Читать книгу Once, Two Islands - Dawn Garisch - Страница 16

Chapter Ten

Nights are very long if sleep refuses you; you lie wide-open-eyed inside earth’s shadow with nothing to distract you from intractable ghosts.

Since that terrible night of Astrid Tamara’s death, since preparing her broken body for the funeral, Nelson had been shaken awake in the early hours by violent dreams of blood and falling. He lay and lay for hours beside his wife’s deep, deserted body, suffocating under the dark blanket of night as it pressed down on his chest, wanting yet afraid of sleep – and thus waking to that nether world of relentless torment. Wandering through the house like a spectre himself, he’d enter their two-year-old son Raef’s room and sit at the foot of his bed, listening a while to the tide of his breath, wishing there was a way to keep him from harm forever. The world was suddenly full of danger, with no way of keeping it all at bay. Worry wormed away at him, the days and nights dragged themselves slowly through his exhausted body. He was always in a twilight zone of partial sleep, terrified that his attention would slip one day, and with it his hand beneath his butcher’s blade.

“What’s happening to you?” asked Condolessa, his wife, at dinner. “You never hear what I say.”

What? Nelson had no recollection. It occurred to him that sleep’s measured absence perhaps restored the daytime capacity for presence of mind. He pushed his chair back and left for the tavern, where he found his brother Jerome, his cousin Jojo and the others, joking as in the days before falling women.

“ . . . there were times he didn’t know which end to hang over the gunwale!” laughed Jojo Schoones.

“He’s talking ’bout David,” explained Arthur Bardelli, chortling. “Poor boy ain’t cut out to be a fisherman, that’s for sure!”

“He’s on a drip at the hospital.” Jerome waved his younger brother into a seat next to him.

“He’d be better off here, trying to fix his reputation!” said Samuel Pelani. “The boy can hold his brew better than he can weather the sea!”

Frank shook his head with exaggerated shame. “What to do with a landlubber.”

“Makes you wonder where he got his genes,” said Jojo. “Thought he was born from fisherfolk.”

Frank joined in the laughter, although his was a little strained; it was his mother’s virtue Jojo was questioning.

“Something eating you?” Samuel Pelani handed a glass of home-brew to Nelson.

Nelson stared back out of red, burning eyes. “I’m fine,” he said.

“That Tamara girl’s death still getting to you?” asked Arthur Bardelli. “Must have been quite a mess you had to sort out.”

“You did a good job,” Samuel Pelani reassured him. “What you could see at the funeral looked like her.”

“You’d think Nelson was used to the sight of blood,” jibed Jojo, his eyes across the table cold as fish. “Deals with it every day.”

Nelson felt rage river through him, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Get over it, man,” proclaimed Frank Bardelli. “It’s for the best in the end. Terrible life, wired to madness.”

“Poetic justice,” pronounced Arthur, with an eye on Samuel, who was related to Astrid by marriage. “She was a proud girl.”

“So was the witch,” agreed Frank.

“What’s David going to do then?” Nelson turned to Jerome abruptly, shifting the focus back. He had come here to escape the millstone of his memory, not to dwell on these matters. He was horrified that both Samuel and Arthur had seen something in his face.

“He’ll apprentice himself to old Absalom. Electrician’s a respectable job. No good catching fish if there’s no way to preserve them.”

Nelson downed the shot, made excuses and left them to their stories. Deep inside the belly of night, he found himself sobbing outside the church, the cold biting at his ankles. He was going mad, the world a blur of sludge dragging at him, nausea rooting his belly.

“You’re looking terrible,” Graça Bagonata informed him the next day. Phoebe, her one-year-old girl child, was on one arm, a puzzled sheep on a leash attached to the other. “You need a break.”

Nobody had ever said that to him before. Nelson grunted, ashamed, unshaven, and told her she could fetch the cuts the following day. He took her sheep through to the back. Gripping the bleating animal fast between his knees, he pulled her head back and cut her throat with a quick slice of his sharpest knife, and felt how her struggling life bled out into the bowl, how her body went limp and sagged down onto the floor.

Tired, so tired he was, splitting the still-warm skin, but he was terrified at the thought of time alone with his own madness. He had almost forgotten himself at the tavern, almost said something to Jojo that could never be unsaid. That’s what exhaustion did, as effectively as alcohol: it loosened the tongue and muddled the judgement. He would cause problems where there were none – except those inside his own head. He could not go on like this.

He gutted, beheaded and hung the animal and washed it down. Then he cleaned up, changed and went up the road. At the junction, he hesitated. Which way? Ahead of him stood the church, with Minister Kohler’s house propped next to it. He suspected the minister was better at preaching than listening; besides, there were certain things he could not say in the cold, clear light of day.

To the right squatted the hospital. Above him, a petrel slewed into the wind; a dropping spattered white onto his jacketed shoulder. He cursed, brushed it off with his handkerchief, and turned towards the hospital.

That evening he shook a diamond-shaped pill out of its container. Hard to believe that this small compacted tablet contained the essence of what had eluded him for so long. Extraordinary that swallowing this tiny dose was sufficient to put an end to his suffering. He downed it with a tot of island brew for good measure, and lay down wide-eyed as an expectant bride. Before long the room tilted, a warm haze oozed in; Nelson felt his body twitch puppet-like before he slid effortlessly down into the muffled velvet depths.