A Kind of Compass

by McKeon, Belinda; Rahill, Elske;

  They break, late in the afternoon. Each woman is allotted a single herring, which they take home to fry and eat with bread, onions, a meal that will become as inevitable over the coming days as the thick clag of oil in their hair and the briny cuts on their fingers.

  When Elfrida and her mother have eaten, Elfrida, left alone, clears the plates and, with the time that remains before the evening shift, goes up to the Heugh. The air is warm and still. The sun has lowered behind the Needles, and for a tiny moment two brilliant halos flame around them. At the throat of the harbour a porpoise breaks the surface – it goes back under and she traces its course, anticipating where it will come up again.

  ‘Alright.’

  She startles. He stays, unmoving, at the top of the path.

  ‘Sorry.’ He points to a rock close to her own and walks towards it. She finds that she cannot respond, even to move her head.

  He sits down on the rock.

  ‘A view, that.’

  They both look down at the drop.

  ‘I seen ye, up a height here.’ She does not know if he is looking at her. ‘Ye the harbour pilot eh?’ he says, and she is at once fearful that they have been talking about her, the quarrymen, laughing at her. But when she glimpses across at him he is staring at the cap on his lap, his hands fisting, unfisting inside it. Four miles over the sea the castle at Bamburgh is backlit, then gone.

  ‘Speak English? Where ye from?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘I’m from Dundee. Working for Nicoll’s, burning the lime. I stay next the quarry.’ He stands abruptly. ‘Ye can see it from here.’ He points, as if it is new to her, as if she does not know by heart every dune and pool and plant of the place.

  ‘I am away to work,’ she says, getting up.

  He does not understand, so she nods in the direction of the herring houses. ‘Curing.’

  He continues watching her. She feels herself colouring and wonders if he can tell through the dusk.

  ‘Good night,’ she says, and begins the descent towards the village.

  She can hear her mother’s voice inside the cottage as she nears it, coming back to pick up her oilskin. Assuming that she is praying she waits on the step until she has finished, but there is a succession of ratcheting sobs, words, muttered and broken in between. She moves back from the step and walks alone down to the curing sheds.

  When her mother arrives, a short time later, she hands Elfrida her oilskin, without comment, and Elfrida does not look at her face; nor, fearful of what she might detect there, does she let her mother look into hers.

  The morning is grey and soft. A fine mizzle dampens their faces as they hasten towards the bustle and laughter that is audible before the edge of the village. On the approach to the sheds they see that a new group of women, a dozen or so, have arrived. They stand apart from the islanders, in yellow aprons, talking. Herring girls, from the mainland. They are looking out at something. Elfrida views with them, surveying the kiln tops, the wagonway, flushing with unexpected relief when it dawns on her that they are looking at the castle.

  ‘Shake your feathers, you lot, come on now.’ Mrs Allan claps her hands and the crew of silent island women watch the newcomers, all of whom are young, some not much older than Elfrida, go inside the first shed.

  A team of three is stationed to one side of her at the trough. She tries, without attracting their attention, or her mother’s, to follow their conversation – rapid, Scottish – about Berwick, the poor state of their dormitories above the curing sheds there; the relief of decent rooms now, above the pubs, where there is not the constant reek of fish. Or men, one of them says, quietly, though Elfrida senses that May and her mother hear it too.

  Their work is quicker, more precise, than the island women. From last season she knows that they will have been moving down the coastline since the spring, trailing the migrating shoal, stopping at each of the fishing towns along the way – accumulating money, stories, adventures, moving on. Their four teams finish the first gutting almost simultaneously. They sort their fish into piles of three sizes, then each of the packers climbs with a simple easy motion into their barrel to arrange the first layer. Many of the island women slow or stop to observe. In very short time they have the layer flush and clamber out, pour salt into the barrel, then press it down with the tamp stick – except for one girl, whose team, Elfrida suspects in mockery of the island women, lower her by her ankles into the barrel to tamp down the layer of salt with her hands.

  He comes at the same time, as the sun is burning into the back of Bamburgh Castle. He nods in greeting and sits on the same rock. For some time, neither of them speak. When she gives a cautious glance over she sees that he is stroking a thumb over a long red weal on the centre of his palm.

  ‘Tide is running,’ he says.

  She looks at the thickening membrane of water over the flats. An ancient excitement – altered tonight, new – runs through her: the knowledge that the island will soon be cut off, freed, taken by the black swarming sea.

  ‘Ye ever get left this place?’ he asks.

  ‘Ay, of course.’

  They fall silent again. Her mind turns to Berwick. The tight busy streets. The herring girls, laughing in their dormitories. She wonders if he has seen them; if he knows that they are on the island.

  The last time that she was on the mainland was in the winter, with her father. He had been in need of new netting and had borrowed a horse and cart from the Arms’ landlord in agreement that he would pick up the pub’s supplies for the week. She can remember his quiet carefulness with the horse; her own determination not to disappoint him. And, strongly, the same sensation of being adrift that she has known each time she has been away from the island. The strange threatening absence when the noise of the sea is not all around her – even while it echoes still inside her body, soft and insistent as the blood in her veins.

  She pictures with sudden clarity his coble, wrecked, wood and boxes and floating sandwiches. A need to be home grips her. She gets up, barely letting herself look at the boy while she mumbles a goodbye and walks away.

  The next evening he has something for her. Nestled inside his cap, which he carries with slow reverence up the path and across the cliff top towards her, is an egg.

  ‘Where d’you get this?’ she asks.

  ‘Ahint the quarry.’

  ‘It is took’d off a nest?’

  He smiles. ‘Clam the rocks for it.’

  ‘It’s a Cuddy Duck. You’ll have to put it back.’

  He gapes up at her, baffled, disappointed. ‘This is all I took. There was more.’

  ‘They are not for taking.’

  She is surprised at the force of her own words. They both look at the perfect green shell, spruttled all over with thin white streaks, like a prize gooseberry. She imagines showing it to her mother. Here, look, I have been given an egg. This is what I have been doing, thinking, with my time while you are praying and hoping and grieving alone. Small tufts of down are still clung to the shell. ‘You must put it back,’ she says again, and leaves him there, cradling his cap.

  While they work that evening, rain begins to tap on the roof. She is not onto the next fish before it becomes loud enough that they have to shout above it. The herring girls rush to the doorway to look outside at the steaming harbour. Her mother, though, does not look up once from her work, her eyes remaining fixed on the slice and twist and purple slurp of entrails onto the table.

  Mrs Allan lets her go early, when she has come to the end of her batch. She goes outside into the rain, but instead of following the path home she starts to walk in the opposite direction, following the edge of the harbour, past a bait pile of shellfish taller than herself, then along the foreshore past the schooner moored at the staithes and – shielding her momentarily from the rain – the castle ramparts, until she comes to the kilns. She pauses, listening to the chemical fizz of water hitting the roasting lime, then continues on to Castle Point.

  Through the misted dark s
he cannot see farther than her fingertips reaching towards the sea. She shivers at the caress of water running down her neck. Her face feels bruised with cold, but she stays there, refusing to yield. Diffused for an instant through the sea fog is the minute brightening of the lighthouse. She lets out a cry, a howl, which immediately disappears.

  The rain persists through the night and into the morning. Inside the shed the air hangs with damp. The herring girls are quieter than usual, and Elfrida grows certain that they can sense the anxious mood of the island women. Her body aches. She knows it is likely that she will fall ill. She scrapes and slides and discards the tornbellies, staring into the bucket of eyes, trying to concentrate.

  Before lunch the wind picks up and a belt of clear sky moves in from the sea. Excitement speeds through her at the sight of it, which she suppresses, knowing, however she tries to convince herself otherwise, what it is for.

  He is there, waiting for her. Straight away he tells her that he has returned the egg: he did it at night during the rain and almost slipped to his death the rocks got that slick. She says that she is pleased. He smiles, studying his feet.

  ‘Are ye working the morning?’

  She shakes her head. It is a Sunday.

  ‘Will ye meet me?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anyplace. Here. Show me the island?’

  She tells her mother that she will be gone for the morning, and has planned an explanation that she is taking out over the flats with a small party collecting ragworms for the start of the cod season, but her mother does not ask, so she leaves her in the kitchen, kneeling at the hearth.

  He is ready on the Heugh, a cloth sack over his shoulder. Her skin goes cold when he comes towards her, but he stops a few paces away.

  ‘We’ll be off, then?’ he says.

  She steps carefully onto the steep stony path, charged with an awareness of him behind, following her. At the bottom he comes alongside and they walk together onto the beach. To their left the tide is full out and the flats lie bare beneath a thin haze. They skirt around a soft wet heave of seaweed: brown, dark green, seamed here and there with red, then yellow, like a forest at the turn of the season. He does not appear uneasy at their silence, she thinks. They slow to watch a curlew toying with a crab – tossing it into the air then monitoring it scuttle brokenly away before going again in chase of it.

  They enter the sandhills. They rise along ridges where marram grass brushes against their legs, then dip into the hollowed shelter of the dunes, which are warm already in the sunlight. He lets her go ahead of him to pass through a narrow gully – and they come upon a pond. A small tree grows at the centre of it, directly from the water.

  ‘I’ve no been down here before.’

  She does not know how to reply, so smiles, but he quickens ahead and she judges that he has recognised where he is – the quarry visible now away to one side.

  ‘You’ll have the sea thereaway just now,’ she says. And as they come over the lip of the next dune it is there, shimmering and unending before them.

  ‘We’ll sit down here eh?’ To her surprise he pulls from his sack a rough woollen rug, dusted with white patches. He lays it down on the bank facing the sea and she waits for him to sit down – but he gestures for her to go first so she lowers herself at one side of the rug, and is relieved when he settles down at the other.

  ‘I’ve pieces,’ he says. She cannot help letting out a small laugh when he takes out two unwrapped sandwiches, uncut, a brown filling seeping from the middle.

  She shakes her head. ‘Thank you.’

  He takes a large bite from his sandwich, gazing at the sea. ‘That Berwick?’ He points, chewing, to the huddled smudge of town far away on the mainland.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Dundee’s too far to see,’ he says, staring north, intently enough that he is not distracted by the doleful signal of a seal, screaming from the rocky peninsula beyond the beach where an eccentric party of seals and spread-winged shags are enjoying the sun together.

  ‘Yer family work the herring catch eh?’

  ‘Depends the season.’

  ‘Yer da, he a fisherman?’

  She turns her face from him. Her throat is constricting. A small noise escapes her and she knows that here, now, she is going to cry. She laughs weakly, as the tears come, because it is happening in front of him. She fights to control herself but he is moving closer to her and as she sees his face, gentle, unembarrassed, she lets herself place her head against his chest. His shirt smells of something animal; horses, she realises.

  ‘I’d heard tell about the fleet. I’d no thought – just no thought, sorry.’

  She stays against him for a moment. When she pulls away he is mindful not to look at her while she wipes her face.

  He goes into his sack. ‘Here.’ He produces an earthenware mug, full of blackberries. ‘These is off the bushes by the wagonway.’ He hesitates, then offers the mug, grinning. ‘I’m allowed to take these eh?’

  She smiles, picking a couple out. ‘Them that wants them is welcome.’

  A sudden rush of noise from behind makes them both start. A dense flock of knots – twenty thousand or more – appears over their heads. He twists, grabbing his sack, and holds it above her. For several breaths the dune is in shadow – and then the flock passes, the sun once more on her face. She watches the dark cloud of birds speeding to sea, a long tendril at the back swirling and thinning, splitting from the main body, then absorbed again into its mass. He stays where he is, close to her. He is stroking the red mark on his palm, and she sees that there are other cuts and scabs on his knuckles.

  He notices her looking. ‘Hands is battered. See.’ He holds them out. ‘And see this.’ He pulls up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a long raw blister up the inside of his forearm. It is recent. Damp. ‘Burned it. All that rain. Makes the quicklime terrible jumpy.’

  She puts out her own hands. ‘I’ve keens too. Bealings on all the finger ends.’ She shows him the swellings where brine and salt has got into the tiny cuts from the scaling knife. He takes one of her hands, carefully cupping it in his own, to inspect more closely.

  ‘Working hand, that.’

  He trails a finger lightly over her cuts. She closes her eyes – but opens them again at the thought of her mother. She gets to her feet, saying quietly that she is needed. He gives a small nod before she scales the dune side. Only when she is at the top and turns round to take him in does she see the people on the beach below, coming down from the quarry cottages, some pointing, waving, to sea – where a distant scattering of cobles, nine, ten, not enough, is sailing towards the island.

  THE PLACE FOR ME

  E.C. Osondu

  Whenever Tochi’s elder brother visited from London their house became one long party that did not stop until his departure, right up to the moment his flight was called. Lots of Star and Gulder beer was consumed. Chicken Pepper Soup was made the way his brother preferred it – clear and light and spiced with habanero peppers and scented leaves. And of course the girls, a different girl each day, sometimes two. Tochi often wondered what it was about living abroad that made his brother go at life with such gusto.

  At their house his brother would stand on the balcony wearing only a pair of shorts with a towel around his neck because he was perpetually sweating. He said it was the change in the weather, but that bottle of beer followed bottle of beer could not have helped. He would look up, raise his hands and say, ‘Ah freedom! So this is me enjoying my life here. This country is sweet, I tell you. Life in London is great – the only trouble is that white people don’t know how to enjoy themselves. They don’t know how to have fun. Breathe in their air over there, so sterile. Smells of nothing.’

  And he would breathe in the air noisily.

  ‘Do you know how many things I can smell here?’ he would say. ‘I can smell the aroma of akara frying. I can smell tomato stew. I can smell the bread from the bakery. I can even smell the sawdust from the sawmill. This life.
Give me another beer. Let me enjoy myself jare.’

  He would be drinking and he would pause, tell Tochi to increase the volume of the music playing on the sound system and he would break into a jig.

  ‘Won’t you dance? Ah I will dance, oh. If I lived here I would be dancing every day.’

  Tochi wanted to ask him if he was not living in the same London where the latest dance moves they watched on TV originated from. Eventually, he did.

  ‘Have I not told you that they don’t have the secret of enjoyment the way we do here? They dance over there but their dancing has no spirit.’

  ‘What about the ones we see on TV dancing?’ Tochi asked.

  ‘Those ones are dancing for money. They are performing. Putting on a show. Do you see them dance with reckless abandon the way we do here? Besides, they only dance with their feet. Here we dance with our entire body.’

  And he danced his way to the bathroom.

  His brother’s old friends from high school visited. His brother complimented them. He told them he envied their lifestyle at home. He said he would come back in a second if he could get their kind of jobs.

  ‘But you make money over there,’ they told him. ‘You make hard currency. Iron money. Pounds and euros, not this weak naira.’

  ‘Over there people make money with one hand and the government takes it back with their two hands. Tax, tax, tax. Everything is bills and tax. You see this our house, you see this balcony, if this house was in London you’d be paying taxes because your house is overlooking the street.’

  ‘But what about the girls? The pretty white girls we see on television and in the movies?’

  ‘Forget them. When you are in a relationship with them you are always looking over your shoulder. Watching your back. Sleeping with one eye open.’