The Islanders (30 page)

My name is Wolter Kammeston, and I was born and have lived all my life on the island of Piqay. My younger brother is Chaster Kammeston, the Inclair Laureate of Literature. I always loved my brother, in spite of the many events in our lives which have tested that love.

With his reputation secure and permanent, I have decided, with dread in my heart, that I owe it to posterity to describe what I know is the truth about him. This is not to try to deny his real achievements as a writer but to add a human context to the work.

The whole family – that is myself, my sister and both my parents – were aware there was something strange and difficult about Chaster all through his childhood. He and I were alike in many ways, but there was something deep inside Chas that would not come out. It was dark and unreachable and it always felt risky for us to try to approach it.

Our childhood was both difficult and easy. It was easy because Father was a successful businessman with a direct line of connection to the Monseignior of Piqay, so we were a wealthy family with many of the attributes of advantage and comfort and influence. We were educated privately, at first by a series of governesses, later at a private school on the other side of the island, and all three of us attended Piqay University.

But our lives were also difficult because of Chas’s dysfunctional behaviour. He was taken several times to see doctors or analysts, and these people made various efforts to find remedies: allergy treatment, dietary control, psychological testing, and so on. He was almost always given a clean bill of health, with the general consensus that he was going through the growing pains of youth, which would resolve themselves in due course. Chaster himself, I feel sure, somehow manipulated things to achieve these non-interventionist verdicts.

When Chaster wanted to be charming he could bring down the birds from the trees, as our mother used to say. But when he was not in a mood to believe there was anyone in the universe apart from him, he was awful to know. He could be angry, sulky, threatening, selfish, deceitful, and much else . . . all those childish tantrums everyone knows and which are fairly normal, but in Chas’s case he could resort to them all at once, or switch between them, one after the other. I was often – usually – the target, and if it was not me then it was my sister, Suther, and if it was not her then it was both of us at once.

If these were growing pains we could hardly wait for the process of healing to begin, but with Chaster the progress was in the opposite direction. When we were small, his difficult nature only appeared briefly, almost undetectably: a likelihood of tears if he did not get his own way, a period of sulking, and so on. But these were always short-lived. Chaster’s real difficulties began to emerge only as he headed through his teenage years, and every year it grew worse.

By the time he had reached his twenty-first year he was almost impossible. The least worst manifestation of his odd behaviour was his prickliness, the quickness with which he would take offence, his inability to warm to others, even briefly in a social setting. More disconcertingly, his behaviour was eccentric: he was always straightening or cleaning objects around the house, or counting things aloud, pointing to them pedantically, as if expecting those of us around him to check or confirm his result. Much worse than that were his rages, his threats of violence, his aggressive physical demeanour, his controlling behaviour, his attempts to undermine everyone around him, his constant lies.

He got through his university years somehow, perhaps by curbing this behaviour as by then we knew he could, at least to some extent, but he left university with only a poor degree. He blamed everyone except himself.

Then, several months after leaving the university, he suddenly announced that he had been offered a job and was intending to take it up. To be candid, my reaction, and that of the rest of the family, was relief. We all felt that a break with the family environment, fresh horizons, working with other people, might well induce a change in him.

There was no indication at all at this time that he might one day become a writer. He had never been particularly bookish, often declaring he could not be bothered to finish a book once he had started it. Nor did he have any apparent facility with the written word – indeed, for a time at school one of his teachers had thought a serious and lasting problem with literacy might be underlying his behaviour. However, this turned out to be a false alarm, possibly related to one of his darker behavioural periods. If Chaster had any ambitions at all, we assumed they would lie in the direction of Father’s business. This of course has been my own route through adult life.

We were surprised to discover that Chaster’s job was not on Piqay. It was in fact in a part of the Archipelago none of us had ever heard of, in the north, a small group of islands close against the northern continent, at least two weeks’ sailing from home with many ports of call on the way. He would tell us little about the job, but he said he would be working as an assistant manager in a theatre. No sooner had he told us this than he announced the ferry was sailing that night. He hastily packed a couple of bags, our driver took him down to the port, and then he was gone.

He stayed away for a long time without any contact at all with his family. Naturally, we were concerned for him. It was all too easy for us to imagine this irascible, unpredictable, moody, short-tempered, sarcastic young man provoking something with strangers, and coming off much the worse for it. But it has always been our parents’ method to allow us to make our own way in life, to learn by experience, while keeping a distant watch on us. In Chas’s case, when he first went away, my father employed a private detective to locate and then to observe him.

The first report came back a few weeks later: Chaster was working every day in the town’s theatre, he appeared to be happy and productive, he had found somewhere to live, he seemed to be looking after himself. My parents allowed another six months to pass before asking for a second report – it was much the same as the first. After that, they asked for no more observations. Perhaps they should have done.

The first sign that something had gone wrong was an urgent email from Chaster to me, not long after we had read the second report. He demanded I sail immediately to join him. A few minutes later a second message arrived, and in this he made me swear that on no account must I leave Piqay. He said he was returning home, but would not say when.

Then a third message. He warned me that people – he did not say which people, nor how I would recognize them – might come to the house asking questions. He pleaded with me that if they did I was to pretend to be him and to swear I had been on Piqay for the whole of the time he had been away. He told me nothing more.

Both parts of this request were in theory easy to fulfil. I could say with complete truth that I had been here at the family house on Piqay, and if necessary I could produce witnesses to confirm it: my parents, servants in the house, friends in the town. The second part was also not a problem, or not in practical terms. Chas and I look alike, and we had grown up with people constantly mistaking each of us for the other.

But to maintain both of these amounted to a lie, one made worse because I had no knowledge of what Chas had been up to, nor even a clear idea of where he had been.

I had hardly any time to think about this, because the morning after I received Chas’s last email two officers from the policier seignioral came to the house, demanding to see him. With great trepidation, and with feelings of doubt and misplaced loyalty to a brother who for the past several years had been little short of a monster to me, I went down to meet them.

I lied as little as possible to them. They assumed I was Chaster, so I did not disabuse them: a lie by omission, but still a lie. I told them, truthfully, where I had been during the last few months. No lies there, except in what I again omitted. The officers remained respectful to me – which brought home to me the influence my father continued to have on the island – but it was clear they were suspicious of everything I was saying.

I was questioned for at least two more hours and everything I said was recorded, as well as being noted in writing by one of the two officers. They told me nothing about the reasons for their questions but gradually the mysterious unspecified spaces behind the interrogation began to take on a definite shape. I was able to piece together some idea of what might have happened, what must have happened, and my brother’s assumed role in it.

It did not take me long to work out there had been a violent death at the theatre where Chaster said he was working. He was thought to have been in the theatre at the time, or at least in the same town, but they were not sure. He (I) was no longer there, but they did not know when he had left. The death was caused by some kind of failure or accident with stage machinery or props: scenery was involved, or perhaps a trapdoor. Someone had died on stage but the officers were trying to find out if it had been a real accident or a deliberately prepared attack on the victim, disguised to make it look like an accident. Again, my brother’s role in this was uncertain.

The officers tried to lead me, implying that if I would only admit the whole thing had been an accident that would be the end of their enquiries. I said nothing. Terrified of saying too much I invented no details, did not depart from the broad outline of what Chaster had told me to say.

They went away at last, warning me that they might need to interview me again. They ordered me not to leave Piqay without informing them first. In fact, that interview turned out to be the end of the policier involvement, because I never heard from them again and neither, I believe, did Chaster.

He stayed away, sending only occasional messages that he was ‘about to return home’, and pleading with me once again to remain silent, or at least compliant to his wishes.

The problem for me was the fact that I had been forced to lie to protect my brother. Although the lies were minimal, evasive, partial, they were none the less lies, and clearly my brother had been mixed up in something serious. I brooded on this endlessly. With every day that passed I became more resentful of him and angry. Because he was not there I could not confront him, so the pressure inside me mounted.

I believed I could not live with him any more should he return to the island, so with my parents’ help I bought a small house in Piqay Town, well away from home. I moved in, settled in, began a life I hoped would be my own, free of Chaster and his moods and his way of manipulating me. Had I never seen him again that might well have succeeded.

But one day he did return, slipping in to Piqay harbour on a night-time ferry, then walking all the way to the house carrying his belongings in a bag across his back. He was found in the morning by one of the servants, sleeping in his own bed.

Curiosity, mingled with undeniable relief that he was home again, made me forget my decision not to see him. I went to the house later that day.

Chaster was a man transformed. He looked leaner and healthier, and his manner was calm in a way I had never known before. Although he was weary from the long shipboard journey he was in an expansive, friendly mood. He embraced me in his arms – something that he had never done before. I could smell salt and marine engine oil on his clothes. He complimented me on how well I looked, said how happy he was to be home again. He asked why I had moved out of the family home and said how much he’d like to see my new house.

We went for a long walk together, across the grounds and through the girdling woods, to the clifftop path high above the sea. There we enjoyed the views of the neighbouring islands in the emerald sea, the gleaming waves, the shining sunlight, the swooping gulls, all familiar as background to our shared lives, full of reassurance and memories, a sense of joining up the present with the past.

We walked and walked, not saying much, but that was because it was windy. The steepness of the path, as it roamed up and down the cliff peaks, made talking difficult. We came eventually to a place we had often rested in before: a small valley in the top of the cliffs, where a stream ran through then plunged out and down to the rocky foreshore below.

Chaster said, ‘Thanks for doing what you did, Woll. Getting the policier off my back.’

‘You never told me what you had done.’

He said nothing, but stared away across the sea. We were looking south-west and it was mid-afternoon, late enough for the sun to be throwing shadows of the islands. Whatever else happened in life, there was always this: the view, the gusting wind, the great panorama of dark-green islands, the slow ships and the endless sea.

‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Chaster said after a while. ‘I’m never going to leave again. This is where I’ll stay for the rest of my life.’

‘You’ll change your mind one day.’

‘No, I’m certain about it. Now and for ever.’

‘What happened while you were away, Chas?’

But he never gave me an answer, then or ever. We sat there on the rough clifftop rocks, staring down at the islands, a great unsaid thing hovering around us. Eventually we walked back to the house.

Chaster’s behaviour still made me nervous: I kept waiting for an outburst of his dark side. He had always frightened me when he was like that. In a sense it was more alarming when he assumed a pleasant persona, when he seemed to be approachable, because of the sudden way in which I knew he could change. That was how he was on his return to the family: he seemed reasonable, sensitive to the needs of others. It put me on edge. And because he would say nothing about the months he was away, I was still left with that unresolved sense of injustice, of having had to lie for him. Surely, at least he owed me an explanation?