by Lydia Syson
‘You won’t want to know.’
‘Yes, I will. I do.’
A huge sigh, another long silence, and Ada begins to speak, thinking long and hard as she frames each sentence.
‘It’s Pa. You don’t see it. You’ve always been his golden girl. No, don’t deny it. You know it’s true. He thinks you’re perfect. Oh, Billy and Queenie and Gussie … they’re all right, I suppose. And me. Sometimes. He knows we won’t let him down. But he can’t forgive Albert.’
Lizzie’s lips open, but she thinks better of speaking.
‘However hard he tries, it’s never enough,’ Ada continues. ‘Pa always thinks him nesh. A disappointment.’
And how can you blame him, Lizzie wants to ask. After all Pa’s done for us, and for Albert most of all. To have a son like Albert when you’re a man like Pa, of course it drives him wild. Everyone has to get on with things. Make the best of the hand they’re dealt. They all knew that, and they all did get on with it, as best they could. Why should it be any different for Albert? It wasn’t fair. Except it was impossible to deny that he was different. Marked out not just by his fragile beauty, but his health; such a sickly boy, Albert, on land and sea. He never quite recovered from each new blow before the next one came along – the flu, the flux, the swollen joints, the vomiting. Always marked by his careless injuries. Always hobbling. Always wimbly-wambly. It was harder for him, she had to admit. So however much she wants to protest, Lizzie doesn’t dare.
‘He’s tough on all of us,’ tries Lizzie. To think that Albert had actually given up, had run away from their promised land, from all of them … nothing could anguish Pa more. Ada was right. Better Pa thought him dead. ‘It’s for our own good.’
‘Not Albert’s. And he’s ten times harder on Albert than he is on us. Twenty times harder than he is on you.’
Lizzie thinks of denying this.
‘That’s because he’s a boy.’
‘Does that make it right?’
Lizzie doesn’t answer. She’s not sure. It makes it worth it, maybe. A bit of her still thinks Albert might deserve Pa’s anger. Some of it.
‘Albert was on the wrong side,’ says Ada, surprisingly. ‘I think I am too.’
‘Families don’t have sides.’ Lizzie is incredulous.
‘You think that because you’re on the right one,’ says Ada. ‘I was before. But now I’ve slipped through. Not for Ma. At least not yet. Only Pa. But you know Ma. She’ll never be on the other side from him for long. She can’t. Then what? But it’s always been different for you. That’s what makes you so blind.’
‘Blind to what?’ Lizzie asks slowly. That queasy, shifting, slippery sensation’s back with her. Whatever Ada is about to tell her, she doesn’t want to hear.
‘Blind to Pa of course. To what he’s really like. When you are on the wrong side. When Ma can’t see.’ Ada’s hands are sweaty with anxiety and she tries to dry them on her tunic. Then Ada looks straight at her. ‘Lizzie, do you remember when Albert first hurt his leg, ages and ages ago?’
Lizzie thought back. There had been so many accidents and aches and pains. One merged into another.
‘Do you mean when he nearly lost the nanny goat? Before we moved to this side of the island? He fell. He’s always falling and making everything worse.’
She thinks back to the pinched blank look Albert often came limping home with after a day spent digging, or hunting, or fishing with Pa. Not glowering, or angry or resentful. As if he’d been emptied out. His silences. Pa’s too. She always used to feel sorry for their father.
‘He fell, yes. But he fell because Pa knocked him down. After he let the goat go. And then he hit a rock.’
Pa was often free with his belt. What father wasn’t? Discipline. That’s just the way it worked, and always had. Albert had the worst of it of course – because he made the most mistakes. But he’d thrashed Billy a good few times too – for cheek, or forgetfulness, and sometimes for taking the Lord’s name in vain. The girls usually only got a slap. Lizzie rarely. More likely a pinch on the ear from Ma. Seeing the dismay on Ada’s face, Lizzie hastily concedes: ‘But of course he was unlucky to fall.’
‘No. Listen to me, Lizzie. Listen. You don’t understand. Because Albert didn’t tell you. He didn’t say how hard he’d hit him, and why he’d hit the rock so hard. Hard enough to break a bone, perhaps. Or that Pa went on belting him even then, even when he was on the ground, and screaming. And that wasn’t the first time he’d hit him like that.’
‘No,’ Lizzie says quickly. ‘No. Albert must have … Pa couldn’t …’
Lizzie’s head begins to shake. Side to side. Over and over again, in waves of denial. Her whole body saying no.
‘I don’t believe you. Pa would never … Make Albert lame? It makes no sense. Why on earth …? And that’s still an accident. I mean … Maybe he hit him, but … Albert said he’d fallen.’
‘Pa told him that if anyone found out, he’d beat him again, even harder. He knew it was cruel. He knew it was wicked. But he didn’t want Ma to know. And he thought he could hide it from the rest of us.’
Lizzie is still shaking her head. All those cuts and bruises. But Albert was awkward and clumsy. Everyone knew that. Anyone could see.
‘Albert was frightened, all the time, Lizzie. Couldn’t you see? He was desperate. He hated being alone with Pa. And Pa never stopped testing him.’
Lizzie’s fingers cover her eyes. Every part of her has begun to tremble. She doesn’t want to hear or see or know any more. Ada gently moves her hands so she can see again, then turns her back on Lizzie, and lifts her tunic. She’s hitching up the hem of her drawers, and Lizzie can see the backs of her thighs, quite clearly now, just below her buttocks. There are dark pink stripes zigzagging, criss-crossed, five or six, overlapping like fallen sticks.
‘They don’t hurt now. But Lizzie, you don’t know what it’s like, when he comes for you. With that look in his eyes. And you know you haven’t got a chance. I didn’t know till he came for me.’
‘Ada …’ Asking permission with her eyes, Lizzie stretches wondering fingers to feel those thin raised lines, fine cord against smooth hairless skin. ‘When …?’
‘A few months before the ship came. They were cutting wood, just Pa and Albert, and Ma sent me to tell them it was nearly time to eat, and she was cooking fish. But when I finally found them, Pa was thrashing him, over and over, with the buckle end of the belt too. He’d made him take his shirt off and his back was bleeding. I don’t even know what Albert had done. And I rushed to stop Pa, and then he looked at me, that way, that horrible way, and right away he ordered Albert to cut a switch for me, and then he beat me too, and Albert could do nothing.’
Lizzie is trying to remember. What had she noticed? A night Ada went to bed early, and slept all crouched and huddled. And Lizzie had imagined another kind of blood had brought her low, the kind you couldn’t talk about, and she and Queenie had left Ada alone as Ma instructed.
There’s a certain kind of shiver in Oceania that tilts you off balance before you know it. Your soles and stomach feel it both at once, and the air shimmers, and also your ears and eyes and nostrils. It’s inside you and outside you; sometimes to give notice that a pot will fall or a plate will break, sometimes that trees will move and the earth will gape. Even if it only lasts a second, even if its beginning is also its end, right at the heart of that very second balances the nauseating prospect that nothing might ever be the same again. Ada’s last words give Lizzie that sensation now. Something inside her slides away. The hairs on her arms stand upright, one by one.
Ada tidies herself up, and looks at Lizzie. She’s all closed up again. ‘So now you know. But just you remember your promise, and don’t go sneaking off to Pa or Ma.’
‘No, Ada. Stop. Don’t go now. We’ve not finished. I can’t … I’m sorry … I didn’t mean it.’
She is alone. Hundreds of questions hum and thrum. Lizzie wants to retreat, go right back in time and start again so that
everything can come out differently. Back to the day before Albert vanished, even before the day they landed here. Maybe to a time before the night she crouched in the hotel bar and listened to Mr Robson talking, laying out temptation for the tasting. When did Albert decide he had to go, come what may? How on earth did he manage it, and how did Ada help him and nobody realise? Most of all, how could Lizzie herself have failed to see what was happening to Albert? Not just Lizzie, but Ma, and Queenie and Billy too. How had they all let this happen?
BEFORE
‘It’s getting closer!’ Ma said, blinking. ‘It’s coming our way! Oh yes! They’ve seen us!’
‘What’ll you tell Captain MacHeath, Pa?’ asked Billy. ‘What’ll you say to him?
Pa paused with a palm frond in his hand, then threw it on the bonfire.
‘Nothing,’ he answered gruffly. ‘It’s not the Good Intent. She looks to me like a Yankee whaler.’
‘But is she coming in?’ asked Albert.
‘She’s standing to shore all right.’
The sky, so blue and bright when they first sighted the ship, had turned a sallow yellow. Haze veiled the sun, creating a sickly glare. The sea looked as greasy and stale as the sky above, and its grey was flecked with white where the tops of the waves broke into spray.
‘They’ll not be put off by a bit of dirty weather, will they, Pa?’ said Lizzie, trying to read his face, trying to read the sky. Already the clouds, the colour of rotting plums, were banking up, and gusting wind blowing the coppery smoke this way and that. ‘Not a whaler. Aren’t they tough as old boots, Pa?’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Will they come ashore this afternoon? Will they have food for us?’ asked Queenie.
‘Might they take us away?’ risked Albert.
Pa stared at the white lines forming ever further from the beach; the surf had begun to break a long way from shore.
‘They’ve not turned back.’ Ma shouted to be heard. ‘They’ll not turn back if they see the children. They won’t … will they?’
Her tears ran unchecked but Pa offered no reassurance.
‘Pray, children! Right away!’
She knotted her hands and clenched her jaw with effort, and all five dropped to their knees to copy her.
‘She’s dropping anchor!’ Billy shouted, running down the beach. Pa snatched him back with a furious yell. Surf like this could whip a child away faster than a frog’s tongue scooping up a fly.
‘Stay here, I tell you. Just wait.’
The family huddled together, watching and hoping. Another cry of joy went up. The barque was lowering a whaleboat, pointed at each end, narrow as a Viking vessel. Oars out, the boat plunged from the shelter of the ship and into the heavy sea.
‘They’re coming,’ breathed Albert. ‘They’re coming to get us.’
Minutes later, the sea was almost too dark and mountainous to make out the boat at all.
‘It’s no good,’ groaned Ma.
Queenie pulled her hand from Lizzie’s grip and rubbed her crushed fingers.
‘No!’ shouted Lizzie, cowering, when she saw the stern tipped up so high the boat stood almost vertical. Against the odds, the sailors brought her crashing back down, but then she slipped sideways, briefly lost to sight again in the trough of the waves. Capsized? Swamped? A gasp from the children when they saw it again, oars like scrambling insect legs. But the retreating sailors had given up the struggle. The barque seemed to leave them without a backward glance, sailing away towards the spindrift. Lizzie sat down and sank her face in her skirt.
Hope was something physical, Lizzie understood just then, and could drain from your heart faster than rice spilling from a torn sack. It fell through your fingers, and scattered itself, and couldn’t be caught, and when it was gone it left you flapping and empty and wounded.
‘At least they’re safe,’ said Ma.
‘Can’t blame ’em. Nor must you,’ warned Pa. ‘She had no choice. Our lives are in no danger.’
‘They soon will be if we don’t take cover,’ said Ma, grabbing Queenie’s hand and marching her up the beach.
The family hurried together through bending trees back to their hut, dashing here and there to get everything under cover before the rain came, while the goats bleated like banshees. They piled up anything that might blow away inside the hut or the new outhouse.
Fear blew into Spy. He flattened himself and whined at the door, until Queenie dragged him inside, Sal shrinking silent at his heels. Ma only nodded, and told the children not to get undressed. Wrapped up in blankets, they shuddered with the walls’ shuddering. They hardly heard Pa hammering tight the shutters, but at last the door opened, letting a lurid light and wilder roar fall briefly into the dark hut, and slammed shut.
As if far out at sea all night, their hut shook and whispered. How little it cared for those who had built it. Defiant, disloyal beyond belief, it would have been happy to tear itself loose and fly free. Into the roar of wind and sea, indifferent and indistinguishable. In darkness, Lizzie silently begged their shelter not to abandon them now. Exposed, they’d be thrown into the heavens to weep and whirl among the stars for ever.
Small, invisible comforts kept their minds from bolting: Pa’s arm round Lizzie, and the warm, breathing bulk of him; Ada and Albert’s interlocked fingers, reining in their galloping hearts; Ma squeezing Queenie, who in turn held Gus; Billy’s fingers in his ears. Pressed so hard together, their bones felt sharper, more in need of flesh than ever.
And all the while the whaler ran before the storm, alone on that vast ocean with all the rocks and small islands of the Kermadecs on which to wreck itself.
*
The sky barely lightened until noon next day. Before long nobody could remember when their heads didn’t roar. The few hours of brightness and racing clouds they were granted on the second day Pa snatched to rethatch the roof. The following night the rains came even harder, bringing scree and stones slithering and bouncing down the cliffs, to be swept away by the torrents of the flooding swamp. Chasing the wind, the rain at last departed, and only then were the children allowed out.
The island smelled of fresh-hewn timber. Uprooted tree trunks and fallen bushes careened across the path through the woods. Nikau palms stood shocked and headless, amid piles of litter, or with broken fronds that hung like injured bird wings from trunks which tilted away in shame. So full of promise the day before, the vegetable garden lay in a tangled, flattened mess. The parsonbird had nothing to preach. As for Mrs Peacock, she was committed to despair and the dark holes of her eyes looked right through you in a way that made the children wary of asking anything. Lizzie wondered if she might be ill. Except Ma was never ill.
*
‘We have to forget we ever saw the ship,’ Ada counselled, as they squatted in the bracken of the lower woods, elbow-deep in earth. Pa had said it might be weeks before it was safe to climb the cliffs again. He had spent the morning inspecting the damaged vegetables, trimming back broken stems and lacerated leaves, searching for undamaged buds, re-staking, earthing up, rescuing plant by plant all that he could. Foraging was once more the order of the day. ‘What if it had come ten hours later and passed us in the dark? We’d be no worse off than we are now.’
One by one, Lizzie’s fingers were snapping the threads that bound each fat aruhe root to the soil. She twisted to look at her sister as though she had lost her senses.
‘Can you forget?’ asked Albert.
Ada shook her head, and dropped her attempt at piety.
‘I never will,’ Lizzie said, and chucked her precious lump towards Albert, who clubbed it to a pulp with gritted teeth.
‘At least they saw us,’ he said, when he’d finished. ‘Someone knows we’re here.’
‘True,’ said Ada.
‘And if they’re on their way somewhere, they must be on their way back sometime,’ Lizzie persisted, fingers working away at the next root.
‘Unless they were already going home,’ said Ada.
‘And that ship might tell another? And then?’ said Albert, ever more eager. But Ada was firm.
‘We mustn’t get our hopes up again. It could be another seven months before the next one passes.’
So Albert tried to change the subject.
‘Maybe Pa will get his fiddle out tonight.’
Even that didn’t lift Ada.
‘He always says he’s too tired.’
‘I’ll ask him,’ offered Lizzie.
‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll do it for you,’ said her sister, and looked at Albert with her eyebrows raised.
BEFORE
And then the ship came back. A week later, strangers shipped oars in unison and hopped out as light-footed as dancers, swiftly heaving the boat through the coarse sand in a single practised movement. They knew exactly what they were doing, said the awe in Billy’s eyes, and Lizzie knew then that one day she’d surely lose her brother to the sea. These were big men with chests twice the width of her father’s, voices three times louder, and even on that broad empty bay, they took up so much space between them that Lizzie found herself shy. Ma stood stock still, breathing fast, her gaze fixed queerly on the giant of a man who led the crew, whose ears were like sails. He tipped his cap, and made her a brief bow.
‘Herb Higgins, mate of the Magellan Cloud, out of Nantucket.’
His voice, so new and different, cast a spell on the family. They stared back blankly. Higgins glanced at his crew. Perhaps these unlikely islanders had no English. Germans? His jaw briefly twisted and a dark stream of chewing tobacco shot out onto the beach.
Mr Peacock was first to find his senses:
‘Joseph Peacock at your service.’
‘You folk shipwrecked? Or castaways?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Peacock, taut with indignation. He might as well have called them beachcombers. ‘We’re settlers. Came from Maoriland. New Zealand.’
‘By way of the Friendly Islands,’ added Mrs Peacock, coming at last to herself, and moving forward, in front of the girls, as if they needed protection.
