The Island Child

by Molly Aitken

  Some days, when it was only Mam and me at home, she wept and wept and went back to bed. If a neighbour came to the door, I was to say Mam had gone to wash the clothes or to fetch my brothers or gather seaweed. I was never to mention it to Dad or the boys but I was sure they knew she cried, because at night I often heard her through the wall. But once, when I said to Enda that Mam had spent the day in bed and I’d made the dinner myself, his eyes grew so wide and his forehead so creased I never opened my mouth about Mam’s sadnesses again. I’d seen that if you spoke your bitterness it spread and grew in others too.

  The only days we were sure to leave the cottage were Sundays. Mam and I walked up the road, me on my toes trying to see the island, to drink in this place I called home, but I was too short so I waited to grow, and I did, but at seven, almost eight, I still wasn’t tall enough to see beyond the grey stone walls.

  Still sat in the nook where Dad had left me, I blew on my knees to sooth them. The door banged and I jumped and turned but it was only Enda with a basket tied to his back and a frown on his wind-beaten face. Even though he was only a year and seven months older than me, he’d grown into the sleekness of a young crow while I still had the tufty hair of a pony, as he told me often.

  Enda came and knelt near to me, his hands held out towards the fire and the basket still strapped to his back. He smelled of outside, of salt and air and sweat.

  ‘I had to pray today,’ I said.

  ‘And what did you talk to God about?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s never one for answering me.’

  ‘It might be that you’re not talking to Him right. You have to be polite, Oona.’

  He was easily the best to look at in the family. Even without ever seeing myself I knew this, as everyone always smiled at the sight of him and never at me. Once Pegeen had said to me, ‘You’re the picture of your brother’, and I cried, ‘You don’t mean Kieran, do you?’, and she laughed so I knew she did. Enda was slim for his age, made for flying into the sky, but no good for heavy work. He still hadn’t grown the muscles that had already pressed into the seams of Kieran’s shirt at his age. Dad once growled to Daithi, ‘My youngest’ – he meant Enda, not me – ‘was made for the schoolroom.’ And the old fisherman had grunted his sympathy. I knew this was true as Enda had a small frown line between his eyebrows from thinking and reading the Bible aloud for Mam some evenings. She would shut her eyes, her whole body rigid with listening. After he was done, she would sigh in a joyful way I never heard when I made her tea or helped with the scones or fetched the eggs without being asked.

  Enda unhooked the basket from his back, set it on the floor and rubbed his shoulders. Kieran strode through the door in a haze of smoke; even though he was only twelve he had a lit pipe between his teeth almost as often as Dad. I never knew where he got the tobacco, as it wasn’t cheap and had to be brought from the mainland. He was the spit of Dad. Short but with thick shoulders and a rounder, more boyish face than Enda. His lips were always busy either chewing, smoking, complaining or laughing.

  ‘Food?’ he cried to the room.

  ‘Mam’s at the washing,’ I said.

  He strode across the kitchen and through the back door, calling out that he was starving in the pitiful, whining voice he used only for her. She could never resist him.

  ‘Will you do us a play tonight, Enda?’ I said.

  Most nights Mam asked him to read from the Bible and he tickled all of us, except Mam, by doing the voices. The Old Testament was best, although Mam wasn’t as fond of it as she was of the New. Dad would make Enda do the stories he’d heard as a child at his mam’s knee. They were the best of all. They were the ones Enda acted.

  ‘Which story would you be having, littlie?’ Enda asked me, as he climbed into the nook and rested his head against the warm hearthstone, staring up at nothing. He often was empty like this when he got back from a day’s work.

  ‘Saint Patrick is always a pleaser,’ I said. ‘Or—’

  ‘I could act a new one,’ he whispered, as if he wasn’t sure.

  ‘That’d be nice for us.’

  ‘Don’t sound so disappointed. I’ll do the good man Saint Patrick for you, littlie.’ He held out his hand to me and I took it and squeezed. The light was coming back into him.

  ‘What’s it like out there today?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, Kieran and I went hunting. We climbed the cliffs and more than once I thought myself or him would fall to our deaths. In the end, all I got was a seagull.’

  I smacked my lips in appreciation.

  ‘Kieran got more than me.’

  ‘Will you take me with yous next time, Enda?’

  His smile fell away. I toed the floor.

  ‘When I’m your age, do you think Mam will let me go off to hunt too?’ Enda’s eight and a half years seemed so far away.

  ‘Girls don’t hunt, Oona.’

  Mam came in and laid the table with steaming potatoes, fried mackerel and two scones which I knew she would split and butter for us. I hooked my leg over the bench to sit next to Enda, eager to hear more about the hunt. I reached out for a potato and Kieran pinched my arm, making me squeal. Mam’s beady eyes darted towards me.

  ‘Go to the little room, Oona, and think about what you’ve done.’

  ‘But, Mam—’ Enda said.

  ‘No, Enda. She’ll learn this now. Saying filth to the priest, a man of God, there’s no worse crime. My own daughter.’

  I could think of much worse crimes but I didn’t say them. I marched into the bedroom I shared with my brothers, tears stinging my eyes. I stood on my mattress and peered through the tiny window. I could just make out the green fields behind. I watched and waited for a movement, the sign of someone I’d only heard stories about. Like in the legends Bridget told me, I pictured Aislinn as a child, with long hair running down her back like water, and lips as ripe as berries. The room darkened and on the bed I curled up around my empty belly. I wondered if Aislinn had told the waves to take her man away because she was a sea-fairy like Pegeen said. I wondered could she make the water take other people too.

  Someone opened the door, piercing the black with light and voices from the kitchen. I turned away but felt the softness of a half scone pressed into my hand. It was warm. I turned and saw Enda’s dark head lit up in the doorway.

  Outside the sky moaned and I could see all of nothing out the window. My knees ached, but after the boys had come in and were snoring gently, I too fell away from thinking and into dreams.

  I dreamt I was the daughter of a sea-fairy.

  As the woman’s daughter grew, she watched, forgetting to sleep in her fear that she would miss a moment of her beloved’s life.

  She sprinkled petals over the crib and watched. Five-pointed fat fists reached up to catch the falling blossom stars.

  The mother wept because life is fleeting and one day her child would be gone.

  The daughter had cheeks as ripe as fruit and a quick and easy smile. The mother’s heart overflowed with a love that ran to the corners of the house, sealing up the windows and doors. The woman began to feed her child less and less to keep her small, to keep her young, but the girl kept growing, expanding, and started to look out the window, searching for what lay in the meadows.

  The Daughter

  It’s not yet dawn and I stand in the lake. It’s 1987. As a child, I never knew the names people on the mainland gave to years. I noticed only the change in the weather, the bitter wet breath and dark of winter blowing gentler into the green and bird song of spring. I only came to know time when Joyce was born: Friday, 7 April 1968. That was the day I started counting forward, and counting back.

  Joyce is now nineteen. Her birthday was just a month ago. Pat drove down and fetched her from his mother’s house. We took her out for a meal to the Italian in town and ordered three pizzas, which was a mistake as none of us were hungry. She was quiet; we all were, still in shock from Enda’s death. Six months had passed but I still couldn’t speak about him. I gave
her my gift wrapped in old newspaper and tied with brown string. When she opened it and unfolded the quilt I’d made her, she chewed her lip and gave me a watery-eyed smile. I’d been making it for years, using pieces of the dresses she’d grown out of and some of mine. Her yellow dress took the form of a sun at its centre. I was stretching out my hand to her and she was reaching back. But three weeks later I had torn us apart again.

  The water nips my toes and, above, the sky is paling but I can still make out a few frozen stars. Mayflies hum, wind plays scales through the trees and the lake whispers with the voices of the dead.

  In the distance, I hear the hum of Pat’s car – no one else would drive up here. A flame of fear lights in my belly. He must have some news of our daughter.

  I picture the blue Ford climbing the road through the pines and him squinting into the dark. Like a fox, he uses his nose to find his way. I dab my feral hair and smooth my tatty jumper.

  Yesterday I caught a glimpse of myself in the gas station window. I was a wild animal, a beggar in the Bible who is stoned to death because of her monstrousness. I was a white face with dark eyes gouged out and framed by dark, grease-wet seaweed for hair. The boy behind the counter looked kindly up at the ceiling. Lake washing had clearly not been enough.

  Pat’s car judders to a halt on the grass and he jumps out and looks about.

  I balance unmoving on a stone and watch him waiting too. If I wait, I won’t have to hear his news about her.

  ‘Oona?’ he calls. ‘I see you.’

  I slip; water drenches my rolled-up jeans. I trudge up the rocky shore. Under my damp feet the stones clack against each other. No quiet approach.

  From a distance his still-fair hair is lit by the first glimmers of morning. He must see every straggled end of mine, and the blue stains I’m sure weigh under my eyes. We reach each other halfway between the lake and car. His hands lift and hover above my shoulders. I wait. It’s been years, years of us living side by side, lives brushing, skin never touching.

  When Pat first took me up here, he blindfolded me. By the time the car stopped I was fuming with him, but I let him lead me across the grass and whip the scarf off my eyes. Nestled beneath tall, mossy trees was a buttercup-yellow cabin. I ran but didn’t step inside; there was no turf-stacked hearth, no rocking chair or spinning wheel, no fishing rods or baskets perched in the corner.

  My fist was a stone against my chest.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he said. ‘I thought you might like to be close to the water.’

  The breath I had imprisoned in my throat rushed out and he reached out to touch me, but stopped.

  ‘I like it,’ I told him.

  A rush of air passes me. His hands fall to his side. That stern and worried expression of his is so familiar.

  I step backwards, widening the gap between us.

  ‘What did Joyce say to you?’ There’s an infuriating rasp of fear in my voice. The cold night grates against my throat. All my subtlety is gone. I’ve become wild here. Unused to people. Unused to lovers.

  He takes my hand. His skin is cool and smooth and I want to say thank you for touching me in spite of everything but I swallow the words. He’s touching me, so Joyce has told him nothing. His glasses flash as he turns his head and his ice-blue eyes settle on me. I drink in the lines of his face, the slight turn up of his mouth on the left.

  ‘Joyce is missing,’ he says.

  Somewhere behind me, the lake slaps the shore. I strain for the song of my mourning dove but for once she is silent.

  ‘How long?’ My voice is coming from somewhere outside my body.

  ‘My mother rang me, I dunno, two hours ago. I came straight here so it must be two hours. She said Joyce hasn’t come home for three days.’

  ‘Three days? She got back to your mother’s after . . .?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I found her and drove her to the city. When I got back you weren’t there.’

  ‘Three days. Why is your mother only ringing you now?’

  ‘She must have thought Joyce was with a friend or—’

  ‘A boyfriend?’

  He pulls his hand from mine, shaking his fingers. I was crushing them.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘Joyce doesn’t keep secrets.’

  The wind sighs at me on its way through the trees.

  ‘Some of her things are gone, some clothes. She used to come to the lake so I thought . . .’

  ‘She wouldn’t come here. Not with me in the cabin.’

  When he first brought me here, the floor was swept and he had placed a few of my potted herbs in the window. He’d made the thin bed with clean sheets and when night fell he piled blankets on the floor. It was there Joyce curled up in his arms, her heavy child’s head on his chest, and drifted off. I slept deep and woke to an unfamiliar bird calling in the morning.

  If Joyce were like him, she wouldn’t have hated me. But she is like me. Anger and resentment burn just below her surface.

  The damp morning air laces across my shoulders and down my spine. I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.

  ‘I have to go.’ He gives me a look that says, if you don’t come with me, you will lose us both.

  I stare out at the shimmering reflection of leaves and broken blue sky on the water. She left me on the porch without looking back over her shoulder. No regrets. Maybe she doesn’t want me to find her.

  My mouth is dry. I could stay here. The lake is deep. It would be easy to slip away beneath its weight.

  You are not my mother.

  Waves slap the shore.

  ‘I’m coming with you, Pat,’ I say.

  The Angel and the Whale

  In my dreams I walked hand in hand with the child Aislinn, along the ragged cliffs that were said to cut off Éag from the sea. We ran so fast my heart soared.

  When I woke I kept my eyes shut to stay with her but she drifted away and the morning light pressed through my closed lids.

  It was a rare dry day for the island, a day for washing, and not a sound to be heard but the whisper of waves on the shore and the odd tread of men’s boots down to the water. Mam and I sang as we did our work, the old songs Mam’s mam had taught her, and we were shining with a lightness we passed between each other.

  It was times like this, when I was all bubbling over and Mam smiling, I remembered she wasn’t from the island and her foreignness made our life hard for her. Dad told it that he trapped her like a bird in a net in Ennis town, stealing her away from my grandmother’s nest with its blue-and-white china, gas cooker and clean-cut marmalade. Mam’d never see such a fine kitchen again. It was Dad’s shimmering black hair and soft words that charmed her away and she suffered the aching arms and legs and constant fear of death that every island woman wakes to.

  We finished tidying up the breakfast and got to the two baskets’ worth of catch Dad hadn’t bothered to clean the night before. We gutted, salted and hung the fish all morning until my hands were bleeding and my eyes burning, but I sang until Mam snapped at me to stop deafening her.

  I waited for her to remember that on this day I had turned eight.

  She slammed the knife down to cut the head from a glistening mackerel and I knew it was Dad’s head she was thinking of. She stood up and marched into the big room. I looked outside and saw the sky was darkening with a heavy pile of cloud.

  The freckled, fair face of Jonjoe poked around the back door. He had the applest of cheeks, the kind you want to bite into, crisp and juicy. I knew him only to see at church and once, when Kieran saw Jonjoe hovering close to me after the Mass, he’d laughed and said I’d be wed in a year. I never made eyes at Jonjoe again.

  ‘Oona,’ Jonjoe whispered, his muddy green eyes on me.

  My skin grew hot and I dragged the bucket of fish bits closer. I was sat under the table gathering the guts Mam had dropped.

  ‘We’ve found a monster on the point!’ he said.
r />   ‘A monster.’ Mam stood in the doorway of the big room, her hands tangled in her red skirts.

  ‘Aye,’ said Jonjoe, standing straight at the sight of Mam. ‘Everyone’s down at the shore out by that Aislinn’s. You’d be missed if you didn’t show yourselves.’ He flashed a smile at me and took off before Mam could shut the door in his face. I dropped the bucket and lunged to run after him but Mam grabbed the neck of my shirt.

  ‘Mam, please.’

  She was looking at Mary on the dresser.

  ‘We’ll go together.’ Her teeth were gritted. It would be the first time I’d known her to go beyond church or out to our field to dig dinner.

  In front of the small high mirror in the big room, Mam fixed her bun tighter and pinched her cheeks. I’d never seen myself in that mirror. I was too short to reach it but Dad had once said I looked just like Mam. The idea made me shudder like I’d eaten a mouldy potato. Mam’s skin was white as a ghost’s, her hair like threads of the night and her eyes were burnt black.

  Outside the cottage the air cut away the inside smell of rotting fish guts, leaving only grass and salt. As we walked along the road, Mam’s hand gripping mine, a fire burned in me to run. Twice someone overtook us, waving and nodding their hellos, and I nearly chased after them, my feet hardly able to obey my repeated whispers to slow, slow, slow. If I rushed off she’d make me go back home without ever seeing the monster.

  The sea was wild from the storm the night before and it was still high up the shores and crashing fiercely on the rocks. It had stopped the islanders taking the boats over to Éag for the Saint John’s Eve fire, the only time anyone visited Éag without a death, and I had never been but a monster was sure to make up for the lost fun.

  ‘I saw you looking at that boy,’ Mam said. ‘God is always watching. He knows your thoughts.’