by C. J. Cooke
‘We only have a couple weeks left, honey,’ Sariah says.
‘I don’t care!’ Hazel shouts. ‘A couple of weeks might as well be an eternity if we have to shoot rabbits to survive!’
‘Joe, might I trouble you for a glass of water?’ Sariah says, holding her glass up and nodding at the water jug he placed on the table.
‘Me as well,’ adds George.
‘I’ll fill it,’ Joe says, lifting the jug and heading for the sink. He turns the tap and we wait, but nothing happens. Only the squeaking sound of the ancient tap as Joe turns it, followed by a weird gargling noise.
‘Hmm. This happened earlier today,’ Joe says, turning and turning the tap. ‘Should work in a moment or two.’
‘What happened earlier?’ Sariah asks.
Silence.
‘Joe?’
The sound of clanking fills the room, as though the pipes are grinding together. The tap chokes and splutters.
‘Oh no,’ Joe says.
‘What?’ George says.
‘Come on!’ shouts Joe, thumping the worktop.
Hazel looks up. ‘It’s the water,’ she says in a low voice.
‘It came back on this morning,’ Joe says.
‘It’s gone, isn’t it? It’s all used up.’
‘What do you mean, “used up”?’ I say.
‘The water comes from a cistern,’ Sariah says. ‘It collects rain and filters it.’
George pushes back his seat, and says, ‘It can’t be used up. It’s been raining plenty lately. It’ll be a blockage, that’s all. Leave it to me.’ He gets up and walks out of the back door, slamming it behind him.
I push away my plate, unable to eat any more. Joe is banging the tap and shouting, but Sariah tells him to stop.
‘What are we going to do?’ Hazel says in a high voice. ‘No water, no food, no wine …’
‘This is very serious,’ Sariah offers, and I nod.
‘We have to find a way of contacting Nikodemos or someone on the mainland,’ Joe says. He seems calm until he reaches the table, and then I notice that he has turned deathly pale and is blinking furiously.
Hazel weeps.
We sit in silence for what seems like hours, lost in our thoughts. I want to ask Sariah about what she said earlier, about my needing to remember in order to get off the island. I don’t want to ask in front of Hazel and Joe, and I don’t want to leave her here. I need to wait until George fixes the water.
At last, there is the sound of cursing and stomping at the back door.
‘There he is now,’ Sariah proclaims brightly, rising to open the back door. ‘He’ll have fixed the cistern,’ she tells Hazel. ‘You’ll see.’
The door opens before Sariah reaches it, banging against the wall. George is stooped over at the top of the back steps, grunting and wiping his brow.
‘Anyone want to give me a hand with this?’
We all look over.
‘Give you a hand with what, George?’ Sariah asks, watching as he stands his rifle upright against the inside wall. ‘You took your rifle to fix the cistern?’
‘Never know … what you might … be up against … out there,’ George grunts, stooping to shunt something inside. We all rise from our seats, curious to see what he’s doing.
‘George, what are you— aaaargh!’
Sariah lets out a shout and staggers backwards from the doorway, her hand clapped across her mouth.
Hazel looks from Sariah to George, panicked. ‘What? What is it?’
George walks backwards through the door into the kitchen, both arms extended outwards as he hauls a heavy object over the doorstep. When he moves into the light, I see that he is dragging a creature with horns.
Silence falls like a guillotine. Sariah is whispering to herself, a ringed hand pressed against her chest to calm her nerves. Hazel is mesmerised, her terror replaced with curiosity. Joe moves to give George a hand shifting his kill.
Long, curling horns, ridged like the ones I saw on the roof of the hotel. Its gold eyes staring, seeing nothing. Dark, matted fur bloodied at the neck from a gunshot wound. Its cloven hooves motionless. I can’t be sure, but it looks exactly like the one I’d encountered.
‘Surprisingly big, this fella,’ George says proudly.
‘So when you said you were going to fix the cistern,’ Joe says in a dry voice, ‘what you really meant was you were off to shoot a goat.’
‘Ibex,’ George grunts. ‘The cistern’s broken.’ He wipes his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Got a crack in it the size of my arm. Rats inside it. I’ll go back tomorrow morning, when it’s light, to see if I can plug it up – but we’ll have to boil all our water. Don’t want to catch the bubonic plague, do we?’
Hazel starts to hyperventilate. Sariah wraps an arm around her and murmurs soothing words.
George kneels down and tugs the horns. ‘Beautiful, isn’t he? Ran into him when I was headed for the cistern. Reckon I’d get a pretty penny for the horns at the market.’
‘George, you’re insane!’ Hazel shrieks.
‘This is enough,’ Sariah says firmly, having managed to calm her fright. ‘Tell me where the satellite phone is, George.’
He throws her an inane grin.
‘Please,’ Sariah begs. ‘We can’t stay here without water. We need to phone someone who’ll help get us off the island.’
George rises, sobered. Suddenly he plucks the phone from his pocket and hands it to Sariah. ‘There you go.’
She takes it, stunned, holding it in her hand as though she doesn’t quite believe it’s real. After a few glances at George, she extends the antennae. She begins to dial, then looks at the phone. She tries again.
‘The battery’s gone,’ she says.
‘What’s gone?’ Joe says, glancing up.
‘How do we charge it?’ Sariah asks.
‘Oh, it’s fully charged,’ George says. ‘Found it this morning. It’s dead. Kaput. Not. Working.’
‘Let me take a look,’ Joe says, rising to his feet and taking the phone from Sariah. He glances up at George. ‘The screen is lit up. Why’s it not working?’ He presses some buttons and glances up at the ceiling.
‘No signal,’ he says.
‘Yep,’ George grins. ‘You think I ain’t already tried the phone outside?’
Hazel gives a huge wail and holds her head in her hands. ‘I knew this would happen,’ she shouts. ‘I knew it, I knew it!’
George drags the goat further along the floor into the kitchen. With a groan he turns it all the way around so that its eyes are visible. At this Hazel slumps to the floor. Joe is fast to attend to her, catching her before her head cracks on the tiles. He kneels down to turn her on her side.
It is then, right as Joe is tapping Hazel’s face and calling her name, right as George pulls out a measuring tape and begins to measure the length of the goat’s horns, that I remember something. It so vivid, so bizarre and unexpected, that I gasp out loud.
‘Don’t tell me you’re about to faint now,’ Joe says from the floor.
‘You OK?’ Sariah asks, glancing over at me.
My mouth is open but I don’t speak. I’m lost in a clear, vivid memory of a man at a roadside. A car stopped in the middle of the road, both doors flung open. The smell of petrol in the air. The man walks towards me, grinning, saying, ‘Eloïse.’
I have a sense it’s a time from about four years ago, not more than five. I remember him telling me I had to do something, and the feeling of revulsion in my gut as I realised he was right.
The man I remember is George.
1 April 2015
Potter’s Lane, Twickenham
Lochlan: It’s late. Gerda has taken the children away. I was fine, really I was, right up until they got strapped into their car seats and I had to close the door. Max hadn’t seemed to realise that I wasn’t coming, too, and so he spent a good length of time sorting out which toys he wanted to bring and getting excited about his Gruffalo Trunki. Then, right as I opene
d the front door, he turned to me.
‘Aren’t you coming, Daddy?’
I remained standing and ruffled his hair, determined to keep this all as light and easy-going as possible. ‘No, darling. Daddy has to stay here.’
His brow wrinkled. ‘You have to stay here? But Cressida’s coming. And Mamie.’
‘I know, Maxie, but Daddy’s got some work to do.’ I realised as I said it that this was a phrase that I used so often it slipped easily off the tongue.
He started to wriggle out of his backpack and take off his coat.
‘No, Maxie, what are you doing? Come on, keep your coat on. You’ve got to go.’
I squatted to help him put his arms back inside his coat, but he resisted. A long moment where he held my face, working me out.
‘Is this an April Fool’s?’
I was puzzled until I worked out what day it is. ‘No, Maxie …’
‘… because Mrs Evans says today’s April Fool’s and that means you get to play jokes on people …’
‘No, no. I’m sorry, Max. This is for real.’
His face crumpled. ‘Where is Mummy, Daddy? Why are you not coming? I don’t want you not to come.’
He fell against me and wrapped his arms around my neck. Gerda was waiting in the driveway. I forced myself not to look at her, overcome with a sudden charge of hatred towards her for creating this situation. I had a vague memory of deciding that it was in my children’s interests to go back to Ledbury. Why was that again? How was this benefiting them? A voice in my head said, Eloïse would want them to go, she’d want them to be shielded from all of this and I tried to pull myself together.
Gerda marched back into the hallway and set the car seat on the floor. Cressida was sleeping, her little face turned towards the T-shirt belonging to Eloïse that I’d tucked in with her to remind her of her smell.
‘You have to go, Maxie,’ I said, blindly trying to pull his arms away from my neck, but he was bawling now, insisting that he stay with me.
‘You’ll only be there for a little while,’ I promised, though I still have no idea how long this arrangement is in place for. A week? A month?
‘Mamie’s house is only a couple of hours away. I’ll see you very soon.’
‘Daddy, Daddy! I don’t want to go! No, Daddy! Please!’
I don’t exactly recall how he ended up in the car. Maybe I was so worn out and upset that I missed the moment where Gerda lifted him and carried both him and the car seat to her car.
Magnus had materialised sometime during this, and it was his hand on my shoulder that suddenly made me buck up and wipe away my tears. Now that I think about it, I’d have been wrong to let the children go if Magnus had accompanied Gerda. His staying here indicates that he’s chosen a side. Had he chosen Gerda’s side, I’m inclined to think that she’d be getting that highbrow lawyer of theirs to file for guardianship.
I’m sitting in our closet surrounded by Eloïse’s clothes. There’s the red silk dress she bought in Sydney just before we came home from our honeymoon. She looked incredible in that dress. The black leather waistcoat she bought at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and never wore because she decided it wasn’t ‘her’. So many memories clinging to these clothes. I hold her denim shirt against my nose, breathing her in, and I am transported back to the holiday we took to Switzerland the summer we conceived Max. We always talked about that holiday in terms of how tired she was, how the smell of wine made her strangely nauseous, but then I remember the car accident.
We were driving through the Grimsel Pass with its labyrinth of winding roads through turquoise lakes and white-tipped mountains. It was dark, an enveloping and luscious blackness speared with moonlight. I thought I was taking the road carefully – braking hard before each hairpin bend, headlights on full-beam, my eyes fixed on the road ahead.
I never saw what we hit until it was too late. A sickening thud against the bonnet and a screech of tyres. For a handful of agonising seconds, I thought we’d hit a person.
I pulled over hastily. Neither of us spoke until we’d raced back to the shape at the side of the road behind us, its heavy breaths rising like steam in the moonlight.
‘What is it?’ I asked, relieved when I saw hooves.
Eloïse got down on all fours and crouched by its head. ‘I think it’s a mountain goat.’
I pulled my keys from my pocket and found the torch I kept on a keychain. A halo of white torchlight revealed magnificent gold horns curled around the goat’s head, each about a yard and a half long, and the blood that was oozing steadily from its side. The air around us thickened with brackish, bestial smells of earth, vomit, and a metallic odour of blood. The creature was twitching and grunting, clearly in a lot of pain.
Eloïse glanced up at me expectantly. ‘What do we do?’
‘Nothing we can do, by the looks of it.’
El ran her hand along a ridged horn, her other reaching out to hold the animal’s head. She looked up at me, pained. ‘We can’t leave him to suffer.’
The goat lurched then, as though trying to get up. I stood up on alert.
‘Please don’t get so close,’ I told her. ‘Move away, El.’
She knew I was acting protectively towards her on account of those long horns, but she ignored me.
‘He’s in so much pain,’ she said quietly, laying a hand on his side when he stopped trying to stand. The goat’s cries became rhythmic, human sounds, his breaths slowing.
‘Help him, Lochlan.’
‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘We’re miles away from any kind of vet clinic.’
I hadn’t picked up that she meant a coup de grâce.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ she spat angrily. ‘Put him out of his misery!’ Then: ‘Is that a rock behind you?’
I turned and shone my torch on a large stone on the ground behind me. I hefted it towards the goat. ‘Do you want me to do it?’
Her silence told me that she did. I felt it was the manly thing for me to be the one to kill the goat, but at the last minute the rock slipped out of my hands and landed on its head, injuring it but not killing it.
‘Lochlan!’
The goat had started scrambling to get up again, its hooves kicking at the ground, its head thrashing and the horns swiping close to Eloïse. She picked up the rock and with both hands slugged it down hard on the animal’s skull. Within seconds it stopped moving.
We stood over the body watching the steam and dust all around it settle quietly into stillness. Eloïse drew her hands to her mouth. I pulled her to me and gave her a hug.
‘I’ve never killed anything,’ she sobbed.
I knew this wasn’t completely true – she’d killed a few wasps and cockroaches in her time, and there was that snake she bludgeoned in Thailand – but I understood this was a different situation. It was a cold night, and so it wasn’t long before we got back in the car and drove on through the night.
I strain to remember what happened after that, because it suddenly occurs to me that she wasn’t right at all for a while after. We discovered she was pregnant almost as soon as we returned to London, and she was ecstatic, but frequently I’d be woken in the middle of the night by her yelling. I’d wake her and tell her it was OK, she was dreaming, but I’d never seen her so upset. Once, I got angry with her about it.
‘It was a goat, El. An animal, not a human being. Get over it, will you?’
She was sitting upright, gleaming with sweat and trembling. She shook her head.
‘It was my mother,’ she gasped. ‘I dreamt that we hit my mother on that road.’
And that was how it continued.
Every other week or so she’d cry out in the middle of the night, and instead of murmuring about mountain goats or rocks she talked about hummingbirds and her mother not waking up. I’d ask her about it when we both woke up and she’d say she didn’t want to discuss it. Somehow, though, I sense that the goat and El’s mum were related in her mind. I don’t know how.
She’d never had
nightmares before the car accident. Did killing the goat trigger her? Even if it did, it would hardly cause her to walk out on our kids. Unless someone persuaded her with something else, something better than what she had with our family.
I can’t stand all the cul-de-sacs in my brain. I get to my feet and trawl through her underwear drawer. Nothing’s folded, it’s all been stuffed in here any old how. It’s a small detail and yet strange – she was always so meticulous, so neat. Everything was folded.
I pull out a mass of pink cotton with numerous straps that resembles a miniature parachute. A white tag that informs me it’s a maternity bra. I press it to my face and pick up the faint, sweet scent of breast milk. I remember Eloïse buying this bra soon after Max was born. I remember her struggling to feed him. I remember running out to the shops at midnight to buy a breast pump. She had so much milk that she said her breasts were going to explode. Oversupply syndrome, the midwife said, and hinted that El should give up. But she expressed and fed him from a bottle for another four months.
I empty the drawer, tossing the contents on the ground. There are papers at the back. I feel sick that I didn’t find these before, that the police didn’t find them. They’ve scoured the house, taken away boxes of paperwork, shopping lists stuck to the fridge, and yet these have been overlooked. I fold them, a little relieved to see they’re receipts from Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Clothing for Cressida. A pair of shoes from Clarks. And a notebook.
Naturally, I flick it open. It’s about A5 size with a pretty embroidered floral cover, Cath Kidston or Paperchase, maybe. Lined paper of a decent thickness. Eloïse has written her full name in the front: Eloïse Beatrice Shelley. I flick through it casually, assuming the notes and scribbles in Eloïse’s handwriting to be related to her charity, and then I recall Niamh’s mention of the writing group. The writing group! I never looked into that. But as I turn the page a series of questions written in bold black ink and caught in a thickly drawn circle makes me stop and read the page over and over.
It looks like Eloïse’s handwriting. I’m 99 per cent certain that it is. But – abuse? What abuse?
