by Rob Ewing
Mum doesn’t look glad that we’re the same. In fact it’s opposite-day for her looking glad.
‘Oh, my wee girl, no, no, no,’ she says.
Then she holds me. She sways me in her arms, which feels the best, it’s a thing to mend our problems.
We do shadow-puppets after all. We do it without sound, which is best because your imagination makes the noise.
Mum’s top creation is a dragon. Mine’s, a dog.
She keeps shining the torch at me, even when it’s meant to be her turn, and won’t let me shine it back.
‘To see your face,’ she says. ‘My love.’
After this Mum starts to shiver again, and so she takes some tablets from her medicine box, then she strokes my hair until I fall asleep.
When I wake again Mum’s already up. The place looks different; strange. She’s taken down all the cardboard from the windows, plus all the blankets she put up on the blinds. Instead, she’s put up the Christmas tree. The lights don’t work, but Mum has set the lantern nearby, plus candles, and that makes the tinsel shine good.
I find Mum in the kitchen. She’s cleaning everything: the table, our cups, even the chairs. Plus she’s put away the pots and pans that we filled up with water earlier. She’s wearing her big jacket, the one for when it’s very cold.
‘It’s all back to normal,’ she says.
‘Except for my game boxes.’
‘Sorry about them.’
There’s three envelopes on the kitchen table. Mum picks up one of them, seals it, puts it in her pocket.
‘This letter tells you how to work the heating,’ she says. ‘That one there is all the phone numbers for emergencies, with your auntie’s number at the top.’
‘What happened to your face?’
Mum’s face has bumps on it. And on her hands. She looks at them as if they don’t belong, as if they’re on the skin of another creature.
‘We need to be going away now,’ she says.
We drive around the island. It seems to take all night, but how can it when our island is only small? Mum keeps having to stop the van. I climb over to the back space to get some sleep.
When I wake up her jacket’s on me.
Then it’s light outside. How did it get light and I didn’t notice?
Mum’s trying to use her phone. It doesn’t work, no matter how many times she presses the numbers. She puts on her glasses to see better, but they don’t seem to work, either.
From my window I see a bird in the sky. To start with I don’t know it’s a bird. How could it be up in the air?
We’re at the car jam again. Mum’s shivering like she came back from the outside. I can see the bumps on her neck, her ears, even the tips of her fingers. Now she has red bits instead of white bits in her eyes.
A man in a white paper suit puts her in the passenger seat, and drives us home. Then we’re allowed to go through the place with the orange and white fences. This time they don’t even want to check our ears.
I keep dreaming about the bird. It has red eyes, white feathers. It’s big. Somehow it looks like a dog. It runs and flies too fast to get away from. It lives for ever.
Then I wake up: and I’m wrapped in a blanket. I feel cold-hot-cold. It’s a strange room. Too dark. There’s a bottle of juice and a plate of biscuits next to my pillow.
There’s a baby next to me. It breathes with a fast snoring sound. My clothes are all damp.
I don’t see Mum.
Back Bay
The real reason I didn’t put Mum’s letter back together was because she wrote three of them.
One telling me how to work the heating. The next, a list of emergency numbers.
But the last one: what was it?
If I’d seen the other two envelopes as well, it would’ve been easier. But I never found them.
There was just this one, the one she posted back through the door. Paper gone pale on one side, from the sun.
Try not to look at the words as I tape the torn pieces back together again. Dirt-marked but readable, only her signing-words blurry from when I dropped it that day on the wet ground:
Mo luaidh Rona,
This is for when you get home. I’m sorry they didn’t let me stay. As soon as I get better I’m coming back, that’s my promise.
If I don’t get better then I want to tell you I love you with all my heart and always will.
Aunt Moira said she will take care of you. There’s money put away by in the kitchen.
Don’t hide yourself, be bright in this world.
Your mum, who loves you.
I say it out loud. I hear, or imagine I hear, Mum saying the words. I put the letter against my cheek. I don’t care if there are germs of illness on it.
I write the whole thing up on my wall. I colour around the words in rainbows. It takes me hours, and my hands get numb, but it’s worth every second.
I want more. I look at the letter side-on, in case she pressed into it a secret message. I look inside the envelope, unpeel its glue. It’s just plain.
What else? I get hungry for other messages. So I go back to my old home and do a complete search.
Some of the cards on the mantelpiece fell down since we came in. But there’s still dirty washing in the sink, Mum’s grey pants and bras on the clothes horse still.
I rub the pen-marks off the tablecloth. Then I use Sellotape to stick down the wallpaper I peeled.
I peel off the stickers I shouldn’t’ve put on the wall upstairs. But I have to stop, because the wallpaper rips underneath.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Mum.
She’s not answering today.
I look around for anything of her: and after a strong search I find a shopping list at the bottom of a plastic bag, in the cupboard. It says: Carrots, Lentils, Eggs, Tomato sauce, Milk, Breakfast, Rolls, Juice, Treats.
Her writing isn’t hurried, and even though it’s only a shopping list, I want to keep it: because it’s of her.
NEW RULES BY RONA
1. Watch 4 times a day.
2. Send messages.
3. Collect from beaches.
4. New Shopping.
5. Old Shopping.
6. Water – collect rain.
Six becomes one, when I remember that water is the most important thing. So I put loads of plastic cups in a fish crate on the stone wall of the house, with green nets over the top to stop the cats getting in.
After this I wait for rain. Still: I know that if you wait too hard then it never comes. So I pretend to the sky that I was busy doing something else instead.
It works for a day before the snails get in.
I never got to see where they came from. There had been a spot of rain at night, and I went straight out in the morning to find there’d been an attack.
When I shouted the dogs started to bark. There was only a couple of cups spared, so it became a battle: me against the snails. I crushed and smashed them: threw them against the wall, flattened them under rocks.
But then I saw a snail try to slide off, with its sad cracked shell. And all the world hated me, because I was the worst person for hurting this creature.
Draw imaginary people. The family I’ll become part of. A kind dad with glasses, beard.
The sailors who come. They look like pirates. They keep their parrots on long string. One has a wooden leg, the other an eye-patch. The next one a hook for a hand. It was unfair that Long John Silver had all the injuries, so I spread them more evenly around his shipmates.
Talking becomes the new rule. ‘Use it or lose it,’ Mum used to say. My big worry is I forget to speak, like Mairi did; that my tongue shrivels and disappears and it’s gone for good. So I practise. I talk out the words I remember from DVDs. ‘Quiet, you fools. She’s in the oubliette.’ And, ‘Look for the, bear necessities; those simple bear necessities!’ Also, ‘When a zebra’s in the zone, leave him alone.’ Then pages from any kids’ book with pictures: especially the ones Elizabeth used to read to Alex, where I can imagine h
er voice: ‘The night Max made mischief of one kind, and then another … Please don’t go, we love you so, we’ll eat you up …’
Still: my voice sounds too buried inside. So I try adverts, even though I can only remember the most annoying ones: ‘Go Compare! Go Compare! When you hear that sound, look around, Go Compare!’ But though the adverts are usually short, I never seem to know them exact. Then I try reading Gaelic learning books: but I’m never very sure that I’m saying the words proper, or that I forgot how to without a teacher or Mum to correct me.
It starts to be nursery rhymes. I lie in bed and sing. If I shut my eyes I can pretend it’s Mum doing the rhyme. I can nearly make myself think it’s her voice.
It’s difficult, but nearly possible.
The cats begin to follow me. The kittens want to follow most, rather than go to their mothers. To start with I encourage them, but then a big dog runs from nowhere and kills one kitten in a bite, which is so terrible to see and hear that I never let the kittens near me again.
I befriend two big dogs, who both act friendly. One still has a collar on: her name’s Elsa. Elsa only ever wants food. She’s a brown and white dog, with middle-long ears. She’s friendly and sleeps beside me at night, which is a good help.
Elsa eats the dog-meat I open. In exchange she snarls at the night-time rats. It’s a fair partnership.
If she keeps being friendly she’ll become my sidekick.
Sometimes the sea roars. You can’t listen to it for too long because it turns from a quiet rumble to the biggest sound in history. It’s like watching the clock. The ticks get louder and louder until you’re not sure they’re bigger than you.
Other times I worry I’m not alive. So I do a routine of checks to guarantee I’m still here. First: press myself all over. Then I shout to hear the sound of it coming out from my own mouth, so it’s not just air. Then there’s the mirror, though sometimes the mirror lies. Then there’s the dogs, who are friendly and treat me like I’m an actual being.
Then there’s giving myself a Chinese burn. Or pouring cold water from the sea down my neck.
With the mirror I count my scars: check they’re the same as before.
Sometimes I count wrong and have to start over.
But even after the checks I start to feel light. Like I’ll blow away on the wind. Like I’m made of nothing. The mirror helps, but the worry is one day it’ll show me going invisible, or thin like a person made of paper.
I try to make more friends with the dogs. If I manage to coax a dog or two in with biscuits then it helps my heart. And when I talk to them they listen patiently, so it gives me the warmth that people once gave.
The dogs aren’t so scary, not when there’s biscuits. Needs must, Mum used to say, about things you did because you had to. Some of them growl, but then I understood Mairi’s trick: you spray them with paint and they learn from then on who’s boss.
The worst thought is if there never was people. It’s like disappearing, just the other way around.
I only have to go to a bad house and smell to know that’s not true. And seeing the dogs, cats, birds helps to prove that other living things exist besides me.
They tried to rub off the curly G I did on the door, but it only went smudged.
The air got cold inside. I’d remembered it looking different: newer, maybe, or bigger. There isn’t much of a smell, just the damp most houses get in the end.
The living room is a bigger mess than before. There’s a new black bit on the carpet. They had a fire, maybe it was an accident? Maybe not. They didn’t tell about it.
In the kitchen I find shrunken jelly cubes. Sometimes shrunken things taste stronger, but mostly they just taste worse. I take them in case it’s the first kind.
In a plastic bag on the floor beside the table – maybe hidden from Calum Ian – I find the library books about sailing and boats that Duncan took.
He was making notes. His writing looks very bad.
I miss other people, seeing the words.
Their bedroom. They took away the sleeping bags. We left them at the ferry waiting room. The clothes they left are in two neat piles on the floor. Calum Ian must’ve washed them: they smell damp, but clean.
In Calum Ian’s drawer I find his notebooks, from before. He tore out the pages about Elizabeth and him being the parents of a family.
Lastly, I go to Duncan’s room, his old room from before, to lay his fiddle on the bed, with flowers.
‘Knew why you were scared of mirrors,’ I say. ‘It was when they checked us, right? Checked we were alive, Elizabeth told me. So I’ll tell you right now: I don’t blame you for being frightened. I got bad dreams about it, too.’
Duncan keeps his own opinion.
‘You were becoming my friend. We were getting on with each other. That’s all I want to say for now.’
I scatter the last of the flowers on his fiddle.
‘Why did I come here? Would you even answer? Would that be all right?’
Duncan doesn’t say.
But I get the idea why: looking out from the window.
I pull Duncan’s dusty curtains right open. Then I turn the handle, open it right up.
In the garden is their plan.
The plan they were busy at, every day. The plastic bottles they kept. The petrol they sucked and collected in the plastic bottles.
The fire they were going to make.
I get less and less strong for remembering. It’s like a talent you took for granted until it got too late. When did I get up today? Don’t know. What was my dinner last night? Forgot. Which dog did I pat last? Can’t remember. What day is it? Who knows? My clock, my best ever clock, ran out of batteries when I wasn’t paying attention.
Mum’s voice used to have a colour. It was warm and red at the edges. Now it’s only shadow-black. There isn’t even a sound to it.
I watch films to remember other voices. But they don’t sound like real voices, not really. Real voices always take you by surprise. With films you know the words.
I special-covered Mum’s letter. I used cellophane from the big roll in the Co-op to make glass. Then I made a frame out of brown card, which I coloured with glitter.
She said, Be bright in the world. So I will. Only it gets hard when the rest of the world can’t see.
My head gets sore when I forget to drink. There are only two things on the shopping list for today:
1. WASHING LINE
2. MATCHES
Before I do it, I drink the last of the coloured water. Then I read the list of two over and over until I know what it is I’m going to do.
There’s a hoodie crow too lazy to fly.
Their road lost its scorch-marks after it rained. And the grass is beginning to grow back again normal.
Some of the dogs are interested. They cuddle in, which is nearly enough to put me off the plan because it’s a break from loneliness, but I tell them to go away.
I changed Elizabeth’s rule 8. It was the one about matches: how they could hurt very much.
Changed it by turning the ‘Do not’ into ‘OK to’ touch, so it meant that I could go ahead with this.
I remember now how Calum Ian did it at the ferry terminal: that night when he made a torch, to look for Elizabeth and Duncan. Even though they were already ghosts. Even though we knew they’d already died.
His routine was: you make a fuse. Just like in cartoons. Then you dip a washing line in one of the petrol-milk containers. Then lay and lay out, back past the side of their house, out and away to the busy car park.
The dogs are not so interested in the smell of petrol any more.
They keep back, mostly.
Unwind, unwind.
I don’t have a box with a handle to make my explosion. I’ve just got the one match.
But it works—
Past World
Daytime. A man stands over me. He holds a mirror up to my mouth, then looks surprised to see me waken.
He holds a mirror over the baby’s
mouth.
I notice there are three other blanket-shapes in the room. The man goes around them all with his mirror, coughing, doing the same thing he did with me.
When he leaves, a lady comes in. She takes away two of the blanket-shapes, then the baby.
She leaves more biscuits and juice, even though we didn’t eat much of the earlier stuff.
Use all my strength to sit up. Thought it was night, but it’s not: somebody just covered the windows.
I make a peephole. Window looking out on the school. Lorries keep coming. I see the ambulance flashing.
See the doctors, then just one doctor.
Nights and days come like a light switch going on and off. Then I wake up, to a smell.
A smell like the taste you get biting your finger: but all around me, in the air.
Another kid has appeared beside me, lying on a camp bed. Eyes puffed up so there isn’t any white or colour to see. Red bumps so his skin looks like pebbles. He stays for a while, but then goes off somewhere else.
I never see the faces of the adults, just their shoes.
Feet with blue shoe-covers on. The covers torn through. Spotted with black, red.
I want to see their faces, but they’re always way up in the sky, too far away.
No adult has come for two days. But someone beside me is singing – Huis, huis air an each. The words come cracked, then loud, then cracked.
When I wake up proper it’s a surprise to find that the singing voice is mine: was mine all along.
Dark. Then light.
Somebody calling my name. It’s a girl’s voice, maybe even older than me.
I recognise her from the school. She’s Elizabeth, the girl from Bristol who came to live on our island.
Her arm stretched out to me.
‘Don’t be scared,’ she says. ‘Come out from there. I’ve got some water. Come out.’
For now I’m too scared to come out: because that’s when my new life has to start.
Back Bay
The boom is at the back of the house. Then I’m lying down: there’s a flash of light racing over—
Then I’m not hearing.