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.
Chapter Eleven
The end of each year heralded highlights of island life: this was the time of the sheep shearing and the potato harvest, the Hunt and the Summer Solstice Masked Ball, Christmas and then New Year – busy times for both the doctor and Minister Kohler. As December approached, the minister’s sermons would become longer and longer. His congregation fidgeted under his stern gaze as he wheezed out his warnings of the peril that lay in wait for the soul indulging in activities traceable to pagan rituals and heathen practices.
“Desire and restraint,” he announced, “quarrel over our every waking moment, they fight over the weakest part of what makes us human! Consider, ladies and gentlemen, the situation in the Garden of Eden.” He loved the pauses in his sermons: the abyss of quiet like a cliff edge that launched his words towards God for His blessing, then allowed the meaning to parachute down onto the field of upturned faces. “Eve and Adam and the serpent all succumbed to desire in the full knowledge of their sin!” He watched for a sign of the impact of his words, praying for assistance in this thankless task. “Consider too: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane! He desired to live! He feared death! He appealed to God: ‘Take this cup away from me!’ Yet he was the Son of God, and despite his fear, despite his desire, he practised restraint and submission, saying: ‘Thy will, not mine.’” He leaned right over the pulpit for emphasis as he said this, looking down on his pitiful flock in the corrugated landscape of the pews. Often, of late, he had considered going back to the mainland. He felt weakened by the daily labour of his mission, an eternal pushing of a boulder uphill. Yet this was his restraint: God had lashed him to this cross, this place.
Minister Kohler rocked back on his heels, gripping the edge of the pulpit, and contemplated the beams that held the thatch roof of the church in place. “And so, as we near the time when we celebrate the anniversary of the coming of Christ to the earth, let us be mindful of the choices we make. Choices to obey God’s mighty will – or to follow our own corrupt one.” He never went as far as to name the Hunt and the Masked Ball; everyone knew what he was referring to, and for the following month few in the village could look him in the eye. Nothing was going to dissuade the majority from these observances – surely God knew that they were only a bit of revelry, which never got so out of hand that a prayer or two wouldn’t rectify matters? Only Fabio Bagonata, who lived in perpetual dread of the end of the world, would shout “Amen!” with enthusiasm at the end of the minister’s service, and avoided the temptations of the Hunt and the Ball each year by going fishing.
The build-up started with the sheep shearing and the potato harvest. The potatoes were said to be the best in the world, and the portion that was earmarked for export had to be bagged, and the wool carded and spun in time for the departure of the December ship. This same vessel brought to the island post and gifts and books and supplies, as well as occasional locals returning from the mainland, and island teenagers returning from boarding school for the summer holidays, full of stories to savour of life away from an island existence.
Officer Dorado Bardelli was the first to know the expected time of arrival of a ship, as she was in contact with the captain by radio. Sometimes a ship would arrive during the night, and the children would wake early and run down to the harbour, where the bay beyond accommodated the large and imposing ship, too big by far to fit into the small fishing harbour. The best was when it arrived in the day and the weather was good. Mrs Mobara would let the children out of school to climb up the black volcanic slopes of the mountain to the lookout point, trying to be the first to see the speck on the horizon that would slowly grow into a huge ship carrying dreams from far away.
As soon as someone had spotted the vessel, the children would run down to the harbour, hearts racing, to see how the bow thrusters brought the ship to a halt out in the bay, and how the huge anchors fore and aft were released with a splash into the water. They crowded onto the end of the breakwater, barely heeding their mothers’ shouts to them to be careful. The barge, run by Frank Bardelli, would set out for the ship, coming alongside to receive the cargo hauled from the holds by the ship’s crane and swung out over the barge in nets and containers. Then the barge would ferry the precious items into the harbour, where the process would be repeated with the cranes onshore.
In her office, Officer Dorado Bardelli, who doubled up as the customs official, would oversee the issuing of the goods the islanders had ordered. Some things could be opened straight away and savoured, others had to wait for the Summer Solstice Ball or Christmas or birthdays, when they would provide a further surge of pleasure. Fabio Bagonata always received one of the largest parcels: all his spare earnings went on tinned goods, which he stacked in his increasingly cramped cottage in preparation for the end of the world.
By night, half the islanders would be drunk, getting into fights and throwing up their imported wine and food over their new shoes. The year after Sophia was sent into exile, Mr Bacon – as the villagers called Giorgio Bagonata, the shopkeeper, the fourth person on the island rich enough to order