They found a snail, and passed it from palm to palm. They tickled its little greasy foot until it retreated and stayed firmly hidden. And in the warm water at the very edge when there was low tide, and there were little pools, Hanako showed Vera the fry of the scallops. How they could skip nimbly through the water in a zigzag way. They made themselves shoot forward by suddenly opening and closing their shells.
Without seeming to notice, Hanako crawled back and forth equally through water and air. They walked on the stones, and ran on them, over and over, hardening the soles of Vera’s feet. Hanako ran in the water and out of it, but Vera remained at the edge. She let the waves lap her, but never carry her off the sand.
After a week, Hanako brought Vera a pair of the goggles that the
ama
wore. They were simple, glass eyepieces that attached around the back of her head with a piece of rubber. When Hanako wore them, her eyes looked round and bulging. In the sea where the water was chest-deep, they stood staring into each other’s magnified eyes, taking breaths, and staying under, blowing bubbles up to the surface and making faces through the bubble stream.
They dived from there, pressing their hands, and then their feet on the ocean floor and shooting up into the air. They floated on their stomachs in the tide pools over beds of seaweed, parting the green grasses and looking down to their roots to see what shellfish they could find. Vera learned to judge the depth of the water by its colour. The green stripes that came with the wind, the white lines of foam, the yellow places where the rocks were near the surface, the warmer spots where there was no current.
When they got cold in the water, they came onto the grassy sand. They collected two dozen half shells, and put coloured stones under them and played the memory game where they turned the halves upside down and had to find the match. There was another game called Waiting for the Snake, which they played in the eel grass at the edge of the marshy place. The little white snake had something to do with a goddess who lived on the island, that Vera understood, but no more. She had begun to know some words, and even to speak simple sentences.
All this happened in the late afternoons. The sun would still be bearing down hard, and the wind, if there had been a wind, died. The rocks were baking hot and the water still. It was the sweetest time of day. But eventually Hanako’s skin began to pucker and goose-bumps to appear in the fine, nearly invisible
hairs along her legs and arms. Vera would say ‘cold’, and hug herself and make burring noises with her lips. She would say, ‘you must go home’, and pick up the
yukata
and gesture for her friend to wrap herself in it. Hanako insisted she was not cold. But as the sun passed five o’clock and began its steady decline toward the water, they felt the faint stirrings of what might be an evening breeze. Hanako would say that she had to go home to help her mother.
‘Mother,’ she said, and smiled enquiringly. ‘You, mother? Not Keiko.’ She would giggle at the thought.
Here Vera was silent.
She did not have to go home.
She did not have a mother.
‘No, no, no,’ she said to Hanako. ‘I’ll stay outside.’
Surely there were some advantages to being motherless! Keiko could not make her help in the house. She could not make her do anything. Vera ran by herself on the summer island. She had made up her mind, those many hours when she lay with her cheek on the hard ground. She had given in to Keiko enough, in coming here, and the rest would be her way.
And Hanako accepted, although it seemed she did not understand.
There was a ritual to the way they said goodbye. First they walked a little way inland to the spring by the lake. They splashed – it was always cold, that water, colder than the salty lip of the sea where they’d been playing – and dunked their heads and scrubbed everywhere to get the prickly salt out of their skin. They mirrored each other the whole time: if Hanako scrubbed out her right ear, Vera scrubbed her left. If Hanako stood like a crane on her right leg and brushed sand off her left foot, Vera did the opposite. They laughed with great delight while they did this. Then, turning and spinning, in the spots of sun that remained, they dried themselves. Finally Hanako collected the stones or snails they had saved from their hours foraging, and, with only a look and a slight wave of her hand, turned toward home.
Vera watched her go and then walked in the other direction. She went over the bridge made of planks and up the incline to the broken edges of the crater, farther away from the village and above the rim of the beach, to the High Place. She imagined long ago this was a small volcano, that black lava and fiery rocks had flown out of it. The flat top was ringed by boulders poised as if about to slide down the slope. She climbed part way down. There were places you could sit amongst these boulders, and look out to the sea.
Out of sight and protected from the evening wind, she leaned back on a warm rock and pondered. In the lengthening light she was alone, more alone than she had been all day waiting for Hanako. She thought about her mother. She saw her standing there above the beach in her apron with her hands on her hips calling Vera in to dinner. It was strange for her to appear, here on the summer island, so far from Vancouver and from her life. It had been four years since Belle had taken her handbag and got on the bus, and Vera had come home from school to the empty house. But for those years, Vera had her grandfather. Now that James Lowinger was buried, and she had come to this alien island, Vera was face to face with it: her mother was dead and gone.
But even as Vera swallowed this hard lump in her throat, she looked up and there Belle was, transformed from a burning hurt to a shape flared with the lowering sun. She was standing in the centre of the High Place looking down on Vera. Her outline was clear and dark against the deep blue sky of evening. She wore a woollen skirt with box pleats behind the knee, and a pale pink blouse, everything fitting at the waist. She looked severe; her dress was formal, compared with the local style of dress, which was, basically, undress. Vera knew it was not possible for Belle to be here, and yet she could see her clearly, her arms folded across her waist, pacing a little while keeping an eye on Vera, just as she had long ago at English Bay. It gave Vera the shivers just sitting, so she got up and, with a stick in her hand, began to imitate the
katanatogi
‘s movements with his
sword, making sideways cuts and overhead blocks and swinging the stick as hard as she could, to see if she could hear a whistle.
‘Who are you fighting?’ Belle asked.
Vera looked up. There was a tremor in her mother’s voice. Belle was always sad, but less sad when she was at the shore, pulling up ropes of kelp and popping its buttons between her thumb and forefinger. Maybe the water had made her feel she could get away.
‘Water! I am fighting the water.’
‘Water!’ Belle said, hugging herself. ‘Why pick a fight with water? It doesn’t fight back.’
‘Oh yes it does. It’s hard and cold and slaps you. It goes everywhere.’
‘I see.’ She laughed a little, as she had at Vera’s cleverness when she was very small.
‘It’s strong. Very strong!’
Vera clambered down through the boulders and crossed the narrow bit of sand to the water’s edge where she smacked the surface of the sea with her stick. She did not make a dint. She smacked it again and a small wave formed.
‘See? At first it just resists you, but eventually it will react, if you keep at it.’
‘Ah! Remember that,’ Belle said. Then she came down from the High Place and was beside Vera. It seemed at that moment as if Belle were happy. At least Vera’s antics roused her from the doldrums.
‘Look, it’s transparent when it’s still. But now –’ Vera plunged the end of her stick in and stirred it ‘– it gets all boiled up and you can’t see through it.’ She pressed her stick deeper and then found she couldn’t stir. ‘It is heavy! It is bad.’ She said this last word proudly in Japanese.
‘Be careful what you say,’ Belle retorted. ‘You are born from water. It is like your mother. The womb is a small, enclosed sea, and it is salty, too.’
This made Vera angry. Belle had to play that trump card, didn’t she? She smacked the water some more and walked off
down the beach. But Belle followed, walking along the edge of the High Place. She had put on a cardigan, pulled close around her waist, and her brown hair was blowing out of the chignon she always wound, little bits of it coming across her cheeks like the age lines she never lived to get. She stopped above the place where Vera was and looked out to where the sea drew its thin straight line across the sky. She had to finish her lecture.
‘But after you are born, water is fatal to you. You are a land creature.’
‘You are. That doesn’t mean I am.’
Her mother said nothing. She had ended her life in water, after all.
‘Japan is your home country,’ said Vera to her mother. ‘Weren’t you born here? Is that why you came back?’
‘I was born in Yokohama. But I don’t remember it. My mother took me to England and put me in school, when I was four. You know that.’
Vera tried to imagine a four-year-old in boarding school. She could not.
‘Where did your mother go?’
‘She came to see me,’ said Belle, quietly. ‘Just as I am coming to see you.’
‘Was she dead?’
‘No, she was not dead.’
‘What was she like, my grandmother?’ It just occurred to her now: her mother had never talked about her own mother.
‘She had a good eye for a pearl, they said,’ said Belle. And that was all.
‘You never talk about her. She took you away from here.’
‘My mother hated Japan,’ said Belle.
‘Why?’ Vera asked.
Belle did not answer. ‘It is not a good place for you. You made a mistake coming here.’
The two sat companionably enough side by side at the rim of the sea. Belle, thought Vera, was alone too much of her life. And now Vera was alone.
‘Do you know that when you were born your father was away at sea?’
‘Yes, I know, Mum. You told me.’
‘And your grandfather came to see you? You know he came in from the South Seas, all that way, to be there for the birth. I was so proud when I held you in my arms, and showed you to him, and he bent down to look at your face.’
‘I’ve heard this a hundred times, Mum.’ For some reason Vera did not like the scene she conjured: Poseidon coming to claim his little pearl.
‘And you screwed your face up in a big red ball and screamed at him!’
‘You better believe I did!’ She danced away with her stick.
Sometimes Vera hated the old man, her grandfather. There had to be some balance, between the two of them, and if her mother adored him that much Vera should go the other way. Besides, he was the one who got her here. If he was so great, Vera thought, where was he now? If it was a betrayal for her father to be out on the ocean, then why was it not the same for her grandfather?
‘But that was his life! My father came from a seafaring family,’ Belle said. ‘It was always that way, when I grew up.’
Vera ran off to inspect a water-soaked log that had drifted in. It had green moss on one side and the ends were split. It was crusted with salt and full of insects. When she kicked one end, it exploded.
Belle was gone.
Then she began to cry. She always cried when she felt unfairly treated. This weakness maddened her. Just when she wanted to be defiant, she collapsed. Never when she was injured, or when other kids picked on her, when she could have been expected to cry. Only when the accusation was unfair.
After Hanako went home she cried, most evenings, when the sun finally sank off the end of the island, and, only after she had wiped her eyes, did she go home to Keiko’s hearth.
* * *
Keiko was a single woman, a widow, as she was politely known in the village. But she did not live alone. No one lived alone on the summer island. The house, the paper box as Vera called it, did not belong to her, but to her family. Keiko had grown up coming to this simple house for the fishing season, and had memories of it filled with mother and father, aunts and uncles, cousins. But now there were only a few of them. Keiko’s father had died, and her mother stayed on the mainland to care for his parents. Keiko’s brothers, like her, wanted to escape: one lived in Tokyo now, another had gone to Australia with a fishing fleet. One had to stay at home, the one Keiko and Vera had gone to in Toba, but he no longer fished at the summer island. There were, this summer, five: Keiko and Vera, an old aunt, an uncle, and the boy. Vera hardly noticed the others, they were so small, and quiet, and focused on their curious tasks of scraping the earth and sewing the nets and preparing mysterious food. And then, too, she had not learned their language. In fact, except when she was with the
katanatogi
or Hanako, she felt a positive determination not to learn their language. Keiko spoke to her in English.
When Vera entered the shaded house with its small stone oil lamps, there was a rustle amongst the older folk. Perhaps they counselled Keiko to keep her inside, to make her help with the chores; Vera imagined they said unsympathetic things like, ‘There she comes, the wild one, the foreign girl’. She was to discover later that their instincts were more protective. They did not want her out observing the sunset, which to them was an omen of death and decay. But Keiko’s face showed nothing but an easy pleasure to have Vera back amongst them. She made a place for her around the square hearth with the few coals burning in the centre of a little plot of grey ash. The ash was raked to a fine smoothness, and stood in perfect rows like a field ready to be planted.
She motioned Vera to come to sit in the place she had made. Vera held out her hands for the customary bowl of miso, and drank it quickly.
‘And your day, how was it?’ Keiko asked.
Vera looked away and mumbled, ‘My day was nothing.’
And suddenly the day, which had been in its way miraculous and full of challenge, wonder and tenderness, became, indeed, nothing. Vera held it to be Keiko’s fault that she was here, on this lost little rock, when she could have been in Vancouver, at her school, shopping on Granville Street with her friends, going to films at her namesake theatre. And she was not ready to stop blaming her, so in her eyes she had to have had a miserable day.