Page 21 of The Elements

I don’t hear the end of that sentence as I’ve already hung up.

I’m trembling. I stare at the phone in my hand, as if it has betrayed me in some way.

I picture my husband shouting “Hello? hello?” into the receiver and someone behind him telling him that his time’s up and to fuck off out of it, and Brendan simpering before him like the coward he is before running back to his cell with his head down.

Should this image satisfy me? Because it doesn’t.

I can take no pleasure in it whatsoever.

I open one of the cupboards and extract the bottle of whiskey, pour myself a healthy glass, and drink it down in one go. The phone sits on the counter now, and I pick it up, opening the text application to see the face of my remaining child.

She has changed her picture again. Now it shows her and Emma in their teenage years, arms around each other, laughing uproariously. I’ve never seen this one before, so I take a screenshot and save it to my gallery before she can change it again.

Your father phoned me , I write and, a few moments later, to my astonishment, a reply appears.

There is no such person.

I nod and put the phone away.

Outside, the storm is worse than ever. How can the island even retain its foundation in the earth?

How is it not dragged from its mooring and hurtled into the sky, spinning away into the clouds like Dorothy’s house?

I pull on my raincoat. I need fresh air.

I need to feel the wind and the rain on my face in order to wash away the obscenity of that call.

I open the latch, then the door, and it bursts outward in ecstasy, like a body emerging from a near-drowning, reaching the surface and gasping for air.

I don’t quite know where I’m going, and it’s difficult to see anyway, but I make my way in the general direction of the seafront and start singing at the top of my voice.

An old song. “The Shoals of Herring.” I’m no great singer, but it doesn’t matter.

These are shouts more than anything else.

I’m roaring into the wind about fishing the Swarth and the Broken Bank, sailing toward Canny Shiels with a hundred cran of silver darlings, and oh, if anyone was to hear me now, they would think Willow Hale, the woman who came from Dublin without a husband and took up residence in Peader Dooley’s cottage, and talked to islanders, and had her lunch every day in the old pub, and slept with Luke Duggan, has gone off her mind from loneliness and will now be known as the Madwoman of the Upper Hills.

But no one can hear me, for I am as alone here as I have ever been in my life.

I stretch my arms wide and throw my head back, opening my mouth to capture the rainwater, and how is it possible, I ask myself, to feel so at peace in such chaos?

In the distance, on the Duggan farm, I think I see Luke staring down at me, as he did the first time I saw him, but he would be as foolish as me to venture out into this bedlam, so perhaps I’m imagining things.

I daresay that mother of his would drag him back in by the scruff of the neck anyway, promising him pneumonia if he stays outside another minute.

I blink, my eyes finding it difficult to focus, and maybe he is there and maybe he isn’t, and what matter either way, because I can’t get that line out of my head, it’s repeating over and over—

You lived off for me for thirty years, you filthy bitch, and when I’m laid low… You lived off for me for thirty years, you filthy bitch, and when I’m laid low… You lived off for me for thirty years, you filthy bitch, and when I’m laid low…

Before struggling back toward the cottage, I weep at the loss of everything that was once mine.

The loss of Emma. The loss of Rebecca. And, may God forgive me, the loss of Brendan too, who I loved once.

The wind is against me and every step takes effort and there is a part of me that wants to lie down on the grass and let it do its worst. How long would I survive?

An hour, perhaps? A little more? The elements—water, earth, fire, air—are our greatest friends, our animators.

They feed us, warm us, give us life, and yet conspire to kill us at every juncture.

But I don’t need their permission to take me away.

If I could simply clap my hands and fall into a deep sleep out here, never to wake again, I would clap them.

I would clap them again and again and again until I was gone from this world and reborn or forgotten, whatever the universe decided.

The door is in sight now, and I trip over what I think might be a rock, and fall to the ground, my hands splayed out before me.

Grizzly pebbles crush into my palms, tearing at them, drawing blood, stigmata on my skin, and I lie there, sodden, the storm doing its best to finish me off.

I am howling at the pain and misfortune of my life, and when I turn to curse the stone that felled me, I see that it was no stone at all, it was Bananas the cat, for he would not take my advice and stay indoors, and the weather has done for him.

In that moment, I weep for this miserable, aggressive feline who somehow came to be my companion, but I envy him too.

“You’re better off out of it, my love,” I say, but the wind lifts my words away, and what does it matter anyway when he’s past hearing them.