The Disappearance by Michael Bloor

There’s something about small islands: a bounded space, every corner familiar, memory-laden. I understand the attraction because I left and then returned. Like a lot of islanders, I joined the mercantile marine, but a bad fall left me lame in the right leg. So I came home to work as the harbour master. And now, in my sixties, I’m damn pleased I did.

Islands like ours attract all sorts of interesting people. Once the summer holidaymakers have left, there’s only around three hundred residents. More than half of them I grew up with. I like ’em well enough, most of the time. But it’s the incomers (we call ’em ‘the white settlers’) who most interest me: wanderers from all over, who’ve somehow washed up in this wee place on the watery edge of Europe.

Marienka, a retired Dutch gynaecologist, has been a particular favourite of mine. She never said why she’d ended up here in the Hebrides, but I knew she didn’t really count herself as Dutch, having been born in Indonesia, which back then was the Dutch East Indies. Along with tens of thousands of others, as a small child, she had been interned with her mother, by the invading Japanese. She said that, towards the end of the war, everyone in the internment camps was starving: there were deaths every day. Had it not been for the atomic bomb, Marienka would surely have died.

As she put it, two hundred thousand Japanese civilians died to save her life. A truth which gave her mixed feelings about nuclear weapons. And which also decided her on a career as a gynaecologist, bringing in new life and fresh hope. Our island just has a district nurse, we’re too small for a medical practice: we are all registered with GPs in Oban, on the mainland. Those GPs always ensure that pregnant islanders are safely installed on the mainland well before the birth, but everybody on the island knew that Marienka could always be relied on in an immediate medical emergency (usually featuring a hapless holidaymaker).

In addition to being an unpaid, unofficial, eighty year-old, Emergency Response Worker, Marienka has always been a relentless gardener. After she retired from the hospital in Amsterdam, she came to the island and rented the hotel’s old walled kitchen garden and the old gardener’s cottage. Gardening is seen by the islanders as a rather quirky activity: the Gulf Stream ensures that we are free of frosts, but on still, warm days the midges are ferocious. Yet they never deterred Marienka, toiling away in beekeepers’ overalls, gloves and headgear. She told me that the Garden of Eden wouldn’t have suited her – there would have been nothing to do there. Her garden was bonnie: she knew a great deal about flowers and shrubs, but her passion was vegetables (you know that old joke about the guy’s favourite flower being the cauliflower?). And also fruit: her loganberry jam was fit for a prince’s table.

Although always polite and kindly, I suspect Marienka preferred cats to people. We probably only became friends because her cats couldn’t play chess. Most winter evenings, we’d play chess after the departure of the 4.30 ferry, in my office at the harbour. We ‘d been doing that for about twenty years. More recently, her arthritis had made her less mobile, so we played in a corner of the public bar at the hotel, a few yards from her cottage. Often as not, we’d sit in companionable silence. But she also liked to get me talking about voyages, ports, old shipmates, and so on, from when I was in the merchant navy. Her father had been what we call an ‘owner-driver,’ master of his very own cargo vessel, carrying freight around Java, Sumatra and Celebes. When she was a baby, she had lived with her parents in the master’s cabin. In the internment camp, her mother used to tell Marienka tales about those voyages.

I only recall one discussion on serious matters with Marienka. It was last New Year’s Eve: we’d come out of the hotel bar (it was getting too noisy) and were hobbling along the shore in the moonlight. We were talking about a TV programme on Hiroshima. Marienka believed that you could only fully grasp an individual truth if you could place it in relation to other truths, as part of a harmonious whole. She compared it to crop rotation in a vegetable garden. To have a successful crop of carrots, they must precede, not follow, the planting of potatoes; potatoes should be followed by leeks, peas and beans, and so on. She reckoned that if you encountered a shocking, jagged truth – like Hiroshima – you’d never fully understand it. And it would snag in your memory for the rest of your life.

It was two months later that she disappeared. It was me that phoned the police. Two detectives eventually came over on the ferry from Oban. They asked a few questions: was she a strong swimmer, and so on? I couldn’t tell ’em much.

As I was walking with them back from her cottage to the ferry, one of them asked me why I wasn’t too surprised that she had disappeared. I told them that I gone over to the cottage and the walled garden and realised that Marienka had harvested all her leeks. They thought I was joking. But I wasn’t.    

Michael Bloor

Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay – bunches of harvested leeks