by Julie Mayhew
‘They want to know who it is,’ he tells her. He grinds his teeth against his lips, flexes and clenches his papery hands.
‘But that’s their job, isn’t it?’ She trips over her sentences. ‘To find out who it is. Once they get here, start a proper investigation, then we’ll know who –’
‘The body, stupid!’
She feels the spittle of his exclamation land on her face. ‘Oh.’
‘They need positive ID of the body. From me.’
He makes a break for the Land Rover. Viola goes too.
‘But I told you who it is!’
‘And we’re to trust the word of a ginger fucking coycrock, are we?’ He means to hurt her and he does. Viola takes a moment to rebound. Saul gets behind the wheel.
‘But you looked at it yourself,’ she implores.
‘Not the face, I didn’t,’ says Saul. His tone is sarcastic, self-punishing, and now she understands where this fury has come from – he’s messed up. The people on the other end of the line have pointed it out. You’re not a real policeman.
He slams the door.
‘Wait!’
She runs around to the passenger side. She must go with him. He could do anything – move the body, hide it, make it look different. Saul could change the story. Viola scoops up Dot and tries the door. Locked. He starts reversing.
‘Wait!’
She bangs on the window, bringing him to a halt. He leans over and slides the glass across, just enough for them to speak.
‘You stay here,’ he tells her.
‘I need to come too.’
‘Why?’
‘Because…’
He revs the engine.
‘Because…’
‘You don’t need to come.’ His foot itches at the clutch. ‘You’ve already seen who it is.’
It strikes her again, that blood-spattered image. The feet. She’s seen the feet. The boots, the legs, the coat – the right coat – but if she had trampled into the ferns to see anything more, she’d have spoiled the scene. And anyway, she didn’t need to. Because she knows who it is. She knows.
‘I know who it is,’ she says meekly, to avoid telling a lie.
‘Well, there you go.’
He goes to slide the window back across, but she thrusts in a fist, a last gasp.
He sighs. ‘You just need to wait here, cherub.’ His voice is coaxing, parental, tired. The cherub soothes Viola. He doesn’t hate her, not really. She removes her hand.
‘I’ve told them you’ll be waiting in the Customs House,’ he says.
‘But…’
Too late; she is behind glass.
‘Told who?’ she yells, banging at the window once more. ‘Told who?!’
No one will be arriving in the short while Saul Cooper is at Cable’s Wood. The ship doesn’t arrive until lunchtime, and Viola has seen the way the islanders cluster on the cobbles waiting for their deliveries; the ship is always late.
The Land Rover reverses, swings to point north.
Unless, Viola reasons, there is a quicker way to get to Lark, and always has been, some covert system of speedboats and helicopters impervious to the conditions out there, some method not available to mere mortals.
She steps out of the path of the Land Rover and drops Dot back onto the cobbles, retrieving the lead from her mouth.
Of course not. It takes days to reach Lark.
Then it dawns on her, seizes her like a hand to her throat. She has messed up too. Failed in Geography and Mathematics all over again. She really is a dunce.
This whole thing has been orchestrated to coincide with the arrival of the April ship, but that’s no use. It needed to be timed to coincide with its departure from port, three days before, so the mainland police would know to board the ship in the first place and be on their way now. Viola’s stomach lurches; she is sickened by her own stupidity.
‘They won’t keep you hanging around for too long,’ Saul calls before driving away. ‘They’ll be here any minute.’
The Land Rover kicks up dust on the road above the East Bay.
Viola snatches her head around towards the Counting House, then the other way, up towards the estate, the chapel, the school.
Then, knowing what she knows, Viola runs.
THE BOOK OF LEAH
The game continued into October.
By day, I walked the earth in all obedience – teacher, daughter and pure-born catch. In the queue for the online computers one Saturday, Sarah Devoner told me how she hoped for a grant from the Council to order more books for the library, and she reached up to pet my head for the luck she needed, thinking she was touching the black hair of a virgin. I did not flinch; I only smiled. Sarah didn’t know who I was now; I was Leah with the tender eyes.
I had knelt in front of him in my bedroom, watched him shake his head and grin, say, ‘ladies first’ as if this was a joke we shared. I followed his lead, let him edge me back onto the bed and ease apart my thighs. He worked his fingers there until something began to reverberate through me. He placed the coldness of his tongue between my legs, making the release sweeter yet.
‘Touch yourself,’ he liked to say as we moved together, which felt like permission or a gift, one that I understood was mine to use when I had only thoughts of him, and not him in the flesh.
Afterwards, we lay there in almost perfect blackness. Other times, when the moon was waxing gibbous, our limbs were picked out, iridescent. I felt none of the shame I had anticipated, no gravitational shift, no fiery judgement. The same ceiling hung above me. The rigging sang against the masts in the harbour as it always had. I felt whole, intact, though I was supposed to feel the opposite.
I understood what my body was capable of now. I had experienced joys it had thus far kept hidden – that I had kept hidden from myself.
Listening to Ben’s breathing as it slowed into sleep gave me something to savour, a sensation to recall, when we were in the staff room together in plain sight, discussing something necessary and mundane. I would think of it in chapel and when negotiating my weekly shopping with the gatekeepers at the Provisions Store. When I looked out to sea and thought of those who had left, I no longer experienced that sharp stab of rejection. Knowing I had lain beside Ben made everything that was painful, boring and difficult on the island – all that I wished to escape – feel entirely bearable.
Sharing a pillow in the early hours, we compared our lives. I’d grown up with a younger brother, he an older sister. His dad had left his mother and married someone else when Ben was a teenager. A man deserting his family like that shocked no one on the mainland anymore. I told him about my father, the gamekeeper, and his decision a few months before to step down from the early work to set a path for retirement, and how he now resisted those plans as if they had been made by a rival, one plotting his downfall. My mother was losing her patience.
‘We often run away from the very thing we know will make us happy,’ Ben said and we smiled at this, at his efforts at playing the sage, but also because we thought ourselves victorious. Look at us, we were saying with those smiles, we’re not like everybody else. We had grabbed what we wanted. I reached out across the island of my bed to feel the warmth of his skin: proof.
We could have built our relationship gradually, I knew that – done things properly, in the right order, not leapt immediately into the delight of our bodies, yet how easily we could have slipped through each other’s fingers. He was my Knight of Cups and I was proud of myself for snatching hold of him, without question.
In the early hours, one chilly October morning, he said: ‘You need to help me out with something…’
He was twisting a strand of my hair between his fingers, weaving a black line of it up and over his knuckles. I thought he was going to ask me to steal something else for that lab of his, the one burgeoning in the corner of the lower seniors classroom.
‘What’s the deal with the Eldest Girls?’ he asked.
I rolled onto an elbow to face him, m
y hair pulling free of his grasp.
‘That is what you call them, isn’t it?’ he went on. ‘I’ve heard people say it, like it’s a band name or –’
‘It’s just what they are. They’re the eldest.’
‘– like they’re some kind of legend.’
I paused. His expression was strange in the moonlight, oddly transfixed. Dreamy.
Familiar.
I knew how the girls were talked about now. They’d come of age, they were women, beautiful, soon ripe for the picking. The idea of it withered me instantly, aged me a thousand years. Ben was not supposed to see them like that. He was supposed to see them as I did – as pupils, girls. Just young girls.
‘What do you mean, “the deal”?’ I said, sitting up, wrapping a blanket tightly around myself. This wasn’t a conversation to have naked.
‘Well, you hauled one of them out of chapel on the first day of school,’ he said. His speech was tentative now; he’d noticed the way I had stiffened.
‘An isolated incident.’ This was my teacher’s voice. I didn’t want to be using it, not there, in my bed. ‘Jade-Marie is usually very well-behaved.’
‘And the dark-haired one?’
‘Britta?’ I offered.
‘Yes, Britta. I know her name. I just didn’t know if you did.’
‘Of course I know her name!’ I was irritated at this too-swift ownership of St Rita’s pupils, this unearned authority. They had been my girls the previous year – a pleasure to teach. The three of them were bright, without being exceptional – Anna the most academic, Britta the strident debater, Jade-Marie surpassing the others in creative tasks. I knew them far better than he ever could.
‘What of Britta?’ I asked.
‘Well…’ He pulled the sheet free of the end of the bed and covered himself too. ‘Well, she… she…’ He took a levelling breath. ‘Look, I’ve become friendly with all three girls. They sought me out early on. They wanted to know what music I had on my laptop, what films I’d seen, mainland stuff. But this one time…’
I swallowed hard. Was I frightened of what he was about to say? Jealous? I was both.
‘This one time she came to me alone.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And?’
‘Well, it began with our usual chitchat, music, fashion, that kind of thing… but then… then she put me in a really difficult position.’
The word ‘position’ conjured images I did not want to see. Lips pressed together under the gaze of St Rita. Bodies wrapped around one another, contorting, defiling a bed.
There had been a shift in the girls recently, since they had moved up to do their A Levels. I had witnessed it – their harder edge, their strange confidence. Still, I had no time for the rumours about them reclaiming the Sisters’ Stones and meddling in Lark’s pagan past – it meant nothing. I too had been intrigued by that part of our island’s history when I was young. Girls can be silly. They push the boundaries of what is acceptable, then they snap right back. They grow up.
I was happy with my good memories of them, how they used to be. I was happy to look away.
I laughed anxiously. ‘Is this the right time to be talking about them?’ I said. ‘I mean, am I the one you should be talking to? Don’t you think you should take this to Mr Crane if it’s a matter of –’
What was it a matter of? I was desperate to know and not know.
‘You’re right. You’re right.’ He swung his legs from the bed and started retrieving his clothes. There was a change in the breeze and the powdery tang of the smokehouse drifted in through the gaps in the window frame. It was a smell I had learnt not to notice until Ben brought it to my attention one night, shocked that I had managed to tune it out.
‘What kind of difficult position?’ I said. The dread was there now, the doubt; like the September rains, it had found its way in, there was no way of ignoring it.
He carried on dressing – jeans, t-shirt – his back to me. He had various combinations of casual clothes – a wardrobe like no other person on the island. He wore soft jogging trousers and sweaters with capacious hoods as he ran lengths of the harbour wall, falling to the grass above the East Bay to perform endless repetitions of soldierly exercises. Recently, the Cater brothers had joined him in this routine, disciples in a strange cult.
He stood, ready to go. We were still keeping our secret. Ben hadn’t managed to extricate himself from the widow’s lodgings yet; he had to be back before day broke, so she did not know his curfew had been broken.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I regret mentioning it. It was all very innocent, I’m sure.’ This was his teacher’s voice, the one used on parents – impassive, controlled, fake. He dragged a palm down his face to wipe this persona away. Then, he sat on the edge of the bed, placing a hand very deliberately on my arm. ‘It’s just that, when you said, that first time when we… Downstairs. When you let me into the kitchen, and we…’ He forced out a sigh. ‘You told me that… You said that you didn’t know what you were doing, and I thought you meant… I thought you meant it metaphorically but… you literally didn’t know what you were doing.’
The way he was looking at me, I wanted to die.
I knew from magazines what the mainland thought of purity; it had no value over there. Or rather it did, but bewilderingly, at the same time, it was something to be frightened of, considered weird. I had convinced myself that my innocence would pass beneath Ben’s radar, but he’d found me out. I was a black-haired virgin when he met me, an aged, unwanted virgin. I was so embarrassed that I found myself biting back tears.
‘Oh, god, no, Leah, don’t!’ He lifted a consoling hand. I snatched my face away. ‘It wasn’t a criticism, Leah. I wasn’t saying that. It was great! You were great! I think this is all… great!’
I tried to move away, distance myself from his unbearable sympathy, from the awful juxtaposition he’d made between what we did in the moonlight and those girls, those young and beautiful girls. He gripped my arm.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I only mentioned it because I wanted to know… I wanted to understand how on Lark, as girls, as women, you are taught about… Oh, god, I don’t know how to say this…’ He stopped, inhaled deeply. ‘Look, when Britta came to see me alone, she wanted to talk about Eve.’
I looked up, confused.
‘Eve Grogan? In my class?’
‘No, Eve-Eve! The Eve! She wanted to talk to me about the part in the bible where God catches her naked with Adam and asks… Sorry, I’m not very good on the wording of –’
‘What is this that thou hast done?’
‘Yes, that! And Eve replies something about how –’
‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.’
‘Exactly!’
This was fiery judgement in another form, God demonstrating precisely what he thought of my Knight of Cups, forcing me, sullied and naked, to deliver aloud verses that should have been closer to my heart. Ben smiled; my offering of these lines, my cooperation, was somehow reassuring to him. Embarrassment sank away, replaced by a resurfacing terror. Was I to brace myself for a terrible confession? Was the double-cross finally complete, never mine to engineer? I thought that I had climbed into bed with Ben, just Ben, but it seemed that the Eldest Girls been lying there all along.
He continued: ‘Britta wanted to know, “with my mainland view of things”…’ He mocked this appraisal of him, the idea that he should have some influence over us, but he knew that he had. It had been there in his playful talk at the Anchor. Let’s drag Lark kicking and screaming towards the shores of the twenty-first century! Britta was no fool.
‘She wanted to know if… And I just assumed this was some kind of trick, a test to make the new teacher uncomfortable, but if it was, she’s a good actress, because…’
I didn’t want to hear it, but I asked. ‘And what was it? Her question?’
He looked down, a silent apology. He removed his hand from my arm.
‘She wanted to know if… That’s how it
really happens?’
‘How what happens?’
He spoke gently, his gaze on the mess we’d made of the sheets.
‘How sex happens.’
OCTOBER 2017
Viola became a spy too, crouching low in the ferns, fronds spearing her cheeks.
They kept their distance, so as not to be seen, and so Michael would not be considered to be trespassing and invite down that terrible fury.
The mist obscured their view at times, drifting towards the cliff edge, but when the vapours parted, when the curtains opened, the scene took Viola’s breath away. Those fat grey stones rising up from the meadow grass gave her a sense of dread – of the past, of the huge unfathomable distance of it stretching out behind them, of the people who had placed the stones there in the first place, using just their bare hands and rudimentary tools. It was as if these forebears had understood this future would exist – this exact one, with Michael and Viola in it – so had left them a monument as a message, as a warning.
Balancing on his haunches, grinning proudly, Michael had played the role of the smug tourist guide as he introduced Viola to the sight of the Eldest Girls and their ceremonials. Viola had been careful to keep her amazement to herself, lest Michael should think he held all the power.
‘I do know one of them,’ she’d whispered to him, lying nonchalantly. ‘I got talking to the blonde one in the Provisions Store once.’ The truth was, of course, that Michael had brought to her attention something wonderful, something life-changing.
Everything about the girls, ethereal in their white nightdresses, particular in their rituals, mesmerised Viola – confounded her too. When they lit matches, she presumed they would smoke a joint, cigarettes at least. That’s what rebellious girls did on the mainland – they inhaled substances or swallowed them, numbed themselves, then loaned out their bodies to boys, piecemeal, in return for status. Instead these girls burned herbs, wafting the air with their scent. They lit candles in jamjars as they muttered indecipherable prayers. It was weird – the weirdest! – but could Viola say it was any stranger than drinking and smoking your way towards an unwanted fumble?