Back to the Island

Again, we’ve tried to remember our exact conversation, but it’s difficult to get it totally accurate, because Vikkie is a raging alcoholic and finds it hard to remember stuff. Well, she isn’t, but it’s my blog so I can just pretend she is.

I sink down onto the bed and flip open my phone, dialling Vikkie before I remember that she is visiting her family. She answers after the first ring.
“Oh thank god!” she exclaims.
“I’m sorry, I forgot you were at home.” I mutter, preparing to hang up.
“No! don’t leave!” she hisses “I’m already hiding in my room.”
I smile despite myself.
“Why? What happened?”
“The whole family is here…even people I thought were dead.” she whispers.
“I haven’t told my Mum, so now I‘m a liar and a disappointment.”
She goes silent for a moment.
“Ok you win” she mutters, grudgingly “what did you say? I mean, she must have asked you about uni”
“I told her that I was going to biography a dead poet and visit his native lands for a huge research project.”
“Oh” There’s silence on the other end “Well, you will have to tell her eventually.”
“Oh no I don’t”
“Yes you do”
“Whose side are you on?” I bleat petulantly “I know I have to tell her, but she’s going to hate me, and…It’s just too much on top of everything else, all the work and the worry over all the finances. I just need some more time.”
Vikkie giggles
“What?” I snap
“It’s like you’re having an affair, university doesn’t understand me! I’m going to cheat on it with an island, my parents can never know!” She giggles again
“Just a few more days and then we can leave anyway” she continues “and then I get to spend two glorious weeks as slave to Emma the Renovator.”
“And don’t you forget it” I add
“Yeah Yeah, just bring me some chocolate.”
Reluctantly I ring off and put my phone away, unload the rest of my things and go downstairs.
Things do not improve over the next few days. It‘s difficult being around my parents without feeling like an evil guilty liar, so I spend most of my time with Jake playing on the Xbox and doing the occasional bit of work. I take Alfie out over the fields, visiting all the old landmarks. I climb the mud hills left over from the construction of the doctors surgery. I visit the place where I once went to playgroup which is now a concrete slab covered in broken glass and charred remains thanks to an electrical fire.
I push through hedge boundaries and visit “The Quarry”, an enormous pit in a ploughed field where everyone dumps rubbish. Our camp is still there, a rusting blue trailer roofed with bits of wood and accessed by climbing on a wooden bucket. Inside I find the wine bottles we recovered and stuffed candles in, and a stack of reclaimed paperbacks, fat with damp.
I walk around the back of the church, on a thin path bordered by straggly grass, and wave hello to the spooky gargoyle and the tilting headstones. I peek over the fence of my old primary school. At home I eat with my family and count the days until I can leave again. I use my laptop to keep in contact with an equally desperate Vikkie and we arrange trips to our old haunts.
We meet on the second to last day, planning a pilgrimage from Royston to Buntingford to Stevenage to Hitchin. We start in Royston in the morning to take a look around the little occult/tourist trap shops that we used to visit for ritual supplies, then head to Tesco, our second stop for spell ingredients (for we were witches of limited means). We sit for a while on the fence in the car park, drinking thick chocolate milkshakes.
“I really miss this, just hanging around” I say after a while
“What is it we do every day in Bath?” smirks Vikkie, flicking her bottle cap at me.
“Yeah but that’s grown up hanging, we don’t just sit in car parks drinking…oh my god full fat milk!” I stare at the bottle in shock, then, even more shocked I say,
“When did I become an “oh my god full fat milk” person?”
“A while ago” Vikkie shrugs “I didn’t have the heart to tell you.”
“See this is what I mean! suddenly we’re all grown up.” I slump on the fence “I mean, getting older is unavoidable, but I shouldn’t have to be a grown up.”
We sit still for a moment in silence.
“Is this really hurting you’re arse?” asks Vikkie, giggling.
“Yeah, lets go.” I stand, fluffing out my skirt, and we walk to the bus stop.
It was a strangely sad day. We visited the bakery where we bought lunch most days in sixth form and the tree into which I hurled my coursework in a moment of frustration and then had to climb to retrieve it. There was even a patch of ash left from the bonfire in the park onto which I had joyfully thrown my copies of Shakespeare and Wilde on the last day of term. In Stevenage we saw the very first film we had seen together, now shown again as an “oldie”.
“I still say “The Emperors New Groove” was severely underrated” argues Vikkie, still munching popcorn on the ride home from Hitchin that evening. I scoop up a plastic forkful of cheesecake from the box on my lap and hand it back to her.
“Yeah, talking livestock and huge chins never get old.”
Carefully I perch a kernel of popcorn on top of the cheesecake and eat it. I am officially exhausted. After the film we caught a bus to Hitchin and spent hours in the charity shops, avoiding Starbucks and peeking enviously at the gorgeous displays of fair-trade clothing in Harvest Moon. I have blisters on my blisters, but I’m glowing with happiness and nostalgia. I take another bite of cheesecake, I’m trying to get back to my pre-calorie counting state by having desert for dinner. I get off the bus at my stop and wave goodbye to Vikkie, then practically dance to my house, where my good mood is swallowed by the black cloud of deceit that hovers over my family.
I spend my last day there the way I spent the ones before it, barely speaking to anyone, remaining distanced by my secret. Finally Vikkie drives up outside and honks her horn loudly. I hug everyone stiffly, except Alfie whose oddly biscuit scented head I kiss goodbye. I lug my things outside and deposit a cardboard box on the front seat. Vikkie views it with surprise, as I didn’t have it when she dropped me off.
“What’s in the box Emma?” she asks with mock seriousness.
“Severed head” I reply nonchalantly, climbing into the back. “How did it go at home?”
“Great!” she exclaims perkily “With luck and some chilly weather no one will find the bodies for a few days.”
She pulls out onto the road and engages the guidance system.
“Seriously though, what’s in the box?”
“Some stuff for the house, mainly jam” I reply “I made a couple of dozen pasta sauce jars full last blackberry season and Mum apparently has no use for them.”
“Is that like the apology jam you gave me? You know, when I helped you gather all those earwiggy elderberries and carried them because they freaked you out, so all that purple juice got on my favourite jeans. Because that jam could have filled potholes.”
“That was the practice jam” I say “I wouldn’t waste good jam on you, you critic.”
“Right then, what are we going to do at this place of yours anyway?” she turns onto the main road just outside the village and immediately begins to speed.
“Not much, put a lock on the door, keep an eye on the men installing my stove and sink, a little gardening maybe. I just want to get it ready for habitation and leave a few things up there ready for summer. Get my garden growing.”
Vikkie grumbles as I tap her shoulder to get her to slow down. The jars in the box rattle around and my bag slides onto the floor as she brakes.
“Hate to break it to you but there aren’t enough fertility runes or green candles in the world to make you good at gardening.”
“I happen to be an accomplished gardener.”
“You tried to kill cabbage fly with shampoo.”
“Ok, shut up or I’ll make you eat my lousy jam.”
“Ok Delia, keep your hair on” she raises both hands in a surrender gesture, causing me to dive forwards to make her hold the steering wheel.
Needless to say it wasn’t the most restful journey, which I suppose had something to do with the new “GLaDOS” voice of the navigator. We drove stopping once at a motel for some sleep and stale cornflakes. Then completed our journey to the small port in the Scottish town nearest to the island. After unbending my cramped back and legs I eased a crumpled piece of paper from my pocket and consulted it briefly.
“You made a list? Who are you and where is Emma you body snatcher.”
“You promised you would never mention that again! You know it freaks me out.”
I have had issues ever since I saw a clip of that film on TV, for the next two weeks I carried a gazebo pole with me everywhere, even to the shower. Seriously, it was traumatic, when Jake did the snatcher point and scream thing I started to cry.
“You mock me for the whole “Jaws” phobia thing.”
“I will now we’re going on a boat” I smile sweetly
In a camping superstore I select a wood framed folding cot and a blue and white gingham sleeping bag. During my ecstatic baking phase my Mum used to joke that I would wind up toting gingham iced muffins in a wicker basket whilst wearing a gingham dress and generally being wholesome and pure. Just thinking about how things used to be makes my heart momentarily heavy.
We return to the car to collect our bags of clothing and the box I brought from home. Manoeuvring a camp bed and all the luggage onto the tiny boat was a little more difficult than I had anticipated, but then again I can always grow new nails. I had taken a few pre-emptive anti-nausea tablets so I was ok on the bumpy journey over, Vikkie however, was not.
“Uh!…Kill me” she moaned from her position, lolling over the back seats.
“Told you not to mock me.” I reply smugly, flipping a page in my magazine.
“Evil, you are pure evil.”
“Nah na…Nah na…” I tease, humming the Jaws music for the rest of the journey because Vikkie is too sickly to make me stop.
All I can say to this is “MWAHAHAHAHHA! I regret nothing!”