Алия Уайтли - Skein Island

It’s all so wrong , Hamish had said. Criminal out on the streets, you know. I found out a paedophile lives down the road from us. Rebecca’s very sensitive to things like that; how can she relax, knowing he’s in the street too? We never had kids because of people like that. I know it’s really upsetting her .

How horrible to be in that situation, David had thought. He remembered feeling guilty over how relieved he was not to be in that situation himself.

But that situation was everywhere. That blackness of broken, selfish, dangerous souls had spread all over the world, and nobody was doing anything about it. ‘Pliers, that’s what you need,’ said Geoff. ‘Take a pair of pliers to the bastard’s testicles. Doing that to your wife.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ said David.

‘You don’t want to believe everything Marianne says,’ said Arnie. ‘She was always a good liar, that one. All of them are. And they all leave in the end.’

David strode over to Mags, laid a ten-pound note on the bar and met her gaze. She gave him a small smile, apologetic. ‘You don’t need any cubes now,’ she said. ‘Look at you.’

He left The Cornerhouse and ran for the library.

‘Can I just say…’ Patty hesitates in the doorway. ‘That we all think you’re really brave and when you feel ready to go back out on the front desk again, you just let us know.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’m still a bit…’

‘Yes, of course.’ She looks at the kettle on the work counter, as if it is deeply interesting. Eventually she points to it. ‘You want?’

‘No, thanks Patty.’

‘Okay. I’ll be out the front, then.’

‘Give me a shout if there’s a rush,’ I tell her, safe in the knowledge that a rush of customers at 7:45 on a Thursday evening is the most unlikely of things to happen in this library.

‘Okay. You do your—’ She points at the spreadsheet I have open on the computer screen. She’s in her sixties and says she’ll never get comfortable with electronic systems. I have always liked that about her. She is determined to remain immune to modern life, and her vision of the world is intact, frozen, formed from Coronation Street , Panorama and the Silver Jubilee. I can feel, in her presence, that maybe everything isn’t out of control after all.

After she has left the back office, I switch from the spreadsheet to Google once more.

The news has become a code to crack. I start every day on the BBC website and I hunt for articles, through the Guardian and the Independent , on through CNN and Al Jazeera, even the Sun and the Star and the Daily Mail . The stories give me clues as to whether Moira escaped the island, where she might be, how her power to affect men is changing everything.

Because around the world, men are changing. They are becoming heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Today, in Kentucky, a fireman rushed into a burning orphanage and saved sixteen children, one after the other. Police think the fire was started deliberately by a serial arsonist who is now operating in the area. Today, in Lancashire, an old man lay down on train tracks and had to be forcibly removed. He had written on his face in indelible ink:

I DON’T WANT THIS

Today, in Kenya, Somalian pirates attacked a holiday resort. They rounded up all the men and divided them into four groups. They killed every member of the smallest group, and kidnapped the men in another. Two groups they left alone. Five men dead, six missing. Forty-eight ignored.

Were these things happening before? Not like this, not in such clear delineations, I don’t think. Or am I catching Amelia’s madness?

I think Amelia knew what unique and special thing she was hiding in that basement. That’s why she named her monster Moira. By doing that she left a clue that was easy to follow. All it took was a quick internet search to find the truth.

I looked up the derivation of the word monster. It comes from Middle English, leading back to a Latin root: monstrum . A portent, an unnatural event. Whatever Moira is, I don’t think she’s unnatural. And if she’s part of the natural order of this world, then that means men are meant to be more important than women.

I click on the bookmark to my favourite page: the Wikipedia entry on the Moirai, the Fates – the Greek idea of incarnations of destiny. Three women who control the threads of life for all men. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. But in Homeric stories and Mycenaean myths there aren’t three women who perform these roles. There is one.

Whenever I consider this, my hands begin to shake. It’s a terrible piece of knowledge to possess.

I look up Lady Worthington on Google. There are many sites that mention her; she is a romantic historical figure, I suppose. I click on one devoted to feminist pioneers:

Born into the heart of the English establishment at the end of the nineteenth century, Lady Amelia Worthington was niece to the fourth Earl of Stanhope, and heir to the Worthington fortune, a trove of priceless Roman artefacts collected in Northern Africa by her father, the Victorian explorer, Lord Percy Worthington.

Upon her father’s death, Lady Amelia used her vast wealth to travel with a freedom and independence that women were just beginning to explore after the end of World War One. She participated in archaeological digs in Egypt, and was a close friend of Lord Carnarvon. After his sudden death in 1923 in Cairo (some say due to the Curse of Tutankhamun, but nowadays widely attributed to blood poisoning), Lady Amelia left Egypt and travelled extensively in Turkey, the Greek Islands, and the Mediterranean. She was heavily involved in the British dig in Thermi, on the island of Lesbos, conducted in 1933, that uncovered extensive pottery and figurine remains from the fourth century BC, along with rich mosaics and impressive sculptures.

Her whereabouts are undocumented during World War Two, rising to speculation that she remained on the Greek Islands and was involved in the resistance movement. Cretan resistance fighters later recalled reporting to a female British secret agent who lived and worked amongst the Cretan women without arousing Nazi suspicion.

In 1945 Lady Amelia conducted a deal with the British government, aided in part by an unlikely friendship with Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin (with whom she shared a political belief that the days of empire were over, and a penchant for Webster Cigars) to purchase Skein Island, lying only eighteen kilometres from mainland Devon. She then used her vast fortune to set up the world’s first feminist retreat, offering a week of free board and lodging to those who needed a period of reflection or to escape difficult domestic circumstances.

The rest of the piece deals with things I already know. She lived as a recluse, and lived on the island she dominated. And then she passed the reins on to my mother.

I sit back from the screen. I can’t control my thoughts any more. Everything I learn sends me a new message I can’t ignore. The world is being filled with the stories of men: heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Women will be marginalised into minor characters once more. We will lose the freedom we never knew we had – a chance to make our own stories.

Moira is Fate. The Fates. Three women in one, making heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks in order to weave a tapestry of stories. Were all those myths true, after all? Odysseus, Hector and Achilles, Perseus, Theseus? And others, later: King Arthur, Mordred, Lancelot, Merlin. Thousands of stories, shaped by Moira for her entertainment. Weaving together the strands of men’s lives.

Each man delights in the work that suits him best , Homer wrote. They are all born with the seed within them to become one of four things. And now those seeds are growing.