Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

Around back of the abbey, his makeshift bedroom is still chilly from the night. He lifts his guitar case onto his cot and pops it open, checking the instrument for damage from the cold. He adjusts the tuning, then picks out a few bars of “Roxanne” by the Police. “Roxanne” was playing the first time he saw Georgina, in a club in Palma de Mallorca, leggy in a pair of yellow silk shorts, dancing with three Spanish boys wearing sorbet-colored Lacoste shirts with the collars turned up. Smooth, handsome, dark boys, a striking contrast to fair-haired Georgina, creating a tableau watched by everyone around them.

Don’t put on that red light, she mouthed in his direction, abandoning her dance partners to pull him onto the floor.

Someone had brought him over to Palma from Barcelona on a long white yacht with two levels and teak trim, although who it was and how it came to pass he can’t remember. He had his own room for the week they floated around on that boat, with its own little bar and a double-size bed that he wasn’t alone in for long, then they docked on Mallorca and everyone on the yacht spilled out into the breezy Mediterranean night. He took up with Georgina and, once he’d fetched his guitar and pack from the yacht, never saw those people again. Instead he and Georgina spent a couple of sangria-soaked weeks hopscotching around the clubs of Palma, fucking like rabbits and laughing. Suddenly, she had bought him a ticket to come back to London with her. They were still having fun, and winter was coming. There was no reason to say no. The minute they disembarked at Heathrow, however, rain slapping down around them, Georgina wasted from downing four Bloody Marys during the two-hour flight, everything felt different. Everything felt rotten. He should have split right then.

I don’t normally live like this, he told her after she’d thrown open the door to her posh apartment.

She dumped her ankle-length leather coat on the floor and sank onto a massive chintz-covered sofa. I don’t imagine you do, darling .

Georgina’s father had bought the flat, and her mother had gotten it put together, lavishing it with flowery prints in silk. Georgina joked that the only thing she did herself was change the locks, so they couldn’t sneak in and lift her stash.

He’s not one to judge others’ lifestyles, but how Georgina managed to hold so many drugs in that slight body mystifies him. In London, it no longer seemed like holiday fun. She was still lively and wry and, of course, pretty, but she became something else, too. Dangerous. The smooth walls of the room where he sleeps on Iona, the tiny square window facing onto the sea and the stone fragments of ancient grave markers stored under the gables; if he’s going to thank God for anything, it’s that he managed to get out before there was real trouble.

Tomorrow, however, he’ll bundle up his things and say good-bye to Iona. Better to leave before the Community has run out of need or space for him, struggling to tell him to go, with a lot of coughing behind fists and embarrassed glances. He’ll ride the ferry back to Mull, hitch across it to the larger ferry for the mainland. From Oban, he’ll hitch again or hop on a train. He is sure to have enough money in his pockets to pay for a ticket and a couple of weeks in a room somewhere until he picks up another job or meets a nice lady. Maybe he’ll go to Glasgow — it’s supposed to be a scruffy town with a decent music scene. So far, Scotland has been good to him.

He digs his shaving kit out from his duffel and, pouring water from a pitcher into a porcelain-covered bowl, mows the stubble from his face, nicking the slight cleft in his chin in the process. He dabs at the blood with a towel, slaps on some oil to guard against midges, and slides into a clean shirt. He’s been shaving since he was sixteen but for some reason has never grown hair on his chest. Some women ask whether he shaves it; at least one asked whether he waxes it. Like a swimmer? Nah. Then I’d have to shave my head, too. Of course, she took it as an invitation to run her fingers through his wavy shoulder-length hair. Well, fair enough. Although he didn’t enjoy her calling him Goldilocks.

Maybe he should head north when he leaves instead of east to Glasgow, up to the Isle of Skye. According to legend, selkies guard the Isle of Skye’s shores. Jethro Tull has moved up there. Or was it just Ian Anderson? He slides his canteen into his jacket pocket and picks up his guitar.

He stops in at the abbey kitchen. He tucks a fistful of warm oatcakes and a scrap of cheddar cheese into a paper bag and fills his canteen up at the tap, the clear, cold water spilling onto his fingers. He writes a swift note for the cook: I won’t be eating at the abbey tonight, thank you. Francis. If he eats with the Community, the groundskeeper may mention a task for tomorrow or the day after, and then he’ll have to say he’s leaving, and then there will be the need for good-byes. Better to leave quietly.

And then he’ll be gone, and they will swiftly forget him. Someone who actually belongs here, someone of faith, will take his place. He made his peace with not being at peace with God or even knowing whether there is a God years ago, maybe when, as a nine-year-old boy, he saw his father die right before his eyes. Certainly when he watched his brother’s coffin being lowered into the ground beside the mound over his father’s body.

And then Eugene’s, two years later, in unconsecrated ground because the son-of-a-bitch priest at the Catholic cemetery said they couldn’t take him.

One thing is certain. If there is a God, he wouldn’t turn Eugene away. Not any God he could ever believe in.

* * *

A soft northeasterly wind is blowing, rustling the new wildflowers in the machair. White-bellied, long-beaked oystercatchers and flocks of small black starlings pass overhead, as though leading the way to Saint Columba’s Bay. He hasn’t taken the long hike down to the southern tip of the island since shortly after he arrived, although some in the Community make the hour-and-a-half pilgrimage over rocky hill and sheep-strewn meadow every Sunday afternoon, regardless of the weather. After rowing across the open sea from northern Ireland, with the help of his twelve acolytes, Columba pulled his wooden currach up onto the shore here in the sixth century and effectively established Christianity in Scotland. Spiritual seekers on the island consider the bay sacred.

No one much walks down to the bay during the week, however. Maybe in the summer, when the number of overnight visitors with more time to spend on the island picks up, but today the bay should be a good place to play music and enjoy some sunshine undisturbed and disturbing no one, a good way to spend his last day on the island. He hasn’t brought his guitar outside much here for fear of it being damaged by rain or the heavy mist that often veils Iona. Other than the guitar, the sum total of his possessions is the shaving kit, a wallet, a US passport, a knife, his boots, the leather jacket Georgina gave him, a rugged sweater a Norwegian girl made for him, a few changes of clothes, a bandanna, a belt, the two books he always carries, and the canteen. Georgina gave him stuff during the five months they were together, but he left everything except the jacket behind. He had to take that because she’d ruined the one he had, throwing up on its shoulder outside the Wag on a cold January morning. This new jacket — warmer and softer leather than any he’s ever owned — appeared two days later, with a note saying: So I don’t have to lean my head against my own sick. Your G.

Ah, lovely Georgina.

He likes his guitar, though. Don’t get some dumb, lousy one, Eugene said after they’d fried enough fish sticks and poured enough sodas for him to afford it. Get one you’ll want forever. Cause you are going to want it forever. Well, Eugene is gone, but he still has the guitar. He’ll busk on the street in decent weather, but he’d go hungry before exposing its rosewood curves to snow or rain.