named but unrenowned seas. And yet living sometimes came with a price. The way an eye of a Communion Islands child appeared, for example, sometimes to have no ending. Not in its shape or size or the color of its pupil. But something else, in its depth, so that as you looked into it you felt yourself slipping from your moorings, coming adrift. Falling inward, as it were.
I should know: I was one of these kids.
Children from families like the Eddins and the Drinkerds, the McOrdles and the Beards, the Yorks and the Blackspikes. It was there. The Hurleys and the Handinos, the Lakehams and the Curbows. To name just a few of the pre-deceased local dynasties. I ask: “How many of these pursued that trait of haruspex desire?” Connections, that is, with the animal kingdom of the Communion Islands. Seeking answers in the ways of creatures. “Plenty!” I answer. Out in the trees, or in the sea, up in the mountains, along the trails of opossum and amper deer, black parrots, and fur mice. “How many seemed to carry no other scent but the occasional scent of ether and antiseptic and gauze and benzoin?” (Home medicine sufficed! That is, you’ve heard the expression “Smells like Death”? Well, they never did!) How many had bones so supple that even after falls from heights—such as the crumbling clay cliffs above Skelton Beach or treed ridges of La Roneo - they continued unscathed.
To those from other islands, who came to discover these islands, the children of the Communions only seemed to become ever stronger, never weaker, only to be ever more healthy never more ill, only to be becoming ever more permanent, never less so.
Alternatively, the visitors themselves felt themselves staggering onto and off these shores. Across their brows grew furrows, furrows appearing as they observed us. Typically (if any of this could be said to be typical) two furrows, above their eyes, and some just below them. Horizontal, and lateral, like crossing train tracks (as many of these long distance travellers bore, none too happily, inscriptions of ordinary, dull, human experience clashing with what they now observed of our lies). And their particular furrows were particularly angular, riding over the cheekbones of these island visitors like the waves of our rising sea swell, up and over. And onwards. And these furrows moved too, they altered, as they discovered more about our ways of living. From initially shallow to soon deep, from light to dark, from narrow (mere lines) to wide (gullies), from short (an inch, maybe, perched over cheekbones) to long, flowing, impossible, heading into the distance, beyond. You might even say that these Communions furrows—which island visitors observed in mirrors as their time on the islands lengthened - reminded our visitors of the tearing teeth marks of something truly enormous.
But back to our history! To cut a long story short: after the Mycean-to-Anthrohalocyn periods, those half-formed primal brutes, then The Communion Islands saw more steady and more concerted growth—devoid finally of the restrictions of potential but never complete malady and disorder that infected the Founding years and borne forward, increasingly, on the fundamentals of minerals, fisheries, wood and fruit. The four pills of Life, perfectly served by The Communion Islands.
The burgeoning 21st Century burgeoned onward. Yippeee! Modernity. Tourism began. . . .
(See there in this, our fine cinematic vista of time, the bright green horse-drawn tour bus of the Communion Islands Private Bus Co Ltd [Thomas Seawell, proprietor], taking adventurous visitors out along Water Street, weekly, and onto the meandering miles of the Gushing Highway [highway in name but not in action; road holes so large as to accommodate towns. Gushing [the name of an island government road builder of yore] it ain’t], on their way to staying overnight at the Toobay Inn, which in later years would be owned by Seawell himself, who had traipsed out there one high season toward the end of the century, taking a gaggle of eager travellers in their leather boots and white flounces, and, for reasons best known to Fate, promptly decided to stay in the room overlooking the small courtyard from which the high green peaks of South Welson can be spied but very little of Toobay Bay - thus why he took the room, to give visitors the best views of blue whales and waterbirds, and the steaming sails of the fishing fleet, in the hope they might understand us. And for this he subsequently stayed eternally without any sight whatsoever of the ocean, for which he had an almost impossible affection)
All the while, growing Communions around it, trees came down—hardwoods, softwoods, apple and orange woods, woods for train tracks, woods for homes, woods so exotic that they were sent to cities in remote provinces or given to Kings by Heads of State, woods that swirled with grainy mysteries, woody contrasts, hardened seams, softened stratums—and as these trees came down, beneath them, way beneath the alluvial coast and beneath the rising mountains behind us, beneath rich soil and once volcanic rock, men and machines burrowed for wealth.
Figure 4.
7.
Suffice it to say, before the arrival of Death, danger here on The Communion Islands consisted entirely of a knife and a block of volcanic stone on which to blunt it.
Men certainly lost their way, but nothing became of it. Women became ill with half-born children and themselves alike, simultaneously, but they always recovered. Infants fell at the feet of their vibrant island parents, and were simply picked up. Life expectancy—strange concept that!—life expectancy for those who never left The Communion Islands was, simply, Eternity. We were a nation composed almost entirely of brown skinned children, tanned, tempering in the island sun, and permanent.
Consequently, we looked at our local world as abject novices, never old enough to be old. We were constantly beginnings, not more, but determinedly not less. Openings. Alphas. Originals. Island kids in all our unadulterated kiddery. Flowing with new and unfathomable life about which we had little understanding and few concerns. We opened ourselves to everything. Why wouldn’t we? How couldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we?
You could hear our island nascence in our ordinary daily conversations, which rarely dwelt on anything but the unknown. Indeed, today a common opening on The Communion Islands remains:
“Do you know. . . ?”
As in, “Do you know, it might rain today?” addressed to someone (say your dearest friend, or a fisherman) who you might rightly suspect would know this.
More poignantly:
“Do you know, today is a good day?”
Or more tellingly perhaps, on account of these, our origins:
“Do you know what?”
“Do you know when?”
“Do you know why?”
As you can imagine, some visitors have mistaken some idiosyncrasies in our way of speaking for irony, as if the entire population of the Communions is given over to speaking in circumlocution, real meaning hidden in the thick jungle of our belief in opposites, situations presented in determined islander reverse. Other islanders, at the time, even thought of us as cruel and unprincipled. Can you believe? Accusations were frequent that we lived a kind of metaphoric life, devoid of any real feeling, perpetually young and persistently inattentive to the problems of others and of the real world.
Ha! Let me report. A youthful islands, we craved (and had long craved) what we did not yet know.
Figure 5.
1c. By the Chin
And so. . .
The clerk looked at my newly delivered bat-loving passenger: Death, standing in flustered red-hatted dishevelment
