Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

  There is no time to react – another voice rises up.

  ‘Believe me.’ It is the hairdresser, Hope Ainsley, who had earlier cowered in the Counting House doorway. Abe and Reuben move aside so she can enter the room. ‘My Tom and his Bernadette did not leave the island to marry. They left because Bernadette couldn’t stay in this place after what that man had done to her.’

  Hope raises a trembling finger to single out the headmaster. The man’s breath comes in great heaves now, his wife blanching at his side. The hairdresser looks to the stage, to the Eldest Girls, her eyes red, and she croaks out a sorry. ‘I was too scared,’ she says, ‘to know what to do.’

  ‘Believe me.’

  Another voice. A middle-aged woman steps forward from the gallery to say how she could never understand, though she always had suspicions, why her sister took her nieces away from the island. ‘I have sons,’ she says. ‘Was I just lucky?’

  ‘Believe me.’

  Another voice, a young woman’s, words steeped in regret, recounting how a former classmate had tried to confess what had happened to her in the headmaster’s office one morning. ‘It never happened to me, so I thought she must be making it up.’

  And more voices.

  ‘Believe me…’

  ‘Believe me…’

  ‘Believe me…’

  ‘Believe me…’

  ‘Believe me…’

  EASTERTIDE: FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

  This is the sound of a community waking slowly from a dream, not willing to call it a dream anymore. This is a piece of pure knowledge gifted from a deep well. This is a story in reverse – an island pushing away its capricious giants.

  The velvet drapes are thrown open, casting a headmaster and a doctor in a fresh new light. The landlord hands over his licence, shamefaced, with muttered excuses for his allegiances – ‘You said they were willing, Jake. You said it was always mutual.’ Wives back away into the corners of the room. Three girls are lifted gently from a stage into the desperate arms of their mothers.

  They ride the wave of these accusations and revelations; it carries them from the room. The collective act of confessing, of listening, has buoyed them – for now. Soon they will come crashing back to the shore – they must. The body of a boy lies silent and alone at the edge of the woods, and justice on his behalf has yet to be served.

  The coycrock girl returns a stolen brooch to the palm of her enemy and is told that she must keep it.

  ‘It’s supposed to ward off witches but thank goodness it does not work!’

  The radio is not accepted back either.

  ‘Hang onto it,’ says the Customs Officer.

  ‘But what will I ever use it for?’ she asks him.

  ‘Who knows?’ he replies. ‘Whatever fate throws at you next.’

  So, the girl heads towards daylight, a trial still to face, her pockets full.

  Outside on the cobbles, Father Daniel leads the community in songs of sorrow and mourning. Margaritte Carruthers stands alongside him, arms raised to the sky, her blouse unbuttoned enough for them all to see the upper markings on her chest. The curate with the spiky hair moves about the crowd with a wooden voting box and slips of paper, assuring everyone who offers up testimony that they may remain anonymous, if they wish.

  The Customs Officer and the handsome coycrock teacher steer the headmaster and the doctor out through the lobby into the unforgiving day. The sight of the red dog lead on the wrist of the housekeeper’s daughter sends the red-haired coycrock bursting across the threshold, to be reunited with her animal familiar, to rub her face into the damp roughness of its fur.

  A horn blares, deep and resonant, and heads turn to see a distant grey vessel on the horizon. The April ship.

  Margaritte Carruthers takes this as her cue to raise the dead, to honour them – the fishermen drowned, the spirit of Bethany Reid, the boy whose body lies in an open grave of bramble and fern.

  The crowd jostles the headmaster and the doctor in the direction of the stocks. The girl’s dog barks in her arms, offering condemnation of its own.

  ‘Shoot that damn’ dog, Luke! Take a shot!’ slurs the headmaster venomously into the blustery air.

  It is an order that makes the coycrock girl clutch her companion even tighter, the name wrenching the attention of the three girls still locked in the embraces of their mothers.

  Luke. The sacrifice. The body in the woods.

  The headmaster must be delirious, they imagine, or else forgetful, using that name.

  ‘Let the dead rise up!’ croons Margaritte, head thrown back, eyes closed in rapture. ‘Let them see us reborn as this divine child, a new vision of God within us!’

  And the dead seemingly do as they are told, because there he is – the boy with the gun, Luke Signal, flesh and blood, alive. He lopes towards them from the direction of the smokehouse.

  THE BOOK OF LEAH

  I boarded the April ship.

  I could see no other choice, no place for me on Lark. I stood awkwardly between its past and its future. In that meeting room, I had said what I needed to, but only as a means of opening a door that others might walk through. If I could summon up the arrogance to think that I held such importance, I might say that I’d performed the task that I had been put on the island – on this earth – to do. It was done, and now I was done.

  He arrived on the cobbles a different man – Luke Signal. His lope that day was born of deep sorrow and guilt, all his customary swagger wiped away.

  His little brother was dead when it was supposed to have been him.

  Michael had been curious of late – Luke told this to anyone who would listen, clutching at them, gathering them around him, needing them to bear witness. His stream of justification, of confession, was punctuated by guttural sobs. His little brother wanted to know about kissing and touching, he said, what goes where and who does what. Luke had thought it funny, easier, to send the boy off for a practical demonstration rather than explain it to him himself. There was a promise waiting at the Sisters’ Stones – four girls, naked, willing – a red-lipped Viola had said it would be so.

  Luke described in tender detail, if only to injure himself, how he had swapped boots with his brother and lifted onto Michael’s broadening shoulders the oily weight of his oversized wax jacket. On the boy’s vulnerable head he had positioned a pair of spiralling goat horns. All will be fine, was Luke’s assurance to Michael, at the last. In the pitch black, Luke had told him, those girls won’t know the difference.

  And they hadn’t.

  When they stood on the stage that morning in the Counting House and confessed to the gallery what their intention had been – to kill Luke – they believed that’s what they had done. There was no missing coda to their story to be offered once the women’s testimony was over – we meant to kill Luke but… They were sure that the body of the elder Signal boy lay there, still and bloodied, in the mud beyond the stones; they had reconciled themselves to that sin – that specific sin. The taking of this boy’s life was different from the taking of another’s – it was less. The sacrifice of Luke was a fair exchange for a greater good.

  The girls had been under the spell of odious men certainly, so much so that they had adopted their behaviours, their means. They had put their trust in force and the inflicting of damage. They believed they could control a person’s fate.

  When the elder Signal boy arrived on the harbourside, the girls might have thought him a true ghost, or else he was the brief apparition of relief. Had they managed to bring about long-needed justice and escape a black mark against their own names? Hallelujah! He is risen!

  This relief could only have been fleeting. They understood the violence they had exacted, how irreversible it was, even if they hadn’t – as Saul had, as I had, in the unforgiving light of day – gone to the trouble of looking beyond the boots and the jacket, pulling aside the ferns and seeing that skull, that throat, looking into the open eyes of the boy who lay beneath.

>   Michael: inquisitive, eager, my best student, cruelly sacrificed for the sins of those who went before him.

  Martha Signal did not share Luke’s need for self-punishment. She and her husband had been occupied that morning in the lifting of the broken body of their younger son from the place where he’d been beaten to death before delivering him back to his bedroom – forever his childhood bedroom – as a temporary resting place. Soon, they would face the unbearable task of lowering him into the ground. This was punishment enough; too much, in fact. Martha wished to mete out some punishment of her own.

  She swooped across the cobbles like a harpy, her son’s avenging angel, and was not for a moment softened by the sight of the four girls on their knees, weeping at the revelation of what they had really done. Martha had defected from her friends in support of these girls; she had helped to found the Easter Committee with the girls’ interests at its heart – and this was how she was repaid? They’d meant to rob her of a child however the night had turned out. Martha wanted a scalp.

  She seized one of them, any one of them. If a boy was to stand for the wrongs of all men, this girl could pay for the crimes of her sex too. Viola still had hair, shining vividly in the lunchtime sun, and Martha took a fistful, dragging the girl towards the harbour’s edge.

  There were screams and protestations, a desperate battle at the waterside to restrain a woman hell-bent on drowning a novice witch, a murderous girl. Gasping her threats, Martha promised to hold Viola’s head beneath the surface for the terrible thing she had done. Ben and Saul left their guard of Crane and Bishy in the stocks to wrestle with Martha, in defence of a red-haired coycrock.

  I stood back.

  Over and over in my mind I replayed the moment I had caught Michael in the shadows of the Billet House. What are you doing here, Miss? I wished to rewind the hours, send him home to his mother. I prayed that I would be able to forgive myself, in time, but I knew I would never forgive the girls. Maybe one of those four did have to die. And mine eyes shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…

  When I thought of all the damage she had wrought, Viola seemed, like Luke, to be the best candidate for sacrifice, and in saying that, in expressing my desire to see her suffer, I understood that I was demonstrating how contagious evil can be. It passes from mind to mind, from hand to hand, dressed in the guise of justice, until we cannot distinguish the face of the enemy from our own.

  It was the mother who saved her daughter, or at least bought her a temporary reprieve. Deborah Kendrick had been drawn to the harbourside, perhaps by the sound of chaos carried on the wind, or by the hymns sung to soothe. Perhaps she had been brought there by that unspoken something that allows a parent to know when their child is in danger. She wrapped her arms around Martha Signal, an aggressive embrace that pulled the woman off balance, backwards, away from the water, forcing her to release the girl.

  The coycrock mother rocked Martha when she began to howl at the failure of her vengeance, at the futility of it, joining her in a lament for which there can never be any solace: ‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair…’

  As this drama played out, the April ship growing more defined on its journey from the horizon towards us, I kept my distance. I did not try to intervene or have my say. It was as if there was a great body of water between me and that painful scene, not a stretch of cobbled ground. I cared about what was happening, the people involved, of course I did – I wept as I watched, thinking of all that we had lost and the inevitable suffering still to come – but I understood very clearly that it was no longer my place to find an answer.

  I did not live there anymore. I was done.

  As the girls were hurried away for their own safety, as Martha was consoled and as Luke’s guilt continued to pour forth, the crowds remained, the hymns began again with renewed fervour. I returned to the harbour cottage to put the last of my things in the suitcase. I looked about each room, saw the mess that Viola had made of the carpet, the bed, sensing her fingertips on everything, but I refused to let it touch me. I considered instead what I would miss most. Nothing physical: the chime of boat rigging in the evening breeze, the familiar ashy scent of the smokehouse, the sun setting on the west coast, the lustre that the moon paints across our sometimes unforgiving waves. I unhooked the carved heart from the window latch and dropped it into the pocket of my coat.

  The incoming stevedores unloaded their cargo as I walked across the cobbles for the last time, found my mother in the crowd and hugged her goodbye. The supplies we had longed for all winter piled up on the quayside, the Lark boatmen neglecting their side of the task, continuing instead in their songs of consolation and regret, and in the discussions about the proper apportioning of justice.

  In the front office of the Customs House, as I took a seat on the hard wooden bench opposite the black-and-white images of the Big House, my feet on the boards where I had once lain with Saul, sacks of post for individual islanders were thrown down and sat ignored. Inside those parcels – clothes, toys, books, cosmetics, so many small shards of mainland life to splinter the Larkian way. Any other year there would have been a queue out of the door in anticipation of these offerings, but that day Saul worked in quiet conference with the ship’s purser at the main counter, logging all that came in and the little that would go out, including me.

  In the back office with its vista of sea the mainland crew laughed and drank tea, and at one point the captain came through the doorway to enquire about the gathering of people on the harbourside. What were the hymns in aid of? Was there a reason two men were secured by their feet in the stocks?

  ‘Island tradition,’ said Saul, without looking up from his paperwork, not missing a beat. ‘It’s the Feast of St Rita,’ he lied. ‘She’s the patron saint of impossible causes.’

  The captain returned to the teapot, and I suppose he thought that Saul and I could not hear him when he recounted this information to his crew, adding quietly that we were the strangest of the strange, us people from Lark, not like the mainlanders at all.

  I had convinced myself that I knew the ocean – the sound it made as it licked the walls of the harbour at night, how close you could get to the tidemark on the East Bay and remain safe, the agreement that every seven years we owed it a sacrifice. But the feeling of the sea when you are out there upon it is entirely different from how it feels to stand at the edge of the land and look across, wondering.

  Holding tight to the railing of the deck, the wind came in crisp, suffocating blasts, the broil of the grey waters causing a constant looming roll. The rules were different on the water; the ship was trespassing. There were no safe places at sea, and I was beginning to understand that that was the case on land too. Lark had been the entirety of my fathomed world but the further we drifted across the North Atlantic, the smaller the place became, its details falling away, questions rising. The last twenty-seven years seemed improbable.

  One of the first things I did, once settled on the mainland, was to get a tattoo. I had been looking for a church, but tattoo parlours were startlingly easier to find and Margaritte had always taught me to listen when the universe is speaking.

  There was a parlour just five minutes’ walk from the house where I rented a room. I passed it on my way to the small high-street supermarket where products – cereals, rice, tea – were offered in endless flavours and brands, but all in tiny quantities designed to last just a week, not months. It was peculiar to hand over cash in return for these goods, my biscuit tin fund supporting me until I garnered the strength to work out how to extract money from my bank account. Stranger still was having my groceries run through the till by a woman who knew nothing about me, and sought no blessings from the blackness of my hair. I saw her eyes flicker upwards, though, when she thought I wasn’t looking, no doubt assuming that such an unusual colour must have come from a bottle.

  To find a church, I had to walk several miles. The first one I came upon had the flintstone grandeur a
nd spire of a religious building, but inside it was set out with tables where people drank wine and ate steak. Further afield was the Church of Our Lady, whose services felt similar to those at home and so became a small comfort to me in this unfathomable, new world. I sat in the back pew, greeted the smiles that came my way and shook hands when it was time to pass peace amongst us, but I stayed seated for the Eucharist, unsure if the baptism of my previous life held good there.

  My teaching qualification, I had decided without any investigation, was worthless, nothing but a piece of decorated paper.

  The night before Pentecost, as I ate dinner alone in the small shared kitchen, a strong breeze blew the window from its prop, making it bang against the outside wall. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. I should have been fasting that evening, so rightly deserved no such sign, but still I took it as one – a guiding spirit. I wore a bright red scarf on Sunday, sat three rows from the front and offered my tongue for the host.

  In the choosing of a tattoo, I was more forthright. I leafed through books of designs as I drank tea made by a young woman with the kind of white-blonde hair that certainly came from a bottle. There was a bright stone in her nose and inkings climbed her neck, richer in detail and more vibrant in colour than the ones that marked Margaritte’s silvery skin.

  I considered angels and eagles, lions and bulls, and the woman with the white hair suggested a mandala.

  ‘I could combine the elements of all those animals,’ she said. ‘They’re like your four selves. In the square structure of a mandala it will work really well.’

  Before she could begin her work, I had to sign a form. Yes, you may cause me this pain, I agree. Then came a tick-box questionnaire about my medical history. I said ‘no’ to everything, including the question, Are you or could you be pregnant?

  I am sure that I had carried a child. Three months passed without any bleeding by the time I confided in anyone besides Ben. Margaritte told me to lie back on her cushioned sofa while she held above my belly a gold ring on a length of silk, to determine the baby’s sex.