The Whip Hand

by Nadine Browne

  The cold filled my lungs as I drew breath after breath of salty air, and soon the comforting lights of our house were so distant they might have been just stars in the night.

  When we stopped, we were in between Grundvik and the three small islands to the north. They were uninhabited and, now, only slightly blacker bumps in the black before us. Toma stood up, the boat swinging wildly, and Helena squeezed my hand.

  ‘Toma, sit down!’

  My father had told us, when he had found us huddled on the beach the previous evening, that the sea was as deep as the distance from Grundvik to the mainland. He had sat down next to us and I had squeezed myself into his warm side, feeling so safe with his arm around me, so warm, that nothing seemed further than the bottom of the sea.

  Now, as drops of ice splashed up and burned my cheek, I found myself whispering ‘daddy, daddy’, desperately trying not to cry.

  The oars dropped over the sides and with dull splashes sank to the bottom of the night.

  When Toma turned around, the boat rocking unsteadily below us, we saw that he was crying. We couldn’t see the tears, but his face was twisted and he kept wiping at it in angry jerks that shook the boat and made us squeal.

  ‘Toma! Toma! Please sit down, please!’

  Helena was also crying, and squeezing my hand so hard it made me wince.

  ‘I’m not going back.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Toma, we have to go back! We’re going home tomorrow. Why did you drop the oars?’

  Toma raised his chin and looked up at the sky above us, a black spread to match the black of the sea below, both vast and deep and hungry.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ he said again, looking down.

  I tried to catch his eye. There was something in his voice that scared me and I thought I could understand it better if I could just see his eyes. Helena knew more, she had dropped to her knees and was trying to pull him down, she was saying ‘don’t, Toma, don’t’ and I wasn’t sure what he shouldn’t.

  And then the boat rocked and Toma leaned back, and for a moment he seemed to be leaning on the night.

  We would never say anything other than that he had lost his balance.

  The exact spot where it had happened remained unknown. There was no chasm in the sea where he had fallen and the body was never found.

  There were no more visits to Grundvik Island. We left the house, just abandoned it. We left the beach and the cliffs. We left the pier to rot away.

  We left the unbroken surface of the Baltic, and beneath it we left one of us.

  Love

  One night when I was ten years old, I found my mum crying in the kitchen.

  I had awoken in the middle of the night, unsure of what had pulled me out of a bonbon dream that was instantly forgotten. I crept out of bed and opened the door of my room, gazing suspiciously up and down the hall beyond. All the lights in the house were off, and the first thing to pinch me through the darkness was the smell of cigarette smoke.

  It was a smell I instantly associated with early mornings and coffee, with the pre-school rush and Radio 4, and it seemed out of place slinking down the corridors in the middle of the night. So I followed it to the kitchen, where I found her perched on the single barstool, guiding the orange ember of a cigarette.

  Smoke curled around her silhouette and stung my eyes, and even before I could see the look on her face, or hear the quiver in her voice, I knew something was wrong. I knew with the instinctive knowledge of a creature under threat. I knew with the sudden unease in my stomach, with the sudden desire to run away.

  When she spoke, her voice was soft and calm, and only the most sensitive of ears could have perceived the danger.

  ‘Daddy doesn’t love me anymore,’ she said to me, with that shattering voice.

  ‘Who does he love?’ I asked, for a moment believing it was a game, a riddle.

  I had stopped in the doorway, a couple of metres away from where she sat, and now my mother reached out to me, her arm white and ghostly through the night. The gold bracelet on her wrist, the bracelet she never removed, gleamed once then fell into darkness.

  I took a step towards her, then another, and let myself be pulled into her arms, where she held me for a long while, her cigarette too close to my cheek and her breath stirring the hairs on the back of my neck.

  Love was a foreign object then. It was like a strange instrument, beautiful and tempting in its intricate construction, but of unknown purpose, mysterious function. It was the reason for so many things and the explanation that never made sense. Love earned pretty declarations in rhyme from one, and suicide bids on dirty napkins from another. It was at times puritanical and hostile, as in the lofty promises of Hollywood films, and at times dark and haunting, like in the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, or in certain poems that explained so little but wafted a crisp, luscious feeling.

  I had, at the tender age of ten, the inkling that what I had witnessed the previous summer, back in Romania, had been in part legitimate love and in part illegitimate.

  My auntie Cristina and her fiancé had stood holding hands before the priest and the congregation. Her mother had cried openly, the adults had danced all evening and into the next day, and I had experienced the drama of my first wedding, grasping the significance of the event in the same academic way that I knew the world to be large and Pluto to be far away.

  The whole family had come together, from as far away as Canada, and gathered in the picturesque mountain village that boasted a painted monastery, to witness the union between Cristina and Jack.

  My parents and I knew Jack from London, and he had been introduced to Cristina at a barbecue the previous year when she had come to spend a summer with us, her London relatives. After their first meeting, Jack visited us every day. He received heavy encouragement from my mother, who knew enough about him to consider him quality husband material: he had a job, a university education and wanted children.

  Cristina was twenty-seven and, though quite beautiful in a sultry, emaciated kind of way, was considered to be playing her last hand in the game of love and marriage.

  Cristina did not speak a single word of English, and as my mother and father supposedly had better things to do, it fell onto me to play translator.

  For a good ten days I ran back and forth between the amorous couple and one or another of my parents, asking how to say this in English, or what that meant in Romanian. On one occasion, my mother sent me back to Jack translationless but with the suggestion that he subdue his enthusiasm a tad.

  Mum got Jack a Romanian language course on tape, and before Cristina went back home he naively forced me, the annoyed nine-year-old, to teach him how to say ‘It has been a pleasure to meet you and I hope to see you again soon’ in Romanian.

  At Heathrow, after the twelve-day romance, Jack informed us all that he would be visiting Cristina in Romania the following month, and that his intentions were of the most serious nature. They kissed, passionately, and my mother welled up and squeezed my hand.

  For one moment Cristina’s black, black eyes flickered to my father, like a dying light, and he looked away at the planes taking off on the runway outside the walls of glass.

  As Cristina, looking fresh and happy in spite of the tears, made her way towards the passport check, Jack rushed forward in a passion that made the security guards jump, and yelled that he will be her waiter tonight and the evening’s specialty was the pan-fried liver.

  Exactly a year later we received the wedding invitations.

  It was the first time we had visited Romania since our exodus in the early eighties, and I had no memory of the place. When we finally arrived in the village where the wedding was to take place, hot and exhausted after a long day’s travel, I was attacked by an onslaught of perky and entirely unknown aunties, uncles and cousins who all claimed to have known me when I was tiny.

  Those couple of days before the wedding, when all the grown-ups had been busy, were magic. I made best friends instantly. I had never known
such freedom. In our cramped little terrace house in north-west London I had never felt the joy of mountains and fields and wilderness.

  After the wedding ceremony I had gone, by myself, to lie in the field, look up at an enormous sky and wish things could be like this forever.

  That’s where I was when I saw my father and my auntie Cristina walking on the border of the wooded land that extended to the west, towards Doina. There had been nothing strange about their behaviour, nor about their presence. They were walking, simply walking; my father in his dark suit and Cristina in the white dress that looked fluorescent in the dimming light, and which the wind licked around her body, so she was forced to hold it down with her hands. Her hair was up and her shoulders bare and my father cupped one of his large hands over a milky shoulder, swallowing it whole.

  They stopped on the border of the forest, right on the edge, giant oak and maple reaching with lush branches, reaching down towards them, wanting to pull them into the gloom, into the wilderness.

  He was smiling. His big childish face stretched wide in a joy I had until that moment thought belonged only to me and, before any other wisdom, there came the sharp twinge of jealously, quickly followed by something else.

  It came, as my father’s smile fell, and his face darkened as if the shadows of those trees had left the forest and were advancing across the field.

  Another emotion, like fear; like losing control of your bike down a steep hill or losing sight of your mother in a crowded supermarket. But this was the fear of losing something else, something so huge that it couldn’t be seen.

  My father was, to me, my world. He made the rain fall and the sun shine, and I knew completely and with unwavering certainty that I was his world, and until this moment I had never believed it possible that things could be any other way.

  In that field, on that evening, nothing made sense – not my father’s white knuckles as he dug his fingers into Cristina’s flesh, not Cristina’s grimace at his grip, which might have been one of pain had she pulled away, but she did not pull away, and he dug in and clawed his way across her back, beneath the low cut of her glowing dress.

  I jumped up and ran towards them, leaving my shoes behind. It was in the moment that my father turned to me, the moment his eye fell on me, that I felt the affirmation of something forbidden, as if I had eavesdropped on a secret conversation.

  For one instant, my father looked a stranger to me, and looked at me like a stranger, like he had been looking at Cristina before he could rearrange his face. Everything warm and comforting seemed in that moment vanished, and instead I felt a threat, harsh, urgent, and I stopped dead, like prey in the glare of the lion.

  And then he was back, himself again, asking me where I had been rolling around, and warning me of my mother’s predictable displeasure at the grass stains on my stockings and the twigs in my hair.

  At that moment I longed to be back in England, back in Kilburn, where things were of cement and made sense.

  That night, with my mother in the kitchen, I had the feeling that love was a thing you can equally give away or withdraw; like a gift, bestow upon someone or snatch back. But that when it is drawn back it continues to take and take of you, like the never-ending chain of bright handkerchiefs that the magician pulls from his pocket.

  After that short, mysterious exchange in the dark, my mother roused herself out of her melancholy, looking at me with infinite tenderness, and asked what I was doing up at that time. She took me by the hand to my room and tucked me into bed, caressing my hair and warning me that there would be no excuses for not getting up for school the next day.

  At that moment I thought I wanted the truth. I thought that the truth was love and I felt wounded by my mother’s silence.

  I couldn’t have known that love was swallowing that bitter truth and allowing me to grow up, soon forgetting about the incident, happy and protected, with the heroes of my little world intact, safe in the knowledge that whatever love was, it lived, unchallenged and unthreatened, with me.

  Returned

  It had been two days before they’d found the old man, so Magge Ericksson tells me.

  On midsummer’s eve all the young girls had run off to the fields and to the woods to pluck flowers, and his little Ulla had joined them.

  ‘Marie’s daughter,’ he says, ‘you remember my Marie? You remember kissing her?’

  I remembered. Magge points with his cane towards the copse of oak and elder that has always surrounded the house. With every gust, these guardians sigh deeply, their crowns rippling like green foam.

  ‘You remember hiding in those woods?’ Magge chuckles and wipes his mouth with a clean white handkerchief.

  ‘You were frightened then, isn’t that so? So frightened you climbed the tallest tree and wouldn’t come down again. Such a wet lad … but all the girls liked you well enough, didn’t they?’

  He gives a toothless grin and lays a large, rough hand on my shoulder.

  ‘She was my first love, Marie,’ I say, smiling at the memory of happiness that even then seemed impossible, evanescent, like the sweetest thing ever so briefly ripened before spoiling.

  ‘She has three little girls of her own,’ Magge says. ‘Ulla is the youngest, and just like her mother; you can’t keep her still, you can’t keep her quiet. Like quicksilver, that lass. They’ve all moved to the city, of course, like all the young people in this place. But the little one likes to come and visit.’

  We stand in silence, Magge and I, and it is a fond, comfortable lull. The sun has dropped to its lowest point and the woods, the fields, the houses on the slope beyond, lean against the stark grey light.

  Every night, all summer long, the sun in this place skims the horizon, threatening with a perpetual dusk that never settles into darkness.

  I had forgotten. I had forgotten covering the windows of my bedroom with old blankets, desperate for the dark, for a moment’s peace. I had forgotten that half-light; insidious, playing softly on the floorboards, through the cracks, between the blinds.

  On my first night back, kept awake by the murmur of light, I remembered. I walked through the house, restless, hearing whispers, creaks; the house a living thing with me in its belly, the walls like skin, too thin to block out the dull glare of a dogged sun.

  I opened doors and watched dust stir and settle. The old office smelled of damp. Maps were spread open on the desk, faded by time, and a fountain pen lay poised against a crystal inkwell, encrusted with dry ink and as opaque as granite in the twilight. The wooden floorboards, bare and uneven, bore testimony of restless nights spent pacing to and fro between the bookshelves and the locked glass-fronted cabinet. How many nights had he spent guarding his treasures, I wondered. How many vigils had been held against the dark, against the hordes of thieves and gypsies that would come to loot and destroy, if only they would come.

  My sisters’ old room, with the twin beds side by side and the collection of dolls, was as it had always been, like it would always be: a tribute to purity, a pretty pink lie. The bookshelf in the corner of the room held no books, but cheap trinkets and porcelain angels with perfect hands, frozen wings, faces full of blank submission. This was a little girls’ room, but the little girls who had lived there were young women, their betrayal as natural as it was abhorrent.

  Half-light breathed half-life into the past, and for a moment I thought I saw the milky faces of twenty-three angels turn on me: twenty-three pairs of dead eyes demanding an explanation.

  I slammed the door shut.

  ***

  He was dead. He was gone. I had flown in from London on the day I’d received the news to make sure. Elina, the elder of my sisters, had called through to the office, demanding that I be pulled out of my meeting to speak with her.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she’d said.

  ‘He’s …’

  ‘Dead. Old Magge found him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They think he fell down the stairs, cracked his head open. Like an egg.’ />
  I turned away from the glass wall that separated my office from the main floor. ‘Lina, are … you going down there? Is Annika?’

  ‘She can’t. Annika can’t. And I’ve got the kids this week … Albert?’

  ‘I know. I’ll get there as soon as I can, tonight if I can get on a flight.’

  I arrived late in the evening at Arlanda, and picked up the hired family saloon, the only car available, to drive the 250-odd kilometres north-west. In spite of all the years, I had no difficulty finding the way, and stopped only once to fill up the car and get enough supplies to last a couple of days.

  A few hours later, I turned off the main road, heading up towards the three lakes that were Lilla, Mellan and Stora Justasjöarna. Every field, every barn, every turn in the road seemed familiar to me; so much so that I had the feeling I could have closed my eyes and navigated by instinct alone.

  The largest of the lakes lay in the first valley and as I crested the peak I saw its wide, tranquil face, holding a perfect expression of the sky, the hills, the weeping willows that fringed its shores. A raptor soared above, and then dipped low, leaving, but for a moment, a scar in its wake.

  I found the narrow track that ran along the western side of the lake, through the woods, and followed it, higher and higher.

  When the car could go no further on the rough track, I left it in a ditch and walked the rest of the way.

  ***

  I was awake all night, walking up and down stairs and corridors, standing on thresholds, and finally lying on the floor of the living room where I had made my bed. I’m not sure when I finally fell asleep, but by the time I stirred awake the sun was low on the horizon.

  I got dressed and walked out, through the woods and down to the fence, where I found Magge, waiting as if he’d known to expect me. I offered him my left hand to shake, keeping my right behind my back, as, though I have nothing to hide from Magge, is my habit.

  ‘She came back with seven flowers and put them under her pillow, like all the girls do, and do you know what the child dreamt of, Albert?’ Magge says.