Only the Ocean

by Natasha Carthew

  No matter how high the cliff face and how long it took to climb, she would stretch out her hands for a firm finger-hold and hitch her toes the same until she found Rose, and the thought of the girl all pink and scrambled in the wash spurred her on.

  ***

  Halfway up the cliff all angles changed and Kel took a minute to prepare for the vertical climb. She rested against the cold smooth rock and skimmed her fingertips all ways to get the measure of it and found it was a beast with all the scratches and scars of deceit cut into it.

  She thought out every way to conquer the thing but a brain drained of water and nutrients was a dust-bowl full of dry dirt whistling.

  ‘Nothin to it,’ she said. ‘Nothin but a slow climb, just got to keep my eyes up.’

  She could hear the waves taunt her from below, their slow turn up and down the shingle-sand beach a nauseating rhythm that tipped her sideways until all sound clogged together into a deep, fat buzz. But each step she took was a toe-touch toward land; each bloody-fingered rock a claw pulling her up so she could stand astride this world she did not know or understand.

  The cliff was a labyrinth of twisted granite shards and slides: similar in its many shades of purple and grey to the Cornish coast, and in its detail too, but everything blown outward and up towards the clouds. The off-cuts and the waste of granite stacks thrown here either for future keeping or to forget. A mountain just about climbing out of the Atlantic like a defiant, neglected piece of moorland jigsaw. Left to its own devices it had grown fierce and proud, all that crazy beauty gone mad.

  Still Kel kept on, with her body slapped up against the stoic rock and everything that was in her gripped tight with concentrated fear. Without fear she would be a twisted corpse ripped on the rocks below, a bloated belly full of the spiteful rising tide.

  She leaned into the narrow ledges to rest and shake the life back into her numb hands and flick the blood from the fingers and she wondered about mortality and kept from looking anywhere but up and out at the constant bastard sea. But still the grey, tedious ocean stretched and gummed its way into the corners of her eyes and it adhered to the sky and pulled it crashing toward her. The magnitude of it haunted Kel and it would haunt her for a long time to come. She watched as the strange daylight pulled clouds from all four corners of the earth. Their shadows crept about the cliff face like things undead. Spirits of stranded wreckers and starved bootleggers and the mere unlucky slunk sideways and up-ways and all ways toward Kel and still she went on to get the better of the madness that was this place. The thought of never seeing the girl again and that of the baby was everything to her and it was this that had her turn back into the rock with the final push upon her. She would get to the top no matter what.

  An hour dragged by and in time a good wind came to tie and knot her to the cliff face. It was cold, but cold was good because it kept Kel from thirst and slapped her alert, and when she reached the summit she stretched out her hands to catch the cool racing wind and she held it to her until the ache fell from her bones and the boil simmered from her blood.

  Kel sat down and she sat for a good while. There was nothing left in her. The sumit was nothing but a small plateau of rock with the strange plants twisting across it. Where were the fields? Where were the crops that she imagined grew up here? She watched a flock of seagulls navigate the landscape. Sometimes they landed to eye the amusement that was Kel, muttering and mingling amongst themselves, and Kel asked them if they had seen Rose and they had not. But still she called out the girl’s name and turned an ear out of the wind in the hope that she might hear her call back.

  She stubbed her heels into the sop earth and kicked double to prove that she was still alive and stood up. The realisation that she was not on the mainland dawned upon Kel slowly.

  ‘This is not Cornwall,’ she said. ‘This is an island.’ She put her hand to her chest and closed her eyes, felt the sting of tears as they pushed into her eyes.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, no, no!’ She shouted until the seagulls took flight and her ears pulsed with pain and she screamed until finally her voice snapped, went silent.

  She opened her eyes and looked at her feet with the blood on blood and at the roping plants that snaked and bundled crazy about her ankles and wiping her face with her T-shirt she told herself to get a grip, hold on, work out a track for herself that would lead down to the other side of the island. This was all she could do, all she needed to do. It was good to be walking, it meant she was doing something other than thinking. It was strange to be stepping on to unyielding earth after so many days at sea. Her legs wandered everywhere except where she was heading and she cursed them and slapped them straight. She was grateful for the downhill incline because there was not one bit of puff left in her.

  Within five minutes by Kel’s reckoning she had reached the other side of the island summit. She stood at the stub-end of the rock and bush and peered down into the void below. Here everything was washed with a clearer brush and to her relief everything was closer. The strange island had redeemed itself slightly; it was the shape of a rearing shark, and here Kel stood on the slope of its neck having scaled its snaggle teeth and snap-trap jaws. The thing really was a monster and Kel had the dumb sucker scaled and conquered and wrestled into submission. Below her was a beach, a hundred metres ahead at most and every bit of it a stroll.

  Kel stepped off the bony headland and down the earthy banks of the west-facing bay and she had energy enough to curse the ocean tides for stranding her on the other side of the island and she called out to Rose as she scanned the beach. Here and there the storms had washed up a little more of what Kel recognised as theirs and it made her sick with worry, but she told herself to take comfort in the knowledge that they were here somewhere.

  She saw her shirt lapping with the tide and she picked it up and hugged it, tied it about her waist and continued with her search.

  Daylight was slipping from the sky and with it the tide that had been pulled from the beach and it was replaced with slipping rocks. Kel was careful not to cut her feet further as she stepped through the rock pools and all the while she called out for the girl that was in her care. If she could find Rose then perhaps she would find something inside herself worthy of existence, a tiny piece of compassion that beat within and that she never knew she possessed until now.

  At last her feet found rock pressed smooth and flat, and the tiny moment of comfort had her sit and she put her hand to her chest suddenly to feel her heart beating strange as usual and she took comfort in that. To have it beat at all was something, she told herself, and then she said it out loud like a mantra because out there on that island there was not one other bit of good or happy or hope.

  She thought about what fate had dealt her and couldn’t make sense of it. Even a girl like her didn’t deserve this.

  She put her knees to her chest and rested her head and arms wherever and she bit back the need to cry and she thought about the cabin in the woods to put the toughness back in. The place that was home but wasn’t, the point of escape that she would never rid from her thoughts, from her flesh, whilst the baby lived.

  ‘The baby,’ she said, and she opened her eyes and said it again, and for the first time she kept from thinking about the part of the child that was half bad and her mind settled instead on the part that was good, the part that was her.

  ‘My baby,’ she shouted and she stood with the panic of parenthood in her and she shouted until her throat choked dry.

  She stood to chart the sea as far as it bothered to stretch and then she stopped to look back at the island, and that was when she saw the familiar flash of orange that was the boat and the drift of limbs come unstuck in the shallows that sluiced the foot of the beast.

  Each step Kel took towards the boat was a slip-cut fall and it took every scrap of stamina she had not to buckle completely. Occasionally she looked down at her feet and she noticed blood and the trail of footprints they left behind. Proof that she had come and proof that sh
e had gone, herself a ghost passing through, the same as all the other stepping-stone spirits that surrounded her. She felt their meanness streaking on the wind as they tried to push her to her knees and saw their roaming shadows gather up above her on the ridgeline from where she’d come. They shouted profanities and chanted that the girl and the baby were dead dead dead.

  Maybe they were, Kel thought. But maybe there was still something of light-life catching in them, a slow-beat heart that drummed low to the ground.

  ‘Rose.’ Kel said the name over to keep the girl with her and she felt her neck for pulse and when the baby that was wrapped in the deflated boat stretched up to her she cuddled him so close she thought she might never let go.

  ‘Rose,’ she shouted, ‘I know you int dead, you gotta wake up.’ Kel shook her and then she noticed the leg that was hitched-up wrong and twisted in the rock pool.

  The girl had suffered enough. She shouted this to the taunting sea and the chanting island spirits that had come to watch the show; the story of a dead girl and a starving baby and a girl with madness threading like crazy-wire through her veins.

  Kel didn’t know what was real and what was muddle-minded but as she looked down at Rose’s leg she saw the white tooth bone stick clean from the distended flesh. She had seen worse in her life of redneck rioting, she had seen broken bones split the sinews of both the living and the dead. But for a girl who was usually all pretty and precise it rubbed all wrong and Kel knew she would have hated that. The thought started as a tickle in the back of her throat and it made her smile despite tears of despair.

  A good mind told her not to touch the wound, but curiosity for what it was that made up animal was in her and the hand not holding the baby went close to it and settled in the blood slop puddle where they both sat.

  Kel must have sat there in the leaving rock-pool tide for the longest time, because when Rose asked her what she was doing she could barely see the girl for the dim drag of darkness that had descended upon them.

  ‘Rose?’ Kel leaned forward to find the light that made the girl complete.

  ‘Kel? Are we all right?’

  Kel nodded and said that they were all alive and breathing and that was one thing and then she looked off toward the cliffs to check for the goading shadows and was relieved to see they had gone.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We capsized,’ Kel said.

  ‘I kept trying to stay awake, but my leg hurts so badly.’ The girl went to sit up and Kel told her not to.

  ‘It hurts like hell, is it OK?’

  Kel didn’t know what to say but Rose sensed something wasn’t right.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  Kel shook her head and told her not to move.

  ‘Is it broken? Tell me, please.’ She tried to twist to see it.

  ‘Dunno, maybe.’ Kel put the baby down so she could hold Rose’s head and told her not to move until she knew what was what.

  Rose sighed and Kel could see tears building in her eyes.

  ‘Kel. How much worse can it be?’

  ‘You could have cut an artery.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Broken bone.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m going to die, and not just die but slowly bleed to death.’

  Kel told her to stay still.

  ‘This is all your fault.’ Rose moved her head away from Kel. ‘I hate you.’ She lay dumbstruck with fear. Kel let the horror of living sit between them.

  She told Rose that there was no way that with her leg as it was she could make it over the summit of the island and back down the side of the cliff. She told her they would have to wait for the tide to come back in instead, so she could swim her off the rocks toward the shore.

  ‘Why?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why move?’

  ‘There’s caves on the other side of the island. Shelter. There’s no shelter on this side and we need shelter to survive.’

  ‘We need a lot of things.’

  Kel ignored her and said for now they needed to get her on to the beach this side and out of the wet and see what they could do for her leg at least and they waited until the tide was right.

  When the moment finally arrived it was loaded with the weight of killed time and the screaming, spiralling girl had nothing but loathing splitting her lips. Kel tried soft-soap talk and grown-up shouting, but nothing came out right and soon she settled herself into the calm indifference that she was known for.

  She waited for the surrounding rock pools to fill and make islands of the highest rocks and when a path big enough for easy passage was set between them and the shore she pulled the orange rubber sheet from the nipping barnacle ridge and floated Rose and the baby back toward the beach. She lay them in the foamy bubbles and told them to not go anywhere whilst she went to find a splint and then she stayed close by for a moment, to see if humour might flick-start the spark back into the girl’s eyes, but no. Nothing, just dull-ache marbles staring ahead.

  Kel walked the beach and through the dire damp dusk she found a length of wood good enough for setting a leg and she took it back to the girl and positioned it beneath her in the hollow sand. She tied it fast with strips of plastic she’d cut from the boat with her knife.

  ‘I’m gonna pull you up the sand,’ said Kel and she told her it would hurt but this was the only option other than drowning and she lay the baby on Rose’s chest and set about dragging them a small way from the shore.

  ‘What now?’ whispered Rose when they were safe from water.

  ‘We prepare ourselves.’

  ‘What for?’

  Kel thought for a minute. ‘For being rescued.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘Any day.’ Kel had no way of knowing where they were or if they would be rescued, but she knew she needed to reassure Rose, she had to give her something to hold on to. ‘I reckon ships pass by here all the time.’

  Kel took what was left of the dead deflated boat into her lap and cut herself two squares of rubber and carried them to the cliff edge and she walked it close, listened for drips falling from the slate above and dug cradles in the sand. Settled the rubber into them to make soft cups.

  When they were full enough she took them back and they drank and refilled and drank again and Kel gathered driftwood where she found it in the dark by the touch of foot. What thin drift splints she found she circled and lit with the lighter that was still in her pocket and to her amazement still worked and with tiny light she found better wood and in time they had a fire that gave heat enough for drying. She slashed the last flap of boat and made head and leg bundles for Rose and some kind of pillow bed for the baby. They sat with the dense night weighing down on them and Kel wondered about the dark shadow creatures that patrolled the island. Circling and closing around them like a run of rope ready to lash.

  She sat close to the fire and fed it with the damp brittle bone sticks long into the night. She draped seaweed fresh from the surf on to a boulder close to the flames and she turned it and mashed it through and this was what they had to eat. The taste of salt was better than no taste at all and Kel knew from a lifetime of knowing things that there were nutrients in the awkward plant blubber. Nutrients that would keep them alive long enough to figure out what was needed. Kel sat back on her elbows and she chewed the weed down to pulp and then she swallowed hard and waited for the pain in her chest to subside and the dry squeeze of hunger became less so.

  She looked up into the sky and followed the arch of its dome from left to right with the baby lethargic but partway feeding from her. Through the thin-skin covering Kel noticed stars wrestling to be seen and she gave them their proper names as always, because those stars were angels and their comfort was everything familiar. She named them as Ursa Minor and Ursa Major and she nodded toward the North Star, Polaris. She had spent most of her short life taking refuge beneath those stars wishing on a better day. Naming them put them at the centre of her universe and she at the cen
tre of theirs. No matter where her day and life ended they were there at the start and would be there at the end and there was comfort in that.

  With the passing of the fog came a new kind of night-light to the island and it was as if a lid had been raised and so Kel told her sleeping companions that she was going for a walk. She paced the tideline and watched it deliver fresh seaweed to the shore and what driftwood bobbed there in the wet she lifted up the beach to dry. Water and fire was all they needed for now, and then tomorrow she would float Rose and the baby round about to the better side of the island and together they would plot things and hatch things until just about everything was taken in and accounted for. Kel would build more of a shelter in the cave for when the inevitable storms returned and she would make a spear and stand strong in the current and stab them a big ugly crab. She’d done it a hundred times as a kid with swamp fish. She would pick every last winkle from the rocks for snacks and the rock-pool blennies she’d cook pink to prawns and chew them all day through. They would eat like kings and they would eat like paupers and they would survive as long as it took to survive, as long as it took to be rescued.

  Kel walked the length of the beach and she stood at the cut of cliff that wedged itself into the sea and she wondered about that other side of the island and she wondered about it a long time. The odd-job things that had washed up on to shore with her were on that other side too. The useless, broken, bit and bob things that would be useful to them now more than ever; rubbish things and good things the same and from which she could make a world worthy of existence, if only for a day or two. A place to think, a place to replan and work out a way to get off the island.

  Out toward the horizon Kel liked to think there was a little shard-light coming. It was not so far since summer after all and the nights were short, even on the daggered dead-end island with its bandit spirits waiting for them to become corpses upon which to feed. Morning would come. It would be a day with all the everyday running through it, Kel would make sure of that.