The Islanders (48 page)

‘The wind’s getting up,’ Oy said.

‘So now you do weather forecasts?’ she replied.

‘I’ve just about had enough of this. I’ve got better things to do than hang around all day, waiting for you. I’m going to move on soon.’

‘No you’re not. I need you.’

‘I’m not just your sex plaything.’

‘Oh, but you are. Best I’ve had so far.’ She pressed herself against him, rubbing a breast against his arm.

He moved back from her. ‘I’ve my own work to do.’

‘All right. But not yet. I want you here for this.’

A big wave suddenly struck the rocks, throwing up a spray. The drops flew against them stingingly, borne on the warm wind. It was refreshing and stimulating in the hot night – it made Oy think of the way Yo liked to make love.

‘I read about the wind yesterday,’ Yo said. ‘This is the Nariva at last. It’s been expected for several days. Listen – can you hear anything?’ She was turning her head from side to side, as if seeking a sound. There was just the constant racket of engines from the harbour, the echoing of the loudspeaker voice, some shouting from the ferry marshals directing the traffic, the whining of a winch, the surge of the sea waves. ‘It’s too noisy here!’

She marched back along the jetty towards the town, with Oy following. The tide was rising and they were drenched by several more flows of windswept spray before they turned on to the apron of the main floodlit wharf, between the cranes, the lines of waiting traffic, the traffic marshals in their yellow jackets and shiny helmets, guiding the drivers and waving their torches.

Once they had reached the street where she lived, on the edge of the Old Town, the presence of the wind could barely be felt. They were sheltered by other buildings, but there were trees on one of the hills above and these were swaying darkly in the night. Yo was muttering furiously, striding ahead of Oy. Whenever he caught up with her she would shrug a shoulder angrily against him and increase her pace.

In the apartment, which was stickily hot after the long day, she went around and opened all the windows wide, bending her head beside each one, listening outside. Finally, she threw off all her clothes.

‘Come to bed!’ she said.

‘What were you listening for?’ said Oy.

‘Keep quiet!’ She crossed to him, sank to her knees and quickly undid his pants.

An hour later, lying naked side by side on the bed, listening to the peaceful sounds of the night-time town through the open windows, they became aware of a deep vibration, transmitted through the building.

‘That’s it at last!’ Yo said, sitting up and moving quickly to the window. ‘Listen!’

He went to stand beside her. The Nariva wind was blowing more strongly now, gusting across the town and along the streets, skidding litter around, but the vibration was rising through the ground. At first he could not discern any sound that was part of it, but soon he heard a deep, low rumbling, a constant note, a distant siren. The town remained dark and shuttered against the windy night. The droning note wavered with the gusting of the wind as it came down from the direction of the mountain, sometimes fading away but mostly gaining in strength.

After a few minutes of gradual crescendo, the note held at a steady volume, a loud, deep booming, basso profundo.

‘Ah,’ said Yo.

‘Congratulations,’ said Oy. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘Now
that’s
why you are here,’ she said, holding herself against his arm.

‘Just so you could show off to me?’

‘Who better to show off to than you? Could you have done this?’

‘I might have done it more quickly. But I fill things in. I would never have even started.’

He had rarely seen her smile before.

The immense bass note throbbed unendingly across the town. Somewhere in a street adjacent to theirs a car alarm, nudged into life by the vibration, began to screech. Another followed soon after. A policier car, or some other kind of emergency vehicle, rushed unseen by them through the town with its own siren suppressed but with its warning lights blazing and flashing. They saw the radiance reflecting quickly off the tops of walls and roofs, before the vehicle sped off in the direction of the port. After a few more minutes of electronic screeching the car alarms switched themselves off. Mt Voulden continued to moan its single, dark note.

The mountain fell silent an hour after sunrise, when the wind at last slackened. Yo had been euphoric throughout the hours of darkness, alternating between manic proclamations of her own genius, and bitter, lacerating attacks on Oy’s own perceived failings as an artist. He no longer minded her abuse, because he knew by now it was her way of working herself up into a sexual frenzy.

If he learned anything from that long sleepless night of the mountain’s deep roaring it was that the time had indeed come for him to move on. In some way he barely understood he knew he must have been useful to her, perhaps as a foil. Whatever it was, it seemed to be over.

Yo fell asleep soon after the mountain went quiet. Oy left her in the bed, showered and dressed and packed his few belongings. Yo woke up again before he could leave. She sat up, yawning and stretching, her face drawn with fatigue after the mostly sleepless night.

‘Don’t go yet,’ she said. ‘I still need you here.’

‘We agreed you were showing off. That’s what you wanted from me. What you’ve done with the mountain is good, it’s brilliant, it’s incredible, it’s unique. I’m impressed. There’s never been anything like it before. I couldn’t have built it myself. Is that what you want me to say?’

‘No.’

‘I really mean it.’

‘But it’s incomplete. I’ve hardly started. What happened last night – it was like someone picking up a musical instrument for the first time. Have you ever tried to get a note out of a trumpet? That’s all I achieved last night. I simply made my instrument sound a note. Now I have to learn how to play it properly.’

‘You’re going to teach the mountain to play tunes?’

‘Not straight away. But I can program a tonic sol-fa, at least. There are vents up there in the tunnel that will create vortices when I open them. One will release a torus of air. I’ve no idea yet what they will sound like.’

‘All right, but I’ve stuff of my own to do. Maybe I’ll come back and see you later, when you’ve taught it to play the national anthem. How long is that likely to be? See you in another five years?’

‘Don’t be a bastard now, Oy. I need your help. I really do.’

‘Anti-help, anti-art?’

‘Come to bed and put me back to sleep.’

In the end Oy agreed to stay on with her. Yo remained as she was, difficult and perverse, often yelling at him for doing something wrong, sometimes abandoning him so she could work on her own, but her reliance on him did appear to be genuine. Every day they worked together on the tuning vents inside the tunnel. Oy found this interesting, the endless range of settings and combinations, harmonizing as the wind shifted direction and pressure.

Soon the mountain was responding to the opening of the extra vents. A strong wind was no longer necessary to produce a note – Yo had installed a series of Venturi tubes that increased the local speed at which the wind stream passed through the tuners. One night they lay awake as the mountain groaned and curled its tremendous rumbling notes, fading away and recovering as the erratic Nariva swept across the face of the mountain. It was gaining a sort of ponderous, elephantine beauty.

But much as Oy admired her ingenuity he found the endless deep droning of the bass notes uninspiring. People in the town had started complaining too, but so far no one appeared to have worked out who was behind the all-pervading sound.

If Mt Voulden had been one of his own pieces, Oy would already have left the island. He disliked hearing comment on his work.

One morning at dawn, after another wakeful night, he said to Yo, ‘It needs a descant.’

‘A what?’

‘Another tunnel, shorter, narrower, at a different angle to the wind, playing a higher harmony.’

Yo said nothing but stared at him in silence, before she shut her eyes. Several minutes passed. He could see her eyes moving rapidly behind the closed lids. Her jaw was clamped tight and Oy could see veins in her neck, pulsing with pressure. He braced himself.

Finally, she said, ‘Fuck you, you bastard. Fuck you,
fuck you
!’

But this time her abuse did not lead to sex. She dressed in a hurry, went to the mountain alone and Oy did not see her again until the following day.

When she was ready she took him up the mountain, much higher than the main tunnel, to a place where she had found a long ridge on the southern face. The wind was keener and colder there and made its own harsh whistling as it scoured across the bare rocks and deep crevasses.

‘If I could somehow drill a new tunnel through this ridge, would you stay around and help?’

Oy was balancing on an exposed boulder, buffeted by the freezing wind. Far below them the first tunnel was moaning, but they could barely hear it up here.

‘If you could somehow drill it, I would somehow fill it in.’

‘Then what’s the point?’

‘Ah – that old argument about point,’ Oy said. ‘Art has no point. It only is. We could do both. You drill a tunnel and I’ll fill it in.’

‘I thought I was the mad one.’

‘Yes and no. That’s the other old argument.’

Yo gestured impatiently. ‘Then what the hell?’

‘What the hell what?’ Oy stared down at the astounding elevated view, the hommke islands, the seething sea, the white clouds and the shafts of brilliant sunlight. A squall of rain was distantly moving across from the south. Two white-painted ferries were passing in the narrow strait between two islands. ‘Some places don’t need art,’ he said. ‘Look at what’s here! How could you or I improve on that?’

‘Art isn’t just about pretty views. There’s no sound from the view, for one thing.’

‘There’s the wind. Why don’t we build a virtual tunnel? You drill it, I will fill it in. All at once. It starts here where we are now, it comes out on the other side of the ridge. You know what you will do if you drilled it, I know what I could do if I repaired it. We achieve parity. That’s what real art is. Parity! Now shall we go back down before I get frostbite?’

‘What about the descant? I need that now.’

‘There are other ways.’ He leapt down from the boulder, narrowly avoiding turning his ankle on the hard and uneven ground. ‘You’ll think of something. I’ll be back in a year or two, to see what you have come up with.’

But ten days later he was still restlessly there. Yo kept finding things she needed to do in the tunnel, and thinking up ways of making him work with her on them. In one sense it suited him, as he had a destination in mind, but the particular ferry he needed to catch to Salay had sailed a couple of days before. Another was not due for a while.

Mt Voulden now played its bass song every night, in low winds and high. Yo declared herself dissatisfied with it. She wanted to keep tuning and adjusting the baffles, but the reaction against the booming music from people in the town was growing more vehement every day. They both knew it was time to leave, time to start other projects.

Irrespective of what Yo herself might be planning, Oy was intending, no matter what, to catch the next ferry to Salay. It was due to dock in the harbour in the morning. He packed his stuff as unobtrusively as possible while Yo was showering.

When she emerged, hair wet and with a towel plastered around her body, Mt Voulden began to drone its tuneless music. Yo abruptly turned on Oy, shouting that she knew he was about to abandon her. She accused him of betraying his own art as well as hers, of selling out, of trying to destroy what she was doing –

It was the familiar overture. This time, knowing it was to be the last, Oy did not allow her to pull him down on the bed. He stood up to her, yelling back. It was anger in the cause of expression, not real anger, but it was verbal slaughter. He gave as good as he had ever got from her, and more. She hated that. She spat at him, so he spat back at her. She punched him, he punched her.

Finally he allowed it to happen and they sprawled together on the bed. Her towel had been knocked aside while they fought, but now she tore off his clothes. It was aggressively passionate, lust not love, but as before it was all the action of hands and mouth. Mt Voulden roared anew. A wind-borne scale began, a slow tonic progression.

Yo suddenly yelled, ‘In me! Do it!’

She guided him so there was no misunderstanding what she meant, and at last he entered her. She gasped aloud, a rasping shriek beside his ear. Her fingers and nails dug into his back, her mouth pressed hotly against his neck, her legs clamped around his back and buttocks.

The tunnel through the mountain attained the top of the scale, and the great interminable note began to grow louder. Yo climaxed with it, screaming, shrieking, the highest music of sexual pleasure.

Oy slumped over and across her but she continued to release her noise of pent-up passion. Every breath she gave was another note, sweet and high. She was waiting for the sounds from the mountain now, listening for its cue, breathing with it, harmonizing, a tuneful descant, a melody of the air and sky, of the winds that curled through the tuning plates and fanned the vents and crossed the seas and islands. Her voice was surprisingly pure and innocent, untouched by her violent moods and mercurial nature. She was at one with the music she created, and now she sang the wind.