Instead, she lays her out in the underwater cave beneath the island. With her own hands she chooses limpet shells to trace the pattern of her bones. Scallops to emerge from her scalp like curls. Mussel shells over her eyes. Cowries on each of her fingers and toes. A grey pebble with a white streak of sky over her nipples. An oyster, rainbow-sheened inside, its hard grey barnacle ridges the whorl of her pudenda.

In this way, shell by shell, stone by stone, she becomes her.

NANA PEAZANT: The ancestors and the womb, they one, they’re the same. We carry these memories inside of we . . . Let them old souls come into your heart . . . let them touch you with the hands of time. Let them feed your head with wisdom that ain’t from this day and time. Cause when you leave this island, Eli Peazant, you ain’t going to no land of milk and honey.

Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 1991

No woman is an island-ess.

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, Los Angeles, 1997

13
Women

ZOE: [Weeps]

Nobody knows who placed the first shell. It may have been Stella – she has a good eye for a symbol. The day after Eva disappeared, women began arriving at the Islands of Women Study Centre, with their vulva-shaped offerings in the vagina-shaped harbour, where the air has the reassuring rank tang of dead fish and seaweed. They brought fingerprint-pressed cowries, lapis-streaked mussels, yellow ridged limpets, and left them in her honour. Not, as the council tried to claim later, to the detriment of public health (littering of highway).

JEN: I would go past in the evening, and tidy up the shells. Some people were treading on them, perhaps on purpose; it was making a mess . . . and I didn’t like to think of Eva’s memory being trampled on. It was chaos. Eva missing. We were waiting for the coroner’s report.

Since it was cold at that time of year, and in order to encourage people to linger – it was really important to do that – the women began giving out soup and tea, chocolates and cake; miniature bottles of whisky, donated by the Archipelago Women’s Whisky Distillery. They set up a book of remembrances under a shelter.

JEN: The sons wanted a memorial service; and for the estate’s affairs to be settled. They still had no idea, at that stage. Then there was Zoe.

Zoe went looking for her, after the storm. She walked up and down the beach, regardless of the tide, the waves breaking over her, feet slipping on seaweed, face cold with tears.

She stood looking out at the island of Cwen. She knew that Cwen knew.

NINA: Mum said, she needs to go and see a therapist. My doc in Ayrness referred her to a guy – a man. Zoe’s friends said it was outrageous but still. That’s who was available in Ayrness at short notice.