The Island

by Ben McPherson

  Elsa was looking at me levelly. She nodded, half-smiled.

  ‘Also, full disclosure about a little lie of omission: I’ve started shaving the outside of my ears and hoping you won’t notice.’ Elsa pretended shock. I turned away from her. ‘But here I am with the most beautiful woman I know, with our beautiful family, in the happiest country on Earth. I don’t know how I got so lucky.’

  ‘So why won’t you stay?’ said Hedda, loudly.

  ‘We should, Hedda. We should. These past eight months have been amazing. But you guys knocked me off my game. Everyone’s so fucking incorruptible and so fucking nice. And I can’t make satire about good people doing good things. I need sleaze, American style. Quickly, before the newspaper closes my column.’

  People were laughing again. At the far end of the room I could see Vee looking up from her screen at me, anxious. There was the real reason we had to return home. In the most perfect place on Earth, Vee was unhappy. We had not understood how hard she would take moving to this strange and beautiful land; what it would cost her to leave behind her friends and her social status, to find herself at the bottom of the heap.

  I smiled at Vee. Vee smiled back, uncertain, then returned to her game. Elsa, who had followed my gaze turned towards me, nodded.

  I said, ‘I thought I was used to being a foreigner. I thought it came easily to me. And in Washington DC it pretty much does. But here I really am a foreigner. You all very kindly speak my language to me, but here I can see there is this part of Elsa that I can’t fully know, and it’s available to all of you, and not to me. And if I’m honest I’m a touch jealous of you all for having that part of her, when I don’t.’ Our friends clapped and smiled.

  ‘And Elsa told me it was an easy language, but you know and I know that’s simply not true. Which leads to the horrible question: Have I – finally – caught my wife in a lie?’

  Elsa smiled, meeting my eye, and I was sorry I had doubted her.

  I looked around at her friends. ‘Thank you for listening, you beautiful people. I’m Cal Curtis, and I used to be a lot funnier.’

  Elsa was on her feet beside me, eyes sparkling. We toasted the brightness of the summer day, and the resilience of the Norwegian people. All the while I watched Elsa, thinking how happy she looked.

  ‘I love you,’ I mouthed.

  ‘No, Cal, I love you,’ she said, loud enough for people to hear. ‘You strange, sentimental fuck.’

  I had a bad feeling about taking her home to America, a sense that it would do her some quiet violence, that at some level Hedda was right, that we should stay. But for the sake of our children …

  Vee sat in a quiet corner of the bar, laptop plugged in, headset on, lounging in her chair. On her screen an avatar, a slim white girl in a tight T-shirt, short black hair covered in a blue beanie hat, staring out. Lasser8. Another avatar appeared beside the first, dark-skinned and muscular. Marldathug.

  ‘A week Tuesday,’ she was saying. ‘So maybe, I don’t know, like a pizza, or something? Good to go here, by the way …’

  ‘You all right, Vee?’

  ‘Wait a second …’ She smiled, lifted the earpad from her right ear.

  ‘I was asking if you were OK.’

  ‘Dad, can I go out for pizza Tuesday when we get back?’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Marlon. A couple of Marlon’s friends.’

  ‘Sure, love. Sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She replaced her headset over her right ear and picked up her control. ‘Good for Tuesday. And we are … go …’

  On screen her avatar was skydiving towards an island. ‘Marlon, low building top right.’ Below, other avatars were landing, picking up weapons, disappearing from sight.

  I stood watching her face, looking for some sign of trauma.

  She noticed me staring. ‘I’m really OK. You should go be with Mum.’

  Her avatar landed on a roof, picked up a rifle, ran to the edge of the roof and began to shoot.

  For a while the euphoria carried us along. We drank white wine and ate crab from steel platters, half-dazzled by the sun on the fjord.

  Only Jo kept checking his phone.

  I leaned forward. ‘Everything OK with Edvard?’

  ‘Am I being that obvious?’

  ‘Come and talk.’

  The bar was fuggy with the heat of the afternoon. Fruit flies flew lazy loops above the beer taps. In the corner, Vee seemed lost in the world of her screen. She was talking easily to Marlon. Excited about going home. The barman and a few customers stood watching a large TV screen showing pictures of the waterfront.

  Through the windows you could see the same cityscape, the buildings grey-brown in the smoke. I chose a table near the door, away from the television, facing Vee.

  Jo sat opposite me. ‘Please tell me I didn’t just see my goddaughter pickaxing a guy to death?’

  ‘It’s a game. Tell me about Edvard …’

  ‘Yeah, Edvard,’ said Jo, serious again. ‘Edvard is having a really shitty day. He spent the afternoon trying to scramble the police helicopter. They have three pilots, and guess what? One pilot’s with his family in the Arctic, one can’t be contacted by phone, one is with her family on Tenerife.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘I realize you think this country is some kind of safe space where nothing ever goes wrong, but Edvard can’t track down a helicopter pilot because it’s Midsummer, and everyone deserves to be with their family on Midsummer. I mean, why aren’t you satirizing that?’

  Through the doorway I could see Elsa, sitting talking intimately to Hedda. She must have felt my eyes on her; she looked up, then away. There was something furtive about her glance now, something very different from the way she had looked at me earlier, as if talking to Hedda made my wife love me less.

  ‘Cal, mate?’ Jo was staring at me.

  ‘Sorry. Yes.’ Elsa had turned in her chair. She was facing away from me. I looked at Jo. ‘I think maybe Edvard should speak to a journalist.’

  ‘You have news connections. Edvard likes you, Cal. He’d prefer to speak to you.’

  Cheers from all around. They were announcing it now: no one had been killed in the bomb.

  I stood at the far end of the pontoon, earpiece in. ‘Patching you through to Carly in the studio.’ A click, and I could hear the studio feed. Carly’s voice was clear and strong.

  ‘Back to that explosion in Oslo, Norway, and to eyewitness Cal Curtis, whose family experienced these traumatic events at close hand. Cal, everyone here is delighted that your family is safe.’

  ‘Thank you. And yes, you can almost feel the country breathing a collective sigh of relief. Sources close to the police tell us that not a single person lost their life in what looked, at one point, to be a major terrorist incident. The town hall bomb appears to have been something of a damp squib, an act of spectacle terrorism on a building where no one was working, though it does raise important questions as to the level of preparedness of this proud little Scandinavian nation.’

  ‘Thank you, Cal Curtis in Oslo.’

  I took off the headset, looked out across the bay. The entire city was shrouded in smoke and dust. Terrifying, but strangely beautiful, cut by heavy shafts of sunlight.

  A voice shouted. ‘Cal!’

  I turned. Hedda, framed in the light of the bar.

  The plume of smoke on the mainland. The concern in Hedda’s face. The urgency in her voice. ‘Cal, you have to see this.’

  Fear beginning to take hold.

  I was on my feet, running. Hedda turned, moved out of my way, touched my hand as I passed, followed me in. There was Vee, fighting her way through the people and next to Vee was Elsa.

  ‘My daughter,’ I said to the couple beside me. They moved to let me pass. I reached out. Vee grasped my hand. I pulled her towards me.

  New images on the screen.

  A girl sheltering by the water’s edge, a man waving desperately from the water. In the downdraught from the
helicopter the fjord frothed and turned.

  We crowded around the bar, every face staring up at the screen.

  ‘Lyden,’ said Elsa. Sound.

  The barman nodded and turned up the volume.

  Pictures from TVZ. A sundress of kingfisher blue. A shooting on an island near Oslo.

  I saw the terror in Vee’s eyes.

  ‘Licia,’ she said.

  I stood outside the restaurant, eyes fixed on the water, phone in hand. I could not look at Elsa or Vee, though I could feel their eyes on me, willing Licia to pick up.

  A click. Licia’s voice.

  Can’t speak now.

  Funny.

  Almost.

  Punchline to a horrific cosmic joke.

  5

  That dread silence.

  Further along the coast bonfires lit up the fjord. Here the pyres remained unlit. The sun was down now, the air cold.

  We stood on the mainland opposite Garden Island, watching as the boats came in.

  A hundred of us, maybe more, looking out across the fjord, waiting for our children to return, barely daring to speak. From time to time a hand sought out a hand, a body leaned towards another. Whispered words, furtive almost. But mostly I remember the silence.

  In my hand I held the form that we had filled out:

  Name: Alicia Curtis

  Height: 5' 6"

  Age: 15

  Skin colour: white (pale)

  Hair: blond

  Clothes: blue dress (kingfisher, sequinned). Silver dragonfly bangle. Converse sneakers?

  Identifying marks: none

  Elsa had crossed out the height, had rewritten it in centimetres.

  Height: 167.5 cm

  As if that might make the difference.

  I leaned towards Elsa.

  ‘Focus on New Year in Whistler,’ I whispered. ‘Focus on Licia coming back.’

  Heavy winds had been forecast in Whistler that New Year’s morning, but it was lunchtime and the storm had not come.

  I tried to hand Licia her phone.

  ‘No need, Dad.’ She smiled, dropped her skis to the snow, stepped into them, began fish-boning up the slope. Vee was waiting by the lift, arms crossing and uncrossing, tiny and impatient in her helmet and her stormproof one-piece. They were skiing without us for the first time, drunk on the excitement of it. Licia was the better skier, fearless, skilful, and fast.

  ‘Licia!’ I shouted after her. ‘Phone!’

  She stopped and turned, waved, called out, ‘Enjoy your meal!’ Then she turned to face her sister, who cuffed her playfully across the temple.

  And so Elsa and I sat drinking Riesling, toasting the New Year in, eating Swiss fondue from long skewers as we held hands under the table. We did not see the blackening sky. We were happy in each other’s company, easy in the warmth of the wine, and of the food, and of the fires in the grates.

  That first gust. A metallic shriek, not easily forgotten.

  We were on our feet, outside before we knew it, looking up.

  Heavy sheets of rain beat down across the slopes, freezing as they hit the snow. Clouds curdled across the mountainside. Chairs swung in the lifts.

  I ran up the slope, skis in hand, tried to make my way through the barrier.

  ‘Lift’s closed,’ said the man in the booth.

  ‘It’s still turning.’

  ‘For people heading down. You can’t go up.’

  ‘My daughters,’ I said.

  ‘Give a description to Mountain Rescue.’

  An hour Elsa and I stood in the doorway to the restaurant, wet through, waiting for our daughters, each hiding our fear from the other. I pleaded with a god I did not believe in to return them to us, safe and unharmed. Vee was so small and Licia so naive. How stupid we had been to allow them to go.

  And then they were there in front of us, laughing, high on the electric excitement of danger, wrapping themselves into us as we held them close.

  ‘It’s her fault,’ Vee was saying. ‘She made me not take my skis off. I must have fallen like fifty times.’

  ‘Dad, she snuck on to the lift again.’

  ‘Liar! You frickin’ dared me!’

  I said, ‘I thought all the upper lifts were closed.’

  Vee gave her sister a conspiratorial look. ‘Not if you know what you’re doing. And you didn’t have to come with me the second time, Licia. Or the third.’

  Licia turned to me. ‘Dad, you might want to think about having my sister baptized. For her own safety. Before something bad happens.’

  The event had become a happy memory. A disaster averted. A narrative of sisterly heroism.

  ‘Cal, this is nothing like Whistler,’ Elsa was saying, quiet as breath.

  I tried to take her hand. She tried to take mine.

  We could not do it; we could not touch. And when I looked around us I saw that the other parents stood as we stood, holding papers with their children’s details on them, undone by nerves, separate and alone, eyes fixed on the island across the water where something had happened, some dread thing for which we did not yet have a name.

  A larger boat this time, bullet-nosed, striped green and orange at the bow. It seemed to lift itself above the fjord as it rounded the headland. Every face in the crowd watched. The boat turned a lazy arc, came to rest by the slipway. From the bow, two armed policemen surveyed the crowd, submachine guns readied. In the stern were two female officers, rifles half-shouldered as they scanned the shoreline.

  Two more uniformed officers emerged from the wheelhouse, one tall, one small. Both men were blond, both were unarmed. Something strange in the way they carried themselves; some unnatural swagger. They stood on the deck, looked out at the crowd, expressionless. Narrow white bands cuffed their wrists. Two further female officers appeared close behind them, pistols drawn and pointed at the men.

  I turned to Elsa, wanting to know if she felt my confusion, but she simply stood staring. I looked from face to face in the crowd. In every face I saw that same blank incomprehension that I saw in my wife.

  Police officers.

  I had not thought the perpetrators would be police officers. I thought they would be darker-skinned, that they would be … had expected to see the words jihadisme or islamisme in the news feeds, to hear those words whispered knowingly amongst the other parents, spoken carefully into microphones by the reporters on their live links. Our values. Their values. Allahu akbar.

  To be plain: I had not expected these men to be white.

  In the bow an officer lowered his submachine gun, dropped a gangplank into place. Metal slid on concrete. The officer beside him stepped ashore, his weapon at the ready. Grit crunched beneath his shoes. Both officers were onshore now, surveying the crowd, weapons readied. They glanced at each other, nodded. One of them turned, nodded towards the escort.

  The unarmed men – could they really be police? – began to move towards the gangplank and on to the shore, each followed closely by a pistol-carrying officer who tracked their every move.

  The crowd split into two, made room. These men – these suspects – were not just white, they were archetypically, almost comically white. Their hair was bleached, their noses narrow, their eyes blue, their foreheads high. So close they were now. You could almost reach out … I caught the eye of the first, the taller of them. The man nodded. I felt myself beginning to nod back.

  I checked myself. Because this man … because surely no policeman would have done … what? What had these men done?

  Please, where is my daughter?

  None of us spoke. We parted quietly, made room for the police escort and for the two unarmed men who could not – surely they could not? – be policemen themselves. Their collars were undone. Their boots were scuffed and muddied. Badges hung from their shoulders, as if torn by briars.

  The shorter man spat something on to the slipway. A gobbet of chewing tobacco, grey-black and shiny.

  I caught the eye of another father, a man of my own age, saw in him my own confu
sion and rage. These men walk easily by us, arms cuffed, uniforms torn. When our children …

  What have they done with our children?

  Elsa was muttering something. I could feel her stiff staccato words, could hear the S sounds, and the Ks and the Ts. I did not look at her – could not look at her – must not let her see my fear.

  The pistol-carrying officers led the men up the rise to two waiting police cars. The policewomen in the stern tracked the path of the men with their rifles, while the officers on the slipway scanned the crowd. I looked around. Still that dread silence. Still the faces, empty of emotion, though every parent there was thinking the same thought: Please. Our children. What have you done with our children?

  The machine-gun-carrying officers moved away to join their colleagues at the cars. Doors opened. The officers separated the suspects, one into each car. The men sat calmly in the back seats, facing forwards; they offered no resistance. An armed officer got in beside each man, and another into the passenger seat.

  Doors closed, headlights lit, engines started. The cars stayed where they were.

  In my pocket my phone vibrated. I held it in front of me like some alien thing.

  Dan.

  I stepped carefully up the slipway and away from the crowd. I brought the phone to my ear.

  ‘Hey,’ said my brother’s voice, ‘just wondering …’

  ‘Nothing yet.’ My own voice sounded jarring, even at a hoarse whisper, as if I might cry.

  A thin man in a black suit was quietly collecting the forms. Something familiar about him.

  ‘Sorry, Dan. I just …’ I turned away from the man.

  ‘Listen, Cal, whatever you need, you tell me, OK?’ I could hear the catch in my brother’s voice, though he did what he could to disguise it. The knowledge that things were bad, that Licia most probably wasn’t …

  I couldn’t allow myself the thought so I said, ‘We’re good. We’re really looking forward to this whole thing being over.’

  ‘Everyone here is sending love, Cal. Daisy wanted you to know she’s thinking of you. Oh, but Lyndon’s at soccer practice, so he doesn’t yet know.’