Skein Island

by Aliya Whiteley

  Inger was pulling at his arm. He realised she was shouting at him.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Come back! Come back!’

  She was strong – he could feel her muscles pulling against his – but he didn’t step away. There was something he was here to do. It came to him as a revelation. He had to go down into the hole. Marianne was in there. He was not about to be defeated, not when he was so close to her.

  ‘I have to go in,’ he said.

  ‘Back!’ shouted Inger, still tugging at him. He turned to her and saw enormous eyes, fear-filled, liquid. Beautiful. He took her hand from his sleeve and kissed it.

  She snatched it back, and David stepped forward, felt the earth begin to slide under his feet. He kept his balance and rode it to the tilted house. The window he had been looking through had lost most of its glass and shape to become a squashed rhombus of an opening. He climbed through, felt the remaining shards catch on his tracksuit bottoms, and then he was in the black and white tiled hall, turned at an angle so that, to stay upright, he had to lean against the wall and crab down the corridor to where the next doorway lay, burst outwards, with only rubble piled high beyond it.

  ‘Marianne?’ he said.

  He listened, and heard nothing beyond the groans of the dying house. Shouting seemed ridiculous; he was certain she was there, so he put his hands on the stones and started to throw them behind him. More flowed out of the gaps he made, and he suspected it was an endless task, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He would have done it for eternity.

  Inger was calling his name. He didn’t turn around. After a few minutes of shovelling with his hands, he heard her scramble down the corridor, and say, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ at his back, as if that meant something.

  ‘Marianne,’ he said again, and Inger said, ‘No, no.’ He felt irritation at her decision to react rather than act; wasn’t she meant to be a saviour of those in distress? But then she knelt down and started to pull at the stones around his feet, and he realised all she had needed was a moment to read the situation.

  They worked together.

  ‘It might collapse,’ she said, after a while, in between breaths.

  David concentrated on the rhythm of his hands. Someone was screaming outside.

  ‘I’ll go and see,’ said Inger, and started back down the corridor.

  He pictured a group of women standing around the house, their hands over their mouths, portraying shock and terror. Soon, with Inger’s help, they would get over it, start to organise themselves, build themselves into a team of good intentions. He suspected they would attempt to pull him clear for his own good. And his hands were a mess of cuts; his blood was making the stones slippery. The window of opportunity to save her was closing. What would he do if he couldn’t save her? He would be a waste of a man, a dead end of the possibilities he had been born with. He thought of Arnie, and the other men who slumped in The Cornerhouse, waiting for a win on the cubes for a few moments in a dream.

  He heard himself saying, ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ in time to the widening of the hole, each stone in turn. He had to save her. It was his destiny.

  A hand poked through, clutched at his. A voice he didn’t recognise said, ‘Please,’ and he squeezed the fingers, felt the skin, realised it was Marianne at the moment she said, ‘David?’ How could he not have recognised her? He felt hot, feverish with guilt, as he scrabbled at the stones until they gave and he pulled her up and out, falling backwards, so that she came into his arms and he was holding her, listening to her cry, wanting her to cry because nobody else had ever cried like her. She yelped and snorted, and always got the hiccups afterwards, and David waited for the hiccups to start, then stroked her face as she alternated between them and trying to talk.

  ‘How—you—you—you,’ she said. He picked her up. She felt heavier than he remembered, and there was no blood on her, no rips on her clothes. She seemed intact, weighed down by the dust that cloaked her. Every second that he held her cemented her back to him. He could feel her, prickling, singing with life, like a part of his body waking from numbness after too long being still. Life was returning to them both.

  Inger awaited them on the other side of the window. David helped Marianne through, watched a knot of women tie themselves around her with towels and torches. A light rain was caught in the beams of light, like the moment was frozen.

  ‘Come out,’ said Inger.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

  ‘The emergency services are on their way. But it’s going to take time, coming from the mainland. Ten minutes for the helicopter. They said stay out of the house. It’s unstable.’

  Marianne was being led away by the women. He watched her shake her head, turn, point at him. No, not at him, at the house, her gaze rigid with fear, expectation. The women piled towels on her shoulders and dragged her on.

  ‘Are there others?’ David said.

  ‘Come out,’ said Inger, again.

  He said, ‘I’ll be careful,’ not meaning it. He had no intention of doing less than any hero should. He ran back to the remains of the doorway and squeezed himself through, into the darkness beyond.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Now the island holds men. They walk around as if they’re stepping on any normal, sane stretch of land: hillocks of wild grass, dark brown crusted turds of sheep. Their feet squelch these things down, and they don’t understand they are violating this place. Or perhaps they know and don’t care. There are more important things in life than the sanctity of Skein Island. This is, after all, an emergency.

  I’m aware that, in my head, I sound like my mother.

  But Vanessa is being put in a helicopter right now, so maybe I feel like I should step into her shoes until she can resume her responsibilities. She was carried out by David, unconscious, but now she is awake and annoyed, her eyes stretched wide, making frantic statements at me over the top of the plastic mask they’ve clamped over her nose and her intact mouth. Whatever I saw down there wasn’t real. Her mouth is proof of that.

  The paramedics have tied her to the stretcher. She was clawing at them, and she even scored a cheek with her long nails. She looks fine, if furious, but the way the two paramedics have marked her as a priority, even before Rebecca with her broken leg, is giving me the feeling that her outrage is a blanket under which is hidden all manner of failures – failure in her body, in her duty, failure to keep us all safe, failure to keep this island under her sole control. Perhaps this is a long enough list of failures to defeat her.

  She clenches and unclenches her fists rhythmically, so I take one of her hands in mine and walk alongside her stretcher as they take it to the helicopter, away from the crater that was once her house.

  She doesn’t let go of me, and she has a grip like steel. The paramedics turn, and the stretcher is taken to the right, away from the helicopter. My wrist twists awkwardly as they put Vanessa down in the field, then step away and begin a quick conversation, their mouths close to each others’ ears. I look behind me, putting more pressure on my aching arm, and I see another stretcher, other men sprinting with it to the helicopter.

  One of the paramedics follows my gaze, and beckons to me. I lean over, and he shouts, ‘Worse off.’ It must be Kay. But I find myself considering the possibility that it’s Moira, revived to flesh under the rubble, and I feel such fear, strange fear, as I imagine what she might be about to do to these men surrounding her. Moira, kept prisoner for years in that basement, chained to the wall, encased in stone. Turning men mad in her presence so they rip each other to pieces. But why would she need hospitalisation? She’s not human, is she? And besides, I tell myself, she’s a statue, a statue, a bloody statue.

  Vanessa is watching my face. She opens her mouth under the mask and then can’t seem to shut it again, because her tongue is protruding through her lips, just the tip of it, as if she has just eaten something spicy and is waiting for a glass of water to arrive.

  I picture the meze: dolmades,
olives, scattered food, thrown over the wreckage of the floor, being trodden into the remains of the carpet by the men, who are everywhere, swelling in numbers, multiplying in response to this emergency. I find myself retching. I shake free of Vanessa’s grip, crouch down and lean over the grass, but nothing comes up. Have I already digested tonight’s meal? Are we already moving on in time, skittering away on an icy sheet of minutes spent?

  ‘You’re not empty,’ I hear myself say. Or maybe I just hear the words in my head, because the helicopter is taking off and the wind is fierce and deafening. I stand up and watch it go, and as it becomes smaller, shrinking to a speck, the world is returned to sound, and Vanessa has somehow got her mask off and is trying to speak, but her lips slap together without form, without control. The paramedics are moving around me with a new urgency. They snap the oxygen mask back over her face, so I can no longer clearly see the struggle in the lines of her mouth, even as she fights on.

  Does she want me to find Moira? I turn around and scan the crowd, half-expecting to see the living statue standing there, smiling. The ground is an open wound, bleeding clots of dirt, spurting steam. The house is a weapon jutting from the gash. I’ve never seen anything so horrible. As I watch, David emerges from the wound. He is filthy, his clothes are ripped, his hair is plastered to his head. He looks alive. I see the other women – the island visitors now gathered in a knot to this tragedy – watch him too. I’m not surprised. He is no longer the David I knew. He’s a golden icon of a man. We women are now beneath him.

  Once I saw potential in him, a greatness glimmering under the surface. Now he has unfolded into a hero. He comes to me and puts his arms around me, wrapping me in the smells of mud and smoke, and I love him again, oh I love him. He kisses me and he is reverent. It is like the kiss he gave me in front of the altar. We have resealed our bond, and I could never leave him again. I don’t want to be anywhere else.

  He says, ‘Thank God, thank God. I’m here. I’ve got you.’ I realise I’m telling him I’m sorry.

  ‘No, don’t be sorry. I found you.’

  ‘My mother.’ Why has she worked her way into this moment? But it seems vital to say, ‘She’s been here all the time.’ Calm now, prone, on the stretcher she lies. I look at his face. I can tell he’s moved by the sight of her. He saved her too, brought her out of the ground, carrying her.

  ‘She was trapped,’ he says.

  ‘Under a statue?’

  ‘It was heavy. I managed to move it eventually.’

  ‘You touched it?’

  ‘I was amazed she was alive at all.’

  Something in his tone alerts me to what I should have seen. I make myself examine her face. Her eyes are open. Her chest is still. She does not fight any more because that option has been removed. She has been overcome, and conquered.

  ‘We had to prioritise the other woman,’ says the businesslike paramedic, who is suddenly at my side.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘she hasn’t explained it yet, not properly. I don’t understand it yet. No, that’s not how this is meant to be.’ My voice is so loud, getting louder. I’m never normally this loud. I’m a softly spoken person, that’s who I am, but these words just won’t come out quietly because nobody seems to be understanding them and I have to be louder, louder, louder, so I am shouting in the face of something that’s not listening to me.

  David pulls me closer, shushes me, rocks me, until something clicks shut inside me.

  We have reached the end of a pattern, a cycle of discovery. It’s time to go home and take slow, deep breaths until the meaning of all this becomes clear.

  I take in the morning sky. It is clear and pink, and the rain clouds have disappeared, for now.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘She never said all her children were girls,’ says Rebecca. ‘What are the chances of that? All four of them, mini-Kays.’

  ‘Why would she?’ I ask.

  ‘No reason.’ Rebecca shifts in the wicker chair and pulls at the deep V-neck of her black dress. Her encased left leg sticks out to rest on a matching stool, the plaster a grainy white. ‘It just makes me feel worse. Stupid, I know.’

  I know what she means. The four girls had taken up the front pew of the church, with the eldest on the end of the row. A hymn had been chosen, one I didn’t know, about God accepting my heart, and during it the eldest girl had thrown back her shoulders and sang to the vaulted ceiling, and the pit of my stomach had moved in recognition of Kay’s genes, Kay’s mannerisms, living on.

  But maybe Rebecca doesn’t mean that. Maybe she thinks that bereavement is harder on women than on men. I don’t know her well enough to understand her, and what I do know of her irritates me.

  She pokes the strap of her black bra back underneath her dress – she can’t seem to stop fiddling with it – and takes a sip from her glass of lemonade. I would not have chosen her as a companion for this funeral. I didn’t even know that she was going to attend; we’ve not spoken since the island. I wasn’t certain I was going to attend until the last minute, but David persuaded me in the name of closure, and I had a new black suit for Vanessa’s funeral, so I thought I might as well get some mileage out of it.

  How practical I am about these things. My father wouldn’t attend Vanessa’s funeral, and so I organised a bouquet of white lilies and signed his name on the card. Whilst performing these administrative tasks, I thought only of myself. It was an act of make-believe, the fantasy of a small child who can’t bear the reality of quarrelling parents. Even a pretend pact, signified by white lilies of all things, made me feel better, just for a moment.

  But now, here, at Kay’s wake, that illusion has passed. There are no reasons or reconciliations in this death. I thought I might come to understand why Kay’s decision to get back on that motorbike, to live her life no matter what the consequences, became worse than inconsequential in the face of a statue, in a basement, on an island. I have been looking at her mother and her girls, to see if they have understood how ridiculous their arguments were. They all begged her not to buy another motorbike.

  Standing here, in the conservatory of Kay’s mother’s house, I keep Rebecca company as we look out over the ordered garden, watching the rose bushes in the December rain. There’s an arbour, and beside it a large pampas. The empty raised beds are a churned dark brown, and the shining stones of the rockery look as if they would be so slippery underfoot. I turn and observe the mourners hold their faces rigid and whisper as if they are slowly turning to stone too, from the neck down. David is standing next to the buffet table, beside a metallic red plate that bears delicate slices of garlic bread. He’s nodding his head as Rebecca’s husband talks to him. Their eyes are locked, their body language engaged. They are obviously enjoying the conversation. I wonder what they are talking about. The husband is a surprise to me. Rebecca never mentioned him on the island. How is it possible to have a husband and not talk about him?

  If I had my way I suppose David would not be here, and then Rebecca would have thought that strange, no doubt. So perhaps it is as well that he talked me into letting him drive. The fact that he is willing to stand a short distance away from me today is a step forward. Since he rescued me from the basement he has not left me. He loves me, and I love him, of that I have no doubt. That has never been in question. But he is no longer just my husband, and of that I have no doubt either. Touching the statue – touching Moira – has changed him.

  ‘You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?’ says Rebecca. While I watched our husbands, she was watching me. I feel ashamed of whatever might have just passed across my face. But I’m glad Rebecca has raised this topic; I realise I have something I want to say. ‘Thinking of Moira, yes. I’m having the house rebuilt. The basement will be excavated, if possible. If she’s down there, I’ll find her.’ Settling my mother’s estate is ongoing, but everything will eventually pass to me; the solicitors who held her Last Will and Testament have made that clear. The island will become my pr
operty.

  I can’t get my head around that, but I’m certain that the house must be restored.

  ‘Are you thinking she’s still down there?’ Rebecca says, in that voice she uses – the patient tone of a therapist to those lowly individuals who don’t understand their own motivations. I wonder how her husband stands her. She must dissect every meal, every word, every sexual encounter they share.

  ‘Are you asking me if I think stone statues can move?’ I say, calling her bluff. I keep my eyes on David, wondering if he will look at me. But he’s talking, arms moving, making compact gestures as if describing an object. If he was the kind of man who cared about cars, I would say he was having that sort of conversation: how fast, miles per gallon. But he really never seems to care about such things. Maybe Rebecca’s husband does. I have to search my memory for his name; we were introduced before the funeral, briefly. It finally comes to me. I say to Rebecca, ‘Does Hamish like cars?’

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘No. Try to concentrate. This is important.’

  ‘At least we can agree on that.’

  David and Hamish are smiling at each other, both talking, mimicking each other’s movements. They are in complete agreement about something. Around them, others are having the stiffer conversations that suit funerals better. If Kay were here she would have wanted to drive a motorbike through the living room and upset the carefully laid plates of garlic bread and sausage rolls, spilling them over the floor.

  Kay’s mother is circulating through the crowd. She’s a tall woman with good posture, and she wears her white hair in an angular bob that looks fresh and glossy. She’s holding a silver tray upon which cluster flutes of white wine. Every time she stops at a group, the mourners draw together. She nods and smiles at them, and they respond in kind, but nobody takes a flute. As she crosses my field of vision I see annoyance flash across her face – Will nobody take a bloody drink? She is thinking. This tray is getting heavy. Why doesn’t she set it down and forget about it? Walk out of here, return later when everyone has left her house? Somebody would probably even do the tidying up and the dishes, out of guilt.