Skein Island

by Aliya Whiteley

  ‘On the pile,’ she said, pointing to the small round table next to the slot machine. Geoff got up and wobbled over to the stack of papers upon it. He riffled through them with surprisingly quick flicks of his fingers.

  ‘Got it,’ he said. He came back to them, and put the paper in front of David. Arnie snatched it up, licked his thumb, then turned the first page and pointed to the top of page three. It was a small article, only one column, with no picture.

  Appeal for Information

  Wiltshire police are asking for witnesses to come forward regarding an alleged sexual assault that took place outside Wootton Bassett library on the night of Thursday 15th October.

  If you were in the vicinity or have any information that you think might be relevant, please contact—

  David stopped reading. ‘No. That’s not her. She wasn’t assaulted.’ He worked backwards in his head, checking the dates. This attack had happened while Marianne was away on the island. The man she had faced down had escalated his game. He felt a strong urge to tell her. ‘I have to talk to Marianne.’

  ‘You sure it wasn’t her?’ Arnie folded up the newspaper.

  ‘Certain. Look at the dates. She was attacked the week before. But she stood up to him, and he ran off.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said Arnie. ‘I knew it. I knew it. Same bloke, then. That explains why she ran away. All these poor women getting raped right here in our town.’

  ‘She wasn’t raped,’ said David.

  ‘Rapist living in Wootton Bassett and nobody tells us, do they? You’d think they’d give men the chance to deal with it themselves, protect their women. He could be out there, doing it again, right now, and he loves that library, doesn’t he?’ There was a malicious enjoyment to Arnie’s voice.

  David stood up. Marianne was in the library, the quiet, bright library, a shining beacon in the darkness. The ugliness of the world was becoming so very clear to him. It had been moving into focus since he talked to Hamish at the funeral.

  It’s all so wrong, Hamish had said. Criminal out on the streets, you know. I found out a paedophile lives down the road from us. Rebecca’s very sensitive to things like that; how can she relax, knowing he’s in the street too? We never had kids because of people like that. I know it’s really upsetting her.

  How horrible to be in that situation, David had thought. He remembered feeling guilty over how relieved he was not to be in that situation himself.

  But that situation was everywhere. That blackness of broken, selfish, dangerous souls had spread all over the world, and nobody was doing anything about it. ‘Pliers, that’s what you need,’ said Geoff. ‘Take a pair of pliers to the bastard’s testicles. Doing that to your wife.’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said David.

  ‘You don’t want to believe everything Marianne says,’ said Arnie. ‘She was always a good liar, that one. All of them are. And they all leave in the end.’

  David strode over to Mags, laid a ten-pound note on the bar and met her gaze. She gave him a small smile, apologetic. ‘You don’t need any cubes now,’ she said. ‘Look at you.’

  He left The Cornerhouse and ran for the library.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Can I just say…’ Patty hesitates in the doorway. ‘That we all think you’re really brave and when you feel ready to go back out on the front desk again, you just let us know.’

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’m still a bit…’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She looks at the kettle on the work counter, as if it is deeply interesting. Eventually she points to it. ‘You want?’

  ‘No, thanks Patty.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll be out the front, then.’

  ‘Give me a shout if there’s a rush,’ I tell her, safe in the knowledge that a rush of customers at 7:45 on a Thursday evening is the most unlikely of things to happen in this library.

  ‘Okay. You do your—’ She points at the spreadsheet I have open on the computer screen. She’s in her sixties and says she’ll never get comfortable with electronic systems. I have always liked that about her. She is determined to remain immune to modern life, and her vision of the world is intact, frozen, formed from Coronation Street, Panorama and the Silver Jubilee. I can feel, in her presence, that maybe everything isn’t out of control after all.

  After she has left the back office, I switch from the spreadsheet to Google once more.

  The news has become a code to crack. I start every day on the BBC website and I hunt for articles, through the Guardian and the Independent, on through CNN and Al Jazeera, even the Sun and the Star and the Daily Mail. The stories give me clues as to whether Moira escaped the island, where she might be, how her power to affect men is changing everything.

  Because around the world, men are changing. They are becoming heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Today, in Kentucky, a fireman rushed into a burning orphanage and saved sixteen children, one after the other. Police think the fire was started deliberately by a serial arsonist who is now operating in the area. Today, in Lancashire, an old man lay down on train tracks and had to be forcibly removed. He had written on his face in indelible ink:

  I DON’T WANT THIS

  Today, in Kenya, Somalian pirates attacked a holiday resort. They rounded up all the men and divided them into four groups. They killed every member of the smallest group, and kidnapped the men in another. Two groups they left alone. Five men dead, six missing. Forty-eight ignored.

  Were these things happening before? Not like this, not in such clear delineations, I don’t think. Or am I catching Amelia’s madness?

  I think Amelia knew what unique and special thing she was hiding in that basement. That’s why she named her monster Moira. By doing that she left a clue that was easy to follow. All it took was a quick internet search to find the truth.

  I looked up the derivation of the word monster. It comes from Middle English, leading back to a Latin root: monstrum. A portent, an unnatural event. Whatever Moira is, I don’t think she’s unnatural. And if she’s part of the natural order of this world, then that means men are meant to be more important than women.

  I click on the bookmark to my favourite page: the Wikipedia entry on the Moirai, the Fates – the Greek idea of incarnations of destiny. Three women who control the threads of life for all men. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. But in Homeric stories and Mycenaean myths there aren’t three women who perform these roles. There is one.

  Whenever I consider this, my hands begin to shake. It’s a terrible piece of knowledge to possess.

  I look up Lady Worthington on Google. There are many sites that mention her; she is a romantic historical figure, I suppose. I click on one devoted to feminist pioneers:

  Born into the heart of the English establishment at the end of the nineteenth century, Lady Amelia Worthington was niece to the fourth Earl of Stanhope, and heir to the Worthington fortune, a trove of priceless Roman artefacts collected in Northern Africa by her father, the Victorian explorer, Lord Percy Worthington.

  Upon her father’s death, Lady Amelia used her vast wealth to travel with a freedom and independence that women were just beginning to explore after the end of World War One. She participated in archaeological digs in Egypt, and was a close friend of Lord Carnarvon. After his sudden death in 1923 in Cairo (some say due to the Curse of Tutankhamun, but nowadays widely attributed to blood poisoning), Lady Amelia left Egypt and travelled extensively in Turkey, the Greek Islands, and the Mediterranean. She was heavily involved in the British dig in Thermi, on the island of Lesbos, conducted in 1933, that uncovered extensive pottery and figurine remains from the fourth century BC, along with rich mosaics and impressive sculptures.

  Her whereabouts are undocumented during World War Two, rising to speculation that she remained on the Greek Islands and was involved in the resistance movement. Cretan resistance fighters later recalled reporting to a female British secret agent who lived and worked amongst the Cretan women without arousing Nazi suspicion.

  In 1945 Lad
y Amelia conducted a deal with the British government, aided in part by an unlikely friendship with Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin (with whom she shared a political belief that the days of empire were over, and a penchant for Webster Cigars) to purchase Skein Island, lying only eighteen kilometres from mainland Devon. She then used her vast fortune to set up the world’s first feminist retreat, offering a week of free board and lodging to those who needed a period of reflection or to escape difficult domestic circumstances.

  The rest of the piece deals with things I already know. She lived as a recluse, and lived on the island she dominated. And then she passed the reins on to my mother.

  I sit back from the screen. I can’t control my thoughts any more. Everything I learn sends me a new message I can’t ignore. The world is being filled with the stories of men: heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Women will be marginalised into minor characters once more. We will lose the freedom we never knew we had – a chance to make our own stories.

  Moira is Fate. The Fates. Three women in one, making heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks in order to weave a tapestry of stories. Were all those myths true, after all? Odysseus, Hector and Achilles, Perseus, Theseus? And others, later: King Arthur, Mordred, Lancelot, Merlin. Thousands of stories, shaped by Moira for her entertainment. Weaving together the strands of men’s lives.

  Each man delights in the work that suits him best, Homer wrote. They are all born with the seed within them to become one of four things. And now those seeds are growing.

  David will think I’m crazy. But, after Christmas, I must attempt to explain it to him. And he will react as a hero should, he will attempt to protect me from myself. His desire to do this, to take control and make the decisions, will only get worse.

  The feeling of foreboding, of dread, knowing that I’m about to be controlled, dominated – I am familiar with this. I felt it that night the stranger walked into the library and said, Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.

  I can’t bear it, can’t sit here waiting for this to happen all over again. A part of me thinks my fear of it is the reason for its creation. I must be making this whole thing up in order to bring my fear to life. This is an elaborate construction of explanations, assurances, abandonments; is it of my own doing? Am I mad? Rebecca would find a textbook way of putting it. I’ve had a break with reality. I’ve rationalised a traumatic experience.

  I push the doubts away. I am the strong one. I have worked so hard to be the strong one. I can’t even begin to rationalise it, but I know I have to tell myself that I am indomitable, have been ever since the day he came into the library and said Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.

  And I said—I said—

  I wrench my mind away. My heart is a runner on a long, straight road. I am prickly with sweat, on my scalp, under my arms. The world is out of control, doesn’t anyone see it? Men set buildings on fire and other men run into those buildings. Men are divided and killed and born and they must be men of action, while I must lie down, take off my clothes and lie down, take off, lie down.

  ‘David’s here,’ says Patty. ‘He’s early.’

  I am amazed at myself. I say, in a perfectly even tone of voice, ‘Oh good, I’ll come out to the front. You can take off now if you like, Patty, and I’ll lock up.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. David’s here.’

  She accepts that with a grateful nod because, after all, David is a man. She knows he will protect me. She gathers her things – anorak, umbrella, woven shopping bag – and says, ‘Have a good Christmas, then.’

  ‘Are you working on the twenty-seventh?’

  ‘No, twenty-eighth I’m down for, afternoon and evening.’

  ‘Great. I’ll see you then. Are you cooking for everyone?’

  She sighs. Every year Patty buys an enormous turkey and invites all the lonely members of her extended family to her house for Christmas dinner. She has a number of unmarried cousins and widowed aunts, along with an ancient grandfather who ruins everything if he gets the chance. Last year he spat his false teeth into the gravy boat. I wonder if Moira will have an effect on his villainous behaviour this year, and he’ll have some macabre masterplan in mind, such as demanding to carve the roast and then stabbing someone with the meat fork.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I tell her, sounding so much like my old self that I have to resist the urge to reward myself with a smug smile.

  Patty leaves, and I close down the computer. Then I follow her out. In the bright library, standing alone in front of the rotating display of slushy paperbacks, is David. He faces the window that looks out over the car park. I can see his reflection in the glass, his lips pressed together, his eyes moving over the darkness, as if scanning for something or someone.

  ‘Nearly ready,’ I say. ‘You’re a bit early. I’ve still got to shut down.’

  ‘I was with your father.’

  Is that why he’s so anxious? ‘I know, I’m sorry, I will get round to speaking to him. I just can’t face it now, but I will go and make it up with him after Christmas, okay?’

  David turns to face me. The way he looks at me is disquieting. He wants something from this conversation, and the energy in his expression scares me. ‘Arnie said another woman was attacked. The week after you. In the car park.’

  ‘The library car park?’

  ‘Right outside the building.’ He jerks his thumb into the darkness. I realise he’s angry. Beyond angry.

  ‘That’s terrible, but it’s the responsibility of the police to—’

  ‘She was assaulted.’

  I wait for a moment, then say, very carefully, ‘That’s terrible. I gave the police a description of him. It’s up to them. If it’s the same man.’

  ‘I need to stop him. I want you to tell me what happened. Every detail. I know it’ll be difficult for you, but I’m sure you understand—’

  ‘I told you already.’

  ‘So he came in, you said no, he left? What was so different the next time, that it ended up in an assault?’

  ‘I don’t know! These people… progress. On to worse things. They get up courage. I was lucky. If you want to call it that.’

  ‘I just… I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth. I feel like you haven’t told me the truth in a long time.’ He looks sad, so sad, and it’s terrible to realise that I have done this to him. Not deliberately, never that, for he’s still my husband, but I should have realised that he would know on some level that I was feeding the world a pack of lies.

  There must be a way to find words for the truth, for all that has happened to me. It would be impossible to spit it into sentences, recreate it in syntax, grammar, punctuate it with exclamation points. I did this, I didn’t do that. All those declarations on Skein Island, all the words that Moira took into herself – what did they mean? How can we tell the truth when it will change the lives of those who listen? ‘Are you ready?’ I ask David. ‘If you want the truth, I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘Will you?’ He sounds doubtful.

  ‘If you want me to. It won’t be—It’s horrible. The words don’t even begin to describe it.’

  ‘I need to understand it. Then I’ll know how to stop him.’

  So I turn out the library lights and lock the door. We are shadows, lit only by the bulb from the back office, and I tell him, ‘It started like this. It was closing time. I was about to lock up when he came in, and stood in the doorway. He told me to go into the back office and take my clothes off. He wanted me to lie down.’ It doesn’t sound right to me. My voice is different, strained, with a saw-edge of fear. It’s the memory of it, coming to life, taking me over. The edges of that night and this night are bleeding together.

  David stands perfectly still. He says, ‘No. Right? You said no.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked him not to hurt me.’

  David pauses, swallows. ‘What then?’
>
  ‘Then I did as I was told.’

  I lead the way into the back office. We stand together under the strip light.

  ‘I took off my clothes,’ I say. I don’t whisper, or shout. I am calmer now, emptier. This is the moment I have been dreading, fighting against, but now it’s here and I am ready for it.

  ‘All your clothes?’

  ‘Everything. I folded them and put them on the desk.’ My white knickers, folded, on top of the trousers, the waistcoat, the shirt, the bra, in order: so neat. I don’t look at David. I don’t want to get caught up in his emotions. It is so much easier if I pretend this is not something that happened to me. I, I, I. It helps if I picture this as a story. So I find myself changing into a different form of speech. ‘She took off her clothes,’ I tell David. ‘But that’s not where the story began.’

  I am a distant measurer of words as I tell him:

  There was once a man who was born evil.

  He knew it from the first moment he knew himself. He was meant to do no good. He was certain of it. And that thought made him proud and excited and sad and lonely, all at the same time. But there was no way to express it, because the wrongness within him was palpable. Whenever he tried to talk to anyone about the evil inside him, even his own family, they refused to listen. They didn’t want to spend time with him, because they were afraid of what was inside him too.

  So instead, when he was old enough, he bought himself a camera. It was a digital camera, small and easy to use, but he had opted for one with a very powerful zoom, so that he could sit in public places, like a park or a coffee shop, and take out his little camera, and pretend to be cleaning it or photographing ducks when really he was zooming into the face of a woman, right up into her eyes, her lashes, so close that every pore was captured. He didn’t just want their faces. He also took photographs of the soft skin at the back of their knees, the casual overlap of nail varnish onto the cuticles of their fingers; arms, legs, hair and cleavage and anything that wasn’t covered by clothes, he shot.