Island, p.16
Island, page 16
It is crystal, when I step into it it will shatter and cut me but instead I watch his legs he pushes his feet forward and it doesn’t shatter it parts like water. He can walk along. We can walk along. I can walk. I want it to stop the sea is glittering like knives like razors’ edges. I am afraid. I am breathing and the air is too thin no goodness in it I am breathing and breathing it trying to get it in I am trying I am gasping. I should not have come.
‘S-sit down.’ He sits on a grey stone grave grey stone he pats it sit here gravely. He slides away to the edge. Stopping is as dangerous as moving when you move it could shatter at any minute and lacerate you cut you to a thousand pieces but when you stop – when you stop it all stops. Suspended. Moves in. Comes to your edges, closes in around you, comes right up tight and wraps you suffocatingly close like clingfilm over your face the edge of the world comes right to your edge and clogs your mouth and nostrils and seals you tight as an unopened cellophane packet no air gets in to make it stale you will be vacuum packed and keep for ever in one spot.
‘Breathe slowly. Count. One potato t-two potato three p-potato four, five potato, six potato seven potato more.’ He moves he sits he moves his face, makes the sound to come out and nothing bad comes I can. I can. I can too.
We are sitting quietly, Calum says, ‘You see that ruin over there? Th-that tumbledown cottage?’ I see road it has little specks that glitter sharply: ditch; thistles, sharp crowns of thorns and rose brambles with their triangular thorns I see the hurting things they want to cut to puncture to slash to pierce.
‘S-slowly. Breathe slowly. One potato t-two potato–’
I see a ruin two half-fallen walls the third is higher I see charred roof beams still there and blue polythene is wrapped around one. ‘Yes.’
‘The salt murderess lived there. Shall I t-tell you the story?’
A mother. See the flashing blades see the points?
‘It’s not scary. It’s got a h-happy ending.’ I think I am hollow I am brittle as those chocolate bunnies at Easter they have bright tinfoil they have dark smiley faces all rich and chocolatey but they have a seam down the middle and you get your fingernail in and the bunny falls in two just like an empty shell. The Little People got here first. Nothing in the middle, nothing to eat, nothing to mend. No meat.
Pressure shatters hollow things. She is willing me to break.
‘C-can I have a cigarette?’ Calum is looking at me I feel my pockets I give him the packet and lighter Sally’s lighter he takes out two he lights them both he gives me one. It is so kind of him. He lights it for me he passes it into my fingers, it is simple kindness. Tears spring to my eyes. Everything is crystal clear, Calum, inhalations of cigarette, the circle of paper at the lighted end turning into ash, a distant tractor, sigh of wind. I hear the faraway honk of geese I hear a baby crying a woman scolding I hear sobbing I hear–
‘Don’t be afraid.’ Calum waves his hands in the air. ‘The island’s f-full of voices.’ We wait. We listen until silence falls like sleep.
‘I’ll tell you her story.’
This is the story he told me. How much can you see by lightning? Everything; one flash; everything. I was distracted (meaning mad; that’s the old meaning, not just inattentive, but mad). I saw the whole story together, beginning and end like a painting the plot and outcome simultaneous, not a story plod-plodding the line from one event to the next.
I can’t paint you a picture. I can’t show it in a flash. By now I will have forfeited most of your sympathy. Why should you listen to me? You have to be patient. I can only attempt to deliver it as it came to me, which is fragmentarily. If it was food my life would be a trail of half-chewed fragments, it would be a pile of cores and peelings and then a long stretch of saliva strands to the next item, maybe a plain bread roll a nice no-nonsense roll with butter. This is what it’s like. I have not been served a menu in order. Probably you wonder why I don’t tidy it up. Why should you have the regurgitations or the still lives of old leftovers?
Maybe I will. Maybe if I keep on telling it will get tidied in the telling. As Calum’s stories are tidied and smoothed by telling into shapes that fit like sea-pebbles in the palm of your hand. Tided by telling, by the waves of the sea.
Maybe ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was once regurgitated seafood. In the meantime you should be glad because the story Calum told me of the salt murderess is a round dish that you can have all in one like a bowl of soup perhaps, a deep red bowl of bortsch with a pale swirl of soured cream and brilliant green sprinkling of chopped chives on top. At least that’s how it was to me even in extremis as I was at that time. And it’s how it is now, I’ll tell it for you now. I call it Salt.
A woman lived here who murdered her children with salt. Joyce. She didn’t come from here. She came from a city. She spent fifteen years in prison, before she came to the Island.
Her children were one and three, both girls. She didn’t set out to murder them. She didn’t think she set out to murder them. No. What happened was this.
The little one didn’t sleep. She simply wouldn’t sleep. In the evening Joyce started by telling her stories, as she had to the older girl. In the end she was just counting. ‘Four thousand seven hundred and eighty-four. Four thousand seven hundred and eighty-five.’
When the child’s breathing was even and her fluttering eyelids closed, Joyce would stop. Wait. Listen. Then infinitely slowly, put down her right hand on the floor, turn her stiff creaking body to the right, shift her weight onto her knees. She would wait, kneeling on all fours, for the rustling of her clothes and creaking of the floor to subside. Then very slowly, hand against the wall for support, haul her aching self to her feet.
Nine times out of ten, as she inched towards the door, the baby’s eyes and mouth would fly open and a yell would freeze Joyce where she stood.
If the baby did fall asleep, she stayed that way for about an hour. Then she would be up again, rattling the bars of her cot, calling, babbling, crying. If Joyce tried to ignore her and remained slumped on the soggy sofa, the crying became wailing became shrieking and the crone next door began knocking on the wall with her stick and the older girl clutched Joyce’s legs and shouted ‘Naughty! Naughty! Naughty!’ and the walls of the room throbbed in and out with every exhaling shriek and indrawn breath and the band of suffocation tightened over Joyce’s chest.
When the child slept, Joyce slept; sometimes sitting propped against the wall by the cot; sometimes sprawled on the sofa; sometimes curled on the older girl’s narrow bed with the bedclothes twisted into a plait beneath the pair of them.
She gave salt to the older girl to punish her. It was morning and she was at the sink, quietly washing yesterday’s dishes, running through in her mind what she might be able to do if the baby slept on. After the dishes she might have a bath; she would gather up the dirty clothes and put them in the machine. She would take the bin down and empty it, if the baby slept, maybe even sweep the floor. Outside there was watery sunshine, a gleam of hope on the wet black tarmac.
Then the older girl fell off a chair. She’d been standing on it, leaning forward over the table to reach a crayon that had rolled – went to set her foot back down on the seat and missed it – fell sprawling sideways, pulling the chair over on top of herself, screaming with fright and shock. Instant stereo from the bedroom.
Joyce picks the fallen girl up by the scruff of the neck, plonks her on the righted chair, bawls into her face. ‘Now look what you’ve bloody done!’
The girl sits snivelling; from the bedroom the screams get louder. Joyce buries her face in her arms folded on the work surface; at last raises her eyes and focuses on salt. Before she’s thought she’s poured a slug through its Saxa red funnel into her daughter’s mug; half-filled with water, stirred till the cloud’s dispersed.
‘Here.’ Slamming it on the table. ‘Drink that. That’ll teach you.’
The girl sips and puts it down carefully.
‘Drink it!’
‘Don’t like it.’
‘I don’t give a fuck what you bloody well like. Drink it.’
The little girl picks up the mug and drinks. When she is half done she starts to retch. Her mother picks her up and takes her to the bathroom, stands her in the bath.
‘Puke there if you’re going to puke.’
The coughing subsides.
‘Now get out of my way. Get.’
The girl scrabbles out of the bath and runs to her bed. She gets in and pulls the covers up. Joyce stumbles to her room and grabs the screaming baby.
At first it was a punishment. Something she could make them both do, that they didn’t like. Force the girl to drink it. Put it in the baby’s bottle and let her gulp until she tasted it. Give her something to scream for, that would.
Then she noticed it made them sleep. That first morning, the girl stayed in her bed till noon. If they drank enough to make them vomit it exhausted them and they slept even more. Or it gave them stomach aches and they lay whimpering quietly, squirming in their beds, unable to run around or bellow.
The baby’d drink it without a fuss, mixed in juice. With the older one, she and the girl both knew it was punishment. For making a noise. For spilling something. For being clumsy or untidy or simply in the way. For being. And she was big enough to say no, to go without a drink. Joyce slapped her away from the taps and the fridge. When she drank her dirty bathwater Joyce started putting salt in that.
It was never intended to kill them. She didn’t know it could. Just wanted to teach them a lesson.
Teaching them a lesson is for their own good. Joyce had been taught lessons. She’d learned I want doesn’t get and nothing in this world comes free. She’d learned not to get above herself and not to ask for the moon. She’d learned money doesn’t grow on trees. She’d learned life’s a vale of tears. Valuable lessons, needing to be learned by young children. Joyce was helping them to learn. Helping them not to be like herself; so desperately furiously suffocatingly trapped, so caged and raging, so dissatisfied. They were born bad, like her, and she could teach them to be otherwise. Teach them – herself – a lesson.
When the older one had a fit, her body twitching and convulsing like a fish flipped out of water, Joyce watched with tearful sympathy then carried her, calm and floppy, to her bed; tucked her in and kissed her. Poor little kid. So much pain in life. She might as well get used to it now. Joyce was doing her a favour. Poor little mite; now she was beginning to understand the truth of it, life.
When they were both in bed all the time, it was easy. Poor things. It was for their own good. If they learned who was boss now it’d stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives. She mopped up the vomit lovingly. Bought fresh orange to put the salt in.
The baby died first. It had been sleeping a really long time. So long that Joyce herself was calm and refreshed, humming as she made herself a cup of tea, smiling at the TV presenter, only mildly annoyed by the car alarm that went off under the window, loud enough to wake the dead.
It didn’t wake the baby.
The baby was cold to touch. In terror Joyce grabbed her up. Thumped her on the back, tried to breathe into her mouth, ran to the phone, stabbed 999.
It was only when she was being asked her details in the hospital that they found she had another; back went the ambulance – and back again to the hospital, bearing the older child still breathing, but salted down into a coma from which she never would recover.
The salt murderess. At her trial she cried salt tears and said she was only trying to keep them quiet. Why is it on sale if it’s a poison? she wanted to know. The prosecution said it was a poison so unpleasant that no one would take it unless forced by measures of extreme cruelty. That the physical sufferings it induced included painful muscle cramps and contractions, raging thirst, vomiting, diarrhoea, hallucinations and convulsions.
‘But they drank it!’ wailed the mother.
‘You gave them no alternative.’
The salt murderess was sent to jail, judged to be of perfectly sound mind and a danger to all children.
In prison all children visited her, convulsing up and down the walls of her cell. For fifteen years she lived in a cell where children writhed around her like worms in a fisherman’s bucket. For fifteen years she half lived, numb with pain, blind with too much vision.
And when they let her out of prison she came to live on the Island. A fellow prisoner had talked about it. About the emptiness, and the gleams of light on water. From the prison library Joyce borrowed books on gardening.
She found an empty cottage – that very one we sat by: semi-derelict, forgotten, owned by someone on the mainland.
She lived there lightly, with planks and polythene sacks across the roof, an untidy plot of onions and potatoes at the back. Walked to the post office each Thursday to collect her giro, buy a few groceries. Never bought salt. Spoke to no one. Sat in the evening and the morning staring out to sea, the sides of her head unpeeled to the horizon, not a wall not a child in sight.
Dreamed by night of glistening saltchildren floating in white from the sea, sculpted and still as bars of soap in the moonlight; saltchildren, a million crystallised tears. They floated gently as ice in the black water, bumping and nudging in to shore. But in the morning when she looked they were gone, there was only the brown seaweed bobbing to the surface, and the occasional grey-backed gull.
Salt preserves and salt destroys. All life sprang from the salt-soup of the sea but her children are dead as rocks and hang as heavy about her heart. It was a madness, an accident, an impossibility. How can there be a thing done, which can never never be undone? How, in a botched and transitory life, can one thing become irrevocable? She sees she is only that: a saltmurderess. All the rest of her life is void. It was all, waiting to become that, and living to regret it. Clouds and sea spume are the colour of salt; sea air keeps the taste of it in her mouth: even here, there is no escape.
Then one frosty salt-grained night there’s scrabbling at her propped-up door; scrabbling and snuffling and shuddering sobs. Head still full of salt-mummies she stumbles to the glassless window and leans out. A young girl is battering weakly on the door, fists upraised, hair salt-silver in the moonlight.
‘Here,’ Joyce calls. Her voice has scarcely worked for sixteen years. The girl comes blindly to the window – Joyce helps her over the sill, leads her to her matted pile of bedding, wraps her in a blanket. When the girl has snuffled and burrowed herself to sleep, Joyce lies beside her, curling her body around the warm question-mark of the girl’s blanketed back.
It is no mystery where she comes from. She’s the younger daughter of old McCaulin. Who that night had tried with her what he’d been doing with her older sister the past five years. Only the nine-year-old did not lie sickened and still but fought like a cat, scratched him to bleeding and ran two dark miles to the safety of the nearest dwelling: Joyce’s.
And there she stayed. Walking down to get the boat for school, and back in the evening to Joyce’s cottage. When McCaulin was out fishing she fetched her things from his house, and two of his six geese that she said were hers. They kept them in the ruined front room and they made fine watchdogs. She showed Joyce how to collect winkles, and where the blackberries were. They ate no salt.
And when Joyce sat staring out to sea in the evening, the girl coloured in her exercise book on the flat rock beside her; or if it was wet, they sat either side of the driftwood fire, and made up spooky stories.
Joyce never spoke of her children; nor the girl, her father. This was their life. And when Joyce lay curled around her island-daughter’s sleeping back, she had no more dreams of saltchildren, but dreamt instead she was at the prow of a boat, with the warm sun on her face and chest, sailing forward into the light.
18 Birthday cake
After the story we went on down to the shore at Viking Bay where all the pebbles are black and we looked for things to go in Calum’s rucksack. A child’s broken plastic truck (red and yellow), some polystyrene (white), shreds of torn net (green). While we were on the beach it clouded over, the sharp sunlight was muffled, swathed in clouds. I felt safer. Calum gave me a drink of hot tea out of his thermos. I was very – small. Concentrated. I was a small compact bundle for me to carry around and although susceptible to attack I was slightly protected, I was volatile but wrapped. I was carrying me quietly, concentrating on the black pebbles and the bits of polystyrene.
And when we walked back up the beach and back to the path he told me the Viking Bay story. Which I will tell you later. And we went back to Calum’s house and I was alright, I watched him add today’s finds to his mounds. Then he was taking a sack of onions down to the shop to sell, he slung them over a bike and wheeled it and I went with him there as well and bought some bread and tomatoes and kippers for my tea. I bought a newspaper to read. Calum bought tobacco and papers, he was excited, it was the first time he’d bought some himself. I was holding it together and I was able to think I remember this quite clearly, thinking I am managing to get back on balance I’m doing well. This may only have been a Fear-wobble not a plunge, I’m going to be all right. It depended on the night I realised that but I was controlling things well. I was OK with Calum, there was a clear space between me and Calum, and nothing like that would ever happen again.
It was quite dark when we got back to her house, Calum didn’t ride his bike, he wheeled it beside me and I was glad of that. The house seemed very dark, as if she’d forgotten to turn on any lights, Calum leaned his bike on the fence and went to the front door. ‘Come this way,’ he said and I followed him. It smelt smoky. And waxy. There was a candle burning in the hall. I thought there’d been a power cut. I followed Calum into the kitchen. There were candles arranged in three rows from end to end of the table, and in the middle a cake. She wasn’t there. Calum was staring at the table.
‘What is it?’
‘I-I forgot.’
‘Forgot what?’
