Алия Уайтли: Skein Island

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ whispers Rebecca. ‘Bad dreams? To do with home?’

‘I should have told him,’ I manage to say.

‘Told your husband? That you were coming here?’

‘I left him.’

I wait for condemnation, but instead Kay’s voice, too loud for the middle of the night, says, ‘Yeah, well, we all do something terrible every now and again. That’s life for you. Did you bottle it all up for so long that it had to come whooshing out, all of a sudden, like a bottle of Coke that someone shook? You have that repressed look about you.’

‘Shut up, please, Kay,’ says Rebecca, in what sounds like an amused tone of voice, ‘if you don’t mind me saying so.’

Kay claps her hands together, says, ‘Brilliant!’ and then there is the sound of movement, and the overhead light bursts into shocked life. ‘Since we’re up, I’m getting tea.’

‘There’s only horrible, cheap teabags,’ says Rebecca.

‘What would your majesty prefer? Earl Grey?’

‘I like Earl Grey,’ I say, and the two of them laugh at me. Kay pads away in her zebra-striped pyjamas, and the kettle is soon audible through the partition wall. It works itself up to boiling point and Kay hums along with it, occasionally talking to herself, saying things such as not even then and it’s meant to be green, stupid .

‘She’s a live wire,’ says Rebecca. ‘Do you really want to be here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You say you want to know why you were given a place here by a dead woman. It strikes me you didn’t have to come. You could have simply asked over the phone, couldn’t you? And they would have told you that it was an error by some new member of staff. A mix-up of letters. Are you really trying to solve that mystery, or are you after the experience? The experience of being your mother. What it’s like to leave.’

I can’t move. I absorb the words, until tea arrives. Kay passes around the mugs and sits down on my bed too; it creaks beneath her.

‘It’s so quiet here, I actually can’t sleep,’ she says.

‘Me neither,’ says Rebecca. ‘I should say, by the way, I’m a therapist. I’m sorry if I overstepped the mark, Marianne.’

‘Why, what did you tell her to do?’

I shake my head at Kay. ‘She didn’t tell me to do anything. She just pointed something out.’

‘I hate it when people do that.’ Kay smoothes the duvet with one hand. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about how we could get hold of your mum’s declaration, if they won’t give it to you.’

‘You mean break the rules?’ says Rebecca. She’s in a peach silk nightdress, showing the aged skin at the tops of her arms. Her face is shiny from being cleansed, toned and moisturised before being allowed to relax into sleep. ‘They’ll kick us off.’

‘They’ll kick Marianne off anyway, when they discover she never handed in her mobile.’

‘It was an honest mistake, I’ll hand it in first thing tomorrow.’ I lean over the side of the bed and pull my handbag out from under the bed by its leather strap. David bought it for me in Barcelona while on a stag weekend for a work colleague. A coach had been commandeered, and the back rows of the aeroplane given over to their testosterone-fuelled two days. I never asked for details. Instead, I enjoyed a secretive delight at the thought that he had stopped to buy a handbag even though he had been in the midst of a male adventure. I take out the phone from the inner pocket and stare at it.

‘Are you going to phone him?’ says Rebecca, in a stage whisper.

But the choice is wrenched away from me. I’m grateful. ‘No signal.’ I drop the phone on the bed. ‘I wonder why they make you give up your phone if there’s no signal anyway?’

‘Psychology.’ Rebecca taps its screen. ‘Whether the phone works or not, it connects you to your normal life. Once it’s locked away, you’re going to commit to the week more, to meeting new people, forming new ties. Because on a subconscious level you’re much more likely to feel vulnerable, and forget the people who usually keep you safe.’

‘Do you think reading your mum’s declaration really will help you?’ interrupted Kay.

‘I don’t know.’ I slip the phone back into the bag and push it under the bed once more. ‘What else could?’

‘All right then. Tomorrow night. We’ll go and find it. Be ready.’

‘Are you serious?’ says Rebecca.

‘Yup,’ Kay tells her, with a level stare.

Rebecca sighs. ‘Well then. You’d better try and get some sleep if you’re both going to turn into hardened lawbreakers.’ She is our mother figure. Kay rolls her eyes at me, then returns to her own bed.

I lie down once more. The rest of the night passes in a deep, deliberate silence. The cold air crackles with thoughts that have no place to go.

‘So she’s gone too,’ said Arnie. ‘She won’t be coming back.’ He undid the zipper of his grey ski jacket and pulled one arm free, then the other, carefully, so as not to knock his pint. ‘Sorry, but there it is.’

‘No, she’ll come back,’ said David.

Arnie smiled at him, baring his grey teeth. ‘Is that right?’ He raised his voice to the rest of the bar. ‘He’s still got hope, this one.’

David remembered a story Marianne had once told him about her father. Her first boyfriend had left a message on the answering machine, dumping her, back at the age when face-to-face talking between boys and girls didn’t happen. Arnie had played it for her when she got back from ballet class. He’d also played it for the neighbours, who were round having drinks that night, and they’d had a long discussion in front of her about how she should just get over it and not mope about such a stupid boy. Arnie hadn’t considered it to be her private business at all, apparently, and David had wondered if Marianne had exaggerated the story, as she sometimes did, for dramatic effect. But now he suspected it was true after all.

‘So what’s going on?’ said Arnie. He took a long drink of his pint, then patted his thin moustache with his fingers and wiped the moisture on the front of his jacket.

‘Did she talk to you? Phone you, at all?’

‘No. But I wouldn’t expect her to. You, on the other hand, should be her closest confidante. Shouldn’t you?’

‘I am,’ David said.

Arnie shook his head. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but it has to be your fault. Your wife’s not happy, it’s your fault. Trust me.’

So this wasn’t about a father protecting a daughter; this was about men being left behind. Abandonment was not the same, however it happened, no matter what Arnie might think.

‘Drink your beer,’ Arnie said.

Getting drunk in the pub – this was his idea of mutual support.

The Cornerhouse was one of those pubs that people walked past regularly and never went into. It sat where the less developed end of Wootton Bassett high street turned a sharp left into seedier territory, such as DVD rental places with ripped posters in the windows and dry-cleaning places sporting filthy net curtains. There was a sign hung on the roof of the little pub that promised Sky Sports, and then three stone steps down into the barely lit room where a few wooden chairs and thick, round tables squeezed up together to leave room for a skittles alley and a dartboard. David had never been in there, although he had known it was Arnie’s second home for years.

At the back of his mind had been the idea that it was a pub by invitation only, for those older men who all knew each other and didn’t want to have to deal with young idiots when they socialised. The quiet murmurings, half-hidden under the strains of early Elvis from the radio behind the bar, were not about women or cars or jobs, David guessed. He didn’t know what they talked about, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t know for another thirty years or so, when, one day, he’d find the urge to step inside a place like this and find a lot of tired old men looking back at him without judgement.