Алия Уайтли - Skein Island

David looked behind him. Inger was nowhere.

He ignored the door and moved to the nearest window. Inside was a pattern of black and white tiles covering the walls and floor. David put his hands to the glass and it trembled at his touch. No – the glass wasn’t trembling. Something else, something under the ground, had come alive. It shuddered and squirmed at his touch, then groaned, so loud, so lonely.

He pulled back his hand and covered his ears.

The house reared up, and the windows split apart with great cracks, the glass falling into splinter shards that pelted down in dust and tiles and plaster.

And the ground opened.

It swallowed half the house in a second. The rest of the house fell over and lay on its side; David watched it, felt certain it would attempt to get up. It creaked and complained on, and gouts of steam erupted from the black mouth of moving earth into which the house had fallen, just beyond his feet.

Inger was pulling at his arm. He realised she was shouting at him.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Come back! Come back!’

She was strong – he could feel her muscles pulling against his – but he didn’t step away. There was something he was here to do. It came to him as a revelation. He had to go down into the hole. Marianne was in there. He was not about to be defeated, not when he was so close to her.

‘I have to go in,’ he said.

‘Back!’ shouted Inger, still tugging at him. He turned to her and saw enormous eyes, fear-filled, liquid. Beautiful. He took her hand from his sleeve and kissed it.

She snatched it back, and David stepped forward, felt the earth begin to slide under his feet. He kept his balance and rode it to the tilted house. The window he had been looking through had lost most of its glass and shape to become a squashed rhombus of an opening. He climbed through, felt the remaining shards catch on his tracksuit bottoms, and then he was in the black and white tiled hall, turned at an angle so that, to stay upright, he had to lean against the wall and crab down the corridor to where the next doorway lay, burst outwards, with only rubble piled high beyond it.

‘Marianne?’ he said.

He listened, and heard nothing beyond the groans of the dying house. Shouting seemed ridiculous; he was certain she was there, so he put his hands on the stones and started to throw them behind him. More flowed out of the gaps he made, and he suspected it was an endless task, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He would have done it for eternity.

Inger was calling his name. He didn’t turn around. After a few minutes of shovelling with his hands, he heard her scramble down the corridor, and say, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ at his back, as if that meant something.

‘Marianne,’ he said again, and Inger said, ‘No, no.’ He felt irritation at her decision to react rather than act; wasn’t she meant to be a saviour of those in distress? But then she knelt down and started to pull at the stones around his feet, and he realised all she had needed was a moment to read the situation.

They worked together.

‘It might collapse,’ she said, after a while, in between breaths.

David concentrated on the rhythm of his hands. Someone was screaming outside.

‘I’ll go and see,’ said Inger, and started back down the corridor.

He pictured a group of women standing around the house, their hands over their mouths, portraying shock and terror. Soon, with Inger’s help, they would get over it, start to organise themselves, build themselves into a team of good intentions. He suspected they would attempt to pull him clear for his own good. And his hands were a mess of cuts; his blood was making the stones slippery. The window of opportunity to save her was closing. What would he do if he couldn’t save her? He would be a waste of a man, a dead end of the possibilities he had been born with. He thought of Arnie, and the other men who slumped in The Cornerhouse, waiting for a win on the cubes for a few moments in a dream.

He heard himself saying, ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ in time to the widening of the hole, each stone in turn. He had to save her. It was his destiny.

A hand poked through, clutched at his. A voice he didn’t recognise said, ‘Please,’ and he squeezed the fingers, felt the skin, realised it was Marianne at the moment she said, ‘David?’ How could he not have recognised her? He felt hot, feverish with guilt, as he scrabbled at the stones until they gave and he pulled her up and out, falling backwards, so that she came into his arms and he was holding her, listening to her cry, wanting her to cry because nobody else had ever cried like her. She yelped and snorted, and always got the hiccups afterwards, and David waited for the hiccups to start, then stroked her face as she alternated between them and trying to talk.

‘How—you—you—you,’ she said. He picked her up. She felt heavier than he remembered, and there was no blood on her, no rips on her clothes. She seemed intact, weighed down by the dust that cloaked her. Every second that he held her cemented her back to him. He could feel her, prickling, singing with life, like a part of his body waking from numbness after too long being still. Life was returning to them both.

Inger awaited them on the other side of the window. David helped Marianne through, watched a knot of women tie themselves around her with towels and torches. A light rain was caught in the beams of light, like the moment was frozen.

‘Come out,’ said Inger.

‘What’s happening?’ he said.

‘The emergency services are on their way. But it’s going to take time, coming from the mainland. Ten minutes for the helicopter. They said stay out of the house. It’s unstable.’

Marianne was being led away by the women. He watched her shake her head, turn, point at him. No, not at him, at the house, her gaze rigid with fear, expectation. The women piled towels on her shoulders and dragged her on.

‘Are there others?’ David said.

‘Come out,’ said Inger, again.

He said, ‘I’ll be careful,’ not meaning it. He had no intention of doing less than any hero should. He ran back to the remains of the doorway and squeezed himself through, into the darkness beyond.

Now the island holds men. They walk around as if they’re stepping on any normal, sane stretch of land: hillocks of wild grass, dark brown crusted turds of sheep. Their feet squelch these things down, and they don’t understand they are violating this place. Or perhaps they know and don’t care. There are more important things in life than the sanctity of Skein Island. This is, after all, an emergency.

I’m aware that, in my head, I sound like my mother.

But Vanessa is being put in a helicopter right now, so maybe I feel like I should step into her shoes until she can resume her responsibilities. She was carried out by David, unconscious, but now she is awake and annoyed, her eyes stretched wide, making frantic statements at me over the top of the plastic mask they’ve clamped over her nose and her intact mouth. Whatever I saw down there wasn’t real. Her mouth is proof of that.

The paramedics have tied her to the stretcher. She was clawing at them, and she even scored a cheek with her long nails. She looks fine, if furious, but the way the two paramedics have marked her as a priority, even before Rebecca with her broken leg, is giving me the feeling that her outrage is a blanket under which is hidden all manner of failures – failure in her body, in her duty, failure to keep us all safe, failure to keep this island under her sole control. Perhaps this is a long enough list of failures to defeat her.

She clenches and unclenches her fists rhythmically, so I take one of her hands in mine and walk alongside her stretcher as they take it to the helicopter, away from the crater that was once her house.