Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  And I thought of the bowls and plates and the glasses that we’d left in the sink, the dishes on the draining board, the crumbs on the counter still unswept, a gift for Mrs Odie and her all-embracing censure (and can we be blamed for the disorder which will surely be left in the wind’s wake, I wondered? Or will the house have been swept clean by it, thoroughly scoured out?).

  And I thought of the heavy-curtained sitting room with its clay and stone and stitched menagerie of seals and seabirds, and the cut-glass bowl in the centre of the table which already has collected the detritus of our days, the tokens of existence, hers and mine, mingled there – three pennies and a pound, an elastic band, tiny shells chosen for their wet lustre, now dry and ordinary; a piece of smoothed green glass, a pen, a paperclip, two silver coins and a pair of dice – how did we acquire them? All bedded in a small drift of sand, for our pockets are always silted with it by the end of the day, and each emptying dredges up a few more grains.

  I thought of the spoil she kept for me from her ruined castle; a disc, like a coin, spined all over with tiny spikes, with a hole in the middle as if made to be strung. How simple a skeleton can be. A poor harmless urchin, now rotted away or stripped of flesh by some relentless chomping predator; but predator is perhaps too quick and wily a word for those great acid jellies undulating over the seabed, taking their time, preying not upon one, in a deadly chase, but upon hundreds, mouth wide to allow any poor creature crossing its path to be sucked in unheeding. Rolling over and slurping them clean like the gristle and meat of a chicken’s foot pulled through the lips. Patient and voracious, the way of the sea hunter. I thought of them down there, untouched by the storm.

  I listened to the sea and thought of the boats and ships, the buoys bobbing, the beam of the lighthouse signalling danger and hope; I thought of setting out on that sea for home, I thought of my office, my work, so many miles distant in another time; and I turned over and under and saw it all submerged, my desk sinking down, drawers lolling open, streaming seaweed as it fell, I found myself down among the seals, the whales, the squid and narwhals, mermaids laughing at my efforts to catch at my papers as they turned to pulp; until it settled on the bottom, redundant, a wrecked ship, coral-crusted, beaded with tiny bubbles. Anemones, their brilliance dimmed in the night-sea, mere ghosts of blossom. And my thoughts were turned back by the tide to this shore.

  I thought of the tale she told me of Hildaland – of the hidden, sinking Orkney isle where the Finfolk spend their summers, shrouded in bright mist and music. An unseen island, rising from the water, enchanted, uncharted, where the sea-king reigns, she says, beyond the sea’s brim, where those handsome jealous fishermen make their home. The merman in his sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep; her forsaken father, his bones of coral made. All of that, below the crazed surface, unheeding, deep, deep below the turmoil of the storm, while she slept on quietly.

  I reached for her. She barely woke.

  At last, I must have slept.

  It is, today, so I am told, an attry day, rashan’ and rainan’ … When I woke it was late but still dark, the blind for once closed and only a crack of grey light seeping in, and the wind still roaring. She slept on, well into the morning, and I lay beside her quietly, curled against her, my face in her hair. She made no move, no sound, not a murmur, and eventually I extricated myself carefully and made my way to the kitchen to discover that the wind, with an effortless snap, has severed us from civilisation; sometime in the night, the lines were cut.

  So I set out into the storm, climbing up our path to the road for the stretch of perhaps twenty feet where there is phone reception, and called Mrs Odie. A few steps at a time unbeleaguered, and then blasted by the wind rushing over the crest of the hill, lancing through my pyjamas. She took a long time to answer. She picked up the phone and said her number, rather primly, as my mother used to do – to preserve her anonymity, she always said. You never knew who might be calling. I wonder why Mrs Odie should wish to protect her identity. She could be hiding anything.

  I said, It’s Professor _______. ‘Oh, aye, Mr _______,’ she said. I cannot tell if she means anything by this insistence on denying me my honorific. I said our power was out. She said ‘Oh, aye?’ I said I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs Odie. I wasn’t sure who I should call. ‘That’ll be back on soon enough,’ she said, with unfounded certainty. Right, I said. Do you know how soon exactly? ‘It’ll no be long,’ she said. ‘Aye, soon enough.’ I wondered about her reckoning of ‘soon’ and ‘enough’. Not aloud. Aloud, I said, Oh, fine, right, thank you Mrs Odie. ‘Ah’ll come by in an oor or so,’ she said. There’s no need, no need at all, Mrs Odie, I shouted – the wind was rising – ‘No bother,’ she said, and the gale cut us off.

  Well, good morning, I said, coming in harried and wind-torn to find my wife more or less awake and curled up on the sofa. ‘Morning,’ she said, ‘have you been out? There’s no power.’ I know, I said. Mrs Odie says it will be back soon enough. In the scheme of things. She nodded, satisfied, curled herself tighter. I think she rather likes the idea, playing the crofter’s wife, lighting her lamps, tending the hearth.

  You slept well, I said, bending to kiss her head from behind. I thought you were never going to wake up. She stretched, her legs stiffening, her arms tight against my neck and pushing up at the air above me, and smiled. ‘I know, I can’t believe it. I slept right through. Except when you pestered me.’ I pestered you?

  ‘You woke me up,’ she said. ‘I was having a nice dream. And you woke me up to have your way with me.’ Oh, I’m sorry, I said, only a little sarcastic. You didn’t seem all that awake, actually. And what was this lovely dream that you were dreaming so quietly?

  ‘I was swimming.’ She yawned again happily. ‘The island floated away in the night,’ she said. ‘There was a lovely sort of pale lilac mist and we sailed into it, and there were men in boats with lanterns hanging, watching, and the sea had turned to silver, and I dived in and when I came to the surface my skin was all silver.’

  She related all this in a kind of trance, still wrapped in the bright mist of her sleep. I wondered if she’d seen her father’s face there; one of those tall hard unsmiling men, plying his oars. She shrugged.

  The wet westerly brought Mrs Odie blowing through the door late morning, exclaiming, ‘Whit a gushel!’, seemingly enlivened by the storm. She came laden with provisions. ‘Thoo’ll no venture far the day, Ah’d suppose; thoo’ll wait til hid’s glettan’,’ she said, by way of explanation for her offering, or perhaps in admonition – certainly, she seemed to direct this over my shoulder at my wife, bundled on the sofa in her nightgown and an enormous cardigan. She brought more eggs, a loaf, bere bannocks, salty-sweet fresh butter, ‘reestit mutton’ – dear Mrs Odie, a one-woman tourist attraction. Smoked meat and flat dark barley bread, as if hundreds of years had slipped back in the night. I paid her, for these unrequested goods; it somehow didn’t seem possible to refuse them. ‘Oh, thank you, how kind,’ said my wife sweetly. Any day now, I expect the old crone to arrive proffering a half-red apple. ‘Thoo’ve plenty lamps and coal and matches, noo?’ she said. ‘Ah’d mind the fire; mind thee’re no smoked oot. Jist give a call if thee want anything bringing. Aye, yin’s ferly a skreever. An attry day,’ she muttered to herself as she swept and dusted, ‘might as weel while Ah’m here,’ she said, a song of censure almost comforting in its list and lilt, tilted at the sea and sky and the unmade, storm-tossed bed alike. ‘Hop there’s a glett, or the ferry’ll no be sailing,’ she said. And then out she went with her basket, with a bang of the wind-blown door. I turned to see my wife beaming, bright as the vanished sun, delighted.

  I boiled a pan of water and made toast under the grill, lighting the gas perilously with a match. Bearing the plate and a mug of tea, I found her pulling on long socks and boots in the sitting room, pushing her falling hair behind her ears. ‘Look at the sea!’ she said, ‘look at the rain!’ It was hard, in fact, to distinguish one from the other. I pressed the mug into her hands.
I said, Have some breakfast. Have some tea. Have some toast. I said hopelessly, Please put more clothes on if you’re going out. She looked down in surprise at her attire, and laughed, and made her way to the bedroom, shedding cardigan and gown as she went, and I gathered them as I followed and stood in the doorway watching her, her clothes still bed-warm and musty under one arm, and holding out a buttered, jammy triangle in the other hand. I watched the long line of her spine, the awkward hopping dance she did to pull her knickers over her boots, roll her socks over her knees; skirt, T-shirt, jumper, coat; I went to her, put a hand on the small of her bent back to still her for a moment, held out the toast as she stood up; she snapped it between her teeth and said, mouth full, ‘You coming?’

  Perhaps in a while, I said. It’s … it’s an attry day, you know, I said. Maybe you should stay in this morning. ‘An att-rry day,’ she repeated, pleased, chewing and somehow rolling the r through her mouthful. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll keep you company. Maybe I can help. I can be your inspiration.’ If she only knew. She sat down by me at the sitting room window, removing her coat but not parting with it, making a nest of it around her.

  We sat before the window all morning, reading, and looking up from time to time to watch the waves, the rain on the sea, the angered sky, wrapped up from the relentless rage of it in what seemed to me a cosy, peaceable indoor silence. With no trees to stir in it, the wind is not always immediately visible here, although it can be heard, roaring in with the waves and wheouing in the eaves; but adjusting one’s gaze, it becomes possible to see the whirl and eddy and rush of it in the rain, which flouts convention utterly and refuses to fall downwards. She sat opposite me, eyes flickering, following each gust. But after an hour or two I became aware of an increasing agitation in her, little shiftings and sighs, playing with the pebbles she’s brought in and ranged along the sill, distractedly, fidgeting and fiddling, twisting her hair.

  ‘Do you think,’ she asked eventually, ‘there will be a glett?’ A what? I said. ‘A break. A lull. An intermission.’ Ah, I said. A respite. Who knows?

  Her fingers were actually drumming the sill, a slow tattoo. Each long thin bone in turn stretching the skin on the back of her hand, tight across the bridge of her knuckles; tension taut and twanging like over-wound catgut. Lifting a shell to her ear. ‘I can hear the sea,’ she said. Could it be, I said, that perhaps it is really the sea you are hearing, not the echo of a shell?

  ‘Maybe. I hope it stays stuck there, when we …’ and she trailed off, looking into the smooth pink hollow of it. We’ll take it home with us, I said. We’ll carry the sound of the sea with us.

  She twisted and fiddled, a snap of nervous energy, restless as the wind fretting at the window. Strange light filtered through the massing clouds, the sky and the sea churning.

  After a pause of perhaps ten further fidgety, fiddly minutes, she put down her mug and said, ‘Shall we go out, then, just for a little while?’ I set down my pen, with a short sigh, perhaps; looked at her, I suppose, as if she was mad. She looked back as if she wasn’t, as if she didn’t think so; but betrayed by that agitated dancing behind her clouded eyes. Feeling cooped up? I asked. I recited: Or narrow if needs the house must be, outside are the storms and strangers; we … She smiled with half of her mouth. Thee and me? I prompt ed. I gave up. You go on, I said. I’ll keep an eye on you. You go. And she went.

  A room without her in it. Just the faintest static flicker of impatience left behind her. So she stands there again, alone, impossible, watching as the waves leap and thrash; she can barely stand at all, yet holds her ground, making little side-staggers to right herself against the wind, which presses her coat so close against her that it could be another skin. The long thigh, the bone-jut of her hip, her narrow waist that I can almost circle, not fragile but strong and serpentine, twisting in my grip.

  I wish she would come in. But she’ll stay there I think until the tide comes for her, or I do.

  There she stands, a violet-grey smear against the saturated horizon. Washed through so that I can almost see the squalling sea right through her. The rain on the glass streaking her image. Woman resolving into water. Undine, returning to her element. Any bright rivulet might be her. Any or none. No longer my wife but just a ghost made of rain, an elemental returning to form. And I find myself asking, who is that woman who stands heedless on the beach? Can she be my wife?

  Spreading her hands out in front of her and turning her face up and the water pouring around and through her, and I wonder if she might dissolve, disperse into the water and be washed out with the tide, and I wonder, if she were, if I or anyone would believe she ever existed at all.

  The wild waves, rearing and pounding.

  The wind-whipped sky.

  My wife. The storm-witch on the shore.

  *

  I watched her watching for an endless hour, less, perhaps; and quite suddenly the sky went from purple to black, lowered as if to crush her, the black tide rushing; she climbed up to the rocks, I watched as she spread her arms wide. She staggered, leaning into the wind; lost and found her footing; I saw her fall. I cried her name, useless behind the streaked glass, I stood and called her name and couldn’t see her, could barely make her out at all. I should not have let her go alone. I pulled my shoes on desperately and dashed out as I was, in just a sweater, out into the storm; as I rounded the corner of the house I felt the blast of the sea-wind, smashing into my chest. And I thought, How could she possibly have stayed standing so long, how is it that she is so strong? I pushed on, over the links, every inhalation snatched by the gale, forcing my way through the tar-thick dark, my torch sweeping the rocks like a feeble lighthouse beam, and I saw her laid out on her back there, laid out on the rocks, and laughing, crazed, hair splayed out around her like the corona of a fallen moon. I could hear only the faintest echo of her in the gale; I went to her, knelt beside her, cried out to her, but even her own name could not reach her. I clasped her shoulders and then her eyes flew open, and stared up at me wide and unfrightened, when I could hardly keep mine open at all; the sea now was rushing onto the rocks, reaching for her feet, far beyond the tide-line in its grasping fury, and she didn’t seem to care until I shouted, The sea! Stand up! Look at the sea! And she sat up then and gasped as if waking and I helped her stand and she gripped on to me hard enough to hurt me, and I felt the night had come to overwhelm us, and we might drown in one of her dreams. I raised her up and led her, staggering against the wet, the wind, the slippery weed, until at last we reached the grass, and we put our heads down and forced our way on, drenched with the vicious scour of salt and sand; I thought I heard her call out, I turned and could barely make out her face, her cheeks sea-streaked or tear-stained, streaming black with mascara I didn’t know she wore, as if she were crying coal-dust. I yelled, We’re nearly there; she let out a thin, exhilarated scream.

  We reached the side of the cottage and were thrown around the corner of it, the wind tunnelling, and reached the door at last. She skittered inside like a dry leaf, the only leaf on this treeless isle, blown in on a foreign breeze, and I forced the door shut against the storm and secured the catch and the room whirled around us and resettled, papers shifting and lifting, a panting all through the house as it caught its breath and exhaled; her hair whipped into twisted hawsers that my fingers would later tug in. I took her in my arms and she stood with fists bunched against my chest and I gripped her wrists; she was breathless, all the energy of the tempest unleashed and crackling around her; I looked down at her, and she looked wild, thrilled and terrified, her face still wet from the sea-spray, her storm-light eyes wide with the mad wind. Her hands so cold, and she didn’t seem to notice. Was this the same girl who doodled in her margins and blushed at my office door? I remembered the day she came in from the rain, so calmly … You scared me, I said. You could have hurt yourself. Did you hurt yourself? You could have been blown away. Please don’t do that again. I was pleading, my voice shaking with a waver of panic that I couldn’t co
ntrol. Promise you won’t leave like that again. ‘You could have come with me,’ she said. I’m sorry, I said. I know. But I came for you. Please don’t do it again.

  She didn’t answer, but detached herself, and slid out from between my body and the door, and said, ‘I’m soaked,’ and took off her coat and let it fall, and took off her sweater and dropped it, and unhooked her skirt and stepped out of the damp ring of it, and stood there in bra, knickers and high-laced boots with a darkening, gathering cloud of a bruise at the top of her thigh where she’d fallen. I went to her and touched it, gently, and she pulled my hips in to her and wound her cobweb hair about my neck, murmured, ‘You promise you’ll stay. With me.’ Of course. Of course I will. For as long as I can I’ll be with you. Come to the fire, I said. Come back to me, come up from the deep. And she kissed me fiercely then, the storm still in her; the gale raging without, the waves clutching at the shore empty-handed; close, safe, warm inside.

  I and she.

  I tended to the fire while she lit candles. I fiddled with the oil-lamps, their greasy wicks smearing the glass. ‘Does it remind you of when you were little? Before electricity?’ she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she was joking. I made for the kitchen, and felt her approach, silent, behind me; her arms circled my waist, and I led the way; like children not wishing to be alone, we travelled together in this truncated conga line. We ate by lamplight at the solid table, bread, cheese, soup from a tin. It was salty.