‘It sounded like someone shouting, but we couldn’t really tell,’ said Tressa. ‘It could have been a sheep that got stuck in a fence, or even seagulls calling, or maybe it was nothing and we imagined it in the mist.
‘We decided to go a little way towards where we thought it was coming from, but we couldn’t see two metres in front of us, so we all held hands and picked our way across the field.’
As they moved nearer, the sound became clearer, so they knew it was people shouting, and very soon, they knew who.
‘So we started shouting your names,’ Elspeth said, ‘and by then I thought I knew where we were going. Towards the driftwood beach, not the long way around the coast but directly, as the crow flies.’
‘What are we going to do now?’ Hamish asked.
‘We should probably go back to the ceilidh before they send out a search party,’ said Elspeth. She offered me her hand and I let her pull me up.
We followed the stream inland and hit the track between Anderson Ground and Jean’s house. Mum had left the porch light on but there was obviously no-one home yet, so we carried on down to the hall.
We dived into the toilets before we went in, slipped out of our sweatshirts to shake the droplets of water off and dried our hair under the hand-driers. But Mum still greeted us with, ‘Have you been outside? You look soaked and frozen!’ Matt said all kids loved running around in the dark, and he was probably right—Milo would definitely have been cross with us for going without him if he hadn’t been busy teaching Meggie his made-up ‘London reel’.
I didn’t want to dance any more. My head felt fuzzy and my legs felt weak. None of us wanted to dance, so it was just as well that the band was packing up. Some people stayed to clear away the leftover food and sweep the floor, while the rest of us scrabbled for our things in the jumble of coats and poured out into the night.
It was properly dark by then, and we had to point our torches at the ground because if we pointed them straight ahead all we could see was luminous fog. There was a crowd of us at first, but gradually people filtered off as they reached their own houses.
Me, Tressa, Hamish and Elspeth were walking in a huddle at the back, not really talking but still wanting to be on our own. Mum stopped and waited for us to catch up.
‘Where did you get to?’ she asked. ‘I think you were gone a long time.’
She knew something had happened.
‘We went to the beach,’ I said, which wasn’t a lie because we did go to a beach, only not the one she assumed, the one with the jetty.
‘It was spooky in the fog,’ Tressa said, trying to make it sound like a great game.
Elspeth and Hamish played along. ‘We all held hands so we wouldn’t get lost.’ ‘We had a race along the water’s edge.’ ‘We watched the tide come in.’
Not one of us told on Duncan. It wasn’t a plan, just an instinct. We kept his secret, which was a big secret, like the one that Fin had been keeping. Only this time it wouldn’t be one person’s word against another’s if we should ever decide to tell.
Now everyone else had the power, and Duncan had none.
Chapter 7
Ashes on the water
By morning, the mist had cleared and me, Tressa and Milo walked down to the bothy in the sunshine. We were meeting Hamish and Elspeth, but none of us had any idea what we were going to do when we got there.
‘It’ll be like when we first found the bothy,’ Tressa said. ‘We thought it was a den, and now I suppose it is.’
I suddenly remembered coming down onto the beach our very first day and seeing the bothy huddled under the cliff; Tressa’s hand on the door handle; me saying we shouldn’t go in. Then the darkness inside, the fish-box seats and the driftwood table.
I remembered how it felt as our eyes got used to the dark and we found the curious circles of things in the corners, the shelves in the wall, the plate and the knife, the row of tiny skulls and finally the locked tin box with Privite—keep out written on it. Tressa’s eyes lighting up as she realised it was a child’s writing and that meant this must be a den.
But this time, it wasn’t like the first time at all. The door was open, and everything had gone. The makeshift chairs and table, the shelves and all the things on them, the candles, the pile of driftwood beside the hearth, the fishing net with all the things in it, the shell circles and the line of skulls. The bothy had been stripped bare.
As we stood there in the gloom, trying to take it in, a shadow blocked the light from the door and Hamish walked in, closely followed by Elspeth.
‘Where is everything?’ she said.
We looked at each other and shrugged. Then Hamish said, ‘I think I know.’ He led us back outside and down to the circle of big stones where we’d built the fire for the Feast of the Ancestors. There was a heap of new ash in the middle, with charred bits of wood from the fish-boxes leaning in from the sides.
Blackened shells and pebbles broke the surface of the ash, with scraps of string from the fishing net and empty tea-light foils. In the middle was the tin box, all twisted and burnt out.
Hamish picked up one of the pieces of wood and poked at the ashes.
‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘Duncan must have done this last night.’
I tried to imagine Duncan coming back, deep in the darkness, making the fire, dragging the driftwood table down the beach, throwing all the things from the bothy into the flames. Had he been in a furious rage? Or had he been sad, because it was the end of the Binding?
Elspeth sat down, and then we all sat down around the dead fire as if it was still alight, gazing into the ashes as if they were flames. It was like we were waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do.
‘I suppose we could start again,’ said Hamish. ‘We could find some more fish-boxes and make a new table.’
I noticed a scrap of black cloth, snagged on a charred bit of wood, all that was left of the Judgement.
‘Maybe we should look for a new place,’ said Elspeth.
‘Yes, but where?’
I tried to think of the many old sheds and buildings we’d seen on the island, but they all seemed to either have no roof or no door or no glass in the windows, or else they were too close to people’s houses. Then I had a brainwave.
‘What about your granny’s house?’
They looked at me as if I’d gone mad, so I said to Elspeth. ‘You go up there on your own. Why couldn’t we all go?’
‘It couldn’t be secret,’ she said. ‘My mum and dad would have to know.’
‘But it would still be our own place,’ said Hamish. ‘They wouldn’t be there.’
‘Would they let us, though?’ Tressa asked. ‘What about safety and all that?’
‘The electricity’s turned off, but it isn’t dark like the bothy so we wouldn’t need candles.’
‘And it’s just across the field from your house so we could easily get help if we had any problems.’
‘Yes but. . .I don’t know.’ Elspeth frowned. ‘What would Granny think?’
‘She loved having you there when she was alive,’ said Hamish. ‘Why should it be any different now?’
Elspeth considered it. She slowly nodded her head.
‘Granny would like to have all of us in her house. She’d want Meggie to come too,’ she said.
Milo jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and did a little dance of excitement at the thought of Elspeth’s little sister joining in. We looked up and there behind him, coming down the beach, was Duncan.
He came straight to where we were sitting. You might have expected him to be sheepish, ashamed even, about what had happened the night before, but Duncan didn’t do sheepish and ashamed. It was the same as after my punishment with the birds—something had been done that had to be done, and that was that. No inquests, no regrets.
‘I promised I would finish the Binding and I’ve done what I can.’ He gestured towards the cold ash inside the ring of stones. ‘Now, if you agree, I think we should have a closing ceremony.’
He took out a big tin camping mug and filled it with ash from the fire.
‘Page, for the last time, please serve the Lawmaker and carry this.’
Milo looked at the rest of us to check it was OK, before he took the mug, and then we all followed in a procession down the beach onto the hard sand near the water’s edge under the sparkling sun.
Duncan told us to take off our shoes and socks. He rolled up his trouser bottoms; the rest of us didn’t need to because we were wearing shorts. He asked Milo to put the mug of ashes down, took six large shells out of his backpack, and arranged them in a circle around it. After that, he brought out six smooth stones and placed one beside each shell.
The stones had names written on them in marker pen—Lawmaker, Teller, Deputy, Teacher, Joker and Page—so we knew where we had to stand. It felt strange, and wrong, but at the same time it felt right. Duncan had created the Binding; he was the one who knew how it should be ended.
We joined hands and slowly turned towards the left, while Duncan said:
In unwinding, round and round
What we unwind is unwound
What we unbind is unbound
The Binding.
We changed direction and repeated the words, finally coming to a stop and dropping hands. Then Duncan scooped some of the ash out of the tin mug with his shell, picked up his stone and walked slowly into the sea. When he was up to his knees, he scattered the ash on the water and dropped the stone into the middle of it.
Duncan turned and looked at Elspeth, and she copied exactly what he had done. One by one, we all followed him into the water, scattered our ashes and dropped our name stones into the middle of them.
The water was chilly and crystal clear, with hardly any waves. The ashes lay like a film of dust on the surface. We stood there for a while, until our feet were numb with cold, and it was Milo who broke the spell, splashing out to put his shoes on.
I thought Duncan would go away once we’d picked up our shoes because he’d done what he’d come to do, but he hung around. Nobody actually asked him to join in, but when we played knock-the-bottle-off-the-rock, he picked his stones too, and took his turn throwing, though he sat a bit further away, to one side. We didn’t invite him, but we didn’t stop him either.
It was the same when we played French cricket, and when we went to lie down on the dry sand at the top of the beach, he tagged along too. We were lying in a line with our eyes closed when Elspeth said, ‘We’re going to see if we can use Anderson Ground for our new den.’
Why was she telling Duncan? Surely he wasn’t going to be part of it! But even as I had the thought, I realised that, of course, he was. In a tiny place like this, everyone was part of everything.
‘I know a story about Anderson Ground,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s the story of the last and first tree on Morna. I could tell it to you later, if you like.’
We all knew what ‘later’ meant. It meant when we were all there amongst the gnarled old trees together.
‘Shall we go and check it out?’ Hamish said, ignoring Duncan but not really ignoring him.
He and Tressa went on ahead, with Milo running at their heels like a happy puppy. Duncan followed a bit behind. He didn’t have his stick any more. He’d probably burnt it with all the other things of the Binding.
Elspeth and me didn’t stand up straight away, but rolled over on our fronts to watch them make their way up the beach.
‘How can you trust him?’ I said. ‘What if it all starts again after Tressa and me have gone home?’
‘It won’t. Me and Hamish won’t let it. And anyway, I don’t think Duncan would want it. I think things just got out of hand, he got carried away, and maybe he frightened himself.’
I didn’t believe that for one minute, and I wondered if she really did. I glanced across at her.
‘Don’t worry,’ Elspeth said, seeing the look on my face. ‘We’ll be in my place, on Anderson Ground, with my mum and dad just across the field, and everything will feel different, with Meggie and Christa joining in.’
‘Are you two coming?’ Hamish shouted, from the top of the beach.
As we followed them back across the fields to the track, Elspeth told me she wished we weren’t leaving at the end of the summer.
‘We’ve still got a couple of weeks,’ I said.
‘And I suppose that when you go home, we can always Skype and message each other, can’t we?’
That reminded me of a joke. I wasn’t ready to tell jokes to the whole group again, specially not with Duncan still around, but I told it to her.
‘What do you call sheep that live together?’
She looked at me, groans at the ready.
‘You call them pen friends!’
Copyright
First published 2015 by
A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2015 A & C Black
Text copyright © Jenny Alexander 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 4729 0873 5
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The Binding Page 12