The cliffs were hers and so was the island no matter how hard her heart beat and punched in her chest, and she ignored it and kept on at the kick and climb until she reached the summit.
She lay on her back to enjoy the one-minute wonder of light that had appeared briefly through the dull day. Through the circle of blue she could see the thin puff tail of an aeroplane and it startled her to see the world still pushing on. The rich still got to do as they pleased and she supposed the poor still got to dream on from the gutters that surrounded the new world walls. For a moment she thought about Dad and the brothers and sisters and kids born or bought and all bred the same out there in the swamp woods, and she wondered about them enough to have a little sickness rise in her throat and she coughed and spat it into the wind. She promised herself that nothing would turn her from the job of salvation, no matter how the voices of memory shouted her down to a worthless nub.
She set to work scouting any wood not fixed down and dragged it close to the cliff edge and she set about lighting the fire with the twist of tinder bundled in her pocket and the small flame soon grew into a big damp fire that was smoking up a storm, a forever fire that meant rescue.
She found a rock for sitting and leaned back with her wrists resting on her knees. She let the heat flush her cheeks and hands and the skin that showed through the holes in her jeans. Her eyes followed the scribble-tail scars that dented her arms to mess and for the first time in memory there was no part of her that wanted to do damage, and with that thought she moved forward and blew into the fire. This was it; this was the fire that would free them from the island. The fire that would send out smoke signals high and far above the sea and bring in a boat that was good-folk and not pirates and maybe it was fairytale but it was all Kel had.
At times she used a scramble of dead bracken to stop and start the smoke and when the rain returned and the wind picked up she used both to her advantage until the island peak was nothing but blinding acridity.
When dusk fell Kel made more of the flames and she fanned them almost out of control, using fire and heat to push back the wet that came and kept coming and the damn pushy wind.
All evening long Kel held on to the glimmer of light that was the fire.
She had made a promise to herself to keep it alive, because that life meant they had a chance of living too, but as the rain grew heavier, the wind caught the droplets of water and blew them into every corner of the fire. When the colour faded and black ember soot began pooling there she continued to talk it through to something. She sat in the black and pulled good wood from the sop and she searched the wreckage for signs of life but finally there were none. The fire had gone out, gone and taken with it the last of the light from the sky and the only spark Kel had been carrying inside, her star of hope snuffed out.
It was a dark night. For all the nights that had come and gone, it was the darkest night.
She bunched her knees to her chest and watched the darkest clouds move out to sea and she let the last of the rain soak her complete and she bent forward to let it tip from her head. Beyond the drum and roll of wind running riot she could hear her name come calling. She told herself it was nothing more than the stirring island spirits. She closed her eyes to the night because it was all black in any case and cupped her hands to her ears for quiet. Inside her fortress she could hear the run-rabbit beat of her heart and its rhythm was the discord of a wrong song and flanking it beside she heard her name again and she recognised the voice; it was the voice of her father, thick through with the tone that meant business. He had come to get her.
Kel shook her head to loosen what she knew was her memory playing tricks, but still she kept herself in hiding the way she always had. A little girl so tiny in size and might, she knew all the cracks and splits in the shack and every hiding place she made her own, no matter that most were passed to her from her sisters like hand-me-downs. But the little girl still got got either way, and then down on to the bed and deeper down toward the dark and the night that went on for days.
All of a sudden the fight that had been in her since childhood was everywhere. The anger that burnt hot like flame-gas lifted in her and she squeezed her head to popping to stop the expanding bloat, but there was only one way to stop the explosion and that was to leach the steam from her flesh.
It was then that Kel took the knife from her belt and she lifted her shirtsleeve and pressed it into her arm and with one flash she swiped the blade in deep.
The colours that came with the release were everything that was rainbow in her mind. Kel breathed them in, she could smell them and taste them on her tongue. Every flavour was beyond memory. They belonged to another place and it was a good settling place, a place of such tranquillity, except it didn’t last. The pallid hue of real life soon returned. Black nothing and then white surf something coming and going in the cove below, the sea just being, beating.
She stood and turned an ear, let the rumble of turning water take over and wash her thinking clean. She was either overthinking things or she was not thinking things through enough, and both directions had the potential for losing grip. Reality was, then it wasn’t, and then what was it? Since falling prey to the island Kel’s imagination had her tricked into all kinds of thinking.
She looked down toward the subsiding cliffs as they scrambled into the night sky. She could hear the scuff of falling, slipping slate-stones, and suddenly she saw one solitary light swinging like a fluttering firefly in the white-caps below. Kel knew it was nothing, just her mind playing tricks, but still, it got to her.
‘What you want?’ she shouted and she waited for an answer and when none came she threatened whatever it was out rattling that she was not one to be shaken, and she looked around her but all she could see was four hoary steel walls surrounding her. Whether sky or sea or cliff face the island had become their prison. It had captured them and beaten them, and now came madness, and madness was the worst of all.
Chapter Thirteen
Kel lay down in the remnants of happy-maybe and the smell of wet burnt sod was the smell of death. She closed her eyes and held her breath, waited for her heart to slow, tap out. If it wasn’t for the thought of the girl waiting for her down by the beach and the baby that was her charge she might have remained, waited until the spirits decided to take her. But thinking about Rose had Kel picturing her smile and the beauty that radiated there.
Kel wanted her to smile again, pink cheeked, to get her back to some shade of beauty. If Kel helped Rose to find that old self then she would also help herself. To care for another was to care for all humankind; the tip-turned society was a mess worth fighting for after all. If Kel could only come good, then the world would spin back strong and caring.
She kicked off toward the cliff edge and in the pitch black she felt around for the dip in the ledge for the descent, but with every step the earth gave way. The cliff had become the foundation for a waterfall; turned the island’s mud and guts into a river riding out to sea. Whatever rough-route path Kel had tried to follow in her ascent was long gone now. She would have to find another way down, head instead toward the cove where she had first found Rose and the baby.
The storm had lessened a little, and occasionally the moon found a way through the clouds enough to offer guidance and Kel took it. She took to running across the island plateau and when a spiteful rock or root put out to trip her up she got back to her knees and then to her feet. She did not stop until she was at the other side of the island, where the descent was an everyday walk down toward the beach. Kel could feel her heart pump hard and fast in her chest and she pleaded for it to not give up on her now. She could feel it ballooning up against all else, a thick-skinned pig ball bullying her ribs into snap-sticks. An organ too big even for a giant. She put her hands to her chest and hugged it in, told it to stay put, be good, beat strong.
She traipsed the divide of wet dragging sand until she could no longer walk and then she stood and waited until the moon silvered the sea so she could
gauge the tide in its comings and goings. Given up but with her instinct for going on, Kel made one more lap around the cove and that was when she saw it: sticking out of the mud-bank cliff like a marker to a past life was the stolen day-glo oar. Poking from the island in a last-ditch attempt at being saved.
She ran toward it and pulled the oar from the sand with a cheer. A new plan of rescue came into her head and it was better than the last. She could do it and she would do it.
***
Kel sat on the sand and thought. She would build a boat, a raft, a floating jetty of flotsam to sail back out to sea. All in it wasn’t about being rescued, it was about rescuing yourself.
That was something worth thinking about and she lay on the beach and planned everything out of her system until she was left with a good-to-go floating water craft of her imagination.
All the useless rubbish that had beached on the shore near their cave in the storms had the potential for use, she realised. The drum containers and the squares of polystyrene. Plastic crap that had journeyed wrong into the ocean and had travelled up and down the forever shores to become something right.
Kel would make use of them, breathe new life into the dead cells with knots and prayers.
Kel sat at the edge of the shoreline and waited for the dawn to come and pull the tide closer and put a little light into the sky. She would have to wait and watch for the thin pewter strands of low-tide water to cover the horizon like lucky streams. When the time was right for swimming depths she would jump right in, swim the bay with the oar across her back and get back to Rose and the baby and the bit-bob flotsam. Then she could set about making the raft.
When the tide grew high she walked the surf and washed the blood from her arm and then she went into the sea fully with the soak riding past her knees. When the light was halfway good she etched out a route in her mind’s eye and she took it.
Since the last storm, the sea had returned to sub-zero sucking and Kel could imagine ice-crystals clutching and worming into the seams of her jeans. But still she went on, and when she could no longer feel anything of herself and her legs dangled like blubber-babies she swam on with her head out of the water so her brain would not freeze. She swam hard with the ice-soup tugging her backwards and the oar passing from one hand to the other, and she clawed at the water and kicked her way free of its grasp. Fighting her way towards the jut of cliff-rock that separated the two bays was all she could think about, and she knew that with her strange heart beating somewhere within her numb chest she would soon set foot on to the beach and into a new day. Occasionally she caught a current that floated her toward her destination and this was how she finally crashed in.
‘Rose,’ she shouted as she headed up the beach and she squinted for fire or movement or both.
‘Rose?’ Kel stood at the entrance of the cave and she said the girl’s name over and she kicked into the embers of the fire for the light and she saw the baby in its makeshift bed and she bent to check for breathing.
Dawn was breaking. It snapped and cracked above her head and it drew her attention back out toward the ragged rip-line water.
Kel adjusted her eyes to the new morning light and that was when she saw her, a dark shape shifting in the tide.
‘Rose,’ she shouted and she ran back down the beach toward the slumped figure and pulled her from the wet. ‘What you doin?’
‘I’m cleaning myself,’ said the girl, and she looked up at Kel with eyes full and flashing mad with ocean colours.
‘What you talkin bout?’
‘My leg.’ Rose bent to the salt water and splashed it over the wound.
‘You’re crazy,’ said Kel.
‘I know.’
‘Crazy slippin and slidin all ways to get here. Let me carry you back to the cave.’
‘In a bit, I’ve not finished cleaning.’
Kel looked down at Rose’s half-rotten leg beneath the sink of water. She wished there was a way to clean it properly but there was not. She put an arm around Rose and lifted her for the carry but she lay loose as a bag of compost, blood and bone.
‘Put me down,’ Rose shouted. ‘Put me down, Kel, I’ve not finished, I can still smell the rot in my leg.’
‘Don’t be daft, it’s just its way of healin,’ Kel lied. She had caught it too; the high-fly stench of festering flesh fizzed at the tip of her tongue and stitched the back of her throat shut.
Kel lay Rose at the mouth of the cave and sat down beside her. They sat in silence for the longest time and watched the sky brighten and then Kel told her about the plan to make them a raft.
Rose looked around at the beach and said she wondered if what had happened before might happen again.
‘What you mean?’ asked Kel.
‘We might capsize.’
Kel shrugged and said she would have a good go at it in any case. ‘Either the storm gets us or it don’t, we’ll just have to take our chances is all.’
‘What about getting rescued?’
‘You were right.’ Kel looked at Rose. ‘We int gettin rescued, we’re goin to have to rescue ourselves.’ She stood up and looked at the plastic barrels that were strewn up and down the beach and she looked back at the girl and told her things would work out all right.
‘Do you promise?’
Kel sighed and promised something more than nothing. She could see tears pool in Rose’s eyes as they reflected the morning light.
‘For all my partying, all the drinking and the laughter, did you know I wanted to die?’
Kel shook her head.
‘Before all this. I wanted to die just because I didn’t want to live.’
‘When?’ asked Kel.
‘Back home. Before the ship and everything that happened.’
Kel looked away because she didn’t know what to say.
‘I don’t want to die any more, Kel, don’t you think that’s funny?’
Kel looked at her and shrugged. It wasn’t so funny. She had known people with their heads half-in and half-out of happy, and she thought about herself and the harming and what folks mistook as misery. It wasn’t misery; it was anger.
‘Because when I had everything,’ Rose continued, ‘and there wasn’t any danger, I thought that danger was what I wanted. But now here I am, practically waist-deep in my grave and I don’t want it so much any more.’
Kel smiled and told her the best thing she could do for hope and happiness right then and there was rest.
‘I want to live, Kel, more than anything I want to live.’ Tears were smearing up Rose’s face and still Kel saw beauty there.
‘I’m gonna get us off this island,’ Kel said suddenly. ‘Off the island and off the bastard sea and put us somewhere back to safe and solid.’
At once Kel set about collecting everything that was not sand from the beach and she was determined to make use of it all. She would build a craft worthy of the three of them and worthy of everything the sea and sky had to offer. She would work the day through from one end to the other to keep the thought of Rose from her mind. She lay the plastic containers in a line on the sand and there were four of them. That would be the base. Four empty barrels and all with their waterproof caps intact.
Kel could not find words to describe some of the plastic jumble junk. Broken objects split and rounded by the bash and smash of rocks and water, and each thing gummed with tar and oil. Objects that had gone around the world and would go around the world again.
She found a net more string than rope that had caught between the teeth of tumbling boulders and she unpicked it and wound the good strands between her hand and arm. When the rope ended she added more with a good double knot, and this she plaited and used to tighten the barrels together and she did the same with the bits of misshapen wood.
All day through Kel worked on the raft despite the usual ice-rain weighing her down, and she was able to win over her heart that was close to ripping by fuelling it with hope. Kel Crow would save Rose’s life and by doing so she would save her
own.
Not just save it but shake it up and change it, make good from all that was bad. Kel looked over at Rose to see if she had seen the raft taking shape, but the girl was sleeping and she looked at the bit-bob pile of rubbish she’d collected and wondered what was best for making a spare paddle. A plank of wood with the weight of the world stained into its grain, or a half-scooped two-litre milk carton? She told herself to leave nothing to chance. The thought of being without any kind of paddle or oar still stuck in her memory like a bone lodged in the throat. Two paddles were better than one, nothing was going to stop them this time. She sat astride her beached vessel with her legs dangling and going over her options, going over every potential danger that might catch them out in the dark and the wet and the constant storms that rattled continually. She thought back to the night they capsized. If there were things she could have done better she would think them through now; stupidity was in the past, along with green-gills and a plain old hope in things turning right.
Preparation was everything, so she packed a hundred days of thinking into the one day and then she looked out to sea. She could feel the blue-grey reflecting in her dark eyes, its spirit pushing at her, and Kel pushed back.
When there was nothing more to be done to the boat besides fancy, Kel roped it and dragged it down to the shore. She watched to see how it floated as the sea gathered it into its arms. In coming days it would become bed and home and shelter, a place for living out their last days on earth or their first few days of a new life.
Kel pushed the raft further out into the sea and she looked at the moody sky that refused to show the sun and she rough-guessed its whereabouts anyway.
She looked ahead and thought about where they should head for once they were waterborne once more. She found the sun and worked out which was west because that was where the sun was already beginning to set, and she knew that this island could only be south of the mainland. So they would have to head north. Because if the route they’d followed onboard Rose’s dad’s ship went one way and the route they had unfollowed on the life raft went another, then there was only one way back on track open to them. They would have to retrace their footstep-seasteps until they crossed the shipping lane, hang out in the strait and hope good followed bad.
Only the Ocean Page 17