Backformation

(Cassia-rose)

They say that once I was not here.

There are pictures on every wall. The same eyes sitting in slightly different faces. Someone wrote names under them once, but this same aunt says living in fifty years ago is far more interesting than whatever day it is now, so some of them might be wrong.

It is a place of wind and shells and three large houses, one with a light that is taller than I am, and might fit a word I found in my dictionary: candelabrum. (n. singular, from the Latin...) it is not my favourite book—I have to like a book for it to be my favourite, I think—but it is the most useful. Aunty gave it to me. Another one. She said that all the good children grew up with Flambards, which is the book’s name, if books have names. She feeds me, and told me that my mother was named Delphinium and that she took me away from here—she tells me that my name does not have to be Gratitude. Except that it always is, because she forgets this magic rule every few days and then thinks it up again, all new. She tells me about how she left, too, and lived for years in a place where there was no rain and no shells; where the roof never needed mending. But when she was old, and started forgetting, this was the place she remembered, and that is where she returned.

I never forget. I know all the same-faces. Most of them old, older than Flambards or dirt, and the young ones always have something wrong with them. A dead look, eyes that stare through you. The ones who never went away.

I must have come back in a boat, like the ones that come here, sometimes, with smugglers on them. At least, that is what I think they are. The men who always look angry when they remember this Island has three houses and a lot of same-faces. Smuggler is a noun, and it means suspect, an adjective. Suspect means untrustworthy. I hide when I see them. In one of the houses there is a cupboard under some stairs. That is the safest place. It is full of dust, but there is a sort of bed, and shelves. Aunty says she thinks a boy used to live there, which is silly, because there are no boy children—“only the odd girl, and less, now.” I hate the cupboard—in it the waves are too loud and the walls never stop creaking, and I think of the boy who had the shelves and am angry that he is not real—but it is safer, sometimes, and rain doesn’t get in.

I’m sure it rained, the day I came back on the boat. Beat, beat, beat, taking me here in little waves. Sending me back where I belonged. Aunty says she was glad to see me. “No one is ever sent back”, she says. “They only ever go away.” When she remembers, she tells me about “old days”, when there were horses and she had a grandfather who had a grand old cane. She tells me stories that she knew, about a woman who was wild and fierce and angry, who came back in a fine suit, with a beautiful princess on her arm; “dark, curling hair just as strange and different as silk.” The woman’s name was Rose. Nothing like Delphinium. Delphinium just went away. A small story with no real end. Rose returned, she returned and she took, adding the only little boy on the Island to her story.

Stories eat other stories. It isn’t fair that Rose should come and go with her princess and have the little boy as well. I tell Aunty this, and she laughs. “Patience,” she says. “There was another little girl, called Patience.” She was taken by someone with red hair and a man with sad eyes. She walked up to them, Aunty says, and told them that she wanted to be kidnapped. She used the Rose fairytale, which Aunty says all children know. She used it in a special way, which my dictionary says is “to cite,” a verb, back formed from the noun.

She was another who went away.

I am different. I came back. As a baby in a boat, beaten by waves. Aunty hasn’t said anything in days, and I can’t open the door to her room. The same-faces can’t remember which it is.

I keep my dictionary on the shelves, now. They seem to be built for it. But the room is small and dark.

If I was sent back, then I must fit here and be grateful. Perhaps, when I get old and blank, the little boy will stop making me angry, and I shall learn to forget.