by Lucy Atkins
‘No.’ Ana shakes her head. Her eyes are intense. ‘She just has the floathouse.’
‘Are you sure?’
She gives a curt nod. And I believe her.
‘Well, then, I have to get to the floathouse, to Black Bear Island. Right now.’
‘My nephew’ll take you out in his boat,’ she says. ‘But not tonight.’
‘I’ll pay him. Whatever it takes. I’ve got cash. Please. Give me your nephew’s number – please – just let me speak to him.’
‘Won’t take you tonight. No one will.’
‘But someone has to.’ I hear my own high-pitched voice. ‘Look, I don’t think you understand – Susannah may have my child up there. Something could have happened to them. I have to get there, right now. If no one will take me I’m going to call the police.’
She thinks for a second. ‘But they could be back on Spring Tide, though, huh?’
‘No. I don’t know. Maybe. But I don’t think so. I have to check the cabin, the floathouse. I have to check it.’
She looks at me, steadily, for a long while, and I can see that she’s running through various possibilities. Her pink scalp is visible through her hair. It’s hard to tell how old she is. She is very upright and there is an energy to her that is younger than her weathered face and thin hair as she picks up the phone and dials rapidly. She turns her back on me. I can’t hear what she’s saying, she’s mumbling, and her lilting accent doesn’t help.
‘Please,’ I say over her shoulder. ‘Could I just talk to your nephew?’
She hangs up. Her eyes are alert and serious. ‘Sven’s on his way.’
‘Who’s Sven? Your nephew?’
She nods, then walks away, down the corridor and into a kitchen. I can see a big black old-fashioned range. I hear her open and close a cupboard.
‘Ana?’ I call. ‘Sorry, but can I use your phone again? It’s an international call. I’ll give you the money.’
I dial Doug’s mobile. It rings, but there is no answer. I leave him a message, in a very calm voice, explaining where I am and giving him the number on the guest house phone. I try home, and his work number – and leave messages on both. Then I ring Alice.
‘Where on earth are you now?’ She laughs.
‘Alice. Shit. Shit! You’re there.’ Talking way too fast, I try to explain what’s happened. ‘I’m getting really scared. I think I should call the police. I’m going to call the police.’
‘OK. Slow down,’ she says. ‘Slow down. Tell me again. This Susannah woman – Mum’s old friend – left you a note saying she was taking Finn on a day trip to give you a break?’
‘Well, no, or I don’t know, I don’t know if she left a note or not – Maggie said she would have done but there wasn’t one, or maybe there was, but I didn’t see it.’
‘Who’s Maggie again?’
‘The baker. A friend of Susannah’s.’
‘Wait, just let me make sure I’m clear because I don’t think it’s time to panic, yet, OK? You fell asleep this morning, and while you were sleeping this Susannah was looking after Finn for you. And then she decided to take him on a day trip to her holiday house to let you rest?’
‘Yes. Well. Sort of.’ I hesitate. ‘But it’s not a holiday house, Alice. It’s a cabin – sort of – a floating place that used to belong to … that used to … look, it doesn’t matter. I’ll explain all that later. But she’s got him and now I don’t know where they are.’
‘Does this cabin have a phone?’
For a moment, I feel ridiculous. ‘Wait … I’ll ask.’ I cover the phone. ‘Ana?’ I call out. My voice sounds high. ‘Does Susannah have a phone at the floathouse?’
She comes to the door, with a tea towel in her hand. ‘No.’
‘No. You should see it up here. It’s unbelievably remote. There’s nothing here at all. No mobile coverage. Nothing. There’s lashing rain, and the sea is violent – and it’s so bloody cold. It’s not like going to the Isle of Wight, Alice. This is far away.’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘So when you couldn’t find a note you panicked, and came after them on the ferry – but you somehow missed them. And now you’re stuck on this island and they’re either back on the first island, Spring whatsit, or they’re at her holiday cabin?’
‘But I just found out it’s on another island entirely. The floathouse – cabin – it’s another boat ride away. I’m waiting for someone to come and take me there.’
‘Christ, there are a lot of islands up there.’
‘It’s a bloody archipelago, Alice.’
‘But they’re probably on their way home, aren’t they?’
‘They can’t be. That’s the point. I just watched the ferry to Spring Tide – the last ferry of the day – pull out and they definitely weren’t on it.’
‘It’s going to be all right, Kal. Try to stay calm, OK? This is just a mix-up. I get why you’re freaking out, I really do, but losing it isn’t going to help. Just slow down and think clearly. Are you one hundred per cent sure you couldn’t have missed them at the port?’
‘Yes, there’s nothing there – a small shed. Nothing. And it’s a tiny ferry with about three passengers. It seems to be mainly for unloading and loading supplies. If she was getting on that ferry with Finn I’d have seen her.’
‘Right. Then what if she didn’t come to the holiday house after all? She’s back at her house, on the first island, Spring Tide. Did you call her there?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘God. I didn’t – I’m an idiot, I can’t believe I didn’t think to do that first. I don’t think I have her number but … ’
‘Fine. There you go! Get her number from the guest house – they’ll have a local phone book, won’t they? Try her at home. Honestly, I bet she’s there. But if she’s not, then go to the cabin because you’re up there, and you might as well. But I’m betting they never came out there in the first place and they’re at home, and the worst thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to look like a twit, and you’ll have to stay in a guest house for the night and apologize profusely to this poor Susannah woman.’
‘But I can’t leave Finn alone with Susannah for a night!’
‘I know. I know. But it won’t kill him, or you. He’ll miss you for one night, Kal. It’s not ideal, but he’ll be fine. He’ll survive. You’ll survive. She’s, what, a sixty-year-old woman? Does she have children?’
‘Yes, one, a grown-up son, but … ’
‘So, she’s a mother herself. She’ll know how to look after him. Just be thankful you’re at a guest house – you have a bed for the night. This could be so much worse.’
‘How?’ I wail. ‘How the fuck could it be worse?’
‘Listen, I know your mummy instinct says it will kill Finn, or you, or both of you, to have a night apart but it won’t. OK? This is going to be all right.’
‘But … ’ There is no way to explain to her that any amount of rationale won’t really calm me down because I don’t know where my baby is.
‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly benign explanation. It’s bloody hard to get Finn anywhere on time, isn’t it? I know I’d never catch a ferry if I had him. She’s probably forgotten what it’s like to get a toddler out of the house, and that’s why she missed the return ferry.’
‘Well, they are pretty unreliable up here … ’ Alice is right. I have to think of rational explanations, normal ones, not plunge into terrifying scenarios. ‘They don’t seem to follow a schedule. Getting out to Spring Tide in the first place, from the mainland, was ridiculous – they were all over the place.’ I feel my shoulders relax, just slightly.
‘There you go. She could have been calling you to say she missed the boat and was staying in the holiday house but you weren’t there to answer the phone. She’ll be worrying about you now.’
‘I’m going to kill her, Alice, when I find her. You can’t just take someone’s child like this.’
‘I know. It’s out of order, it really is. And if that’s what she’s reall
y done then I agree. But you know what? There might be a generational thing going on here too. I believe they weren’t as clingy in her day as mothers are now.’
‘Are you saying I’m being clingy? Jesus, Alice, she has Finn!’
‘No. No. I’m not. All I’m saying is, she probably thought she was helping by giving you a break, that’s all. She probably still does.’
I can’t explain that Susannah is a mother, but not the reassuring sort. All these explanations don’t stop my heart feeling as if it’s going to explode. They don’t stop me wanting to call the police and get a helicopter and fly wherever Finn is right now. They don’t stop me wanting to kill Susannah with my bare hands – strangle the life out of her – when I find her.
‘I know it’s horrible that you aren’t with Finn,’ Alice is saying. ‘You’ll find him any moment now. If you don’t – if you don’t get an answer from her home and he’s not at the cabin, or anywhere else, that’s when you call the police … OK? but you won’t have to. I’m sure.’
‘OK.’ I take a breath. ‘I have to go now. You’re right. I have to call her at home. But if she’s not there then I’ve got to get to Black Bear Island.’
‘I’ll call Doug for you now, and try to reassure him. Nothing bad is going to happen. Try not to let gut-level maternal panic cloud things.’
‘That’s a very lawyerish thing to say.’ I try to make it jokey, but can’t.
‘I’m his aunt,’ she says. ‘I love him too. I’ve just got more of an overview than you have right now. This isn’t a catastrophe, it’s a misunderstanding. Call me as soon as you get back to the guest house. Wait – I’m writing it down – Raven Guest House? Raven Bay? Raven Island? Wait – I’m going to google map you right now.’ There is a pause.
‘Alice, I have to go.’
‘Holy crap, Kal. You really are in the middle of nowhere.’
‘I know. And I’m about to fall off the map completely.’
‘Call me,’ she says, suddenly serious. ‘The minute you find him.’
*
I hang up. Ana is in the kitchen. I flick through her phone book and there it is – Susannah’s home number. I dial.
The empty ring goes on and on. I picture the phone on the wall of her kitchen by the fridge, sounding out through the echoing house on Isabella Point.
Eventually I hang up. I tuck a twenty-dollar bill under the phone. Ana comes out of the kitchen and hands me a tumbler of whisky. I drink it down in one slug and it burns the back of my throat, but it feels warming. Then I remember that I’m pregnant, and shouldn’t be drinking whisky.
‘Sven,’ she looks me in the eye, ‘will get you there.’ There is something about that look that chills me. This woman knows that I should be worrying. She knows.
A moment later, an enormous man gusts through the front door.
*
Sven turns out to be as taciturn as his aunt though he is twice Ana’s size – a bearded fisherman with blue Swedish eyes, maybe not much older than me, though it’s hard to tell because of all the facial hair. He leads me back out in the rain and down to a fishing boat that has steel cables, and rope and fishing equipment looped all over the deck, and tall metal poles and more cables towering over a windowed cabin. There are three red buoys attached to ropes on the side of the boat, and a life ring hooked outside the cabin.
The deck smells strongly of fish. Sven gestures me into the cabin. It is warm, with benches, and stairs leading below deck, and a big ship’s wheel, and a dashboard of complex switches.
‘Do you know Susannah?’ I ask. ‘Susannah Gillespie?’
He turns and looks at me. Then he nods, just once.
‘Thank you for taking me in this weather. I know it’s late.’
He turns on the engine. A radio crackles to life.
‘How long will it take?’
‘Forty minutes in this sea,’ he grunts.
‘What?’ I say. ‘Did you say forty? Forty minutes? The floathouse is forty minutes from here?’
He nods, grimly.
‘Jesus Christ. Are you sure? Forty? Four-oh?’
He turns and glances at me.
‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Fucking hell.’
I hunch into the parka, fighting hysteria. This lunatic has brought Finn on an hour’s ferry ride then a forty-minute boat ride to nowhere. But she can’t have. This must be a monumental mistake. If I’d known this at Spring Tide, I would have called the police then and there. This is wrong. On every level. If she has him on an island another forty minutes from here then something is deeply off-kilter. And if she doesn’t have him, then what the hell am I doing heading out onto dangerous seas with a stranger?
Sven bumps the fishing boat out of the port. Alice is right: I have to stay rational. If I lose it, I will only make this situation worse. Right now, Susannah may be the one calling the police, thinking I’ve been swept off her rocks by a killer whale. Right now, Finn could be tucked up safe in bed while she tries to find me.
Through the dirty window I can see the shore receding until Raven Bay is just a blurry shadow behind a curtain of rain.
Sven’s thigh, encased in a yellow waterproof suit, is thick and broad and I know that if I touched it, it would feel like oak. As we push through towering waves towards a storm Sven’s thigh seems like the only solid thing in the world – the only certainty. I remind myself that he knows these seas. He wouldn’t do this if he thought we couldn’t make it. I want to crawl over and hang on to Sven’s leg, cling to it with my eyes squeezed shut.
The boat rolls up and over, up and over; it teeters at the top of each wave then plunges downwards like a roller-coaster. I dig my chin into the scratchy wool of Doug’s jumper and it grows damp with my breath. I stare at Sven’s broad back. He knows what he’s doing. He will have fished these seas his whole life. Voices crackle and bark on the radio. Occasionally he clicks and mutters things into it, but I can’t make out any words. It is like a foreign language.
I close my eyes, willing this to be over.
When I open them again, we are passing a blip of land, lit up through sheets of rain by the boat’s strong headlight.
‘Is that it?’ I lean forwards, squinting through the streaked window. A cluster of snow-dusted pines ringed by rocks – only fifty or so metres away. Close up, I can see that while some of the trees are tall and healthy, other are frail brown skeletons.
Maybe I misheard. Maybe he said fourteen, not forty. ‘Sven? Is this Black Bear Island?’
‘Nope.’
Above the chug of the engine I can hear the waves crashing against the stern. We lurch and plunge onwards. How the hell did Susannah get Finn across this water? Does she own a boat? It was earlier in the day, less stormy, but I can’t even think about my tiny boy in a boat on this wild sea. With her at the wheel. Did she even have a life jacket for him?
Don’t think about that. Don’t. Just do what Alice said. Stick to the facts. But even the facts are unbearable. Whichever way I look at this I’ve messed up catastrophically, I have let my baby down. He needs me and I am not with him.
The waistband of my trousers digs in. I slide a finger up inside the parka and undo the top button. Nausea is building. I don’t want to throw up in front of Sven but I feel my salivary glands tighten. It can’t be good for an unborn baby, all this anxiety. I have to breathe. I have to believe that I am going to find Finn at Black Bear Island and take him – and the baby inside me – home to England. One day, this will be a story I tell my children – the time their mother lost the plot in Canada.
The nausea is overwhelming. But there is nothing in my stomach to throw up – except for a whisky I am empty. I remember my mother telling me that the cure for car-sickness is to find an object far on the horizon and focus on that. Perhaps seasickness works the same way. Maybe this is how she knew that trick. She always knew these things. But it is pitch dark out there – a darkness so deep and disorientating that I can’t bear to look out at it.
To take my mind off
the fear, I try to think of all the other things my mother used to do to make me feel better. I dive into the deepest part of my subconscious for memories – any memories – and I find them there, glimmering at me like white shells on the seabed.
When I was cold on the beach she’d stop and press her lips between my shoulder blades and blow for as long as she had breath and the heat from her lungs would radiate through my body, warming every organ, right down to my toes.
She used mud, rather than dock-leaves, to stop stinging-nettle pain. She made ginger-root tea for sickness, rubbed onions on our palms and feet for sunstroke. She kept an aloe vera plant in the hall and would snap off a leaf to ooze cool gel over heat rash or insect bites or bruises or burns. She must have learned all these things up here where there are no drugstores – but a limitless natural pharmacy.
What would she say if she could see me now? How would she stop this from hurting? She would tell me to stop wasting energy with guilt. She’d tell me to stop imagining the worst. She’d say stick with the evidence, the facts, nothing more. She’d tell me to be strong. She’d tell me, in fact, that I am strong. Suddenly it’s as if she’s on the boat, between me and Sven; I can feel her, right here, and then I hear her voice – she whispers, Don’t let fear get in the way.
Then she’s gone, and it’s just the thud of waves on the hull, and the howl of the wind outside, and the engine of the fishing boat straining beneath it all. I squeeze my eyes tight and try to summon up my mother’s voice again. But all I hear is the crackling voices on Sven’s radio.
There is nothing to focus on to stop the nausea, because there is no horizon. There is nothing out there but rain and this gale and waves that are so vast it seems that the sea is rising from beneath us, as if Moby Dick himself is pushing towards the surface and in a moment we will be teetering on his spout, or swallowed up whole.
I could ask Sven to radio for the police. But what would I say to them? I imagine myself on that crackling radio trying to explain what has happened. Or, worse, calling police helicopters out in perilous gales, only to find that Susannah is back on Spring Tide Island.