by Emlyn Rees
David jerked her around to face him.
‘Have you any idea of what you’ve just said? Have you?’ he shouted.
She stared at him, falling still . . .
A tear ran down his face. ‘Take it back.’
But she couldn’t. ‘It’s the truth.’
‘You don’t mean it. You can’t. I know you –’
‘No you don’t. You don’t know how I feel. About anything.’
‘But –’
‘I can’t look at you any more.’
‘Because you think I’m responsible,’ he said.
Her eyes slowly rose to meet his.
‘You think I’m responsible?’ he repeated.
David stepped towards her and held both her arms.
‘Please don’t do this, Stephanie. Please. I love you.’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said, shaking free.
‘Get what?’
‘It’s over, David. I want a divorce.’
He shrank away from her as if she’d punched him. Then he turned, and left the dining room, slamming the door behind him. Under the table, the dog began to retch.
Chapter 18
‘I’ll go first,’ Michael said, staring into the gloom of the escape tunnel.
‘No.’
Taylor brushed past him. She took a swig from one of the miniature bottles of spirits she’d stolen from her granddad’s house, then threw it hard against the tunnel wall and watched it smash. She switched on her torch. The shards of glass glinted up at them like cats’ eyes.
So much for not letting Simon know that they had any booze, Michael thought.
Taylor had hardly said a word to either Michael or Simon since the three of them had set out from her granddad’s house twenty minutes before.
Michael had gone there after lunch to collect them, as agreed. Taylor and Simon had answered the door with their grandfather and he’d told them it was fine for them to go outside for a walk. It was only when they’d moved away from the house that Michael had noticed that Simon’s eyes had been puffy with tears and Taylor’s had been like steel.
‘What’s been going on?’ Michael had asked, as Taylor had set off towards Solace Hill without even saying hello.
Simon had told him, ‘My parents are fighting and Aunty Izzy’s going to have a baby. I don’t know why Aunty Izzy wants –’
‘They’re arseholes,’ Taylor had shouted back at them. ‘All of them. But the biggest arsehole of all is my dad.’ She’d turned and yelled down the hill at the house: ‘Elliot Thorne is the biggest arsehole of all!’
Now Taylor was still acting like she couldn’t give a shit. He marched on without looking back. She was drunk. That last miniature, a whisky, had been her fourth. She’d already downed a vodka, a Drambuie and a Baileys on the way here.
But Michael was hardly in a position to criticise. His own stomach was on fire. He’d had a vodka and a schnapps, downing them both in front of Taylor only minutes before. He imagined his mum and Roddy, who’d be opening the pub around now. He wished he was with them. He wished he was anywhere but here.
He shook his head and tried to sober himself up. A baby? Isabelle was going to have a baby. He pictured her in her bedroom the day before, studying her stomach in the mirror. But why had she been crying? Why hadn’t she been pleased?
‘Stick with me,’ he told Simon, ‘and if you get scared, or if it gets too dangerous, we’re turning back, all of us.’ He looked for Taylor, but she had passed him and the darkness had already swallowed her up. All he could hear was her wet footsteps, fading up ahead. Michael switched on his torch and carved out a passage through the dark, a tunnel within a tunnel, through which he and Simon swiftly walked.
The tunnel floor was sticky. It felt and sounded like they were walking on chewing gum. Their breath came back at them so fast and so loud that they could have been marching in a crowd. The tunnel smelt wrong, not of nothing, as he’d imagined it would, but alien, and alive.
‘I’m not scared,’ Simon started whispering. ‘I’m not scared. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not . . .’
Michael’s eyes and ears picked out details: cracks and overhangs; echoes and drips. There was a gloss to the smooth, water-polished stone which surrounded them, as if it had been licked by a giant tongue, and again Michael remembered how he’d first thought the entrance to the tunnel looked like a throat. Well, now they’d stepped into it, now they were letting themselves be swallowed alive.
‘Wait up,’ Michael shouted after Taylor, as the tunnel began curving round to the left, but the only answer he got was a mocking echo as his own words bounced back at him. Then he heard scratching sounds ahead, as if someone was shaking a box full of sand. The ground grew uneven. His torch beam lurched from side to side, as if it was swinging on a rope.
Then it settled on Taylor. She was featureless, her back to them, nothing but a silhouette. She’d stopped and, as they drew level with her, it was easy to see why. The tunnel was wider here than before, but low, so that Michael had to stoop. He shone his torch alongside Taylor’s, illuminating the ground in front of them. There was a gash in the tunnel floor ahead, four or five feet wide, as if the ground had been torn apart. The gap was too wide to jump, because of how low the tunnel roof was. Michael leant forward and peered down inside.
The first thing he thought of was death. If they’d walked along here without a torch yesterday, then the first one to have reached this hole would have fallen in and died. The hole dropped away, like the shaft of a well, into nothing.
Michael could see twenty, maybe thirty feet, and then blackness, as if it might have no bottom at all. Taylor shone her torch across to the other side, to where the tunnel continued to veer off upwards and to the left. Then she fixed the beam steady on the right of the hole, where a one-foot-wide ledge connected this side of the tunnel with the other.
‘No fucking way,’ Michael said, reading what was in her mind.
‘Why the fuck not?’ Taylor laughed. ‘Mum’s got another kid on the way. I’m replaceable now.’
She walked straight for it. Michael would have called out Stop, but it was too late. She’d already gone. She pressed her hands, one still holding her torch, against the tunnel wall. She sidled across the ledge. He shone his own torch on the ground ahead of her, to guide her way. It was glistening, wet. Her trainers flashed bright white, like snow against coal. One wrong move and she’d drop like a stone.
‘Easy,’ she then said, as she stepped down on the other side. Michael’s torch beam crossed her grinning face. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so who’s next?’
‘Wow!’ Simon gasped. ‘Wow-eee, wow-wow!’
Michael wanted Taylor back by his side. Was this what it would be like, he wondered, when they said goodbye in a few days’ time, with him staring after her and her looking mockingly back? He had to tell her soon that he was leaving Brayner. He had to find out how she felt.
‘Come back,’ he told her.
‘No.’
Michael silently cursed. He should have just lied to her, told her that the torches were broken, even secretly broken them himself and then demonstrated the fact to her. Then they couldn’t have come today. They’d be back at her house now, or his, maybe together alone, with Simon somewhere else. And then . . .
But there was no then. Wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that why he’d really come? Because there was no next week for them, or next year, not now that his mother and Roddy were taking him away. If he didn’t explore the tunnel together with Taylor today, she’d only come back and explore it without him the next time she came to the island. And he didn’t want this place to be hers. He wanted her to remember him whenever she came here, or thought of here. He wanted to make this place theirs.
‘We can’t take Simon,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ Simon asked.
There was anger in his voice and a defiance which Michael recognised from other times when Simon had lost his temper. Michael waited for Taylor to intervene, bec
ause she must have spotted the danger sign, too, but she said nothing.
‘Because if you fall down there, you’ll break your neck,’ Michael told Simon, ‘and because you shouldn’t even be here with us, because you’re –’
‘Don’t tell me I’m too young,’ Simon interrupted, ‘because I’m not. I’m not a baby, and you shouldn’t tell me that – anyway, just you watch!’
Simon ran for the ledge, and before Michael could stop him, he too had started across.
‘Come on, Simon, you can do it,’ Taylor called out from the other side.
There was a scratch, like a claw being dragged across rock, as Simon’s foot slipped, but Taylor was there, reaching out, gripping him by the shoulder and setting him right. Michael breathed out in relief. Another two side steps and Simon was safe.
‘Ha!’ Simon shouted. ‘I did it. I did it. Did you see that, Michael? I did it on my own. And you said I couldn’t, but look at me: I did!’
‘Are you coming, or not?’ Taylor asked.
Michael walked to the ledge and looked down at its glistening, burnished surface. Would it hold him? He was heavier than Simon, heavier than Taylor, too. He stared into the hole. It was only here, he reasoned, because the ground beneath had given way. Which meant the whole tunnel was unsafe.
No one knew they were here. If anything happened, they were on their own.
But stronger than the fear he felt, stronger than his desire to be outside, was his desire to be with Taylor – and to protect her. If he didn’t follow, then there’d be no one there to take care of her if something did go wrong.
He placed one foot on the ledge, then another. He leant against the tunnel wall for support, as he’d seen the others do. His torch beam flickered across the tunnel roof. The rock was cold and slick. He slowly moved to the other side.
‘See,’ Taylor said. ‘It’s a piece of piss.’
They continued along the tunnel. Taylor led, Simon went next, and Michael was last. He turned round at one point and swept his torch beam back. The tunnel was no longer straight, and all he saw was rock. The ground sloped upwards in the direction from which they’d come. He wondered how far under the ground they were. It was impossible to tell. How long was it since someone had walked this way? Decades? Years?
Then Taylor said, ‘Oh, my God!’
Michael walked into the back of Simon, who’d stopped dead in his tracks.
‘What?’ he asked, but then he saw exactly what. ‘Switch off your torches,’ he said.
The moment they did, they gasped. There were a thousand shining pin points in streaks and patches all around, phosphorescent and bright as stars, like a miniature Milky Way. They might have been looking up at the night sky through a telescope, only it was close enough to touch.
‘What are they?’ Simon asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Michael said. ‘Some sort of moss, I suppose . . .’
‘They’re incredible,’ Taylor said.
‘Amazing,’ Simon agreed.
Taylor stepped up close to Michael. ‘Astonishing,’ she whispered in his ear.
Then he felt her cold fingers on his face and smelt the alcohol fumes on her breath. Her lips brushed briefly against his.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, then stepped quickly back. ‘What was that?’ she asked.
What was what? Michael hadn’t heard a thing. But then he did. He heard a moan – soft, mournful and distant.
‘I’m frightened,’ said Simon. ‘Now I’m scared. Now I’m scared. Now I’m scared.’
His voice made Michael start; he’d entirely forgotten Taylor’s little cousin was there.
‘It’s nothing,’ Michael said. ‘It’s probably just the wind.’
‘But how do you know? It could be any—’
‘Michael’s right,’ Taylor said. ‘Let’s just keep moving.’
Michael’s mind was still reeling as they set off again, not from the noise they’d just heard, but from what had happened before. Thoughts whirred through his head like the lights on the pub fruit machine, all of them a blur, moving too fast to allow his brain to turn them into sense.
What did it mean, what she’d just done? That kiss. Had it been a kiss? Had Taylor really just kissed him on the lips? The darkness had cloaked whatever expression she’d worn. Had it been an accident? Had their lips only touched because it had been dark, and she hadn’t known where he was? Then he remembered her fingers, stroking across his face, mapping it out. Could it still have been an accident, even after that? His heart pounded loud in his ears, so loud he wondered if Taylor and Simon could hear.
Then ahead of them, the tunnel split into two.
‘Which way now?’ Simon asked. ‘We’re lost, aren’t we? Are we? Are we lost?’
Michael answered, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Here,’ said Taylor, ‘stepping into the left branch of the tunnel. She aimed her torch along it. It curved upwards, then to the right. ‘Can you feel it?’ she asked them. ‘It feels like . . .’
They heard another moan, louder this time, as if it was closer, as if it had come from one of their mouths. Simon whimpered and grabbed Michael’s jacket, but this time Michael was certain they had nothing to fear.
‘It’s definitely the wind,’ he said, ‘coming from the sea. I can smell the salt.’
It was only now that he had something to compare it with that he realised how stifling and stale the air they’d been breathing had been. He wiped his hand across his brow. He was drenched with sweat.
He took the lead and felt the breeze growing stronger with each step he took, funnelling down the tunnel towards him until it felt like a cold tap running on his face. Then the quality of the darkness began to shift. The blackness through which his torch beam cut began to get less solid. It was becoming more grey, more transparent. Then Michael’s heart soared as he realised why.
‘It’s a way out!’ he shouted back to the others. ‘Look. There. There’s daylight up ahead.’
It turned out that he was both right and wrong. The tunnel did lead out into daylight, but it wasn’t a way out, not unless you had a 200-foot-piece of rope, or could fly.
The tunnel terminated in a deep, wide cave set into the side of the cliff. It must have been at least ten times the width of the tunnel and the wind howled through it like an angry pack of wolves. Keeping low, Michael crawled to the front, to where it opened on to an enormous sky. He lay flat on his stomach and stared out, breathing in the icy air, happy to be free from those cramped tunnel walls.
Relief swelled inside him as he recognised the view. Hell Bay stretched away below, to the left and to the right. The sea ice hugged the land here as well, running alongside it like a cobbled street thrown down from space. Further out, angry white waves rushed across the sea. The beach was no longer visible, buried beneath the ice and the snow.
Taylor crawled up beside him. ‘I can’t believe how high up we are,’ she shouted above the roar of the wind.
It was the first time he’d seen her face since she’d kissed him but, looking at her now, it was impossible to tell whether or not he’d imagined the whole episode.
‘There’s no way down,’ he shouted back, ‘not from here.’
‘How much longer do you think we’ve got before it starts to get dark?’
He checked his watch and then the steely afternoon sky. ‘We should probably start heading –’
‘Look, what’s that?’
She was pointing down to the old fisherman’s hut on the rocks at the back of the beach. In the snow beside it were splashes of red.
‘It looks like blood,’ she shouted. ‘Like someone jumped off here and died.’
‘Or something,’ Simon called out, squeezing in between them.
Their jacket collars and sleeves whip-cracked in the wind.
‘What?’ Taylor teased. ‘Like a ghost?’
Simon shook his head furiously. ‘Ghosts can’t bleed,’ he yelled. ‘They’re already dead. It must be a sheep, or a dog . . . H
a! Or even a sheepdog!’
‘I think –’
But Michael never heard Taylor’s answer, because it was torn from her lips by the wind. He signalled to the others that he was moving back and they shuffled after him into the centre of the cave, a safe distance from the edge, before standing up, then he led them over to the black hole at the back which marked the beginning of the tunnel from which they’d emerged. He crouched down on the ground and they huddled down next to him. The wind was less strong here. They could hear one another speak.
‘It’s not blood,’ he told them. ‘That red stuff in the snow. It’s a boat. It must be Ben’s, the one he brought Kellie over in.’
‘That bitch,’ Taylor said. She spat on the ground. ‘That vile fucking bitch . . .’
‘Who’s Kellie?’ Simon started to ask. ‘Why’s she a –’
‘Mind your own business,’ Taylor warned him.
A rush of wind hissed through the cave and Taylor got up and walked across the back of the cave to a flat outcrop of rock in its far corner. Simon looked inquisitively at Michael, but all Michael did was shrug. It wasn’t his place to tell Simon what he and Taylor had seen down at the harbour that morning – and besides, what was there to tell? Kellie and Elliot had walked into the same boatshed and closed the door behind them. That was all Michael knew. What had gone on in there between them was anyone’s guess.
‘Stay here,’ Michael told Simon. He picked up a sharp piece of rock from the floor between his boots. ‘Take this stone and see if you can scratch your name, or even better, all of our names, into the rock.’
Simon took the stone. ‘What for?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Michael said, unsure himself. ‘Then because I suppose it makes this place ours, and anyone who comes here afterwards will know that we got here first.’
‘Like we’re the winners,’ Simon said.
‘Exactly. Just like when your football team won at school.’
Simon weighed the stone in his hand, then looked up shyly. ‘You just want to talk to her, don’t you?’ he said. ‘And you’d rather I wasn’t there . . . so that it’s just the two of you, so that –’