Skein Island

by Aliya Whiteley

  ‘They don’t do that.’ Kay puts the car back down on the start square, and fits a blue peg behind the wheel.

  ‘I know, but I thought—’

  ‘Good luck with thinking. It never works for me.’ She spins the wheel in the centre of the board; it stops, abruptly, on number three. ‘Right. We’re off.’

  * * *

  I wake up.

  The enormity of what I’ve done is upon me, pressing on my chest. I can’t remember why I left him; all I can feel is the certainty of guilt. I have become my mother. We have finally been united in the act of desertion.

  I should have explained it to him. I should have said, I need to understand why I received this letter. I can’t understand why I didn’t. There is no light. The sea is audible, a murmuring voice outside the windows. I picture myself, how I must look from the sky: a tiny, smothered mass, surrounded by the blue, awaiting my answers, travelling towards a goal that David can’t appreciate.

  On our fifth date, I told him what it was to be abandoned. We went to a restaurant, like a couple from a romantic novel: an arranged meeting, reservation made, then the slow walk home afterwards, holding hands, a kiss. Containing the relationship within those strictures gave me the much-needed illusion of control. David wore a suit, a tie, aftershave; I found his desire to impress me with his appearance charming and also a little funny. So I responded in kind by wearing a dress to dinner, a different one every time. I liked the idea that with each dress he was getting a different woman. That evening, I had been in a low-cut wraparound dress, offering him more than I had dared to before. But instead of taking it as an invitation to flirt, it had brought out a serious side in him. He asked questions about my life, my past, all the things I hate to talk about.

  David likes to search for the bottom of things. What do you really feel? he asked me, that night. How very seriously he took my replies, over lamb shanks and strawberry mousse cake, sitting in a deserted bistro on the Swindon road where the waiter strutted by the table, attempting to rise to the occasion.

  ‘What happened on the day she left?’ he asked, after three glasses of red wine, just before the arrival of coffee with a burnt aftertaste. I felt so romantic, in a literary sense, with the candlelight between us and Norah Jones on the CD player.

  I told him it hadn’t been an unusual day. My father had been working as a gardener back then; well, doing any job, really. So I had let myself in after school with my own key.

  ‘How old were you?’

  Sixteen. And he had shaken his head at that.

  I confided in him, rewarded his desire to know me. I had talked about always feeling that my mother had wanted to leave, to get away from Arnie, with his drinking. Sixteen would seem to be the age when a girl can start to fend for herself; perhaps that was how my mother saw it.

  ‘But sixteen is… at sixteen you’re a baby,’ David had said. ‘You were just a baby.’

  I remember reaching across the table and touching his arm. He had said something important, and I had begun to understand, at that moment, that my books were not enough.

  Standing at my front door, after the walk home, I asked him to come in, wanting him, and he had said no. A week passed. By the time he phoned I had changed my mind again, decided that I didn’t want him, attack being the best form of defence. I would not have returned the message he left on the answer phone if it had not begun with the words, I’ve gone and fallen in love with you.

  I didn’t believe him, of course. Nobody could fall in love after five dates.

  And now I understand, as I lie here in the dark, why I hadn’t told him in person where I was going. He has always been the better talker. He would have persuaded me out of it in less than a minute, maybe told me it was my mother I was looking for, and we would be in Bedfordshire right now, searching places together.

  I find I’m crying, noisily, competing with the sea, keeping it company.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ says Rebecca, from my left.

  I hear the squeak of bedsprings, and then a new weight settles on one side of the bed, next to my knees.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ whispers Rebecca. ‘Bad dreams? To do with home?’

  ‘I should have told him,’ I manage to say.

  ‘Told your husband? That you were coming here?’

  ‘I left him.’

  I wait for condemnation, but instead Kay’s voice, too loud for the middle of the night, says, ‘Yeah, well, we all do something terrible every now and again. That’s life for you. Did you bottle it all up for so long that it had to come whooshing out, all of a sudden, like a bottle of Coke that someone shook? You have that repressed look about you.’

  ‘Shut up, please, Kay,’ says Rebecca, in what sounds like an amused tone of voice, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  Kay claps her hands together, says, ‘Brilliant!’ and then there is the sound of movement, and the overhead light bursts into shocked life. ‘Since we’re up, I’m getting tea.’

  ‘There’s only horrible, cheap teabags,’ says Rebecca.

  ‘What would your majesty prefer? Earl Grey?’

  ‘I like Earl Grey,’ I say, and the two of them laugh at me. Kay pads away in her zebra-striped pyjamas, and the kettle is soon audible through the partition wall. It works itself up to boiling point and Kay hums along with it, occasionally talking to herself, saying things such as not even then and it’s meant to be green, stupid.

  ‘She’s a live wire,’ says Rebecca. ‘Do you really want to be here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You say you want to know why you were given a place here by a dead woman. It strikes me you didn’t have to come. You could have simply asked over the phone, couldn’t you? And they would have told you that it was an error by some new member of staff. A mix-up of letters. Are you really trying to solve that mystery, or are you after the experience? The experience of being your mother. What it’s like to leave.’

  I can’t move. I absorb the words, until tea arrives. Kay passes around the mugs and sits down on my bed too; it creaks beneath her.

  ‘It’s so quiet here, I actually can’t sleep,’ she says.

  ‘Me neither,’ says Rebecca. ‘I should say, by the way, I’m a therapist. I’m sorry if I overstepped the mark, Marianne.’

  ‘Why, what did you tell her to do?’

  I shake my head at Kay. ‘She didn’t tell me to do anything. She just pointed something out.’

  ‘I hate it when people do that.’ Kay smoothes the duvet with one hand. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about how we could get hold of your mum’s declaration, if they won’t give it to you.’

  ‘You mean break the rules?’ says Rebecca. She’s in a peach silk nightdress, showing the aged skin at the tops of her arms. Her face is shiny from being cleansed, toned and moisturised before being allowed to relax into sleep. ‘They’ll kick us off.’

  ‘They’ll kick Marianne off anyway, when they discover she never handed in her mobile.’

  ‘It was an honest mistake, I’ll hand it in first thing tomorrow.’ I lean over the side of the bed and pull my handbag out from under the bed by its leather strap. David bought it for me in Barcelona while on a stag weekend for a work colleague. A coach had been commandeered, and the back rows of the aeroplane given over to their testosterone-fuelled two days. I never asked for details. Instead, I enjoyed a secretive delight at the thought that he had stopped to buy a handbag even though he had been in the midst of a male adventure. I take out the phone from the inner pocket and stare at it.

  ‘Are you going to phone him?’ says Rebecca, in a stage whisper.

  But the choice is wrenched away from me. I’m grateful. ‘No signal.’ I drop the phone on the bed. ‘I wonder why they make you give up your phone if there’s no signal anyway?’

  ‘Psychology.’ Rebecca taps its screen. ‘Whether the phone works or not, it connects you to your normal life. Once it’s locked away, you’re going to commit to the week more, to meeting n
ew people, forming new ties. Because on a subconscious level you’re much more likely to feel vulnerable, and forget the people who usually keep you safe.’

  ‘Do you think reading your mum’s declaration really will help you?’ interrupted Kay.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I slip the phone back into the bag and push it under the bed once more. ‘What else could?’

  ‘All right then. Tomorrow night. We’ll go and find it. Be ready.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ says Rebecca.

  ‘Yup,’ Kay tells her, with a level stare.

  Rebecca sighs. ‘Well then. You’d better try and get some sleep if you’re both going to turn into hardened lawbreakers.’ She is our mother figure. Kay rolls her eyes at me, then returns to her own bed.

  I lie down once more. The rest of the night passes in a deep, deliberate silence. The cold air crackles with thoughts that have no place to go.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘So she’s gone too,’ said Arnie. ‘She won’t be coming back.’ He undid the zipper of his grey ski jacket and pulled one arm free, then the other, carefully, so as not to knock his pint. ‘Sorry, but there it is.’

  ‘No, she’ll come back,’ said David.

  Arnie smiled at him, baring his grey teeth. ‘Is that right?’ He raised his voice to the rest of the bar. ‘He’s still got hope, this one.’

  David remembered a story Marianne had once told him about her father. Her first boyfriend had left a message on the answering machine, dumping her, back at the age when face-to-face talking between boys and girls didn’t happen. Arnie had played it for her when she got back from ballet class. He’d also played it for the neighbours, who were round having drinks that night, and they’d had a long discussion in front of her about how she should just get over it and not mope about such a stupid boy. Arnie hadn’t considered it to be her private business at all, apparently, and David had wondered if Marianne had exaggerated the story, as she sometimes did, for dramatic effect. But now he suspected it was true after all.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ said Arnie. He took a long drink of his pint, then patted his thin moustache with his fingers and wiped the moisture on the front of his jacket.

  ‘Did she talk to you? Phone you, at all?’

  ‘No. But I wouldn’t expect her to. You, on the other hand, should be her closest confidante. Shouldn’t you?’

  ‘I am,’ David said.

  Arnie shook his head. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but it has to be your fault. Your wife’s not happy, it’s your fault. Trust me.’

  So this wasn’t about a father protecting a daughter; this was about men being left behind. Abandonment was not the same, however it happened, no matter what Arnie might think.

  ‘Drink your beer,’ Arnie said.

  Getting drunk in the pub – this was his idea of mutual support.

  The Cornerhouse was one of those pubs that people walked past regularly and never went into. It sat where the less developed end of Wootton Bassett high street turned a sharp left into seedier territory, such as DVD rental places with ripped posters in the windows and dry-cleaning places sporting filthy net curtains. There was a sign hung on the roof of the little pub that promised Sky Sports, and then three stone steps down into the barely lit room where a few wooden chairs and thick, round tables squeezed up together to leave room for a skittles alley and a dartboard. David had never been in there, although he had known it was Arnie’s second home for years.

  At the back of his mind had been the idea that it was a pub by invitation only, for those older men who all knew each other and didn’t want to have to deal with young idiots when they socialised. The quiet murmurings, half-hidden under the strains of early Elvis from the radio behind the bar, were not about women or cars or jobs, David guessed. He didn’t know what they talked about, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t know for another thirty years or so, when, one day, he’d find the urge to step inside a place like this and find a lot of tired old men looking back at him without judgement.

  ‘All right, Mags?’ said Arnie, to the woman behind the bar. ‘Another two here.’

  Mags retrieved two pint glasses from the stack behind her and pulled at the pumps with muscular efficiency. Her arms were bare; she wore a stretchy white top with straps that had entwined with the lace straps of her bra, in a shade of red that clashed with her curly, purplish hair. David imagined her to be in her early fifties, with heavily wrinkled skin under her arms, flapping as she pulled their pints, but her blue eyes, intense in the bristling mess of mascara, looked younger, more alive than the patrons of the pub. She was looking straight at him.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I’m not a waitress.’

  David got up and took the pints from the bar.

  ‘Nine pounds, lovey.’ He paid the money.

  ‘Is this your son-in-law, then, Arnie?’ she said, not taking her eyes from him.

  ‘That’s him. The daughter’s only gone off to Skein Island and left him.’

  This news was greeted with fresh mutterings from the other men. David carried the pints back to the table.

  ‘Like mother, eh?’ said Mags, with some degree of satisfaction evident in her voice as she switched off the radio. ‘Right, well, it’s eight o’clock.’ And that was the end of the conversation about Marianne. How unimportant she was to them. It was a strange relief to not have to field questions, to explain the inexplicable. Apparently this leaving business was something that women did, apart from Mags, who seemed to have transcended female status. Old men knew not to be surprised when women left. Instead they merely nodded, and pulled their chairs closer to the bar as Mags retrieved a small green box from behind the rack of spirits.

  Arnie rubbed his hands together and gave David a wink. ‘You’d better watch this time, see how it goes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The game,’ his father-in-law said, as if that explained everything. Mags opened the box, and took out four small painted cubes, one red, one blue, one yellow, one green. She placed them on the bar. David glanced back at Arnie; he was leaning forward, his attention fixed on the cubes. Mags stood back, her hands on her hips. Her expression was difficult to read. There was pleasure there, David thought, but she was trying to hide it under a veneer of watchful superiority. She was in charge, that much was obvious. The men did not move from their seats, but they were all hooked to the cubes, their eyes glued to the wooden sides, lined up in a row.

  David felt Mags’s attention on him once more. ‘You in?’ she said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Not good enough. Come back when you’re in.’

  ‘He’s with me,’ said Arnie.

  ‘Not good enough.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ David said. ‘I should go, anyway. I’ve got a teleconference in the morning.’

  Arnie pulled a face. ‘Right, well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Will you let me know if she rings again?’

  ‘Course.’ But Arnie wouldn’t look at him. David picked up his leather jacket and put it on, feeling the men around him wishing him gone. Mags had turned back to the cubes, tapping them with a purple fingernail, one at a time, the noise like the tick-tock of a metronome, counting out the seconds until he left.

  He walked to the door, stepped outside, pulled it shut behind him. He started a brisk walk back to his empty house, then gave in to temptation, and headed instead for the library.

  * * *

  David crouched and waited.

  Blame was an organism. It grew, and stretched, and multiplied in unexpected directions. Although it had a pinpoint-sharp focus on the unknown attacker, its outer edges also encompassed Marianne’s father, and the other women she worked with who had left her alone to close up. He hated himself for letting her leave. He should have leapt out of bed when he first spotted the open wardrobe door and the absence of her suitcase. He imagined, nightly, living that moment of realisation again, acting fast, throwing himself in front of their car.

  The library
was a small, grey, one-storey building, rectangular with a porch area into which the main doorway had been set. The outside light above the doorway was operated by motion sensor; every time David shifted position it clicked on to throw a sickly bluish glow over the path and the privet where he hid, and when it clicked off again it left David with the temporary illusion of absolute, icy darkness, blanket thick.

  And, of course, nobody came.

  There was another reason to be here. It made him feel closer to Marianne. She loved her job: the smell and the feel of well-used books, the joy of recommending a tense thriller or a slushy romance to her customers.

  He shifted his weight on to his left buttock and stuck out his right leg, flexing his foot. The exterior light clicked on as he worked out the cramp in his calf with his fingers. Agonising, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. In The Cornerhouse, ten minutes’ walk away, Arnie would be drinking and watching television, playing the game with the cubes. David wondered what the prize was; it had to be good, to have captured everyone’s attention so completely. Or maybe they had nothing else to live for.

  He heard the light footsteps behind him only a moment before he heard the voice.

  ‘Stand up.’

  It was a woman. Hope leapt in him, but an instant later evaporated. It wasn’t Marianne. It was too harsh a voice, too confident.

  David did as he was told. The woman must have come from the far side of the library, working her way along the small, gravel path that ran along the back of the building, where the bins were kept.

  ‘Put your hands behind your head,’ she said. He linked his gloved fingers around the back of his neck. She sounded so calm. He guessed she was a policewoman, maybe, but still, his major concern was that he didn’t move too quickly and frighten her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’

  It was too complicated to explain. ‘Can I turn around?’ He didn’t know why, but he thought seeing her face might help.