Читать книгу Once, Two Islands - Dawn Garisch - Страница 7

Chapter One

There is an island situated in one of the three vast oceans of the world, an island which is actually a peak of a huge mountain, lying on the ocean floor like a sleeping dragon with only two scales of its humped back poking through the surface of the sea. Two, because near the island is another, smaller one, further east, which has all the qualities of the larger yet is different, like an echo. A man and his wife, some of the islanders call them, although their appointed names are Ergo Island (the larger) and Impossible Island (the smaller). They were formed long ago, before the beginning of time, by the power of the dragon, bursting out of the ocean with fire and ash and steam, affecting a quarter of the planet, causing tsunamis and black skies. But now they are merely two islands, the only comma and full stop for miles and miles in the blank blue page of the sea. To look at them, you would never guess the power of the dragon below, for they seem inconsequential, out of the way of the main shipping lines, in the way of the gales that roll in from Antarctica. Although the islands are made mostly of black volcanic rock, Ergo has an apron of settled sediment which is fertile, and on which people and their animals have come to live with the seabirds and seals and penguins.

Amongst them was a young girl, born on the island one winter’s day while the spindrift wind sang strange songs around the cliffs. Her body had thus far been immersed in the music of her mother, the shush of the sea of her, the thrum of the blood drum of her, the tinkle and resonance of her belly embrace. She’d grown from a full stop to a comma, from a tadpole to a frog to a fish, the plates of her face slowly colliding to form her features. She’d put on flesh and hair and pushed out frontal lobes, preparing to leave the sea behind, to drag herself out of her mother’s belly onto dry land.

The handsome doctor, Orion Prosper, washed his hands, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and examined his wife again. Prostrate beneath his gaze, the brown mound of her belly tightening, Angelique gripped the bedpost as a wave of pain rolled through her.

“Not too long now,” her husband informed her. “Remember, when the time comes, close your mouth and push!”

Angelique’s thoughts strayed to her cow last season, lying and lowing, a black struggling sack emerging from under her tail.

“You must push into your bottom!” Sister Veronica concurred. She was childless, but trained in one of the best hospitals on the mainland. “Don’t forget to push as though you are going to the toilet!”

Angelique remembered the beached whale last summer, dying under the weight of its enormous body, its sonar gone wrong.

Frieda, who’d had her own babies, held her young sister’s hand. “Soon you’ll be seeing your child,” she consoled her.

At that moment, all Angelique could see was the Virgin Mary hanging on the white hospital wall, left there by one of Veronica’s predecessors, her face full of good sadness, her only son lost, lost, and all for a good cause. Another wave washed through her, flushing all thought from the pink coral of her brain as she clung to the side of the bed, and to an ancient body knowledge of how to give birth.

It seemed to Frieda that this birth was taking too long. Something in the flow of things had been arrested; the passage would not open, despite the doctor’s modern chemicals flowing into Angelique’s arm, up her vein, through her heart and down to her womb. She knew from her own son’s birth what was required. Of course, Sophia should be there, but that was impossible, impossible.

Frieda wiped her sister’s brow with a cloth and tried to keep her mouth closed. She liked the doctor enough. A confident man, a man who had brought all manner of good to the island. Why, he had saved her own daughter’s life when her appendix blew. No home remedy from Sophia could subdue that beast, only the knife would do, and so her Liesa carried the mark of the surgeon upon her belly: a neat straight scar where her body had sewn itself closed around the doctor’s stitches, a reminder forever that life can change in a moment. There were some things a woman knew better than a man, though, some things that the spirit world knew better than the human one, and some things better left to those who do not have to wrestle through the confounding drapes of love and ardour; the doctor was, after all, the patient’s husband. Frieda watched the doctor’s brow pinch and wished there was a way she could open him too: he was closed, as closed as the unfathomable language of his journals.

Her chance came an hour later, when the doctor and Veronica were called away to attend to Elijah Mobara, who had fallen badly on the rocks at the Point, and to little Phoebe, Graça Bagonata’s newborn, who had the croup. Frieda sat by her sister’s bed, torn by the roar of warring loyalties inside her.

“Please!” gasped her sister as another spasm gripped her, lifting a face brimful of fear.

Frieda could sit and watch no longer. She went to the window and flung it wide open. The cupboard doors, too, she opened, and the taps till they gushed. She undid the ties that bound the curtains, her own shoelaces, and the ties of the hospital gown around her sister’s neck and back. It was up to the ancestors now, she thought; she had done what she could.

When Veronica returned a quarter of an hour later, she found winter right inside the room, a gale blowing in the patient’s hair, rain slanting in through the window. Like a whirlwind herself she stormed about, shutting out and cutting off water and wind, tying and closing, releasing from her mouth a torrent of horror directed at Frieda – “You people are a danger to yourselves, imagine exposing a woman in labour to the elements!” – while Angelique, gripped by the end-stage madness of her yawning womb, felt how her body had become an instrument, how the oboe of her body had opened, how her mouth moaned a long and perfect O sounding out of the foundation of her and somehow flowing in two directions, out through her open throat and through her dilated cervix simultaneously, a sound to move the heavens. There was no stopping her now.

The baby released her grip, pushed aside her mother’s swollen lips and slid out into her life. The doctor, her father, arrived in time to cut the cord, too late to be told of Frieda’s duplicity.

The doctor allowed himself a quick smoke and a whisky before delivering the afterbirth. He had been afraid it might come to a Caesarean section. He was a good surgeon, clean, efficient, working by the book, taking no undue risks, but he did not relish the thought of putting his hand into the very centre of his wife’s body. He was not a religious man, but somehow that would be going too far.

Of course, some would have said he took risks, delivering his own child so far from the help of obstetricians. They had considered going to the mainland for the birth, but it was a week by ship, and ships only visited the island four times a year, bringing provisions and luxuries. What if his wife had gone into labour on the high seas? Besides, if he was not prepared to deliver his own child on the island, what would the islanders think – that he was not a good enough doctor for theirs?

He went over to where Frieda was washing the baby, dousing the child in coos and smiles and warm water, and looked his daughter over, this sprung and fragile scrap that had something to do with his loins, with the nightly pleasure he took in his wife. Everything was present and correct, but he had to admit a moment of disappointment. He would have preferred a son; a daughter was too vulnerable to predatory men. He was a man who did not like to worry, and he could feel worry tighten in him already.

“Well done, my darling,” he said, kissing his wife on the forehead. She smiled at him, happy he was pleased with her, happy the ordeal was over, that her wayward body had brought their daughter safely to the shore of the world.

* * *

Underneath, the dragon that underlies life shifted, almost imperceptibly, it’s true, yet just enough to open up a rent in the fabric of things – a rent large enough for a woman to fall through. Two days after the birth, Angelique sickened, and despite the doctor’s best efforts, she turned to worse, burning up in the middle of her white hospital bed like a forest fire, her chest crackling with the heat, her eyes bright with sparklers, her dry breath a desert wind.

Two days after that, she died.

Outside the storm continued, unconcerned. Squalls of rain beat against the windowpanes, against the fluffed and oily backs of the millions of skua, petrels and albatrosses nested in a myriad mosaic on Impossible Island, also against the bridge of a Chinese fishing vessel lurching about in the sea to the northeast.

Work at the crayfish and fish factory came to a halt; no one could put to sea in this weather. The workers took the time to wash down the tanks and tables and floors. The fishermen mended nets indoors and felt for the weather changes that started in their bones; they tapped their barometers in a gesture as natural and familiar as breathing. A few villagers sheathed themselves in their all-weather gear and waded out through the gale to tend the turnip, pumpkin and potato fields, but most kept indoors, waiting for the impersonal rage of the storm to dash itself to pieces. In homesteads and in the tavern, they waited in the still glow of hearth warmth that dotted the village: islands of comfort surrounded by the mayhem of weather. They mustered around their paraffin stoves and wood fires, preparing food, drinking tea and home-brew, and talked about this and that, and especially about the goings-on at the hospital: would she live, would she die? Whose fault was it? And why? The theories circulated, eddying from cottage to cottage, sucking in a fresh tributary here, spitting out dead wood there. Some said it was bound to happen after what he did to Sophia – didn’t he realise who he was dealing with? A woman who brought in the living, healed the sick and ushered out the dead. Others said maybe, but that doesn’t make it right. Another said to stop this superstitious nonsense, this dead-old-wives’ tale. Here the conversation fractured: that was an unfortunate thing to say, it’s a wife we’re talking about here, she wasn’t even old, and who knows how ill-considered words carry fate on the wind, to where it is sniffed out by the hungry old dog that waits for us all? They didn’t know yet that she was already gone, sucked out of the tempest of her body, held loose and light in the eye of the storm.

In her stone cottage near the fields, Sophia spread pumpkin seeds out on a tray before the fire to dry. She could feel the shift coming, the one foretold in thrown bones. The birth of this child was a portent of the turn of the tide, a change of phrase that would alter the rhythm of things. There was a tightening in her, too, for the bones had had an awkward lie, and she knew no one on the island would escape the change unchanged.

* * *

The doctor sat a moment at his wife’s bedside, tracing with his eyes her last exhaled breath, feeling the great insulated door of the freezer of his chest swing closed. What had happened, what had gone wrong? He had been the top obstetric student in his final year, he had won a prize for his fifth-year essay on “The Use and Abuse of Antibiotics: Keeping the Upper Hand in the War between Man and Microbes”. His CV ran to several pages and he’d had as many options for his career path as there were fingers on both hands. He hadn’t had to come and toil in this godforsaken windswept corner of the world, he could be advancing to professorship in a top academic hospital, he could be flying all over the world to conferences, delivering scientific papers on vaccinations for malaria, AIDS, prosthetic heart valves or proton-pump inhibitors. He had come here for a short adventure and had stayed for love, love of this woman now gone, now snatched away, this burnt cinder of his love still warm on the bed in front of him.

Sister Veronica closed Angelique’s eyes, washed her hands, and left the room quickly to break the news to Frieda, asleep next door. She so badly wanted to rest her hands on the poor doctor’s shoulders, to lift from them the weight that bore down so heavily. She wanted to take him into her arms and comfort him, to let him weep into her breast, to stroke his dark cropped hair. It isn’t your fault, she wanted to tell him. She could’ve told him about Frieda’s native stupidity, about how his wife had been exposed to wind and rain, she could have pointed fingers, and she did consider this. But she knew the fault lay with her alone and she would never be able to tell him why, never. She had trained at the best hospital on the mainland, there was nothing wrong with her technique or her hygiene or her knowledge, oh no. It was her thought that had spirited the young, unsuitable wife away. She would make it up to him, she would.

Orion could not look at his dead wife. His eyes instead traversed the hills and vales of the counterpane, travellers in search of rest, his very centre buffeted by the wretched commotion out of doors. Whoever would choose to live in a place like this? Angelique, that’s who. She had persuaded him to stay and marry by falling pregnant, all against his desire, it now seemed, all against his best intentions to be successful, to travel, to shine, to be a name remembered. Ghastly, that sudden word leaping to his aid, a word he could not remember ever having used before: ghastly, the sudden horror of his name remembered in this fashion, associated with death and error, with loss and disgrace.

His gaze had climbed the wall in a separate act. While his brain was firing rounds of blame, ammunition going off uncontrolled in the horror chambers of his mind, his eyes had climbed the white hospital wall as though detached, coming to rest upon the Virgin Mary, whose eyes stared accusingly back down at him. The sight shocked him into action, a bolt of recognition shooting through his terror and confusion, threading his thought and will and body together onto one long string. He stood up, took the image off the wall, threw it into the bin and left the room. He instructed John Peters, the porter and general cleaner who, weak with shock, was leaning on his broom outside the tearoom, staring at a crack in the cement floor, to turn the mortuary fridge on. On no account, he added, was John to let Sophia in, with her superstitious ways and her supercilious smile. He could not bear to think of her hands on his wife’s body; he would not stand to let her look down on the evidence of his failure. Nelson Peters, John’s cousin, could arrange the funeral. He would have no other.

John nodded, not finding any word to fit his lips, and shuffled away to do his bidding.

The doctor went home and shut himself in his bedroom.