I rise onto the tips of my toes and look along the darkening sky and road and here she comes again, Mercedes, and still she jaws vaguely on her song – buenas tardes? Again she ignores me and it is as if she cannot see me even. She carries beneath her arm a carton of table wine – tinto is one of the words I have, and never too far from the tip of my tongue – and a jar of Nutella and in a blue plastic bag a frozen octopus. This will mean a grocer open down the road someplace and a stick of bread for me. Tentacles and spindles and bulbous sacs – I need to dig into myself harder lately for the words of things. The dog is up beside me and she sniffs at the air after Mercedes and the evening falls away from us quickly. I’ll need to decide soon where to lie down tonight. The animal must choose its lair. The first stars burn coldly on the plain and I am so many miles from home. I reach out a last time for you. Your warm skinny flank and the way that you sigh and move closer to me just once more just this last time. I fix a finger under the rough collar of rope and work it to loosen it and you settle in this moment that much closer to me.
A moto runs its troubled lungs; the young girl’s step recedes; the old man’s falters.
The man in the yellow t-shirt passes along and he says hello to the dog and he looks right through me. This is no place for me tonight, I decide – I would rather not their shelter. I’ll move on again and maybe tonight I’ll keep moving all the way through until the sunlight wakes the yellow of the yellow of the fields of rapeseed and in truth I am still drinking some of the time because I have not yet drank her all the way out of my mind and I still have this broken heart.
HOLY ISLAND
Ross Raisin
She lies inside the warm belly of the dune and looks out over the furred complex of sandhills, at the sea. The sun, in, out, of the swift clouds is on her back. She closes her eyes, allowing herself the pleasure of it. The sea presses against the island. Waves crash and suck at the shingle beach below the dunes. The warmth, the rhythm of the water, lull her – but she returns her eyes sharply to the sea, scanning the bare horizon, willing herself to remain vigilant.
The following day is colder. A wind is through the dunes. At the crest of the sand slope tiny white flowers quiver in the marram grass. A bank of raincloud a few miles out is moving over the sea, advancing on the island. For an instant she thinks that she sees something. A dark speck. She keeps her eyes focused for a long time on the same patch of water, but it does not appear again.
There is a low rumbling behind her. She moves to the other side of the dune and lowers herself by the earthy spyhole at the top, from which vantage point she can see the top of the quarry and the roofs of the scattered colony of cottages that is growing up beside it. She waits, her forearms pulsing against the sand. There are voices. The whinny of a horse. She creeps closer to the spyhole, watching the opening a short distance away where the wagonway on its raised embankment emerges from the sand hills.
The usual two men appear, at the head of a convoy: behind follow a grey horse, harnessed to a dumpy wheeled tub rolling along the tracks of the wagonway; a boy; a second, larger, chestnut horse; another tub, then two more men at the rear. As their course curves closer to her she can see the heaped chalky stone inside the first tub and the faint white smoke above it when the tub judders over the track joints. She tries to listen to the conversation of the front men, but she can pick out only the odd word. Rain. Castle. They are Scottish, she thinks. Their boots, clothing, faces are smeared white. The hooves of the horses too are whitened, and as they pass directly beneath her she notices the white prints on their stomachs, which she knows, as she observes the boy moving between the animals, patting, stroking, are his. Every few steps the boy turns to glance at the men behind. When the one she presumes to be the foreman, because his clothes are not stained, quickens his pace to join the men at the front, the boy slips from his pocket a halved apple and feeds it to the grey horse. Then, without taking his eyes off the foreman, he drops back and repeats the action for the chestnut.
The procession travels past her, towards the south shore and the kilns below the castle. It begins, lightly, to rain. Before she has pulled her shawl fully over her head it is a downpour. Craters plug the sand around her face. She scrambles to her knees, watching the men rush for the saddlebags strapped to each horse, to take out covers that they pull over the tubs of limestone. She waits until they are a good distance ahead before she gets to her feet, runs out from the dune, jumps the tracks and is away over the brown exposed farmland across the island for home.
The fire is going in the kitchen. Her mother crouches beside it, pressing a spoon against the dry salted cod that is roasting in a pan on the hearth girdle. She has changed into dry clothes but her hair is still wet, clung to the rain-raw skin of her neck.
‘Will you see on the butts, Elfrida?’
The girl gets up from the table, where she is binding lats for a crab pot, and goes out the back. Rain pours from the roof down a channel into the water butt. It is almost full; she shunts it aside and slides into its place a second, empty, butt. When she is back inside she sits again at the table to continue working at the crab pot, watching her mother by the hearth.
‘They are come in their numbers, the limers,’ the girl says.
Her mother does not look around from the fire. They fall again to silence. There is only the sound of the rain, the minute crackle of fish skin.
‘More cottages is gone up. I seen them from the dunes up by the Head.’
Her mother stands up. She goes to the corner of the room and bends to inspect the weather glass. The level in the jar has dropped, the water drawn up into the small upturned bottle that floats inside.
‘They have you interested.’
‘They are getten a lot, is all,’ the girl says, but she lowers her face so that it does not show in the light of the candle that she is working from. Her mother comes to join her at the table. She takes up two lats and begins, quickly, skilfully, to bind them. There is a rash on the back of one hand, another on the exposed part of her chest, and Elfrida knows that she has been at the harbour all day, sitting in front of the herring houses, viewing the passage onto the sea.
They complete the base of the pot, eat, clear away, and her mother goes up the stair. She goes out to check on the butt and finds that the rain, which has been easing with the approach of evening, has stopped.
She leaves the cottage and walks through the village to the path up onto the Heugh. When she is at the top she lays a blanket over a large stone, a few steps from the cliff edge, and sits down. From here, even in the ebbing light of the sun she can see for miles around. To the west the wet amber gleam of the mudflats stretches away to the mainland. Below her – a sheer rock fall to the shingle beach and the harbour, on the other side of which the Needles tower above Black Law. Hope surges inside her chest at the sight of them; the urgent belief that they must be visible still from the sea.
She looks out at the open water. A wind that she can see but not feel batters the Farnes, foams over the concealed ridges of rock that lie just below the surface. Last summer, there had been storm after storm. The herring shoal, as it migrated down the coast, had been unpredictable and the island cobles, her father’s amongst them, had drifted farther and farther out to sea in search of it. They had provisioned for three nights. By the sixth night her mother ceased her vigil by the harbour. After eight nights her father returned, with the other survivors: the sixty-three men out of ninety who had set out.
A shifting breeze brings the smell of smoke from the village, snugged into the corner of the island behind her. The weather has been kinder this summer, she reminds herself. The men have set out better provisioned – her father with seven days of squeezed corned beef and onion sandwiches, water, tea. She recites her usual blessing, pulls her shawl tight to her chest against the strengthening wind. By tomorrow the excursion will have entered its second week. She trains her sight on the black throat of the harbour passage onto the sea. An awareness of duty, and her mother,
holds it there, or tries to – but her eye is drawn back to the land at the side of the passage where the castle, massed against the darkening sky, rises above the six glowing orange rims of the lime kilns. Since they were lit the previous week they have burned all day and all night, and before long they are the only thing remaining in the gloom, except for the intermittent flare of the lighthouse on Outer Farne.
She watches the convoy roll out of the sand hills and she shrinks back as they pass below her. Once they have gone ahead she is pulled by guilt to squint a final time at the sea, before she comes out of the dune.
There are no hills or long grass so she follows stealthily on the shingle alongside the wagonway, wind and spray lashing her cheek until she is close to the south shore. Through the gap between two large boulders she can see a great deal of activity beneath the castle. Men are coming in and out of the access tunnels at the base of the kilns. A schooner is moored at the staithes by the foreshore – a pulley-wheel in its rigging winching down a basket of coal to where three men stand on the rocks ready to reach and guide it. She looks for the quarrymen, and spots them stationed by the track up to the kiln tops. She watches the boy, stroking the chestnut horse’s neck, until the foreman appears from an access tunnel, at the head of a small group. There is some calling out which she cannot understand, and her gut hollows at the sudden thought of her father – his opinion of these migrants; these landsmen.
Ropes are tied to one of the tubs. Some of the men move to the front of the tub and take up the ropes, wrapping them around their waists; others form a ruck behind the tub, bracing their hands against it. At the foreman’s command they begin to heave it up the slope to the kiln tops – and it does move, slowly, but some of the men start to slip in the mud, losing their footing sliding with the tub back to the bottom.
The foreman claps his hands and two men move towards the horses. The boy shakes his head. He stands between the horses, gripping their reins. The foreman says something to him and points to the tracks up the slope. Again the boy shakes his head. More men advance and there is a short struggle as the boy is restrained while the chestnut horse is tethered to two ropes.
The new combination of horse and men ascends steadily. When they near the top the boy breaks from where he is detained and runs to the slope. ‘’Tis over hot for her,’ he shouts – he is Scottish, she comprehends, pressing her forehead to the stone gap. There is a commotion, but the boy indicates with his hands that he does not intend to stop the operation. He runs easily up the muddy slope and positions himself by the horse’s head, talking into its ear, cupping a hand over its eyes.
As the horse reaches the level ground at the top she notices the heat haze above the pots, the air rising and glistening over the castle ramparts. The horse starts stamping, arching its neck. The boy unties it from the ropes while the men, shielding their faces with their hands, turn around and put their backs against the tub to drive it towards the lip of the first pot. It tilts, tips, and limestone cascades down the chamber. There is a dull crash, sparks jumping above the pot, but her eyes move to the horse, and the boy, his mouth against the animal’s neck, soothing, stroking, guiding it gently back from the pot.
She is woken early by the sound of feet outside. Voices. There is a loud knocking at their door. A moment later there is another at the next door, then the next, repeating, echoing down the street. She gets out of bed and goes into the kitchen where she finds her mother, dressed, pulling on her boots. Her face is bright, desperate.
‘They are home, Elfrida.’
Other people are hurrying down the street: wives, mothers, sisters, sleep-dazed children. An old man is coming out of a doorway, through which the embers of a fire breath slowly in the dark. She stays in step with her mother, who is almost running now: she is making a noise, a thin repeated moan, that shocks Elfrida, embarrasses her. Her mother, though, seems oblivious to her presence – her eyes are set on the pink horizon of sea and then the harbour that is coming into view as they hurry with the others down towards it.
The tops of coble sails show above the barnacled roofs of the herring houses. Blood is thundering at her temples. She counts the sails – realising, before they reach the back of the throng of women, that they are not all there. Half, at most. She scours the sheds along the harbour where men are hauling in carts and shattered remnants of wood but she cannot see her father so she looks to the cobles, bobbing and broken on the water, and cannot find his own. Some of the women are crying. Two have their arms around their men, sobbing into their chests. Another woman is on her knees, trembling, alone. Elfrida wants to take her mother’s hand, but her mother’s hands are bunched into tight red corals of knuckle and she knows that she cannot go to her.
A fisherman, a friend of her father, is at the water’s edge, addressing the crowd. Behind him, half a dozen men stand motionless, looking down at their boots submerged underneath the green skin of water.
‘No shelter, nothing,’ the man is saying, ‘and thereckly the entire sea is boiling and we cannot see an arm’s length.’ The men in the water remain silent as he relates the story and it occurs to her that they have rehearsed this; they have agreed on these words to say to the stricken congregation of women.
‘We are pulling buckets, and all we are thinking is to get left the storm but when it is passed we are someway a clean distance off where we were, and it is only us, these cobles that you see here.’
‘Did you not go back?’ one woman shouts.
‘Ay, of course. But nothing. Nothing.’
‘They are swep away?’
He lowers his face, shaking his head. ‘I couldna tell you. I don’t know.’
Her mother begins to walk away. Elfrida turns instinctively to go with her; but there is nothing that she can say. She does not move. She watches her mother’s even progress away from the harbour. Through the clouds a weak blanket of light is thrown upon the crumbled remains of the priory as she passes below it, onto the village lane, out of sight.
All afternoon her mother has kept to her room. She came out for the short silent meal that they have recently finished and now she is in there again. Elfrida watches the passage by Castle Point merge into the rocks and the black sea beyond. Two seals playing in the harbour are perceptible now only from the occasional oiled flash of fur as they jump and slip about each other. She urges herself to feel more of her mother’s pain, but it will not come – she feels instead a blank, a blackness; and the constant sidling desire to turn her sight to the six molten rings.
Three figures are walking up the shore below her. She steps to the edge. When they are almost level they look up, all three, to where she stands. She is afraid, exhilarated, but she stays rooted to her position. They look away, then continue down the shingle until they are beyond the rocks at the corner of the island. She waits, her shoulders stiff with cold, until the black spots of their heads come into view again on the other side of the rocks, walking on and gradually receding into the dark sheet of the mudflats. An uprising of seabirds launches, some way ahead, at their approach. A moment later she listens to the passing thunder of wings, follows and loses the flock in the night sky.
The curing begins the following morning. Elfrida and her mother make the walk down to the harbour in long boots, oilskin jackets and shawls wrapped across their chests. The same gathering of women is outside the herring houses, hair pinned above pale faces, waiting by the silver blaze of fish that is piled inside a line of carts, already stinking in the sun.
Mrs Allan, who used to teach Elfrida in the school, arranges them into threesomes. She comes up to Elfrida and her mother and signals for another woman, May, whose man is returned, to join them. As she calls the names Mrs Allan places her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Elfrida sees the fingers squeeze; sees her mother clasp Mrs Allan’s elbow in return, and she is hurt by this fleeting gesture, left out, a child.
They file through the doorways of the two upscuttled boats, into the dark stale workspace. Some of the taller women drag i
n the carts and pour the herring into the long, brine-filled troughs that cross the length of the room. Elfrida binds May’s then her mother’s hands with strips of flour sack-cloth to protect them from any slip of the gutting knife. She can feel her mother’s breath on her face as she ties the strips fast with thread, running it round and round her sturdy, unflinching hands, stroking secretly over her fingers with each circuit.
The teams take up their formations along the troughs and are immediately to work, with no explanation or preparation, straight into the fast rhythm that will continue into the evening. Elfrida starts pricking on, scraping the scales from the herring and cutting off the heads into a basket. She slides each completed fish to her mother and May, who gut and separate the cleaned fish into a bucket, ready for packing. A sunset of blood deepens over the cloth on her mother’s hands, working beside her own. Blood pools in the trough, drips to the floor. All around them the room is silent but for the sound of scraping and gutting. Sliced necks. The soft patter of piling heads. There is the wet stink of guts. The basket between her feet filling with eyes. Through the bright doorway the men are at work: some folding drift nets and torn sails, for the women; some sitting and tending to the bust hulls of their cobles, which have been lifted and lined up on wooden blocks along the side of the harbour, like casualties.
Elfrida, carefully, regards her mother. She studies the side of her face for any sign of what she is thinking, but there is nothing. She is intent only on her task, the quick skilful dance of the fish and the gutting knife in her hands.
A Kind of Compass Page 9