She normally liked to say ‘like an orange’, but there was something about Kevern that made her think of strays.
‘I can understand why,’ he said, losing his fingers in the tangle of her hair.
She raised her face to him, like one of her own flowers. ‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Because to see you is to see no one else.’ He meant it.
‘Then it’s a pity you didn’t choose me first.’
‘Why — were they unkind to you?’
‘No, not at all. Just remote.’
‘Are they still alive?’
‘No. Or at least Mairead isn’t. Hendrie is in a care home. He has no knowledge of the world around him. Not that he ever had a lot.’
‘You didn’t like him?’
‘Not a great deal. He was a largely silent man who fished and played dominoes. I think he hit Mairead.’
‘And you?’
‘Occasionally. It wasn’t personal. Just something men did. Do. Towards the end, before they put him in a home, it got worse. He started to make remarks like “I owe you nothing”, and “You don’t belong here”, and would throw things at me. But his mind was going then.’
‘And you never found out where you did belong?’
‘I belonged in the Mernoc orphanage.’
‘I mean who put you there?’
She shrugged, showing him that his questioning had begun to weary her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Adding, ‘But you belong here now.’
ii
As a matter of course, she woke badly. Her eyes puffed, her hair matted, her skin twice its age. Where had she been?
She wished she knew.
At first Kevern thought it was his fault. He’d been tossing and turning, perhaps, or snoring, or crying out in the night, stopping her sleeping. But she told him she had always been like this — not morning grumpiness but a sort of species desolation, as though opening her eyes on a world in which no one of her sort existed.
He pulled a face. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re not yet the world I wake up to,’ she said. ‘It takes me a while to realise you’re there.’
‘So why such desolation?’ he wanted to know. ‘Where do you return from when you wake?’
‘If only I could tell you. If only I knew myself.’
Mernoc, Kevern guessed. He saw an icy orphanage, miles from nowhere. And Ailinn standing at the window, barefooted, staring into nothing, waiting for somebody to find her.
Pure melodrama. But much of life for Kevern was.
And thinking of her waiting to be found, while he was waiting to find, gave a beautiful symmetry to the love he felt for her.
What she’d told him awakened his pity and pity gave him a better reason to be in love than he’d ever had before. There was rapture and then there was responsibility. Each imposed an obligation of seriousness. But together they made the serious sacred.
He couldn’t rescue her from her dreams, but he could make waking better for her. The minute he sensed her stir he would get out of bed and open the windows, so that she would wake to light, the smell of the sea, and the cries of the gulls. But sometimes the light was too harsh and the smell of the sea too pungent and the cries of the gulls a mockery. ‘They sound the way I feel,’ she’d say.
Did that mean that gulls, too, suffered species desolation?
So he had to make a quick decision every morning: whether to open the curtains or keep them closed.
But when the sea was rough they could still hear the blowhole like a giant mouth sucking in and then expelling water. On wild days they would even see the spittle.
‘Reminds me of a whale exhaling air,’ she said once. ‘Do you remember that passage in Moby-Dick describing whale-jets “up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air”?’
He didn’t.
‘But you’ve read the book?’
He had. Years ago. Moby-Dick was one of the classic novels that had not been encouraged to drift out of print — though most editions were in graphic form — the grounds for its remaining available being the interest felt in it by fishing communities, its remoteness otherwise from the nation’s calamitous recent history, and the fact that it was from its opening sentence — ‘Call me Ishmael’ — that the colossal social experiment undertaken to restore stability borrowed its name.
OPERATION ISHMAEL.
‘We should read it together,’ she suggested when Kevern told her he could remember little of it beyond Ahab and the whale and of course OPERATION ISHMAEL. ‘It’s my most favourite book in the world,’ she told him. ‘It’s the story of my life.’
‘You’ve been hunting a great white whale? Could that have been me, perhaps?’
She kissed him absent-mindedly, as though he were a child that needed humouring. Her brow was furrowed. ‘It wasn’t Ahab I identified with, you fool,’ she said. ‘That’s a man thing. I took the side of the whale.’
‘Don’t worry, men do the same. The whale is more noble than the whaler.’
‘But I bet you don’t wake to the knowledge that you’re the whale.’
‘Are you telling me you do? Is that where you’ve been all night, swimming away from the madness of Ahab? No wonder you look exhausted.’
‘I don’t know what I’ve been doing all night, but it’s a pretty good description of what I do all day.’
How serious was she?
‘All day? Truly?’
She paused. ‘Well what am I signing up for if I say “truly”? If you’re asking me if I actually hear the oars of the longboats coming after me, then no. But when people describe having the wind at their back it’s a sensation of freedom I don’t recognise. An unthreatening, invigorating space behind me? — no, I don’t ever have the luxury of that. There might be nothing there when I turn around, but it isn’t a beneficent nothing. Nothing good propels me. But I call it a good day when I turn around and at least don’t see anything bad.’
He couldn’t stop himself taking this personally. Wasn’t he the wind at her back? Wasn’t he a beneficent force? ‘I can’t bear to think,’ he said, ‘that you get no relief from this.’
‘Oh, I get relief. I get relief with you. But that’s the most dangerous time because it means I’ve forgotten to be on guard. You remember that description of the nursing whales, “serenely revelling in dalliance and delight”?’
He didn’t. He wondered whether she was intending to quote the entire novel to him in small gobbets. Something — and this he did remember — that his father had done when he was small. Not Moby-Dick — other, darker, more sardonic books. Until his mother had intervened. ‘What are you trying to do to the boy?’ he had heard her ask. ‘Make him you?’ Shortly after which his father locked his books away.
‘Well, whenever I feel anything of that sort,’ she went on, ‘whenever I feel calm, at rest, loving and being loved — as I do now — I feel I must be in danger. In my universe I don’t know how else to account for being loved. Don’t kiss me, I used to say to Mairead when she tucked me up in bed at night. I won’t be able to sleep. If you kiss me something terrible will follow. Hendrie wanted to send me to a psychiatrist. Or better still, back to the children’s home. Mairead said no. She believed the children’s home was to blame. She was convinced that something terrible must have been done to me there.’
‘And had it, do you think?’
‘Oh God, you and my mother. Something terrible’s been done to everybody everywhere. Where’s the point of hunting down the specifics? Anyway, I think you can tell when a terror has an origin in a particular event. You might not have a name for it but you can date it. A five-year terror, a ten-year terror. . This is a thousand-year terror.’