The Islands

by William Wall

  Grace has that same pitilessness. I see her with a seagull trapped in one of her rabbit snares. First she tries to catch the bird but it flies at her. Then she kills it with a stone. She detaches the snare and throws the dead bird into a field. I never see her mourn a single dead thing.

  There are things I can recall with precision, like when a slide comes into focus in the microscope, a simple adjustment bringing to life a universe in the objective lens. Trivial things come most readily. I remember how clear the sea is on calm days. A distorting mirror. I remember the brackish taste of well water after a storm. I remember Em’s thumbnail soft and white from sucking while her other fingers have a fine black sickle under each nail. I remember how Richard hauls a fish straight up out of the water on his handline and lands it into a bucket, how he inserts his thumb and forefinger into the gills to break its neck. And the crooked cock of the head relative to the body. I remember Grace throwing herself on the bed, exactly how she pouts when she says I’m stupid, how thin she is, her body straight as a fish. I can see her now. The sea has its own light, a blink of brightness. There is always sea in the light of an island. She lies on her bed in our house, constructing her dilemmas. Richard and Mother and Em are downstairs. Richard’s boat is anchored in the bay.

  Whales are following the tide.

  Seals are moaning.

  The stones face the ocean impassively, never suspecting that the ocean will win.

  It is that time.

  Grace

  My sister Emily died. She fell from the watchtower. She was scrambling on the stones of the wall.

  Jeannie said that Em had taken to following her, that she was always in and out of the tower.

  Later the coroner would say that she had injured herself on the way down, that her back was broken too. Richard Wood and my father made the story straight for him. He praised their clear concise evidence and expressed his sympathy with the family. A childhood accident, he said. He quoted the Bible. They know not what they do. They never asked me. At that time I had other ideas, though I came to believe their story.

  I was the one who found her. I should have been taking care of her. But I knew where to look. I brought her ashore. Richard Wood was not there. My mother waited at the pier. I carried Em to her and gave the child into her hands. Then I pushed the boat into deeper water and started the Seagull. I went for the doctor and the lifeboat and I phoned Tiraneering from the public box above Rally Pier. They got to the island before me.

  My mother wanted to bury the child there but it was against the law.

  Laws of interment are ancient instruments. They are designed to prevent contagion, disease, and theft. They only appear to be concerned with dignity, love, hospitality. In reality a grave is a piece of property like any other. It is a small piece of land into which a child is put. It has a stone with the child’s name. Time elapsed is recorded. It is a complete archive. It contains flesh and bone and memory and the parentheses of birth and death. And in the end, like most property, it is owned by someone other than the occupant. It is a mortgage on the past.

  The coroner pieced together a narrative of her death for us.

  We experienced it as a piece of fiction, less credible in fact because it had no internal order, no structuring principle. We fell apart. The world fell apart.

  But the coroner’s inquiry could not touch us.

  My memories were useless and, in fact, I was already forgetting. It would take me thirty years to remember my part in it. I could tell how she slept with her nose to my back. How she held my mother’s hand when she was talking to her, looking up at her face and just holding her hand like a toy. Those things cast no light on the matter, though he listened to them patiently enough.

  My mother remembered. She gave evidence in a tight, hurt voice, like a frightened child reciting last night’s homework. Even I could see that she was in danger of falling apart, or that she had already fallen apart and been put together the wrong way. She kept looking at my father and he nodded and smiled at her.

  This is what she said. Em had been with her in the kitchen. It was teatime. It was my day. Then Em was gone. Where is that notice-box of a child? And where is Grace? I’ll have to go after her. Then she broke down and cried. The coroner gave her tissues. He seemed to have a box ready just in case. Perhaps coroners always do.

  In time she continued. She told them that she knew something terrible had happened.

  Everyone looked for Em.

  I was the one who saw her. I climbed the watchtower wall because it was the highest thing on the island. From the height of the tower I saw her drifting in the submarine currents, among the white and rounded shale from the last cliff fall. She wore blue dungarees and a pink-and-white striped shirt and one blue rubber sneaker. Her hands were outstretched.

  She sometimes slept like that too, face down in her bed.

  My mother’s horror was terrible. I remember very little of it. There was a time when I recalled it all but I found it useless in dealing with her life or my own. Memory is an overrated capacity. It is most useful to those who need to deny things. I remember she was upstairs in bed and my sister Jeannie and I were sitting in the kitchen. There were candles on the table because the electricity cable had failed, as it often did—boats were forever anchoring on it, despite the warning signs. My father and Richard Wood were upstairs. We could hear my mother’s voice. It came in rapid stuttering bursts, like a sewing machine. I remember that an earwig walked across the table in front of us. Jeannie pinched it up and held it to the light. I saw its jaws working, its tail bending and straightening, its antennae. Then she dropped it into the candle. It fell into the molten wax and settled quickly down. It drowned. In the morning there was the shadow of the earwig in the cold wax.

  My mother’s horror was also perfectly reasonable. One of the things we forget is that the world itself is madder than anything our heads can make. How should one remember one’s child falling into the sea? Sustaining injuries against the cliff on the way down? After that everything is impossible.

  My mother’s horror was all-encompassing, all-consuming. It devoured the night and the day, the sun and the moon, God and the future and everything in between. It paralyzed us. It divided us.

  Jeannie was crying too. I resented her for doing it. It seemed to me she wanted as always to be the center of attention but nobody paid her any heed. Her tearfulness turned into wailing and then I wanted to choke her. I slapped her once but it only made her worse. Shut up, I said, it’s bad enough. Then I said, A pity it wasn’t you.

  Later, the night before we came out of the island—How long was it between Em’s death and our crossing?—I woke to hear running and urgent voices. I stood on the bed to see out the window but I could not see the ground. I ran down and saw that the front door was open. Richard had been sleeping on the kitchen floor. His sleeping bag was empty. I closed the door and went back to bed. My mother’s room was empty too. It meant that she had run away again.

  After a time I heard the voices coming back. Richard, my father, my mother. They did not go to bed. I fell asleep. In the morning Jeannie said she had been asleep all night but I knew she was not. She was listening too.

  Where did my mother go that night? Nobody tells children these things. They hope, maybe they believe, that we sleep through every danger, that childhood is, in fact, a kind of sleepwalk through their adult world. Like someone said that madness is a nightmare in a waking world. And then later they assume we know. As if the simple act of growing up involves absorbing their memories in our own. All that time they were inventing the lie that would ravage my life. I could hear them talking it through. They were talking about me. If I had been older, stronger, wilder, I would have run away. I could swim ashore at high tide. It was the kind of thing I was good at. This is what you’ll say to the Guards, they told me, and this is what you’ll say at the coroner’s court. And then they told me a lie.

  Later my father would write a full account of how we came out of the
island. How the men on the lifeboat turned their backs out of natural sympathy. One of them was the fisherman who called to tell his stories and who came and went that night that we heard her screaming. He never looked at any of us. It was a wet day. They wore their long sou’westers, their sea boots. They were rough men. They made their living by farming or fishing but they volunteered to save people. They had seen madness before; the hills and the valleys were full of it. They did not want their eyes to say what they saw. They watched the sea and the boat and tended to it with skill and gentleness while my mother wept and raved and my father held her together and we children could not close our eyes. In a sense they had always known this would happen. They had seen her coming ashore on her foraging trips, seen the things she bought, heard her talk. They knew about her wild life in the wilderness of the Atlantic where no woman in her right mind would want to live—in remote places everybody knows everything, or they think of it that way. They saw the kind of children she reared. There’s a want there—that was a phrase she picked and brought with her—meaning she was not the full shilling, she’d heard it used. Maybe it was intended for her. Where was Flanagan the cat? Cats can look after themselves and I suppose we always intended to go back for him.

  SISTERS

  I took the train from Waterloo to Portsmouth Harbour and then the Red Funnel Ferry. I glanced back on the crossing and saw that I was leaving a vast industrial harbor. There were warships at anchor. It was a summer’s day and sailing boats were working up with the tide. There was a yawl there. She had a high-clewed Yankee and a staysail. I saw how they trimmed the mizzen hard to keep her nose to it. The man at the tiller wore a blue yachting cap. He was lean and long-limbed. He wore faded red trousers and a blue fisherman’s smock. I watched him until he was too far away.

  My sister met me at the pierhead. I tried hard to recognize her in the waiting crowd but it was she who picked me out. In five years or six years she had turned into a sullen beauty. In the breakdown of our lives she got my father and I got my mother. She got dark hair and I got fair. She got a perfect complexion and I got freckles. She was sixteen, I was twenty. She opened the trunk for me to put my bag in and left me to close it. Her car was an Anglia. She drove with determination and uncertainty along the waterfront and up the hill past crumbling Victorian summer houses. Then we were among fields and small villages for a time, then a harbor lined with houseboats, elaborate affairs with balconies and patio windows—one had an entire bungalow built on the deck. They were settling gently into their mud berths as the tide fell. There were dismasted dinghies floating outside a clubhouse. Across the water they were closing the huge doors on a boatyard shed. A haze like smoke blurred the outlines of things. The shore blended into the sea and shaded into the scrub trees of the roadside. England looked different down here. London felt like another world, or at least another country.

  I asked her about the island.

  I told her about our mother, although she didn’t ask.

  We had to stop on a causeway with the harbor on one side and a bog on the other. I could see she was impatient. A lorry and a tractor were maneuvering to pass each other. I had time to see that this was a tamer sea, the harbor shallow. The distant bleak gleam of mudflats stretched towards the English Channel. There was something closed about the sky. A sullen god lurked in its coverts.

  She gets agitated, I said, you remember she used to be like that even before. Remember how she worried about having food in the house that we could use if we got cut off in a storm? She worries about her pills all the time now. She’s always double-checking that she’s taken them. Sometimes she empties them out on the table and counts what’s left and divides it by the number of days since the last prescription. She fusses about small things. It turns to efficiency at work, but at home it’s a bit strange—you know, strange.

  My sister didn’t seem to be listening.

  She’s still beautiful, that’s the amazing thing. I mean, people who don’t know her are always impressed. Her eyes are on fire.

  Look at that tractor, my sister said, he shouldn’t be coming this way.

  I said, Mum worries about you.

  She put her hand to the horn but didn’t blow.

  And later we walked a bridle path that led along the backs of gardens and through a beech wood. It was Beatrix Potter and Jane Austen and all the clichés between. We came to a beach. My sister said the stones were chalk flints, Tertiary flints, and quartz pebbles, all rolled round by the sea a million years ago. But there were also fragments of ironstone, sarsenstone, lydianstone, hornstone. She made them sound like a poem in some unknown language. I saw that she loved stones in a way that she could never love anything else. Until now I had only known London. My wilderness was London Fields or maybe Highgate Cemetery, one of Mother’s favorites, or Abney Park, where the founder of the Salvation Army was buried. Jeannie held my hand. There was something childlike about her. I was glad of the warmth. Her hand was small but her fingers were hard and strong. Daddy encouraged her geology and mineralogy, she said. I tried that the other way ’round. Daddy encouraged my psychology. It didn’t work. I was jealous, I knew that. I was not a fool. He brought her books. When he was traveling he always thought of her. She was allowed to search his bags. She was allowed to find things. Sometimes he brought stones. She had a piece of alabaster from Italy, a banded agate from Greece, and a moss agate from America. He hides things from me, she said. I found the alabaster in the lining of his old leather bag. It’s a game we play.

  This is my favorite place, she said. Nobody comes here. I sit in that tree and watch the ships.

  What is it like living with Daddy?

  He takes care of me. Daddy is the caring type.

  Do you remember before?

  Daddy says not to go over things. Think of the present, he says. Concentrate on what’s happening around you.

  She looked around.

  The raised beach is still here, she said. It’s under the turf. It runs all along this side.

  She pointed at a line of shells and gravel.

  There’s a shell midden, she said. Iron Age, I think.

  What does he say about me? Daddy.

  He says you’re the brilliant one. You’ll go far. He says no one ever knows what’s going on inside your head. You’re the genius and I’m the beauty. Would you give me a hug?

  She moved towards me.

  Please, she said.

  I put my arms around her. Already she was taller than me. My head was against her breast. She put her arms around my shoulders and I put mine around her waist. The long-legged fly and the stone. I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Did we glisten like enamel, mica, oil? From a ship in the channel we must have looked permanent, a realist sculpture on the shore, depicting loss, disaster, exile. A mother and child. A sailor and his lass. But it would have been a lie. After a time she patted me on the head as you would pat a child. We’re still sisters, she said. Then she stepped away and turned her back on me.

  LOVERS

  We are fossil hunting at Undercliff beach. It’s a September afternoon after school. The sea is a mirror that stretches as far as the horizon. We’ve walked miles. He was always one for endurance. He wears shorts, a pale yellow shirt, and a pair of battered rubber sneakers. We have a bottle of Robinson’s Lemon Barley Water and a wax paper packet of ham sandwiches.

  We sit down to examine our only find, a tiny ammonite from the London Clay, solitary in my canvas bag. Still, it is beautiful, coppery, fractured, abstract.

  You know, he says, what I love is the imperfections; perfection is a dangerous myth, what we need to love is our immanence, not our possibilities.

  I know what he means although I don’t know what immanence is—it doesn’t seem necessary to the thought. Saying immanence means he’s treating me as an equal. I like that.

  He ignores me. He closes his eyes for a time. When he opens them he indicates the cliffs at our back. Tell me about this place, he says.

  So I te
ll him the story of the chalk and mud that is the island; I know the story well. He lies back, closes his eyes, and listens. Even that lying back is accomplished like a deliberate gesture, an unfolding of the body in equilibrium. I have always known this grace. It’s part of the landscape of my childhood, as natural as a tree moving in the wind. His body straightens as smoothly as one might open a fist and straighten a hand. His lean face and clear eyes, then the long pale lashes. Now I can look at his face, now that he can’t see me. I try to memorize it. The downy hair around his lips, almost like a girl’s. In the steely light I see it. And a tiny scar near his left eye, so smooth I feel I could rub it away with my finger.

  It’s a dream—the flat sea, the hot sand, the canvas bag of tools, and the single burnished ammonite. The story of the rock, the clay, the sand, told in millions of years. Sweat on my face, in my armpits, between my breasts and my legs. The humidity is rising. Over on the French side of the channel I can see cumulus building into giant anvils. As I talk I learn something new and it is this: that two people could commit any enormity and it wouldn’t alter the long history of stone by as much as a micron. On this day in the four-and-half-billion-year existence of the Earth I could have exactly what I want, what I had always wanted, and afterwards the universe would be exactly the same without waste, without imbalance. So when I see that he’s asleep I bend down and put my mouth close to his. I am careful not to touch. I am so close I can almost feel my own shadow.

  He wakes. I draw back. I feel my face redden. I try to look away.

  Then he puts his arms around me and pulls me down. Later he says that he did it because he didn’t want to hurt me, he didn’t want me to feel rejected. But it doesn’t feel like that.

  First there is the kiss. Everything is rougher than I expected. By the time he feels for my breast I am beyond caring, beyond doing, beyond resistance, beyond common sense. I’ve fallen for sex, fallen into sex, I’m falling in sex.