Chapter 12 #2
I don’t know how much of it was true. Cat agreed, but neither of us could see why they would lie about any of it.
Maybe they were filling in their own gaps.
Maybe stories of our parents before we were born are all like that, like fairy tales we half make up because we weren’t there and only ever know the incomplete parts that we were told.
So what Storm told me one night on top of the Tower was this:
Their mother was a twin like them, and those twins lived with their family high up on the other side of the North Sea.
And because of something that happened in that family the two young women, the mother and her twin, left and sailed south and found a place to live in the sun far away from whatever or whoever was bad in the family, so far south that none of that would be able to find them again.
And they were happy and lived in an orange grove on a hill that was like an apple orchard except with oranges which are fruit that is juicy instead of crunchy, and you don’t eat the skins.
Being on a hill with a view of the two wide bays to east and west of the spit of land it stood on meant they could see all round and a long way out to sea, and so spot any sails that might have decided to follow them from the north.
The mother and the aunt liked it there because it was just the two of them and because it was hot, hotter than where they had come from, the bad home they called the winterlands because they still had snow up there most years.
Where they now lived, in the orange grove, there was never snow and even the winters were warm enough not to bother them.
They lived there for two winters and three summers and no sails ever came looking for them from the winterlands, and they were happy enough.
But then one day they woke to a sound they had never heard before in their lives.
It was music being played on an instrument they found out was called a violin that rose and fell on the still morning air, sometimes low and mournful, sometimes wild and happy as it swooped up and down the highs and lows of the tune.
They ran to the edge of the terrace of their house and carefully peered down through the orange trees to see that a strange boat with red sails had anchored in their bay.
The music was being played by a bearded man sitting beside a fishing rod propped on the bow rail, as if he was calling the fish to dance their way on to the hook on the end of his line.
Their father – because that’s who the man on the boat became – was a traveller, he said, an explorer who had sailed far and wide, looking for people and collecting things to trade with any that he found, though he admitted he had not found many people at all.
In fact, the mother and the aunt were the first he and his dog had seen in over a year.
They, after initially being suspicious of his easy smile and his generous way, decided they liked him.
He was young like they were, and clever with his hands and could make them laugh.
He played wonderful music and was full of stories about the places he had sailed to and the other places he wanted to go.
He came from the North Sea too, from even higher up than them.
They had been raised in an archipelago, which is a long word for a scrabble of little islands, all smooth rock and pine trees, but he had been born deep down the sharp end of a long fjord, which is a long high-sided valley full of water cut into the unforgiving coastline of once upon a time Norway.
His father had been a sailor too – as had his grandfather and those that came before him, most likely – a trader and a tinker, threading his way from settlement to settlement, looking for the remnants of humanity, mapping them on old paper charts that he adjusted as time took its toll and families that had been clinging on five or ten years ago, when last visited, had disappeared or dwindled or gone away to join up with other diminishing groups to cling on for a few more years.
He had left it when he was old enough to sail his father’s boat, leaving the day his father died, and they burned him like an old king on the steep edge of the shoreline.
He said living at the bottom of a fjord had made him feel like the walls of his world were always closing in, squeezing the breath out of him when all he wanted was big horizons and a whole wide world to breathe in.
He had his father’s boat and his family maps, and decided to go and see who was still out there, and what he might find along the way to trade with them.
He found fewer people than his father and his father’s fathers had found, but he also encountered many things they hadn’t, the most delightful of which, he said, was the girl’s mother and aunt.
Except of course they weren’t a mother and aunt yet, just two young women living a happy life in the sun on a hill overlooking two bays, surrounded by orange trees.
That changed, but not in a bad way, not to begin with. And not, in the end, because the man did anything wrong. It was what he didn’t do that was bad, which was return. Because one day he left, and didn’t come back when he said he would.
That was a bit that Cat and I couldn’t make sense of, but it had happened in the sort of myth time before the girls were born, so they were just repeating what they had been told, and maybe that was just kindly meant lies told to explain to them why they had two mothers and no father.
Because he didn’t come back, but of course he left something behind, two things actually, since nine months later Freya and Storm were born.
Although Storm said it might have been nice to have had a father, especially one who could sing and make music dance in your head, they had an extra mother instead, and so the four of them stayed together and were a happy family.
They weren’t a happy family among the orange trees however, because one day, maybe six months after the traveller had gone and they’d admitted to themselves that he wasn’t coming back, maybe because he had drowned or his boat had foundered somewhere over the horizon, two boats came into view with sails that were the wrong colour – not red like his, but still familiar.
The way Storm said her mother told it, the family from the north had come south looking for them as they feared, and because luck is a joker, in the whole huge haystack of the world they had accidentally sailed into just the place where the needle they were trying to find was hidden.
That was the bad news. The good news was that they came at dusk and dropped anchor in the East Bay, not the next one along, where the mother’s boat was moored.
If they had arrived earlier in the day they might have sailed on and seen it, or dropped anchor where they were and gone for a short walk up to the ridge with a view of both bays.
As it was they moored, slept on their boats and when the sun rose on the next morning they found nothing to see in the West Bay because the mother and aunt of the two girls had gone.
They went north, thinking that the family would keep searching southwards and not have any reason to double back on their tracks.
They went a long way, to France Storm said, and this time they found a river and sailed far down it so the girls when they were born grew up on a wide and gentle river surrounded by land.
They had their two mothers and a happy life hunting and growing things.
But always with one eye to the river, Storm told me later, when we were almost friends and talked about things.
One eye to the river, she said. Because this river was one our father had told our mother that he loved. Because the city at the end of it had so much good stuff to find, hidden among the ruins.
So their eyes stayed on the river as much out of hope of seeing him as fear the family from the north might find them. But he never came and neither did the family. In some ways it sounded as if their life was quite like ours, except with parents to teach them, instead of just books.
Then, years later, the aunt didn’t wake up. That’s what Storm said. She didn’t die of anything, not any illness or an accident, just of not waking up.
I suppose she died of a surprise, she said. Because that’s what it was for all of us.
After the sadness of the aunt who was also really a mother dying, their real mother decided they should move, because although her dying had just been a bad surprise and even worse luck, where they were was where that bad luck now lived, and she thought they should go looking for somewhere with better luck in it.
The girls didn’t want to leave the riverside place that was their home, neither the house nor the tree under which their aunt now slept.
They didn’t want to leave her there, left in the cold ground, abandoned and alone.
Their mother told them they weren’t really leaving the aunt behind because you take the people who you’ve loved and who have loved you back with you wherever you go, in your heart.
And she told them they could always look up at the moon, because wherever you went the moon would always be there, and they should imagine their aunt was up there looking back down on them, and that way they’d never leave her, not really, and so would never need to feel alone.
That was so like what my mother had said to Cat that it made me shiver when she said it.
So they packed up the boat with all the useful things they might need and took them and the happy memories of their aunt and sailed back out into the wide world beyond the river looking for a better place to be.
Or maybe a father, said Storm, again later, when we were almost friends, and she was going back over the story. I think maybe our mother was looking for a father for us, but by then it was too late. Because we were already grown.