Morgan

Halfway up a hill, I look across the island. Directions. Expanse, distance, danger? My head and body feel so light I could float off up into the sky, but I plant my bare feet in the cold wet grass, step around thistles and rocks, watch for brambles. I imagine I’m a farmer who tills the fields and feels the earth pulsing beneath the grass. I can smell the salt air that blows in from the sea. In the night sky clouds pile like floating islands. I could be a fisherwoman with a cloudboat that drifts me from one cloudisland to another. My eyes are used to the dark, and there is a vastness of hills, a horizon of ocean in the distance. I can pick out the shapes of walls and stiles, small cottages, a hill crowded with gravestones. Where my father must go when he buries the dead. I don’t think he ever told me the collective noun for gravestones. Perhaps now he never will. I want to turn back, write him a note to say goodbye.

A woman wearing a long coat tied at the waist walks along the thick hedge at the bottom of the graveyard. I duck down behind a bramble bush and watch her. Something twists inside my stomach and tells me not to speak to this woman, in her dark coat and white boots. My mother’s voice saying, All the people here are mad … flits through my mind.

I get a little nearer to the woman and crouch behind a small laburnum tree with coiled branches. The trees are stunted, some grow with their branches stretched to one side, as if the wind has taught them to lean away from coldness.

The woman has stopped – she’s listening to something in the graveyard behind the hedge. If she was in one of my storybooks, what would she be listening to? What can she hear in a graveyard? Do the dead bodies lie there at night, their coffins risen up, like blanketed beds, handing around hot milk and honey, telling each other filthy limericks?

The woman turns towards me. I crouch lower. I think she can see me, but she turns back to the hedge.

Someone else is in the graveyard, further up the hill. A woman with long dark hair and a pale face. She stands next to a grave, leaning on a spade. I shudder. She’s going to dig up one of the coffins my mother made and my father buried, with its gruesome contents. Dig up someone she was in love with … kiss their dead blue lips.

My throat catches, an acid taste.

The woman with the white boots hasn’t seen her.

Further along the hedge, a man who looks like a tall shadow walks out of the graveyard.

Everything holds its breath.