Rory just wants to run downstairs and away and out into the fresh air where things like this don’t happen. He can’t though, he’s stuck watching it. Some part of him is imagining what it’s going to be like tomorrow when his mother finds out she can’t leave the island after all. He has an overwhelming suspicion that there’ll be no family anymore, he’s going to have to go and live in the Abbey, with Kate and Fi and the others who are in the right, who are Eekonomical, who Can Cope.
“So where are the other bags, then?” Fi’s just leaning in the doorway, tapping her fingers on her arms. “Already on your boat? Which, by the way, other people gave to you, out of kindness.”
“There are no other bags. If other stuff’s missing then someone else sto— Someone else took it. Someone else might not be a perfect saint.”
“Have you got Asha’s keys?”
Asha is Missus Shark’s proper name.
“Rory was in the garden when she lost them.” Fi’s still looking at his mother. “She says she only put them down for a few seconds. And there’s food missing too, from the cold stores. Which were locked.”
The silence is horribly cold.
“No, of course we bloody don’t.” His mother comes to stand beside him. She hugs his shoulders. Her hands are trembly. “Of course you’re not a thief, Rory,” she says, much too loudly. “I can’t imagine what sort of person would think—”
“Just,” Fi says, very sharply, and with the unmistakable fervor that means she’s close to blowing her top. “Just give the keys back before you go. If that’s not too much trouble. You could leave them somewhere we’ll find them, if you want to go on pretending you don’t have them. On the dock, maybe.” She turns away. Rory and his mother listen as Fi goes down the stairs and outside. She closes the door quietly behind her.
His mother slumps on the floor and starts crying.
After a little bit Rory sits down and tries on a different pair of boots.
* * *
When they’re finished they haul the suitcases downstairs and outside. His mother’s hardly spoken and Rory doesn’t dare say a word, not even to ask where they’re going next. Although he knows Fi was wrong to accuse her of stealing the keys and the food and the other clothes—Lino did all that, of course—he also knows that in some more important way Fi was right. Fi and Kate may be irritatingly bossy but he doesn’t have to think about it to know that the way they do things is the right way, the proper and just way. He’s never seen before what happens when someone smashes the Rules.
“We should have done this months ago,” his mother says, as they wheel the suitcases back to the road.
He thinks she’s gone properly mad. Everyone knows that every single person who sailed away from the islands has never been heard from again. He’s gripped with the abrupt fear that there’s a flaw in his brilliant plan somewhere, that it’s going to go wrong and she really is going to end up forcing him out to sea to die cold and terrified and helpless. He can’t let it happen. He’s got to get away from her. Just for a little bit, surely that’s all he’ll need.
She turns back towards the Beach.
“Where are we going, Mum?”
“We’ll leave these on the quay. Or maybe we should take them up to Parson’s and lock them in there, that bitch might come back and go through them. No. She wouldn’t.” She’s muttering to herself. He’s not sure she really knows he’s there. “We’ll put them on the quay. Then tools. I’ll do the Toolshed next. Keep up!” She’s pulling her suitcase faster than he can manage. “We’d better get a move on.” They follow the curve of the Beach around to the Harbor quay. The tide’s coming up. Already there’s water between the wrecked ferry and the end of the quay. Whether it’s deep enough yet to bring a sailing boat he’s not sure. The boat’s down at the south end of the island and you can’t sail anything more than a dinghy up the Channel until at least half-tide. There must still be time to figure something out. He just needs to keep an eye—
His mother drops the suitcase on the road with a shriek.
He can never see how She does it. It’s as if the sea has a hand, or a wing, something which comes out and unfurls, and when it’s finished unfurling it’s Her instead of water. There are only little waves in the Channel but one of them rustles against the rust-flaked bow of the ferry and stops being a wave, stands upright, becomes a glistening white girl.
His mother makes a strangled noise, grabs Rory, and shoves him to the side of the road. “No,” she whispers, hoarsely, and then—as he tries to keep his balance—“No!” she shrieks. “Don’t look!” He did look, for a moment: he thought he saw Her waving to him, unless it was a trick of the sparkling morning light. He’s dropped his suitcase too. His mother’s pushing him violently back along the quay road. “Oh God,” she’s saying, “Oh God, oh God.” She gets him as far as the back lane, which leads to the north fields. It’s almost swallowed between banks of gorse with their sun-yellow flowers, but she shoves him into the opening, out of sight of the water. She’s clinging to his wrists. “Oh God. What am I going to do? Think. I’ve got to think.” She looks as if she thinks it’s the middle of the night, not a clear autumn morning. Her eyes are hunting around without seeing anything.
“Mum? What’s wrong?”
The glaze over her face has hardened.
“Sit down,” she says.
He does.
“Let me think. God. Are you all right?” She stares blindly into his face. “Do you feel all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Everything’s fine, Mum.”
“Let me . . . I know. I’ve got it.” Her hands start ticking things off in the air. “I’ll . . . Yes. Bring the boat round. Leave him in Parson’s. I can manage. That’s it.” She pulls him to his feet again. “That’s right. No, not that way.”
“Mum?”
“Up this way.” Holding him by the wrist, she starts scurrying up the back lane.
“What are we doing?”
“We’ll take you to Parson’s.” She rounds on him suddenly. “You’ve got to stay there!”
His heart leaps. He tries not to let it show.
“You’ve got to! Just for once, do what you’re told!”
“I will,” he says. “I swear.”
“Draw the curtains. I’ll lock the door. It’ll be all right.”
“’Course it will,” he says.
The back lane’s badly overgrown but she won’t slow down. Whips of bramble spring back from her shoulders as she hurries them along. They come to the top of the ridge and turn aside onto the mud track leading across to the Lane. His mother keeps saying the same things. She’s telling him he has to stay in his room and wait for her. He tells her he will but he’s not sure she’s listening. When they get to the house she goes around closing all the curtains. She pulls their edges too hard, as if she’s trying to zip them up.
“Where are you going, Mum?”
“Never mind. You stay here.”
“All right.”
“Upstairs.”
“All right.”
“In your room.”
“I will.”
When she goes out she listens while he locks the door behind her. Then she shouts through the door telling him to head up to his room. Even after he does that he hears her rattling the door to make sure it’s really locked. He decides he’d better wait a while before he goes out. He tries reading a comic but it’s hard to concentrate, he’s turning pages without really looking.
Better to go while he can, he thinks.
He lets himself out a window, listens, then sets off down the Lane to the Hotel.
* * *
He’s hoping Lino will appear out of the bushes before he gets there, but no. This corner of Home is the same as always this morning, a sad wasteland abandoned to the unstoppable avalanche of weeds. Even in clear sunlight the remnants of the Hotel look creepy, dark with ivy and full of blind alleys. He picks his way onto the rocks above the
shoreline, remembering the way Lino led him before. The black boat’s still grounded on its shoal. Rory promises himself he’ll take a dinghy out to explore it sometime after they’re gone. The thought surprises him with melancholy.
He finds the old service door and bangs on it. No one comes straightaway, so he pushes it open and leans into the machine room.
“Hello?” he calls. “It’s me. Rory. Is someone there?” He cups his hands around his mouth. “I’ve got an idea!”
* * *
Silvia jiggles up and down on her toes, thinking. She and Rory are outside the service door, in the alley between the main Hotel building and one of the blocks of what used to be seaside rooms. The walls are close together but the sun’s at just the right angle to flood straight down between them. She turns her face up to it, closing her eyes.
“Wonderful,” she says, finally. “It’s perfect.”
He knew it would be, but he feels a happy glow anyway.
She blinks her eyes open and looks seriously at him. “You see?” she says. “I always know you can help us.”
“Yeah,” he says, tongue-tied.
“Lino is out watching. I’ll tell him when he comes back.”
“The only thing is.”
“What?”
“It’s my mum. She’s acting weird today. I think she might try something right away. So maybe you should, you know. Soon.”
“I understand.” She’s communing with the sunlight again. “I don’t miss my chance. I never do.”
“OK then.”
“This boat. Where will it be?”
“At the Harbor. Not this one.” The Old Harbor’s right by the Hotel, he doesn’t want her to get confused. “On the other side.”
“Lino will know.”
This strikes him as likely.
“We will get ready, then,” she says.
It occurs to him that they’re saying good-bye, sort of. He feels abruptly shy.
“I better get back,” he says.
Silvia ruffles his hair, which makes him even more uncomfortable. “You are a lucky charm for us, I think.”
He wonders if this means thank you. “That’s OK.”
“I have a feeling,” she says, ducking into the shade so she can look at him without squinting, “we will meet again.”
“Yeah?” He’s obscurely flattered. Silvia’s not at all nice-looking, with her freckly tea-colored skin and her incredibly black and greasy hair, but she’s very thrilling in a way he can’t explain to himself.
“Maybe after we finish our journey I come back here. Do you think these women would let me join them? It’s a good place.”
He’s astonished. The idea is unimaginable in about ten different ways. “Here?”
She laughs. “You don’t think so?”
“There’s no . . .” No TV. No computer games. No chocolate, no power, no money. No supplies, no upstairs toilet, no rest from work. And winter’s coming. Last winter they all nearly died. Missus Stephenson and Missus Hatchard and Missus Anderson’s baby did die. The baby’s buried in the Abbey garden.
“You have peace,” Silvia says. “And best of all.” She leans down to him and speaks in a stage whisper. “No men.”
From inside the Hotel comes a rough shout. Per.
Silvia winks at him. “See?” Before he can say anything else at all, even good-bye, she’s inside the door and gone.
* * *
He picks his way back over the rocks, thinking, Well, that’s done. His brilliant idea has worked perfectly but he’s feeling strangely empty.
He wonders whether Silvia really will come back. His life might be completely different by then. He might not be living with his mother. He might have become a proper part of the Commonwelf. This is a word Kate uses sometimes: it means the way they all live together by looking after each other and sharing everything and Coping, instead of freaking out and stealing stuff. It’s obvious that he and his mother won’t be able to go on like before, not after she swore at Fi. What will happen instead he can’t imagine. One thing he knows for sure, though, which is that if Silvia really does come back he’ll be here on Home to greet her. At one stroke his brilliant idea has provided her and her gang with the boat they needed and put an end to his mother’s plan to take him away. When his mother finds out that the sailing boat’s gone, that’ll be it. She can’t possibly go back to Maries and tell them, Sorry, I lost that first boat, can I have another one? And even if she does there’s no possible way Kate and the others will let her have another whole can of diesel. And even if they do—he’s thinking it all through again, as he scrambles past the Old Harbor and back onto the Lane—it can’t possibly get sorted out quickly, and the leaves are turning, the sun’s staying lower, there won’t be many clear days left and however mad she is she won’t dare go to sea in winter. He’ll still be here, Home, tomorrow, and the next day, days and days, all winter long, and by spring he’ll have figured out a way to explain that he’s not like Ol. They’re not going to kill him. Perhaps he’ll ask Her himself. Why not? He could ask Her to promise that They’ll never drown him. He knows She wouldn’t, She’s his friend. She’s not a monster or a villain. She’s not mean. She likes talking to him, She always says so. She’s—
She.
(He stops in the road.)
She’s standing outside Parson’s.
There are gulls flying around overhead, the sun’s beaming down, and the breeze is blowing, everything’s doing what it normally does, and there’s a fish-white naked girl standing on the road outside the front door.
“Is this really your house?” she says. Her voice comes from between her lips but also from somewhere else, some other shore where surf is rolling and retreating. “It’s so tiny. I never thought you’d live in one of the doll’s houses.”
He blinks his eyes to make the hallucination disappear. He’d rub them too if it wasn’t for the fact that he can’t move his arms, or in fact anything else. He can’t even close his mouth.
“Where I used to live,” she says, reaching out a finger and touching the door experimentally, “there was a room which was wider and higher than your whole house.” Her finger slides over the nameplate below the dolphin knocker. “Parson’s,” she reads. “That means a priest lived here once. Oh, because it’s close to the church. Of course.”
She steps back to look up at the window of his mother’s room. Her feet leave small wet prints. “This is the right one, isn’t it?” It’s more a statement than a question. “I can smell you on it. And that woman.”
He manages to get enough control over himself to permit speech.
“What are you doing here?”
“Talking to you. You like it when we chat.”
“I thought you couldn’t . . .” He’s churning inside. The two of them are just standing in the middle of the road. What if someone sees?
“Oh,” she says. “You mean, what am I doing here.” She waves to encompass the surroundings, brambles and twitching leaves and peeling paint.
“You’re supposed to be in the sea.”
“I am,” she admits. “But I still remember all this. My father was a man. I never told you that, did I?”
He’s not properly listening. (Anyway, it’s not like her father would have been a woman, is it?) He wants her to go away. He shuffles closer as if he can shoo her up the road like a chicken. “Someone might come!” he says in a thick whisper. “What if they catch you?”
She smiles her funny lopsided smile. “We catch you. Not the other way round. Did you know these islands are sinking? Centuries ago it was all land from south to north and east to west. There are stone walls under the water that were once around fields. The land’s been falling all that time. One day your house will drown. And that church, all the way up to its tower. Then I’ll lie in your bed.”
He’s trying to shake her voice out of his head. It’s like water, it looks soft and weak but it can throw you around as if you’re made of paper. He’s having an unwilling yet irresist
ible vision of her in his bed, a sort of smooth cold sheet against his skin. “Please go away,” he says. “They’re going to come and work in the north fields soon. Just over there.”
“I saw them yesterday. Lots of them.” He can’t make her listen. He’s all cramped and squeezed with dread but she’s talking as calmly and dreamily as if she’s lying on the rocks in the cove. “And you, for a bit. You were all in little boats together, going west. You must have seen me as well? Everyone was looking. That other woman covered you up so I couldn’t see you. They’re afraid you love me, aren’t they.” She brings her arms over her head and then slowly lowers them, like a step in a dance. She comes so close in front of him that he can smell her briny tang and she can lower her voice to a murmur. “But you don’t, do you?”
“’Course not.”
“Not yet. One day, though. It’s coming. It’s like the land sinking.” She holds a hand out level and then lifts it slowly up, past his shoulders, over his head.
“Please,” he says. “You’ve got to get out of here.”
“I’ve been looking for you, you know. You haven’t come to see me for days. I thought after I looked for you yesterday you’d come.”
“I couldn’t!”
“Then I remembered how to walk on the roads.” She dances away, placing one foot behind the other very deliberately, and then strides back, demonstrating. “I walked a long way once. Miles and miles. My mother would be terribly angry if she knew I’d gone walking again. Did you know that when she’s angry the storms blow and the sea rises up and throws your ships around and breaks them in pieces? And the people come drifting down. They look so relieved, I always think. Not sad at all. Like this.” She makes a blank-eyed, heavy-lidded, openmouthed face, the corners of her mouth gathered in the beginning of a slack smile. “It looks like bliss, doesn’t it? As if they know they’ve left the horrors of the road behind.” She looks down at her feet and curls her toes to poke at the tarmac. “Although this one seems all right.”
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