The Seagulls Laughter Read online

  The Seagull’s Laughter

  Holly Bidgood

  Wild Pressed Books

  First Edition.

  This book is a work of fiction.

  The publisher has no control over, and is not responsible for, any third party websites or their contents.

  The Seagull’s Laughter© 2019 by .

  Contact the author via the publisher.

  Editor: Tracey Scott-Townsend

  Cover Design by JDSmith Design

  ISBN: 978-1-9164896-5-3

  Published by Wild Pressed Books: 2019

  Wild Pressed Books, UK Business Reg. No. 09550738

  http://www.wildpressedbooks.com

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  For my children, Kim, Noomi and Iduna.

  I hope we will always tell stories together.

  PART ONE

  1

  Malik

  Iceland, 1974

  I listened to the sharp crack as Snorri dropped ice cubes into two crystal glasses on the table between us. I continued to watch his face for any clue as to his thoughts, but his expression remained mild and affable – concealed, even. With calm concentration he filled the two glasses with water. His eyes did not seem to explore any memories and admitted no recognition of me. His fair complexion hid his age; the two missing fingers on his left hand, stunted ends blackened by frost, were the only marks he wore that alluded to his past, to the time and place at which our lives had become intertwined.

  The walls of his study, similarly, were empty of pictures or maps. No artifact peered down from the bookshelves, no carven figure, grotesquely formed, reared its bald skull; square teeth bared menacingly, blackened eyes glinting with the dark polar winters. There was nothing in the room that alluded to the time that he had spent in the Arctic. The ice in our glasses, enveloped by pouring water, glittered in the afternoon sun and threw spots of dancing, ethereal light about the walls. Once the glasses were full, Snorri placed the lid back on the jug, the jug back on the table, and reaching to the highest shelf of one of the bookcases, brought down a leather-bound book. The binding was blank.

  ‘Rasmus,’ said Snorri, and tapped a long finger against the first page, the first photograph. The image was grainy, a little unclear, but I recognised the man I knew to be my father: the heavy eyebrows, the sincere countenance, the informal but confident stance. He was standing on the deck of a ship with one foot squarely planted on a crate and one elbow resting on his knee. In the distance rose great icebergs, like castles and mountains, indistinct in the hazy stillness of the day and the passing of time. I traced the print below with my finger: Polar Explorer, Charles Rasmus Stewart, Angmagssalik, Greenland, 1948.

  ‘A newspaper cutting,’ Snorri explained. ‘We received a lot of publicity: he knew how to make sure we did not go unnoticed.’

  The book was filled with photographs chronicling the expedition: sleds and dogs appeared with ghostly clarity from between the pages, interspersed with unshaven faces discoloured from the chill of the air and inset with wild eyes. The wilderness enduring. My heart ached as I looked upon this bleak and distant landscape, teeming with life to the trained eye, but a frozen wasteland to those who only visited – like aliens from another world.

  The images were distorted as the watery sun spilled again through the open window in rays and splashes. The room was comfortably cool. Outside, the wind blew with a gentle whisper, laced with an iciness that took the breath away, following its path over the glacier, across the barren flood plain and now to the openness of the Atlantic.

  The final page of the album: a different image altogether. Against a hazy backdrop that previewed a cluster of skin tents under bleak, snow-strewn mountains, there stood my father – the depiction of him with which I was now so familiar, never having encountered the man in flesh and blood – dressed in kamiks and bear-skin trousers as though he himself were one of our people. His hands, head and face were exposed. Beside him I recognised the towering figure of Snorri, curiously unmistakable in the same native attire, though the age and quality of the image almost obscured the features on his pale skin. And on my father’s other side, small and unremarkable, stood a woman. Strange, that while I knew my father only from old photographs, I had never encountered an image of my mother. She looked young, some might say little more than a girl, her face full and round; and although the monochrome nature of the picture kept forever hidden the bright colours of her sewn-skin costume, her hair still fell to her hips in a striking raven-black cascade. There stirred no emotion within me, for I found myself unable to reconcile this unexpected image, immobile and un-living, with the mother I had known, the woman who had brought me into the world. But what else could I see? From the folds of her large skin hood there peered a face over her shoulder, a new, innocent face, black hair and plump cheeks, eyes screwed tightly shut.

  ’The child,’ I began, though did not see the need to say any more as Snorri nodded his head and smiled wistfully.

  ’Yes. You could not have been more than a few months old.’

  I looked again with some discomfort. I could not reconcile my existence with this moment of which I of course had no recollection. The two people who were responsible for my coming into the world, together in the same image – and I, too, was there: the life they had created. I was relieved that my eyes had evidently been closed when the photograph was taken. Without their strangeness I looked like a normal Greenlandic child, the evidence of my cursed nature hidden from the judgement of the world.

  ’And the girl standing beside you?’ I added, resting my finger on the figure, eager to deter the path of my wandering thoughts. Snorri hesitated, appeared almost bashful as he no doubt apprehended my meaning, the possibility of an accusation against him.

  ’But you were married,’ I said; ’you have a family.’

  ’So did your father.’ he answered, and at once the topic fell from his lips. For a moment there was silence, and the air became heavier as the wind dipped momentarily. ’I was very sorry to hear of his passing.’

  I sensed the sincerity of his remark, though I knew their friendship to have come to an end many years previously. I only nodded in response. I had not known the man.

  Stirring himself into motion, Snorri took a seat, silently and almost apologetically in the chair opposite mine. The early spring wind picked up once more and sent a sharp gust through the open window. The panes rattled. The ice in our glasses had all but melted.

  ’I would very much like to know,’ he said, ’how you came to be here. In this country, in my house, so many miles from your home.’ As the query came to an end, the wind made a sudden exit from the room, leaving in its wake an open, peaceful sort of quiet in which one could almost hear the swell of the tempestuous sea and the creeping advance of the ancient glacial ice.

  ’I was guided here,’ I said quietly, unabashedly, ’by a helping spirit.’

  My heart sank in my chest as I mentioned my absent friend. I considered telling Snorri, there and then, that my helping spirit had in fact gone missing, and it was the continued search for him that had brought me here, to Snorri’s home. But I could not bring myself to say it – what would he think of me? I fought the bizarre urge to smile as I thought about how I would ask Snorri if he had seen Eqingaleq: an ancient figure padding along the Reykjavík streets, perhaps, in worn sealskin kamiks and bearskin trousers, suspiciously eyeing up the passers-by with their plastic umbrellas. But they would not be able to see him, of course. Snorri would not be able to see him.

  I glanced back to Sn
orri and saw that he was looking at me thoughtfully. Yet there was no hint of derision in his gaze, no eyebrow raised in scepticism nor patronising sympathy – something I had come to expect from those who knew only the culture they had been brought up in. But this man had spent time in the far north, that much was true, he had lived amongst my people, taken a woman there; adopted our clothes and customs as his own. My heart warmed towards him that he should understand.

  ’As it is just the two of us here,’ he said, ’perhaps you might like to tell me your story.’

  ’My story?’

  ’The story of the path that has brought you here, and the reason for your journey.’

  I looked down at the photographs on the table. Disconcerted by the blurred faces of those people who had since passed away I instead studied the shapes of the mountains in the distance. I saw reflected in them the warm recollections of home, the landscape captured so teasingly in these old, grainy images. I closed my tired eyes, and the windswept Icelandic coast evaporated and was lost.

  2

  Angmagssalik, Greenland. May 1973

  Where I come from, fields of ice stretch to the horizon and the mountains reach to the sky. There is only one long day and one long night by which the lives of those who live there are mapped out year after year. When the sun shines in the short summertime, it casts its perpetual light upon both the waking world and the sleeping world. When the winter darkness falls and the bitter cold sets in there is no respite brought by the morning, for the blackness is enduring.

  But sometimes the sky is alive with leaping, dancing colours: pillars and prisms fall from the atmosphere and rise again, forming a path across the heavens and illuminating the endless fields of ice in ethereal light. In midwinter this is the only light – this, and the meagre but welcoming flames of the blubber lamps – for Sun and Moon, brother and sister, will not be seen together in the wide sky. Their own fate was sealed in the blackness of the long night when, the lamps all extinguished, they found each other in the dark, seeking the warmth and comfort of living bodies yet each believing the other to be somebody else. Now Moon pursues Sun across the sky, and Sun, ashamed, will not look upon him.

  Beneath their eternal chase, the world moves to the same rhythm, steadily and sometimes secretly. Over and under the ice there swells a great force of life: the seal, with its deep human eyes; the bear, the lonely hunter who roams the frozen expanses in search of a kill; and the lingering fox who hopes to steal a scrap of meat. The raven and the sharp-eyed gull patrol the skies and see all below, though they are not friends. The hunter will take from this only what he needs for his family and community, and in harmony the same rhythms of nature will ebb and flow like the summer tide.

  The White Man came late to our way of life, though before my time and before my mother’s. He found our people living at the end of the world and on the edge of existence, an uncivilised people untouched by the Western world, eking out a primitive existence from the land.

  But civilisation comes at such a high price. Now there are few of our people who remember the ways of our ancestors: few who are able to flense a seal using tools fashioned from bone, few who can recall the uses for each and every part of the animal. Now the landscape is a hindrance, an obstacle to overcome, for our imported houses are ill-adapted to the northern temperatures and our tinned food creates waste for which there can be found no place.

  Now there is no one who, by transcending his earthly body in trance, can appeal to the Mother of the Sea when she takes back into her long flowing hair the creatures who have fed our existence for many thousands of years. She does this only when she has been wronged by the people; now there can be no hope to appease the hurt she has suffered through all our wrongdoings.

  My own ancestry cannot be denied. Like so many others of this generation I am the result of the union between the gull and the raven: a White man and a Greenlandic woman. Since early childhood Eqingaleq has appeared – only to me – as my helping spirit, yet sometimes I still feel that my wings are white. But Eqingaleq has remained with me: he would only guide one of his own, and never one who, like the gull, would fiercely fight with him over the same scrap of meat. We all know, however, that the gull will win.

  Did I expect him to guide me down the path of our ancestors? Perhaps that is not his purpose. We are fast-footed and wild, divided between two paths. Yet the world in which these two paths collide is neither here nor there. We were never meant to remain in this abandoned place.

  At one time a boy would grow up to become a hunter and provider; now he grows to be unemployed. My own mother could not have concerned herself much with the fate of her only son, however, for she drank herself to death before I had grown to truly understand the lure and destruction of this new vice.

  Guided by Eqingaleq, he taught me how to fashion harpoons, to hunt the seal and the hare, to steer a kayak amongst the pack ice, yet there seems little use for these skills when the voices of our ancestors can no longer be heard.

  I grew into a man, and the girl I thought I loved bore me a child but would not marry me – did she see in me the white wings and goggle eyes of the intruder from the West? A reminder of this new half-formed world of material comforts and spiritual desolation.

  The divided soul cannot endure forever; sooner or later a choice must be made, whether conscious or not, whether intuitive or calculated, long-awaited or spontaneous. There comes a point at which, the blubber lamp having burnt out and the once-good meat having been thrown to the dogs, one path becomes non-traversable – perhaps it had always been closed off.

  ◆◆◆

  My own turn of fate came one spring afternoon, when the hare’s pelt had just begun to turn its summer brown, when Sun dared show herself in the sky for a few hours a day and the dog sleds could no longer be driven across the fjord for it had begun to thaw and fragment into opening water. I was sitting on my front doorstep in the last few rays of weak sunlight, resewing a seam on the soles of my sealskin kamiks with sinew thread when, hearing the crisp crunch of ageing snow I looked up from my task and beheld a man approaching. A White Man, dressed in jeans and bright orange rubber boots. This was the only impression I received, for as he drew closer and mounted the few wooden steps to the front door the fleeing sun cast her rays from directly over his shoulder so that, squinting, all I could see was a looming silhouette against a backdrop of colourful, snow-strewn houses. The dogs howled and pulled at their chains.

  The figure cleared his throat and, in curiously-spoken Danish, asked me if my name was Malik, Ketty’s son. Still peering up at his obscured features – boot and needle clutched in alternate hands – I answered in the affirmative, adding that he may be disappointed to know that Ketty was no longer around. He coughed, made no more mention of my mother, but said bluntly that he was a friend of my father’s.

  My father? Now there was a character I did not often hear mentioned – ever, in fact. Eqingaleq, from where he sat dozing against the wall of the house, pricked up his ears.

  I suggested that I should pour us both a cup of coffee, for I had just made a pot in anticipation of completing the mending of my boots. I added that perhaps he should join me on the step. This would save him the hassle of removing his own boots, I pointed out. At any rate, I thought to myself, the house was quite dark and rather empty – for cruel fate had so dictated that I should be its only occupant – and certainly no warmer than the crisp, spring air.

  Once he had awkwardly murmured his consent, I sprang up and slipped inside for the coffee. The veiled darkness by which the man’s features were obscured was making me a little uneasy.

  The arrival of springtime was a blessing for me, if only for the opportunity to spend at least some of my waking hours outdoors, once the cold had shed some of its bite. The interior of the house could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a homely place: in addition to its severe lack of warmth, laughter and indeed furniture, every inch was filled with unwanted, unpleasant memories of my incapacit
ated mother engulfed by the suffocating smell of liquor, passed out unceremoniously on the floor or sprawled, slurring bitter nonsense, across the kitchen table. I had tried my best to better these living conditions, but there was nothing I could do without a family of my own to bring the place to life. Since I was denied my baby daughter, for reasons I struggled to comprehend, there seemed little hope that the walls might be scrubbed of their unwelcome memories. The front doorstep had its memories, too, for I could not count the number of times I had found my mother face down there in the snow. But at least here the sun’s rays had the power to alleviate the vestiges of much of this past unpleasantness.

  When I returned with two cups of fresh coffee my visitor had, as bidden, taken a seat on the step. I could see him more clearly now: the thick grey hair uncovered, the straight mouth, the beaked nose and calculating blue eyes. It was his eyes that made me shiver with unease, though I did not know why. There was something familiar about his face, I thought, but I could not place him.

  He shifted his feet, apparently ill at ease as I scrutinised his features. He accepted the coffee with a polite nod.

  He was an Englishman, he announced, when I had barely managed to sit down and before I had the chance even to prompt him. He had arrived that very morning, on the year’s first supply ship from Denmark, and once in the town had sought me out, for shortly before leaving his country for the journey here he had received some news which concerned me directly. I was certainly intrigued: how could the outside world, I wondered, find itself linked to me? I lived at the end of the world; I was a ghost caught between two peoples and two conflicting ways of life – one dying, one dominating.

  It was not good news, my visitor continued, pulling at the neck of his jumper and trying unsuccessfully to conceal his discomfort. He had come to tell me that my father had recently passed away, a heart attack at the young age of fifty-five. He was very sorry, he said, to have to bring me such news. I nodded, if only for the sake of a response. This was not bad news, nor was it good news; it was simply news from a distant land that concerned people other than myself and could surely have no foreseeable impact upon my own circumstances. I had not met my father. I had not met anyone who had known my father well, save for my mother – who had always refused to discuss the matter, exploding only with profanities if I dared encroach upon the subject – her brother, and perhaps the man now sat on my front doorstep, shifting uncomfortably and letting his coffee go cold.