Only the Ocean

by Natasha Carthew

  Kel looked at Rose. There was something in Kel’s own mind that was twisted in dilemma. She had something to tell the girl and something she didn’t want to tell and it was the same thing. It was a secret and it felt wrong to keep it from her after everything that had gone between them.

  ‘What?’ asked Rose.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s something you’re not saying, I can see it in your eyes.’

  ‘Nothin.’

  Rose shook her head. ‘I’ve known you long enough to figure out when you have something to say.’

  Kel turned to look out to sea and Rose did the same and they both sighed in unison when they saw the dark clouds rolling towards them like boulders.

  ‘If I tell you somethin you gotta promise to keep it to yourself.’

  Rose looked around. ‘Who am I going to tell, the baby?’

  They both turned to the sleeping child and smiled.

  ‘It’s bout him.’

  ‘What about him? He hasn’t got a condition, has he? Your heart thing or whatever.’

  Kel shook her head and said she didn’t think so anyway.

  ‘What then? What about the baby?’

  Kel coughed nervously, ‘There int nothin wrong with him.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And he int to blame for nothin.’

  Rose laughed. ‘What did he do, get in with the wrong crowd?’

  ‘Don’t joke.’

  ‘What then? It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘It is that bad, to most anyway.’ Kel looked at the baby and then she looked at Rose and she told the girl she had never told the secret before: ‘I int never even said it out loud, int even put it to the wind.’

  Rose hauled herself closer and she told Kel to go on.

  ‘It’s the baby’s father.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He int no swamp lad or whatever you might think.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It int good, it’s Dad.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘My dad’s his dad.’

  Rose stared at Kel while she filtered the information down into fine logic.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘My dad. He’s the baby’s father.’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  Kel sighed and she looked away so Rose couldn’t see her stupid girl tears.

  ‘Shit,’ said Rose.

  Kel shrugged; she couldn’t speak.

  ‘Double shit.’ Kel could see Rose wanted to know more so before she could ask Kel told her there was nothing more to say, except that whatever went on back then she’d never wanted to happen.

  Rose put her hand on her shoulder and it felt wrong and Kel pushed it away.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rose and she put her hands into the folds of her lap.

  ‘Int your fault.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry anyway.’

  Kel shrugged and said it didn’t matter, stuff happened for happening’s sake.

  ‘Still,’ said Rose, ‘you’re not responsible for the things that happened to you, for the stuff that happened in that shack where you were reared.’

  ‘Sounds like I’m an animal amongst many, spose that’s just about the truth of it.’

  ‘I’m just saying, it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Never thought it was.’

  ‘Well, I just mean if you’re feeling guilty or whatever.’

  ‘I int.’

  Rose looked at her and Kel shrugged as a way of proof that she didn’t care.

  ‘I’ve seen the scars,’ Rose continued. ‘The scars on your arms.’

  ‘I know where I put em.’

  ‘Some say it’s because of hatred, don’t they? Hating yourself or whatever.’

  Kel looked across at the girl who had unwittingly become the only person worth anything in her life and shook her head and she told her it was anger that drove her to it. ‘Some days I could just pick up the world and throw it.’

  ‘Because you hate it?’

  ‘No, cus it hates me.’

  Kel shook the tears from her eyes and she watched her friend stretch to pet the baby’s head.

  ‘At least one good thing came from the bad,’ said Rose.

  ‘What?’ asked Kel. ‘What’s good bout abusin?’

  Rose gestured toward the baby. ‘Nothing good but the baby, and he’s more than good.’

  Kel shrugged. She wasn’t so sure. The baby was a millstone weight around her neck.

  ‘He int no good for me,’ she said. ‘Int no good for me and I defo int good for him.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

  ‘It’s true though, I can’t look after him right and we both know it, draggin him all round and now look where I got him.’

  Rose told her to stop talking stupid talk. ‘There’s a reason you took him with you.’

  Kel shrugged and she looked down at the sleeping boy. ‘Poor bugger, he don’t know nothin but milk just about.’

  Rose smiled. ‘At least you’ve stopped calling him it.’

  ‘Spose.’

  ‘Do you have a name for him yet?’

  Kel shook her head and said she was working on it. ‘Int much inspiration out here.’

  The two girls looked at each other and the little something that was wired between them sparked just a little and Kel looked away.

  Rose rubbed her hands to the fire and then she sat back and asked Kel if there was anything more she wanted to share.

  ‘Bout what?’

  ‘I don’t know, what about your mother?’

  ‘Died.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Died when I was born or bit before or after. Can’t remember all what I was told; kin int big on talkin up the past.’

  ‘Do you have a big family?’

  ‘Bigger un big, but none worth botherin to name.’

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Older just.’

  Kel looked at the child, looked away. She tried to think of something interesting to say, but her life had always been dead-end and deadbeat, the same as everyone else she knew. So she looked at Rose and said she had no family except those who made her live like a slave and kept her running drugs.

  ‘Where do they get the drugs from?’

  ‘Home cookin.’

  ‘And you liked doing it?’

  ‘No.’ Kel poked at the fire and arranged it better so she could keep from the guilt.

  ‘I hope you’ve changed your mind about the kidnap?’

  Kel smiled and said of course she had.

  ‘Well that’s good, that’s one good thing to know, so thank you for that.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘It would be a bloody shame otherwise, to go through all this and then have to deal with that on top.’

  ‘Spose you might think bout gettin back to a better life.’

  Rose looked across at Kel and said she supposed that was the same for both of them and Kel agreed.

  A new start over sounded good. It sounded good to hear someone say it and it felt good to think it over and have it settle in her mind.

  Maybe someday her dream really would come true, the hill with the little cabin house and the low-level rivers running and falling tides and the sun happy in heaven.

  ‘It would be somethin,’ she said suddenly, ‘to see the sun again and everythin.’

  Rose agreed. ‘It would just about make the start to a better life, I reckon.’

  ‘Even just to see it proper,’ Kel continued, ‘for a moment even, to know it still existed. That would be somethin.’

  Rose sighed. ‘It would be everything.’

  The two girls sat with the ice-winds rustling around them. It snapped at their exposed skin like gummy gang dogs, harmless but threatening the same.

  ‘You hear that?’ asked Kel suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Callin, I spose, some kind of callin.’

  ‘Some kind of animal?’

  Kel said maybe, but ma
ybe not. She hoped it was nothing but a dumb thing with four legs scratching and a mouth with noises rattling within just because. She sat up close to the entrance of their cave and remembered the shadows that danced the day through and she moved beyond the fire and squatted in the wet sand and looked to the back of the cave and then at the sky.

  ‘No stars,’ she said. ‘No stars and the storm’s still circlin.’ She sat with her knees pressed tight to her chin and her arms wrapped protecting and watched the ice-grit rain as it turned to hail and dug a billion craters in the sand. The strange land had become stranger still, its colour grey to blue to bright-frost white, ethereal and empty despite the crashing dangling storm.

  Shapes shifted and jostled at the shoreline for a peek at her and they made hands of the wind and beckoned for her to come play, come swim with them. Kel rubbed her eyes. She knew that she should lie down and sleep, but sleep would not come. Madness had sunk in from all the bad talk and it settled within, rot and rust that came with the fog to clot and scab her usual practical thoughts. Corrosive thinking: things that weren’t there before were there now.

  Kel saw that Rose was bedding down to sleep and that image made her smile and she stepped fully from the cave and out into the rain and down the beach toward the shadows. She watched them skid into the rising tide as she approached. She told them whether they were listening or not that she would not break the little happiness she had been gifted. She would put it into her damaged heart and like a healing thing it would not be removed.

  Chapter Twelve

  It wasn’t until the arrival of a new day that Kel realised she must have slept at times during the night and she was grateful for that but she was more thankful for the morning. She looked across at Rose and smiled. They were alone again, the island cleared of spirits.

  ‘Mornin,’ she said.

  ‘Already?’

  Kel nodded and she sat up and stretched to rescue the fire. ‘I thought it would never come.’ She bent to blow life into the embers. ‘Thought I’d never see daylight again.’ She added a little of the stored wood to the one good spark and blew it into life.

  ‘I’m glad of everything,’ said Rose. She went to sit up and Kel helped her and then took up the blanket and placed it lightly on the girl’s lap. She was careful not to wake the baby.

  Neither girl spoke about Rose’s leg because it was a thing that existed and a thing they didn’t want to exist. Kel kneeled her way to the entrance of the cave and she wondered which way the weather might go.

  ‘It’s not so bad out there, is it?’ asked Rose. ‘it sounds like the wind and the rain have gone.’

  ‘They’ll be back.’ Kel tried to follow the thickening clouds that assembled out on the horizon but they had a toe in both directions.

  She stood up and left the cave and looked out at their surroundings; both the beach and the sea wore the same cloak as yesterday. When Rose asked what she was thinking she said she was thinking about food. Her eyes were on the dolphin and she watched the gulls make good work at pecking holes in its hide. She wondered what it would taste like and she wondered about it out loud.

  ‘I’m not eating any dolphins,’ said Rose and when Kel looked down at her she shook her head and repeated her words.

  ‘Won’t it be just like shark?’ asked Kel.

  ‘I’m not eating any sharks either.’

  ‘But folks do, don’t they? Shark steaks or whatever.’

  ‘You tell me, you’re the one from the swamps.’

  Kel took her knife from its sheath and passed it from hand to hand. What harm could it do? It was energy, and Kel needed that today in order to climb the cliff and work on the rescue fire. The animal was already dead and with the slamming waves and the gulls gone crazy it was a hundred times dead. She set off down the beach and she heard Rose shout that she would rather starve than eat the goddamn dolphin but Kel ignored her. If she did not provide them with more food that was just what would happen, and she knew without doubt that starvation on the island would be long-drawn and spirit-infected.

  She went on toward the animal; even when the stench of putrid flesh caught hook-like in her throat and threatened to haul out what little content lay in her gut, she went on.

  Her eyes searched between the patches of rip and tear for clean meat. The dolphin was no more animal than it was a factory carcass, clubbed and chopped. A thing that had no purpose beyond feeding the island’s wretched inhabitants. She bent to it and settled her knees in the rock pool’s wet and tarry grove and set about her work.

  Nothing stopped the girl from digging. Knife in hand, she stabbed and levered the thick-leathered blubber into sizeable chunks, and even when the seagulls came back fighting and clawing she did not stop until her shirt that she had laid out for collecting the bounty was sack full. She gathered the cloth and tied the sleeves to corners and it was a beast in itself that she carried across her shoulders and back up the beach.

  ‘It’s good food,’ she said to Rose as she dropped the bundle at the entrance of the cave. ‘Good food goin to waste.’

  Rose sat forward and sniffed at the thing in the flannel sack. ‘How are you going to cook it?’ she asked.

  Kel shrugged and wondered if it was steak or fish or what was it? She sat beside her haul and a bit of pride and a bit of shame fought amongst themselves within her.

  ‘I’m gonna smoke it,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Smoked dolphin?’

  Kel got up and nodded and she went about finding damp green sticks in which to trap the meat. If she smoked the flesh they would have food for a long time to come. She told herself they wouldn’t need it, but just in case, it was good to be prepared.

  She scrambled a little way up the cliff and cut and pulled the new shoot roots from the slate-slip earth and felt them for bend and they were good. Kel Crow had an idea and nothing would stop her now. They would sleep well with the fire raging and smoking through the day and night and in the morning they would eat like kings.

  She brought the sticks back to the cave and all through the day she wove them as best she could into open-book racks, one and two, and when the racks were secured to two hands holding she set about cutting the chunks of meat into thin slices.

  Occasionally she caught Rose watching and Kel would smile the awkward out of her because she could not let the girl know that she was feeling anything other. What it was to feel every emotion just from looking. It made her mad and she put her back into the chopping. To look too long was to be close to shouting crazy from the island summit: the girl had her and she had her so completely it broke her to think that Rose might die because if Rose died then Kel would die the same. Without her knowing it Rose had reached into her chest and found Kel’s heart; it was in her hands now.

  ‘You know it’s dead already, don’t you,’ said Rose and Kel ignored her. ‘It had better taste nice, what with all the effort you’re putting into it.’

  ‘It’ll taste what it tastes; it’s the goodness I’m after.’ She laid the strips in neat rows up and down one side of her contraption and secured them into place with the other and then she poked the tripod points that she had secured above the fire clean through it.

  ‘There,’ she nodded when she had finished and stepped back. ‘I did it.’ She glanced over at Rose in the hope of a little praise, but the girl had gone back to sleep.

  Kel sat with her feet to the fire and she stretched her legs to the heat to have it dry her jeans. Occasionally she found herself watching Rose and she wished she knew something of the girl’s heart to know her completely. The firefly flutter that seared within scared Kel; it had her blood run hot with hope and cold with the fear of loss and these feelings were new to her and not just new but so unexpected that they had her whispering to the island spirits for advice.

  When night came she curled up close to the fire with her eyes full of beauty and the thought of everything that was good firing her through. When sleep came it carried with it hope and it was as if everything from thereo
n in would be better than before.

  The next morning they ate some of the meat without discussion and Kel told Rose that she was going back up the cliff. Energy and thinking had returned and she reached into her pocket, found her notebook and pencil and wrote ‘RESCUE FIRE’ beneath her new plan. It was obvious, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before.

  When Rose asked to see what she had written Kel passed it to her.

  ‘Rescue fire?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Have you seen a ship?’ asked Rose. ‘I mean, since we’ve been here?’

  Kel thought for a minute; she knew where this was going. ‘No, but –’

  ‘So why are you bothering to spend precious energy on it?’

  Kel shook her head. ‘Cus it’s all I got.’ She waited for Rose to hand back her notebook, watched her flick through all her past plans.

  ‘Always planning,’ Rose said. ‘Always running after something.’

  ‘Or runnin from,’ said Kel.

  ‘That’s funny. You’ve written “Operation” here, but after that …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. You’ve left it blank.’ Rose looked up at Kel. ‘What comes after?’

  Kel shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ This was a lie. She did know. It was freedom.

  When Rose handed back the notebook Kel went and stood at the foot of the cliffs and waited for the best part of the day to stretch out in front of her and the worst to bunch behind. She kicked at the roots that had fallen and died and she thought about the night spirits and it felt good to be certain in regard to things again. She wasn’t mad, just had moments of lunacy, and she knew it was the continued hunger and sleep deprivation that had overtaken her. She would storm the cliff once more and light herself a huge bonfire piled ten foot high with all the wet roots and green wood timber she could find. Day or night, if a ship passed by the island they would see smoke or flames, they would see her fire. Things would get back on track and it started with the one-foot two-foot mountain stab.

  This time it was a little easier. She found that she had scratched divots into the surface where on day one she had toed the near impenetrable earth, and so she followed her previous route with a spider’s stick and crawl. She would defeat the crumbling ice-island, keep chipping at it until its back was broken in two.