Malta,
Gozo.
Dwejra Point, Twenty Fourth of July Two Thousand and Seven.
Through the eye. The Azure Eye, opening and closing and blinking at me. The limestone archway, crumbling away into the pressing roaring sea. We’re here today and gone tomorrow my breath I feel has grown so shallow. On a cliff-top, perched like a lonely diving bird, urged to plummet into darkness, where the sun shines no-more, through the waters that cool the burns. This is the edge of reason. My ‘Egg Rock’. The place where I hold The Fates spinning hands and ask myself.
‘Is this the right thing to do?’
Little Rhys and my Dad, I see their faces coming fast. Silence please. I plead and ask, don’t deter me from my task. Here, in the heat with my pockets full of heavy stones, that cannot be turned or over thrown. The past’s immobile. The past’s inert. No getting away from all the hurt. But I did nothing you see. I was innocent, not guilty. I am a daughter, a mother, a giver, a taker, a lover, a muse, a catalyst, a blasting fuse.
‘Listen.’
I can hear the moan of the ocean floor. A massive pregnancy about to spawn. Let the sea rise and take me on its wave of spit and scorn. Let it rise up and hang me , by my root of tangled hair. Here, at Dwejra Point, on the tiny island of Gozo, a woman of thirty two with a red bandana in her hair. Let her fall onto the rocky spur, to be washed-up, way down shore. A seaweed crown. The body never claimed. An open and shut case. A white sheet in a morgue. The careful closing of a door.
‘God rest Rosie Morgan, for she was there for us all.’
A child screams through my reverie. Gulls alarm and waken me. Revived with a draught of water. I watch with pity the screaming toddler. Her little sun hat lies lost on the sand but the people pass and don’t lend a hand. I tell myself; retrieve that hat, pick it and take it back, to the little girl who will smile and laugh, at the pretty lady with a colourful past. But the father is there. A terrible scar shaped like a horse shoe, stamped on his head. He’s pale and sallow with a hint of death. He kisses his daughter; and the screaming stops.
‘Twenty of us sailed from Gozo.’
The ferry rolls beneath my tread. The heat rises to kiss my feet. Sweat dissolves my inner core and runs out thick from every pore, down my cheeks in tiny tears, down my neck, through the cut of my breasts.
I wait. Baked. Minutes and minutes. A need to move. A need to leave and sail across the open seas. The stiff movement. Repetition and repetition. Revolution and revolution. The engine turns in mechanical loops. Guts churning. White-washed brine. Children scattered across the decks, the little sisters and their brothers. Now where the hell is my son, in this chaos, in this sun. I have to catch him, I have to run, I have to smother and kill his fun.
‘But he’s not here Rosie dear.’
Men and women standing still. Their bodies pressed against ferry rails, seeking out new horizons, looking out for life’s insurance. A life to date of re-assessment. The imminent pause. The interregnum (one of my father’s favourite words). I worry about my father : Dad. He will search and scour the earth but he will never find me. Hiding in the nook and cranny. In the hole with my dead son. In the crevice that shuts behind me.
‘I run, I run, I run.’
I ran at school on my stick legs. One hundred metres. Ten thousand metres. Another trophy for Rosie Morgan. But the lights of memory have grown so dim. My pace and stamina now diminished. I started something I can’t finish. Daddy don’t you worry for me. The ferry churns up the sea. The tractor ploughs up the dirt. In a line for the harbour. Petrol fumes. Sick oily vapours. My stomach rides on acid waves. A sip of neutral tepid water. Woman overboard. A joker’s laughter. Into port about to dock. About to buffer, about to stop. There’s no bunting or waving crowds. No hugs and kisses or family calls. Miles and miles away from home. The hand of reality slaps me down. And I feel the sickness course through me. A nasty prick. A giant hit. I could pack and go right back from these blue morning skies to the damp mildewed vistas. Malta to England. Island to island. Life to life.
‘We enter. Mdina.The City of Ghosts.’
I want to scream my dead son’s name all across the world. I want this silence to be wrought with anguish. A cry from history’s captured soul. I want my screams to tear it down, this ancient city on a hill. Ransacked and pillaged. Our grief commingled. Throats, choked on desert dust that cannot offer up one sigh. I am so embarrassed; mute and tongue-tied. In a choir of silent singers
‘Oh baby, baby.’
The little girl with the sun hat clings onto to her father’s legs. A boy not long for puberty, wipes his hands down his vest; and he waits for the games to start. But there is no-one here to play with, only jumping shadows to battle with, and no new pals to cross swords with.
‘This is old silence.’
We meet beneath the awning; the tour guide and the twenty. She is part New Zealand and part Maltese. Black hair. A texture different to mine. Her eyes are lively portals, to the deepest darkest mines, to where the island’s treasure lies: the gems of history that she shares so easily. Cast offs from ruby red lips that tell of –
Saint Paul’s conversion.
Moorish occupation.
Napoleonic liberation.
British colonisation.
I listen with my father in tow, who would have interrupted by now, with his dry scholastic questions. He, the ex-teacher, desperate to be a schoolboy again.
‘Release and go.’
Alone through the belt thin streets, dragging my nails over peeling paint. Music plays behind balcony doors. Opera. Aria. Indigenous people they watch and hide, too scared to show their faces. An isolated island race, trembling at my paces. Reverberations. Kicking up a dust. A smokescreen. Where the streets run hither and thither in a mad constellation. A map drawn by a blind man.
‘The Guardian of the City.’
From the alleys they come to greet me. The silver cats. Sly feral children on their legs of porcelain, following me, like a doomed Pied-Piper through the labyrinth streets.
But I have no back trail, no Ariadne line, I am lost here without a light. In a tight spot, in a hot spot, brightening and widening, the heat returning, as I emerge.
‘Down into the plaza.’
The cathedral revealed in all its splendour. The shadows fade and surrender. A massive facade of honeyed bricks. The octagonal dome. The bell tower. Two clocks with two faces that tell two times. Two black doors; one for good and one for evil; overlooked by Saint Paul’s viper where a lonely bird taps the floor; spooked by heavy footfalls. And on that trigger I see them there in their measured pose, a middle-aged couple on the cusp of fifty.
‘Distracted and forgetful.’
His eyes are turning and his mind is walking. She feels the tension in the hand she’s holding. She knows his eyes are grooming me. In his polite white polo shirt, beige slacks and rimless glasses. Grey haired, face fallen, an avalanche of loose fat flesh, neck and shoulders indecipherable. He points his camera right at me. Lovely. Shooting at me. Put this animal out of her misery. I mouth silent expletives back.
‘Inside the cathedral.’
Incandescent with holy light. Sunrays kiss the Latin cross as I shuffle to where the candles bend and drop. The place where Christianity has began to search me and touch me with is heavy pathos; its story. Three women kneel and pray and pass the beads silently. I am drained by space, light and air. Pure things. I try to clear my mind with a rude cough but a chastening echo comes back. And then he arrives, his soul a memory. The chosen one.
‘My dead son.’
The rain was impressive on that day. The seventeenth of July, Two Thousand and Seven. I could hear my father in the next room. Rhys’ tiny bedroom. He did not want my son’s bed, but I forced him to take it. With hindsight it was cruel, a terrible thing to do, but if Rhys’ ghost came in the night, I wanted my father to behold him. He, the hackneyed old atheist, the weekend Marxist. I wanted Rhys to visit him and sit upon his bed. I wanted my father to see the vision that plagued me.
And so, after our breakfast of dry toast, I asked him what he had seen. But there was no answer, only a smile, and then he just looked down at the floor for what seemed to be a lifetime. An eternity. I hated him for that.
I collapsed before the funeral, abandoning huge slices of memory. What remained was the rain. The heavy summer rain and the lakes of clear water. The waters of baptism and absolution that fell upon my head and gave up the sign that I could start again without remorse or the blame.
‘Jesus please teach me to live again.’
The funeral went with a shower of hail and a crack of thunder. It hurts me now to remember: the shock of white flowers, the roses and lilies, his friends singing the most English of hymns, my father crying into his liver spotted hands. A ladybird crawling over the pages of a well thumbed prayer book. That is all I remember.
‘Flowers and flames.’
I close the door of the cathedral to the thought of Rhys never coming back and now I cross into a new light. An arc light, a spotlight. The sun searching for its victim. In the plaza, cross-examined. I am a witch burning beneath these Maltese skies. I am a lamb off to slaughter. A forsaken creature.
‘I walked among the horses.’
Their carts their are strapped to their backs. Waiting for their ride. Poor beasts caught in time, surviving without an option. Equine. Human. Horse and I, the same. Nothing better than today. Horse sweat foams to a milky froth. A cappuccino stands in a cup. Brushed by olive skinned hands. The black horse stares from beneath its blinkers. Its long lashes batting. I can see myself in its eye. In the glass of my reflection. Beasts bound together in growing tension. He whinnies and brays, lifts his head to butt the skies. Futile.
‘My last night?’
I walk upon the beach at dusk and unless I act quickly; tomorrow will be my very last day. I shall end a migrant, a transient, one whose future lies in the dirty rooms of condominiums or in the rabbit hutches of wet cardboard boxes or in the soup queue or in the dole queue. Standing naked alone and insane, in the early morning dew by a rail track, waiting for the final train.
I could not kill myself at Dwejra Point nor find myself in old Mdina’s silence.
Cowardice and a lack of perception have overpowered me. I thought I was an intelligent woman whose mind could not be challenged and yet, when it came down to it, I was broken by bereavement and confusion.
‘The everyday in all of us.’
Out at sea, a column of white seabirds rise like a tower of smoke. The surf moves back and forth like an old bread knife, slicing away at the coast, piece by piece, until there is nothing left but a single memory.
England.
Isle of Wight.
Alum Bay, Tenth of July Two Thousand and Seven.
We combed the beach in search of fossils. We made a ring of shells and he stood at the centre. Oh my, what a beautiful child, that was made by myself and some drunken lover. Perhaps, it was the man with the snake tattoo, with a predilection for suffocation or the pale student with his sizeable manhood, but God knows, not much extra.
‘Does it matter?’
The sea shimmered a million fish scales. We sat by a rock pool and bathed our sore feet. Mine a four and his are a six. I cannot believe how much he’s grown. But he’s just a little boy, to me anyway, as I hear him whisper and talk to the water; to the crab, the anemone, the barnacles, the cockles and rag worms. New friends with cartoon names. If only I could share in that fun, without worry or without history.
‘I spoil it all and whisk him away.'
We trudged through the heavy sand and into the shadows of a chalk white face. White. White like baby’s teeth. White like baby-powder. Soft skin, unblemished and clean. Pure white; like my son.
‘Nearly there now Rhys.’ I offer a Mother’s enthusiastic backing, but I look back and glimpse him mocking.
But a breath later he’s back and asking strange questions. ‘Mommy, can I see your life-line. Katie Farrell said ‘it tells you how long you’ve got before you die.’’
I said, wishing I could strangle little Katie Farrell, ‘don’t worry, I’ll never leave you and don’t talk about dying again.’
‘The sea winds stirred and blew me away.’
The chair-lift rattled, strained and buckled. I suggested an ice cream when we got to the top, ‘but he said no thanks’, and I asked him ‘why’, but he replied, ‘it’s nothing. Not hungry.’ ‘Forgive me’, I said in a sarcastic tone that sounded harsh and uncaring. We alighted and he hung back and I shouted, ‘You are too old for this. Grow up.’ I screamed, loud enough for an old couple to turn and tut.
‘A boulder of shame grew in my throat.’
I was wishing it all away. It was getting at me. I said to myself, ‘Just relax and let be.
Life is too short really.
‘Rhys it’s time to go now. Come on, baby. It’s time to go.’
Nothing. His back turned on me. Petulant. Playing deaf. Playing football.
He made a dribble; the ball glued to his foot, a step-over, a chip and then he volleyed it high, sending it skywards. I watched it fall like a meteorite from the sky. Then it hit the ground and bounced away, fast and teasing, toward the precipice. He was sprinting. I was running by then, my muscles tearing, lactic acid building, my breath draining a shallow reservoir of air. Never going to get there. He was leading. The gap growing. Screaming. Screaming. My tongue vibrating. Through a swarm of mosquitoes. The ground cracking. My mind elsewhere, distracted by images of jets crashing and bombs falling, Icarus with his feathers burning and the Angel Lucifer, black-winged, laughing in my face me.
I watched, as the land gave way. I watched his tiny hands claw the air. A wasp landed on the back of my hand. Shocked Stopped. A drum pounded. And I ran again.
Optimistic that he would just fall then land, only scratched, on a cushion of hawthorn bushes or on, an out-crop with just a tibia broke. I screamed again, raked the sun, the moon, and the stars from the skies. ‘No, not my Son. Not my Son.’
Looking down over the lip, I saw his body laid out. A man with white hair looked away in horror; (forever held in my disdain).
My son’s eyes were still open. A chance. A dream. But the scarlet halo that encircled his head annihilated that. So I went, closer and closer but I could not jump, it would be easier to suffer.
‘Was I really his Mother?’
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