He wants her to go, desperately, before Something Bad happens, but at the same time he doesn’t. And anyway it doesn’t matter what he wants, it’s like wanting the tide to go up and down; it’s not up to him.
“She shouldn’t be angry anyway.” She stretches her arms again. “She’s only afraid I’ll get hurt again, but nothing can hurt me anymore. I’m like the drowned people; I’m safe now. Did you know she loved my father so much she kissed him and filled his mouth with the sea so he wouldn’t have to go on suffering?”
She waits for his answer, studying him with a serious look. He’s completely sunk in whatever she’s saying. He’s trying to struggle up to where he could take a breath and scream, Help! Go away! but he can’t do it. “No,” he says.
“She did. I remember”—a flicker of something other than tranquility disturbs her smoothed-out features—“it made me sad once. That was when I still lived here, where all the unhappiness is.”
“Here?” he says. He’s kicking and flailing and fighting inside, but it’s no good, it’s not even breaking the surface.
“Not here, silly, not this house. Above, I mean.” She opens her arms wide and executes a sweetly balanced pirouette, hands fluttering to indicate the world around them. “Here. It wasn’t always unhappy. I remember lots of good things. But.” She comes to rest, drops her arms; her face tightens. “It’s like a road. Wherever I start remembering it always seems to come to the same end, where the two men hurt me.” She crosses her arms over her chest and steps back, troubled. “I’ve never spoken about that before.”
He has the impression of a small cloud passing over the sun. He’d look up to check but he can’t take his eyes off her face.
“It’s not a good thing to talk about. They hurt me inside and out, one after another. Just because they wanted to. It was in a small house like this one. In a room full of faces. You’d never hurt me, would you?”
It sounds like a threat. “’Course not,” he croaks.
“You’ll want to, though. You will. I saw the way all those women in the little boats were looking at me. I know what faces like that mean now. They all wanted to hurt me.”
“I wouldn’t. Never. I swear.”
“I don’t listen to boys’ promises.” All of a sudden she’s ocean-cold. He can almost feel it in his flesh though he’s not touching her (he’d never touch her, he wouldn’t dare). “Not anymore.”
“I’m different from them,” he says. “Let’s not just stand here.”
“Are you? There was another boy once who told me he was different from other people. He betrayed me too.”
“Please,” Rory says. He’s actually frightened of her now. In her eyes he can see what it would be like to drown, the throttling weight, the terror. “You’ve got to go.”
“Now you’re scared,” she says. “Is that why you haven’t come to talk to me? Because you’re afraid of me?”
“No,” he says.
“They’ve taught you to be afraid of me.”
“It’s not like that.”
“You don’t want me here, do you? You don’t want to see me.”
“No! I just—”
“They can’t stop you. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, one day you’ll love me and you’ll come to me and stay forever.”
Her eyes and voice are all drowning, drowning and yet the words fill him with a different kind of breathlessness, bliss. He’s in turmoil.
“Did they bring those people to the island? Is that why? To drive me away from you?”
“What?”
“Don’t let them, Rory.” She’s changed again. Suddenly she’s entreating him. She clasps her hands. “There’s terrible danger. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you, but you wouldn’t come.”
“I wanted to. I tried.”
“I can feel the fire in the air. It’s hungry. It’s waiting, getting impatient. It came with those people on their boat. We couldn’t come near them; the fire drove us away. I remembered it as soon as I felt it. It’s a very bad thing. You have to believe me. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes. ’Course.”
“Everything bad that happened to me started the first time that fire came. You mustn’t let it come here. You have to tell everyone. Tell them to make those people go away. Rory?” He wants to understand her. If he could work out what she’s saying he could tell her All right, whatever it is you want me to do I’ll do it, and then she’d be finished and she’d leave. But he can’t keep up with her. “Whatever they think, they’re better off without it. I know!” The morning’s definitely clouded over. She’s not glistening anymore, she’s gone the white of dead flesh, and her hair’s blowing in matted strands over her mouth. “It came into my house. It turned kind people bad. Then it gave itself the body of an animal and tried to kill us.” She shuts her glassy eyes for a moment and shivers. “It wants to come in again. I can feel it. It wants a house. Whatever you do, you mustn’t let that happen.” She reaches out and almost, almost touches his face. He’s weak with an overwhelming combination of confusion and terror and crushed delight. “I love you,” she says. “I want you to be safe with me. Where it’s always quiet.”
His blood’s whistling in his ears like the sound a shell makes. He hardly knows she’s stopped speaking. Her head turns away and she brushes hair from her mouth just like Laurel does, like a real girl. She’s gone quiet at last, and in the silence he can hear—
His limbs turn to lead.
She frowns a little and then looks over her shoulder, and says, “Is that someone coming?”
The next few moments are like falling off a bike. You know it’s going to happen just before it happens. There’s the first wobble and slip, that’s how you know; then you’re watching and waiting for everything to collapse into chaos around you. He hears steps on the road: that’s the wobble. Someone’s coming. The realization hits him fast and slow at the same time: too quickly for him to do anything about it and yet slowly enough to feel every tick of imminent disaster. He looks up the Lane, where—
His mother drops the bag of tools and screams. The tools fall, clank, rattle. She goes as white as Her. She stops the scream and stumbles forward, waving her arms. The stumble makes her kick the bag. A spanner slides across the road, clank. She trips, picks up the spanner as her hands hit the road. She’s trying to shout something like No. The crash is over now, Rory’s mangled and stunned and at that stage where you’re lying on the ground thinking How did that happen? but still can’t do anything. His mother lurches upright and flings the spanner. It hits the door of Parson’s, thwack. Rory flinches and looks around. No one’s standing by the door. In the space where She was a moment ago there’s only a wet patch on the road. “Get away!” his mother screams. Rory keeps turning and discovers that She is getting away, light on her bare feet down the road. Then he can’t see anything because his mother’s on top of him and wrapping his head in her arms. She smells of diesel. He can feel her heart beating, much too fast. “Go away!” she screams, again and again, and at the same time she’s scrabbling at the door with the key and then pulling him into the house. He can’t quite breathe or think but in the middle of it all he still has a moment of clarity: the thought comes to him that maybe sailing off to be drowned would have been the better option after all.
* * *
Her hands are shaking all the time. She keeps almost tripping over herself. She’s made him sit down at the table. “Don’t get up!” she keeps saying, though he’s not trying to, he’s trying to stay very quiet and very still. She makes him put his hands flat on the table. “Like that,” she says. “Don’t move!” The dirty porridge bowls are still there. She drags a chair to the front door and tries to wedge it under the handle, then heaves another chair on top of the first one. They both tip over. She kicks them and starts crying, but even though she’s crying she keeps going round and round the kitchen, pulling the curtains, saying Don’t move, don’t move.
He’s never seen her this bad.
Libby comes and knocks on the door.
“Go away!” his mother screams.
“Connie?” The door bumps in against the chairs. His mother lunges at it and slams it shut.
“Don’t come in!”
He can hear Libby and someone else talking outside. His mother opens the door a crack, puts her mouth to the gap, and shouts, “Leave us alone!”
“Connie—”
She slams the door shut and then bangs her fists on it. “Why can’t you leave us alone?” She slumps into a chair across the table from Rory, drops her head on her arms, and starts crying properly, like she used to most of last year.
After a good long time Rory thinks he’d better say something.
“Mum?”
She lifts her head to look at him. She looks raw and wasted. She looks a bit like Molly did the evening after Ol died.
“It’s OK,” Rory says. “Should we calm down a bit?”
She gets up, comes around the table, and hugs him fiercely.
“You’re all right,” she says. Her voice has sort of lost its inside: it’s the shell of a voice. “You’re OK.”
“I’m fine, Mum.”
She unwraps her arms and peers at him. “What’s your name?”
“Uh. Rory?”
“And where are we?”
“What do you mean, where are we?”
“What’s this house called?”
He hesitates before answering. “You mean Parson’s?”
“All right. All right all right.” She sits down again. “Don’t panic.” He’s pretty sure he’s not the one who’s panicking, but never mind. “We can do this. What we need is somewhere.” She’s picked up the dirty wooden spoon and is rolling it back and forth between her hands, quite clearly with no idea what she’s doing. “There must be somewhere.”
There’s another knock at the door. His mother ignores it.
“Connie? Please let us in.” It’s Libby again.
“With a lock,” his mother mutters. She looks around the room as if she’s lost something. “And no windows. Think. Think.”
More knocking. “Is everyone OK in there?”
“I think someone’s outside,” Rory says. His mother sits up and stares at him, then goes to the door. She smooths her hair out a bit before opening it a little.
“Sorry,” she says, in a blankly polite voice. “I got a bit of a fright. Can you give us a few minutes, please?”
“Rory?” That’s Missus Grouse.
“Rory’s fine,” his mother says.
“I’m fine,” Rory calls. It’s horrible when other people are around to watch his mother cracking up. He tries to make everything sound normal. “It’s all OK.”
“Just a few minutes,” his mother says. “If you could wait for us at the Abbey. We’ll be along in a bit.” She closes the door gently and leans against it, listening.
There’s some murmuring outside. Then they start drifting away up the lane. He can tell they’re going that way because he can hear Missus Grouse’s grumbling even with the door closed. His mother stands pressed against the door, barely moving. After a little while she opens the door a crack, very carefully, and listens some more, holding her breath.
Finally she turns and looks at Rory.
“All right now, Mum?” Very carefully, he tries moving his hands. She doesn’t shout at him, she just goes on staring.
She snaps her fingers. “Got it.”
She’s no closer to getting back to normal.
She frowns. “But that would be stupid. No. Wait. Yes.”
“Mum? What are you talking about?”
“Yes,” she says. She plucks at the ends of her hair. “Yes. That’s the place. It didn’t open the door, did it?”
Rory takes a few moments to realize this is a proper question, meant for him.
“What?”
“No. It didn’t. You saw it through the window, didn’t you, so you climbed out. That’s what happened. Isn’t it?”
She’s talking about Her. He knows he can’t say anything about being outside already when he saw Her, so he says, “Yeah,” and then, remembering that she made him swear about a thousand times not to go outside, “Sorry, Mum.”
“No. No no no no.” More violent hugging. “Don’t say sorry. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it. That’s how They do it. We just have to make sure you can’t see out.” She tugs him upright. “Let’s go.”
They’re going to the Abbey already? He’s been hoping she’ll have time to calm down before everyone else has to see her. She notices his hesitation and composes herself into a terribly fake reassuring manner. “Off we go,” she says, with the kind of false brightness people use when they say This’ll hardly hurt at all. “Wait, let’s get some of your comics, there’s an idea.”
“OK,” he says, turning to go upstairs.
“No!” She just about stops herself from shrieking. “I’ll do it. Sit! Down. Don’t move.”
She keeps shouting from his room above. “Are you still sitting there? . . . You haven’t moved, have you? . . . Stay right in that chair!” Rory concentrates on the fact that this’ll be over soon. He’ll ask Kate if he can stay in the Abbey tonight. They’ll see what his mother’s like and they’ll have to let him. She comes back down with a stack of comics in the spare plastic bag. “There,” she says, twisting the top of the bag and looping the handle over his wrist. “That’ll keep you going. It won’t be for long anyway. It’s for your own good.”
* * *
He discovers what she means very soon.
She marches him down the Lane with his head in the crook of her elbow. He has to walk hunched over and scurrying. The comics bump uncomfortably against his knees. They get to the Pub and turn right instead of left, and that’s when he knows something’s wrong.
“Mum?”
“Careful. Watch where you put your feet.”
“Where are we going?” Left is the way past the Club to the Abbey road. Right doesn’t go anywhere, just around the back of the Beach to the quay.
“It’s only for a little while, I promise.”
“What is?”
“I’m putting you on the boat.”
He stiffens. His legs lock. “You can’t.”
She drags him forward again. “Not for long.”
Out of the corner of his eye he sees a grimy battered-looking sailing boat splattered all over with gull poo and the smeary fuzz of lichen, tied up inside the quay by the ferry steps. It’s the boat that used to be off the south end of the island. She’s brought it round, while he was off explaining his brilliant idea to Silvia.
His brilliant idea.
“I’ll stay in Parson’s,” he says. “I won’t look outside. I swear.”
“There’s a cabin at the front,” she says. “I’m going to have to lock you in there. I’m sorry, Rory, but you understand why, don’t you?”
“I won’t even look at the windows. Please, Mum.”
“It’s the only safe place.” She’s got hold of him really hard now. “It’s not for long. I just need to collect a couple more things.”
She’s marching him along the quay. A gull takes off from the boat’s railing as they approach. At the top of the steps he makes a proper effort to break her grip. She grabs him harder than he’d have thought possible. A moment later and she’s wrestling him down, and it’s all he can do not to fall off the steps completely. He can hear himself protesting increasingly desperately. A sense of unspecified disaster is beginning to take hold. He can’t exactly let himself think about why it’s so but he knows with perfect certainty that he shouldn’t get on this boat. It’s not making any difference. She won’t listen to him. There’s a moment of teetering clumsiness as she brings him alongside and then they’re aboard, the deck wobbling, the bitter stench of fuel everywhere. They’re almost fighting each other now. He’s too little, though. The bag of comics has gotten itself wrapped around his arms like a ball and chain, she’s got hold of his wrists too, and
once his hands are trapped there’s nothing he can do. He loses his footing in the steep companionway which goes down to the cabin and for a moment he’s actually dangling and kicking before she drops him into a stripped-out space of stained plastic and bits of foam padding. There’s no way out. He thinks he’s crying now as he pleads with her, he can’t tell. She comes down after him, picks him off the floor, and carries and shoves him through a narrow space between two moldy bunks to a tiny door. Here she stops, finally. They’re both gasping.
“You’ll have your comics,” she says. “It won’t be for long. I’m sorry, Rory sweetheart.”
Unthinkable consequences are spinning around his head, so vast and black he can’t speak. She opens the tiny door of the forward cabin. Beyond it is a dim squashed space rank with condensation and neglect.
“Mum, listen to me.”
She bundles him inside. There’s a hatch overhead but it’s almost black with age and dirt.
“Don’t shut me in here,” he says. The fight’s gone out of him. It’s too serious for fighting now.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she says, very shakily.
“Mum!” She slams the tiny door. He hears the latch rattle. He hears a padlock click. “Please!”
* * *
It’s a bit like the silty water in a rock pool. When you swirl it around the sand gets caught up in the water and the whole pool goes cloudy, you can’t see anything. You have to not touch it for a while. If you wait and don’t do anything the sand settles, and then you can see all the way to the bottom, crystal clear.
He sits quietly for a while after she goes, and so he begins to see what’s going to happen.
He whacks the door and the hatch a few times each. The door feels flimsy but it’s not flimsy enough. He ends up hurting his hands. Perhaps he could try harder but he doesn’t. He sits again, wondering why.
Eventually, of course, they come.
It all happens very quickly. He’s been thinking about what he’ll do when it happens: sitting in his damp dull prison, thinking. Or trying to. In the event, when he hears low urgent voices and then feet on the steps, and then the boat wobbles and scrapes as they jump aboard, he just goes on sitting, holding the bag of comics on his lap. He’s amazed at himself and at the world. Three voices chatter hurriedly around the boat. Lines rattle. Once steps come close and the locked door shakes, for a moment. The fenders squeal. Motion grips the boat. Quietly, he takes one of the comics out of the bag. There isn’t enough light from the filthy hatch to read by. He opens it anyway and stares silently at the pages and has the sudden knowledge that everything’s inside out. The comics were once more vivid and wonderful than anything in the whole real world; now they aren’t. His life has become a story instead of a life.
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