Алия Уайтли - Skein Island

He doesn’t reply. He crumples up the napkin and drops it on the table.

‘I’m sorry that my mother left us and chose a different life. But that was her choice. Not yours. And you have always been too much of a fucking idiot to understand it.’

I stand up and walk off, down to the beach, to where Geoff is picking up pebbles and attempting to skim them across the waves. He’s rubbish at it. I watch him for a while, feeling Arnie’s gaze on my back, making my shoulder-blades prickle.

‘Not enough wrist,’ I tell him, and pick up a stone to demonstrate. It skims three, four, times, before losing all energy and sinking to the bottom. My father taught me how to skim stones when I was very little. We used to go to Camber Sands for holidays, and I’d amaze the other kids with my skimming ability.

I turn around and look up, to the bar. Arnie has gone. He’s probably inside, complaining to David about me, telling him they should leave me behind in the morning.

Over my dead body.

Geoff tries to emulate my skimming style and fails dismally. ‘I never could do this,’ he says.

‘Practice.’

‘That’s what everyone says, but I’ve been practising all my life at everything and I’m still rubbish. Do you know what it’s like to not be good at anything? I bet you don’t.’

‘David said you were a big help to him.’

He looks pleased with this. ‘Yeah, I did a good job, clearing that whole mess up. Sam said—’ He claps a hand over his mouth.

‘It’s all right. I know who Sam is.’

I know enough, anyway. More than I want to know. She’s in David’s life when I am not, and I have no right to hate her for that. But I do anyway.

The sea moves quietly, drawing closer to my feet, then pulling back: an eternal pattern. Behind us, the pop music from the bar changes to a slower song. Geoff sings along, words about not wanting to fall asleep, not wanting to miss a thing.

Suddenly it seems important to find out more about him. ‘Don’t you listen to music at home sometimes?’ I ask him.

‘Not really. I watch telly. Do you like EastEnders ?’

‘No, not my kind of thing. Do you live alone?’

‘With my parents.’

‘They must be getting on. I hope you don’t mind me asking – how old are you?’ He looks on the wrong side of middle age but his behaviour is so young, even immature. It’s difficult to get the measure of him.

‘Look,’ says Geoff. ‘It’s not really a big deal, is it? I don’t mind talking about stuff if you like, but I get the feeling you should concentrate on what we came here to do, right? Who cares if my favourite colour is yellow? I’m here to help David. He’s the important one.’

There is nothing I can say to that.

I wish there was something else in his life. I wish he wasn’t just a sidekick, had not been born that way. He is prepared to die for my husband, and he will get nothing in return.

I want to give him a memory that is not about David. So I reach out to him, and take his hands. I pull him into a rhythm, a step to the left, a step to the right, and we dance out the song while he sings along.

He knows every word.

‘This is it.’

The mouth of the cave yawns wide.

A bird overhead makes a curious sound, like a laugh, loud and mechanical. I look up into the clouds, but can’t see it.

It’s been a long morning. The men didn’t leave without me. When I awoke, David was waiting with coffee and a croissant, of all things, claiming to have found them in the minimart down the road. He watched me eat, and told me to wear practical clothes. I picked out trousers and a jumper, utilitarian, and he nodded. Then we went to find Geoff and Arnie.

We shared a car to get here: David driving, Arnie in the passenger seat, looking even worse than before, even though the only beer he swallowed last night was by accident when I threw it over him, Geoff in the back seat with me. The ring road around the island was clear, easy to negotiate, but when David turned off to take the mountain road it became pebbly, potholed. About a mile back we started to encounter debris on the road: rocks, branches. In some cases David had to stop the car and Geoff helped him to move these obstacles aside.

We passed a taverna, shut up, the wooden tables overturned to form a barricade against the front door. I thought I couldn’t feel any more scared, but the tables, in a haphazard, frantic pile, terrified me. It spoke of a future where everything is overturned, abandoned.

When we arrived at our destination, I found myself climbing from the car and into David’s arms. I’ve not been able to let go of him since. I hold his hand, so tight, as we approach the mouth, and stare into the darkness. There’s a set of steps, gouged out of the stone, worn by so many tourists’ feet, and an orange rope set into the wall by metal rings, making handholds. It looks so normal. I must be wrong. Moira must be somewhere else, far away, in a place I would never think of looking.

‘It’s here,’ says David. He lets go of my hand.

I look up into his face and see a faraway fascination, eyes glazed, lips loose.

‘What is it?’

‘The colours. Don’t you see them?’

Geoff comes up to join us. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘Like a rainbow. A trail. Leading inside.’

A shout cuts through the silence of the mountain. I spin round. Arnie is on his knees, his back to us, bent forward at the waist, his hands over his face. I run to him. There is blood on his fingers; he is clawing at his eyes, gouging. I take his hands and try to force them down but he’s strong, so strong. I can’t stop him from putting his fingernails into the corners of his eyes and ripping, ripping. David and Geoff grab him, wrestle him, until they have him still, lying on his back on the ground. He stops struggling and starts whispering. I put my ear to his lips, and hear, ‘Not any more, not see any more, no colours, no colours.’

David says to me, ‘Can you hold him while I get the first aid kit?’

I put my hands on Arnie’s chest and David slips off the backpack he’s wearing, then crouches over it, searching through the pockets. I can’t look at Arnie’s face, his ruined eyes. I stare at his hands, lying placidly on the ground. They are slick with his blood.

David unzips a small green case and unwraps a sterile gauze pad, then snips lengths of surgical tape to hold it in place over Arnie’s eye socket. He repeats the action for the other socket. I want to scream at him, tell him to run for help, find a hospital – shouldn’t we all be in the car, breaking speed limits, looking for doctors? But he snips the gauze, methodically, and Geoff watches the procedure with interest.

White tape knitting the remains of his face together, the gauze already staining pink, Arnie lies still, unmoving. I stand up. The broken rocks of the mountains form asymmetrical grey and brown patterns to the sea, which stretches onwards, like the promise of a calmness to come. But not now. Something is building. I can feel it.

‘The colours,’ whispers Arnie, and then he wails, like a dog hit by a car, a noise of such pain and fear that I can’t bear it. I step back; I want to be away from him, my own father, and I would rather that I died than have to hear that sound. He gets to his feet. I take his arms and he shakes me off, then starts to walk, fast, up the path that leads to the higher peaks of the mountains; he doesn’t need eyes, I don’t know how he’s doing it, but he’s climbing higher, leaving the path, dropping to his hands and moving like an animal over the rocks and stones, at speed.

‘Dad!’ I shout after him. He doesn’t look back. I run to David, pull at his arms. ‘Go after him!’