The Islands by William Wall

Author:William Wall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822983132
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

My mother’s horror was terrible. I remember very little of it. There was a time when I recalled it all but I found it useless in dealing with her life or my own. Memory is an overrated capacity. It is most useful to those who need to deny things. I remember she was upstairs in bed and my sister Jeannie and I were sitting in the kitchen. There were candles on the table because the electricity cable had failed, as it often did—boats were forever anchoring on it, despite the warning signs. My father and Richard Wood were upstairs. We could hear my mother’s voice. It came in rapid stuttering bursts, like a sewing machine. I remember that an earwig walked across the table in front of us. Jeannie pinched it up and held it to the light. I saw its jaws working, its tail bending and straightening, its antennae. Then she dropped it into the candle. It fell into the molten wax and settled quickly down. It drowned. In the morning there was the shadow of the earwig in the cold wax.

My mother’s horror was also perfectly reasonable. One of the things we forget is that the world itself is madder than anything our heads can make. How should one remember one’s child falling into the sea? Sustaining injuries against the cliff on the way down? After that everything is impossible.

My mother’s horror was all-encompassing, all-consuming. It devoured the night and the day, the sun and the moon, God and the future and everything in between. It paralyzed us. It divided us.

Jeannie was crying too. I resented her for doing it. It seemed to me she wanted as always to be the center of attention but nobody paid her any heed. Her tearfulness turned into wailing and then I wanted to choke her. I slapped her once but it only made her worse. Shut up, I said, it’s bad enough. Then I said, A pity it wasn’t you.

Later, the night before we came out of the island—How long was it between Em’s death and our crossing?—I woke to hear running and urgent voices. I stood on the bed to see out the window but I could not see the ground. I ran down and saw that the front door was open. Richard had been sleeping on the kitchen floor. His sleeping bag was empty. I closed the door and went back to bed. My mother’s room was empty too. It meant that she had run away again.

After a time I heard the voices coming back. Richard, my father, my mother. They did not go to bed. I fell asleep. In the morning Jeannie said she had been asleep all night but I knew she was not. She was listening too.

Where did my mother go that night? Nobody tells children these things. They hope, maybe they believe, that we sleep through every danger, that childhood is, in fact, a kind of sleepwalk through their adult world. Like someone said that madness is a nightmare in a waking world.

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