“Of course I get it.” I was trying to figure out how I was going to get down the black stuff I had been handed. “I just don’t think it’s funny.”
The man came back from the kitchen carrying a mug. “Not funny, eh? Oh, well, I’m out of practice.” He handed the mug to Call. “It’s half tinned milk and half water.”
Call tasted it. “Good,” he said.
I waited for him to offer me something to put in my tea, but he didn’t. He just got himself a mug of the black brew and sat down.
“My real name is Sara Louise Bradshaw,” I said, forgetting that minutes ago I had decided against revealing my true name.
“That’s a very nice name,” he said politely.
“My real name is McCall Purnell, but everybody calls me Call.”
“I see,” he said slyly. “If I want you, I just call Call.”
“Call Call!” cried Call, as though it was the most original idea as well as the funniest thing he had ever heard. “Call Call! Did you get that, Wheeze? It’s a joke.”
Good heavens. “I don’t suppose,” I said, loading my voice with significance, “I don’t suppose that you would tell us your name.”
The man feigned surprise. “I thought everyone on this island knew my name.”
Both Call and I leaned forward, waiting for him to say more, but he didn’t. I was puzzling it out, whether to press him further or to play it casually, when Call blurted out, “You don’t seem like neither spy.”
The old man raised an eyebrow at me. I’m sure I turned the color of steamed crab. How do counterspies keep from blushing? He stared at me unmercifully for a minute. I was shrinking into the bench. “Why,” he asked accusingly, “why aren’t you drinking your tea?”
“Tin—tin—tin,” I stammered.
“Rin tin tin,” shrieked Call.
The man laughed, too, but at least he got up and brought the tin of milk over to me. My hands were shaking with rage or frustration or exasperation, who knew which, but I managed to fill the mug to the brim with the thick yellowish milk. He waited in front of me until I had sampled the brew. I took a scalding sip. It was too hot to know how it tasted, but I shook my head to indicate that it was fine. Halfway into the mug, I realized I should have asked for sugar, but then it seemed too late.
That was the way most of our early visits to the Captain’s house went. We decided, Call and I, simply to call him “the Captain.” On Rass any waterman who owned his own boat was called Captain So and So after he had passed fifty. I wouldn’t call him Captain Wallace, because he’d never actually claimed the name. I kept going to see him in the fading hope that he’d turn out to be a real spy and I could have a medal after all. Call kept going because the Captain told great jokes, “not like yours, Wheeze, really good ones.”
At any rate, it was Call the Captain liked, not me. If I’d been a more generous person, I’d have been happy that Call had found a man to be close to. He didn’t remember his own father, and if any boy needed a father it was Call. But I was not a generous person. I couldn’t afford to be. Call was my only friend. If I gave him up to the Captain, I’d have no one.
6
It is hard, even now, to describe my relationship to Caroline in those days. We slept in the same room, ate at the same table, sat for nine months out of each year in the same classroom, but none of these had made us close. How could they, when being conceived at the same time in the same womb had done nothing to bind us together? And yet, if we were not close, why did only Caroline have the power, with a single glance, to slice my flesh clear through to the bone?
I would come in from a day of progging for crab, sweating and filthy. Caroline would remark mildly that my fingernails were dirty. How could they be anything else but dirty? But instead of simply acknowledging the fact, I would fly into a wounded rage. How dare she call me dirty? How dare she try to make me feel inferior to her own pure, clear beauty? It wasn’t my fingernails she was concerned with, that I was sure of. She was using my fingernails to indict my soul. Wasn’t she content to be golden perfection without cutting away at me? Was she to allow me no virtue—no shard of pride or decency?
By now I was screaming. Wasn’t it I who brought in the extra money that paid for her trips to Salisbury? She ought to be on her knees thanking me for all I did for her. How dare she criticize? How dare she?
Her eyes would widen. Even as I yelled, I could feel a tiny rivulet of satisfaction invading the flood of my anger. She knew I was right, and it unsettled her. But the lovely eyes would quickly narrow, the lips set. Without a word, she would turn and leave me before I was through, shutting off my torrent, so that my feelings, thus dammed, raged on in my chest. She would not fight with me. Perhaps that was the thing that made me hate her most.
Hate. That was the forbidden word. I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was the equivalent of murder.
I often dreamed that Caroline was dead. Sometimes I would get word of her death—the ferry had sunk with her and my mother aboard, or more often the taxi had crashed and her lovely body had been consumed in the flames. Always there were two feelings in the dream—a wild exultation that now I was free of her and…terrible guilt. I once dreamed that I had killed her with my own hands. I had taken the heavy oak pole with which I guided my skiff. She had come to the shore, begging for a ride. In reply I had raised the pole and beat, beat, beat. In the dream her mouth made the shape of screaming, but no sound came out. The only sound of the dream was my own laughter. I woke up laughing, a strange shuddering kind of laugh that turned at once into sobs.
“What’s the matter, Wheeze?” I had awakened her.
“I had a bad dream,” I said. “I dreamed you were dead.”
She was too sleepy to be troubled. “It was only a dream,” she said, turning her face once more to the wall and snuggling deep under her covers.
But it was I who killed you! I wanted to scream it out, whether to confess or frighten, I don’t know. I beat you with my pole. I’m a murderer. Like Cain. But she was breathing quietly, no longer bothered by my dream or by me.
Sometimes I would rage at God, at his monstrous almighty injustice. But my raging always turned to remorse. My wickedness was unforgivable, yet I begged the Lord to have mercy on me, a sinner. Hadn’t God forgiven David who had not only committed murder, but adultery as well? And then I would remember that David was one of God’s pets. God always found a way to let his pets get by with murder. How about Moses? How about Paul, holding the coats while Stephen was stoned?