The back door went straight into the kitchen, which was like something from a museum. It had thin brown lino on the floor and cupboards that looked as if they’d been home-made and painted over a billion times. The sink was big and oblong, with metal legs instead of a cupboard underneath it.
There wasn’t a cooker, but a big old range with four rings on the top and two ovens. Everything looked exactly as if somebody still lived there—plates and cups stacked on the wooden draining-board, tea-towels draped over a string to dry, saucepans hanging from a beam—but everything felt cold.
‘My granny and grandpa built this house,’ Elspeth said. ‘It was the first Anderson Ground.’
Of course! Anderson was Elspeth’s surname. That was why her grandparents’ and parents’ houses were both called Anderson Ground.
‘Grandpa planted all the trees. I don’t really remember him, because he died when I was three.’
She looked as nervous as a rabbit and I didn’t want to make trouble for her.
‘I think I should go. I mean, you’re not even supposed to be talking to me.’
‘But the thing is, you were right!’ she said. ‘Taking things from your parents without asking is stealing.’
I was going to argue it like Duncan had, but she hadn’t finished.
‘It feels wrong to always do as you’re told and be good, and not argue when your parents are around. It’s like tricking them, or lying or something. And also, it’s wrong to be rude, and we’re being rude to you, by not talking.’
I said it didn’t matter, I didn’t mind. I’d had a nice morning with Matt and anyway it was only for one day.
‘But still, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like this when Fin was here. Fin wasn’t scared of Duncan. But now Fin’s gone.’
Chapter 3
Seeing Elspeth
Shadow wound himself round Elspeth’s legs, purring loudly, until she picked him up.
‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘He misses Granny. We’ve tried to make him live with us now she isn’t here any more, but he keeps coming back.’
She led the way into the other downstairs room, which felt slightly cosier, but still as cold. There was lino on the floor like in the kitchen, but with a square carpet in the middle and two stiff-looking armchairs, one on each side of the fireplace. Above the mantelpiece, a scenes-of-Scotland calendar was hanging on a pin, still open on the January picture of a big hill covered in snow.
I could imagine Elspeth and her granny sitting in that room, talking. They would be eating those cardboardy biscuits in cellophane bags that they sold in the shop, and drinking milk that came from the cow in the byre.
Elspeth would ask about her grandpa, and her granny would tell her stories from the old times, and it was weird, because in my imagination Elspeth in her granny’s house felt solid and real, where in the bothy she seemed like someone who almost wasn’t there: a trick of the candlelight, a whisper on the air.
I followed her upstairs to the bedroom she or her little sister Meggie or their cousin Fin used to sleep in whenever one of them stayed. It was so tiny that an ordinary bed couldn’t fit in there, so Elspeth’s dad had built one specially, like a wide shelf with a mattress. There were three wooden boxes underneath where Elspeth, Meggie and Fin once kept some of their clothes and games, but they were empty now.
‘Is this your granny?’ I asked, pointing to the photo in the little silver picture-frame on the bedside table.
Elspeth nodded.
‘It was the first picture I ever took with the camera she gave me last Christmas. That’s why it’s a bit blurry, but Granny liked it. She said you couldn’t see her wrinkles.’
The cat wriggled in her arms and jumped down, disappearing through the open door—now you see me, now you don’t. I could understand why they called him Shadow. We found him again in the other bedroom, rolling on the bed.
This room was much bigger, with a long chest of drawers covered in photos, some yellowing black and white, and others bright and new. Elspeth showed me her grandpa, leaning on his spade among the baby trees, and her great-auntie Hannah who went to Australia.
‘This one’s Auntie Lou and Uncle Fraser,’ she said, ‘and that’s Finlay when he was little.’
There was a school photo at the back, taken last year, with Duncan, Hamish, Elspeth and Finlay and their teacher sitting on chairs behind five younger children, cross-legged on the floor. Elspeth said that was the whole school and playgroup. She pointed out Meggie and her friend, Christa, giggling at each other, beside three even younger ones, gawping at the camera.
‘Granny didn’t like Duncan,’ Elspeth said, still looking at the photo.
‘Why not?’
She glanced at me, as if she was making up her mind whether to tell me.
‘Granny used to say she could see colours round people, and Duncan’s colours were very dark.’
I remembered Hamish saying, ‘Yes, but your granny was a bit mad, wasn’t she?’
‘Do you like Duncan?’ I asked.
She looked at the photo again.
‘He isn’t the kind of person you like,’ she said. ‘But you want to see him; you want to listen to him and be around him—I don’t know.’
She said she couldn’t explain, but she didn’t need to.
‘And what about Fin?’ I asked. In the picture, he looked taller than Duncan, Hamish and Elspeth, but that might just have been because he was sitting up straight, very smiley and confident.
‘It was always Hamish and Duncan—they were best friends—and Fin and me, but all four of us played together as well because there wasn’t anyone else our age to play with.’
Her voice seemed stronger, here in her grandmother’s house, and less like a silvery whisper.
‘It was Hamish and Duncan who found the bothy and made it into a den. That’s what it was in the beginning, just a den. Somewhere we could all go and play.’
Elspeth said Duncan and Fin always used to argue—like their teacher said, they were both ‘strong characters’—so it wasn’t surprising when they fell out over Duncan’s ideas about creating a secret club.
‘He wanted to be the leader and make the rules, but Fin told him to stop being an idiot.’
‘I bet Duncan didn’t like that.’
‘They had a massive argument, but Duncan wouldn’t let it go. He said we were going to do it anyway, whether Fin liked it or not. Nothing happened after that though, and we thought it had all blown over, but then one day when we went to the bothy, Duncan had got there first and he’d made the driftwood table and fish-box chairs.
‘He told us to sit down and we all did, because we were curious to see what he had in mind. Fin played along, treating it all like a joke.
‘When Duncan gave us our names, and Fin was the Warrior, he laughed and said that was about right. He wasn’t going to let Duncan push him around.
‘And he didn’t. If Duncan tried to make him do anything he didn’t want to in the Binding, he just laughed it off.’
I could guess that from his picture.
‘It was really good at first.’ Elspeth sighed. ‘Duncan turned out to be brilliant at making up ceremonies and stories, and he could get all kinds of things from the hotel store cupboards without anyone noticing. It felt kind of natural for him to be the leader.’
He could be bossy, of course, and tetchy when Fin wouldn’t do what he decreed. Once or twice they’d nearly come to blows. ‘Do you want to be in charge, is that it?’ Duncan would shout, squaring up to Fin. ‘Do you think you could do it better than me?’
Then he’d turn on Elspeth and Hamish, saying, ‘What about you? Do you think Fin could do it better?’
‘And the fact was, we didn’t,’ Elspeth said. ‘Not really.’
Elspeth sat down on the bed next to Shadow, and stroked his ears. I sat down too. I could see that talking about Fin was upsetting her, but I really wanted to know what had happened.
‘Well, one day, Duncan got the idea for the Judgemen
t. Before that, he’d told us what to do and Fin mostly hadn’t done it, so he said we needed punishments. Fin told him he’d lost the plot if he thought any of us were going to put up with that, and Duncan went completely mental.
‘He said Fin was always trying to spoil everything, and enough was enough. I thought they were going to have an actual fight, which would have been terrible because Fin isn’t as strong as Duncan, or as aggressive, but Duncan suddenly went all calm. “We’re going to sort this out once and for all,” he said, and then he walked out.’
‘We didn’t go to the bothy for a whole week after that, but the next time we were there, everything felt different. You could tell something had happened. Duncan was acting weird, and Fin seemed moody and bad-tempered, which wasn’t like him at all.’
Elspeth picked Shadow up off the blanket and tried to cuddle him, but he struggled free, jumped down onto the floor and shot out the door. For a few moments, she just sat there, staring after him.
‘Fin left soon after that,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on the open door. ‘I thought the reason he wasn’t his normal self those last few weeks was because he was upset about leaving. I mean, he loved Morna as much as I do.
‘But the day before he left, he told me he was glad to be going. He said, “Be careful of Duncan. Don’t cross him.”
‘That’s why I said it to you, when you first came,’ she added.
Nobody did cross Duncan any more after Fin had gone. Hamish was best mates with him, and Elspeth was wary because of what Fin had said. In a way, that made the Binding even stronger and more magical. As Duncan moved fully into his power, he seemed to have even better ideas.
‘It was exciting,’ Elspeth said. ‘He made us do hard things like the leap, and told us scary stories about places like the wreckers’ beach, which came back in our dreams.
‘We weren’t keen on some of the things we had to do, like the rules of how to behave at home, but that was part of the Binding, and we got swept up in it.
‘Me and Hamish never crossed him and never had to do a punishment, but then you came, and I warned you, and you didn’t listen, and he made you go into the bonxies’ nesting ground. Then you crossed him again, and now we can’t talk to you, and everything feels wrong.’
‘Are you saying I’ve spoilt the Binding? I didn’t mean to.’
‘You didn’t spoil it,’ she said. ‘You reminded me of Fin.’
We came out into the sunny back yard. Shadow was hunting in the gap between the outbuildings. Elspeth said he was a good mouser—the trouble was he’d take anything. Frogs, slow-worms, baby birds. . .once he’d even tried to kill a hedgehog.
‘Duncan says that’s just his nature, and nature is cruel.’
I suddenly thought of the flowers flying up into the air as Duncan beat the nettles with his stick, and the scared little chick, that time, in his fist.
‘You reminded me of lots of things,’ Elspeth said, going back to what we were talking about before. ‘When you came, we started playing again, in the pool, on the beach and in the bothy, and I remembered what it was like before the Binding, when the bothy was just a den and there weren’t any rules.’
She sighed. ‘I wish we could go back to how it was before.’
‘You could just leave,’ I said.
‘No, I couldn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘If I left, I would be completely on my own.’
I tried to imagine what it would be like to live here, not for a summer, but forever, with only Duncan and Hamish your own age, and nobody else to play with. How would it feel if your best friend had moved away, when there was no-one else around who could become your new best friend and stop those two from walking all over you?
We left the yard, walked round the end of the house and started down the track between the trees. Neither of us said anything until we reached the junction and were going our separate ways.
‘Anyway, it’s not your problem,’ she said. ‘You’ll be leaving and going back to your own life soon.’
I watched her run up the track towards her house, as light and quick on her feet as Shadow. Now you see me, now you don’t. She was disappearing again, like she did in the Binding, where she looked no more than a trick of the light and sounded no more than a whisper.
Chapter 4
One word and it’s over
I walked back down towards Jean’s house on my own. There were sheep nibbling the grass at the edge of the track, sometimes ambling across in front of me, their raggy wool dangling beneath their bellies.
When we first came to the island, I was actually wary of the sheep. They were silly and jumpy, but there were lots of them, and you never knew which way they were going to run. I used to try to avoid them but now I walked calmly through the middle and they cleared the way.
‘It’s not your problem,’ Elspeth had said. There was nothing to stop me accepting the Binding under Duncan, enjoying the magic of more strange events and adventures, and then going home to my normal life, a thousand miles away.
‘It’s not your problem.’ She was right. So why would I take Duncan’s challenge?
I suddenly thought of Jenson Powell. I had hardly noticed him until we were in Year 5 because he didn’t use to play football, but then Arthur, Marc and Truan suddenly had it in for him. No-one knew what he’d done to deserve it, but they kept calling him names and kicking his legs and stuff like that, and if anyone tried to stick up for him, they got the same treatment.
Not that anyone did much, after the first few days. No-one stuck up for him, including me. I didn’t stick up for him because he wasn’t really my friend, and that meant it wasn’t my problem.
The longer it went on, the more he got that not-there look, like Elspeth in the Binding—sort of empty and sunken in. Then there was this day when Mrs Ford was away and we were waiting for the supply teacher, and everyone was getting bored. It got noisy, and Arthur, Marc and Truan pinned Jenson down, pulled off one of his shoes and started throwing it to each other.
They threw it to each other and then to other kids. Jenson kept trying to get it back but he knew he didn’t have a hope. Arthur, Marc and Truan were laughing, and soon everyone was laughing, and the noise brought Mr Carter marching down from his office to find out what was going on.
He told us we should all be ashamed of ourselves, and I was ashamed, especially after it came to light what Jenson had actually done to get picked on in the first place. What he’d done was he had cried in the dinner line, which anyone would do if they had a really ill sister like he did.
Trying to shove that thought out of my head as I walked along was making me feel hungry, so as soon as I got back I went to the shed to have some of my secret cake. Tressa was there, waiting for me.
‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘Me and Milo got back from the bothy ages ago.’
‘Well I’m not going to sit around and mope, am I?’ I said, though that was obviously what she thought I’d be doing, just because I wasn’t allowed at the meeting.
I broke off a bit of cake, and passed the Tupperware to Tressa.
‘So where were you?’
‘Exploring,’ I said. ‘What did you do at the bothy?’
‘We had a fire and toasted marshmallows on sticks. Duncan got Elspeth to read from her pages about some of the feasts and celebrations they had before we came.’
‘That sounds good.’
‘It’ll be even better tomorrow, when you’re back.’
I finished my cake and picked a corner of icing off the bit that was left in the box.
‘What?’ she said, when I didn’t say anything.
‘I’m thinking of taking Duncan’s challenge.’
She laughed and then, catching my eye, stopped laughing.
‘You can’t be serious!’
‘Why not?’
‘Well for one thing, he’s bigger and cleverer than you. You won’t win.’
‘Thanks for your support.’
I put the lid back on the Tupperware
and hid it again. Tressa said why should she support me? She didn’t want me to challenge Duncan. She liked the Binding. It was amazing, and we would never find anything like it anywhere else in the world.
‘You’re going to ruin everything,’ she said. ‘Not just for us, either. Think about that. We’ll be going home at the end of the holidays, but Duncan, Hamish and Elspeth will still be here.’
‘Yes, well, that’s the point.’
I told her what Elspeth had told me about how it used to be her and Fin, and Duncan and Hamish, two pairs of best friends, only now that Fin wasn’t there any more, it was Hamish and Duncan, as thick as thieves.
‘What’s this got to do with the Binding?’ said Tressa.
‘Elspeth says the Binding was better when Fin was there because he stood up to Duncan, and they didn’t do stealing from their parents and stuff. She doesn’t want to do it, but she’s scared. If she crosses Duncan, she thinks she’ll be out on her own, and there’s no-one else here for her to be friends with.’
Tressa frowned.
‘That’s not our problem though, is it?’
I told Tressa about the house in the trees, how it had belonged to Elspeth’s granny who died, and Elspeth was really missing her. First she lost Fin and then she lost her granny, and she was really unhappy.
‘Imagine if our granny lived next door, and we could go back and forth to her house across the fields whenever we liked, and stay over if we wanted, and then one day, she dies and she’s gone forever. No-one there. Just a cold empty house.’
Milo appeared in the doorway.
‘Are you talking?’ he asked, suspiciously.
‘Of course not,’ Tressa said. ‘That would be against the rules, right?’
‘I think you were talking,’ Milo muttered.
Tressa got up and steered him out of the shed. ‘Why don’t you give me a ride in your van?’
She didn’t bring it up again. You could tell she was thinking I wouldn’t do it anyway, what with having the backbone of a jellyfish and everything. I actually didn’t think I’d do it either. I wasn’t even certain that I wanted to.
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