The crabs were bad ’cause they were the devil in disguise. Crabs, we’d been told by Gracie’s older sister, was a disease you got when you were bad with a boy.
‘They’re blue in the sea, and red when they’re cooked,’ Tabs said. ‘They’re red when they’re shown the fires of hell, see. That’s their true colours. Crabs are the devil and the devil wants us to rant and rave. He wants us to take off our knickers and lay down with him on the cliff tops. He wants us to throw out our souls like stinkin’ rubbish. And then we can’t ever go to Hollywood.’
I nodded at this logic.
‘If you’re unclean with a boy, you have to drink the blood of a cat and pray for forgiveness.’
‘Ain’t it a bad thing, cat killin’?’ I asked. I was worried for our cat, Feda, who was out half the night.
‘Not in the eyes of the Lord,’ she said, angel-like. ‘Not when the blood’s for cleaning souls.’
We crossed ourselves hard and looked to the sky.
‘One day, there’ll be a path, or a ship or summat,’ Tabs said, skipping along the rocks. ‘And then w’can run away, see.’ She slipped on some seaweed then and her blood was the colour of burnt anemone. She cursed and threw her face into the water, yelling down at whatever was in there. The waves swallowed the sound and changed it into bubbles. Tabs came up spitting, choking, yelling her rehearsed words of war.
It’s hard work, see, chasing devils out of our kingdom.
Me and Ma live two streets away from Tabs. We live in a house with Frank. He ain’t my dad though, see, my dad was a pirate – he was probably famous and everything but Ma doesn’t like to talk about it. He was killed by a sea-devil what swallowed his ship. Frank ain’t nothing like a pirate; he’s a wuss. He collects bugs – all kinds of ’em. He traps ’em, gasses ’em and carries ’em around in a mauve leather suitcase. Once, he whipped out a giant silk moth and said it reminded him of Ma.
He spends most of his time in our greenhouse, polishing the windows.
I reckon if our house was flooded by a sea-devil, Frank’s suitcase would swell up and pop open and all the paralysed bodies of the butterflies and luna moths and woolly bear caterpillars would drown, ’cause they don’t know how to swim good. I wouldn’t though, see. I’m the best swimmer on our street. Ma says you’ve got to know how to swim good when you live on an island.
She says an island’s just an atom, waving at the sky.
‘Let’s play pretend,’ Tabs said.
Those days never ended well.
That time she reckoned we should play Houdini and strap ourselves to chairs – throw ourselves out from the rocks and flap our legs like dancers. Cross ourselves and whisper prayers and hope we didn’t drown.
‘Like them witch trials,’ she said, peeling a starfish off her bucket.
‘We ain’t witches, are we? ’Cause witches ain’t good people.’
‘Witches is devilry,’ Tabs spat. ‘They get to wear nice clothes in movies, but in real life they’re evil-bad. Movies is where people can act out the Bad Stuff, ’cause movies is only pretend.’
Then she made me strap her to a dining-room chair and throw her out to sea.
The month Wayne Cross got a video camera, Tabs did a lot of Bad Stuff. She’d go visit him in the afternoons when she was supposed to be egg-collecting. She met him in the barn beside his parents’ cattle shed; told me she was halfway to Hollywood, and I was left to catch crabs on my very own, scraping all my hair up high so as to watch the tide better. Sometimes it can sneak up on you quick, see, like it’s stealin’ the crabs back into its mouth.
I broke the crabs apart from their bodies so the devil couldn’t reincarnate. Then I lit a fire in the back of the cave with a match I’d stolen from church. God wouldn’t mind, but the vicar might, so I didn’t tell him. Crabs don’t really go up in flames ’cause the devil is resisting. They go red and then – later – they go black, like the colour of their souls. They smell bad, too, like fingers on fire.
It was a long summer, crab-killin’. My skin got red and my hair went wild. Some days Tabs came, and some days she didn’t. When she did, she had a fire in her eyes, like she’d danced all night. She’d stopped chewing nets and started chewing tobacco. One day she said she felt butterflies growing fast in the centre of her belly and I threw the net over her head, joking-like. She rolled around in the dirt and said she was like buried treasure. Then she laughed so hard I thought she might explode.
Mostly, she lay on her back and let me do all the work. She talked about how she was starring in films that were selling in a shop far, far away. The only shop I know of is Martha Graham’s greengrocer’s, but I kept quiet ’cause sometimes Tabs likes to play pretend. She’s full of stories, she is. A tank full up to the brim with hundreds of words that all mean different things.
‘My cat’s missing,’ I told her. ‘You haven’t seen Feda, have you?’
She stared straight past me and pretended not to hear.
‘I’m saving up,’ Tabs said. ‘One day, I’ll swim out into nowhere, and then I’ll be everywhere, see.’
I nodded, as though I knew what she meant. But all I could think of was dark holes and nothingness. Like when you close your eyes tight and see strange fireworks there.
Feda had been missing for three days when I found him. It was late at night and he’d bled out from the neck. His fur was all matted, and his body was swollen. I found him floating in a rock pool down by the bay. I tried to hunt for his cat-soul but I didn’t know what it would look like. So I just patted his broken head and looked out to sea.
One day, I thought, a huge wave is going to come. And I’m the only one who knows how to swim.
I could hear her then, Tabs, up on the cliffs. The whirr of a video camera. Grunts in the dark. Wayne Cross angling her bones to the light. Tabs burying her way to Hollywood, smiling all the way.
Human Satellites
To the north-east of our galaxy, there’s a planet called The Hours.
Time migrates there from other superclusters; it’s where atoms flee to retire.
The Hours is composed of soundbites from across the universe. Snippets of time and space pulled in by some foreign gravity that lines them up like jigsaws.
Like moving conveyor belts.
Like films.
When astronauts fly past it, their very atoms stir.
The surface of The Hours is obscured by the half-lives and faces contained in the snippets of time and space that live there. Those flickering stories with no stars to power them. The half-lit half-light.
They take turns showing themselves, advertising life. Creatures we can barely imagine and oceans that aren’t made out of water.
Microbes dancing microscopically.
The planet folds in on itself and expands, kicking at its skin like a baby bump.