Jonah creeps up my path, stepping from brick to brick, his mossy eyebrows flecked with dust and too many memories.

Jonah is the name I give him, for I’ve never met him, and it was the first that came to mind.

He knocks on my door, and he must know I can hardly hear it. Not my poor old ears, no; it’s his knuckles, cracked and grey, and many times have they knocked on this door. Long before I came here. How do I know? There’s nobody else here to tell me, that’s how I know. So few homes, and they used to be crowded with island songs, laugher, pipes and dancing. Everyone knew everyone else. Now there’s only me and him. You can’t be strangers with someone if there are only two of you.

He stands, head slanted, listening. He lays his ear against the door, and so I listen for his breathing, but it’s only the icy air calling through the gaps and all the hidden places that have always known the wind’s song. Four minutes pass, perhaps. I watch him from my dark corner, from behind the old plaid curtains. Maybe I’m a little curious, but I don’t want to be. I came here to avoid people, and I thought it would be easy, but it’s hard to avoid people when there are so few about.

I tire of watching him, and I go into the kitchen to boil up some tea. Fire’s nearly out. I found enough wood to last me a few weeks, and I’ve enough food. I don’t know where he gets his. There’s a post office in the village, but the village is on the other side of the island, so unless they make deliveries, he must walk over there.

Late at night I lie in the rusty old bed, and I look out the window. There’s an old black tree standing in the garden, and this time of the year she’s not there, but sometimes she is, that little bird. I’m not sure what you’d call her. A little yellowy-green thing. I listen a lot more than I used to, and I watch more, too. There: the stars, look. Millions and millions. An eye can never tire of looking at the stars, and getting lost amongst them.

A person can truly be alone when she looks at the stars.

I wake up early, most days. Sometimes I do my washing, and other times I make the bread. I have but one set of cutlery, and one bowl, and one tin-can opener. Back when I used to cook, I hated it. Now I wish I could. But there’s no soil here that can grow anything half decent, and I certainly can’t traipse up to the village every week for fresh produce, so tins it is. I was doing my washing on this day, and I didn’t get inside quick enough before old Jonah appears behind the scraggly hedge down the lane. So I watch him come. He’s wearing the same old brown trousers, and shoes without soles, and a terrible old patchy flat cap. His hair’s mostly white, and down to his shoulders, but he manages to keep a respectable beard.

“Annalie,” he wheezes. “I thought you was gone.”

I wait till he’s walked up the path to the line. He seems to smile behind my sheets.

“I’ve not gone”, I say. “Jonah. Why are you always knocking on my door?”

“The sheep are lost, Annalie. What can I do?”

I know there have been no sheep here for decades. So I say, “You go and look behind the hill. They’ll be grazing there, and you see if I’m wrong.”

I watch him go. His head sticks out like a pigeon’s.

I follow behind him, see him turn the corner, and then I carry on until I reach his cottage. It’s tiny and whitewashed, with an ancient herb garden gone to seed and an old metal cart in the back garden. There’s no fence. Fences don’t mean much out here. Same goes for locks: I shove at the door, and it pushes in easily enough.

The windows are covered with tatty old sheets. The floor is bare and nails stick up in places. Even for me the ceilings are low.

I creak up the stairs, and there’s an old desk in the corner of his bedroom. A few photos lined up against the back and on the windowsill. Apart from that it’s bare. There’s a straw mattress in the opposite corner, facing away from my own bed in my own bedroom. In his desk there are letters tied up with fraying twine and ribbons. I decide to take them down, and sit with them at the kitchen table, waiting for him to return. Then I go back, and open a can of beef stew, and take it over to his cottage, so I know he’ll have something tonight.

When he returns, Jonah seems unsurprised to see me in his kitchen.

“There ain’t no sheep there Annalie,” he says, taking off his cap. He slumps down at the table.

“I made you some stew,” I say.

He nods, and starts to eat messily.

I am hungry for stories. My own has consumed me for too long.

“Jonah’s not your name,” I wonder aloud to myself. “So what are you called?”

“You know me, Annalie.”

“Suppose we go over these letters, eh?”

He pauses, gravy dripping from his beard. The spoon falls heavily. He shakes his head. “Oh no, you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t look in them, Annalie, it’ll only upset you.”

“All right then, I won’t. But you’ve got to call me Cora, for that’s my real name.”

But he seems to have forgotten, and goes back to eating. I slip the letters into my apron pocket. Mine’s gone cold, and I leave it for him.

The island is an open prison. It’s no more than a few thousand hectares, and I know most of it by now. I came here to be free, and to not be free. To be free of people, and myself I suppose, but to be trapped in one place, so that I can run no more, so that I have to stay and grow roots. I needed somewhere small and confined like this.

Upstairs, there’s an awful leak. Now that it’s raining, water trickles down the wallpaper, as though the house itself is crying. Mourning its inhabitants, whoever they were.

When I came here, it was deserted just like the rest of them. No money, no fish left, worthless. Families left, and didn’t take much with them. These cottages are all hunched up in their little patches, like wild things growling at each other, but inside they are soft, decaying, pitiful.

I open the first of the letters: Dear Father, it reads. All’s well. When are you coming? My conscience pricks, and I scan to the bottom of the letter, picking up just the odd words: Mama, bathroom, new cooker; and then I read who it’s from. Your loving Leanne. Then I begin to invent stories for Jonah. He was married, and his wife strayed, took his only daughter, left him broken and mad. (I don’t have much of an imagination.) Now he thinks I’m her. I listen to the rain, watch the tears. I think to myself, the old bed is going – I can feel it, and I’ve got no flesh to cushion the springs. I think about how Tommy and I would lie on the bed when he was a little boy, back when homes were heated and there were radios and things.

The next day is fine, with thin wisps of clouds hanging miles and miles up. I knock on Jonah’s door, but he doesn’t answer, so I go in. On the scratchy table is a note, but it’s garbled and illegible. I know one of the words is a place behind the hill. The name is local, obscure, nothing that a geographer would know, or perhaps anyone else but the islanders. I know it, of course: it’s a cove, the only place on the coast where the waves are calm and there’s sand on the beach.

Birds skitter about in the sky. I have always longed to be a bird. Nobody knows you, nobody cares for you, and you can observe everything from a safe distance. The sky is so blue, and the leaves so green, that perhaps the blackness would be held at bay. To be a dot against the sky, away from everything. I smile then, and it’s the first true smile since I’ve been here. I begin to jog a little, and I’m soon behind the hill, where there’s no breeze. There’s the cove, and that tiny speck is Jonah.

“Why did you leave me, Annalie?” he cries, when I get to him. He’s knelt down in the sand. “Why did you go?”

I don’t want to be her, but I don’t want to be me either.

“I came here to be free,” I say. It’s not even an answer.

Jonah nods, and a big sparkling tear rolls from his left eye. “You went to be free. No good here. Not enough people, no jobs.”

“Why didn’t you go?” I ask.

“Too many people,” he says. “I can’t go. I can’t go, don’t make me!”

“I won’t make you. I won’t.”

“I thought you was dead, Annalie.”

“I nearly was. If I’d stayed there … trapped like that. I nearly was.”

Tommy left when he was sixteen to join the army. A lifetime of his father’s beatings had toughened him up so that he didn’t really need me around. I was always so useless anyway. I’m not very big, and I’m not one of those mothers who knew what to do, and where to seek help. I never did hear from him again after that.

I wonder about Leanne, or Annalie, and feel the letters crinkled up against my stomach. I lead Jonah to a shelter between two outcrops, and we sit down on the beach.

“I’ve got your letters – I think you should read them to me,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Can’t read them.”

“May I?”

A pause. A nod, slight.

I take them out: there aren’t many. The last of them should hold the most answers. I let my eyes drift over the off-white page, and the sun shines through it, highlighting places where the ink has congealed most.

“She was such a child,” Jonah says. At first I don’t notice the shift to third person. “Dear, sweet little thing. Her mama was the same, but wanted a better life for the babe. More opportunities. Took her away, said I was unfit, just before her birthday. She wouldn’t let her come over. Kept telling her evil things about me.”

“She might come back yet,” I say.

“Doesn’t know the way,” he says. “I don’t know where she’s gone. Some days I make sure to myself she’s dead, so’s I don’t have to think about going out there.”

“I have a son. He’s lost too.” I turn to him. “His name’s Jonah.”

We both look out to sea, out past the invisible bars and into the dark sunset. He’s a prisoner here, and so am I, and though we’re in different cells, we’re together really. I came here to be free, and he will leave to be free.

I shall make sure of it.

About Michael Bennett

Michael grew up in the flat arable landscape of Suffolk, and spent most of his formative years wandering seldom-trod paths between hawthorn hedges. He is currently engaged in numerous creative pursuits, viola-playing, painting and writing being the top three. He lives in London, but dreams of a small detached cottage hidden down an overgrown lane.

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