Little Black Lies (13 page)

‘What was he wearing?’ Gemma, the mother, is the most practical. I think of the canvas trainer I saw, dark blue, with laces that might once have been cream. A few words from me would confirm her worst fear. Or prolong the agony. I can’t tell her, it would be shockingly irresponsible.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you. You need to talk to the police. I’m sure they’ll have answers for you as soon as possible.’ I try to turn away, someone catches hold of my shoulder.

‘What the hell were you doing there anyway? Who goes out to a wreck in the middle of the night?’ The man is in my face, tall and threatening.

‘Catrin, the gun.’ Callum, speaking softly, steps to my side. I relax my hold on the gun and let him take it, just as the group confronting me notice it too. A different emotion entirely creeps over their faces. A couple of them take a step away.

‘Going to the wreck was my idea.’ Callum tucks the gun into his waistband. ‘We were looking for the missing tourist kid. Catrin gave me a lift. Now, we are very busy here and you need to talk to the police.’

Two of the soldiers have joined us. ‘Sergeant, these people need to leave the beach.’ Callum is standing for no nonsense but I’m the one who gets Jimmy’s dad’s parting shot. He looks around, taking in the dead animals, the crimson beach, the spatters on my clothes and skin.

‘Jesus, what is wrong with you?’

He turns, and the others follow him from the beach.

*   *   *

By late afternoon, all the whales are dead. John, Brian and a police officer arrive and we start the collection of data. No one has the heart to say that every cloud has a silver lining but the information we’ll gather today will be shared with cetacean scientists all over the world.

Slowly, at last, the beach empties, until it’s just Conservation people, the army and those few who are here for me. Aunt Janey brings sandwiches that no one can eat and hot coffee that we can’t drink fast enough. She also brings a change of clothes, for which I’ll be grateful before the day is over. She presses me to stay, promises me my old room is always ready, but I have less than twenty-four hours now. I have to be back in Stanley tonight.

When what little that remains to be done can be handled by John, Brian and Pete, I walk to the next beach, which is all but empty of living creatures. Every bird within a five-mile radius will be feasting on the dead whales by now. I strip down to my underwear and walk into the water. It feels cold enough to stop my heart. I walk further, submerge myself completely, rinse the gore away from my body, face and hair, and all the time I know that no matter how long I live, it will never leave the inside of my head.

For a moment, I’m tempted to keep walking, start swimming, until the cold gets too much for me, because maybe I can appease the anger of the people who saw me kill today, if I give myself in payment for the whales.

10

Around a year ago, with no reason to go on living, I started to give serious thought to no longer living. My parents and my children had died, my husband had moved on, my best friend had become someone I couldn’t bear to have in my head, never mind in my life. There was Queenie, of course, and I felt bad about abandoning her, but I figured Ben would take her and she’d be fine with that. I started leaving extra food out for her, in case there came a day when I seized the moment and didn’t make it home, but she’s a greedy little beast and I had to stop when she got too fat.

One Sunday morning, I kissed my little dog goodbye, straightened the house, and drove the boat all the way round the coast to New Island on the westernmost edge of the Falklands.

Over the years, my family have owned a lot of land on the islands but New Island has always felt like home to us, because it was to New Island that my ancestors first came and established their whaling operation. A little way off the coast there is a wreck of a ship called the
Isabella,
that got into trouble carrying a cargo of mother-of-pearl. Decades later, fragments are still found on the shore, some cut into the little tesserae used in mosaics, some still attached to the shells. Rachel was enchanted by the place, renaming it Treasure Island. On my wedding day, I gave her a necklace and earrings made from
Isabella
’s mother-of-pearl and she cried for so long I had to redo her make-up.

When our older boys were six, our younger two just four, we took them to Treasure Island. We lit fires, sang songs, watched penguins mooch about and the black-browed albatrosses sitting on their doughnut-ring nests and in an hour and a half on the beach, we collected twenty pieces of mother-of-pearl. I think it was one of the happiest times of my life.

If anywhere could bring home to me what I’d lost, make the leaving behind of this empty life at all easier, it would be New Island.

So the Sunday morning I decided to end it all, I didn’t bother with a wetsuit, figuring the cold would ease my passing. I attached a tank with only ten minutes of air and went down. I went in a diagonal line to take me away from the boat. By the time I hit the ocean floor I had roughly five minutes of air left. The water was nearly thirty metres deep and visibility poor. I thought about my sons and let the pain wash over me. I thought about the possibility of seeing them again, although I’ve never really believed in the afterlife. I heard the sucking, rasping sound of the air running out.

I sat, glued to the sand. When my lungs began to fight, I pulled off the tank and ripped the mouthpiece from my face. My stomach was starting to pulse, my ribcage felt on the point of bursting inwards. I knew it was only a matter of seconds before the urge to draw breath became impossible to resist and when that happened water would flood in and the venture would no longer be within my control. And, at the moment when I think my vision was starting to blur, a beam of sunlight made its way down to the ocean floor. There, directly in front of me, was a small, iridescent fragment that wasn’t rock, or shell, although it was once created inside one. A piece of mother-of-pearl.

Rachel. She was right there with me at the bottom of the sea. I saw her twelve-year-old self, face aglow with the shining, gleaming things washed up on the beach. I saw her, tearful and beautiful, on my wedding day. I saw her in the knife, fork and spoon set she gave Ned at his christening.

Seconds later I was on the surface, clutching the shell fragment.

I tried again, of course, I am not so easily dissuaded from a purpose. I stockpiled paracetamol, and succeeded only in making myself very ill. I took a sharpened kitchen knife into the bathroom and after several half-hearted attempts to make a dent in my own flesh, hurled it at the mirror. I read everything I could get my hands on about the psychology of suicide, trying to find out what it was that I was lacking. In the end, I got the message. I was too angry to take my own life. Unless, of course, I could take Rachel’s first.

Standing here in the sea, letting the cold water wash over me, as if anything could ever make me feel clean again, I realize that any lingering doubts have finally slipped away.

I’ve been wondering if I have what it takes to kill. Whether I can look a living creature in the eye and take the one irreversible action that ends a life. Asked and answered, I suppose. Nearly two hundred dead mammals on the next beach are testament to that. I have no difficulty in killing. I’m actually rather good at it.

*   *   *

It’s dark when Aunt Janey’s boat drops Callum and me back on the mainland. When I say goodbye, I hold her so tightly and for so long that I feel sure she must suspect something. I’m in luck though. She puts it down to the stresses of the day.

Queenie greets Callum and me rapturously, leaping high into the air with excitement, but that could be because she hasn’t eaten for hours.

‘I can still smell blood,’ I say, as we set off across camp.

Callum shifts in the seat. ‘Janey didn’t have anything to fit me.’ He smiles. ‘And I’m far too much of a wimp to wash in the sea.’

Taken unawares, I smile back. We have a daft tradition here on the islands called the Midwinter Swim. On the day of the Winter Solstice, which occurs here in June, a couple of hundred foolhardy types gather at Surf Bay and – well, not swim exactly, more run into the water, dunk their heads and run out screaming. In the old days, Callum took part every year. The first time I saw him in swimming shorts, I thought a man from Norse mythology, one of the heroes of old that Rachel talked about, had stepped out of the sea. His hair was quite long then, and it shone strawberry blond in the winter sun. His skin was pale, freckled, and covered in fine, gold hairs. He was massive, magnificent, so very, very male. It was four years ago, a few weeks before I met him properly for the first time. I was a very different woman back then.

I lost more than my sons, when Rachel’s car plunged over the cliff.

11

I wake suddenly, with no idea of the time or where I am. Then I realize I’m lying across the front seats of Callum’s Land Cruiser. His coat is below my head, a tartan-plaid rug over me. The car smells of the slaughter we left behind on the beach at Speedwell: blood, the shore, flesh already beginning to rot.

Queenie is with me, not curled up between my stomach and thigh, as is her habit when we both sleep, but upright on her haunches, her tiny ears pricking. She’s alert, on the watch for something, staring out of the windows. Maybe she can see something out there. I can’t. Her breath, and mine, have misted the windows over.

‘Callum?’ I don’t expect a response. I don’t get one.

I’ve been dreaming. Bad dreams of gunfire and flesh ripping apart. Of blood and bones exploding into the air. I was somewhere very dark. All around me was noise and I was very, very afraid.

I sit up, wipe the windscreen, then the passenger window. Queenie jumps on to the driver’s seat to get out of my way, but she’s watching my every move.

‘Where’d he go?’

She sticks her nose against the window then looks back at me. Her ears flatten. She doesn’t know either.

There are no keys in the ignition.

The night air, thick with the smells of gorse, peat and the sea, streams into the car as I climb down. The stars look like droplets of ocean when the sunlight catches them but there is no moon. It’s too dark to see much beyond the Diddle Dee, the dense, woody shrub that grows along the roadside like the frayed edge of a ribbon.

I find the small torch I always carry with me, and make my way round the car. There is a wide, deep ditch beyond the Diddle Dee to either side of the road which means I’m somewhere between Darwin and Stanley. I shine the torch as far as it will reach. No sign of Callum.

A sudden explosion of sound and light in the distance has my raw nerves tingling. Fireworks. As the coloured sparks fade I’m remembering more of my dream. Mud and slaughter. Darkness and deafening noise. The battle for Goose Green.

When I first got to know him, Callum told me many stories about the conflict, but only light-hearted stuff. He told me about stealing a sheep to make mutton stew, about the wine store in Stanley that took a hit and caused the streets to run with wine and beer. He didn’t tell me anything about the death, the mutilations. He shared nothing of the real horror of the Falklands war.

So I found it out for myself. I read every account I could get my hands on. It wasn’t from Callum that I learned of his regiment’s five miserable days on Sussex Mountain after their landing, surrounded by bleak hills and lifeless slopes, trying to keep warm in the face of a ceaseless mid-winter wind. He told me nothing about that, but I knew all the same about their failure to dig trenches in solid rock or waterlogged ground, about their grasping at shelter of any kind, even a gorse bush.

I know what he went through on this hillside.

While I’m still undecided about what to do, Queenie takes off along the road.

‘Piglet, stay!’ Without thinking I use Callum’s old name for my dog. She pulls her nose out of the Diddle Dee and looks back at me. Then sets off again.

‘Did he go that way?’ Queenie is no sniffer dog but she could usually track down the boys when they were hiding.

She yips at the ditch. I stand on tiptoe but there’s nothing I can see, beyond dark heathland and endless black emptiness. Then she runs a few metres further down the road. I follow, as another flurry of bangs erupts.

In all the time I knew him, Callum told me nothing about his regiment’s overnight march towards Goose Green, about crossing eleven miles of countryside in the winter darkness. I learned from written reports that the Paras marched silently through flat, barren land, knowing the enemy outnumbered them and had had time to plan their defences, to become thoroughly entrenched.

I fail to see a dip in the road and stumble.

The moor the Paras crossed that night in 1982 became a mantrap. Men fell into bogs, twisted ankles on hidden rocks, learning to hate the land they’d sailed so far to protect. They drew closer to where they knew enemy soldiers were waiting, wondering whether the first sound of gunfire might be the last thing they heard. Ever.

Callum did tell me that on that first march they were made to turn around and retrace their footsteps twice, so that by the time they finally engaged in battle they were soaking wet and exhausted. He told me that due to some gigantic cock-up, the BBC announced to the world that the British army was poised to liberate Goose Green, effectively giving away its plans to the enemy.

Callum, already stressed by our adventure on the
Endeavour
last night, has spent the day surrounded by death. He watched me shoot one animal after another, heard nearly two hundred gunshots. For hours today, Callum has been subjected to the heartbreaking sound of animals dying. He’s listened to people crying, to shouts of recrimination. Now he’s somewhere in the darkness, on the same hillside where he once fought a terrible battle.

Callum, when I first knew him, had firearms. He kept them in the locked box in the back of his Land Cruiser. I should have checked that box.

Queenie’s white face appears on the other side of the ditch. With a growing sense of unease, I jump down.