by Megan Tayte
‘I didn’t know the dark bothered you.’
‘It didn’t used to.’
There was a pause, and then he said gently, ‘Sienna?’
No, I wanted to say. Daniel. He was the man in the darkness. But he wasn’t the darkness itself. He wasn’t what made me tremble with fear and anger and grief. That was Death.
Sienna’s.
Mine.
There was no time to speak. I moved quickly in his arms so that I was straddling him and I wound my fingers into his hair and I pulled him to me so that his lips crashed onto mine and I held him there as I kissed him – urgently, desperately. For the briefest of moments surprise rendered him still, and then he was meeting my every move eagerly.
‘Bed,’ I breathed against his mouth.
He slid his hands under me and lifted me and carried me down the hallway. But he passed the spiral staircase leading to our room.
‘Bed!’ I protested.
‘Bath,’ he replied. ‘Your feet are black.’
‘I don’t want a bath.’
‘You need one.’
‘I need you.’
It was meant to be a suggestive comment, but it came out wrong. It rang with truth: I did need him, right now. I needed to feel, to be lost in sensation. I needed to be as far from alone as a person can be. I needed to be alive.
He halted mid-stride and kissed me so hard that it was a good job he was holding me or I’d have been a molten puddle on the floor.
‘And I need you,’ he said, mouth still on mine. ‘It’s a bath for two.’
‘Oh!’ I said.
And for the next half hour, that was the only word I could think to say.
28: PETER BLAKE’S GRANDDAUGHTER
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next day was a crocodile. I shrieked.
‘What – what?’
‘Sorry – sorry!’
I grabbed Luke, who had shot up in bed and was urgently scanning the room for the threat. ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I’m an idiot. I just woke up and saw that, and it freaked me out.’ I pointed to the chair beside the bed, where yellow eyes were watching us.
‘Hey!’ shouted a voice from downstairs. Cara. ‘You guys okay?’
‘No!’ hollered Luke. ‘We’re being attacked by a bloody sequined crocodile!’
Cara’s laugh was long and loud. Luke cringed and took out his frustration on the beast, beating it soundly with a pillow.
‘Okay,’ I said, stilling his hand. ‘I think you killed it.’
He stopped pounding. ‘Sorry. It’s just – the humiliation! She drives me mad!’
I picked up the offending article and it hung limp in my hand. Why I’d mistaken it for anything dangerous was a mystery. It was a novelty sock, garish green with yellow sequined eyes and toes designed to look like jagged teeth.
‘I take it this is Cara’s work?’
‘Yes. She swapped out all the normal socks in my bag. Her idea of a fun prank.’
His expression was thunderous but I couldn’t help grinning.
‘You went out in these last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that explains why you didn’t want to give me your shoes outside the club.’
‘I would have, if it came to it.’
I pressed a hand to my heart. ‘You’d have braved the streets of Newquay in these for me?’
The storm clouds dissipated. ‘For you,’ he said, ‘anything.’
He pressed me to him and kissed me and we fell back onto the bed. But along the way I reflexively tightened my hand on the sock and a merry jingle rang out. We froze.
‘What the heck is that?’
‘Er, Disney, I think?’
A disembodied voice took up the tune of Peter Pan’s ‘Never Smile at a Crocodile’. A very close disembodied voice.
‘CARA!’ roared Luke.
‘Luke!’ she called back cheerily from the other side of the door. ‘Come on – up and at ’em. Aunt Maud’s expecting us at midday, and I really need Scarlett’s help with… er… choosing an outfit to wear.’
‘To see Maud?’
‘Yep.’
‘The cream,’ I mouthed at him, and pointed to my legs. Understanding dawned on his face, washing away most, if not all, the irritation.
‘Fine,’ he said loudly. ‘The sooner you go away, the sooner Scarlett’ll be down.’
We heard her moving away – but only just.
‘Since when is Cara stealthy?’ mused Luke. ‘Usually, you can hear her coming a mile off, stomping along.’
‘I’d better get up,’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ he agreed, then wrapped me in his arms so tightly that movement was impossible.
‘If I don’t, next time she’s bound to just walk right in.’
‘Probably.’
‘And find us like this.’
‘She’d probably cheer.’
‘She probably would, but I wouldn’t.’
‘I know. It’s just hard to let you go.’
A pause. Then his pout dissolved and, smiling, he took the lead:
‘But we still have another night here, after the surf.’
‘We do.’
‘And many more nights, back in Twycombe.’
‘We do.’
He squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, and then released me.
‘Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
I sat up in bed and looked about for a t-shirt to pull on while I sorted myself for a shower. The lamp on the bedside table caught my eye – it was shining uselessly in the sun-soaked bedroom. I reached for the switch on the electrical cord and turned it off.
‘Did it work?’ said Luke, serious now. ‘Leaving the lamp on all night – did it chase away the monsters?’
Monsters. The Fallen. Darkness. So vivid last night, so terrible. And then obliterated by light.
I closed my eyes and drank in the sensation of his fingers tracing patterns on my back.
‘No,’ I said, ‘the lamp didn’t do that. You did that, Luke Cavendish.’
Intimacy: the antidote to death.
*
Sunday in the apartment was shaping up to be a quiet one. By half past eleven, when Luke and Cara and I were ready to leave for our lunch out, only Si and Duvali and Tamara had surfaced. Duvali made them all some kind of vile hangover cure – a Prairie Oyster, he called it. I watched, cringing, as the three of them knocked back the concoction, abundantly glad that while my energy drink tasted like cough medicine, it at least didn’t contain a raw egg and Tabasco sauce. Afterwards, Si muttered half-heartedly that he’d better wake the others to get ready for coasteering, but then followed Duvali and Tamara out onto the balcony and collapsed on a sunbed.
Cara, conversely, seemed to be suffering no ill effects for her late night and not-quite-so-virgin cocktails. She was so excited that she’d been able to dance, really dance, at the club, and was completely wired over the YouTube video of yesterday’s flash mob that Liam had uploaded – the hit counter was at five thousand and rising steeply. Her compulsion to check the view count every few minutes had made our healing session that morning somewhat stressful for me: she kept opening her eyes suddenly as I worked on her legs. At one point I thought she’d caught me out – seen my light. But in moments she was buried in the YouTube app again. The only time she really took a break from it was when I told her there was only one application of cream left in the tub. She looked so downcast – her legs were better, undeniably so, but nowhere near healed. But I couldn’t do that for her now, so quickly. I told her that the cream was my mother’s, and I would ask her to get more, but that it would take time: it was experimental, not readily available. She seemed to accept that.
We took a taxi into town. On the way Luke and Cara gave me a little background on their aunt. She was a little blunt, they warned me, but had the biggest heart of anyone they knew. She had come to Newquay as a young woman, married a doctor, talked him into buying a dilapidated house, renovated the house an
d opened it as a guesthouse. The business was any bank manager’s worst nightmare: Maud’s guesthouse never turned a profit, and frequently ran at a loss, because she had a habit of taking in people down on their luck – the homeless, the lost, the waifs and strays. In her last year of business the local council had awarded ‘Aunt Maud’, as all of her guests called her, a gold trophy for her contribution to the community. She promptly pawned it to help one of her residents pay off a debt.
For forty-five years Maud somehow managed to keep the guesthouse operating. And then she lost her husband to cancer, and she had to concede that the house was too big to keep up by herself. So when someone made her a good offer on the guesthouse, she took it, and moved to a small flat in a retirement development overlooking the sea. She was happy there, Luke told me, entertaining a steady stream of former guests.
Certainly, the lady who greeted us at the door to her flat seemed delighted to have company, and was so practised a hostess that I felt like I’d barely blinked before I was sitting on a comfortable armchair with a glass of orange juice in one hand and a ‘nibble’ (a.k.a cheese and pineapple on a stick) in the other. Maud was the spitting image of her sister, Grannie, but her direct manner reminded me of Cara. She was without doubt the most commanding presence in the room, and she had an unnerving stare. At least, the way she looked at me unnerved me.
‘Have we met before, Scarlett?’ she said.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Strange.’ She tapped her cocktail stick on her lower lip and studied me. ‘Because I’ve certainly seen you before.’
‘Maybe Scarlett reminds you of her grandparents,’ suggested Luke. ‘You may have met them in Twycombe when you visited Grannie.’
‘Perhaps. Who are your grandparents?’
‘Were,’ I said gently. ‘Peter and Alice Blake.’
Her cocktail stick stilled. ‘You are Peter Blake’s granddaughter?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ Finally, she broke the stare and looked away from me, out of the window, which I could see from my seat offered a fantastic view of the beach. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That is why you are familiar to me.’
‘You knew my grandfather then?’
‘I did not,’ she replied, and there was something sharp in her tone. Before I could say anything else, she clapped her hands. ‘Now then. Go wash your hands, dears, and we’ll sit up and have lunch. I made tuna pasta bake. Everyone loves tuna pasta bake.’
I did not, in fact, love tuna pasta bake, but I ate it, every mouthful. So did Luke and Cara, though it took them a good deal longer to clean their plates because they kept having to pause to answer Maud’s questions. She asked a lot of questions, and many of them were searching. Most of all, her interest was in their plans for the future. Clearly, she wanted to see her niece and nephew make something of themselves. I sat quietly throughout, relieved to be a spectator not a participant, until Maud turned to me and asked, ‘And what about you, Scarlett? What are your plans?’
Under the table, Luke’s hand squeezed my knee. ‘Scarlett’s taking a year out,’ he said.
I braced myself for Maud’s reply. So far, she’d been impressed with Cara’s plan to grow her business, but pretty scathing of Luke’s lack of direction – man-and-van and pub cook were entirely beneath him, she thought, and he should be pursuing the dream he’d once had of running his own restaurant. At least Luke was doing something now and for the foreseeable future, though. I was achieving exactly zilch.
But Maud didn’t point that out. She just fixed those penetrating eyes on me for a while, long enough that Luke cleared his throat awkwardly. Then, seemingly satisfied with what she saw, she gave me a smile and a nod and granted us all a reprieve from interrogation by turning the conversation to some of the more eccentric guests she’d had at the guesthouse.
After dessert, Luke and Cara helped Maud clear away. I tried to help, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, she was quite insistent that I take in the view from the small balcony leading off the living area.
‘I’ve seen your eyes sliding over there, dear. Drawn to the view, no doubt. Bound to be. Go and take it in.’
Outside, I held tight to the balustrade and looked from the cloudless sky, where gulls darted and dived, to the gently rolling sea, where novice surfers wobbled and toppled, to the wide, sandy beach, where families picnicked and dug in the sand and rock-pooled around the base of a jutting island. It was the kind of view you could look at for hours and not get bored.
My text alert beeped. I dug my phone out and checked the screen. A message from Jude.
How are you after last night?
I texted back: Okay.
Nothing I need to know about?
No.
Are you going back to that club tonight?
No. It’s the night surf at Fistral.
My phone rang at once. I rejected Jude’s call. Seconds later:
You can’t surf waves like that at night!
I sighed. I wasn’t remotely planning to surf tonight – this was an organised competition for experienced surfers. I’d got pretty competent on a board, but I wasn’t remotely in that league. But that little word, can’t, in Jude’s text irritated me.
Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, I typed. Then I felt a little guilty; I knew he was just trying to look out for me. So I added: PS: Thanks for last night.
He replied in moments: Welcome.
‘Who are you texting?’
Luke had appeared beside me. I jumped guilty and locked the screen on my phone.
‘Um, just my mum.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I didn’t realise you two were on talking terms.’
‘Yeah, she rang the other day. She’s doing better.’
‘Good. That’s good.’ He looked out at the beach. ‘Fancy a walk? There’s something I want to show you.’
‘What about Cara?’
‘She’s happy to stay on with Maud – peas in a pod, those two. She can get a cab back later.’
‘But isn’t it rude to leave now?’
‘The great thing about having a brutally honest aunt? She never finds brutal honesty rude. I’ll just go in and tell her I want some time alone with you to kiss you senseless on the beach.’
*
I don’t know whether Luke told his aunt that (I told him not to!), but when we got down to the beach he seemed very determined to make those words a reality. He found it amusing that I was self-conscious in front of all the people on the beach and kept twisting away when his lips got close.
‘Luke!’ I scolded when my attempt to escape him ended in me backing into a little girl’s sandcastle.
‘Sorry,’ he said to the girl, who was gazing up at him in horror. He crouched down and used his hands to quickly reconstruct the south wall of her castle. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Good as new.’
‘Come on,’ I said, when I saw a man frowning and heading our way – the father, no doubt. I tugged Luke away. ‘What is it you want to show me?’
He pointed. ‘That.’
He was gesturing to the tall rocky island, cut off from the mainland by a hundred feet or so but connected to it by a tiny suspension bridge. Now, at low tide, it was jutting out of the beach, but when the tide came in it would be a true island in the ocean. From down at beach level there was little to see but the rock and some greenery high up, but I’d seen from Maud’s balcony that there was a house on top.
‘Quirky,’ I said. ‘But it’s so high, and the drops are so steep, and the bridge… I think you’d have to be mad to live up there.’
Luke was laughing.
‘What?’
‘The house up there,’ he said, ‘was Maud’s guesthouse.’
‘Oh!’
‘It’s not so bad once you’re on the island. Then you forget the cliffs. It’s just the house and the garden and the sea and the sky. Like living on a cloud. I wanted to show you – if I could coax you over the bridge. I asked Maud if she could arrange it with the
new owner, but she said no. Said he’s really reclusive.’
I stared up at the house, so high above, and wondered about the man who lived there, isolated, in such a vulnerable position.
‘Whoever he is,’ I said, ‘he’s either a very brave man or a very foolish one to live there.’
‘Brave,’ said Luke firmly.
‘What makes you say that?’
He smiled and brushed away a strand of hair that had caught the breeze and was whipping around my face. ‘Because I happen to know someone quite like him. Lives alone in an isolated house pretty close to a cliff.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘her. No, I have it on very good authority that she’s not at all brave, but actually spectacularly stupid. To the point of mistaking socks for real-life predatory animals.’
He laughed again and I thought how much I loved that sound, how it wrapped around me like a comfort blanket.
We walked, hand in hand, down to the waterline, where the waves lapped the sand. Without a word, we began a game of chicken with the water – standing at the last point a wave had touched, and daring the next one to come wet us. In Twycombe the result, invariably, on an incoming tide was soggy trainers. Today, in this sheltered bay, with waves so gentle, we should have been the all-conquering victors, and for a short while we were. But then we got distracted and… well, it turned out that it was kind of hard to see a wave coming with your eyes closed. There was a decided squelch in each step we took home. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I had officially been kissed senseless.
29: SACRED
The annual Newquay night surf – the central purpose for our trip – was an iconic event on the UK surf calendar, attracting the very best surfers. None of us were competing, but Si, Liam and Duvali were thinking of entering next year, and wanted to scope it out. Plus, with a bar on the beach and a DJ blasting out beats into the night, it was a partying surfer’s dream.
We arrived in the evening, when the sun was hovering above the ocean, and already the men’s competition was well underway. We used a few picnic blankets to stake our claim on a patch of sand, and sat down to watch. The waves were big enough to demand expert surfing, and that’s what the men on the boards delivered, over and over. They were poised, they were fearless, they were fast, they were free.