Skein Island

BOGOF!

If there’s wisdom in there I can’t see it.

The usual double-decker arrives and I manage to get a seat on the top deck. An older woman takes the seat next to mine and we sit with our knees touching because it can’t be helped. She puts her large patent leather handbag on her lap and hunches over it, opening and closing the silver clasp.

I pull myself into that inner space I’ve perfected specifically for journeys on public transport. The town centre slowly rolls past, punctuated by the stops and starts of arrivals and departures. I have a long way to go yet.

‘Here,’ says the woman sitting next to me. She’s holding out a pen.

‘Pardon?’

She points at my hands. I’m still holding the leaflet, but I’ve folded it once, down the centre, to reveal its clean white reverse. It looks like it’s waiting to be written on.

‘Did you need this?’ she says. Then she looks past me, out of the window, and jumps up to push the stop button on the vertical bar. She leaves the pen – a cheap biro – on the seat, and walks away. I watch her descend the stairs and emerge on the pavement. The bus jerks, and moves on.

So there are signs, when it comes to writing. I’m not strong enough to resist them.

I look up. The road is unfamiliar. I’ve gone past my stop and run out of paper. We pass a road sign: Uneven Road Surface Ahead.

I’m sick of signs.

When you visit Skein Island you write a declaration. It is the story of your life. You give up your declaration to be stored in the library along with the stories of the thousands of other women who have visited. This isn’t about your story being read, or appreciated, or turned into a thrilling adventure for all the family. It’s how it has to be enough to know your story exists because that’s all there is.

Susan wrote her declaration, then came back to this town to discover she had been set free from it. She could move on and create a new story. There was more to her.

I sit at my kitchen table, before my open laptop that displays Skein Island’s official website, and I make a phone call to their administrative office before I can change my mind.

The woman on the other end of the line is polite but regretful. No, they can’t accommodate me just because I’ve discovered the burning need to write a declaration right now. No, I can’t get a place without filling in an application form, and no, it won’t make any difference if I just turn up at the dock to see if anyone else drops out at the last minute. Sorry.

So I pour myself a glass of wine and fill out the online application, and all the writing I’ve been doing makes it easier to reach into myself and find some strange new twist of truth in the Other Information That May Influence Your Application box:

An open-plan kitchen and living room. A sofa and an armchair, a microwave and a fridge. Behind a thin partition wall I find a bedroom with two single beds positioned as far away from each other as possible, which isn’t far. There’s the same amount of space as I’d have in my flat. Do I feel at home?

But it’s the view outside the window that matters. A ragged expanse of green grass and weeds, wild and tufted, leads my eyes to a cliff edge, and the blue sea beyond. Late summer on an island. It’s the feeling of being held in position as the giant world turns and the tide sweeps in and out according to its own rules.

I waited four months for this, and got lucky with a cancellation. I’m not sure whether it’s serendipity or not. I’m still attempting to believe in that concept.

I choose the bed nearest the window and put my case on it. I find my thick socks within and slide them over the socks I’m already wearing. The floorboards are cold, and there’s a strong draft at ankle-level; the main door has a thick gap at the bottom through which I can see daylight. This place is not well-built, it seems. It’s a flimsy shelter with its makeshift walls and breeze-admitting gaps. How is it meant to keep out a ghost?

The light at the bottom of the door is blocked. Then the door swings back with a creak.

For a moment I expect my ghost, made flesh.

‘You all right?’

No. No, it’s a woman. Of course it’s a woman.

‘There’s a draft,’ I say. ‘Hi. I’m Min.’

‘I suppose we’re sharing this cabin. I’m Katie. Is this my bed, then?’

‘I’ve put my case on this one,’ I say. ‘I hope that’s okay.’

‘It’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be fine?’ She shakes her head and frowns as she shrugs off her small rucksack and places it on the other bed. I don’t know whether she’s annoyed or not. Her dark hair is cut very short, threaded with white, and she’s dressed entirely in red of varying shades of stridency. I’d guess she’s at least twenty years older than me but wearing it very well. She looks complete, comfortable, finished. I still feel like a work in progress.

‘A single bed,’ she muses. ‘I haven’t slept in one of those for a long time. I’ve got a king-size all to myself at home. I’m difficult to live with at the best of times so I should probably apologise up front. I’m sorry you got me as your companion for the week, Min.’

‘Why are you so difficult to live with?’ I ask.

‘I can see right through everyone’s bullshit,’ she says, and gives me a hard stare. I feel my innards shrinking away from her.

‘I’m just messing with you,’ she says. ‘Sorry. I’m not good with people. It’s also probably why I became an estate agent. Dicking people around on the topic of the most expensive purchase they’ll ever make appealed to me. Again, just messing.’ She sits on her bed and removes her leather boots, pushing down the long zips from her knees to her ankles so they slide from her feet to land on the floor. She’s wearing scarlet socks, too. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m in administration.’

‘Well.’ She looks out of the window, then says, ‘Someone has to be. I thought all the cabins were for four people? How come we’ve ended up in a two-person outfit? There must be something special about us. What do you think it is?’

At what point do you tell an acquaintance that you’re followed around by a ghost? I start to speak but she holds up a finger and says, ‘No, no, I’ll find out for myself.’

‘All right. It’s your funeral.’

I have no idea why those particular words came to mind. Those are obviously not the right words for this situation; I can tell that from the way she’s choosing to ignore them.

‘I’m not good with people,’ she says. ‘I came here to learn if I wanted to be. Good with them. If I’m missing something.’

‘What do you think you’re missing?’

‘I already suspect the answer to that question is nothing.’ She hums as she unpacks.

She probably thinks I’m an idiot. But that’s okay because I think she’s an overconfident bully who’s attempting to verbally dominate me. At least we have one thing in common: We’ll both find out what’s going on for ourselves. We are women together for a whole week.

I’ve got a feeling it’s going to pass slowly.

What makes a boy?

When I first began to understand that I was not a boy, I began to look around me and categorise others as I was being categorised in turn. I couldn’t have been more than six years old; I remember many things feeling new to me, including school. I hadn’t settled into familiarity with the routine or the others of my age who now surrounded me on a daily basis. There were so many of us, all in orbit around the larger bodies of teachers. I understood I was a kid, but not that I was a girl. That came later. I don’t really understand it now, except if I define it as not a boy.

I don’t believe girls exist, really, except as a disguise. And I’m still not certain that boys grow into men. Perhaps a man is a disguise too. An acceptance of certain rules. No different to firing a gun in the playground and demanding that the other fella lies down dead.

Having had these thoughts during a long and sleepless night, I’m in no way surprised when my ghost turns up with the first creeping rays of dawn. He sits on the end of my bed, and I wonder why I thought the rules of Skein Island might ever apply to him. If he wasn’t really a man when he was a man, then why would he be one as a spirit?

I wish I could talk to him.

I feel the pressure of him, by my legs. He’s not large. He’s creating only the smallest of dents in the mattress. He shifts his weight every now and again, and I can imagine him muttering to himself – bloody sciatic nerve, won’t leave me in peace even for a nice sit-down – but if he is talking I can’t hear it. I thought the countryside was meant to be quiet but the birds outside the thin window are rhythmically raucous. I’ve never heard these throaty calls before; I think it must be the sound of seagulls en masse. I lie there and listen.

My ghost gets up and breathes out his smoke, long and freely, into the room. I think he likes the extra space to fill. I watch the smoke stream forth from an empty space, then form a thin fog above my bed. A pause. Then he does the same over Katie’s bed, and he laughs.

She coughs. She’s awake.

We both lie there, being awake. Being breathed over.

‘Oh God,’ she says.

‘He’s just a ghost. An old man’s ghost,’ I tell her. ‘It’s really not a big deal. He visits me at dawn every day. He doesn’t mean any harm.’

He chuckles again, and is gone. The light of day is brighter, strengthening, but it cannot chase away his smoke. It’s still chewy.

I get up and pad over to the tiny bathroom. I close the door gently, then have a wee and brush my teeth. The toothpaste never quite takes all of the taste of cigars away. It has a habit of sitting right at the back of my throat.

When I emerge Katie is still in bed. ‘Come over here,’ she says. I sit beside her. She looks younger. Her eyes are very wide and her lips are pale. I keep watching them as she speaks; I find it difficult to follow what she’s saying, in a jumbled rush.

‘…understand how that could be because it’s been years and why would he be with you? Unless you’ve got some sort of other connection to him?’

‘What?’ The seagulls are raucous and it’s so early. I don’t want her to feel in control of this. Why is she talking about a connection? ‘It’s a spirit. A ghost. I know that’s a bit of a shock—’

‘It’s my grandfather,’ she says.

‘No, it’s not your grandfather—’

‘I knew him straight away. It’s him. It’s him. How do you know him? Tell me why he’s here. Is he here to speak to me? Has he told you about me? Is that why you came? You asked the staff to put us together? Did you—’

‘I think it’s time for breakfast,’ I tell her. I get up and walk to the kitchen.

‘Min,’ she calls as I hunt out a bowl for cereal, and switch on the kettle. ‘Min.’

Let her wait.

Let her fail to take him as her own.

We have a morning of activities ahead of us. Yoga and poetry and self-defence. Katie finds a space beside me for all of these classes. She seems weakened, in a way I can’t define. She overbalances while attempting Crescent Moon pose and puts out her hand, urgently, to me; I grasp it, and hold her as she rights herself.

During a group conversation about overcoming personal issues one of our number reveals that she has a degenerative disease. She doesn’t tell us what the disease is, and nobody asks. I notice nothing but a slight tremor in her voice as she talks. It could just as easily be down to nerves, if she’s not used to public speaking.

‘I wonder what bits of me will last the longest,’ she says, to our circle. ‘Not physically, so much, but mentally. No, not even that. Not my faculties but my personality. How it feels to be me. The way I pick at the sleeves of my jumpers until they start to unravel, and the way I hate the smell of salad cream, even at a distance. What if one day soon I lose the ability to smell salad cream and be repulsed by it? I won’t be me any more at that point.’

‘Your entire personality hinges on salad cream?’ says Katie, waspishly, perhaps even maliciously, and it triggers a reaction from the group that feels passionate and righteous. There’s a general condemnation of saying hurtful things for the sake of humour, and I find I want to say something too. Something loud. Shouting would suit me now, but what would I shout about? The only thing that comes to mind is an explanation of how hating salad cream might turn out to be the only element of a person that remains in their afterlife, and wouldn’t that be worse? The woman with the degenerative disease is frightened to lose herself entirely but I suspect she’d prefer that to becoming a vengeful spirit who roams around restaurants slapping sachets of salad cream out of the hands of unsuspecting diners.

They’re all shouting about the same thing, which is the need to listen to each other, and it takes them a while to realise it. I sit in my own circle of silence, and observe. The moderator restores order and the session goes on. People list what they would most hate to lose about themselves and when it comes to my turn I say, ‘My sense of humour.’ Let me remain as a long mouthless laugh that hangs in a room. I can see the appeal of that destiny, now.

Next it’s Katie’s turn. She says, ‘My personality.’

‘You can’t lose that,’ says someone. ‘Nobody can ever take that away.’

‘How naïve of you,’ says Katie, triggering another intense conversation. She doesn’t speak in the group session again.

She only wants to talk about the ghost, and all I want is to refuse her. Whenever she tries to raise the issue I put another task between us and the conversation. A swim. A shower. Dinner. And now, at the end of the day with the meal all eaten, I demand to spend half an hour on my declaration.

Katie sits across from me at the kitchen table and puts down her own words. She writes fast, without pause. She has a lot to say.

I don’t try to pick up where I left off. I don’t think this whole thing will find any order, chronologically or otherwise.

Those are all the words that will come to me. I put down my pen and wait for Katie to stop writing. She levels a calm stare at me, and I meet it.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Tell me about your grandfather.’

She reads it straight off the page in front of her and I try to take it in and hold it.

‘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?’

‘Who knows?’ she says. ‘There are more things on heaven and Earth…’

We are not friends. We’re not going to be friends. It’s not a surprise. She has already been clear that she doesn’t make friends. It’s only a certainty, now, from my point of view.

‘Not good enough,’ I say. ‘We need answers.’

She considers this.

‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘Bring your duvet.’

I’ve never been camping before and I’m not sure this really qualifies. Duvets under the stars, wearing all the clothes I brought with me to keep out the cold that permeates all British nights, regardless of the season. Katie’s grandfather was used to this.

‘What’s this going to prove?’ I ask her.

‘I’ll know it when it comes to me.’ She’s lying close beside me, within touching distance. She picked the spot for us to sleep, after we walked the length of the island, tramping around until she found a place that worked for her. I wonder if she chose it according to her memory of that night; we are in the shadow of a stone wall, and there are sheep in the field beyond. It’s as if she was describing this place all along, in her declaration.

At least a tent would create the illusion of safety, and a little heat. Mingled breath, and the warmth that living bodies give out. Instead there’s only my heightened awareness of the dark, and what it can hide, and the stars overhead don’t seem to light a thing.

‘Do you go camping a lot?’

‘This is my second time,’ she says, dryly.

‘What…’ It strikes me as an insolent question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. ‘What was it about your grandfather that makes you want to emulate some areas of his life but not others? You don’t go camping, you don’t smoke cigars. But you do refuse to get into relationships. Or would you only get into one for a bet?’

‘I’m not emulating him,’ she says. ‘It was only that we understood each other. I realised because of him that it was okay to not like people.’

‘Because you liked him.’

‘Yes,’ she says, as if that wasn’t a contradiction.

‘I don’t understand that.’

I’m putting off attempting to sleep by having this ridiculous conversation, I know it. I don’t want to wake up early tomorrow and find out her truth.

‘Are you in a relationship?’ she asks me, from where she lies.

‘Yeah.’ I try to sound convincing, but my initial pause was too long. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Of course it is.’ I hear smugness in her voice. ‘If it was going well you wouldn’t be here, on this island, would you? Taking advantage of the one visit policy. Using your Get Out of Jail Free card, at least for a week.’

Is that what I’m doing? ‘It’s just a sticky patch.’

‘Have you been in lots of relationships?’

‘The usual amount.’

‘And they all hit sticky patches, and you keep wading through them. See, that. That, I don’t understand.’

I turn over and face away from her.

‘Good night,’ she says, softly, and a little while later she has the temerity to softly snore.

I wake up to clean air.

The sky is a dark, deep blue above me, and I am the coldest I have ever been. I force myself to sit up, gathering the duvet around me, and notice how the sky is changing colour on the horizon. As I watch pale streaks form and collate and turn to glorious orange. It’s dawn.

He’s not here.

I want to call out to him, but it would be a presumption to use the name Katie knows him by. And even if he had that name once, it surely wouldn’t fit him now.

This is what loneliness feels like.

Katie stretches and mutters.

My eyes water and sting. My cheeks are raw.

A chuckle.

I place it. It came from behind me, on the stone wall. He’s sitting on the wall. I swivel and see the cigar smoke, rising up and dissipating to blow out to sea, away from where we lie.

‘Is it you?’ Katie whispers.

Nothing happens.

‘It’s you,’ she says.

He’s here, with me. With us. There can’t be any explanations. How could he tell us about his choices? He’s nothing more than a feeling, a scent, a sound.

‘Why are you here?’ she asks. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’

The sun rises just that little bit further, just enough to clarify, solidify, to a new day.

‘You can’t tell me, can you? You don’t want to.’ She sounds reconciled to her own words, as if she’s hit upon an answer of her own, somehow.

He’s gone.

Katie holds out her hand to me and I take it. We are frozen together. She thinks she’s found him, and I think I’ve lost him, and we’re good and strong in this moment for different reasons that don’t really matter.

The week passes.

Katie and I take classes, and swim, and talk to each other. We talk about her grandfather and my ghost, and the ways they were the same and they were different. We can find no answers between us.

We also talk to many women about their lives, lives that come across as strange and normal at the same time. It’s only a glimpse of what makes us all work. I find I want more.

We take half an hour after dinner every night to work on our declarations.

The last thing I write is:

This voice I give to him is nothing like the voice he would have had when he was alive, I’m sure.

Sometimes I think about asking Katie to tell me how her declaration ends, but I never do, and she doesn’t offer to read it to me.

Every day I wake up at dawn and every day I breathe in, and listen. I don’t move. All my concentration is on the smell and the sound of the air around me. He’s not there. He’s not there.

I miss him.

I’m ready to go home.

We stand on the dock and watch the boat coming in. It takes its time. The women talk and laugh quietly. We don’t join in but it’s good to be on the periphery, as the silent but accepted members. They don’t know much about us, but what they know is enough.

‘We don’t have to keep in touch,’ I tell her.

‘Good, because I don’t do that stuff,’ she says.

‘No, really?’ I make my shocked face.

‘I’m just reminding you.’

‘That’s very handy, because I nearly forgot your personality, there, for a second.’

‘Glad we’ve got that settled.’

‘Think of me when you dick around with people trying to purchase houses.’

‘Yeah, spare me a thought when you have conversations with boring people as part of your administrative job.’

‘You make it sound soul-destroying,’ I say.

‘It is.’

‘I don’t think so.’ I’m not certain how I feel about it. I don’t feel that my life and my job should be escaped, not right now. Not before I know what I should leave it all behind for. I have a feeling that maybe I could make a difference there. Alter the crueller behaviours of the pack by leading from the front. Is that realistic?

The boat draws closer.

‘I wonder if he’s going to stay here,’ I say. ‘On the island. Breaking the rules and smoking over the visitors. Would that suit him?’

‘Not in the least. Not unless he’s changed.’

‘Of course he’s changed!’

‘Yes, of course he’s changed,’ she echoes. ‘I didn’t ever really know him, you know.’

‘No. Me neither.’

‘Let me have your mobile number,’ she says.

‘Okay.’ I find a scrap of paper and a pen in my bag, and write it out for her.

‘Thanks.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say.

‘I don’t need it. I might want it, though. One day.’

‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘Yeah. That’s going around,’ she says.

Is it okay to know people, just a little, and only want them when you want them? To take the parts you like and leave the rest, on your own terms?

I don’t have an answer for that.

Katie is right again, though. Not having an answer is going around.

My time on Skein Island has given me a taste for the outdoors, but I prefer it in smaller doses. I visit Jimbo’s Golf Accessories Emporium and kit myself out, then sign up for lessons at the golf course. It’s a good walk through a maintained landscape, and if I get cold I can give up and return to the clubhouse for a drink.

I’m standing at the bar, chatting about the water hazard on the ninth hole with some of my new friends, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. My first thought is for my ghost and my second thought is for Katie. But no, it’s not either of those options. It’s Dave.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know you played golf.’

‘I’ve just taken it up.’

‘I heard you went to Skein Island.’

‘I did. And no, I didn’t wear dungarees and get in touch with my inner goddess or whatever.’ I’ve heard all the jokes in these past few weeks, and none of them even begin to bother me. I’m getting tougher.

‘I wasn’t going to say that. I just wanted to say – I’m sorry. That it didn’t work out between us. It was the cigar smoke. I hate cigar smoke.’

‘The ghost’s gone,’ I tell him.

He rolls his eyes at me. ‘You’re not on about that again, are you?’

‘What?’ It takes me a moment to realise what he means. ‘You don’t believe in the ghost?’

‘If you don’t like the smoke, stop smoking. Smoking in bed is disgusting and dangerous.’

‘I don’t smoke!’

‘And stop making stuff up. This ghost guy – you created him to push me away… You realise that, don’t you? He was only there to make me jealous. I told you, you need to do something about it. I wish you the best in solving your problems. I really do.’

The things we tell ourselves to make certain we’re front and centre in our own stories. ‘Goodbye, Dave,’ I say. I turn my back on him. I hear him sigh, and then walk away.

I lie very still, early the next morning, in the first light of dawn, and I think of what my ghost would have said to me about the whole thing. Min, girl, that wasn’t the right man for you. He fooled his own memory to make you out to be the bad guy. He decided not to believe in me, even though I’m right here. Plain as the smoke drifting past your nose.

Except you’re not here any more, are you? There’s no more smoke.

I pick up my phone and take it with me under the duvet. In the warm darkness, I find there’s a text message from Katie.

All right?

I wonder what it cost her to write that, and whether she’ll hate herself for it later.

I text back, and we start a conversation. I tell her about Dave and she calls him deluded, which makes me feel much better.

Forget him. Irrelevant. Bloody people. I still hate them all.

I text back:

I hate them all too. Do you want to meet up? I was thinking about trying parasailing, or taking tango lessons.

There’s a long pause. Just at the point where I’m about to put the phone down and return to sleep, she texts:

But I’m miles away.

I’m not sure who she is and I have no clue who I am, but I know us just enough to be sure that we’ll find something that brings us together, real or imaginary. It doesn’t matter which.

I text back:

I’ll come to you.

If there’s more to us both, we’ll find it.