Salt and Skin E-Book

Eliza Henry-Jones

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 510

Beschreibung

'Brilliant. With such a good ending, it had me slapping the back cover closed with utmost satisfaction and respect. Hard recommend.'Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites and Devotion 'Until recently, there had been four of them. Unspeaking, the three remaining Managans lugged their bags into Ewan's waiting car. Luda and her children were not staying in the ghost house on Seannay that first night. The window broken in the storm must first be fixed. Living on the islands means being in constant conversation with the wind; negotiating where it will and will not go. The Managans do not know this yet. It is a lesson they will begin to learn a week later, watching the cliff collapse into the sea.' Luda, a photographer, and her two teenagers arrive in the Scottish Northern Isles to make a new life. Everywhere the past shimmers to the surface; the shifting landscapes and wild weather dominates; the line between reality and the uncanny seems thin here. The teenagers forge connections, making friends of neighbours, discovering both longing and dangerous compulsions. But their mother - fallible, obsessive, distracted - comes up hard against suspicion. The persecution and violence that drove the island's historic witch trials still simmers today, in isolated homes and church buildings, and where folklore and fact intertwine. A compelling and magically immersive novel about a family on the edge and a community ensnared by history, that gathers to an unforgettable ending. 'An astonishingly rich and intricate exploration of loss, love, ambition and redemption ... A thrilling read.' Marie Claire

Leseprobe

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Published in the UK in 2023 by September Publishing

First published in Australia 2022 by Ultimo Press, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Copyright © Eliza Henry-Jones 2022, 2023

The right of Eliza Henry-Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Printed in Denmark on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Nørhaven

ISBN: 9781914613364 Ebook ISBN: 9781914613371


For Henry. I love you in the wild.

It has been called the ghost house for as long as anyone can remember. It’s set on a tidal island called Seannay, which can be reached from Big Island by crossing damp sand at low tide, or picking a careful route across the causeway when the tide is high. Once, the ghost house had had neighbours; answering glows of candlelight through door and window gaps. Answering whistles of wind on stormy nights; answering sounds of life. Its neighbours are ruins now.

The ghost house is alone.

The roof is made of old slate, and there are narrow beds pressed up against opposite walls in the small loft. There is the skin of a dead fur seal pushed into the rafters and long forgotten.

Plovers and curlews; a spirit who calls in the voice of a gull. Sometimes baleen whales sing at night, their bones stuck fast in the shallows of the bay. A trick of the light or an old curse or spell that makes the tidal island a particularly curious place. It is said that some folk, as soon as they step onto Seannay, can see the luminous traces of scars across human skin. Every injury a person has ever sustained to their flesh – every scratch and pimple and pox and burn – illuminated by the pearly light. Someone with the sight can see the scars spun brightly across the skin of their children; strangers; enemies. Their own skin, too. In this way, all skin is the same on the tidal island. And all skin on the tidal island is utterly unique.

Island witches are said to have met there on clear, still nights.

But, of course, that was years ago. Centuries.

People know more now than they did back then. They do not believe in witches.

PART ONE

Chapter One

February (their first year)

The boat had seemed large at the dock, but now that they’re rumbling away from Big Island, it seems flimsy and ludicrously small.

Luda tries to think of the last time she’d been on a boat before coming to the islands. Years ago. Someone’s thirtieth birthday on the thick, marshy water of the Hopeturn River back home in Australia. Even back then, the river’s level had been low and the unpleasant smell of wet things made dry had permeated the boat, making people drink more than they should have.

Ewan whistles under his breath, doing whatever a seafarer does in the cabin of their boat. Luda’s two children, Darcy and Min, are out on the deck with her. Darcy, the eldest, is slouched against the gunwale, looking as though he’s waiting for a late bus that’s going to take him from one bland place to another. Min, two years younger, clutches at a pile of rope (Luda notices, but does not point out, that it’s not fastened to anything). Min is pale and looks almost bewildered by the world viewed from the small and rumbling fishing boat. When she notices Luda’s gaze, she scowls. Fierce, fractious little Min who is not so little anymore. Fourteen, Luda thinks, with the usual jolt of shock. She’s fourteen.

Ewan cuts the engine and the boat immediately begins a slow spin in the currents. The strangely intimate sound of water against the side of the boat. Ewan comes out of the cabin, his beanie low over his eyes. ‘You can really see the erosion of the cliffs from here,’ he says, and points.

Of course. Luda has almost forgotten why she’s here. Almost. They have been here a week. Ewan is trying to help her find her feet as quickly as possible, so that she can get to work documenting the damage climate change is doing to these islands: taking photos, writing funding applications. It is, she knows, not a particularly popular topic in the local fishing circles. Through his subcontracting to the council for these sorts of climate change adjacent projects, Ewan has made himself something of a pariah. Still, he smiles at them now, smelling of coffee and brine. He looks far older than twenty-seven.

Luda studies the shoreline Ewan’s pointing to. It’s low tide now, the sea pulled back to reveal a short, sloped skirt of rippling sand up to the base of an overhanging, rocky cliff. Figures walk along the sand, leaving silvery footprints, their pants rolled up. Shoes in hand. Now cavorting, chasing each other. A mother and child, Luda thinks, but the shore’s a bit too far away to be sure.

She cocks her digital SLR camera, focuses on the cliff face, the beach, the figures which (with her camera’s zoom) she can now make out more clearly. Yes, a little girl with curling bronze-red hair. She looks six or seven or eight. She is with a muscular woman who is perhaps in her mid-thirties. Luda follows them for a moment with her lens. What she sees is the easy intimacy of a parent and child at this age – the way the child’s body still touches the parent’s without thought. The mindless, automatic easiness of it. Had Luda ever appreciated it the way she should have? She misses it now.

She feels like a voyeur. They’d have no reason to imagine a camera trained on them from the fishing boat. The idea gives her a little thrill, shivery and darting.

‘Sandstone,’ Ewan says. ‘You can make out the bands of it, see?’

Luda has noticed that Ewan engages in quick, heavy bursts of interaction and then retreats back into himself. He continues to talk about erosion and deposition behind her, further along on the deck. He will be talking to Min, but it is Darcy who will be listening closely, storing the information up in that terrifying vault of a brain he has. Min tends to let information trickle over her, off her, like water. She remembers the broad strokes and how they fit together. Darcy has always been preoccupied with the finest details of a thing.

Luda snaps a few frames. She inspects them and is impressed by the mood of the midwinter light, which she had expected to be glaring or dull. She lifts the camera back to her eye, trains it back on the cliffs. And then the world collapses.

***

A cracking sound. A flurry of movement as sheets of rock fall onto the narrow, sloping beach. Stillness, and then the awful keening of a woman parted from her child.

‘Allie? Allie! Allie!’

Swearing, Ewan hurtles into the cabin, fires up the engine and begins making calls on his phone. For a moment, the three Managans are alone on the deck. Min and Darcy watch their mother, still peering through the lens of her camera.

‘Jesus,’ Darcy says over the throb of the engine. ‘Mum, put it down!’

Luda looks up. Her face is bright, almost feverish. Her horror has twisted itself into something that makes Darcy show his teeth.

Ewan eases the boat as close as he can to the shore, and then he drops the anchor and throws himself off the side into the water. He swims until he can touch the sandy bottom, then he begins an awkward lunging.

Darcy follows, his freestyle strokes unpractised but still somehow graceful. Min, who has never swum more than a few strokes here and there, hangs over the boat’s edge, white-faced. Luda, who can swim better than either of her children, stands up.

Min spins around. ‘Don’t! Don’t go.’

Min has always been the bolder of her children – the sort who insisted on dressing herself from before she was two, who used to scream until Luda unhitched the leading line from her pony’s bridle. The panic in her voice is new, and so Luda sits down on the deck, holding her camera in both hands.

On the shore, Ewan helps the woman dig frantically through the rubble. Darcy stands in the shallows, staring up at the cliff face, from which stones still trickle.

‘Move!’ he yells, his voice carrying over the water.

Ewan looks up, but the woman, bloody-fingered from the scrape of the rocks, does not.

Ewan grunts and pulls the woman away from the rubble. She fights him. Fingernails and teeth. ‘Let me go! Let me go! Allie!’

Darcy moves quickly to the beach where he wraps a long arm around the woman’s waist. She continues to writhe, to kick. To scream. It takes both Darcy and Ewan to pull her away from the cliff face.

Min sits down, shuts her eyes and covers her ears. Luda thinks, unbidden, of red hair tangled under rocks. Blood. No. She can’t. She cannot.

Luda has long known that the world is full of awful things and that if you let them inside you, if you let yourself linger or think, they’ll damage you, these things, as surely as a gun or poison or the flash of a man’s fist.

ISO. Shutter speed. Aperture. Luda squeezes the camera like she’s holding someone’s hand. She raises her camera, takes another photo, then another. Nobody sees. It’s just skin. That’s all she can capture of a person: skin. Luda feels like a ghost. Quicksilver. She thinks that this is her power.

***

‘She couldn’t have survived that first fall of rock,’ Ewan says, later. It’s dark and he clasps a glass of whisky that he’s not drinking. ‘Let alone the second one.’

The second rockfall, when the trickle Darcy had noticed had given way so violently that pieces of cliff had landed as far as the shoreline. The water had reared back from the land so that Min and Luda had felt the force of the cliff’s collapse in the sudden agitation of the sea.

A helicopter. An ambulance.

The keening. The keening. The keening.

Min and Luda, shivering on the anchored boat. Luda found a thermos of lukewarm coffee in the cabin and some stale crisps. She and Min sat and ate them and it felt a little like watching something unfold far away. Emergency coverage on a news station, perhaps. The mother, Violet, never stopped fighting to get back to the rubble.

It was dark by the time Ewan dropped the Managans back at their house on Seannay and joined them at their kitchen table. Home, Luda thinks now, in the cosily lit kitchen. But the word refuses to stick. The scent is wrong; the fall of light. The accents and the call of birds. There is no Joshua here.

‘I should go back and help them move the rocks …’ Ewan says again.

‘They’ll handle it. You’ve done enough.’ Luda pats his back, but she keeps finding herself gazing at her camera bag. Min’s watching a DVD on her laptop, curled up on the couch like she’s sick. Darcy sits up on the kitchen counter with his hands cupped around a mug of dark, unsweetened tea. His face, like Ewan’s, is marked by the woman’s fingernails.

Underneath those fresh marks, the play of luminous scars across Darcy’s skin. Luda pretends not to see them. Min, she thinks, cannot see them – Min who says things as soon as they enter her head. Luda suspects that Darcy can see them. It’s in the way that he sometimes studies her skin, Min’s skin, like he can’t help himself. It’s in the furtiveness of how he looks away if Luda catches him at it.

Luda wonders how long Ewan will stay, hunched at the scrubbed kitchen table in the ghost house. They have only been on the islands a week – not long enough to learn the intricate play of expectations that binds a community together. Perhaps Ewan will stay here overnight. Perhaps she has committed some sort of faux pas by not already having offered him the couch to sleep on. She wonders how long Darcy and Min will mill down here before climbing up to the loft where they reluctantly sleep (‘Mum! Seriously! How can you expect the two of us to share a room?’).

The ghost house is the only habitable place on Seannay, which is hitched to Big Island via a causeway. Seannay has no trees, just the house and turf and gorse and piles of stone and slate where other houses and byres had once stood. The ghost house is tiny and smells of damp sand and chalk. The ground floor has a kitchen, fireplace and couch. Above the bathroom is the loft with two single beds. Luda sleeps on a pile of cushions on the ground floor. She doesn’t mind – it means that she’s unlikely to wake anyone when she goes out for her early-morning runs. Her late-night runs. Her during-the-day runs. With every pound of foot on earth, Luda thinks about her photography.

‘Mum?’ Min’s voice sounds young. She’s taken off her headphones.

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s good, what you’re doing, you know. Documenting all the climate change stuff. It’s important.’ Another pause. Her voice is unusually gentle, stilted. ‘I get … I get why we needed to come here.’

Luda blinks. ‘Thanks, Min.’

In another family, in another time, Darcy might have echoed his sister’s praise. Instead, he gulps down his tea and the ghost house goes quiet.

Ewan shifts. ‘I should go back, help them with the rocks.’

More back-patting. Luda’s gaze tracing the lines of her camera bag. ‘They’ll handle it, Ewan. They will.’

Chapter Two

February (their first year)

The Managans had arrived on the islands a week ago. In the hours before their ferry docked, a storm had blown in from the north, agitating the sea into a large swell that battered the beaches and sunk smaller boats at the docks. The storm shattered a window in the ghost house; leaked water into the transept of the kirk. There were not many trees on the islands, and this storm brought down three of them.

The Managan family, still smelling faintly of their farm in Australia – of dry, loose earth and peeling paint and the wood of cracked branches – had arrived as the storm was easing. The curtains of rain had softened into a lacy drizzle, the clouds had shifted from darkly bruised to a bright and chilly grey.

Until recently, there had been four of them.

Unspeaking, the three remaining Managans lugged their bags into Ewan’s waiting car. Luda and her children were not staying in the ghost house on Seannay that first night. The window broken in the storm must first be fixed. The islands are a place where broken windows and crooked doors need to be mended before the wind works its claws inside. Living on the islands means being in constant conversation with the wind; negotiating where it will and will not go.

The Managans did not know this yet. It would be a lesson they’d begin to learn a week later, watching the cliff collapse into the sea.

On the day that they arrived on the storm-bruised islands, Min hesitated near Ewan’s car door.

‘Min,’ said Luda tiredly. ‘Min, just get in. Please.’

Min took a step back. ‘How long’s the drive?’

‘Ten minutes,’ said Ewan. ‘Maybe fifteen, with all the storm damage.’

‘I can walk.’

‘You can’t walk, Min,’ said Luda. ‘You’re exhausted and you don’t know where you’re going. Get in the car.’

There was a moment when it seemed that Min was not going to get into the car, and then Darcy had turned and looked at her. ‘Min,’ he said.

She softened a little. She climbed into the back seat.

Ewan drove them to a house at the top of Big Island, where a woman called Cassandra lived. Cassandra, who was some very aged, very distant relative of Luda’s. She had orchestrated Luda’s job here with the local council. And Luda had accepted because this was her purpose, her passion. She had accepted because it was right and not because she was running.

‘You can see the flow from here,’ Ewan said, pointing towards a huge, still bay.

‘The flow?’ Min asked.

‘They narrowed the neck during the war,’ said Ewan. ‘There are thirty shipwrecks down there.’

Min shivers.

After helping the Managans carry their luggage to the door of Cassandra’s house, Ewan backed away.

‘What’s wrong?’ Min asked. ‘You don’t like Cassandra?’

‘Oh, I like Cassandra well enough,’ Ewan said. ‘But I can see Father Lee’s car parked just there.’ He nodded at a maroon station wagon with a crucifix bumper sticker. ‘And I don’t go where Father Lee is, if I can help it.’

Inside, Father Lee greeted them by clasping each of their hands in both of his own and hanging on for too long. ‘I’m so glad I could come and welcome you to the islands personally. The council’s holding an emergency meeting but, fortuitously, it’s not until this afternoon.’

Darcy extricated his hand from Father Lee’s and glanced at the door behind him, as though wishing that he’d followed Ewan briskly away from this man and his maroon station wagon and too-big, too-damp hands.

‘I’m still of the mind that politics and religion shouldn’t mix, Marcus,’ Cassandra called from the front room.

Father Lee gestured for the Managans to enter.

Cassandra was seated neatly in a floral-printed armchair. She wore a plaid skirt, beige cardigan and a large, glittering parrot brooch.

‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ said Luda. She paused. ‘Thanks again for putting me forward for the job.’

‘A pleasure.’

Cassandra studied the three Managans. Luda had brown hair that was darker at the roots and heavily sun-bleached at the ends. She had large, hazel eyes, wide shoulders and a body that was narrow and wiry. Her face seemed too heavily lined for the age she must have been. Luda glanced, quickly and often, at her children. Her glances were appraising. She looked out the window, at the paintings on Cassandra’s walls, in the very same way.

Wilhelmina, with short dark hair, a gap between her teeth and her mother’s wide shoulders. She did not have her brother Darcy’s startling beauty, but there was something magnetic about her face, something that made it hard to look away. Cassandra watched how Wilhelmina circled and circled and circled the living room. How she paused to inspect the small sea treasures that Cassandra had carried from the floor of the ocean when she was young. Aye, it’s you, Cassandra thought. You’re here.

Darcy hardly moved or spoke. With light brown hair and hazel eyes that were both green and gold, he was beautiful in that startling and transient way only boys of a certain age could be. The beauty would settle into handsomeness as he grew, Cassandra thought, or else it would disappear altogether. It was, by its very nature, effervescent. It was fleeting.

Cassandra marked the parts of the children that came from Luda; thought of their father, of how he’d died. She cleared her throat. ‘You must have had a rough crossing on the ferry,’ she said.

‘I thought we were going to capsize,’ said Wilhelmina, still circling. ‘I threw up practically the whole way from the mainland.’

Cassandra made a sympathetic noise. ‘I’m not surprised, Wilhelmina. How long did the whole trip take you?’

‘It’s Min.’

‘You mean from Australia to Scotland?’ Luda asked, giving Min a look. ‘I don’t even know. We had to drive to the airport, then a flight from Melbourne to Dubai and Dubai to Edinburgh and then the train from Edinburgh through the highlands to … to the terminal to catch the ferry here.’

‘Quite a journey,’ Father Lee said, as though commenting on a child’s trip home from school.

‘Are you familiar with the islands?’ Cassandra asked, ignoring him.

Luda shook her head.

‘Darcy knows plenty. He looked it all up before we came here,’ Min said, and Darcy gave her a sharp look.

‘Did you now?’ Cassandra smiled at him. He did not smile back, but was not rude about it. Cassandra turned back to Luda, Min now pacing behind her mother’s chair. ‘Big Island has a population of a few thousand. This town is by far the largest one, but there are a couple of smaller places on the north and southern edges. Mostly just a pub and a general store, nothing like the town here.’

‘How many islands are there?’ Min asked.

‘Thirty-eight,’ Cassandra said. ‘Not including tidal islands like your Seannay. I believe eleven are inhabited now.’

‘Eleven.’ Luda frowned. ‘Are storms like this usual?’

Father Lee began handing out mugs of tea. He seemed very proud of himself for procuring them – holding each out to be appropriately admired before letting it go.

‘They’re getting worse,’ said Cassandra. ‘Or so I hear. It’s been decades since I’ve been anywhere more interesting than the pub. But even watching through my window I can tell that they’re more frequent. The islands further north tend to be hit the hardest.’

‘I try to get out there to help as often as I can,’ Father Lee added. ‘Hardly anyone left on some of them now – the damage was just too much. And it’s a domino effect, isn’t it? Less people, less funding for infrastructure, less services, so more people leave. It’s sad. A whole way of life, just gone.’

Luda nodded, trying and failing to imagine what it might be like on those other islands.

‘So, it’s really kind of incredible eleven still have people on them,’ Darcy said quietly.

‘Aye,’ said Cassandra. ‘It is.’

‘But you’ll be fine on Seannay,’ Father Lee said. ‘Ewan and the other council lads will be finished repairing that broken window by tomorrow.’

Cassandra generally tried to avoid agreeing with Father Lee, just as a matter of principle, but the Managans looked so worn out that she made an exception. ‘Aye, the ghost house is solid.’

‘It’s very kind of the council to give us accommodation,’ Luda said. ‘We really appreciate it.’

Darcy looked up. ‘Ghost house?’

Father Lee smiled. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just a silly nickname some folk give it.’

‘Why?’

‘There’ve always been stories about Seannay,’ Cassandra said, leaning in. ‘Witches used to meet there.’

Father Lee snorted. ‘Oh, aye. And a selkie washed up.’

Darcy frowned. ‘A selkie?’

‘Aye,’ said Cassandra. ‘Folk who look like seals but can shed their skin and become human. In the stories, men used to steal the selkie skins and then the seal women would have to stay on land with them.’

‘That’s awful,’ Min said.

‘There are all sorts of other stories about Seannay,’ Cassandra continued. ‘My favourite is the scars – how the light there illuminates the scars from every injury you’ve ever had. Only some people can see them, though.’

‘It’s mostly women, I’ve found,’ Father Lee said, his voice lazy. ‘Women will believe all sorts of things – particularly bored housewives.’

Cassandra’s head snapped around. ‘Oh, Marcus. Really?’

Father Lee ignored her and turned to Luda. ‘Speaking of which, will your husband be joining you?’

Luda startled. ‘What?’

‘You put “Mrs” on your paperwork.’

Luda crossed and uncrossed her legs. Her children had both grown still. ‘No. He’s dead.’

Min recommenced her pacing. Darcy straightened in his chair.

Father Lee’s expression flickered. ‘Aye, I see. Well, I’m very sorry for your trouble. What a dreadful thing.’

‘Crivvens! I told you he’d died, Marcus,’ Cassandra said. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being a priest to remember important details about your parishioners?’ She paused. ‘And potential parishioners?’

‘The purpose of a priest – which I’m sure you’d be more familiar with if you ever came to worship, Cassandra – is to be a spiritual warrior of the Scripture. It’s my duty to act as mediator between humanity and God.’

‘Fancy that,’ said Cassandra, biting into a biscuit. ‘Some would think it’s not terribly godly to mock a crippled old woman for not being able to get to the kirk as frequently as she might like.’

‘You seem to make it out to the pub when it suits you.’

‘Aye, seeking out my own sacraments, Father,’ she said. ‘Just trying to make the best of things.’

Across the room, Darcy snorted.

Later, Father Lee and Min washed dishes in the sink, which was to say that Min washed dishes in the sink while Father Lee stood nearby. He clasped her shoulder in what he evidently thought was a warm, paternal gesture; it took all of Min’s self-control not to shrug it off. ‘I assume you’ll be dropping in on Cassandra regularly now that you’re here, Wilhelmina. To keep her company.’

‘What?’

‘Well, she’s very old. She has the carers coming around, and members of the kirk council, of course, but nothing beats having your family around you.’ His eyes were intent. ‘Does it?’

Darcy appeared in the door, carrying a single spoon, his eyes sharp. Father Lee dropped his hand.

‘Alright,’ said Min.

‘Excellent. I’ll ask Lorraine to forward you the times that would suit.’

And then it had started to rain and both Managan children had turned towards the window, silent and almost breathless with the wonder of water on glass.

***

Now, watching the water stream down the window of the loft in the cottage – the ghost house – the rain already seems more normal. Min rolls onto her side in the gloom of the loft. Above her, she can make out the pattern of carvings in the wooden beams. Jagged V shapes and symmetrical flowers and loops. The sight of them soothes her. It stops her from thinking about the keening of the woman near the cliff that afternoon. The sight of her clawing at Darcy and Ewan’s arms and faces and necks. The way the girl had been alive one minute and then, quite suddenly, dead.

Dead. Min swallows, tries not to think of Narra. Home. She tries not to think of the countless afternoons she will spend pouring tea for Cassandra. Min had liked her, but it would have been enough to see Cassandra for an occasional roast dinner with Darcy and her mother. Min has always craved the feeling of being close to other people and that’s what she wants to focus on – making new friends her own age, not tending to an elderly relative she barely knows who already has an army of carers looking after her. Besides, what’s the point in getting attached when Cassandra could clearly kick the bucket at any time? Min’s not naive enough to think that she can spend the rest of her life avoiding the sort of agonising grief she’s been stricken with since her father died, but she doesn’t particularly want to seek it out, either.

Across the room, her brother shifts a little in his bed. Darcy breathes silently when he’s awake and noisily when he’s asleep. She likes that they have to share a room, although she’d never admit it.

‘Tell me something,’ she says to Darcy. The years of their shared childhood spun between them, as delicate and precise as a spider’s web. Tell me something.

Darcy keeps particularly still and breathes silently.

‘Darcy,’ Min says. ‘I know you’re awake.’

The sound of their mother typing on her laptop downstairs. Min knows that she will have a wine by her elbow; that Luda – so quick to feel the cold – will be sitting close to the drowsing warmth of the Rayburn. Ewan had gone home a little after midnight.

‘Darcy.’ Min pauses. ‘If we could see scars like how Cassandra said – if it was real, I mean – would you want to?’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘Tell me something! Then I will.’

He groans. ‘Fine! Once upon a time, a motorcyclist got hit by a car on the other side of Narra.’

Min lets a breath out. ‘God, Darcy.’

‘And then his flight instinct kicked in.’ Darcy tugs at his blankets. ‘And even though his head was all crushed, his body didn’t know it. So he got to his feet and ran down the road. It took the police hours to catch him.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Of course it is,’ says Darcy. ‘His sympathetic nervous system was overloaded when his head got crushed. It’s basic science.’

Min wraps herself up more tightly in her blankets. ‘Bodies don’t get up and run around.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘Yeah. He was alone.’

So much between them. Delicately binding them both to things they don’t have words for. The newest thread: the keening by the cliffs. The name Allie. The shock of so much rock and weight shifting with no warning. Min thinks that she might want to talk about it, but isn’t sure how. Besides, Luda has always said that there’s no point going over and over painful things. It is better, as far as Luda is concerned, to set your eyes firmly on the horizon and keep moving. The past will tear you apart, if you let it.

Min figures that if she was meant to talk about things, it would feel more vital and urgent, and perhaps finding the words would be easier. Maybe it is better to do what their mother does; to put them out of her mind and avoid getting bogged down in awful things that have already happened; things that none of them can do anything about.

‘You’re a dick,’ she says into the gloom and hears Darcy’s small, satisfied snort.

Both of them lie awake, thinking of dead bodies running across the parched landscape of Narra.

Chapter Three

February (their first year)

It is one of those days where Luda wakes disjointed; where she wakes and smells salt and blindly reaches for Joshua. But the salt is her own. It is one of those days where she must be firm with herself, lest the sorrow and bewilderment of everything break her open.

Focus on the present. Focus on the future. As she works, Joshua still sneaks into little moments – a cup of coffee for one; a whiff of something that smells like the cologne he had worn to dinners and parties. Cutlets. Her wedding ring. The gap on her finger, when she takes it off. The smell of Imperial Leather soap. How she had managed to miss that he was so desperately unhappy.

Joshua. Joshua. Joshua.

This is what she knows: being haunted is not static. It is a fluid thing, a constellation of changing colours. Some days, she senses him everywhere. Other days, she barely thinks of him. On these days she will recognise his absence – her own self-absorbed carelessness – and it will be like a physical blow. She will stagger.

Her children are outside; the ghost house is entirely hers. She opens her laptop at the kitchen table and continues to go through the raw images she’d taken from the boat. They’re good. Powerful. She finds that if she breaks each image down into pieces, she can face them without flinching.

This is why she is here. This work. She sits back and drums her fingers on the table.

On impulse, she opens an older file on her computer. An image of Darcy. It’s one Luda had taken of him a few years ago, sprawled in the middle of their dried-up dam in Narra, his expression agonised, his limbs milky against the cracked earth. She had taken it without him realising. She had initially had it earmarked for part of an exhibition, but had sold it to the papers without telling him, instead. Luda makes herself keep looking at it. Darcy had been furious when the photo had been printed. He’d said that she’d had no right. The boys at school had plastered the photo across all the lockers and he had come home shaking and colourless. She’d felt bad immediately and yet she’d defended herself. She’d argued that the photo wasn’t about Darcy. She’d argued that it was bigger than him; that it was about raising awareness of the plight of everyone living on the land and the land itself. Raising money for them, too. That if he couldn’t see that, he was selfish – and she hadn’t meant to raise a selfish son.

Even as she’d spoken these words, she’d been so aware of Joshua in the other room, aggravated and energetic, full of plans for bore pumps and irrigation and high-energy stock feed. In that moment, Darcy clench-fisted and furious in front of her, Luda had been so aware of how vital that image of him was – how integral it would be to tiding them all over until the rains came.

If they came.

Finances. Panic. Obligation. There are so many things that get in the way of Luda and her art. Between Luda and creating.

More privately, she is aware of just how beautiful it is. How it shows something primal and urgent about being human – something Luda obsessively hunts and only sometimes glimpses. How this hidden and hungry part of her is still disappointed that the image had been printed in the papers, its narrative anchored to the impact of climate change. She would have much preferred it be called boy in drought or untitled and hung in a quiet gallery space. She had wanted it to be recognised as the wordless, urgent and vital thing it showed. She had wanted it to be recognised with feelings rather than words. She had wanted people to look at it and feel seen, their skin peeled back.

She has never had anyone, not even her closest friend from back home, Leanne, understand this about her. Now, this hidden and hungry part of her acknowledges that the climate change emergency might not have been worth betraying Darcy in this way, but that her hunt for the wordless, urgent humanness was. It is. Darcy.

God, why does parenting have to be so hard? Why does she always lash out at them when she feels at her most guilty? She couldn’t quite bring herself to say sorry to Darcy (Luda has never liked saying sorry), but she did her best to convey it in other ways. She had bought his favourite foods. She said that she hadn’t realised how upset he’d be. She didn’t want him to be upset. She had tried to explain that she hadn’t done it on purpose; that she hadn’t been thinking. That she was worried about what was going to happen to them – to everyone impacted by the drought. She had even tried to rein the image in, but it was too late. It had already spiralled far beyond her control. The magic and horror of her work.

Would Darcy have minded so much if it had been hung in a quiet gallery, instead? Probably, but maybe not. Luda has never been able to predict Darcy.

As it was, the photo of Darcy had gone viral and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, then millions, for those impacted by the drought. The photo’s international reach had meant the local council here had been persuaded by Cassandra into offering her a job right when she most needed it. She was to document the impact of climate change on the islands; to apply for grants; to liaise with the media.

Darcy had made her promise to never take photos of him ever again.

Blinking quickly, Luda finally allows herself to look away from the image. Darcy had been so damaged by living through the drought. She knows this because when she’d spied Darcy on the crusted dam bed, she had recognised his pain, his anguish, as something that existed deeply within her own body. The drought existed in all of them – an ache in the bones. A weariness. But they were away from that now. Safe, on this small, damp and salt-laced island.

She opens yesterday’s images again. Like that image of Darcy, she feels that secret part of herself hum. She yearns for a gallery space, for this fleeting and powerful moment she has captured to be offered to others only as itself. But no. She drums her fingers on the table some more. And then she starts typing an email. After a moment’s hesitation, she attaches the file.

And then she closes her eyes and presses send.

***

Darcy crosses the causeway from Seannay to Big Island, avoiding the deeper puddles, his head bent against the constant wind.

‘Wait!’ Min calls. She reaches him on the other side, lungs raw from rushing. ‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m going to see Cassandra.’ He starts walking again.

‘Okay,’ she says, and follows. She expects him to say something scathing, to try to make her leave, but he walks silently, arms crossed over his body. She allows herself this indulgent thought: Darcy likes having her close, even if he won’t admit it.

Getting there had seemed straightforward enough in Ewan’s car, but on foot they’re disoriented. Darcy asks people for directions, more than once, on these narrow, curving roads. They all mark his accent, ask him and Min about their trip over from Australia. Some make comments about where they’ve come from; others ask if they had pet kangaroos. They are asked about Australian politics; about refugee policies and desalination plants and the flavour of the air. Some don’t talk to Darcy and Min at all, just gaze at them with a sort of weariness born from too many outsiders coming here to live and then quickly leaving.

Min only half-listens as the conversation Darcy is having with an older woman shifts to the cliff collapse. Min watches a group of girls who look about her age, clustered on the pavement a little further down the road. She will be tested on the first day of school – accepted or found wanting – and studying any young person she encounters on the street is her only way of preparing. Min feels Darcy’s attention sharpen, his body tense. ‘What photos?’ he asks the woman.

Except he does not wait for an answer. He grabs Min by the back of the jacket and pulls her a few doors down the road to the newsagency. A couple of the clustered girls look up. Min flushes and waits for sniggers at the sight of her being dragged along, but instead the girls cluster more tightly, giggling and whispering. They probably haven’t even noticed Min. It’s always disconcerting to be reminded that people think her brother is handsome.

‘What?’ She pulls free and for a moment she wants to hit him, as she’d so often done when they were younger. Their mother does the same thing to her as Darcy does; dragging her places without any context or warning. Min is stronger than Darcy now, but some part of her always yields to him when she so rarely yields to anyone else. If she ends up being eight foot tall, Darcy and her mother will still be able to drag her places. She will (helplessly; endlessly) let them.

He jabs his finger at the cover of a newspaper. erosion blamed in freak death of eight-year-old alison reynolds. But it is the photo that sends bile guttering up into the back of Min’s throat. A photo of the bronze-haired girl, the rocks blurred above her. A chance photo that captured the last split second (God, Min hopes it was the last split second) of her life.

‘It’s a national tabloid,’ Darcy says, his voice completely toneless. ‘Half of Scotland will have seen it by now.’

He tosses coins onto the counter and goes to stuff the newspaper into his satchel, but Min grabs at his wrist. ‘Wait.’

She can feel his pulse. Rabbit-quick with rage. The tendons and muscles in his wrist tighten beneath her fingers. Surely there had been a time when Darcy hadn’t winced every time he was touched?

Darcy shakes her hand off but leaves the paper where she can see it. ‘She’s not credited, but everyone will know who took it. Why the fuck would she publish it?’

Between the two Managan children spins another wordless thread, bright and tangled in the silvery light. That long-ago photo of Darcy in the dam.

His fingers tighten on the paper. Min studies the images for a moment longer and then steps away. She wishes that there were a way to touch him without him shying away. An ache for her friends back home; for Harper and Sōta and Nico. How they’d looped arms around each other’s necks and pressed their bodies tightly together. How they’d brushed hair from each other’s faces and giggled into each other’s hands. She misses every part of them. Back at home, she’d catalogued in advance all of the things she imagined that she’d most miss after moving here, and then she’d tried to gorge on them – food before a fast. But she had not thought of touch. She had not recognised the value of reaching across space, knowing the closest person would welcome her skin against theirs. Here, on this damp street, the certainty of such a thing seems impossible.

Darcy folds the paper crisply in half. ‘Bloody Mum. Bloody Luda.’

‘She’s only thinking about raising awareness,’ Min says, her voice unsteady. She is bewildered, as always, by her mother’s choices. Maybe if she paid more attention to Luda, she would be better at predicting her, but it’s hard to pay close attention to a mother who has never really paid close attention to you – just your skin, your expressions, the way light plays across your collarbones.

The image of Alison will haunt Min. She knows this. And if Darcy’s rage were less incandescent, perhaps she would be able to meet it with her own. But there is no room for her to be angry when he is like this. She swallows her gum, regrets it. It feels like a pebble in her stomach.

‘She never thinks.’ Darcy begins walking.

‘Allie’s mum probably won’t even notice.’

Darcy stops. ‘Of course she will! Maybe not now, but she will. You can’t take these sorts of images back once they’re out there. And it’ll tear her up. And what about everyone else, Min?’ He drops his voice. ‘The people here aren’t going to like this.’

Min shrugs because she’s not sure what else to do. For a moment, she’s overcome by an urge to tackle Darcy and grind his face into the damp ground. It would be easier than standing still, swallowing back her own frustration and confusion.

Darcy gives her a look, like he knows exactly what she wants to do and also knows that she won’t do it. ‘You’re the one who’s always tied up in knots over what people think of you. How do you think this is going to go down at the school we’re starting in three weeks?’

Min swallows. ‘It’ll be fine.’

Darcy mutters something under his breath and keeps walking. Like so many other times in the last few years, Min feels like she’s missed a moment in which she and Darcy might have connected. She strides after him, keeping a careful distance between them so that he doesn’t snarl at her.

She draws level with him as they begin the sharp ascent to Cassandra’s house. Min has spent her spare time riding horses, tearing around on quad bikes, racing through the bush on foot. Her arms and legs are strong. Darcy has spent his spare time reading. He breathes harder than Min going up the hill, face flushed, fists clenched.

At the house, Cassandra sits in the same chair she had been in on the day they’d met her. Ewan, tearstained, sits on the couch. He wipes at his eyes. ‘I’ll be off, then.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Min says.

He leaves anyway, his footsteps slow down the hallway. As he puts his shoes on, he begins to smother the sound of sobs. Cassandra studies both Managans. ‘A coffee please, Wilhelmina. Black. I get so tired of tea.’

Min heads into the kitchen, flicks the kettle on and then leans against the sink, listening to Cassandra and Darcy speaking in the front room.

‘You and Father Lee were talking about … seeing scars on people’s skin when you’re on Seannay.’

‘Aye. You can see them, then?’

‘No,’ Darcy says quickly. Min can picture his face, that alarmed look he gets when he feels he’s been misunderstood. ‘No, I can’t. I’m just interested in the stories. That’s all.’

There is a brief pause. The kettle clicks off and Min takes her time making a black coffee for Cassandra and tea for her and Darcy.

‘Aye, well. If I were on Seannay and the light hit me just right, I’d see the scratches here from brambles. I’d see the cuts on this finger from opening cans of ale. I’d see the grazes I got from gorse bushes. I’d see the marks from when I got rope burn the first time I went out on a boat.’

‘I still don’t get it. There aren’t any scars there for the light to show up. The skin’s healed. So why can some people suddenly see them when they’re on Seannay?’

Min takes the mugs into the front room and passes the coffee to Cassandra. Darcy gives her a quick glance, clearly reluctant to talk about the scars in front of her.

‘Thank you, Wilhelmina,’ Cassandra says. ‘Perfect.’ She turns back to Darcy. ‘You know, witches used to meet on Seannay.’

‘Yeah. You mentioned that, too.’

‘Aye, so I did.’

‘What … what do you mean by witches? Exactly?’

‘I mean women with old knowledge of magic met on Seannay and called whales to the shore. They were accused during the witch hunts.’ She pauses. ‘Only one of them escaped execution.’

‘How would they have called whales to the shore?’ Min asks.

Cassandra shrugs. ‘It was over four hundred years ago. That’s just what the story says.’

Why is Min so sure that Cassandra is lying? Why does she have a sudden sense of damp sand, of cold whale skin and starlight?

Darcy frowns, threads his fingers together in his lap. ‘So, what you’re saying is people think that being able to see the scars is some sort of … residual witch magic from back then?’

Cassandra sips her coffee. ‘Some folk might say that.’

‘Do you think that?’

Cassandra tilts her head towards Min. ‘Can you see the scars, Wilhelmina?’

‘No.’ Min glances at Darcy. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’d know, if you could,’ Cassandra says.

‘Darcy, do you see them?’ Min asks.

Darcy’s frown deepens. ‘No. Of course, I don’t.’ He looks away. ‘They’re not real.’

***

Luda’s workspace is a tiny, cramped office above the laundromat on the main street of the largest island town. The town is grey, made of stone – should be dreary but somehow isn’t. She’s sharing the space with a harassed archaeologist who’s employed by the council to conduct site checks before building or renovation permits are granted. He is a strange creature, all sharp angles and frustrated academic ambition. His name is Tristan, he’s from the south, and he spends most of his time muttering at his keyboard, cursing his camera and reading out serial numbers to himself. The office is really too small for two people, and yet Tristan has only been affable, generous. He wears an old leather jacket, has grey-streaked hair and green eyes, and his face, like Luda’s, is lined prematurely from years spent outdoors in wild and unforgiving weather.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, you know,’ he says suddenly. His chair squeaks as he sits back in it. ‘Publishing that photo.’

‘We’re going to do this now, are we?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Look, it’s my job. It’s what I’m here for.’

‘Maybe.’ He scratches his chin. ‘It’s also unnecessarily sensationalist.’

‘Excuse me?’

He studies her, one eyebrow cocked. ‘Oh dear. I get it now. You really don’t see the issue, do you?’

‘There is no issue. I’m a photojournalist.’ She turns pointedly back to her laptop. I’m an artist. I’m an artist. I’m an artist. Except here, she is not. Except, even back home, she had not been an artist in a very long time. She is now something more; something less.

‘I’d watch out for the kirk crowd, after this.’

She looks up, irritated. ‘What?’

‘The kirk crowd. The Reynoldses are big churchgoers and the parishioners here tend to close ranks like hyenas when things go awry.’ He leans forward. His chair squeaks again. ‘Father Lee wasn’t happy about you being employed by the council. Did you know that?’

‘But he’s on the council.’

‘Right.’

‘And he came to welcome us when we arrived.’

‘Yes,’ says Tristan slowly. ‘Because that’s what’s expected of him. He’s very committed to keeping up appearances. But you’d still do well to watch out for him.’

‘Well, thanks. I think.’

She turns once again to the document on her laptop, trying to link the dry wording of the objectives statement with the wild, magnificent, disordered places she’s visited over the last few days with Ewan. Low-lying farms. Shorelines bitten viciously by erosion. She realises that she has perhaps been mistaking people’s coldness for shyness on these farms. She thinks of those images. It’s easier to think of them as images – as stills that can be viewed and filed away. No keening, no shattering of rock on flesh and sand. She breathes out. She had done the right thing, even if it was unorthodox. Even if it was hard. People would be talking about erosion, now. People would be talking about climate change.

The chair squeaks again and Luda grits her teeth.

‘You’ve been out on Ewan’s boat?’ Tristan asks.

‘Yes.’

‘How is he?’

‘Honestly? Wallowing.’

‘Wallowing? He watched a girl die. He had to keep Violet from killing herself trying to get to her body. Being shaken by that’s not wallowing, Luda. Christ.’

‘It’s self-indulgent.’

‘Dear Lord.’

‘Is it going to help anything? Does it make Ewan feel better? Is it going to help Violet or bring Allie back?’ Her voice cracks and she winces. She frowns back down at her laptop.

Tristan watches her from across the room. ‘Acknowledging that something has been hard to witness or live through isn’t wallowing. It’s human.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this anymore.’

‘Fine. How are you liking the apotropaic markings in the ghost house?’

She sighs. ‘You know that I don’t know anything about archaeology, Tristan.’

‘Hexafoil? Daisy wheel? Witch mark? Really?’ He sighs. ‘Have you noticed the graffiti carved into the walls?’

‘Oh! That’s what you’re talking about. I haven’t really paid much attention. Should I have? What are they?’

‘Well, they’re generally simple marks carved into stone with the intention of warding off evil. A sort of protective spell, I suppose. They’re often found in places like doorways and lintels and windowsills, to stop bad spirits or witches getting in. That house you’re living in is teeming with them.’

Luda is startled. ‘Teeming? Really?’

‘Aye. Teeming. Haven’t you noticed the clusters of them?’

‘No.’

‘The clusters are on the ceiling and the rafters and the walls. In numbers I haven’t heard of, apart from the Creswell Crags. I’d love to get funding and make a proper research project out of it, but the council goes into conniptions any time I mention it.’

‘Hang on. Let me get this straight. So, you want to research the ghost house because the walls have a lot of these markings?’

‘Well, there’s a lot of them and many of them are utterly unique. They’ve got a classical hexafoil pattern with the addition of what looks like a scarred whale figure. Nothing like them has ever been found anywhere else in the world, as far as I’m aware.’ He rubs at his chin. ‘I’m not sure what the meaning of it is. I don’t know whether they’re meant to afford the whales some sort of protection, or whether they’re meant to invoke the whales for protection. Maybe they viewed the whales as something benevolent and godly, or maybe as an evil spirit they wanted to trap in stone.’

Luda raises an eyebrow. ‘Spooky.’

‘I wrote a paper on the markings a few years back. The councillors lost their minds.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I hadn’t strictly sought permission to enter. I normally get in through the kitchen window. But that’s not the point! The point is that councils are meant to be supportive of projects that highlight the cultural and historical significance of the land – but our council? Forget about it.’

‘Please don’t come in through the kitchen window.’

‘Well, obviously I won’t now that you’re in there!’

‘The council … can’t you go over their heads?’

He grimaces. ‘No. And in the meantime, I’m up to my eyeballs with all these fun projects.’ He waves a hand at the boxes and papers filling the cramped space. ‘We humans have a real penchant for layering significant buildings on top of each other. It’s mostly debitage, but I still have about four hundred artefacts I need to properly photograph, catalogue and store before spring.’

‘What on earth’s debitage?’

‘You really don’t know anything about archaeology,’ he says conversationally. He has a sip of coffee and winces. ‘This is truly foul.’

Luda is silent for a moment. ‘Do you think the council will ever change its mind?’

‘I hope so. Look, I know it’s important work and some people love it, but I hate this tick-a-box, is-there-a-neolithic-chamber-under-where-I-want-to-build-my-new-family-room council work. But the alternative is relying on funding and spending all my time trying to convince people that projects are worthwhile. That they’re worth embarking on and then that the sites are worth protecting. And even if they finally agree to fund the research, you’ve still got to prove that you’ve done everything you’ve said you were going to, over and over again. It’s just report after report after fucking report.’

‘Could you just keep researching it without telling them?’

‘Yeah, that’s the plan. But that’s hardly the point, is it?’

‘Would they know?’

‘They keep an eye on it.’ He pauses. ‘And they’ll keep an eye on you now, too. Don’t forget that.’

‘Because I’m in the house you want to research?’

‘Because of that damn photo you took.’ Tristan goes back to pecking at his keyboard with two fingers. The sight of him hunched over, the smell of cheap coffee. Grumpy and cynical, yes, but she thinks she glimpses an encompassing passion, a consuming hunger for his work (or what he would like his work to be). It is an arresting thing. It has been so long since she’s seen this sort of passion up close. The people back home had been ground down by the impossibility of living off a dying land. Their passion had long worn thin and been transformed into grim tenacity. She and Tristan, both lit up and longing for something they could never quite reach.

‘Lunch?’ she says.

‘Lunch.’ He shrugs on a jacket.

They eat sandwiches in the local cafe and Tristan tells Luda about the south. He tells her about the town and coming here and strange things on the islands; eerie flashes and colours that were not the northern lights; voices and shadows from the deep bellies of very old crypts. He tells Luda about the foundling boy who had washed up on the shore of Seannay a decade ago. He asks her about Narra; about Joshua. She swallows and says, ‘Where do you think the foundling came from?’

Tristan gives her a look and then settles back into his seat. Luda has noticed this about him; the gentle way he allows conversations to be steered away from the painful and uncomfortable (with the notable exception of his opinion on her cliff photographs). ‘I think he prefers the name Theo. And no idea.’

‘If you had to guess.’

He runs a finger along the edge of the table. ‘You’ll think it sounds stupid.’

‘Well, if I do, I won’t mock you.’ She tries not to smile. ‘Much.’

He snorts and reaches for his coffee. ‘Well, in that case, I don’t think he’s like the rest of us.’

‘What do you mean?’

Tristan clears his throat. ‘He doesn’t have any scars.’

What she thinks is, You see them too. ‘So, you believe in them, then? The scars?’

‘It’s not a matter of believing or disbelieving. They’re there. I see them on my own skin and I see them on other people’s. There’ll be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the whole thing.’

‘Why do you think some people can see them and other people can’t?’

He shrugs and looks away. ‘Different eyesight, maybe? I don’t know. Anyway, you were asking about Theo.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s … unusual. Everyone says that his hands are webbed, although he always wears gloves so how would anyone know? He can’t read or write, as far as I’m aware. They’ve never been able to get him to kirk or to school.’

Luda sips her water. ‘Bet Father Lee loves that.’

‘Hmm. I’d just started working here around the time he was found; I was on someone else’s dig on the other side of the island. But I remember the look of him when Iris bundled him out of her house and took him to the hospital to get checked.’

‘There’s a hospital here?’

‘Yes. Full of oldies, mostly – you know how it is. I expect it’s nice for them, though.’

‘Theo.’

‘Right, right. So, it would’ve been a couple of days after he washed up. People pushing in outside Iris’s house, taking photos. Yelling questions.’

‘You came out to look?’

‘I was driving home. Curious. There was nothing human about him.’ He shakes his head. ‘How he’s … adapted … the way he has in only ten years is staggering. I know there are anthropologists who want to study him, but Iris has always put her foot down. She’s managed to keep most photographs of him off the internet, too. Anthropologists.’ He sets his jaw. ‘No class.’

***

The early dusk is settling over the islands when Min and Darcy arrive back at the ghost house (back at home, Min tells herself). Shortly after, Ewan turns up in his big four-wheel drive. He opens the back and pulls out two old pushbikes and discoloured helmets. Min stands barefoot on the flagstone doorstep.

‘What are these for?’ she asks.

‘You and your brother,’ he says, not quite looking at her.

Darcy comes out, nudging past Min to where the bikes are leaning on the turf. He lifts one, holds the handlebars in his fists. They are rusted and peeling and one has mismatched pedals. ‘These look great,’ he says, and Min thinks of him sweating up the hill to Cassandra’s. Is cycling easier than walking? ‘Thanks.’

Min picks up the other bike. ‘Thanks!’ she echoes. ‘Have … have you heard anything about the mum?’

‘Violet? Aye.’ He grimaces. ‘She’s hanging on. Best you can hope for given … given everything.’

‘Yeah,’ says Min. She rings the bell on the bike.

‘Thanks again,’ says Darcy.

Ewan nods, still not looking at either of them. He is embarrassed. He had cried at their kitchen table and now he is embarrassed.

The weight of the bike feels wrong. Their complicity in keeping the rawness of his grief – the depth of him – a secret from everyone else. Min feels suddenly exhausted by it. Why, she wonders, do blokes feel the need to pretend that they don’t have feelings?

***

Darcy watches drizzle hit the kitchen window. Min is poking and prodding her bike in the shelter of one of the ruins; a head torch strapped to her forehead. The cereal he’d made himself for dinner has become gluggy on the table in front of him. He thinks about falling rocks. It’s harder to distract himself when he’s tired.

Luda comes inside from talking on the phone to Leanne. She has to stand on the highest point of Seannay to get enough reception to hear her. Now, she sits down opposite Darcy, gazing at him in that very particular way she has.

‘I’ve told you!’ he snaps, crossing his arms. ‘No more taking photos of me.’

‘What?’

‘You’re looking at me … like you want to get your camera out.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about my camera.’

He hunches down in his chair, staring at the kitchen cupboard under the small sink.

She clears her throat. ‘The cliff collapse was pretty awful, wasn’t it?’

He looks at her. ‘What?’

‘The cliff collapse. It was awful.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just that … it’s not wallowing …’ She swallows. ‘It’s okay, you know?’

They stare at each other.

Darcy stands up from the table. ‘I have no idea what you’re trying to do right now, but it’s weird and I’m leaving.’

He takes his time scraping cereal into the compost bin. When his mother doesn’t say anything else, he feels a familiar burst of anger. He climbs up into the loft, being noisier than he needs to be.

Chapter Four

February (their first year)