by Jan Carson
Sandra had loved the quiet faith in her husband and also envied him. Occasionally, catching his eye over the Communion cup, she’d seen a loud, white belief slip over him. He shone like Jesus in the children’s illustrated Bible. In these honest moments, she could not have despised him more.
She would starve herself during Lent and still feel further from God with each small sacrifice. Lent, for Sandra, had been nothing to do with leaning. Lent was only ever anticipating the moment when everything would be returned to her: chocolate and daytime television, Nivea moisturiser and the joy of the Lord’s presence, which was sometimes difficult to distinguish from the pleasure of a finally full belly.
For forty days, Sandra’s God would be dead. She’d press hard into the hunger surrounding his absence, enjoying the way it twisted inside her. This had nothing to do with holiness. It was teeth. It was physical like the need for bread, or sometimes, after eating bacon, a Coca Cola, like the times she’d kept herself from Jim before and after the children, too sore to allow him close, too raw to bear his absence.
For forty days, Sandra would feel lonely for God. Though she could not admit it to herself, this dry lust was the only thing which separated her from her unbelieving neighbours, who smoked and sexed widely, and got their groceries in on a Sunday afternoon.
Easter morning had always been a relief for her. Between the flowers and the children and the up-from-the-grave-he-arose triumphalism, there was no room for doubt, either general or specific. ‘He is risen indeed,’ she would repeat silently, testing each word for its breaking point. She’d keep her eye on the place where the paint had peeled off in the shape of a bird. Her lips would never move. And, with this unspoken confession, Sandra had permitted herself another year of demure belief. God had been returned unto her unbroken, and all the lesser joys would come sloping after.
This year would be different. Even Easter could not bring Jim back to her. Sandra’s God was not brazen; he was no longer in the habit of miracles. Yet, she expected to receive something in return for her loss: a glimpse of his purpose or a moment of the resting peace so many people had written about inside their sympathy cards. She believed that Easter morning would bring an end to God’s silence. After Easter they would begin again, with bruises, like a couple committing to give it one more painful try.
On Easter Sunday, Sandra felt no different than she had the previous day, which had been a Saturday with rain and a fish supper for tea. She sat in the pew between her son and Sam. The child was not used to sitting through a whole church service and could not keep his boredom still. Sandra was glad of the distraction. She fed him Polo mints and dandered him on her knee. Looking down the side of her grandson, she did not have to confront her disappointment directly.
‘Gran, it’s Easter,’ the boy said. ‘Jesus died on the cross today.’
‘That was Friday,’ she whispered. ‘It’s Sunday now. He’s not dead any more.’
‘Why’s he not here then?’ Sam asked. Sandra had no good answer for the boy so she opened a second packet of Polo mints and passed them to him two at a time. He crunched them noisily, opening and closing his mouth so she could see the white shards on his tongue like tiny splinters of bone or tooth.
During the service, three young people were baptised on profession of faith. Baptisms were a new thing for Easter morning. The young minister had introduced them a few years back, not just for babies, for adults too. Baptisms were the perfect way to celebrate the Easter resurrection. ‘Such a joy, to see these three dear children choosing today to enter into Christ’s death and resurrection,’ the young minister began. ‘Yet another reason to celebrate on Easter Sunday morning. Aren’t we blessed folks? Isn’t God immeasurably good?’
The new believers lined up beside the baptismal font to share their testimonies and take a blessing. As they bowed their heads to receive a teaspoonful of water from the minister’s hand – three almost-grown adults in suits and heels – the urge to laugh came rushing up Sandra’s throat like a demon thing she had not known or nurtured. ‘You fools!’ she wanted to cry out. ‘You lost, lost fools!’
The sun was rushing through the stained-glass window of Noah’s ark, turning the tops of their heads rainbow-coloured in stripes. They were like heavenly beings or Christmas lights blinking at the front of the church. The verse, ‘and I will remember my covenant which is between me and you’, rose up within her, God’s promise after the Flood. The words had never held for Sandra and they did not hold now. She was too proud or stubborn, too bound to those truths you could prove with your eyes or your holding hands. These three, sleek-haired youngsters were believing as she had never been able to believe herself.
She glanced to her left and right, to the pew in front where all her close friends and family had gathered like soldiers swarming around a fallen comrade. They were light with the belief that everything, even this, had a purpose. They could have been glowing. Sandra was heavy and always standing to the side of their joy. She felt herself warming with jealousy, sweat collecting at the base of her spine and behind her knees. She knew that when she rose for the next hymn, there’d be a damp perspiration patch left in the pew behind her, and she could not control her own heat.
That evening, after the roast had been eaten and the table cleared in preparation for a new week, Sandra read the grandchildren their bedtime stories. Horse books for the girls, and for Sam, who slept in his own bunked bedroom, a picture book about aliens with brightly coloured pictures. She tucked him in tightly, drawing the duvet up to the child’s chin so his head seemed severed from the thin, pyjama-clad body curled beneath the blankets. His breath, when she bent to kiss him, was minted; chalk-white toothpaste crusted in the corners of his mouth. He slept with a plastic action figure now – Buzz Lightyear or Spiderman – already too old for teddy bears.
‘Will you do my prayers, Gran?’ he asked.
There was no room for distraction in such a tiny space. The walls inched just a little closer to Sandra, the ceiling seemed inclined to fall, and, grasping the rails of Sammy’s bunk bed, she felt her lungs struggle to stay afloat. She had not the strength to manage this today.
‘It’s late, Sammy,’ she replied, trying to keep her voice a straight, measured line, ‘and you’ve had a really long day.’
‘Mummy and Daddy always do my prayers before I go to sleep.’
So Sandra prayed with the child. She put words together to make sentences, simple sentences she’d probably said a hundred times or more. She spoke them over him in a praying voice and kept her eyes closed. She could not bear to look at her grandson while lying. She would tell this lie for the rest of her life, to Sammy and other people she loved. She’d never be able to bring herself to hurt them.
Outside in the hall, she leant against the closed bathroom door and tried to pray, ‘Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.’ She allowed her lips to move over the words but no noise came out. ‘Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.’ Even this, the simplest of all prayers, seemed stuck inside her like a tumour too far gone. ‘Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.’ It wasn’t even a thing that proper Protestants said. She gave up and went downstairs to put the kettle on. As she passed his bedroom door, Sandra could hear Sam singing to himself in the dark, his voice fumbling around the words of a popular Sunday-school chorus. This was almost too much to carry alone.
15.
Children’s Children
They met, by arrangement, at the rock that looked like a rabbit from one side and the Empire State Building from the other. She had never ventured further north and knew it only as a rabbit. He knew nothing of the south. The rock had been a skyscraper to him for as long as he could remember.
She was the last and he was the last. All the other young ones had left for the mainland with the notion of becoming beauty therapists or PhD students. The pair of them were leftover children, too fat and faithful to consider leaving. They did not dream remembering dreams, nor indulge themselves in ambition. They felt physically ill if they went
so much as a single day without encountering the ocean. They knew nothing more than the placid seasons of their parents and grandparents: up with the sun, down with the cows, and television for all those needs which could not be grown, or hauled – sleek gilled and flappering – from the sea.
They were leftover children, set aside for such a time as this. Tomorrow they would be married for the good of the island, both northern and southern sides. They understood what this meant and could picture themselves tomorrow evening, in good clothes, with music. Yet, when they tried to imagine one month later, drinking tea and making up a stranger’s bed, they could not alight upon anything more concrete than the details: shoelaces, crockery, the caustic smell of Lifebuoy soap on an unfamiliar sink.
They understood entirely but had not been given a choice. The arrangement was a simple mathematical equation; if more people were not soonly made, there would be no one left to keep the island afloat. They would marry for the good of everyone, themselves included. Little thought had been given to what would happen after their marrying. Questions such as which side of the island they might settle on, or who their children would marry, or where they would eat their Christmas dinner when Christmas made its annual appearance, had not been considered.
The rock marked the exact midpoint of the island, seven foresty miles from the northern shore and a similar, open-fielded seven from the opposite coastline. The island was long and puckered like a section of intestine, recently unravelled. It was drenched in the winter and barely dry by the time summer had folded into autumn. Each year it lost ten to twenty stones of weight as, one by one, and occasionally in couples, the young ones caught the ferry to the mainland and never returned. Bolstered by this newfound lightness the island’s tideline had receded by three centimetres in the last decade. This extra pinch of pebbly sand was widely attributed to global warming. The islanders rested easy, convinced that they, and they alone, were riding high while the rest of the world sunk on the whim of a polar icecap.
The islanders were a staunch and meaty breed, shock-haired, handsome and raised on short-loan classics from the library boat which visited once a month on a Wednesday. They lived in either the north or the south. Even those who hovered around the midlands, like small children toeing the bonfire’s edge, knew exactly which side of the line they laid their heads on. On the island you were north or you were south, or you left for the mainland. The east and west were not to be considered. They remained geographical afterthoughts, as inconsequential as a pair of open brackets. Once, in the 1970s, a half mile of the east coast had unhooked itself and floated off to Lanzarote or some such sunny place. No one had noticed or particularly cared, for the peripheral directions had remained unimportant so long as north had stayed north and south had continued to dominate the southern extremities.
All the island’s children had been formed from the same sandy soil and sprouted annually, in metric units, towards the same sap-grey sky. They spoke the same words, darkly set, and drunk from the same slow river, rising as it did in the north, and fumbling southwards through fields and forests in pursuit of the motherless ocean. When it rained, as it every day did, it was the same cloud sulk which settled on all their pitched roofs, their swing sets and off-road vehicles, the same rain which coaxed the lazy turnips out of the island’s muck-thick belly and into their soup pots.
The people were consistent as common spades, on either side of the border. Yet, it was unheard of to point these similarities out to an islander currently resident. In 1973, a young fella who’d come to make a documentary film had been drowned by the feet and posted home in envelopes for claiming it was sheer stupidity to split the island while the same sort of people lived on either side of the border. The islanders could not so much as look in a puddle for noting just how different they were from their neighbours across the border. They prided themselves on variegated eyebrows, specialist cuisine and sporting activities peculiar to their own backyards. Even a throwaway comment from a visiting mainlander, such as, ‘Do all the good folk on this island have the same lovely shade of hair?’ or ‘Youse ones on the island are fairly good at the old boatbuilding, are you not?’ could turn an islander purple with indignation. No true southerner wished to be mistaken for an eejit from the north. Neither did the northerners wish to exhibit habits or haircuts distinctly associated with the south.
As she approached the rock, she recognised him. He was shorter than his photograph but the moustache was familiar, also the furious eyebrows. And, if she was not greatly mistaken he was wearing the same faded polo shirt he’d worn the day his picture had been taken.
He’d never seen her before, in person or print, but as she was the only woman in a field of trees, rocks and twitchetty sheep, he rightly assumed her to be his wife.
‘Are you she?’ he asked.
She nodded. Her hat crept up her forehead and came to rest like a dollop of cream on the peak of her crown. She was pretty enough, like a lady on local television, but not the sort you’d see in the movies.
‘Are you he?’ she asked.
‘I am for sure,’ he replied.
The sound of him was all through his nose and strained, exactly like her Uncle Mikey from the north, who she’d only heard on the telephone and once in person, as a small child, at her grandmother’s funeral.
‘I brought sandwiches,’ she said, and he wondered if they put the same things in their sandwiches on the other side of the island.
He’d heard from his brother Paul, who lived on the mainland now, that they buttered their sandwiches with mayonnaise in the south. This was probably just rumouring though. Ever since the island had split in two, like a pair of book pages parting, all sorts of stories had crept backwards and forwards across the border: the northerners kept their old ones in with the chickens; the folks of the south did not believe in dentists or even toothbrushes; they had not yet got satellite television or even microwave ovens in the north. As children they’d passed these rumours round the primary playground, gently, gently with cupped hands and lowered voices. They were too old for such nonsense by the time they arrived at big school. Big school was a Portakabin in the corner of the primary playground, with proper-sized toilets and a set of encyclopaedias preaching leather-bound reason from the topmost shelf of the bookcase. In light of histories as definite as Martin Luther King, the Battle of Hastings and also the Holocaust, it was ludicrous to believe sheer fluff and speculation. Yet the rumours were too delicious to let go of entirely.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘have a ham sandwich.’
She unpeeled the tinfoil for him and passed the naked sandwich across the border. They sat down on the grass. She on her side, he on his. He pressed the two pieces of bread together and mayonnaise oozed out between the crusts.
‘There’s mayonnaise on this here sandwich,’ he cried. ‘Are youse mad over there in the south?’
‘Youse can talk, putting red sauce in your tea; most disgusting thing I ever heard.’
‘We do not.’ But there was no way of proving this without a teapot.
They ate their sandwiches in silence. The mayonnaise nearly made him boke but he didn’t want to put her off before they were even married. She watched him eating. The way the saliva caught in the corners of his mouth, like cuckoo spit stretching with every bite, turned her stomach. She was not used to people eating with such animal enthusiasm but she tried not to stare. When they were married she would start into his manners, teach him how civilised people approached an eating table.
‘So, are you up for this then?’ he asked.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Happy enough with what you’re getting?’
‘I’m sure you’re in the same boat as me. I’d always planned on wedding one of our sort.’
‘Desperate times, eh?’
‘Are you saying I’m ugly?’
‘Course not, sweetheart. You’re definitely not the worst-looking woman on this island. It’s just, I think neither of us would be doing this if there was
anybody left on our own side.’
‘Anybody else at all.’
‘Still it’s for the good of the island isn’t it? We’ve to make a wee sacrifice for the auld ones.’
‘We do indeed, sure haven’t they always put us first?’
They fell to talking, he and then she, describing at length the very many exotic things which existed on their sides of the island: tall trees in the north and a man with seven fingers in the south, five kinds of ale on her side of the line and five completely different, but similarly potent, draughts on his.
The sound of him was a Continental holiday against the boredom. She found herself goosebumpling up and down her forearms, much afraid and also excited.
The sound of her was a shotgun far away and not quite threatening.
They were all but ready to cross the border, to skip the priests and get on with the good act of marrying, when the future sneaked out like a stifled fart.
‘Your side or mine?’ he asked.
She feigned grace and offered to move north for the sake of her husband’s kin. (This was a lie of sorts, lovingly told and masking her desire to live, for the first time beneath trees, with foxes, in the company of singing folk.) He countered her lies with his own. He would move south, first for the good of his wife, then for the prospect of open fields and fresh milk and the lion’s slice of morning sun.
