The Islands

by William Wall

  He’s not dying, she said. He’s as strong as an ox.

  But he wrote: I feel my time is coming to an end, the weather is closing in. And he wants me to write a book. About the family.

  Really? How extraordinary.

  On the last page of the letter he asked me to write the book that I had destroyed. Write it your own way, you know the story.

  Grace, I told you, he forgave you.

  He’s still trying to control his legacy.

  He told you to write it your own way.

  But he knows I can’t do that. There will always be his voice in my head.

  You’re so full of bullshit, Grace. Everything is psychology. Do you ever have a simple unmediated reaction to anything human? One of the reasons I like geology is because a stone is a stone, its future is much the same as its past, it doesn’t require analysis except in relation to time. Humans can be like that too, you know? You can just be.

  I know.

  What do you know?

  I know I can’t do that.

  For God’s sake!

  I walked my sister to a taxi under my umbrella. Our legs were wet. The leather of my shoes turned from tan to black. As soon as a cab stopped the rain stopped too and almost immediately Romilly Street, shabby Soho, lit up like some kind of ice sculpture on a hot day. As she stood with the taxi door open we both looked up and laughed. She gave me a quick hug and I handed her the Marks and Spencer’s bag.

  What’s this?

  It’s his book. Send it to him.

  You never destroyed it?

  No. I kept it. It’s been in a drawer in my bedroom all this time. I’m looking forward to being able to use the drawer again. He can finish it now.

  I could see she was shocked.

  The meter is running, I said.

  All this time, she said. Then she got in and closed the door. I saw her put the bag on the seat beside her and tell the driver where she was going.

  Two weeks later I came home from work to find a parcel from Italy containing the same olive-green Marks and Spencer bag and the same weight of paper. There was no letter. The pages looked undisturbed. I didn’t know what to do.

  7

  We scattered his ashes on the island. It was his will. The day was blustery. A cold wind from Greenland or somewhere else to the northwest had cleared the air. There were occasional heavy showers and strong gales, but you could see forever. The rocks were as clean as monuments, their striae and strata marked out like pencil strokes. We went out on Johnny Casey’s fishing boat from Rally Pier. It was there waiting, tied to the wall, when we arrived. And while we traveled we watched the seas breaking outside the harbor. My father in the wheelhouse in a small wooden box of cedar; inside there would be a screw-cap plastic jar and the contents would be him. We come down to so little. The shakings of a tea caddy, with stray fragments of bone. After the fire we are not even clay.

  The trawler landed us at the pier under the old tower. My sister and I looked at the place where I found Em. We caught each other’s eye. Here in the lee of the island the water was the same translucent green and I could see the stones at the bottom and the sea’s long hair, kelp and bladder-wrack, lying out in lines with the current. We made our way along the old road until the place where it had fallen into the sea and then we went up into the fields. I saw again the Jurassic fronds of the bracken, the quivering webs. Seabirds called. The sea thundered onto the shore and the shore stood its ground and drove it back. But there were losses. Each time something died.

  The house was still dry. The roof had not fallen in. There was glass in the windows. There was some kindling by the fire. An ash block was a nest of woodlice. They had hollowed it out. My sister took it outside and shook them out. Then we burned it. The flame warmed us even though the room slowly filled with smoke.

  Suddenly, inexplicably, I was happy. I found two glasses. I had brought a naggin of whiskey. I cleaned the glasses with my shirttail and poured some for each of us. The taste of flame. Here’s to you, my father, my lost father, my past, my sister Em. We drank it back. Whiskey always brings tears to my eyes.

  The night I returned to London I went into the bedroom. I opened the bottom drawer of my dressing table. It didn’t open easily. I got his book out of the bag and took it to my desk, a solid block of typescript. Time had finished it. I knew the ending now.

  Opening the drawer was like drawing a deep breath.

  I could begin again.

  I could build something with that block. I sat down and opened my laptop. I started a new document. I typed my first words. I already knew what they would be. It was as if I had been composing them for years, but in truth they came to me on the island, that day after we had opened the twist-cap a second time, then offered his ashes to the wind and the stony beach. It was sheltered there and the small waves made no sound we could hear. He blew away onto the tide and we put the heavier parts into the heather at the field’s edge. If I could have prayed I would have, but my mother neglected to teach us about eternity.

  I would write it for Em, for the life she never knew, the loves she never experienced. I would write her future.

  A long time ago I had two sisters and we lived on an island. There was me and Jeannie and Em. They called me Grace, but I have never had much of that. I was an awkward child. I still am all these years later. Our house had two doors, one to the south, one to the north. Its garden looked towards the setting sun.

  The moon over the city. The ragtag roofs of east London, its merry gables and hips and saws and skillions and mansards and pavilions. Far below, an ambulance was trying to edge between two badly parked cars. Its lights were winding silently. Down the street a red man changed to a green one but no one was there to make the crossing. There were pools on the road. There is a game for every eventuality. Tomorrow is a spinning coin, heads or tails, nobody knows which is better. I turned the radio on. It was the shipping forecast. They were giving Lundy, Fastnet, southwesterly six to gale eight, occasionally severe gale nine at first. I don’t know why it made me cry. I thought of the wind driving over the island and children sheltering in their beds, darkness hammering on the roof. Life blows through like a hurricane stripping everything from us, leaves from a tree, old washing from a clothesline, illusions, dreams, affections, hope. The wind in the walls said, Lonesome child, go away, go home, childhood is a shadow on the floor. I turned but my mother was not there. I saw a crow breaking a mussel on a stone. He had the shell trapped under his claw. Water rushed in and out, sweeping the ground from under me, drawing me on a long cable, its windlass far away.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to express my gratitude to The Bogliasco Foundation/Fondazione Bogliasco, which provided me with time to research and write the Italian stories in this book. Versions of the opening story, “Grace’s Day,” were first published in the Prairie Schooner and won the Virginia Faulkner Award and subsequently appeared in English in Lost Between (New Island Books) and in Italian in Tra Una Vita e L’Altra (Guanda). The story “The Mountain Road” first appeared in Granta magazine and was subsequently published in my collection Hearing Voices, Seeing Things (Doire Press).