Morgan
My small bed has an elaborate birdcage carved into the headboard, an empty cage, with no bird inside it, and no door. I kneel on my blue quilted bedspread and pick out a book from the shelf, sit on my bed and open it on my lap. The Direction of Currents and a Discussion of the Contents of Glass Bottles. I stroke the cover. Inside it has pictures of all the glass bottles that have been found with messages inside them, washed up on shores all over the world. Photographs of faded messages on parchment, paper, papyrus, tissue, cardboard, sealed in bottles and sent out to sea.
I flick the pages and open the book to see a photograph of a drawing on white tissue, found in a glass bottle washed up by a coastal town. A picture of a tree, drawn in black, in a child’s hand. Below the branches – feet planted firm on the earth and roots growing from their shoes into the soil to join the roots of the tree – are two small girls, drawn simply, holding hands, identical, with a tear on each cheek.
Where was I when my parents decided on the twins’ names? Probably in the kitchen. I imagine Mum and Dad discussing names, swapping each crying baby girl backwards and forwards between them. Naming them after trees, something so far away, something they knew from so long ago, far from where we have all landed. They must miss those trees, to have chosen the names Hazel and Ash for their daughters.
I close the book of washed-up messages. I’ve never been near the shores here to send out my message. But I’ve written my messages over and over again in my mind.
The storybooks have always been my favourites, even now I’m an adult. I’ve learned from these that: locked-up daughters always escape captivity if they bide their time. That mothers are meant to be good, but good mothers often die young. And fathers are tired or poor or hard-working or generally weatherworn. That beauty in young women is described using images of snow, rose petals, blood and pure hearts, but snow melts, petals dry and curl, blood turns brown, and hearts are easily punctured or removed by all kinds of sharp implements – thorns or scalpels, axes or claws. Princes arrive at the end of the stories – but princes are only ever described as handsome, which could really mean anything. In my imagination, these princes are shadowy men who bestow kisses or happy futures. Neither of these events are ever fully described, and then the story just ends. The arrival of the prince seems at best suspicious, and at worst sinister.
Mum’s footsteps are outside in the hall. They stop at my door.
Silence.
Mum’s listening to my thoughts. The handle turns.
Her silence skulks in around the edges of the door. She’s in her purple dressing gown. ‘You’re awake. Been crying but all right now?’
I say, ‘Thanks for trying.’
‘What do you mean?’ She frowns. ‘You forgot to sweep the kitchen floor. Your father’s asleep. I don’t want the twins woken.’
She nods, once, and walks away. Along the hallway a door creaks open and clicks shut.
I open the ruffled lilac curtains. The tall house on the hill seems to look back at me through the dark. Tonight, it looks a different shape. Almost … the shape of a hand, with turrets for fingers. It doesn’t look like that in the daytime.
Or at night.
It’s never looked like a hand before.
One of the fingers flickers in a ripple on the windowpane.
Come here.
I’ve dropped the broom on the kitchen floor. I can’t move, can’t believe what I have in my hand, can’t look away from it, in case it disappears.
Such a small thing, this black clunky key. And yet it unlocks the outside world. I turn it over and over in the palm of my hand. Pinch it to make sure it’s real.
The key to the padlock in the pink fence.
It’s fallen from Mum’s charm bracelet.
This chance will never come again. When she notices she’s lost it, she’ll collapse into pieces and then break everything else apart to find it.
I knew I just had to bide my time. I didn’t have to hack my way out. Didn’t have to barter for my escape. Didn’t have to cause pain.
I just needed something to happen.
The house on the hill beckoned. Come here.
And Mum has dropped the key.
So something has happened.
Now is the time to begin the story of my return to the mainland. Of returning to a place called home. Turn back to the first page. Can’t take anything I love with me and perhaps it’s best to take nothing at all, because in so many of my storybooks, the first page is blank.