I like the way the world feels just as the sun is coming up. There’s a quality to the predawn quiet that is so different to the sullen roar behind the wind. It’s expectant. The day smells fresh.
I only realize when we get going, how petrified I’ve been my whole life, how I’ve been scared every moment of being alone and of being left on the island. I was tight like a fist, but when we get moving, my fingers began to unfurl, to relax and then reach out.
Maeve made me pack for us, and now my decisions have been made, and I could not have made better ones, no matter how bad they are. I’ll know soon whether I’m strong enough for whatever there is, for this life.
I try to sleep the night before, knowing I’ll need it, but only manage to doze when the darkness begins to soften. When it’s light, I dress with my fresh-cleaned knives, a hat against the sun, layers against the cold.
Outside I give a low whistle, and after a few moments the dog noses his way through the long grass around the house, tail wagging lazily.
Maeve came home one day, two summers after Mam died, with this big-pawed black dog, and I felt a softness, a bit of give in the tightness in me, for the first time since.
I still hated her, but it was like hating a rock—she didn’t care. She trained me hard but wouldn’t speak a word otherwise, so she couldn’t notice me ignoring her. Maeve was always quiet, but after Mam she was silent in new ways. I went a bit mad, I think, and so did Maeve. Even still, apart from that, she knew I needed someone to talk to, and somehow she found something that’d suit.
“He’ll be useful,” she’d said, and I’d looked at her properly in the light for the first time in a long time. She was getting old. The light in her eyes had gone, and her skin was papery and pale. She got old all at once after Mam died. “He can warn us if people are coming.”
She was so unused to speaking, she’d trouble making the words; they were slurred in her mouth. Anyway it seemed cruel then to point out that nobody was ever coming, so I stayed quiet.
It’s a problem all on its own, so it is; we’re to be afraid of people, and we need them.
All Maeve needed really was Mam. Even Mam and Maeve together weren’t going to be enough for me, not forever.
I wonder about where she found Danger to bring him home to me. Not on this island. She’d a habit, after Mam, of leaving, of going off in the skiff on her own without bothering to tell me, and I wouldn’t see her for days. I nearly missed her when she was gone, even with the distance between us, and then she’d be back, and I had to face her silence and her misery in person, and I’d realize I still missed her. Maeve was off looking for Mam even when she was sitting in the same room as me.
I can nearly feel now when she’s thinking about taking off. I’ll catch her sometimes, and follow her down to the skiff, watch as she casts off and wonder will I see her again. She’s nobody with her to bring her back if she’s caught, and every time she goes, it seems more likely she’ll meet her own end out there.
In the meantime, I only get stronger and more desperate to get the fuck off the island.
It was only after she brought the dog back with her that I started feeling like I could speak again, and I used my speech to tell her, not for the first time but for the first time in years, that I wanted to go with her. It had been the plan anyway, it always was. I was full grown, and it was past time. Even still, she shook her head and I cried and we went back to not speaking. The feelings settled and fixed. Days passed slow and unchanging while the years bunched together and wasted, so fast.
Danger and I head down to the beach together. The dog trots ahead of me, pausing every now and then to make sure I’m coming, and when his eyes catch mine, his wagging tail goes a bit faster. Watching him makes me feel lighter.
I breathe in the air, warm now, but the coolest it’ll be for the next twelve hours, and break into a little jog along the sand. Soon Danger is panting. Maeve—the old Maeve—is in my ear saying I can’t slow down, I have to keep pushing. The minute you slow down, that’s the same minute they’ll get you.
I leave myself a few moments to look at the waves. I won’t see them tomorrow, and that knowledge is strange after a lifetime of routine. I love this beach. It hadn’t occurred to me, really, that I’d miss it, and now I can’t stop thinking about what makes Slanbeg home. I try not to pause over Mam, or even about the way Maeve used to be, as a rule, but now I can’t keep my thoughts away from them. I was a stupid child and a pain, probably, but oh, I was loved.
I get angry sitting there thinking away to myself. I’m so aggrieved at what I had and lost, of all the things ruined before we even got here. People had enough to eat and drink, and work to do, and families, and hot water coming out of the tap and toilets that’d cart all your shit away so you didn’t even have to think about where next to dig a latrine. And you could get in an airplane or a boat and go anywhere in the whole wide world you liked and there’d be whole other groups of people, whole communities there. I can nearly understand the hunger of the skrake, thinking about that. The desperation of having nothing and needing needing needing.
All we’re left with is this broken place, and emptiness that starts in the fractured sky and torn earth but ends with this hollowness in my chest, and a fear of what the hell is out there. All the things Maeve told me about, and especially those things she hasn’t. There’s acres within me I know nothing about and I won’t ever learn unless I get away from Slanbeg.
It makes me furious, thinking about it all.
The anger is helpful, though, I’m finding. Anger’s more useful than sadness or fear. I hold it close to me; I shape it into plans. I keep my teeth biting into each other and my fists curled tight. I want to pound them on something again and again until that thing is nothing more than the sand on this beach.