The Boatman and Other Stories

by Billy O'Callaghan

  ‘You’re hurt,’ he whispered to Isabelle, when he could form words again, and she stared at him, seemingly lost, then reached to delicately fingertip her head wound. Even with the mist, blood had matted the hair and stained nearly to blackness the entire left side of her face. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I fell. I was looking for you and I fell.’ She sounded drunk, that same stunned blur of a voice, and the effect intensified when an unaccountable bleat of laughter bubbled up through her tears. ‘The boat’s gone. I thought you’d left me.’

  ‘The boat.’ He inhaled with effort. ‘I moved it.’ Whispering, then: ‘Up the path. It’s safe.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d rowed away in the storm.’

  ‘Never,’ he said, trying hard to smile. The light now was growing dim and he tried to think about how much time had passed, how many hours, and whether it was possible that evening could have already settled. But the logic eluded him and, above and all around, the day continued to fade. ‘I’ll never leave you, Izzy. You have me for good.’

  She wept harder then, kissed his mouth and face, and telling him in sobs how much she loved him and how she’d been born for him, how they’d been born for one another, she lay her head down on his chest and shoulder in an awkward half-embrace. Unable to move or respond, his stare contemplated how the little remaining wind, thick with mist, made shapes in the air. And after some time, when it just seemed easier to do so, and against the constant, soothing backdrop of his wife’s sad words, he gave in and let his eyes slip shut.

  ‘Tom?’ she whispered, once she realised that he was no longer awake. Then, louder: ‘Tommy, everything will be fine. I promise it will. It has to be. Can you hear me, Tommy?’

  He moaned, and it was a sign of life but nothing more, and she sat up and considered him and the way that he was lying and then the waves spilling in barely ten feet below now, coming up to the bottom of the track in soapy rushes and trailing back again, but trailing back a little less with each new flourishing spill. And yards out, the big waves continued to build and roll, and the sea, having turned glassy over a deeper grey and lit up with a kind of cruel hardness away in the distance, was a war that she understood would just keep on coming.

  Her own head pounded, not just from the burn of the wound but with some deeper and more considered hurt, and the pain was still fresh in her chest and ribs when she made the least movement. Yet as significant as these injuries were, and as hard as it was to make any sense at all of what had happened, her agonies needed to be put aside. Survival was all that mattered now.

  Kissing him a final time, shuddering at the coldness of his mouth and the earthy taste that had turned his breath so sour, she turned away, set herself and began to clamber up the path, oblivious now to the claws of briar that punctured and ripped open the skin of her palms, knees and shins, moving with care, dreading a misstep that would spill her again, watching only the hacked and battered ground beneath her hands. When she finally reached the top the urge to stretch out and rest was immense, but she forced herself on and broke into a staggering, lopsided run, and within a couple of minutes was back in the tent, rummaging through their rucksacks for the rain capes, a dry wool blanket and the plastic covering sheets that would at least shield him, if he absolutely had to spend the night where he lay, from the worst of what the storm might bring. Thoughts as to the magnitude of his injury pressed at her mind but she pushed them away, not yet ready to face them or to admit to herself how serious the situation had become. As soon as the rain stopped, she’d attempt a fire, and if necessary she’d burn everything they possessed in the hopes of attracting the attention of someone on the mainland. Even the boat, if it came to that. For now, though, given that Thomas was in no fit condition to be moved, she resolved to stay on the path with him. Whatever was to come, whether freak waves or lightning strikes, they’d deal with it together.

  * * *

  After the rain, which had finally given way at some point in the night, dawn broke cold and clear. Isabelle woke reluctantly, her head slamming, her whole body full of chill beneath her plastic blanket. Thomas hadn’t stirred since his eyes slipped shut those few minutes after his fall and, even with the wool blanket pressed tightly to his body beneath his own waterproof covering, his skin felt perished to the touch. Stars were bright in those patches where the cloud had split apart, and even with the sun on the first of its rise away in the east, darkness continued to cloak the sheltered beach. Down below, it was just possible to make out the phosphorescent breaking of waves that, having spent their ire, had already begun to settle.

  Stretching away the night’s stiffness caused such a stabbing sensation in her chest that a surge of tears welled suddenly, but she understood that her pain meant little, even the head wound that was probably by now past stitching and would likely leave her marked for life. All she could do, at this point, was start a fire and pray that somebody across on the mainland would notice her signalling for help.

  Deciding on a plan brought a modicum of peace. She clambered back up the slope, and at the tent began to gather anything that could be set to burn. They had some driftwood put by, and remembering how Thomas had used seaweed to get their evening fires lit, she emptied her rucksack and over the next few hours returned again and again to the beach, where she collected all the old dead ropes of it she could find. Everything was sodden from the storm, but her intention was to get a small fire going first, and to lay out the kelp close to the flames in order to bake it dry.

  After a quick consideration, she settled on a small dip in the ground about twenty paces from the island’s easternmost side, facing Dunmore Head and the beach from which they’d set out, and began to stack her wood. The fire needed to blaze for as long as possible. Their only hope now – certainly the only hope that Thomas had – lay with rescue.

  But even the small fire she set in order to dry out the kelp refused to take the flame. She persisted, trying for more than an hour to coax it awake, and by then the sun was already well into its climb and the morning had once more begun to swelter.

  Not knowing what else to do, and telling herself that the seaweed would dry out naturally now and of its own accord, she hurried back to the path. She could see from the ridge that Thomas was as she’d left him, still upside down among the briar and cocooned in his wool and plastic wrappings. And smiling instead of giving in again to tears, she inched her way down the slope and crouched at his side. He looked the way he so often did when, on summer mornings, she’d woken early and just lay there in their small rented bed, watching him sleep. Breath sifted in and out of his body in such shallowness as to be imperceptible, and his face, relaxed, seemed just a layer of skin removed from the boy he’d so recently been. Though she rarely gave credence to the existence of a God any more, she’d often spent minutes of those bright, twilit dawns considering the convoluted hindsight destinies which had somehow steered them each across the other’s path, and in that found herself allowing again for the possible existence of an Almighty. Even if her belief only ever held for those early minutes and was always quickly lost to the attrition of the rising day, the idea that life, in all its seeming confusion and turmoil, had already been mapped out ahead of them proved strangely comforting then, the assurance that nothing was quite as random as it seemed and that there really was some greater purpose to it all. Now, again, she clung to such a notion, and insisted to herself that if fate truly was for anything more than fairy tales then there was no way that this could be the end, because what God would take the trouble to design something as complex as a life, with all its forked paths and unpredictable intersections, simply for it to run such a futile course? No, this wouldn’t be the finish; there’d be more to come, and in time they’d look back and laugh about or at least roll their eyes over such folly. Sitting here now and studying Thomas, she considered what stories his mind in sleep might be unfurling, and rubbing his cheek gently with her dirty fingertips, feeling the scrub of beard that had in recent days taken proper
hold, wished only happiness for his dreams. Then, overcome again with love, she stooped to kiss his lips. The sourness that had filled his mouth last night seemed to have deepened and turned rotten, and his lips were cold as raw meat, but she held herself to him and uttered reassurance and oaths of devotion against his teeth and frozen tongue.

  Too often, she knew, her tendency was to live either among memories of days that had passed or in fantasies about what might lie ahead, and always at a cost of the true moment. Breathing was the trick that Thomas had taught her, though actually he was just as guilty of such wishful indulgence. But she practised now what she’d learned, working against her pain with long, unsteady breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, repeating the process until the present once again began to shine, heightening reality to its rightful level. The waves had dropped, and within a minute she’d eased herself down the last few feet of slope and was naked, taken by this sudden, irresistible urge to strip away her dirty clothes, and stretched out on the soft sand just where the water lapped at the shoreline in nothing more than foamy whispers. Once she’d settled, the low waves came barely against her, cool fingers and tongues that numbed and thrilled with each caress, but now and then a slightly greater surge spilt the tide up over her entirely, submerging her for the one-two punch of a heart’s slamming before drawing back again. Her wounded skin burned with the bite of the salt, and though the stinging at first made her gasp and clench her teeth, gradually it became almost pleasurable, and her mind filled up with a sense of healing. The water swept in and over her, the rushing coldness causing her flesh to prickle, her nipples to tighten into small knots, and everything stopped and her head filled with noise, a single booming hush, and for that instant she felt herself on the fringe of a second state of being, a dense, murky, slow-motion existence as true as the one which lay above the waves. Then, once again, she was in the open, squeezing her eyes nearly completely shut against the glare and gasping at the day that closed down on her like a hot blanket.

  After a while, she got up, washed her shorts and T-shirt in the surf and lay them out on the rocks to dry. Always, Thomas was in sight, never more than twenty or thirty paces away, and apart from the strangeness of his pose, inverted as he was on the incline and pillowed against the stub of rock, it was easy to imagine him as simply asleep. At home, she’d often chat to him while he slept, especially of a Sunday morning when he’d drifted back into a lazy doze in the aftermath of love, and on those occasions she’d talk just to put a sound in the room, keeping to nothing subjects, the conversation suited to a one-sided shape since the questions she asked were little more than air and echoes anyway. Seeing him now, it seemed easy enough to keep that same game going.

  ‘You know what we should get, Tommy? A dog. I’d like a dog, I think. But not something small, not one of those poor things that have to live in a purse. Something normal-looking. A Border collie, maybe. They’re a loyal breed, and intelligent, not to mention beautiful. They have such handsome faces, don’t you think? Kind of old, as if they already know you and all about you. Even as pups, they’re like that. We’d have to get a bigger place of course, and we’d need a garden, or at least a yard, because it’d be cruel to keep a dog like that boxed in, but we’ll have to find somewhere new to live anyway when we get back, so these are things we should probably be thinking about.’

  As she talked, she leaned against the rock wall and felt with the fingers of both hands the cuts and slashes striping and criss-crossing her entire back side. Some were particularly deep, and sore: one high up on her right leg, another at an angle across both cheeks of her bottom, and a third just beneath her right shoulder blade; but these were merely the most significant of the superficial wounds, and there was hardly an inch of her body from neck to ankles that stretched unmarked. These cuts and scratches, though, would at least heal, given time. More serious was the pain that continued to dig into her right side, and the skin from her breast down to the jut of her pelvis was clouded a deep, angry red that looked as if blood had seeped from something precious within and corroded the flesh without penetrating the skin. It ached still to stretch, or even to walk, and she was so tender to the touch that even an accidental rubbing reduced her to tears. The ribs were almost certainly broken, but from the little she knew of such injuries she understood that the only treatment was rest.

  ‘Give it a chance. That’s what my mother used to say. The body knows itself. That’s probably why yours has you sleeping so much. You’ll probably wake up ready to run races. Maybe you’ll need a few more hours, or even a day or two, but there’s no hurry on us, is there? And as soon as the seaweed dries out, I’ll get the fire lit. It shouldn’t be long now. The sun is already strong. And somebody will come. That was a bitch of a storm, though, wasn’t it? At one point, I thought we’d wake up in Oz. But we’re still here. It’s a good little island, all things considered. Beginish. Even the name is nice to say. Sad, that all of these places stand deserted, don’t you think? But if there were still people here then I suppose that would have been reason enough for us not to come.’

  Her clothes, even after a couple of hours on the rocks, were still damp to the touch. The ocean lay spread out before her, beautiful now in its colouring, cracklings of light sun-dropping the blueness. Off to her left, but hidden by the jut of the beachhead, lay the Great Blasket, and she wondered whether the morning’s tourists had yet arrived there, and whether or not the ferry, in returning, would come close enough for her to possibly catch their attention. But instead of rushing off to survey the situation, she went again to sit a while beside Thomas, and settling herself cross-legged on the sheet that had served as her protection through the night, she loosened his bindings but left in place the woollen blanket. Again, she kissed him and found his mouth and the flesh of his cheek cold as lead to her lips.

  ‘I’m going to have another try at getting the fire lit,’ she said finally. ‘And I suppose I’d better put some clothes on, just in case someone does come. A glimpse of me dancing around in the skinny might lure them onto the rocks. Or scare them away.’ She smiled at him as if he could see and was watching her, then returned to the tent and dressed in her spare shorts, pink denims that came in shreds nearly to her knees, and an old sleeveless blue linen blouse. With the sun shining, the morning seemed to have stagnated. Nothing moved anywhere, apart from a couple of huge Atlantic gulls circling like kites high above the water away to the north. The belts of seaweed strung out on the grass had at last begun to dry, though the heavier ones were still clammy, and she used what she could, bedding the most brittle pieces in beneath the chunks of driftwood, adding a few twisted pages from the end of A Political History of the Middle East, one of three or four books they’d squeezed into their rucksacks in case they ever found themselves overcome by boredom. The paper caught fire quickly, lapping up the match’s small orange flame, and some of the more thinly cut slices of wood also began to burn. The kelp only smoked, bluish-grey ribbons initially, which soon thickened into a defined charcoal column, and although she’d hoped for a hard blaze, even an inferno, she decided that this was fine, too, because smoke could usually be seen from quite a distance and was at least as likely as the sight of flames to get them noticed. Yet within minutes the smaller pieces of wood burned themselves out without having more than singed the larger chunks, and soon after that the smoke from the kelp thinned out to nothing. She’d been stooped in a crouch to one side of the bonfire, and as it died she felt such a surge of despair that she cried out. In panic, she tried feeding more kelp in among the smouldering wood, but far from reinvigorating the blaze her efforts only served to quicken the extinguishing.

  Tears once again squeezed up into her eyes, and she angrily wiped them away with the heels of her scratched palms, then sat back on the grass, felt it pressing damp into the seat of her shorts, and stared across at the mainland, at the thin strip of beach and the grey knuckle of Dunmore Head. But the whole scene was a picture. Nothing moved anywhere.

&nbs
p; Giving in, of course, was not an option, and she understood that her only chance was to try again, and to keep trying until the last shred of combustible material had been spent. But instead of immediately doing so, she got up and walked a slow lap of the island, surveying the water on every side, not with expectation but perhaps in the hope, however forlorn, of finding inspiration. The day continued to sweat, and off to the east harmless scratches of cloud laid shadowy hints across the hard-lit water, creating the illusion of large, barely submerged shoals or some behemoth set to break the surface.