The Island

Through the windows you could see the same cityscape, the buildings grey-brown in the smoke. I chose a table near the door, away from the television, facing Vee.

Jo sat opposite me. ‘Please tell me I didn’t just see my goddaughter pickaxing a guy to death?’

‘It’s a game. Tell me about Edvard …’

‘Yeah, Edvard,’ said Jo, serious again. ‘Edvard is having a really shitty day. He spent the afternoon trying to scramble the police helicopter. They have three pilots, and guess what? One pilot’s with his family in the Arctic, one can’t be contacted by phone, one is with her family on Tenerife.’

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘I realize you think this country is some kind of safe space where nothing ever goes wrong, but Edvard can’t track down a helicopter pilot because it’s Midsummer, and everyone deserves to be with their family on Midsummer. I mean, why aren’t you satirizing that?’

Through the doorway I could see Elsa, sitting talking intimately to Hedda. She must have felt my eyes on her; she looked up, then away. There was something furtive about her glance now, something very different from the way she had looked at me earlier, as if talking to Hedda made my wife love me less.

‘Cal, mate?’ Jo was staring at me.

‘Sorry. Yes.’ Elsa had turned in her chair. She was facing away from me. I looked at Jo. ‘I think maybe Edvard should speak to a journalist.’

‘You have news connections. Edvard likes you, Cal. He’d prefer to speak to you.’

Cheers from all around. They were announcing it now: no one had been killed in the bomb.

I stood at the far end of the pontoon, earpiece in. ‘Patching you through to Carly in the studio.’ A click, and I could hear the studio feed. Carly’s voice was clear and strong.

‘Back to that explosion in Oslo, Norway, and to eyewitness Cal Curtis, whose family experienced these traumatic events at close hand. Cal, everyone here is delighted that your family is safe.’

‘Thank you. And yes, you can almost feel the country breathing a collective sigh of relief. Sources close to the police tell us that not a single person lost their life in what looked, at one point, to be a major terrorist incident. The town hall bomb appears to have been something of a damp squib, an act of spectacle terrorism on a building where no one was working, though it does raise important questions as to the level of preparedness of this proud little Scandinavian nation.’

‘Thank you, Cal Curtis in Oslo.’

I took off the headset, looked out across the bay. The entire city was shrouded in smoke and dust. Terrifying, but strangely beautiful, cut by heavy shafts of sunlight.

A voice shouted. ‘Cal!’

I turned. Hedda, framed in the light of the bar.

The plume of smoke on the mainland. The concern in Hedda’s face. The urgency in her voice. ‘Cal, you have to see this.’

Fear beginning to take hold.

I was on my feet, running. Hedda turned, moved out of my way, touched my hand as I passed, followed me in. There was Vee, fighting her way through the people and next to Vee was Elsa.

‘My daughter,’ I said to the couple beside me. They moved to let me pass. I reached out. Vee grasped my hand. I pulled her towards me.

New images on the screen.

A girl sheltering by the water’s edge, a man waving desperately from the water. In the downdraught from the helicopter the fjord frothed and turned.

We crowded around the bar, every face staring up at the screen.

‘Lyden,’ said Elsa. Sound.

The barman nodded and turned up the volume.

Pictures from TVZ. A sundress of kingfisher blue. A shooting on an island near Oslo.

I saw the terror in Vee’s eyes.

‘Licia,’ she said.

I stood outside the restaurant, eyes fixed on the water, phone in hand. I could not look at Elsa or Vee, though I could feel their eyes on me, willing Licia to pick up.

A click. Licia’s voice.

Can’t speak now.

Funny.

Almost.

Punchline to a horrific cosmic joke.

5

That dread silence.

Further along the coast bonfires lit up the fjord. Here the pyres remained unlit. The sun was down now, the air cold.

We stood on the mainland opposite Garden Island, watching as the boats came in.

A hundred of us, maybe more, looking out across the fjord, waiting for our children to return, barely daring to speak. From time to time a hand sought out a hand, a body leaned towards another. Whispered words, furtive almost. But mostly I remember the silence.

In my hand I held the form that we had filled out:

Name: Alicia Curtis

Height: 5' 6"

Age: 15

Skin colour: white (pale)

Hair: blond

Clothes: blue dress (kingfisher, sequinned). Silver dragonfly bangle. Converse sneakers?

Identifying marks: none

Elsa had crossed out the height, had rewritten it in centimetres.

Height: 167.5 cm

As if that might make the difference.

I leaned towards Elsa.

‘Focus on New Year in Whistler,’ I whispered. ‘Focus on Licia coming back.’

Heavy winds had been forecast in Whistler that New Year’s morning, but it was lunchtime and the storm had not come.

I tried to hand Licia her phone.

‘No need, Dad.’ She smiled, dropped her skis to the snow, stepped into them, began fish-boning up the slope. Vee was waiting by the lift, arms crossing and uncrossing, tiny and impatient in her helmet and her stormproof one-piece. They were skiing without us for the first time, drunk on the excitement of it. Licia was the better skier, fearless, skilful, and fast.

‘Licia!’ I shouted after her. ‘Phone!’

She stopped and turned, waved, called out, ‘Enjoy your meal!’ Then she turned to face her sister, who cuffed her playfully across the temple.

And so Elsa and I sat drinking Riesling, toasting the New Year in, eating Swiss fondue from long skewers as we held hands under the table. We did not see the blackening sky. We were happy in each other’s company, easy in the warmth of the wine, and of the food, and of the fires in the grates.

That first gust. A metallic shriek, not easily forgotten.

We were on our feet, outside before we knew it, looking up.

Heavy sheets of rain beat down across the slopes, freezing as they hit the snow. Clouds curdled across the mountainside. Chairs swung in the lifts.

I ran up the slope, skis in hand, tried to make my way through the barrier.

‘Lift’s closed,’ said the man in the booth.

‘It’s still turning.’

‘For people heading down. You can’t go up.’

‘My daughters,’ I said.

‘Give a description to Mountain Rescue.’

An hour Elsa and I stood in the doorway to the restaurant, wet through, waiting for our daughters, each hiding our fear from the other. I pleaded with a god I did not believe in to return them to us, safe and unharmed. Vee was so small and Licia so naive. How stupid we had been to allow them to go.

And then they were there in front of us, laughing, high on the electric excitement of danger, wrapping themselves into us as we held them close.

‘It’s her fault,’ Vee was saying. ‘She made me not take my skis off. I must have fallen like fifty times.’

‘Dad, she snuck on to the lift again.’

‘Liar! You frickin’ dared me!’

I said, ‘I thought all the upper lifts were closed.’

Vee gave her sister a conspiratorial look. ‘Not if you know what you’re doing. And you didn’t have to come with me the second time, Licia. Or the third.’

Licia turned to me. ‘Dad, you might want to think about having my sister baptized. For her own safety. Before something bad happens.’

The event had become a happy memory. A disaster averted. A narrative of sisterly heroism.

‘Cal, this is nothing like Whistler,’ Elsa was saying, quiet as breath.

I tried to take her hand. She tried to take mine.

We could not do it; we could not touch. And when I looked around us I saw that the other parents stood as we stood, holding papers with their children’s details on them, undone by nerves, separate and alone, eyes fixed on the island across the water where something had happened, some dread thing for which we did not yet have a name.

A larger boat this time, bullet-nosed, striped green and orange at the bow. It seemed to lift itself above the fjord as it rounded the headland. Every face in the crowd watched. The boat turned a lazy arc, came to rest by the slipway. From the bow, two armed policemen surveyed the crowd, submachine guns readied. In the stern were two female officers, rifles half-shouldered as they scanned the shoreline.

Two more uniformed officers emerged from the wheelhouse, one tall, one small. Both men were blond, both were unarmed. Something strange in the way they carried themselves; some unnatural swagger. They stood on the deck, looked out at the crowd, expressionless. Narrow white bands cuffed their wrists. Two further female officers appeared close behind them, pistols drawn and pointed at the men.

I turned to Elsa, wanting to know if she felt my confusion, but she simply stood staring. I looked from face to face in the crowd. In every face I saw that same blank incomprehension that I saw in my wife.

Police officers.

I had not thought the perpetrators would be police officers. I thought they would be darker-skinned, that they would be … had expected to see the words jihadisme or islamisme in the news feeds, to hear those words whispered knowingly amongst the other parents, spoken carefully into microphones by the reporters on their live links. Our values. Their values. Allahu akbar.

To be plain: I had not expected these men to be white.

In the bow an officer lowered his submachine gun, dropped a gangplank into place. Metal slid on concrete. The officer beside him stepped ashore, his weapon at the ready. Grit crunched beneath his shoes. Both officers were onshore now, surveying the crowd, weapons readied. They glanced at each other, nodded. One of them turned, nodded towards the escort.

The unarmed men – could they really be police? – began to move towards the gangplank and on to the shore, each followed closely by a pistol-carrying officer who tracked their every move.

The crowd split into two, made room. These men – these suspects – were not just white, they were archetypically, almost comically white. Their hair was bleached, their noses narrow, their eyes blue, their foreheads high. So close they were now. You could almost reach out … I caught the eye of the first, the taller of them. The man nodded. I felt myself beginning to nod back.

I checked myself. Because this man … because surely no policeman would have done … what? What had these men done?

Please, where is my daughter?

None of us spoke. We parted quietly, made room for the police escort and for the two unarmed men who could not – surely they could not? – be policemen themselves. Their collars were undone. Their boots were scuffed and muddied. Badges hung from their shoulders, as if torn by briars.

The shorter man spat something on to the slipway. A gobbet of chewing tobacco, grey-black and shiny.

I caught the eye of another father, a man of my own age, saw in him my own confusion and rage. These men walk easily by us, arms cuffed, uniforms torn. When our children …

What have they done with our children?

Elsa was muttering something. I could feel her stiff staccato words, could hear the S sounds, and the Ks and the Ts. I did not look at her – could not look at her – must not let her see my fear.

The pistol-carrying officers led the men up the rise to two waiting police cars. The policewomen in the stern tracked the path of the men with their rifles, while the officers on the slipway scanned the crowd. I looked around. Still that dread silence. Still the faces, empty of emotion, though every parent there was thinking the same thought: Please. Our children. What have you done with our children?

The machine-gun-carrying officers moved away to join their colleagues at the cars. Doors opened. The officers separated the suspects, one into each car. The men sat calmly in the back seats, facing forwards; they offered no resistance. An armed officer got in beside each man, and another into the passenger seat.

Doors closed, headlights lit, engines started. The cars stayed where they were.

In my pocket my phone vibrated. I held it in front of me like some alien thing.

Dan.

I stepped carefully up the slipway and away from the crowd. I brought the phone to my ear.

‘Hey,’ said my brother’s voice, ‘just wondering …’

‘Nothing yet.’ My own voice sounded jarring, even at a hoarse whisper, as if I might cry.

A thin man in a black suit was quietly collecting the forms. Something familiar about him.

‘Sorry, Dan. I just …’ I turned away from the man.

‘Listen, Cal, whatever you need, you tell me, OK?’ I could hear the catch in my brother’s voice, though he did what he could to disguise it. The knowledge that things were bad, that Licia most probably wasn’t …

I couldn’t allow myself the thought so I said, ‘We’re good. We’re really looking forward to this whole thing being over.’

‘Everyone here is sending love, Cal. Daisy wanted you to know she’s thinking of you. Oh, but Lyndon’s at soccer practice, so he doesn’t yet know.’

‘Love back,’ I said, and ended the call.

The thin man in the suit approached me, hair mussed, shoes covered in dust. I looked down at the sheet of paper in my hand. I held it out to him, began to turn towards Elsa.

‘Cal.’ I felt his hand on my shoulder, saw the concern in his eye.

‘Oh my God, Edvard. Thought you were at police headquarters. Jo said …’

‘We’re all doing everything we can,’ said Edvard. ‘But it’s a mess. I’m really sorry.’

‘What do you mean?’

He nodded at the men in the police cars. ‘You don’t bring them ashore somewhere crowded. Things could have got out of hand. No one’s following protocol.’

‘So those men …?’ Again I couldn’t finish the thought.

‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘This is bad, Cal.’

I swallowed down my fear.

I nodded. ‘Wait …’ I reached into my pocket, pulled from my wallet a strip of passport photos that Licia had taken and never used, folded at the middle. I had rescued them from the trash, carried them with me without her knowing. I held out the strip of pictures to Edvard.

‘These will help,’ he said. He took a paperclip and attached them to our form, added the form to the top of the pile in his hand.

‘You’ll tell me?’ I said. ‘When you know something?’

His look told me not to expect too much.

Another boat, closing fast.

Behind, around, voices murmured then fell silent. Paramedics opened ambulance doors, unloaded equipment on to the slipway, waited. The boat was closer. I searched for Licia’s face, but Licia was not there.

Elsa knew it too.

Licia is not here.

Parents stepped forward, reached out, held to them their boys, their girls as they stumbled forwards from the boat. Some drew their children gently from the scene and away. Others knelt beside gurneys, ruffled hair, kissed foreheads and backs of hands. Beside them, nimble fingers found veins, attached cannulas, fitted monitors. These sons, these daughters: amongst us again now, but changed.

Water lapped. Wood strained against wood. Gurneys slid into ambulances, doors slammed, motors started. Around us, amongst us, news people spoke hushed words into shielded microphones. Ambulances began drifting up the rise, silent, blue lights flashing. We forced ourselves to turn to face the island. Too early for despair, too late for hope.

Down by the slipway children were standing in small groups, confused, waiting for parents who had not yet arrived.

A hand pressed gently against my back, another placed a coffee cup into my hand. I could not see Elsa.

‘Here.’ An arm in a grey sleeve, steadying me, so that I might not spill the coffee.

‘Thank you,’ I murmured. That small unbearable kindness: I looked only at the hand that offered it, afraid that I would give myself away if my eye met the eye of this stranger.

‘Be assured that all will be well.’ Words spoken softly, in accented English, the man’s mouth by my ear.

I glanced upwards, saw a shock of black hair, a grey vestment.

You can’t know that all will be well, I thought. But there was kindness in the man’s eyes. I nodded and thanked him for the coffee.

Further down the slipway I saw Elsa, staring out across the fjord. A new boat was crossing the mirror-flat water. A fresh wave of ambulances was approaching from the rise. All else was silence.

When I looked around again the priest was gone.

I was about to return to Elsa when I felt the phone in my pocket vibrate.

CELEBRATE

That same word. Another film clip that was not a film clip. This was either a mistake, or a cruel joke. I deleted the clip and blocked the number from my phone.

There was one child on this last boat. A boy, shockingly young, statue-like in the bow, arm in a blood-blackened sling. The officer at the wheel took the key from the ignition; his colleagues moored the boat to concrete posts on the jetty.

‘Oh please God, no.’

Every face turned towards Elsa. The boy stared at her, eyes wide. She had spoken the words loudly and clearly. I took my wife by the shoulder, drew her away from the group towards a rocky spit that pointed out towards the sea.

She looked across at the jetty. I followed her eye, saw the boy carried up into the air, held tightly in his mother’s arms. The arc lights picked out the wetness of their faces, the relief, the love.

‘I mean,’ Elsa said, her voice level, ‘we don’t know, of course, because no one has told us. But actually we do know, and every other parent here knows.’

She looked over her shoulder at the other parents. The group had scattered. Some stood looking out across the ink-black fjord. Others sat huddled in groups, blankets around their knees, clustered around the arc lights and the heaters. Elsa sat down, stretched her legs out along the rock, pointing out towards the island.

‘How many of us are there left?’ she said.

‘Sixty?’ I said. ‘Seventy?’

‘So that’s what? Forty missing kids? Fifty?’

‘These are just the parents who live near Oslo,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing.’

‘So it’s more?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So strange,’ she said. ‘Right now I feel calm.’

‘Because we aren’t out of hope.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, actually we are.’

The boy looked smaller than ever. He sat bolt upright, saying nothing, still in his orange life preserver, as his mother talked to the medical crew.

‘Cal,’ said Elsa, ‘you need to understand this: that boy is the last of the children.’

As the next boat drew near we saw the shrouded bodies on the deck and turned away.

A new wave of adults began to arrive. The parents of the missing, contacted by the police, setting out across the country, desperate for news.

Further up the rise were four rows of white tents. Officers were leading people inside, singly, or in pairs. Lights on metal stands threw vast shadows. You could see the stark outlines of the parents on white nylon walls, as they stood and identified their children. We saw hands raised to faces, saw shoulders bend and heads shake in disbelief.

When our turn came, a police officer led us to the nearest tent on the bottom row. On the canvas wall silhouetted figures slid a gurney into place.

‘I can wait with you, if you like,’ said the officer.

I shook my head. Elsa shook hers.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘Someone will be with you shortly.’

It was only then that we cried, wordless, by the white canvas wall that separated us from the body of our murdered child. We cried to prepare ourselves for what was to come: the fragmenting of bone, the tearing and obliteration of muscle and lung. We cried silently because we could not surrender to the pain, could not let it consume us, could not scream and rail and shout when we were surrounded by other parents who knew – but had not yet seen the proof – that their sons and their daughters would not be coming home.

‘Cal Curtis and Elsa Steen?’

I looked at Elsa. Elsa looked at me. She nodded.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice as steady as I could keep it.

‘Yes,’ said Elsa.

‘This way.’

Dry earth. Stale air. Disinfectant.

The body had been covered with a hospital sheet, ruched at the thigh. Pearl-white underwear on milk-white skin in the blinding light of the arc lamp.

‘Is this how she was found?’ I asked.

The officer nodded.

Half-naked, and so very vulnerable. She must have jettisoned the kingfisher dress.

I loved her for wearing that dress. Those iridescent blues, constantly changing. So exuberant; so very unlike Licia.

‘Promise me you will have fun,’ I had said in the hall.

‘Why would you think this time would be any different?’ Vee had said. ‘You know she never does.’

‘I promise I will.’ Licia smiled a serious smile as she leaned in to kiss me, as if having fun would require preparation.

‘Love you, Licia.’

‘Love you so much, Dad.’

My little girl.

How unlike herself she was now. How strange her hand looked, palm up, fingertips bleached in the glare of the arc light, like an object I knew but could not recognize.

I turned to the police officer who stood between us and our daughter. She looked exhausted, worn out by other people’s grief.

The officer stepped out of the way. Elsa knelt down, began to draw the sheet down Licia’s torso.

‘Please,’ said the officer. ‘You mustn’t touch.’

The child-white skin. The pair of bullet wounds in her shoulder, a finger-length apart, just above the left clavicle. The bruising that radiated outwards.

Seawater had emptied the wounds of blood.

Elsa’s hand up by her mouth. ‘Oh, my …’

Something odd. Wrong.

I stepped forwards, crouched down. A beautiful face. A girl’s face, tiny pink spots the only disturbance on her otherwise perfect skin.

Elsa put three fingers on the strap of the girl’s bra, ran them up and down.

‘You mustn’t touch,’ said the officer again.

‘Elsa,’ I said. ‘Step back.’

‘This is not …’

‘I know …’

‘But …’

The girl’s lips were a fraction tighter than Licia’s. Her forehead a fraction broader; her hairline a fraction higher.

‘Fuck,’ said Elsa. ‘Oh fuck.’ She gave a confused laugh.

I turned to the officer. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Laughter is not uncommon,’ she said levelly. ‘People often swear.’

‘She doesn’t understand,’ said Elsa.

‘There is no correct response,’ said the officer reflexively. ‘You are both very much in shock. I am here …’ she gave a professional half-smile, designed to reassure. ‘… to help.’

‘This is not my daughter.’ Elsa’s eyes were blazing.

‘Also a common reaction. Would you like me to call someone?’

‘It isn’t her,’ I said.

‘Would you like to be alone?’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. ‘This girl is not Alicia Curtis. This is someone else’s daughter.’

* * *