Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She walks away, wiping her mouth on the deerskin.

She cannot remember her mother’s face. She can remember the faces of her brother, her cousins, her father. She can remember the faces of the men who sat around the council table. She can remember the faces of the four male servants who were trusted enough to work in the royal apartments. But she cannot bring her mother’s face to mind.

This is the woman who brought her into the world, the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind’s eye in her mother’s direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders. She begins to realise how little her mother did, how rarely she offered an opinion, how the family revolved around her without ever making contact, how small an effect she had on the world.

How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning.

She realises that she can no longer remember what her own face looks like so she leaves the tent and makes her way to the shallow pool on the rock. She puts her back to the sun and makes a canopy of the deerskin cloak to shield the surface from the glare. She stares down into the water and sees her brother’s sister staring up at her, hair matted like his hair, skin filthy like his skin, cheeks sunken, eyes dark, the skull starting to come through.

There is a storm at night. The thunder is like buildings coming down, and after every explosion the tent is flooded with a harsh blue light that sings on the back of her eyes for minutes afterwards. She wills the lightning to strike her directly, for everything to be over in an instant, but this does not happen. The canvas bucks and cracks and after several hours she is woken from her half-sleep by the rough cloth smacking her face as the tent collapses around her. The wind fills the canvas like a sail and drags her along the ground. She has lost all sense of direction and is terrified that she will be hauled over a cliff. She does not want to die, not now, not like this. She does not want to lie on rocks with shattered bones or drown like a dog in a sack but she does not possess the strength to wrestle herself free, so she lies flat and prays for the wind to slacken. Eventually a gust hoists her free of the ground, she is swung hard against a boulder, the tent comes to a halt and she can do nothing but block her ears to the roar and the whipping of the canvas so that she can nurse the pain in her side.

Morning comes and the wind dies away. She frees herself and rolls what remains of the tent into a heap behind the rock that anchored her through half the night. She looks back towards the square of dead grass where it had been pitched. All but two of the pegs have gone. Putting the tent back up is impossible now. She drinks some water then begins the painfully slow process of dragging the torn canvas sheets down to the head of the beach where there is some protection from the wind and she can wrap herself up at night.

There is now a constant throbbing in her head and a churning anger in her guts that she has no way of expending. She lies down and closes her eyes and tries to get some of the rest she should have got last night. As she slips out of consciousness she hears the women’s voices again and that distant tinkling, but when she opens her eyes she can hear only the surf. She descends into vivid, fitful dreams. She is in the bridal suite once more, standing by the bed and examining the tapestry of the weeping woman and the receding ship. This time, however, she sees a part of the picture she had not noticed before. In the lower left-hand corner of the great, woven square, on the green of the island, she can see a band of figures. They are walking towards the weeping woman. She does not know whether they are coming to help the woman or whether they are hunting her down. She steps forward to examine them more closely and the dream evaporates.

The sun is overhead and the air is warm again. She decides that she must make use of what little energy she has left to find some food. Picking up the sharpened stone she climbs to the grassy plateau where the shrubs grow. Half of her is in her body, half hovers in the air above. She moves fluidly and for once walking is easy. She can smell the perfume of the small blue flowers and see two gulls hanging on the breeze.

She finds the largest plant, breaks off the straightest, toughest branch then uses the sharpened stone to whittle a point at one end. She walks to the place where she first saw the seals. She has no idea how many days ago that was. She simply assumes that they will still be there and indeed they are, three adults and a pup. She sits on the grassy ledge and looks down. There is a drop, perhaps twice the height of a man, to a slab of rock that slopes smoothly down to the little channel beside which they are lying. Holding the makeshift weapon in her teeth she turns, lowers herself as far as she can then lets go.

She feels, briefly, as if she is flying, then she lands badly. The pain is so bright and sharp that she cannot breathe, only cradle herself and moan till it dies away, before rolling onto her back. She examines her left hand. The little finger is bent backwards and will not respond to any commands. She cannot bear to touch it. She is sweating profusely.

She looks up to the grassy ledge. She can see no way of getting back. She looks down. The seals are still there. They seem unbothered by her presence. She tells herself that this is good. They are tame. She can do what she came to do.

Her stick has slid down the rocks. She stands up, intending to walk over and retrieve it, but as she does so a flock of tiny, white insects swarms across her field of vision. She sits and waits then shuffles sideways, using her one good hand until she has the stick in her possession again.

She begins moving towards the seals. Two of the adults are watching her. She is fifteen paces away now. They are bigger than she had thought, their bodies as bulky as the bodies of oxen. One of the adults nudges the pup into the water then slips through the surface after it. She is ten paces away now, and she can see, for all their ungainliness, how strong these animals are and how much they weigh. She realises that what she is about to do is dangerous. She cannot remember precisely why she is doing it but changing her mind and doing something different seems like the hardest thing of all. She is five paces away. One of the seals lumbers towards her, rears up, opens its mouth and barks. It sounds like the bottom of a great jar being scraped. It is talking to her and no one has talked to her in a long time. She almost says something back. These animals are going to save her. She wonders why she did not come here sooner. It would have made everything so much easier.

Putting her right hand flat on the ground she gets slowly to her feet. She is a little giddy but there are no stars this time. The seal rears and barks again. She grips the stick tightly, steps forward and shoves the point into the flesh of the seal’s head. It moves with surprising speed, flicking the stick away and swinging immediately back to sink its teeth into her ankle, then swinging its head a third time so that her leg is yanked out from underneath her. The seal lets go and she is tumbling towards the channel. She puts out her hands but the stone is slimy with weed and she cannot get sufficient grip. She crashes into the water, her arms flailing. She’s hunting desperately for handholds but there are none to be found. Her head goes under, she breathes a mouthful of salty water and coughs it out. She grabs two hanks of weed and pulls her head above the surface. She looks round, thinking the seal is going to attack again, but they are all gone. She wonders if they are circling beneath her, biding their time. She looks down but she cannot even see her own feet. What she can see is the pink froth and clouds of blood in the water.