Viking Bay Viking BayAnd there’s nothing I want to say about that. It was 365 days all 24 hours long. There were 60 minutes in every hour. I had time to think about each thing that had happened, each incident on the island, each conversation with my mother and my brother, each story that Calum told me. There’s a bay just south of her house, Calum called it Viking Bay. I held that in my head a lot of the time, because of its black rim of stones. Because of its waiting. The story he told me there was all about waiting.
Viking Bay faces the north Atlantic. The shoreline is quite black, black boulders and pebbles, and the grass runs down to the edge. There’s barely any height to the ground here, the merest wave would wash right into the field, and the flat sea stretches to the tiny flat islands of land and cloud that float on the distant horizon.
Late one summer a thousand years ago a Viking longboat pulled into this deserted bay. They had set off from Norway making for distant Iceland; Ragnar and his wife Freya and his brother Olaf and their freedmen and their slaves and their furs and their shields and axes was happily married and mead and supplies of barley and seed and dried fish. But they had run into a storm and then into days and days of fog. Ragnar knew they had lost their way – maybe even sailed in a circle – and on the first day the fog lifted he released the ravens and set a course to follow their flight to land. They moved into warmer air and he recognised the mild current that flows around the north-western parts of Britain. He had been down the Irish coast the previous year, raiding; had brought back rich plunder of goods and slaves, including an Irish girl.
They pulled the boat ashore and turned it over; made fire and food and settled for the night. During the night Freya went into early labour and gave birth to a tiny sickly boy. In the morning the fog closed in again.
All day and night as she lay huddled under the boat with the baby in her arms she listened to fragments of Ragnar’s passing conversations. Arguing with Olaf about what to do: they should leave tonight, sail on for Iceland, before the winter prevented them. But they must wait for the fog to lift. The baby must be killed and buried here, no point in taking a sickly thing on such a journey. Later she heard her husband calling to the Irish slave girl; she heard him questioning the girl and copying some words of her language; she heard them laugh together. She heard the deep voices of the brothers murmuring together as they sat by the fire after their food; she heard the sounds of a man and woman lying together close by. But she did not know if the man was Ragnar.
They were stranded on the island for days, blanketed in fog. On the day it lifted five whales came past the bay and shoals of fish so thick the water glittered with them. The baby boy was feeding well and growing stronger, he had his toehold on life.
The men argued about the wisdom of sailing on. The island was a safe place to overwinter. To make the northern journey so late in the season was becoming hazardous; better to bide here and sail to Iceland in the spring. There were rich lands to raid nearby and no enemies on the island. Freya listened to her husband and the Irish girl exchanging words and laughter in the Irish tongue. She listened to them gasp and moan at night. She held the small baby between her breasts.
The next day Ragnar split the party: half for Iceland, half to overwinter on the island. In spring he would return for his wife and his son, and the freedmen and slaves he left with them. Sailing with Ragnar were the strongest of the oarsmen and three slave girls including the Irish one.
When they had gone Freya walked the black stones of the bay with her baby in her arms and looked out as the dot of their sail melted into the distance. When they had gone she sat on the rocks and combed her long fair hair with the bone comb Ragnar had carved for her when she was still a girl.
The days began to shorten. It was dark when they woke in the morning. It was dark by mid-afternoon. On some days when the cloud was low and mist hung in the air the darkness never lifted. The dark was a mood which hung in Freya’s heart, it contained the sounds made by her husband and the Irish girl, and the black finality of the stones of the shore. The island was damp and quiet and dark and held permanently in suspension between the black night sky and the inky depths of the sea. She thought her husband would never return.
After the turning point of the winter solstice she walked the west coast of the island every day, eyes fixed on the cold flat sea. The dark pressed on her, it bowed her head, it infiltrated her and filled her up and was only broken by lightning flashes of vision: her husband and the Irish girl laughing together, her husband turning away from her. In a rage of despair one day she flung the comb he had made her out into the sea. Her son grew strong and healthy.
Early in the spring, before anyone could have expected it, a sail appeared to the west. It was a low dark misty day, it had never been light since the autumn, it seemed they had lived a whole five months by firelight and torchlight, the world closed in to the small dim circle around them that firelight created. Now a bright sail coming out of the darkness, coming straight to them.
She sat on the rocks and watched it grow with both joy and terror in her heart. He had come back to fetch her, he wanted her still. She would step from the black stones into the bright keel of her husband’s boat. But now that she must leave the island its safety and solidity rooted her to the spot. Those black stones demarcating the land from the sea; were they not protection? Against wild formlessness, against the unknown, against swamping waves and engulfing winds and being dissolved into a thousand thousand grains pounding sorrowfully on the shore? Against rekindled love, against the laughing Irish girl, against all the grief in store for her? Underneath the sea, the waves inched the comb in to shore.
When he landed she asked him, ‘How can I be sure of you?’
‘When they put me in my boat with all my prized possessions, my sword and my shield and my drinking horn and my wife–’
‘Ah–’
‘And pour oil over us and set us alight. Then you can be sure of me.’ Flames would leap over their oil-drenched bodies, the long planks would spit and snap out of place, the vessel would burst on the water red and gold as the setting sun and their black smokes entwined would spiral up to the waiting clouds.
The island was a safe place. It was both prison and freedom. But it was time to move on.
She stepped from the black stones into the bright keel.
They let me out of my cell. I catch the bus and the train and the bus and the ferry, I smile at the old folk and the walkers with their rucksacks. I come to the island and follow the road to Tigh Na Mara. The sky is so huge it makes me dizzy, the blues and greens and soft purple-greys of the mist over the islands and drifts of cloud in the tree tops stop me and make me stare. The air is alive with scents and sounds that stretch back to the furthest horizon, that waver and shift and move constantly like the quivering lungs of a giant animal. I am cradled in a living breathing landscape which melts and reforms into new shapes every time I move. It is infinitely various. There is no danger in it, there are shadows and echoes of long-lost voices but they touch the earth they walk on the water they float through the air like the patterns forming and reforming inside a kaleidoscope, they are in the texture and colours of vision. I breathe them in, they swirl in and out of me, my senses my breath my blood.
My name is Nikki. Sharp, with fangs; angry. Outside all charmed circles all groups friendships families sops. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. When I first came to this island it was flat as a plate.
Something has changed.
I can hear. I can see.
I live with my brother in our mother’s old house. A social worker visits sporadically to check I haven’t murdered anyone else. The house is dirtier than it was, it has heaps of stones and driftwood and sea treasures and tools and vegetable sacks blocking the hall and heaped in the sitting room. I have the upstairs. I emptied it. I burned her things, Calum helped me. And to begin with I just took up my bed. There’s a little table now I bought from a house sale in the village, and a broken chair Calum found washed up a long time ago that he’s made into a stool. On the windowsill is the little Viking comb, carved by Ragnar a thousand years ago. The soft grey light flows in the windows like balm, sometimes there is a rectangle of bright sunlight on the bare floorboards. I can sit and watch the light shift and change, I can wake in the morning and before I even open my eyes I can feel the gentle mist patient against the pane I can feel the way it bridges the space between my window and the sky I can feel touched and blessed.
Calum is slow chaotic maddening my brother. He tells me stories. He likes my tale of Fir Apple. He plants and tends his garden. Every day he roams the island and brings back treasures from the sea.
Sometimes I see it one way, sometimes another. I can still see who I was. Even, who I will be. Not here in this peace for ever. Not cradled and cocooned in island mists, caressed by island voices, bathed in soft island light for ever. It is a milky womb where I swim blind and protected as a foetus, where I hang suspended perfect and weightless. I am in a still safe place. I am in no hurry for what’s next. While I wait, I rehearse the stories. As a baby floating in its amniotic fluid dreams the dreams of its past and coming lives, I tell Seal Rock, Bull Rock, the Ashplant, the Prayer Stones, Salt, Table Rock, and the Seven Swans. I tell Viking Bay.
I haven’t discovered anything new I have discovered something old and always known, not lost, not forgotten, not rare, not difficult.
Only unknown to me.
I have discovered a brave new world with voices in it I did not have before. Each voice has stories, each story has voices. They radiate possibilities.
The first story Calum properly told me was Table Rock, as he led me through the fog on my second day on this island. The woman who leaves her child on the rock, the child which is not her husband’s. Now I can tell it over again: Table Rock.
A couple want a child, but the husband cannot father one. They love each other, on cold nights they curl around one another for warmth, their gentleness and kindness together feathers their bed like swansdown. But there will be no child.
They grieve, each for the other’s loss. When he sits on the cottage step in the evening, staring out to sea, she watches his face and her heart weeps for him, because she knows he is thinking of the child he will not have. She loves him. She thinks of a plan.
When he is out in the boat one day she takes herself to his brother, who is home waiting for the cow to calve. She tells him her problem and her plan, and she gives him a cheese she has made, in exchange for what she needs from him.
And as the months go by she barely conceals the swelling belly, she almost flaunts her new self to her wondering husband, who strokes her soft flanks with timid, gentle hands, and wonders but does not question, because he loves and trusts her.
When she delivers the child she lays it on Table Rock. He’s a good man, he will look for it. When he comes in from fishing he will find it there.
And when he comes in that night to the neighbouring bay, because he had a catch to deliver there, so doesn’t pass by Table Rock, she bites her lip till it bleeds but says nothing. He is a good man and she must let him freely choose. She trusts him.
He takes in her face, her body, looks into her eyes. They do not speak. After his meal he leaves the table almost hurriedly – glances back at her where she sits in the shadow, looking after him. Outside he raises his face to the evening breeze, sniffing like a dog. Hurries, stumbling, down the cliff path, until he comes in earshot of the sound his ears have hunted – wades, splashing and nearly falling in his eagerness, out to gather up the child. And as he makes his way back to the cottage the questions he did not formulate, because he loved his wife, are answered. He sees what she has done and why, and his heart swells with love of her. He gives her the baby as a gift of the sea, as she has given it him.
Closer to home there’s another story. A woman who abandons her daughter and keeps her son, and ends up being murdered: Phyllis’s story.
An unhappy woman was once cruelly treated by her parents. She was impregnated by her father and gave birth to a daughter. Her mother told her that this baby, fruit of an unnatural and shameful liaison, had died.
The woman moved far away from her parents and began a new life. She met a man and gave birth to his son. She lavished upon the boy all the love she had been unable to give her daughter. For a while she was happily married, but then her husband died. Although she loved her son she found herself haunted by guilt and sorrow over her lost daughter, she became increasingly withdrawn and unhappy. She told her son about his sister who had died so terribly young. She was fearful for the boy and tried to keep him close, she wanted to protect him from danger but she hurt him by taking away his independence.
When he moved away from her she tried to kill herself. He saved her life. Her sense of guilt and shame was doubled, as she realised the burden she had become to this boy whom she loved so intensely.
A young woman came to the island where they lived, and rented a room from the mother and her son. The girl paid great attention to the son, walking and talking with him for hours, until the mother became convinced the girl was trying to steal her beloved boy.
Then the girl confronted the woman and announced she was her long-lost daughter. The wretched woman was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. She had believed the story that her baby was dead so the girl’s claim was as shocking as the appearance of a ghost. She wanted to believe but she did not dare; she wanted to laugh and rejoice and hug the girl but she was petrified of this dead person who’d suddenly come to life. She was afraid that the girl still had a plan to take her son away, and that she might be mad. The girl was furious with her mother for abandoning her and warned her that she was going to kill her. When the girl stormed out the mother collapsed in terrible distress, not knowing which way to turn. It seemed to her that the girl was strong and would survive, that the girl was like herself and could endure as much as the mother herself had endured (which seemed to her to be a great deal – an infinity of suffering). Whereas the boy was different, more vulnerable. He was the one she must protect.
Soon after, her son came to see her and confirmed his mother’s worst fears by announcing that he wanted to marry the girl. The mother spilled out the whole sorry story to him. But her son, instead of sympathising, grew angry with his mother for lying to him about his sister’s supposed death. If the girl was his sister, as his mother claimed, then he could not marry her. Thus his mother would prevent him – as she had done all his life – from doing as he wished. In his rage he grabbed the nearest thing to hand and hit his mother, killing her with one blow.
Then there’s Nikki’s story, another way of seeing it.
A young woman gave birth to a daughter whom, through no fault of her own, she could not keep. The daughter grew up bitter and twisted. Everywhere she looked she saw cruelty and selfishness and she reflected this back in her own spiteful nature. She could neither love nor be loved; she was petty and vicious and destructive, she was cowardly and terrified of shadows. She had no lasting friends, no real pleasures, no hopes or ambitions, no faith in herself. Unable to shoulder any responsibility for her misfortunes, she laid the blame on her absent mother. She decided to visit her mother on the island where she lived and kill her.
To her surprise she discovered she had a brother who lived on the island with their mother. The brother was as sweet-natured as the girl was cruel; he loved the world around him and didn’t know what fear was. He knew the stories of past islanders and they were still alive to him. He collected lost fragments of their belongings and their homes, and treasured them. He liked the girl but he didn’t know she was his sister, he thought he would like to marry her.
The girl revealed her identity to her mother – who denied it, because she had long believed her daughter to be dead.
In the morning the girl discovered her mother’s body and believed that she herself was responsible for the murder. She did not find any relief in the mother’s death, and so resolved to drown herself. As she was walking into the sea her brother came running down and pulled her from the water. And then …
Well, well, well. You know this story, I’ve told you everything. The only question is where does it end. Here? Here?
Here?
We are living like castaways on the edge of the world but we live in peace. I have no Fear. I have escaped the terrible loneliness of hating everyone around me.
I could tell you how I’m starting work for my friends Sally and Ruby, who took Calum under their wings during my imprisonment. I could tell you that one day I’ll go back to the mainland, as Freya stepping into the bright keel. I could tell you Calum and I have spoken to a museum curator at Fort William who is next month coming to look at some of Calum’s treasures. But all these things spoil the shape of the story.
I could tell you I am here.
Think of me here, on this island, now. I am safe.