4 October
Salvation Island
EVERY LOOSENED THREAD
I haven’t unpacked my cameras yet. I’m itching to, but this ridiculous situation with Cleo is hanging over my head like a goddamn guillotine. Coming here is once-in-a-lifetime stuff for me. There’s no space in my head to accommodate an obstinate British woman looking over my shoulder or chewing my ear off. Being here is an intensely personal thing, and when it comes down to it, I’m a pretty private man.
You didn’t mention your wife. Cleo’s voice grates in my head from last night, and I slam the kettle down harder than necessary on the stove. No, I didn’t mention my wife because here’s the thing: it’s none of your damn business. I told you a bunch of other stuff in the hope you might try to understand that this is more than just a vacation for me, that this island is in my DNA, and that whether you like it or not, that does give me priority. I glance across the lodge to where she’s still sleeping, passed out with her dark hair spilled across the white linen pillow. The woman perpetually looks as if she’s on the set of a Snow White movie. Again, my fingers ache to close around the familiar form of my Leica; I can’t look at anyone or any place without assessing the shot, mentally adjusting the lens, choosing the precise moment to capture it exactly as I see it. The thrill never gets old. I took more shots on my own wedding day than the guy we paid to take photographs for us, images that have been pulled out far more often over the years than the official white leather album with our names embossed in gold letters on the front because they catch the people we love in their most unguarded moments. Susie’s mother, cupping her beloved daughter’s face in her hands. Daryl, my best friend and best man, casting a longing first look across the sunlit church towards Charlotte, Susie’s colleague, now the mother of his daughters. I swear you can almost see threads of love arc their way over the heads of the congregation from his eyes to her profile. A second later she turned and met his gaze; I captured that too. It hangs on their bedroom wall.
I’ve walked through every important moment of my life with my camera around my neck, and I’ve always known there would be a time in my life when I’d come to Salvation to capture the landscape and meet its people, to create a visual record of the place that runs in the blood of my grandmother, in my mother and in me. A few days before I left, Susie referred to my coming here as a vanity project – harsh-edged words chosen to cut me, diminish me, to underscore how far apart we’ve grown. She knows me better than anyone. She’s listened to me tell our kids stories of this faraway island as their eyes fluttered to sleep, the same stories my mother used to tell me. She knows full well this runs soul deep for me. Vanity project? Right now, it’s more like a fucking sanity project.
I’ve followed the trail that leads to Salvation’s northernmost point. My first glimpse of the island’s simple stone church and the graveyard beyond it – a collection of white granite crosses scattered across the clifftop, strikingly simple, their words turned out to face the sea. I walk amongst them, hands shoved in my pockets, my shoulders bunched against the harsh wind. Jeez, the weather here is a daily struggle. The last names carved into the granite are unknown to me yet familiar – Macfarlane, Campbell, Sweeney, Macdonald. They echo my grandmother’s stories, faces on faded black-and-white photographs stored in an old cookie tin in the back of her kitchen cabinet. I wish I’d found the time in years gone by to ask more about them, to make notes on the back before the early stages of dementia started to throw dust covers over her memories. And then I find a cross inscribed with ‘Elizabeth Doyle, December 1907’， beside her husband, ‘Henry Doyle, March 1909’。 I study the scant information, hungry to know more about these long-passed relatives of Barney. Of mine. Elizabeth died when she was seventy-nine, Henry just fifteen months later, aged eighty-four. They clocked up fifty-six years together. I stand behind their graves and look out to sea, a hand braced on either stone. ‘Fifty-six years, folks,’ I say. ‘That’s a damn fine number.’ Life couldn’t have been easy for them out here on the island, especially back then without modern comforts. Or maybe I’m wrong and it was bucolic and romantic, far from the madding crowds and all the better for it. ‘Less complicated, anyway,’ I say, thinking of my own tangled marriage, faltering when we’re barely into double figures. Day by day, week by week and month by month, Susie has systematically untied every knot that bound us together, and with every loosened thread she drifts further from me. She said there wasn’t anyone else, just that she needed something different. She said it hurts like hell that she isn’t sure if we’d make better friends than lovers. It doesn’t seem like we’re either at the moment. And that, Elizabeth, Henry, is why I’m here, three thousand miles from the people I love most in the world. I hear a creak – wind in the trees, or perhaps it’s Henry turning in his grave at the thought of a Doyle man being so remiss as to let his family slip through his fingers.