The Island Child

by Molly Aitken

  My breath came short and thin again. Step, step, step. Light.

  It was so bright and in the brightness was a shadow. Felim stood with his back to me. Rain beat down and the land shook with thunder. As I got closer his voice came to me, strange and small. He was singing. He was calling to the sea-fairies to slither out of the water, grasp me in their damp fingers and drag me under the waves. Felim must know I dropped the baby in the sea and he was punishing me. A whisper from the spirit of the dead children entered me and I screamed with every last bit of air in my chest. Felim leapt to his feet and spun to face me. There was a panic in his loose limbs and it jumped into me too and sent me tumbling back. For the briefest breath his face looked torn in two by the gaping hole of his mouth. From somewhere inside me a deep laugh burbled to my lips and rolled out of me, on and on and on.

  He ran up the beach, becoming another dark smudge among the rocks, and when I stopped laughing a bit of childhood, a bit of light, had torn away.

  He was stood on the seaweed line, the barrier between the sea and the human world. I ran to him, the stones sliding under me, and soon I was more drenched than I’d ever been. Felim turned and his face belonged to a life-worn fisherman, not a boy.

  ‘You left me with the ghosts,’ I said, panting, rain slipping into my mouth.

  He stared out at the waves blossoming and scattering.

  ‘People say your mam is a murderer,’ I said.

  He flinched and my mouth tasted sour. I couldn’t stop it.

  ‘You were afraid,’ I said.

  His eyes held mine. And then his arms shot out and shoved me. My cheek slammed hard into a rock. My ear rang. He stood over me, staring down, and again his face was blank. Then his hand stretched out. I touched my head, looked at what had come away and then gave him my bloody hand. He paused for a breath and hauled me up.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and walked off up the beach. I didn’t follow him. He was right. My mam was the murderer.

  * * *

  Aislinn’s cottage was a good walk, but I didn’t want to go home with a bleeding face and Bridget always said the English woman was good at healing.

  I found her in the garden. No sign of Felim. She was bent plucking twigs and humming a sunny tune. She straightened and pushed her loose hair back from her face with a muddy hand. She smiled, glowed almost, at me but said nothing and I passed through the small gap in the tall wall and breathed in the green smell of damp soil and dripping leaves.

  Her eyes were rockpool green-blue.

  ‘I fell,’ I said in English.

  She frowned. ‘Come in. I’ll look after that for you.’

  I hadn’t noticed the night I’d been there, but their cottage was smaller than any other I’d been in. Plants hung drying from the beam and filled the air with a brown, mouldy taste. It was dark, only one small window casting in one ray of sunlight. The whole cottage was one room with one bed, but the night I had come there had been a second head, Felim. But he wasn’t there.

  ‘Where did you fall?’ she asked.

  ‘On the beach.’

  She tilted my chin up, drawing my face into the light falling through the door.

  ‘How is your mam?’

  ‘She doesn’t notice when I’m gone now.’

  I sucked in my breath as she dabbed at my forehead with a cloth. ‘Did she talk to you about what happened?’

  She was looking closely at the side of my head, like she cared about the hurt there, but her hand was still. She pressed harder and I felt in its force that she guessed what Mam had done and judged her.

  ‘It was Felim,’ I said.

  Her hand dropped from my face. ‘What was?’

  ‘He pushed me over because I laughed at him.’

  ‘He hit you, Oona?’ She was all still, her eyes on mine now, making me all squirmy under them, but I had to distract her from Mam. She might make the sea take Mam like she did with Colm, and I still needed Mam.

  She stood up. ‘Tell me just how it went.’

  ‘We were in the dead babies’ cave and he left me in the dark by myself and I heard a little girl crying. I scared him when I came out. I did want to scare him, but not like that, and then when I ran after him he pushed me.’

  She licked her bottom lip and drew a hand over her eyes, and I worried she’d guessed why he’d really hit me.

  ‘He did say he was sorry,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘How have you been, Oona?’

  ‘Why did you give my mam that poison drink?’

  ‘Every woman deserves a choice. I think your mam will heal eventually.’

  ‘How did you get so good at healing?’

  ‘I used to be a nurse.’

  She strode to the little bed on the floor and began shaking out the blankets. Mam had once told me the English live in big houses with giant comfy mattresses.

  ‘Why did you come to Inis then?’

  She dropped down onto her stool, hands limp in her lap. ‘It seemed like a place lost in time, you know.’ She lifted the rag and began dabbing my face again. ‘I wanted to live off the land and have a quiet life with . . . But, well, that’s life, isn’t it?’ She stopped her dabbing. ‘Your face will heal just fine.’

  She handed me a shiny flat thing the size of her palm.

  I had never seen myself before, except as a moving rippling blob in a bucket of water and Mam’s mirror in the big bedroom was still too high for me. The scratch had stopped bleeding and was now only a pale pink line but it was the rest that held me there, staring. I had Enda’s pointy chin; my skin was almost as milky as his but with freckles over my nose and under my eyes, which I pressed at in a kind of wonder. My eyebrows were bushier and my hair was a dark mess of knots so I could see why Mam nearly ripped it from my head with the comb on Sunday mornings.

  Aislinn laughed. ‘Shall we go out?’

  I nodded, the reflection nodding back at me, and for a moment there was Mam’s frown. My hand dropped and the mirror clattered against the table.

  We went to the beach to fetch seaweed and plucked green leaves from the garden and took them back inside to make a soup. And all that time I tried not to think about my face and tried not to think how I longed to steal her mirror.

  She ripped the leaves into the pot hung over the fire.

  ‘Do you remember three summers ago when the men killed the whale?’ I asked. ‘Why were you so angry?’

  Her hands stopped their tearing. ‘I hated seeing them cutting up that defenceless animal.’

  ‘But we needed the meat and it kept the lamps alight all winter,’ I said, echoing Dad’s and the other men’s words.

  ‘But they didn’t wait for her to die.’

  ‘What will the whale do?’ I said with a shudder.

  ‘What whale?’

  ‘The one that’s the island.’ And I told her the story Bridget sang to me when I was small.

  Aislinn delivered the soup to me in a small bowl.

  ‘Do you think the island whale will punish us for eating her sister?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Aislinn. ‘From what you’ve told me, I’d say she’s forgiving.’

  The soup tasted sharp and bitter.

  ‘Should we always forgive?’ I asked. ‘If people, or one person, does a bad thing, should we forgive them?’

  Aislinn was quiet, and I thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she said, ‘You never know the reasons behind why a person behaves a certain way. Even if they hurt someone else or do something you can’t understand, then they will have had a reason. You don’t have to forgive them but you may feel lighter in yourself if you do. But sometimes it is too much to forgive.’

  No one spoke to me like this, like I was a grown-up. I tried to think of the right words to say so she’d keep thinking I was old like her.

  ‘Do you ever miss your husband?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes.’ She laughed and it sounded like her voice was full of water.

  I left soon after and again, with a sigh in her voice like she was muc
h sadder about it than me, she said she was sorry Felim had hit me.

  I ran along the road towards home, the wind nipping at my heels, waiting to walk until I was well beyond the shore, the cliffs far off with the smudge of their cottage on the tip lashed by the wind and rain.

  When the daughter was almost as tall as the mother, she begged to be allowed out alone to pick flowers and collect eggshells. The woman looked out the window and saw it was a flawless, blue-sky day. The curlews were calling from the long grass and a gentle spring breeze was blowing. There was no good reason to deny her.

  ‘You may go,’ she said, and her daughter cried out with joy and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘I will return soon,’ the girl called over her shoulder as she ran into the fields.

  The mother sat in front of her house, her fingers trailing her child’s kiss across her mouth, and sewed a dress. She tried to push away the fears pressing at the corners of her mind. Their homeland was safe after all, and the woman knew every God-fearing person who walked the fields and shores. There was no threat she knew of or could name that might harm her daughter, but still the mother left the front door open, still she was afraid.

  The Childhood Friend

  I drag Felim’s letter from my pocket.

  I’m perched on Joyce’s bed. Mrs Lightly is in her room, asleep I hope, and Pat drives the streets of Ottawa searching for our daughter. Out the window, a half-moon paints a glow over the white houses all along the road.

  I tear the letter open. It is light, written on thin paper like a Bible page.

  To Oona,

  I never was good at words or writing but I could see no other way to let you know.

  Your daughter phoned for me at the pub on Inis. I’m on Éag now so when I was over on Inis one of the men told me. She said she is coming. You’ll want to stop her.

  I still think on us and Enda. I miss those days when we were children and nothing mattered.

  God bless. Felim

  I scrunch it up, slamming my fist into my knee.

  Enda promised to never talk to Joyce about the island, and I know he was loyal. I drop to the floor and feel about under the bed, my fingertips brushing the fluff. He never betrayed me in life so it was something else: my fingers brush a box. I drag it out, dust shivering off it. Inside are letters. Bright postcards from Enda’s friends: Mexico, Paris, Japan. I never saw Joyce take them when we were clearing out his apartment in New York, but that time is so blurry. His home was so beautiful, so full of things, so unlike the almost empty rooms of our childhood. Full of plants, the walls packed with shelves of books and prints from artists I’d never heard of, tasseled lampshades on at least fifteen lamps. All the figurines he collected on his trips. We kept so much but I never noticed the postcards. Did he give them to her before he died? Or did she take them without telling me? A memory thief.

  I drag out a letter. It’s from Aunt Kate and her handwriting is just as precious as when I was a child and we waited with longing for her words to brighten cold evenings that stretched on for ever. There is no date but it must years old because it’s yellowed. She says she is married and misses us. The address on the back of the envelope is Galway. She is where Joyce would go for answers.

  I’m sure Mrs Lightly knows. She left the box here for me to find.

  The hall has the same vinegar smell it had when Pat and I were newly married and Joyce was beginning to swell my belly. I slip out the front door and head to the bottom of the street, wrapping my arms around my chest in the frigid air. At the payphone I call a taxi and book it to bring me to the airport at five a.m.

  I lean against the front door and light a cigarette. Just a few hours to wait.

  There’s a rap on the glass behind me. A pale face and tall hair hang just behind the door’s window. I step backwards and she opens the door and looms out from the darkness.

  ‘Give me one of those.’ She points at the cigarette glowing in my hand.

  I pass her one, flick a match and illuminate her thin face. She breathes in deeply.

  ‘I don’t usually but I found them in the car,’ I say.

  ‘Sometimes they’re unavoidable,’ she says, almost casually, like we are two strangers who just met at a bus stop on the way to somewhere better. ‘Joyce wants to be alone. Leave her alone and she will come back when she’s ready.’

  I laugh. ‘You don’t know what people are like where I came from. You don’t know what they’re capable of.’

  ‘You never thought to warn your own daughter?’ The bitterness is back in her voice.

  I flick ash onto her roses. Small satisfactions.

  ‘What will you tell him when I’m gone?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ll think of something.’

  We both lie to him. I taste guilt like the cigarette flavour in my mouth, but I can’t tell him. If I tell him Joyce is in Ireland, I’ll have to tell him why she left.

  When I was small Mam made me promise to always tell her the truth. She listed the tortures in hell, salting my dreams with huge flames and sharp-toothed monsters and endless night. I still couldn’t help it. The taller I grew, the more lies raced out of me. Hell didn’t frighten me. I was a child and far from death. I didn’t know hell was real for the living too.

  Of all the lies, I deserve my torment for the ones I told Joyce; but when a lie is repeated the liar starts to believe it. And I did. I wanted my new life to remake me. The future was light and the past would only drag it down so I pushed it away like it never happened but truths left unsaid rot like old clams.

  ‘I love Joyce,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  We breathe smoke together until the cold gets to me and I go inside.

  In Joyce’s room I curl up again on the patchwork, a square of my old red skirt against my cheek. There’s no wedding white among the stitched-together fabrics. For my First Communion Mam argued with herself and Bridget about whether to cut up her old bride’s dress to make my gown for my marriage with God. In the end she decided to keep her virgin’s costume intact, carefully preserved for my own wedding day. But when it arrived I just wore my old red skirt.

  I used to bring the ironing to the bedroom window and stand there in the summers to watch Pat and Joyce in the garden below. Joyce dug holes in the dirt outside his shed, cupping bugs in her hands and trotting inside to show him. I’d picture the exchange: him cooing in appreciation; her face proud, superior. I would iron everything, even knickers, just to stand there longer soaking them both in.

  Car headlights slash through the window and I run to look out. I want, by some miracle, some change of fate, for him to have found her. Head down, he walks up the path alone. It’s me who knows where she is and me who has to follow her there and if Pat comes with me he’ll see the cracks that were always there.

  My breath fast, I sit at her desk.

  I miss you, he had said.

  After I bring Joyce back I will return to the lake.

  All I write to him is: I’ll find her and bring her back to you.

  An Aunt Blows In

  ‘It’s against God to kill, isn’t it?’ I said to my aunt Kate.

  ‘Jesus, Oona.’ She dropped her lit pipe onto her navy trousers.

  She always wore what I knew to be the latest fashions. ‘I was just starting to relax here.’ She nipped the glowing tobacco between her thumb and finger and popped it back into the pipe’s bowl.

  It was Kate’s first evening with us and the whole village had gathered at ours to welcome her. Everyone liked Kate, despite her painted fingernails, because she was Mam’s sister and quick to laugh at people’s jokes. I was only small the last time Kate took the ferry to see us, so when I’d heard I was cheerful for a week. Outsiders were rarer than sunny days, but already Kate was losing her shine for me. She was too bright and joyful, and soon she’d be gone back to Galway, leaving me behind to the days that were always the same, always inside with my murderer mother.

  ‘What are you asking about murder for?’ Kate said.
‘There’s never been a theft here, never mind a murder.’

  ‘I know.’

  It was a year since I put my sister in the sea but I still dreamt of her.

  We were sat in the hearth nook and the voices of everyone had dimmed to murmurs beyond us.

  ‘What stories has that priest been filling your head with?’ She glanced at Father Finnegan, whose greasy face was bent close to Enda’s, whispering fiercely.

  ‘Father Finnegan never told any story about a murder,’ I said. ‘I’m usually too tired to listen to his sermons anyway.’

  She laughed. ‘You sound like an old woman, Oona.’

  ‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘Please don’t laugh at me, Kate. I am being serious.’

  ‘Well, if you really want to know, some men get away with murder in every way, not just killing. And women can’t get away with a thing. We get blamed for men’s crimes too, you know.’

  ‘And if a woman does do something bad?’

  ‘She’ll be burned at the stake.’

  ‘That’s a bit much.’

  ‘A bit. More than a bit.’

  ‘Well, some punishment is needed.’

  ‘Believe me, if a woman does do something wrong, she’s sure to punish herself far more than anyone else will.’

  ‘I see.’

  She blew smoke slowly through her lipsticked lips.

  ‘You’re ten now?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘That old. Time’s flown.’

  That afternoon she and Mam had sat outside with tea and I crept out to look at them. Mam was collapsing. Kate’s head was thrown back like she’d just been laughing and I thought how different my life would be if I was her daughter.

  Kate’s eyes narrowed on me. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Good.’ She smiled and puffed her short hair from her eyes, the sign she was about to get up and leave me.

  ‘What’s your life like, Kate? Is it really different to here?’

  She settled back against the wall. ‘Well, I suppose a lot of my life is easier,’ she said. ‘I get all my food from the shop. I only live with one woman and work inside in an office.’