by Carmel Bird
The child was lying as if dead or sleeping, a doll-like creature, sopping, a crust of vomit across its cheek, cradled by the succulent pigface that grew in carpets and tufts and webs all over the island.
The boat lies at the bottom of the Strait, small pieces of scrappy timber floating in scummy drifts on the surface of the waters, making their way into narrow spaces between the rough and rusty rocks that frill the edges of the islands that lie scattered through the Strait. A small straw bonnet sails, a cheeky duck on the surface of the water—now almost completely still. All bodies save those of Minerva and Magnus and the baby have disappeared forever. No set of teeth, no eyeglass, no wooden leg, no chestnut wig—nothing but the forlorn straw bonnet bobs on the rocking waves. Three whole humans only, marooned together on Puddingstone Island, a fresh-made family group. Man, woman, baby.
It was as if the ship, the crew, the passengers had never existed, as if they were but figments of the hot imaginations of the lone surviving trio. Dogs, horses, chickens, pigs, monkeys, cats, children, agile sailors, the piper and the boy with the violin—all stilled and silenced by the sea. Gone was the strange and beautiful tortoise bought by one of the crew in Cape Town. Minerva simply named the baby La Niña, girl-child, for the time being. They began to call her Niña. It was Minerva who took charge of Niña, who suddenly became a mother to a child there in the middle of the ocean, who gathered the baby to her and who then said with urgency and desperation that they must look for shelter.
It was as if some part of a mission had been completed, and they must now move on to the next stage. Where they must find their home, their shelter. The wind began to moan. The child began to cry. She was alive, and she was hungry, and the sound of her cry was the most urgent and the most primitive of sounds. The hunger in her cry tore at Minerva’s heart, ran like a jagged blade through Magnus’s brain.
Magnus could only stare dumbly at the baby in amazement, and a kind of horror mingled with hope as he realised that perhaps she would die, that she would almost certainly die. Perhaps they would all die on the hell-spotted rocks by the sawtooth sea beneath the thick bleached canopy of the heavens. Above them loomed the arching no-colour of the southern sky while deep down serpents larger than imagination thrashed in steely dark-green shadowy ocean depths. The stillness and silence was only an episode in the strange weather at the end of the world. They knew that tonight or tomorrow almost certainly there would again come curls of surface foam, mountains of moving, slicing, pleating water, black with a glinting edge. Perhaps bodies would be released from the wreck, and would float to the surface before their eyes. Minerva had seen newspaper etchings of wrecks and bodies, as had Magnus, and they both silently tried to suppress the grotesque images of black-grey bloated corpses bobbing eerily on the waves of the mind. The will to live is stronger than love or sorrow, and Minerva and Magnus would not give in to the phantoms that could pull them back down into the ocean.
Minerva stood beside the water with the baby in her arms, and sometimes the baby cried, and cried and cried, her voice the voice of all things abandoned in the universe, the cry of despair in the hollow darkness of primal nothingness beneath the arching void of heaven. Minerva removed all the child’s clothing and held her in the sea-water lest her small body die for want of moisture, then she lifted the top layer of her own nightdress, and cradled the naked creature in its sorry, sopping folds.
No whisper, no bubble of sighing air would ever rise from the splinters and bones of the Iris. What shards of memory would stay with Niña, soft milky fragments gold and white of a warm and innocent time? Her mother’s skin, her mother’s breast. Someone singing in the half-light: ‘Rockabye-baby-bye.’
Niña remembered deep inside herself the soft lining of her father’s jacket, the joy of the sun shining through the glass of a little room somewhere in County Down or County Clare or County Tyrone or Cornwall. The cheep of a chick. The mew of a kitten. A little white dog. A patch of green wall, fragment of wallpaper, painted with pink roses and red. A silky cushion by the fireside. The motherely glow of the candle in the pewter candlestick. Somebody was calling from far away: Caroline! Caroline! Line! Line! Line! And there was gentle rain falling, falling, falling in the twilight outside the window. Sweet Caroline. Baby Niña?
A small boy is laughing, laughing out loud in the sunlight under a chestnut tree in flower. New pennies chink on a chipped china saucer. There is the rocking of the waves, the calling of the thunder, the terror of the storm, the stark and staring eyes of the fainting mother, the father beside himself with panic and black fear. Then, Baby Niña, in some strange super-human seizure of the mind, by some non-human, some unearthly inspiration, your terrified father holds you by your back, swings his arm in a mighty arc and releases you into the high, high air, hurling you from the suck of the sinking ship, high, high into the whistling air, above the swishing scummy foam, out out out into the whirling world he throws you out, he throws you overboard to seek your stormy story fortune in the flying air. Child overboard! The demented father has thrown the child overboard into the howling dark!
Two iridescent angels in embroidered cloth of gold catch you, for a little miracle has occurred, and they ferry you, these angels, to dear Puddingstone Island through air as thick and thin as air in Chinese mythology long, long ago. The black crack of the adamantine tempest—and the whole world splits and spits and you fly, a baby angel in your cambric nightgown, unconscious in the freezing whirling air, light as a leaf, heavy as a teardrop, and you land on your back in a bed that is a great clump of tangled seaweed caught between two snaggles and snarls of rock, covered by a shawl of pigface.
The child’s shoulders and heels are bruised in the fall; her head lands on a soft squishy wad of pale green succulent leaves that are mixed with dark strappy pungent seaweed. She has emerged from a gushing, twirling world of shifting shadows, crenellations, lacy froth and the shrieks and howls of sorrowful demons. She will never see the weird wild seaweed caught in the hair, strapped across the eyes of her doomed and drowned and drifting family. Icy waters stop their mouths which will yet cry out with silent cries, forever seeking their child, their little sister, their baby Caroline, Baby Niña.
They set out with you, your father and mother and brother, to seek their fortune, your fortune. Far, far away from neighbours and cousins, seeking a new beginning, fresh adventure, untold security perhaps. Perhaps. You are all that is left of all those hopes and all those bright ideas. This is your destiny, alive and not alone on Puddingstone Island, which is a pile of peter-piper-pebbles in the Strait. You are now Niña, the baby of Puddingstone Island.
So Niña the baby was saved. The angel who looked away that sunny day when Dorothea nibbled on the buds of the hydrangea was most actively present on the night of the storm, the shipwreck, the appearance of the monster from the ocean deep. That angel plunged through cloud and wave, lightning and hail, and as Niña left her father’s open desperate and grieving hands, angel hands took her gently and flew with her in that perfect arc towards Puddingstone Island, placing her as carefully as possible on the bed of succulent pigface. Demons were busy that night, hand in glove with storm and squid; angels were busy, bringing together a new little family in this far away strange place, and arranging also for some useful luggage. For what would be the good of saving the baby’s life if she didn’t have at least a nice warm blanket and somebody to wrap her in it? You can see a sort of logic in it all—Dorothea’s story was perhaps trivial when compared with the dramatic story of Niña. Nina survived the storm and the serpent and the sea; Dorothea died in her own garden from eating a lunch that was set out for the fairies—who can really make sense of that? God is supposed to be watching out for the fall of the sparrow. Poor little sparrow Dorothea. Lucky little sparrow Niña.
CHAPTER NINE
Secret Chronicle of Virginia Mean II
‘And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundr
ed and threescore days.’
REVELATION OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE
A thick wood of dark trees surrounds the facility out at the Black River. The forest sets it as a place apart, marking it off for the lodging of people who have done such terrible things they can never be allowed out into the world of ordinary folk ever again. They are not just mad, insane, not just criminal, but they are doubly damned for they are the criminally insane. The wood is the wood that is found in dreams and in fairytales.
There was once a beautiful palace, as white as clouds, as cold as ice, and as mysterious as mysterious could be. It shone like mirrors, glittered and twinkled. It was like something made from gleaming sugar, and a pale owl cried in the forest at night. When they were building this palace I remember reading of it in the Circular Head Gazette. Some people living in the district were much opposed to having a mental hospital and prison at Black River. Then there were people who were very angry because they said the facility was so opulent, was so luxurious and modern, a work of art. They thought that offenders such as Caleb should be tortured and put to death, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, should not be permitted to live out their lives in a home-like place where they are well fed, and where they have many comforts such as centrally heated single rooms with televisions and computers and CD players, and where there is a heated swimming pool and full gymnasium. It all looked most seductive and desirable in the pictures in the Gazette, if the pictures were telling the true story, and it is possible they were not. I have grown more suspicious of everyone since I left Skye, more wary of the things people say. I used to trust, but now I realise that I can no longer take things at face value. It’s difficult for me to discern the marks of duplicity and deception, but I believe I am learning. A shell of snail-cynicism is protecting me now.
I learnt from the newspaper that the eiderdowns at the palaceprison are filled with the softest feathers from the moonbirds, and people are particularly angered by that detail. As if there was something about the moonbirds that forbade their feathers to be used by unworthy members of society. The palace was designed by a man from Norway, a man with the name of a god—his name was Thor. Much of the story I read spoke of how light enters the building, and I was quite fascinated by that detail, ‘bringing the light into the darkness of sick minds’ it said. When I read the article in the newspaper I did not imagine how important the building would ever become to me, that it would be the dark dungeon of my darling heart, the castle of his permanent enchantment, the guardian of his silence, guardian of my own silence as well. I do not really understand why he can not write me a letter, or why at least I can not write to him. Why are we not permitted to use the telephone? I always understood that prisoners had some access to maintain contact with the world beyond the prison walls. But Caleb is considered to be so dangerous that he must not contaminate the air with his voice, or stain a sheet of paper with his thoughts. His links with the world must be severed so that he can perhaps be changed, be rehabilitated—if I am here to speak that language in which he is now trapped. He is forbidden to write letters, and because of the fire at Skye he is forbidden to use matches. It is just as well he does not smoke—if he did, perhaps somebody would light his cigarettes for him. But they should realise that he would never be interested in burning anything in the prison. His task is done, his mission performed, but they do not understand. I do have one slender line of communication with one of his doctors who is able to send me formal reports. I am also permitted to respond to his doctor in writing. So that is at least a small sliver, a glinting shard of hope. I do not know how much to write to him, how much of myself I should reveal.
Around the perimeter of the trees, stretches a stark white concrete wall, electrified, and swept, during the hours of darkness, by creepy blue lights that probe the forest. There is a tower that is pierced by one slit, one window, looking out to sea, like in the tower of Rapunzel, while all the other windows I believe face inward, turn their back upon the world. Natural light enters the building through thick glass slabs up on the roof, but the greater part of the light inside the palace is artificial. The whole of the building burns inside day and night with clean bright electric light.
Caleb could easily imitate a lunatic—for he could imitate anyone, imitate anything, by action or sound. He could imitate the cleverest doctor in the whole of the universe. He could always produce the cry of any bird, the roar of the waterfall, the snarl of a rat. The laugh of a child, the sigh of a mad musician, or the cadence of a poet. He could be any politician, any movie star, any lost and wandering beggar. He was born with the gift of words, but it was much, much more than that. Caleb truly is a magician and a prophet and I believe him to be the most beautiful man in the world. He was described in some newspapers as one of the most vicious killers on the face of the earth. It also said that in the prison he must use a clear toothpaste so that he can not hide any weapons inside the clear plastic tube. I thought that sounded like a rather magical idea in itself, and I imagined fairy daggers lying quietly inside a tube of toothpaste.
I do not really know why I write about him in the past, for surely he can still do all these things that I describe. Unless perhaps the doctors have drugged him—perhaps they have drugged him right out of existence, or cut out his tongue. Such things do happen. Yes, they do those things to psychiatric patients for their own good and for the good of society in general. Dead. Perhaps Caleb is dead. Because of the rules I have received no letters, no telephone calls, but more significantly I have also received no telepathic thoughts or images. The absence of thought messages suggests to me that Caleb must be either drugged or dead, since we have always been able to communicate in this way. I am told that I will never ever see him again, and that I might as well forget all about him. How can I do that? How might I learn to forget his beautiful naked body in union with mine the first time we loved, the last time we loved? Those afternoons in his white, white meditation sanctuary perfumed with clove, where the girls in white play their dulcimers for us as a stipple of sunlight sifts in through the leaves of the cherry tree. How to forget? Under the window is growing wild a bed of poppies, flowers of sleep, and we drowse and love all afternoon, all evening, as the quiet lullaby of the dulcimers plays our love song. The notes of the music linger in the luminous air.
How to forget? How to banish from my mind’s eye the memory and image of Caleb in his silver suit striding along on his way to the Temple of the Winds, under the great white umbrella, through the long grasses on the clifftop, while the pale salmon-coloured butterflies whirl about him, flecks of snow in broad foamy flurries? How to forget? Those salmon butterflies were made from wire and tissue paper, fashioned by my Aunt Tamar, and they were a most important part of the scene, part of the performance. We never pretended they were real. Yet there were times when Caleb had no paper insects, but he could persuade people to think they saw things, to imagine the beauty of the miracle that attended his own birth, and perhaps they did indeed see them. Caleb’s imagination is powerful and is able to project what it sees, thereby instructing the minds and thoughts of others. The reality of imagination, of the unconscious mind, is one of the central beliefs of our faith. We have such ceremonies as the Festival of Dreams that was inspired by an ancient tradition of the Iroquois tribe, and which came into practice in Skye early in the twentieth century. It is an opportunity for people to release anger and to behave violently but safely. Within the people of Skye there is always one, usually the leader, who has the gift of non-dreaming, and Caleb has this gift. The gift frees the unconscious mind for its greater works. The Festival of Dreams gives the gifted one the liberty to commit acts (which may be seen as violent acts) without suffering any repercussions. During the Festival one person can physically or verbally assault another, but must stop as soon as the victim guesses the content of the first one’s dreams. The first person must be honest about their dreams. I was always honest, but I suppose now that there were possibly people who lied. I do not know. Since Caleb
has no dreams, he can not be challenged, and is free to impose his violence upon others for their own and ultimate good.
In my mind’s eye of memory I can see Caleb naked among the wreaths of incense, among the flowers and summer fruits of our secret, secret bower. Here there are no musicians, no witness to our union. His body is taut and pale and smooth as ice, yet lit from within with the fire of God. I see him in his public role, presiding over the village feasts, preaching, always preaching, gathering about him his groups of devoted followers who bow beneath his radiant and sumptuous smile which is a sign of wisdom and of the grace of God. And between us we made our child, Golden. She is my only child, although Caleb had many other children among the community. Logically, Golden was the only one he chose to save. He said to me that he would sacrifice all his sons, all his other daughters first, but he would take Golden with him on his final journey. She would not burn, but would fly with us in our great leap from the cliff. I mourn for those children now. Caleb said that Golden has a special mission, a special meaning, a calling, that she has the gift of prophecy. In my heart of hearts, I hope that she does not have that gift, for such forespoken gifts I know are sometimes curses. If Golden could lead the life of a normal child, my prayers would truly have been answered.
Although I believe with all my soul, and I am bound to believe, that what Caleb did was right, when it happened I was so very shocked. I had not realised how I would feel. All our families, all our friends, all the brethren of our community of Skye—they are all gone. It is almost impossible for me to comprehend this. Groups of tuneless children singing folk songs beside the river. My sister Bethany is dead. I say that to myself over and over—my sister Bethany is dead. My sister Bethany and my little brother Zimran. I seem to see them through smoked glass, as if looking at the sun, and into my memory leaps the day that Bethany and I sat underneath the mulberry tree making daisy chains, and Zimran was lying baby-roly-poly on the rug, and we gave him a crown of flowers, and a necklace, and he gurgled with pleasure, then began to scream in pain because he had been stung by a bee in the long summer grass. My mother came running out of the house wiping her hands on her apron, flour—what on earth!
