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The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead

E.M. Linden

 

The living have been leaving Tawlish for centuries; this evacuation is only the latest and last. There are good reasons for it: the freshwater spring gone brackish; the water, always encroaching; the colicky, relentless wind. No schools for the children. No doctor. We should have seen it coming, but sometimes we forget what the living need.

We cannot cross salt, so we watch from shore. Our loved ones and descendants wade into the sea. The men strain to hold the boats steady against the waves. Everyone’s weighed down by possessions, a village crammed into sacks and lifeboats. Spoons, spindles, fish-hooks, balls of yarn. A clothes-peg doll in a twist of old apron. Seabirds’ eggs wrapped in blankets: habits ingrained by generations of scarcity. They’ve even dug up their potatoes.

Katie Zell’s mother is already on the boat. The songbook is tucked inside her jacket.

Thirty-seven people. Only some of them look back.

They leave cold firepits and fulmar bones, middens, empty crofts with the thatch already collapsing. Sheep they’ve blessed and turned loose to fend for themselves.

And us. The dead of Tawlish.

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Katie Zell’s father has been dead longer than she’s been alive. Before he drowned, he’d hoped to sing her lullabies: the ones he sang to her older brothers, the ones his grandparents sang to him. Now, in farewell, he rests his hand briefly on her curls. Most of the living are oblivious to the dead, but the Zells are a noticing kind of family.

Katie raises her hand to his; perhaps she mistakes the cold brush of it for sea-spray. It’s enough. He smiles. That’s all there is time for: Katie’s uncle lifts her from the shore, over the churn of the sea, and seats her next to her cousin on the boat.

Old Maureen Stornaway is furious, sees evacuation as defeat. She clenches a knuckle of island rock in her pocket. Tiny luminosities watch her from shore: the ghosts of three of her children. She strains her eyes and peers back through the sea-mist. Maybe something shines there. After decades of loss, of wishing them still with her, this is the first and last time that she almost makes them out.

The rector, smug, takes nothing. He doesn’t need to. He has a house on the mainland, and — as far as he’s concerned — he’s saved thirty-seven souls.

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A Tawlish tradition: the living and dead send each other gifts. The living give tobacco and carved pipes, posies of sea-vetch, griddle-cake. Packets of seeds for Lizzie Knell. Wooden rattles and teething rings. Handkerchiefs embroidered with our names. They slip our gifts into the flames so that they’ll cross over to our side. Burnt offerings. The wind chases the sparks out of the sky. The gifts arrive smelling of smoke.

Our gifts are less generous. All we can send are dreams.

Tonight, all together, we dream safe passage for the living. Grudgingly, because they’re abandoning us; jealously, because we want them here: their songs and laughter reminding us who we are, their bones buried beside ours in the thin Tawlish soil. We dream them returning.

We dream them bringing our songbook home.

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The songbook holds all the magic of Tawlish. Spell-songs that nudge the wind and sing fish into nets, that knit bones and heal coughs and call the drowned ashore for burial. The rector feared our spell-songs, but they made life here possible.

We wish the living had left the songbook behind. Burned it as a farewell gift, perhaps. There’s no magic on the mainland, after all; the spells work nowhere but Tawlish. Perhaps we’re being childish — what use to the dead are spells for fishing and healing? — but we want it back.

We miss the songs.

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Somewhere on the mainland where only our dreams can reach, Katie Zell, her mother, and her two older brothers are making the best of a narrow, cramped house, far away from even the horizon line of the sea. We don’t know any of this. More things we don’t know: The air smells wrong to Katie. She misses the sound of gulls. But she loves the flowers in the town’s gardens, bright beneath the coal-dust in the air; daffodils instead of potatoes and turnips.

Katie’s mother gives thanks for jobs and schools and electric lights. A working stove. Unchapped hands. The neighbour gives her seeds.

“You see?” Katie’s mother stands in their small kitchen, shakes the packet at her three uprooted children. “We can grow here.”

None of them mention their dreams.

Katie’s mother insists they go to church, and Katie scowls at their rector and swings her legs. She doesn’t fully understand what’s happened to her life, but she knows it’s somehow his fault.

We don’t see it, but Katie’s mother wraps the songbook in the shawl that Katie and her brothers were baptised in, and tucks it away in her drawer. She props a blurred photo of Katie’s father on the mantelpiece.

“Who is that man?” Katie asks.

Her mother doesn’t answer. Tears gather in her eyes, and Katie thinks of sea-spray.

---

Maureen Stornaway struggles to hold what’s left of her family close to her. In her life she’s wrestled loss and grief and hardship, but never distance. She has no experience of loving someone far away. One by one those of her children that survived to adulthood move away for partners, bigger cities, better-paying jobs. They do not need her, she announces, and they should never have dragged her from Tawlish in the first place. She won’t visit. She’s still saying this when the first of her grandchildren is born, and she boards the overnight bus with her bags full of knitting.

Always in her mind, the three she buried on the island. The glimmer of small ghosts.

As for them, they cannot imagine what their mother is doing, have no idea that they still haunt her at all. They’ve no reference points for anything beyond Tawlish. They know they were once precious; all of them remember being held. And they achieved things, important things, while they were alive. One of them touched the sea. One took his first steps. One lasted only hours but she heard and approved of a lullaby. But now, despite all this significance, they think themselves forgotten. We don’t know how to comfort them.

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Years ago, the rector burnt a violin. He intended to destroy it, but instead it came to us. We, the dead, squabbled over it. Tore that little violin out of each other’s hands, wrenched it back and forth, cried over it. It was agonising: we knew it contained music, but without the songbook, we could not remember how to play.

Music, we remember, leapt like fire and waves. Music was one of the few bright things on Tawlish.

The rector, though. He was always a mainlander at heart. If we think of him at all, we roll our eyes and laugh. We have his measure. Our dreams are wasted on him.

In the graveyard of Tawlish’s only church, Lizzy Knell hovers, polishes her headstone. In life, they said she had a green thumb. She was the only person on Tawlish who grew flowers. She gave them to her neighbours for their weddings and adorned the church with them in spring. She cannot tend the flowers that grow over her grave, but she kneels close and pushes her hands among them anyway. Can almost feel the tickle of sea-lavender. The churchyard is a lovely spot: high but sheltered, overlooking the smaller harbour. Maybe she thinks of the rector more than most.

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We, the dead, clutch our shreds together, try to distinguish ourselves from the morning mist that breathes all over the island, hold tight to the gorse and use the rocks as anchors when the gales get up. There’s a formlessness without the living here. We erode; the land slips into the sea. We miss the cradle of our bones.

It’s cold, without the living. It’s very quiet.

Katie’s father worries no one’s watching over her. We can’t comfort him either.

Visitors still come to Tawlish occasionally: bird-watchers, historians, scientists. But they don’t notice us, and none of them bring what we need.

There always used to be singing. All through the generations the living sang, to the dead and to each other. Strands and skeins of song between our ancestors and our descendants. Sometimes lyrics changed, notes were dropped, new songs written and others forgotten, but the songs always told us who we were. Wove us together and held us in shape. There was always music. Over the rocks and harbour, mingling with the peat-smoke, hanging under our eaves. Between us and the painfully clear stars.

But the threads have gone slack. Silent. The living are letting us go.

We wait and dream, but they don’t return.

At first we think: our descendants are fortunate. They’ve safely crossed the strait. They’re living long lives.

But still nobody comes. It dawns on us slowly. Our families will never return to Tawlish. Not even to rest.

Even so, we send our dreams of good fortune and protection across the strait. We keep calling them home.

---

Maureen Stornaway and Katie Zell take the train to the seaside. Brightly painted changing sheds and matchstick boats. Wavelets. A pier lined with striped booths: fortune-tellers and sticks of rock. Nothing that could withstand a Tawlish storm.

By now Katie Zell hardly remembers Tawlish. “This is nothing like home,” she says, and pretends it isn’t a question.

Sometimes, Katie worries that she has no claim on the island. It is inarguably home for her mother and brothers. The moods of the sea are in their voices: lilt and rage and laughter. But Katie’s accent is imbued with coal-dust. She coaxes sunflowers from the narrow strip of yard their landlord calls a garden, but she never learns how to tie the knots for wind and fortune.

If we were there, we’d teach her. If we knew her worries, we’d send her dreams of welcome. This is always your home, we’d say. Katie would smile, and we’d remember the living need us too. It would be another kind of gift.

At the seaside, Maureen nods. “Nothing like Tawlish.” Privately, though, she welcomes the weak sunlight, the pale golden sand, the ice-cream van’s jingle. The seaside colours disappoint Katie, but Maureen is grateful for little disappointments. She needs distance. If this place were too like Tawlish, she’d be sunk.

Bad enough when a toddler trips in the sand. The mother picks the boy up and comforts him. Maureen’s arms unconsciously mirror the mother’s, shaping themselves around the remembered heft of her own one-year-old son. She left him on Tawlish with his smaller sisters.

She turns her face away. Too late: she’s spinning through thirty, forty, fifty years of memories. The pain is new and bright as a white-hot coin. No. Not that. A coin is small and can be handled. Grief is the sun itself. Everyone talks about it as if it rises and falls, as if it has seasons. The truth is, she’ll orbit it her whole life, and she’ll never be able to look at it without flinching.

“Are you all right?” Katie asks her. Katie’s a good girl, but how can you explain things to the young? Maureen Stornoway clenches her knuckle of island rock. The daylight could split her wide open.

---

Katie’s father would be so proud if he could see her now. He doesn’t know it, none of us do, but Katie is the first Zell to go to university. Her mother is thrilled enough for the two of them. Katie studies anthropology and travels the mainland, collecting Tawlish stories from the other evacuees. She listens to everyone: her mother, Maureen, even the rector.

At first none of the others see the point, but they take it in good part. Katie’s one of them, after all. And once they start reminiscing most of them can’t stop: the weather on Tawlish, the food, the beauty of the skies, the singing, the hunger, the gnawing cold, the way the damp crept into their lungs, the gleaming fish. Katie crams her notebook with stories and memories. She hears about the gifts for the dead, and who was buried where, and who had grudges and who died too young. She hears about her mother’s songbook. The Tawlish islanders tell her about her father and their own loved ones and insist that one day — any day now, maybe next summer — they really will go back to tend the graves.

Finlay Price gives her tea as thick as porridge and an old guitar of wood the colour of honey. “Your father sang,” he says. “He could coax a tune from anything. Your mother played the fiddle. Thought maybe you’d like to try.”

Katie doesn’t know it, but she has her father’s knack for music. Her mother’s ear. Her own singing voice. On weekends she bar tends in a pub and plays for ceilidhs at the community hall. Saves up for a violin.

Katie’s father never hears how easily music comes to his only daughter. If he knew what he was missing, his greatest regret would no longer be drowning. It would be that he never heard Katie play. She spins joy and tears from her listeners like yarn from wool. She has them up and dancing. She plays all the old ones. Fishermen’s Jig. Wedding in May. The Weaver’s Loom, that’s her favourite; it’s one they danced in the ramshackle hall on Tawlish. Feet stamping. Dancers criss-crossing the floor.

But her father never knows any of that. He never hears her play.

---

Our songs were twisty, tidal, sea-breeze things. Swells and surges, seabird squalls, glimpses of cloudless sky. We remember the dancing. Hands thumped on tables, feet on swollen floorboards. Pipes, fiddles, and goatskin bodhráns. The calling of the women and the men.

Even now, Tawlish is not silent. Gannets shriek against the wind and waves. But we cannot help it: we only hear what’s missing.

---

None of us know that we’re still remembered. How could we? The living don’t dream to us the way we dream to them. It’s not just that we miss them. We’re losing ourselves without them, our shapes and our names. We’ve no reason to carry on.

The island scares us now: we scare each other. We’re thinner. Perhaps it’s good they’ve left, we tell each other; we’re too hungry to be near them. We can’t trust ourselves.

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Sometimes the rector worries about the state of his soul. There is a woman back on Tawlish buried in consecrated ground. Lizzie Knell.

Lizzie chose her own end. Because of that, she should be buried outside the walls on the sinner’s walk, a rocky strip of land already falling away into the harbour, too badly eroded for mourners to visit. But the rector insisted she be buried in the churchyard. He knew it wasn’t right, but he was also human. He couldn’t bear to think of her family grieving more than necessary, having no grave to visit. Didn’t want them to feel shame over this bright, sad woman who grew flowers even on Tawlish, who whistled to her sheep and made her neighbours laugh.

In his prayers, he offered to carry the weight of her sin himself. He hides it from his congregation, can’t admit it even in his prayers, but after Lizzie Knell he finds he no longer truly believes in sin.

He’s not perfect. The islanders didn’t even like him that much. But he’s satisfied with how he’s spent his life. Thirty-seven souls. Thirty-six, shepherded safely in small boats to the mainland. And Lizzie Knell, with flowers on her grave.

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The latest Stornaway baby is named Lily. They wanted to call her Maureen for her grandmother, but old Maureen refused.

“Old-fashioned name,” she says. “Never liked it myself.”

Baby and mother are doing well. But only because of certain interventions, procedures that had never been available on Tawlish. Maureen dandles Lily, supports her head with years of practice, and lets the conversation wash over her. It’s only women talking, so the details are bloody and true. Monitor, she hears, induction, falling heartbeat. She doesn’t understand all of the medical terminology. Emergency caesarean. Blue. Resuscitation. Thriving. Understands enough. This baby stuttered back to life because they’re here. Mainland doctors and midwives, medicine and equipment.

The baby spits up a little on her shoulder, and Maureen forgives the mainland with her whole heart.

---

“Songs,” we remind each other. We, the dead. We’re almost gone now. “Music. It was like . . .” We trail off. We can’t remember who of us is which anymore, who belongs to whom. We’ve lost the names. Faces. Families.

We wish we could have seen them grow. We’d have danced in secret at their weddings, hovered next to them when they wept, welcomed the babies, kept watch at cribs and wakes. Instead, this rupture.

Another of us tries. “It was,” one says, “like a sound. A long sound.”

“It was words,” another says. “Or sometimes not.”

“It was wood,” one says. “Like that violin.”

We have to admit it. We’ve forgotten our songs. We’ve forgotten.

---

We don’t know that Katie’s life is music. She plays at Maureen Stornaway’s wake. She marries and has children; her children have children. She sings them lullabies. Passes the little scraps she remembers of Tawlish on to them.

We don’t see Katie inherit her mother’s songbook. Our songbook. We would have been jealous, but also pleased to see the care she takes with it. She unwraps the little book and thumbs through its salt-splashed pages. She tries to make out the blurred notations of the songs.

---

One by one we slip into sleep. All we have now are our dreams.

---

One day two young men arrive in a small rowboat. One navigates the deadly currents as if by memory. We surface from our dreaming to pay closer attention. We shake ourselves a little. Scent the air.

When he climbs ashore, his feet already know the rocks.

We drift closer; all we are now is hunger. Almost all. But names start coming back to us, distinct from dreams and hunger. We’d forgotten other things existed. As we wake fully we find our voices. We whisper among ourselves: He is Finlay Price’s grandson. No, he’s Zennor Canne’s youngest child.

We know one thing: He’s been listening to the dreams we send.

The other man sketches seabirds and purloins feathers. We ignore him. We only care about our young man.

A Stornaway, we mutter. Look at his blue eyes.

They build a campfire. Fire on Tawlish, after all these years. Another gift. We lean closer, we clustering dead, marvelling at its warmth.

We speak close by his ear. A Quarn: see the red of his hair.

He jumps, rubs his arms, stares wide-eyed around him.

“What’s wrong?” his friend asks.

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “Just thought I heard someone.”

Heard! We are delighted. He’s a Zell, says Katie’s father, proudly.

“Come on, get this over with,” the friend says.

We shush each other, our hunger forgotten. Our young man pulls a sheaf of paper from his rucksack and unrolls it.

“The Tawlish Island Songbook,” he says.

Our songbook. A hum of excitement goes through all the dead. It charges the air, glitters like sunlight on the waves, sends flurries of seabirds skywards. Our young man looks around in wonder. He shakes his head. “Odd weather.”

“Seems a waste.” The friend, who hasn’t noticed, frowns. “Your grandma really said to burn it?”

“She has copies; the original’s barely legible now. But yeah, Nanna Katie insisted.”

He sits by the fire. The three tiny Stornaways curl close to him: one on his boot, one on his shoulder, one tucked in the crook of his arm. Maybe he thinks it’s sea-spray; most likely he doesn’t notice them at all. But he moves gently, as if he’s taking care not to disturb something he knows is nearby.

He thumbs through the songbook. We crowd close to see. There are the songs we once knew. And at the back, a new sheaf of pages, trimmed to fit and stitched into the cover. New songs.

They’re for us and about us. There’s one about Katie’s father. One about Finlay Price’s sheep. One for the tiny Stornaways, a lovely threnody set to violin and flute. Even one about Lizzie Knell and the rector. These songs aren’t magic the way the old ones are; they don’t bring favourable tides or sing fish into nets.

They’re something else. They’re proof.

We didn’t know, but the living never forgot us. They carried us with them over the salt of the sea.

The threads have never gone slack. They criss-cross the strait, our weft, their warp: love and loss, life and death, past and present. We’ve always been dancing with the living.

Katie’s grandchild places the songbook in the flames. It rises with the smoke.

A gift.

The songs are there. The spells. Snatches and strains. Some are warped by time, others missing, others new. But we recognise Tawlish, the old magic woven from wind and seawater. The music. New songs and old. We’re dead; our people will never return. But one after the other, we sing.

 

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was ‘The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead’ by E.M. Linden, and if you enjoyed that then check out their other work at emlinden.blog and Louise’s other narrated stories for us. Here’s what E.M. told us,.

‘This story draws on my own and my family’s experiences of migration, and what you do and don’t leave behind.’

Islanders always leave something of themselves on the shoreline and as someone born on the isle of Man, this story is singing a tune I’ve known since childhood. The Isle of Man, we like to joke, is the place the weather forecaster is always standing in front of. We’re home to a mountain—just one (any more would be ostentatious, and the Manx don’t stand for tall poppies)—a lot of sheep, a remarkable amount of offshore banking and once a year the island’s population effectively doubles when the TT motorbike races occur.

That’s the Wikipedia entry. The truth is ragged, just like every small community. I once got lost in the fog in that mountain, during a camping trip. A redheaded friend took his hat off and, with the comic timing only the universe truly excels at, the fog cleared at that exact moment. I have other friends, one of whom flirted with the sort of ultra low level criminality that every kid in a rural town considers, who are now trained Coast Guards. One of their regular refresher courses is in how to get sheep, always alive, usually fine, from the bottom of the cliffs they keep falling down. A friend did work experience at a bank, successfully identified the account of a Very Bad Man and was rewarded with a couple of interviews with the police, the rest of his work placement off and his name nowhere in any documentation. Those same police by the way included Constable Ged Power, a man who was 6’infinite tall, had a deep Yorkshire accent, and regularly went undercover in the bar where drugs were sold. I have friends who have emerged, pleasantly numb and hung over, from Douglas, the island’s capital town, at the end of TT week with tattoos they didn’t have at the start and no memory of getting them. Everyone in everyone’s lives. Everyone back to back, watching the ocean, making sure the boats come back and the sea doesn’t rise too far. Voices carry and they can’t help but harmonise, sometimes in minor chords, sometimes major. The major chords are the Bruce Springsteen shouts of crumpled joy, Glory Days playing as you remember just how stupid and beautiful you were (you are, I promise, still beautiful) with fellow survivors. The minor chords are the moments that bring you up short on sunny days. The teacher who once told you she knows where the kids who can’t go home sleep. The bench engraved with a quote from your best friend, dead too young, that you’re too frightened to go back and make sure is still there. The threads that you worry will go slack are always the ones you worry aren’t slack enough. Nothing is perfect, anywhere, ever and in small spaces, small towns, small islands those imperfections are either part of life or the hill you climb to get to the part of life you can stand. Sometimes, as Linden says, you really do only hear what’s missing. Sometimes you worry that’s all you’ll ever hear.

The threads never go slack, and that’s both a relief and, very occasionally, a horror. I’m working on a project this year directly inspired by comics my best friend recommended to me. My mum, who passed last year and hated a lot of the time she spent on the island, considered going back there to die. We never truly leave. I’m one of a graduating class of 300 kids. I’m having coffee with one of the other two who stayed on the mainland later this year.

We never truly leave. The dead never truly leave. Our accents, imbued with coal-dust or, like mine polished to a Transatlantic sheen, always shift when we go home. According to Marguerite, the Manx accent hit the second my foot touched Manx soil in fact. The ghosts welcoming me back in my voice, my gait, the history stacked on history, the song of the island, rising. Always rising.

I love this one. Thanks so much for having me on, Matt.