"How long does a bone last, anyway? A skull?"
An exclusive extract from Audrey Magee's 'The Colony'
Throughout the Festival we’ll be sharing new writing and exclusive interviews from this year’s Orwell Prize finalists on our Substack. We are delighted to share this exclusive extract from Audrey Magee’s The Colony, a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022.
Audrey Magee will be in conversation with fellow Orwell Prize for Political Fiction finalist Jessie Greengrass (The High House) and judge Monique Roffey (The Mermaid of Black Conch) at Waterstones Gower St, London, 6.30pm Monday 12th July 2022 as part of this year’s Orwell Festival. Get your tickets here.
He left. She washed the plates and cutlery, and stoked the fire. She sat down and lifted the charcoal grey knitting from the basket at the side of the chair. The start of a jumper for James. Dark to hide the dirt. She stretched the knitting across her lap and counted. Eight rows done, two to go, one row plain, one row purl. Ready in time for school, James. If you ever go back. Back to those priests and their ways. She started to knit, sliding one needle over the other and looping the wool. Their quietening of you, James. Their stilling of you. And your nails chewed to the quick. She finished the cuff at the base of the jumper and added six extra stitches to each side. She knitted on, rows of plain and purl to build the foundations of the pattern to come, her own pattern, her design, as she knitted it for Liam, now for James, who tells me nothing, insists only that I shouldn’t worry, that they don’t like me because I’m an island boy, but don’t worry, Mam, because I don’t like them either. She counted the stitches. One hundred and thirty four. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. The knitter’s prayer. She continued, three more rows, plain, purl, plain. She stretched the knitting across her thighs, counted the stitches one more time and started on her pattern, blackberry stitch, cable, moss, diamond up the middle and out the other side in reverse, moss, cable, blackberry. She knitted the first blackberry, building three stitches from one, gathering them, wrapping them in purl, and pushing through, the birth of a berry to texture the jumper. She smiled and stroked the woollen knot, a thickening of the wool to keep James warm, as it warmed me, knitted by my mother, though not my grandmother who still calls this English knitting, the English scheme, their guilt for the famine, for the land theft. They take our land, she says, starve us and then to alleviate the poverty, to assuage their guilt, they set us up with knitting. Make jumpers this way and sell them, they said. Earn your living that way, they said. Earn your rent that way, they said, though we liked earning our living the other way, from the land that was our land, the sea that was our sea. But they told us to knit, so now we knit. Well, I’m not knitting, says Bean Uí Fhloinn. Not that knitting. Their knitting. Their Scottish, English, Irish knitting. I’ll do my own knitting. Knit as my mother did. As my grandmother knitted. Mairéad laughed. At Bean Uí Fhloinn sitting up there still, by the fire, with her pipe, her tea and her knitting, defiant, making socks that nobody wants to wear any more, socks with patterns more intricate than these jumpers, socks of waves and weaves, twists and turns, socks that sit in a drawer because my father, her daughter’s husband, was the last islander to wear them, dozens of socks in that drawer waiting for him to come back from the sea. Mairéad smiled. At least his feet won’t be cold when he comes back from the sea and opens that drawer of socks. She knitted on, twenty plain stitches, the foundation of the cable that will run up the sides of James’s chest, from his hip bones to his clavicle. Then the moss stitch, plain, purl, plain, purl, the knitting soothing in the stillness of the sleeping house, the sleeping village, her metal needles sliding one over the other to build the base of the diamond pattern that would run up the centre of the jumper, along James’s chest, still skinny, though his voice has broken, and he has shaved once or twice, his chin only, surreptitiously, the hairs washed away, the blade hidden, his father’s blade without his father’s guidance, without the guidance of a man, for the priests are of no use to him, those men in frocks, and he has no time for Micheál, even less for Francis, his own uncle, though he likes the English man well enough. Maybe he talks to the Englishman as he would have talked to his father, a man of little use to him now, under the sea, in one of these jumpers, dark like this one, a bed now for fish, a blanket for crabs, the wool more enduring than his skin and flesh, than his black, black hair. But what of your bones, Liam? The marrow of your bones? Of you? What is left of them? Of you, my love, down there, underneath in the sea grave, the grave sea. Is anything left, or are you all gone? Eaten? Atomised? Diluted and dispersed. Carried from one ocean to the next. Tiny particles of you travel ling around the earth. My husband in Australia, in Africa, in South America, travelling the world without me, though he promised that we would go together, leave together, the three of us. But you left without me, Liam. Without us.
She sipped at her tea and knitted on.
How long does a bone last, anyway? A skull? Shorter or longer than a jumper? My brother was wearing a jumper, too. Dark as well, like this one, but made by his mother, my mother, with fewer blackberries so that we could tell them apart in the washing. Though they seldom need washing, these jumpers, as they absorb the smells as well as the sheep. Have you ever met a smelly sheep, Liam? Cows, yes. Goats? Terrible smell out of those billies. But the sheep? Left to its own devices, it’s a clean animal. Unlike that Frenchman who is clean only because I clean him.
She reached the other side of the diamond and began the pattern in reverse, moss, cable, blackberry. My father though, he never wore a jumper, not even in the middle of winter. He wore Bean Uí Fhloinn’s socks and shirts, and the sleeveless jacket and scratchy trousers made by the tailor man who came to the island twice a year. He wore a proper jacket to Mass, but on that day, that autumn day, that last day, he was in his traditional clothes, adamant that he felt no cold, though he must have as the water seeped into him, soaking his skin, his lungs, soaking into their skin, their lungs, my father, my husband, my brother. That Holy Trinity of men. Amen. No men. On a still autumn day. Weighed down by wool. By the denseness of knitting. By the denseness of my knitting. My beloved man drowning in my knitting, drowning in my English knitting.
She stretched the beginnings of the jumper across her lap, the foundations laid, the pattern established. She stuck the two needles into the wool, returned them to the basket and stood up, almost silent in her movements out the door and into the Frenchman’s house, into his bed, staying until the dark grey of the summer night began to lighten, when she dressed again and left for the cliffs, for the Englishman who was dragging the mattress, sheets, blankets and pillow from his bed to the tiny space in front of the fire, setting the pillow where he could achieve most light from the fire and the window, waiting on daylight to creep through the panes, waiting for her to arrive, uncertain if she would, this woman who would be his sleeping woman. She rattled the door. He opened it, and reached out his hand.
Thank you for coming, he said.
Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow. She worked for twelve years as a journalist and has written for, among others, The Times, The Irish Times, the Observer and the Guardian. Her first novel, The Undertaking, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for France’s Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards.