Cover Blackbird.indd 1 30-9-2019 12:15:03

Memories are stories. Stories are fi ction.Do you trust your memories?

1968 – the Isles of Scilly in the Atlantic Ocean.Eight-year-old Robin is playing on the beach when she

sees something peculiar lying in the surf: a small object, wrapped in a blanket. It looks like a doll. She runs towards it, picks it up, and, in one horrible split second, she real-izes it is not a doll or a toy. It is real.

When she returns with her mother, the baby has van-ished. Robin’s mother warns her never to speak of the incident, claiming it has been a fi gment of her daugh-ter’s vivid imagination. But the image of the baby haunts young Robin every day.

Haunted by memories of the baby, Robin revisits the island twenty years later to fi nd out what really happened and what she saw that day.

Blackbird is a gripping pageturner that takes its readers on a journey from 1968 to 2035 in a moving and heart- warming tale about the power of memory, the power of story – and everything in between.

Blackbird was published in June 2019Lebowski Agency | Oscar van Gelderent: + 31 6 46096823e: oscar.vangelderen@lebowskipublishers.nl

Sarah Meuleman

Blackbird

Lebowski Agency, 2019

© Sarah Meuleman, 2019© Dutch translation: Hester Velmans, 2019© Lebowski Publishers, Amsterdam 2019Cover design: Peter de LangeCover image: Anna MorrisonPhotograph of the author: © Eric LangeTypesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout

www.lebowskipublishers.nlwww.overamstel.com

All rights reserved.Th is book or any portion there of may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

‘To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle – may they never give me peace.’

Patricia Highsmith

‘Blackbird fl y, blackbird fl y,Into the light of the dark black night.’

Th e Beatles

table of contents

synopsis 9

sample chaptersPrologue 13Part i 21

biography 95quotes 97

9

synopsis

1968. Robin, Blackbird’s main character, is a lively and crea-tive woman who had a traumatic experience when she was eight years old. On the island where Robin and her sin-gle mother used to vacation every summer, she had spotted something unusual, lying on the beach. Robin is a curious and adventurous little girl, and decides to fi nd out what it is. Slowly, she approaches the mysterious object in the sand and realizes it’s a doll, a small doll wrapped up in a white blanket. But when she comes even closer, to her horror she discovers that it is not a toy at all, it is not a doll. It is real.

Frantically, she tries to wake up the baby, but she’s un-able to. She runs to fi nd her mother, but when the two of them return, the baby has vanished without a trace. Robin’s mother tries to convince Robin that it was impos-sible she saw a baby on the beach and forbids her daughter to speak of the incident again.

Blackbird describes several emotional, decisive moments in the life of Robin as a little girl. Ever since that day on the beach she’s been struggling to come to terms with what she really saw. Was the baby a fi gment of her imagination? A wild and grim fantasy?

10

1990. Th e main story of Blackbird is set in the nineties when, after her mother has passed away, Robin bravely decides to return to the island to fi nd out what really happened on the beach all those years ago. Th is journey to the Isles of Scilly, a remote archipelago off the coast of England, is also Robin’s crusade to fi nd out what defi nes her as a person; ultimately, to understand who she is.

On the island she is welcomed by Faber, an eccentric taxidermist and an old friend of her mother’s. She gets the key to the dilapidated cottage on the beach where she used to stay with her mother, and where she hopes to fi nd some clues. She is assisted by Tess, a young woman who was her close childhood friend during the island summers. Th e two women fi nd that time hasn’t changed their friendship. Th e trust is there, they fi nd comfort in each other’s com-pany, tenderness, and even more.

Soon after Robin arrives on the Isles of Scilly, she real-izes that the islanders don’t want her there at all. Th ey don’t talk to her, they ignore her, or try to scare her off . It seems the Scillonians know something, share some dark secret. Why would an entire island keep a secret? What, or who, are the islanders trying to protect? And how about Faber and Tess; are they on Robin’s side? Or are they lying as well? Gradually Robin’s suspicions grow: is there anyone she can trust?

An important location in the story is (the real island of ) Gugh, a tiny place that is connected to the other islands by a strip of beach, Th e Cove, that is sometimes laid bare

11

by the tides – when you can easily cross it on foot – and sometimes engulfed by two strong surges. Her mother used to warn Robin about the place and called the wild surges the ‘two mouthed monster’. Th is strip of sand is where Robin made her discovery all those years ago. When she returns to Th e Cove she encounters Vera, a woman whose appearance initially shocks Robin because she looks so much like her deceased mother. Vera and her husband live in the only house on Gugh, a place where Robin will discover things about her past, secrets that will force her to re-write her personal history.

2035. Blackbird adds another layer to its story by embed-ding Robin’s adventure in a setting in the near future in New York. Rebecca is a beautician lost in a rather violent, unhealthy relationship who meets an older woman in the place for elderly where she works as a beautician. Th ir-ty-something Rebecca and the seventy-something woman become friends and the woman tells Rebecca a story. Rob-in’s story.

As Robin’s adventure unfolds in the narration of the old lady, we get to know Rebecca and follow how the older lady inspires Rebecca with Robin’s bravery. Robin inspires Rebecca, even emancipates her. Every day there’s a bit more powerful Robin in shy and hesitant Rebec-ca. So Blackbird becomes a story of how women (Robin, Tess, the old lady, Rebecca) can truly make one another stronger.

Th ere are multiple twists at the end of the book that

12

will certainly surprise the reader, but that also emphasize and give depth to the novels’ main themes.

Blackbird is a novel about memories and how they shape our identity. History and truth, the relation between those two concepts, are important themes in Blackbird that, be-tween the lines of a fast and twisty plot, poses its readers questions like: can we remember the truth? Is truth always fi ction? How do we create our personal history? Th e novel plays with the idea that every truth is a story, and therefore a version of what has happened.

Essentially, Blackbird is a story of hope and growth, a novel that secretly wants to do to its readers what the story in the novel does to its characters: inspire and empower.

prologue

15

summer

Isles of Scilly

‘Some stories are better if you listen to them with your eyes wide open. Hey, look at me, won’t you? If you’ll sit still I’ll tell you a story. Yeah, like that.’ Th e little girl nods, content; fi nally she has his undivided attention. She draws a circle in the sand with her fi nger.

‘Long ago there was this beautiful land called Lyonesse. People said there were lions that lived there, but that’s not true, because it was very close to England, and there’s no lions in England. Just think: you’d never be able to go play outside or ride your bike to the playground or to school, the scary lions would chase you, run after you real fast, ready to eat you all up.’ She shakes her head emphatical-ly. ‘No, in England, there’s only spiders, and those aren’t scary.’

She stares at the circle and sees the lions come to life, their gritty bodies surging from the sand to devour an eight-year-old girl. Hastily she erases the scene with her two hands.

She looks at Bill and wonders if he’s still listening. She goes on. ‘Everyone was happy in Lyonesse, they never had

16

any wars or fi ghts. But one day a wave came, an enormous wave, as big as a mountain, and it fl ooded the whole is-land, and all the people living there. Lyonesse sank deep down in the ocean and all that was left was these little bits that broke off . Th at’s where we are now, on one of the pieces that stayed afl oat. Get it?’

Bill is quiet. He doesn’t like stories, he’s too young to understand, and besides, Greek tortoises are horribly slow at everything they do. Of course she’d have preferred a cat or a dog or something normal, but Winnie bought her a tortoise because they live longer and so you get more out of them. But is that true? When a pet lives longer, do you get more out of it? Even if it can’t talk and hardly ever moves at all?

Th e girl sinks to her knees, looks Bill straight in the eye. ‘Sometimes, when the water recedes, other bits of Lyonesse come up to the surface. Th en suddenly there’s sand again and you can walk across from one island to the next. But you have to watch out, ‘cause the sea always comes back. Th e waves are strong, dangerous and fast, faster than any lion!’ She gazes at the tortoise, who stares blankly into space, sleepy and inert.

‘Faster than you, Bill, anyway. Th at’s for sure.’ She sighs. Not getting a little sister for her birthday is something she can understand, but a tortoise — what’s the point of that? At least cats and dogs make noises, they’ll come sit on your lap or they’ll bark because they want food or a walk or they need to pee. Bill doesn’t want anything, is always happy, or maybe always unhappy; how’s she supposed to tell? Grip-

17

ping his shell fi rmly with both hands, she picks him up and places him in the wheelbarrow next to her backpack.

Th e summer holidays are almost over, tomorrow they’re taking the ferry back to the mainland, and then on to Brighton and the big house with the blue room where they live. Winnie said she could go play for a bit, a last trek down the path with the gleaming pebbles that winds around the island. But don’t go down to Th e Cove, Winnie had said sternly, because there’s a monster with two mouths that lives there.

‘Look!’ She points at a long strip of white sand connect-ing the two islands: St. Agnes, where they’re standing, and over there Gugh, the tiny island where in summer they like to go hike and play. Funny name, Gugh. It sounds like a kind of glue, or something disgusting you’ve just touched by accident. Gugh!

She straightens her rain jacket. From the rock she’s stand ing on, she can see all the way to the far side of Gugh. Proudly she points to the red plastic binoculars hanging around her neck. ‘Th ese are spynoculars, Bill, real spynoculars. Th ey let me see real far, even beyond the horizon.’ She’s not sure what the horizon is or where it is exactly, but it’s an awesome word and it sounds very, very far away.

Carefully she pushes the wheelbarrow to the edge of the rock that sticks out over Th e Cove’s beach, stops next to the yellow sign with the stern letters that she’d read out loud to Winnie without faltering:

18

warning! danger of drowning! proceed at your own risk!

Th e monster with the two mouths is already here, chomp-ing huge bites out of the beach from either side. Where there’s sand now, soon there will be nothing but water; the waves will crash into each other like raging heavyweight boxers and it’s no longer safe for any boat to try making it across.

Th e girl presses the binoculars up to her face, scans the water and the big white house on top of the rocks, the only dwelling on Gugh. Th en down again, where the sand is so fi ne it trickles through your fi ngers like water. She needs to go back.

Just as she’s about to drop the binoculars, she spots something strange down on the beach: a white smudge, right by the water’s edge. She presses the binoculars more fi rmly to her eyes, cranes her head forward.

Yes, there’s something down there, it looks like a box, or a bag; something wrapped in a piece of fabric. Maybe it’s a towel left by some child playing there, or a toy rolled up in a cloth, the way she always rolls up her shovels and sand toys when she’s done on the beach. Or a doll.

She catches her breath. Th e white bundle is rocking gently from side to side. Yes, it’s a doll someone forgot, that’s it. It’s lying there small and vulnerable, on the verge of getting devoured by the two-mouthed monster.

Th e girl glances sideways at Bill, who’s still sitting mo-tionless in the wheelbarrow.

19

‘We have time,’ she says. ‘It isn’t far.’Bill doesn’t reply, of course. But the beach keeps shrink-

ing and she’s thinking of the yellow sign.‘No, Bill,’ she says at last. ‘It isn’t far, the sea’s calm. I’ll

be back before you know.’And she scrambles down, slips and slides along the

rocky slope on her slippers, grazing her knee on a nasty outcropping and fi nally landing on the sand on a single slipper. She tries wrenching the plastic sole of the other slipper from a cleft between two rocks, but it’s stuck fast, so she darts off on one slipper. Th e red binoculars swing wide, she pulls them off her neck and holds them tightly in her hand.

Now she can see everything with her own two eyes: the sand is littered with seaweed and shells. Halfway down the beach an empty Coke bottle rolls across the sand and beyond it, close to Gugh: the white bundle.

Th e air is fresh, it stings her skin, the waves swish loudly. She walks on, just a few more steps. Th e doll is pale, much whiter than her own doll, it looks like porcelain, the little mouth smiles softly.

Something wrenches her, a bad, heavy feeling deep down in her tummy. Th e wind pushes her back, but she makes her feet walk on until she’s standing next to the bundle and sees how small the doll is. Smaller than her own doll, and why is the little mouth so blue? She kneels in the sand, smells the salty sea air but something else too, something musty. Th ere’s a piece of cloth folded over the doll’s eyes.

20

‘You can’t see that way, silly.’She lifts up the cloth.Later she’ll wonder when she knew, but the precise mo-

ment of recognition, that one second between knowing and not knowing, is never to be recovered. Suddenly she understands, realizes with every fi ber in her body: two glassy eyes, stiff cheeks, icy skin beneath her fi ngers.

In a panic she picks up the bundle, which feels clammy and heavy. Get warm, please get warm. She hugs the wet cloth to her chest. Move, please move. She’s crying, clutches it tighter, rocks the bundle, whereas everything inside her knows: this is no doll. Th is is no toy. Th is is real.

i

23

New York

A home that reeks of salty soup and smelly vases with cut fl owers that have seen their best days. Th e Mimosa: a long corridor, a window. Listlessly I lean against the metal frame; twenty-two stories down below, the fetid city teems with life; up here it’s quiet.

Th e window is open, every breath of wind is a boon on this sweltering day, the umpteenth hot day in a row. Th e earth is burning, say the experts, and it’s only getting worse. Drier, hotter, too many of us living on this planet on palliative care.

Th e corridor is empty, none of the old people are com-ing out of their rooms today. I’m worn out, although I can’t think why. I had hardly any work; none of the resi-dents felt like a haircut or having their nails done on such a sweaty day.

I’m dawdling. Th e casing feels cool against my cheek, I press it hard against the edge and close my eyes. Th e heat wave has to end. It’s got to. Otherwise Mitch will be right and it’s all been for nothing.

Ever since the ‘bullshit jobs’ were scrapped, work has

24

become a luxury, even though the powers that be continue to claim the unemployed are the lucky ones. Working is bad for your health, they say, the stay-at-homes live longer and are happier to boot. Well, I wasn’t.

I feel like a cigarette, but gave up smoking ten years ago. I open my bag and start sorting the combs, sprays and creams, rearranging them pointlessly. I made up a story, told Mitch I wanted to ‘give something back to society’, that I felt guilty about vegging out all day in our cramped apartment in Queens. It wasn’t guilt, of course, it was pure boredom. I wanted to give something back to myself.

Mitch couldn’t refuse because we need the money. He’s not allowed into Manhattan with his hybrid taxi, he curses the self-driving cars that make his cabbie’s knowhow a joke, but has yet to save enough to buy an all-electric car. Now the AC’s on the blink too, and he’s home every day lolling on the secondhand sofa with the IKEA houseplant next to it watching Gladiator III on his ridiculously pricey fl at screen.

At Th e Mimosa, at least, there’s peace and quiet. Every one in here is slow, passive and over seventy. I’m too young, I don’t really belong, but I feel comfortable in the sterile world of the care-hub where every breath is shallow er, every heartbeat is weaker, and life is so much tamer than down below.

A vacuum cleaner disc zooms across the fl oor like a giant pill, polishing the corridor to such a sheen that it gleams like ice. I lean forward; in one of the fl oor tiles I see a heart-shaped face staring back at me. Wavy hair, glit-

25

tering eyes: the contours of a woman I barely recognize. I look away.

Down below the cars glide through the street like chil-dren’s toys, too small to be real. Seen from above every-thing becomes less material, and so much lighter. On the twenty-second fl oor, no one is out to win any more. In Th e Mimosa life isn’t what it might become, but what it has been — a shadow of its former self.

A bird fl ies up from a fl at roof across the way. A dark bird, small, but fast; what kind is it? No, species. Th e word is species. I know nothing about birds and very lit-tle about nature in general. I used to say it proudly, with a smug smile: I’m a city girl, what do you expect? Now I’m ashamed of it.

Th e bird soars through the air, coming closer and closer to the window, its wings stretched wide, black feathers gleaming in the sun. Closer still, heading straight for the window as if it knows the way in. Instinctively I want to shut the window, but don’t, because I know what happens when birds fl y into glass.

When I was little, about four, I found a dead sparrow on the ground by my bedroom window. I cried and Daddy explained that the bird had made a mistake. It hadn’t seen the glass, had fl own right into the hard surface. ‘ Smashed itself dead?’ I asked, shocked that something like that could happen.

As a precaution I open the window wider and step aside. Th e bird whizzes through the opening into the cor-ridor, fl apping its wings even more rapidly, doesn’t look

26

back but fl ies resolutely into the third door on the right, the only one that’s always slightly ajar.

I hold my breath, waiting for something: a shout, a scream for help. But nothing happens. I stare for a while at the door of the only unit I’ve never visited because it’s always dark in there. A person who lives in the dark probably isn’t in the mood for a haircut, or maybe I don’t feel like dealing with someone who lives in the dark. Th at is also true.

For the fi rst time ever I walk up to the door with my battered shoulder bag and peer through the chink into the silent room. How does a fl apping bird fi t through that crack? It seems impossible, and yet I saw it with my own eyes. Unless I imagined it, but I have no imagination. Th at’s what Mom said, once: You have no imagination. When at school we had to draw a tree, I had no idea where even to begin. A tree. Which tree? I panicked, gave it my best shot, and my best was clearly not good enough, for the next day my parents had to go talk to the teacher. It’s all in the details, he said, we learn about a child’s devel-opment through the details she puts in: branches, twigs, leaves, maybe even veins. My drawing only showed the trunk.

Gently I push the door of the unit open. In the dark I can make out the soft hum of a fan; I hesitate on the threshold, stick my head in and whisper, ‘Hello?’ And then, because I have no idea what you’re supposed to say in the dark in a room a bird just fl ew into that may not even be real: ‘Would you like a facial massage?’

27

No one answers, maybe the room’s empty, maybe there’s something seriously amiss here. You hear often enough about old people dying of a heat stroke and only being found in their home days later. I cough deliberately, loud enough, take a few steps forward. As my eyes slowly get used to the dark, I ask, ‘A nice little face mask, perhaps?’

Someone chuckles. I look around, see the dusky con-tours of a room furnished like all the other rooms in Th e Mimosa: on the right a bed, on the left a chest, and in front of the window a square table with a single chair. I walk on inside.

‘Stop!’ a hoarse voice shouts. I turn and next to the bed the outline of a wheelchair swims into view, with a slight female body in it, shoulders hunched, spindly hands on the armrests, feet bare. Just the tips of her toes reach the chair’s footrest, she seems as ethereal as a ballerina frozen in a leap. ‘What do you want?’

‘A bird fl ew just in here, I thought.’‘Nobody comes in here if I don’t want them to. Not

even a bird.’‘I just wanted to know if everything’s OK.’‘It’s not OK.’‘Well…’‘Nobody in here is OK, but I’m also a churlish bitch, at

least that’s what the guy who comes to put me to bed at night tells me. I heard him whisper quietly it to someone, or maybe he said it loud enough on purpose so that I'd hear. What do you think?’

‘I have no idea.’

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‘What does that mean, churlish? Poor as a church mouse? Th at’s true. I have nothing. What I have is what you see.’ I look around, but in the dark it’s hard to see. ‘Open the curtains a little,’ the woman commands. ‘So I can see you better.’ Is that a quote? Embarrassed, I stare at the silhouette in the wheelchair. Can’t have an argu-ment, that’s something I must avoid. As long as there are no complaints, I’m tolerated in Th e Mimosa, me and my ‘Salon-the Run’, the logo written in jaunty adhesive letter-ing on my shoulder bag. Th is encounter can’t and mustn’t mess that up.

I walk over to the curtains, look for an opening in the fabric. Nowadays nobody has curtains anymore. Th e win-dows get blacked out automatically, but Th e Mimosa, out of nostalgic considerations, has installed curtains for her elderly denizens, to give them a feeling of home and the-way-it-used-to-be.

‘Not too wide, I’m sensitive to the light.’Carefully I push aside the heavy brown material. Th e

summer sun pours in through the crack, making the room light up. I look around and gasp: animals everywhere. Birds, but rats too, foxes, squirrels and guinea pigs. On the dresser, under the table, surrounding the metal bed: ani-mals wide-eyed, open-mouthed, in attack mode, upright, alert, motionless. Frozen in time.

‘Do my friends scare you?’ the woman asks, amused. I don’t reply, try counting how many there are, approximately. Dozens, maybe as many as fi fty, on their little planks, some on a branch or beside a piece of trunk.

29

Th e entire room is a mind-blowing zoo.‘Never mind. Nobody likes my friends,’ says the wom-

an. ‘Except me.’She rolls the wheelchair toward me and I see that she’s

bent forward in a strangely twisted pose. Her skin is brit-tle and greyish white, a chalky tint no longer a color but the absence of color. She folds her thin fi ngers together, twisting them in and around.

‘Would it surprise you to hear I stuff ed them myself, every one?’

‘No,’ I say, and I mean it.‘Come closer.’Obediently I take a few steps forward.‘What are you doing here?’ the woman asks. Excellent

question. I could tell her again about the black bird that fl ew into the room, but seeing that the place is fi lled with nothing but dead animals, and there’s no black bird fl ap-ping anywhere, I stay mum, just like the other creatures on their silent mounts.

‘You’re young,’ says the woman.‘Not really. I’m thirty.’Th e woman in the wheelchair laughs. ‘Th irty, that’s

noth ing. Th irty is the beginning. Everything’s possible, the world’s your oyster.’ I shake my head, the world’s oyster is wasted on me.

‘Th ere’s so much yet to experience,’ says the woman. I nod, but I refuse to think much about what experiences to expect: whether we’ll ever move from our two-room bubble in Queens, whether some day there’ll be a little

30

baby crawling in the bubble, whether there will be more fi ghts, more angry silences, if the bubble will ever burst.

‘Are you on the run?’‘What do you mean?’Th e woman points at my bag.‘Th at’s just a name,’ I say, and walk over to a stuff ed

bird with folded wings perched elegantly on a branch. I stroke the feathers, jet-black, just like those of the bird in the corridor.

‘At least the branch is real.’ I say‘No, the bird is,’ the woman replies. She sits up straight

and turns her face to the blast of air coming from a bravely droning fan on a little metal chest. Beneath her armpits in the sleeveless top, thin little fl aps of skin fl utter along with the fan’s breeze. I know just what that skin feels like: fl abby and waxy, skin that has long given up —something my face masks and my creams can do little about.

‘Tomorrow’s her birthday,’ says the woman, her eyes shut in the wind.

‘Whose?’‘Th e blackbird’s. And mine.’‘It’s your birthday tomorrow? Happy birthday.’‘Congratulate me tomorrow.’‘I’m not here tomorrow.’‘You want to go.’I nod.‘Will you come back?’‘I only work Th ursdays and Fridays.’‘Do you know what makes the bird real?’

31

‘Sorry?’‘Th e spark. Th e thing taxidermists look for when they’re

stuffi ng their animals, the thing they try to recover with all their might. Th e spark. Dead matter reviving. Something that looks like life.’ Th e woman’s cobwebby hair quivers in the fan’s draft.

‘Nothing here looks like life,’ I say. ‘Th e animals are dead.’

‘How do you know?’‘Th ey don’t move.’‘Is that all?’‘Th ey have no heartbeat.’Th e woman laughs. ‘Do you really think everything

with a heartbeat is alive?’I look around, looking for something in the room,

some thing else to discuss—photos, drawings, color; but all I see is the animals, displayed higgledy-piggledy on and among the standard furniture of a Mimosa interior.

‘When I was young I once found a dead bird outside my bedroom window,’ I tell her. ‘My dad said it had fl own into it — fl own itself to death.’

‘Th at’s something birds do.’‘Not on purpose.’Th e woman waves away my remark with a trembling

hand. ‘Th at’s what we think.’‘Birds don’t fl y into glass and kill themselves on pur-

pose,’ I say. ‘Th at’s cynical.’Th e old woman laughs, amused, winks with an eye

whose color I can’t quite make out, but they’re blue, I

32

know they are, icy blue, sharp and knowing. ‘Birds can fall.’

‘Yes, if you shoot them.’‘Not necessarily. Anyone can fall—that’s why I’m in

this chair.’She grabs the wheelchair’s handlebar and swings it

around, reaches for a glass carafe on the dresser, with jerky movements pours two cups of water.

I sink down on the chair that’s been pulled away from the table, as if expecting someone. Th e wheelchair zooms back, the old woman hands me a cup. Her cold hand brushes mine, frail and light. A hand of air.

‘Do you have time?’ asks the woman.‘What for?’‘A story.’I knew it. Th ey all have a story.‘You’ve earned it,’ she says, and I laugh.‘Is it possible to earn a story?’She opens her eyes wide. ‘Of course, a story is some-

thing terribly intimate, more embarrassing and indecent than love and sex all rolled into one. If a story winds up inside the wrong mind, it will turn out terribly badly.’

‘In that case I’m afraid my mind isn’t right.’‘What do you mean?’‘It’s just that my mind isn’t very special. I mean, I’m not

very clever and I have no imagination.’‘Nonsense. Everyone has an imagination.’ Briskly she

clamps the brakes on either side of the wheelchair. She leans back and clears her throat, the way storytellers have

33

always cleared their throats when they start a story. ‘Once, long ago, a ship sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on its way to a place myths and legends refer to as the lost land of Lyonesse.’

34

Atlantic Ocean

Th e waves bashed furiously against the sides of the tossing ship. Water everywhere, to the very depths of the hold. ‘Stare at the horizon,’ the sailors had shouted. ‘Th at will make you feel better.’ But how for God’s sake can staring at a horizon calm you down when it’s lurching all over the place?

Staring at the bucking horizon made her sick to her stomach. She’d ducked inside where at least it was dry, staggered through the galley, past the narrow door to the toilet, which was out of order, on, deeper into the under-belly of the freighter, where she fi nally sank down between two cardboard boxes, her back pressed against the rough burlap of a mailbag.

Her hand clutches a plastic bag from the London out-door shop where she bought her hiking boots a few days ago. It holds some sour dregs of vomit; she clamps it closed in her fi st.

Everything’s in motion; she crosses her arms over her stomach. Pretty Peaches it says on the cardboard box in front of her, over the picture of a grinning peach with

35

brilliant white teeth: Sliced peaches, as sweet as they come! She presses her back up against the mailbag and focuses on the Pretty Peach, a makeshift horizon.

She thought she had sea legs. Idiot. Deposit Robin on a ship, and every sense of balance is off . Equilibrium is an illusion. And she who always thought of herself as a pirate, not a princess, who as a toddler walked right past the pink shelves in the toy store and triumphantly made for the monsters and racecars, turns out to be totally unsuited to something as ordinary as a sea crossing. Two hours ago she came on board with the other sailors, eager, head held high; now see her skulking among the boxes like a cowering dog.

Again a wave of nausea—no, don’t think about peaches, about soft, gummy peach fl esh, pink-orange glop fl oating in a sticky syrup. She pulls the plastic bag open and throws up again.

Th ink of trees, think earth, fi rm ground. Th ink about nails and things mortared with layers of cement, of every-thing that’s hard: walls, tabletops, wooden planks. Th ink of St. Mary’s, the ancient streets with their gray cobble- stones and white cottages, the boardwalk along the ocean that’s so often been smashed to splinters by the very waves that are now carrying you there: the Isles of Scilly, a chain of islands south-west of England circled by crashing break-ers, a wild surf that the tourist ferries only dare to navigate in summer. Not now, the beginning of March, when it’s cold, the waves still far too ragged.

Th e ship groans; she throws her arms around one of the

36

boxes. A bucket slides across the fl oor and crashes into a metal can. Cursing, she crawls toward it, drags the bucket back with her, wedges it fi rmly between two boxes. He’s been sitting there quietly in his own bucket for the entire duration of the journey, under a dark cloth that makes him think it’s nighttime, for days on end. Greek tortoises are so easy to fool.

Robin stretches her legs out in front of her, feels the blisters throbbing inside her new hiking boots. Bill doesn’t do blisters, Bill has thick, scaly skin. She envies him, and not only on account of the thick skin, but particularly for the ease with which he’s experiencing this whole journey, or rather barely experiencing it, which makes it so much easier.

Again she gags, when there’s nothing left in her stomach to vomit.

Robin fumbles under her coat in the back pocket of her jeans, takes out the photo. Th e only thing she still has. She thinks of the notary and his professional sympathy as he informed her that everything her mother left her could fi t inside a single envelope. When she opened it: one photo-graph. No letter, just a photo—while Winnie absolutely detested photographs.

‘Egoistic affi rmations,’ she’d say, ‘that are misused to es-tablish things that aren’t true or that people already know. You might as well draw it instead.’ And on a piece of paper she sketched two little dolls smiling at each other with over-sized mouths. In between the two dolls she drew a heart. ‘Look, that’s the two of us,’ Winnie said. Robin grinned.

37

‘Feeling nauseous?’She looks up; standing right in front of her is John, the

freighter’s captain, a man with a beard and fl ushed cheeks in dripping yellow oilskins straight out of the famous brand of fi sh sticks. He shines a fl ashlight in Robin’s face and she blinks her eyes as if she’s just waking up.

John turns and pulls a rolled-up rope from a hook on the wall. She tries to make herself small, feels caught out somehow, wobbly as the mailbag she’s leaning against with her comatose turtle and smelly shopping bag. No, her body isn’t cooperating, but that’s not going to stop her. Nothing will persuade her to go back.

Th e ship swings about sharply; John doesn’t blink an eye, Robin clutches her Greek-tortoise bucket close with trembling fi sts.

‘You’re white as a sheet,’ John yells over the creaking of the boat and the howling of the wind. ‘Didn’t you take a pill? Nobody gets on the Gry Maritha for the fi rst time without getting sick.’

‘Th e warning comes a bit late,’ she yells back, waving her shopping bag. John laughs. ‘Easy now, stowaway, we’-re nearly there, you can already see the shore. Come on up on deck, moving will do you good, let the ship rock you. Don’t fi ght it, go with it.’ He tosses the rope over his shoulder and disappears in the direction of the deck.

Fight. She has done nothing but, her entire life, and where has it got her? Not a penny to her name, zero in-spiration, an aimless artist who brazenly lets the days go by without accomplishing a thing. At art school they still

38

considered her someone with considerable promise, which did not pan out later, in real life.

Stiffl y she crawls out of her hiding place, clutching the photo in one hand, the disgusting shopping bag in the other. Th e boat abruptly swings left, she staggers, presses her back up against the wall and tries to keep her footing. Go with it.

She turns the photograph over: two short sentences on the back, written in black ink. If hadn’t been for those words, she’d never have found herself here, she’d never have left everything behind in order to make her way into the lion’s den. Robin takes a deep breath, slips the photo into her back pocket, and lumbers clumsily up the nar-row stairs to the deck. In the driving rain two sailors with steaming mugs of tea and stomachs of steel stand shooting the breeze. Th e fl are from the Peninnis Head lighthouse fl ashes through the early dusk, the wind roars; she yanks at the hood of her raincoat, ties the two cords tightly under her chin — it strangles her.

‘Th at’s where we’re letting you off .’ Ed points at the port. ‘At least, if that’s what you really want?’ He looks at her doubtfully and she knows why: he sees a slender girl with big eyes, a shiny red raincoat and a shopping bag full of vomit. ‘You know it’s not the tourist season, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I know.’‘You’ll be on your own.’‘Th ere are other people.’He shakes his head. ‘Not your people.’She turns, clamps her two fi sts around the gunnel and

39

shuffl es to the bow, where she’ll have the best view.Th e ship approaches St. Mary’s, growing larger like a

blob that keeps expanding. Cautiously she touches the is-land with the tips of her fi ngers, her index fi nger outlining what she sees: palm trees, bushes, beach, and, somewhere in the waving woods, buried deep in the fi ne sand or hid-den in a rock crevice: the one she seeks. Her.

In the distance, the wharf she remembers from long ago looms into view. Two lines on the backside of a photo. Th e fi rst words she has had from her mother in years. And the last.

i’m sorry. find her.

40

Isles of Scilly

In the dusk of a misty winter evening the Gry Maritha docks at Hugh Town harbor. From the deck Robin gazes at the wharf, the rusty street lanterns, the quay with its wide, sand-colored cobblestones. Th e island smells salty and fresh, the way she remembers it: of mossy rocks and candy-colored plastic sieves full of scavenged shells.

Th e palm trees in front of the harbor offi ce wave to and fro. It’s chilly, and it’s drizzling. Four dockworkers in fl uorescent vests come running up to begin unloading.

‘Th anks for the ride,’ she says politely to Ed, who gives her a look of irritable concern. She shakes his hand and carries her luggage down a slippery gangway to the quay.

As soon as she’s got both feet on fi rm ground, her body starts to feel prickly. Not a pleasant sort of tingling, but a thousand little knives viciously stabbing her right under her skin. Twenty-two years ago she’d stood here on this wharf, boarded the ferry with Winnie, and cried her heart out for the entire crossing. Everything’s moving, the is-land’s spinning, she gags, buckles over.

‘Are you ok?’ Ed yells at her from the deck. She pretends

41

she hasn’t heard him, takes a deep breath in, out, keeps looking straight ahead until the wharf stops rocking, the harbor shed has come to a standstill and the lurching palm trees steady a bit.

She looks up. At the end of the wharf, under a dim street lamp, she sees him standing square and tall, as if on a pedestal. With his large head, wavy hair and colossal rain boots: the giant awaiting her arrival.

He doesn’t make a move to meet her, stays where he is, watching stoically as Robin approaches him with her buck et and suitcase. Once or twice she glances up, looking for something warm or familiar, an old picture in her mind that she can reconcile with the apparition on the quay. But the giant doesn’t look the way she remembers him. He is younger than she thought, and with his wild hair and bushy beard he seems more like an incongruous Viking than a giant.

When Robin is standing face to face with him, he nods and thrusts a beefy hand at her. Th ey shake. He turns his back on her, leaving her disappointed, confused. But what did she expect? A festive delegation that would welcome her jubilantly to St. Mary’s after all these years? Th e village band marching out, streamers, confetti, banners? A wel-come speech by the mayor, opening with the quip: Miss Robin, we presume?

‘No way back,’ she mumbles sotto voce to a sleeping tor-toise, and follows the giant to a bicycle carelessly leaning against a palm tree. Th e giant takes her suitcase and slips it over the handlebars.

42

‘What about us?’ asks Robin, staring skeptically at the rusty bike. Th e giant points at a narrow, fl aking luggage rack on the back. She hesitates, but says nothing, and obe-diently plants herself on the rack with the bucket on her lap. It’s late, she has no choice. Or: she made her choice weeks ago when she invited herself to his home..

Th e giant does have a name, of course: Faber Helling. Hermit. Eccentric. Pioneer. As a child she already knew how diff erent Faber was: he wore the same overalls every day, reeked of bleach and glue, worked with the thickest, palest fi ngers she had ever seen. He was endearing and repellent at the same time; the sort of uncle you adore, but whom you’d rather not kiss, all things considered.

Faber swings a leg over the bar, steps on the pedal with a muddy shoe, and clamps his big hands on the handlebars. He hesitates a second, turns around, looks at Robin and says earnestly, ‘It’s all going to be fi ne.’

She nods and feels a cold shudder travel up her spine. Th at phrase, that deep voice. Th e summer of 1968, when every conversation Faber had with Winnie would end with the words, ‘It’s all going to be fi ne.’ Robin was eight and would wonder: What? What needs to be fi ne? Worse still: what could be so wrong? It was the summer holidays, there was an infi nite abundance of sun, sand and sea. Winnie and Robin lived in a pretty cottage close to the beach, they slept together in one bed. In that innocent, perfect fairytale world, what could possibly be wrong?

At every pothole in the road, the spokes of the luggage rack poke viciously into her fl esh. Th ere are only a few

43

paved roads in St.Mary’s, cars are banned. Th e inhabitants travel by bike or in cast-off golf carts that race around the island like souped-up wheelchairs.

Robin gazes over the top of the bucket in a daze. Th e island looks nothing like the vacation spot of her memo-ries: a heavenly land of sun and palm trees, of days spent at the beach and Winnie always very close by. A house for two. Our kingdom by the sea.

Now it’s wintertime and the island looks deserted. Even nature is doing its bit to deter visitors: the ocean is too wild to ferry tourists over, a cold wind howls across the plain, the sea holly bares its thorns.

Th ey zoom past bare fi elds, the road narrows and the view keeps growing grimmer. Here and there stubborn branches poke out of the arid ground: how can a place surrounded by so much water be so parched?

After about half an hour’s ride they reach the far side of the island, and Faber halts. Robin jumps from the luggage rack, puts down the bucket and dusts off her sore behind — as if that would help get rid of the pain.

‘Come,’ says Faber. ‘Th e last part is on foot.’He carries her suitcase to a low gate with sagging hing-

es. He taps the wood with the tip of his boot; the gate crashes to the ground. She follows him along a sandy path meandering in the direction of the sea; looming up at the far end of the path is a tower she remembers. Dracmon Tower. Faber’s castle. Th at’s what she called it as a child: a castle. Whereas Winnie preferred to call it a ‘wreck’.

Just as an image in a children’s picture book can stay

44

with you forever, Faber’s house is etched into her memory: the medieval tower and the low annex tastelessly slapped onto it hundreds of years later. Two eras that have nothing in common, a hallucination in stone.

Somewhere a gull screeches. She looks up and sees a white bird soaring through the air in long, sweeping loops – they must be within steps of the sea. Robin picks her way with her bucket past fl owerbeds teeming with weeds and sawdust and grit.

In spite of the wind and cold, the front door is open. She jumps aside as a wild hare races past, right at her feet. A cat with gleaming grey fur comes stalking up to her, stops and sniff s her new hiking boots, then turns up its nose disdainfully. Always animals, she remembers; there were always animals spooking around Faber’s castle.

She was around fi ve years old the fi rst time she’d ever set foot in Faber’s tower, and the fi rst thing she’d seen was a large fallow deer. Th e animal towered over her, its glassy eyes staring into space above her head. It looked real, but it was much too still. She stood rooted to the spot, and Winnie said, ‘Don’t be scared. It isn’t real.’

Robin stood on her tippy toes, gazed straight into the mouth bristling with teeth and was gripped with a strange sensation, something huge and new; gripped the way you can be gripped by objects with a special something: a bike with handlebar streamers, a Little Pony with rainbow hair, a pink glitter pen. But this was diff erent. What this deer had wasn’t a special something, but what she would later describe as a special nothing. An emptiness that transport-

45

ed her to an unfamiliar place, where everything felt dan-gerous but also ominously warm.

Faber’s animals fascinated her and she’d have liked to help him, but Winnie wouldn’t let her. Occasionally she’d go take a peek, sneaking into his workshop to watch him painstakingly scrape the hide clean with his little scalpels and prepare the creature for stuffi ng. Th at’s what he called it: stuffi ng. But even then she knew what it really meant: bringing to life. Bestowing a second life. She was sure of it: Faber was God.

Today God enters his domain silently, ignoring her. A doormat that appears to be brand new shouts in big white letters: WELCOME HOME!

On the mat, a black cat licks its paws. Faber briskly steps over it. Robin stumbles clumsily past it with her bucket, steps into the room and gags.

Th e stench. She slaps a hand over her mouth and nose, the air is acrid and dank, the room smells of rotting wood, sour milk and moldy bread. Th e whole place looks like a dump: not a single sofa is intact, not a single chair is erect. Every nook and cranny is occupied by some nest, taken over by cats, mice and rabbits.

Faber drops her suitcase next to a leather couch that’s seen better days, the foam fi lling spilling out, and yet an-other cat dozing on the backrest.

She doesn’t remember this this chaos, this mess. Maybe it was all diff erent back then, or maybe a child of fi ve has a blind spot for disarray.

Faber walks over to a stack of fi rewood leaning pre-

46

cariously against a bookcase, takes out an armful of logs and drops them in the fi replace. Robin just stands there, speechless, clutching her reptile like a cold-blooded teddy bear. Th e giant seems to have forgotten her completely. How can he forget about her? Madness, her coming here of her own free will, even intending to sleep here.

Robin turns around; outside it’s almost dark and she has no idea how she’ll get back to the village, or in what direction the village may even be. All she sees is fl ower beds full of garbage and beyond them trees, bare trees. It feels as if she’s landed on the wrong island, ended up in the wrong castle. She could turn and walk out, but where would she go? She’s exhausted and she’s clutching a tor-toise in need of light and water.

Th e black cat gets up from the doormat, strides up to her and nudges its head against her jeans. She bends down, caresses the little thing, which starts to purr. Th e giant is still in front of the hearth, runs his hands through his hair, pokes the fi re. Next to him a labrador retriever sleeps on a woolen rug, its chin resting on its paw, motionless.

From a corner she hears a fl uttering sound: a bird comes sailing down, lands next to a crust of bread on the fl oor and starts pecking at it. Mice scamper beneath the bookcase, the cat on the sofa stretches, and suddenly she understands: to Faber, she is just one of them. He isn’t ignoring her; he simply treats her the way he treats every creature that sets foot in his tower. His guests don’t need to be greeted or shown around as a rule, they don’t need a bowl to eat from or a plush basket to get comfortable.

47

Th ey’re all capable of fi nding a spot of their own.Resolutely she grasps the bucket handle, walks over to

the bookcase, pulls up a chair, climbs onto the wobbly seat and stashes the bucket on the top. She stares at Faber’s broad back by the hearth, watches him as he pokes the fi re attentively and pets the dog that still hasn’t moved.

She makes her way to the only door in the room, and sees a kitchen of sorts: a counter with a double hotplate and pans encrusted with leftover food, empty tins, a For-mica table and a plastic chair. She takes a dirty glass from a pile of unwashed dishes, rinses it, fi lls it with cloudy water and gulps it down greedily.

Across from the kitchen counter is a low wooden door that connects the house with the medieval tower. She opens it cautiously, ducks her head, and sees the rounded curve of the stone wall. It is dark in there; in the center a staircase with uneven treads winds upward. She climbs the stairs, touching the stone wall for support.

On the fi rst landing the tiny space is almost completely taken up by a thin mattress with bare pillows and grubby sheets. On a bookshelf along the wall there’s a copper lamp with a bare, fl ickering bulb. Th ere’s also a duff el bag fi lled with books, a tape measure, a box of latex gloves. She steps into something, looks down, sees some white gunk oozing out beneath her foot. She picks up the tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, tosses them on the mattress.

She continues up the stone steps, another space without windows. In the curve of the tower stands a small desk. A metal spotlight shines on a pelt of some sort. She peers

48

into the light to see what it is or what it once was: fox, probably — a fox. Th e hide is almost transparent, she runs a fi nger over the soft velvety skin. Th ere are tools on the fl oor everywhere, she has to pick her way between sacks of wood wool, handsaws and fi les.

Another set of stairs, and at the end, another door, which opens after some jimmying. Bewildered, she gazes at the tiny room, furnished unlike the other levels: a Persian rug peeks out from a wooden bed. Th e white sheets are spotless and neatly tucked into the mattress; on the pillow lies a folded towel. Next to the bed a full-length mirror leans against the uneven wall, and in front of a small, round window a wicker chair looks out over the ocean.

Th ere’s something on the towel; she walks over to it and picks it up. It is an animal, a small mouse, stuff ed with care. Th e fur is white and soft, and the little animal stands in an awkward pose: upright, nose in the air, little twig arms raised up to its ears, pink palms open in worship or surrender.

‘Do you like her?’ a deep voice asks. She turns and sees the giant leaning against the low doorframe, stooped, as if he’s talking to a baby rodent in a hamster cage.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Did you make it specially for me?’Th e giant smiles for the fi rst time.

49

New York

‘Did he teach you, Ma’am?’ For the fi rst time I dare to interrupt her story, gesturing awkwardly at the animals in the room that are breathlessly listening.

‘Don’t call me Ma’am.’‘Did Faber teach you?’ I repeat. Th e woman groans and

presses a knobby hand to her chest.‘Did I say this story was about me?’‘No.’‘Well then.’I keep my mouth shut, try hard not to smile: the veil is

paper-thin. A story as a pretense for a memory is a disguise that fools no one. Or maybe every memory is a story, and there’s no need for a disguise.

‘Are you still listening?’I shut my eyes. ‘Yes, I’m listening.’

50

Isles of Scilly

She opens her eyes and doesn’t know where she is. It’s the same thing every morning: waking up nowhere, landing in a body that feels as if it belongs to no one. ‘Falling awake’ is what she calls it. She looks around, tries to latch on to a clue, sheet, bed, window, in order to fi gure out a location, a time, and fi nally: a Robin. Th irty years old, in Faber’s tower, on the island.

She lifts one of her legs: clammy jeans, a foot in a hik ing boot. She must have fallen asleep with her clothes on. Th ere’s light coming in through the tower’s window — morning light? Rain clatters on the roof, a housefl y buzzes around clumsily, races toward the light and smacks into the window.

Lyonesse: the summer island. Th ey were happy here, the two of them. She turns onto her side, fumbles in her back pocket for the photograph, feels a reassuring edge.

It’s chilly in the room, Robin gets out of bed, runs her hands through her shoulder-length blond hair in front of the mirror, moistens a fi nger, slicks down her dark eye-brows. Good eyebrows, Winnie used to say, you’ve inherit-ed them from me.

51

She opens the door leading from the tower room into the dark passageway and is surprised to see a staircase leading up higher still. She follows the stone treads up to a hatch door, throws it open and is blown back by a cold blast. Braving the wind, she pushes on until she fi nds herself standing at the very top of the tower, with a view over the entire island. Th e Isles of Scilly spread out from the tower like a map, she sees the fl ag of Star Castle on top of Th e Garrison, the fort that for centuries defended the archipelago from invaders. Beyond it: Hugh Town’s wharf where she debarked yesterday, and Hugh Street, the main street meandering evenly between the two bays.

‘Lyonesse,’ she says, although she knows no one uses that name anymore. No one except her and… Bill! Shit. She hasn’t thought of him since last night, when she left her best friend on top of a bookcase and then clean for-got about him. Bill needs sunlight and food, this minute! If he hasn’t been toppled off by Faber’s rude and hungry housemates.

She ducks through the hatch, feels her way down the stairs, past the room with the fox skin, through Faber’s grubby sleeping quarters and the kitchen that reeks of burnt coff ee. She hears footsteps, voices; someone laughs.

In the living room she sees two men: Faber with un-kempt hair pacing around the room in the same overalls as yesterday, and on the sofa is a bespectacled man in his sixties dressed in a baggy jacket — the type who in nine-teenth-century literature is always ‘Th e professor’. He has an unusually lean face and his black hair is plastered down

52

and greasy, like the marks of a heavy sofa on a deep-pile rug. He’s seated with his arms and legs crossed, and is looking at Faber with a haughty expression.

‘So I don’t see, Faber, why you wouldn’t do it. You’ve done plenty of shadier things in your day. Don’t be so diffi cult.’ Faber is silent, rummaging absent-mindedly through a drawer.

Robin says nothing, makes straight for the bookcase, gets up on a chair and lifts the bucket down with two hands. Th e men look up.

‘What have we here, Faber?’ the professor asks jovially.‘Jacob, this is Robin,’ Faber nods, reluctant. Robin is

still balancing on the chair with the bucket in her arms.‘Good morning,’ she says, even though she has no idea

if it is morning. Jacob looks her up and down as if the chair is some kind of pedestal entitling him to give her a brazen once-over. She thinks of Faber’s stuff ed animals on their little wooden planks, it gives her the heebie-jeebies, and she jumps down.

‘So you’re the Gry Maritha’s mystery cargo?’ Jacob smiles. ‘I did hear stories in the village of Faber ferrying a strange kind of animal across the island last night. Th ere were whispers: what beast did he hunt this time?’ He throws Faber a triumphant look, smiling with a pursed mouth and deep grooves around his eyes, a stingy old-man’s smile that annoys Robin.

‘Th ere’s coff ee,’ Faber says amiably. ‘And bread.’‘What’s in the bucket?’ asks Jacob.‘Bill,’ she says. ‘He has to acclimatize.’

53

‘A reptile?’‘A Greek tortoise.’Jacob raises his eyebrows, the grooves move up to his

narrow forehead. ‘And it’s been up there all night long? I’d put it under a lamp immediately if I were you, if you want it to stay alive.’

Robin looks at Faber questioningly. ‘He’s a vet,’ Faber explains.

‘And the mayor,’ Jacob adds.Faber raises his eyebrows skeptically. ‘Th eoretically.’‘Why theoretically?’ asks Robin.‘Because the islands don’t offi cially have a mayor, but

someone has to be in charge. I say, Faber, don’t you have a mercury vapor lamp around here somewhere? Haven’t I seen turtles in here before? For a… limited time, anyway.’

‘Jacob!’ Faber growls. He mutters something unintelli-gible and stalks to the kitchen.

Jacob leans forward, rubs his hands together brightly as if he can’t wait to see what’s coming. Smiling, he asks, ‘What are you doing on the island, if I may ask?’

Robin squats down, places the covered bucket between her knees. Slowly she moves the black cloth off the bucket, little by little, so that the daylight won’t give Bill a shock.

‘I’ve come to visit Faber,’ she says without looking up. On the gray bottom of the bucket she sees a shell rocking gently from side to side. Bill seems to have survived.

‘For how long?’ he asks.‘Excuse me?’‘How long are you planning to be here?’

54

‘No idea.’‘Listen, Robin, it’s winter and you know how that is,

on an island.’She looks up. ‘No, I don’t know.’‘It’s simple: as long as the ferry isn’t operating, tourists

have no reason to be here.’‘But I’m not a tourist,’ she says.Faber enters with a long cord and a light bulb, walks

over to the coff ee table and in one supple move turns it upside down.

‘I have no idea what you’re doing here, but Faber is a hermit, and by defi nition he doesn’t do guests. Am I right, Faber?’ Th e giant doesn’t seem to hear him, he’s fi ddling with the cord, concentrating on hanging the mer-cury lamp from a hook in the ceiling. Th e inverted table becomes a stockade, its legs and crosspieces the fence posts of an improvised coff ee table terrarium.

Robin places her hands fi rmly on either side of Bill’s shell, lifts him out of the bucket and deposits him careful-ly under the lamp. His head is tucked deep inside his carapace and he’s motionless. Bill seems more dead than alive, but for a Greek tortoise that’s rather a normal state of aff airs.

‘Impressive, Faber,’ Jacob says, nodding. ‘Handsome reptile.’ He smiles at Robin. ‘You’d better watch out. With Faber, you never know!’

Faber switches on the mercury lamp. Half of the coff ee table-terrarium is bathed in a sky-blue light. It doesn’t take long for Bill to poke his round head out of the shell,

55

the light spreads across his reptile skin, and he smiles. Robin is all too aware that turtles don’t smile, but she’s convinced she knows her friend. She knows him better than anyone. And no one in the whole wide world knows her better than Bill.

Jacob gets to his feet. ‘So,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back tomor-row, and then I trust you’ll do it.’ He rattles a big bunch of keys ostentatiously – a lot of keys for an island where, Winnie used to say, you never have to lock anything. She spots a car key.

‘Do you have a car?’ Robin asks, surprised.‘A sports car,’ Jacob nods. ‘Of the modest sort.’‘Golf cart,’ Faber growls.‘Could you give me a lift?’‘Where do you want to go?’‘To Gugh.’ To the island with the strange name, the

smallest of the Isles of Scilly. From St. Mary’s it’s a short boat ride to St. Agnes, which is attached to Gugh by a narrow strip of sand. You can only walk across at low tide, between the two shores of the same ocean, past the two-mouthed monster. Th ere, somewhere on that strip of sand, is the place she has to be, where everything began. Or ended.

Jacob jeers. ‘You don’t get to Gugh on four wheels, dear, you need something that fl oats.’

She ignores his laughter. ‘I want to get to the harbor.’‘Th at’s not going to happen today.’‘Why’s that?’‘What are you after, on Gugh?’

56

‘Why can’t I go there today?’‘Th e weather,’ Faber answers. ‘Gale wind, storm. You’ll

fi nd nobody to take you across today. Too dangerous.’‘Too dangerous? Not for me.’Jacob shakes his head condescendingly.‘In that case I want to go to my house,’ she declares.‘Your house, well, well!’ Jacob exclaims, shouting with

laughter. ‘Have you rented a bungalow? Are you here for some kind of winter holiday? You don’t own a house here, my dear.’

Faber is quiet.‘Faber?’ Jacob asks, perturbed. ‘What’s she talking

about?’‘Helvear Cottage,’ says Faber, carefully rolling up the

extension cord.‘Helvear? What’s she thinking?’‘She’s got the right, in theory.’‘What do you mean?’‘Winnie’s daughter,’ says Faber.Jacob hesitates a moment, and then his pursed mouth

falls open in astonishment. ‘Winnie’s Robin.’‘Yeah, that Robin,’ she says. ‘Winnie was my mother.’

She holds her breath. Even spoken softly, it sounds awk-ward. Winnie and mother: two words she seldom uses in the same sentence. Certainly never of late. You are not my mother, she said one day, and pronouncing those diffi cult fi ve words made everything much easier. After that every-thing was right. And ruined.

Jacob squares his shoulders, pulls himself together.

57

‘Condolences,’ he says stiffl y. ‘But — and I don’t want to be insensitive — doesn’t Helvear Cottage belong to us? After all this time? Doesn’t the property belong to the island now? Nobody’s been there in years. It’s a dump, a wreck, no one would want to go there.’

‘Th e house is hers,’ says Faber, ‘and she wants to go there.’

Jacob stares at him. ‘Faber, what for God’s sake are you up to?’

Faber shrugs his shoulders, crouches down by the im-provised coff ee table terrarium and places a hand on Bill’s blue-lit shell.

‘Fine!’ snaps Jacob. ‘In that case I’ll take you.’

58

New York

It isn’t Gladiator, it’s American football, and he’s on the couch watching with a beer in his hand. I say hi and set the groceries on the coff ee table. Th e apartment is small and it’s just a silly bottle, but everything reeks of beer.

‘How was your day?’ I walk over to him and give him a kiss on the cheek.

‘Fine.’I carry the groceries to the counter in the corner that we

charitably call the kitchen, open the Smartcooker ™ and slip in two frozen meals. Waiting for the ping, I stare at a screen packed with men, in a cheaply furnished apartment that suddenly looks a lot like the units at Th e Mimosa.

Th is is home: all the square footage we can aff ord in this city. A two-room fl at in Queens with a living room that’s a kitchen, a bathroom that can be converted into a study, and a bedroom that functions as a walk-in closet.

‘What’s for dinner?’‘Pasta’‘Again?’‘I didn’t have time to cook, I had to work, remember?’

59

I realize my answer annoys him since he’s still against my working — actually, maybe he asked just so that I’ll give him an answer he can pout about.

I press my lips together and ask myself, when did the suspicion start? When did I stop giving him the benefi t of the doubt? When did the one I love the most become less friend than foe?

‘It was quiet today,’ I say. ‘Too hot for the old biddies. It’s lucky our AC’s working.’ Mitch mutters something unintelligible from the sofa and I start setting the table, which is just as small and square as the table I sat at this afternoon, listening to a hoarse voice in the dark.

Plate, knife, fork. Plate, knife, fork. Every single day is the same drill; the routine dance of setting and clearing, over and over again. I’m not bitter, I’m being realistic. What was it that woman said this afternoon? Everything’s possible, the world’s your oyster. A line lifted right out of a fairy tale.

‘Can’t you cut out the noise?’ he grumbles.‘Sorry.’ I take a glass from the cupboard, fi ll it with

water and drink. I gaze at Mitch’s face: his straight nose, pouting lips, eyes drooping at the outer corners, features perpetually conveying vexation and dismay. Ping.

‘Let’s eat at the table, shall we?’ I ask, taking two con-tainers from the microwave. To my astonishment he ac-tually gets up, switches off the television and sits down opposite me as I set the aluminum trays of pasta pesto on our plates.

‘Enjoy.’

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Th e pasta is still too hot to eat, so we stare at the green strands in silence. Were our silences always this uncomfort-able? I don’t remember any silences. Or, maybe silences don’t wish to be remembered.

‘I met an old lady today,’ I say.‘Th at goes with the territory, I should think, in your

line of work.’ He laughs.‘But this lady was diff erent, peculiar.’‘How so, peculiar?’‘I don’t think she liked me.’‘Well then, that’s most peculiar,’ he says. ‘Everyone likes

you.’ I feel myself blushing; he notices, and goes on. ‘With your looks and your bangin’ bod. And your sublime cu-linary skills!’ He holds up a steaming forkful of the slimy green noodles. I smile and feel his knee rubbing lightly against my thigh. But I want to tell him something, make him pay attention. I want to share a story with him, the way I used to.

‘She was… intriguing.’‘People who are nasty are always intriguing. What’s

great is telling them where to get off .’I’m chewing. ‘We had a good conversation, though.’‘What kind of conversation?’‘I don’t know, it just felt good.’‘She didn’t like you and it felt good.’ He stares at me

tartly, his knee is gone. ‘What do you think that means, Rebecca?’ I hate it when he calls me by my full name like that. It presages a critical dig, it’s a red fl ag.

‘I don’t know,’ I say quickly. ‘She seemed lonely.’

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‘Th ere are so many people who are lonely, Rebecca.’ He takes a bite and swallows it without chewing. ‘I’m going go-karting with Tony.’

‘Which Tony?’‘Go-karting Tony. Weren’t you listening?’ And so the

dance begins. Carefully threading my way around the shards that are always there, the sharp remnants of con-fl icts that never disappear. When you break something it will come back to bite you over and over again. No, not today. Don’t rock the boat, stay cool, roll with the punches until the fragile peace is restored.

‘Aren’t you working tomorrow?’ I ask and I kick myself. His job is one of those sharp shards. A huge one.

His fork clatters to his plate. ‘Th e AC’s on the fritz, Rebecca. Do you seriously think anyone will want to get into my sweaty shit-taxi if they don’t have to?’

Warily I prick my fork into a noodle, stare at my plate; watch out.

‘If only you made some money in that geriatric shit hole, but it’s always something.’ He shakes his head peevish ly from side to side and gripes, ‘Too cold, too hot, too early, too late, not enough supplies. Do you know what your little racket has cost me so far?’ He gets up, walks over to my shoulder bag and tosses it in the air, jars and bottles clink ominously, a packet of nail fi les sails out and falls on the carpet. ‘With the money this junk has cost me I could have had my AC fi xed three times over by now!’

He glares as only my Mitch can glare, I know that look and yet it scares the daylights out of me every time.

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Sudden ly he turns into a diff erent person, a stranger who has nothing in common with the good-tempered guy I developed a huge crush on four years ago. Never before had anyone made me feel that way – a strange and amaz-ing sensation that I still can’t put into words. Or maybe I choose not to because the right word may prove to be something much darker and harsher than ‘love’.

‘Come back to the table, Mitch, please.’‘I’m done eating.’‘Mitch, I understand—’‘You don’t understand a thing! What do you know

about what it’s like to sit here all day long doing fuck-all, feeling effi n’ useless!’ I could tell him that’s what my life was like for years, but I know better. I get up, walk up to him, reach for his hand to calm him down, but he’s there fi rst, he grabs my wrist, pulls me close.

‘No, Mitch. Not now. Th e dinner.’ He kisses me, and I turn my head away.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘Not in the mood again, for a change?’ He slings an arm around my waist, pushes his hips forcefully against mine. He kisses me again and I let him, but don’t move my lips. I juggle his words in my head: not again, for a change. I hear them and I know them and as he pushes his tongue inside, I stare at the table with the two half-empty trays, as if it’s a station platform that I’m leaving behind.

He leads me to the sofa and obediently I let myself fall backwards. Th is smell, this body belongs to me, I chose this. To be his was what I wanted. Under an arch of roses

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we exchanged vows: for better or for worse. Fake roses. He pulls down his pants. I ought to worship this handsome body, but I feel nothing, the sofa is cold and plastic roses have no scent.

‘No,’ I whisper, almost inaudibly. He doesn’t listen and I know very well why not: our no can mean so many things. Th e demand to stop goes hand in hand with the demand to go on. Because we trust each other.

‘No,’ I say, louder. I extricate myself and roll to the fl oor. He crawls after me, clamps an arm over my head, pulls up my skirt and rips my underpants. I turn my head away and then— how strange—my body obediently starts moving along. It’s behaving instinctively, presses a face against his arm, scratches its nails softly down his back, slings its legs around his legs. I make love like a prisoner.

‘No.’Is this bad, I wonder, like a child who doesn’t quite

understand the rules of the game, feeling his hard thrusts between my moist thighs. Is this wrong? Th e wool rug that’s always hot chafes my lower back. Th e fl oor at my head is smooth, I press my cheek against the surface. It feels bare and cool.

When he’s done he lies there, always with that expres-sion on his face: baffl ed, astonished, as if he’s just done something he doesn’t understand. But it can’t be a sur-prise: our sex has been like this for years, it’s become a ritual, a scenario that fi nishes a little sooner every time. He won’t look at me, but caresses my back with mortifying tenderness.

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I stay silent and wait patiently for the excuses to start.‘Sorry,’ he whispers. ‘Was it ok for you? I couldn’t con-

trol myself.’I purse my lips into a sad smile.‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You deserve better.’‘Mitch, it’s ok.’‘No, I’m an idiot.’I get up and pull my skirt down; every part between my

legs burns and chafes. I walk back to the table where the food has gone cold and the forgetting can begin.

65

New York

Today is a perfect day for rain, but the weather doesn’t do what it’s supposed to these days. I’m in the elevator, which is just a tad cooler than outdoors, in my dark sunglasses. Th ere’s canned music coming from a speaker; two wet streaks trickle down my linen trousers. Sweat.

I clasp my hands around a steel rail, roll my wrists a long the metal. Above the rail there’s a mirror, and in that mir-ror I see a young woman peering at herself from behind her dark glasses. She has auburn hair, nearly invisible eye-brows, beads of perspiration above a small, determined mouth.

I never liked the way I looked. In grade school I wasn’t the sort of girl who wore her hair long. At least, I didn’t think I should. Long hair was a privilege for the girls who were really beautiful. On the others those wispy locks just looked vain, as if they were trying too hard.

Th e fi rst time Mitch looked at me, I saw that he thought I was amazing. He looked as if thunderstruck by something very special, and that special thing was me. Th at look is gone. I look for it, sometimes I even catch a

66

glimpse of it, a sliver of the admiration that once existed, although I don’t know if it’s really there or just an echo of my hope.

Th e elevator door buzzes open, and I walk to a glass door that recognizes me, as usual, and welcomes me person ally in the most impersonal tone of voice I’ve ever heard: ‘Welcome back, Rebecca.’

I step into the corridor and fumble in my pants pock-et, pull out a small cardboard box, press the little candle out of the box and shake it: an artifi cial curl fl ickers with a fake orange glow. It in no way resembles a real fl ame, but burning candles indoors has been against the law for years. I take the cupcake from my shoulder bag, punch the candle into the glaze, tiptoe to the room and muster the courage to push my way inside.

‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear….’

Since I don’t know her name and can’t think of anything else, I stop singing abruptly. I walk on inside, my hands cupped around the cake with a candle that’s valiant ly per-sisting in playing the tinny birthday melody. It sounds horribly off -key, but I keep smiling, with my peace off er-ing smothered in a thick layer of pink frosting.

She’s sitting in the same spot as yesterday, still or again: beside the bed, in her wheelchair, across from the dresser with the buzzing fan. She says nothing, sits there motion-less, in the same shorts and sleeveless white top. It’s diffi -cult to make out the expression on her face, but something in the room feels diff erent, lighter. Her skinny form is no

67

longer slouched in the chair but sits upright, watching wide-eyed as a singing cupcake approaches.

‘Blow,’ I say, bending over the wheelchair.Th e old woman hesitates, shuts her eyes and with all her

might lets out a puff of air — far too little to extinguish the electric candle. She tries again, minuscule wheezes of air sputter from her mouth. I try to help, but the fake orange fl ame refuses to go out. Realistic fl ameless candle easy to blow out, it says on the package and so we keep blowing, until the old lady is out of breath and mutters, waving her hands, ‘Just…just forget about the wish!’

I shake the candle to make it go out. ‘You’re allowed to make a wish without blowing the candle out,’ I say. ‘Th at’s what it said on the box.’

I wink; she smiles, crosses her hands in her lap and catches her breath.

‘Why are you sitting in the dark anyway?’ I ask.‘My eyes.’‘Allergy?’‘No, I’m just not used to the light anymore. And it’s

better for the insurance.’ She waves her wrist buddy, an old model, the oldest one the care hubs still allow. ‘In the dark both my blood pressure and my premium stay low.’

‘Shall I open the curtains again just a little?’ I ask and I don’t wait for an answer, but go over to the curtains and surreptitiously open them considerably wider than I did yesterday. Perched against the empty square of the table, I start peeling off the cake’s paper cup. Th e woman stret-ches out her hand, I place a piece on her trembling palm.

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I think of holy communion and baby birds.‘Good?’ I ask.‘Good,’ she says, chewing with diffi culty. Her shirt is a

mess of crumbs, but I let it go. We eat in silence and when we’re done I look at her questioningly.

‘Where were we?’ she asks.‘Jacob, the golf cart.’She nods, and starts to hum softly.

69

Isles of Scilly

An opera crackles from the speakers attached to the dash-board with duct tape. Robin senses Jacob’s knee against her leg — a discomfort she can’t escape, squashed as they are in the golf cart. Th ey ride shuddering down the dirt roads; every left turn all but lands her in his lap. It reminds her of the bumper cars at the fair when she was little, and how even back then she felt uncomfortable in those jerky, aggressive vehicles. She clutches a plastic strap dangling from the roof as the souped-up golf cart careens across the island’s roads like an out-of-control wrecking ball.

‘Yes, we sure remember Winnie!’ Jacob jeers for the umpteenth time. His voice is shrill. Robin looks away, she’s trying not to listen.

‘Good old vacation-gal Winnie! Our Salome of the summer months! In her sexy dresses, long hair and itsy-bitsy bikinis!’ Illustrating their scantiness with his index fi nger and thumb, he shimmies his shoulders to the rhap-sodic music. He smirks and the cigar clenched between his teeth seems to be smirking too. ‘Yeah, that was a long time ago. But it’s left us with such fabulous memories! We

70

all adored Winnie. She had such pizzazz, and such fi re.’ He thrusts a fi st forward, as if fi re had a fi st.

Robin tightens her grip on the strap. How much farther can it be to that cottage?

‘Th e entire island, I can tell you, loved Winnie. And then, whenever Salome let anyone visit her in that cute little house on the beach, they had a ball, of course.’

She shuts her eyes, clenches her fi st until her knuckles grow white.

‘So you were the little one she trotted around with those last few summers? Little girls grow up fast. Allow me to… Damn, you look like her!’

‘Stop,’ says Robin. He doesn’t hear her. She clears her throat and yells to be heard over a soprano’s blaring aria, ‘STOP!’ Jacob slams on the brakes; she is thrown forward, very nearly smacking her head against the windshield.

‘Did you say stop?’ he smirks. Robin jumps down off the golf cart, which is stopped in the middle of the road among yellow fi elds.

She wants to stalk off but has no idea which direction to take. She gazes at him sullenly. ‘Where do I go?’ A question that feels like a capitulation.

Jacob shrugs his shoulders. ‘Ask your reptile friend why don’t you.’

‘Where do I go, Jacob?’He waves a hand at the ocean. ‘Th ere, Robin. Back

home.’‘Where is the cottage?’‘Don’t you know?’ he sneers. ‘It’s your house, after all,

71

isn’t it?’ And he nods as if that’s that, presses his foot on the pedal and screeches off .

Robin watches the little golf cart disappear around the bend. She’s alone and everything is quiet and still, as only an island can be still. Th ere’s a stiff breeze, she pushes her hands down into the pockets of her raincoat and closes her eyes, hears the bushes rustling in the wind. No, it’s not the bushes, but the sea whispering; on a small island like St. Mary’s the ocean is never far away..

She looks around, trying to fi nd something she recog-nizes. A low stone wall lines the dirt road; behind it lies a fi eld with daff odils sprouting from the ground in tidy rows. A little farther on she sees a farm with a tractor and agricultural equipment beneath a corrugated metal roof. A white horse grazes next to a post. Beyond, as far as she can see, no other houses.

On the other side of the road stands a bay tree split in two halfway up. She remembers this spot. Hidden in the branches’ fresh foliage, overgrown but still just visible, she fi nds their footpath. One afternoon Winnie had taken a pair of hedge shears to the bay tree and scratched out a narrow trench with a shovel, fashioning a track leading right up to their house.

Th e path looks as if no one has trodden it in a long time. It is for a large part overrun with dried grasses and brambles. In her hiking boots and ankle socks Robin plows her way through the weeds, the nettles stinging and the brambles scratching her arms and legs.

I was here twenty-two years ago, she thinks, on this very

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path. She doesn’t have any photographs of the cottage, and barely any memory of how it used to be.

Down below lies the white sand of Watermill Cove, and the secret mooring only the islanders know about. Beyond: the wide ocean. Th e horizon is empty, there is no other land in sight, just the water and waves that swell and then ebb again, forever stumbling over the same age-old rock formations.

A few meters on, the path leads to an area devoid of greenery. On either side the hillside is covered in bushes and Monterey cypresses whose twisted, angular trunks seem to defy gravity.

Here they would halt on the fi rst day of the holiday to admire the cottage from a distance. Th ey’d gaze at their little house in silence. She remembers thinking: Our little kingdom. In the commune in Brighton, everything belongs to everyone, but this place belongs to just us.

Helvear Cottage is still proudly standing, a stone house straight out of a child’s drawing: a front door of oak, fl anked by two small windows; two strips of lawn left and right. Th e grass is dry and neglected; ivy has conquered the façade over the years, shiny leaves crisscrossing the stone wall like dark green arteries. Th e cottage used to be bright white; now the grey stone is showing through the ample cracks in the paint. Faber did warn her: the house has been empty for twenty years, after you no one has lived there; it’s a wreck, we nailed the front door shut for safety.

Robin doesn’t see a wreck, she sees the cottage just as it once was. Only now does she realize how much she

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was dreading this encounter, not because she was afraid of what she would fi nd—she couldn’t care less about the weeds and the ivy and the peeling walls – she was afraid of what she wouldn’t fi nd, a past she wouldn’t be able to recall. It wasn’t the decay of the house that she feared, but that of her own memory

Now that she is back on the island, and so close to the cottage, it all comes rushing back with overwhelm-ing clarity: the smell of sunburn and freshly laundered sheets, the sickly sweet vanilla ice cream speckled with sand that crunches between your teeth, the garden path and its make-a-wish dandelions; in fact, the memories feel so fresh and real that she could expect Winnie to emerge from the door at any moment.

‘Winnie!’ She shouts the name, although she has no idea why. It doesn’t matter, she shouts and runs as fast as her legs can carry her, right up to the house, tripping over the rocks. She falls to her knees, gets up again, runs on down the sandy path to the front door, where she stops and spreads her hands on the damp wood.

She shuts her eyes, smells the fresh air, sea, sand, stone, and something dark as well, musty, the nagging odor of moist, rotting wood.

Th e door is boarded up with two planks Th e windows on either side are smeared with sand and dirt; the panes are still intact, but the salty air has been gnawing at the sills and there are only traces of the original blue paint left.

Th ey had brought that paint over especially from the mainland. Winnie had spent days painting the house

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while Robin painted her own work of art on a big white sheet of paper: blue boats, blue people, a blue sun.

Robin runs her hand over the wooden window frame, which immediately starts to fl ake, large chips drifting down on the grass. Th e old house is vulnerable, a house of sand, of glass.

She walks around the back where a narrow porch ex-tends the full width of the cottage. Th is is where Winnie whiled away most of her time in summer: reading, writ-ing, chatting, as Robin played on the beach.

Cautiously she climbs the listing treads up to the pine fl ooring. Some of the boards are rotten and splintered; there are gaping holes everywhere, showing the sand down below. Crouching down, she peers through the cracks: empty bottles, cigarette butts, a Lego fi reman and a knot-ted condom. Winnie’s rattan chair is still there, stiff bits of wicker poking up from the seat. A chair on its last legs.

Around the corner from the porch is a wooden lean-to with the bicycles still inside: a lady’s bike with a child’s seat, and the gaudy yellow tricycle she remembers so vividly: a piece of junk impossible to get moving in the sand. Robin pedaled and pedaled but she couldn’t move the thing, until Winnie came down and pushed, putting her entire weight into it, just to give her daughter the illusion she could.

For no good reason, she sits down gingerly on the little trike’s saddle. It can’t take her weight, naturally, the saddle creaks, she gets up again and with the tip of her hiking boot pushes the tricycle up against the wall. Th e tires on the lady’s bike are a bit defl ated , but it looks perfectly

75

serviceable otherwise. She could just mount it and ride back to Faber, but she doesn’t. Now that she is so close to her goal, there’s just one thing she wants: to get inside.

She pulls at one of the planks barricading the door. Th e nails appear new, but they’re not hammered very far into the wood. To her surprise, the plank lets go obediently. Robin releases the other board with equal ease. She feels her hands growing impatient, twists the iron doorknob and pushes, but it won’t budge. Again. Th e door doesn’t move an inch. She presses her shoulder fi rmly against the wood and rattles the knob, as it slowly occurs to her that Faber has barricaded a bolted door. Why?

She turns away, helpless and fuming. Th ere’s a small window right next to the door: a frame divided into four squares. She peers in through the smudged glass: a dim, hazy room, a kitchen counter right under the window, and in the window’s sill, an old-fashioned push bar latched with a pin. If she breaks the lowest pane, she can easily reach her arm through to open it.

Something strong and sharp. She looks around, wan-ders across the grass; all she sees is empty cans, a magazine, a shoe and something she doesn’t immediately recognize. She picks it up; it’s blue and red and shiny, endowed with an enormous torso and a disproportionately small head. It’s from an eighties franchise Winnie-the-feminist de-spised: Transformers, robots that turn into cars— two evils merged into an epitome of manly authority. OPTIMUS PRIME it says on the plastic fi gurine’s chest. Just what she needs: a hero.

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She walks back to the window, glances around, even though there can hardly be anyone there, swings back the hand clutching Optimus, and hurls the robot with the shrunken head at the house.

Th e glass shatters. Optimus has created a hole large enough for him to fl y through, but not wide enough for Robin’s hand. She hastily pulls back her hand; her skin bristles with glass splinters, and a line of blood seeps across the ball of her hand. Someone screams.

She turns around, doesn’t see anything, until she looks down, where a boy of eight or so is staring at her with anxious eyes. It makes her jump. A child, appearing out of nowhere. Is he real, or is she imagining things? She shuts her eyes takes a deep breath, the way she was taught to make herself stay calm. It usually works.

‘What… What are you doing?’ the boy stammers. He’s wearing a knitted sweater emblazoned with a tractor, and a bulky blue scarf he probably didn’t tie around his neck himself. In a fl ash she sees herself through the kid’s eyes: a dazed, bleeding woman who just smashed in the window of an abandoned house by means of a plastic manikin.

‘I’m trying to get into my house,’ Robin says as coolly as she can, attempting to pick the splinters from her skin and stem the bleeding.

‘He’s mine’‘Sorry?’‘Th at Transformer was mine.’‘Oh.’ Both stare at the window.‘Optimus Prime.’

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‘Shit.’ Robin walks to the window and catches a glimpse of a robot-shoulder sticking out behind the counter.

‘Your hero managed to get inside, all right’ she says, trying to smile. Th e boy, not smiling, puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a grubby handkerchief and off ers it to her hesitantly.

‘Th ank you,’ she says. She squats down, tries to wrap the handkerchief around her wound, and manages to knot it using her teeth and left hand. Th e boy comes and stands next to her, pulls the knot tight. An angel in a tractor sweater.

‘What now?’ he asks.‘Where do you live?’‘Green Farm.’ He points behind him, at the farm with

the grazing white horse.‘What’s your name?’At the same moment they hear someone yelling in the

distance. Robin, looking over the boy’s shoulder, sees a farmer in overalls storming towards them through the fi eld of daff odils.

‘Tristan!’ he cries. ‘Tristan, come!’‘My dad’s looking for me,’ says the boy.Just what she needs, an angry dad. ‘I have to go.’ She puts

a hand on Tristan’s shoulder. ‘As soon as I can get into my house, I’ll get Optimus back to you, OK?’

Robin turns, hurries over to the bike, and pushes it over the grass and sandy path up to the road. Th ere she jumps on the saddle and starts pedaling as hard as she can. Th e broken child’s seat rattles along behind her.

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Brighton

‘I spy, I spy with my little eye…’She’s sitting on the bike behind Winnie. Robin always

wins at that game, maybe because Winnie lets her win, or maybe she really wins, no way to tell, really. Th ey’re on their way to the supermarket where Winnie works as a cashier. It’s the summer holidays and Robin is some-times allowed to come help with stocking the shelves. She prefers that to staying home with the others. Winnie doesn’t get it, she asks why Robin insists on keeping to herself, but she’s not doing it on purpose. It’s the others who keep away from her because they’re so diff erent. Th ey make jokes Robin doesn’t understand, and play games she doesn’t like.

Robin jumps off the bike and takes Winnie’s hand. Th ey walk into the store, not to buy stuff but to work there, which feels really cool. She is proud her mother is at the cash register, quite a responsibility. Winnie’s boss gives Robin little jobs to do, and if she does them well she’s allowed to pick out a bag of candy at the end of the day.

Leaving Winnie at the checkout, she trails on her fl ip-

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fl ops past the clothes racks, the gardening supplies, the dairy department, the fresh bread. Everything’s in its place; all’s safe and orderly at the supermarket. Not like the com-mune, where it’s always chaotic, where everything’s a mess and nobody knows what belongs to who, but that, says Winnie, is precisely the point. Th at’s why Star now sleeps with Robin’s Snoopy. And she’s not supposed to mind be-cause Snoopy belongs to everybody.

Robin walks past the fruit department to the swing doors, where she fi nds Elma, who’s going to give her a job to do. Elma is sweet, and she likes to sing along with the store’s piped music. She’s chubby and wears a green apron with the name of the supermarket stretched across her ample breasts. Her calves have curious purple and blue lines that wobble when she walks.

‘Assistance, register two, Elma to register two.’Elma, in her plastic clogs, rushes through the swing

doors past Robin, sees her and turns around. ‘I’ll be right there, darling. Just wait there!’

Robin stands next to a rack of white grapes and at least fi ve diff erent kinds of apples. I spy, I spy with my little eye. It’s yellow and it pokes fun at you. Ba-naaa-na,na-naa-na. She laughs. It’s orange and slimy. Car-rot. She thought of that one herself. Elma returns with two bottles of juice past their sell-by date. She takes Robin into the little kitch en through the swing doors and pours them a glass each.

‘It’s safe to drink two weeks after what the expiration date says on the bottle. Do you know how many days that is?’

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Robin nods. ‘Fourteen.’ She takes a sip of something red that tastes of strawberry and chewing gum and isn’t very nice.

‘Do you like it?’ asks Elma.Robin nods, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.‘I thought you might work on the stationery supplies

today. Look, all these diff erent pens and pencils, you can unwrap them and arrange them on the shelves, all right?’

A little later, Robin’s sitting on the fl oor between two racks next to a see-through plastic crate full of pens. Th e shelves hold notebooks with lined or squared paper, and ring folders in bright colors. She kneels in front of the box with the pens. Th ere are loads of them, each individually wrapped in plastic, lying helter-skelter in the bin like pick-up sticks. She used to like pens, she loved to draw, she even drew a whole comic book once, with real numbered pages. Winnie put it in a frame, it looks nice but now you can’t read it anymore.

Robin rips the cardboard off a box containing six pens. Ribbed black pens — why do people make things that are so boring and ugly? A shopping cart rolls by, someone grabs a black folder and tosses it into the cart. Wham!

It’s quiet in the store, calmer than usual. She doesn’t want black pens, she wants something colorful, there must be pink pens somewhere in there, maybe ever some with glitter. She leans over the crate, rummages through the pens, digs her fi ngers through the plastic, deeper, deeper.

Th e pens dance around her hands, swarm around her fi ngers, and then suddenly she feels something diff erent,

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softer, hidden underneath. She keeps digging, pens slip through her fi ngers, she loses her grip, what is it that’s down there? It’s white and limp and fl accid, it has a face. Two open eyes, pale lips. Th e baby is staring back at her.

‘Winnie! Winnie!’Violently she kicks the crate away from her, lets herself

fall backwards, and lands with a crash. She screams. A lady in a green apron rushes up to her. Shaking, she gives herself over to a stranger’s arms. She buries her face into the green apron.

‘Assistance, offi ce supplies, need assistance. Winnie to offi ce supplies. Now!’

Winnie comes running up in alarm. She hugs Robin tightly, stroking her head slowly, steadily, as she always does to calm Robin down. Winnie isn’t mad, fortunately.

When Robin disentangles herself in order to rub away her tears, Winnie asks, ‘What happened?’ Elma has in the meantime popped up at Winnie’s side with a pink box of tissues, which she opens.

‘It was nothing,’ Robin sobs.Winnie frowns, annoyed. ‘Come, Robin, just tell us.’No, because that would only make everything so much

worse. Robin shakes her head.‘Let her be…’ Elma shushes her, handing her a tissue.‘No. What scared you, Robin? What did you see?’Robin presses her lips together. She’s not telling, noth-

ing.Winnie points at the plastic box. ‘Was there something

in that crate? What did you see in there? A spider?’

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Yeah, if only!Again, hopeful, insistent almost: ‘Sweetie, was it a spi-

der?’ But they both know it wasn’t an insect she saw; not a spider, not a wasp, not a mosquito, not even a grasshopper.

At fi rst it would come at night—the baby. A little girl, because she knows it’s a girl, even though there’s no way she can really know. Th e baby would appear in her dreams, and that was bad enough: all the tossing and turning, crying, wetting her bed. And Winnie, with tears in her eyes, just kept telling her over and over again, ‘It’s not real, it isn’t real!’ Th en one night the baby crawled out of her dreams and into broad daylight, hiding among the socks in her drawer, behind the bedroom curtains; even, one time, under the lift-up lid of her school desk. Nowhere is safe for her anymore. Winnie is unable to console her. No one can make her feel better about it because nobody believes her.

‘I don’t see anything, Robin. Look!’ Winnie gets to her feet, walks over to the plastic crate and turns it upside down. Th e pens scatter all over the fl oor, under the shelves, everywhere. Now Winnie is mad. She holds up the crate, tilting its bottom towards Robin, as if to prove it’s empty: there is no baby and there’s never been a baby; nothing there. As if you can prove something with nothing.

Robin takes a deep breath; nods. Together they start picking up the pens off the slick fl oor. Elma pats Robin on the back and says, ‘It’s lucky pens don’t break, dear. Don’t worry, everything will be fi ne.’

Robin smiles, but it’s not fi ne. Winnie knows full well

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what she saw in that plastic crate. Th ey both know what’s going on and that it’s going to go on. Everything is diff er-ent now. Th e game has changed.

I spy what you don’t spy with your little eye.

84

Isles of Scilly

Th e houses of Hugh Street are huddled together like silent conspirators, sheltering from the stiff wind that so often rages through St. Mary’s streets.

With a post offi ce and a pub, Hugh Street prides it-self in being the island’s main thoroughfare, though it’s baffl ing why the town’s center was built in this particular spot. It lies smack in the middle of an isthmus, at the is-land’s waist, between two bays, where the waves are forever ready to pounce. Th e main street has been fl ooded dozens of times, and the stubborn Scillonians rebuilt it every time in the exact same place.

An icy gust tousles Robin’s hair, slithers up her pant legs, sneaks inside her buttonholes. She walks up the de-serted main street bicycle in hand. An awning fl aps, a paper bag dances across the pavement. She misses the fa-miliar denizens of the London streets: the passersby, the absentmindedly nodding mothers with their babies and strollers, the joggers, the shoppers, the bicyclists with their eager bells and bulging grocery bags.

She wanders along the façades, past the shuttered

85

houses that are shutting her out in the cold. A window displays a rain-soaked poster of palm trees and children running on an idyllic beach:

the isles of scilly: your slice of paradise.

It’s not paradise that she feels, but a wet butt, from the water seeping through the spongy saddle’s torn seat; she feels raindrops rolling down her cheeks and a cut in her hand that’s throbbing. She stares at the handkerchief tied around her right fi st; it has stopped bleeding.

Across the street a man approaches: woolen hat pulled down, collar fl ipped up. He strolls past and stares at her; says nothing. She wants to smile at him, but doesn’t. Some thing in his gaze doesn’t feel right. She keeps walk-ing, past Val’s Post Offi ce, the only shop on the island.

At the far end of Hugh Street she sees, up on the left, Th e Garrison, the island’s fort, where the canons still stand ready to drive away invaders from any side. In the center of the fortress: Star Castle, a dilapidated, star-shaped ruin, where captured pirates would pine away in dark an musty dungeons.

On the corner stands the Mermaid Inn, a fi sherman’s pub with a sign depicting a red-haired mermaid. An old man stands in front of the door, smoking. As Robin walks by, he starts to laugh, quietly at fi rst, a tepid chuckle, but then louder and louder. Is he making fun of her?

She’s walking faster now, past the Hugh Town har-bor and the dock where the Gry Maritha let her off . Th e

86

freighter has left, the dock workers have gone home.Why is the street so quiet and empty? She used to feel

safe here, once. She knows the place, knows the islanders. Or one islander, anyway. Th e third house on the right.

At Town Beach, a white strip of sand in the shape of a half moon, where sloops and fi shing boats rest hull-side up, Robin has to push her bike up a slope. On the espla-nade along the beach stands a row of a dozen or so white houses. Classic, identical fi shermen’s cottages, modest and compact.

Th e third house on the right. Th at’s how she was always able to fi nd her, not by the signs whose numbers were long rendered illegible, eroded by salt and wind. Robin counts. Th e third house looks exactly the way she remembers it: an unremarkable front door in a drab brown frame, two dull windows and inside, the least dull creature she has ever known.

Th ey played together all the time, summer after sum-mer. Tess was her buddy, her best friend. With an Asian mother and a born-and-bred Scillonian fi sherman father, she was, just like Robin, something of an outsider. ‘I don’t really belong to the island,’ Tess said once with a sad look on her face. Robin thought that was silly. She didn’t get how you could belong to an island, anyway, and why you’d even want to. Robin’s befuddlement had made Tess laugh, and it had made her cheer up again.

Robin rings the bell, a shrill dring. Maybe it was Tess who made the summers so much fun. Tess and her exuber-ant laugh, her two black pigtails, her stories. Th ey used to

87

fi nd treasures, chase monsters, steal sweets from Val’s shop; spent hours running up and down the beach at Helvear Cottage, and wrestled on the gleaming sand of Periglis. In the summers, at least, she had a friend. A real one.

She hears shuffl ing, agitated paws scratching on a bare fl oor. Th e door swings open. Th e fi rst thing she sees is the small dachshund leaping up against her knees. With total determination, tail wagging, he hurls his hard body against her leg. She jumps back.

‘Robin?’Tess stands in the doorway in a rust-colored vest over a

T-shirt from which two thin arms protrude. Th e pigtails are gone, her hair is short now, but she still has the same cheeky, cheerful, nervous energy.

‘Robin!’ she cries. She darts forward and wraps her arms around Robin. A gesture that’s so warm that it startles Robin. She’s touched, and it fi lls her with something that, strangely enough, feels more like sadness than anything else.

‘Robin,’ Tess exclaims again, smiling. ‘It really is you!’ Th e tough little dachshund goes on wagging its tail and barking; and now it’s trying to push its snout between her legs.

‘Marie!’ Tess shouts. ‘Stop it!’ She points. ‘In your bas-ket!’ Th e dachshund obediently slinks off .

‘She listens,’ says Robin.‘She’s the only one,’ grins Tess, slinging her arm around

Robin’s shoulder. She’d forgotten that: their easy physical closeness, the cuddles, the horsing around. Tess squeezes

88

her hand softly and Robin groans, jerking her hand back.Only now does Tess notice she’s injured. ‘What did you

do?’ she asks.‘An accident.’Tess frowns. ‘Come in, quick.’Th ey walk through the narrow hallway that leads to the

kitchen where Marie, resting her dachshund-chin on the edge of a linty dog basket, lies sulking. On the left a low door leads into the living room, which is crammed with old furniture. Robin remembers the furnishings from be-fore: the wide dark yellow couch, the heavy carved-wood coff ee table, even the musty newspaper basket. As if time had stood still.

‘Not much has changed, has it?’ says Tess, almost apol-ogetically, as if she’s ashamed of the same old cushions on the couch, the same old picture frames on the mantel. ‘Th ere’s no money for new stuff . Everything’s stayed the same, actually, even though Pops and Ma haven’t lived here for three years.’ Robin looks up, brows raised. ‘Pops died fi ve years ago. Cancer. Ma lived in a home on the mainland for a while, but passed away last year. Now there’s just Marie and me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Robin.‘It’s better this way. At the end Ma cried constantly,

she kept saying she missed the island, that she’d been torn from her roots and couldn’t live without her island. I didn’t have the heart to disabuse her. She seemed to have forgotten she’d always struggled with ambivalence about this place; the people here never really accepted her. Th e

89

imported bride of an old fi sherman: much too Chinese, much too foreign to be up to par.’ Tess shakes her head. ‘Strange, what your mind makes you forget when you’re at the end of your life.’

‘Allows you to forget,’ says Robin.‘Maybe. In one sense I’m glad for her that it’s over. Tea?’Robin nods and sits down on the sofa, which is so soft

and saggy that her whole body is engulfed in it. From her hollow she looks around the room: a house that feels like a museum. Mausoleum. She used to love coming here to play, but now it smacks too much of the past. It no longer feels warm and cozy, it feels stuff y and cramped, like a bomb shelter: an indoors without an outdoors.

Tess returns with two orange mugs. Th ey share a teabag, the way they used to when they were allowed to make real tea in their toy tea set, with cold water. Sometimes they’d even have a sugar cube to go with it, which made the water taste sweet and not at all like tea, but that didn’t matter because if you could think of the water as tea, then it was.

‘I still have the boat,’ says Tess.‘Your dad’s boat? Th e sailboat?’‘We could take it for a spin if you like.’‘Today?’Tess laughs. ‘It’s stormy out there, Robin! No, I don’t

think today. Even the fi shermen haven’t gone out.’ She tells Robin about her bartending job at the Mermaid Inn, how she plies the fi shermen with big mugs of beer and lets them shoot their mouths off . How stuck the men are in their miserable island life. How she wishes for more.

90

‘But you don’t have to stay here, surely?’‘It’s not that easy.’‘You have a boat.’‘You don’t understand the situation.’‘What situation?’‘Never mind.’‘What?’‘Faber didn’t want me to go see you. He said I should

wait because it was your decision.’ Tess looks grave. ‘He wonders why you’ve come back.’

‘To see the house. Our old house,’ Robin lies.‘Helvear?’‘Yeah.’‘My God, Robin, that place hasn’t been lived in for

years. What do you think you’ll fi nd there?’Robin holds her tongue and stares at the brownish-red

line across her hand.‘Has Faber told you about our project?’ Tess points at

the coff ee table, which is strewn with photos and news-paper clippings.

Robin bends over the pictures, pushes them around slowly. Faber’s stuff ed animals: a badger, a deer, an eagle. Some look straight into the lens, some gaze into space somewhere next to the camera, but what’s unusual about it is that in the photos, they look alive and kicking. Faber has stuff ed his creatures so artfully that you can’t tell from the photos that they’ll never move again. To the camera, death is a blind spot.

She sees a picture of a young Faber, around twenty.

91

He has a hunting rifl e slung across his shoulders, arms dangling down loosely, like a light yoke; in his right hand he’s holding a dead rabbit by the ears. He looks grave.

A second portrait accompanies a newspaper interview: Faber posing next to a tiger. Th at’s the Faber she knows, with unruly hair, a full beard, blue sunken eyes beneath bristly eyebrows. Th e tiger is staring at him with its jaw wide open, teeth glistening. In the interview Faber says, ‘Who knows where life ends and death begins?’

‘I’m writing a book,’ says Tess, beaming.‘What sort of book?’Tess puts down her mug, squares her shoulders, bright

as a poodle that’s about to perform a trick. ‘A poignant, exciting biography about the talented taxidermist who founded the fi rst international taxidermy guild, used to stuff animals for Saudi princes and American celebrities, but eventually became a victim of his success and was kicked out of his own guild. A contrarian, a risk-taker, an artist outcast by society, who withdrew into a dream of continuing to fi ght for his profession as a medieval hermit.’ She blushes. Little Tess. ‘Th at’s the pitch. What do you think?’

‘I’m impressed,’ Robin smiles.‘I’ve only been at it three weeks, but it’s going to be a

masterpiece, and then a bestseller, and my book will get me off this hellish island in the end. Just you wait!’

Robin nods warily.‘I know what you’re thinking,’ says Tess, plopping down

on the couch next to her. ‘Th at I’m a coward for not just

92

leaving. But you haven’t any idea what it’s like, living on this tiny island. As an islander you know every nook and cranny, every bend in the road, every fi eld, every tree. You’re always bumping into the same people. Th e others all keep an eye on you, they know where you were, every day, who you talked to. Th ey know every little sin, and will forgive you for it too. On an island you don’t have any freedom. Never.’

‘You don’t have to stay.’Tess shakes her head. ‘You know, the summer visitors

come to the island to fantasize about what life could be like. Th ey picnic on the beach, snap pictures of the views, they feel free at last. When they gaze at the sea all they see is possibilities, but their sea isn’t the same as ours; to an islander, the water is the place where everything ends. Th e border—the brink.’

Tess looks at her seriously and Robin recognizes some-thing in her eyes: Faber’s look back on the dock, the man with the woolen hat on Hugh Street, the chuckling man outside the Mermaid Inn. An antagonistic, harsh look that pegs her as an outsider. She feels her hand starting to shake, looks away, tries to focus on the cuttings and pho-tographs of Faber’s vocation: stuff ed animals, a lifelong conspiracy with death.

‘Robin?’ Tess puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘You look pale.’

‘I feel strange,’ Robin whispers and for an instant it’s as if the world is slipping from her hands, everything is turning hazy, reality starts to dissolve, and she can’t stop

93

drifting away. Tess is furiously spooning sugar into a mug. Robin feels a hand cupping her neck, the rim of a mug against her lips, and sips. A sickly sweet concoction slides down her throat, warms her chest, relaxes her.

‘When did you last eat?’ asks Tess.‘I want to go back to Faber’s.’‘Now?’ Robin nods and Tess gets up. ‘Fine, then I’ll

come with you.’Th ey put on their coats and walk through the narrow

hallway to the door. It’s still very windy outside, it’s always windy. Th e waves swirl over the half-moon-shaped beach.

Tess pumps up the old bicycle’s tires as a provisional fi x. A woman in a duff el coat with a pointy chin, white hair and a cat on a leash passes them and greets Tess warmly. When she spots Robin, she looks away. Th at face, that scowling chin; she knows her.

‘Was that Val?’ asks Robin. ‘Val, of the shop on Hugh Street?’

Tess nods.‘Why didn’t she say hello to me?’‘Leave it, Robin.’ Tess rolls the bike towards her.‘What’s her problem?’‘Come on, let’s go.’‘Does she know who I am?’Tess sighs. ‘Everyone knows who you are. Did you

think you could just wander around this island without attracting attention? Everyone knows you’re here, Robin, everyone’s talking about it.’

‘And why is it ‘everyone’s’ business?’ Robin sets her feet

94

on the uneven pedals to push off , but Tess bars the way.‘Why did you come, Robin, really?’ she asks. ‘Tell the

truth?’Robin looks at her, straight into the familiar dark eyes

she knows so well, and from an old place of trust, she admits, ‘To fi nd somebody.’

***

95

biography

Sarah Meuleman is a Belgian author and journalist. In 2015 she published her fi rst novel Th e Six Lives of Sophie, which received much critical praise in the media and was nominated for the Bronze Owl Award, for best literary debut of 2015.

In the beginning of 2016 however, she ‘remixed’ her de-but novel and presented a new version with the title What I Won’t Tell You which, again, received much critical ac-claim.

On October 23rd 2018, Find Me Gone, Sarah Meuleman’s English debut novel was published by Harper US in the United States and Canada, to glowing, starred reviews. In January 2019 Find Me Gone was launched in the UK. Blackbird is Meuleman’s second novel.

‘Clever, dark, engrossing. Highly recommended.’ Library Journal (starred review)

‘Fascinating, multi-layered, intelligently written.’ Publishers weekly

‘One of the best books of 2018.’ Marie Claire USA

quotes

‘A carefully constructed novel in which multiple plotlines intertwine. Meuleman is a master at creating atmosphere’ Knack ****

‘One of this spring’s literary gems’ Het Nieuwsblad ****

‘Sarah Meuleman is an unusual author who freely crosses between countries, time periods, and genres. She manages to substantially enrich our (at times all too predictable) literature’ Arjan Peters, De Volkskrant

‘With her second novel, Blackbird, Sarah Meuleman shows herself to be a strong voice in the fi eld of Dutch litera ture. She is averse to the (overly) commonplace fi rst- person nov el as a genre in which the author features as a (fi ctional) character, and in her writing chooses instead to exercise her freedom, both factual and fi ctional, to break out into new worlds. Th ough her books are full of sus-pense, they are layered to such a degree and written with such attention to language and sound as to tower far above the thriller genre’ Marjolein de Cocq, Het Parool

‘A wonderfully enthralling and intelligent novel’ JAN

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