The day I first consider killing one of the guards is the day I nearly die.
Outside the infirmary it is cold, with darkness dropping like a stone, the sky sudden grey granite, fading to black. I search for the first star, but the bite of the wind makes me close my eyes. I have forgotten my coat but it is too late to go back. My ankle throbs where it caught on the bed and, as I walk, the memory of Dot’s words beats out the timing of my steps: I’m tired of you hanging off me.
The first star glimmers. I shiver and try to make a wish. But what could I ask? For my sister to see sense? For the Italian men to be swept somehow from the island, or struck down with disease? Or perhaps I could wish for something else. Perhaps I could beg for my own memories to be different.
I run my fingers over the hollow at my throat and count my steps until I can breathe easily, until I can no longer feel the sensation of his hands there.
I feel them in my sleep, his hands. Squeezing.
Sand. Darkness. His breath hot in my ear.
I whirl around. There’s no one behind me. He’s not here. I’m safe.
Then I stop. The silhouettes of the prisoners’ huts loom around me in the darkness and, with the stomach-lurching sense of having missed a step, I realize that I am lost.
Lost in a camp of hundreds of men.
With their muscled arms, their strong hands.
The thought is ridiculous – how can I be lost? But the flimsy huts are a maze. Every one of them identical. Like the faces of the men. I imagine them sitting in those huts. Their hot breath, their broad chests. I imagine the sound of their laughter.
My own breath is tight in my throat, my legs suddenly weak, my vision narrowing. I used to think that the idea of tunnel vision was just that – an idea, a myth. But I remember the way my sight had reduced to a single point, a single face. And the thought I’d had: that this would be the last face I would see.
I stop. I lean against the steel wall of one of the huts, drawing air into my lungs, exhaling slowly, watching the clouds of my breath rising towards the star-scattered sky, then disappearing for ever.
I make myself walk onwards, but I have a constant churning dread in my belly, as though the next step might be empty air. If I can just get to the bothy, I’ll be safe and Dot will come to find me. Then I’ll be able to explain the danger she’s putting herself in. Or perhaps I should walk to Skara Brae – the sunken houses on the coast that are over three thousand years old. If I hid there, it would give Dot a chance to look for me. Perhaps she’d feel the terror of losing me, then. Perhaps she’d understand how I feel. Maybe she’d see sense.
It is fully dark now, but from behind the wall of the hut, I can hear voices talking in a language I don’t understand. Every word seems loaded with menace.
The darkness is a physical thing as I force myself to walk past the huts, counting each one, trying to find my way out of the labyrinth. From behind one wall there is soft singing. From another, many voices join in a chant that feels like prayer.
The end of the line of huts, and only the barbed-wire fence in front of me. I squint at the grey silhouettes of my surroundings. I’ve come the wrong way: the gate is on the other side of the camp.
I turn but a noise stops me. Two of the guards are talking and smoking by the fence. The orange glow of the cigarettes lights their faces. I freeze.
It’s him.
Again, my hand finds the hollow at my throat. The place where he once pressed his lips.
I want to turn and run, but I’m afraid they’ll hear me, so I stand very still as I watch another man – a prisoner – being led out from one of the huts, about twenty paces away.
The guards toss their cigarettes down, walk up to the Italian and then, before I have a chance to turn away or cover my face, they begin booting him. The man cries out, clutches his stomach, falls to his knees. They pull him upright, mutter something into his ear, and kick him again.
One of them laughs as he kicks the prisoner.
This time, the man doesn’t cry out, but with every thud of a boot into his body, the breath wheezes from him. No one comes out of the surrounding huts. No protest or protection from the other prisoners.
Who is this prisoner? Was he part of the riot? The guards’ kicks are methodical now, their faces expressionless, bored, as if this is simply something that they do to pass the time.
I remember the men in the infirmary – their bruises, their fear-filled eyes. They are so frightened all the time, like me. The only people who aren’t scared are the guards. Is everywhere like this? Is most of the world made up of terrified people, with just a few men sitting on top of everyone else, laughing as they boot us, then growing bored, but kicking us anyway?
I watch, my entire body frozen. On the ground at my feet is a rock. Sharp along one edge and heavy enough to crack bone. Heavy enough to smash through a man’s skull. I feel the old fury, the old terror – the same mixture of emotions that have kept me sleepless for so many nights since leaving Kirkwall.
And I feel shame. I let him touch me, at first. I led him on.
Bile rises in my throat. I swallow. My eyes water. I close them, pressing my back against the cold wall, counting my breaths, pretending that the rock isn’t there. Pretending that I’m not imagining, time and again, how I could bring the rock down. How I could stop the prisoner’s pain.
When I open my eyes, it is over: the prisoner has been dragged back to his hut and the guards are leaning against the wooden fence posts, their faces once more lit by the glow of their cigarettes.
I hear the soft sound of Angus’s laughter.
I knew it was him. Of course it is him. That laughter raises the hairs on the back of my neck, makes me dry-mouthed, rigid with terror. The sound is engraved into me, is part of me.
I’ve heard it said that every person has their breaking point, although that seems a strange way of describing how someone may fall into violence. There can be no single point when a person breaks, surely. Rather, a person’s patience is like the cloth bandage that holds a wound together: over time, it is rubbed thinner and thinner, until the material is all but worn away. The final threads are simply a mesh over the rawness.
The body is a strange thing. It counts out its own time and rhythms with heart and breath and blinking eyes. All these motions are a struggle towards living, but they might as well be grains of sand tolling out the seconds into the grave.
And the dying is done alone.
The guards are smoking, smiling. The soft sound of their laughter could belong to any man, anywhere. There is no way to tell from a man’s face whether he is good or bad. There is nothing in his voice or his smile that will let you know if he plans to kiss you or try to kill you, or both.
I drop the rock and walk backwards. I can’t kill a man. I can’t do anything but back away and try to forget what I’ve seen. I retreat into the warren of huts – they are all quiet now. The Italians must have heard the prisoner’s cries. Perhaps their nights are full of shouts and screams in the dark. Perhaps each morning a different man wakes with bruises and limps down to the quarry, broken before the day begins.
But their suffering doesn’t make them harmless. I must remind myself of that. Even men who seem innocent, who seem gentle and affectionate – even they can hurt you. And if you let yourself feel for them, if you allow them to deceive you, they can destroy you.
I don’t choose to run – my feet make the choice for me – but it is freeing to be moving quickly away from the men, away from the guards, away from the huts. I break out into the open yard at the front of the camp and wait for a guard to call to me. We’re allowed to leave, of course, Dot and I, but if they see me running, they will ask questions.
But all the guards must be elsewhere because no one shouts at me to stop.
I slow to a walk and stand next to the edge of the fence – the part closest to the cliffs. Below, the pulse of the sea crashing against the stone. It never stops pounding, the water beating itself against the stone. Relentless as a heartbeat.
After I crawl under the fence, it will take three steps. The space. The fall. The silence.
I imagine Dot alone in a camp of a thousand men. I count the exhalation of the waves. Implacable, eternal.
I feel the thread of my life, suspended, waiting for the blade. Three steps forwards will change everything. I can do it, if I want. Just as I could have brought that rock down on the guards’ heads.
Only I didn’t.
I shiver, tears on my cheeks.
I didn’t do anything. I let everything happen around me, as always.
Somewhere, in the darkness, I think I hear Dot’s voice crying my name.
I force myself to turn, to walk back in the direction I’ve come from, to go back to the infirmary.
The lights call to me, leading me back to the warmth of the hospital hut, the medicinal smell, the beds of sleeping prisoners. And Dot.
But Dot isn’t there. I check our sectioned-off bed, the cleaning station, the small office behind the curtain, where Bess is drowsing.
I shake her arm. ‘Have you seen Dot?’
She startles awake, focuses her eyes on me. ‘You’re back. I was worried.’
‘Where’s Dot?’
‘Oh, she went . . .’ Bess’s eyes slide from mine and, for a moment, I think she’s going to say that Dot went looking for me. That she’s out in the cold now, searching. How could I have run off like that? How could I have put her in danger?
Bess stands, straightens some of the clamps and surgical knives. ‘She went to see the prisoner, I think. She took some honey to Cesare. For his cough.’ She turns, sees the fear on my face and misinterprets. ‘Con! Oh, Con, she hasn’t left you. I’m sure she was worried about you. She waited for you to come back. She even shouted for you. She must have thought you’d gone to the bothy.’
I nod, then turn away, my mind a white blank.
As I look around the infirmary, counting the beat of my blood in my ears, I don’t see the prisoners laid out sleeping, peacefully, in their pyjamas. I imagine the hair on their bodies beneath the sheets. I picture their hands, which could so easily turn into fists. I think of muscles in their thighs and backs. And I think of Dot, in the Punishment Hut, holding out a trusting hand to a man she barely knows.
Cesare looks smaller when they bring him out of the Punishment Hut after nearly a week. He is filthy, his skin yellowish. When he coughs, I can see the tendons drawn tight in his neck, as if every part of him is struggling for air.
But the sound of his breathing – laboured though it is – fills me with light. He’s alive! He’s alive!
I’d petitioned Major Bates daily during the six days that Cesare had been imprisoned. ‘It’s cruel,’ I had said. ‘He’s ill.’
Major Bates had shuffled his papers. ‘It’s not that simple.’
But, in the end, it was. Bess had spoken to her mother in Kirkwall, then bounced into the infirmary one morning, her face bright.
‘There’s been a meeting. People on the island aren’t happy with the prisoners being mistreated.’ She’d grinned at me, and I’d tried to share her excitement but found it hard to believe that there had been any sort of protest on the behalf of foreign prisoners.
Still, early the next morning, there was a crowd of guards stamping around the Punishment Hut, looking nervous and resentful, as if expecting a repeat of the riot – although Angus MacLeod wasn’t among them.
And now here Cesare is. Coughing, stumbling, but alive.
He chokes, falters, falls. The guards pull him upright again by his arms and he gives a grunt of pain.
‘Let go of him!’ I call. The guards ignore me, their heavy boots thudding along the path. I follow them up to the infirmary, making a list of the things he will need. Honey, water and sulfa tablets for the infection. Some sort of soup or broth. Perhaps Con can fetch that from the mess.
Con. As if I’ve spoken her name aloud, she is there, next to me, watching me. Her arms are folded across her chest, her mouth pressed into a thin line.
Don’t say anything, I beg her silently. She doesn’t, but I can feel her judgement like a cold breeze icing my skin.
They take Cesare into the infirmary and lay him on a bed, where I try to make him drink some water, but he is coughing too much to swallow; his skin is hot and dry, like parchment ready for the fire. I wave the guards away, then sit and wipe a wet sponge over his head and arms and chest to bring his fever down. Under my hand, I can feel the flutter of his heartbeat in its cage, a trapped bird panicking.
Angus MacLeod walks into the infirmary. He stares at Cesare, then at me, his face set in a sneer. ‘No firing squad needed. Well done – you’ve made his death slow and painful.’
I want to launch myself at him, but Con is suddenly there, her hand on my shoulder. I can feel her trembling.
His face softens when he looks at her.
She speaks fast and low. ‘Are you looking to have that cut on your head opened up again, Angus?’
He slams the door as he leaves.
Con squeezes my shoulder. ‘You don’t know this prisoner, not really. He might be –’
I pull away. There is no point in trying to explain anything to her. All I know is that, from the first moment I saw Cesare, from the first moment he smiled, I felt as if I’d always known him and he me. But to say such a thing to Con would have invited mockery or jealousy, and I know it sounds ridiculous – like something from a story: Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, or Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet.
‘He’s not like Angus,’ I say. Meaning, also, I’m not like you.
Con is still pressing my hand against her cheek, but she stops and stares at me, her eyes wide.
‘What?’ I snap, regretting my tone instantly, as she recoils.
‘You don’t understand anything.’ She drops my hand and stalks from the infirmary.
I don’t follow her, though she will want me to. I stay with Cesare, sponging his chest and holding a glass of warm honey water to his lips.
I sleep on the floor next to his bed that night, waking every hour to drip more water from my fingers into his mouth. I can’t get enough of it into him: when I try tipping the glass against his lips, the water dribbles down his chin. I think about the lambs and how, when we want them to swallow medicine, we syringe it into their mouths and massage their throats. I climb onto the bed and lie alongside him. It is nearly dark, just the dim, buttery glow from the single lamp in the corner of the room. All the other prisoners are sleeping. Cesare’s body is scorching against mine and, as I press against him, I can feel the ridges of his ribs, the hinge of his hips. I can imagine the delicate silk of his lungs expanding, struggling, contracting. When I touch him, his breathing steadies.
I make sure the other prisoners are still sleeping, then take a mouthful of the honey water and press my lips against his. His mouth is hot and dry. I drip the liquid into his mouth from mine, stroking his throat until he swallows. His lips are burning; he tastes metallic and sour. I press my mouth to his again and again, until the glass is empty. Then I sleep, my head resting on the bony hollow next to his shoulder.
It seems only minutes later that Con wakes me by shaking my arm roughly. Her jaw is hard and her eyes blaze.
‘Get up! What are you thinking?’ She grabs my hand and yanks me upright, but my muscles are leaden and I can’t find the strength to stand. I slump against her; she puts a hand to my forehead and curses softly.
‘Idiot,’ she murmurs, then puts me into the bed alongside Cesare’s.
Time bleeds into itself. I try to stay awake, but my eyes keep closing. One moment it is light and the next it is the middle of the night. Every time I open my eyes, Con is there: sponging my forehead, bringing me water, spooning honey into my mouth.
Occasionally I hear her muttering to herself. I’m aware of her gaze on me. Her fear is almost palpable. She rests her head on the pillow next to mine, strokes my hair, kisses my cheek.
‘You’ll get ill,’ I protest.
‘I don’t care.’
She tends Cesare too. Sometimes I wake to find her gazing at him, watching him breathe; it gives me some relief to know that she wants him to live – why else would she stare at him so?
After an endless stretch of nightmarish light and dark, my fever fades. I wake with a clear head. Con is gone but Cesare is looking at me from the next bed. I try to speak but only a wheeze emerges.
He smiles. ‘I think you are angel but you sound like my grandfather.’
I laugh, then cough. ‘You are better.’ I feel foolish for saying what is obvious.
His face is serious. ‘You save me.’
My cheeks heat and I want to hide my face.
‘Look at me,’ he whispers.
I turn my face towards his. There is intimacy in this, lying down together, within arms’ reach.
‘I remember . . .’ He touches his lips.
Then Con walks in. She stops in the doorway, staring at us. She looks as though she might be sick.
She doesn’t return my smile. The lamp casts ghastly shadows on her face and, for a moment, she seems menacing, monstrous. Before I can call to her, she turns and stumbles from the room.
It is heat that brings him back to himself. Heat and cold. The heat from Dorotea’s body near his, as if she is a lamp held up close to his warming skin. As she drips water into his mouth, something inside him thaws. Everywhere that she doesn’t touch is icy, numb, dead.
When he wakes fully, it is as if everything during his fever was a dream – had she really touched her mouth to his? What does this mean? What does he want from her, this foreign woman on this strange island? His mind feels fogged and fuzzy. He drinks and dozes. Gradually, his strength returns.
She recovers from her illness more quickly than he does – the work in the quarry has weakened him. Once she can walk and move around more easily, she sits by his bed and reads the newspaper to him.
He sees her sister too. Costanza – Con. Her name means steadfastness, but also obstinacy. Her face is more serious than Dorotea’s, and she is always watching. If she were a man, Cesare would think that she meant him harm. It is not aggressive, her stare, but it is suspicious. Something about her reminds him of the wary cat in Moena’s church: it used to sit above the pews like a gargoyle, glowering, its tail twitching. Sometimes it pounced – Cesare still has the scars on his wrist.
Now Cesare pretends to doze, while Dorotea flicks through the newspaper, recounting stories about war meetings in London and about the movements of the round-faced British prime minister. Her voice, when she reads, is clear as a struck bell. Her red hair falls over her face. The other men lean in to listen too, the whole infirmary quiet while Dorotea tells them everything that is happening in the war.
Occasionally, her eyes skim over an article, her lips compress, and she turns the page, before beginning to read again. The second time she does this, Cesare sits up.
‘What is this story?’
‘Churchill is meeting –’
‘No. The story on the first page. You are not reading to me, I think.’
She looks down at her feet and gives an almost imperceptible shudder. He waits, suddenly fearing what she will say. Her eyes are bright with unshed tears.
‘Bombs?’ he asks, his voice no more than a whisper. The other men must have heard it too, because a silence falls over the rest of the infirmary. Every man holding his breath.
‘Moena?’ he asks.
‘It . . . it doesn’t say here. It says . . . forgive me. It says, successful attack. And it mentions Milan. Is that near your home? Your . . .’ she swallows ‘… your family?’
He shakes his head and closes his eyes, feeling a rush of relief, and then is sickened by it: if his family is safe, then another man’s loved ones will be dead. There will be at least one prisoner in this camp with family in Milan.
There is muffled sobbing from the corner and he looks over to see the man in the far bed with his sheet pulled over his face, his shoulders shaking.
Cesare’s thoughts are suddenly back in the desert: the bleached sky, the circling vultures, the explosions and fire. The coppery smell of blood that was impossible to forget. And he thinks, too, about the quarry. About the endless sea, the brutal guards and the barrier they are building for the enemy.
Madonna Santa.
He’s sick of all of it. He can’t even begin to listen to Dorotea again, though he can feel her watching him, waiting. But how can he lie in a bed, hearing war tales as though they’re entertainment? How can he listen to this foreign woman talking about a successful attack on his people?
‘I am tired,’ he says, trying not to care when Dorotea’s face falls, when she winces as though he’s snapped at her. Perhaps he has. Perhaps that doesn’t matter when, somewhere, everywhere, people are dying.
He turns his face to the wall, pulling up the covers, over his shoulders, over his head so that he re-breathes his own panicked exhalations in a white tent, which cuts off the rest of the world, which cuts off Dorotea. As he hears her rise and turn to leave, her sister, Con, says to her, ‘I said you should stay away from him, that –’
‘Enough!’ Dorotea’s voice is sharp. He hears the door open. A freezing breeze scours the infirmary, and then there is stillness, apart from the low whispers of the other men, and the quiet weeping from the bed in the corner.
Later, the sound of movement wakes him. He opens his eyes, still facing the wall, but he knows it is her: he knows it from the sound of her breathing, from the smell of woodsmoke that she often carries with her, as if she’s not had long to warm herself properly and has stood, very briefly, too close to the fire.
He can’t bring himself to turn, to look at her. He feels ashamed of the way he’d shunned her, the way he’d blamed her for simply delivering the news. The war isn’t her fault. She isn’t the enemy.
Who is the enemy now? He isn’t sure he knows.
He watches her shadow on the wall, watches her reach out a hand, as if to touch him, then sees her withdraw it. He tries to keep his breathing steady, but on each outbreath he thinks, Please, please, please.
Finally she touches him. Not on his shoulder, where the sheet covers him: she places two cool fingers on his bare neck. Skin on skin.
He stirs; he turns.
On her face, a tremulous smile. ‘I talked to Major Bates. I told him that you – that all of you – must hear news from Italy. I said you should have a companion to read your letters from home. One of the other men to read the Italian. I said – forgive me, but I had to convince him – I said that many of the prisoners probably couldn’t read.’
Cesare sits up, with effort. ‘He knows I read. What did he say?’
‘He said . . . well, he said a lot of things. I think he feels guilty about what has happened.’ She looks down at her hands, then glances back at him. ‘And he has agreed, as long as there are other guards here to make sure there is no trouble.’ She shifts uncomfortably as she says this, but he nods in quick agreement.
‘Sì. There are many guards after . . .’
‘After the riot, yes. Fifty more.’
‘Sixty,’ says a voice from the shadows, and Cesare jumps. He hadn’t realized that Con was standing there. He can’t see her face, but her voice is hard. ‘There are sixty more men on the island.’
‘So,’ Dorotea leans forward, ‘I asked for a man from your hut, Gino, to read some letters to you, and to the other men. He is allowed to come in the evenings. A guard is bringing him now.’
Cesare sits up, just as the door opens and Gino is there, walking behind a stern-faced guard, carrying a pile of letters and grinning. ‘You look terrible,’ he says to Cesare in Italian.
‘English only,’ the guard snaps.
Dorotea flashes Cesare a quick smile and then, before he can thank her, she goes to tend the other prisoners. Her sister follows her, like a shadow.
Gino sits in the chair next to Cesare’s bed, opens one of the letters and says, ‘Mio caro,’ at the same time as the guard says, ‘In English, you Italian pig. I’ve told you.’
Still smiling, Gino turns, and says to the guard, ‘Il mio inglese è molto buono.’
‘What’s he saying?’ The guard glares at Cesare.
‘Stronzo.’ Gino’s smile doesn’t falter as he says arsehole.
‘His English is very not good,’ Cesare says, although he knows Gino speaks English well. ‘He must read this letter for me in Italian.’
‘You can’t read your own language but you can speak English? That doesn’t sound right.’
Cesare shrugs. ‘My village is small. I learn English when I help the priest in the church. No time for reading.’
The look the guard gives him is the same expression he’s seen on the faces of dozens of other guards: it says, You are stupid, you are worthless, you are an animal.
Cesare swallows the rage he feels, then nods at Gino to continue.
‘Mio caro,’ Gino begins again, and then, squinting at the paper as if he is reading the letter, he says, in Italian, ‘There has been trouble in the camp. No one would work for a long time and we were fed bread and water. Then the major told us that we were working on causeways, not barriers, and that these causeways are needed for the islanders in peacetime, so are not part of the war effort.’
‘Stronzate!’ Cesare curses.
‘English from you!’ the guard says.
‘Sorry. The letter is bad news.’
Gino continues in Italian, still studying the letter. ‘Some men have started working on these “causeways”. Those who won’t work are still being given only bread and water. The guards are making them stand all day in the yard in the cold. If we don’t do something, then more of us will be ill.’
Cesare struggles to keep his face smooth. The guard is watching them closely. He finds himself gripping the sheets and forces his hands to relax, his jaw to unclench, and makes himself nod, sadly, as if he has heard some unhappy news from home.
He looks at the window, where a lamp casts a sickly yellowish light on the flakes of snow being whipped through the air. Something cold writhes in his gut. He has never been a violent man but slowly, in this place, he is beginning to understand why some men hoard scraps of steel that they sharpen until the jagged edges gleam. He is beginning to understand why, over time, a man might start to lash out, or might plan something brutal and final.
The sudden comprehension – hot and shameful – frightens him.
He draws a deep breath. ‘We must do something.’
After Gino has moved on to ‘read letters’ to the other men – giving them the same news, Cesare guesses, from the outraged whispers, the shocked faces – Cesare lies back, his thoughts whirling, as if some explosion is readying itself inside his skull. The anger feels like a return of the fever: first he is too warm; then he shivers. His hands are bunched into shaking fists.
To calm himself, he thinks of home. He imagines the green sweep of the mountains, the little houses crammed as closely as teeth, one garden spilling into another. Women swept each other’s doorsteps, looked after each other’s children. Everyone shared bread, meals, stories. And at the beating heart of the little village, with the bell pulsing out its passing hours, was the church. Cesare remembers the comforting hum of the priest’s words, the gleaming censers casting smoke heavenwards, the touch of the holy man’s fingers on his forehead as the Communion bread melted on his tongue.
Nel nome del Padre, del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo.
And he remembers the paintings that stretched over the ceiling, so that everywhere was brimming with life. He remembers the church swelling with the music of joined voices. The peace on the faces of those he loved. The hope.
He inhales deeply, filling his chest with a resounding longing for home. It echoes through his limbs, leaves him trembling, on the verge of tears.
When he opens his eyes, he has decided: they must build a church on this island.