Only the Ocean
Page 15
She stamped her feet one two in the sud-surf and she told herself that she could overcome this land and then she shouted it so that she might hear it fully. There was more world out there than her world and it was no better or worse, but it had the potential for change. Kel could feel her nails hooking a little under the skin of something new: if she could just claw at the flesh that was this new place and pull the skin clean from it she would find something that resembled civilised living, Reveal the bare-bone clues to what it was to live a good life. She would have something to build on, a new world to create.
Kel stood in the water and she watched it climb the cuffs of her jeans and she watched it return to the fiddle and forage of the rock pools. She stood still until her mind was set: if she got off the island alive she would be a better person, and not just a better person but the best kind of person. Good heart broken heart she would do it.
Chapter Eleven
At first light Kel found herself lying half-in half-out of the seaweed surf. Exhaustion had taken over and it had taken everything from her in the process.
She wondered how long she had been asleep and tried to make sense of the sky but the white bright clouds were nothing more to her than a headache.
She pulled herself to sitting and looked around at the beach. She shielded her eyes from the dazzling bright of day until she saw Rose and she shouted out her name and went to her.
‘You OK?’ Kel asked as she crouched in the sand.
‘I’ve felt better.’
‘You thirsty?’
Rose nodded and Kel went to fill the water cups. The girl was holding on and that was good. She filled one cup and drank it down and filled it again and carried both to Rose, and together they drank the rubber-band water down into their empty stomachs and then Kel fed the baby with what drop of milk remained in her.
‘How is he?’ asked Rose.
‘Don’t think he knows nothin of nothin.’
‘That’s good.’
Kel looked at her and nodded. She had been wondering about the overturned boat. How Rose had managed to keep the baby afloat, alive.
‘What?’ asked Rose. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Bout the baby.’
‘What about him?’
‘How did you keep him alive?’
Rose shrugged. ‘I filled that carrier you gave me with air and tied it to his wrist and then we still had the boat. It was a bit deflated but OK for a while.’
‘You make it sound easy.’
‘It wasn’t too bad, not until we hit the rocks anyway. It took everything to keep him from smashing into them.’
‘Thank you,’ said Kel. ‘Thank you for savin him.’
Rose smiled. ‘I’d say it was nothing, but …’ She looked down at her leg.
‘Thank you,’ said Kel again. The words felt strange on her lips; she didn’t think she had ever said them and meant them before.
‘How is it?’ She bent to look at Rose’s leg.
‘Hurts like hell. How does it look?’
‘Bone snapped clean, spose you’re lucky.’
‘Really? How do you know?’
‘It int fractured all ways, clean break right through.’
‘And that’s lucky?’
‘Good you int got no splinters or whatever.’
‘And what would happen if I did? Really.’
‘You’d bleed to death.’
Kel gave Rose the baby to take her mind off her leg and she sat back on her haunches and told the girl she didn’t look so bad considering.
‘Well that’s good. I’m glad I’m not too sore on the eyes.’ Rose looked at Kel and tried to smile. Then she asked what Kel had planned because she could see plotting in her eyes and she had become accustomed to that look.
‘We gotta get to the other side of the island.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Kel sighed and told her there were things worth having that had washed up on the beach. And there were caves for sleeping in.
‘What’s wrong with sleeping on the beach?’
‘Int goin to stay dry forever. Would be good to have somewhere we can light a fire and stay dry.’
‘So what do I have to do?’ asked Rose.
‘Get your good leg on to what’s left of the boat and I’ll lift the other.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’ll slide you to the water and then float you round.’
‘What about the baby?’
‘The same.’
‘I don’t like this.’
‘I don’t either, but we’re runnin out of options int we.’
The two girls looked at each other and they waited for alternatives to suggest themselves but none did.
Morning came and went with the near corpse dragging and the shouting and screaming along the beach, and when Kel got Rose into the sea she sailed them calmly without word whilst the girl clawed fists of hair from Kel’s head. Kel told her this was their only chance at a smooth ride whilst the tide was right and she promised her it would be the last time that she would have to be moved until they were rescued. Kel didn’t know if Rose believed her or not and she didn’t know if she believed herself, but she pushed on through the water with her feet barely touching base and kept her eyes from looking anywhere but at the rocks that hammered and kicked towards them. To lose sight of direction would be to allow the underwater current to drag them toward the rocky cut and thrust.
The bright-brilliance in the sky outsized all else and it poured light into the ocean like mercury. The silver beads clung to them and curdled the water into an incredible silver embroidered mantle. Everything around them tried to dazzle their eyes shut, but Kel forced hers open in order to guide Rose to safety. Eventually the seawater slipped beneath her waist, and then her hips, and she changed position to pull Rose on to the beach.
They lay side by side on the warm sand with their heads tipped toward where the sun almost split the clouds. The most normal of days laid out Sunday-skimming on the beach, and the strangest one the same.
Kel held her breath and closed her eyes to the tempting warmth and she thought back to the memory of happier times but there were none. Her life was chalked out as a long line of miserable winters, and even the summers consisted of cold wall staring despite the wet and warm. She waited for the inevitable cloud to curtain the sun and when it did she opened her eyes and she looked across at Rose and sighed.
‘You ready?’ she asked.
Rose nodded. ‘It looks like rain might be heading our way,’ she said and Kel agreed. A dark thick smudge had come and lodged itself crossways in the sky.
‘You ready?’ Kel asked again and she bent to the girl and wound the rubber tight in both hands steady for pulling and as Rose shouted and screamed her way up the beach Kel told her she would soon have them a fire lit and hollering up a storm.
She left Rose crying in the entrance of the biggest cave with the baby crying out the same and went to collect the wet and dry and wet again bones of trees. Each twist of weathered wood she dragged toward the cave and the smallest finger-bones she gathered into her shirt tail and these she used as kindling. Everything on the beach had the potential for fire: Kel even picked the scramble knots of rope from the seaweed tideline and smiled at the clots of tar that stuck there.
When everything was piled ready and the fire-pit had been dug and circled with smooth-back stones Kel took her lighter from her pocket and she hit it against her leg and squeezed the wick dry and flicked it into life. She sat with the world heavy on her shoulders and bent to set the tiny flame into the tar-soaked rope and when the flame steadied she cupped it with her hands and fed life into it with the sticks from another land – the bones that had grown and broken and splintered from the earth and had settled on the island for their use only. A gift from the far-end reaches of the planet, Kel supposed.
When the fire came good she looked up to see a fine-comb mizzle had come in from the sea and descended on the island a
nd the way it crawled about the beach had melancholy needled clean through it. She was glad of the heat and light from the fire and was glad of its company as it hid out in the caves with them. The two girls who were neither strangers nor friends stared into the new place of colour. The warmth that circled the low cubby rock behind them hugged their shoulders close and it snuggled the baby the same.
‘Could almost be cosy,’ said Kel. ‘Almost.’ As she peered around she saw the firelight continue on, beyond the cave wall.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked Rose.
‘Back there, through the crack, looks like this cave leads somewhere.’
‘Don’t tell me, more caves.’
‘You reckon?’ Kel pressed herself up against the wall of the cave and felt the contentment that had engulfed her seep away.
‘Who cares,’ said Rose.
Kel sighed. She sat forward to look past the flames at the slap-back rain that now thundered from the sky. ‘I should look for food.’
‘I can wait for food if you can,’ said Rose. ‘Now you’re halfway to getting dry you might just as well dry out completely.’
Kel shrugged. She wanted to have something in her stomach besides water, but the warmth was heaven and it was pulling her toward sleep.
‘Maybe I’ll wait out the rain,’ she said and she reached for a great hulk of wood to haul on to the fire. She held her hands to the heat until the palms pricked with pain and then she lay down.
Kel told herself that she needed to make a new plan. A plan that had a start and an end with all the steps that meant survival stuffed between. She had found shelter, soon she would find food. She looked deep into the flames. ‘Tomorrow I’m goin to make a rescue fire,’ she said and she promised herself this.
She made the best of turning into the womb of the cave and Rose did her best of doing the same with the baby bundled to her.
She’d take a couple hours’ sleep and a couple hours’ heat to have her come good before night fell proper, or so Kel thought. She had not reckoned on tiredness so weighted that the night fell with a grave thump and it stuffed the castaways deeper into the cave and down into the heart of the island, where sleep and hunger and exhaustion was a thing akin to dying.
Kel fell to sleep and she fell to dream, and in the dream the sun shone at a constant and was smiling warm. It followed her as she went about her this and that chores and stood at her side as she climbed the hill that was her fantasy hill with the little new shack house on top that was her house. A house with a fence and a gate where she could sit and swing out above a land good and even and dry enough for tilling.
In the dream that was her go-to dream she saw rivers run in silent spirit form and the distant sea kept mindful of the cliffs to expose settling sand on each and every coast. Everything opposite to the way things were. No place sodden and rotting and no social boundaries in any case. All citizens equal in a new world cared for long enough to have the balance brought back into play.
When finally Kel awoke several hours had passed. She lay in the slot between reality and fantasy and watched the perfect orbs of subterranean water bloat and fall from the cave walls all around them. She stretched out a hand to catch a little of the sup and when Rose woke she did the same.
‘Still raining,’ they said in unison.
‘How you feelin?’ she asked and Rose looked at her and Kel knew the girl had energy enough in her because though she was a long way from all right she was spoiling for a fight.
Kel poked at the fire and it was dead and she said that she would go out in the forever rising dawn to look for food and this was what she did.
Down at the water’s edge Kel carried on walking to keep the cold from her bones. Winter was not yet upon them but the temperature skirted zero in the evening and the rain had kept everything sponged wet and wintry. The rain-fog bunched and bagged the bay and Kel watched the thick bilious clouds fight for space out on the horizon. Big bastards bumping and bullying into position, preparing for the attack. If things went their way, then the storm would about turn and run its mouth off someplace else. Leave them to fish and fend and turn their world back into being without the added wrath, give them a shot at survival. The rain was one thing, but gales were another. She wondered how much of another storm they could take.
Kel scanned the grey-slap sand for a stick. She crouched to pick the straightest and she took her knife from her belt and set to work at skinning the knots and turns from the twist of wood until it came halfway to representing a spear. She sat with her feet sunk in a pool and the salt water licked at the cuts and splinters that muddled there and she splashed them occasionally whilst sharpening the stick into a pencil-thin tip.
When the job was done she stood and jabbed it into the air and she saw Rose was watching and she waved the spear and the girl waved back. The girl with a broken rotten leg and a death wish growing. Kel wondered if Rose had got to realising yet that her life up to that point had not been so bad after all, that the things she had wished different she now hoped to return.
Kel crossed the rocks and followed the tide to where it drew breath at the bottom of a long, twisting sandbank. Her toes enjoyed the squelch and squeal of tarry worm-casts and the soft worn ridges and peaks of sculptured sand as she made her way out to the shallows to stand and wait. She held the spear a tip-bit out the water and she watched the water bump her knees and waited for the spiralling rings of surface water to slowly unravel so she could sink her eyes into the opaque underworld and wait for breakfast or lunch or dinner to walk her way. If down there a crab happened to wander by then she would be ready for it.
She slowed her breathing down to the occasional intake of air so that nothing moved inside or out and nothing moved for a long time. The clouds came and chucked their guts fully in a wide gash splitting and still she remained with her legs balanced just so and her back bent and breaking forward. She could feel her stomach holler for attention as the thought of food grew wild. She convinced herself that soon there would be something worth waiting for and she said this over and often until the moment came when movement came, enough movement to be of interest, and she lanced the thing dead and digging into the sand.
She bent her knees to duck fully into the milky calm and she unpicked the crab from the spear.
‘Got it,’ she shouted and she lifted it high into the air so Rose could see. ‘Told you, dint I?’ She took her time to make her way back up the beach and there was a little swagger to her.
‘Shush,’ whispered Rose when she was in earshot and she told Kel to be quiet because she had just got the baby off to sleep.
Kel sat down by the fire and ignored the bit-bite mood that Rose still had nipping at her. She added more wood to the fire and set about snapping the legs from the crab and fingering what there was of good meat toward the heat.
‘I’ve never eaten crab,’ said Rose.
Kel looked up at her and frowned.
‘What?’ asked Rose.
‘You’re kiddin, int you?’
‘Why would I be kidding?’
‘I dunno, just bout everyone’s had crab I reckon.’
‘Well, I guess I’m not everyone.’
Kel pushed the meat around on the flat stone with a stick and she waited for the girl to return to a better mood.
‘You probably think I ate fancy food and nothing much else before all this.’
Kel tried to ignore her, but she couldn’t help but say she had never paid much mind to the lifestyle of those who lived in the towers.
‘You think you’re so funny, don’t you, Keryn.’
‘Not really.’
‘You find it so easy to point a stick at what you don’t know. You might just as well get your spear and dig it in deep.’
Kel sat back on her haunches and she asked the girl what had got into her.
‘Nothing,’ said Rose. ‘There’s no point saying it, anyway, you’ve got an idea of me, your mind’s been made up on that score from the beginning.’
‘Up in my ivory tower or whatever. I know you lot have got names for us.’
Kel nodded and said she supposed some people did.
‘What name would you call me?’
Kel looked at Rose and smiled. ‘Privileged.’ She nodded. ‘Privileged is what I’d call you.’
‘And the rest.’
‘I don’t shout names just cus. Int got a need for trash talk till I get to know someone.’ She divided the crab meat in two and put Rose’s share on to a cool stone slate for eating.
‘Don’t you know me well enough yet?’
‘For what?’ Kel passed the slate.
‘For your trash talk?’
Kel shook her head and said she hadn’t made up her mind.
They ate the meat in silence and shared the last of the collected water and when Kel had finished eating she told Rose that she was probably the type of girl that she would never know in truth.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Spose there’s things you int ready to give away.’
‘You’re one to talk.’
‘Dint say I wasn’t.’
‘You with all of your mystery and secrets circling.’
Kel didn’t like where the conversation was going so she asked Rose if she was missing home yet and this made the girl laugh.
‘Compared to this place? Yes!’
‘And your old folks, you miss em?’
Rose shrugged. She stopped and thought for a moment. ‘No I don’t miss them.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well where do I start? Evidently you know about Dad, but my mum? She had too many high hopes for me. She was always saying I could do better.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Kel.
‘Well nothing, strictly speaking, but to the trained eye you would notice that she never achieved anything for herself. Now I know where the money comes from, she must have felt guilty. It would be hard to keep a secret like that.’