‘Different Islands’ by Cassia Gaden Gilmartin

‘Left at the roundabout,’ Cecelia says.

Rachel takes the left off a roundabout with beds full of red and yellow flowers, though her instinct was to go straight ahead. On the way through she sees a road sign labelled Tulsk – they’re going the right way, and she tries not to let that disappoint her. Two hours have passed since they left Dublin and, though Rachel has been this way before, she’s relying at this stage on directions from Celie’s phone. None of the turns have come where she thought she remembered them.

They’re on their way to Achill Island because Rachel used to go there every summer with her family, visiting a friend of her mother’s. The woman sold things made from seashells: jewellery, ornaments, a little figure of a mouse that Rachel, as a child, got from her as a present and kept for years in her room. The mouse wore a tweed suit and a bow tie, and had tiny black glasses perched on its nose. The woman’s dead now, and Rachel doesn’t know if anyone kept her shop open.

‘They have it on a baby blanket, too.’ Celie’s looking at something on her phone, pinching the screen to bring the image closer. Ever since Rachel told her about that mouse, she’s been looking up pictures of craftwork from the island. This, though, is the first time she’s found something to give to the child they’re planning for.

‘What do they have?’ Rachel asks.

They’re back on the N5, with no turns to worry about for a while. The road goes on for as long as Rachel can see, lined with evenly spaced trees that grow out of openings in the pavement. The leaves flicker in the sunlight. She can tell how fast she’s driving from the speed of the trees disappearing behind her, and she tries to think of nothing but the sight of them vanishing quicker and quicker.

‘The rainbow fish,’ Celie says.

She means the design from the fleece shop’s website, Rachel realises, the one they found earlier on a ladies’ jacket. A fish in striped fabric, with a bright blue eye and scales sewn on one by one. Celie said that, if they found the shop on Achill, she might buy one.

Growing up, Rachel always had one of those fleeces. Every time she grew out of the one she had, her parents would buy her another. She remembers tugging at the jackets on the lowest rail, when she was too small to reach the others. Stepping in between the hangers and letting herself be covered up.

They’re picking up speed. Outside, trees flash by them.

‘I like the fish,’ she says.

She does. She thinks its scales, bumps of soft fabric sticking out from the rest of the softness, will feel good to touch. Something in her can see the baby liking it, too. Small fingers testing out those bumps, fingers that don’t know how it feels to touch things yet.

‘We could all match.’ Celie reaches out to brush a hand against her leg.

It’s only a joke, but something still tightens inside her. Matching clothes don’t make sense for the place they’re going. Not for the windswept cliffs, not for the beaches where she went out collecting shells as a kid and found only broken pieces all the time.

That song won’t stop playing in her head today, the one by Simon & Garfunkel about another Cecelia, a woman who can’t be pinned down. Every time Rachel thinks of her partner’s full name, it feels like a warning. She wants to have a baby, but she’s not sure she can have one with her Cecelia – and she doesn’t know which should take priority, the child or the woman. There’s something about the way Celie delights at things, about the way one source of delight fades away when a new one makes itself known.

‘Let’s hope they have it in the shop,’ she says.

Her mind is laden with images. Celie in Lanzarote, picking out jewellery made of lava and olivine. Celie in Marrakesh, piling up bright handwoven throws for the couches. Celie on Crete, not buying anything but soaking up the sun, taking it home in the burnished brown of her skin. They’ve been around the world, seen all the new places Celie chose, and this is their last trip before trying for a baby. A shorter, cheaper trip, to somewhere that belongs to Rachel this time. A thank you, Celie called it, and a chance for Rachel to gather her strength before setting into the trials of pregnancy. She remembers what Celie said on the beach at Sandymount last week, when they agreed to rent a cottage on Achill, near Keel Strand: ‘I like you on beaches.’ As if Rachel were part of the landscape, its most beautiful, most treasured part.

This isn’t a place that makes you beautiful, she wants to say. Your hair tangles and your lips chap until they bleed.

*

First thing yesterday, stumbling downstairs, half-light of a cloudy morning in her eyes. She had woken to find the bed empty, though it was only seven. Rachel had to put in an extra hour’s work at the library before leaving the next day, but with the school term over she should have been the only early riser. Celie, an art teacher, had nothing but correcting to do in June.

Celie was already downstairs, swathed in her blue dressing gown, scrolling through something on the computer. She sat on the couch with her legs crossed, the laptop balanced on her knees.

‘Hey,’ she said when Rachel reached the bottom of the stairs.

‘Hey.’

When Rachel went to boil the kettle she found her coffee already made, the good kind from the filter, and a slice of bread waiting in the toaster. She turned to say thanks and found Celie smiling towards her – the computer light falling on her hair now, bringing out the gold in it. Rachel gave an answering smile and popped down her toast. She could feel Celie’s eyes on her as she moved around the kitchen.

Once she’d buttered her toast and reheated her coffee, she joined Celie on the couch. ‘What are you reading?’

Celie turned the laptop to face her. ‘Check out this guy. He looks like me, and he’s an artist.’

She didn’t know how Celie could tell what the man looked like. None of the profiles on the sperm bank’s site had pictures, only facts: eighty kilos this time, 185 centimetres tall, blonde hair and blue eyes. He was a photographer, his profile said, and he liked to travel. His name was Leo. To the left of the profile, where his picture might have been, there was a generic image that might have been the outline of a head and torso.

He might give them a child with Celie’s eyes, her hair, maybe even her talent for painting. Just not the curve of her lips, not the lines on her palms. Rachel could look at her partner and child and pretend they were bound by blood, but only if she didn’t look too hard.

She turned the computer back towards Celie. ‘Try again,’ she said. ‘I had a cat called Leo.’

*

Each day, Celie wears the colours she’s planning to paint with. Rachel doesn’t think she knows this about herself, but when she’s working on mountains she rushes from their room in green and grey. For a day of seascapes it’s always blue. Today her shirt is cream but the gemstones in her necklace are pink, the soft kind that colours clothes for baby girls. Rachel doesn’t remember seeing that colour on her before. It stands out against the grey of the car seat.

Outside, the rare sunlight is still holding strong, but there’s nothing for it to shine on here save grass and heather. Telephone lines stretch overhead, too thin to catch the sun. They’re three hours in now, between towns, and there’s nothing ahead for as far as Rachel can see. On the side of the road, a sign welcomes them to County Mayo.

‘We still need to get something for Anna,’ she says. Celie’s niece, her brother Rory’s daughter, has a birthday the week after they come home. ‘We should look when we’re in the shops.’

She doesn’t like to mention Anna. The other day, she suggested again that they ask Rory to be their sperm donor. Celie refused to even talk about it, and everything to do with him feels like dangerous territory now. Still, Anna is the only niece they have. Celie’s sisters have no children, and Rachel has no siblings of her own. It feels important, now more than ever, that they find a gift the child will love.

‘I saw something the other day that she’d like,’ Celie says.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah, these blankets shaped like mermaid tails. You can stick your legs inside and sit in them, and they were big. They’d come up to her neck.’ ‘Those sound perfect. She could use it as a sleeping bag.’ She thinks of that pretend camping trip they went on in Rory’s back garden, one time when she and Celie were asked to babysit. The way Anna sat under a blanket with her arms clasped around her knees, eyes alight as she listened to the stories Celie invented around the patio fire pit. She thinks of the way Celie had forgotten what stories she told, when Anna asked another night to hear them again. Everything she says and does feels like a test today, rolled out piece by piece to trap a woman who doesn’t know she’s being tested. Rachel doesn’t want it to be like that.

‘They had them in different colours, too,’ Celie says. ‘There was one that’s all different shades of purple, with these shiny scales on it.’

When Anna draws or paints she always uses purple, far more of it than you’d ever see in nature. She’s obsessed with the sea and always draws things that live underwater. Last time they went to visit Rory, she just painted a stretch of purple ocean. Celie suggested she make it a sunset scene and add a pink sky over it. When it was finished, Anna let them take it home to frame and hang in their living room. This is what matters, Rachel tells herself. Celie forgets things like the content of old stories, but she remembers favourite colours.

‘Where were they?’ she asks.

‘Dunnes, I think.’

‘Damn, we should have got one before leaving.’

‘Sorry. Hopefully they’ll still be there.’ There’s a pause, with nothing but grass and heather to break it. ‘I think she still believes in mermaids.’ Celie smiles, her head lying back against the headrest, her face lifted up.

‘How old is she this year?’

‘Seven, I think. Maybe eight.’

‘Don’t you know?’

There’s no answer, but Celie’s face lowers. Her skin looks pale, washed-out, against the cream of her shirt.

Rachel waits as long as she can make herself before speaking again. ‘I never got into the mermaid thing as a kid.’

‘You spent so much time by the sea. Didn’t you wonder what was down there?’

Celie looks at her, expectant. The flicker about her lips doesn’t dare to be a smile. Rachel almost wants to give her something, some gesture to show she’s still allowed to smile and ask questions, but nothing comes.

‘I guess I did,’ she answers.

In place of dunes, Keel beach has hills of stones that rise and dip like a second ocean. When Rachel was a kid, she found the skeleton of a spider crab somewhere among those stone dunes. The shell was bumpy and bone-white, each leg twice the length of the body, the whole thing sprawling to the width of a dinner plate. Her mum and dad let her carry it back to the cottage, to bring back to Dublin and display in her bedroom for years. She came across another one the year after – the colour pinkish this time, more suggestive of flesh and blood. She wanted to take it back with her, but her parents said she couldn’t. The thing hadn’t finished rotting, and flies were still feeding on it.

*

A week ago, Celie came home with a bag of dillisk that she’d picked up in a health food store.

When Rachel cut open the plastic, she closed her eyes and let the smell hit her – not quite the smell of the sea, but something like sea dried out. Once she’d washed it she took a piece, bunched it up and ate it all at once. The taste made her think of her mother’s friend: the swing of her walk, the swing of the bag she used to carry around and fill with pieces torn from the rock pools. She used to bring Rachel out collecting with her, and once they had enough shells they’d forage for seaweed. Rachel could never tell the difference between the edible kind and the others, but she’d watch the woman pull the fronds apart, taking the ones she wanted and leaving the rest behind. In reward for the help Rachel always tried and failed to give, she’d get a bagful to bring home for her mum.

Celie took some too, a long thin frond that she held up against the window to see its colours in the afternoon sun. ‘I’ve never had food you can see through like this,’ she said.

Rachel held up a piece to look. There was the reddish purple she remembered, but with a brown that she’d forgotten around the edges. In her memory it had always been opaque all over, but Celie was right. In the sunlight she could see that it was transparent but dotted with darker patches, spotted like old skin.

Once they’d had enough, she put it away in a cupboard and didn’t touch it for days. She couldn’t bear that Celie had told her something new about this, the food her mother used to eat, but she didn’t know why that was so hard.

*

At last, they arrive at the island. The bridge has been rebuilt since she last came here, and driving across it now feels different. With a footpath and fence on the left-hand side and a white wall on the right, it looks imbalanced, as if its two sides belong to different bridges. It ends in a series of arches that join together at the top, like a ribcage splayed out above them.

Without saying anything she parks at the SuperValu, as they planned to do. They buy fruit, smoked salmon, things that taste of sun and saltwater. They don’t talk much, and their silence may mean nothing or it may be waiting to hurt them.

Once they’ve loaded the bags into the car, she leaves Celie smoking in the car park and goes to use the bathroom in the gift shop across the road. It takes stepping back outside, from among the coffee table books and stuffed toy sheep, to realise the air is different here. The afternoon sun has faded, leaving grey skies against which the shops and people are the only points of colour. The wind blows harder than it did in Dublin.

Celie stands very still in front of the car, raising her cigarette now and then to her lips. She doesn’t seem to see the people rattling back and forth with trolleys, or Rachel walking back to join her. For as long as they’ve been together, she’s been able to do that – disappear into her own world no matter what’s going on around her. It’s a gift unique to the children of big families, Rachel thinks, something that she herself will never be able to imitate or understand. To feel the peace of solitude, she has to really be alone.

‘One more,’ Celie says, lighting another cigarette as Rachel reaches her side.

‘Okay.’ She’s glad enough to wait. Right now, she doesn’t want to show Celie the island. She feels certain the reality of it will disappoint her, and all this time they have managed to cover up that feeling, talking about clothes with the whole rainbow in them when most of the time there’s more grey here than rainbows.

Even now that they’re together, Celie stares into the distance, to where you can see the mountains rising. She will say something soon, Rachel knows, and it could be something that will hurt them both.

‘We should bring our kid here,’ it comes at last. ‘When we have one.’ ‘You haven’t even seen it yet.’

‘I know. I like it, though.’

That makes sense, a kind of sense that takes the strength out of her. She says nothing, but allows herself to lean back against the car bonnet. She wonders which of her stories have made Celie like the thought of this place. The rock pools with their indistinguishable seaweeds, the stone sea, the way the shadows of the cliffs darken the water. The shop with the rainbow fish.

Across from them, at the opposite side of the car park, a man and a woman pile bags into their boot. When they’re finished, the woman lifts their toddler from his stroller to strap him into the back seat. There’s something terrifying, Rachel thinks, about the fact that two people can make matter together, make a living thing that starts as clustered cells but grows and grows. There’s something sad about the fact that she and Celie can’t.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says, when the car on the opposite side has pulled away. ‘I don’t want to use the sperm bank.’

Celie’s expression remains the same, as if the statement has failed to surprise her. She takes a drag on her cigarette. ‘I just don’t want you to have Rory’s kid. Screw him; he already has one.’

There it is. A catch in her breath that makes the smoke she exhales waver too.

‘I know,’ Rachel says.

‘Why does it matter? Why can’t it just be a stranger?’

Once, when she was seven, she sliced up her hand on broken glass. Her mother washed out the dirt, then held her hand, turned it over and stuck a plaster to each cut. There was a slit across her thumb, and the plaster for that one wrapped round and round. She thinks: blood ties. Not something to tie up what’s bleeding; the phrase doesn’t mean that, but ties made of blood itself. She can’t explain out loud that, to her, the biological link she wants her family to share feels like that bandage wrapped around her thumb.

‘I don’t know. I just –’ There are people here, men and women who wouldn’t understand their problems, passing in and out of the shops. She doesn’t know how they came to be talking like this in a car park, at the gateway to a rural community where people hear and remember everything. ‘I want us all to be related somehow.’

‘We will be.’ Celie stubs out her cigarette butt on the car. She lowers her voice. ‘We’ll be a family. You know it doesn’t matter where the sperm comes from, right?’

‘I know in theory; it’s just –’ She hears someone else come out of the SuperValu, their trolley rattling. ‘Can we get back in the car?’

Back inside, she doesn’t try to finish what she was saying. She clips her belt into place and rests both hands against the wheel. There are no people here, and with the windows closed there’s no wind. There’s a silence while Celie waits for her to speak.

In the end, Celie is the one to say it: ‘We need to leave it a while, don’t we?’

‘Maybe we do.’

*

In the early days of their relationship, Celie used to make sketches of her any time that she was sleeping or sitting still. The best ones would be redone in watercolours later, and Rachel would hardly want to see them. The way she looked in those paintings always surprised her – the eyes seemed too piercing, the body too smooth to be a vessel for her own jagged thoughts. She’d tell Celie she liked the paintings. Later, she’d try to make herself like them, sitting and staring into those alien eyes that were meant to be her own.

It scared her for a long time, being watched that closely when she didn’t know how she looked. It felt creepy at first, but after a while it didn’t.

Once, when they’d just moved in together, Celie did a painting of nothing but the curve of her hip. With her eyes closed, she can remember: the clean white sheet that Celie put on their bed just for the occasion, her own body a pink freckled mass against it as she lay naked on her side. She’d forgotten to shave the trail of hair descending from her navel, and it felt too black against the whiteness. She remembers how her eyes pricked at the thought of Celie painting on those hairs, one by one – and how, no more than a minute into the work, Celie came over to correct her posture. The pressure of a hand pushing back her hip, sharpening the angle of her body against the bed, leaving everything exposed.

That painting started as a compliment in the kitchen, as hands on either side of her waist while she emptied breakfast cereal into bowls. ‘It’s so small,’ Celie said, and when she took away her hands she kept the distance between them, so that Rachel could see for herself.

Rachel stepped into the gap, wanting to be touched. In bed an hour later, holding her, Celie whispered her idea for the painting.

*

There’s nothing left now but the drive to Keel, another twenty minutes in the car with their windows open and the air coming in. Even after the four hour journey, they’re early for their appointment to receive the keys to the cottage, so they drive down to the beach instead. Everything here is as she remembers it: the cliffs, the caravan site, the sheep with splotches of different colours on their sides to mark them as belonging to different flocks.

A few months, they’ve said, and they’ll talk again. They both have things to think about.

They step out of the car, onto the stretch of grass that leads to the sand. Here, the ground is flat enough to let them see the waves coming in. This is the gentle part of the beach; there are no stone hills. If they were to keep walking away from the cottages, Rachel knows, she could see the stones again, but she doesn’t want to go that far today.

She watches her feet as they walk. The grass is covered in sheep droppings and, as she always used to be at the beginning of a holiday, she’s nervous of stepping in them. There was a period of years, an anxious phase, when that fear would never go away no matter how many days in a row she walked this path.

‘Hang on; let me show you something,’ Celie says when the dirt starts to turn to sand. She digs her phone out of her pocket again. ‘I did a sketch of you after we went to Sandymount. I forgot to show you, but I thought I might paint this one.’

It’s been years since Celie drew a picture of her. She bends to look, while Celie shelters the phone with her hand. In the picture, her hair is loose and sailing around her face. She’s dressed in an old raincoat that’s too big for her, the sleeves pushed up, their material bunched halfway up her arms. Though her mouth is tight, there are lines of laughter around her eyes.

The wind is strongest here by the ocean, and the waves are low but quick against the shore. There’s no one around save a few people, walking in the distance, whose features she can’t make out.

‘I like it,’ she says, and then ‘I’ll figure out what it is, about the baby. Why I’ve wanted it to be someone related to you so much.’

Celie puts the phone away, and reaches out to take her hand. ‘We’ll figure it out.’

*

In her memory, her hand is bleeding again. She sits on the floor, in a sea of broken glass and shells, beside an overturned cabinet. On all sides, handmade shell creatures stare down at her from the shelves.

She was trying to reach something on top of that cabinet, while her Mum and the owner were engrossed in conversation. The adults whispered to one another now and then, laughed when she didn’t know what they were laughing at, reached out and brushed one another’s arms. She could have waited to ask them for help, but she didn’t.

It might have been the creatures that made her start screaming. The fish with each fin a different shape and colour, each a different kind of shell. The owl with plastic googly eyes and the pointed shell of a sea snail for a nose. Dozens of them on the floor, smashed into their composite parts and even those parts shattered.

She didn’t see much of her mum’s friend for the rest of that holiday, and years passed before they went out again to collect shells together. Her mother stayed with her though. There was the drive back to the cottage, all in silence.

The bandages across her fingers, the one around her thumb pulled tight enough to hurt.

It was sometime after that the worries started, about what she might step on when she walked across the grass. The washing of her hands when they didn’t need washing, the plucking out of hair that could have been left alone.

Rachel misses that woman, even now. She told good bedtime stories. There were wrinkles around her eyes.

*

‘Let’s stay here a while,’ Rachel says when they reach the tideline. Right now, she doesn’t want to rediscover what the rest of the island looks like. They each have their imaginings.

‘Okay.’

She’ll figure out the reason why she needs Celie to be tied to their child by blood. Maybe, when she figures out why, it won’t be a reason anymore. She looks at her partner, tall and pale against a sky that’s turning pink. The stones in Celie’s necklace shine, even in the low light, and Rachel thinks of them now as the colour of skin. Celie is painting her again. Maybe not yet; they haven’t got that far – but she’s captured Rachel’s form in pencil, and she’s wearing the colour she might soon paint with around her throat.

The tide moves with a motion like breathing, in and out and in. It’s the only living thing here, besides herself and Celie, and she wants to be closer to it. She steps forward, so that the water laps at her sandals. She shivers. There’s a chill in the water, the winter’s cold lingering in it, that won’t go away all summer.

They’re here now, and not for the reasons they thought they would be. There’s no pregnancy about to take its toll on her body, no need to build her strength, nothing to thank her for. They’ve spent four hours cooped up in the car, but it feels as though they each made a separate journey, as though each were travelling to her own, separate island. Still, it must be the same sea that pulls at their toes now. It breathes. She wants to know if Celie sees that too, but she doesn’t have the energy left to ask the question out loud.

‘I saw a chipper on the way down here,’ Celie says at last. ‘Want to get something to eat?’

Rachel blinks. She was starving on the way past the cottages, looking out for a place to get dinner, but she didn’t see it. That bewilders her, even makes her a little sad, but she’s glad that Celie spotted it when she couldn’t.

‘Sure.’ She reaches out for Celie’s hand, and waits for the returning grip. ‘Let’s go.’

From issue #8: spring/summer 2019

About the Author
Cassia Gaden Gilmartin holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. Her work has appeared in Transnational Queer Underground, Eunoia Review and The Bookends Review.