Kaitangata Twitch

by Margaret Mahy

  ‘Shelly Gentry,’ said the name under the picture. The small print seemed to come alive, writhing under Meredith’s gaze. ‘Shelly Gentry on her tenth birthday.’

  ‘Kaitangata twitch!’ Meredith said aloud, as if she were speaking a spell. ‘Kaitangata witch!’

  ‘What did you say?’ called her mother from somewhere above her.

  ‘Nothing!’ Meredith shouted back, wondering if her mother could hear the crackle of fear in her voice.

  Then Rufus leaped into the room, struck a graceful pose, saw her expression and changed to a stage gesture of alarm.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he cried, leaning away from her as if she had something catching.

  ‘Nothing!’ repeated Meredith, and made herself look down at the picture one last time. Then she shut the little book as tightly as she could, holding it closed between her palms. The cover seemed to twist horribly against her skin as if the child she had just imprisoned was trying to force her way out from between the pages. Meredith threw the book back into the box.

  She watched it narrowly, but its cover didn’t flip open, nor did its pages flutter, for after all, it was just a book, and the photograph was just a photograph of someone long gone – a girl called Shelly Gentry, who fifty years ago had vanished during a birthday picnic on Kaitangata. Meredith did not turn to look back through the window at the island out there, but somehow found the shape of it forming inside her eyes. And she found herself longing to set off in the blue canoe, even though some other part of her mind fluttered like a lost spirit-moth, crying, ‘Stay away! Stay away!’

  ‘I’ve just come back from a cannibal isle

  Called Ti-tiddly-i-ti Isle . . .’

  sang Rufus, dancing again.

  ‘What are you singing that for?’ asked Meredith, and was surprised to hear how angry she sounded. Rufus was surprised too. He stopped his dancing.

  ‘It just came into my head,’ he said in an injured way. ‘The door was open and it walked into me.’

  ‘Ha ha!’ was all Meredith could say. After all, uninvited guests were always crowding into her own head, banging into each other, arguing and abusing. There was no good reason to feel cross with Rufus, simply because he was singing an old song which she had enjoyed herself for many years. So she grinned and shrugged and went on with the rest of the day, reading, then watching television, then having dinner, doing homework and being read to, along with the rest of her family, by her father before going to bed, and at last, to sleep.

  14

  Meredith pushed the blue canoe into the sea, scrambled into it and began paddling towards the island through that curious metallic light, which somehow darkened around her as the sea deepened under her. Where had she seen that glow – that exact glow – before? But of course she was being silly. Light could never be exactly the same as itself. She must be remembering wrongly. What time of day is it? she wondered. Is it morning? Where’s the sun? Her mother’s donkeys lined up along the fence above the house and shouted down, asking their usual question, then answering it in the same breath. Hee? Haw! Hee? Haw! Once again Meredith felt certain she had heard that exact sound before – it was as if the donkeys had managed to tape their voices and were now replaying the same cry. Hee? Haw! Hee? Haw! they were still asking and answering as the canoe scraped up onto Shelly Beach. The western end of the island was blanketed by fog, but the sharp eastern end was bright with sunlight – or something like sunshine. It certainly shone.

  So Meredith made for that bright shore, going from one little beach to another, and scrambling up and over the fingers of rock that thrust out into the sea, then wound her way over sand and broken shells, following a tideline of sticks and wet pine cones – of other things too. With increasing uneasiness she passed first the skeleton of a fish, then a yellow glove and then, within another two steps, found herself staring down at a sodden black sandal, seized by something close to terror – for she had known exactly what it was she was going to see, half a second before she actually saw it.

  But she could not turn back . . . not this time. She must go on. So on she went until she reached the eastern end of Kaitangata where she forced herself to pause and stare out to the mouth of the bay, pretending that she had come to stand at the pointed end of the island like a captain of old standing in the bow of his ship, watching the weather with narrowed eyes. All the time she knew she would have to turn, and look along the northern beaches.

  Hee? Haw! Hee? Haw! cried the donkey voices.

  She turned, and the light immediately seemed to alter around her, to grow harder and more brassy, while the sky, though it remained blue and cloudless, seemed to settle over her as if she were an egg of possibility that needed brooding. And now Meredith saw what she had already known she would see. The linked beaches along the northern side of Kaitangata were smooth and empty of any human trace except for the signs. HAND BEACH said the first one in white printing on blue. Meredith looked on past this sign to the one on the next headland, while on the third . . .

  ‘No way!’ said Meredith aloud and tried to turn back on her own tracks, only to find that thick mist had come up silently behind her. Though the northern beaches were flooded with sunlight, those on the south must now be blotted out. Meredith understood that the world was rolling itself up after her. She could not bear to walk into that mist, groping her way blindly back towards her blue canoe. For, if she put out an uncertain hand, what old bouquet of flowers might be slipped into it – what silver fingers might entwine with hers, drawing her forward into a chilly embrace.

  There was nothing to do but to walk on, keeping just ahead of the fog which crept silently at her heels, like a well-trained dog. In the distance, on the third headland, dark shapes were waiting for her, one standing a little in front of the others, and Meredith wondered if Shelly Gentry could possibly be both in front of her and behind her at the same time.

  Then, suddenly, her dream muscles remembered something her brain had forgotten, and she found herself leaping sideways, and just in time. The raw pink fingers straining up through the sand to snatch at her ankle clamped shut on air. In leaping aside she found she had put herself within reach of a blue glove, which also snatched at her, and she leaped again, sweat forming on her forehead, for now the sand in front of her rippled as if the Kaitangata twitch was alive in it. It rippled; it blistered. The blisters swelled and burst, blossoming into other snatching hands, some of them brown and lean, some of them brightly-coloured, smooth and nail-less, but all writhing with a horrid, urgent, island life of their own. Among the large hands, all straining avid fingers, she saw a small pale hand, not snatching but simply opening and closing in the Kaitangata air. Something about the very meekness of this small pale hand, its transparent fingernails and soft palm, frightened Meredith more than any of the other horrors.

  Though they could obviously feel her footsteps, though they swivelled on hidden wrists, the hands were working blindly. Gasping and dancing, Meredith skipped between them, and found herself safe at last on the rocks that thrust out between Hand Beach and the beach beyond it. EYE BEACH said the next sign.

  Meredith jumped across the long rockpools, and collapsed onto the sand beyond. A soft rhythm came out of the mist that had collected behind her as if the hands had begun simultaneously to snap their fingers.

  Eye Beach ran from the edge of the sea back to a high bank – almost a little cliff. It would take Meredith about half an hour to walk around the whole island and reach her blue canoe. Still, half an hour was not so very long, not now the worst was over – and her first few steps were almost light-hearted. Then suddenly she felt an all-over prickling, and knew that it was not over. Something was watching her . . . and the gaze she felt falling on her was not a human gaze.

  Meredith stopped again. A small wave, scarcely more than a ripple, dark with suspended sand, flopped onto the shore, making an insignificant wet sigh, before running back towards the sea. Meredith could hear the tiny, prickling sound of that water soaking into the sand. T
he watchful island silence took over once more; another wave lifted and flopped over. And, then, as this wave swept back in turn, Meredith became aware of another sound – a fine, sifting sound – coming from the small cliff to her left. Grains of fine soil were falling from under its green fringe onto the shore below. Below the fringe, someone had cut a long oval into the hard, dried earth of the bank. And once Meredith had seen it (as if it needed her to witness what it was planning to do), the oval quivered within its own outline, and the soil fell faster.

  Then the cliff opened a great eye and looked at her.

  The eye had no white to it. Its iris was dark and glittering with grains of embedded quartz, but its pupil was a black space, greedily sucking light from the surfaces of sea and sand, so that as light fell into it, an accelerating twilight seemed to surge around her . . . a twilight with force, like wind or tide, a twilight which spun Meredith around, and swept her towards the eye. The pupil now became a pit into which everything must fall – and somehow she was no longer looking up towards it, but down into it. Meredith let out a cry. Too late! She was already falling into that circle of nothing, and somewhere behind her the eye was closing its lid. Darkness rushed into her open mouth, down her throat, into her lungs and stomach, up though her nose and into her brain.

  She was throttling on darkness, dying there under the surface of Kaitangata. She was becoming part of its inner night.

  And then she woke up. At least it was a sort of waking, though what was around her was certainly not the room in which she had gone to sleep. Meredith found herself hanging in a huge space, burning with grains of quartz, all set in patterns she recognised. She was smelling a smell she liked, though it was wrong to be smelling it at the moment of waking, and for some reason she thought she must have wet her bed. As she gasped, struggling to work out just where she was, something breathed harshly in her ear. Something tightened around her.

  ‘Merry!’ said a voice. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe. It’s one of those old dreams of yours . . . dreams . . . dreams. Nothing but!’

  Meredith was not lying in her bed. She was on her knees in the sea in front of the boatshed. The glitter above her came from familiar stars. On her right floated the blue canoe, and on her left, her father was kneeling – kneeling in the shallow sea, holding her close, and saying the word ‘dreams’ over and over again.

  15

  ‘Dreams, dreams, dreams!’ Mr Gallagher was repeating gently, hugging and holding her. ‘You’ve been walking in your sleep again, Merry. You haven’t done that for years.’

  ‘Am I awake now? Really awake?’ Meredith cried, collapsing against his shoulder and shivering violently. She was so cold it was like being in pain, and she thought, as she leaned against her father, that she might freeze herself right into him. For how could she ever believe in the beach . . . her father . . . even the cold, which could probably be dreamed like anything else – how could she ever believe in anything ever again? Only a moment ago she had been a mere grain spinning in Kaitangata’s eye. And now that dangerous glitter had retreated. It had become nothing more than the distant twinkle of winter stars. No. This must be true. Scorpio, the constellation of autumn and winter, was sprawling above her, curving across the world, and her father was holding her tightly. She was safe.

  But for how long? The dream was nothing but a dream, and yet it had drawn her down to the shore, and there was nothing safe about being here in her pyjamas, wet sand working itself between her toes and the canoe nudging her leg with its pointed snout. If she could find her way down the Zigzag without waking up, she could just as easily have paddled all the way over to Kaitangata and walked around its pointed tip to Eye Beach.

  ‘Come on,’ said her father gently. ‘We’re both freezing. Let’s get you home, safe and warm.’ He bent to pick her up. But then, in spite of everything, Meredith suddenly felt in charge of herself.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. I can walk.’

  So they walked, side by side and hand in hand, back towards the Zigzag. Faint starlight reflected from the water, and Meredith found that now she was used to the dark there was enough light to show her the way. If she closed her eyes, though, a picture of the beach and the bay, much clearer than anything she could see with eyes open, formed behind her lids. No wonder she had been able to find her way in her sleep. The beach and the track that led to it were like a bright map deep inside her head.

  ‘So! What’s brought all this on?’ her father asked, patting her shoulder.

  ‘I dreamed about the island,’ Meredith mumbled between chattering teeth.

  There was a short silence.

  ‘My fault,’ sighed Mr Gallagher at last, ‘raving on about this place the way I do. Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!’

  By now, they were nearly at the Zigzag. Looking up Meredith saw the shapes of trees, billowing out against the night sky, which had a transparent blackness all its own. She and her father began to climb. ‘I have island dreams myself, these days,’ said Mr Gallagher, sounding as if he were talking to himself rather than to her. ‘I dream that I get up in the morning, go out into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, glance out of the window – and it’s gone . . . all gone, the island, the bay, everything. It’s as if it’s part of myself that’s gone. My whole childhood. Of course there was more to my childhood than the holidays, but somehow it seems as if so much of me was concentrated into being here, and seeing the same beaches . . . the same headlands. And of course the island.’ Mr Gallagher was not just staring into space. Meredith could tell he was staring into himself by staring back into past Christmases. ‘All gone! Destroyed! But of course it isn’t really gone,’ he added quickly. ‘We can still save it.’ His voice, which had grown harsher at the thought of the vanishing island, softened with hope. ‘Save it for your kids, eh?’

  ‘How can we save it?’ Meredith asked, shivering with cold and with her Kaitangata memories too.

  ‘We must save it,’ her father said. ‘I know I overdo things, at times, but I want to be sure of something in a slippery old life.’ Ferns brushed against them as they counted six steps this way, then six steps that, climbing steadily towards home.

  As they came round the last bend of the Zigzag, he began to talk almost as if he were reminding himself of an old story.

  ‘I couldn’t wait to get away from all this when I was a boy,’ he said, sweeping his arm sideways in a vague semicircle. ‘I was just like Rufus – thought the best things were happening somewhere else. Anyhow, I won that scholarship and set out travelling.’ They reached the top of the Zigzag, and saw a yellow glow spilling through the open back door and the grass glittering with stars of its own. Up the steps they came, being careful on that third rickety step – the one her father was always going to mend next weekend – then crossed the verandah. He shut the door firmly behind them. Meredith knew she must be standing on the hall matting, but she could not feel it properly.

  ‘Hot chocolate?’ she suggested quickly, begging and telling in the same two words.

  ‘You need warm, dry clothes more than chocolate,’ said her father. ‘Cuddle up beside the pot-belly. It’s still warm.’ But Meredith was already dragging a stool to the wood stove that stood in a corner of the kitchen. She sat, dabbing her feet against it, one at a time, and felt as if she were still dancing.

  ‘How long was I down there?’ she asked, wondering if she could have paddled over to Kaitangata and then back again.

  ‘I was right behind you,’ her father said. ‘But you were a lot quicker than I was. I was really surprised at just how speedy you were out there in the dark.’

  I had to go. I was called, Meredith wanted to say, and then made up her mind to keep that idea to herself too.

  ‘There are clean pyjamas on the hot-water cylinder I think,’ her father said. While he collected milk from the fridge and cocoa from the pantry, Meredith changed into the warm, dry nightclothes. The hands of the clock on the mantelpiece were both pointing to twelve.

  ‘Was it fun, bein
g overseas?’ she asked, beginning to enjoy the chance to be alone with her father, gossiping at midnight.

  ‘I did that Arts degree in the UK,’ her father’s voice drifted around the pantry, ‘and then I decided to hitch around the world.’ Once again he was talking to himself as much as he was talking to her. ‘Worked here and there, always taking off when I’d saved enough. I just loved it at first. Working and walking in great cities where famous people had lived. But then – oh, well, I was ill for a while . . . and I couldn’t get a real job. I don’t know quite what would have happened to me, but Dad sent me my ticket home. And the weird thing – the really weird thing was that somehow everything I wanted was waiting for me at home all the time, right here in the bay. It was just so beautiful – the bay I mean. Not beautiful like that touristy picture on the District Plan, but beautiful in some other way . . . a secret way, just as if it were being beautiful especially for me. And I met your mother again. Met her properly, I mean. Of course we’d known each other at school, but she’d been a couple of classes behind me, which was like being on two different planets in those days. Anyhow, we got married, and she worked while I studied for another degree – horticulture, this time. More my thing, really. And then we bought this bit of land, set up gardening and landscaping – and the donkey stud, too; had you kids . . . everything was all so perfect. And the bay just . . . I don’t know – it just was. The hills behind. The sea in front. And Kaitangata.’ He fell silent. ‘And Kaitangata,’ he repeated, rather more briskly as if the name were something he was using to fix the whole bay in his mind.