Now the island holds men. They walk around as if they’re stepping on any normal, sane stretch of land: hillocks of wild grass, dark brown crusted turds of sheep. Their feet squelch these things down, and they don’t understand they are violating this place. Or perhaps they know and don’t care. There are more important things in life than the sanctity of Skein Island. This is, after all, an emergency.
I’m aware that, in my head, I sound like my mother.
But Vanessa is being put in a helicopter right now, so maybe I feel like I should step into her shoes until she can resume her responsibilities. She was carried out by David, unconscious, but now she is awake and annoyed, her eyes stretched wide, making frantic statements at me over the top of the plastic mask they’ve clamped over her nose and her intact mouth. Whatever I saw down there wasn’t real. Her mouth is proof of that.
The paramedics have tied her to the stretcher. She was clawing at them, and she even scored a cheek with her long nails. She looks fine, if furious, but the way the two paramedics have marked her as a priority, even before Rebecca with her broken leg, is giving me the feeling that her outrage is a blanket under which is hidden all manner of failures – failure in her body, in her duty, failure to keep us all safe, failure to keep this island under her sole control. Perhaps this is a long enough list of failures to defeat her.
She clenches and unclenches her fists rhythmically, so I take one of her hands in mine and walk alongside her stretcher as they take it to the helicopter, away from the crater that was once her house.
She doesn’t let go of me, and she has a grip like steel. The paramedics turn, and the stretcher is taken to the right, away from the helicopter. My wrist twists awkwardly as they put Vanessa down in the field, then step away and begin a quick conversation, their mouths close to each others’ ears. I look behind me, putting more pressure on my aching arm, and I see another stretcher, other men sprinting with it to the helicopter.
One of the paramedics follows my gaze, and beckons to me. I lean over, and he shouts, ‘Worse off.’ It must be Kay. But I find myself considering the possibility that it’s Moira, revived to flesh under the rubble, and I feel such fear, strange fear, as I imagine what she might be about to do to these men surrounding her. Moira, kept prisoner for years in that basement, chained to the wall, encased in stone. Turning men mad in her presence so they rip each other to pieces. But why would she need hospitalisation? She’s not human, is she? And besides, I tell myself, she’s a statue, a statue, a bloody statue.
Vanessa is watching my face. She opens her mouth under the mask and then can’t seem to shut it again, because her tongue is protruding through her lips, just the tip of it, as if she has just eaten something spicy and is waiting for a glass of water to arrive.
I picture the meze: dolmades, olives, scattered food, thrown over the wreckage of the floor, being trodden into the remains of the carpet by the men, who are everywhere, swelling in numbers, multiplying in response to this emergency. I find myself retching. I shake free of Vanessa’s grip, crouch down and lean over the grass, but nothing comes up. Have I already digested tonight’s meal? Are we already moving on in time, skittering away on an icy sheet of minutes spent?
‘You’re not empty,’ I hear myself say. Or maybe I just hear the words in my head, because the helicopter is taking off and the wind is fierce and deafening. I stand up and watch it go, and as it becomes smaller, shrinking to a speck, the world is returned to sound, and Vanessa has somehow got her mask off and is trying to speak, but her lips slap together without form, without control. The paramedics are moving around me with a new urgency. They snap the oxygen mask back over her face, so I can no longer clearly see the struggle in the lines of her mouth, even as she fights on.
Does she want me to find Moira? I turn around and scan the crowd, half-expecting to see the living statue standing there, smiling. The ground is an open wound, bleeding clots of dirt, spurting steam. The house is a weapon jutting from the gash. I’ve never seen anything so horrible. As I watch, David emerges from the wound. He is filthy, his clothes are ripped, his hair is plastered to his head. He looks alive. I see the other women – the island visitors now gathered in a knot to this tragedy – watch him too. I’m not surprised. He is no longer the David I knew. He’s a golden icon of a man. We women are now beneath him.
Once I saw potential in him, a greatness glimmering under the surface. Now he has unfolded into a hero. He comes to me and puts his arms around me, wrapping me in the smells of mud and smoke, and I love him again, oh I love him. He kisses me and he is reverent. It is like the kiss he gave me in front of the altar. We have resealed our bond, and I could never leave him again. I don’t want to be anywhere else.
He says, ‘Thank God, thank God. I’m here. I’ve got you.’ I realise I’m telling him I’m sorry.
‘No, don’t be sorry. I found you.’
‘My mother.’ Why has she worked her way into this moment? But it seems vital to say, ‘She’s been here all the time.’ Calm now, prone, on the stretcher she lies. I look at his face. I can tell he’s moved by the sight of her. He saved her too, brought her out of the ground, carrying her.
‘She was trapped,’ he says.
‘Under a statue?’
‘It was heavy. I managed to move it eventually.’
‘You touched it?’
‘I was amazed she was alive at all.’
Something in his tone alerts me to what I should have seen. I make myself examine her face. Her eyes are open. Her chest is still. She does not fight any more because that option has been removed. She has been overcome, and conquered.
‘We had to prioritise the other woman,’ says the businesslike paramedic, who is suddenly at my side.
‘No,’ I say, ‘she hasn’t explained it yet, not properly. I don’t understand it yet. No, that’s not how this is meant to be.’ My voice is so loud, getting louder. I’m never normally this loud. I’m a softly spoken person, that’s who I am, but these words just won’t come out quietly because nobody seems to be understanding them and I have to be louder, louder, louder, so I am shouting in the face of something that’s not listening to me.
David pulls me closer, shushes me, rocks me, until something clicks shut inside me.
We have reached the end of a pattern, a cycle of discovery. It’s time to go home and take slow, deep breaths until the meaning of all this becomes clear.
I take in the morning sky. It is clear and pink, and the rain clouds have disappeared, for now.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘She never said all her children were girls,’ says Rebecca. ‘What are the chances of that? All four of them, mini-Kays.’
‘Why would she?’ I ask.
‘No reason.’ Rebecca shifts in the wicker chair and pulls at the deep V-neck of her black dress. Her encased left leg sticks out to rest on a matching stool, the plaster a grainy white. ‘It just makes me feel worse. Stupid, I know.’
I know what she means. The four girls had taken up the front pew of the church, with the eldest on the end of the row. A hymn had been chosen, one I didn’t know, about God accepting my heart, and during it the eldest girl had thrown back her shoulders and sang to the vaulted ceiling, and the pit of my stomach had moved in recognition of Kay’s genes, Kay’s mannerisms, living on.
But maybe Rebecca doesn’t mean that. Maybe she thinks that bereavement is harder on women than on men. I don’t know her well enough to understand her, and what I do know of her irritates me.
She pokes the strap of her black bra back underneath her dress – she can’t seem to stop fiddling with it – and takes a sip from her glass of lemonade. I would not have chosen her as a companion for this funeral. I didn’t even know that she was going to attend; we’ve not spoken since the island. I wasn’t certain I was going to attend until the last minute, but David persuaded me in the name of closure, and I had a new black suit for Vanessa’s funeral, so I thought I might as well get some mileage out of it.