The Island at the End of Everything Read online

  ‘Don’t—’ exclaims Mr Zamora, but Nanay has already ripped the petition away from the tweezers, leaving a shred behind between the glinting pincers. She scrawls her name in a tiny piece of space, then puts it back down on the desk, jabbing the pen back into the inkwell so little black spots spray everywhere.

  ‘There. Now everyone on this “sorry rock” has signed it,’ Nanay hisses. She is breathing hard, her scarf flaring in and out. Behind her, Bondoc is looking at her as if she is as wondrous and terrifying as a tiger.

  Mr Zamora is staring at her too, but as if he has seen a ghost. His arms are raised as if he still holds the petition, the fragment quivering in the tweezers. His skin is pale as paper, his puffy lips mouth wordlessly. His gaze flickers from Nanay to the ink spots that are blooming across the square piles of papers, across Nanay’s scarf. He whimpers like a kicked dog, and looks down at the spreading black on his pink tie.

  ‘Mr Zamora?’ says Sister Margaritte.

  He whispers something.

  ‘Pardon?’ she says.

  ‘Out,’ he says, quiet as a hiccup. ‘Get out.’

  ‘But, sir, you haven’t given us an answer,’ says Capuno, stepping forward.

  Mr Zamora reels back, knocking over the chair and drawing himself up jerkily.

  ‘Don’t come near me!’

  Capuno stops mid-implore.

  ‘You want an answer?’ Mr Zamora turns his back on us and opens the drawer of the dresser he has stumbled against. He takes out a small bottle and scourer, then squirts the clear liquid from the bottle on to the ink on his tie. A sharp smell prickles my nose, like the tang of the hospital. While he speaks, he begins to scrub.

  ‘The answer is no. No matter how many petitions, how many signatures, no matter how much you lepers and your offspring want a different answer, it will still be no.’

  ‘But—’ starts Capuno.

  ‘And you’ll be wanting a reason, as if the reason is not clear enough!’ Mr Zamora is not looking at any of us, which I am glad about because I don’t want him to see me cry. ‘We want to end this disease. And do you know how we kill a disease? We stop . . . it . . . breeding.’ He stops scrubbing his tie and puts some of the clear liquid on his hands, then begins to scour his palms. ‘We stop it multiplying. And to do that we must keep clean.’ His palms are scrubbed raw.

  Sister Margaritte touches Nanay on the shoulder and we all begin to back away towards the door. Mr Zamora continues speaking into his hands, which have started to bleed.

  ‘We stop it cleanly in its tracks. We take the clean ones, and give them a clean life. Surely you must agree that is important above all things. Take these butterflies,’ he says, gesturing at the walls. ‘They have never known disease, or danger. I even give them a clean death – is that not a kindness? They are beautiful. Clean. Untouched by the world.’

  Sister Margaritte opens the door and we hurry out. Before she closes it I look back at Mr Zamora, still scrubbing, surrounded by the rainbow patchwork of dead butterflies. He looks up, finally. He is panting, his eyes wild.

  ‘We will make history of lepers,’ he says, ‘and a museum of this island.’

  Sister Margaritte slams the door.

  My hands are shaking, and even Bondoc trembles as we leave Doctor Tomas’ house. I hear Doctor Tomas asking Sister Margaritte what happened, but she only shakes her head and walks past us all without a word. She takes the path down towards the sea, towards church, and I know she is going to pray.

  The rest of us walk in our own little bubble of quiet past the hospital and its queue of people, past the new houses, all the way home. Nanay is limping heavily, leaning as much on me as she does on her stick. Bondoc hovers, but she does not fall.

  At home, I boil water and steep ginger root. I huddle next to Nanay as we drink.

  ‘He’s sick,’ says Capuno finally.

  ‘We knew that already,’ rumbles Bondoc.

  ‘No, really sick,’ says his brother. ‘Did you see how he laid the tweezers and magnifying glass out? Such precision. And how regimented those butterflies are?’

  Lepidopterist, I think, rolling the word out over my silent tongue. Lep-i-dop-ter-ist. The beats drift softly up and down, like butterfly kisses.

  ‘And how he reacted when I got near him,’ says Nanay in a small voice. ‘He wasn’t just disgusted, he was scared.’

  ‘We should report him,’ says Bondoc.

  ‘To who?’ sighs Capuno.

  ‘The government that sent him!’

  ‘But they are in agreement,’ says Capuno. ‘He is acting on their behalf.’

  ‘Then why the petition?’ Nanay says sharply. ‘Why give us that hope?’

  ‘Because it was worth it, wasn’t it?’ says Capuno. ‘To try everything?’

  She does not answer him. I am not sure either.

  THE BOAT

  B

  ecause these are the last days Nanay and I will be together – until I have lived six years without her and can come back to live in the Sano areas – we decide to do fun things together, but feel so sad it doesn’t really work. Six years is half my life so far, every other day lived without her. It feels impossible.

  Most of the fun things only make it feel more impossible. We plant the garden with vegetables I will not see grow. We fix the wickerwork on chairs that will need reweaving by the time I get back from Coron. I say ‘we’, but Nanay spends most of her time wincing when she thinks I’m not looking. She finds it hard to kneel, to grip the spade, to scatter the seeds. She does not even try to help with the chairs. How will she do any of these things without me?

  It is only now, when I am about to leave her, that I realize how much I help her. Like a tide coming in, it has crept up on us, me doing more with each passing year: I help her dress, cook, clean. But if Nanay is worried, she does not show it.

  Every day she insists we go to our favourite beach for lunch, though it is a long walk. It has the whitest sand and despite there being a small harbour with a pier nearby, none of the fishermen launch their boats from this side of the rocks, so often we are alone. I think of our visit to Mr Zamora, of his fear, and, most of all, of the butterflies.

  ‘Why does he keep them like that?’ I ask on the day after our meeting.

  ‘To make himself feel powerful,’ says Nanay. ‘To make himself feel clever.’

  ‘And because they are beautiful, maybe?’

  ‘Do you think it is right to trap a thing because you think it is beautiful? To kill it? I love butterflies too, you know.’ Nanay swallows. ‘Your ama planted flowers to bring them to our house. Two summers I saw them, just before the rains. They’d cover the house like leaves, like . . .’ She scrunches up her face, trying to find the right word. ‘Like petals – orange and blue and white. They stayed for a whole week one year. It was enough to see them for a few days alive. Better than seeing them for ever but dead.’

  I am barely breathing as she says this. She hardly ever talks about my father, has never mentioned details of their life together. A house covered in butterflies – I try to picture it.

  ‘Is that why you want to bring the butterflies here?’ I say. ‘To the patch by the bakery?’

  Nanay blinks, as if coming around from a daydream. ‘It was a long time ago. And that patch is gone now, built on.’ Nanay looks me straight in the eye. ‘My point was, Mr Zamora does not collect them because he likes them. They’re just specimens to him. A project. Something to know a lot about because it makes him feel clever.’

  ‘Your butterfly house—’

  ‘A world ago. Come, let’s eat.’ Her voice shakes, and though I dream of a forest with a house at its heart, pulsing with wings, I do not ask her about it again.

  On our fourth day of lunch at the beach we haunch in the lapping waves and watch for shrimp. The tide is coming in and they arrive like a flock of birds, tiny and blue-white. Nanay sieves them from the water with a piece of cotton. I scan for the scuttle of crabs, and one nips me on the toe before I can catch it. Some
of the older boys from school are playing ball nearby, and they point and laugh as I hop around, rubbing my toe.

  Nanay offers to swap jobs and I manage to collect a basketful of shrimp while she gets several small crabs, young enough for their shells to be soft. We dig out a firepit and Nanay lights the wood she has brought from home.

  She fries the shrimp with a little oil and garlic root in her shallow metal basin. It heats quickly and when it is hot enough she adds the crab.

  ‘This was my mother’s,’ she says tapping the basin. ‘It was her mother’s wedding present to her. She was going to give it to me at my wedding but then I was brought here. So she sent it to me.’

  The sadness in her voice has many layers. I used to ask Nanay about her family constantly, but it always made her shrink inside herself, or snap at me, so I stopped. I don’t know how to draw her out of it because I feel sad too, so I make myself useful instead and fetch banana leaves for us to eat off, and straight sticks to pick out the shrimp and crab.

  The crab shells are crisp, the insides cooked into a lovely melting lightness, and we eat them whole. The shrimp are so small they jump from the oil as it spits. I salvage some from the beach and am able to make Nanay laugh by pulling faces when the sand crunches between my teeth. We don’t really talk as we eat so it is barely noon when we swallow the last crab, split down the middle. Nanay is tired and her foot hurts, so she lies down in the shade with her face cloth on to stop sand going in her eyes and nostrils.

  I watch the boys kicking the ball. The tallest, Datu, will also be leaving for Coron, and I wonder about going to talk to him, but he sticks out his tongue when he sees me looking. I am good at playing on my own so I don’t mind.

  First I cover the firepit, because the wind is blowing the flames too close to the treeline. Then I pretend the sea is acid and that I must build trenches to stop it touching us. I dig with my hands as fast as I can, but it becomes harder when I get below the soft, loose sand and reach the harder, damp stuff. The tide is creeping closer and I want to ask Nanay to move further up to stop it touching her, but I know she will say I am being silly. It is just a game.

  Eventually I can’t stop the water lapping her feet – she can’t feel things on her soles any more, which is another thing being Touched means for her – so I sit beside her and watch the sea instead. It seems to hold more light than the sun is giving it, as if there is a second sun or a mirror below its surface, so the whole ocean dazzles at the sky. It is almost too bright to look at, and I am squinting when I notice the shape far out at sea.

  At first I think it is a rock or shadows cast by the waves, but it moves closer and grows larger the longer I watch. It is soon only a Bondoc-stone-throw-away, and the voices become audible and the smell of many bodies catches on the wind. The boys stop their game, picking up their ball and taking off towards the town.

  I have seen boats before, but never one this big, nor one so full of people. It is sitting so low in the water that the sea’s shimmer makes it look as if the passengers are walking on water. It is rectangular, formed of planks of wood nailed together, and the varnish gleams wetly in the sunlight. It has been built in a rush, just like the houses, I think.

  When I look at the people, they seem unfinished too. I have seen Touched people arriving before of course, but usually one at a time, brought by silent men on small boats. There are so many here, and some are missing limbs or noses. There is a man with what looks like an overgrown baby strapped to his back with stained cloth, but when he turns I see it is not a baby, but an old woman. I can tell by the shape of her body pressing against the cloth that she does not have her legs. Rosita has no legs either, but she is carried in a wheeled chair with a cloth draped over, not bundled on someone’s back like an infant. It doesn’t seem right.

  The boat is now only a me-stone-throw-away, and it is so long only the front can tuck itself alongside the wooden pier. There are probably a hundred passengers, no more than a church service’s worth, but I feel I have never seen so many Touched before. From what I can tell, there is not a person there without visible signs. As Mr Zamora said, they must have come from all over the Places Outside. I wonder how they must be feeling, crammed in amongst strangers with only one thing in common – the only thing that matters to the government and people like Mr Zamora.

  ‘You, child – come and help moor us!’ The man steering the boat has Touched sores on his arms. They are open and weeping, and Doctor Tomas told us that means they’re infectious and warned us against going near, but I don’t want to be rude.

  There is a girl about my age squashed up against the side facing me. Her nose is folded and she is watching me carefully. Her eyes are bright with fear, like a caged rabbit. I want her first impression of Culion to be good. I look at Nanay, who is still sleeping, undisturbed by the stale smell of unwashed bodies and the sounds of voices speaking in unfamiliar dialects, and walk to the pier.

  The boatman throws the rope. I catch the heavy, stinking end and wrap it around a post the way Capuno taught me. I don’t think it will hold very well but I can’t stay close to the smell for long enough to double knot it. I step back and the captain climbs up and places a wooden plank across the gap.

  ‘Did the government man send you?’ His voice is rough and clipped.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Typical,’ he mutters. ‘They’re in a rush to get us here and no one to greet us!’

  ‘Ami?’ Nanay is sitting up, shielding her eyes from the sun. I watch her see me, then the boat, then the people. She looks at the people for a long while, many breaths in and out through her nostrils. Then she is up and running towards me, fumbling her face cloth over her mouth and landing heavily on her Touched foot.

  ‘Ami, away! Get away from there!’

  Many people turn to watch her hobbling, and I feel bad for them. I can tell she is afraid. Bondoc says you can catch fear easier than becoming Touched, and some of the arrivals are looking nervously around for what has scared this wild-eyed woman enough to make her run on her Touched foot.

  ‘Get away, I said!’ She arrives panting, the boatman watching her with amusement clear on his face.

  ‘What’s the problem, lady?’

  Nanay is already pulling me, barging past the passengers that have disembarked and drawing me close to her.

  ‘Nanay?’ I start hesitantly, but her face is furious. She has my upper arm in a vice-like hold and is heading back towards home, although her stick and her metal basin are still on the beach.

  I look back over my shoulder and see that the arrivals are still standing on the beach, probably waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Halfway up the hill we pass the boys and Datu says, ‘Was it them? From the Places Outside?’ But Nanay does not slow down to let me answer.

  As soon as we are home Nanay wheels me around roughly to face her.

  ‘What do you think you were doing?’ she shouts at me through the cloth. ‘Do you really think I wouldn’t notice?’

  ‘Notice what—’

  ‘It’s that stupid petition, putting ideas in your head!’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Don’t play innocent with me. I know what you were doing! You took me to the beach today, you knew they were coming, you knew I’d fall asleep—’

  ‘We’ve been to the beach every day, Nanay.’ I follow her with my eyes as she paces. I have never seen her so angry.

  ‘And if I hadn’t woken up you would have . . . would have . . .’ Her breath is coming in big gulps like a fish out of water.

  ‘Nanay,’ I try again. ‘I don’t know what you are saying. But I’m sorry for upsetting you.’

  She turns so sharply I think she is going to continue shouting, but then she crouches before me. I hear her inhale deeply but she doesn’t speak. Her eyes, pinched by worry lines, are no longer angry. She sinks back on to the floor and wraps her arms around her knees, resting her chin on them. She is shrunken, whereas only moments before rage had grown her big as Bondoc.
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  I sit down too and rest my chin on my knees too, to show that I am happy to wait for her to tell me what is wrong. Finally she unwinds her face cloth.

  ‘You really weren’t trying to be near those people on purpose? The ones with open sores?’

  I am more confused than ever. ‘No. I was just helping them moor the boat, like Capuno taught me.’

  Nanay’s head sinks down and her shoulders shake, so I crawl forward and wrap my arms as far around her as they can go. ‘I thought you wanted to be near them. I thought you wanted to catch it.’

  ‘Catch it?’

  Nanay’s face is already swollen from crying. ‘Those people, their sores were undressed. It would have been easy to . . . catch this.’ She gestures at her nose.

  ‘Oh.’ I can’t think of anything else to say. Nanay takes my hands gently and looks me straight in the eyes.

  ‘Ami, I believe you. But I do not believe you haven’t tried to think of a way to stay. I love you, Ami, and that means that I want a better life for you. It is a blessing that you have stayed with me so long, and I want you to stay for ever. But I will not be here for ever.’ Her voice falters. ‘This disease is more terrible than you can understand. Mr Zamora is right. There is no future on an island of lepers.’

  I want to correct her use of the word, but my mouth has stopped working.

  ‘So you must go. It is for the best. You will be all right in the Places Outside. You are the kindest girl I know.’ She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the berry. ‘Did you give me this?’

  I nod.

  ‘Then I must give you something. That is how love works, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Giving and receiving.’

  ‘Exactly. Not give, give, give, like that God-of-the-Church demands.’ She looks around her and then claps a hand to her forehead. ‘I left the basin!’

  ‘I didn’t want to remind you when you were angry.’

  She laughs softly. ‘I was quite scary, wasn’t I? I got that from my mother, too. Well, let’s fetch it.’