– wire that sags, rotting posts. There is a sign by a break in this fence which reads Do Not Use In Wet Weather – but Maggie has often used these steps when the rain has been so heavy that it has bruised her. She’s used them in a thunderstorm. She’s used them at night.
They are slick, black steps cut into the rocks and which lead down to a small harbour. Uneven steps, and steep. Once, perhaps, they’d been used for smuggling since the lighthouse’s beam never reaches them and they can’t be seen from the sea; but they are not used for that now. They wind down into darkness and end, abruptly, on a slab of rock. This slab is the quayside. It is lost entirely at high tide and so it is both rough with barnacles and velvety with weed, and Maggie is careful when treading on it. She comes here three times a week, or more: Pigeon is kept here.
Pigeon. Named by Maggie herself, long ago.
So she can always find her way home.
Maggie started early today. She dressed in the half-dark, made a flask of tea, put a head-torch on and made her way down those steps. She looked east, as she readied the boat. She looked through the harbour’s narrow opening and saw the dawn – pink, grey, the last blue of night.
And she’d hauled on the cord to start the outboard motor, thrummed across the water, past Sye and Bundy Head. A cool, early morning. The smell, always, of fish and diesel fumes. She’d felt the motor’s vibration, heard the quiet slosh at her feet of water that had come aboard in various ways – off the pots, or rainwater – and it is the same every time. It does not change – how Pigeon smells, how the silence rushes in when she turns the engine off. There are the same rituals as there always were, and she finds a comfort in them. Pigeon is familiar. So are the orange fibreglass buoys, the sound of the sea against the boat’s sides, the gulls that follow hopefully, the ghostly loom of the lobster pots as she pulls them up from the dark.
Nothing changes on Parla. That’s what she was told, when she first came. It stays the same – just so you know … And Maggie had loved that. She’d loved the idea of a safe, strong, unchanging life. Just Tom, and her, and the water.
But then he died. And everything changed. Nothing changes here proved, in fact, to be the greatest of all lies. He died and so much died with him; countless more things were lost. She learnt this: that grief changes more than you ever thought it could. All certainty goes away. All strong things stop being strong. Tom was there and then he was not: and so what could be relied upon? Nothing felt safe any more: a lone sock felt symbolic; an embrace from a friend seemed like a trap; letters had no meaning or too many meanings so that sorry for your loss felt coded, impenetrable, too hard to understand. Maggie believed, for a time, that she was being lied to. She’d eyed others, looking for that lie. Nothing can be trusted – to be kind, or safe, or to stay with her.
I will not feel or care for anything. I will rely on nothing.
But no-one can live like that. Maggie tried to be self-reliant, and hard – but she could not fully. She had to give shape to her days. She had to hold her hand out or she’d sink, she knew that. And it was routines that Maggie turned to. Tentatively, she sought comfort in small, necessary, practical things – so she’d make proper coffee in a cafetiere, clean the bath, pluck tomatoes from her plants and inhale their bitter smell. She’d pull the cord on Pigeon as she used to when Tom was still living. She’d bind the claws of lobster with coloured elastic bands.
And this place. Coming here.
Maggie is walking, now. She has left the half-moon harbour; she is walking down the island’s western coast. The wild west, Tom called it: bare, fully exposed. No other islands lie to the west of Parla; from here, there is only the open sea. And centuries of storms and thundering water have battered it – picked off rocks, and scooped out caves so that this coastline echoes. The sea booms; the birds wail. She hears them now, as she walks.
This was her routine, too: she’d walk on this coast at every low tide. For two years Maggie would come, twice daily – so she has come to know each stile, each thistle patch, each rabbit hole. She knows each track through the gorse, how the word Tom! bounces back to her from every dank cave wall. And in the early days, before she believed that he was truly gone, and not returning, she’d step down the wooden staircase onto Lock-and-Key and tread across its sand. For it is on this beach that a whale stranded itself, where the best shells have come, where there has been driftwood so smooth and bleached by the waves that they looked like bones and it’s here that Maggie has found pottery shards and a piece of glass that had been so worn, so turned over and over by the sea that it had been rolled into a ball. A marble as green as an eye. There is a fence, too, on which those lost rubber boots have been hung – boots that have been washed ashore without their other, matching halves – so they look out to sea forlornly. And if something of worth – something she’d loved, and still loved – was to wash ashore, she has always believed it would be here. This beach.
Lock-and-Key. Named because the headland to its south is shaped, or partly, as the beach is. It has the same outline, but inverted. One might fit the other … If you squint. So she was told.
Maggie steps down the staircase now.
The row of rubber boots is still here – still waiting.
Tom. Who knew all the beaches. He knew each cave, each promontory. Tom was Parlan entirely, and so he knew the history of houses, the names in the graveyard, how puffins fly, how to coax the lugworm out, how to read the weather by clouds or a sheep’s positioning, how to cook mussels in garlic and white wine. So many stories in his head – of love and loss, of the old pig farm. Maggie had been in awe of this.
You’re lucky, she’d told him.
I feel it. Kissing her.
She was told time would help. People said it to her, meaning well: give it time … But time does not help. All that happens with time is that you grow tired – so hugely, indescribably tired. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was in the gold band on her finger but he was not in the house, not in their bed. And she began to grow tired of walking on this beach: walking on this beach meant she was looking at each sodden piece of cloth, each inch of rope, each footprint in the sand thinking is that his …? She would hurry towards new driftwood. She’d make her way to each line of faded plastic in case it held a clue. And one dusk – one awful, half-lit, winter dusk – she’d thought she’d seen a person lying on Lock-and-Key. In the gloom, she saw it: a dark and indefinable shape at the water’s edge. So she ran. She dropped to her knees as she reached it. She plunged her hands into the shape, gasping, swearing, saying Tom with sand in her mouth and tears in her eyes – and it was weed. Just weed. Two metres or more of tangled wrack which had fooled her, briefly, in the evening light. And she knelt by that weed, and sobbed. He is not coming back to me. He is not coming back to me. She knew, she knew. She knew he was not. She had to admit this, kneeling there.
Maggie never wants another moment like that moment – no more crouching next to weed. No more Tom! – sand-tasting. And so for four years she has tried to live a small life. A safe life. No changes.
No hope, and no loss.
But now this … A man. A man has come ashore. Nathan says just passing and she spills her yellow paint, and for one tiny, impossible moment …
Maggie closes her eyes. The wind finds her hair and it tugs, tugs.
I have to see this man. She must. He is not Tom; she knows he is not. But he is a new, rolled mass of weed; he is a new indefinable shape that she must kick at, at least, to make sure of. For otherwise, she will always be thinking what if …?
She will see him tomorrow.
This human driftwood. This jetsam that washed up with more unwanted things.
* * *
He is sleeping again. He is upright but his eyes are closed. Tabitha smiles, and takes the empty mug from his hand.
People are children again, when they