When the fire starts to take, he holds the woman’s hand and leads her up to the chest of drawers in his bedroom. The temperature is colder up here. He takes out his black Motörhead T-shirt with flames on the back and tucks it under his arm. Lauren watches the woman shake with cold. Lauren pulls the tartan blanket from her father’s bed and wraps it around herself. He has not switched on a light.
Niall leads the woman to the bathroom and locks the door. They are in the bathroom for a long time. Lauren hears water running. She wants hot water too and the lounge fire. She presses her ear to the bathroom door and hears her father’s low voice, singing something.
‘Dad, can I help?’
‘No, love. Out in a sec.’
Lauren walks slowly along the dingy landing clutching the blanket like a toga. Her pumpkin bucket bangs against her knee. The house is never fully bright apart from the skylight over the staircase. A royal-blue carpet covers the floors throughout, including the damp bathroom. Net curtains veil the small windows and heavy velvet covers the entrance to the back room. Unopened letters clutter the spindly table in the hallway. The walls are clad in a deep-yellow pine. There are a few pictures of hilly landscapes, icy rivers and wild animals painted in soft, fantasy colours.
Lauren listens hard but only hears the drip downstairs in the utility room, nothing more. Droplets of water are falling from the roof into a red bucket that her dad put out the day before. He says he will fix it tomorrow. Outside the wind grows thick and it starts to rain. In her bedroom, there are outlines of horses on the walls, pages carefully torn from magazines. Dreamcatchers hang on her curtain rail, their feathers heavy.
When she gets into bed, she reaches down into the gap by the corner of the wall and brings out a small drawstring bag and an old battered notebook. The bag is printed with gold stars on midnight-blue velvet. There is a tarot deck inside. In the evenings she will often shuffle the cards, unwieldy in her small hands. She tries to read and learn the cards as best she can, but sometimes she dreams up the meanings when she doesn’t understand. On the first page of the leather-bound notebook it says SPAEWIFE’S BEUK. This is a book she found in the bottom compartment of her mother’s vanity case. She soon learned it tells secrets and explains powers.
Some of its yellowed pages are covered in scrawls made by her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who wrote her name inside the front cover. Others are written in a more old-fashioned script. Others again are written in bold, curvy letters that look friendlier to her, like a teacher’s writing. Some of the pages have been taken from jotters and glued or Sellotaped into the book. Many are dedicated to the reading of cards, with illustrations and diagrams.
She is too tired to try and concentrate on the deck, so she flicks through the pages of the book to see what she might find. Someone has sketched out pentangles, clubs, wands, an overflowing goblet and a dove and, in one beautiful illustration, a blindfolded woman crossing sharp swords.
Next to the notebook on her pillow is a thumb-sized box of worry dolls that she talks to each night. She has given them names. She takes them out of the box and lines them up against one side of her pillow. Stacey. Crystal. Spencer. Kendall. Silently, she communicates to each, asking them to keep her and her father safe as she places them under her pillow.
Her breathing is shallow against the heavy rain outside. She remembers she is wearing her mother’s lipstick and goes back along the landing to the bathroom. It is empty. ‘Dad?’ she calls out. There is no answer. She feels cold, so she runs the hot tap over her palms and wrists and touches her neck with her warm hands. In the dim light she sees tiny smears of blood in the sink. She is not sure for a moment whether there was a lot more and she has been washing it away. Sometimes when Lauren brushes her teeth she spits out blood, but this is not the same. She tries to wipe the smears away and, in the gloom, wonders if they were ever there to begin with.
She scrunches up her eyes at the mirror. A cold draught blows. There is a flicker and she glances at the bottom corner of the mirror to look at the room behind her. She once heard older girls talking about a woman who would appear in a mirror at night if you said her name three times. She looks back at her face to check it is unchanged. The damp has worked its way into her hair and the black kohl has spread around her eyes. She undoes the plait circling her head and her hair springs out in a shock. She looks stranger now than when she was guising. She rubs her blotchy eyes while the rain batters the frosted window. The wind sounds like a dog whose owners have been away too long.
2
Sunlight has broken through the curtains. The back garden outside is made of three concrete levels, giant steps that are covered in flowerbeds and gravel and now overgrown with brambles. In the summer, Lauren hits a tennis ball against this side of the house with a warped racket. In winter, she keeps indoors and looks at the miles of forest that rise beyond the garden on the hillside.
Waking up, Lauren notices how messy her bedroom is, crumpled clothes and books with splayed pages scattered around the edge of her divan in the dingy light. The house has grown cold again. As she makes her way down the staircase her stomach chews at itself. The previous evening swims back to her and she pauses at the blue curtain to the back living room. She is hungry again and thirsty and there is no sound in the house except the drip from the leaking roof of the utility room.
She pulls back the edge of the curtain and slips through, letting the velvet slide from her fingers. The room is empty and smells of ash. There are no blankets on the sofa and no signs of a bed. The Himalayan salt lamp is illuminated. She doesn’t remember it ever being used, and goes to turn it off. She inspects the kitchen and the utility room, which lead off from the sofa-dining area, for some sign that the woman stayed over, but they are empty too. Bowls and plates are all stacked in the cupboard. She peers out of the back room’s sliding glass door, hoping to see her father outside chopping wood in the grey light, but he is not there. She does not know what time it is. There is a sharpness in the sky and the bushes look dark and slick from the rain.
The chill of the kitchen tiles rises through the cable knit of her socks. She pours milk over a snapping bowl of Rice Krispies on the tiled work surface and fills her favourite puffin mug with water. At the clink of crockery, Jameson appears and offers his paw. She shakes it, his wet nose brushing the tips of her fingers. She can feel the bones of his claws under the tough fur.
She turns to the window, the stoneware bowl freezing her palms as she eats. She finishes her cereal and sees patterns in the milky dregs: the shape of a bird, the shape of a house. The clock on the wall says ten thirty. She never lies in this late and neither does her father, except for the days when he doesn’t get up at all.
‘Dad?’ she calls. She vaults back upstairs and knocks on his door. Silence. She enters slowly, squinting at the mound of lumpy blankets in the half-light. ‘Dad?’
‘What is it, Lauren?’ His voice sounds swollen and cracked.
‘Where’s that lady?’
‘What lady?’
‘The one from last night.’
There is a long silence. Just as Lauren thinks he is falling back asleep, he says, ‘What?’
‘The lady in the dressing gown.’
‘I dinna ken what you’re on about.’ His voice snaps into Scots when he’s frustrated.
The silence ebbs back. ‘Lauren, leave me be the now. I’m not feeling well.’
As she turns to leave, he speaks again from beneath the covers. ‘Have you made yourself something to eat?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be down in wee while … and I’ll cook us a fry-up. OK?’
‘Can you get the boiler going?’
‘In a bit.’
Standing by the bedside table she can see the back of his head and his long mess of hair, the colour of lightning. He turns towards her with his eyes closed. His chin is light-grey stubble.
‘Dad, do you not remember that lady?’ She hovers in the doorway, knowing that the more she asks,
the more she will wind him up.
Sure enough, his tone changes to a warning. ‘Lauren. Away and read your book. See Billy. Please, now, on you go. I’ve got the cold this morning.’ His eyes stay shut.
Lauren shakes her head, slumps back to her room and pulls back the curtains. The dim morning light feels strange. From a nest of T-shirts on the floor, she picks up a Jacqueline Wilson novel that she has borrowed from the library bus and drinks her water. A damp spot is spreading quickly across one corner of her ceiling.
Their orange Bakelite phone rings like a musical drill. When she doesn’t hear her father creaking, she runs downstairs to answer it.
‘Hi, Lauren. It’s Billy.’
‘Hi.’ She knew it would be.
‘My mum says she’s making apple scones today. She was wondering if you want to come around.’
‘Yes please.’
Lauren can hear Billy’s mother, Kirsty, in the background.
‘She says we’re going on holiday the day after tomorrow and she’s clearing out the fridge.’ Billy pauses as Kirsty says something else. ‘She’s got some food that you might want to take home.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’m going up to the woods now. To work on the hut some more. Are you coming?’
‘Yeah, OK, I’ll just get ready.’
‘I’ll wait for you.’
She dresses quickly, taking another T-shirt – with white horses galloping across a shore – and jeans from the colourful pile of laundry under her windowsill. The sill itself is strewn with the little wooden animals her father has carved for her: owls, cats and fishes. She knocks quietly on his door again.
‘Dad. I’m going to the woods with Billy.’
There is no answer.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Be fine in a bit.’
‘I’ll bring you back some scones from theirs. Maybe some other food. I’m taking Jameson.’
‘Sorry about the fry-up, love. I’m just not feeling great.’
‘No bother.’ She just wants to be with Billy and the trees.
Lauren scoots down the creaking stairs, whistling for her dog and grabbing her zip-up jacket as she runs.
To get to Billy’s, Lauren takes a shortcut, climbing over a gaping wire fence at the back of the garden that Jameson can scramble through. From there, she cuts diagonally across the edge of the forest and four fields, her wellies sucking against the mud. Three pheasants take flight ahead of her like a gust of autumn leaves. She thinks about the emptiness of the house and her father. She knows she didn’t dream up the previous evening. Sometimes when her father drinks too much he gets very sad or angry, so keeps on drinking until he sleeps and forgets. She can imagine the young woman feeling scared and slipping away, but that was the wrong decision. They live in the middle of nowhere, in northern Scotland. What if she needed their help?
Billy is waiting at the lichened back gate of his garden. He ruffles Jameson’s soft, rust-coloured ears. ‘How are you today, Jameson? How are you?’
Jameson tries to put his paw in Billy’s hand.
They walk up the stony track towards the forest, bordered by spiky whin bushes and birches tangled with old man’s beard. The hilly land stretches into yellows, deep greens and deciduous orange. Jameson is well camouflaged as he sniffs the hedgerow for rabbit holes and badger setts. Lauren jabs around in her pocket among old tissues and the bumpy shell of her pocketknife. She found the knife in her father’s work shed a few weeks ago, a place that had always been forbidden, just like the room by the front door. Her father says it’s a living room ‘for best’, but on the odd occasion someone comes round, they never use it.
When her father isn’t in there, the work shed is locked up, but if he is, she creeps up to the draughty entrance and looks at the sharp metal tools hanging from the walls, both frightening and alluring. If he catches her standing there, he’ll yell at her to get back inside. A few weeks ago, when he had been out working at someone’s house, she saw the shed keys, glinting, dropped accidentally on the ground. Certain he would not be back for a couple of hours, she opened the shed padlock with a clunk. Inside, she studied the bow saws of different sizes on the walls and the rope and electrical leads that coiled around giant cotton reels. They were all precious, simply because they were forbidden. It made her heart race to know she had been here and touched these surfaces, one by one, and that no one would have to know and she wouldn’t get shouted at.
She looked along the shelves and in boxes, as if trying to find something as yet unknown to her. A clue that Niall was not just her father, but also a human being, with parts to his life she didn’t know about. The table in the middle of the shed was made of thick, battered wood that, like everything around it, was spattered with paint. Next to a couple of sandbags and a roll of carpet mesh, Lauren found a rusty blue tool box with two sides that folded out like bug’s wings. Among the screwdrivers and nails she found this sleek piece of antler with a wide steel blade about as long as her foot. This was her treasure, her trophy. The thing that had made the adventure worthwhile. She holds it now and enjoys its weight in her hand.
On the path to the forest, she finds the dog biscuit she is looking for and throws it to Jameson. He leaps in the air, twisting like a salmon.
‘Dare you to eat one of them,’ Billy says.
‘Don’t think so,’ says Lauren, trudging on, her hands clenched in her pockets.
After stealing the knife, she was careful to leave everything in the shed as she had found it, and locked the door behind her as she left. Just before her father walked into the room, she put the keys down the side of the sofa. She still wished she could tell someone this story and how quick-thinking she had been.
Billy tries to keep up with her. ‘Mind when Grant MacBride ate they dog biscuits, that time on the bus.’
Lauren doesn’t reply. They walk some more in the November air. The juniper bushes and giant hogweed thicken at the sides of the path as they go. Billy takes some foil-wrapped chocolates from his pocket, left over from guising. ‘One for one?’
‘What, a dog biscuit?’
‘No-o! Have you got any more gummies? You know, the ones Angela Walker had.’
‘No.’ She remembers them stuck to the rubber mat on the pickup’s floor. She tries to shake the woman in the dressing gown out of her head; perhaps it is better that she left. People in Strath Horne love to talk about her and her dad, she knows that. And the incident feels too strange a thing to say out loud.
‘I don’t have any more, I ate them all,’ Lauren says.
‘Ya pie.’
‘Billy!’ She tries to hit him but he dodges her arm and, like this, they weave up the stony track. They stop bickering when they reach the mouth of the forest where the fields disappear and the mottled trees turn to miles of pine.
The sprawling forest is the same size as their hamlet, fields, farms and small town put together; the wild inverse to their man-made space. They take the path known by locals as the Loop, which cuts into a section of forest for a couple of miles and back again. The only people to do this now are children and the occasional dog-walker. The children know this path by heart, making it easy to forget that they are surrounded by large swathes of parts unknown.
‘I’m only at school tomorrow then I’m away to Disneyland Paris,’ Billy says, trying to sound casual. ‘My mum got permission.’
Lauren looks at him. Her ideas of ‘Disneyland’ and ‘Paris’ are a fuzzy mixture of the photos Billy brings back every year and the film Ratatouille. ‘I’ve never been on an aeroplane before,’ she says.
‘I canna believe that. Seriously?’
Lauren ignores him.
‘Anyway, we’re only flying from Inverness to London, then we’re taking the Eurostar.’ He stops and looks at Lauren. ‘It’s this train that goes under the sea.’
‘You’ve told me before.’ She rolls her eyes.
‘What’s that?’ He grabs her arm and points to where someone is walking in
the trees to the left of the path. There are flashes of white material among dark-green branches. She looks straight into his sky-blue eyes and then back. The person is walking away from them, deeper into the forest.
Billy has already started walking further up the path, but Lauren stays standing and lets out her breath. ‘She’s gone.’ She’s sure the figure was the young woman from the road.
‘Who?’ Billy says as he continues to trudge on up the path.
‘That person. The one we just saw there.’
‘Didn’t see anyone.’
‘Yeah, you did. You grabbed my arm. Two seconds ago. And now they’ve gone.’ He has to be winding her up.
‘Did I? I didn’t mean to … I’ve got a bit of a sore head.’
‘We both saw them. Her.’
‘Her?’
‘How can you not remember?’ She hasn’t moved from her spot on the path, but now he is far enough ahead that she has to raise her voice, her eyes darting to the empty trees. He shrugs in reply. She wants to go home now. But the idea of walking back alone feels wrong. She runs to catch him up.
‘You probably saw Stuart or Maisie,’ he says. Stuart and Maisie MacAllister live on the neighbouring farm, whose land stops at the edge of the forest. They occasionally come up to play in the trees and at school they claim that the land is theirs. Billy usually tells Lauren to keep a lookout for them. In the summer, someone kicked Lauren’s stick hut to pieces and stole the tarpaulin roof, as well as a huge cake tin that contained a bottle of lemon Fanta and five back issues of The Beano.
‘If I saw them, so did you.’
‘I’m not remembering this at all,’ he replies, as if he’s talking to a much younger kid.
Banks of beech ferns bow either side. Their leaves are changing from bright green to a rusty brown, with many at the in-between stages of deep orange and golden yellow, spreading sunset colours across the forest. Lauren likes to turn the fern fronds over and pick off the bright spores underneath.
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