Whether Violent or Natural, page 3
‘We should get back,’ says Crevan. ‘We need to eat. Get warm.’
‘Yes and yes and yes.’
Yet we neither of us move. Perhaps we know already; have already guessed that it is about to happen, that it is about to begin. Or perhaps we are just reluctant to leave the sea, to break the serene clarity that comes after immersion within the gelid waves, a full-body baptism by moon ice. Even shiveringly-shudderingly cold as I am, it is oh-so-pleasant to be held fast in Crevan’s arms, to look aimlessly out across the night sea and to know with complete and rare certainty that this is what it is to be alive; nothing more, nothing less than this, this shared fluttering beat of a slow-thawing heart.
And then Crevan takes a sharp breath, a gasp like a curled fist slamming into a glass mirror, one that shatter-scatters out a fine haze of glittering splinters and sand. He points outwards, far beyond the bounds of my sight, and asks in trembling tones whether I too see what he sees.
Despite his apparent alarm, despite the warning pulse of dread in my wrists, my throat, I think perhaps he has only spotted one of the blubbery fat seals that sometimes come to explore the rockier outcrops of the island, out for a night-time swim, just like we are. I follow the line of Crevan’s finger as best I can, squinting, peering, eyes narrow. I see nothing, nothing at all, nothing unexpected. Beyond the breakers, the sea is clear as distilled gin. Or so it seems to be.
Another second of staring and there it is: a sharp-lined mass floating among the waves, aimless as driftwood. The moonlight – serenely in on the secret – teases us, shows a hand with the fingers splayed, shows an upturned face; eyes closed, mouth open. A body in the water. No. I don’t want it. Not right, not right at all.
‘A woman,’ says Crevan.
I turn, pressing my face into his shoulder. ‘Make it go away,’ I whimper, not daring to voice my prayer entire: Make a cross-current to catch the body and carry it back out to sea. Instead, I give only wordless, whining plea.
‘Quiet.’
The tide is against me, every wave driving the body closer and closer still. When next I look, it is only a few feet away. A wave-wanderer, an Oceanid, a Potamoi; sea-kin of some kind or other. How Crevan can be so sure the body is that of a woman, I do not know; not from so far away, not with how the long brine-swept hair shrouds the face, not without asking first. But fine, let him decide. I don’t want to look. I don’t want to see, don’t want to know who this sea-kin is, what she looks like. Why is she here? What does she want with us? What could she possibly want? Because she can’t come here. She can’t, she simply can’t. It’s not fair, not allowed. She’ll ruin everything, I can feel it in the thrash and twitch of my stomach, and I don’t want that, don’t want her.
I scream.
‘Be quiet, Kit.’
For the first time, I notice how tense Crevan is beside me, how his muscles are all wound up – coiled tight, ready to snap – and for a moment I think oh, poor baby and wonder how I could have been so foolish, so careless as to forget how frightened he is, how scared he is of all the backbiters and all the other creeping-crawling nasties from the mainland like the ones that gave him his scars. Of course he’s upset, of course he’s afraid. I should look after him, tell him it will be all right. But then I look again and wonder to see that he does not look so much disquieted as he does concerned, his face lined with worrisome care, his green, green eyes fixed upon the water.
There is a sudden snap of movement. A flailing limb, perhaps, though it could just as easily be a cresting wave or a trick of the light. Yes, that must be it. Only Crevan sees different.
‘She’s alive,’ he says and jumps to his feet.
‘Don’t,’ I say, understanding. ‘Don’t, please. I don’t want it. You can’t—’
It’s too late. Crevan doesn’t listen to me. Crevan never listens to me. Before I can think how to stop him, how to persuade him against it, he is diving into the water, fully clothed and nowhere so neat or graceful this time around. Splash-plash-crash, the waves churn to foamy delight. In a few powerful strokes, he reaches the floating woman. I watch through my fingers, not daring to believe what is happening. This is my island, mine. I don’t want another body here. The ones we’ve got are plenty, enough to be getting on with, themselves already far, far too much to bear.
Not stopping to check whether she lives or dies – and which is worse I cannot say – Crevan hooks his hands under the woman’s armpits from behind and begins to tow her to safety, legs whip-whipping together to propel him backwards through the water. When he reaches the wall, he has to shift his grip, heaving himself up with one arm and dragging the woman along behind him with the other. I do not help, cannot, cannot bring myself to move an inch from where I sit, hands over my eyes, fingers spread wide. An ill-timed wave tugs at the woman’s limp body, jolting her from Crevan’s grasp. For a heart-stopping moment, it seems that she will slip away and be pulled to the depths. I bite my lip and hope. But Crevan catches her just in time, damn him, damn the day that first I saw him, damn the freak twists of chance that turned his eyes to my island and brought him here. I choke and cough and gasp for the words to tell him to put her back where she came from, to say that the sea can have her if it wants her so bad, to ask who are we to intervene with what the fates have so commanded? This woman was meant to drown, let her drown. But the words do not come, only stay stuck in my maw like a scritchy-scratchy bone swallowed wrong-wise. Crevan doesn’t hear the words I cannot say, only tightens his hold on the woman and makes one final push. Then they are out, him panting on hands and knees, her flat on her back.
‘What have you done? Why are you doing this to me? I don’t like it, make it stop. Now, Crevan. Please. You have to.’
But he ignores me, his every attention bent on the woman. He is looking at her in a way I cannot fathom, in a way like he is afraid, in a way like he knows who this lost soul might be and fears it. But come, stay. That is impossible. She is a stranger, a woman – nothing more, nothing less.
He pushes aside a tangle of her hair and I see a face, striking in the moonlight, strong and lantern-jawed. There is a gap, a line of parted flesh running from her right nostril and down to her mouth, dividing her top lip completely in two – a deft bisection but with no blood and no scarring to be seen, so I guess it was something given to her by the womb rather than by any knife or scalpel; an unexpected felicity of her creation, a loose end that was never tied up, an absence as loud and proprietorial as a thumbprint on a lump of clay. What is not womb-given is the nasty bruise on her forehead, just below the hairline.
‘Hit her head,’ says Crevan, surmising. ‘Got knocked out and fell in the water. Lucky we saw her.’
I think of screaming again, of throwing myself into the sea, of cracking my own head against the stony spine of the sea wall, crack and crack and crack until Crevan leaves her and comes to get me, comes back to himself, comes to see that I am still here and that he has betrayed me, crossed me, left me out in the cold. But I do not and he does not either, does not flick his eyes away from the woman for so much as a moment. Lowering himself down, he awkwardly hover-leans with his left cheek poised just above the woman’s nose and mouth. Nods when he feels the rush-brush of air against his skin. She’s alive, alive-o; alive, alive-o. Oh god. Oh hell.
He sits back on his heels and takes up the woman’s hand, seeking her pulse with his fingers. Let it be dimming, I pray, let it be erratic and fading and soon to die down. But it is hopeless. I know that even before Crevan sighs his relief, even before he turns to me at last, his lips as white and pressed as any of the scars knitted across his skin. He tells me the woman is all right, that her pulse is faint but steady, that she has a good chance if only we can get her warm and dry, if we can get her back to safety. His own sodden clothes are clinging to his skin and already he is beginning to shake with the cold. If we stay here much longer, he’ll be in danger; every passing second bringing him closer still to the slurred confusion of hypothermia, to the fatal drop in pulse, pressure, breath. My heart aches, breaks. I can’t do nothing. I can’t leave him here. And he won’t come without the woman, that much is clear.
Should have let her drown, Crevan, should have let her drown.
I look out across the water to where the moon drops slowly through the sky. For one maddened moment, I see myself shoving Crevan aside, I see myself determinedly rolling the woman off the wall and back into the sea like so much waste to be flushed away with the tide. Should have let her drown. It would have been kinder by far.
‘We can’t keep her,’ I croak. ‘It’s strictly no pets.’
But Crevan doesn’t hear. He is hoisting the woman from off the ground, looping his arms around her chest so as to take the bulk of her weight.
‘Help.’
He is desperate in a way I have never seen; in a way I cannot ignore or argue against.
‘Please, Kit.’
I demur for a moment longer and then concede. ‘This is no good,’ I say, grabbing hold of the woman’s ankles. ‘You’ll have tired of her in a fortnight and then we’ll still be stuck with her. Or worse, you’ll get attached and she’ll get better and want to leave or she’ll stay sick and die and either way it will destroy you. And I’ll be the one stuck taking her for walkies. Bet you anything.’
Crevan makes no answer to my grumbled complaints, does not gratify me with response or notice. Not so much as a smirk or a wink. There’s no being baby now, no way to raise even the faintest glimmer of happiness. I can see his attention is snapped, straining as he is against the weight of the woman, no doubt already thinking of the steep path ahead and how easy it will be to slip and fall, to send us all flying, to leave us all with broken necks. I wonder that his instinct isn’t screaming against our every step like mine is, but then I suppose that it’s too late; far, far too late for instinct. Crevan left his behind the moment he dived in the water. Before that, even: the moment he saw and pointed, the moment he made the body a real thing, a thing that we both saw and acknowledged, a thing we had to decide about one way or another. He could have said nothing. Could have rubbed his eyes and said: Funny, I thought I saw something, but I must just be tired. But he did not and as a result we have already ventured so far beyond the waymarker of no return that I can barely believe it; already we are stumbling blindly past the border posts of a now where all possibilities lie open and into the determined hell of the future, the way ahead laid out for us more surely than we can dread or guess. It has begun, that is the long and the short of it. Even though we none of us quite know it yet, quite know it then, it has begun. The way is set.
Should have let her drown, I think again. Should have let her drown.
JOSEPH’S GUMS AND SPICES
There is a castle, but most of it is phantom now, most of it is spectral: an echo of what was once raised up out of the island’s rock and is now, stone by stone, storm by storm, being razed back down to the ground as surely and steadily as the sun burns away the water of a salt-lake to leave behind nothing more than a mineral crust, a white shadow of an ancient body long-since evaporated.
There is a castle, but you can only see it now if you squint, if you know where to look and how, if you can take the suggestion of bare fossilised bones and knit them out with flesh to see the true form of whatever forgotten lumbering creature it was that once did stroll the same earth it later came to be entombed within; buried for centuries, for millennia, before being rude-rough excavated by some well-intentioned hobbyist with a spade and everything to prove.
There is a castle, but it’s mine now – just like everything else on the island – and I’m not interested in sharing, not interested in guests. It’s my home, mine. It’s where I live. And you can’t come in, not to have a look around, not to rest your feet, not to use the facilities. No cold callers or junk mail. Trespassers Will. Please and thank you and goodnight.
Of course, there’s not really any living to be had in the castle itself. It’s more absence than substance, more decay than matter, more abstract than not. What little stonework remains is either roughly pitted after eons of being beaten by the driving wind that blows in on all sides from across the sea, or – in those few, more sheltered parts, the soft underbelly – swaddled and swathed in densely growing moss and lichen. Entire structures have entirely collapsed, leaving nothing in their wake but a few forlorn stumps of granite to mark where once there were pillars, corridors, cloisters. Stone arches loom against the sky, portentous doorways that lead through to nowhere and nothing, as though some two-tonne brat of a giant – ignoring his mother’s express instruction – stretched open his ogrish mouth as wide as it would go and was caught out by a change of the wind or the rise of the sun and got stuck that way, turned to stone and then slowly eroded so now all that remains is that dreadful, gaping maw. Serves him right, I say, making a nasty face like that when he knew what would happen, when his mummy had already said.
Of all the things that once upon a time really did use to be there – here – in the castle, of all the discrete buildings and parts that made up the whole of it, only the walled courtyard and the keep are still more or less intact, the latter glowering disapprovingly over the rubble, keeping watch over the island and now clad all in solar panels like a medieval knight in plate armour. Only the keep has held strong against the vagaries of weather and circumstance, against the almighty macerating power of the second hand, tick, tick, tick. It’s only the keep that has, in fact, kept. (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. All month. All year. Until I die and, in all likelihood, probably for quite some time after that, at least until I’ve been properly macerated too.) The keep is taller than anything here or hereabouts and I bet you can see all the way to the mainland from up on its roof, though I don’t know for sure because I’ve never been up there. Not as far as I can recall, anyway. Certainly, the last time I checked, the last time I stuck my head in, there wasn’t any way up: the stairs that lead up from the only entrance have caved in, crumbled, rotted away. There is a way down – or was once – for there is a heavy trapdoor set into the stone floor. But it is locked and I cannot open it to explore, so it may as well not be there at all. As far as I’m concerned, the keep stands hollow, a discarded carapace, an empty straightjacket, a shell without a snail. Probably it’s been that way since before there was a me to worry about it. I’m not sure. I don’t remember, all right? I’ve been here a long time and I can’t possibly be expected to remember everything. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the keep belongs to the realm of the sky and that is not my concern. My concern lies elsewhere, below the ground along with the better part of my dominion. My concern is the den: a ten-by-fifty-foot steel bunker, cased in poured concrete and embedded deep amongst the foundations of the castle like witchweed clinging tight to the fine roots of some poor, unwitting host crop. It is a keep as sure and as sturdy as the other, a buried keep, a keep-safe, a keep-out. It is where I live, and where Crevan lives too – or has done ever since he came to the island and found me. No one else has set so much as a foot inside it, not for so long as I can remember. And now we are bringing this stranger, this blow-in, this washed-up piece of flotsam of a woman right into our sanctuary. Ho-hum. On our own heads be it and all that.
In fairness – not that there’s much of that going around – I, we, Crevan and me, can’t lay complete claim to the den any more than we can to the rest of the castle. It’s older than we are. It was divined by minds other from ours, built by other hands, lived in and cared for and cleaned by other people, other bodies. I mean, in all probability anyway. Things like this don’t just grow up out of the soil, do they? You can’t plant the right seed or tuber and expect it to grow into a fully furnished steel box. That’s not the way these things work. Den and castle both are artificial, man-made, handmade, homemade. Homespun? Homegrown? No, that can’t be right. I’m getting carried away, carrying this dead weight of a woman. And on we march, hup, two, three, four; onwards, onwards, marching as to war.
No, I didn’t make the den. I didn’t command for it to be made or fabricated or driven into the earth. But whoever did isn’t using it any more, doesn’t need it any more, is long-gone, long-dead. So it can’t be stealing, can it? To live there, I mean, to claim it as mine – ours. It hardly belongs to anyone else, because the dead don’t own anything, do they? Saving their graves. Although I suppose maybe it’s the grave that owns the dead and not the other way around, leastways it must be if a grave robber ever made his name – his fortune, his bread and butter – by snatching a body from out of a tomb. There, that settles it. The dead are commodities that may be owned and are therefore not themselves owners, not themselves owed anything at all. Yes, that seems right. So why do I still have this nasty, niggling feeling that I’m forgetting something important? Never mind, never mind, I expect it will come back to me before long.
So here we are, Crevan and me, a lifeless body strung out between us, hell-bent on sharing all of a sudden, on opening our doors to the waifs and strays, to the freeloaders that wash up on our shore, the stragglers and vagabonds, the penniless and pitiful. More fool us, more fool us. If we didn’t show her the way, if we didn’t forcibly manhandle her into our den, the woman would never have found it; not working under her own steam. For one thing, she’s unconscious. For another, you have to know that the den is there, you have to know where to go. To start with, you have to get into the walled courtyard. Then you have to find the wooden wicket gate, all unassuming and drab in its grey stone architrave, curly iron hinge-fronts braced across its width, and think to yourself: What might be behind that, then? You have to decide to open it up and climb down the spiralling stairs that wind down into the underearth, steps all narrow and worn, slippery with age; no lights, no railing, no nothing at all.
