by Julie Mayhew
‘She’s the one!’ Britta Sayers swung herself towards each of her friends in turn, hair whipping. ‘I told you someone was reporting back.’
‘It’s not me!’ The coycrock girl’s voice grew desperate. ‘It’s not me! I would never!’
Anna came closer, her tone cool, analytical. ‘Why should we believe you?’
‘Because…’ The coycrock girl was trembling, close to tears. ‘Because who would trust me?’ The Eldest Girls fell quiet at this. ‘They doubt me,’ she added, ‘more than they could ever doubt you.’
Jade-Marie spoke gently, wary of another of Britta’s slaps. ‘She’s from the mainland.’
‘We know!’ Anna sighed. ‘We get it! We understand what she’s trying to say!’
‘No, I mean…’ Jade-Marie adjusted her nightgown where it pulled at her throat. ‘I mean, she will know. She will know things. Just like we thought Mr Hailey would. We can ask her if he’s telling the truth.’
Anna and Britta looked to Jade-Marie, then slowly back at the girl. They bit their lips.
‘Who is Mr Hailey?’ asked the coycrock, nervous under their stare.
And this is where the tone changes, as if a new roll is loaded in the projector, belonging to a different film. The same actresses perform, in wholly different roles.
Accounts have the girls going limp at the knees as they describe the new teacher; they giggle, groan, their language a little oily, maybe hysterical. Oh, his eyes! they say. Oh, his golden hair! Have you seen the muscles in his stomach, and the size of his … Their tongues go sibilant. They are in a trance with their thoughts, reaching for the mounds of their own private parts through the cloth of their gowns.
They start talking of other men in a similar fashion. They grasp at the swell of their breasts, and even though they are wearing layers of school uniform beneath those nightdresses, the detail of their hardening nipples finds its way into the story as it is passed around.
I wonder, says one girl – Britta in some accounts, Anna in others – if that boy with the gun has something else as long and powerful as his rifle.
The girls scream at the idea, urging the coycrock girl to come nearer, to join them in their quivering huddle.
Have you ever done it? they want to know of her. Have you? Have you?
They reach out to touch the strange redness of her hair and stroke the freckles of her cheeks. At this juncture, some listeners want to know if the girls kissed.
‘No,’ says the teller, ‘because they didn’t know they were being watched. Girls only do that when they’re being watched.’
The coycrock girl was pulled into the Eldest Girls’ circle, subsumed by them.
This part of the story seems to hold up, even among its participants.
She had started speaking low and fast, the coycrock girl – like wizards do when communing with the dead, if the Book of Isaiah is to be believed. She told them all the things that she’d seen, all the things that she’d heard, all the things that she absolutely knew. Britta put an arm around her, Jade-Marie too, the sides of their oversized nightdresses becoming wings. They gathered her up, these seeming angels, and whether they laughed there in that close embrace, or sighed, or wept for one another, for all that they had endured, one thing was true, no matter the interpretation – three were now four.
Four became one.
FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018
Viola is running again, bones juddering as her boots strike the hard earth. The two-way radio in her pocket bangs against her thigh. One foot lands in a grassy pothole and she bites her tongue at the jolt of it. There is blood in her mouth. She doesn’t stop.
Sitting still was no longer an option. The women were arriving for their early shifts at the Provisions Store. Tobacco smoke coiled its way into her shell hideout – the men making for the harbour, lighting their first roll-ups of the day.
The island was closing in on her and she was flooded with memory.
Hide and seek, played with her brother in the generous spaces of their 1930s house on the outer reaches of the M25; making herself small behind the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard under the stairs, breathing in the dry fug of its dust bag; Seb’s voice calling out, ‘Coming! Ready or not!’; his footsteps immediately there, the door swinging open to let in a brutal light. ‘Found you,’ he’d say with a sigh, expecting better sport.
This glimpse of the past was a warning, a premonition. She had to find a better place to hide, not make it so easy for them.
At full tilt, Viola drops into the channel that runs between the netted allotments at the nunnery. The narrowness of the passage makes her speed feel wild, her breath loud. Dot does her best to keep up, mouth open with the joy of it – a joy that is spiked each time she falls out of step and the lead snags her neck. Viola prays that the holy sisters are too busy with their kneeling and contemplating to see the flash of maroon coat and grey dog streaking across their land. Even if they were to report her, they’d say she is heading where she isn’t.
This is a roundabout route. This is a ruse.
They reach a fence dividing the allotments from the sloping land of the estate and Viola throws Dot over, then climbs the wooden rails herself, landing with a thump on the other side. They sprint across open ground, making for a stripe of trees. Once concealed by hawthorn and hornbeam, they turn nonsensically downhill, back in the direction of the east coast and the harbour, almost towards where they started. This convoluted route will take them away from the usual paths, the ones the rest of the island use to deliver children to school and themselves to work.
It means she will not bump into Michael, but she doesn’t need him now. She has a plan of her own – one of distraction, of delay. Her only regret is that she won’t catch sight of the Eldest Girls heading up the hill to St Rita’s as she instructed, acting as if this is just another day.
Though it is Viola who has given the girls their orders, she is not in charge. She is equal to them; that’s what she likes to tell herself, though she understands deep down how separate she will always be. Viola is a mainlander; the Eldest Girls belong to Lark. They know the island right down its blackest core; it has shaped them. And more than that, the girls are magical, heaven-sent. Viola cannot shake this belief, no matter how much she has seen behind the curtain.
Her complicated route reaches its conclusion: Viola and Dot dart along the ginnel behind the houses. They go through a gate, in through a door.
‘Hello!’
Viola’s hair is squally from the run, strands of it sticking to the sweat of her brow.
‘Hello!’
There are footsteps on the stairs. Dot whines in anticipation of who will arrive in the small hallway beyond the kitchen. When she appears, dressed formally, as if for work, a hairbrush in her hand, Dot tugs forward, eager to offer a greeting.
‘What are you doing here?’ the woman demands.
‘It wasn’t locked,’ says Viola, still breathless from the sprint. ‘I let myself in.’
‘I can see that. Don’t they teach you to knock first on the mainland?’
‘It’s important!’ Viola gasps.
‘Why?’ The hairbrush hangs limp in the woman’s grasp. ‘Has something happened?’
‘It’s Saul Cooper.’
‘And?’ says the woman, trying for nonchalance.
‘He’s at the stones.’
‘Why would Saul Cooper be –’
‘He’s with… a body.’
The woman’s eyes go large. ‘What body?’ The hairbrush drops. ‘Where’s Ben?’
‘You didn’t find him last night, did you?’ Viola keeps her grip steady on the reins, holding the woman’s gaze, waiting for the mask to fall.
‘No, no, I didn’t but… Are you saying that… What are you saying?’
Viola says nothing, she lets the woman fill in the gaps. The colour drains entirely from her skin.
‘No,’ she whimpers, sinking to the floor. ‘No, no, no, no!’ She clutches the end of the bannister to st
ay afloat.
‘Get up,’ says Viola sharply, playing the adult. ‘You need to get up.’
The woman does not. She mutters her denials.
‘It looks really bad,’ says Viola, raising her voice. ‘For you, I mean, this all looks really bad – with the ship arriving today…’ She gambles on the next part. ‘Your name in the ledger…’
The woman does not object. She quietens, still clinging to the bannister.
‘You need to go up to the stones.’ Viola’s breath is her own once more. ‘Get a story straight. But you need to go now, before it’s too late.’
The woman stands, her face wholly changed. A switch has been flicked. Here is what Viola always knew was behind that mask: someone selfish. The woman gives a nod of resolve and pulls on a coat, thrusts her stockinged feet into sturdy boots. Then she is off, pushing past the intruder in her kitchen.
The baton has been passed.
Viola depresses the button on the two-way radio and she speaks. ‘You need to stay where you are,’ she tells Saul, buying herself some much-needed time. ‘Leah Cedars is coming to find you. Over and Out.’
THE BOOK OF LEAH
Tuesday night, I knocked on her door.
‘I’ve brought a bottle,’ I said, holding out the small, stout vessel – empty now.
‘Did it work?’ she asked. She knew the answer. The skin on my knees was as perfect as it had ever been; old netball injuries from the schoolyard left more lasting marks. Margaritte had allowed me to emerge unblemished from what I’d done. I might even pretend it had never happened.
‘So,’ she said, taking the bottle from me, ‘are you coming in?’
We drew the curtains, lit incense and settled down opposite one another across the green baize. Margaritte leaned heavily on the table as she lowered herself into her seat, wincing at the movement, cursing the cold of December. I looked up unthinkingly for a clock, as if the face of one might tell me where the year had gone.
We worked through our experiences of the recent storms, giving an inventory of the plants in our window boxes that had survived the onslaught, and then, these topics exhausted, she asked, ‘What brings you to me, then?’
‘Tuesday nights are our night,’ I replied.
I smiled, thinking this was enough, that we would not speak of it anymore, that line we crossed when we were last together in my front room, how she had reached within me – seen me. This was the Larkian way. We avoided difficult subjects, lifted the carpet, swept them beneath, carried on.
Margaritte took up the cards from their wooden box, freeing them from their scrap of coloured silk. She shook her head.
‘It was difficult for you to come here.’ She looked up from her unwrapping to see my smile falter. ‘Let’s not pretend it wasn’t.’
With one deft movement of the wrist, she fanned the cards across the table.
‘I had a crisis of the soul,’ I told her, ‘that’s all. But I have decided now that I am going to believe.’
She nodded – a sign that I was to go on.
It should be an effortless task, I explained – to believe – I was merely out of practice. I needed only to remind myself of the good book and how straightforward it was to put one’s faith in that. This skill was surely transferable. Universal, even. I could apply it to every story I was told. For example, if a man came and sat next to me in the midday quiet of the chapel and said that he knew nothing of the girls’ tattoos until I had asked for those bandages to be removed, or if he swore that he had been teaching them science – only science! – then wasn’t I at liberty to believe him? If the story seemed like a noble one, with love and truth at its heart, I was surely duty-bound to put my trust in it. One decision, no going back, no questions.
Margaritte drew the cards into a pile and signalled for me to cut. She wanted more.
I told her that my love for Ben was stronger than my suspicion; that my lack of confidence in him – in myself – seemed unfathomable now.
‘How could I think that he was capable of such terrible things, think that all of this…’ I gestured to the burning incense and the cards in her hand – here was the apology that was most overdue. ‘That this constituted witchcraft!’ I gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I was thinking like a child!’
Margaritte shrugged. ‘But we are all still children, deep down,’ she said.
I ploughed on, a preacher of wild conviction, telling her how I was back in my stride in the classroom, feeling stronger than ever. When Miriam Calder had launched into a scissoring attack on Dellie Leven in the staff room, questioning Dellie’s judgement during one of Mr Crane’s absences, I had stepped in.
‘That is none of your business, Miriam,’ I’d told her crisply. ‘You are the school administrator and you work for us, not vice versa.’
Miriam stole away to her office and Ruth French started a round of applause – one that Miriam must have heard.
Margaritte nodded in acknowledgement of my account, a basic receipt in return in for its telling.
‘And did your Knight of Cups applaud too?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’ I took a large of gulp of wine and let my breath catch up with me. The certainty and the triumph I had talked of were all of a sudden gone, scared away by the passion that I’d used to describe them.
‘Ben Hailey – your Knight of Cups,’ she asked again, ‘did he applaud?’
‘He wasn’t there,’ I told her. ‘He was out on a field trip with the Eldest Girls.’ I resisted the urge to ask what she was implying; I shied from it.
Margaritte dealt a small cross of cards onto the green.
‘I like those girls very much,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ I replied – a lie, and not the first time I’d told it, if only by omission.
When Ben and I had sat alone in the chapel, reunited in that pew, he’d expressed worry for the Eldest Girls. They seem fearful of what life will be like for them now that they are almost grown-up, he’d explained to me.
‘I am just as protective of them as you are,’ he’d said, squeezing my hand, and I didn’t correct him, didn’t admit that I had, in recent weeks, wished those girls away. This would have been too terrible a thing to say out loud and too easily misunderstood. It wasn’t that I hated them or wanted any misfortune to befall them, only that I could hardly bear the way they made me feel – like I did not understand my own mind, not just about Ben, but about Lark, about life. It was as if these girls, who should know nothing compared to me, knew everything.
‘They’re our future, the Eldest Girls,’ Margaritte went on, as if she could see my thoughts and was nudging them into line. She tapped each of the cards in my spread, neatening the cross. ‘They’ll be the ones to save us, you mark me.’
I snorted. Save us from what? was the question that rose within but I pushed it down; I hid from it.
‘So…’ she looked down at the spread ‘…you have decided to put your unquestioning faith in Ben.’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Yet here you are with questions nonetheless.’
I opened my mouth to object, closed it.
When I eventually spoke, I did so quietly. ‘It will be the last time,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ I didn’t know who I was promising this to – myself, Margaritte, the forces that made the cards land the way they did. ‘Just let me know that I am right to trust him.’
She gave me a sympathetic glance, said, ‘He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed’ – quoting from the Epistle of James. Then she started turning those cards face-up.
First came the Eight of Cups, telling me what I already knew: that I must turn my back on a way of being, a way of feeling, liberate myself but not lose hope.
Next, the Lovers, marking the challenge that would cross my path: a choice between the holy and the temporal, the teachings of my youth or the possibilities of the future.
The Tower followed this: a symbol of ruin. A structure I had come to rely on would be razed to the groun
d.
And my guide through the aftermath? The Two of Swords: a blindfolded woman sitting at the water’s edge, her weapons crossed protectively at her chest, unwilling to see, unwilling to know – for now. A difficult balancing act lay ahead, before I could be gifted a final truth.
The last card – more swords, three of them piercing a heart.
Margaritte sat back and sighed. ‘Our deepest fears,’ she said. Then, ‘Death, more death.’
I had been a guest at that table enough times to know that hanged men and punctured hearts were not to be read literally. Even the death card itself, with its skeleton riding a horse into town, didn’t necessarily mean a life would be lost. These cards indicated an end, one that might involve pain and struggle, but one that also offered the possibility of a brilliant, new beginning.
Margaritte’s eyes were red. A tear slipped down the creases of her cheek.
‘We lost ten men fifteen summers ago,’ she said.
I pushed away from the table, confused, perhaps a little scared.
‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but what’s that got to do with –’
‘I think we might lose more.’
‘Right.’ I had no idea why this should show itself in my cards; there were no fishermen in our family. ‘And you think another boat will go down?’
Margaritte shook her head. ‘You weren’t there.’
‘I was there,’ I replied. ‘I do remember.’
I had seen the reverberations at least. I was twelve years old. I understood what the small boats were searching for – wreckage. The wives stood at a safe distance on the East Bay, praying for the tide to be charitable and return the bodies. One of the women started up a call-and-return folk song about hearts dissolved by salt – Come back, my bonny boy, turn back. A ceremony on the cobbles followed in the weeks afterwards, my father part of a choir of men singing ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’, those voices so deep they vibrated within me, as if I was singing too.
Paul had brought up the accident at the breakfast table some time later and Dad had rapped him hard across the knuckles with a spoon, told him: ‘We don’t speak of men who are taken by the sea.’