Isabelle Button had always been a fragile creature. Then Isabelle Bottomsley, she was the last of seven children, the only girl born into a fishing family. Jack Bottomsley had recruited each of his six sons into service on his fishing boat and his disappointment at the birth of a girl, some twelve years after that of his youngest son Geordie, was quite palpable. Her mother Sonia bore the brunt of his unpleasantness over the matter, to the point where she herself was turned against Isabelle for the trouble she had brought between her and Jack. Sonia’s resentment dried up her milk and baby Isabelle was raised on little more than water and mushed pumpkin, growing quite sickly and never far from feeble.
Raised in a torturously cold, draughty, rain-lashed shack away from the other families, a few damp miles outside of a tiny village to the north, Isabelle was left mostly to fend for herself. She only rarely saw her father and brothers, who were out on the sea through the night and in the markets of a morning, coming home late in the day and only for long enough to collapse wearily into their cots, dragging home the stench of fish past their prime. While they slept her mother would add the fish off-cuts they returned with to a broth, clean up whatever scant vegetables could be gathered from the miserly, salt-scoured garden bed and prepare a meal.
This her mother would divide into eight main portions, removing a small amount from one (her own) into a ninth bowl that would then be Isabelle’s. While the men still slept, their thunderous snores filling the shack, threatening to topple its leaning walls, Isabelle and her mother ate in silence at opposite ends of the table. The rumbling in Isabelle’s stomach threatened at times to drown out the snoring, but she steadfastly refused to ask for more, knowing that not only would her pride be dented but her begging would be frowned upon and her request refused. She had to contend with the skerricks of scraps she could occasionally make away with when not under her mother’s watchful eye, or the occasional morsel she might be able to snatch from a barrow while passing through the markets.
Isabelle was destined for a life of hard work and miserable thanklessness, of abusive indifference and mirthless servitude. Her distance from the village made friends nigh on impossible and she learned to get by with those she created. There was the dashing Percival who, though a cad and a bounder to be sure, knew Isabelle was his one true love. There was kindly Dorothy, a motherly figure who would offer words of encouragement when Isabelle was at her darkest. Her best friend and closest ally, however, was Veronique, whose accent Isabelle simply adored.
Though of her creation none of them would come into Isabelle’s home, so she could only be with them when out and at play. She would get her many chores over with as soon as possible so she could spend a few precious moments with them before the evening work began.
Some years later, upon the day Isabelle turned 15, a vicious tempest the likes of which none in that part of the world could recall having ever seen smashed into the coast with a fury impossible to fathom. Her mother had ventured into the village and told her she must stay and do all of the washing, leaving her alone and deliciously free. Watching the storm roll in from the boot-scuffed patch of earth in front of their shack, Isabelle was secretly thrilled by Mother Nature’s kaleidoscopic display, the once-in-a-lifetime performance that, in the best of Shakespearean traditions, followed three disparate but seamless acts.
The curtain-raising first act began in absolute silence. The breeze that had been bobbing the heads of the dandelions and toying with the ragweed dropped away, a foreboding stillness taking its place. This saturated calm drew attention to itself as an anomaly on a coastline that was an ever creaking, restless soul, but was broken by the nervous gobble of a nearby hen, scratching up a puff of dust and twitching its bony shoulders. A metallic smell tickled Isabelle’s nose, like that sent up when cold water hit a hot pan that had been sitting over fire. The air pressure leached away, leaving her head feeling strangely light. The breeze returned, but it had swung around – the gentle off-shore meander now a more insistent on-shore gust, picking up white caps and twisting little triangular scoops of the sea into a vast plain of bejewelled pyramids.
The sea was where the show was to be found, the sky still a thickly rich blue. As Isabelle watched it, anyone looking into her eyes would have seen the changes it underwent, for her eyes, had anybody cared to notice, had always changed colour with the sea’s every tonal shift. The day she was born they were almost black, the storm raging outside passing through the cracks in the house and slipping beneath her delicate lids. By the next day they were a piercing blue, the following a deep emerald.
Now, an observer would see that their periwinkle lustre was following the ocean’s swirling slide into a mischievous turquoise, an Aegean green and, before long, a gunmetal grey that was a steely challenge against which few could hold. Isabelle stared into the wind until her eyes watered, seeping with hues that stained her cheeks as her salty tears spilled. But the tears were not of sadness, nor of joy, simply an outpouring of solidarity, an offering to mark her secret bond with the sea.
The second act was marked by the first cloud to loom at the horizon’s edge. Instead of rolling in as a uniform blanketing, the foggy thatched sheet or the misty stretched cotton that was typically the case at this time of year, it grew taller and taller before Isabelle’s eyes, mushrooming heavenward as it sucked up every trace of trouble it could find. Once it reached a height and thickness that had her wondering if there was enough cloud in the world to sustain its inexorable rise, it began its surge towards her.
With an incredible speed it raced to the coastline, seemingly powered by the electricity that pulsed through its blackening head. Every few seconds it would throw a bolt of this lightning down to the sea, as though running across its surface on jagged legs of light. Isabelle felt the first stinging drops of rain that fled before it, mixed in with the spray whipped off the sea’s tumbling peaks. Her eyes darkened and narrowed, at odds with the twist at the edge of her lips, the upward turn into a wry smile. Thick droplets of inky rain now slapped down on the tin roof behind her, kicking up dust as the hen had done before it scurried through a gap beneath the shack’s floor. The ground was soon riddled with these perfect wounds, the strafed landscape under siege.
The storm front was barely a mile away now. Isabelle could see a veil hanging beneath the low-skimming clouds and stretching to the water, a wall of rain that from this distance seemed suspended in mid-thought. The cloud formation was almost that of an arrow, its centre shooting at her could not have been more targeted than if sent from an archer’s bow. But still she stood, mesmerised by the bright rim of gold that sat at the very summit of the billowing, tar-black cloud, a dying gasp of defiance from the all-but-swallowed sun.
Isabelle watched as the shoreline retreated. The sea sucked its tendrils away from the stony stretch of beach against which it had been delivering armfuls of foam, slurping and groaning as it was dragged away. The low tide mark appeared and still the sea shrank away, revealing rocks she had never seen and leaving fish of all sizes floundering in their sudden nakedness. It drew further and further away until it reached the veil she had seen, where it stopped. The storm and the sea seemed frozen in perfect equilibrium, lovers embracing on a train station platform, perched on the edge of a dream that they had long shared but never been brave enough to perform.
The third act had arrived.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment