The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  ‘Bacon and beans.’ She smiled. ‘Nectar of the gods. I just wish we had a slice of bread and butter to go with it.’

  ‘We better make the most of this, though, because if the weather turns bad on us this’ll likely be the last hot food we have for a while. Keeping a fire lit is tough enough at the best of times, but factor in the wind and rain and you can just about forget it.’

  Isabelle looked up, thinking that it was difficult to imagine a more beautiful night. The sky was still clear, apart from a small wall of horizon cloud shining with the blood-orange stains left behind by the sinking sun. Away in the opposite direction, the empty blueness had already deepened enough for the first stars to have pressed into view. ‘We might be spared the rain,’ she said. ‘We might be lucky.’

  They weren’t. That night, at Thomas’s insistence, they slept in the tent, and it was strange at first to be so confined after the recent nights of freedom, but when Isabelle woke shortly before dawn to the torrential drumbeating of the rain against the pitched roof and canvas walls, her first thought was one of immense relief for this shelter, however limited. She crawled from the sleeping bag without disturbing Thomas, and undid a little of the door flap’s upper binding. The island was awash, the rain so smothering that no morsel of detail survived.

  Soon after, Thomas woke. He sat up and listened.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Bad,’ she said. ‘You’d have to swim to get anywhere in that.’

  ‘You can really feel it, can’t you? And this mightn’t be the worst of it at all yet.’

  ‘Or it might blow itself out in an hour or two. We’re neither of us experts on storms, are we? For all we know, by mid-morning we could be sunbathing again.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said, trying to sound at ease, ‘I love your optimism, sweetheart.’

  ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ She slipped back into the sleeping bag and curled herself just a moment against him then rolled onto her back and lay with her right arm raised and crooked above her head. ‘Any idea what we can do to keep ourselves occupied?’

  When he turned his face to her he saw that her eyes were a wide wet shine even in the tent’s gloom and her mouth had thickened to the pout she always wore when trying to tease him into some game.

  After some time had passed, Thomas was overcome by restlessness and got up and began to dress. When he sat to pull on his shorts, Isabelle reached out from the sleeping bag and caressed his back. His skin still held on to its wintry pallor, and nubs of bone marked the line and contours of his frame.

  ‘You’re not going out in that? Even if you don’t get blown across onto the next island, you’ll be a week trying to dry off.’

  ‘I just want to take a look.’

  ‘Are you mad? You can see well enough from the flap of the tent.’

  ‘Also, I think I’d better check on the boat.’

  She tried to remain calm. She could hear herself breathing.

  ‘Well, if you’re going then so am I.’

  ‘There’s no need, Izzy. I’ll be ten minutes. You can stay here where it’s nice and cosy. And when I get back it’ll be your turn to find some way of heating me up.’

  He turned, brought his mouth to hers and let the kiss linger. The quick dab of his tongue tipping against her own caused her to smile and then laugh. ‘Go, if you’re going,’ she said, ‘before I start ripping the clothes off you again.’

  She watched him then, crouching to unfasten the tent flap, hesitating in the face of the outer storm and finally pushing himself forward, out into the morning’s grey wash. Uncertainty stirred in her, and to counteract it she lay back once more on her pillow, closed her eyes and thought in a happy way about the hour they’d just passed.

  When she opened her eyes again, nothing seemed to have changed. Rain still lashed against the tent, the light still bore the same leaden grey. But she was cold again, the parts of her that had remained exposed, her shoulders and her outstretched arm, almost numb. With difficulty, she sat up. In those few minutes, or however long it had been, there’d somehow been time for a nightmare. Snatches of it remained, filling her mind with wrong images, which made it a challenge to decipher reality; something about a small white dog, a Scotch terrier or some such similar breed, that arrived at the door of a house she’d never seen before but which, in her sleep-state, she apparently owned and called home. In his mouth, the dog carried, as a gift for her, the body of a pied wagtail. Blood reddened the dog’s lips and teeth, so she assumed that the bird had been mauled and was dead, but once he’d dropped the little creature at her feet it began to stir, barely at first but then with increasing violence, trying in panic to flap its smashed wings. Through all of this, she did nothing but watch, and sometimes she watched the dog watching too. And then, suddenly, before she could even think of moving and just as the bird seemed set to recover and somehow fly away, the terrier leaned in, nudged the bird with his muzzle over onto its back and bit off its legs.

  The whole thing had the quality of a nightmare, and yet she’d felt neither fear nor revulsion. In life she’d have wept for days after witnessing such horror, but in the dream she was quite untouched by the bird’s suffering. After losing its legs it let out a terrible high-pitched noise, a single wavering note, and that, she thought, had probably just been the wind outside, its singing through the ruins of the shepherd’s walls somehow penetrating the plot that her mind was unfurling. The bird lay there again, freshly destroyed, not moving but screaming, and then, pathetically, attempted once more and without the least success, to fly. She looked on, and so did the dog, and at last the dog got bored and turned and walked off, and then she too began to find the wagtail’s efforts tiresome, and she lifted her foot and brought it down hard, twisting her heel against the threshold until nothing remained of the little life but a pulp of feathers and gore. Then she went back inside, wiped her feet on the mat, and closed the door.

  Now she lay awake, still naked in the sleeping bag, helpless against a flood of dread. Thomas had said he’d be ten minutes, but surely it took longer than that to dream. She reached for her shorts and a T-shirt and, still huddled shivering beneath the covers, began to dress.

  The rain came in sheets, and within seconds she was wet through. Away from the walls of the ruined cottage, the wind took full hold, a sweeping westerly that put everything at a hard slant. Isabelle braced herself and pushed headlong into the storm, blind to direction except in an instinctive way and perhaps guided too by a certain familiar footing within the ground’s vague contours. Fighting into the wind, she called out repeatedly for Thomas, and even though it became quickly obvious that no words could penetrate this onslaught, she persisted in shouting, as if just feeling his name in her head and mouth could be enough to connect them. But nothing was moving behind the rain. And then, almost too soon, she found herself on the verge above their pocket of beach. Out ahead of her, somewhere, was the ocean, but sky and sea were one wetness this morning and only the faint white flashes of rupturing waves gave any semblance of balance to the morning.

  From the little she could see, the beach below was empty. The rock wall and its side banks made a kind of cauldron of the land and the mesh of rain and tumbling waves smothered the little cove, so that details were hard to determine. At first she was sure that she could identify the shape of the boat close in near the foot of the cliff face, but the longer she looked the more her certainty weakened, and finally, just because she could think of nothing else to do or nowhere else to go, she decided to work her way down the path.

  She hadn’t time to realise her mistake. Over the past several days, the briar and fern had been trampled so repeatedly that it had flattened to a kind of carpet, but the night’s deluge had turned everything slick. After a couple of steps she lost her footing, and slid and clattered on her back down the steep incline to within ten feet of the beach. A wedge of rock checked her forward momentum at some midway point, catching her a hard blow to the shoulder, and a glancing second shot to the
head just above her left ear, and she came to a halt, finally, when she wrapped herself chest and midriff around a second, larger stump. There was no air to breathe then, and she shuddered and tried to cry out, but either the noise of the morning or the fire that had started inside her head, obliterating everything, crushed any sound she could make. And though she never quite lost ­consciousness, she did, for a time, lose the awareness of consciousness. Her mind just seemed to stop, and when it tuned itself in again, reluctantly, through a haze of static, the light had brightened a little and the rain had softened to a dense but more gentle mist. The least movement brought searing pain but she braced herself, spilt away from the rock and slid the last few yards down onto the sand. Slumped on one side, facing the water, she saw the ocean stacking waves away into the distance. In close to the shore they stood up to something approaching the height of a man, and broke, brushed for seconds at a time with foaming yellow-white crowns just before shredding themselves apart and rolling high up onto the beach. Further along, out where they hit the rocks, the crash was like trains colliding, and the spew climbed high up against the sheer cliff-sides, over and over, all with the relentless rhythm of a heartbeat, until the idea passed through her head that, if this should keep up, the island would surely find itself washed or worn away.

  The sound of the sea filled her and made her feel small, but it was minutes before she realised that some of the whispering was internal and that she could hear nothing from her left ear. That side of her head felt split open, and when she reached to examine the wound felt a long flap of scalp and hair hanging down all the way to the corner of her jaw, and her fingers came away from their explorations drenched in blood that, as she watched and because of the mist, brightened and diluted itself down over her palm and wrist to almost nothing.

  The head injury was deep and bad, she’d likely broken or at least badly bruised some ribs, and all down her back side, from her neck to her heels, the skin had been flayed and split to gaping by talons of briar. But the urge to just curl up and sleep was, she knew, a dangerous one. She had to move. The waves were huge and the tide was coming in, and if the storm hadn’t yet blown itself out there could still be more and worse to come. The beach was not a place to be stranded. The effort of sitting up made her cry, and the tears that filled her eyes and spilt down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth were the first hint of heat she’d known since leaving the tent. Pain rolled like gunshots through her head, and even the smallest stirring brought on a dizziness that threatened to put her out. But she wiped her eyes with a sandy wrist and looked around.

  The beach was empty, the boat gone.

  ‘Thomas,’ she called again, in pure helplessness, lifting her voice as much as she could above the wind and holding her scratched and bleeding arms tightly across her middle, just beneath her breasts, in a largely futile bracing action. But there was no reply.

  When she felt able, she walked the beach, taking each step carefully, testing her limits. The rock wall, which had hung forever above these and other ancient waves and which she had already seen lit up, screened in salt, under the hottest sun, now shone from the rain and the polish of the gales, hulking greyish sheets that looked to have been laid down by giant hands with some clear design in mind, the surface patched in white and yellow continents of lichen. At the wall’s base, no hint of the boat remained, the sand long since washed and blown flat. Her initial assumption was that it must have slipped its mooring and been sucked down into the water, but then her mind threw up the possibility that Thomas might have come down here and taken it out in search of a better sheltering point. An experienced seaman would never have chanced the swell in such a flimsy vessel, but it was an explanation that made sense because, from what she’d seen, he was nowhere on the island.

  Pressure had been building in her head, and now her vision began to blur. All noise faded into the distant background, and it was like being submerged in water and held under. A fresh wave of dizziness washed over her and set her trembling, and then the joints of her legs came loose and she dropped onto the sand and lay there, slumped over on herself, face down, one knee drawn up against her chest.

  An hour later, Thomas found her.

  After leaving the tent, and while she’d been asleep, he’d come to the beach to secure the boat. But the waves then were running huge and swamping the strand in great heaves, and leaving it simply tethered to a rock was surely all kinds of dangerous, especially with the tide coming in. Taking it out onto the water, though, seemed tantamount to suicide; and even if he could manage to avoid a capsize, finding a safer mooring place on the other side of the island was far from guaranteed. The only logical option was to haul it up the path and stow it safely inland. This idea at least was a sound one, but the effort it demanded was immense, taking nearly two hours, moving the vessel barely inches at a time and at alternating angles in an effort to keep it from sliding back to the bottom of the slope, and if the briar had helped supply a degree of traction then the hull’s flat underbelly had so flattened the path as to make it, at least for the next few days, unusable. In the midst of his struggle, though, that seemed a trifling inconvenience. What mattered most was the safety of the boat, their lifeline.

  The task was a relentless one, and had to be. Every step of taken hillside was hard earned, and he couldn’t risk even a few seconds’ rest, fearing a backslide. So once he and the boat made it to the relative safety of the top of the path, he collapsed down onto the soft wet grass. The rain then was still driving, but he was wet and dirty and no longer cared. He lay that way for a long time, with steam rising from his body, feeling the ache in his limbs and stretching occasionally in order to deepen the sense of it. Then, because drifting off into sleep became a real possibility, he roused himself and set off again, dragging the boat towards the nearest low point. And once he found what he adjudged to be a suitable dip in the ground, he capsized the vessel and made sure it was set fast and that the wind could in no way roll it.

  He returned to the tent beaten and weary, ready to strip down, dry off with a towel and crawl back into bed, to sleep and wake and chat and laugh with Isabelle, leaving the storm around them to do its worst. But the tent was empty.

  Panic flashed through him, but quickly passed. He knew what she was like, how she struggled to stand idle for long when left alone, and could never let such weather pass without getting outside to pleasure in its drama. With a deep sigh, he crawled back out, fastened the tent’s flap again, and began to call her name.

  At first he just walked, now and then calling out even though the wind collapsed his sound, making for the east end of the island, and for a while stood trying to glimpse some suggestion of the land across the reach. By now the rain had begun to ease, but aside from the wash of shadow in the distance that might have been Dunmore Head, there was nothing much at all to see, and Isabelle was nowhere around. He continued along in an aimless fashion, heedless by now of the rain but not yet really concerned either, not until he thought of something she’d said on one of the nights about the beach being Beginish’s greatest surprise, that little perfect strand, the detail which had given her the most joy since they’d been here. The one part of the island that seemed to have been waiting for them to come along and discover.

  Tired as he was, and barking out her name now, he broke into a run.

  Within a minute he’d reached the rock ledge and because the wind had lessened was able to get right to the brink. Below on the sand, in near the sheer wall of stone and made ghostly by the mist, he could make out what looked to be Isabelle’s shape. He called out to her repeatedly, and after a long, dead pause something down there stirred and he heard his own name spoken back small and frail.

  ‘I’m coming down,’ he shouted, and ran to the pathway with no thought now for his own safety. The speed of his descent helped, but only initially, and he managed to keep his footing until halfway down. Then he landed hard on his back, spun, and smashed head first into the large outcropping some f
ifteen feet from the bottom. Above him, the sky was falling gentle now as feathers into his face, and though he felt no pain and although the morning seemed to have turned suddenly quiet, a terrible coldness overcame his mind and he knew his neck was broken.

  Isabelle had seen his fall and had even registered the sickening crunch of the collision. Her own pain instantly forgotten, she lifted herself up first onto her hands and knees and then, unsteadily, stood and staggered across to where he lay. Struggling up the path at a crawl and calling out for help that couldn’t possibly come, she knelt beside him and stretched herself across his chest. Because she was crying, and perhaps also due to the effects of a concussion, her words were slurred and, apart from the pleading repetition of his name, largely unrecognisable. He stared past her, unable yet to speak, and wept too, warm tears that built and in their bursting dissolved all focus. She’d never known him not to be strong, and now her own fear deepened, but she used a thumb to wipe the tears away then leaned in and kissed his eyes, whispering and whimpering all the time that the situation probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed and that, if they only rested here for a while, an hour or two, maybe, they’d be all right.

  The wind had dropped but the waves continued to build, and they lashed the beach with an appetite for ground, huge breakers that thickened and burst in sheets up along the strand. Though the high-tide line stopped roughly at the bottom of the path, the storm’s surge seemed likely to set a new mark, one that could even potentially engulf them where they perched, and Thomas strained to work out how high the water would come and how long they’d have but with his mind shutting down his focus refused to hold on anything for more than a few seconds before been overtaken by a sweep of other thoughts and memories. Older doors, especially, were swinging open, and he kept returning to how it had been as a child, after he’d tumbled from a tree or off a wall or after he’d been badly on the losing side of some fight, and the terror of knowing that damage was done, a creeping numbness that made other details drop away. Broken fingers, a broken nose, teeth knocked loose, tetanus shots from stepping on the rusty nails that littered building sites, wounds that needed stitching, knee or head gashes usually, but once his chin and, another time, most painfully, his tongue, after he’d bitten it nearly in two while jumping from a shed roof. The biggest thing then, just as much as the actual injury, was having to tell his mother, because of how she’d weep at seeing him hurt, and the scene she’d make, even in the hospital, shouting and threatening him with what his father would do when he got home, and at the same time smothering him with a hurricane of kisses and hugs that would have the young nurses bowing their heads or turning away in order to hide their smirks. And there’d been the time when, at twelve years old, he’d gone skinny-dipping with some of the other kids from school and broken his ankle jumping off a low bridge into the river, because somebody had dumped a shopping trolley in the murky water. That one had required surgery, the insertion of two pins and a steel plate to reconstruct the bone, and everyone, even the doctors, had said how lucky he was to have gone in that way, because if it had been a head-first dive then he’d likely not have survived. For years after, he’d suffered nightmares about what happened, about hitting the water and not immediately going under, and then keeling sideways in a stupor of pain and nearly drowning because his lungs had filled so quickly. When he regained consciousness in the ambulance, they had him muzzled with oxygen, and they were almost at the hospital before he realised that his clothes had been left back on the bridge, his T-shirt, jeans and boxer shorts neatly folded on top of his running shoes. Until this new fall, the broken ankle had been his most serious injury, and his mind now held on to the absurd thought that at least this time he was clad.