Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
Axe
The island has grown smaller. Now that his height has shot up, Axe feels like he could stretch his arms and reach both the north and south sandy shores, his wingspan wider than a falcon’s.
But he can’t reach. He lives in a literal castle on a hill, with rolling grounds and trees and a ballroom big enough to fit a thousand.
Of course, the island hasn’t grown smaller, and his life hasn’t grown bigger.
Hamish says it’s normal for thirteen-year-old boys to want to run away, to dream of getting in a rowboat and leaving everything and everyone you know behind.
Axe doesn’t feel like he’d be leaving much behind anyway.
He doesn’t know many people—unless you count the revolving girls, and he doesn’t know them, not really—so it wouldn’t be too hard to say goodbye. But he doesn’t say that to Hamish.
He doesn’t want to break his big brother’s heart. If he still has one.
Axe has spent his whole life on Skara Brae, except a failed experiment at boarding school. His one chance at escape, and he was home within the year—with two black eyes, a broken rib, a bruise blooming across his back.
The administration said that maybe the school “wasn’t the right fit”—what they really meant was they didn’t know how to keep this sensitive soul safe from furious little boys playing at being men.
Didn’t know what to do with a kid who had never watched telly or heard Eminem.
Didn’t know how to teach a student who knew more about physics and astronomy and history than the faculty.
“Come on, little brother. Put away that book, and let’s go watch the girls change,” Hamish says on a Monday afternoon like every other—the Whales partying, Axe hiding away in the library.
But Axe doesn’t want to watch the girls.
They look through him like he’s a ghost, and he prefers it that way.
He’d rather they ignore him than flinch, which is what they do when they see Hamish or Da. Or any other man.
Hamish has never seemed to mind living in the castle, or even his father, though he gets the cane as much as Axe.
He admires their da’s power, wants to step into his shoes one day.
Hamish will be king of the castle for real and not just in the games he used to play with Axe before Hamish outgrew them.
“Nah. Leave them alone. They get enough of that from everyone else,” Axe says, turning back to the book in his lap. He now spends all his time tucked away in a corner in a leather armchair facing the window, reading, or outside, identifying trees and plants and flowers to draw in his journal.
“Come on. It’s time you learned how to be a man,” Hamish says, and knocks Robinson Crusoe, Axe’s favorite novel, out of his hands with a hard swipe.
It lands on the floor with a dusty thud, and though it’s obvious Hamish is trying to get a rise out of Axe, to make him get to his feet and throw punches, all Axe feels like doing is crying.
“I don’t want to do this, Hamish,” Axe says in a tone too weary for thirteen.
Lately, he’s been learning all about Darwin and wonders if maybe he and his family are of different species or if they’ve adapted some survival gene that somehow bypassed him.
He doesn’t want to touch the girls, not with their sad, hollowed eyes, and he doesn’t want to bloody Hamish’s lip the way Hamish so desperately seems to want to bloody his.
With the girls, the problem is he’s seen too much.
He knows they swallow pills to stay up late and then more to sleep.
Once, Axe walked into a bathroom to find two of them sitting on the edge of the tub, sticking needles in their arms. Once, he came down for breakfast to find a girl passed out in the dining hall in a puddle of her own vomit.
Once, he saw the mangled body of a girl who’d thrown herself off the crenellated roof.
He wonders what really happened to his own mother, who died when he was ten.
How did she go? Was she carted away and buried at sea?
No one says. Da never speaks of her. Hamish doesn’t know; different mothers, different silences.
So Axe did the only thing he could think; he climbed the cliffs and drove a wooden cross into the earth.
No name on it—just a way to remind himself not to wait for her return in this world.
“Da’s right. You are a pussy,” Hamish says, stepping closer, and he sucker punches Axe right in the gut. Axe feels the hit, sharp and fast, but doesn’t give Hamish the reaction he wants. Instead, he looks past his shoulder, as if seeing a ghost lurking there that his brother cannot see.
Axe’s mum, Lurlene, was a model. She used to live behind a locked door in the keep, the part of the castle that used to be its most heavily guarded building, and it still is—men with rifles stand by its doors all day and night.
Lurlene got special privileges because she belonged to Da.
She didn’t have to go to the parties, didn’t even talk to the other girls.
Axe wasn’t allowed to see her except on special visiting days, when he’d walk past the men with the guns and enter the keep and then sit on his mum’s lap while she read to him.
Until one day Da said things were going to change. A lad did not need to be babied by his mother. And then, as if it were of no consequence, he told Axe that there would be no more visiting days; his mum had gone to heaven.
Axe remembers his own mum as warm and Hamish’s as cold.
Hamish’s mom, Ekaterina, was a short, thin woman who flitted around the castle in a bikini even when it was snowing.
He remembers her “taking care of the other girls,” which seemed to mean yelling at them in a language he didn’t recognize when they stepped out of line.
Russian, maybe? Axe doesn’t know what happened to her, either.
She was there before he left for boarding school and was gone by the time he got back.
And that’s when Hamish changed, too: started noticing the girls, made them look at him and touch him like they did Da and his friends.
“You’re just going to stand there, ya daft prick? Come on. Fight me. Show me what you’re made of,” Hamish says, fists raised like a boxer’s. This is what Hamish does when he’s bored. He sniffs around for trouble.
“Do we really have to—” Axe says, and before he can finish his question, he hears the crack and then feels the blood gushing from his nose. Hamish punched him right in the face. He is a pussy, he thinks, he must be. Because even now, all Axe wants to do is run.
He understands the girls—the pills and the needles, their unfocused eyes. He understands dreaming about the oblivion of the deep blue sea, of catapulting off this tiny patch of land into the unknown.
Far, far away from the king of the castle. Far, far away from Da.
Axe calmly stops the bleeding with the front of his T-shirt, picks up Robinson Crusoe from the floor, and lightly brushes past his brother’s shoulder as he walks out the door.