The Island Child

by Molly Aitken

  I sit for a long time with the wind biting my ears and stare at the wreck. The cold is deep in me when I stand and shake myself off. I shouldn’t have stayed so long but I am afraid of finding Joyce. I’m afraid of what I have to do and say.

  * * *

  I stop outside our old home. Grey and red washing flaps on the line. The wooden door flakes with salt as I push it open. Inside, the air is stale, floor swept and table scrubbed. On it rests a brown loaf, a pat of butter and a steaming pot of tea. The dresser still has the blue china on display, Mary stood proudly in its midst, and by the hearth in his old chair is Dad. His skin is more weathered, lined like a map of his life. He can only be in his sixties, but the island has drained his life away.

  I run to him and he looks up, but his eyes are milky.

  ‘Dad,’ I whisper. ‘It’s me, Oona. I’m come home.’

  I kneel by him and a faltering hand closes over my head. He strokes the short strands of my hair, leans down and kisses me.

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ he says.

  He smooths his rough hand over my cheek and my tears slip over his fingers.

  ‘Your girl is just like you, love,’ he says. ‘Just like you.’

  Red Milk

  Pains tore across my lower back.

  ‘Ssssh,’ Pat whispered, stroking my shoulders ineffectively. Mrs Lightly was asleep so I bellowed louder, curses rolling out of me as easy and loud as waves crashing against a cliff. There was a massive rock stuck inside me, pulling me down, and it had been getting heavier all night. The bed was wet. He bundled me out of the house, guiding me over the spring ice and into the cold car. His braces were loose around his legs and he had no coat.

  Street lights flicked by and became a blur. It hurt my head. Mam’s pale face pressed close to me. I didn’t know what would happen. She never told me anything. She never told me what to do.

  In a room, in a bed, they looked inside me. I roared at them and Pat squeezed my hand but they whispered to him and I yelled at him to tell me the truth.

  ‘The baby’s the wrong way around and you’re not breathing right.’

  He said more, but I stopped hearing him.

  They took me away from Pat, placed a mask on my face and while I slept they cut me open. The smell of sweat and bleach woke me.

  I saw the baby first through a fuzz of medicine. My beginning was magic, delivered to Mam by the Virgin Mary. My new baby was sliced out by people in rubber gloves. An ugly story. I sniffed her and she smelled of nothing, just skin. Clean. That was when I decided I would never tell her the story of her beginning. I’d tell her nothing.

  * * *

  I sat in the front room with the six-week-old baby on my lap. Out the window rose bushes weren’t yet blooming, a boy streaked by on a blue bike. A cat shrieked.

  Mrs Lightly watched me like she was sure I’d drop the baby or forget to feed her. But this morning she was at one of her church meetings.

  Pat rocked the chair with his foot to lull me because, he said, since the baby’s birth I was jumpy.

  ‘Quiet, isn’t she?’ He went to the door and perched himself there, wearing a relaxed smile and his ironed work shirt. Somehow he slept through her midnight cries, waking content and rested in the mornings. The baby screamed and screamed and I would sit in the cold moonlight downstairs.

  The chair’s rockers squeaked against the floor. Pat reached down and stroked the baby’s head, his mouth creased with love.

  ‘Any ideas for a name yet?’ His daily question.

  ‘No. I can’t think, Pat. Leave us be.’

  I was afraid to name the baby. Names have meaning. In Irish, Oona is a lamb, a sacrifice. In the story Bridget told me when I was a girl playing by the fireside, Una was queen of the fairies, a cursed mortal woman forced to live in Tír na nÓg, a frozen life, a marriage to an immortal fairy king. But that Una could return home every summer. I could not.

  If I gave the baby a name, I would curse her with all the weight of one.

  Another car passed. The baby mewled. I put my nose against her soft forehead and hummed a song from childhood. For a moment she quietened, her blue eyes full of knowing.

  She was heavy against my breast. Limp strands of black hair had fallen into my eyes but I couldn’t move to wipe them away. I couldn’t disturb her. It was days since I’d washed. I was moored in my seat, tied to the harbour of mothering.

  As if she were listening to my thoughts, the baby began to cry, her flushed face scrunched with effort.

  ‘What about Joyce?’ Pat said.

  ‘What?’ I asked. She was roaring.

  He leant on the doorframe, peaceful, somehow deaf to the monstrous screams.

  ‘The name. Joyce,’ he said. ‘For the baby?’

  ‘Isn’t it your mother’s name?’ I asked, bouncing the baby, trying to dampen the sound.

  ‘Yes. You don’t like it?’ He frowned. ‘We could call her after your mother. Mary? It could be a nice reminder of her and the island.’

  ‘No. Joyce is grand. I don’t care. You choose, but not Mary.’

  ‘Joyce then.’ He smiled.

  The name Joyce means cheerful. Joyce shrieked in defiance at this daft new christening.

  ‘Do you think she doesn’t like it?’ he asked.

  ‘Babies don’t have a choice about anything,’ I replied.

  Joyce’s howling filled me up and I couldn’t hear anything else. Pat stood staring. I unbuttoned my dress and placed her to my breast. Her rubber mouth was strong, her cheek already smeared with blood. My hand clenched the wooden arm of the chair, to focus the pain and stop me from squeezing the life out of her. Deep breaths. She needs it. I have to. This is what mothers do. I longed to unclamp her, even brushed my fingers close to her mouth to test, but Pat was smiling at us because I’d drowned her screams in a river of motherhood. It was the first time she and I played our game of lies for Pat’s sake. In some way we both must have wanted to protect him. So many lies are built out of a wish to shield the ones we love from the horror of the truth.

  The next day when Pat returned from work, grey under the eyes but beaming, he presented us with a piece of paper.

  I squinted at it. ‘Nice bit of writing there.’

  ‘It’s got her name on it. It’s official,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to christen her later, of course.’

  There was no escape. She was bound for ever by words to the name Joyce.

  Running

  One morning, deep in the bitterness of winter, I returned from one of my walks and pushed the back door open to find Mrs Lightly stood in the kitchen. She was shoving bread into the toaster.

  She turned. ‘What are you doing?’ Her eyes were sharp as metal.

  ‘I was out walking,’ I said, sidling around the table towards the hall door.

  ‘It’s freezing out there.’ That’s all she said, but I heard the rest. She never needed to say more than a passing phrase to be understood. I knew she was saying, you’re mad, you left your daughter alone, you’re a terrible mother.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, as if I’d not heard the rest at all.

  She drew her lips into a tight line, dipped her chin a little and left the room before me. I watched the red glow of the toaster. A stinging, burning smell hit my nose. The white bread slowly transformed to black. I put my finger out to touch the glow, the black.

  ‘Oona!’ Pat grabbed my hands. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Wrong? Nothing.’

  ‘You were touching the fire.’

  ‘I know.’

  His hands floated into his hair. ‘You can’t go out in the cold like this. It’s dangerous for you. Okay?’ His eyes were too close together.

  ‘I need it,’ I said. ‘I need the air and to hear the trees. They sound like the sea.’

  He examined my tingling fingers. ‘You scared me. What if Joyce woke up and you weren’t there?’

  ‘Our daughter sleeps in the morning, Pat.’

  ‘I know, I know, but—’ />
  His mother was stood behind him. A shrill sound rang in my head. I told them I was going to bed.

  * * *

  ‘“Can a woman forget her sucking child,”’ Mrs Lightly was reading the Bible to me. ‘“That she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet I will not forget thee.”’

  We had been in the city, in this high-ceilinged house, for almost two years. The baby was just over a year and I was eighteen and my days were dull and empty. I couldn’t escape to the forest any more, as Mrs Lightly was always watching me.

  She sat solid as a cow on the dull striped sofa, the style the women at her church approved of. The Lord’s book was held in front of her face and I was perched on a hard chair, tangling my fingers. Together, apart, together.

  Dust spun in a rod of sunlight. A car horn blared down the street and it seemed like the first real sound I’d heard all day. The house was dead.

  I strained to listen for the baby’s cry. Mrs Lightly was always there to take Joyce from my arms as soon as she was finished feeding, to ‘put her down to nap’ or ‘give her a bath’ or ‘take her for a walk’. She pretended to clean or cook, but she always made excuses to watch me, to check. I always had to be two steps ahead of her with my ‘But I washed her this morning’ and ‘It’s fine. I’m not tired. I’ll walk her now’.

  ‘“Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit,”’ Mrs Lightly said. ‘“But a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”’

  I often got the feeling her Bible reading was just for me.

  ‘Did you hear what I just said?’ It was Pat.

  ‘I did,’ I lied.

  He and Mrs Lightly gave each other the look. He knelt beside me, nibbling his lip. Through the window, the wind was blowing leaves yellow, brown and red.

  ‘Oona?’

  ‘Mmmm? Where’s Joyce? I need to be feeding her.’

  ‘Mom’s giving her a bottle.’

  I looked up but Mrs Lightly wasn’t there. When had she left?

  ‘No. I have milk. The baby needs my milk. Where’s she taken Joyce?’

  I headed down the hall and into the kitchen. Mrs Lightly was stood by the sink, holding the baby against her hip. Joyce’s short legs kicked as the teat of a bottle was forced into her little mouth.

  ‘I can feed the baby,’ I said. ‘Give her to me.’

  Mrs Lightly stared at me with her wide, clean face like I was the madwoman. I held out my hands. Joyce looked down at me from Mrs Lightly’s hip, afraid, her hair all tangled in a nest of straw. It’s all right, I tried to say, but Mrs Lightly held her tighter, making her cry.

  ‘Give. Her,’ I cried.

  Mrs Lightly was gazing over my shoulder and I wanted to slap her.

  ‘She’s my daughter, not yours.’

  Pat talked, Mrs Lightly talked more, and the baby wailed. I grabbed her and rushed down the hall and into the street, but the noise chased me. I ran into the next street and the next, on and on, and she kept crying and crying and crying.

  I didn’t cry but I was lost. I looked and looked but couldn’t find myself and a man grabbed my arm but I slithered away.

  ‘Where are you running to?’ he shouted.

  The water, I’m heading for the water, but there was none in this city, only the rain and puddles in the street and it hadn’t rained in days.

  We were on a long straight road, the houses all painted white with a car out front. This world was measured, everything the same, the nature here so controlled. I ran, but I was slow and heavy, and my breath rasped inside me, trapped against my ribs. My eyes hurt from the cold and dust, and I blinked and blinked and hot tears seared down. There, just ahead, was a tree. It stood in a garden at the end of the road and was so tall it reached up and over the house. At its roots it had scattered hundreds of red and gold leaves. I stepped over a low fence that only came up to my knees and the grass was damp on my feet and the leaves crunched and I walked across more just to hear the sound. At the base of the tree, I lowered myself to the ground and leant my head back against the trunk like it was the hearthstone in the cottage. Above, the leaves brushed against each other in the wind like flames, rustling their dancing reds and oranges that blurred as my eyes filled up.

  It was gone dark when a car with a flashing red light pulled up by the little fence and two men got out. The one with grey hair walked slowly towards me.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ he said. He was crouched down like I was a wild horse that might buck or bolt at any moment.

  I only realised then how much my body was shaking.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the man said.

  ‘I’m Oona.’

  My voice was so small I could hardly hear it myself, but he said, ‘Oona Lightly?’

  I nodded to him, trying to make my lips smile at his kind face. He was wearing big leather gloves with tufts of fur coming out at the wrist. I could see this well because someone in the house beside the tree had turned on a downstairs light.

  The other man, whose hair was so brightly lit I couldn’t look at him straight, stepped over the fence too and went up to the porch.

  ‘We can take you home, if you’d like,’ the man said.

  ‘I’m grand here, thank you.’ I whispered the words as it hurt my throat less.

  He knelt in front of me, one hand raised to me like he was waving. I wanted to laugh but knew this was the wrong reaction.

  ‘Mrs Lightly, your husband—’

  ‘Oona,’ I cried so loud I made myself jump.

  A high-pitched cry shattered all other sounds.

  ‘Would you like me to take your baby?’ he asked.

  I looked down and Joyce’s tiny face was scrunched up and red. She was all wrapped up in my jumper and very unhappy about it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and handed the baby to the grey-haired man. He bounced her in his arms, and I knew he’d done it before because soon she started to quiet again and I felt sure she’d be all right.

  Pat was stood on the porch, his hands jammed into his pockets, but he dragged them out and, as if finding them empty was unbearable to him, shoved them back in again. His silky hair was chaotic and his face, it looked scared. I had done this to him, to the unshakeable man, and I couldn’t breathe. The ringing inside me got louder and I wanted to scream again and again.

  Joyce’s soft head rested against my shoulder, a warmth and weight that somehow anchored me to this road and this place. Pat looked as if he was about to speak or reach out and embrace us. I waited for him to hold us, to hold the baby and me together in the circle of his warm arms, safe, but he walked past me and spoke to my grey-haired man, who put his arm around Pat’s shoulders and whispered to him while I stood shivering on the path.

  I turned away and searched above for pictures in the stars, but the street lights with their sickly glow blotted out the sky. I started when a hand, Pat’s, touched my shoulder and Joyce woke and wailed.

  ‘Don’t touch me.’ The words came out before I could stop them and I saw how much they cut through him.

  He opened the front door and I stepped in with Joyce screaming in my arms. Mrs Lightly stood right in the entrance, a solid barrier, and dragged my baby from my arms.

  ‘No—’

  Without her warmth, her weight, I felt unstable, so I rested my head against the wall.

  ‘Joyce needs to sleep,’ Mrs Lightly’s voice said somewhere far off.

  I pulled myself up the stairs, a soft hand on my back, guiding me, stopping me from falling.

  The Winter

  I was sick for days after I ran away, my throat burning, my feet colder than the ice on the ground, and my dreams were of drowning and night. In these dreams I remembered what I had managed to push away while awake and I clawed at them, trying to break through their walls, but the blackness was thicker and harder than stone. Voices sometimes broke through, Pat’s, and sometimes Mrs Lightly called me, but when I woke they were gone and I was alone.

  Sometimes I opene
d my eyes to the dark, shaking, my forehead burning and a smooth hand on my cheek, my shoulder. And then I slept, but far off a baby was crying.

  * * *

  The next time I heard the bleats, they were gentler, weaker.

  She’s sick, I thought.

  I pulled back the heavy drifts of blankets, dragging each leg out, listening out for my baby’s cries, but there was only sickening silence. The floorboards were an ocean to cross but I hauled myself, holding my body up with the wall, and reached the door. The stairs were slow but her crying had started up again and I’d never heard anything so terrible and wonderful. She was alive and she was deafening me.

  The sitting room door was ajar. My breathing was quick. The stairs had taken all my strength away from me but I put my hand on the door and it fell open wide.

  The light was blinding. At first I could see nothing, only stabbing pain in my head. Through the enormous window everything outside was white, the world covered and life hidden.

  Mrs Lightly was sat there, in the snow light, her head bent, her hair loose. She was the Virgin and in her arms the baby. I only noticed then the room was silent, the crying had stopped and everything was brilliant white and clean. I was what didn’t fit in the picture. I was dirty.

  The old woman gasped, words pouring from her mouth, shattering the silence. Ghost, I heard. Ghost, and Joyce heard it too, and she began to scream.

  I looked down and there was the rug against my cheek, so I shut my eyes.

  * * *

  I woke on the soft mattress and in the corner of the room was Pat’s carved wooden chair. He or his mother had pulled back the curtains and outside the air was chalk. There was a thirst in my throat, but the pain in my head had eased.

  I remembered he had brought hot water bottles to thaw me, but nothing helped.

  ‘The winters are tough here,’ he’d said once. ‘You got a really bad flu, almost pneumonia, but the doctor said we warmed you up in time.’