The Islanders
I. TIGER SONGS
You could not compete with his mother’s mouth. The ceaseless stok- ing of a fire fermenting inside. Hard candy cracking between her teeth, tongue twisting cherry stems or prodding the inside of her cheek. Restless tics that caught her son’s eye like an exposed nerve as she sat by the front door in the paisley-papered hall, listening for the signal.
Then it would come: the sound of neighbours clanging tin lids against the footpaths outside.
Her whole body would be wound and ready to spring, to let in the men with the shiny black guns. The back door in the kitchen would already be ajar, waiting to spit the men out into the tiny courtyard, among the linens wrinkling on the laundry line. And the men would disperse into the alleys between the blowsy-brown houses so they might hide from the Brits, or the peelers, in the outhouse with the rippled tin roof. Or jump into a car packed with still more men and still more guns. Or disappear through another sympathetic door.
A scream had nestled inside Jamie’s mother. He saw how it burned her throat if she held it in too long. Even in the midst of the densest riots, in the ripe, roiling heart of west Belfast, he heard her. In his sleep, he heard her. Yelling at the men in the blue berets until her voice blistered.
And where had it gotten her? Where had it gotten any of them? Jamie could tell you where it got him: the arse end of nowhere.
The morning dripped blue. Rain sharpened the wind as it rushed off the dimpled silver of the North Atlantic. Jamie paused and looked over his shoulder. He surveyed the grassy acres flowing unencumbered but for craggy outcrops and the occasional bright, whitewashed house — some with neat, fern-green shutters and red-berried vines, others ill-kept, dark cracks in the brick like vein-rot.
He was sitting alone on the shore with his aunt’s umbrella. He had kept to himself since she moved him out of Belfast. He had done the same back home, preferring the reliability of his own com- pany. But roaming solitude had not often been possible in the city, or within the anemic avocado walls of St. Brigid’s Home for Boys, where the relentless tumult of other people crowded in on him until he felt only a loose, downy sense of himself, like a dandelion clock coming apart.
Here on the peninsula, he could be alone. He opened the umbrella his aunt had badgered him into taking — what adult owned a million silk scarves but only one umbrella, and it was broken? — and tilted it against the sand, obscuring himself from view. From his pocket, he took the lighter his only friend, Grady, had given him. A dirty old brass Zippo they figured had once belonged to a cool-tempered cowboy all the way in the American West, who taught his sons to tame horses and chewed on cheap cigars.
An orange bud sprang from the lighter, and began to feed on the riddling patterns of purple embroidery along one of Aunt Lydia’s scarves. He did not know why he had stolen the scarf, or why he wanted to burn it. But a pain churned in him when she asked — again and again — how he was feeling, and this was the only thing that eased it.
For the briefest moment, as the scarf burned, Jamie’s heart stopped spinning. Seabirds circled overhead, and he felt their whirl- pool rhythm deep in the stillness of his body. The electricity of on- coming rain prickled his lungs. In his hand was a contained chaos that he could ignite and extinguish at will. He let the cold ruffle of the tide roll under his toes, and tug at his feet. He dropped the scarf into the water and watched it be devoured as it drifted away.
It was then that the girls appeared. He saw them on the virides- cent fields that swelled and sloped into tumbledown rocks leading to the beach. They were barefoot, with matted oat-blond hair and dirty wool jumpers hanging down to their knees. They made their way across the beach, lugging a tin wash bucket between them. Jamie thought they looked like lost, limbo-bound children from some terrible fire-and-brimstone tale.
The girls crouched and began dipping red, roundish items from the bucket into the water. They rinsed and scrubbed with their little thumbs, minding their own, until the younger one let out a throat-frayed cry.
Thinking she might be hurt, Jamie ran toward them. Did a jellyfish get you? Let’s see that foot, then. Where are your ma and da? As he spoke, his voice grew distant, as if swept to the other end of a wind tunnel. All he fully registered was the blood smeared across the bucket, humming and frenzied with flies, and down the ropy knitwork of the girls’ jumpers.
The smaller girl kept wailing. Her mouth widened, a pit of em- bery darkness. A fly crept up her tongue, flicked into the air, and disappeared into her eye.
Jamie was too frightened to move. His body felt reduced to a rootless pulse — until the older girl reached up and set the salve of her hand on his forehead. They stared into each other’s eyes. Hers were silvery sage, like his mother’s, and the arid cores of Jamie’s own eyes filled with the nourishing rustle of trees, the flighty whistles and bleats of birds.
There was kinship here; he knew it instantly. He reached for her, wanting to hold her close. Through her small hand alone, he felt the strength of her command, the power to envelop and guide like a high wind. She spoke to him, a voice the green of sunlit grass: You are a force, Jamie. A fighter. But a fighter needs a cause. Belong to us. Be one of ours. Just step into the water … come along, a little farther, so we may be certain you are who we think you are.
He was in the water only a moment before Aunt Lydia was standing in front of him, hysterical in a purple housecoat of tissue- paper satin. Trembling waist-deep in the water, soundlessly calling his name.
His aunt’s voice slowly broke through as she hauled him back to the shore. “Jamie? Can you hear me?”
“Did you see them?” he asked.
Lydia clutched the collar of her housecoat and tried to hold the flimsy umbrella over both herself and her nephew, who would not stand still. “See who?”
“The little girls.” Jamie looked around, but the girls were gone. It was only him, alone with his aunt, as she hounded him with her dainty tiptoe run. Not letting up an inch with that banjaxed um- brella, flapping its unhinged wing, half of its ribs snapped.
“Jamie, please, I need to get you inside,” Lydia said. She worried he would give himself pneumonia. She had spotted him only by chance, glancing out the window to see him wading into the wind- roused ocean. “There’s nobody here. Whoever it was that frightened you —”
“But they were right here a second ago.” Jamie moved up and down the same patch of pebbly beach, one hand to his head, clutch- ing a fistful of hair. His aunt kept trying to pin him to one spot, but his feet were agitated, as if sensing cracks in the ground, impending free fall. “I swear I saw them … there was this bucket …”
“What bucket?” Lydia asked. “There was blood all over it.”
“Goodness,” she said. “A bucket of fish, probably.” So much sudden movement had nauseated her, and she stared into the wob- bly middle distance. “Places like this, you know … maybe that’s normal around here.”
It was the blood that set him off, she was sure. What other reason could there be for two small girls upsetting him so much?
“Look, Jamie … look,” she said, gesturing to the water running clear along the shore, quivering over sand and smooth, black stones. “Right as rain. Any blood’s been washed away by now.”
She waited for some sign of relief to pass over him. Though if it did, how would she know? In their time together, Lydia had come to know the quietly stormy expression and sharp, glittery-green eyes that defined his face. The impossible bed-head of his badly trimmed hair, the same cool black as his mother’s. The stomp in his step. Shoulders hunched and taut as he walked, though he was all of eleven, as if he were moving against his own private squall. Yet she continued failing, day in and day out, to reach him. To open him up.
“Catch yourself on,” he said, growing frustrated. “You’re not going to faint over a wee bit of blood, are you?”
“It’s you I’m worried about.” She touched his arm, inviting him closer, but he shrugged her off. “Jamie, what you say happened doesn’t make any sense.”
“What I say happened?” he asked.
Jamie wondered at the look on his aunt’s face. Soft pity, a flinch of wariness. Like he was a helpless wild bird she meant to stifle in a tea towel and take home. He turned from her with a sense of both reeling and sinking, the disorienting blow of not being believed.
“I’ll run you a hot bath and that’s the end of it,” Lydia said, at last managing a feeble grip of his shoulder. “A nice hot bath fixes everything, or it bloody well ought to.”
Her nephew said nothing, just stared into some internal projec- tion being cast over the water.
Turning him toward their house and nudging him along, Lydia took in the peninsula’s mild mounds and squat, scruffy cliffs — the village as a whole closed off by the ocean’s steely bastion — and she was comforted by the thought that their new home looked like either the beginning or the end of the world.