Orkney

by Amy Sackville

  I should go to her, now.

  *

  I sit down on the rocks and watch; I pull off my shoes and unroll my socks; neat, ribbed, navy-blue, pulled up the calf without a wrinkle, I unroll them and neatly turn them together in a ball and, standing, pocket them, and step onto the sand. It is unexpectedly sharp, each tiny rock-shard not quite smoothed enough; and it is saturated with seawater that is very, very cold. I have almost reached her, almost. I approach quietly, not wishing to startle her, as if she is an animal that might take fright and bolt. The water comes for my toes, a thousand freezing needles, but soon I feel nothing; standing ankle-deep beside her, all I can feel is a numbed tingle, and I am conscious of how pale and gnarled my feet are, of the black hair on the knuckles, they are flattened and fattened in the water like another, dead man’s, feet, the big old horned toenail, bent inward, a yellowed claw. Monster’s feet, which shouldn’t be on show. Monster’s feet and monster’s hands, I have.

  She looks out to sea, puts the tips of her thumbs to the tips of her forefingers to make a frame. A photograph. ‘We’ve been here twelve days,’ she says, not to me, staring out. So little, so long? It seems only a moment, it seems forever. Green light through the trees, wine in the garden; our wedding day, the sun pale in her hair and the falling leaves: impossible. I cannot reach beyond this horizon.

  ‘Look,’ she says suddenly. ‘Look at the birds, look at them circling.’ Wheeling, spiralling. Crying ‘look-away’, it sounds like, I say. They pour away from the sky, diving, and as I watch, the world tilts. Look-away. She doesn’t.

  ‘Richard …’ she says. ‘What if we …’ And trails off, like that, a silver tail evading capture. What if we what? I ask; she doesn’t answer. What if we stay here, does she mean to say, as her eyes do? What if we don’t go home? What if we run into the sea, now?

  What if we drown? What if we die? We won’t drown, I want to say. We won’t die. But I will.

  What if we what?

  We sit together on the sand and watch the sun fall. We have been sitting for what seems a long time. The light shifting; her eyes suddenly veiled, just as suddenly shimmering. Luminous, obscure. I no longer feel the cold; my bones are numb.

  Out where the sea meets the sky, a swelling of deep, powdery purple cloud, a band of palest eau-de-nil below, and then the reflection of the cloud again purpling the sea violet. The colour of your birthmark, I say; ‘and my bruises,’ she smiles.

  Above the cloud bank … ‘Periwinkle,’ she says. ‘I had a crayon by that name, as a child.’ Me, too, I say. How extraordinary. We fall quiet again.

  The evening deepens. The cloud breaks across a full moon.

  Mauve, now, I say.

  Minutes pass, the night cools; I put an arm around her, she shivers and winches herself into my side. We don’t go in. An hour passes, an age of peace. We watch the day end.

  Tyrolean purple, I offer; it is almost entirely dark. I am almost near her, now. ‘Indigo,’ she says, softly, so as not to stir the silence. ‘Prussian blue.’ Indian ink. ‘Mussel-blue. Midnight blue.’ Not quite, I say. But come. Let’s go in. ‘Bedtime blue,’ she sighs.

  *

  The night is so dense that there’s nothing to see of it, just black, just darkness without, and silence within, but for the sound of the wind, and our breathing, slowing. She is almost inaudible. I can still hear her last gasp, the last sound before this silence; I can almost still feel her around me.

  What if we stayed here? I whisper. Thee and me. She doesn’t say anything. Perhaps she is sleeping. But I think she smiles, in the dark.

  She walks into the sea, leaving the faintest swirl in the fog, the water barely eddying around her, and I cry out, I cannot make a sound, I cry out in silence, Oh, do not go on; the echo of some ancient warning of which all but this is lost, do not walk on, do not go on; I cry out, silent, frozen by the fog, I cry out from the beach and the waters close over her and she is lost to the world below, her hair floating out among the shifting fronds and wrapped around by tendrils, by tentacles, pulled down into the murk, all the lost souls stretching pale arms from the gloom to greet her and pull her under and bind her in the dark green weed; her hair floating out and turning to wrack, her pale skin pearling, her eyes become bottle-glass smoothed by the sands and on, into the deep, into the dark, dissipating, oh do not go on, do not go in, do not go under, do not go on, I weep and I wake, weeping, and I try to hold her, I reach for her and she

  Thursday

  When I woke this morning she was gone.

  I had set an alarm for seven. I woke at five from a heavy, reeling, pressing sleep, and she was gone. I reached for her, I called for her, and had no answer; the blind was open, the moon was full, almost touching the water, casting its silver path. The sky clear. She did not dance on the silvered beach. Everything as bright and sharp and heightened as a hallucination. I listened to the sea Shhh and slept and dreamed she was taken from me, dreamed she was gone, and woke and she was gone. I thought I heard her gasp but she was gone and when I called her name she didn’t answer.

  I call again; there is no answer.

  I can’t see her on the beach; we are due to leave at nine and there is no sign of her, and everything she’s brought is still strewn about the floor; I throw jumpers and jeans and socks at the open bag and stuff it all in and call again but no answer. Her handbag is still here, she can’t have gone far. As usual, no reception. Out on the path, out in the wind

  Nothing.

  No answer at Mrs Odie’s.

  Nowhere to be seen on the beach.

  *

  I seek her footsteps, I scour the sand for traces, and there are none. I sift it through my hands and find nothing, nothing but shards of dead shells, I can’t feel my fingers, I am numb, numb.

  I climb up the rocks, I slipper and slide over the rocks, calling out. There is no answer.

  *

  Nine o’clock has come and gone; from the rocks I watched the ferryman arrive at the dock, I watched him waiting, I saw him leave the boat and stalk up the beach and knock at the door and knock again and he came around to the front and glowered through the windows but there was no one home. I called out to him but he didn’t hear, and I couldn’t in any case think what to say. He couldn’t wait indefinitely. He went back to his boat and sailed off into the late dawn. The boat is gone, without us.

  She is gone.

  Blood thudding in my temples like the tide around an empty cavern.

  *

  Midday has come and gone. There is no one on the beach or on the cliffs. It is bright, bright and cruelly clear. To the south, our plane will be leaving its flare across the sky.

  I look out to sea; there is nothing. No silver selkies at play. No song that I can hear.

  The gulls wheeling, crying, ‘Look-away, look-away.’

  I cry out to her on the beach and strain to hear her returning call.

  No answer.

  *

  At Mr Begg’s the ting of the bell jangles my nerves and I stand stupidly amid the limp produce and the turnips and the sweets, and Mr Begg asks if I’m looking for anything in particular and I laugh a high strange laugh and say I’m looking for my wife, he hasn’t seen her? He’ll let me know if he does? He raises his eyebrows and nods ‘aye’.

  At the hotel, the lounge is empty and horribly quiet and dusty in the daylight. It’s too early for the barmaid to be around, and Bob and Linda and Mart and Will are of course long gone. The hotel receptionist comes to the bar and can’t help me; having never met me or my wife how could she, why should she; her expression remains carefully impassive as I order a whisky; she checks the clock indiscreetly, but it has gone midday and she pours it without comment and I gulp it down and ask for another and then wander out into the wind, calling.

  *

  I pound on the door of the old croft house, I peer in the window. I pound on the window but the old man has left, or is hiding. Tins and beer cans litter the carpet but the filthy bedding is gone. I shall have no
answer from Old Tom.

  *

  The ruined church stands hollow to the sky; no echo of her pledge remains. No one hides among the headstones, and I slump among them and listen at the ground but the old dead keep silent and there is only the sound of the gulls.

  *

  I circle all the island round, and cannot find her. I call on beach and rock and cliff, and cannot find her. I peer into the caverns, I call from the heights, I bellow on the highest crag and the sea rushes below me, and I hear only her name echoed back, empty. And the crabs edge off sideways, telling no tales, and the sorrowful seals tell no secrets. And the sky lowers, closing in.

  *

  The sun has set, the full moon rising. She is not here to dance under it. No, I am wrong, tonight the moon is waning. A day has passed.

  It will be days, weeks, before it is full again.

  I pour myself whisky and wait for the morning.

  Friday

  I have sat all night in the chair by the window and barely slept; I drifted under and woke all through the night and called again and again, hearing her name over and over, every time, the wrench of remembering, and the strangeness of the sound in the silence echoing so that I am unsure now if I spoke aloud; once I thought I heard her say, I’m here, Richard. But I can’t be sure of that either. I poured whisky. The familiar burn.

  Watching from the window, watching the empty beach, the moonlight made my empty mind ache, pressing upon my eyelids; I let them close and thought I saw her, walking into the water, dancing, white arms reaching and her voice calling, singing, and I would gladly have gone to her, gone out to her there in the water to be pulled under, and I called her name, and it woke me, my own voice, reedy in the thinned-out silence. I would exchange anything for a last spell to wake me, but I know it is not a dream. So instead I want a spell to let me sleep a long, unbroken, deceived sleep in which she is not gone. I can only drowse and I fight against the tide because when I slip under I watch her walk again and again into the sea, and now the sky is lightening and still there is no sign.

  It’s cold. A drop more. The last of it.

  *

  A shake of the shoulder woke me, and I grasped at the hand for a moment like a drowning man. But looking up through the blear I saw no one, and realized it was only a shiver, and could have wept, if I wasn’t sobbing already.

  I called out, called her phone, called for her on the beach; no answer. Tried Mrs Odie. No answer.

  I called the police. I said to the officer who answered, I can’t find my wife. She’s gone, I explained. I have made myself a cup of tea, while I wait for him to arrive. It is going cold.

  My wretched heart is beating so hard and dull that it hurts.

  *

  The policeman, out of his depth, performing a role, wants to know when I last saw her. He wants to know how long we’ve been married. Two weeks, I say. Two weeks today. I try not to cry, remembering her, in her wedding gown, in her nightgown, silk, her skin. He wants to know if there’s anywhere I can think of, that she might have gone to. He wants a description. I find I cannot give one. I have no photograph. I say, she is tall, she is thin, she has white hair and green, or bluish, or grey eyes. What am I to tell him? She has a violet freckle on her hipbone, a bruise; her hands and toes are webbed and the veins behind her knees are green. These few meagre secrets – haven’t I a right to them? He asks to see our bedroom, he looks through her things. She has left a book behind, an Orkney poet. No clues to be found. She has made no mark, no scribbles in the margins. This book might have belonged to anyone.

  She has left her coat too, waxy, briny from her days on the beach. There is nothing to identify her in the pockets, or in her abandoned bag; just a pencil and a sketchpad, a single portrait of me, fire lit, glowering, and page upon page that I did not see her drawing of underwater currents swirling, sea-stained, heavy and shining with graphite; it comes off on my fingers and everything I touch is smeared with it. The hollows of my eyes are rubbed with it, like a highwayman. Her phone was buried at the bottom, among the sand, the shells, the stubs of pencil. It was switched off. There are no numbers saved, apart from mine.

  He asks after Mrs Odie and I say I can’t get hold of her. He says that’s no like her. She’s mibbe off seeing her sister in Inverness, he says. I nod. I don’t know what to tell him. He wants to know if we can contact my wife’s family. I say, I don’t know her family. I don’t know where to look. I think her father is dead. And somehow I don’t even plead with him, I can’t even ask him to find her for me, I don’t see how he can, when I have never known myself how to find her. Anyway he says he’ll try to. He asks, how was her mood, the day before she …? Did she seem upset; did she seem strange in any way? I almost laugh. She seemed strange in every way, I want to tell him. I can give you no account of her moods. This sky of yours, this sea, that is how she seemed – like that, like the light changing. You tell me, if you know what the weather will do.

  I say only, she was sad to be leaving. She liked it here. He tells me to stay on the island while he makes enquiries. He looks at me closely as if waiting for a reaction. He will be back, he says. I mustn’t leave. As if I could.

  *

  I found the red lipstick in her bag, too, and put some on, a synthetic waxy kiss, to touch where her lips touched. After the policeman was gone, of course. It leaves a mark on my whisky glass, as if she has just stolen a sip.

  Her answerphone message is pre-recorded, with a gap for her name; I have listened over and over to her saying it in that gap, in barely a whisper, so I have to strain to hear it at all. She has already recorded her new surname. Her married name. When did she do this? There are twenty-seven voicemail messages. I listen to them all. I listen to myself: anxious, wheedling, pleading; a slur, barely an aspiration, an empty sound. I listen to myself breathing, I catch the fragment of a sigh. A sob, a dreadful rattle, a rasp. I say her name. I listen to myself, yesterday, last night, this morning, saying her name.

  *

  Mr Begg serves me a bottle of whisky with a hard sympathy. I buy the best and don’t care for the cost. To appease him maybe.

  I buy cigarettes and smoke the whole pack without noticing.

  I buy bread and slice it in wedges and burn it under the grill on purpose, and the smell brings tears to my eyes but I have to eat something.

  *

  I wander the house; she goes out as I enter. Echoes, traces; her bright hair like cobwebs left in corners. Not enough to weave a bracelet of. I curl up under her coat and try to smell her through the smell of the sea; beneath the rime and seaweed, the deep salt-water smell. I catch it in the air and think that she’s come through the door, think she’s behind me when it is only some shift in the tide or the wind. I pour salt into the palm of my hand and touch my tongue to it and can’t seem to taste it. There, on the sill, are the pebbles she placed in a ring; and the urchin skeleton, the paperweight stone, the hollow bone, all piled neatly in their cairn. A broken pile of tesserae that refuse to tessellate. I scatter them, and sit among them in the silence after their clatter, trying not to listen to the useless Shhh-shh of the sea.

  I prowl through the rooms and find nothing to tear, nothing to rip and gouge at. I yowl and gnash. I see myself enraged, filling this little room with my bulk, preposterous and horrifying, black-furred, swiping about me so the walls are torn by my claws, the rug ripped under them, fibres and fragments of wool, paper, tartan, glass and slate and china flying; the ornaments dashed from the mantel and smashed; leaving spittle and tatters in the wake of my fury, snarling, everything laid bare, stripped to plaster and stone and bone – nothing left of her at all …

  Horrible. A dram, to steady the nerves.

  It chinks against the glass. A death at sea. Hold the bottle straight.

  I press my head to the window, and scan the beach.

  I thought I saw, for a moment, something out in the water, a familiar flash of something surface and dive beneath the low waves, rippling on the sheeny sand.
/>   But now the sea is perfectly still, all passion spent.

  This grey place. Everything grey. Oyster, dove’s wing, silver … Grey. Everything ashes and bone, drained, nothing, neither night nor sunlight, nothing, nothing.

  I look out, at the sea, at the gulls, the deranged sky, the clouds ripping in the wind. I look down at her cairn of stones; I do not recall the patient hour I must have spent in reassembling it.

  My fingers, I notice, have turned slightly blue in the cold. I clutch my glass.

  It’s getting dark again and I try to doze but I can’t. I dream her dreams.

  The wind cracks and shudders.

  I am jolted by a bang at the door but there is no one.

  I thought I heard her say my name.

  Saturday

  People out on the cliffs this morning in bright fluorescent windcheaters, swinging torch beams into the dark caves. It is too dangerous, I’m told, for me to join them. If they call out to each other, I can’t hear them for the wind, and she won’t either.