Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “Yes, you should go.” Her small-hours-of-the-morning voice, I hadn’t heard it in a while.“You should.” It was closer than my thinking,“You really should,” salting my blood.

  “If I don’t, they’re going to come and find us.” Me with a stranger who looks like my wife.

  “I know.”

  Fucking her in the night grass—I wanted that.

  I ought to remember that I never enjoy being this far away. I’m not bothered so much by the distance, only by the time. Here, I’m walking out an hour before dinner and, there, Maura’s already asleep. I hope. Unless the baby got her up.

  But the wee one’s much more settled now—hardly ever really makes a scene. At night, lately, she’s seldom ever genuinely cried. It’s more that she’s curious, checking to know we’re still there. I can just put my head in most times and she’ll go off again, satisfied. I mean, it isn’t unfair crying, it isn’t that unreasonable bellowing you hear from other people’s kids.That would drive me crazy. That would make me start to think there was something vital I’d forgotten to provide and that my daughter was growing up with some type of lack that she couldn’t describe to me yet, not having words.

  I’m glad I don’t have that problem. I’m glad everything’s all fine.

  They’ll both be sleeping now, I’m sure. Nice and early to bed and then spark out . . . My dad used to say that—Spark out in no time. He was usually right and now I am, too. We’re good sleepers, my family, it’s in our genes.

  Maybe next time, if I’m here again, Maura and Kiddo could come out, too. Then, if I wasn’t working, we could toddle about, see the lake, the islands. I’d take Kiddo up the CN Tower. I wouldn’t bother for myself, but small people—I’d imagine—might really appreciate high places and uninterrupted views. Kiddo certainly adores all that, endlessly wanting to be picked up. Maybe the CN Tower could save my back: let her know that buildings can lift her, instead of only me. Not that I mind all the lifting. Or being thought of as indispensable. Naturally.

  I could nip up today and look out on her behalf, be a dutiful dad. If the mist clears. No point if it doesn’t. Although her mother would prefer it this way—so many eerily spotless buildings, looming like monstrous art deco ornaments in dove blue and verdigris. Then the skyline hits mist height and fades into white. If I raise my eyes for too long I could believe I’m walking through a decomposing photograph.

  I’ll tell Maura about it all tomorrow morning—her afternoon—and she’ll know what I mean, she has a good eye for the lovely. That’s the one thing I like about being apart—it makes us collect up the best of our days to pass on for each other. It probably makes us appreciate things more.

  I’d like to talk to Kiddo, but Maura says there’s not much point, which is true, she can’t really answer yet, I suppose. But I would still like to say hello. It would be something to do once I’ve spoken to her mother, found myself clinging to her voice, searching it for meanings it doesn’t intend.

  “Nathan, tell me what you want.”

  My arm was around her, around Maura, my wife.

  “I want you.” I hadn’t felt this horny in ages, not for months. Or if I had, it had never seemed such a good and possible idea.

  A familiar, anticipating twitch was back in my hands. “We could manage before they find us.” We were turning back to our old way of being—to the time before the baby and the house full of infant-sized wreckage—to the time when we were only us. “We could.You know we could.”

  “Or we could make them go home.Then not hurry.”

  Which was a far better idea, I had to agree, although I still couldn’t leave her yet, even if it was with the definite promise of more fun to have later on. “All right. You tell them to fuck off home and I’ll go up and check on Wee Lamb.”

  “No. Leave it.” I felt her body disagreeing much more clearly than her words.

  “Leave what?”

  “You don’t have to check.”

  Obviously, we had to stand apart then, just enough to face each other and talk properly.

  “I might as well. It won’t take a minute—I’ll make sure she hasn’t kicked off her blankets, made any troubles in store. After that we’ll be clear for the night, I’d reckon. She’s been good.”

  “You’ll pick her up.”

  “I won’t if she’s sleeping.” I had to fold my arms then—it helped me think. I wasn’t easing Maura away. I would actually have liked to touch her very much, but I needed a little clear-headedness at that point. “I’ll give her a wee look. No more.”

  Maura nodded and turned for the house, half-lights and glimmers disguising her face, shading away her eyes. I took a last breath of the garden and then followed her inside.

  And I’m almost sure she spoke again. “You’ll wake her.” Her voice quite sleepy, a murmur that I couldn’t truly catch. “You’ll wake her.” I could have been mistaken. “Then we won’t be alone any more.” I might have misheard her. She might not have said a word.

  I want to buy them presents, that’s mainly why I’m walking about. This isn’t an idle wander, this is a search. They have beautiful black squirrels here that Kiddo would love—sleek as you like, lithe and undulating, the way our red ones used to be, before the grey ones killed them. Or before things changed and they were naturally selected, edged out. I’d expected that somewhere would sell me a toy black squirrel, but it seems there are none to be had.

  The people here are very helpful, nonetheless, more so when I mention a daughter—being the doting dad. Everyone has tried their best in the healthy Canadian way: offering me mooses of every type, some ugly owls, beavers wearing Mountie hats and polar bears that only compulsiveobsessives could ever keep clean. But no squirrels. Squirrels are, perhaps, too urban for mass-market tastes.Tourists may well demand only creatures from vicious snowfields, or strange forests—more unmistakably Arctic types.

  I’ll end up settling for a moose, but I don’t want to. Kiddo would like a squirrel, I know her taste. Sounds unlikely, I realise. But she is absolutely her own small person, even now. So I can sometimes understand exactly what she likes.

  I’ll trot upstairs, softly, softly, dodge into her room. Her nightlight will be in there, whirling away, making the place seem oddly psychedelic, which unnerves me but amuses her.Then I’ll watch. Somewhere under the covers her whole ribcage will be dipping and bowing with breath, flummoxed by inhalations in a way that is terrifying but perfectly customary.The fluctuations of life in her hypnotise me.

  And lead me to conjure lies against my wife. Because I do pick up my daughter and hold her when I’ve promised that I won’t. I do eel my hands in round her and lift her, still asleep, so that I can sneak her head against my shoulder and kiss the fuzz above the bone above her personality.This is the best close to my days. When she’s been screaming tired and shitty, when she’s hated her food and howled and spat—which is hardly a shock: I’ve never tried a jar without gagging, but she does have to eat, after all—when she’s been doing all those mind-bending, draining, bloody things that only babies can possibly think of to do, I just imagine her sleeping, giving me peace. And that sees me through. On other, equally random days she will be almost immaculate, gentle, quiet, and she will hint at small opinions she has— for example, that she’d like a squirrel instead of a moose.

  I am going to disappoint her. But I think she’ll forgive me. I think a moose will be all right.

  Maura asked me for an Inuit carving—soapstone and bone and all that— the smaller pieces are relatively cheap. Not that I wouldn’t spend money on my wife—it’s just that she doesn’t want me to. I looked at some little figures yesterday, but I felt there was something about them I didn’t like—disturbing. The seals were inverted, or twisted, or slightly human. And there were precarious carvings of bears that danced and slipped too near to being men, while the men slid overly close to being bears. Everything spun, transmuted, and was very smooth and beautiful, but unkind company.

  Last night, it seemed t
o upset me: seeing so many peculiar sculptures made me dream unpleasantly. I woke up frightened and wanted to speak to Maura and to sound ordinary and daft, telling her I’d been scared by the thought of myself as a bear and by the empty yowl of snow somewhere in my head. I could have phoned: it would have been her morning: but it seemed I couldn’t work the time zones out, couldn’t focus properly, so I ended up only having a shower to swill off the sweat I was covered in and the memory of fur. I looked at my hands, washing, and I remembered that in my dream, when I’d had bear paws I couldn’t touch my baby, my Lamb.

  My arm was around her as we faced our guests. I smiled them goodbye and they smiled back before I started up the stairs.

  “Don’t wake her.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “I won’t wake her.”

  I could feel our visitors still grinning up behind me, noting the altered Maura, the changed me. We were, conceivably, more endearing as parents than as friends.

  The front door chattered open and let in the street air and I climbed without listening to the last of the night’s conversations trickling away.

  She’d uncovered herself, my daughter, and was sprawled, expansive and relaxed, out for any count, for any spark.

  I feathered the blanket over her again and sat on the floor by her head, watching her face through the bars of the cot, the rush of different lights across her. She was racing at sleep, avid: small movements of hunger from her mouth, her fingers bunching and gripping out of sight.

  “You can’t leave her be, can you?”Maura was in the doorway, dressed for bed, which meant that I’d sat for more time than I’d intended. “You can’t stop.”

  “No.” Seeing Maura’s shape spinning with colours and in a frame of brighter light I had to guess that she was smiling and that I could be honest comfortably. “No, I can’t.”

  “No, you can’t. Because you’re always feeding off people. Always taking notes. You make me tired.”

  I remember every part of the night we spent then, Maura and I: her edging away in the bed until I let her be, any hopes upended, spilt. I lay on my back beside her and attempted to breathe unobtrusively.

  Sleep caught me on the brink of morning and I dreamed of somersaulting into skies filled with raging shadow and twisting light. And I landed, chill and giddy, in an unforgiving country where I was not known.

  Then my daughter woke me, crying, and I went to her.

  “I am the Keeper of the Foal Island Light.”

  Joseph Christopher, standing with his back to the low winter sun, white hair burning round a shadowed face. He could look quite remarkable, if he tried, and he was definitely trying. He was aiming to inspire a blend of cheerfulness and confidence, but he only made Mary flinch. For an hour and a half, she’d been shifting dully on the post office bench, mesmerised by tiredness and burned-out expectation. Consequently, she hadn’t noticed him creeping up from the harbour wall until his shadow fell across her, cooling her face.

  Joe laughed.

  God, he’s mad.

  “No, I’m not, actually. Neither of the lights needs a keeper, they’re automatic. This your stuff, here?” He was only averagely tall, quite slender and plainly on the far side of fifty, but he slipped her rucksack up over one shoulder, as if it were a summer coat. “Sorry.” He swung out his right hand and caught hers into an oddly hot, dry shake. “Joseph Christopher, Chairman of the Fellowship. Among other things. We should get moving, if you don’t mind. It would be better if we landed before sunset. Safer—speaking practically. Waiting long?”

  “I don’t reall—”

  “Well, that’s all done with now.” Joe broke his turn, stopped, twitched his head to one side, the sunlight striking both his eyes into a blind, bright stare, with a tick of dark movement behind. Mary flinched again, felt somehow inspected, touched. She scuffled up to stand and deal with her holdall and then paused. He was still staring, the look shaded now and much more obviously tasting at her, palpably curious. He rubbed his lips with the crook of one finger, almost frowned.

  Completely crazy.

  But he can’t be mad, he’s a novelist. He’s a good novelist. That would mean he has to be—

  No. Bugger this, whatever he was—she knew there were types of behaviour she didn’t have to like. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Christopher?”

  He smiled—something he was good at—a broad, immediately reassuring gesture, full of innocence and well-maintained calcium. “I’m sorry. I’d been wondering what you’d be like. From your stories. And I am glad you’ve come. So I’m smiling—I do that when I’m glad. You’re bringing our complement up to full strength.” He rested one hand on her shoulder, “You’re home now. You do know that, don’t you, Mary Lamb?”

  “Tell me what it was like?”

  Mary wasn’t too long awake. She’d been on the island three days now and met everybody but Nathan—Nathan that everyone talked about, but always in slightly evasive ways—Nathan, the man that no one but Joe seemed to like—Nathan, the writer who was meant to be her mentor for the time she spent here: her teacher (not that this seemed likely), her example (this seemed more unlikely still), her encouraging-even-inspiring-person-who-is-not-supposed-to-alarm.

  But he was being alarming. Knocking the door and opening it in one brisk movement. Standing, vaguely rigid, packed into a long, tight mackintosh and two pullovers, the upper thick-knitted and oily, the lower a softer polo neck to cover, had she but known it, his neckline bruises. He forced out a hand to shake hers and then immediately asked, “What was it like?—come on, you must remember, you must have been paying attention. That’s our First Rule, if we’re going to have rules, Pay Attention. Because you’ll have to if you want to write. You do want to write?” he growled, still standing, not pausing for any reply.

  Mary stood the interrogation for three or four minutes, at least, and then turned her back on him smoothly, found and lit a match. She was pleased when her hand didn’t shake.

  “What are you doing?” Finally, a question which seemed interested in her response. Nathan stopped, breathing audibly, and Mary thought that she didn’t like him, that he was almost sweating for not much reason, his forehead already a little repellent, with a moist, uneasy shine. His eyes flittered, evaded, while his hands clamped against each other, fierce and square.

  “What am I doing, Mr. Staples? I’m going to light the gas. I haven’t had my coffee this morning, or anything to eat, but now I am going to because breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you like, I can answer questions once I’ve made toast. Or you can just keep on asking them—I don’t mind.”

  They both surprised themselves by almost smiling, both felt a certain settling in their scores.

  Nathan refused toast—it was more than a little carbonised, Mary was sad to note—but he sat docilely at her table, still stiff-armed and mildly breathless, bound up in his layers of clothes. She considered the back of his neck, the hard and very slightly lopsided line of his shoulders. He was her first visitor, the first person to call on her in her own house. More of a big Nissen hut, really, but her own place with her own things—a few of them—and, she supposed, her own power to ask unpleasant people to go away. That was a comfort.

  She listened to the gas, trying to hold the peaceful sound of it close enough to calm her without letting it make her homesick. She crunched at her charcoaly bread, which seemed immensely loud, and then turned out the almost invisible blue of the singing flame. Nathan rang one thumbnail off his coffee mug and then sipped. She went to join him, regretting each anxious creak of the floor.

  As soon as she’d finished eating, he swallowed, cleared his throat, and then began to speak again, perhaps more gently. “All right. Because you were paying attention and because, by definition, first times can’t be had again and should therefore be thought of as precious and intense—because of all these things, you should be fairly capable of describing your first evening here, telling me what it was like, as a narr
ative exercise. When you met everybody—”

  “Everybody but you.”

  “Mm hn. When you met everybody. Tell me . . . No. Let’s start at the start. Your journey from the mainland. Describe it. Take your time and be careful. And please correct any obvious mistakes.”

  “What?”

  He looked coolly beyond her at the wall. “Narration, give me some.”

  She felt her heart shy, batter briefly, while her stomach gave a nauseous wink. But then she did begin, softly, aware of his thumb, still tapping against his mug.

  “I felt excited, even exhilarated.”

  “Which? Make up your mind. No one else will.”

  “Exhilarated and, because I’d never been in a boat before, I felt . . . I suppose seafaring. Childish. Also foolish, I suppose. And I felt safe. Even though the boat was bucking and—possibly—” she looked at Nathan, “definitely also swooning under my feet, I felt well and safe. The wake pushed us from behind, very small, eventually delicate, and there was a clot of shadow ahead, pressed in between two different blues.” Nathan showed no sign of being impressed, although she’d quite liked that, as a sentence. “I knew that shadow would be the island. Eventually it grew, blackened, solidified—even towered—as we turned under the Lighthouse cliffs. Then, for a while, the land lay between us and the sunset, which was beautiful. I think Joe meant it to be that way. There was no real need for us to motor all the way around—other than to see everything.” She dropped her voice, knowing she was being disappointing. “The lights, the colours, they unfurled.”

  “Better. Slightly.”

  “I knew I’d never seen anything exactly so large and lovely. And that I had no way of describing it.”

  “Yet. There should be a yet there. You have no way of describing it yet.” He smiled, not unkindly, but also not for her. “Good. Honesty. Better than getting poetic and wrong. Poetry being, of course, by its very nature, wrong.” He smiled again, this time at one of her hands, which she then moved back a little, out of his way. Nathan blinked directly at her, offered her a dark little warning look and blinked away again. “Now. The Lighthouse.”