On the path, the children reach the old water tank, a shed of browning corrugated iron, and pick through the marshy reeds to peek inside for frogs.
‘Hel-looo, froggies, you seen anyone?’ Billy’s voice reverberates across the dark metal walls of the tank, but only their reflections stare back at them from the deep black water. Billy runs away but Lauren stays and watches. There are times like this when a feeling comes over her and the world stands still for a few moments. There is a rippling in one corner of the water, which spreads out in circles, suggesting something is moving beneath the surface.
Soon the children reach the towering pines and the mossy stone foundations of an old bothy, close to the path, where they have started to build their hut. It is made of carefully placed sticks fitted around a stray cluster of birch trees that grow close together, mottled with reindeer lichen. They start to walk around, searching for fallen branches. The springy moss underfoot and the layers of pine needles soak up any sound.
As they stand making sure the walls of the hut are still sturdy, Lauren begins to lop off stray twigs from the outer walls with her pocketknife. She keeps turning round as she works, with the crawling feeling someone might be watching her. Someone could live out in these woods, easily.
Billy sits his rucksack down at the base of a tree trunk. He loosens the drawstring and pulls out a packet of Golden Grahams.
‘Hungry?’ He offers her the box.
Lauren grabs a handful and tries to cram them in her mouth, smiling slightly as she does so.
‘You’re like a hamster,’ Billy says.
‘Shut it,’ she says through crunching teeth. She runs her hand over a part of the hut that is a little spindly and will let in rain and snow. ‘We need more sticks.’ She takes another handful of cereal and tips back her head.
‘We need to turn this area into a fully operational military zone,’ says Billy. ‘I’m planning on building in some spy holes here. And an embrasure over there.’
Lauren sighs. She doesn’t know what an embrasure is, but it sounds boring. ‘I think this is more of a house,’ she says. ‘Like a secret cabin.’ It’s hard to concentrate on the game, because she can’t shake the discomfort of last night. It has seeped into the daylight. She wonders if she really did just see the same woman as last night. She tries to focus on what Billy is saying.
‘We’ve got to protect ourselves, though,’ he explains, rootling further into his rucksack. He is becoming less fun to play with.
The urge to tell him keeps bubbling up. She wants to feel safer, but not in the way he means. She looks at the soft bloom of fungus growing on the side of the trunk. When she starts to talk, it comes out in a ribbon of story, unspooling. ‘When Dad and me were driving home, we saw this woman standing in the passing place and so Dad picked her up and we took her home.’
‘Who was she?’
‘I don’t know. She didn’t speak.’
Billy is readjusting some of the branches on the hut roof. ‘What?’
‘We took her home. I didn’t see her in the morning.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did your dad fancy her?’
Lauren sighs. ‘Get tae France.’ She walks away down a small hill of bracken and sits on the wet verge. She puts her arms on her knees and plucks a reed. Her fingernail splits a line down the middle and she scoops out the spongy white insides like the stuffing of a tiny cushion.
‘Lauren! I was only kidding.’ His voice is muffled by the trees.
Jameson snuffles up to her, pushing his nose between her arms and head. She gives him another dog biscuit and walks further down to find more branches, her feet squelching as she tries to get a hold in the mud.
She can hear Billy wandering off somewhere in the tall ferns, so she returns to fix the hut. She takes some scissors and string that Billy has brought and starts tying crooked sticks together. At that moment Billy bolts out of the trees, snatches a branch like a rifle and makes the sound of gunfire. ‘Gonna get my own one day. I asked Dad for one but he wouldna let me.’
They hear Jameson growling, his head inside a rabbit hole.
‘Lauren, you’re in a mood today.’
‘You’re the one who’s acting weird.’ Lauren imagines the woman walking back through the trees. Her shoulders tighten, but the forest stays still.
‘How am I?’
‘You keep forgetting stuff.’
‘Like what?’
‘That person, the girl.’
‘Lauren, I swear, I didna see anything. Sorry.’
‘You don’t get it.’ She wishes she could move through the world like Billy, the way a duck crosses a pond, without thinking what’s beneath it.
‘Good thing I brought these too.’ He pulls out a pair of walkie-talkies like giant black insects from his rucksack. Lauren begged her father for a pair two months ago, but he said there was no point when she could use Billy’s. Niall has bought her a mobile phone instead. When she points out that the phone rarely works in the village and never in the woods, he just shakes his head and mutters about batteries.
Lauren clutches a heavy radio and runs further out into the trees. When she switches it on, static crackles through the air. She sneaks towards a large tree and crouches, her back against the bark. ‘I feel like someone is watching us,’ she says.
‘I have an idea.’ Billy’s voice scrapes through the radio grill. She’s not sure at this point whether he is in character. ‘I need you for reconnaissance.’
‘What?’
‘Go and do a recce – try and find Stuart and Maisie.’
‘Nah, I’m OK.’ Lauren looks through the trunks between her and the hut, but she can’t see Billy. Jameson’s ginger tail waggles out of the bushes on her left.
She runs deeper into the woods, skidding sideways down a mossy slope and into a patch of crackling bracken, then denser trees. The only paths here are narrow cuts into the undergrowth, made by deer. She wants large sticks, which can only be found a little way off, where bigger birches and oaks grow, nearer the edge. She feels the silky bark of a birch tree. Birches, she understands, are protective, the same as rowans, which cleanse the air in their own fiercer way. She edges her thumb under some of the peeling bark and pulls it off gently; she takes a couple of small birch branches that have fallen on the floor and breaks them up into little pieces. She picks the leaves of twinflower and primrose.
Billy’s voice crackles over the radio again: ‘See anything?’
‘No. I’m finding more sticks.’
She follows grey stones sunk deep in a line, the remains of a cottage or outhouse at some point in history. The forest used to belong to the local estate and in the Victorian era it was used for shooting game. But the trees grew too quickly and spread out in the intervening years, making the land unmanageable.
Lauren hears a fluttering behind her and stops. She switches off the radio and turns, but there are only more trees. If she listens hard she can hear them creak. She is thinking about her father’s lined face and whether he lies or if he does things and doesn’t remember. She moves closer to one broad trunk. Of course he does. Both. She’s seen him almost forget her altogether, sometimes, although those days are rare. She’s seen him lie to the neighbours when they ask too many questions. He keeps her out of the wood shed and the posh living room she can’t remember using. He keeps parts of himself locked and secret. It annoys her that she isn’t allowed to lie. He still doesn’t realize she puts on her mum’s lipstick in the bathroom sometimes.
At that moment, her footsteps squeeze water from the moss like a sponge and it runs over her wellies. She imagines how strong his hands must be when they haul logs into the back of the pickup. He can still lift her up over his shoulder and she will hang like a dead weight. A cool damp lingers from the rain. She once overheard him telling Kirsty how you strangle a chicken. She walks down a ridge of ferns to a fallen oak and hears the sound again. She spreads her hand against the trunk an
d notices the tarry puddles of black witch’s butter mushrooming near the roots. There is a tawny blur in the trees ahead. A deer, now still, with its neck bent downwards, has its eyes on her. They stand facing each other until the deer leaps and vanishes into the bracken.
When Lauren makes her way back to their den, Billy has gone. She starts to weave more sticks into the walls. There on the ground is something she didn’t notice earlier. Someone has placed large pebbles and stones in a neat ring around the hut. She counts them. Twelve in total. Each stone is of a similar size and placed the same distance apart.
Lauren steps out of the circle and holds the radio to her mouth. It fuzzes with static. ‘Billy?’ she says.
Piercing feedback screams out of the machine.
Lauren drops it on the ground, screwing up her eyes.
When she is sure it’s quiet, she picks the radio up by the antenna like a dead fish.
‘Jameson? Jameson, home time.’
Billy walks out of the trees instead. He’s smiling.
‘Where’d you go?’ she says.
‘I was just up that way.’ He is out of breath and she wonders if he has been looking for her.
‘Did you hear my radio? It’s broken.’
‘No?’
‘It was so loud! Here you go. I was on my way home.’
‘Hey, it’s not finished yet, come on and do a bit more.’
She looks up at him and notices his freckles and blue eyes. She keeps noticing them, these days, and the fact he is now a bit taller than her. She turns back to the ground. ‘Have you seen these stones?’
‘You’re such a girl,’ says Billy.
She shoots him a look. ‘I didn’t put them there.’
‘Sure you didn’t.’
It starts to rain. A few heavy drops, widely spaced, then more, falling quickly through the branches. Billy shrugs. ‘Fine then.’ They pull up their hoods and start back to Billy’s, with Jameson following, covered in mud.
‘Maybe we should get a tarp for the roof. It’s gonna get wet,’ Billy says.
Lauren doesn’t answer. The sky grows too dark for the afternoon. The rain is so thick and loud that Billy, too, is quiet. There is a faint, deep sound of thunder beyond the fields.
When they reach Billy’s house, water has seeped up their denim jeans to their knees. The Mathesons live in an old steading with a slate roof and untidy brambles. There is a football net in the paddock-sized garden, edged with dry stone. Billy’s mother Kirsty is taking her horse Pepper to his stable in the far corner of the adjoining field.
The children walk through the back door and shriek as Jameson shakes his wet coat in the passageway. The kitchen smells of fresh baking. They take their wellies off, one foot helping the other, and lean against the radiator. Jameson begins to smell of wet dog drying. Lauren can feel her hair slimy on her skull. The house is brighter than hers in lots of small ways. They stand warming themselves, looking at the plate of apple scones on the waterproof tablecloth. A couple of leftover Braeburns have been placed in the centre for decoration.
‘Can we eat them?’ Lauren asks, picking up an apple.
Billy pauses. ‘Mum’ll have to say.’
He starts to make two glasses of Robinsons orange squash when Lauren puts the apple in her pocket and says, ‘I think your aura is blue.’
‘My what?’
‘Your aura.’
‘Oh aye. What’s that?’
‘It’s a kind of colour that comes out of you.’
‘Like … blood?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Lauren the auren.’
‘Aura.’
Billy’s mother comes through the back door, peeling off her bumblebee jacket and taking a seat at the table as she rubs her arms. ‘How’s that den coming on?’
‘Fine. Lauren says she can see my aura and it’s blue.’
Billy’s mum laughs. ‘Is that right?’
Lauren doesn’t look at either of them.
‘Billy,’ says his mother, ‘have you packed yet?’
‘I will in a bit.’
‘Well, you’d better do it soon – you’ve got school tomorrow, then we’re off.’
‘Lauren saw a wifey on the road.’
‘She wasna a wifey,’ says Lauren too quickly.
Lauren loves the television at Billy’s. She sits alone watching it, huge and colourful in the living room, and it takes her into a world of Nickelodeon animation and American reality shows. She loves the strangeness of Americans. People who live in a universe of lie detectors and drug addiction and paternity tests. She likes watching shows about women with puffed, frozen faces who talk to similar women in restaurants about other women. There are large mansions and tiny dogs.
She doesn’t know how much time has passed when she turns around to see Kirsty sitting behind her on the sofa, laughing too, with Lewis on her lap.
‘Oh, she is not a happy bunny, is she?’
‘She found out that her sister lost her memory when they were skiing and has been keeping it a secret.’
‘Aye, that’s what she’s saying.’
‘I think she really did. Uh-oh. The mum’s not happy …’ They laugh, and toddler Lewis tries to laugh along too, not understanding.
Kirsty says, ‘Lauren. Are you going to be all right while we’re away?’
‘I’ll be fine, of course.’
‘Do you want us to bring you back some Minnie Mouse ears like last time?’
Lauren tries to suppress a smile. She looks down at her crossed legs and nods.
‘OK, I’ll add those to the list. You think your dad’ll want something? Maybe some Mickey Mouse ears for him?’
Lauren giggles.
‘Your dad knows you’re here, doesn’t he?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘OK, just checking. We’ve got quite a few things left in the fridge unopened that’ll be going off while we’re away. Do you want to tell him to come round and pick them up maybe?’ She says this as Lewis tries to grab her hair and she brushes his small hands away.
‘OK.’
‘I found Billy upstairs playing Fifa, but I think he’s almost packed now. And I’m going to be making us tea soon. Would you like some?’
Lauren remembers her father lying up in his bed seeming as though he’d had too much to drink. ‘I think I should check my dad’s OK. He didn’t seem so well this morning.’
‘Oh, is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Will he be making something for you to eat?’
‘Think so. Yeah.’
‘I’m going to make you a sandwich to take away home with you. In case you get hungry on the way, eh?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Is your dad keeping all right these days?’
‘Seems … fine.’
‘You’ll be OK while we’re away, won’t you?’
Lauren tries to brighten. ‘I’ll be just fine, Kirsty.’
3
When Niall wakes up again, the house seems to be floating on water. Varnished pine planks edge the walls like a fence. It was a previous owner’s idea, a woman from the Lowlands, before his uncle bought the house. He remembers his wife Christine’s face the first day they moved in. She called it ‘perfect’. Perfect seemed something simple to attain back then. Niall didn’t think it was perfect, though, and didn’t like the walls, but within a few years of living here they became invisible to him. He sees them now anew, and closes his eyes. He tries to lie still against the nauseous fog rolling in. He will not be working today. A song is turning around in his head, a music without words that he cannot place.
One day he will make big changes. He likes to sit with a tin of beer in the evenings and tell Lauren he’s going to paint the walls another colour or reclad them or build an extension. He asks her what she wants him to build and she will say a turret, a swimming pool, a library with a hidden door, a dog bedroom for Jameson. Once she asked him to build a slide from her window into the garden. He said he wou
ld build her a tree house, but he never has. Now he buries thoughts of the workshop and carpentry, sandpaper, drills, hammers. He buries all thoughts and all potential for thoughts. He has become quite skilled at this over the years.
The lady from the Lowlands made one alteration he approved of: she changed the name of the house to Dunscaith. Before that it was home to Alan Mackie’s uncle and known as Trapper’s Cottage.
Alan’s uncle, the trapper, had been a drinker. Alan says that the outhouse that’s now Niall’s workshop was once full of traps and carcases of poached animals and barrels of home brew. Alan says his uncle’s fingernails were always black from dried blood and earth. One night the trapper took an axe to the bare staircase and hacked it to pieces, which he then burned on the fire.
But the circumstances of the trapper’s death are unclear. One evening, in the pub, Niall asked Alan what happened to him but Alan just drank the last of his ale and set the empty glass on the small round table and wiped his mouth. A silence passed between the two men. Then Alan got out of his chair and started putting his coat on. He said, just before he left for the night, that some stories are better left buried. Niall thought of bodies in the ground.
Cherie, who owns the petrol station, once told Niall that the trapper passed away soon after he cut up the staircase. She leaned forward over the cash register patched with lottery advertisements and mouthed ‘hanged himself’ with her hand lying lightly on the base of her neck. Christine was horrified at the story and tried to clutter the house with New Age crystals to ‘dissipate bad energy’.
Niall was told this same fact by Hamish Murray at the Black Horse Inn, who said that Alan found the trapper in the outhouse. Bruce Dunbar the egg man also told this story, sticking his head inside Niall’s truck window, his breath smelling of Golden Virginia. He said the body was hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Local children used to ask Christine if her house was cursed. It explained some of the looks he got when he told people where he lived.
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