The Ghost's Child Read online

  She lit the lamp and carried it with her up the beach. She had imagined the sand would be clean and powdery, but it was coarse under her bare feet. She turned up the flame and held the lamp aloft, expecting to see palm trees and pools of azure water and the tumbling quills of gorgeous birds. Instead she saw craggy ochre rocks piled haphazardly upon one another, a harsh rent scenery like the floor of an exhausted quarry. She picked a path over and between the boulders, slipping on yellow grit. As she climbed, she listened for the grumble of hyenas or rattlesnakes. The island seemed the sort of place such bad-tempered creatures might call home.

  She struggled to the point of a jagged peak, hoping that beyond the citadel of rocks might sprawl a lush oasis. At a height, the breeze blew sulkily cool. The indigo sky and burnished moon cast a velvet light over the island, which was small – Maddy could see, not too far away, the ocean looping the land’s other side. Looking down from her vantage point she was pleased to discover clusters of palm trees, their spiky fronds lounging from skinny, flaking trunks. But there weren’t many trees, and they stood apart like strangers, and around their feet was worn, bristly ground. They were also very quiet trees, making not the faintest rustle – as if they had spied, and disliked, and agreed to be frosty towards her. Between her lookout and the island’s opposite shore Maddy saw no streams of water, no swaying grass, no flowers or mounds of rich soil. There was nothing that moved; there was a pallor of strange deadness; there was nothing pleasing to see.

  “Feather!” Maddy yelled, and not even a skink took fright. She stared about herself, thinking that obviously the west wind had made a mistake. Feather, who loved the pulse of living things, could never have desired to find himself in this barren place.

  But then a sure voice said, “Maddy,” and she turned, and he was there.

  In the moonlight, he looked more beautiful than ever – more feathery, more silvery, more smoky and unplaceable. Scraps of cloth hung about him like the plumes of a ruffled bird. His fair hair was longer, and disarrayed again, draping into his eyes. He looked strong and lean and stood lightly, coppery around the edges. Maddy had always imagined herself running to him, leaping into his arms, both of them laughing exultantly. Instead she hung back, warm with shyness, and the air enclosing them was still. “Hello, Feather,” she said.

  He said, “Come and sit under the trees.”

  She followed him down the cliffs to the flat sandy land below. After all the months of talking to him in her head, Maddy was bewildered to find she had nothing to say. Her mind was empty of inspiration, her mouth hollow of words. The importance had completely sputtered out of the question she’d burned for so long to ask him. She felt as brutish as the cliff boulders. Feather, walking ahead, glanced over his shoulder at her. “I wish you could see the island in daylight,” he said, and his voice was the same, as restful as swans. “The rocks gleam like chests filled with jewels. The grass is green as a river bank. Sleeping on the earth in the afternoon is like sleeping on a waterlily in the middle of a lake.”

  Maddy glanced down at the crusty dry dirt – it didn’t feel like a lake to her, but rough as a lion’s tongue. Shrivelled grass, husky as hay, cracked under each step. The rocks were pocked and charmless, inert angular things. She could even smell the burly odour of decaying seaweed. Surely mere daylight couldn’t make a difference to this. “Is light bewitching here?” she asked, suddenly thinking she’d found the explanation. “Does sunrise transform everything into something lovely?”

  Feather shook his head. “No, it’s not bewitching light. Everything is always lovely. In the moonlight, it’s lovely. In the daylight it’s lovelier, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” said Maddy; and felt prickly with awkwardness, and let the subject drop.

  They stopped in the centre of a ring of palms; Maddy sat down to pick burrs from her feet while Feather built a fire of grass and sticks. The sky had thickened to an incubus-blue but the moon was low and lustrous, brighter than the lamp. Mosquitoes and tiny midges arrived to fumble about peskily. Feather did not seem to notice them. He sat down and looked through the flames at her, fire glinting off his eyes. “It’s nice to see you,” he said.

  His voice was so familiar and evocative to Maddy, such an unpredicted cause of pain: hearing it made her remember everything, and forget the brave girl she’d seen reflected in the sea. The sorrows that had bleached her life returned, spilling like chilled water down her spine. Her heart gave an oceanic lurch: the fay was gone, her great love was gone, there was nothing worth waking for. Come back, she ached to say, come to me. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

  Feather looked aside. “See the spider webs on the leaves.” He pointed. “A galaxy is caught inside them.”

  Maddy turned her head reluctantly, saw two or three stars hanging like parched bugs inside webs, a sight that seemed somehow annoying to her. Indeed, anything her eye glanced upon managed to vaguely irritate her. She looked back at Feather, asked, “Is this island the thing you were longing for, all those days and nights when you roamed the beach so restlessly?”

  “Of course,” he said, as if she were a child asking the most quaintly naive question in the world.

  Maddy looked at him over the weaving flames – at his slender brown feet, his square empty hands, the scaffold of bones in his shoulders. She couldn’t think of a thing to reply. Seeing him should have been thrilling, but instead she felt shut behind a wall. The island was horrible, all her struggle seemed wasted, and Feather was someone she couldn’t understand. Come back, she might have pleaded: Return, be what you were. Rather she said, “Zephyrus says that an Island of Stillness grants a person’s dearest desire. Will you tell me what your island has given you, Feather?”

  Feather replied, “Eternal peace.”

  He said it simply, as he’d say the name of a dog or plant, as though eternal peace was an everyday thing you might trip over if you didn’t watch where you walked – but proudly too, it plainly being something he considered enviable. Maddy cocked her head, frowning. “Is that why you left?” she asked. “Because I didn’t bring you peace? I loved you, we trusted one another, I would never have hurt you, we were friends: wasn’t there peace in that?”

  Feather sighed, and shifted his place, because he heard plaintiveness in her voice, and plaintiveness can be a bore. He poked the fire with a stick and raised a wraith of hot sparks, looking away from her. “Sometimes,” he said, “love is not the strongest or the most important thing in the world. For you to be happy, Maddy, you need someone different to what I am. For you to be happy, I would have had to change. And I did change – all that I could. But I must be true to myself, as you’re always true to yourself. And I’m true to myself when I’m here.”

  Maddy smiled thinly. Without doubt, she had always loved him more than he’d loved her. His love had been mediocre: her love had been a hawk. She would willingly have changed herself for him, eternally, utterly – he’d needed only to ask. The imbalance between them was painful, and made her want to cause pain. “But what exactly are you, when you’re here?” she asked. “With me, you were vital, and wanted, and adored. What are you, what use are you, what good are you, in this lonesome place? Eternal peace might make you peaceful, Feather, but that’s all it will make you. You’ll never be anything else.”

  She clamped her mouth shut, her words flying off like bats – her voice was probably the loudest thing the island had ever heard. Feather gazed steadfastly into the fire. “If you can’t understand it, Maddy,” he said, “then I can’t explain it to you. Sometimes you must do what is right for your blood, your heart – for your spirit. Maybe this place isn’t perfect, but I’m supposed to be here – here, alone – and this is where I will stay.”

  Maddy said nothing. Her nails were dug in her palms. She glanced away into the darkness, where there was nothing she wanted to see. How curious it was, that this person she craved so much should crave something so different to her. A small voice inside her was piping, Come back! Come back! Come back! B
ut she let it cry unheeded, turned her face from it. The palm leaves rustled, the fire popped, the ocean slushed the shore. Maddy thought she must not have a spirit – or that, if she did, it was a boorish thing. Her spirit knew no shades of grey, only black and white. Grief and happiness, loss and gain. “Well,” she said eventually, looking back at him, “are you happy now, Feather?” And she hoped, more than she’d ever hoped for anything, that he would say he was. What purpose was there in all that had happened, if both of them must still suffer?

  His silver eyes lifted to her; he said, “My nature is comforted here.”

  Maddy nodded. She felt abruptly tired, and ready to go home; she hankered to be aboard the Albatross, roving the vast free sea. She could hardly bear how alienated she felt, here on this island of Feather’s dearest desire: if she were forced to stay, Maddy would stalk the beach just as Feather had done, relentlessly scanning the horizon for elsewhere. And it was dismal talking to this being who looked like Feather, and spoke like him, who was even tinged with the wheatfield smell of him – but was just an echo of the Feather she’d loved, the one she’d longed to see again. Those days were finished, that Feather was gone, the only place he lived now was in the past. And she resented this new Feather spoiling her memories of the old, which were the most cherished things that she owned. “I’m glad you’ve found peace, Feather,” she said. “I’m pleased you were able to forget me. Because how else could you live with the hurt you caused? It’s a terrible thing, to love, and be left behind.”

  “I believe you,” he said softly – and looking up she saw a spangle of someone she had known. “I haven’t forgotten you, Maddy. Part of me never stops remembering you. Remembering you comforts my nature now, too.”

  She watched him shimmer, turn smoky and flare with light. Somewhere inside him her Feather survived, holding her hand in his own. The realization stung her, and made her eyes smart: she did not know if his absence would be less painful now, or much, much worse. But this was the Feather she had searched for, the one who would most understand. Hastily, before he vanished, she said, “I need to ask you a question, Feather. It’s a question bigger than the world. By the time I guessed you knew the answer, you were already gone. But I need the answer so badly that I crossed the horizon to find you.”

  “And I’m here,” said Feather. “So ask.”

  Maddy drew a breath, rehearsed the words in her head, and asked, “How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?”

  “You can’t,” Feather answered. “You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a safe corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that’s how you go on living.”

  Maddy saw it in her mind, a great coin flipping slowly, showing first the whiplash tail of sadness, next the warm facet of joy. Sorrow and joy, bonded so closely that occasionally they spun inside each other. “And you take pride in knowing you’re capable of great love,” she said, “and live in the knowledge that you can feel it again.”

  “…Yes,” said Feather. “You can feel it again.”

  After that, there seemed little else to say. They sat in easy companionship for a while, feeding sticks into the fire and reminiscing about the cottage and the beach. They did not talk of the fay or the pond, or about his leaving in the middle of the night, because these were things that had not yet been safely cornered somewhere. Their conversation was suffused with a poignancy, which they pretended didn’t exist. They talked like two old soldiers with not much in common once the battlefield stories were done.

  When the moon hung directly over their heads, Maddy knew it was time to go. She shook the dust from her oilskin and scratched her mosquito bites. Feather walked with her down to the sand, to where the Albatross was aground. They stood side-by-side at the boat’s pointy prow, reaching for the right things to say, hoping to make these last moments soar, but flailing like drenched birds. “Will you be all right?” Maddy asked, because it was important that he be so. It would never make her happy to think of him as sad.

  He shrugged, smiling sweetly. “Of course. Will you?”

  “Of course,” she said too.

  “And do you really like my island?” he asked.

  Maddy looked up at the ugly garrison of rocks, smelt the cloyed, seaweedy air, felt the sand gravelly between her toes. Eternal peace was an awe-inspiring thing: but it was also a frightening and stultifying thing. Here on his Island of Stillness, Feather would never feel frustration, anticipation, regret, or glee. He’d be immune to confusion, impatience, disappointment, and surprise. He would not yell with exhilaration, he would know no fear. He would not be irate, he would never weep. He would be stone, unmalleable, living a stone’s life, as bland as the Island of Stillness itself. Despite this, she said, “It’s beautiful, Feather,” and it was, if it made him happy.

  They pushed the Albatross into the water, and Maddy climbed aboard. As the waves pulled the boat out to sea, Maddy watched Feather become smaller and smaller. Finally, when he was just a tiny speck that could hardly be seen in the dark, she whistled for the west wind. Zephyrus put a shoulder to the canvas and sped her lightly away. When she next looked back, Maddy could see only the thick night sky and the thicker blackness of the ocean below it. The Island of Stillness, she knew, was standing where it had come to a halt centuries ago: it was she who was gone.

  Maddy had plenty of time to think during the long voyage home. The west wind steered the Albatross while she sat on the seat with her chin in her hands, turning over matters in her mind. She thought about Feather shrinking smaller and smaller as she sailed away. By the time the conifer forest that surrounded her cottage appeared as olive stubble in the distance, Feather would be tinier than a grain of sand, tinier than the tiniest speck of dust that might catch in the eye of the most miniature insect ever known. He filled her heart hugely though, so there was hardly room for anything more. In her memory he flew as wide-winged as an eagle. She wondered if his shadow would hover over her forever, a bruise in the background of the rest of her life, a wound that pained when it was deliberately or accidentally knocked. Strangely, she wanted it to be this way. If the hurt of Feather healed, metamorphed into joy, she might one day forget him. And she did not want to forget him.

  She hoped he would be happy on his Island of Stillness. She wondered if he would ever think of her wistfully, spoiling his serenity.

  She would never see Feather again, Maddy knew. That part of her life was over. And the best she could do was take what she’d known – of Feather, of the fay, of the future she’d imagined in the forest’s shade – and salvage something from it. She had lost, but loss has its own quality and promise. She could gather up the bare bones of her life and build from them something wiser and more intricate than what she’d had before.

  “Thank you,” she said to Zephyrus, when the Albatross glided into the bay.

  “My pleasure,” said the wind. “Any time. I like you, you know. You remind me of me, and I really like me. You don’t want peace or sameness. You know that life is for going, not stopping.”

  Maddy asked, “Do I?”

  The wind said, “You do. But when life goes, it goes fast, Maddy: so be careful. Don’t waste your time wanting what you can’t have.”

  “From now on,” Maddy promised, “I will try.”

  She let down the sails, tied the boat to the pier, slipped off her oilskin, and walked home.

  The west wind was right: life lasts a long time, but it goes by in a blink. There are plenty of quiet hours in which to sit and think, yet so little time to make decisions and get the serious things done. As soon as she opened the door of the cottage, Maddy knew that living within a dark forest wasn’t something she should do. She was not, after all, Snow White. She packed her favourite things into a box, and tied down the lid. The nargun was crammed in a corner of the room, its black face full of worry. “I don’t need your protection any more,” she told it. “I must look after myself now. But I hope
that you will always be my friend.” The beast pranced to its feet and wagged its stumpy tail like a pup. When Maddy finished packing, she left the cottage for the last time, closing the door behind her. She glanced back several times as she walked, her heart panging and protesting. But soon there was nothing to see except pine trees, and she turned her face to the front.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” was Mama’s verdict of Feather. She swallowed a mouthful of wine. “I told you he was intolerable, Matilda. Hopefully one day everyone will forget this sorry saga, and you can hook a widower.”

  Maddy’s father, slicing roast lamb, said, “He was never good enough for you.”

  And although everything had been so futile and disappointing, Maddy said, “I’ve never known anyone better than Feather.”

  Mama gave a snort. “I wonder if he speaks so highly of you, while he’s lazing around wasting his life and making mayhem of yours. How can you care a fig for someone who casts you aside – in favour of what?”

  “Of truth.” The word occurred to Maddy from nowhere, crisp as crystal. “I’m glad I know somebody who would choose honesty over everything.”

  “My goodness! How whimsical! Truth! What is that?”

  Maddy shuddered. She would not speak of Feather at this table. She looked to her father and said, “Papa, I don’t want to sit about doing nothing. I have been thinking: I want to go to the war.”

  “What?” The boy stretched out on the settee sat up on his elbows. “War? What war?”

  Matilda leaned back in her chair. “Surely, at school, you’ve learned about the war.”

  “Of course.” His eyes thinned, he resented being suspected ignorant. “But what was the war doing in your poky town? The shooting and trenches were on the other side of the world. How did they get to your dinner table?”