ONCE, THERE HAD been the fisherman and for a while Harlean had sold her memories of him to the red-haired women of the island.
Harlean claimed to have spotted him in the mud one evening, all loose and dead-looking and jostled by the pink, lacy edge of the in-creeping tide; to have put him on her back like a basket of shrimp and carried him home. Harlean (shrunken, old, ugly as a toad) claimed he’d stayed with her till morning, when his friends came in a flat-bottomed boat with a square sail and took him away. She said his hair had been black, and so had that of his friends. ‘Black like night,’ she’d told the women as they took their coins from their apron pockets and dropped them into the clay dish next to the door.
But after the initial excitement, the women had grown bored. They were tired now of Harlean’s story and wondered if it had really happened or was something she’d made up so she could take their money. Harlean still insisted it was true, and when the red-haired women stopped coming, she sat in her little house and looked out at the huge rose-coloured sea and the coral sky and told herself that if he ever came back she would keep him and not let him go. She would put him in the low room under the eaves, bring soft pillows and a lamp in there, and charge them all a shilling a time.
Only Gerda still came whenever she could, with the occasional halfpenny she managed to smuggle out of the crimson teapot where Lorm kept the money.
‘Tell me again, Harlean,’ said Gerda in a whisper, as if she thought Lorm might have followed her along the beach and be listening outside, his thick, rufous beard pressed close against the rough planking of the old woman’s little door.
‘Go on, Harlean,’ she said. ‘Tell.’ And when Harlean heard the clink of the coin in the dish, she told. The thing about Harlean—greedy, old, ugly Harlean Gill—was that she had a poet’s tongue in her frizzled auburn head. To hear Harlean recall the day she found the fisherman was to see him lying across the filthy vermilion quilt of her wooden bed, breathing softly in his sleep and muttering words from his strange language like the lines of a jumbled song. To hear Harlean describe his black hair was to feel it fall across your rust-freckled shoulders; it was to forget, in the cool inky glitter of its touch, the dreary russet monotony of your own people, the red-kissed dot in the ocean where you lived and died.
To Gerda, Harlean’s fisherman was a wonder, a cup of water in the desert, as much a miracle as the rainbow that had appeared once in the coral sky when she was a girl, revealing to them all possibilities they had never dreamed of. She confided to Harlean that at night when Lorm was asleep she searched her skin for the coarse red threads his beard had left behind there; she climbed out of bed and crossed the small dark room and dropped them on the fire; watched them sizzle and turn to a pale-pink ash. Night, she said, was her favourite time, when the dark quenched the island of all its lurid pigment and you could look at the black sky and the pale moon and the blinking stars and feel refreshed.
She said she longed for some kind of change, some interruption in the eternal sameness of the island and its inhabitants. She told Harlean how the red dust from the streets coated the inside of her mouth like fur, that she felt thirsty all the time, that she gagged on the shrimp and the ruby-fleshed fish Lorm brought home every night for supper. That she spent hours in the woods hunting for undiscovered leaves and flowers to make new dyes for their clothes, as if by some miracle she might manage to produce a new colour. She cried with fury when everything came out the way it always had, everything the same ancient, familiar shades of raspberry and rust; salmon, carrot, madder, rose. Scarlet shawls and crimson skirts till you were sick of the sight of them. Every object looking back at you out of your own four walls: the quilt on the bed, the teapot, the floor’s woven rug, Lorm’s clay pipe, his soft work cap, everything washed with the same dull repeated palette.
What she dreaded most was the thought of the children she would one day bear Lorm. She watched the other women kissing and cuddling theirs: all of them, as far as she could see, exactly alike, with the same tedious shock of thick, glowing curls, each one like something grown in the island’s glutinous gingery clay and pulled from it. Sometimes she went across to her neighbours’ houses to mind the children while their mothers went out on some errand. She could hardly tell one child from the next; the sight of them filled her with an indescribable boredom.
Harlean listened silently, and thought of the income to be had, should the fisherman and his friends or some other freak of nature ever set foot on their shores again.
Lorm knew all about the stolen halfpennies. He’d watched Gerda hurrying past their neighbours’ low houses strung along the beach road until she reached the old woman’s hovel right at the end. He’d heard the hiss of his own hair in the fire at night and asked himself how he could change to make his wife happy. He knew that his contentment with what they had, with the way things were, was a thorn to her. She couldn’t bear him to tell her he had everything he wanted here in the island’s pink, pleated cliffs, their russet pigs.
My beloved flame-haired wife.
She ended up storming off to the beach in a fury and he’d watch her from the house, a small strawberry smudge in the distance looking out to sea. He pictured the grim determined set of her square, heavy jaw. It was as if she believed that by the sheer force of her longing, she could change things.
One day, brought to furious tears by a batch of new dye—a deep, nauseating shade of copper that merged with everything around her and made her chest heave—Gerda screamed at Lorm like she never had before. Screamed at the back of his bowed red head bent over the logs as he arranged them carefully into a neat pyramid for their evening fire.
‘Aren’t you ever curious, Lorm? Aren’t you ever thirsty for something new that might be out there?’ and she thrust a freckled finger towards the window in the direction of the sea.
Lorm felt her scorn in his back. He was conscious of his own head bobbing in and out of the fireplace as he worked, and thought how he must look like a fat red bird. He turned to look at his wife. Her flushed face was almost the same florid shade as her hair. He thought she looked lovely. He wished he could invent something to long for, but however hard he tried, nothing came into his mind. A hopeless, lopsided smile slid across his face. He shrugged, extended his empty, spade-shaped hands towards her and she ran out of the house, across the field behind and vanished into the trees.
On the other side of the wood, she stopped running, burning hot and choking. Her hair hung thickly over her arms; she picked up a hank of it, held it up to the light and groaned. The red trees blazed around her, in the water below the pink cliffs she could see shoals of coral fish moving, kicking up the sand beneath them and making it rise through the rosy water in scarlet clouds. A wave of nausea ploughed through her body, she shivered, her limbs shook, her teeth chattered and she sank to her knees. ‘God help me,’ she whispered and vomited on the ground.
Harlean Gill was sure she’d glimpsed a sail out on the horizon. She was certain she could smell something new and foreign on the breeze.
If she closed her eyes she could picture his cabin, a map spread out on the table, showing a tiny dot in the middle of a great expanse of nothing. She could hear it crackle beneath his exploring fingers. In her mind’s eye, she saw his notebooks, his specimen jars, his butterfly nets; she pictured his black hair arranged in a long pigtail, tied with a ribbon half-way down his back. She could see him opening the door of a narrow cupboard where his clothes hung like a rainbow.
She swept out the cramped, windowless room beneath the eaves, put two pillows on the floor in one corner and plumped them up till they looked like a pair of rosy cheeks. Crimson feathers flew out of the seams, turned slow somersaults in the air. She filled a lamp with oil. She was sweating when she’d finished, her dry hair stuck out like a wild auburn hedge, ruby dust rimed her fingernails. Finally, she checked the fit of the key in the roughly gouged lock, wiped the clay dish by the door with a fresh rag and sat down on the doorstep to wait.
Gerda lay in bed with the curtains drawn. She had been almost constantly unwell since the afternoon she’d run off into the woods. She was very quiet, too ill to go to Harlean’s. She still tried to picture the fisherman but as the months went by she found it harder and harder without the help of the old woman’s poetry. She began to wonder if the other women weren’t right after all to say that Harlean had made him up, that such a being could not exist, and they should all forget about the whole thing. What did they want with such a man anyway? they said. They had everything they could ever need right here on the island. Slow tears crept down over Gerda’s face, across the broad bridge of her nose and onto her cheeks and down behind her neck into the collar of her nightgown.
‘I am so sorry, Lorm’, she said sometimes, touching the side of his face with sad affection.
She tried to shut out all thoughts of the future.
‘Don’t,’ she said, when Lorm tried to talk to her about the baby that was coming.
Occasionally she asked him to bring her something to pass the time: the darning egg and a needle and a handful of his worn-out socks. A pot of vegetables to peel. But one afternoon Lorm came home to find her crying again. She had cut her hand with the paring knife and it had bled onto the potatoes.
‘See, Lorm,’ she said, holding up a potato so he could look. ‘There is no difference at all between the colour of my blood and the skin of this potato.’
The blank despair in his wife’s eyes made Lorm’s heart shrink.
Anxious and wary, he watched her. He emptied the crimson teapot onto the table, letting the coins trickle through his fingers. He picked up a halfpenny, turned it between his thumb and his forefinger, felt its uneven, frilly edge and wondered exactly how many like it his wife had given away already to the greedy, lying Gill woman with her mad stories and her false promises. He counted up all the money they had, arranging it into small piles according to its value. He told himself he would do anything if it would make his wife happy.
As the expected birth approached, he wandered restlessly in the woods and up and down the vacant beach below the single line of low houses where he and Gerda and all the other inhabitants of the island lived, all of them facing the ocean, a row of spectators looking out across an empty stage.
Harlean was nothing if not patient.
While Gerda pined in her bed and Lorm roamed about trying to distract himself from his worries, the old woman waited. She’d come to acknowledge that she’d been mistaken about the explorer being so close, about the sail of his ship already showing itself above the thin red line of the horizon. But she was as sure as she’d ever been that he was out there somewhere. The picture she had of him was as sharp and clear as it had been when it first bloomed in her mind; indeed it had become much clearer over the last few months; it had gathered depth and detail during the long evenings she’d spent sitting waiting in the dark, or moving slowly about in the little room that was prepared under the eaves for his imprisonment. A young man, he would be, well-made and tall—taller than Lorm. Married, no doubt, with a child of his own left behind when he boarded his ship. She saw a picture in a wooden frame of the wife and child—moon-pale and dark-haired just like him—on the small fold-out table he had bolted to the wall of his cabin. He would be a reluctant guest, almost certainly, however great Gerda’s charms might be—and Harlean did not consider the young woman’s charms to be very great. Lorm’s wife, with her firm, slightly jutting jaw, the flatness over the bridge of the nose, was no beauty. Harlean worried the locked door would not be enough. Remembering the thick old chain she had used to hobble her old horse before it died, she scurried down the short open staircase, past her low bed with its ancient vermilion quilt, past the stone-cold hearth, and out by the door to fetch it.
If anyone could have got hold of him, if anyone could ever have conjured him up out of the sea, it would have been Harlean.
Lorm was out when the baby came.
A girl, born quickly and without trouble onto the stone floor early one morning. Still lying on her back, Gerda grasped it beneath its slippery armpits. It coughed and cried and its bandy legs pedaled the air as if it were trying to escape.
Gerda saw Lorm appear in the doorway, saw him stop and drop his soft crimson cap onto the ground and stare, open-mouthed.
Gerda stared too at the creature in her hands. She could never have imagined such a thing.
‘Look, Lorm,’ she said.
Its hair was thick and dense and very red, like her own, like Lorm’s beard; its skin freckled like hers with tawny spots, its jaw square and firm like hers too. It had Lorm’s shovel-shaped hands. Her flat, broad nose. Gerda’s stomach lurched and seemed to empty.
She held their daughter up to the light, showing Lorm the squashed tomato face, the lantern jaw, the shovel hands, the copper thatch of tough, clumpy hair.
Neither of them said a word. Lorm squatted on the floor next to his wife and in the silence they continued to look.
They loved her at once with a fiery passion that lasted all their lives.