It feels like I’ve never moved so fast, felt so happy. My face is stretched into a grin a mile wide as the air whooshes past, Kian’s arms are round me and all the time Midnight pounds along, his mane flying, his hooves thumping the grass, his black coat shining like silk.
By the time we come to a halt a while later, back beside the wishing tree, I feel so strong, so alive, I might as well have just flown to the moon and back.
‘That was amazing!’ I say to Kian. ‘Seriously, that was the best, the scariest –’
Kian puts a finger to my lips. ‘Knew you’d like it.’ He grins. ‘But right now, we have to find some shelter. See those clouds on the hills beyond the lough? There’s rain coming, and soon!’
‘It’s sunny!’ I argue. ‘There’s no way…’
But when I squint at the distant hills, I see clouds I never even noticed before, trailing a soft grey mist. It rolls down the hillside towards us, blurring the purple-green heather.
‘What’ll we do?’ I panic. ‘We’re going to get soaked!’
‘Hey it’s only rain!’ Kian says. ‘It’s just nature, right? What’s the problem?’
We slide down from Midnight’s back and Kian grabs up the striped picnic blanket and pulls it round us like a cloak, draping it over our heads. The rain hits then, a wall of grey sliding over us, chasing the light away.
‘Crazy!’ I protest, shivering. ‘How can things change that fast? Is it because of the hills or something?’
‘Maybe. Sometimes, you can just smell it in the air. Everything’s perfect – then the storm hits.’
‘Story of my life,’ I say. My hair is dripping and rivulets of rain slide down my face.
Kian looks at me sidelong beneath the dripping blanket. ‘Change isn’t bad,’ he says to me. ‘Stuff happens. You have to accept it, adapt.’
‘I was happy,’ I argue.
‘So be happy again.’
‘It’s not that easy!’
‘It is that easy’ Kian grins. ‘Really – try it!’
I look at Kian, his lips slightly parted, the smell of wild mint on his breath. For one split second, I have the strongest urge to reach over and kiss him, but abruptly he drops the blanket and I’m draped in cold, soggy wool, squealing and yelling and chasing him down to the water’s edge, where Midnight is standing. The big black horse looks like he just walked out of the water. His coat gleams, and he raises his face to the storm, breath steaming.
Then the rain cloud slides past and the sun reappears. As if by magic, a perfect slice of rainbow appears on the hillside. You don’t get many rainbows in London. I know the science, sure – sunlight and rain create a prism of light, all the colours of the spectrum. It’s just that I’ve never seen one like this before. It arches over the hill, chasing away everything sad and dull and ordinary, making you believe in miracles.
‘Wow,’ I whisper.
‘That’s Connemara.’ Kian shrugs. ‘Sun, rain, rainbows, all in the space of five minutes. Storms and sunshine, darkness and light.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ I whisper.
Kian grins at me. ‘It is, of course,’ he says.
We are silent for a long while, and somewhere in the silence Kian finds my hand and holds it tight. We huddle at the edge of the lough, eating apples and damp fairy cakes, watching the rainbow fade.
Later, Kian walks me home along the lane, leading Midnight behind us. He’s stuck a sprig of velvet-green leaves behind my ear, so the whole world smells fresh and cool and good enough to eat, and he’s picking fuchsia flowers from the hedgerow, showing me how to suck the sweet juice from their bell-like centres. ‘Fairy food,’ he says.
‘Yeah, right,’ I laugh. ‘You don’t believe in fairies!’
‘Not the storybook kind, obviously.’ Kian grins. ‘That’s kid’s stuff. There’s definitely something to it, though – this is Ireland, after all!’
‘You’re crazy!’
‘Not at all,’ Kian says. ‘Did you never wonder where all those stories began? Will I tell you? They began right here. Long ago, there lived a people who were tall and bright and brave. They knew so much about the land and the sky and the sea that they were just about immortal. Then, one day, invaders came, a few at first, and then so many there could be no stopping them. They were ordinary folk, farmers, fishermen, soldiers, and they became the Irish people.’
‘What happened to the first lot?’ I ask.
‘They couldn’t leave and they wouldn’t fight,’ Kian tells me. ‘So they decided to live alongside the newcomers, but hidden away, like shadows. It was like two worlds existing alongside each other, one real, one magical. The ordinary people could sense they were there, and sometimes they’d leave offerings, ask for favours, especially at places where the veil between the two worlds was thin. That’s what the wishing tree is all about.’
My eyes are wide. ‘You’re winding me up, right?’ I ask. ‘You don’t really expect me to believe that rubbish? No way!’
Kian laughs. ‘Aw, c’mon, everybody’s got to believe in a little bit of magic!’
He takes my hand and squeezes it tight, and I think of rainbows, the lough glinting in the moonlight, a dark-velvet sky sprinkled with stars. I think of a boy with tanned skin, raggedy hair, a boy who laughs and takes risks and tells tall stories, and I know that there’s more than one kind of magic.
‘See you, Scarlett,’ Kian whispers, and I slip inside the gate with mint and fuchsia flowers in my hair, a smile as wide as Lough Choill.
Holly is on the tyre swing, her back to me, her hair in bunches flying out behind her. She looks like something out of a TV ad for washing powder, squeaky clean and seriously cute. Then she looks over her shoulder and I see that she’s been at my make-up. She has painted her lips black, streaked purple blusher across her freckled cheeks. Scary.
‘Hi, Scarlett!’ she shouts, waving.
‘Hi, Holls!’ I look over my shoulder, but there’s no sign of Kian or Midnight. They have melted away, disappeared back into the woods.
I wander inside, pulling the mint and the fuchsias from my hair to bunch up like a posy.
Clare is at the sink, rinsing strawberries from the garden. She puts the fruit down to rub her back and I try hard to hate her, dislike her even, but somehow I can’t. She turns to me, smiling, cradling her tummy beneath the apron, and I hand her the mint and fuchsia posy.
‘Lovely!’ she says. ‘Wild mint. I wonder what that’d be like with the strawberries? Did you have a good day then?’
‘Good day’ I tell her. ‘Great day, Clare.’
And then I do something neither of us expects. I hug her quickly, shyly, because she may be my wicked stepmother but she cares about me, I know she does.
She has been infuriatingly kind and patient. She has let me shout and sulk and rage and tried her best to understand. I’m the stepdaughter from hell, pitched up out of the blue to mess up her quiet little life. I guess I am the last thing she needs right now, jumping out of windows, running away, turning her goody-two-shoes kid into a black-lipsticked mini-me. The funny thing is that in spite of everything, Clare makes me feel like she’s glad I’m around.
As I pull away, I see that her blue eyes are misty with tears. ‘Oh, Scarlett,’ she says. ‘That’s great. I’m so glad.’
‘Did I miss something?’ Dad asks, mooching through from his study. ‘Scarlett? What happened?’
‘Nothing happened, Dad,’ I say, and watch his face come to life because it’s the first time I’ve called him Dad out loud in almost three years. I fling my arms round him and he holds me tight, and he smells of Polo mints and apple shampoo, just like he always did, and I can’t believe how much I’ve missed that smell. How much I’ve missed him.
Clare laughs and takes a jug of home-made lemonade out of the fridge, and Dad calls Holly in and the four of us sit round the table, drinking lemonade and eating strawberries tossed in crushed mint and brown sugar.
‘Wow,’ Dad says. ‘Strawberries and mint. I never tried it
before.’
‘Smells good too,’ I chip in. ‘You should make it into a soap. It’d be really summery, and you could package it with fresh mint leaves…’
Clare’s eyes widen. ‘You could be on to something.’ She grins. ‘I’ll play around with that idea tomorrow. Thanks, Scarlett!’
I shrug, but hey, it’s good to feel like I’ve done something right for a change. It’s good to feel part of things.
I live here now, in the middle of nowhere, with the three people (three and a half?) I once hated most in the world. It’s not so bad. They’re not so bad. It’s not like I belong, exactly, but it’s not such a crazy idea that I could. One day – maybe. If I wanted to.
That’d show Mum.
My project folder takes shape. I have painted a map of Lough Choill, complete with hills, woods, farmland. I have marked the altitude of the ridges I climbed the day I walked cross-country from Kilimoor, mapped in Dad’s cottage, the lanes.
I have sketched pages and pages of wildflowers – ivy, wild strawberry and honeysuckle from the woods; yellow flag, ragged robin and wild mint from the loughside. I know their names in Latin, English and Gaelic.
I have a graph to show the temperature and rainfall, so I know that this summer is shaping up for a heatwave, hot and dry. Every day I hang out by the lough, ploughing through dusty old library books on the long, sad history of Ireland. I’m also reading legends of long-gone heroes, warriors, giants, magical princesses with golden hair and cheeks the colour of foxgloves. They’re as crazy as any story Kian might tell, and beautiful too.
‘This is wonderful stuff, Scarlett,’ Clare says one evening, flicking through my folder.
‘More than wonderful,’ Dad agrees, his eyes shining with pride. ‘See what you can do when you try?’
I shrug and smile and pretend I couldn’t care less.
Holly and I are holed up in the sky-blue bedroom. I am writing out an old Irish legend for my project folder, about a wicked stepmother who turns her husband’s children into swans and leaves them to flounder around above the Irish Sea for hundreds of years. Holly is making a poster from a bit of white card, sketching out the letters and filling them in with vivid rainbow colours.
It’s the first day of the school holidays, and Holly has painted her lips blue with my eye pencil to celebrate. She looks cute but sinister, the kind of Hallowe’en trick-or-treater who’d pelt your window with eggs for handing out the wrong kind of sweets.
‘Scary look,’ I tell her. ‘Clare’ll go mad!’
‘Nah,’ Holly says. ‘She likes it that we’re friends. Wish I could dye my hair, like you. And pierce my tongue! I will, when I’m older.’
‘No way, Holly,’ I snap, surprised at myself. ‘It’s not like having your ears pierced, y’know. It hurts. Like crazy.’
‘Tell me,’ Holly says.
I sigh. ‘It started out as a dare. My friends dressed me up and shovelled on the make-up to make me look lots older. Like I said, Em’s big brother worked in a tattoo place. He did it.’
‘Did it bleed?’ Holly asks, eyes wide.
‘Buckets,’ I tell her. ‘Well, a bit. But the pain… Oh, it was unreal. My tongue was all swollen and Em tried to give me ice cream to eat to cool it down, but I couldn’t eat it. I was sick all over my shoes. It was a nightmare. I really wanted to cry, Holly, it hurt that much, but I never cry, no matter what.’
‘I know,’ Holly breathes.
‘Em took me home on the tube and Mum was furious, but she couldn’t say too much because she could see how sick I was. She put me to bed and gave me ice cubes to suck and I had to take three days off school. She kept trying to make me take it out, but there was no way I was going to do that after all I’d been through. I was lucky it didn’t get infected.’
‘Eeuw,’ says Holly. ‘Sounds awful.’
‘If you want to get something pierced, stick to your ears,’ I tell her. ‘That’s not so bad. Well, not normally! I had a friend in London who did it herself with a darning needle and an ice cube – scary! I was there, and I just about fainted!’
‘Seriously?’ Holly gawps.
‘Seriously. Bad news.’
‘Ears are boring,’ Holly says. ‘If it wasn’t a tongue, then maybe I could get a pierced nose or eyebrow…’
‘Yeah, right!’ I laugh. ‘You’re nine years old, Holly! Nobody’d do that kind of piercing for a nine-year-old.’
‘But –’
‘No buts,’ I tell Holly. ‘Don’t even think about copying me. That whole piercing thing was a big mistake – believe me, it’s caused a whole bunch of trouble. The crazy thing is, I don’t even miss it!’
I stick out my tongue, and Holly looks so solemn that I cross my eyes and squash my nose up with a finger to make her laugh. Then we’re both laughing, tickling each other and rolling around on the patchwork quilt until we’re breathless, grinning.
Holly goes back to her poster, a sign for the cottage gate to advertize free-range eggs and fresh veggies to passing tourists.
‘So,’ I say carelessly as I watch her paint, ‘tell me about the other kids in this dump. You know, kids my age.’
‘Kids?’ Holly echoes. ‘There are no kids around here. Only Ros and Matty, in Kilimoor, and you’ve met them already. It’s dead quiet.’
‘Well, yeah, I’d gathered that,’ I say. ‘There must be others, though. Other boys. I thought I saw a dark-haired boy on a horse, the other day, when I was down by the lough. The horse was big and black with feathery cream feet, and the boy wasn’t much older than me…’
‘A boy on a horse?’ Holly frowns. ‘Don’t know who that could be. Matty has an older brother, Paddy – same ginger hair and freckles, but no horse. Then there’s Kevin Fahey. Very shy, smells of cough sweets. He’s hoping to be a priest one day.’
Kian has black hair, and his breath smells like the wild mint that grows around the lough. I think of how we squashed together in the rainstorm, under the wishing tree, laughing, shivering, his cool cheek against mine.
‘I think this is a different boy,’ I say.
‘Must be a tourist then.’ Holly shrugs. ‘Or a city boy staying with family for the summer. Where did you say you saw him?’
‘By the lough, the other day,’ I say vaguely.
‘He could be a traveller!’ Holly exclaims. ‘You know, an Irish gypsy – they camped up by the lough last year, a whole bunch of them. Five big trailers, top of the range, and a couple of trucks and horseboxes. They had some ponies, and a couple of skinny, scruffy dogs.’
‘No,’ I tell Holly. ‘He can’t be, he’d have said.’
Holly raises one eyebrow. ‘You’ve spoken to him?’
I flush pink, flopping back on the bed to gaze at the ceiling. ‘Maybe just once or twice,’ I admit.
‘Once or twice?’ Holly squeals. ‘Scarlett, is this why you’re always down at the lough? You’ve hooked up with some gorgeous traveller lad!’
‘You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’ I panic.
‘Of course not!’ Holly scoffs. ‘I’m great at keeping secrets!’
‘OK,’ I say, chewing my lip. ‘It’s nothing, anyway, Holly. We’re just friends, and I don’t think he’s a gypsy. He’s really cool, but… Well, I don’t really know much about him.’
‘So ask,’ Holly says. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘No problem,’ I argue. ‘We just don’t talk about stuff like that.’
For the first time ever, this strikes me as slightly weird.
‘I know his name – Kian,’ I offer.
‘Kian? Nope, he’s not local,’ Holly says. ‘I’ll ask Ros. She’ll know – her family have been in Kilimoor forever.’
I sit up, eyes wide. ‘Holly, no,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t tell Ros. Don’t tell anyone. What if Dad and Clare found out? They’d think he was trouble. They wouldn’t understand.’
‘No?’ Holly pouts. ‘Oh well. Don’t stress, Scarlett, my lips are sealed. It’s so romantic!’
‘You think?�
�� I grin.
‘Definitely. I can’t wait to meet him.’
I chuck a pillow at her, laughing. ‘You are NOT meeting him!’ I exclaim. ‘No way! Seriously, no way!’
‘We’ll see,’ she laughs.
Holly has a friend from school coming over for the day, so I pack my rucksack with bread and apples, ready for a day at the lough. There’s no way I want to see any of those Kilimoor kids again – ever.
Clare looks up from the table, where she is stitching new patches into the quilt. Beside her is a heap of scrap fabric and a roll of red ribbon, partly unfurled, snaking here and there through the rags. A memory flickers across my mind, a good memory.
‘What’s the ribbon for?’ I ask Clare.
‘Not sure yet,’ she admits. ‘It was going cheap and I thought it might come in useful. Maybe I’ll use it as an edging?’
‘Right,’ I say.
Clare studies me, eyes narrowed. ‘Unless you want it?’ she says. ‘You’d be very welcome, Scarlett.’
I try for a couldn’t-care-less look, but my grin betrays me, and I scoop up the ribbon, winding it back on to the roll and stuffing it into my backpack. ‘Thanks, Clare,’ I say.
‘No worries,’ Clare replies. ‘See you later, Scarlett.’
Kian is already at the lough when I get there, like he has been just about every day lately. We never plan ahead, it just seems to work out that way. Today, Kian is standing at the water’s edge, brushing Midnight until his black coat shines like silk. I fish the ribbon out of my backpack and unravel it, looping it through my fingers as I walk towards them.
‘OK,’ Kian says. ‘Ribbon? Now I’m scared.’
‘It’s not for you, idiot,’ I tell him.
‘The wishing tree?’
‘As if!’ I snort. ‘No, it’s just an idea I had, for Midnight. I meant to bring scissors, though…’
Kian chucks me the brush and walks over to the wishing tree. He reaches up through the branches, almost disappearing beneath the foliage, and brings down an ancient, bulging rucksack. A blackened tin pan is tied to the strap, and a battered spoon sticks out from one of the pockets. He fishes inside, pulls out a pocket knife and hands it over.
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