Seven swans Seven swansI woke up sweating in a panic my hands were lost I couldn’t touch my face. I was in bed. I sat up. My hands were covered in Calum’s long sleeves which had unrolled, I still had all my clothes on, all his clothes on. There was a bottle of milk gone sour by the cooker, I could smell it from my bed. The light was murky, around dawn I’d say. My throat was sore and dry.
I ran some water and drank. My tin was in the trouser pocket, I rolled myself a cig. Leaning on the sink, I remembered her sitting there. Completely composed in her chair. Staring politely at her hands like she was in a waiting room. Denying me.
I unlocked my door and went into the hall. Her sitting-room door was still open. The light was still on. I saw her glasses and the remote on the floor by her chair. Then I saw her feet.
She was hidden from me by the coffee table. After a bit I moved into the room. My eyes were drawn to the TV, the picture was moving but there was no sound. She was lying on the floor between the coffee table and the fireplace, she was stretched out with one hand by her face.
I pulled Calum’s long sleeve down over my finger and used the covered finger to press the TV button. The screen went black.
Very slowly and quietly I moved round till I was standing over her. Her clothes still covered her neatly, her hand was stretched on the carpet in front of her. It looked quite normal, there was her wedding ring, there was her wristwatch.
I knew I had to look at her face. Because everything else was quite normal.
Her head lies in a dark circle which must be blood. Her mouth is pushed half open against the carpet. I am looking. I can’t take my eyes off her. Her face is bluish. Her hair is red and wet and matted. Her eye is half open, looking at the carpet. She looks like a police photograph of a murder victim.
Enough. I go back to the hall doorway and listen. Nothing. The house is perfectly still. I go back and crouch beside her, put my fingertips against her wrist. It is cold. Nothing moving. She’s dead.
I get up again and walk round the chair and round her. She looks like a murder victim. She looks quite small, curled there. Almost like a girl. I crouch again. Under the coffee table I see a dark shape – I reach for it. An old flat-iron. She keeps one either side of the hearth. I do not look at it closely. It has a wooden handle. I carry it to the fireplace. Its partner sits quietly beside the coal scuttle. There is still a little red glow of embers in the grate. I put the used flat-iron on top of the embers and stir with the poker. I add kindling from the basket. There is a bit of a hiss and a crackle. I wipe my hand on Calum’s sweatshirt.
Then I go to the hall again. The phone is not ringing but it attracts my attention. I stand staring at it for a while. I don’t pick it up. The front door is closed but not locked. The cat is sitting by the closed kitchen door. I open the door to the kitchen, it slips through and clatters out through the flap. I go back to my room and wash my hands, take off Calum’s clothes and put on a T-shirt and jeans of my own, transfer my tin to my own pocket. I put Calum’s clothes in a bag, lock my door behind me and set off for his house.
He’s not there. It’s just after 7.30. Peering through the window I see the chairs we sat in yesterday, pulled close to the fire, and the heap of wet blankets on the floor. The door is locked. I leave the bag of clothes on the doorstep.
I took the lane north, towards Durris. The morning was bright grey and watery, sky and sea shining at each other, all calm and pearly after the storm.
I came to the narrowing of the island where the sea bites into the land on either side; the part Calum called the Neck. I stopped to look down at the bare surface of Table Rock, then went on to the flat pavement of the prayer stones. I climbed the ditch, walked out into the middle of the prayer stones and stared across to the monks’ island. If you stood there and thought you heard mass when it wasn’t being sung, how would it be different to standing there when it was being sung? Would the mass in your head be any less real?
I had not expected anything she said to help me. I had expected her death to help me. The finishing of her should free me, like a diver cut free of the wreckage. When he’s cut free he can power away through the water, surge up to the surface.
But I was not free. I still didn’t know the truth.
I was on the bare stones looking over the flat sea. At the end of a run, a foray, a raid. The meeting with my mother behind me. My mother dead behind me. And nowhere else to go.
When I went on towards Durris I saw that the tide was not fully out; water lapped over and around the bigger stones, it was not possible to cross without getting wet. I took off my trainers and socks and rolled up my jeans. The water was cold but no deeper than my ankles. It seemed to be coming in. Soon the little island would be cut off. OK.
I climbed the slope and looked down from the rim into the dish of land where the ruined cottages stood. No sign of Calum. I crossed the hollow, climbed the ridge at the other side; the island was empty to the sea. I didn’t know what to do. There was something so desolate about that empty stony land and flat grey sea that I turned and went back down towards the ruins. I sat on a wall and tried to work out what to do.
Phyllis was dead in her sitting room. Calum was gone. Nothing had changed. I was the same as I always had been.
I had a vision of all the frenzies of activity I might enter into next, one after another. Buying and decorating a flat. Enrolling on a course. Starting a new job. I might have a child. Take in stray cats. I might hitch across America or pick up a new man. I might even reach the point where I’d go and sit in a church and talk to the Invisible Bastard. I could see them all clearly and each one would be as hollow as the next, none would contain satisfaction, each would be as unutterably futile as the pursuit of my mother had turned out to be. And each would be bounded and circumscribed by Fear. My life would be full of little projects, little attempts to discover whatever it was real people knew, to copy them hard enough to convince myself that I was real too.
The best thing would be to die. It would be less trouble.
I was very calm; all around me the little island, the last island, the island off an island off an island was still. Stillness was most natural. To go on scrabbling and running and grasping after some kind of life was aberration; stillness was lasting.
I didn’t have any means of killing myself to hand, but it seemed to me it must be possible to find something on that little island. Drowning was the most obvious but it’s difficult to drown when you can swim and the sea is calm as milk. Should’ve thought of it yesterday, eh. I got off the wall and started looking for a bit of broken glass. Inside the ruined shell of the cottage there was all sorts of crap, charred sticks and cans where someone’d made a fire, rubble, soggy scraps of an old newspaper. I turned stuff over with my foot but didn’t turn up any bottles. There’s a surprise. First time ever no glass found in ruin complains would-be-suicide. Since when has anything ever been easy, kid? I thought of Calum’s glass mountain, clear and brown and green and blue, twinkling invitingly when the sun shone on it. I thought of it like that but it wasn’t true. It was mostly dull either with dirt or being ground by the sea. The best bits weren’t shiny at all they were an opaque pale green, worn to smooth shapes like sucked sweets. You could see light through them but nothing more, their transparency had been ground to a white frost. The cutting edges were smoothed to the roundness of pebbles, the sea had worn away their sharpness.
I came out of the broken walls and went back up the slope towards the sea. The sea was the only clean thing. She was lying there with blood seeping out of her head. The carpet would be ruined. Everything you touch becomes dirt, doesn’t it? All these island people, look at them. They moved from their houses on the fertile land in the south, they came up here where they could hardly scrape a living – they built new houses and did all that work all over again – and then what happened? They got old and sick and their children left as soon as they could. And the cottages fell down and now they’re here like rotten teeth and the ground is littered with lager cans and charred sticks and the smell of piss in corners. That’s all that’s left of people’s hopes. Anybody’s.
I went down to the edge of the sea, a breeze was coming off it, the water came in little laps to the stony beach and rustled through the smaller pebbles just lifting and resettling them. You couldn’t believe it was the same substance as yesterday. The Blue Men with their foam-grey faces. This was silk. I walked in. It was cold when it first came into my trainers but then it warmed a little. Standing still up to my knees looking out, it was like the land didn’t exist, just me and the flat water. I’m not going to be afraid any more, that’s why I came here. I’m not going to have Fear any more.
The water all around me was unbroken, reflecting the grey light of the sky. There was just me and the water and the sky, it was completely quiet, I didn’t want to move and break the peace at all. If I walked on and the water started to cover my head I would gasp and splash. I would swim, almost certainly, I wouldn’t be able to make myself inhale the water naturally. I would choke and splutter and break up the smooth surface. The best thing to do would be to allow myself to swim. A nice quiet breaststroke. Swim right out until the island was out of sight. Swim for the Arctic, until I was so tired and cold that I drifted down gracefully without resistance, without brutishly struggling to stay alive. I started to push my legs through the water again.
‘Nikki! N-Nikki!’ I turned. He was standing on the crest of the land above the ruins. He started to run down towards me. I didn’t want to go back but I certainly didn’t want Calum leaping and splashing and carrying on behind me – probably falling over and drowning in two feet of water or even worse rescuing me and towing me triumphantly back to shore.
‘It’s OK,’ I called when he got to the edge but he came in anyway. He moved splashing and thundering through the still water. His face was red and swollen, his eyelids so puffed up his eyes were slits. He stumbled towards me splashing me all over, he reached out and grabbed my arm and began pulling me towards the shore. I didn’t resist; he was tugging my arm, leaning his weight away from me, almost pulling me over. When we got to shallower water he did overbalance and he pulled me down with him. The cold shocked me.
‘Calum!’
He kept crawling towards the beach, dragging me after. ‘You d-don’t go in the sea. You d-don’t go in the sea.’
‘Calum, I–’
‘No!’ he bellowed at me; I slumped down on the edge of the sand and he grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me two yards further up the beach. ‘No sea!’
‘OK. OK. No sea.’
He crouched beside me and burst into tears. I lay there and cried too. As if there wasn’t enough salty water in the world.
When we calmed down the quietness crept up around us. The quietness of the sea our splashing had disturbed, the quietness of the land our crying had interrupted.
‘N-n-never–’
‘OK. I won’t.’ By now I would have been out of sight. A dot, far out, like a seal’s head.
He hugged his knees to his chest, staring out to the horizon. ‘Sh-she said you’re my sister.’
It took me a while. ‘She? Your mother said?’
He nodded. She told Calum I was his sister.
‘When?’
He was completely still, clenched in on himself. As he spoke tears and snot continued to stream down his face, he didn’t bother to wipe them away. ‘I woke up and you’d g-gone so I went to the house.’
I imagined him on the dark road. Approaching the lit window. Perhaps hearing our shouting voices. ‘Calum, I–’
‘She said Nikki’s moving out tomorrow.’
‘Last night? Are you talking about last night? Where was I?’
‘Sleeping.’ His right eye, the squinting one, was blinking uncontrollably, his face was twitching with exhaustion.
‘But last night–’
‘She said it’s not up for discussion, it’s decided, it’s none of your business Calum.’
I waited.
‘As if I was a b-baby. So I said – I said it’s none of your business. Because I want to marry Nikki. S-so there.’
He rocked slightly, hugging his long shanks tighter. Calum came to see her after I’d gone to bed. She was still alive after I’d gone to bed. ‘What did she say?’
‘She started laughing. She said you c-can’t marry her.’ He drew a long gasping breath. ‘She said, Nikki is your sister.’ There was a silence punctuated by his shuddering breaths. ‘Y-you can’t marry your s-sister, Calum, even you know that. She l-laughed at me.’
‘What happened?’
‘I – I got angry. I just got–’ He buried his face in his hands. I put my arm around his shoulders for a split second I couldn’t and then I could try to comfort him. He cried terribly.
‘Hush, Calum, hush.’
‘I didn’t mean – I didn’t mean–’
‘I know you didn’t, hush now, hush.’
After a long time when he had cried himself out he asked me if it was true.
‘If what?’
‘You were Susan?’
‘Yes.’
‘She never said, she never, she never.’
‘No. She never.’
He shifted his weight away from me and wiped his nose on his sleeve. The wind from the sea was freshening, the water in the shallows was forming almost-waves. It came over me that I was very very cold. My teeth had started chattering. My clothes were wet through and the wind made it worse. ‘I’m cold–’
Calum hauled himself up. ‘We’ll l-light a fire.’ We went up the slope and down into the dip again, out of the wind. He led me to the central cottage, where embers still glowed against a wall and a charred beam had been pulled up as a seat. His stick and rucksack lay in the corner.
‘You were here last night?’ I had walked past without even noticing. He set about rekindling the fire with scraps of rubbish and sticks; sat me down in front of it and went off for more wood. He came back with a couple of dead branches which must’ve been washed up because there were no trees but the rowans on Durris. The wood made a fierce blaze. I moved as close as I could. ‘Have you got any food?’
He shook his head. What was I thinking of? Some sort of hideaway, we could be like shipwrecked sailors and live on the little island without anyone ever knowing? Eating fish and drinking brackish water, become innocent savages again?
We sat there for a long time watching the red and yellow flames, the way they leapt and splashed like water. I thought of him sitting there through the night. Wondering what was going to happen. Listening for footsteps? ‘Didn’t you hear me when I came through earlier?’
‘I – I – thought y-you–’
‘Yes?’
‘You would be mad at me. I was afraid.’ There was a silence filled with crackling and snapping from the fire. ‘I h-hid from you.’
He had come out when I was in the sea. When I was up to my waist he’d started shouting and running after me. Suddenly he moved so violently that the beam rocked. ‘I’m n-not going away.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘From the island.’
‘Nobody’s trying to take you away.’ I thought he meant me.
Despite the heat from the fire now his face was white. I realised he must be in shock. But he was thinking more clearly than I was. Of course they would try to take him away. They would put him in prison. They would take him from his island where he’d finally made himself free and lock him in a box away from sea and sky and flotsam and jetsam of every kind, away from the rocks where ghosts and stories attached, away from the foam-grey faces of the Blue Men, away from the world he knew. Because of the death of that witch.
I started to revive with the warmth. A rush of energy flushed through me, as if something frozen had melted. Calum. They would arrest him. Put on handcuffs. Lead into a boat, an animal to slaughter. My head was fuzzy but the heat was clearing it, making the mist evaporate, drying me to something clean and sharp. Why should they take Calum? Calum had a life. Calum had a place to be and a thing to do. It was stupid if they took Calum.
I thought about how if he hadn’t come blundering and splashing through the shallows after me I would’ve been drifting to icy nothingness by now. What’d he dragged me out for? I could have taken the blame to the bottom of the sea. If you’ll never leave me, I’ll never leave you.
My skin was tingling from the extremes of cold and heat. Calum got up. ‘We need more w-wood.’ I followed him away from the fire, up over the crest and down to the shore where driftwood might be lying. I found some splintered bits of pallet. Calum had gone off in the opposite direction. Not now nor ever.
I dragged my wood to the top of the rise and suddenly felt very hot. Calum was still down at the shoreline loading himself up. I sat to wait; found my tobacco tin reasonably watertight in my pocket and rolled us both a fag. He came staggering up to join me and we sat there beside our firewood, smoking and staring at the tinfoil sea. Gradually there was a creaking noise which got louder until two swans appeared from behind us, flying low, with effort, huge wings creaking at each beat. They swooped down past the shoreline and landed in the sea, scattering water a thousand ways, shattering the mirror. Then they sat quite still while it pieced itself together and reformed round them so perfectly that four swans floated on the sea before us.
‘You know where the s-swans come from?’
I’d never seen swans on the sea before – nor any swans on the island. The island was practically a bird-free zone. These were huge and snowy in the grey-brown sea; perfectly at home, dipping their beautiful necks under the water, floating in a lazy circle.
Calum told me the story of where the swans came from:
There was once a king on the mainland and he married a shy young girl from the island. He made her his queen. She bore him seven beautiful children, one for each year of their happy marriage, and then she fell ill and died. After a year of grief the king decided to marry again. He chose a widow from the south, a striking beauty, very proud, as different from the island girl as a rock is from a cloud. She was jealous of the first wife’s children, who were tall and strong and handsome and beloved of all who saw them. She herself had a son she was ambitious for, and she was soon pregnant with another child of the king’s. Her stepchildren played with her young son, swinging him between them so his legs flew off the ground, and he squealed with laughter and screamed for more. But the sight of it tormented her because the other woman’s children were taller and finer than her boy, and they were easy and friendly with him instead of submissive and respectful.
She went to see a wise old woman and asked her how she could free herself from the first queen’s offspring. ‘Because one day they’ll have everything and my poor children will have nothing. When the king is gone they’ll lord it over us, commanding both the islands and the seas. They’ll do as they please and we shall be no more than dirt beneath their feet.’ The old woman made up a special potion and advised the queen to pour it into her stepchildren’s porridge one morning when the king was out hunting.
Kindly the queen called to them: ‘Come and eat your porridge, children, before it goes cold. I’ve poured on the cream, just as you like it.’ When the oldest boy had eaten his porridge he stretched out his neck and gave a kind of squawk. His stepmother watched in satisfaction. Then a repulsive ripple seemed to slither along his neck and extend it like a thick-muscled snake so shocking to behold that the queen nearly fainted. The long blind neck stretched itself over his boy’s head like a stocking rolled over a foot and when the shape of his round head was swallowed a sleek white bird head formed in its place with piercing black eyes and strong shapely beak. And he raised his arms which had grown to six foot length each one and with a rustling and a susurration of sudden growth a thousand strong white quills sprouted on each side and the wind as he lifted them was enough to send the breakfast pots crashing to the floor. Slowly he began to beat them and the huge white wings dazzled and unbalanced the wicked queen who fell to the ground in terror and the drumming and creaking of his flight rang deafeningly around the castle until he gained the arched doorway and was gone. And one by one his brothers and sisters followed him, beating through the air and raising such a wind in the castle that it tore hangings from the walls and doors from their hinges and fanned the flames in the hearths so they leapt out to catch at the clothes of the castle inmates. And as the seventh swan soared up high above the castle to the freedom of the heavens, the castle exploded in flames, burning so fiercely that not a single soul inside it escaped. And the swans flew over all the kingdom and were lords of the land and the isles and the kyles, they went where they pleased and obeyed nobody’s law but their own.
Calum and I dragged our sticks down to the ruined cottage, leaving the swans masters of the shoreline.
We made up the fire and Calum told me where the spring was, the spring the old islanders had used. He had two Pepsi cans he’d rinsed and used before. I went down past the last ruin to the bright green patch in the reedy grass, parted it and knelt to fill my cans. As I came back I saw Calum had moved closer to the fire – he was squatting, hands up to shield his face from the heat, long shanks bent. The patient shape of him made me think of an African.
Nobody except us knew who killed her. She was the only other person who knew and she was dead.
It was like stepping off a cliff. Either you can fly, or you will plummet. You don’t know which.
OK. Go to the edge and look down.
To a bad place. Thick close walls, windowless, airless; a locked door, no escape. The clanks and shouts and cries and whispers and moans and sobs of hundreds of other confined souls; misery seeping in through the crack under the door. No dawn sky to put an end to the night’s horrors, only the flickering of cold fluorescent tubes. A black tunnel of time stretching out ahead; the white dot of its ending invisibly, immeasurably far. The casual brutality of warders and other inmates.
But you were going to walk into the sea.
Consider Calum in a prison. They would push, mock, goad, torment, flay. If he didn’t lose his temper they would break him and if he lost it he would kill someone.
Our mother lying there on her carpet. No longer controlling either of us. I can walk away onto the next boat if I want.
Calum bends his head and runs his hands over his hair and face as if he’s trying to brush cobwebs away. He glances at me. ‘We c-can stay here.’
‘Here?’
‘Repair one of the c-cottages a bit – I can grow vegetables …’
And catch fish and seagulls’ eggs; and I can spin yarn from nettles and weave shirts for us and we can make beds from swans’ feathers and every time anyone comes to Durris we can hide. No one will guess where we are and the police will be quite happy to blame Phyllis’s death on an unknown passer-by.
I seize at it though. Imagine getting a boat – rowing across to one of the more distant uninhabited islands – getting out of reach of other people – could we? To live like shipwrecked mariners. If we could escape … He’s still looking at me hopefully, waiting for a reply. ‘They’ll come looking for us Calum. They’ll come looking.’
‘But if we h-hide–’
‘They’ll have dogs to sniff us out.’
He straightens his legs and begins to pick his way backwards and forwards across the rubble-strewn floor like an agitated stork. He is wringing his hands. ‘We need some f-food.’ He begins to cry. ‘I d-didn’t even bring any food.’
‘Calum. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.’
I get him to sit down again. And I tell him what we’re going to do. Once you’ve stepped off, it’s easy, blindingly swoopingly soaringly easy. I can fly.