The Waves Burn Bright

by Iain Maloney

  At the back, the roof of the cave came down almost to the floor. It was so low there were no experiments there, nothing. It was too small for grown-ups. I lay on the dirt and looked through the gap. I wished I had a torch. It felt nice and cool there out of the sun, resting on the ground. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could see a burnt red glow. I crawled forward, squeezing myself under the rock, through the low gap. It scratched my back and I knocked my head again but I made it through.

  It was another cave. There was writing all over the walls, words and pictures done in charcoal like we did in art class. The red glow was coming from further ahead. I edged forward and there was a cliff. Below me was a lake of magma, scarlet and gold, boiling gently like toffee. Rivers ran into it and ran off again disappearing below the cavern walls. It smelt of barbecue and crackled like a steak on a hot plate in a restaurant. I was inside the volcano, inside the heart where all the power and heat, all the volcano’s secrets were stored, waiting to erupt. In Pele’s world. Her home. Her church.

  The heat was different from the heat outside. The sun tried to melt you, to force all the water out of your body and leave you like a raisin. This heat warmed me like cocoa in winter, inside my heart, inside my head. I lay at the top of the cliff letting the fire wash through me and I relaxed like in a bath, like in the hot spring in Hokkaido. I could sleep there, forever.

  Up above me was the dome of the mountain, the flat roof, the underside of the crater, a hole, flickering when the smoke shifted enough to let in daylight. In the smoke I saw her, Pele, the fiery, passionate goddess who controlled this, who decided when it burst, when all the bubbling magma could pour out, who decided how long it stayed locked in. She was stern and beautiful, hard and warm. She looked at me, smiled at me. The magma flared for a second, a jet fountaining up, then the surface settled again, calm. For the moment.

  I woke up on the cave floor, Mummy pouring water into my mouth, over my face. She was putting a proper bandage on my head. Daddy picked me up, carried me down the mountain. The car was hot and sticky and I slept as we drove back, slept on the ferry, waking up lost, falling under again, all the while a heat in my heart, in my head, Pele’s heat still with me. There was a hospital, a bed, Mummy, Daddy, Taka translating. ‘I’m fine,’ I tried to tell them. I just needed sleep. The heat was fading. I was too far from the volcano and as I cooled the pain returned, the pain in my head, in my heart.

  I had concussion from the stone so it wasn’t too serious and they let me leave. Taka wasn’t there and Mummy and Daddy weren’t talking. We got a taxi back to the hotel. Apart from a headache I felt much better but Mummy wouldn’t let me go to the restaurant for dinner. She ordered room service.

  ‘It was an accident. You said yourself she’s fine.’

  ‘She is now, no thanks to you.’

  ‘How was it my fault? She was running after you not me.’

  ‘We’d never have been on that bloody thing if it wasn’t for you. I wanted to take her swimming and get some ice cream but you drag us up a volcano that’s so dangerous it’s closed to the public. What did you think was going to happen?’

  ‘She’s had an adventure. She can go swimming anytime she wants back home. How many volcanoes can she climb in Aberdeen?’

  ‘Why has she got to climb volcanoes? How many other eight-year-olds are being dragged up volcanoes during the summer holidays?’

  ‘Exactly! She’s already had experiences none of her peers have had.’

  ‘And she’s got the scar to prove it.’

  ‘I’d have killed for a father who took me to places like Japan when I was a kid. Every year we went to the same caravan site, took the same pitch, ate the same ice cream and fish and chips, swam in the same bit of the sea and it was soul-destroying. I was the only kid in my school who looked forward to term starting again. I won’t have Carrie suffer a childhood like that.’

  ‘Fine, but you don’t have to go to extremes. How many kids in her class have been to a water park in Japan?’

  ‘Kim’s going to Disney World in Florida, USA.’ I was starving, I hoped the food would come soon.

  ‘Thank you, Caroline. What I’m saying, Marcus, is this is supposed to be a holiday for all of us. Spending even a few hours of that inside another bloody hospital is not my idea of a holiday. We’ve got one full day left in Kagoshima before we fly back to Tokyo. We’re going to the water park in the morning, then we’re going to have lunch in the big department store and get some souvenirs to take home. No, Marcus,’ Mummy put her hand up and cut him off, ‘you are not taking us to the Kamikaze museum. If you want to go you can go yourself.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, Marcus.’

  ‘Okay, but if we’re doing all that tomorrow, can we do something else tonight? Why don’t we go down to the bar for a drink?’

  ‘Caroline can’t go to the bar.’

  ‘She can stay here. You can stay here, can’t you, Sweetie?’

  ‘No, she can’t, she’s got concussion.’

  ‘I’m fine, Mummy. I can read until I fall asleep.’

  ‘Come on, Hannah,’ Daddy pulled her into his chest, ‘a drink will do you good.’

  ‘On one condition.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Flirt with one waitress and you’ll be wearing your drink.’

  Daddy raised his arms like he was innocent but Mummy had her doctor’s face on and he dropped them to his sides. They hit with a slap.

  I ate dinner and got into bed. I thought the futon was too hard at first but now I liked it. My body was tired all over. I lay on my side, my cut facing up, and looked again at the picture of Pele. Jane MacMillan said in her introduction that we are taught to think of men as powerful and women as weak but all through history some of the fiercest and most dangerous deities have been women. Pele could make fire and lava pour down onto villages. The Hindu goddess Sarasota gave humans the gifts of speech, wisdom and learning. The Roman Diana was goddess of hunting. I knew by then I hadn’t gone into a second cave, that I’d fainted and had some kind of dream, but it didn’t feel like a normal dream. The heat stayed with me long after, the smell and the sounds, and the smile Pele gave me through the smoke. Maybe it was a dream but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.

  I left Jane MacMillan open at Pele’s picture, propped against the cedar lamp, and opened Jules Verne. They were about to climb down into the volcano. Harry was scared but he wouldn’t admit it. The chapter was called “The Real Journey Commences”.

  Somewhere Over Russia, June 2013

  The scar was still there on my right temple, just under the hairline, hidden from the world. History written on the surface.

  The face of Scotland is scarred by glaciers, geological wrinkles gouged by rivers of ice advancing, retreating for millions of years. Over enough time these scars will disappear, worn down by weather, wind and rain turning rocks to sand, washing it into the sea, washing Scotland away.

  Given enough time everything erodes.

  The glaciers are still retreating, global warming melting the permafrost. Each summer more and more of Greenland is exposed. The scars, the wounds. Consequences.

  The end of the world.

  Not that climate change is the end for the planet. We’re creating the conditions for our own extinction and no geological scientist would ever confuse the two. I’d delved deep enough into the Earth to know it would get on just fine without us crawling across its skin. Better, perhaps.

  Human extinction. Thirty-five thousand feet thoughts.

  My carbon footprint. Bigfoot.

  We destroy the planet. Justify, rationalise. You push it aside, try not to think about it. Humans can get used to almost anything given enough time. Given enough pressure.

  I reached over Ash and slid the shutter up a little, the clouds ivory in the twilight. Somewhere below us families were preparing for bed. All it would take was a pocket of turbulence, a bird flying into the engine, a loose wire and we’d drop on them.

 
All it takes is one moment to change everything.

  One moment.

  A misfiled paper.

  A flicked switch.

  One moment can create scars that take eons to erode.

  Geological time.

  Deep time.

  Aberdeen, July 6th 1988

  ‘You’re sure Mister and Missus Galloway don’t mind?’ Kim rubbed more suntan lotion into her slender legs, peeling off a piece of grass pasted to her thigh. Top notes of coconut and a hydrocarbon base took me back to a beach in Italy the summer before, Etna tenting the sky and Sicilian boys frolicking for attention, competing unfavourably with James Gleick’s book on chaos theory. The Summer of Chaos, Dad called it. Italian trains. Roman roads all leading to traffic jams, gesticulating drivers and the über-stylish. Not our scene, me and Dad, St Mark’s Square and espressos. This year it would be Iceland. Active volcanoes, desolate landscapes and deep faults – much more us. Iceland with Dad, Portugal with Mum the week after.

  Holidays with Mum were fractal, each trip a replica of the one before. Cafés and pools, seafood restaurants and tan lines. Mum worked hard and holidays were for unspooling. Dad worked hard too but he said his holidays were for living. We hadn’t been abroad as a trio since Japan.

  The vicious Mediterranean sun could be a sister to the pale lemon slice warming Aberdeen. Distance from the source alters the impact. The hottest part of the flame is the blue zone. I followed the smoke from the barbecue as it drifted over the fence and into the Galloways’ washing. There was music, but not too loud; people, but not too many; laughing and talking but not too much swearing. A party, but within the rules laid out by Mum and the Galloways. The Johnstones on the other side were in Spain. For the moment I could relax, let responsibility and anxiety and a never-ending list of ‘what ifs’ simmer.

  ‘No, they’re fine. But we can’t be out here after nine.’ It was only two. Twenty-two thousand two hundred seconds to go, roughly. Mark was DJing. The Stereo Nazi we called him because he wouldn’t let anyone else near the hi-fi, strict fascist control and ghettolike segregation between acceptable and unacceptable bands. He’d got the record player and tape decks set up so he could switch between tracks like a professional, he thought. I didn’t care that much about music but Mark thought it was the most important thing in the world so I had to pretend, at least a little. The music was what couples did, compromised for the sake of peace. It was something with screeching guitars and he and Neil and Kevin were playing air guitar and moshing on the patio. How would they compare if the Sicilian beach boys were there? I knew which ones Kim and Lesley would choose.

  ‘Boys,’ said Kim, lying back on the tartan blanket. She ‘schlepped’ – her word, brought back like a souvenir – to Florida every summer and returned teak. This year she wanted to get a tan before she got there. ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she said as we were changing into our bikinis. ‘For the first week I’m so pale and sick I look like a corpse or something while everyone else is bronzed and gorgeous.’

  The granite sparkled in the sunlight. Aberdeen had a magic quality on days like that, grey transmogrifying alchemically into silver, twinkling like Tinkerbell had scattered fairy dust over the city. Really it was quartz, feldspars and micas. Muscovite gave it the silver twinkle. No less magic, and more satisfying to know. The slate roof tiles baking reminded me of the okonomiyaki restaurant we went to in Japan, the hot plate at the table we cooked our Japanese pancakes on. A bee bumbled over us, blithely ignoring Kim’s scream. It was the third day of the school holidays but it felt like the first because it was the first day with no parents. Dad was offshore and Mum was at some conference in Bristol, had left first thing that morning.

  ‘Now you have the number of my hotel but only use it in an emergency, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Seriously, Caroline, if I come back from a long boring meeting to a message to “call my daughter immediately” and it’s because you want to know where the popcorn is, this will be the first and last time we leave you alone overnight.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘And you know the rules of the barbecue. Finish at nine o’clock and everyone goes home. Kim and Lesley can stay over. No one else. No one. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘And by no one I specifically mean Mark.’

  ‘Mum, I’m sixteen. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘What has sixteen got to do with anything? I can quite easily cancel if I think for one second you’re going to break any of the rules.’

  ‘Mum, I meant I’m sixteen, I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I know. You’re clever. That’s what worries me.’

  She went in the end, a taxi to the station, leaving me in charge. What had I done in my life so far to make her think an orgy was the first thing I’d plan once her back was turned? When Dad got picked up for work on Monday all he’d said was ‘have fun’. She was so frustrating, like she’d got this imaginary daughter who looked like me but couldn’t be trusted. The wind slid gently over the church and down into our garden, circulating lazily through the flowers, mixing scents like a casual perfumer. If it wasn’t for the music and the fact that this lot were my responsibility I could have drifted off. Some peace and quiet. I shouldn’t have let Kim talk me into the barbecue. Just the three of us dozing, inhaling the summer and exhaling a termload of stress, that’s what I needed. Too late now.

  I was cooking, my body a fatty slab of white meat grilling. Kim, and Lesley on the far side of her, loved sunbathing. They could both lie happily for hours in the sun, turning over occasionally, sizzling like eggs. The lying, the napping, I liked that bit, but the burning? Dad took me fossil hunting to Colorado a couple of years before. The ground, the rocks desiccated and baked by the sun. I pictured my skin like that, cracking like a terracotta dish, ravines opening, desperate for moisture, a lizard hotfooting across the desert of my flesh. Turned to dust, dissolved into constituent chemicals, seeping into the ground, flitting on the wind, rejoining the cycle and subducting. My atoms in a magma river circling the world, seeking release through volcanic fire, my elements in Pele’s domain.

  I needed to cool off.

  ‘How’s the barbecue coming?’ Graeme loved barbecues. Anything outdoorsy. He went camping and hillwalking with his family every summer. Dad and I bumped into his family last Easter at Loch Morlich and we all spent the evening on the beach with a bonfire and marshmallows. Our parents talked about house prices, the downturn in the oil industry, the layoffs. Graeme and I gossiped about school, books, plans for the future. He was going to be a lawyer. When I thought of him on the sand, lit by the fire’s glow, the ragged Cairngorms behind him, his muscles carved out of oak, I couldn’t imagine him in a courtroom.

  ‘Almost there. Hungry?’

  ‘Starving.’

  Julie was helping him, cutting rolls, vegetables, opening packs of paper plates, her long curly blonde hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, spirals spilling out. I couldn’t think of anything to say around Julie. She and Graeme were a couple.

  I went in through the kitchen and upstairs to my room, checking everything was intact as I went, straightening Mum’s framed Renoir print, smoothing the one-sixteenth size kimono on its stand. My shoulders were tingling and I was already pink. That was the other thing I didn’t like about sunbathing – I didn’t tan. I burned. Vanilla white – lobster red – vanilla white. Even fake tan somehow didn’t work and I ended up looking like an Oompa-Loompa with a liver complaint.

  The safe silence of my room. My books, my pictures, the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling, my fossil collection, my suitcase open, ready for Iceland. On my windowsill a row of rocks. I rubbed my fingers over the glass-smooth moss agate, felt the tension drawn out. I shouldn’t have invited everyone. Too much could go wrong. I pulled on a white T-shirt and my denim cut-off shorts. The door opened behind me just as I was doing up the buttons.

  ‘Why are you covering up?’ Mark’s shaved head appeared round the d
oor, a wispy caterpillar on his upper lip.

  ‘Because I’m melting faster than a marshmallow in a star.’

  ‘Yeah, but you looked good.’

  ‘You mean I don’t now?’

  He put his arms around my waist and I linked my hands behind his neck the way I’d seen everyone else do when they kissed. We’d been going out for three weeks and this bit still felt awkward. Were my hands in the right place? Was I doing the right thing with my tongue? I needed to keep my eyes closed because if I opened them it wasn’t sexy and I could see his skin from a centimetre away and I started thinking about cells and pores and shaving and I forgot to keep kissing. I was still waiting for sparks, for love, for something. Kissing was just this mechanical act, quite disgusting when you thought about what was actually happening. In the movies women melted when kissed. Maybe I was doing it wrong. He tried to push me back towards the bed. Off balance I took a step, slipped under his arm.

  ‘Carrie, come on?’

  ‘No. Not with my house full of people.’

  ‘Later then, when they’ve gone.’ His ears pricked up like a sheepdog. ‘Fucking hell.’

  He was out the door and down the stairs three at a time. Kylie hadn’t even finished the first chorus of I Should Be So Lucky before the needle scratched across her grooves. I was going to have to think of something to put him off. He’d been hinting since the last day of term. He was getting pretty insistent. Maybe I should just let him. Kim said I should. She did it with Robert in sixth year at Hogmanay, said it wasn’t that scary and only a little bit painful at first. Lesley didn’t say anything. I knew she hadn’t done it but she worried about whether Kim thought she was cool. I knew Kim didn’t think I was cool so I didn’t need to worry about it. Kim was the cool one. I was the smart one. Lesley was the one we wanted to protect. It was all so much hassle. When I was in Iceland, in a tent surrounded by volcanoes I wouldn’t have to worry about that crap. I fought the urge to begin packing and returned to my post, hostess and enforcer.