by Lydia Syson
‘Solomona!’
But Billy is smiling, fiercely, crookedly.
‘This will be quickest. We’ll make kindling of it all!’ he cries – to my vast delight. Pineki helps him, and together they fell my prison, wall by shattered wall, and we jump away from its falling, and I laugh and cry for my new freedom until I’m standing only under the sky, scratched and weary, firewood all around, Vilipate unknotting my bonds. My arms fly up, released, and Solomona is there before me. We fall together, undivided, chest to chest, head to shoulder, the world in pieces round us.
Click, click, click. Pockets are emptied of stones. No need for these, says Solomona. What can one man do now against so many united? My brother no longer speaks of prayer or patience. He whispers only of the cross that rose up on the headland while they set themselves apart on the beach below, of their growing fears and slow understanding, and the urgent knowledge that they could not stand by.
‘Why did you wait so long?’ I ask him quietly.
Solomona shakes his head.
‘False pride? The desire to do my duty? Fear? Confusion?’
‘The reasons I always jump too soon,’ I whisper.
‘I’m sorry, Kalala. I was too slow to act, I know, too trusting maybe. But I never doubted you. Never, never would I have let you die.’
We draw apart reluctantly. So much to say. So much lost time. I know now Solomona has faith enough for two. He will know soon enough where my qualms and questions have brought us. We are both ready, I am certain. With my brother beside me, hearts reconciled, I will be able to return to the dreadful gully, and there I will tell him all I know, all I believe, all we can remember. An end and a beginning. And then there will be choices to make. More questions too. But all in time. First there’s Lizzie.
One by one, my island brothers embrace me, and then Ada brings me water, and I gulp it down, and she waits eagerly.
‘Let’s go now. Quickly. We have been too long already. Lizzie will be waiting.’
I feel the agitation in Pineki run high again – guilt at his first capitulation turned to a lust for revenge – and Solomona has to settle him, and Vilipate too. I set down my pannikin, see how it quivers. I gather all my powers, test my body’s strength.
‘Who has the gun?’ I ask.
Solomona turns me round. I see Mrs Peacock coming towards us, eyes red and swollen. Hearing my question, she steps sideways, shifts the baby laid across her shoulder, bright eyes looking, looking, and raises her chin, so that I can see the key she wears on a black ribbon round her high-collared neck. A shudder runs through her breast, the spectre of all her weeping.
‘She’s locked the bullets in the trunk,’ says Queenie, who supports her mother.
‘There’ll be no more violence here, I hope.’ She slips the key inside her blouse to keep it out of sight.
‘Mrs Peacock …’ I say, bowing my head. ‘Thank you. For your faith in me.’
At first she doesn’t answer. She seems bewitched, as if held by a trance. All the children, all us island fellows, we all wait uncertainly, unable to act before she gives us leave.
‘He never could be stopped, you know, not Joseph. And I believe he will never, ever leave this island. So, however matters fall, we may have to leave him.’
‘But we need to hurry now, Ma,’ says Ada, anxiously. ‘I promised Lizzie. We can lose no more time.’
Every part of me is impatient to find her.
‘I’ll wait here with Joey,’ says Mrs Peacock. I remember how she waited alone before, when we first searched for Albert. ‘Gussie, you stay with me.’ She notices Solomona’s hesitation. ‘You go too. Go with Kalala. I’ll look after the little ones. But you must all go. We’ll need everybody’s strength today.’
48
THE PATH IS BECOMING ROCKIER, AND STEEPER TOO. Pa keeps following Lizzie, begging her to speak to him.
‘Lizzie, please, have compassion. Show some mercy. Can’t you see I didn’t mean to kill him? Can’t you persuade your mother? Ada? You know what Albert was like. You can see how easily a thing like this can happen. You must understand. You always understand.’
She can hardly tell if he is offering her a confession or a denial.
‘An accident,’ he is saying. ‘That’s what it was. A terrible, terrible accident.’
No, not that. She shakes her head. She cannot keep it still. An accident is something that slips and falls. An accident is a gust of wind plucking at a sail or flame and catching hold while your eyes are somewhere else, something unstoppable, a fragmentation of fortune. It is pressure misapplied, a blade off course, slicing into flesh. Spilled milk, falling eggs, broken shells. A moment’s misjudgement. That can be counted a mistake.
It is not a rock hammering on a skull. It is not the instant blindness of anger and injustice. It is not tyranny. Nor is it the seeping away of breath from your own flesh and blood.
Do not call this an accident, she thinks.
He’s as blind now as when he lifted his rock-grasping hand to kill her brother. He’ll never see his mistakes. Lizzie looks at her feet. A small pale scar made long ago by a leaping ember is soil-stained and hidden. All the bones there, everything inside that skin, the blood beneath, the sinews and veins, connecting everything, all that keeps moving her, backs away now from her father’s entreaties, although she has issued no orders and would like her body to halt this retreat. Better to be a tree, dripping in mist, hanging with drifting moss and shining beetles, and play no part in human life at all. Better a plunging whale. A limpet.
There seems nothing familiar about her father’s feet today. Other feet of other colours splay like his. Others have big toes which strain to separate from the rest, and nails as hard and yellow as hoof or horn. These feet belong to a man who has killed his son. Lizzie watches them turn repeatedly towards her own, toes crimped in despair, all connected to the heaving body they bear, the hands that paw at her, and the voice that comes from raw, wet lips:
‘Talk to me, Lizzie.’ Mr Peacock rushes at her and shakes her, again and again, so that metal and salt and a taste of terror seep into her mouth. ‘Talk to me. Promise me you’ll help me.’
‘Ah-ah-ah-ah,’ she hears her throat protest. ‘Pa-ah-ah-ah.’ She wants to spit, and spit at him. The urge bubbles inside her mouth and guts. She wants to tell him she despises him, and he will burn in hell for what he’s done, but she can say nothing while he is shaking her like this, and her head is knocking back and forth, while her clamped arms flail at her sides and her fingers reach for air. The sheathed knife in her tunic pocket thuds against her thigh. But as suddenly as he has grabbed Lizzie, he releases her. As if someone has just told him what he’s doing, and until then, he did not know. The lava subsides.
She has bitten her tongue. She wipes her mouth with the back of a hand.
‘Lizzie?’ he whimpers.
She has to speak.
‘No, Pa. No. I’ll not promise anything. I won’t help you. I’ll never work for you again. I can’t forgive you.’
Snapping twigs and swishing leaves.
Father and daughter turn at once. Ada, thinks Lizzie, with a leap of hope. Kalala? They should soon be here. They’ll help her. For all she longed for it, for all she needed it, her father’s cracked confession is too vast and uncontainable a thing. And she can’t tell how long it’s taken. If she’s too early here, or late. But she knows she can no longer bear it on her own.
The noise is just a goat lolloping through the undergrowth, a real one this time. Quite alone, moaning and anxious, it’s looking for its own lost companions. Meh, meh, meh. Lizzie sees the killing look flit into her father’s eye as he reaches for his own knife – he cannot help himself – and she turns aside. Hearing the steely whisper of blade returning to sheath, she begins to breathe again.
‘Don’t, Lizzie. Don’t,’ he whispers. ‘I can’t bear it. Don’t look at me like that.’
What does he expect?
‘When have I not taken care of you? When have I ev
er hurt you? And it was an accident,’ he says, again.
‘No,’ she mutters. ‘You know it wasn’t.’
‘What?’ he shouts. ‘Say it louder.’
‘No!’ she yells into the wind. ‘No. Impossible.’
Dare she walk away from him?
‘I meant to stop him. I wanted him to stay.’
‘But you lied.’
‘I can’t hear you. Don’t turn your back on me! Look at me, damn you.’
She obeys, briefly, for long enough to make her accusation again.
‘You killed him and you lied, I said. You lied to us.’
There’s the zigzagging track. Ada will soon be there. And the others. She only needs to hold him off a little longer.
‘It was to protect you,’ Pa shouts. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And what could you have done with the truth? How could it have helped you to know? It would have destroyed everything we have made here. I lied for all of us. You must see that. To help us all.’
‘To help yourself,’ she says, ready to flinch.
Nobody has come yet but there is nowhere left to walk. On the flat rocky outcrop of Goat Point, standing between her father and the ocean, she lays her final accusation at his feet.
‘And now, to save yourself, you’d sacrifice Kalala.’
And she had let herself become complicit. Out of love and misplaced pride, she allowed her father to deform her heart. Truly, she is made in his mould. If the Esperanza had not come, would Albert be alive? Lizzie resists this self-deceiving train of thought. She sees now that Albert always lived in danger. There would have been some other kind of accident. There would have been another day when Pa came home alone.
Lizzie bears her own guilt. Shouldn’t she pay too – for her willingness to see the world through her father’s eyes for far too long, as if it would make her better, stronger, wiser, as if it would make him see her more clearly, love her more, raise her higher? A kind of greediness, for which she almost longs to take her punishment. She holds on to the thought of Ada, Queenie, and little Gus, all three taking care of Ma as she’s always taken care of them. There’s Billy too, who will take this hardest of all. She can’t betray their faith, any more than she will betray Kalala a second time. She can only play for time. The others will soon be here. She’ll have to keep him talking, and for that she needs moisture in her mouth. Her tongue still sticks. She’ll have to hope the wind will disguise the way she shakes and trembles.
‘So what now, Pa?’ asks Lizzie. Her knees are bent and loose in readiness, and her bare toes grip the rock. Where are they? How much longer can she hold him off alone? What if they never come? Her hand wants to slip into her pocket. She almost lets it. All her body throbs. How can she hide fear like this? She echoes Queenie. ‘What are we going to do?’
Mr Peacock holds his arms out on either side of him, palms down, slightly rising, slightly falling, in small soft jerks. Like a boy walking a fence. Almost like a hovering bird. He could be readying himself to catch her or to snatch at her. They are both exposed now, to each other, and also to the wind, which has stirred itself again and buffets and nudges and pushes them from all directions. Only the faintest turning up of his mouth, barely visible – you can hardly see his face for beard – but it seems to Lizzie at this moment that his eyes have been becalmed. Sky and sea at once, clear and blue but strangely tranquil. He’s found a solution, she thinks. The habit of faith returns, irrepressible, against all logic, whetting hope and shaking purpose. Of course he has. Of course. He is going to repent now. He’ll say he’ll change. He will show the remorse she’s sought all this time, alongside the regret. And then we will put our faith in Solomona to help us find forgiveness. It’s possible.
There can be a future. Nothing is the end of everything.
Pa sweeps off his hat, as if it’s a hindrance to his thoughts. Flying from his fingers, it’s carried away by the wind in a trice, over the cliff edge and out to sea. He looks naked and unfamiliar without it, the bleached strip across his forehead which the sun never sees suddenly exposed to glaring daylight, as if years have flown away. Emptiness, not tranquillity. His tired and crumpled eyes lack all focus. His mouth loosens and opens. And then, without speaking, with no warning at all, he rushes towards her with such violent urgency that she ducks into a crouch. Hands bound round shins, eyes screwed up, knees jammed into her face, she balls herself up like a millipede. Her father knocks into her. She’s thrown off balance, stiffly, onto her side. Her bony elbow crushed against the rock, her fingers still interlocked, she braces herself. She’s sure a blow is coming. In that moment her mind is somewhere else. Floating, flying, hurtling. Her body is not hers. Becoming nothing at all, she can hold everything at bay.
Only for an instant.
No blow falls. A fear sharper than any physical injury uncoils her, and the shock that freezes her now is sharper still. Pa has ceased his headlong rush. He tilts on the very edge of life, standing too far for her to reach, too rapt. He lifts his arms and stretches them out again, horizontal, and becomes a man with wings. Hadn’t she always known there was nothing he couldn’t or wouldn’t do?
Let him be. Ma’s voice in her head. Let him be. Lizzie doesn’t know if she can. If he turns now … if he sees her … won’t that make him stay? Is she not enough? But the begging words won’t come. She’s almost certain she cannot bear for him to leave, but her silence proves she’s wrong.
No.
She wants him to go. She wants him to fly away from here, and let them be. She will keep watch. Lizzie will be his witness now. And she stares and stares and stares, and even so, it’s happened before she can register the moment. There he stands still. And then he doesn’t. Perhaps she hears a cry. It could have been a seabird. Perhaps she cries out herself, at the vanishing she’s somehow missed.
Pa’s gone.
He’s left them all behind.
A passing has taken place, a crossing over, a reversal of everything and always. Lizzie stands alone on the bare promontory, inside out, flayed, and also free.
*
She cannot stay here for ever. The others will find her when she’s ready, and that’s not yet. She turns her back on the sea and walks away. In time, the trees engulf her, the ocean is silenced and the light softens into something green, calm and translucent. The undersong changes. It’s all birds and insects here, and the gentle stridulation of leaf on leaf. The hushed hiss of life uncurls out of sight, fern fronds stretch and yawn, lichen feathers across bark. White aprons gleaming, a pair of red-eyed pigeons land in a karaka tree to peck at its orange fruit. Other fruits fall and will rot where they lie, and seedlings will soon sprout, very soon, though other seeds will sleep for years, generations, and more will grow elsewhere too, wherever they are carried away and excreted, on other slopes and even smaller islands in this little chain, and some will drop into the impossibly deep waters between and disappear or be transported further still.
She walks for some hours, no particular place or object in mind, without coherence or direction. Lizzie is not yet ready for words. They dance without rhythm, orderless in her head, coming and going, haunting and taunting her. She tries to imagine these scraps of thought turned into letters, pinned onto paper. Or syllables scratched in ash or sand, washed away by water, rewritten again and again until they cannot be forgotten. She wishes, again and again, that her father had found a better word than accident, had remembered at last the word that she’d never heard him utter. But perhaps if she uses it often enough herself, she can make up for his forgetfulness. She will stitch it into her heart and onto her sleeve. She is sorry, sorry, sorry, so sorry.
The ground rises and falls, the air moistens and cools, and her feet find their purpose, taking her towards the clifftop overhanging the tangled shore where she took her first steps here, those gritty grey sands where a shipful of stolen men never found strength to walk at all and were reburied and unburied for months and years. She is ready to look out again and comes now to honour them, and t
heir scattered children, and also Albert.
Coming out of the forest, it’s like looking out on Clapperton Bay for the first time. Wheeling birds. Infinite blue. Then she discerns the sea’s horizon, a curve so vast it presents itself as straight and flat. And by the time she has reached the contorted tree where she paused with her father long ago, waiting for Ada and Albert to climb the cliff face, she can make out the movement of the ridges of the ocean.
The wind is dropping. On white-capped waters, a ship lies at anchor.
She’s like no other vessel that has ever passed this way, like nothing Lizzie has seen before in all her travels. Neither a schooner nor a steamship but something crossbred, a thing in-between: clipper-bowed and schooner-rigged, she has a hull of shiny black, boot-topped with pink, and her upper works are clean and bright and white. Two masts lean slightly back, either side of a yellow-painted funnel, black-banded. A few sketchy drifts of steam emerge. A launch is being lowered.
Unsettled, Lizzie squats to watch. Dark-clothed figures descend, limbs lost against the dark-sided ship, white faces shining. She observes their efforts to unload. They balance something on their rowing boat so long and awkward that it sticks out like an overgrown bowsprit. The boat is thrown onto the beach with disdainful force, dragged back out and in again, and it is only when the sailors have safely reached shore that she sees they are in uniform. Neat and orderly; she imagines blue serge blouses, peaked caps and pigtails. She squints at their commander and his gold-braided frock coat. Brass buttons, she fancies, too far away to see, shining below a chinstrap beard. The men look up at the cliffs in awe, and then away. She is invisible to them.
The commander moves out of sight, beyond the grove of trees, and Lizzie imagines then the muffled knock at their old and battered door, and remembers the way it used to scrape the clayed floor. She cannot see them, but she knows they are breathing in the must of neglect, poking fingers through layers of dried-out palm leaves. She can wait. She will be patient. And yes … soon they reappear, to consult with pointing fingers and nodding heads. They look at a chart. They make decisions. Over there. Yes. (Another nod, perhaps.) That’ll be the spot. The tall pole they have brought is a flagstaff. Quite unsuspecting of their audience, the men stand around the post, and salute. They look at each other briefly, then stare straight ahead.
