Wolfe Island

by Lucy Treloar

  I had borrowed Doree’s Dodge to get there. There was a long, high bridge I had to cross, and on the drive back I thought of the bridge ahead – its flimsy sides, the cars hard up against its edges, the speed of the traffic, the space beneath – and the journey to come through ruined country, where ducks swam in blackened ditches, lone buzzards patiently circled, and big-headed dogs roamed free. For some distance the bridge climbed a low hill rising from a fishing village outgrown itself, and from shopping malls and gas stations, until suddenly unshackled it soared. The ground fell away and disappeared. There was only water and air and movement, and at my elbow the edge of the highway. A seagull sauntered through the draughts alongside, looking in curiously at my moist eyes. Surely I would fly too if I drove through the low wall at my side. The car touched the edge and the metal screamed. Leisurely, I drew away. The steering wheel pulled under my hand like a strong dog. I held it tight then and it was like the quivering of the wheel felt its way into me until I was shaking too, as hard as I ever had. A car drew alongside, the driver’s mouth wide and black in its depth, his eyes going from front to side, to look at me and howl out his rage. I could have killed him, just run into his side. I didn’t think the world would miss a person like that much. I didn’t think it would miss me.

  Chapter 6

  Spring

  I went to the marsh walkway, a structure that ambled above the eastern saltmarsh like a caterpillar in search of a leaf. It had a way of clearing my mind, which was muddied then by many worries: about the future, and about Claudie and what she knew, and whether I should tell Claudie about Cat, and what I suspected about her.

  The walkway had been intended to bridge a widening gut, but failed before they quit building, the water having moved too fast, and after some distance the structure stopped suddenly as if its purpose had not after all been to cross the encroaching sea but to greet incoming storms. It had been good pasture all around for as long as anyone knew, ‘speckled with Jersey cows the colour of caramel chews’, my mother told me. That farmland turning to saltmarsh was the end of dairying on Wolfe – a terrible blow to the island.

  But the walkway hadn’t been wasted. People promenaded its length of an evening, and visitors had enjoyed looking at the unparalleled vistas of this historic region, as the sign below promised they would. Children thought it haunted, but no one could agree by what: a pair of poisoned eagles, a drowned dog or fisherman, a murdered wife.

  I sang one of the old songs, a habit of mine when out there, not really thinking.

  Will you come with me, come with me?

  Stay with me, stay with me,

  Be with me, be with me

  My dear one, my heart

  Will you be with me now

  And forever, forever

  Oh, let it be now and all will be well.

  It has a strange melody in a minor key. My mother once said, ‘Everything has its own tune, Kitty. But you must learn to hear it.’ The island has its own tune, which I sometimes hear at the end of winter when I haven’t seen a person in months. It is mute to me this year. Girl got restless and howled to the wind, a different kind of song, an old one. Maybe she thought my singing a lonely sort of howling, which wasn’t a great compliment to my singing. I hummed some more and looked over the fallen farmhouse enmired in the marsh nearby, the wheeling sun, the circumscribing sea, and the old bridge linking north and south ends, a quaint thing of Willowware design.

  Girl doesn’t like Josh. He makes her uneasy. I try to be welcoming to him to put her at ease, but she shies away from him and is watchful. He approached her too fast one morning and tried to pet her. Girl growled. I put my hand to her shoulder. Menace was running through her.

  ‘She safe?’ Josh said.

  ‘How do you mean?’ I stroked her head.

  ‘With strangers?’

  ‘She keeps an eye out for me. She won’t bother you if you don’t bother her.’

  It’s the opposite with Alejandra. Girl always approaches her with her tail swaying, and touches her hand with her nose, and Alejandra touches Girl’s shoulder.

  Girl found Alejandra lurking on the marsh road on the last day of winter and brought her out on the walkway. The cold whipped her cheeks pink and made her eyes water. She was quiet for the most part, only whispering into the ear of her doll, Luna, but she liked it I think.

  She began to come about with me late in the morning (she did schoolwork first thing with Luis, she said), pretending she’d happened upon me by accident. It seemed polite to pretend the same. I let my eye roam over the mucky ground at the fallen shore and around the marsh mudflats, looking (not intently, more like waiting for a fish to bite on a line) for things of a different colour or a peculiar shape, or feeling for things with a stick tool I had, but not too hard. There it would be, whatever it was, just there. I bent down and felt about and if I could I’d winkle the object out with a finger.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Alejandra asked from a nearby hillock.

  ‘Looking for stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Things from the past,’ I said. ‘They call it mudlarking in England – progging around here. I prefer mudlarking – though that used to mean oystering hereabouts. Words are shifty in their meanings. You’ll find that out. I’ve got a friend there who does the same, except along a river. She goes out and finds things from thousands of years ago. She makes ugly things beautiful, but she only cares about telling the truth. That’s what she says.’

  ‘That’s a funny thing to say.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  She, Irina, has a Russian mother and a Kurdish father and grew up in a refugee camp in Italy and now lives in Essex on the Thames, not far from London. I wonder how she answers when people ask where she’s from, since she’s lived in so many places. What things make her recall her past and the countries that have been her home – a dish, a colour of sky, the first soft wind of spring on her face, the smell of a smoking fire? Nothing on Wolfe is truly strange to me. I have a memory for every part of it. Show me an old drink can and I’m dandling my legs over the side of a skiff, tossing it or any other litter overboard, as everyone did back then. (‘Nature’s trash can’ we called the water. No wonder there’s so much to be found.)

  Thready roots connect me to the island everywhere I go. Wolfe Island folk had known each other’s families for generations; the Willowware bridge was built by my great-great-grandfather; my mother had an old family word that she used for Pine Point on the island’s southernmost tip. There had always been a tall tree there, she said; it was important to keep a new one coming along or it would be bad luck for the island. ‘Superstition,’ my father once said. My mother looked at him with a hint of something knowing, and tartly replied, ‘And who is to say that doesn’t matter, pray tell, Harald Schonfeld?’ And he, hearing her tone, would say, ‘Why, no one of any sense, my dear, I am sure.’ I loved my father, but agreed with my mother in this regard. What we feel is as true as what we think.

  My mudlarking stick has a flattened crook on the end that I drag across the muddy surface. I did this now and the crook caught the edge of something and lifted it. I teased it free. It was a pointed thing, triangular. An arrowhead? Alejandra scrambled across the tussocks towards me. I dipped it in a pool of water, sluiced it clean and looked again. Too big and the wrong shape for an arrow and cold in my hand.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Shark tooth. Millions of years old by the size of it. Rare.’ I held it out and she touched its serrated edge and looked at her finger to see if it had left a mark.

  ‘Why do you do this?’ she asked.

  How could I explain why to a seven-year-old? So one day I can say I lived in a place where such things could be found? To remind me that sharks swam here once and might swim again? ‘I like to find things,’ I said. ‘They’re nice to hold in your hand. Imagine that great big mouth. I’m holding t
he past right here. It’s like it’s swimming past.’

  I handed it to her and she turned it over carefully, smoothing it. ‘You can have it,’ I said on an impulse. Her face lit up. ‘Look after it, mind. There’re more people than shark teeth. Folk will pay for such a thing – good money. We might be able to find out about it when we get back. Keep it somewhere safe. Do you have a deep pocket?’

  She pushed her hand into her jacket pocket and waggled her fingers.

  ‘Don’t lose it now.’

  She shook her head and looked at it again before plunging it into her pocket and doing up the zipper. She ran off. It seemed like she’d had enough. A good shark’s tooth, millions of years old.

  But Girl swayed her tail and suddenly Alejandra was back, a stout stick in hand, and began poking the marsh’s surface, watching for anything that might appear.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Like that. Careful now, not too hard, you don’t want to miss anything.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll get you something else – make it easier for you.’

  ‘One of them?’ She nodded at my mudlarking crook.

  ‘A bit smaller.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She seemed to like doing things with me.

  Luis didn’t mind. ‘If she wants to,’ he said. He asked if she talked.

  ‘A little,’ I told him, and he said, ‘That’s good, that’s really good. She’s been kind of quiet for a while.’

  ‘Kids don’t like change,’ I said, and he said he guessed not.

  I asked her once where they were staying before she came to the island and what she’d liked to do. She stared at me in confusion. ‘Are you my friend and Luis’s friend?’ she asked finally.

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘I – I don’t know . . . Luis said . . . he said I . . .’

  ‘Oh, it’s okay, honey. He said not to say?’

  She nodded furiously.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetheart. Don’t worry. I was just chatting. Don’t say anything you don’t want to, okay? Do you want to go out in a skiff? That’s a little boat.’

  ‘On the sea?’ She looked stricken in a new way now.

  ‘No, just on these little creeks – the guts, we call them. We can just paddle around and see what we see, that’s all. Just for fun. Girl likes being a ship’s dog for a change. Better check with Luis first, though.’

  ‘Okay.’ She went running down the road and a short while later came panting back. That was the first time she came exploring the old waterways, where the water sometimes stayed clear to the bottom.

  ‘What’s that?’ Alejandra said. ‘That thing down there.’

  ‘Coke bottle. We better get it. Wait.’ I stilled the boat, passed her the net. ‘There you go, lean over now, not too far or Cat will kill me and then we’ll both be dead. Better stop laughing or Girl’ll be dead too.’

  ‘Not Girl!’

  ‘No, not Girl,’ I assured her. ‘She’s a good swimmer. Lean now.’ She leaned.

  In the makings room I have cleared a table for Alejandra which she calls her work desk. She arranges her discoveries on it, shells especially, and investigates them online and in a book on shells I found in someone’s house. We found another notebook at Tobe’s and she has begun keeping one too. Alejandra wanted to visit his shanty again, but I said it was kind of private, and she seemed to understand my meaning. We both had quiet places in our pasts. Girl sits at her feet, or at her side on the sofa beneath the study window, while Alejandra reads.

  Luis began spending more time at my place too. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s a help.’

  ‘It’s no bother,’ I said.

  ‘Cat and Josh.’ He didn’t elaborate, but sighed.

  ‘Fighting, kissing, or too many rules?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘I’m trying for some rules, but, yeah, you pretty much got it.’

  He and Alejandra have a quietness that is easy to be around. Cat is like a firecracker, a slightly damp one these days, her spirits being subdued.

  Luis tapped at the computer, as intent as if he was picking crabs, getting that last bit of meat from a claw. I went into my makings room and once in a while he knocked on the door, though it was open, and waited for an invitation to come in, and if Alejandra wasn’t there (if she was washing shells or reading the internet herself, for instance) he sometimes began to talk, as if this room was a kind of confessional.

  ‘I don’t mind if she talks about our mother or little sister with you,’ he said one day.

  ‘You have a sister?’

  ‘Just a baby. Selma. She might talk about her. She loved playing with her. She used to feed her breakfast. Anyway, I don’t mind is what I’m saying. But there’re some things it’s better if you don’t . . . It’s better this way. It’s better if she forgets.’

  ‘It’s fine. Really.’

  So I did ask her about her mama. Alejandra said she was very nice, and that Selma was only good at smiling and waving. ‘She can’t even crawl.’ She made a face at the thought, then stopped talking, the memories’ effects on her face like leaf shadow. I thought she might cry, but she didn’t.

  After a big tide we fossicked the trash line, which my grandfather had called the wrack line and we didn’t talk so much then.

  Items recently collected from the trash line and elsewhere by Alejandra and me

  -5 branches, different sizes, with good silvering and movement (Pine Point, Beauforts ditch, and Deadness gut)

  -Cattle skull, one broken horn, otherwise intact, washed clear near the marsh walkway

  -Fisherman’s white plastic bucket, east side

  -Length of blue synthetic rope, frayed, knotted, with three floats attached, Deadness outlet

  -53 plastic bottles

  -Sea glass, different colours and sizes, one rare sapphire blue

  -Shells, various

  -A half wine barrel

  -3 bottles: poison, whisky, ointment jar (chipped)

  -A car tyre

  -A leather satchel of a handy size, with the embossed initials HLG. Fairly fresh, so it might come good with care (washed onto a bank of Deadness gut)

  The satchel held sodden papers and a real find: a cunning knife, its handle inlaid with the initials EHG, and a blade like the edge of a gull’s wing with an elegant rise at its tip – a loss to someone. I wiped the satchel clean and, sitting before the fire, rubbed in several coats of old boot dressing. It might make a collecting bag. Luis saw it there and seemed surprised that I’d found such a thing. He brushed his fingers across the lettering, admiring the workmanship, I think, so I showed him the knife. He seemed reluctant to take hold of it and was quiet. I touched my finger to the blade, showing its filigree inlay work and the initials. He hissed through his teeth. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘It’s sharp – looks like it is. Where’d you say you found it?’

  ‘Deadness gut,’ I said. ‘Near the walkway.’

  ‘Strange things must wash up here.’ He handed it back, handle first. I couldn’t tell whether he was relieved or disappointed to let it go.

  ‘You’re telling me.’ I returned the knife to its sheath.

  I don’t know if the notebook was teaching me to notice or teaching me to remember so I could write it in my notebook later. It might have been both. Sometimes things caught in my mind – I don’t know why – and I did remember this.

  Cat and Josh went to Blackwater one morning and returned loaded with supplies. They must have been running low on food or were tired of the old tins. It was the first week of spring. I was out of patience with them on account of Cat’s manner, which continued aloof, and went down to tell them they better be careful, even though they didn’t care what I thought. I just wanted to give the line that connected us a good old yank. Cat was on the porch sofa, her hands clasped loose on her belly,
her eyes closed, and she had such a stricken look, tormented really. What was going on in her mind? She opened her eyes at my footfall and with some effort put on her mask of indifferent waiting.

  ‘You’re staying,’ I said.

  ‘Is that okay?’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not to me.’ I sat on the top stair.

  ‘Why ask then?’

  ‘I want to know you’re safe. You’ve got money?’

  ‘Enough. For now. And we used cash so they can’t trace us. We’re not idiots.’

  Josh came and stood in the doorway, leaning against it, tapping his toe at the screen door to keep it open.

  I said, ‘Good to know. Something else: people are going to notice you if you’re there too often.’

  ‘No one knows us there,’ Cat said. ‘Who would care? Luis and Alejandra didn’t come.’

  ‘It’s a small town.’

  ‘Why would that matter?’ Josh said.

  I shifted against the stair post to see him more easily. ‘You know how people are. They see something new, they start talking. They see you shopping like that again – two kids who look like they should be in school – they’ll get chatty, they’ll ask you things and they’ll pass that on. Are you ready to answer? Say someone comes to town looking, then what’s going to happen? Someone says, oh yeah, I saw them just last week, came in a boat. And they start looking at security cameras.’

  ‘Got it,’ Cat said sharply. ‘But why would they come looking here?’ She came to the porch railing in agitation, running her hand along it, up and down.