Encounters by Barbara Erskine

silently in her bed, her eyes fixed on the cracked crazed ceiling which was no ceiling in the dark, but an infinite chasm, of the silver and the blues of the western shore where she had spent her long happy childhood holidays and she grasped towards the healing and the reality which the salt air must bring to her soul.
    ‘Will you be all right, miss?’ The taxi driver’s face, beaten red by the wind and sun was crumpled with concern. He waved away the shaking hand which held a painfully calculated ten per cent and picked up her case to carry it to the door.
    She proffered the key and he took it and opened it for her. The great stone hearth was unchanged. The rocking chair was still there. But the people were all gone.
    She stretched her lips to smile at him and stood when he had gone, a shiver holding her in the centre of the floor. She could hear echoes. Echoes of her voice as a girl, pretty, carefree, happy as only the ignorant can be and of her brother, more raucous his and loud, but with the same intonation. And the Fairburn cousins, their two shouts indistinguishable twin from twin, and the gentle remonstrations of her mother; and her father putting his hands to his ears as he sorted out the lines for the sea trout. And the barks of Romany and Diddakoi, the two Battersea waifs, so long ago buried in the garden beneath the apple tree. She shivered again and felt the tears pricking her eyelids.
    ‘Cry, my child. The day you can cry you will be on the way to being cured,’ the psychiatrist’s level voice echoed in her head. The tears were there all right, but still they would not fell. As they had not fallen since the car had spun out of reality and into nightmare taking mother, father, brother, lover all from her in one clap of thunder.
    Slowly she walked into the bedroom which had once been hers. It was the smallest and it overlooked the island, shimmering in the evening waters. She opened the window and looked out, breathing sweet thyme and lavender from the flower below. The stone was cold and hard to her elbows but she leaned there a long time watching for the luminous highland night which almost never came. Then at last she lay down on the bed, her coat still on, her shoes kicked wearily aside and she slept, not hearing the owls, the jumping fish and the hill noises of the night.
    Instinct told her she had to walk each day. Exhaustion brought forgetfulness. It brought sleep and slowly appetite and a suspicion of colour to her sallow cheeks. She would take crumbs to the squirrels and sit for hours beyond the great rock gazing at the sky. She took a sketch book and slowly captured the growing beauty as it fought its way into her consciousness.
    Once she saw a small boy looking at her from behind the rocks. When she looked again he had gone and she found herself half-smiling, sensing his peeking eyes. To her he was just another squirrel.
    She watched the men with their boats, the tourists with their cameras, the children, shadows of her own past, as they crossed her path, but she stayed silent and withdrawn. In the village store they decided she was some kind of a natural, harmless, lonely, to be watched over with gentle unobtrusive care.
    Then came the old man from over the hill. He knocked at the door and greeted her with a grin. ‘How are you, lass? I heard you were here. Would you be the same little Josie Tansley who came in my boat with her dad?’
    She looked at him frowning, remembering. Strangers’ faces had gone; only the dead were with her. She grasped for a name: ‘Ruaraidh … Macdonald?’
    And he shook her hand the harder. ‘You remember an old man, lass. Tell me. How are your family? Is your father well?’
    He alone in all the world did not know, had not heard the thunder clap. ‘They’re all dead, Mr Macdonald.’ She felt her lips speak, as her mind receded from the truth. ‘Killed.’
    She turned away blindly, but the old man came on. His arm was round her, his faded blue eyes near hers.