Lara Markstein: NO NAME ISLAND • Cleaver Magazine

Lara Markstein
NO NAME ISLAND

In the beginning, in that first month that they’d lived with their uncle on Aorere Drive as kids, Hamish and Kylie passed whole days in the bay. Before Stuart could go on about the cost of diesel with the lights they left on in every room, they kicked free of the breakfast table and rushed down the hillside into waters that clouded with each step, their feet skimming the soft surface of the earth. Hamish scanned the sea for stingrays, pale sprats, and sea snails with perfect spiral shells.

When the tides turned, the bay became mud flats, bubbling with sand flies. So they walked south towards the tip of the peninsula. They were scouts, searching for new routes and lands, as they followed the water to the boulders of the headland, which they could clamber over timed right. The sea still licked at the rocks, which were slippery with slime, and they edged over the sharp stones, barnacles biting at their flesh, until the waves hit their chests. At this point the water before them changed to a darker shade of blue and the ground vanished. Hamish and Kylie stood at the precipice, linked at the hands, held up, it seemed, by the most fragile of shelves.

“Do you reckon people have even seen this place before?” Hamish asked. His knees stung, his breathing was ragged, but he did not complain. Looking out over the ocean, the vastness of it all was terrifying. His lungs ached at the sheer expanse. Nothing but sea straight to Antarctica.

Kylie and Hamish breathed in deep and quiet, then leapt.

◊

Just two years apart, Kylie and Hamish were inseparable. They took turns lying on the kitchen tiles with frozen packets of chicken and peas over their eyes, waiting for the long, blank summer days to end. At night, Kylie wet the back of his neck with her breath. They shared everything: socks, tissues, friends. Hamish finished Kylie’s homework and ate the food from her plate. Kylie cleaned his damp bed sheets and sported a black eye after saving him from a bash at school. They even looked the same. Both with jaw bones so low and wide you could trip over their scowls.

Following their father’s death, they lived even further in each others’ pockets, playing hooky so they wouldn’t have to be apart. Their father had died of a heart condition, so their mum had said. While he’d been diving with friends. They imagined their dad somersaulting into the water, unfolding until he was long as a taniwha—or at least a water snake—and spearing his body down to the rocky bed. When his heart stopped, he floated on and on. “Do we have heart conditions, too?” Their mum never said. She’d gone a bit funny in the head since their dad’s death.

At night, they lay their ears against each others’ chests searching for a fatal sign. A formality. They knew in their bones they were doomed.

Then the social workers found out about their mum and sent all three of them to Stu.

“I’d like to lodge a formal complaint,” Kylie had announced that day as Stu pulled away from the curb.

“So would I,” he said. “Know anyone who’s listening?”

◊

They swam, shrieking, kicking their legs like the tail of a great fish, a whale—a submarine!—till their teeth chattered and their shoulders shook. About them, whole shoals of fish. Not the small triplefins of the Bay, but spotties and flounder that reached tip to tail to his nose. Hamish stretched his hands out wide as though he could gather them all in. Afterwards, they scrambled over the boulders into a cove, a small, secret space, with caves the waves had carved and trees sprouting from rock. A deserted landscape, Kylie claimed; theirs. How much better than the bay, already crowded with a litter of lives! Their inlet was clean of everything but centuries-old ghosts they found in buried bones. A finger, a femur, a rounded plate of pelvis, honeycombed. The owners long gone, unable to correct her invented histories. Hamish steered a stuck starfish ocean-side.

Kylie and Hamish hung their clothes on pōhutukawa branches—the rocks themselves were covered in mussels. Later, Kylie would bring knives so they could prize open the shellfish that tore the skin from their soles. Then they stretched out over sandbags that scratched once they’d dried, staring up at a curtain of blue. Above them, a retaining wall seemed to bang up like a pyramid against the sky—one terrace after the next, a steep staircase climbing to some fantastic sacrifice! Hamish felt almost weightless peering uphill, dizzy.

“You could survive here forever!” Kylie said, satisfied. “We’d never have to go to school.”

“We’d live with the fish. Just you and me.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Kylie said, kicking him with her feet.

He kicked back, and soon they were shoving each other, till they fell in a tide pool, wrestling among the anemones. Kylie a sea-monster, rising from the shallow water, cloaked in seaweed, shells for nails.

◊

They looted pipis with their feet, stole birds’ eggs from the nest, ripped crabs from the mud and fried snails to watch them burn. It was not personal; they were good at killing things. With stolen knives they fashioned spears from sticks, wild hunters on wild land, and they used the weapons to stalk possums along with eels beside the estuary. Their knees cracked from the fine cuts of paspalum grass. When Hamish nicked his index finger with the blade, they did not quit. Kylie sucked at the cut instead and wrapped his hand in a sarong, as though they were not five minutes from plasters and rubbing alcohol, but years and continents away and so had to survive on just their wits. Her lips red as an open wound, a lattice of leftover blood along her teeth. Hamish did not cry. Tears annoyed Kylie. And complaints and bad jokes and carelessness and slowpokes. Her irritation at this weak, dumb world overflowed.

At almost-thirteen, Kylie wanted to poke and prod and squeeze until every organ burst. She tested the boundaries of things—of life, in particular. Her insides were bubbling and she had to scream and run and tug at the seams of the universe. And Hamish followed—because Hamish was good at following.

◊

Then the school year started, and Kylie took a shine to fishing. For him, of course. “You’re a growing boy,” Kylie said. “You need a real meal.” They angled for food with sticks and twine and hooks she had him tie with his fat thumbs. Kylie squinted past the sun to where the neighbor’s boys hauled hoki and the trevally and pilchard they’d barbecue. “Like I always said, we have everything we need right here.” Hamish hardly left Aorere Drive. How was he to know what they lacked? “It’s bloody Moby Dick,” she crowed when they caught a sprat.

Kylie was taking control of their sorry lot. Which meant that Hamish had to get his ass into gear, to learn to pull and reel and gut—entrails and seawater and blood, and just toss the dross aside for the sharks.

But the sea didn’t always cough up its innards easily. “We’ll try harder.”

Only he couldn’t, he wouldn’t. Hamish sat on a boulder, resentfully probing with his finger the wounds he’d received helping his sister so far with her tugging and towing. The skin caved a little, rubbery, like jellyfish. He’d have rather hid hungry in the cove amidst the exquisite teeming waves than kill all that was bright and beautiful. Toast with butter, toast with jam, toast with marmite and Skippies and tomato sauce. There was plenty they could eat without ruining the beach. He was rooting for the sea creatures here.

But Kylie wouldn’t give up. “We could cray? What do you say?” She nudged him in the back with her knees so that he had to hold onto the wood planks to keep from falling into the sea. The neighbor’s son, Jono, had hauled three cray clear the other day. They could leap from the dock into cool water, dive-bomb and somersault. Kylie didn’t like bathing and had a funky, sweet stink.

“The water’s colder than you think,” Hamish said.

“We need food.”

“We need nothing.”

◊

So one day Hamish did not follow her. He planted himself in the sand that seeped from beneath his feet and burrowed his toes in the beach, determined to stay right there on if not solid, then familiar land. If she wanted to floss between sharks’ teeth, she could do so alone. Hamish wouldn’t go ripping out the guts of his ocean companions. Everything went Kylie’s way. For once, Hamish would do as he pleased.

“I’ll go myself,” Kylie said. “I’ll leave you.”

“Look,” he said finally, bending to tear a knuckle of shell from the ground, just like their dad had shown them years ago. Hamish turned the pipi over in his hand, studying the thick lips, which lined the beaches in various states of decay. What he meant was: the world is filled with wonder right here. They didn’t have to fish, to do, to see something marvelous.

“Eat it,” Kylie said. She watched his throat bob up and down. Turned away when he clasped his knees and retched.

◊

Kylie loved him, alright. For his birthday, she planned a party. “Where are we going?” Hamish wanted to know. It was a secret, and she wouldn’t say.

The night before, Kylie cut little sandwiches that got soggy sitting in the fridge. Stu even gave her extra money to buy lollies from Mrs. Froneck in town. Hamish didn’t dare argue with her when she packed damp blankets into their backpacks and dredged out their togs. Normally, they wore their undies when they swam. Or they just dived into the sea bare butts and jiggly bits. She’d gotten hairs between her legs, though, and pointy nubs for tits, and had started covering herself when she caught Hamish staring at this change, so it was possible she’d grown embarrassed.

“No one else runs around starkers,” Kylie said. And she was doing this proper. She even scrubbed the mold from an old umbrella that had housed a horde of small brown spiders and pinned dishrags to Stu’s caps to shield their necks from the sun. Kylie bore sunscreen from the bowels of the pantry, like an archeologist who had unearthed a treasured artifact.

“Ready?” Kylie asked, lifting Hamish’s heavy backpack so he could wind through his arms.

“Now can you say where the party is?”

“Your favorite place.” Hamish sprinted to the cliff, almost skidding down the sandbagged retaining wall, the rope tied to an old pōhutukawa stinging his palms.

“Happy birthday!” Hamish stood stunned. In their cove, all three neighbor boys: Jono and Liam and Sam. A sloshing pitched in his gut.

Kylie skidded down beside him then directed them all to lay their goodies on a blanket just so. Jono punched an old umbrella in the sand, and they lay out lollies and sammies slathered in Thousand Island dressing in the circle of shade. Sam even brought out a sixer of beer and little wax candles that did not add up to Hamish’s age. Their picnic looked like an oil painting. And they all stared at each other, unsure what was left to do.

Kylie was determined, though, that they have fun, and what couldn’t she conjure out of the sheer force of her desire? So she handed Hamish Jono’s fancy fishing rod as though he’d enjoy the well-oiled whirr of the reel, the pleasing weight of the sinker, the stink of bait.

Hamish grabbed a bag of chips and turned away. He sat apart on the dock, where the nail heads burnt small red circles into his skin, and he studied the spiders weaving webs in the shadows of the struts. Impatient, Kylie peeled off the clothes over her togs, but the swimsuit was too small for all that length she had now.

“Come on then, chickens!” Kylie ran down the dock and dived into the sea, the tips of her fingers slicing through water and weed.

Jono and Liam set down their beers and followed with a roar and a great splash that wet what was left of the chips. Though they were soggy, Hamish stuffed them in his mouth. “Come on, Hamish!” Kylie shrieked.

But Hamish did not want to join them in the water, which slapped the balustrades, churning up a fine froth. Hamish thought the beach was prettier before, when it was just he and Kylie and the shellfish on the rocks.

“Oh come on, Hamish. Don’t be a spoil-sport,” said Jono. And Hamish wished they’d all stop hassling him.

“You’re being a real baby,” Kylie said.

But Hamish wasn’t a child to be bossed around and left behind. So he shoved aside the plastic bag and walked towards the boulders, ignoring all the yelling at his back. Hamish raised his arms above his head like a gymnast, closed his eyes, turned, and ran. He drove the balls of his feet hard against the wood, pounding all the splinters smooth with flesh and fat, though he felt light now, elegant. Any moment, he would rise. Gravity could not keep him down. Hamish spread his body out like a sail, pushing the dock’s final slat with just his big toe. He flew; he soared; he surfed the currents of air, a flying fish in human shape, and he built a gob of spit in his cheek he’d hurl at his sister and Jono and Liam and Sam, the suckers! —if he didn’t crash belly first into the sea.

His face, his arms, his nut sack stung and the cold water froze his lungs. He gasped, gulping at salt-water. His legs kicked out one-two, one-two, but he could not find sand. His eyes stung as he searched for light and air, and he heard his wonky heart pounding, out of time. Just like his Dad, floating in the sea.

Then two hands grabbed at his armpits, the skin soft and slippery—Kylie hauling him like a whale from the surf. Their chests expanded and shrunk, expanded up towards the light, a creature with two hearts. Hamish gasped.

“I got him!” Jono cried, one hairy forearm crushing Hamish’s throat.

Kylie, on the deck, clasped her hands to her chest, like some stupid movie heroine. Her shadow lengthened on the crests of the water to cover them, as though she’d grown before their very eyes.

Hamish knew that if Jono had not been there, his sister would not have left him to die. He knew that. Still.

◊

They called Kylie a whore in high school. There was no reason he should have found out. He and his sister did not attend the same school.

It was cross country day at Hamish’s primary, which meant every child had to run and cheer following a series of nonsense rituals. Hamish hated it.

But the real torture began before they even announced his age group, when a troupe from each House performed a haka—all in the spirit of building a healthy sense of competition. Nothing more invigorating than skinny pre-teens slapping their bare thighs and chests, which pimpled in the chill of a windy, late June afternoon. Hamish was enlisted in this show, though he didn’t know the moves. Copying the kid at his side, Hamish was half a beat behind, facing left when the others turned right; his mouth twisted silently around unfamiliar vowels. He’d hoped no one had noticed, but the whole school laughed at him afterwards. Boys passing Hamish mimicked his performance by flailing their arms.

“Should have been in the back with the girls swinging pois!”

“Nah, bro. The spaz’d have taken someone out with one of those things!”

Hamish tried to blend into the groups laying on the grass waiting to participate, but his knee hit a girl’s back, and she said, “Ew,” then her friend, “Scuse you.” He knew no one; he shifted and twisted and curled up small, but others still wiped the sweat of his shoulder from their skin, as though he were catching.

Hamish slipped away and no one noticed, and that hurt, too.

Afraid of encountering Stu at home, Hamish dropped into the crawl space along the foundations, strewn with nails and beer cans and potato chip packets.

“Did you have cross country, too?”

“Jono reads this rubbish,” she said, tossing him one of the girlie magazines she’d been analyzing. She’d picked through the garbage and collected a whole stack. “Got to know what’s going through his mind.” Now that Kylie had a boyfriend, she scrutinized everything, and Hamish sucked in his stomach, worried that his sister might judge him, too.

It seemed to Hamish that Kylie was possessed; one moment her body could not contain her energy, the next, she sunk listless to the ground. She flipped onto her stomach and picked up a pen to doodle on the pages, her bent legs kicking back and forth, the pale sun through the slats marbling her back.

“You’re not very good,” he said of her artwork.

“You wouldn’t know.”

He lay on his tummy and bashed her shoulder until she passed across a pen. “What are you drawing?”

“A map.”

“Of?”

“Of where to go from here. Where to hide.” Girls were bitches at her age, she said. “I’m not the fucking whore.”

“You drew the peninsula wrong.” Hamish twisted the cove to the left.

“That looks like a dick,” she said and they both laughed and laughed until Kylie snorted and their stomachs cramped and they choked, unable to breathe.

◊

Kylie made plans to escape. He woke one night to the smell of sweet air, overripe with rain, and found Kylie down the hall squatting over a pool of clothes, her window opened wide though it was cold. He’d meant to say don’t go but said instead, “They’re mine,” indicating a pair of gumboots.

Still, she seemed to understand him well enough. “Sometimes, I reckon Uncle Stu’s right. You’re a real baby.” Sometimes Hamish reckoned so, too. The thirty months between him and his sister gaped. Hamish felt Kylie had lifetimes on him.

“You’ll miss me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, afraid of seeming even more of a sissy, she’d stepped in close, her old-beef breath warm and stale on his chin. “God knows how you’d survive if I left. You ever kissed a girl?”

“Of course.” He knew that if he hadn’t, he’d be teased.

“Prove it,” she said, although she didn’t sound as if she was talking of kissing anymore but something larger that he didn’t yet grasp.

Hamish was terrified. He’d never kissed anyone. Certainly never with his mouth split open wide like an exposed plug.

His heart clanked clumsily in his chest and he pressed his mouth roughly against hers, aware that if he hesitated, he’d be mocked, and the rain splattered through the open window on the bed and her tongue slithered between his teeth, along the roof of his mouth, his gums. Like an eel, strong and wet. He kissed her hard and long so he could fix her in this place and she could not escape, and his skin pimpled in the cold that washed around their bare feet.

Kylie told him afterwards he sucked. “Not even! You’re worse,” he said and threaded his legs through hers as she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, having given up on running away for the night. They talked about Australia.

Kylie was waiting for Jono to leave. He was going to play for an Aussie Rules team in Sydney. He said he’d take her, too. So they deliberated over where she should live.

“Better not be too pricey so you can afford it when Jono leaves your sorry ass. You haven’t even got real tits yet,” Hamish said. Kylie punched his shoulder as if to keep from laughing loud, but she punched too hard and the next day he bruised in a network of purple and blue, like the tentacles of jellyfish as they uncurled. A reminder of his nastiness. He’d felt bad about what he’d said, because his sister was beautiful and any man would be lucky to have her, but he wanted to prove that nothing ought to change. That she was the same as him: a child.

Hamish wondered if his sister was trying to tear him apart so they’d both be broken bits.

◊

At night, Kylie still sneaked into Hamish’s bed and, wound together tight, she whispered how they’d sail together by sea, returning to the cove just for supplies. “Like nomads. Pirates.” Hamish wiped the beer they’d stolen from Stu’s fridge from his mouth and passed across the bottle for Kylie to finish. Hamish wanted to believe his sister was building an ark; that they would troop aboard, two humans, side by side. But when her sandy feet rubbed his beneath the blankets, they roughened his skin.

Hamish held onto his sister. Because he loved her; because this broken world of Kylie’s was filled with wonder. Jasmine choked the fences and pohutukawa burst with red flowers and every night the sky exploded into stars. Against this terrible beauty, how could he not race with her from one destruction to the next?

Kylie stared out the window long after Hamish fell asleep, her eyes gathering the stars—which would forever fall like calcified fish, all dried skin and bone, by her side.

Lara Markstein is a South African-born American-New Zealander. Her work has appeared across a variety of literary journals, including Glimmer Train, Agni Online, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, and has been recognized by the Pushcart awards, the Sargeson Prize, and the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Short Story Awards. She lives near the town of Waitohi on Tōtaranui/Queen Charlotte Sound in the northernmost part of New Zealand’s south island, Te Waipounamu.