The Seam and The Drop

Shuffling forward on her stomach as far as she dared, Girt leaned over the cliff face into a gale of gannet cackle. Smooth white with butter-coloured heads, gannets, gannets, gannets, gannets in every direction sat on scruffy nests on craggy ledges, necks craning and waggling, stretching their wings, stamping their feet, or, suddenly compelled, curving out into the air. Girt reached for the sole egg in an unguarded nest while neighbouring birds, barred from action by their own responsibilities, shouted their indignation.

Lying on her back in the grassy, dandelion-clocked clearing, the cool albumen oozed on to her pale torso and the yolk thudded lightly on her sternum. She smeared the glossy, fishy viscosity over her belly and breasts, careful not to break the yolk at her centre like the sun.

Arms outstretched, she waited.

The ants came first, filing out from the brambles and ivy-choked holly bushes, marching up her rib cage from both directions. A pincer movement. She was a new landscape to be scaled and reaped. Their thousands of tiny hooked claws were a mere prickle, a titillation.

Next came the little round wren, announcing herself with a sweet and complex song as large as any gannet call. Girt called back silently, expansive. The wren fluttered forwards, then boldly up on to Girt’s shoulder, and set to picking off ants with her fine beak, hopping about the swelling ground of the breasts, her sharp claws setting off subterranean shudders.

When the first wren fluttered off sated, in came another, and another, until the ants were beaten back to the scrub. The egg yolk, still whole, quivered with the rise and fall of Girt’s chest.

She felt a tickle at her fingertips, then a licking. She did not turn her head to see, but willed herself to sink further into the ground, to plant herself deeper. The fingers cleaned of albumen, a snorting and sniffing homed in on the yolk, towing a handsome red vixen. They eyed one another levelly. Girt welcomed the vixen in with a slow blink. The vixen tilted her head to better angle her jaws around the golden prize, her teeth bursting its membrane, releasing opulence, her muzzle gliding over viscid skin, sucking and licking and slavering greedily, tenderly.

Suddenly, the vixen started, crouched and froze. Girt heard a stick snap behind her head.

‘That is an egg you are wasting!’ came a voice from high up, far, far from the animal floor.

The vixen slunk off into the undergrowth. Girt lay pinned to the ground by the outrage of Lolly towering darkly above her.

*

Gamini slipped outside the hut into a breeze sharpened by the glittering blades of the sea. The breeze, and everything else, came from a seam between sky and sea that circled the island. The seam sent in pillowing clouds and grey rags filled with rain and sheets of blue and the dark cloth of night; it sent birds and winds and the sea’s constant surges, occasionally tucking gifts and riddles into its waves to wash up here. This morning the island was taking receipt of a symmetry of colour clines, lemon yellow blending upward and down to blue by way of a vigorous pink. Six adobe huts blushed at the loveliness. Coarse and irregular, they hunkered in a large yard scraped out of a shallow bowl of chaotic shrubland strewn with large rocks dropped from a great height. Goats were already springing up on outcrops between tilted hawthorn, crab apple and fig trees; beetles and centipedes scuttled into crevices under the scrutiny of robins; swifts grifted high above the boorish, squawking parakeets.

Gamini welcomed with gratitude the day and its one shared world. At night he dropped away into a strange and isolated place. Other islanders might turn up there, but on questioning later they would deny all knowledge of it. And some would ask similar questions of him, and he too denied all knowledge. These night places could be blissful, nonsensical or frightening; they were often made up of fragments of huge, straight huts that shone with the sound or feel of many, many people; there might be an inexplicable object under the touch, a feeling of pride or dread attached, or, somewhere deep out of sight, a threat or promise that lit up strange, smudged forms. At first, Gamini would try to grab these forms, objects and sounds and bring them back to the shared world, his hands unaccountably empty come morning. But latterly he presented himself wide open to each arriving day, his back to the night place, like a cupboard emptied for cleaning.

Girt bustled out into the yard carrying the night basin and paused beside Gamini. The sun rose swiftly, overwhelming everything. It was going to be a clear, flat, hot, blue day.

‘It is a water-raising day,’ Girt said.

When she dropped away at night it was to a partial, miniaturised version of the island where she watched herself from above performing the cycles of maintenance necessary to survival. All night she harvested the seaweed, preserved the berries, grinded the seeds, hyled the thatch, milked the goat, sank the well, raised the water, tanned the fish leather. Only to wake and find it all yet to do.

For the islanders, the day was not concealed ahead, round a blind bend, nor the past seen scrolling infinitely behind. Time was not a carriage bearing them along. It emerged through place and moment to moment and flowered and fell away in non-square rhythms. Tomorrow was implicit in the fullness of now, here in the understanding of there. Here and today were the hope of yesterday, though redeemable through reappraisal of then. Up to a point. The past and ‘there’ stopped abruptly on the rocks at the far side of the island. Before and beyond the island was oblivion.

Generations to come would have the first islanders wading in like demi-gods to swells of orchestral strings, their strong thighs parting the foaming water, shoulders wreathed in glittering seaweed, fists clutching pearly shells. The reality was a different genre. Swap out the pomp for crumpled bodies strewn about the rocks, a flickering into confusion and fear under a cruel, wide sky, and a structureless soundtrack of groans, slopping water and shrieking gulls. The first islanders were naked. No baggage, no memory, and hemmed in by sea, sea, sea, sea.

This is not quite correct. They arrived with names. And in these names they found difference: different choreographies of the tongue, different palettes of sound, different grammars of association. And the names were discovered to be but the crests and spires of languages run to ruin, no two the same, and no one of them complete and habitable.

The pressures of immediate survival forced the collective improvisation of gestures and positive and negative sounds. People communicated and pulled together. Thankfully, the island was not one of those mounds of rock that needed chivvying into fertility with carraigín moss hauled up through crashing breakers. There was plenty of soil, and the gulls and goats heaped nitrate upon nitrate. The abundant vegetation, insects and fish were, in the main, delicious, and none were deadly. At worst, islanders experienced flurries of gastric wind and the squits as they tested the island’s resources and formulated a decent, sustainable and sustaining diet, a little squirrel-heavy perhaps, though the nutty tasting meat could be made interesting with permutations of herbs, tart medlars and honey.

With no shared cultural memory or preconceptions, and under severe material constraints, all and any technique imaginable was used to make long-term shelter. A cluster of adobe huts rose up in the rocky scrub, timber tree houses perched in the fringes of the woods, caves in the cliffs were hollowed further inwards. And as the islanders worked together, Babel was overturned. One tongue wrapped round the sounds of another’s; vocabularies melded and split their differences; meanings were matched and traded. Soon a serviceable mongrel language was spoken, though there would be no time for writing to emerge before the island was discovered and Mainlandish seized dominion. Which was when and how the islanders would eventually come to realise the significance of their physiological differences: of their varying facial features, skin, hair and eye colours, their tail and wing stubs, webs and scales. Until then, they perceived only commonality of purpose, and continuities with the creatures around them. One person was strong in the upper body like a tree, another able to manage on very little sleep, like a butterfly, another was good at stripping bark, another at whistling against the wind. Together, these variations made for collective resilience, which yellow or black hair had no bearing on.

Then babies started arriving. The first birth had been a shock to all but Chiaki of the caves, who had come striding into the hut where Girt lay screaming, Gamini holding on to her like a branch in a storm, and other islanders screaming and fainting or running away or leaning in for a closer look then screaming and burying their heads in their arms against the wall then looking again and screaming and turning away. Chiaki had known how to escort the howling creature into their world, and Girt had known how to nurse this new person that was her and not her. The islanders visited the hut to introduce themselves to the baby and to revere the new seam, the gateway from elsewhere between Girt’s thighs. As the baby grew, its cries becoming less like a gull’s, its movements less like an upturned beetle’s, more babies arrived, and the islanders accepted this process of multiplication as they accepted the gifts and riddles that had begun arriving from the seam between sea and sky: as the issue of a structure beyond the reach of eyes, minds and words, but which could be heard faintly, its reverberations drifting in on the forever winds.

Girt shifted the night bowl to her left hip. The bowl was a substantial piece of sky-blue Sèvres porcelain, gilt-trimmed with richly chased lion-head handles and a cabochon hand painted with a froth of flowers framed by impossible, symmetrical laurel. Its flawless white interior set off the deep yellow puddle, like a fresh egg. She turned her pale moon of a face to Gamini, dark and slender like a cypress tree.

‘Yes, a water-raising day,’ he said.

The children, Hon and Kit, burst from the hut, pursued by Krantz, a sallow, quiet old man with watery grey eyes.

‘What was that for?’ he called after them gruffly, rubbing his chin. The children ran off to the cliffs. He muttered, shook his head and shuffled off into the scrub.

As Girt and Gamini stood quietly together, Lolly emerged from her hut. Girt had sensed Lolly almost speak out several times since the fox in the clearing. She had felt her fold out her power like a wing, only to tuck it back in and wriggle comfortably in place, letting Girt know she would let fly one day.

Girt placed her hand briefly in the small of Gamini’s back and set off for the waste pit, her scalp a little hot with that unpleasant sensation that now arrived even with the thought of Lolly. Gamini must feel it too, though he had not mentioned it yet.

Gamini crouched at the communal stove and struck a match.

‘Don’t let the wind kill it.’ said Lolly, behind him. ‘Each match takes us closer to their end.’ He held his breath. The flame guttered and died.

‘Just saying it can make it happen,’ said Gamini with a note of rebuke. Lolly took a step back. Gamini struck another match.

‘The flame, like a fox, licked the wood into red heat,’ said Lolly. The flame found the tinder and took to it nicely. Gamini rose and turned.

‘You make things happen,’ he said.

‘He touched her,’ said Lolly, opening her many layered wrappings. Gamini reached in, his thumb hunting out her nipple like a blind whelp. She leaned in, tugged the taught skin of his neck with her teeth, and withdrew to the hut, gowns gaping, pausing at the door to call over her shoulder, ‘So she ate him’.

*

Kit grimaced with earnest application as her hand, not even holding on, roughly followed Hon’s round the winch handle’s circuit.

‘One more turn,’ said Hon. ‘Ready?’

He exaggerated his effort so that Kit, his puppet, his plaything, would step up her effort too.

‘Where’s the drop up to now?’ he asked.

Kit got down on her belly, shuffled through the dust and prickly tussocks to the edge of the cliff and peered down its craggy face. Among the gannets a cage of rocks hung like a menace, swaying gently just a couple of arm lengths below her. Beneath it, many, many, many lengths beneath, the big flat boulder lay waiting.

‘Nearly here!’ said Kit.

*

The riddles and gifts from the seam were stowed in a long hut equidistant from the huts, the treehouses and the caves. People popped by to look and tinker, or came together to wonder, guess and debate. When something arrived, bobbing in a sealed crate in the natural harbour or strewn across the beaches or rocks, its complex, worked form awakened something in the islanders – though not all things spoke to all islanders, and some things were only heard by one person. That person would respond unpredictably to shapes, textures or moving parts; their limbs and fingers knew something they didn’t. One woman had snatched up a cornopean, held it to her lips and startled the gathered company with a throaty, brassy trill that no one recognised as the signal for a departing mail coach. To the panic of onlookers, one man, on prising open a keg, scooped up a handful of lard and shovelled it into his mouth, the musk having pricked his nostrils and awakened something deep. Blankets, axes, lengths of twine – these had been simple to understand, since they spoke directly to universal needs. And for some, the strain of an upward swing, the indent of a shaft on the shoulder, gravity’s pull on the axe head was stored in their muscles and joints as distinctly as a memory was stored in the head. Where samples of seeds, a barrel of beans and other oddments resembling already familiar foodstuffs required minimal interpretation, tubs of maple syrup, double-refined sugar and a selection of glue samples were more cautiously explored than the lard. Embroidered slippers and purses, ornamental stools and a bark canoe set new standards for what islanders had already been cobbling together anyhow; and bolts of cloth, samples of carpet and tanned moose hide provided new means for making everyday things. The islanders instinctively leaned in to a parlour stove and a cooking stove, their dissimilarities passing them by. Though some items had to wait for other ones to arrive to make sense of them: candles were eventually  illuminated by matches, tobacco by pipes. A church bell was used as a cover for coils of rope, and a chiffoniere became the sombre resting place for sets of dentures made from dead soldiers’ teeth. A pair of moose antlers drew a mystified blank from everyone. And there was a class of objects that spoke to no one but Gamini, among them a theodolite, a model steam locomotive, two model bridges, a portfolio of diagrams of winching systems and viaduct designs and a case of fancy soaps.

Yesterday’s tides had delivered a crate of twenty flutes and a set of obstetric and gynaecological instruments. Being technical machines, girded with metal bands and levers and involving an element of assembly, the flutes were directed to Gamini. He had one together in no time. The smooth wood had lay contentedly in the flesh of his palms, warming to their curves; working the silver levers, the stoppered holes in the tube dutifully opened and closed, just as anticipated. This was an optical instrument, a way of seeing round corners. But the evening light could not be coaxed far into the end of the tube, let alone out through the lateral holes. This morning he poured water along the bore and measured the throw of streams that escaped through holes. This was a good precision irrigation system for very small but potent plants, the seeds for which could turn up any day.

Inside the long hut, Chiaki was investigating the medical instruments, feeling her way around their inquiring curves and authoritative shafts. A uterine dilator, its handles longer than its blades, was like the wading birds that plucked molluscs from the harbour mud at low tide. An irrigator was serpentine, insinuating; a repositor confusing. But the syringe pricked Chiaki in her lost place. As she twisted the handle of the ecraseur, the chain loop tightened and that lost place grew. Spreading the handles of the Haighton-type forceps, the scissoring opened a corridor. The horn speculum, with its flared head, forced the passage wider. Shadowy figures were gathering there. The anaesthesia mask under her fingers, with its muzzling armature and fixing spring, induced another world into full dimensions. Chiaki stepped in. The gatherings were replicated again and again: clusters of white-clad figures, each a short distance from the next and all layered up, stacked in a hard shiny hut to a height made terrible with brightness and shouting. Chiaki joined the nearest group, grasped the decapitating hook and calmly pulled against a threat she could not see. All was the odour of iron and soap and shit; all was cries and sobs; all was slippery metal, wood, flesh. One sharp yank with the hook and that other world of red and white fell back in on itself.

*

The sun had passed its highest point, and the sea was taking a break from crashing about on the rocks. The islanders had gathered and were deciding who should release the drop.

Someone suggested that Aoibheann might like to. Something productive after her fall yesterday. But Aoibheann didn’t want any more attention.

‘Or Kit,’ offered Hon. ‘Kit’s never done it.’

Kit gasped with fear and excitement. Someone pointed out that she wouldn’t be able to manage it. Kit planted her feet squarely and bulked up her posture.

‘Maybe with just a little help,’ said Girt.

It was agreed. Kit would set off her first drop.

The fan of ropes was hitched in place, their passage back to each of the six wells checked and cleared. Kit and Girt stepped up to the apparatus, Girt clasping the pin firmly, Kit laying her hands on her mother’s, frowning with concentration. The assembly gave out a low hum which rose in pitch and volume, slid from a hum to a bray to a full-blast, open-mouth, lung-top chorus, splitting into a close-packed harmony that trembled like a heat haze.

Girt pulled. The pin was stiff. She pulled again and dislodged it a little, then pulled harder. It gave itself up suddenly. Her arm jerked back, hitting Kit on the chin. The drop plunged. Kit lost her footing. The ropes and vessels and wells thundered tremendously. Gamini flew forward to scoop Kit away from the cliff edge. The well water rose. The cage of rocks hit its mark below. The crowd cheered and Kit tried not to cry.

On the flat boulder, Lolly stretched out on her front, her net bag let drop from one hand, the other reaching for something just beyond her fingertips. Her head, wrenched to one side, swelled purple above the eye; her thigh was smashed beneath the cage of rocks. Scattered and glinting about the shoreline were many silver spoons. Another gift from the seam.

*

Lolly was found the next day. She’d not slept in her hut the previous night, but this was not remarkable. The island population was not set solid into family cells – a person might rear a child with one person and have an equally close relationship with another – and so where one slept was not a given. And often, people simply bedded down wherever tiredness sunk them. Most islanders accepted this and rubbed along perfectly well. Affiliations reoriented, tightening and slackening like skin over working muscles.

The cage of rocks had already resumed its gradual ascension of the clifftop when Gamini spotted her body. He had taken Hon and Kit down to the rocks to gather the latest gift from the seam, scattered and glinting among the rocks. He had called to Lolly with no response. He saw that her leg was badly hurt, and that she had dropped away. He shook her but she did not come back. The children stood watching, curious. They wanted to touch the thing that was sticking out from her leg. They shooed away the flies as an excuse to get a little closer. Gamini was stern and sent them to get Chiaki. He too wanted to touch that thing sticking out of Lolly’s leg. Was it coming out, or going in?

*

The first funeral on the island was a confused affair several weeks after the accident, which was how long it took for Chiaki to persuade everyone that Lolly had dropped away and wasn’t coming back. Eventually, the stench had forced a decision. Lolly’s body had begun to smell like the great horned owl, which the islanders had been shocked to discover two summers back. Apart from these owls, all creatures on the island were edible to someone or other. Putrefaction had been a nasty novelty. The question now was what to do about it. About her. The smell urged danger, distance. But it was Lolly, who should be kept close.

After days of elliptical debate, it was finally decided that Lolly’s body should be sent to the seam. She had dropped away and got lost. That part of herself that was awake was missing from the island, and since anything else that was ever found came from the seam, that was the most likely place she would find herself.

Once Lolly was reunited, she might need help finding her way back. Work began on a large structure of stacked hewn stones around a wooden armature, upward tending, tapering to a point and topped with a bright metal dish, a gift, that flashed in the sun. Gamini, having recently come to an understanding with the flutes, suggested they make a similar but bigger sound for Lolly to strike for when the sun was in her eyes, and a team set to work with chisels, hewing holes from the rocky promontory that faced the morning ingress of the sun, angling the aperture to respond with a deep howl when the dominant wind passed over it.

Lolly’s body was clad in squares of jade held together by wire, to better hold its shape, and stowed in a canoe, along with some supplies – a whistle, tobacco and pipe, dry biscuits, a pot of jam – and gifts for whoever might be encountered. Not knowing who this might be, it was decided to offer whatever there was a surfeit of: a flute, a theodolite, lard and some glass beads. For navigation home, a stitched picture of the island, imagined as if seen from the seam, was tucked beneath Lolly’s head. And in case it took a long time for her to return, a wax impression was made of her face and stored in a specially excavated small, deep cave at the island’s centre.

The islanders stood at the clifftop until the canoe disappeared.

‘When will she come back?’ asked Kit that evening in the hut.

‘She might not,’ said Girt.

Gamini frowned. He had noticed Girt finding his time with Lolly difficult to bear. He saw she was as troubled by Lolly’s dropping away as anyone, but some part of her seemed relieved. Which made him feel warm and sad for her, as he would for a fly in a web.

‘If I fall away and don’t come back,’ said Kit, ‘Plant me in the ground with a nut in my mouth so the tree grows and you all have to eat the nuts and have a bit of me in you.’

Hon howled in horror.

‘I want us all to be laid in the earth,’ said Gamini, ‘our heads together at its centre, our feet pointing to the seam, with a thick crust of grass covering us.’

‘You’d take us all with you?’ said Krantz, wide-eyed.

‘You can come later if you like. But we end up together.’

‘Just throw me to the animals,’ said Girt.

The children slipped away to bed and Krantz shuffled out into the evening. Gamini joined Girt by the fire, an arm round her shoulders. As they stared at the flames, she thought about Lolly. Her scalp turned as unpleasantly hot as before. Lolly was still here somewhere.

Gamini reached into her garments, seeking out the blind nipple, which came out to greet his thumb. He moved his hand down, following the drumlin of her belly, the scarp of her hip, to her thigh, strong as a tree. He squeezed the flesh, feeling for the hardness within, thinking of Lolly’s meat and the pale stick that had been trying to leave or enter.