‘Matches?’ he asks.
‘Hang on,’ Picnic says. ‘Chuck us the petrol.’
‘Fuck,’ Ben says. ‘You serious?’
Picnic grins. He is digging a trench uphill and away from the fire. When he is done he takes the bottle of petrol and splashes a line of it along the trench and into the paper. ‘Don’t think we’ll need the lighters, mate,’ he says. ‘Stand back!’
He strikes the match and drops it into the trench at the top end. The flame leaps even before the match hits the liquid, the fumes igniting, spinning immediately down along to the pit, and the paper goes up with a whoof. Picnic sucks on his burnt fingers.
‘Nice,’ Ben says in a low voice. The salt on the wood burns white-hot, each flame with a tiny, violet heart. They all rock back on their heels and watch it a moment. Picnic hands Ben the whisky. He takes a swig from the bottle and pulls a face. Thomas laughs and holds his hand out. It feels good to be this free.
He has finished most of the port by the time light starts to show in the east. It is sweet, sticky, it rolls around in him heavy and thick like oil. His throat feels coated with it. The wind in the dunes twists the smell of the sea until it is all around them, inescapable. It is heavy with salt and fermenting seaweed and the crump and hush of the waves rising up towards them. Ben is asleep. Picnic sits on an old log beside him, smoking.
‘Why’d you drink that shit, man?’ he asks.
Thomas just shakes his head. It is too difficult to explain – what it means, why it feels so good. There is a sensation of suffocation slowly lifting from his shoulders. The fire pops gently, the coals are now a brilliant orange. The bottle of whisky lolls near-empty in Picnic’s hand. ‘You really wanna get out of here?’ he asks Thomas suddenly. His eyes are slits against the firelight.
‘Dunno,’ Thomas says. ‘S’pose.’
‘Why?’ his friend asks.
‘My folks just think I will.’
‘Boarding school?’
‘Dunno,’ he says again, and they fall silent.
‘Are you really happy here?’ Thomas asks after a while.
‘Dunno,’ Picnic says. ‘Yeah, guess so.’
‘What, ‘cos Ben’s right and you really are fucking Mary?’
Picnic snorts. ‘I wish.’ He pauses. ‘She’s keen on you.’
‘Is not,’ Thomas says, but he can feel heat rising through his chest.
‘Is too.’
‘Serious?’
‘Fuck yeah.’ He pauses again. ‘I pick for her old man,’ he adds.
Thomas blinks. ‘Fuck off,’ he says.
Picnic looks at him and shrugs. ‘She won’t stay,’ he says. ‘She wants off.’
Thomas says nothing but stares out again towards the sea and struggles to breathe normally. Ben rolls over, mutters something. They both look across at him and Picnic throws a cigarette butt. ‘Soft cock,’ he says.
Thomas closes his eyes. The wash of the water sounds louder when he does that.
‘We’ve been out here all night,’ he says, and smiles. ‘All night.’ The drunken feeling has subsided almost instantaneously into a pleasant sleepiness.
‘I reckon I might leave,’ Picnic says suddenly. ‘I could go.’
Thomas isn’t sure why, but it feels somehow important.
Picnic stands up.
‘What?’ Thomas says stupidly. ‘You’re going now?’
Picnic just laughs and offers him a hand. Thomas feels his face go red, lets himself be hauled upright. They shake themselves, brush themselves off. The waves change their voice every time he moves.
‘C’mon,’ Picnic says. ‘We should get Shitface back to his bed before daylight.’
They kick Ben awake and shove the matches and the bottles into the backpack. Picnic grabs the bottle of petrol from the sand and shakes it as Ben drags himself up. There are a couple of fingers of greasy liquid in the bottom; the cap has disappeared.
‘C’mon,’ Picnic says again and throws the bottle on the fire. There is a pause, and they all turn and look at it just before it explodes.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ Ben is rasping, his voice hoarse and blood – unmistakably blood – running down the side of his face, between his fingers. The bang is ringing in Thomas’s ears. Picnic has disappeared.
‘Shit,’ Ben whimpers. ‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘Shut up,’ Thomas says roughly. ‘It’s no big deal.’
Ben peels his hands from his face and holds them out. They have blood on them. Thomas makes himself look at Ben’s face. It is only a little cut, really. A shard of glass glistens from it. Thomas looks down at his own hands and brushes a few shattered pieces from the folds in his jumper. He reaches over and holds Ben’s forehead with one hand, pulls the glass from his cheek with the other.
‘You’re fine,’ he says. ‘Shut up.’
Picnic appears from behind the log he was sitting on.
‘Fell over it,’ he says sheepishly. He has a scratch bleeding sluggishly down one leg. He looks over at Ben. ‘Shit, what happened to you?’
He flicks his grin between the two of them, eager, standing there as though he missed the punchline of a private joke. Thomas looks down at the shard of glass in his fingers and begins to laugh.
V
February–March 1992
Saint’s Day of Valentine, Martyr at Rome, 14 February
Shrove Tuesday, 3 March
Ash Wednesday, 4 March
PERHAPS THIS ISN’T FAR enough. Perhaps I should go further back, so you can understand. This is my family, my story, too. There is a diary written by one of our ancestors when he first arrived on the island. Mostly it is a record of goods, of stock, of the direction of the wind and readings from the barometer. But then suddenly will come a moment of sublime beauty: the pearlescent sheen of soap in water; rock art in a cave, the mental shiver of recognising the lines and shapes as people, animals; whales migrating off the coast. Mostly he is thinking of profit, possibilities, but occasionally there is simply awe.
That is too far, though, too deep into the history. It is difficult to find the right perspective. My mother knew a different Chesil, shaped by the mercenary habits of her ancestors. It was booming when she grew up. She should have inherited a fortune. New farms were still being cleared, vines planted, crops sown. She told me once that it was her and her brother who named all the tracks we ride on in the forest. There is a picture of her out there on a horse, its Barcoo bridle loose around its forehead, my mother laughing. And then she was seduced, she ran away with our father . . .
Or it wasn’t like that. My mother, isolated, frustrated, wanting to embrace the world, held down by a family trying to shape her in their image, was rescued by a tall man who swept her off to the city and got her pregnant . . .
Or it wasn’t like that, either. I don’t know what it was. She didn’t ever talk much about her past, we only ever knew the broad facts of her disinheritance. But I know she was trying to save me when she sent me away. She was trying to give me another possibility for my life, something other than the broken relationships and toil of her own. She understood how I loved the island, and she tried to save me. She knew how my life would go otherwise. There are no possibilities in a place like Chesil.
Ah, God, it’s never possible! I want to cut you like a note in a line of music, or the soft touch of a scalpel. But there’s no way to make you feel it. And see? I am hysterical trying. My mother would tell me I am being ridiculous.
Perhaps there are never possibilities. Perhaps it is always preordained. I find it hard to imagine my mother’s life, but I can’t imagine things ending differently, either. I have tried. Always I find myself circling back to the here and now. I am coming to believe that perhaps we set things in train a long time ago. For every moment of awe in that Mulvey’s diary, there is also a reference to Aboriginal people. He refers to them by numbers, like the weather. He records their presence like he does the tides.
I am struggling to tell this story. I need you to know this p
lace like I do.
HANNAH STARES AROUND AT the faces before her. She has three separate lesson plans typed out, but looking down she knows it isn’t going to work. They don’t line up, there is no way to make them line up. She can feel the muscles tight across the back of her neck.
‘Raise your hand if you are in year seven,’ she says.
Nine hands are raised with varying measures of confidence.
‘Okay,’ Hannah says. ‘Year eight? Year nine?’
There are only four year nines: three boys and a bright-looking girl with fair hair and dark eyes.
‘Fine,’ Hannah says. ‘Fine.’
She launches into the introductory speech that she had practised driving down. A few of them watch her with curiosity, a couple with distrust. The face of the girl in year nine is closed off, so that Hannah cannot tell what she is thinking. Afterwards she divides the class up, gives them each basic tasks to start the day running while she works out what to do. The headmistress appears at the door, runs her eyes over the class and smiles.
‘Going okay?’ she asks, sotto voce.
‘Fine, I think,’ Hannah replies.
‘Hi, Mrs Culliver,’ one of the younger boys says, and the woman smiles.
‘Hi, Sam,’ she replies. She turns back to Hannah. ‘Looks good to me. I’ll be next door if you need me.’
Hannah nods and returns to the class, the lesson plans already shifting in her head.
By the end of the day, she feels more in control. The kids are manageable. They chatter and laugh while they work, but none of them have challenged her. She thinks back to her first day at the city school and wonders if it is an island thing to be cautious, reserved with someone new. When the final bell rings, they all file out obediently. Hannah exhales and looks around. The classroom looks almost satisfied in its end-of-day mess.
By the end of the first week, she is exhausted. She feels like a juggler, a traffic conductor, her arms trying to do too many things at once; there is a sense that time thickens, congeals even, as she works her way across three plains, three places. The smell of the classroom has become familiar. The sound of the wind at the windows no longer makes her glance at the weather outside.
By the second week, the kids are becoming familiar, distinct personalities emerging from the uniform brown skin and bright hair. They have, Hannah decides, quiet hands. There is a light inside them, something alive, something free. It makes her remember her own childhood, and Sophie with long legs like a dancer. We were golden, she thinks. Something about the children makes her smile.
The third week, Mrs Culliver asks her to take the whole school on an excursion. Go out to the bridge and give them a history lesson, she says, before winter comes in and we’re stuck in the classroom for the rest of the year. The summer sky is high and blue above, a few friendly clouds shuffling across it as though lost. Hannah imagines the headmistress in the office with a cup of instant coffee and a biscuit, the school quiet about her. The children fan out along the path leading up to the old siding, dawdling. Below them, the hill rolls down into dune and meets the beach, the bridge unfolding its legs and stretching from the solid ground out over the sand into the water. The gate to the siding is open, as promised. Its chain hangs across the fence, the padlock loose. One boy stops to fiddle with it, and Hannah has to step forward and remove it from him. Further down, she can see the hulking bodies of old trains, a crane, all rusting.
There is a local woman waiting for them by a battered car – one of the church ladies, sent by Mrs Culliver to meet them.
‘Mrs Keillor?’ Hannah asks. She has a vague memory of the woman as their babysitter.
‘Sophie!’ the woman says, turning, her face open with surprise.
‘Hannah, actually,’ she replies.
‘Goodness,’ Mrs Keillor says, fluttering her hands awkwardly. ‘Of course. You do look like your sister.’
‘Thanks for meeting us here.’ There is a pause while they both stare at each other. ‘It’s good to show the children the history of the place.’
‘Yes,’ the woman twitters, turning back towards the train tracks and looking out over the bridge. ‘It’s lovely. I love the children. I always look forward to this. Is your mother well? And Sophie? She has children of her own now, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Hannah says. ‘They’re fine, thanks.’ She licks her lips; she can’t think what to say. One boy throws some dried sheep poo, and the kids are running, scattered across the siding and through the long grass. ‘Watch for snakes,’ she calls. They ignore her, and Hannah lets them go. Sections of the rails have disappeared. What is left is dull and random.
‘How did it work?’ Hannah asks, to break the silence.
‘The train would come in and stop here. There was a switch-point there, but that’s gone. Scrap metal, I suppose. People took a lot when the train stopped coming. Like magpies. It’s in the houses, we used it for building. They used to come in here and try to steal the sleepers, too. Top floor of the pub, that’s built mostly of sleepers. My husband helped. They’d just have rotted otherwise.’
Beyond the siding, the track gains cohesion; different branches come together, as though some memory of momentum pulls them towards the bridge, where it runs straight and untouched. Hannah can feel it drawing her eyes like an optical illusion. The children are all over the place, paying no attention, but even they turn every now and again to follow the line of track out towards the mainland.
‘Everyone?’ Hannah calls out to the class. ‘Who can tell me why the railway line was built?’
‘Lizard!’ one girl squeals, and a couple of the boys make to chase it.
‘Hey!’ Hannah yells over them. ‘Come in to me.’
The boys stop and turn, and the children as a whole gather reluctantly around her and Mrs Keillor. Only the four year nine kids hang back together in the long grass, one of the boys stretched out as though he will go to sleep. She ignores them and focuses on the rest of the group.
‘So,’ Hannah repeats, ‘who can tell me why it was built?’
‘For the grapes,’ a girl with pigtails says, almost wearily.
‘Yes?’ Hannah says, one eyebrow raised. ‘And the grapes just appeared, did they?’
A couple of them giggle. Mrs Keillor smiles at them encouragingly.
A boy takes over the explanation. ‘The grapes are what they grew when they couldn’t grow normal crops. It was no good for wheat, and the hills all face the right way, so they grew the grapes to make wine for the people over the other side, and they took them over on boats. But it was too difficult because of the tides, so a heap of men built the bridge. And now we have the ferry.’
‘We all know this,’ one of the others says. ‘We come here every year, Miss Mulvey.’
‘Well,’ Hannah says, glancing at Mrs Keillor, ‘can you tell us what it would have been like?’
Mrs Keillor nods. ‘It wasn’t like today. We didn’t have computers or cars. We walked. I rode a horse to school.’
‘I ride my horse still,’ the pigtailed girl says. ‘And Sam doesn’t have a car.’
‘Cars didn’t exist then, stupid,’ a boy crows from the back. ‘Betcha I could walk across the bridge.’
‘Oh, they existed,’ Mrs Keillor says. ‘We just didn’t have any. They brought the first one over on the train. That hut there was where they arranged everything. The count and the number of trucks and all.’ The hut has almost fallen in on itself, the weight of a feral vine sagging at one end. ‘They’d come in here with their crop and it would be weighed and measured then held in bins before the train came in to load. They used to draw straws to see who had to deliver when. No one wanted to go first because it meant their grapes sat for almost a week in those metal bins, got cooked. But everyone was here when the train did come. And you could see the train all the way along, almost from the mainland, like a silhouette against the water.’ She shades her eyes as if watching it.
Hannah follows her gaze out along the bridge and wonders at
what the woman must be seeing: the train arriving, the fevered moment of raw industrial ambition, a dream, something of connection and drive. She sees an engine labouring over the water, men in overalls shovelling coal or hauling buckets of grapes, doll-like women with parasols and sprung skirts. It plays out for her like a scene from a Dickens novel. It wouldn’t have been like that, she knows. It would have been messy, human, much more modern. She thinks of the labour it would have taken to construct. It would have been lunacy. Why would you build it? What could possess a people to that degree? Above them, a cloud shifts from the sun and the tracks on the bridge reflect the light, become a shining path off the island and away.
‘I remember the first train that came,’ Mrs Keillor says abruptly. Her voice is strangely nasal. ‘I was nine. It was after the war had finished; the bridge was built by the returned soldiers. We were all there, and they let us children up into the engine. The driver had boiled sweets, and my mother said he was handsome.’
And that is it, Hannah thinks. A childhood memory of sweets, the desire for someone beyond them, someone outside. The island chained for eternity to the bulk of the mainland, not by a bridge but by a longing to connect.
‘Can I go home, Miss?’ a boy asks, popping up beside her. ‘That’s my place over there.’
‘No,’ Hannah says, turning to the children again. ‘You can all spread out along the tracks here. We’re going to play a game. Times tables.’
Mrs Keillor claps her hands together. ‘Lovely,’ she says. ‘Lovely.’
The children just groan.
*
Ash Wednesday. Lent. Coming home from his service, Father John marks the calendar and begins the fast. A true fast this year. More than bowed heads marked with charcoal. He pulls a piece of meat from the freezer and throws it out the back door, into the long grass. He thinks of the abstinence of previous years, his wife hiding the chocolate, the biscuits, the sweets. He pulls them all out, throws them into the grass after the meat. Broccoli, half a cake wrapped in tinfoil, leftover pancakes from yesterday’s service, gifts of food brought by the church women. He doesn’t bother to unwrap them, rescue the dishes. He empties the cupboards with a savageness, throws it all outside, until his back garden is littered with the strange bounty, slowly starting to defrost in the sun. A true fast in a field of plenty. He wants to laugh. When is there ever plenty here? He feels a little depraved. He fills a jug with water and sets it in the fridge. Imagines it as earthenware, rough clay turning from red to brown. Water only, in daylight. He sets a cup in there beside it to cool. There is a satisfying sense of good business achieved.
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