Would You Like to Go Home?

The Orinoco . . .

“Say Orinoco.”

“Orinoco.”

“The Oropuche. Say Oropuche.”

The mouth of the Orinoco River empties itself into the sea, there, at that point on the map of Guyana, just across from the narrow blue keyguard of water between mainland South America and the island of Trinidad. Were it not for the sea, the countries would have been neighbours. Which point on the map was that, exactly? Djamila had never learnt that, or at least had not learnt it in the way of things that must be remembered so the right answer can be given when questions are asked at the wrong time. Year after year, teacher after teacher, the geography lesson would seem to have to stop. The teacher of the moment would seem compelled to explain that their Orinoco, the big Orinoco in Guyana, was not the same as our Orinoco River in Trinidad. But such a mistake would never have arisen if the teacher had not been hypnotized by the identity of naming words.

Moving from the mental image of Guyana’s big blue-ink outpouring to the wriggle of blue on the Trinidad map confused Djamila. The rivers overlay each other in her imagination. She knew better, but could not help imagining a non-existent map, where the rush of one Orinoco made a subterranean charge towards the other, the two mysteriously linked in undiscovered blueness. This mistaken vision was the stronger presence in her memory. Djamila tried to concentrate. She felt as if her arms were slotting forwards like a skier’s. The invisible force of the river seeking linkage thundered through her body, blasting her sternum, getting in the way of breathing, making her aware of the liquid stubbornness of her insides.

Orinoco, Oropuche: these were the names of rivers.

When the boy sitting on the fence said them, she realized how tight his kind of English could hold their jaws and still talk. The sounds would not flow out properly. The names emerged crumpled, like the bright cylinder of a tin can that someone has gripped too hard before they throw it into the window where a privileged little girl sits in a car passing on its way from beach resort to bougainvillea garden.

Djamila laughed with pleasure. How differently he talked! She would love to hear him say more: names, anything.

As she started laughing, the boy frowned.

“Be like that if you want to, then,” he snapped.

Djamila felt an instant downrush. Her laugh had flown back into her throat. What weighed her heart down? Sorry, flitted across her mind: a broken-winged bird, fit to be caught for scientific purposes, not fit to live. But she would not say sorry.

The boy’s face lightened. He had as good as heard her. Her whole posture was apology. That was better.

“Where are you from?” she asked him.

He sounded English – very English; but then, why had he materialized on the fence of a stone croft in Orkney, north of mainland Scotland? He did not look like a holidaymaker. She knew she did. Everywhere she lived: Canada, England, Scotland, India or Trinidad: people could take her family for tourists.

Djamila hoped he would not answer her question. She hoped he would tell her his name instead. Somehow she did not want to ask. Here and there she had lived among people who felt it was impolite to keep calling on someone by their name – almost a reminder not to go beyond the little that social rank allowed, almost a kind of bullying. She knew the boy on the fence did not belong to those people. Most likely he had never met them. It was the way he sat there that made her not want to ask his name, or too much about anything. He was someone who would start, and stop, the talking. And he possessed a voice that was strange to hear. She wanted to hear it again. There was no other way of making sure that the strangeness was real.

Where are you from? she repeated, in her mind.

He did not answer her immediately, but turned away where he sat. The land was flat except where rock pillars, ‘sea stacks’, changed the skyline along the coast. Sometimes they slid with a crash into the sea that had carved them. If this was happening now, it was not in view.

“Where am I from,” he almost mocked. “Come up and I’ll show you.”

Exactly what Djamila was not supposed to do . . . She checked her watch (water-resistant, not waterproof: take it off before you do the washing-up!) and saw she was safe for a while. Her parents were hours and miles away, wet-suited against the water that even at this time of year was cold enough to kill you, not too fast but fast enough. They were down there where the light filtered through green to nothing. They paid to be guided on dives among the wrecks of German warships. Many were sunk beneath the cobalt thumbprint of Scapa Flow.

As she hoisted herself up on to the fence, the boy dropped to the ground on the other side. Moving into the place he had occupied, for a moment she caught a tang: tar, brine, petrol, cheese sandwiches, wet dog. It was like this island. It was like that island. It was like any harbour where ropes are coiled and the people who land are not the same as the people who stay. A very old man’s voice, Hindi-inflected, muttered in her mind: White people don’t like to bathe. A young girl’s voice joined in: Is true there are people who don’t bathe twice every day? Djamila scolded the familiar voices: Well, he clearly has been out all day, and the jacket has had more than a few weeks’ hard wearing. You have to readjust your expectations if you want to be outdoors.

She shook her head free of memories, as if she had water in her ears and eyes. The Orkney light had silvered over like a bead of mercury dashed from a thermometer. It cleared. Her new friend became visible again. From her perch on the wooden bars, his dark and pink face looked foreshortened.

His movement was so quick, she blinked again: turning away and stooping to the sandy mud, turning back to her, he must have scooped the puddled rainwater. She did not see when. She only registered the unusual number of wildflowers, clean burgundy in the grass.

“Look,” he said. “That’s where I’m from.”

The water in his cupped hands looked like nothing, at first.

“Look,” he said again. “That’s where I’m from, and that’s where you’ll be from, too.”

Was there a reflection in the water? There couldn’t be. It couldn’t even be the sky. Djamila looked up. Was she hoping to catch out a cloud formation fleeting overhead and casting a shiver through the light?

“It doesn’t look like anything,” she said abruptly. “Thank you,” she added, sliding down the fence, back on to her side of the boundary. She wanted to make it clear that this strange meeting was over. Her business was with the stone croft now. She had all the rights of a renter.

“Be here at the same time next day!” his cry grinned after her and floated off.

She hadn’t wanted to say, “It looks like nothing.”

“Don’t break anything. They’ve itemized everything.”

“Why do you think I would break something?”

“I think it’s rather good of them to itemize everything. It’s obvious they live here some of the year.”

“Well, they have left their ancestors to guard it. Those black and white photographs staring at you from everywhere! It’s enough to make you break something.”

“It’s enough to put you off doing anything.”

How did her parents take forty minutes to produce a meal of pasta and tomato sauce from a jar, and yet have no difficulty managing the very peculiar and unsafe-looking fire which ran the house’s heating from an open hearth?

The owners had furnished the cottage with a mix of nice items, some inherited, some bought to look so: twenty-first-century Sunday-newspaper chic. Certain other arrangements (luckily not the bathroom) were little different from what the stone croft’s more ancient owners would have recognized. Djamila thought it was very much like the Iron Age houses, some excavated, some taken for granted, dotted around the island so that the sense of Neolithic traffic sometimes outweighed the feeling of today in field after human-free field. Not at all primitive, although they had stone shelves for beds and a trough where food used to be boiled for hours, these ancient dwellings featured display cabinets, stone dressers for ornamental bowls.

“Were you all right on your own all afternoon, darling? Did you find something to do?”

“Leave the girl alone. She needs some peace and quiet after those hard exams they put them through. And she said she wanted time by herself to work on her Art project?”

“Oh, so you were O.K. just . . . ‘chilling’ . . .? You’re sure you were O.K.?”

“Look at her! The girl is enjoying her food, yes. Why you making a fuss?”

Djamila hardly had to say anything.

Normally she might have stared at the patterns you can see behind your eyes with your lids closed or in front of your eyes if you open them and focus a short distance into the dark: fixed diamond and drifting sequins. For once she must have fallen asleep. So nobody heard, she did not hear, the knock that should have been knocked (courtesy and privacy are above all important among the people with whom you live most closely); she awoke to the sense of a presence.

Djamila’s parents were standing next to her bed, looking down at her fondly. A lit flashlight was in her mother’s hand. This represented a choice not to spoil the separateness of night’s domain. The perfectly good electric lighting was not an option, never mind the dimmer switch. Father and mother were both wearing cable-knit wool jumpers, acquired during a stop in Scotland on the way north to Orkney.

Djamila congratulated herself silently on not screaming.

“When you were a baby, you always used to wake up smiling.” The tone refused to be disappointed. It was less emotional than a television historian’s.

“You are still our baby!” This tone was an invitation. Come on, defy us!

Not playing.

“You’re awake now?”

“Yes, she’s awake.”

“Good. Here, put on your jumper. We are going outside.”

Djamila could not locate her feet inside the thick boots. The solid wood and glass conservatory, built on to the house where it fronted the cliff-edge, was harbouring sea darkness. The few steps outside on the lawn were to be a real family adventure.

It was so much colder. In the absence of cities, the night was huge and star-bright, without a

horizon. There was a slither and rattle on the rocks beneath them.

“The seals,” somebody breathed.

Her parents started pointing out the constellations. They all knew the stories. But Djamila had never seen the patterns in the sky like this before. There almost seemed to be stars that were not normally visible, faint lights filling in more of the outlines, so the shapes seemed less fanciful. The gods and heroes were really there, once named.

How much did seals swim at night? If there had been a moon, would they have seen the torpedo head breaking the silver surface and basking in the air before rounding itself up for its half dog-like, half otherworldly song?

“The seals.”

The words were spoken plainly, right into Djamila’s ear. She woke with a start. She looked round. She saw nobody. The voice was part of a dream. Last night’s cable-knit jumper was folded on a chair.

“That wasn’t strange,” she said loudly, refusing to count the sets of dark footprints still on the long grass.

It would have been nice to be able to look at the view and not at your feet, but that was not her parents’ idea of going walking. On a surge of familial enthusiasm, they had abandoned the green depths that obsessed them and shed their scuba equipment for unnecessarily armoured boots. They were taking the child for a proper walk.

Enormous slabs of seal-smooth stone and of stone so finely grained that from a distance it looked smooth were being gulped rapidly by the incoming tide. The sea digested without a problem these mouthfuls of Atlantean temple and prehistoric apricot-tanned sharkskin that must be identified as stone. The orange bristle and dark purple hoods of assorted shellfish clung steadily to the rocks, putting in the intermittent appearances that were all the sea would allow.

The path steepened. The pace of the walk did not slacken. The inner flesh on either side of Djamila’s shinbones felt as if it were splitting in two, straining into a shape like the frame of a harp. The sun yellowed over turf-topped cliffs of yellow stone. Here and there the ground opened right down. Djamila concentrated on the short flowers at her feet. The sea proper rushed about, what seemed miles down, re-creating in its hurry the darkness of its insides.

Not Djamila, not her mother, not her father, none of the three would claim to be bored, not even when they sat down and ate.

Back, now, along the coastal path. Past the brown bear’s-head formation, a stubbornness of rock attentive only to the horizon. Unlatch, latch the gate to the tiny cemetery. Soon they would be back in Stromness.

Djamila could let herself feel now that time had been passing.

But her parents would have to stop at the cheese shop and the rope shop and the tea towel shop, because the shops were there. And inevitably there would be other divers, up from their chosen bounds and boom of silence, suddenly wanting to talk.

Would he be angry?

Had he been there?

The fence was just a fence. The garden smelled cleanly of the sea.

Not on the strange boy’s appointed day, but on the day after, her parents well underwater, Djamila once again began to feel the feeling of time. She had been for a couple of short walks on her own; since the family expedition along the edges of its cliffs, it was as if the island had been checked out and certified as safe. Yet Djamila, newly freed, had kept herself on a short leash. She had not liked to take the curve of the road into nowhere.

There is no nowhere like a succession of fields and a near total flattening of the skyline. No nowhere like a place where it is evident that people have cultivated the land, but none of those people is visible, and the majority are no longer alive. No nowhere such that cows the colours of mist or moorland or precious metal sunken underwater outnumber the passers-by, moving smoothly towards them as of right, keeping the human under surveillance; cows whose watchfulness makes the passer-by’s every stop, every swig of water or bite of sandwich, suddenly absurd – the business of being two-legged a jerky balancing act at best.

“Beautiful things,” Djamila had said aloud, flanked by a gang of cows. Humans could pull rank over other species, because of the power of language, couldn’t they? Having spoken, she felt like a baby, the uncool kid who keeps talking for approval long after the group has shut up.

It was the time, but it was not the day. This was not the day. He would not be there. She would have nothing to say for herself, if he did turn out to be there.

She saw him there, not waiting, and not sitting on the fence. He was on the other side of the fence, his back turned to her, looking out to sea. The pitch of the line from his shoulder to his waist, or rather, the forbidding, unsoftened angle his outer clothing made as it hung there irresponsive to any breeze, seemed to remind her of something that she did not altogether like. She could not think what. A cube of metal seemed to form all at once beneath her breastbone and she felt herself deoxygenate, light-headed, mildly asthmatic. To all appearances she was firm on her two feet but her sense of herself was that of someone swimming through the mild summer air.

His side made the same angle as the spar of a drowned ship in one of the photographs her parents most prized.

Forget that.

Don’t ignore him.

Before she could hail him out, he had started walking away. A swing of the jacket and a tilt of the head told her, “I know you’re there. Let’s go.”

Wordless, she followed.

He had not looked back or spoken and now he had vanished into the doorway of the broken-down croft. The way houses grew on this island was not something that Djamila had seen before. One long narrow rectangle of stone, worn down, first wind-destroyed, then taken apart by its owners’ hands into rubble, would be plundered to build a near-identical rectangle of stone, so that old houses stood, cast-offs, next to the latest house on any given plot of land, and in the new croft, old pictures on the wall might show a near-identical building with almost the same view and perhaps the same name, but not the same. This broken-down croft into which he had vanished was not so old that the roof was quite gone, nor so gappy that she could see him through the boulder walls, but it was the oldest on the site, and the site was far indeed from the rental holiday cottage. How long had they been walking? The sun neither dipped nor yellowed. It seemed to have stopped.

“You were telling me about rivers.” He had come back almost to her, standing in the doorway. “Do come in.” He turned again.

She looked down at her feet, careful of the ground, because much had fallen at the threshold. By the time she was over it and ready to adjust her eyes to semidarkness – ready to wait – he had gone.

And she was in a room that contained only blueness. It was welling up and over her. She felt pressure on all sides, and pressure centred in her, under her breastbone, and her back tried to expand with each breath, but her lungs felt pushed against from the outside, and she felt near implosion, near collapse. Humans are so delicately built!

“Do come in.” His voice again, that she had imagined angry when she had missed the day, but was even and dark as ever.

She took a step forward, into the blue. It contracted into a substantial ribbon, twirling madly, as if a sea-giant held it at either end and with no kindness.

She took another step.

Then, as if a scalpel had been taken to the ribbon, she saw narrow seams cut into the thrashing blue, silvery paleness, quadrupled angles.

On the dry floor in the stone croft surrounded by dry land she saw the boy drowning.

She took another step.

Would she have to rescue him from the end of the room? She put her hands in front of her and had to push the air and he looked no nearer. Nor did he look at her, and yet he seemed aware. She took one more step, not watching her feet; she disbelieved in the horror of feet that were under the swirling.

She fell. There was a spar of wood, dry but insalubrious, lying across the floor. Rusty nails sticking up from it ripped her Sprayway jacket, her expensive denims, and the tenderness of her scarcely sunned skin.

There was nothing and nobody in the room except a wail like a seal’s, proceeding from her, and a dusting of warmth-free sunlight.

Where had he gone?

When her parents did not come back, and did not come back that night, and did not come back, how could she find herself thinking of where the boy was from? It had looked like nothing.