Island Read online

  Also by Jane Rogers

  Separate Tracks

  Her Living Image

  The Ice is Singing

  Mr Wroe’s Virgins

  Promised Lands

  Thanks to the Arts Council of Great Britain for their Writer’s Bursary which helped to keep me while I wrote this novel.

  J.R.

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2000 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, New York 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 1999 by Jane Rogers

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-551-7

  For Milla

  Contents

  Also by Jane Rogers

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Murder in Ruanish

  Chapter 1 Lies

  Chapter 2 Fir Apple

  Chapter 3 A plan

  Chapter 4 The pigeon

  Chapter 5 On mothers

  Chapter 6 Falling

  Chapter 7 Calum‘s treasure

  Chapter 8 Seals

  Chapter 9 Table Rock

  Chapter 10 A daughter

  Chapter 11 A sharp knife

  Chapter 12 Bull Rock

  Chapter 13 Enthusiasts

  Chapter 14 Mother’s weak spot

  Chapter 15 Ashplant

  Chapter 16 Dislocation

  Chapter 17 Salt

  Chapter 18 Birthday cake

  Chapter 19 Tempest

  Chapter 20 Susan’s father

  Chapter 21 Seven swans

  Chapter 22 Night sky

  Chapter 23 Viking Bay

  Praise for Island

  MURDER IN RUANISH

  Mrs Phyllis MacLeod (50) was brutally murdered in her own home on Thursday night, in an apparently motiveless attack. She was discovered by her lodger, Miss Nikki Black, who called the police. On their arrival paramedics pronounced Mrs MacLeod dead: cause of death was blows to the head with a heavy object. Her son Calum (27), also from Ruanish, confirmed that no valuables were missing from the house.

  ‘I have never seen anything so brutal as this senseless attack on a sick, defenceless lady,’ said D. I. Sinclair. Mrs MacLeod’s front door was found to be unlocked.

  (Aysaar Reporter, 8 October 1997)

  1 Lies

  When I was twenty-eight I decided to kill my mother. Things were going wrong and I was looking to put them right. They went from bad to worse and I was unwilling, basically, to see the slide continue. I needed to take control.

  Nikki Black’s my third name. The Cannings called me Lily. Sweet white name, little Lily Canning, little girl lost. Then the birth certificate said I was Susan Lovage. But I’m not as white as a Lily, not as blunt as a Susan, I’m nobody’s Lovage. And with no father in the case – unknown neatly printed in his space – I fathered myself. Black.

  The other serious contender was ‘Ruth’; the healer I saw in Hereford recommended Ruth, but to me it smacks of pity. Rueful, you’ll rue the day. ‘There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.’ An Ophelia clone. I don’t think so. Ruth’s a bit open too. Ruth, truth. Nikki’s better guarded. I’ll go for Nikki I told her and she said it would unleash different psychic powers. Different how? I asked. Nikki is more dangerous, she said. OK fine. Dangerous suits me. Not that I believe a word of it, obviously.

  Nikki Black. With teeth. The spelling matters.

  The beginning.

  Lily Canning lived with Mummy Canning and Daddy Canning in a nice house in the suburbs of Birmingham, and it was a happy family with spade and bucket summer hols just like the reading books. But the mummy and daddy fell out and Mummy Canning ran off with her driving instructor. Little Lily was five years old, just starting school. Daddy Canning was a busy man with an important career in banking so one day he sat Lily down and told her something that would be better for her. It would be better for her, he said, to have a mummy. And now Mummy Canning was gone and not coming back, it would be better for her to know that Mummy and Daddy Canning weren’t her real mummy and daddy but had only adopted her. And now he would give her back to somebody else so they could find her a new mummy who would look after her properly and not run off. Because how could he on his own, when he had to be at work all day? It wouldn’t be fair to her. And in another house there would be brothers and sisters to play with. It would be much better for her.

  Lily Canning was taken to a children’s home (the first). There she was a very naughty girl and fought with the other children and wet the bed and scribbled on her books at her new school. They told her she would never get a new mummy if she behaved like that; which was just about the only fucking true thing they ever told her.

  I’ll keep it short and simple. Lily Canning was fostered; no good; taken to another children’s home. Went into the class of Mrs Plant at junior school who taught her to read and told her she was clever. Mrs Plant, who knew a thousand fairy tales off by heart and told them each day after dinner, filling Lily’s head with lost children miraculously found, and happily-ever-afters. Lily settled down, reformed, got herself adopted again aged ten. Thank you Mrs Plant. But was ‘sneaky, secretive, you don’t know what she’s thinking, not open like a child should be’ after a trial period with new mumsy and dadsy. Silly Lily! She tried too hard. Pleasing and thanking for everything, trying to say what they wanted her to, just so they would want to keep her. So that they would like her! Thinking goodness would bring rewards. Silly sneaky Lily.

  To children’s home (the third). Smashed things up. Stole the little kids’ money. Accused the houseparent of sex abuse when he told her off. To children’s home (the fourth). There were quite a few moves around then, predictable stuff.

  At fourteen I got clever again, and was fostered by the Marshalls. Moved up to the top sets at school. You don’t have to be nice to be clever. You don’t have to be liked to be clever. You can be clever all on your own.

  The Marshalls had a fat slow daughter called Louise, she was a year older than me. She used to sit in her room and sulk. They had a pretty cosy corny house, with flowery wallpaper and matching curtains; a dresser with crystal glasses arranged on it, and bits of hand-painted pottery. Oxfam calendar on the wall; they went to church. They were as nice as pie. Suck it up, I told myself, suck it up while you can, Nikki girl, all that middle-class cosiness. They’d be in front of the telly of an evening, Mr and Mrs, with a glass of wine each and her doing something useful at the same time, ironing or putting church newsletters in envelopes or sewing buttons on. The endless useful things these virtuous women do! She had her little photo gallery like they all do that she had to show off to me:

  ‘Sharon, she was with us for a year, she did ever so well at school. She’s at college now’, and ‘Philippa. She was so shy she wouldn’t speak to anyone at all. D’you know what we did? We started leaving little notes for her – what would you like for tea? and have you got any homework tonight? and would you like to go skating on Saturday? and she wrote us little replies. And then one day when I came in I started unpacking my shopping and I said to her, “Philippa, read me what you’ve put on that note, would you love, I’ve got to get this food in the freezer.” So she read it aloud to me! And after that we got her talking.’

  How bleeding wonderful.

  They thought
I was great. I was. Compared to their pudding of a child. I charmed them. I chatted intelligently at meals and passed the spuds before they asked for them. I watched the news and made remarks about world affairs. I read five library books a week. I talked to the woman.

  The man might as well’ve had a lobotomy, he pottered about the house and got himself off to work at eight and home again at 6.30 and cleaned his car and watered his roses and never spoke a word. That’s where the daughter got it from. The mother was desperate. She wanted drama. Emotion, danger, excitement. What the poor old bat wanted was a bit of life. So I started confiding in her, the sort of stuff she wanted. What did I tell her? Oh – about being abused at the home in Hereford. About the girl who killed herself, who shared my room. About my social worker having an affair with the houseparent at the last foster home but one, and not believing anything I said because she had to pretend I was lying about that too. About being raped by those two boys after school, and the deputy head who said he just wanted to help me and put his hand up my skirt. About dreaming about my mum and thinking how happy I would be with her and how good I was going to be because I knew one day she’d try to find me and be pleased about how good I was; how I woke with tears in my eyes.

  Oh she loved it, poor pale woman in her ghostly eventless life. I can see her now, leaning forward on her elbows on the kitchen table, then reaching across to pat my arm and take my hand: ‘Oh Nikki, I’m so glad you feel you can talk to me. It’s so good for you to get all this unhappiness out into the open.’ Parasite. Sucking up distress, slurping up the juice of it.

  Upstairs of course her fat sad daughter’s stuffing her face with choccies (they gave her £10 a week spends and she never went out) and making herself puke. Mrs wanted us to be friends. I could hear her nagging fat Louise when I was virtuously doing my homework. ‘She’s had such a hard life, Louise, you really should try and be kind to her. And she makes the best of it, showing an interest in everything – you would enjoy her company you know, if you made a bit of an effort.’

  She took us to the cinema and left us to see a film together. Louise ate a sack of Opal Fruits and four Mars Bars. She took us skating but Louise wouldn’t go on the ice. They sat together in silence eating toffee, watching me.

  She had so much sympathy for me, that woman, she wanted to adopt me. She talked to me about it. ‘I know you’re nearly fifteen now and some would say grown up, but I just want you to know that you should always feel at home here, I really want you to think of me as family, as someone who’ll always be there for you. You mustn’t think everyone is like those awful people in Hereford; there are people in life who know what love is, and who are loyal.’

  What a lovely time I had. Until Louise got to the point where the domestic supply of biccies and cakes and what she could buy with her spends wasn’t enough, and started nicking from Mum’s purse to supplement her binges.

  I was the first to hear of it, of course.

  ‘Nikki,’ says Mrs, her big brown doggy eyes shining with seriousness. ‘No one’s going to blame you or be angry, no one’s going to be upset. What’s important is that you should be honest with me. That’s the most important thing. I don’t mind what you’ve done, I understand. But I do want you to tell the truth. Now did you take some money from my purse?’

  I had the devil’s own job to persuade her it wasn’t me. She wept at me, she pleaded with me, she set Lobotomy Man on me to ask me to own up and be forgiven, she held my hand for hours, she offered me money, as much as I wanted, as long as I’d promise never to steal again … In the end I lost interest and told them to look under Louise’s bed. She’d got all the wrappers there, everything. ‘Haven’t you heard her chucking up?’ I asked them. ‘I thought you knew she had a problem.’

  Ha. They were pretty sorry for themselves. And surprise surprise all those heartfelt words about always being someone I could turn to melted away. Suddenly there was palpable coldness. And closed doors downstairs, and negotiations with my social worker on the phone. Suddenly Louise was downstairs and I was upstairs, and Lobo Man was heard to raise his voice. He said the same word twice, I heard him. ‘Cuckoo,’ he said. ‘A cuckoo.’

  Mrs Marshall had her very own little drama to focus on and she didn’t need me at all any more. And so I moved on.

  The social worker lectured me. ‘You mustn’t tell lies. You lose sight of the truth and you don’t know what’s real–’

  Can’t see any harm in that myself. Can’t see what’s so great about the truth, that I should need to keep it in sight. Lies make the world go round. People need something to get their teeth into. D’you want the whole world blank and silent? Absence is nothing to talk about. You can’t talk about a gap.

  You mustn’t tell tales. Way back, Mummy Canning said that. ‘Telltale tit/your tongue shall split/and all the little birdies/shall have a little bit.’ I used to imagine that: a flock of them with their sharp little beaks circling flapping swooping in, pecking at thin strips of my tongue, pulling, digging their claws into my chin and heaving like the thrush on the lawn tugging a worm out of the earth.

  I like tales. Those fairy tales from junior school Mrs Plant. I like it when Fir Apple and his sister turn into a pond and a duck to escape the clutches of the wicked old cook. I like it when ugly Rumpelstiltskin helps the miller’s daughter spin straw into gold. I like the princess who weaves shirts from nettles for her seven enchanted brothers to release them from the shapes of swans. (They’re in such a hurry she has to give the youngest his with the sleeve unfinished and he turns back into a fine young prince except he has a swan’s wing for an arm. Imagine.) I like frogs that turn into princes and old women that turn into maidens and fish that can speak and grant wishes. I like to lose sight of the truth. Truth is shit.

  2 Fir Apple

  Fir Apple was the first tale Mrs Plant ever told us. I was new I was in a twin desk at the front of the class with no one in the other half. They used to fight not to sit next to me. When I was nervous I needed to pee and then I couldn’t wait. I wouldn’t have sat next to me either, given the chance.

  I’ll tell you about Fir Apple. He was found at the top of a fir tree, in a huge dark forest. That’s how he got his name. He was a tiny baby all alone at the top of a tree in the middle of a deserted forest that spread over the mountains all around. Lying on a high feathery branch that trembled in the wind. Lying there crying with his voice so small and weak you could barely hear it for the soughing of the wind in the boughs and the cawing of the rooks in their nests.

  But as luck would have it … (O listen)

  As luck would have it … (it still makes my stomach turn over)

  As luck would have it a woodcutter is making his way home through the lonely forest after a hard day’s work. Looking up he spies a strange dot of pinkness in the branches. Then he hears the baby’s thin wail. And he sets down his axe and his bundle, and straightway begins to climb the tree. A fir tree is dense and hard to climb but he forces his way up through the scented prickly branches, up up up until at last he can stretch out his arm and pluck little Fir Apple from the branch. Where he was dropped, it should be told, by an eagle who had snatched him from his mother’s arms whilst she slept, in a far distant land.

  The woodcutter wraps Fir Apple in his jerkin. ‘Poor child,’ he says, ‘I’ll take you home and you can be a playmate for my young Lizzy. Our old cook will take good care of you.’

  So Fir Apple and Lizzy grew and played together closer than ever any brother and sister, for wherever you found one you would be sure to find the other. Never were two children so happy together. Said Mrs Plant. O listen. Never were two children so happy.

  One day Lizzy noticed that the old cook was toiling back and forth, back and forth to the well, drawing buckets of water.

  ‘Why do you need all this water?’ she asked.

  ‘If I tell you you must keep it a secret.’

  ‘O I will,’ Lizzy replied. (But she didn’t.)

  ‘In the morning when your fa
ther goes into the forest I shall boil up all the water and drop in young Fir Apple, to make a tasty stew.’

  When the two children were in bed that night, Lizzy whispered to Fir Apple, as they were always used to whisper – ‘If you’ll never leave me, I’ll never leave you.’

  To which Fir Apple replied, ‘Not now nor ever.’

  Then Lizzy whispered to him the old cook’s plan. And the two children decided to escape together. Very early next morning while the cook was in the kitchen lighting the fire under her huge pot of water, Lizzy and Fir Apple climbed out of the window and ran away into the forest.

  When the cook found them gone, she was furious. What would the woodcutter say when he came home? She sent three servants to chase after them.

  Deep in the forest Lizzy and Fir Apple heard the servants running crashing through the trees. Fir Apple began to cry but Lizzy said, ‘If you’ll never leave me, I’ll never leave you.’

  ‘Not now nor ever.’

  ‘Then quickly, do you turn into a rose bush, and I shall be the flower that grows on it.’

  In an instant the children vanished; as the cook’s servants burst into the clearing all they saw was a rose bush with a single bloom. So they made their way back to the cook and told her they had searched the forest far and wide, and found nothing but a rose bush.

  ‘You fools!’ screamed the cook. ‘You should have cut the bush down and carried the rose back to me. Go and look again!’

  Again the servants chased through the forest, and the children heard their footfalls. Fir Apple clung in terror to his sister.

  ‘If you’ll never leave me, I’ll never leave you.’

  ‘Not now nor ever.’

  ‘Do you turn into a tall tower, and I will be the clock upon it.’

  In an instant the children were gone, and in their place stood an elegant clock tower, nearly as tall as the trees that surrounded it. When the cook’s servants came by they saw from the clock that it was dinnertime, and ran back to tell the cook they had found no children but a tall tower with a fine round clock.