Chapter 31
Should I stay or should I go?
She swam every day, partly because that’s what they had always done when on the island, but mainly because it was the moment when she felt most alive and connected to him.
She swam on the long curve of white sand they called the home beach because you could easily walk the third of a mile to it barefoot across the long sweep of field grass and wild flowers, climbing over the wire fences that divided the fields on rickety stiles nailed to the wooden fence posts.
When there had been crofters working the land, these fields were used to graze and separate cows, sheep and one particularly massive bull, so that keeping the gates closed was a habit drilled into her from childhood.
The fact that all the gates had been left open by the last crofters to leave the land was still something she couldn’t get used to, and she had to fight the impulse to close them every time she walked past. Some sheep had been left to roam wild on the island, and the departing farmers hadn’t thought it right to deprive them of sweet field grass, or the right to roam freely over the newly ceded landscape.
She’d never liked the wire fences, having scratched herself badly on her inner thigh when a teenager and trying to short-cut over one.
Wire in a grass landscape, especially when that grass is not kept low by regular grazing is hard to see and an accident waiting to happen, as it becomes hidden and rusty.
There was an old lane that ran from the back of the house between two fields in a line as straight as a Roman road, heading across the smooth field grass towards the more hummocky land that marked the beginning of the machair and the upswept back-ridge of the long sand dunes crowned with marram grass that swooped down to the sea beyond.
That patch of straight road running between two fields was a relic of a time when supplies came by sea, when the tarmac single-track that circled the island hadn’t even been imagined, let alone built.
In her mind she called it the Road to Nowhere, and she walked it every day, and used to hang her wet towel on the strand of wire that stretched across the three-metre width of the gate at the end, a wire you had to duck under if you were tall, strung as a once-temporary-but-now-likely-permanent fix to brace the tilting gateposts at a time when keeping the gateposts in true with each other so the gate would close properly had been important.
She didn’t have a swimsuit to hang next to the towel because she swam naked.
The beach had been long and private enough for that even when the world was normal.
Now a swimsuit seemed like the greatest affectation.
And even on her lowest days it was inarguable that swimming just felt better without clothes.
She’d pretty much minimised the question of clothes too, in that she just wore a faded blue engineer’s boilersuit, with a T-shirt or no shirt in the hot summer weather, and with layered sweaters under the boilersuit in winter.
There was another green John Deere boilersuit she cut the legs off and arms off and wore when the summer got too hot.
She washed her limited rotation of underwear and T-shirts every Monday because she suspected once she gave up on hygiene and its attendant routines, she might start sliding down a very dark hill.
Wash day gave her purchase on that slippery slope.
So did drawing and painting. She’d always been a good draughtswoman, and the house had enough materials to get her going again.
She sat and watched the birds and the animals of the island and sketched them swiftly and precisely in pencil.
Or she’d find a rock to sit against and contemplate the entire landscape as the weather swept over it, altering the feel of it moment to moment, like moods flashing across a well-loved face.
And then she’d take out the watercolours and try and capture some of that.
Preserving these moments was an activity that calmed her and gave her a much-needed sense of agency.
She’d go to bed feeling that at least she had, in some way, celebrated something of the day by commemorating it on paper.
The other drawings she made were the ones she worked on inside, in front of the long mirror she’d brought down to the sitting room where she worked and read by the peat fire when the weather was too bad to go outside to work on her vegetable patches, or to fish.
She found she needed to keep her hands and eyes busy as much as possible because it took the top layer off her mind and stopped her thinking about all the reasons to worry and despair.
Idle hands let the little devils whisper into your mind, her mother had once said, not too seriously but it had stuck.
In front of the mirror she drew herself, often in charcoal, usually her face and her shoulders, but sometimes full length, naked, exposed to her own uncritical but exacting eye.
And she knew it was the magical thinking she is increasingly having to patrol herself for, because she mistrusts it, but also maybe the self-portraits are a way of freezing herself in time until he comes back.
Maybe the evolving versions of herself are a journal for him, so he can still partake of the missing years.
Because now nearly two years had gone, there was every chance the future would multiply into more plurals.
Maybe she’d chronicle her descent into bent old age, still alone, becoming both littler and less of herself, thankfully needing smaller and smaller bits of paper to chronicle her existence on.
That spoke to the only other worry she was troubled by, other than the fear that he would never make good on his promise of coming for her because the pandemic had come for him instead. The other fear was that she would run out of paper, pencils and paints.
And so began the only bit of larceny that she allowed herself in an island whose empty, furnished houses now lay open for the picking.
She would go into them and look for paper and art materials.
If she took anything she always left a note, because even though in her head she knew that the owners would never return since what ailed the world was not something that it would recover from, in her heart the departed people’s houses would be claimed by their children or grandchildren as they always had been.
Because she hadn’t yet lived it, a future truly lacking the succession of younger generations was literally unimaginable.
She could, in her darkest moments, imagine a world without him specifically, just not one devoid of humans in general.
And she could imagine a world without her too.
She’d imagined another way out of her dilemma.
She had a general thought – that she had purposely and self-protectively not focused too hard on – that one day, if he never came, she would walk out into the sea on a warm calm afternoon and swim away beyond the protection of the bay into the gentle rise and fall of the oceanic swell until her strength failed and she sunk gently into the rocking arms of oblivion.