The Monster's Wife(5)

“Great lump.” With a grunt, May let go.

Oona grabbed the earth near May’s boots. Her heart was a rusted hinge, creaking. She breathed hard, flailing her numb feet, desperate to drum life into them, calves snared by the wet weight of her skirts. When she flopped onto the sand, she was weak as a new calf and could only lie and suck in air and listen to her heart’s dull sound, the snag in its rhythm, that lost fourth beat. She and May had listened to each others’ hearts one day after a race across the meadow. That was the first time they knew that Oona’s heart skipped out of time.

Now she knew it afresh. Her eyes came into focus and the pale gold oval of May’s face swam into view, brow furrowed, eyes fixed on her as if she were another beached dolphin too dead to drag back to sea.

Oona closed her eyes, loathing the pity people seemed to have for her. She hated May for feeling it and herself most of all. She thought of a black hole sucking everything into it, everyone and everywhere she knew, until there was nothing save the purest silence.

Her breath slowed. Her heart hushed. She scrabbled up, keeping her eyes on the black huddle of crofts blocking out square shapes in the starlit sky. The candles in their windows were snuffed out.

“Growing fat without me to keep you busy?” Behind May’s banter there was fear.

“Aye, that must be it.” Oona laughed uneasily.

Silence unspooled between them, tangling in on itself. Their feet slipped on wet rocks that would be red in daylight but looked black as blood now. Oona heard a noise like the tide’s echo in the watery caves that pocked the island. She looked back, her mind on that old crab Cormick, shuffling after them maybe, wheedling and cursing and pleading for a peek under their petticoats. No Cormick. Even the dishwater light in his spiniken of a house had been snuffed.

May climbed fast ahead of her, wedging her boots into slippery toeholds. There was that echo again, the tap tap tap of steps. Oona stopped and squinted at the darkness.

“Someone walk over your grave?” May stood above her.

Oona shrugged. “I fancied Cormick might have spied us.”

“Old lecher. Did I tell you he tried to bribe me with that rotgut of his? Wanted a good long look under my skirts.”

Oona slipped her hand into a wet groove of rock. “Give him it free did you?”

“Minx!” May’s hand skimmed Oona’s head in a play slap. “I might have let him take a peek. I do have a kind heart. At the last, I gained the thing I wanted and it was not barley-broo.” The lilt in her voice was a taunt - I’m not telling. Which was good since Oona didn’t want to know.

“Fine sort of charity to give when you want something, May.”

They walked up to where the burn pleasured secretly in the darkness and Oona stopped to listen to what the water said. It told her that it cut the island like a long wound, fusing sea with sea, swelling gardens, scraping under the earth for gold and onyx stone. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates. May took her hand, squeezing her fingers as a child might. She was thinking of how the island would be without Oona on it, how this would be. The burn at night. The moon, suddenly lonely. For all her secrets, her thoughts were easy to guess sometimes.

Still holding Oona’s hand, May said, “Let’s stay awhile.”

They stole past the turn-off to Quoy and without speaking, turned the same way, ended up in their place, the wild scruff of dwarf birches that lined the riverbank behind the kirkyard. By summer they kicked their legs in the glutted burn. By winter they huddled under a blanket and smoked and smoked, naming shapes in the trees they’d once been small enough to swing in. Every hatred or infatuation, every secret spilled, each bitter fight had happened here with only the trees to hear it.

In the dark, their stockings and petticoats clinging and the storm rumbling further off, they were silent. It was neither a happy nor a sad kind of silence. It was the same startled hush had fallen upon them the day they went to the fair in Hamnavoe and had ill fortunes read from their palms.

After a while, Oona loosed May’s hand, sat up and stretched, head spun and muzzy. She fished the pipe from its hiding place - a wooden box wedged inside a little cupboard of rock - and tamped in tobacco, damp from the storm. It was madness what they had just done, wasn’t it? Filching a boat, sinking crates with who-knew-what inside. Like thieves or vagabonds. Although May had said they were helping the doctor, the foreign doctor with his fine eyes and troubled past.

“Pished through?” May sounded like someone speaking in a dream. She stood, shook her hair out, combing the front curls with her fingers. Oona followed her up, steadying herself on the patchwork bark of a birch, half silk sash, half hair shirt.

“Homewards if I don’t want a thrashing. And you. Your Granny makes me more afeared than my own dear Da.”

“She doesn’t whip me nowadays, not since... And everyone knows I’m...” She wouldn’t speak it. To speak it made it true. She smiled. “She’ll roll her eyes, though, if I wake her.”

“The infamous eye-roll! So frightful!” May gave a mock shudder. “I’ll be your protector.”

“Smokehouse? Dinner-time tomorrow?”

“That’s our ritual.” May appeared to forget they’d not met there in weeks.

There was no virtue in condemning her. “I meant that we should meet as usual. Farewell!”

They embraced. Oona felt a sharp point dig into her hip, some spiky shape beneath the old oilskin that had belonged to May’s Da. Reaching beneath the folds of stiff, stinking cloth that clung to May’s dress, she fished out a clutch of nails. Holding their wicked teeth in her palm, she tried to divine their meaning.