Even though everything in the past twenty-four hours had been leading to this, even though it was a fear Isabel had harboured from the day she had first laid eyes on Lucy as a baby, still, the moment ripped through her.
'Please!’ she pleaded through tears.
‘Have some pity!’
Her voice reverberated around the bare walls.
‘Don’t take my baby away!’
As the girl was wrenched from her screaming, Isabel fainted onto the stone floor with a resounding crack.
Later, the child climbs down from her mother’s knee and clambers up onto Tom. He holds her wordlessly, trying to imprint everything about her: the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, the shape of her tiny fingers, the sound of her breath as she puts her face so close to his.
The island swims away from them, fading into an ever more miniature version of itself, until it is just a flash of memory, held differently, imperfectly by each passenger. Tom watches Isabel, waits for her to return his glance, longs for her to give him one of the old smiles that used to remind him of Janus Light – a fixed, reliable point in the world, which meant he was never lost. But the flame has gone out – her face seems uninhabited now.
As Tom walked away, every step more awful, Lucy pursued him, arms still outstretched. ‘Dadda, wait for Lulu,’ she begged, wounded and confused. When she tripped and fell face down on the gravel, letting out a scream, Tom could not go on, and spun around, breaking free of the policeman’s grip.
‘Lulu!’
He scooped her up and kissed her scratched chin.
‘Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy,’ he murmured, his lips brushing her cheek.
‘You’re all right, little one. You’ll be all right.’
Vernon Knuckey looked at the ground and cleared his throat.
Tom said, ‘Sweetheart, I have to go away now. I hope—’ He stopped. He looked into her eyes and he stroked her hair, finally kissing her.
‘Goodbye, littlie.
Isabel was squeezing the girl to her, sobbing at the touch of her, the legs fitting snugly around her waist and the head slotting automatically into the space beneath her chin, like the final piece of a jigsaw. She was oblivious to anything and anyone else....
The woman and child were knitted together like a single being, in a world no one could enter.
Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.
M.L. StedmanI can forgive and forget... it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things
M.L. StedmanThe oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.
M.L. StedmanTag: deep oceans endlessness
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