by Molly Flatt
The next few hours passed in a blur of sights and sounds. Nests. Gulls. Rocks. Seals. Green fuzz. White paint. A finger of rust-coloured cliff, layered like a wafer. A slice of shale. A hoop of cut-out rock with white water pouring through it. A lighthouse, white with a black cap. The moon, silver on grey.
They growled up to a small jetty just before midnight.
‘You can park wherever you like?’ Alex asked. The words came out garbled, her face stiff, her lips tart with salt. Cautiously, she stood up to stretch as Lucas did Boy Scouty things with rope.
‘Orcadians leave us alone,’ Finn said. He was shivering hard, although it wasn’t cold.
‘Can’t we find somewhere to stay? There must be a B&B?’
‘They leave us alone if we leave them alone.’
Lucas fetched a blanket, curled up on the bottom of the boat and lay twitching like a dog. Finn sat beside him with his arms around his knees and a blanket round his shoulders, and dipped his chin to his chest. Alex lay back on the bench, squashed her bag into a pillow, tucked her own blanket round her, then tilted the peak of her cap over her eyes.
The water lapped and sploshed. The twilight that passed for darkness this far north crept in through shades of grey.
‘Finn,’ Alex said. She could hear him breathing, fast and ragged.
‘Uh.’
‘Do you think it was Iain who attacked me in London, before I came?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But I’ve been thinking. It doesn’t really make sense. Why would MacBrian try to kill me before she knew that I couldn’t unstick my Story? When the Board hadn’t even voted on breaking the Covenant?’
‘I don’t know.’ A pause. ‘I did think it might have been Dughlas.’
‘Dughlas? The one who was helping your dad?’
‘So they say.’
‘Why? Was he violent?’
‘Not so far as I know. But he – Dughlas – got ideas. About people.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He was strange. No-one really liked him. His parents died when he was young and the Council tried to help him with extra training, but he was a useless Reader. He preferred Outside novels – romance, historical fiction, thrillers, all that nonsense. He worshipped Freya. He thought my father was a hero. I thought that maybe he thought – maybe he thought he could be a hero, too. Go vigilante. “Take you out”.’
A pause. ‘You really think it could have been him?’
‘He hasn’t been seen for two weeks, so—’ A sigh. ‘I don’t know.’
There was a squawk. A scrabble. The plip-plip-plip of falling stones.
‘Finn?’
‘Uh.’
‘Your dad.’
A beat. ‘Uh.’
‘I saw the statue of him. In town. That morning you caught me in the index room.’
Silence.
‘MacBrian said everyone loved him. She said he was a prodigy.’
Silence.
‘Finn, what was he like?’
Eventually: ‘He was the most successful Reader on record, in terms of volume and change rate, across all seven islands. He was the best.’
‘No, I mean what was he like like? As a person?’
Silence.
Then: ‘I didn’t see him very often. He was always working. He was obsessed with work. He was stubborn. He always had to be right.’
Silence.
Then: ‘He said I was too impulsive. Too emotional. I wanted to show him. I wanted to be better than him. Better than the best.’ A humourless hnh. ‘Too much wanting. He was right. I probably wouldn’t have made professional, even if I hadn’t been thrown out.’
Silence.
Then, all in a rush: ‘But when he wasn’t trying to teach you something, when he wasn’t thinking about the Board or the paperwork or whoever it was on the Council that was annoying him that month . . . When he was at home on the farm with us, with me and my mother, talking about the people he’d Read that day, the things they’d done, the way they’d changed their lives once they’d dispersed an old Storyline . . . Then he’d made you feel like nothing in the world was impossible. Nothing.’
‘I’m so sorry, Finn,’ Alex managed eventually. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Something blew and slapped in the water, far off.
‘There’s a theory,’ Finn said.
‘Another bloody theory?’ She paused. ‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘Some scholars think that if you love someone enough, if you spend enough time with them, something happens in the Library. They think that, just once or twice, when you hear about a certain significant experience they went through for the hundredth time, or imagine them going about their life vividly enough, you’re able to create a Memory inside your Story that exactly matches theirs. Even if you were never there. Even if your Stories live on islands thousands of miles apart.’
The breeze plucked goosebumps from her arms. ‘That’s beautiful.’
‘It’s bullcrap,’ Finn said angrily. ‘It’s bullcrap that people make up to comfort themselves when someone they love dies. They want to think there’s something left, even just one tiny Memory, living on in them.’
‘But didn’t you say that the only thing you knew about the Library was how much you didn’t know?’ Alex asked gently.
‘Yeah, well. I know that’s bullcrap.’
‘Like someone’s Story being able to kill someone else is bullcrap?’
Silence. The breeze sighed.
‘That man,’ Finn said, after a moment.
‘What man?’
‘In the hospital.’ A beat. ‘Harry.’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you really going to marry him?’
Alex frowned into the darkness. ‘Well, that kind of depends on whether I get gunned down by Iain MacHoras. Or whether this thing eats me up from the inside. But if I’m still alive on Wednesday, I suppose that, well, yes, that’s the plan.’
Silence.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He seemed like a chluidsea.’
‘What does that mean?’ Silence. ‘Okay, fine, I’m pretty sure I can guess. That’s bloody rich, coming from you!’
‘You really love him, then? Someone like that?’
‘What do you mean, someone like that? Harry’s honourable, he’s reliable, he’s thoughtful, he’s loyal. And he loves me, he really does.’
Finn muttered something under his breath in Iskeullian. Alex, her fingers furiously gripping the hem of the blanket, refused to react. Several minutes passed. A bird shook out its feathers. A rope creaked.
‘Finn?’
‘Uh.’
‘Shut up,’ said a new, heavily accented voice.
There was a pause. ‘You speak English,’ Alex said.
‘Of course I speak English,’ Lucas said. ‘Everyone on Iskeull speaks English. We also like to sleep.’ He said something in Iskeullian. Finn muttered back.
Alex waited until she heard both men’s breathing slow and deepen. Then she sat up and unzipped her rucksack. Taking out her phone, she tilted the screen to catch the moonlight and saw that some mast on Sanday was gifting it a single dot of signal.
H, she typed. I had an idea. Why don’t you try out some of those hotels on your list? Go and stay a night in each one with Mum & Dad? On the Eudo card? We want it to be perfect, right? And we can’t recommend people stay in places we don’t know. So pls. Tomorrow. The 3 of you, a pre-wedding jaunt. 4 nights, 4 different hotels. Bonding with the in-laws. Then I’ll see you all on Weds. Please take care of them. And yourself. I DO love you, Harry. I really do xxx
Alex swiped to power off. The screen flashed once, then died. She tucked the phone back in her bag, rearranged herself on the bench and blinked up at the stars.
20
Alex and Finn sat beneath the canvas with the lifebuoy between them. Their arms were braced along the sides, their hands secured with quick-release knots of rope. When the first coal-coloured clouds descended and the first eddies
spun the boat around, Alex watched Lucas from where he sat at the motor. His face was impassive, his body swaying easily with the roll. This was, she told herself, no worse than the Congo River Rapids at Alton Towers.
Two hours in, drenched to the bone, her throat burning with acid and the wind stabbing her ears, she was longing for Iain and his violin case of mercy. The sky screamed. The sea bellowed. Waves as big as whales tossed them up then smashed them down, nail-bombing the deck with spray. The great rabid tongue of the world bucked and belched and tried to vomit them out.
In the next rain-lashed lull, Alex disentangled her stiff fingers from the rope and splashed along the planks in a freezing belly-crawl. She stalled, her ankle caught in a vice-like grip. She looked back. Finn’s mouth was open, his jaw working. She donkey-kicked and felt his fingers slip away. She wriggled onwards and managed to poke her head out of the canvas, her hood dropping back, her baseball cap flying up and away.
Punched. Water-boarded. Instantly blind.
‘COME ON, THEN!’ she shouted, struggling to her knees. ‘COME AND GET ME, ISKEULL!’ She wedged her foot against the strut of the bench and levered herself upright, then spread her arms full crucifix and felt the wind fling a cannonball. ‘YOU WANT REVENGE? YOU WANT ME TO FUCK OFF OUT OF THAT STACK, YOU FUCKING . . . DEWEY . . . DECIMAL—’
She hit the floor. Lucas was sitting on her abdomen, one thick knee planted on either side of her hips. He was swollen, shining, pink as a baby; his eyes salt-crusted slits, his hair glistening eels. He leaned down so that his mouth was close to her ear. ‘Not helpful,’ he said. He shoved his hands under her armpits and hauled her back under the canvas, then threw the ring at her chest and bellowed, ‘HALF AN HOUR.’
She had no idea if it was half an hour or twenty, but eventually the lulls did get longer and the tantrums milder, until the boat settled into a drunken rock. She heard birds. A splash. A clonk. Voices. Finn’s voice, saying one of her names.
She staggered up the slope while Finn and Lucas dragged the boat high enough to avoid the tide. It was raining steadily, but she was so cold she didn’t feel cold any more. The thing out there was pretending to be the sea again: flirtily brooding, Turner-esque. The men unfolded the canvas to its full size and used it to cover the deck of the boat, tying it round with side-ropes. Then they tramped over to where Alex sat on the waterlogged white grit, numb-arsed, numb-everythinged, sodden rucksack heavy on her back. They looked different, she saw; exhausted and half-drowned, but somehow more solid, cleaner, as if some primal tension had lifted from their flesh. Finn had also, somehow, held onto his stupid holdall full of airport-lounge freebies, which was banging against his hip with every step. He stopped and looked down at Alex. She looked back. She contemplated standing up. She considered her knees, her trainers. She scuffed her toes through the silt. Thrust her fingers into it. Filled her lungs. Stood.
They climbed the bank of the cove onto a rise of mossy scrub, where the landscape offered itself to them in that brazen Iskeullian way: miles of moorland, gentle hills, the blind eye of a loch, a coronet of standing stones. Not far off, she could see fences, and low handfuls of houses and barns. It wasn’t until Finn and Lucas crouched down that she noticed the hump in the grass, the blunt mouth of piled rubble, which they now began to pull apart.
‘Don’t worry,’ Finn said, looking over as if he knew that her thoughts had immediately turned to that other, pretend-tomb in the centre of the Stacks. Even his voice sounded wider here, as if it had opened to fill the space. ‘This one’s man-made. And much younger. Bronze Age. Nothing in here but . . . gnuhhh . . . this.’
It was a bike, an old red-and-black Honda that it took all their combined strength to drag out and upright. Finn removed the thong from around his neck and slotted the plastic-topped key in the ignition.
‘That doesn’t look like a horse,’ Alex said.
Finn brushed wet soil off the seat with his cape. ‘First thing my father did when he got his credit card was to ship this in. Caused a big storm in the Council. He was supposed to have got rid of it, but everyone knew he hadn’t. He’d sneak it out, now and then.’
‘He put this on expenses?’
The corners of his mouth lifted, ever so slightly. He threw his bag to Lucas, straddled the bike and revved it to a throaty growl. ‘Wait here,’ he yelled.
Lucas settled behind Finn, bag on lap, and they roared off. Alex could see them for a long time, bouncing over heath, looping round fields, dipping into basins, then reappearing as a distant, incongruous glint. She sat on the excavated rubble and unzipped her rucksack. Her spare clothes were soaked and the new phone was a mess of warped plastic. Thinking of the last message she had sent, she reached up and put her hand on the ancient hump of grass.
‘Please,’ she murmured. ‘I know we’ve got our issues. But call Iain MacHoras back? Please? Reel him in, as hard as you can.’ She left her hand resting there and took the rain as due penance. She found that she felt oddly calm. Post-traumatic shock? Adrenaline comedown? The onset of hypothermia? Probably all three.
When he returned, spraying mud, Finn must have thought the same, because he gave her a worried look. ‘Can you stand?’
She could, as it turned out, but he had to help lift her onto the bike. She dug her fingers into the front of his jumper, laid her cheek on his wet back and closed her eyes.
When they slowed to a putter, she opened them again, but found that she had no strength to lift her head. She caught sideways glimpses of fence and hedge, and saw straggly sheep or goats with their bums to the wind. When the bike stopped she forced herself upright, pushing against Finn, and saw that they were parked outside a big stone barn on the edge of a field. He helped her off and they performed a reverse version of their shuffle through the boarding tunnel at Heathrow, her arm over his shoulder this time. They moved through the double doors and down an aisle between roof-high stacks of hay bales to the back, where there was some cast-iron farm machinery and several large stone bins. Finn kicked aside a pile of leather harness and sat Alex down on a bale. He opened one of the bins and retrieved a towel, a pile of dry clothes, a blanket and a basket. He took the cloth off the top of the basket to show her a flask of water, a piece of cheese and a loaf of dark bread.
‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Sleep. It’ll be warmer if you dig yourself into the hay. As soon as my mother leaves, I’ll bring you in.’
‘She doesn’t know? Where you’ve been?’ Alex pressed the towel to her face. It had a comforting herbal smell, like thyme.
‘No.’ He rose from the crouch. ‘You’re not weak at all, you know,’ he said abruptly. ‘You’re strong.’
She was too cold to laugh or cry. ‘I’m not strong enough to go down there again. I’m not ready.’
‘My father used to say that no-one’s ever ready for anything,’ he said. ‘You just have to get on and do it.’
Alex gave a bleak huff-laugh. ‘Your dad would’ve liked my mum.’
They both almost smiled, a split second. Then Finn turned and walked back down the aisle, leaving a trail of muddy boot prints in his wake.
The light was failing by the time he came to fetch her. They walked silently, heads bowed, through the driving rain, past field after field of soggy animals and slimy crops. Eventually they came to a stable yard, scattering chickens and passing two yellow horses with bottle-brush manes that snorted at them over half-doors as they crossed. At the end was a long, low farmhouse, old but immaculately kept. Finn lifted the latch and ducked his head to avoid the lintel – carved, Alex noticed, with knots and swirls and figures-of-eight – as they stepped into a fug of sweet-smelling warmth. He took off his boots while Alex gazed round the kitchen. At one end there was a cast-iron range and a long stone table stacked with pottery cups and plates. At the other there was a black peat-burner, framed with shelves crowded with books. In front of the burner were two of those high-backed wicker chairs.
‘Shoes,’ Finn said. ‘Please.’ She toed off her still-sodden trainers. ‘Follo
w me.’ He led her up a narrow flight of stairs and into a small room almost wholly taken up by a steaming tin bath. ‘My mother’s with Freya,’ he said, already retreating back through the doorway. ‘She won’t be back until late. I’ll be downstairs.’
Lowering herself into the water was throbbing, itching agony. More than once Alex had to grip the sides, to stop herself from jumping out. Once she was in, though, she stayed until the water was tepid, delaying the moment when she would have to go downstairs, while her thoughts sloshed and bobbed. She silently begged Harry to have been swayed by her text. She tried to imagine her parents ensconced in the safe anonymity of some boutique hotel. Her father would be laid out on the bed with a book and a vodka. Her mother would be tutting over the price of the artisan popcorn in the minibar. She found she was still too tired, too shocked, too numb to cry.
Her own clothes were still damp, so she used the ones Finn had left for her in the barn: sludge-coloured drawstring trousers, a chunky mustard jumper and a pair of hand-knitted red socks. When she walked back into the kitchen Finn was sitting in one of the chairs in front of the peat-burner, ripping bites from an apple while a mottled cat with tufted ears watched him from a windowsill.
‘Tea,’ he said, glancing over and nodding his head towards the table on the other side of the room. ‘Bannocks, if you want. We should start. My mother wants you back in the barn by the time she gets home.’
‘You told her, then?’
‘She has a way,’ Finn said, ‘of getting at the truth.’
‘Is she angry?’
‘She doesn’t want to know about it,’ he said, in a tone that discouraged further questions.
Alex walked over to the table and poured tea from a blue ceramic pot into a matching mug. Sipping the hot herbal brew, she wandered over to the shelves behind Finn. Expecting to find unintelligible leather-bound tomes, she was surprised to see a full set of Penguin Classics, plus modern novels by everyone from William Gibson to John Grisham. She spotted choice collections of recent pop science alongside psychology books ranging from Freud to Malcolm Gladwell. There were magazines, too, dozens of back-issues of Wired and New Scientist, bookended by random objects: a kitsch plastic robot, a pristine pair of Nikes, a twisted iPod.