The Island Child

by Molly Aitken

  And then Felim was off, running through the long grass and up into the yellow rye, a pale smudge on its freshness. Above him, the clouds blew away and a watery sun crept out.

  The egg’s clear and yellow innards seeped into the pebbles, wasted.

  ‘Do you think we’ll see him again?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I do.’

  I lay down next to where Enda sat on the stones. ‘Felim gave me a birthday present, you know.’

  ‘Did he?’ For a moment I thought I heard a scratch of jealousy in Enda’s voice.

  ‘It was a bird’s wing. He left it on the windowsill.’

  ‘A dead bird’s wing isn’t a present, Oona.’

  ‘You could say the same for a bunch of flowers I could’ve picked myself.’

  ‘All I mean is it might not have been anyone meaning anything. Someone walking by saw the wing and put it there without thinking.’

  ‘It was meant for me.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Will Mam be home now, do you think?’

  Enda was silent, looking down at Felim’s hat of eggs by his feet.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  His fists were clenched tight at his sides, then he stood.

  ‘Enda?’

  ‘I’m going home.’

  He strode away, up the beach.

  But when I got back he wasn’t there and Mam was waiting for me, the Bible in her hands.

  I never wondered how Felim got the wing, or whether there was a poor blackbird limping over the island unable to fly.

  The Sea-Fairy

  In the black, the need to escape again danced through my feet. I’d stayed awake since supper. Mam hadn’t noticed me missing because I told her I was just round the side of the cottage fetching water. I watched her closely all evening. She poked at the small smile on her lips as if she was confused where it had come from. I knew it was the priest that gave it to her.

  I waited until the night was so thick my hands in front of my face were imagined. I opened the shutter a crack and peered out into the air. The soft wind seemed laced with words in a foreign tongue. I pulled it closed again and the wind’s voice was silenced and the only sound was the snores of Enda and Kieran. I flew to the door and crept across the kitchen panting, ready to run back to bed at the smallest sound, the briefest cry from Mam, but all was still and no one came.

  Outside, the night opened up for me like a flower and I stretched out my arms to meet the cool sky. I wanted to yelp and cry out with my freedom but I kept my silence while I was still close to the cottage. I would not wake Mam from her dark dreams now I was finally escaping into the night.

  It was bright and sweet-scented out but still the fear crept into me. At night the fairies walked in the lonely places, carrying lights to lead you into stone circles where you’d dance till morning but when you returned to your village a hundred years would’ve passed and your family would all be dead and buried on Éag. I let my eyes wander the high ground as I climbed, searching for their lights, but my skin went cold. Did the little folk have leering faces and fangs like Kieran always said? I searched the moonlit fields and— No. That’s what they want. That’s how they’ll catch you. Look away. Look away.

  My legs were stiff from the cold wind slicing up off the sea and getting under my thin nightie but no rain wet my face. The sky was pricked with winking stars, watching. I walked fast. Below me a rocky shore was crushed by waves. I had arrived at the place where the whale’s blood was let. I pressed myself to the cliff edge and stared out at the flat sea. It was a short drop beneath me to the beach. The silver moonrays stroked the water, making it glitter like fish scales. On the beach black mounds of seaweed lay like sleeping sea-fairies, ready to catch me in their slippery grips and pull me down under the waves, but only if I was fool enough to go down to them. My breath caught in my chest. A shadow. She stood on the line where dark pebbles met the tide and moved with the smoothness of waves. Aislinn.

  On the water a round and glistening shape floated towards her. My fingers clamped cold to the damp rock. She was calling her dead husband back. Bringing life to him again. The waves rushed up against the hard stones. Shhh. Shhh. Shee, the sea said as Aislinn pulled her dress over her head, tossed it. My stomach pooled and thrilled.

  She ran screeching into the waves and, laughing, she called out to him, a melodious sound without meaning. Her long fingers reached out for him but he sank and vanished.

  There was a crunch of stones just along the cliff; from behind a large rock a dark, skirted figure flitted up and away. Aislinn looked up and captured me with her ocean eyes.

  When the woman took her daughter outside into the sunlight, she was filled with hope. The girl laughed and strung daisy chains and in her small fists presented her mother with gifts of beetles, shells and fallen feathers.

  The mother stopped up her fears for a time and didn’t look into her child’s future. She tried not to notice that her little girl was a tree stretching into the sky, reaching for something better, brighter.

  The Mother-in-Law

  When I drive us into Ottawa, it’s ten past nine in the morning. I pull onto the kerb of Pat’s mother’s street. All the clipped yards look the same. Her house is just as clean. I can tell by the way the windows glint coldly.

  Pat jumps out and runs across the road.

  I lean over from the driver’s seat and fiddle with the handle of the glove compartment. It flops open and the letter lies on top of the maps. Small and threatening. The jagged writing cuts me with its sharp familiarity and I remember blistered blue fingers scratching with chalk on my slate.

  The letter is from Felim.

  The back of the envelope is blank. There’s no return address. I flip it over. The handwriting is definitely Felim’s. I would know. I taught him to write.

  It’s covered in stamps. Perhaps he didn’t know how many it would take. But they’re Irish. The last time I heard of him he was in New York. But now he might be on the island. I pincer the letter between finger and thumb and shove it into my jeans pocket. It presses against my thigh.

  The last time I saw Felim was that summer day at the lake with Joyce and Pat and Enda. He vanished before morning and I never heard from him again.

  I lock the car, grab the bag Pat packed for me from the boot, and stride across the road and up the trimmed path. Through the large window the overstuffed blue and grey sofa is still there. It’s not even faded. I put my hand to the shiny metal door handle but it swings open before I can touch it. In the distance a siren screeches like a warning and there in front of me is Mrs Lightly. She must’ve been watching me in the car through the door’s glass panel.

  ‘So you finally came,’ she says.

  Her hair is dyed a severe dark brown and shaped like a mushroom on top of her head. A chemical smell of hairspray wafts towards me, tickling my nose. I sneeze and it’s only half intentional.

  ‘Bless you,’ she says.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask. ‘You look different.’

  Despite a pink lipstick, her mouth is still so tight it looks zipped shut; if only it was.

  ‘Oh, Joyce thought it would suit me.’ Her hand floats towards her hair but she drops it. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’ And she gives me that up and down, raking look as if searching for an ounce of style in my frayed jumper and mud-stained jeans.

  She crosses her arms. ‘I’ve not heard anything about her.’

  ‘Really?’ I prod. She doesn’t flinch but I still don’t trust her.

  ‘Your daughter had to be missing for you to come here. That’s the only way you’d leave your cave, isn’t it?’

  She turns and prowls down the hall towards the kitchen. I hate her habit of never letting me answer her accusations, especially when she’s right.

  In the sitting room there’s nothing of Joyce. No abandoned paperback on the sofa arm or forgotten bunch of keys. She made no impression on this house that I can see, but Mrs Lightly always tidies any bit of life away. In our home
Joyce always left her books and clothes and mugs of tea all over the place.

  I go upstairs with my bag. The door to the room Pat and I shared when we were first married is open. It must be Joyce’s now. There is still a ghost of her here, a small silver breath caught under the bed like a piece of her soul. Above the bed fish, women and birds swim and dance and fly in red, blue, gold. The painting’s so bold. Mrs Lightly must hate it.

  There is a pair of small, black knickers forgotten in the middle of the floor. She must have dropped them as she packed in haste.

  I sink onto the bed’s patchwork blanket. The stitched squares of my past are worn thin, like the fields of the island, leached by time. What a burden I sewed for my child. All my history in each piece of fabric and no words to explain the weight of each scrap or what it means. Stitched with the smell of Dad and Kieran’s pipes, the sounds of Enda whistling and the pains I felt while kneeling in front of Mary.

  Her shelves burst with books and I pick up the old thumbed copy of the Greek myths I read to her as a child. They always made more sense to me than the Bible tales. At age six or seven Joyce would carry its great weight into the kitchen and ask me to read. We both had our favourites and read them over and over, their truths tying us together. I never told Joyce the stories of hell and heaven. Despite her grandmother’s Bible readings and gifts of trinity necklaces, she didn’t suffer the pains of prayer at least. That’s one of the reasons I stopped visiting old Mrs Lightly. Her fervour was too familiar.

  Pat stands in the doorway and his eyes are heavy as stones; his navy jumper droops from his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll go through her desk,’ I say. ‘She might’ve left something. A note or . . .’

  I peel through essays, class notes, the birth certificate – I don’t remember giving it to her. Born here, in Ottawa. Conceived on an island. I search for anything but there’s nothing to say where my child has gone.

  I drop beside him on the bed.

  ‘What’s your mother said?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s not heard anything since I spoke to her on the phone.’

  ‘If Joyce packed clothes then she’s chosen to go somewhere,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he says.

  We sit for several minutes side by side.

  ‘I lost her once,’ I blurt out. ‘I never told you. She was four. I was in town with her and she just wandered off.’

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘With a black cat.’

  Pat smiles weakly and so do I.

  ‘I thought you’d worry if you knew.’

  ‘I would have.’

  I feel Felim’s letter against my leg.

  We go down to the kitchen together. Mrs Lightly has made one of her pot roasts – God, do I remember those dry creations. I would lose my appetite just at the sickly smell rising up from downstairs.

  ‘I don’t want to eat anything,’ Pat says to her. ‘I’m heading over to the police station soon. I’ll just grab a coffee.’

  ‘I already spoke to them,’ she snaps. ‘They’ve not heard anything. Eat something now or you’ll be hungry later.’

  I swallow a smile. Not even her beloved son can escape her poisonous cooking.

  He sits and I take the chair opposite. Mrs Lightly delivers us each a horrifically high-stacked plate of pale chicken and sloppy vegetables.

  ‘What would make her leave?’ Mrs Lightly stares at me as she delivers glasses of water.

  I look right back at her. ‘I couldn’t tell you, Mrs Lightly.’ It’s much easier lying to her than to Pat.

  He clutches his coffee. ‘Maybe she had a study trip and forgot to tell us?’

  ‘She would’ve told me. Joyce always told me everything.’

  ‘Why are you talking about her like she’s dead?’ I say.

  Mrs Lightly turns away and a spiteful joy rises in me, because I’ve shamed her.

  Pat rubs his cheek, leaving a thin white scar.

  ‘I’ll find her and she’ll be fine,’ I say.

  His eyes linger on me.

  ‘Will you?’ she says, and laughs without feeling.

  ‘Mom, please.’ Pat bangs his coffee cup down and some of it slops onto the white tablecloth. She darts up and begins lifting plates and dishes onto the counter. He sighs and gets up to help her. This is how they were when he was a boy and she was a widow. The two of them surviving together.

  I push the overcooked chicken about my plate until she takes the fork from my hand, carefully so she won’t touch me, and lifts the dish away.

  I shove my chair back and it screeches against the tiles.

  She turns slowly, my plate of chicken held well away from her body. ‘Joyce never spoke about you,’ she says.

  ‘And she never spoke about you,’ I say. But this is also a lie.

  She turns to Pat. ‘I’ve been showing Joyce all the family albums. She’s very curious about us. The Lightlys.’

  ‘I never was as a boy.’ Pat smiles at the table. ‘I suppose it’s because she’s studying history now.’

  ‘Did she ask about my family?’ I say.

  ‘No. Joyce knows I know nothing about you.’

  ‘You don’t seem that worried about her,’ I say.

  ‘I could say the same for you.’

  She drags open a drawer and pulls out a new tablecloth that looks exactly the same as the last one. Why anyone would use a white tablecloth is beyond me.

  ‘Did you find anything in her room?’ I stare hard at her. She’s frozen in her smoothing of the new cloth.

  ‘That’s it.’ Pat strides across the room and slams the door behind him. A pause of silence and then the car revs and fades.

  He won’t find her. She doesn’t want to be found.

  Now he’s gone the two of us have nothing to say to each other.

  Just like when I first married Pat, my arguments with Mrs Lightly are purely for his benefit. We act for him. Slowly, I leave the old woman in the kitchen. She’s still staring in surprise at the door he slammed.

  I climb the stairs. I need to read Felim’s letter. I’m not sure how yet but it must be linked to what’s happened to Joyce. After all this time, how can it not be?

  The Sister

  I ran from Aislinn, slipping on the road, and made it home just before morning, drenched and shivering, blood on my shins. Mam was waiting for me.

  I stumbled through the door and saw her sat by the fire. I thought about running but I was so tired and already she was beside me, marching me across the room, her hand gripping my shoulder, tight. She stripped me down by the fire, even though anyone could have walked in and seen me naked. I clenched my teeth, ready for the slap, for the sharp words, for the bite of her anger, but nothing came. My fears drifted to the corners of the room, waiting, but Mam’s seemed to crowd in on her. She was breathing fast, her fingers fumbling as she dropped her dry dress over my head and wrapped her shawl around me. I was drowning in waves of her clothes. Her hands were like winter. I saw then what she had seen. Me washed up on the beach dead. Me bleeding on a rock. Me a ghost following her about as she walked alone through her empty life.

  She sat me on a stool and washed my face with warm water, biting her lip. Holding her hands over the flames, she told me the story of how her sister, my aunt Kate, was caught out in the snow when she went off on her own one evening. What’s snow? I asked her. Cold white dust that falls from the sky, she said. I couldn’t picture it. Kate was sick for weeks, Mam said. She almost died but in the end God was good. But He would not always forgive a girl for running away. It was only the once she’d make it.

  She peered down at me from her tall place and said, ‘It’s not easy. Not a bit. Don’t leave me again, Oona.’

  She sighed, fetched herself a drink of water and went into the big room.

  For days, thoughts of Aislinn took me away from the cleaning and digging and praying. Mam would cry out, ‘Are you away with the fairies or what?’ and I would think, I am. I am. My secret of seeing the sea-
fairy thrilled through me. It kept me full.

  I wanted to see her again.

  * * *

  Mam was sad again. One day Bridget and Pegeen joined her spinning. Pegeen battered on about her husband Liam who made her knees and shoulders ache from the worry of him drowning. I dipped my hand into Mam’s basket but her threads were never as smooth as Bridget’s. The door opened and the wool blew like clouds across the earth-packed floor. Pegeen had left.

  ‘She’s not herself,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Is it just Liam?’ Mam’s voice had no music.

  ‘Aye. Liam’s away longer than most and doesn’t bring the fish or birds back to show for it.’

  Mam turned to look at Bridget. ‘You mean he’s . . .?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to judge.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know what people say, but there’s no knowing.’ Bridget squinted at the wool frothing through her fingers, impossible to draw back. ‘Pegeen’s still going out at night to that beach to watch her.’

  Aislinn. The sea-fairy. I wished Pegeen would take me with her. I wanted to see the beautiful English woman again. I wanted her to love me like I loved her.

  ‘It’s only talk,’ Bridget said.

  ‘It’d kill me if I was her,’ Mam said.

  ‘You’re not yourself as well,’ Bridget whispered.

  After Bridget left Mam stood for a long time, staring at her hands.

  * * *

  The flames chased me across the island, burning. The yellow rye fields, the white cottages, a washing line of red skirts. The faster I ran the closer the fire got, until my feet were swarmed in flames and I was the one setting the world alight. I stopped and let the flames swallow me and I was full of joy.

  ‘Jesus, Oona. Will you ever be quiet?’ Kieran said in the darkness.

  I heard the creak of the straw as he rolled over. I pushed off my blankets, my nightie clammy.

  ‘Bad dream?’ Enda whispered.

  ‘I was on fire.’

  ‘Tell yourself a story and you’ll forget it.’