Алия Уайтли - Skein Island

That had been enough .

My grandfather set his sights on a girl. The girl who became my grandmother, who was always ‘the girl’ to him, if he spoke of her at all. She left him, and my father, soon after my father started school. There wasn’t even a picture of her for me to examine as I wanted to. I was keen to see what the face of a traitor looked like; that was how I thought of her, for years, until I understood life better .

My father told me that story of the marriage as a gamble often, trotting out the familiar sentences to a little girl who was too young to make sense of it. He told it as if it were a parable, and wisdom could be unlocked if only the listener heard with better ears. For a while I blamed myself for failing to find an answer within it .

My father is an idiot. He loves people and their many problems. He can’t walk through the market square of our home town in less than an entire morning because so many people want to stop and chat, even now. I can remember having to hold his hand throughout, pinned in his grasp, shamed by his inane conversations. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other as he chatted. I was wearing yellow wellington boots. This must be one of my earliest memories .

I know my mother went out to work for the local solicitors’ office while my father stayed home with me – an unusual choice in the seventies, perhaps born from his time spent alone while he was growing up. He wanted to keep me company every minute. But occasionally he would grab a day of work for a removals firm or on a building site, and then my grandfather would turn up on the doorstep .

There was always a sense of reluctance to leave me in his care; I felt that from very early on. I used to think my father was needlessly worried that the old man wouldn’t really notice if I lived or died, which I took as a reflection on his own upbringing. Now I suspect he was more concerned about my grandfather encouraging the sociopath in me to emerge, by giving it a proper role model .

We had one proper conversation about the bet early in my teenage years .

‘Katie,’ my father said to me, ‘think of it this way. He likes to pretend he’s an island, but he still made me and raised me. Not well, perhaps, and with long absences, but he did. He wants people to think he doesn’t have feelings, and that’s his choice. It’s not a choice I would make, but he lives with it.’

‘Has he never loved anyone?’ I asked, meaning: Why doesn’t he love me? It’s a difficult thing for a young person to understand .

‘He made a baby and lost a wife, and both of those events were his own fault. But he comes here to look after you, every once in a while. That has to mean something.’

I don’t know if my father genuinely believed that. I’m not so certain that love can be measured in distance travelled, or tasks performed .

I’m not the way I am because of my grandfather, although I wouldn’t deny that he proved to me that living without having to hold fast to another human being was possible. I stress that it was humanity alone that didn’t appeal to him; he loved the beauty of all other living things and knew everything about them. The only time I saw him smile was when he took me out of the house, into the wild .

That only happened once. My parents decided to take a summer holiday to France and I didn’t want to go. In fact, I remember I was angling to be left alone in the house. A week without having to say a word to anybody – the school summer break had started – appealed to me deeply after my father’s endless neediness. But it wasn’t to be. My grandfather turned up on the doorstep on the morning of their departure, and was admitted. They all stood in the kitchen together, and I watched from the doorway .

‘She’ll be fine,’ he said to my parents .

My mother said, ‘I’ll hold you to that, Michael,’ in a warning tone. I think my grandfather was a little afraid of her. But as soon as I’d been kissed goodbye, and my parents had driven away, he looked me up and down and pronounced me old enough to do some proper walking .

‘Where are we going?’ I asked him .

‘Outside.’

He had a strong sense of where to go, veering through side-streets that led out of town and stomping down back roads that bore signposts to the names of villages I didn’t know. Or he would simply set off across the fields, flattening crops with his stride. When the last rays of the sunset faded we were walking uphill with not a word spoken to each other in hours. We stopped in the lea of a dry stone wall, on thin grass, and I watched the sheep huddling together by the gate as he shook out two sleeping bags from his old rucksack, followed by a thermos flask of coffee and a tin of beans .

‘Get comfy,’ he said .

We shared the beans. I was ravenous .

This might seem strange, but I was not a girl, and he was not a man. We were not people. I have never felt so light, so free of expectation, and that was terrifying. If I wasn’t to be treated like a woman-in-training, then what was I?

I don’t remember falling asleep. I do remember waking, in the light of the dawn, and never having felt so cold in my life. I lay there, in its grip, and smelled burning. Nothing made sense. The smell was pungent, deep, rich. My grandfather laughed, and I turned my stiff neck towards him. He was leaning back against the wall, smoking one of his cigars. He puffed out a cloud in my direction, then took the cigar from his lips and smiled. It was not a smile for me. I don’t think he knew I was awake .

I imagined that was his routine. A cigar at dawn, and a private joke at the world’s expense. At all busy, boring people, and their day to come .

‘That’s it,’ says Katie. ‘So far, anyway.’

‘When did he die?’

‘A while back. Lung problems. Emphysema.’

‘What year, though?’ I ask. I want to place it in my own timeline.

She thinks it through, her head tilted. ‘I think around 1997? I remember visiting him in the hospital. He’d been found in a barn by a farmer.’

‘Was that in Bristol?’ My student life, the fish and chip shop.

‘Bristol – no. No. I don’t think he ever went south of Manchester.’

‘Then why would I have found him in Bristol? Why would he have followed me to Skein Island?’

She has no answer for that.

‘It can’t be him,’ I say. ‘My ghost likes people. He likes me.’

‘It is him.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘The laugh.’

A person can be expected to know a laugh beyond reasonable doubt.

‘He hated everyone,’ she says. ‘Why would he hang around? What did he find that’s worth staying for?’

It’s still light outside, although it’s getting late. Even a short journey makes a difference to the perception of the beginning and the end of the day.

‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ I say. ‘Think about it.’

‘I am!’

‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘Unless he already knew we’d meet at some point. Unless it’s all pre-ordained. Written.’ She says it thoughtfully. I can tell she likes the idea.

I don’t. Because it means I’m not the star of my own life. I’m the warm-up act for some tale of grandfather and granddaughter reunited, and my ghost is not my ghost at all. He’s used me as a method of transport to reach an entirely different destination, and I realise in a rush that I don’t want him to leave me, not like this. Not for her.

‘If this is all about you, wouldn’t he just turn up at your house?’ I ask. ‘Why waste all this time, hanging around with me, waking me up every morning?’