Chapter 23 #4
There was a comforting sense of movement to his dreams. The clouds were all floating in the same direction, which they never normally did.
Innes walked the ribbon road beside him and he hummed happily as he ate chips from a greasy newspaper.
When they came upon some sheep, none of them called his name as they sometimes did.
The men met no one else on the road. But they were moving, making progress, not just trampling the same patch of tarmacadam as Cal had done in all those nightmares before.
Tonight, all the perspectives were true: the house was larger than the men, the dog was smaller than the caravan.
The earth under his feet didn’t rise up to meet him, or tilt, crack, and slide him towards the sea.
Tonight, his mother wasn’t fleeing over the hills.
And he didn’t have to chase her, never quite catching her, no matter how fast he ran.
He awoke to a hammering sound.
The big light flashed like an atom bomb and Cal bolted upright, his eyes stung by the brilliance.
His father was shouting at him, which filled him with the instinctual fear that he had done something wrong.
John was cursing in English as he tossed clothes at Cal.
“There are lights on the shore!” he cried. “Get up. Get up!”
He dressed as quickly as he could. He ran his good hand through his hair and the feeling of stubble was so unexpected that he cried out in fright.
Outside his bedroom window, the night sky was like a hand cupped over the eyes, the navy blue licked by the faintest leak of pink at the far horizon. He saw that his father was right: there were lights, many lights, strange lights, all winking in the distance.
His father drove too fast. Ella pressed her fingers to her papery eyelids and held her eyes closed.
They came to the slipway and roared past the inn.
They drove a few miles more and were forced to stop behind the abandoned cars that were blocking the road.
All the engines were running, their headlights pointing every direction, like the torch beams of a group lost in the murk.
Their neighbours were gathering down by the water’s edge and they seemed so small underneath the massive sky.
They stood alone and apart, like the ghostly posts of a rotted-out pier.
He watched as the distance between them started to close.
As they came together their backs formed a wall and they held on to one another for something more than heat.
He had dressed again in the bloodied clothes that his father had tossed to him.
His sport socks were bunching in the toe of his brogues as he helped his grandmother across the rocks.
They fell behind as John rushed ahead and around the wall of bodies, his shirttail flapping in the wind.
Ella clung to Cal. She dragged on him, all heavy and reluctant and she wore an expression that said she had seen too much already, that she didn’t want to know what waited on the other side of the islanders.
Doll was a beautiful shade of powder blue.
He absorbed all the faint morning light. His skin was chalky, as though he would rasp if you rubbed him. His lips were a blue-blue grey, a ghostly absence of colour that reminded Cal of clouds floating over fresh snow. His eyes were dulled to the colour of bad weather.
He lay in the mouth of the ruined Bedford van wearing only his faded boxer shorts.
His denims hung from his ankles like a stitched-on shadow, a bloated Peter Pan.
The rest of his clothes were strewn about and lay in heaps.
His mouth hung open like he was snoring, and he seemed to be asleep, Cal was sure of it.
Someone had ripped the tarpaulin from the rear of the van.
They had pinned it in one corner with a large boulder and now the wind caught it and it danced like a noisy, mocking wraith.
Beady took Ella’s arm and they joined the mass of islanders.
Cal crept closer. He gathered the tarpaulin in his arms and forced it to stop its giddy dance.
He watched as Innes knelt at Doll’s side. He closed the young man’s eyes before wiping the bile from his lips. Then he tucked his flaccid penis back into his boxer shorts, where it had fallen innocently, through the slit in the front.
Sarah Macdonald held her two youngest daughters by the hand.
Her long skirt was caught in the wind and it looked as if she was sailing across the rocks.
Her face was a rictus of pain, cracked lips pulled back in a snarl.
As she floated closer, Cal realised that she was wailing in one long, uninterrupted howl but that her throat was so raw with pain that the rasping sound that escaped her sounded like the sea grating on the shore.
Donnie Macdonald was standing over his son as though he was guarding him.
Sarah reached out to him like she might fall and he took her arm to steady her, but she shirked him and started clawing at his jumper.
Donnie didn’t defend himself as she ripped it over his head.
She kept pulling and plucking at him, as though she were stripping a child that had fallen in muck.
The other women stepped forwards. They formed a wall around Sarah and helped her lift and move the body as she dressed her son in his father’s warm clothes.
Without the mortar of women, the men came apart. They wandered down shore and formed a loose circle. They bowed their heads as Shockie led them in prayer.
As Cal prayed, he felt the heat of another body by his side.
Isla used her finger to pry open the whelk of his fist. Without raising his head he regarded her from the corner of his eye.
Her belly was heavy and sitting low. She supported the weight of it with one hand as Cal ran his thumb over the back of her other.
He swung his lowered eyes to the right and knew his father was watching them.
The prayer ended. They lifted their heads. Cal could look at her properly for the first time. She appeared so grown up in one of her mother’s maternity dresses. He put his arms around her – he didn’t care what the men thought.
Innes scooped up the littlest Macdonald girls and held them to his chest. He wrapped them in his overcoat, and they cooried inside, disappeared entirely until only their straw-coloured hair erupted from his neckline and he was transformed into a scarecrow bursting at the seams.