her feel capable, she says. Wifely. I may buy her one to wear at home. But that is an impossibly incongruous thought now. We seem to have floated free of bonds, of home, of time. In bed, I felt my own heart beating, and hers, her precious heart, against my hand.