The Islands

by William Wall

  He’s almost weightless. When he enters me it hurts and my pain belongs to the subterranean world, primitive as the clay. His body is slacker than I expected; a small paunch begins at his waist and settles in a downward parabola to his groin. His pubic hair is red. His penis is a surprise although I had imagined what they would feel like, read about them, seen them represented on toilet walls and magazines. I didn’t see it before he entered me, but afterwards it is small and sticky and amusing. I want to touch it but I don’t dare. I don’t know the etiquette. He is twenty or more years older than me. This is sex.

  He rolls sideways onto the sand.

  Oh god, he says.

  I think it sounds like anguish. I don’t care. I find I’m holding my breath. I release it slowly. Sex, I tell myself. I’ve had it. Sex. Somewhere in a disconnected but synchronous life, a point from which I can view myself to advantage and still belong, I am amused. There I am lying in the sand, full of semen. This is sex. I’ve had sex. There are fossils everywhere. I’m marveling and silently laughing. I’m inwardly celebrating and at the same time reverent. Sex.

  I lie there with my legs spread, my shirt pulled down awkwardly. The old bag of tools is beside my head. I can almost sense the numinous reality of the ammonite. I’m sore but not as much as I had imagined. I’ve been learning things from magazines, though they haven’t prepared me for the fullness, the experience of being ridden, of his final explosive stop. The terror is pleasure. There isn’t enough of it. I want it again. I want to be able to experience each part of it distinctly, not as a single astonishing mass. Sex. It just happened. I’ve had it.

  We talk seriously once we’ve arranged our clothes again. The clouds have come from France and the sky is lowering. We’re at the upper extent of the sand and there are scars of grey clay like the broken crust of the world. First of all there are apologies I don’t want. Then there are the people we can’t tell. My stepmother would be shocked. She might go to the police. I think the police thing is laughable. And I actually laugh. He doesn’t. He is a guest, he has broken the most fundamental rules, if there is a baby he would acknowledge it, of course, he would not run away from his responsibilities—all that primitive nonsense. He sits with his knees doubled up under his chin, his arms wrapped around them. He looks like a miserable midget. I want to say to him that this is not 1876, that I know what I’m doing, that I’m not a child, that this is the age of liberation. I’ve read articles in which people say these things.

  I’m so sorry, he keeps saying, I’m not good at self-control.

  In the end, child that I am, I laugh in his face.

  Do it to me again, I say as if to prove that I know what I’m doing. I begin to unbutton my shorts.

  Oh no, he says, oh no, my girl, I’m not falling for it again.

  He looks along the beach.

  He stands up suddenly. He walks towards the water, which is coming in our direction. I know this part of the beach can get cut off at spring tide, people have been rescued here. I think about being cut off for six hours or so with him. He picks up one piece of shingle after another and launches them into the water. Some skip on the surface for a while before they go down. I watch him. I feel cool and powerful. When he turns around again he stares silently at me for about ten seconds. Then he begins walking back the way we came. When I get up to follow him I feel where he’s been. The soreness is a peculiar pleasure, a memento. A child no more, it says.

  HONEYMOON PHOTOGRAPH

  We had a room that opened into an orange garden. It was February and a cold wind was blowing from the Apennines and beyond that from the mountains of Greece. They called it the Grecale.

  It was a surprise to us.

  We had imagined a warmer place. Nevertheless I fell in love with it. Perhaps I am drawn to coldness. In time I would learn Italian, translate from Italian, even think about buying a small house in the country somewhere. I never did, of course. I knew too much about small houses.

  It was so cold that on our first day we went into town and bought warm underwear and socks. In the haberdashery, the man knew exactly what we wanted. He brought a stepladder and reached down boxes from the highest row, the just-in-case shelves. Everything came in tissue paper.

  The oranges were as cold as stones but they were the brightest thing—winter’s lights. We walked a lot. I loved it, Bill did not. He was impatient with everything, he thought the people unreliable, the food too oily and sloppy, but when we closed the door on the orange garden and turned out the lights he was as happy as a child. I might have been worried by his cunning sensuality, the perfection of his pleasure. I was not much good at sex, but he didn’t care. He created my body. He imagined my arousal and my satisfaction and they happened as he imagined. It may have been his experience in television that gave him this power. I was grateful for it, anyway. It gave me time to learn both pretense and pleasure. I was happily full of him, rosy-cheeked at dinner, pale at breakfast. The man behind the desk approved—we called him Antonio. Bill named him one night. Naked and flabby in the cold light from the one overhead bulb, he danced and sang:

  Her old hurdy-gurdy

  All day she’d parade

  And this she would sing

  To the tunes that it played

  Oh! Oh! Antonio, he’s gone away

  Left me alone-ee-o, all on my own-ee-o

  I want to meet him with his new sweetheart

  Then up will go Antonio and his ice cream cart

  Bill’s repertoire of ridiculous songs is vast. I’ll say one thing for old Bill, he can make me laugh. He did the hurdy-gurdy handle with his prick and the ice cream cart going up was executed with panache, turning his back to me and flipping his backside in the air like a cancan dancer.

  Antonio wore beautiful shirts, whiter than white, in the words of the advertisements. They seemed to glow against his skin. He was always perfectly groomed; he even shaved again in the afternoon. The girl who served us our coffee looked at us with longing. We thought she was the reason he shaved so often. She had no ring.

  It was a time when many people did not own cameras. Our only honeymoon photograph was taken by Antonio on his Brownie box camera. He stood back under the orange trees, stooped over the reflex lens, the strap around his neck. Two eyes, one big, one small, watched us from the box. When he pressed on the arm the shutter opened and we saw the big eye wink briefly. There we are in the unnatural and slightly garish Kodacolor, fading now, clearly happy and in love. I don’t think the image is a lie. We are seated at the table where we always took our breakfast. It was just outside the dining room of the hotel, sheltered by two walls from the Grecale that blew in the trees overhead. The morning sun reached in there after a certain hour, its blessed warmth on our faces. I’m wearing a sweater and green flares. My legs are crossed under the table, feet in leather sandals. Bill is in shirtsleeves. There is coffee and bread and a bowl of fruit on the table. A white linen tablecloth. The whiteness of the walls and the fabric impresses itself rather too much. Our faces are milky by comparison. I’m laughing, Bill is making a face.

  Antonio posted the print to us. No one would do it now. His real name was Enzo, it turned out. Enzo Muratore. I still have the postcard he enclosed with it. It was a photograph of Vesuvius.

  THE MOUNTAIN ROAD

  James Casey drove off the top of Rally Pier. His two daughters were in the back seat. The tide here falls out through the islands and away west. It runs at a knot, sometimes a knot and a half, at springs. Listen and you will hear it in the stones. This is the song of lonely places. The car moved a little sideways as it sank. And afterwards great gulps of air escaped but made no sound. I know these things, not because I saw them but because they must have happened. The sky is settling over Rally and the hills. It is the color of limestone, a great cap on the country. Ten miles out the sky is blue.

  I heard it on local radio, suicide at Rally Pier. I knew who it was.

  You cannot see the pier from my house. I got up and put my jeans and sweate
r on and climbed the hill behind the house, through heather and stone, to where I could look down. Bees sang in the air. Watery sunshine filtered through thin clouds. When I turned after ten minutes of climbing, the whole bay lay before me, the islands in their pools of stillness, the headlands like crude fingers, boats out beyond Castle Island pair-trawling a mile or more apart but connected forever by cables attached to the wings of a giant net. James was on the boats once. He it was who explained all that to me. I saw the police tape on the pier head, a tiny yellowness that was not there before. If he left a note, what did it say? Suddenly the song came into my head. “Dónal Óg.” Even as the first words came I knew what it meant for me. You took the east from me and you took the west from me and great is my fear that you took God from me.

  When the song was finished with me I walked back down home. I was accustomed to think of it like that—not that I stopped singing but that the song was finished with me. I made up the bed with fresh sheets and put the soiled ones in the washing machine. I washed out the floor of the bathroom. Why do we do these things when we are bereft? Then I had a shower and put on dark clothes. I got out the bicycle and pumped up the leaking tire. My father had shown me how to mend punctures but I could not remember now. I still have the same puncture repair kit, a tin box, but now I keep hash in it.

  Then I wheeled the bicycle down to the gate and onto the road and faced the hill to the house where the dead girls lay.

  They closed the door against me when they saw me turn the bend. Cousins make these decisions, but I leaned my bicycle against the wall and knocked and then they had to let me in. Perhaps it was inevitable anyway. People around here do not shut their neighbors out. They showed me into the front room where the two girls lay in open coffins. Three older women sat by them. I did not recognize them. Aunts, most probably. They had their beads in their hands. I did not bless myself. I go to neither church nor chapel and they all know it. I stood for a long time looking down on the faces. When old people go, death eases their pain and their faces relax into a shapeless wax model of someone very like them. People say they look happy, but mostly they look plastic. But when a child dies it is the perpetuation of a certain model of perfect beauty. People would say the girls looked like angels. There was no trace of the sea on them, no sign of the panic and fear that bubbled through the ground-up sleeping tablets that their father had fed them for breakfast yesterday morning. According to local radio. His own prescription. He had not been sleeping for months.

  When I stopped looking I shook hands with each of the aunts. Nobody said anything. I went out of the room and found the cousins waiting in the corridor. I asked for Helen and was told she was lying down. The doctor was calling regularly all day. She was on tablets for her nerves. She was very low. I was about to ask them to pass on my sympathy when a door opened upstairs. It was Helen herself. She called to know who was there. It’s your neighbor, one of the cousins said. She could not bring herself to name me.

  Helen came unsteadily down the stairs.

  Her hair was flat and moist. She was wearing the kind of clothes she might have gone to mass in, a formal blouse and a straight grey skirt, but she had no tights on. Her bare feet looked vulnerable and childish. She stepped deliberately, stretching so that at each tread of the stairs she stood on the ball of her foot like a dancer. She came down like someone in a trance. I think we all wondered if she knew who she was coming down for. And if she did, what was she going to say.

  Cáit, she said, is it yourself? Thank you for coming.

  Her eyes were flat, too. There was no light in them.

  I’m sorry for your trouble, I said, taking her hand. I held the hand tightly as if the pressure could convey something in itself.

  Helen shook her head.

  Why did he do it? she said. Even if he went himself. But the girls . . .

  Helen, will I make you a cup of tea?

  One of the cousins said that. She was by Helen’s side now, she would like to take her arm and lead her into the kitchen. They did not want her going into the front room and starting the wailing and the cursing all over again. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it would terrify you to hear the things she said. And here she was now talking to Cáit Deane like nothing happened at all.

  There was cake and several kinds of bread and honey and tea and coffee and a bottle of the hard stuff and stout and beer. The house was provided against a famine. They’d need it all by and by. This is the way things go at funerals.

  He always spoke well of you, Helen said.

  We were childhood sweethearts, I said.

  He always said you should have trained professionally. He said you had a great voice.

  I shrugged. I heard this kind of thing from time to time.

  He said it was a pity what happened to you.

  I felt my shoulders straighten. I was fond of him, I said, everybody was.

  He said you had terrible bitterness in you.

  I moved towards the door but there was a cousin in the way. Excuse me, I said. The cousin did not move. She had her arms folded. She was smiling.

  He said you were your own worst enemy.

  I turned on her. Well, he was wrong there, I said. I have plenty of enemies.

  Helen Casey closed her eyes. The only thing my husband was wrong about was that he took my two beautiful daughters with him. If he went on his own nobody would have a word to say against him. But now he cut himself off from everything. Even our prayers. If that man is burning in hell, it’s all the same to me. I hope he is. He’ll never see my girls again, for they’re not in hell. And the time will come when you’ll join him and no one will be sorry for that either.

  One of the cousins crossed herself and muttered under her breath. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  The doorkeeper unfolded her arms suddenly and stepped aside. I opened the door. I was taken by surprise to find the priest outside preparing to knock.

  Oh, he said.

  Excuse me, Father.

  I pushed past him. I noticed that the tire was sinking again; it would need pumping, but I could not do it here. I turned it to face away from the house. People say I’m cold. A coldhearted bitch, some of them say. They say such things. The priest was watching me. He was smiling. The new man in the parish, most likely he did not know who I was. They’d fill him in on the details in the front room with the two dead girls and the old women with their beads. The cousins would know everything. It was how crows always knew there was bread out. First came a single bird, a scout. There was always one. Then they gather. Before long they’re fighting each other over crusts. You can knock fun out of watching them and their comical battles in the back yard. But the minute you put the bread out, one of them turns up to check it out and the others follow soon enough. If you dropped dead on your own lawn they’d be down for your eyes.

  I swung onto my bicycle and launched myself down the tarmac drive and out onto the road and I turned for the hill down home but that was not where I was going.

  I met the car at the place where the road was falling into the valley. There was no question of slipping past. I braked hard and dragged my foot along the road. By the time I stopped I was by the driver’s door and there was a drop of a hundred feet on my left-hand side. He rolled the window down. It was James’s brother Johnny.

  You’d think the council would shore that up, he said.

  The crows are gathering.

  He nodded.

  The priest was at the door.

  He nodded again. He looked at me silently for a moment, then he said, He could have asked for help, Cáit. You’d have helped him, wouldn’t you? I would any day. All he had to do was ask.

  Johnny, I said, you know very well I was the last one he’d turn to. And the last one who could help him. And anyway, there is no help.

  You could but you would not.

  No, I said, I just could not. You know that very well.

  Do you know what, Cáit Deane?

  I probably do, Johnny.

  He lo
oked at me, frustrated. You were always the same. You’re too sharp for around here.

  I shrugged.

  My brother James, he said, you destroyed him.

  He destroyed himself. I didn’t drive him down to the pier.

  Why did he do it if not for you? You took him. You took him and you wouldn’t keep him and then you left him. Why else would he do it?

  I got my foot on the pedal again and faced down the hill.

  Spite, I said. He was always spiteful, like a spoiled child.

  I launched myself forward and went clear of the car. In a moment I was past the subsiding section. Fuchsia speckled the roadsides with their first bloody skirts. In the valley the last of the whitethorn blossom. The river at the very bottom gleaming like concrete in a field of bog iris. And ahead was the bay and its islands and the vast intolerant ocean.

  I chained the bicycle to the stop sign outside the funeral home. The street was a long one that ran into a steep hill; the funeral home, the graveyard, and the church were all at the top of the hill so that the dead could look down on the town, and the townspeople when they looked up from the pavement saw death looming like a public monument to their future. People joked that it was the only town in Ireland where you had to climb up to your grave. To make matters worse, the funeral home was owned by the Hill family. There were several Hills in the parish and naturally the funeral home was called the Hilton. They say that the only people making money out of the economic crash were accountants and funeral directors. Even the bankrupt had to be buried by somebody. At the door in a plastic frame was a poster with a picture of an anorexic bonsai plant and the words: Our promise to you, Phone ANY TIME, day or night, You will NEVER get an answering machine.

  Funeral homes are always cold. There were pine benches in lines like a church. They had been varnished recently and there was that heady smell. It reminded me of my father’s boat, the wheelhouse brightwork newly touched up. It was the smell of childhood.