The Island at the End of the World Page 3

  Alice.

  Yeh.

  I liked that song you did. For Snowy.

  Theres long silents so I say her name a gen.

  It wernt realy for Snowy Finn I jus said that cus I dint want Pa to no the truth.

  I wernt specting any of that so I jus say Wat. Wy.

  The true title is Song for Ma she whispers. But last time I askt Pa bout her he went mad at me you member.

  I dont member. I hate it wen Pa an Alice fight tho so some times I blank out ther words or I blank out the memry after.

  I been thinking bout Ma a lot says Alice. Her voices quite an still like shes talking to her self. Some times I get pictures of her in my head specially at night. I see her face an her hair that wer like mine you member all dark an long an curly. Her eyes wer blue like mine too. You an Daisy are mor like Pa. I member Ma telling me that once.

  Theres a longish pors then an ahm bout to speak wen she sunly starts a gen her voice stronger.

  I dont have many pictures of her in my head only five or six but in two of em shes here.

  Here I echo.

  On the I-land.

  I kinda snort an say Well thats rong.

  How do you no.

  Cus Ma wer never here. She never made it to the I-land. She died saving Daisy dint she.

  But in my pictures shes here Alice sists. I member it.

  Maybe yer magining it I say. Like in dreams.

  I no wats real an wats a dream Finn.

  But Ma died in the sea I say louder. She never reacht the I-land.

  An Alice says How do you no.

  Wat do you mean.

  You only no wat Pa told you.

  Wat do you mean.

  Maybe hes lying she says real quite an I yell No hes not an Daisy makes a noise in her sleep like shes murmring in fear or some thing.

  Pa dont lie I hiss. You lie.

  All right Finn calm down she says I only said maybe he wer lying I dint mean.

  I hiss Liar an turn over in bed so ahm facing the wall. My eyes are justed to the dark now an I can all mos see the lines tween the planks of wood till the tears come an blur evry thing. Alice whispers mor lies but I blank her out an feel the lines in the wood with my fingers so I no theyre still there even if I cant see em.

  Theyre still there. I can feel em. Theyre there. Theyre there.

  V

  When they’re asleep I leave the ark and walk through cool blackness to the Afterwoods, following the flickering halo cast by the firestick in my hand. In the forest the dark grows closer and I walk more slowly, careful not to let the flames touch the branches and bushes that crowd in on me. I could cut a wider path, of course, but it suits my purpose for this forest to be forbidding. I reach the clearing, move between solar panels and unlock the door of the wooden cabin.

  Inside, the electrics hum and I sit down at the desk. But the neon is too bright, so when the computer screen starts glowing blue I switch off the main lights and the familiar chaos of this room recedes into soft obscurity around me. From the first drawer I take out the journal and a pen, from the second drawer a bottle of whisky. I pour a glass, put some music on, have a drink, and sigh. Sanctuary.

  In the journal I write about seeing the dark mark again. I don’t write about what happened with the cat. One day Finn might read these words, and he doesn’t need to know about that. It would only hurt him. So I just say the cat died, and that I buried him, and Finn cried.

  Seeing him like that uncorked a flood of love inside me. My son, my son, so warm and skinny, I watched him suffering, stranded in the darkness of this new world he’d discovered – the world of pain and loss – and remembered him as that younger, happier boy who flowered here in his first years on the island. I remembered him jumping up and down grinning and slickhaired the day the rain came, and helping me pick the first tomatoes, and sitting calmly in the evening with his arm round his baby sister, and asking me impossible questions at bedtime about clouds and gravity and angels.

  Finn, if you ever read this, know that I loved you. That I love you even now, wherever I may be.

  Easy tears come to my eyes at the thought of him reading these words. I hope he never does, of course, but if anything were to happen to me, at least this journal would help Finn and his sisters make sense of. Well, everything.

  I flick idly through the ten years of my life recorded here, people and events spiralling in reverse, the floodwaters pouring back up to the skies, back to the first entry, the first sentence: ‘There was an earthquake yesterday.’ Facing this, on the inside cover, in thick, tall black letters, are the words I wrote the summer before last, after the first of my heartaches:

  IN CASE OF MY DEATH OR DISAPPEARANCE

  What you are reading now you should only be reading if I have died or vanished from the island. Leave it a day or so, children, but no longer than that. If I’m not back after two days, then something is wrong. I would never leave you that long.

  (Do not read this book if am still here or I will be very very angry.)

  Until that day, two years ago, when I went out hunting with Finn, I had always believed myself invulnerable, immortal, here in this Eden. But feeling the wasps swarm inside my chest, feeling my legs buckle, my head blur and tumble, feeling my tongue hang heavy and useless in my mouth as I tried to tell Finn not to worry, that I’d be OK … well, after that day, I knew I had to leave them some clue to their past, to the nature of the world beyond this island. Just in case.

  The song changes and I listen to the unfamiliar chords, frowning. What is this? It’s from some compilation I made, way back, during the first years of our marriage. And then I remember. It was one of Mary’s favourites. The plasticky ballad sweetens and swells into its chorus – a tune I always hated – and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop the tears pricking in my eyes again. Sentimental fucking fool. Your wife’s gone and you’ll never see her again, what’s the point in.

  But, disobeying the diktats of my mind, my fingers creep to the mouse and click on the camera icon. An image of Mary flashes onto the screen, wearing a nightdress, smiling. Her belly is huge beneath the loose-fitting cotton: pregnant with Finn. Alice must have been upstairs asleep, and I must have been … where? Behind the camera, of course: the recipient of that smile; the object of her love.

  I groan, rub my face, drink some more firewater. Why must I rake my own heart like this? ‘Goodbye, Mary,’ I say, not looking at her, and click to the next image.

  Mary with her brother, Christian, in the garden of his mansion. I arrow hate at the screen and click again. A shot of Christian with his family: his oh-so sophisticated wife Charlotte and their two stuck-up kids, Will and Chloë. Once upon a time, I had loved those children – my nephew and my niece. And they had loved me. Regret, longing. But then I remember the day of my humiliation, that boiling August, working on their fucking swimming pool, and I click and click and click until the Highfield family have vanished and a new face appears.

  It is my face. Or was. Another me. Much earlier, this one, back in the New York office, when I was the young hotshot, the rising star. My hair is cut and gelled in the fashion of the time, cheeks cleanshaven, teeth white, eyes unlined and bagless. I look like any other smart, conventional, ambitious 21-year-old, but behind those eyes, I know, there was only emptiness and greed; the desire to forget my sad, slow, shameful childhood and to burn a new future for myself in the wonderful world of money.

  I click to the next image and find myself looking back at me again. But a decade has elapsed between the two photographs, and you can (just) tell. This one is taken in Pacific Palisades, and I am no longer merely hungry and ambitious, but successful, self-assured, happy. I am a married man now, a doting father. I wear a pressed white shirt, the top button open, jacket hanging on the back of the chair, Mary’s dream kitchen agleam behind me, the walls blotched with colourful rectangles (Alice’s preschool paintings), my hands (soft-skinned, normal-sized) cupped round a steaming espresso, papers on the table, hair o
nly slightly greyed, expression tired but patient, amused, affectionate, a little vain. He looks like a nice guy, this me, doesn’t he? This model executive stroke family man, so prosperous and reasonable and normal, his image haunted and surrounded now by the ghostly reflection of my old, bearded, wild-eyed visage. What the hell could have happened to him? That’s what they all wondered, all whispered behind my back, as I began changing from him into myself.

  But nothing is ever quite as it appears and I remember, I remember, being inside that head, behind those eyes … I remember that day in January, my heart full of small anxieties, as it always was, back in Babylon. I was Godless then, I had no faith. I was worrying about MONEY, as I always did, back in Babylon. I was sat at the breakfast table, scribbling ideas for a new campaign concept. Blood buzzing, chest hollow, mouth bitter. First thing I noticed: I couldn’t draw a straight line. Puzzled, irritated, vaguely frightened by this. Delirium tremens? Parkinson’s? Next, a sort of high-pitched rattling sound. I turned round and saw the plates and cups and glasses on the dresser all shaking and moving. Now I understood what was happening: there’d been a few small tremors the week before, and the TV had been warning us that a bigger quake was coming. I stood up and felt the floor vibrating; held on to the back of the chair. A glass fell from the dresser and smashed, then mugs, a whole stack of plates. Alice screaming, Mary in tears and lo the sun became black and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places, and the president and the senators and the shareholders and copywriters hid themselves in the lobbies of skyscrapers, and said to the skyscrapers, Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, for the great day of His wrath is come. And when the quake was over and the city was full of holes and smoke, I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity and lies, and there was no profit under the sun, and I turned myself to behold WISDOM. And, for the first time in my life, I bought a Bible – that same book which Finn is now reading, which Alice read before him, and which Daisy in her turn will read next. And I also bought a diary. The diary which is in front of me now.

  I look around the dark room, which is still, not shaking, and breathe out, relieved. You were only clearing your throat that day, weren’t you Lord? Only warning me of what was to come. But it was enough. Blind as I had been, I saw the Light that day. I sold my cars and began taking the bus to work. I cut up Mary’s credit cards and put the villa on the market. As for my ‘work’, I suddenly saw through it, saw what a sick joke it truly was. After the quake, I could no longer fake interest in what particular combination of words would best help sell sugar-pumped breakfast cereals to borderline obese 6- to 10-year-olds in the fucking Midwest and it was only a matter of time before there were mutterings in corridors, special meetings to which I wasn’t invited, a sabbatical to help me ‘recharge my batteries’, and then, soon enough, nothing at all. No office, no job, no obscene salary or mortgage, only a rented apartment in Crenshaw, a weekly wage for digging swimming-pools, and a sense of freedom, of rightness, I’d never known before. Lord I thank You that I am saved, while they, they are all damned.

  Without even thinking, I click on the mouse again, and a picture of Alice fills the screen. Alice in the Pallisades, before the quake. Alice wearing her Silvergirl T-shirt, dimples in her cheeks, ribbons in her hair, a gap where her two front teeth had fallen out. Behind her the sky is blue and the infinity pool glimmers and glints, making a false horizon where it ends and the sky begins. Three years old she was then, a picture of perfect unknowing …

  O my children. O my innocents. Yea, better are they than all the other people of the earth, who hath not yet seen the evil that is done under the sun. How can I ever tell them? About the world, I mean. About the EVIL. An invisible wave rises over me and the room’s dark air seems to press down like seawater as I think of the Stranger – the dark mark – contaminating our island with traces of Babylon, poisoning the minds of my babes. I see their beautiful faces changing, hardening, scowling, smirking, hating me as they breathe the foul sulphur of his words.

  They must never ever

  I switch off the computer and relight the firestick, then leave the wooden cabin, closing the door behind me. I walk back through the forest paths, back past the lake and through the gardens, back to the ark, where my children are still sleeping. In my bedroom I get undressed and slip under the covers. And I think about Finn again, the shock on his face when he saw the dead cat.

  I took him to the cove at the southern end of the island, inside the spinny of oaks, and we buried the beast there. I promised him we’d plant flowers by the gravestone. He turned, nodded slightly, almost smiled. Brave boy. Thou hast put gladness in my heart, son. ‘Snowy’s body is under the ground, but his soul’s gone up to heaven,’ I said, and he seemed to grow calmer. He didn’t suspect.

  He DOESN’T suspect.

  Of my killing his cat, of the dark mark out at sea, he knows nothing. He must never know. I must never let him see it in my eyes. I must forget it all myself, erase it from my consciousness, drown it beneath the vast and waveless sea.

  Holding hands, the two of us stared out at the horizon. You couldn’t see the dark mark from there, of course. That was some consolation. Often, I find, it is better to forget what you KNOW, and to believe only what you can SEE with your own two eyes.

  The sky, the sea, the empty horizon. The dead cat caught in a trap.

  VI

  Evry things so green today even the air. I drop the spade to rest my arms an look up at the Afterwoods all mense an shining. Wen did the leaves grow I wonder. I all ways thought ahd mark it the day wen it happend but its like they sneakt out wile I wer looking a way or thinking bout some thing else. Winters no thing but a memry now.

  I wipe the swet off my face an pick up the spade. Daisys off below me milking the goats. Alices probly down by the sea thinking her deeps an waiting for her stupid boll to float back. Pas gon to the Afterwoods I-ther hunting or clecting firewood I dont no which. Todays our moonday an theres a weird buzz in the air I felt it soon as I woke. My hunerd an fith Daisys seventy seventh an Pas I dont no how many. Moren five hunerd. But mor portantly or so she thinks its Alices hunerd an sixtyth. Todays the day Pa wer sposed to take her to the No-ing Tree. She askt him bout it at breakfast but he harly spoke a word I cunt tell if he wer angry or spointed or sad.

  The spade makes a stoneshattring sound as it hits the erth an my rists hurt. Where ahm digging will be ground for tatoes but wen I look at the dark hole I cant help thinking bout Snowy. Its leven days since he died I counted em an I thought bout him evry one of em. The pains not so sharp now I dont cry. Its mor like the emty ache you get after a bruise only this bruises where my heart orter be.

  Leven days. I try to think bout wats happend in the time thats past but its all fused. Like trying to see the pictures on the wall of the fire room wen the last songs playing an the walls are spinning an the airs greyblack with candlesmoke. You cant do it in other words your lost in a wirl. All you can sees lil bits an pieces.

  I member see-ing the chicks wen they wer jus born an I member splashing in the lake with Daisy an Pa. I member a couple rainy days an a couple cloudy ones. All the rest musta been like this I reckon warm an blueskied. I look up now tween digs. Far out over the sea theres a big wite cloud. Other wys theres no thing but blue. The same blue as Alices eyes.

  Memrys of the talk tween her an Pa come to me as I dig. I try to blank em a way but I cant stop see-ing Pas face wen Alice askt him bout the No-ing Tree. Wat wer his spression zactly. His eyes wer like looking down into no where his brows a V an the lines round his mouth all tight an deep. I make the same spression with my face an try to feel wat comes. The big black bird slowly flaps its wings.

  I drop the spade an pick up the fork an think only bout smashing the clods into smooth dark grains. I push down an twist out an lift up. A gen. A gen. By the time the hole beds dug theres swet poring off my
face an neck an my shadows come out the other side of me. I look up an see that big wite clouds moved closer over the I-land. Soon itll cover the sun. I stare at it all perly soft an mense an magine its Snowy gon to heaven. Snowy the God.

  Then I sigh. Hungers tugging at my belly. I stab the fork in the erth an gin walking back to the ark.

  *

  Pas outside skinning a rabbit wen I rive. His spressions cheer full he says he caught two so we can eat stew tonight. I smile at him. Evry things back to normal I shure my self. I go in the kitchen an chop up carrots an tatoes. Theyll warm all day in the pan on the range till theyre like melting wen we eat em tonight. I love rabbit stew.

  Daisy comes in with the box full of eggs. Pa says we can have these now she ports so I drop em one by one care full in the pan of boiling water. Ther skincolourd shells float an bob in the silvrish bubbles go-ing tungk-tungk genst the metal.

  Pa made weat bread last night. I cut it in slices an put em on plates an Daisy spreds em with goat cheese. Theres lettuce in a bowl all ready washt an ript. Pa comes in humming Morning Has Broken under his breth. He chops up the rabbits an drops the pieces in the hot wine an grease an water mixt up in the pan. Nex he washes his hands then drops in the carrots an tatoes I chopt an some herbs from the garden then he adds a lil salt an hales the sweetsmelling steam. Thats so good he grins an we laf me an Daisy. Weare so leaved.

  We all get some wine like all ways on moonday an we go out an sit under the branch roof nex to the ark. Its cooler there. Daisy talks bout the Tale she red last night an I sorta drift in a half sleep letting her voice wash over me. Some thing bout a brother an sister who find a house made of bread an gin eating it then a witch tries to eat the brother an sister. Ikerd member the ginning of the tale but not the end. Pa murmurs some times an asks questions but mosly its jus Daisy. I savour the ache in my muscles an think bout no thing.