via his office, where there was a bottle of whisky and one of breath freshener in a locked desk drawer. He washed his hands, noting again the puckers in the skin of both palms, then rubbed them roughly as was his daily habit, hoping this could stop their progression. Then he closed up the mortuary and strode down the corridor.
With some ambivalence he saw two women related by marriage, Rumer and Cyn Peters, waiting for him outside his office. “Good morning, ladies,” he said, noticing how Cyn, the older one, pivoted, holding her body towards him, her contours softening. He must tread carefully, for she was a good-looking woman, troubled frequently by mysterious gynaecological complaints, whose husband the mayor’s attention had wandered elsewhere. Rumer, on the other hand, irritated him by stubbornly refusing to notice he was a man at all. “Get John to draw your folders and I’ll see you in the casualty. I’m on my way down there now.”
“Oh no, Dr Prosper, there’s nothing wrong with us,” said Cyn, flushing. “There’s just something . . .” She glanced at her daughter-in-law.
“There’s something you need to know,” Rumer said firmly.
Chapter Nine
Frieda was putting out food for the ancestors: some potato soup. She hadn’t been able to help fight the fire because of her small charge, but she also hadn’t been able to sleep until she’d heard via the children’s network that the fire was out and no one badly injured. Exhausted, she had gone to bed, but Gulai had woken early, and shouted and laughed and sang from her cot until Frieda gave up and got up. She’d fed the little mite her breakfast, then set about making the doctor’s lunch, knowing he would come home from the hospital tired and hungry. And now, in the garden, she stood a while quietly, thinking of her father, lost at sea; mindful of her mother, silenced by a stroke; her paternal grandfather, diabetic, infected; her paternal grandmother, who went to sleep and never woke up; her maternal grandmother, lost to a cancer that flowered in her breast; her maternal grandfather, yellow with liver failure; her own husband killed in an accident on an oil rig, and one of her sisters taken suddenly one afternoon with headache. And Angelique, Angelique. She said a prayer to them all, made supplication on behalf of the living, gave thanks that the alarm had been raised timeously, that only one boat had been destroyed and no lives, for health and food and shelter, for her niece’s recovery, and for her place in the weave of things.
She had not yet heard about the crowd that had congregated in the early hours at Sophia’s cottage; she did not yet know about Astrid’s death.
She poured a little soup out onto the ground in the customary manner, to give thanks to the ancestors and to the earth from whence all life comes.
“What the hell are you doing?!” The doctor, bearing down.
Frieda stepped back, startled out of prayer. “Giving thanks . . .”
“Thanks!” Behind him stood Sister Veronica, her mouth pulled tight.
“It is our custom . . .”
“It is your custom to throw food away, to lie and steal!” Orion’s rage erupted red and raw from deep inside the well of him. He had been hoodwinked – why, the whole village knew about the betrayal! They had all been laughing behind his back these months. “I will not be made a fool!”
“But . . .”
“I know what you’ve been up to with that . . . that charlatan! Your problem, you know what your problem is? You like undermining authority! That’s the last of it. Pack your bags right now. You’re a bad influence, you stay away from now on!”
That is how Frieda moved out and Veronica moved in; how the motherless child of many mothers lost two more, gained another.
On the other side of the village, another woman was forcibly brought home and told to pack and leave. They say she fought like a wild animal, refusing to go until she had seen Astrid’s body in the mortuary and had prepared her charge herself for the spirit crossing. A needle quietened her. Thereafter, the doctor accompanied the mayor and Officer Bardelli across the channel to Impossible Island in the police launch with Sophia, drowsy and shackled.They released her there to live in a fisherman’s hut with the basics for survival.
A notice was posted at the police station by the council that thenceforth Impossible Island was to be used for exile purposes for miscreants and outcasts. No landing would be permitted save for the regular guano- and penguin-egg-gathering expeditions; fishermen were only permitted to land if forced by inclement weather. No one except the authorities were to have contact with the exile. Anyone found breaching these rules and orders would be fined a month’s wages.
There were those who read the notice, made the sign to ward off evil and nodded their heads, satisfied that the witch had been exorcised. For who but a witch could produce milk when she was near the change of life and had never had a baby of her own? Who but a witch would harbour and encourage an arsonist? And when she gave birth to a son eight months later, they made the sign again. Must be the devil’s child, they concluded. It was unnatural to bear a child at her age, and with no man in sight!
There were also those who shook their heads, appalled, but they did not dare to question. After all, look what happened to those who did.
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