Her leap rocked the clumper and as she swam under the icy brine to the surface a thick blue and mottled iceberg blocked her passage. Down below the water, the clinking of the ice sounded like wooden bells and she did not struggle but was strangely drawn to these sounds she had never heard before. She hung below, still and listening.
Danny was standing waist-deep in the water now and he pushed at the heavy ice pan. He saw her limp fingers poking out, grabbed them, pulled her out sideways from under the iceberg and stood her up in the water. One arm around her waist he half lifted her up to the shore. Moll stood there at her full height, watching silent. Danny pulled Nyssa right past her, wrapped her in his own damp jacket and walked her back up to their mother’s house.
I almost lost you under that bellycater, he said, pulling her to him and soaked in saltwater, safe beside her brother, Nyssa felt all the plain contentment of a girl much loved growing up on Millstone Nether.
Nature abounds in what we call catastrophe. All it takes is a little pressure. Storms. Floods. Mudslides. All caused by pressure, the overturning of the old pattern into something new. Time passes and old patterns are forgotten. But they are not lost and can still exert pressure, remembered or not. Consumed by either fire or fire. While Donal had tried to prepare himself, Dagmar had walked away from him down the shore, held his best friend in her embrace and he hadn’t even guessed that he was losing what he thought he most wanted.
The night Donal fled, Madeleine saw the freak hailstorm over the ocean. She was bent over a pot of boiling haywater for an orphaned goat. The warm scent of the hay clouded up around her face and she filled an old baby’s bottle with the fragrant liquid, took the bleating kid in her lap and urged it to suckle.
Donal pushed through the half door and shed his wet clothes in a pile on the floor. He went into the back room and returned with his bass in one hand and a travelling bag in the other. He said, I’m going now. I won’t be back.
You’re leaving before light? said Madeleine, shifting the kid in her arms.
They’re marrying. It’s dawn soon anyway.
Half the island knew and the other half guessed, said Madeleine. Your friend’s no friend, Donal, but it doesn’t mean you have to go.
I’d choke every time I saw them.
He’s a jader, Donal. Time heals.
With the bristling anger of a young man betrayed he answered, What odds is it to you?
Donal took his double bass and sailed out into the ocean. He had no heart for the great cathedrals to the west and so he found his way south into the scattered dream-rounded islands of the Pacific. He made his living playing in smoky bars where no one knew that his bass was three centuries old and few noticed it was tuned in fifths. He played a perfect intonation few could hear, and was absorbed in the inexplicable mystery of his sound. For three and half decades he picked up with small bands and played in exchange for a bed, a meal, his next passage out, settling with the unsettled on the Pacific Ocean. He played whatever was popular with Japanese and Indonesian and American expatriates, filled his lonely impermanence with their bar-room stories. He sailed on coconut ships and outriggers and supply boats, and protected his bass from Pacific salt and humidity and damp. He played against the rushing of tides and his highest notes drew whales up to the surface. He sleepwalked through the years and only his night dreams reminded him where he had come from and what he had hoped for. They tormented him with the incorporeal cries of lost seamen but each morning he shook away those dream hollies as if they had not revealed themselves.
He possessed nothing to keep him anywhere. One night Donal sailed with an itinerant birdwatcher who had a parrot that spoke fifty-three words of an extinct language acquired from its last living speaker. He was studying an island where everything was dying. Birds that had displayed themselves fearlessly had begun to dwindle in number and disappear. First to go was a flightless bird called a rail. The flycatcher, the bridled white-eye, the honeyeater became rare. Then the squawks and songs and coos of the kingfishers, crows and even