The church glints, also. From inside, its windows are jewel-coloured – ruby, emerald, a deep royal blue. These colours lie down on the tiled floor.
On the west coast, the sinking sun catches the row of single, rubber boots that stand upside down on fence-posts. None match; none are the same size. They shine in a line, looking wistful. They cast their strange shadows on the scrubby grass behind.
And at the same time – at this exact, same moment as the stained-glass windows glow, unseen, and as the widow from Crest takes her washing inside – the men come to a stile. They stumble, hiss watch it! The man they carry hears this. His head lolls. He feels the rock of his body and the fingers pressing into him, and there is the brush of legs through the grass. He smells sweat, sheep, salty air.
He says a word. It is sea, or a word like it.
When he opens his eyes, all he can see is sky.
Tabitha looks at the clock on her kitchen wall. It is past eight. This means, to her, that she can pour herself a small glass of sweet, pink wine so she goes to her fridge and opens it. She loves the sound of a cork coming out. She likes the cool bottle, and choosing the glass from her shelf – for none of her glasses are the same. Small rituals. Everybody has them. Her mother always tapped a wooden spoon twice against a saucepan, having stirred it; her father had names for the weight that would lower itself down the stairwell, and in doing so, turn the lamp.
She sips.
Berries. Vanilla, maybe.
Her home is Lowfield. It is small, cream-walled and south-facing – and it’s a house with no logic, for the kitchen leads into the bedroom and the bath is in a room of its own, far away from the loo. Things creak. Floors slope. She says it has character, as most Parlan houses have – and why would she want a bland home? With paper lampshades and plastic chairs? She has furniture from her childhood here – a linen chest, a grandfather clock. Tabitha touches the clock as she passes it, her wine in her other hand.
There is logic in its name, at least. Lowfield – for it sits in a hollow, a nest of grassy mounds. Three sides of the house look out onto banks of gorse, bramble and grazing sheep; on those three sides, it is fully sheltered from the wind. When Tabitha moved here in her early thirties she had lain in her bed and thought where is the noise? The rumbling? The spray on the windowpanes? For these were the things she was used to. Her childhood had been in the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters and so any inland sleeping place seemed eerie to her, and still. Surely an island home should rattle in the wind? When she came to Lowfield, a storm passed overhead one night and she knew nothing of it. She only learnt of the storm the next morning: as she stood in the garden in her dressing gown and looked at the fallen fence-post – upended, with black earth at the base of it – she told herself this will make a good home. A safe place. It also makes a good place for the tired and sick to come.
That was thirty years ago. Now, her waist has thickened. She has pouches of skin beneath her eyes and when she walks in her slippers she hears herself – the padding on the wooden floors, the slow pace. I walk as if I’m old. It has happened so quickly, or seems to have done. It seems like a day or two ago that she’d worn a red bikini, jumped from the sea wall.
Briefly, Tabitha feels sad. She has her regrets – but Lowfield is not one of them. It is hers; she has spent half of her lifetime here. It feels nurturing, as a home should. Cupped by the Parlan land.
The only room with a view of the sea is what she calls the mending room. She’s always called it this. Surgery feels too grand for it: a white-painted room, linoleum floor, a small cabinet of pills and liquids that islanders have prescriptions for and others which she keeps just in case. A table and chair face the door. Behind them, she has a poster of the musculature of the human body – reddish and gruesome, which the children love. On the table, Tabitha keeps an African violet; she likes its dark, furred leaves.
This room has seen plenty, that’s for sure. It holds its secrets – small ones, and ones that have changed a life and other lives. She, Tabitha, knows all of them. Lorcan, also, must have heard some strange confessions over the years – he walks with the weight of what he’s been told, or so it looks, for he has lumbar pain that she gives him codeine for and a stern telling-off when he carries too many hymn books. They go to him for their souls; for their bodies they come to Lowfield, and so here it is that Tabitha listens to hearts and takes temperatures and tends to the wounds that come from a life of farming, or the sea – a half-severed thumb from the shearing blades, or rope-burn that has broken the skin. She knows who has high blood pressure, who does not sleep, and who is on the contraceptive pill. She knows who drinks too much, whose skin flakes under their clothes, who takes pills to thin their blood, who has athlete’s foot, cold sores, piles. She knows of Sam’s migraines, of her own sister’s painful joints. And Tabitha has brought babies into the world, in her time – all five of the Lovegrove children and three of her own family have slid like eels into her waiting hands.
Tabitha sips. She thinks all those secrets … Once, newly qualified, she’d believed that everything was curable – every human pain. But she was wrong to think it. Guilt, heartbreak – what cures them? Or simply makes them bearable? Nothing on her shelves.
Still – she views this room as safety. She wants each person who steps into it to feel cared for. With the pot-plant and the pressed bed linen, she has always tried for that.
In the far corner, there is an iron-framed single bed. Tabitha goes to it, sits down. She pushes her slippers off with her toes, swings her legs up and nestles back. From here, she can see the finger of land called Litty, the nettle patch which no-one has ever mowed or dug up because of the voles that live there. The tiny, tufty-eared Parlan vole – it is its own species, and rare, and she has seen one or two in her time or at least the nettles swaying where a vole has darted from. Beyond Litty, there is the water. The sea – scattered with light. What view was ever better than this?
She wiggles her toes in their polka-dot socks.
Tabitha drinks her pink wine.
* * *
You knock.
No, you. I can’t take my hand away, it’s under his head – see?
Ian curses. He is aching. He has carried a thousand sheep in his life, slung round his neck like a collar and he’s carried boat engines and tractor wheels and his own kids when they were young – but not this weight, and not so far. I’m too old for this, he thinks.
He kicks at Tabitha’s door. Three kicks, low down near the doorframe – all too hard.
The men shift. They are steaming like horses, sweat on their top lips and brows. The man they carry groans overhead so that Ian says, hurry up …
The kicking must have startled her for when Tabitha unlocks the door, she peers around it as if unsure of what she might find. But then she sees Ian. She sees all of them, widens her eyes. Looks like you’d better come in, she says.
She leans against the wall to let them pass.
The room smells of disinfectant and a false, lavender scent which comes from a bottle plugged into the wall. Put him on the bed.
He goes down heavily.
All four men exhale. Then they stretch, step away. Nathan straightens and his back clicks. Jonny rotates his right shoulder and says Jesus. What do you think he weighs?
Tabitha is by the bed. Foremost, she is the nurse – not the aunt, not the great-aunt or the friend – and she busies herself with what a nurse must do, lifting the man’s head and arranging the pillow beneath it. She takes his wrist, watches