Skein Island

by Aliya Whiteley

  At least, that’s what my father told me. My father, the social being and needy romantic.

  On one of these occasions of return my great uncle, one year younger than his brother, told my grandfather over the dinner table of a conversation he’d had during a night out at the pub in the village. A bet had been mooted that my grandfather would never get married – but who would be stupid enough to take such a bet? Everyone knew he would never tie the knot. He’d never even so much as looked at a girl. Eventually my great uncle had reluctantly taken the bet, out of a sense of familial duty. After relating this story he had, apparently, shrugged and said, ‘That’s good money wasted, unless you’re willing to pay me back for it.’

  That had been enough.

  My grandfather set his sights on a girl. The girl who became my grandmother, who was always ‘the girl’ to him, if he spoke of her at all. She left him, and my father, soon after my father started school. There wasn’t even a picture of her for me to examine as I wanted to. I was keen to see what the face of a traitor looked like; that was how I thought of her, for years, until I understood life better.

  My father told me that story of the marriage as a gamble often, trotting out the familiar sentences to a little girl who was too young to make sense of it. He told it as if it were a parable, and wisdom could be unlocked if only the listener heard with better ears. For a while I blamed myself for failing to find an answer within it.

  My father is an idiot. He loves people and their many problems. He can’t walk through the market square of our home town in less than an entire morning because so many people want to stop and chat, even now. I can remember having to hold his hand throughout, pinned in his grasp, shamed by his inane conversations. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other as he chatted. I was wearing yellow wellington boots. This must be one of my earliest memories.

  I know my mother went out to work for the local solicitors’ office while my father stayed home with me – an unusual choice in the seventies, perhaps born from his time spent alone while he was growing up. He wanted to keep me company every minute. But occasionally he would grab a day of work for a removals firm or on a building site, and then my grandfather would turn up on the doorstep.

  There was always a sense of reluctance to leave me in his care; I felt that from very early on. I used to think my father was needlessly worried that the old man wouldn’t really notice if I lived or died, which I took as a reflection on his own upbringing. Now I suspect he was more concerned about my grandfather encouraging the sociopath in me to emerge, by giving it a proper role model.

  We had one proper conversation about the bet early in my teenage years.

  ‘Katie,’ my father said to me, ‘think of it this way. He likes to pretend he’s an island, but he still made me and raised me. Not well, perhaps, and with long absences, but he did. He wants people to think he doesn’t have feelings, and that’s his choice. It’s not a choice I would make, but he lives with it.’

  ‘Has he never loved anyone?’ I asked, meaning: Why doesn’t he love me? It’s a difficult thing for a young person to understand.

  ‘He made a baby and lost a wife, and both of those events were his own fault. But he comes here to look after you, every once in a while. That has to mean something.’

  I don’t know if my father genuinely believed that. I’m not so certain that love can be measured in distance travelled, or tasks performed.

  I’m not the way I am because of my grandfather, although I wouldn’t deny that he proved to me that living without having to hold fast to another human being was possible. I stress that it was humanity alone that didn’t appeal to him; he loved the beauty of all other living things and knew everything about them. The only time I saw him smile was when he took me out of the house, into the wild.

  That only happened once. My parents decided to take a summer holiday to France and I didn’t want to go. In fact, I remember I was angling to be left alone in the house. A week without having to say a word to anybody – the school summer break had started – appealed to me deeply after my father’s endless neediness. But it wasn’t to be. My grandfather turned up on the doorstep on the morning of their departure, and was admitted. They all stood in the kitchen together, and I watched from the doorway.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ he said to my parents.

  My mother said, ‘I’ll hold you to that, Michael,’ in a warning tone. I think my grandfather was a little afraid of her. But as soon as I’d been kissed goodbye, and my parents had driven away, he looked me up and down and pronounced me old enough to do some proper walking.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

  ‘Outside.’

  He had a strong sense of where to go, veering through side-streets that led out of town and stomping down back roads that bore signposts to the names of villages I didn’t know. Or he would simply set off across the fields, flattening crops with his stride. When the last rays of the sunset faded we were walking uphill with not a word spoken to each other in hours. We stopped in the lea of a dry stone wall, on thin grass, and I watched the sheep huddling together by the gate as he shook out two sleeping bags from his old rucksack, followed by a thermos flask of coffee and a tin of beans.

  ‘Get comfy,’ he said.

  We shared the beans. I was ravenous.

  This might seem strange, but I was not a girl, and he was not a man. We were not people. I have never felt so light, so free of expectation, and that was terrifying. If I wasn’t to be treated like a woman-in-training, then what was I?

  I don’t remember falling asleep. I do remember waking, in the light of the dawn, and never having felt so cold in my life. I lay there, in its grip, and smelled burning. Nothing made sense. The smell was pungent, deep, rich. My grandfather laughed, and I turned my stiff neck towards him. He was leaning back against the wall, smoking one of his cigars. He puffed out a cloud in my direction, then took the cigar from his lips and smiled. It was not a smile for me. I don’t think he knew I was awake.

  I imagined that was his routine. A cigar at dawn, and a private joke at the world’s expense. At all busy, boring people, and their day to come.

  * * *

  ‘That’s it,’ says Katie. ‘So far, anyway.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘A while back. Lung problems. Emphysema.’

  ‘What year, though?’ I ask. I want to place it in my own timeline.

  She thinks it through, her head tilted. ‘I think around 1997? I remember visiting him in the hospital. He’d been found in a barn by a farmer.’

  ‘Was that in Bristol?’ My student life, the fish and chip shop.

  ‘Bristol – no. No. I don’t think he ever went south of Manchester.’

  ‘Then why would I have found him in Bristol? Why would he have followed me to Skein Island?’

  She has no answer for that.

  ‘It can’t be him,’ I say. ‘My ghost likes people. He likes me.’

  ‘It is him.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘The laugh.’

  A person can be expected to know a laugh beyond reasonable doubt.

  ‘He hated everyone,’ she says. ‘Why would he hang around? What did he find that’s worth staying for?’

  It’s still light outside, although it’s getting late. Even a short journey makes a difference to the perception of the beginning and the end of the day.

  ‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ I say. ‘Think about it.’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Unless he already knew we’d meet at some point. Unless it’s all pre-ordained. Written.’ She says it thoughtfully. I can tell she likes the idea.

  I don’t. Because it means I’m not the star of my own life. I’m the warm-up act for some tale of grandfather and granddaughter reunited, and my ghost is not my ghost at all. He’s used me as a method of transport to reach an entirely different destination, and I realise in a rush that I don’t want h
im to leave me, not like this. Not for her.

  ‘If this is all about you, wouldn’t he just turn up at your house?’ I ask. ‘Why waste all this time, hanging around with me, waking me up every morning?’

  ‘Who knows?’ she says. ‘There are more things on heaven and Earth…’

  We are not friends. We’re not going to be friends. It’s not a surprise. She has already been clear that she doesn’t make friends. It’s only a certainty, now, from my point of view.

  ‘Not good enough,’ I say. ‘We need answers.’

  She considers this.

  ‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘Bring your duvet.’

  * * *

  I’ve never been camping before and I’m not sure this really qualifies. Duvets under the stars, wearing all the clothes I brought with me to keep out the cold that permeates all British nights, regardless of the season. Katie’s grandfather was used to this.

  ‘What’s this going to prove?’ I ask her.

  ‘I’ll know it when it comes to me.’ She’s lying close beside me, within touching distance. She picked the spot for us to sleep, after we walked the length of the island, tramping around until she found a place that worked for her. I wonder if she chose it according to her memory of that night; we are in the shadow of a stone wall, and there are sheep in the field beyond. It’s as if she was describing this place all along, in her declaration.

  At least a tent would create the illusion of safety, and a little heat. Mingled breath, and the warmth that living bodies give out. Instead there’s only my heightened awareness of the dark, and what it can hide, and the stars overhead don’t seem to light a thing.

  ‘Do you go camping a lot?’

  ‘This is my second time,’ she says, dryly.

  ‘What…’ It strikes me as an insolent question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. ‘What was it about your grandfather that makes you want to emulate some areas of his life but not others? You don’t go camping, you don’t smoke cigars. But you do refuse to get into relationships. Or would you only get into one for a bet?’

  ‘I’m not emulating him,’ she says. ‘It was only that we understood each other. I realised because of him that it was okay to not like people.’

  ‘Because you liked him.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, as if that wasn’t a contradiction.

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  I’m putting off attempting to sleep by having this ridiculous conversation, I know it. I don’t want to wake up early tomorrow and find out her truth.

  ‘Are you in a relationship?’ she asks me, from where she lies.

  ‘Yeah.’ I try to sound convincing, but my initial pause was too long. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ I hear smugness in her voice. ‘If it was going well you wouldn’t be here, on this island, would you? Taking advantage of the one visit policy. Using your Get Out of Jail Free card, at least for a week.’

  Is that what I’m doing? ‘It’s just a sticky patch.’

  ‘Have you been in lots of relationships?’

  ‘The usual amount.’

  ‘And they all hit sticky patches, and you keep wading through them. See, that. That, I don’t understand.’

  I turn over and face away from her.

  ‘Good night,’ she says, softly, and a little while later she has the temerity to softly snore.

  * * *

  I wake up to clean air.

  The sky is a dark, deep blue above me, and I am the coldest I have ever been. I force myself to sit up, gathering the duvet around me, and notice how the sky is changing colour on the horizon. As I watch pale streaks form and collate and turn to glorious orange. It’s dawn.

  He’s not here.

  I want to call out to him, but it would be a presumption to use the name Katie knows him by. And even if he had that name once, it surely wouldn’t fit him now.

  This is what loneliness feels like.

  Katie stretches and mutters.

  My eyes water and sting. My cheeks are raw.

  A chuckle.

  I place it. It came from behind me, on the stone wall. He’s sitting on the wall. I swivel and see the cigar smoke, rising up and dissipating to blow out to sea, away from where we lie.

  ‘Is it you?’ Katie whispers.

  Nothing happens.

  ‘It’s you,’ she says.

  He’s here, with me. With us. There can’t be any explanations. How could he tell us about his choices? He’s nothing more than a feeling, a scent, a sound.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asks. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’

  The sun rises just that little bit further, just enough to clarify, solidify, to a new day.

  ‘You can’t tell me, can you? You don’t want to.’ She sounds reconciled to her own words, as if she’s hit upon an answer of her own, somehow.

  He’s gone.

  Katie holds out her hand to me and I take it. We are frozen together. She thinks she’s found him, and I think I’ve lost him, and we’re good and strong in this moment for different reasons that don’t really matter.

  * * *

  The week passes.

  Katie and I take classes, and swim, and talk to each other. We talk about her grandfather and my ghost, and the ways they were the same and they were different. We can find no answers between us.

  We also talk to many women about their lives, lives that come across as strange and normal at the same time. It’s only a glimpse of what makes us all work. I find I want more.

  We take half an hour after dinner every night to work on our declarations.

  The last thing I write is:

  I wonder what he would have said to me if he could have talked. I think it would have been something like – Min, girl, you’re concentrating on the wrong stuff. It doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is that you needed me without knowing it, and now you have to do better than that. You have to want something. What do you want?

  This voice I give to him is nothing like the voice he would have had when he was alive, I’m sure.

  Sometimes I think about asking Katie to tell me how her declaration ends, but I never do, and she doesn’t offer to read it to me.

  Every day I wake up at dawn and every day I breathe in, and listen. I don’t move. All my concentration is on the smell and the sound of the air around me. He’s not there. He’s not there.

  I miss him.

  I’m ready to go home.

  * * *

  We stand on the dock and watch the boat coming in. It takes its time. The women talk and laugh quietly. We don’t join in but it’s good to be on the periphery, as the silent but accepted members. They don’t know much about us, but what they know is enough.

  ‘We don’t have to keep in touch,’ I tell her.

  ‘Good, because I don’t do that stuff,’ she says.

  ‘No, really?’ I make my shocked face.

  ‘I’m just reminding you.’

  ‘That’s very handy, because I nearly forgot your personality, there, for a second.’

  ‘Glad we’ve got that settled.’

  ‘Think of me when you dick around with people trying to purchase houses.’

  ‘Yeah, spare me a thought when you have conversations with boring people as part of your administrative job.’

  ‘You make it sound soul-destroying,’ I say.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I’m not certain how I feel about it. I don’t feel that my life and my job should be escaped, not right now. Not before I know what I should leave it all behind for. I have a feeling that maybe I could make a difference there. Alter the crueller behaviours of the pack by leading from the front. Is that realistic?

  The boat draws closer.

  ‘I wonder if he’s going to stay here,’ I say. ‘On the island. Breaking the rules and smoking over the visitors. Would that suit him?’

  ‘Not in the least. Not unless he’s changed.’

  ‘Of course he’s changed!’

&
nbsp; ‘Yes, of course he’s changed,’ she echoes. ‘I didn’t ever really know him, you know.’

  ‘No. Me neither.’

  ‘Let me have your mobile number,’ she says.

  ‘Okay.’ I find a scrap of paper and a pen in my bag, and write it out for her.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t need it. I might want it, though. One day.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s going around,’ she says.

  * * *

  Is it okay to know people, just a little, and only want them when you want them? To take the parts you like and leave the rest, on your own terms?

  I don’t have an answer for that.

  Katie is right again, though. Not having an answer is going around.

  My time on Skein Island has given me a taste for the outdoors, but I prefer it in smaller doses. I visit Jimbo’s Golf Accessories Emporium and kit myself out, then sign up for lessons at the golf course. It’s a good walk through a maintained landscape, and if I get cold I can give up and return to the clubhouse for a drink.

  I’m standing at the bar, chatting about the water hazard on the ninth hole with some of my new friends, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. My first thought is for my ghost and my second thought is for Katie. But no, it’s not either of those options. It’s Dave.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know you played golf.’

  ‘I’ve just taken it up.’

  ‘I heard you went to Skein Island.’

  ‘I did. And no, I didn’t wear dungarees and get in touch with my inner goddess or whatever.’ I’ve heard all the jokes in these past few weeks, and none of them even begin to bother me. I’m getting tougher.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that. I just wanted to say – I’m sorry. That it didn’t work out between us. It was the cigar smoke. I hate cigar smoke.’

  ‘The ghost’s gone,’ I tell him.

  He rolls his eyes at me. ‘You’re not on about that again, are you?’

  ‘What?’ It takes me a moment to realise what he means. ‘You don’t believe in the ghost?’