The Gloaming

by Kirsty Logan

  She wanted to say: Mum.

  She wanted to say: Where is Dad?

  She wanted to say: I’m sorry I can’t be the child you want.

  Mara turned and crept out of the room. It’s not that she knew for sure where Peter was. It’s that she knew where he definitely wasn’t. He wasn’t in the house, and he never went to the beach. Really, there was only one more place.

  At the top of the hill, breath coming faster now, she emerged. She walked to the edge of the cliff through the forest of statues, looking at each stone face. Despite the wind and the hail and the constant damp breath of the sea, none of the faces looked worn. They were still every bit as beautiful or as ugly as the day they’d come up to the cliff. Every face was familiar. And not a single one was her father’s.

  Mara’s smile was part relief and part worry: he wasn’t here – but where was he? She glanced up at the cliff, knowing she wouldn’t be able to identify the patch of flattened grass where she’d first shared wine with Pearl, but wanting to look anyway. She stepped closer, and her smile dropped.

  She had found him.

  He was set apart from the rest, less than a step from the jagged fall to the ocean. Mara crept closer. She didn’t want to see. If she didn’t look, maybe it wasn’t real.

  The thing she couldn’t bear was his position. He wasn’t standing to attention, noble and serene, arms at his sides like all the other statues. Instead his arms were raised, his hands flat, palms to the sky as if trying to catch rain. He looked unready. Unfinished. Ridiculous.

  Her fingers were numb from cold. She reached her hand up and rested it on his upraised arm. Then she pulled down as hard as she could. Only when her muscles spasmed did she stop. Even if she were to put her full weight on his arm, pile every rock she could find on his hands, tie ropes around his wrists and tug, she knew it would be no good. He couldn’t be changed now.

  Up close, she could see the tiny stones that made up her father’s skin. His always-red hair, thick as pelt, was the colour of clouds. His shoulders were as wide as a bear’s. She walked around him, but no matter where she stood, she could not see his face. Was it twisted in pain? Was he crying? Were his eyes closed? If she were to step off the edge of the cliff, only then – for a split second before she fell – would she be able to see him, and to know.

  Mara raised up on her tiptoes, one hand resting on her father’s stone shoulder, leaning in to the stone curl of his ear. ‘I love you,’ she said. She blinked and swallowed. Words congealed in her chest. For years all she’d wanted was to come up to the cliff, and instead she’d stayed and helped. She hadn’t let herself give up. And for what? The grey of him there on the cliff, an eternity of being blown by the wind and pecked by gulls. Silent, still.

  She stepped away from him. Another step. Another. ‘I hate you,’ she said. She turned from what her father used to be, and she didn’t look back.

  Ken

  WE CAN’T CARRY our whole lives with us everywhere we go. Memories have weight, and no one can lift them all at once. We have to leave some of them behind.

  But Bee was so tiny. Perhaps Mara didn’t have to leave him behind. She could tuck him in soft and carry him with her. And everything else, all the other parts of her life, the memories and the love and the responsibilities, the weight of that future up on the cliff? Well, she couldn’t be expected to carry all those things. She would drop them to the ground, and she would walk away.

  Mara said nothing and saw no one. She found Pearl. They left the island together, with no bags and no baggage.

  PART 2 ½

  Gloam

  FOR ALMOST TWO years, Mara and Pearl travelled the world as performing mermaids called the Dreamings. They lived in dozens of different homes: windowless internal cabins on cruise ships that throbbed with the sound of the engine, trailers with bunk beds and fibreglass walls, penthouse hotel suites with silk bed sheets and carpets thick as summer grass. Every home was a shell, and they lived inside them like hermit crabs. They owned only what was necessary – and Mara, coming from a house of endless rooms full of other people’s junk, was surprised to find just how little that was. A toothbrush each, a few books, spare underwear. Their costumes and wigs for performing. And each other.

  They weren’t the only mermaids in the show. There was Céline, and Katinka, and Stephanie, and Mary Elizabeth. But Pearl and Mara were the Dreamings, and they could stay underwater for longer than anyone.

  Every night Pearl listened to the shipping report. She didn’t need to: they always performed in pools, enclosed, artificially heated. Their very own climate, unaffected by the outside world. But still. It was good to know where the storms were, even if you weren’t caught in them.

  Mara read maps like books, making a story of everywhere they went. She folded in the top and bottom of the map, tucking away the poles, and fingertipped their route. So many places to lose. To be lost.

  The seasons were constant and never; always on the move, they sailed through summer and into winter and straight to autumn and back. One week a sundress; the next two layers of coats. They spent a lot of time above the clouds. They crossed time zones, flew from one night into the next. Mara always gave Pearl the middle seat, let her stretch out across the aisle and rest her head in Mara’s lap. She didn’t want to miss the take-off or the landing, where she could look out and see the fallen constellations of the city lights, a world so utterly unlike the island. Mara knew Pearl’s face so well that when she looked in the mirror, she was surprised to see her own face looking back. She never stopped seeing her scar, but in public she learned to keep her face still so it didn’t show as much. The only time she didn’t think about it was when she was alone with Pearl in the dark.

  Once, glancing at faces in a crowd, Mara saw Signe and Peter. They were young again. They were happy, free, light as birds: Signe slinging her arm around Peter’s shoulders, Peter pulling her in for a kiss. Mara blinked, and her parents’ faces were strangers. They always had been; she knew they couldn’t be there. Peter was a stone figure on an isolated island cliff, the petulant sea stroking his stone face. Signe was stuck between the walls of a pink house, a crumbling castle slowly consumed by trees, waiting.

  At every church, every temple, every shrine, Mara paused. She lit a candle, she burned joss paper, she sent a bright paper lantern floating candlelit down a river. She made up her own acts too: collected rainwater in a copper bowl, wove a shiny sewing needle into the corner of her bed sheets. She wasn’t sure if these were acts of remembrance or of atonement. She knew she should feel guilty about what she had left behind.

  The nights were wide and endless. Every morning Mara got up and looked at the wrinkled sheets of the bed she shared with Pearl, and felt content in a simple, deep, animal way.

  What Mara didn’t see was that this time with Pearl was the gloaming: that space between day and night, that lowering of the sky, when the light pales to blue and everything is outlined in gold. It’s the most beautiful part of the day – the golden hour, the photographer’s favourite. But it can’t last.

  To stay in the gloaming is to hold off the night. But if the night never comes, then neither can the day.

  Fouter

  MARA AND ISLAY spoke every month or so. Awkwardly, politely. Sometimes jokily, but not often. Islay’s resentment at being on the island was so familiar to Mara that it made her feel sick. She could taste the bitterness on her tongue. At the end of every call, Islay asked Mara when she was coming back to the island. ‘Soon,’ she’d say. ‘Soon.’

  But one day, Islay called, and Mara knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that Islay sounded unhappy. It was that she sounded content. She didn’t ask Mara when she was coming home. She didn’t ask Mara anything at all.

  ‘It’s so nice here now that summer is coming,’ said Islay, her voice dreamy, sing-songing. ‘Perfect, really. The quick clouds, the flowers. The late light. I don’t know why I stayed away for all those years. I should never have left at all. When I first came back, I nev
er meant to stay. You wanted me to help with Dad, and then he went to the cliff, and I was going to leave then. Lucky I didn’t.’

  ‘How’s Mum?’ asked Mara, half listening, phone cradled against her shoulder as she washed her make-up brushes. The mermaid make-up all had to be waterproof, so you had to scrub to clean it off the bristles. It might not seem important, but there would be no good in trying to paint your eyelids blue and the brush staining them with yesterday’s bronze.

  ‘Oh, she’s wonderful,’ said Islay, ‘just wonderful,’ and it was only then that Mara started listening. She dropped the brushes into the soapy sink.

  ‘Wonderful? Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve never seen her happier. The house is perfect, Mara. And Signe has slowed right down. She doesn’t rush around like she used to. And there’s none of that hectic high colour in her cheeks, that brightness in her hair. Remember she used to be scared of going grey? And it suits her, it really does. Even on her hands.’

  Mara barely heard her goodbyes. She was calling Pearl’s name before she’d even hung up the phone.

  PART 3

  Tae

  THERE ARE MANY legends of mythical islands. Hy-Brazil, Ysole Brazir, Hy Braesail: a Celtic land of copper-roofed towers and gleaming mountains, where faerie queens lived alongside magicians and healers. Or there’s Tir fo-Thuin, the Land Under the Wave; Magh Mell, the Land of Truth; Hu Na-Beatha, the Isle of Life; Tir Tairngiri, the Land of Promise; Mael ruin, a submarine country with roofed forts, psalm-singing birds, and magic fountains that spouted wine; the Isle of Eynhallow, which once belonged to the fairies, who can make it vanish or appear as they wish.

  The thing about these islands is that you can never find them when you want to. If you’re lucky – if the wind is blowing right, and you’ve made the correct sacrifices, and the world is tilting just so – then the island will emerge from the mist, waiting for you. But if you go in search of it, it will sink down beneath the waves, and all you will see is the distant wink of those bright towers.

  There is plenty of wonder in the real world too. Every place has its own small magic. Perhaps you’ve heard stories of rental hearts, or girls with giraffe horns, or smoke-ghosts, or mushroom houses. Perhaps you’ve heard of an island where the inhabitants slowly turn to stone. They’re always stories from distant lands – but everywhere is home to someone, and no land is distant from itself.

  So what happens if you make it to an island, whether mythical or real? Well. Whatever it is, it’s rarely what you expect – and it’s never what you want.

  Volé

  IT TOOK SIGNE a while to realise that her work on the house was getting slower because her body was getting slower. As far as she was concerned she was moving at the same speed as ever, and yet everything around her seemed to be moving faster. How could it be that the radio played three songs in the time it took her to screw on one doorknob? How could the sun travel halfway across the sky while she crossed a single room?

  One bright morning Signe went into a room to sand the old paint off a window frame. Her fingertips were so rough that she couldn’t feel the sandpaper she was gripping. On the other side of the windowpane crawled a bee. Signe could see its slender black legs, its questing antennae, its golden fuzz catching the sunlight.

  When she blinked, the bee had gone. The windowpane was black with night. It took her a long time to walk out of the room; as she bent and stretched, her spine felt like it was wrapped in gravel. Sometimes she stayed so still that she’d look down at her hands and see the silky powder left by moths’ wings.

  That night, the same as every lonely night, Signe dreamed. In her dreams she found everyone she had loved and lost, only to lose them all over again.

  There was Bee, her golden boy, curled sleepy in her arms again. But then, as quick as she found him, she lost him. She lost him in sand dunes and shopping centres and between the puffy ribs of bouncy castles. She mislaid him in the shadowed hollows of her own body. She failed to fight off a bear, which proceeded to eat him. She cut the wrong colour of wire on the bomb strapped to his midriff.

  There was Peter, her loving fighter, with his scarred knuckles and easy smile. She lost him in rainforests and deserts and mountain ranges. She tapped him affectionately on the head, only to realise too late that he was made of glass, and he shattered. She gripped a metal pole in a thunderstorm, willing the lightning to strike her, then watched helpless as the lightning chose him instead.

  There was Mara, her strange changeling girl. She lost Mara when everything else in the world became suddenly enormous, and she slipped through the cracks. She lost her when everything else shrank microscopic, and she was too huge to see. She watched as the space shuttle containing her exploded moments after take-off. She couldn’t convince her not to enlist in a strange foreign army fighting a war in a strange foreign country, from which she never returned.

  She lost them all every night, and every morning when she awoke, she lost them again. And then she got up to start breakfast. As she walked past Islay’s bedroom, she pushed open the door to hear the soft sleeping sounds of her. She stayed there for a long time, sure that her presence was the only thing that kept her daughter breathing.

  Haar

  IT TAKES A skilled sailor to approach the island, to navigate the channel between the rocks on one side and the cliffs on the other. Neither Pearl nor Mara was such a sailor, so all they could do was cling to the side of a stranger’s fishing boat, trying to keep their bodies upright and their breakfasts in their stomachs. Mara held Pearl’s hand so tight that their knuckles were white.

  She didn’t think the island would be happy to see them – though she wasn’t happy to see it either, so that seemed fair. Her cheeks felt damp from the slaps of salt-spray, burning hot from the icy wind. Things had changed in their absence – the bridge seemed almost complete, its wide grey pillars doubled like legs between the shore and the mainland, ready for the road. The fisherman wasn’t the same fisherman who’d sailed them off the island. He didn’t even look similar – not a son, not a cousin. Another change, in what Mara had thought was an unchanging place. When they boarded the boat, she let Pearl do all the talking. She kept her own face still so she could be unscarred, normal. Standing there on that deck crowded with bright blue creels and slimy coils of rope and waterproof postbags and plastic crates of food for the shop, trying to keep her balance as the boat rode high on the waves and dropped into the swells, Mara made the same mistake as the readers of books. The last part of a story is where we think we know exactly what will happen. But, inevitably, we are wrong.

  The fishing boat emerged from the channel and into the bay. The world dropped to an eerie calm. The wind and waves silenced. On the rocks by the shore, fat seals lolled. The air smelled of salt and soil and the coconut scent of gorse.

  The boat pulled into the island, neat and sudden as the end of a dance. Mara waited for the fisherman to tie up the boat, to catch his breath, to reach his steadying hand out to her – anything to have another moment before she had to step onto the island. But it had to happen, and so she took a breath and leapt for shore. When she’d found her feet she turned to help Pearl off the boat, feeling the wobble in Pearl’s knees as she found her balance on the land.

  ‘Home,’ said Mara, and was surprised to hear it come out as a question.

  As they approached the house, they could see only trees. The house was in a dip, a rounded hollow like a giant had pressed his thumb into the land. The trees had grown up and out, closing over the house so only a few chipped chimney pots emerged. Either that, or the house had sunk deeper into the belly of the island.

  Signe was pleased to see them, though surprised. Perhaps not as surprised as she should have been, considering that Islay had neglected to tell her that they were coming. Islay would have been pleased and unsurprised, but she was at work.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Signe, not waiting for an answer. She swayed out of the front room, and her years of dance gave her excellent control ove
r her body. You would have to look closely to see that her gait was not quite as elegant as it was, that her steps fell heavy and her hips were held stiff.

  In the minutes that Mara and Pearl were alone in the room, they said nothing. Pearl wanted to say something. She wanted to talk about calling an estate agent. She wanted to talk about how long it would take to shut up the house. She wanted to see whether they could do it all remotely, because she was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t doing any of them any good to be on this island. She’d never quite figured out how it worked, but she knew its magic was a dark one.

  Mara did not talk about any of these things, because she was too busy straining her ears over the sounds of the kitchen – the boiling kettle, the clatter of cups – to hear the creaks and cracks of her mother’s crumbling body. She couldn’t stay here. She didn’t want to be stone. She wanted to fix the house, and fix her mother, and fix her sister. And then she wanted to leave. Perhaps she didn’t even need to be here for long. It wasn’t all or nothing: live on the island forever or leave it forever. Maybe if she phoned home more, or sent more money, or visited every few months, then perhaps her mother – perhaps her sister … but she knew that wasn’t enough.

  Signe wasn’t thinking about her crumbling body, or whether her daughter was discussing plans with her mermaid lover. She wasn’t thinking much of anything. Or rather, she was thinking too much of everything. This grey flutter in her mind, these endless wingbeats. To have so many children with so many needs – three mouths to feed, six hands to wipe clean, so many tiny white teeth to preserve. How any mother got anything else done. Well, why would they have to do anything else? What else was there?