Stickle Island

by Tim Orchard

  John Newman pushed himself up from his chair and, stretching, walked about the kitchen a bit. He touched things as he mantled and stood gazing out the window for a few moments. He thought about Julie. He thought about D.C. He blew a bit of air out and took some in and thought about how complicated life was sometimes. He knew he didn’t have control, had known that ever since his wife had died. Then, as now, he tried to do the right thing, never knowing what the right thing really was. He thought of D.C. and Julie again. D.C. would come around once he’d calmed down, but he wasn’t giving up Julie. He looked over at Si. The boy was grown, and himself? He’d been alone too long and Julie was lovely. He definitely wasn’t going to give her up.

  “I didn’t sleep with Sylvie. She came to me because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She arrived here one night with a couple of suitcases. She’d walked over from their farm, wanted to stay and to get the morning ferry to the mainland. She was in bits. You can imagine. A mother doesn’t usually leave her child, but I think she’d just had enough. Henry’s temper, the isolation, the new baby. I think she was close to a breakdown. Anyway, I let her stay and she left on the morning ferry.”

  Si watched his dad. It wasn’t often he said so much.

  John continued: “Henry thought I’d slept with her but I didn’t, she just stayed the night. He blamed me, but what was I supposed to do, send her back? We had a bit of a barney.”

  Si sat back, surprised. “What, like physical?” His dad didn’t fight. His dad was Mr. Sensible. John nodded. Si started to laugh and said, “Who won?”

  John moved about the kitchen a bit more and, although he didn’t answer, slid a sideways smile at his son. He’d beaten Henry but it was pathetic, he didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to explain. Two grown men living a stone’s throw from each other, onetime friends who now rarely spoke. Years and years, but some things go deep.

  It was late afternoon by the time Petal got to see D.C. They sat across the table from each other in his trailer. D.C. had Petal’s hands in his own. The business of Petal’s ideas had been dealt with: what she wanted and how she could approach and convince the non-drug-taking community of the plan; how to turn six bales of the best Colombian grass from just a scam into a financial reality. They’d talked about co-ops and bank accounts and how to use the island’s smuggling history to help bring the residents together, but that was all just a form of logistics. They also talked about the danger of dealing with Carter and his cronies. The idea of anyone getting hurt didn’t sit well with Petal, Julie, or John Newman, and D.C. guessed not with Si or Dipstick either. D.C. knew the threat was for real and didn’t bother to deny it. Simp coming up sideways when his back was to the trailer—that had been real enough. He told her. He also told her, “Sometimes you have to kick against the pricks just to remember what it’s like to be alive, and when they come, they’ll come with a team of Simps, but we’ve got a whole island.” Both admitted it could all get scary, but that wasn’t why Petal and D.C. were holding hands.

  They were holding hands because D.C. had said, “When your mother wanted to leave London and come down here, I could have stayed in the Smoke. Our marriage was all but over.” He shrugged. “I know you know I didn’t have a family—foster homes and bloody orphanages was what I had. Well, anyway, I didn’t want things to be the same for you, I wanted you to know I was your father. I didn’t want history to repeat itself.” He shook his head. “I know what I’m like and I know I was lucky to even get to sleep with your mother, let alone have someone like you come from it. Anyway, that’s why I came down here to this poxy little island, to be near you. I know I’m not the perfect father but I am here.”

  Reaching over, Petal took one of his hands in hers and softly touched the fingers. “Dad, Dad, it’s—”

  But before she could tell him it was all right, D.C. put his other hand over hers and said, “Just let me—look, what I’m asking is please don’t reject me, don’t cut me out—you’re my daughter, I love you. Don’t hurt me, please.”

  For a few moments Petal was dumbstruck. Hurt him. Somehow it had never occurred to her that she, or anyone for that matter, could really hurt her father. Now, all of a sudden, she didn’t have a fallback response. She squinted at him. Perhaps he was being honest. As this was D.C., though, she waited for the other shoe to drop. With him, there was always something else, maybe. She waited. Nothing happened. He just squinted back at her. She didn’t know what to say or how to act. She couldn’t be certain, but it seemed as though he was begging.

  Petal didn’t know what a begging parent needed. Or what to do with a begging parent. Was there a self-help book? She promised herself to look in a bookshop. Sometime. In the meantime, she looked around the trailer. It was all clean and tidy. He wasn’t begging domestic favors. Petal sniffed.

  After a silence and a couple of quizzical looks, D.C. said, “Your mother and me, we don’t always see eye to eye, but at least we had something. We were in love and”—he cocked his head and looked straight at Petal—“Julie and me, we still love, sometimes.”

  Petal could have laughed. Like this was news. But she didn’t; she’d seen plenty of their parting and plenty of their coming together. If that was love, she wasn’t so sure about it.

  D.C. shrugged. “Love don’t last forever unless you are very lucky. You can love people for all sorts of reasons but that ain’t love, do you get me?”

  Petal nodded and quietly asked, “What do you think of Dick, Dad? I mean really, you know, and all this moving to London stuff?”

  It would have been easy for D.C. to be snide, to laugh and tell her, “If Dipstick could get a GCSE in wanking he’d be proud of it.” Trouble was that wasn’t even true. Despite the way he looked, he was an all right lad. But nevertheless, the dad-type emotions flickered, faulty and unsure, so D.C. thought carefully and said, “He’s all right. His dad’s a dick but Dick’s okay. Don’t like his hair. But you and him? I don’t know and can’t say, because I don’t really know, yeh? But you can tell me if you like.”

  Petal shirked. Like she’d talk to her father about the boy she was sleeping with. Eh, no way! She still remembered him trying to talk to her about her period. That was bad enough, and anyway, that wasn’t what Petal was asking. She didn’t need to be told if Dick was good or bad—she was quite capable of deciding that for herself. It was something more intangible.

  She’d been going with Dick for nearly a year and she’d always thought they were on the same wavelength. Sometimes she’d even imagined she was in love with him. Now she didn’t know. Was she in love? Had she ever been in love? What was love? Sometimes recently she’d looked at Dick and felt next to nothing. Plus, whenever she tried to think straight about Dick, Si’s face always seemed to float into her mind. That made it hard to concentrate.

  She sighed, blew air, and said, “Like you reckon Mom and you were in love, but how did you know? How did Mum know? Is it like instant?”

  D.C. scratched his chin. “Well, it varies I guess, depends. With Julie, for me anyway, it was pretty quick. I was mad about her from the get-go. For me it was like, how lucky do you get? She was good-looking, clever, funny, and best of all, she seemed to like me.”

  Quiet for a moment, he looked out through the window. Beyond, a half dozen big black crows strutted about on the rough grass of the field like bouncers on crowd control. In the silence, Petal could hear her father’s foot as it tapped spasmodically on the trailer floor. A couple of sparrows fluttered down from the blackthorns and were chased away by the crows.

  Abruptly, D.C. came forward and rested his elbows on the table. “Still, everything else aside . . .”

  Petal froze. She expected him to start pointing his finger at her and telling her something she didn’t want to know, but he didn’t. Instead, he rested his head in his hands and smiled.

  “…there has to be a spark, something basic you can come together about, know what I mean?”

  Relieved, Petal said, brightly, “Like music and b
ooks, stuff like that?”

  D.C. chuckled. “No, yes, of course, but I’m talking much more basic than that. Sex. Look, if you don’t get on in bed together, it ain’t going to last. Wavelengths ain’t the same as orgasms.”

  Petal froze again. D.C. didn’t seem to have the same boundaries as most people, especially other parents. The last time they’d had a conversation as open as this, she’d rushed out of the trailer, her face like a pomegranate, and hadn’t come back for months. These days they didn’t even try to have any conversations about women’s stuff, ever, anymore. End of.

  She pulled her mouth down and wrinkled her nose. Behind her the trailer door was propped open, the flight path clear for takeoff. But she’d asked him, and with D.C., mostly you got an answer, like it or not.

  D.C. laughed, reached out across the table, and touched her shoulder. “Is that what you want to know? Is that what you’re asking me? Because if it is, I’d go further. I’d say it’s all in the kiss. If you don’t enjoy kissing someone, how long are you going to want to be intimate with them? Imagine going to bed and having sex with someone you don’t like kissing for ten, twenty, thirty years. There’s a reason most prostitutes don’t kiss their punters—it’s too intimate.”

  Older now, Petal didn’t run out; she switched, talking of things she had to do, which at the moment mostly involved reading up on cooperative rules. No, she didn’t want any more tea. There was this person to go and see and this or that person here or there and someone else over on the other side of the island, so thanks and all that for your help, but, all in all, she thought she better get off. Did she have any better idea of what love was? No, absolutely not, but she determined she would kiss Si if an opportunity came along.

  A while later, after Petal had gone, John Newman came through the gate to the field, and as he did so, he could hear D.C. talking to the pig as he threw the mixture of pignuts and swill into the trough. “Poor fucker, three-odd months now and your time is up. But just because I kill you doesn’t mean I don’t love you or I won’t think of you when you’re dead.” The animal grunted, its nose in the trough. D.C. scratched it roughly behind the ears. “Eating you is a sign of my love. Every time I eat a sausage or slice off a bit of bacon, I’ll think of you.”

  John Newman came and stood beside D.C. at the pig pen. D.C. nodded a hello. They both watched the pig for a while.

  D.C. said, “You hungry?”

  John Newman said, “What you got?”

  The flitch of bacon was in an old pillowcase hanging in the wardrobe. D.C. pulled it free, sliced off a few rashers, tied the pillowcase back around the meat and rehung it on the wardrobe rail. D.C. had thought about Newman and his Julie together, and he understood he’d been stupid that morning, but sometimes he didn’t know how to act, only how to react. Ranting and raging, blind and uncaring, was all he could do. When it came to Julie, despite what he’d told Petal, that love they’d had for each other was gone, dead, and now they were more like old friends. He wished it was different. He looked over at John, at his healthy rugged face and at his big workman-like hands, quiet on the table. Even if it hurt, D.C. knew John was a good man.

  They caught each other’s eye. Newman sighed and tested D.C. with a crooked little half smile. “I can’t help it about Julie. We like each other a lot, D.C., I mean a lot.”

  D.C. took a loaf he’d made the previous day from the bread bin, cut four slices and laid them on a couple of plates. Over his shoulder, he asked, “Want sauce?” He flipped the rashers and added, “I know, and I’ve spoken to Petal, and well, I’ve had time to think.”

  Newman nodded. “So everything’s okay? Yep, sauce on mine. Between us?”

  The home-cured bacon smelled good as it spat and sizzled in the pan, and D.C. nodded.

  “Got any glasses there?” asked his old friend. From the battered canvas duffel bag at his feet, he took a quart bottle of local cider and poured it into the offered glasses. It was still cold. They clinked them together, swallowed half a glass in a mouthful, and Newman topped them up. D.C. made sandwiches and sat at the table.

  They tucked in, and after a couple of bites, Newman said, quietly, “You know, D.C., you don’t have any good reason to be unkind to me. Calling me a taker, that wasn’t nice. I know you were hurting over Julie, but it was a bit unnecessary.”

  D.C. drank the cider in two big gulps, banged the empty glass down, and smiled insincerely. “Me unnecessary! Julie’s one thing but you called me a hippie! I ain’t and never was a bloody hippie.”

  They looked straight at each other and began laughing. Newman said, “Bloody hell, D.C., you’ve been called worse than that!”

  D.C. reached over, took up the quart bottle, and poured out two more glasses. “That’s not the point. People see you with long hair and put you in a box. Long hair is a fashion statement, not a philosophy, and like I said earlier, that hippie shit is a weak philosophy, it takes you nowhere. Look around the world! We patently ain’t all in it together. Anyway, if I’m anything, I’m a bohemian.”

  Newman started laughing again. “Yeh, we had a few of them here on the farm during the war, when I was a kid. Fancied themselves as artists. Useless when it came to working.”

  D.C. reached up to the shelf above Newman’s head and took down a volume. It was an old dictionary from the 1930s. He opened it and ran through the pages until he found what he wanted. “Here, bohemian, ‘a person, artist, or writer who lives an unconventional life; a gypsy or one who lives by their wits.’” He pointed a finger at Newman. “I don’t think being an artist or writer is mandatory. Personally, I like the last bit best—‘one who lives by their wits.’” He held up his glass to Newman. “‘One who lives by their wits’—you wouldn’t begrudge me that much at least.”

  Newman laughed, bowed his head in mock surrender, and clinked his glass against D.C.’s. “I’ll never call you a hippie again.”

  23

  Sometimes things happen in clusters, so meanwhile after meanwhile, as the day went on, people met, things were arranged, some people sorted out a problem or two, and the vicar and the postmistress punted words around the parish, and in the casual, ad hoc way of Stickle folk, the idea of saving the ferry motivated most, young and old, and a meeting was arranged for the coming Saturday evening, and Paloney did his bit, visited here and there, and others did what they always did, lay on their couch listening to music or the radio, a big fat number hanging from their mouth, and time and tide moved on as it always did, and meanwhile, on the afternoon ferry, a girl on a motorcycle arrived. Amber.

  Perhaps Dick could have missed Amber in a crowd, but when he came out of the post office, Stickle Island wasn’t crowded, and as Amber took off her helmet and shook her hair free, she saw Dick and smiled. A smile is just a smile. It does not portend a future. It speaks only of the moment, but moments add up. Amber needed somewhere to camp and needed to meet the locals, but at that moment she’d smiled because Dick was a nice-looking guy.

  To Dick, when she smiled, it was better than Technicolor and he almost fucking died. He stared stupid, gobsmacked, while his brain tried to catch up and reason. To gain time, he swung his own crash helmet back and forth in his hand as though to say, Hey, smiling motorcycle riders rule, okay! He knew it wasn’t enough—the swinging thing couldn’t last, and then what? He wasn’t the greatest of talkers. He looked at the sky and thought about talking about the weather but that was just too pathetic. He thought about motorbikes. Common interest and all that. He pointed to bits on Amber’s bike and then they chatted on the way bikers do—and bikers can go on—and they chatted on and made unconscious little body movements: eyes opened wide, tips of tongues flicked, they blinked in unison, they inclined toward each other, and hands were palm up or passive in and out of pockets. And they didn’t stop looking at each other. He said things, she said things, and they started to enjoy it, so they said more stuff, they laughed. After a while it was all relaxay-voo, and by the end Dick was about as happy as he could be and Amber was f
eeling pretty chipper too. For the time being, whatever mission her father had sent her on was almost forgotten.

  Camping? “No problemo!” Of course he knew somewhere to camp.

  She laughed. “Speak Spanish then, do you?”

  The smile moment had magnified into minutes, and Dick wasn’t going to let that slide, so he stuck with another smile. “No, mon amie, but I do know somewhere to camp.”

  They watched each other as they put on their helmets and they watched each other as they cranked up their bikes, and then Dick took her slowly through the farm and out to the field that overlooked Fishtail Bay. It was a beautiful spot: the wide-open sea and the pale blue late-afternoon sky, the crescent beach below, the rich green of the pasture, with the sheep and the gorse bushes dotted here and there. Dick thought briefly of Petal, but he reasoned, I’ve not done anything, I’m not doing anything, I’m just standing here.

  Amber had most of what she needed already: a tent, a sleeping bag, a little blue two-burner gas stove with foldaway legs, a couple of small saucepans, two enameled tin mugs, a frying pan, some tinned soup and beans—that kind of thing and, like any sensible girl, a rubber flashlight big enough to concuss any would-be Lotharios.

  She told Dick she’d camped many times, and no, the sheep didn’t worry her. Dick watched her for two minutes and knew she’d never seen a tent before, and she was looking at the few sheep like they were a pack of wolves. Dick thought, No one comes here. Why’s she here? Two seconds later she smiled, and a natural-born innocent, he forgot whatever it was he was thinking about.

  They erected the tent together, all smiles and silliness and little jokes. Their color was up, their mouths were dry. They avoided touching—bodies were suddenly strange, off-kilter. As he watched her unpack and roll the sleeping bag out inside the tent, Dick tried to comprehend what the fuck was going on. It was like he’d gone into the post office for some stamps and come out and like the whole world had changed, he’d changed. He didn’t know if that was possible from one look and a smile, but the world was colored Amber now. He didn’t know what had happened or what to do next, but Petal had become once removed. Not in a cruel way, but like she’d become almost historical, anthropological. Something to remember. The past. It wasn’t that Amber was better looking or had a better figure than Petal, it wasn’t anything like that. It was something else. Something alive was between them, connecting them, and they hadn’t even touched.