by Molly Aitken
‘You tell me things, Enda. That’s more important now.’
We held hands, sitting at the edge of the water with the fire at our backs, his head on my shoulder, and he rasped out his stories, full of people I didn’t know, places I’d never been. When he fell silent we both remembered the same man, but we were looking through different windows, on different pasts.
It was a long time before we went inside to lie down. I took the floor and he had the bed.
‘Oona,’ he croaked. ‘Help me.’
I climbed into the bed with him. He was so thin I was afraid to hold him.
His tears wet my shoulder. ‘Will you take me for a swim?’
‘It’s too cold, Enda.’
‘You sound like Mam,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘Take me for a swim, Oona.’
* * *
We stood tall, side by side on the shore. The moon sent down her milk to light the water for us.
Enda smiled at me and he was beautiful. My tears fell into the water around our feet.
We wove our fingers and walked into the lake, his light frame leaning against mine. The water was an ice clasp. Our toes slipped away from the rough bottom and the chill rocked us, cradled us.
I still gripped his arm. He grew heavier and I held him to me. The moon began to fade and I walked us out again and laid him on the shore.
The sun rose, spilling across the skeleton treeline.
‘Look,’ I said.
But he was gone.
* * *
Pat found us there and took us home.
It was Pat who got in touch with his friends and arranged everything.
At the crematorium Joyce, without a glance, told me, ‘You didn’t really know Enda.’
Pat hushed her, but she was right. The Enda I had known was the boy.
We all drove his ashes down to the sea. On a beach, an hour from New York, everyone took a handful and threw it into the waves. There were whispers about how Felim was afraid to come, rumours. I knew from Joyce that these people had lost friends already. Lots of them spoke about how shining Enda was, how he was the soul of the party, how he shouldn’t have been taken young. I couldn’t speak; all words had gone from me.
As we were walking back to the car, I heard Joyce give a strangled cry. She had sunk to the sand and was sobbing into her fists. I approached her, opening my arms, but Pat reached her first and she clung to him.
I was too late.
The girl mother was lost, the mist surrounding her, blinding her. She knew she was searching but she had forgotten what she had lost. She floundered in the dark, stretched her arms out in front of her, feeling her way. Her ears rang with the voices of the dead, their torn and anguished cries. All around her there was sobbing. She took a step and the world fell away. She smashed against a rock, her head cut open, and blood poured into her cupped hands. Blood everywhere, bright in the dark stone landscape.
She looked up and there above her in the cloudy black sky a light was shining. It was beckoning her.
The Sea-Fairy’s Son
My fist shakes with fingers tight and ready. We are stood on the edge of Éag’s abandoned village, outside the only cottage with a thatch shining yellow with its newness.
Pat is just behind me.
I knock. We wait.
Silence.
I step in and it’s a dark cave of nothing. The place is empty. Only a scrubbed wooden table, the brush abandoned on the floor as if the owner just popped out to get a fresh bucket of water, back any moment.
‘He’s not here,’ I say as I come out.
From the night Felim and I were born, there was no escape. The island made us. It made us love and it made us hate. But in the end the people we hated most were our mams. His because Aislinn was too free and shamed him and mine because Mary was too imprisoned and ashamed of me. But a mother can never be what her child wants, she can only try to be what her child needs, and both our mothers did that at least.
‘I know where he is,’ I say. ‘But I need to see him alone.’
The wind whips at us, pushing me backwards and him after me. He raises his arm as if to grab me, save me.
‘Are you sure?’ he shouts. The sky howls.
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’ll look for Joyce,’ he calls. ‘Meet me up there.’ He points to the top of the island, to the fairy huts where years ago I told him I loved him, even though I didn’t, and I was still that old Oona.
‘I’ll meet you there,’ I yell.
My teeth are chattering and it’s not from the cold. I’m afraid. Afraid we are too late, that the island has stolen our daughter. I thought I would know if she was gone from us, dead, but now I can’t sense her. I can only sense Felim. The knot that tied us when we were babies still holds me to him. Somehow I know him better than the child we share. I know he is close to the sea.
When she was born, Joyce’s hair was bright and her eyes were blue.
Her laugh, the way she slurred her words. I listened. I knew and knew and knew she was herself but still, I watched, I waited for him to appear.
I walk down to the small strip of beach and at the end he stands with his back to me, his face hidden under a cap.
I meet him halfway along the shore, on the seaweed line.
‘You’re back.’ His old smile lights his face, startling as always, as if from nowhere, and I have to take a breath because he is just the same. A boy.
There’s a good gap between us. He takes a step towards me and I don’t step back. We’re the same height still. The same age.
‘Are you going to run away again?’ I ask.
‘There’s nowhere to go here but into the sea.’
‘How can you live here all alone?’
‘I’m better on my own. Just me and the sea and the dead.’
I can’t see his face, only the grey roof of his cap.
‘No one can survive alone,’ I say. ‘I know. I tried it.’
‘You’re still the same, Oona.’ His gaze floods into me, into all the corners I don’t want to be seen or touched, not by him.
‘Were you happy with him?’ I ask. ‘Before you two visited us, were you happy?’
He is lit up again by his sudden smile. ‘He made me so happy, Oona. Those years, they were the best of my life. I forgot everything from before and he did too.’
‘Felim, do you know he’s dead?’
‘I know. Your daughter told me.’
‘So he didn’t write to you.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Felim lowers himself to the rocks and rests his arms on his knees.
‘That first time, did you know she was yours?’
‘I got a fright. I thought it’d kill Enda to know. It was rough enough with him thinking I killed Liam. I never did kill him, you know. He just fell and I found him. Everyone thought I did it, even my own mother, but it was worst with Enda.’
His arms shake, and when I find strength to look at his face I see he is crying. I have never seen him cry before. Not when the priest beat him, or when Aislinn was carried up from the shore.
‘Do you hate me?’ he asks. ‘For what I did to you?’
There is a pain in my throat. Stopping the words. I press it, trying to force up all that is still unsaid, the tears. In silence, we watch the waves crash in. I think of all those who were lost to the sea. Felim’s dad, Aislinn, my sister, hundreds, thousands more. People vanish so quickly from us. There is no time. I begin to talk.
‘It was easier to hate you when I didn’t know it was you. I did know somewhere you were the one who hurt me, but I hid it, because hating the man I didn’t know was easier. What you did, I never could get past it. It was stuck in me the whole rest of my life. I let it stop me from being there for Joyce. I let it but why did you do it, Felim? Did you not know what you were doing?’
He rubs his eyes with his fist. ‘I did know. I was so angry all the time and you were right there. I knew you’d be leaving, off to
some-place where you’d forget everything, and I don’t know why but I needed you to stay with me. I thought you would.’
I don’t know what I wanted him to say, but it wasn’t those meaningless words.
‘Did you decide what you were going to say to me before you saw me?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘But rape has no explanation.’
He watches the sea, and the tears roll down his raincoat. I still can’t cry.
‘Your daughter is like Enda,’ he says. ‘She’s not like us.’
‘Did you tell her who you are?’ I ask.
‘She already knew. She said Enda told her.’
The waves crash up, close to our feet. All that time with Enda and he had guessed. All the words I could have said to him. And he must have filled Joyce up with the stories of our past. That’s why she’s here, to put faces to the names she already knew, to see the island with her own eyes, and hear the shush of the sea.
‘I sent her up to the cliffs,’ he says. ‘To the place.’
I stand, the stones clacking under me, and I hurry up the beach towards the path that winds up to the top.
I stop. ‘Will you still be here, Felim? When I bring her back?’
He stands and gives me one last smile.
Joyce
It was almost a month after her birthday when she appeared while I was asleep on the porch. Sleep was difficult at night and often I collapsed in the evenings on one of Pat’s handmade chairs and fell into unconsciousness, only to wake cold and alone.
Joyce’s face was a blurry light against the waving trees, the vanishing dusk.
‘Are you a dream, Joyce?’
‘No, I’m here, Mom.’ She smiled that smile that dazzled, the one just like her father’s when he was a boy, wild, and I was a girl caged.
After Enda died, Joyce was the only light. I waited in the dark for her to come home from university so I could soak up those brief flashes of her. I would cook for her and Pat and we would talk about the surfaces of things and once a day dive deeper and those were the flaming moments that made me think perhaps, one day, we would understand each other. She told me she liked a boy and I said I love you and trust you. She said, I know. And we were silent again.
She sat beside me on the bench. We were so close. I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell her so much of what I’d always held down, and I wanted to stay silent. I wanted everything, all at once.
‘I miss him,’ she said, and I knew she meant Enda and Adair.
She put her head on my shoulder. ‘Will you tell me now?’ she asked.
There was no breath in me. I was cold except for the soft warmth of her body against mine.
‘Please talk to me, Mom,’ she whispered. She touched my shoulder and I jumped away from her. I didn’t mean to, I just did, my arms and legs moving without me.
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ my mouth said.
When I turned around she was still sitting, her head bowed, and then she looked up. ‘Just tell me. Please.’
‘He’s not your dad.’
‘What else?’
Her eyes were bright, wet.
‘There’s nothing else.’
She opened her mouth and I could see she was full of leaping, angry thoughts. You are not my mother, was what she meant to say, what she should have said, but didn’t. Instead she nodded, stood slowly, lingering, waiting for me to change, but when I didn’t, she strode past me away into the night.
I didn’t follow.
The daughter of the girl mother, the twinless one, grew slowly, quietly alone. She spent days in the forest, talking to the ghosts she met there who told her all about herself and her mother. They told her of another world, the upperworld where they were from, and she became entranced by it, determined to go there.
She taught herself to touch that world through sleep, entering the dreams of the living, but when she stepped into her girl mother’s dreams she found them dark with the mists of the dead river, the memories of the past. She lit a star in the sky of her girl mother’s dreams and hoped her mother would follow its light.
The Girl
I’m bellowing her name.
The hill is steep and the path is narrow. I reach the ridge and hurtle along it. The way behind is empty. There’s no sign of Pat ahead. It is as if the island has him somewhere hidden but safe. The cliffs are high and the rocks beneath are sharpened.
I can’t breathe. I’m stood above the dead bed. Limestone graves huddle together, toppling into each other like drunks. I slip down the slope and arrive in the belly of the earth. No wind or rain here.
No Joyce.
My palms press to my face. I breathe in, out.
I climb up to where the path vanishes and falls over the edge of Éag.
Before me is the flat stretching out, no walls, no rocks, nothing breaking the line between earth and sea and sky. Across the water is Inis and Mam’s cottage dropped onto the rocky land.
I follow the fall of the cliff, seagulls reeling below me. The sea is black and splashed with white. I search for Inis, but find now only empty, empty ocean reaching towards the New World. What remains of the ring of fairy huts now huddle in a half moon. The others and the land beneath them have smashed into the hungry waves. One day the whole island will be swallowed. Everything vanishes into the sea.
She sits on a lip over the waves.
I wait.
I sit on a broken wall and watch the horizon; behind her small, hunched body the blue light of day shines on. She knows everything from Enda, from Felim, probably from Pat too.
I watch her. The sun sets the water on fire. The silence is an agony more painful than any words. When she turns, her face is open like a flower, beautiful, brief and already fading. There is little time for anything and we must grab it while it lasts. My mouth is so full I can’t speak. I just sit beside her. We look at the gold-white where sea meets sky. The first pale star winks at us. The silence is breakable now.
‘Tell me a story,’ she says. ‘Like you used to when I was little.’
‘Once upon a time, a woman gave birth to a daughter.’
‘That’s the one.’
Acknowledgements
Writing a book is an incredibly strange undertaking that requires a lot of lovely humans to pretend that it’s normal. More people than I can count helped me.
To the following, I owe this novel:
My agent, Hellie Ogden, for her unquenchable enthusiasm even as the book laboured on long after we wanted it to be finished. And to everyone at Janklow and Nesbit for seeing something worth reading in an early draft. I will always be grateful to you all for your faith and support.
My editor Jo Dingley for loving Oona and knowing just how to make her shine. And to the whole powerhouse team at Canongate for getting behind this book. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my amazement and joy that I am one of your authors.
My over-the-pond editor Diana Miller for incredible insight and an eye for detail when I could no longer see what needed work.
Fay Weldon for supplying wisdom with wit when I took this story down rambling paths and for being the best mentor any young author could dream of having. And all the staff during my Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing for teaching me how to write better, particularly the wonderful Tricia Wastvedt.
My amazing first readers who gave me encouragement and great notes, especially Chrissy Jamieson, Susie Barnes, Clare Gallagher and Anna-Marie Crowhurst.
The gang at my Manchester writing group, you all made me a much better and braver writer, especially Stephen Clarkson and Sahil Gufar who read the whole beast when it was still rough and scaly. Also to Ian Peek and Rachel Rowlands for giving me such detailed and thoughtful feedback. I couldn’t have wished for better early editors.
Mum, to whom this book is dedicated, for raising me to believe I should follow my dreams, no matter what. Rosie for your friendship and unflinching faith. You make me want to be my best self. Joanna and Alexa for your belief in my odd choic
e of profession and continued support, Helen Hughes for the publishing and life chats, all my aunties from Ireland and Scotland, Hazel and Rhian and other friends who’ve been there with coffee and conversations that have nothing to do with writing. You all kept me positive. Dad for reading to me when I couldn’t read to myself. And Marta for all your support over the years.
Elza, Amanda, Dave and Robert for feeding me your incredible food, putting me up in London and welcoming me into your fold.
Always my thanks to my husband, Art, for your belief in me and for always supplying good food and jokes after I’ve spent long days at a desk. I’m so lucky to spend my life with you.
And most especially my gratitude to Oona, who made this writing journey magical.
‘Fresh and powerful’
Guardian
‘Wonderfully entertaining’
The Times
‘This book is really good’
Guardian