‘What for?’ His voice is slow. He straightens.

  ‘Father will be here in ten minutes.’

  Theo notices the tablecloth, then. He notices the pots simmering on the hob. Iris watches him, frowning. ‘Theofin.’

  He thinks of running, straight out the door. He thinks of running to the cliffs, or to the barrow. He thinks of running to the Blue Fin or to Seannay. But he will have to come back, after. And the idea of leaving the islands entirely makes him flinch.

  ‘I’m actually feeling a bit sick …’ he says.

  ‘Father is coming specially. You will eat with us, you will be polite, and you will listen to what he has to say. If you try to leave, with God as my witness, I will tie you up.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says, backing away. ‘I was just getting changed.’

  ‘Then setting the table?’

  ‘Then setting the table.’ He goes into his room. His bandaged hands make it difficult to dial. He dials Min’s number, but she doesn’t answer. He dials Ewan and he doesn’t answer either. Swearing, he dials Tristan’s number and speaks low and urgently into the phone. God, he’s regretting that joint now.

  Father Lee arrives precisely at six. Iris hangs his jacket up and brings him a tumbler of whisky. Theo sets the table slowly, trying to concentrate, trying not to panic at the sound of Father Lee’s voice in the next room. Normally alcohol, smoking, soothes him enough to be able to be inside with other people. But nothing is soothing him tonight.

  The doorbell rings. ‘Iris! I know you don’t like wine, but I brought some anyway. It’s a bit shit, though. Sorry.’ Tristan strides into the dining room, shedding his jacket and draping it on the back of one of the chairs. ‘Something smells wonderful!’

  Iris comes into the room, glancing at Theo, at Tristan, and at the extra setting at table. ‘I told you Tristan was coming,’ Theo mumbles. ‘Didn’t I?’

  For a moment, Iris’s fists clench but then she takes a deep breath. ‘I must’ve been distracted.’ She narrows her eyes at Tristan and speaks through gritted teeth. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Anything but the wine.’ Tristan catches a glimpse of Father Lee in the living room. ‘Actually, the wine is fine. Whatever is fine. Just alcohol. Please. Thank you.’

  Iris goes back into the kitchen. Tristan raises his eyebrows at Theo. ‘Sorry,’ Theo mutters. ‘I can’t … I can’t get through a dinner with them. Not at the moment. I panicked.’ He frowns. ‘Is that a giant stain on your shirt?’

  Tristan covers it with a hand. ‘You owe me, Muir,’ he mutters. ‘I was going to have pizza.’

  ‘You don’t have to stay.’ Theo closes his eyes for a moment, telling himself that the walls aren’t really creeping in closer and closer.

  ‘That whole Doolay thing’s really thrown you, hey?’

  ‘You know about it?’

  ‘Not much. Darcy roped me into trawling the parish newsletters.’ Tristan grimaces. ‘Honestly, Theo. I wanted to gauge my eyeballs out. There was a piece where Father Lee called himself illustrious.’

  ‘Darcy shouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘No,’ says Tristan, more quietly. ‘He shouldn’t have.’

  Iris strides back in and shoves a glass of wine towards Tristan.

  ‘Thank you. Oh, we’re just going to drink that at room temperature, are we?’ Tristan says. ‘Lovely. Room temperature sparkling wine is really not served enough, is it?’

  Iris appears to spend a moment deliberating whether or not to tip the wine over his head. Theo steadies himself on the back of a chair. His hands ache.

  ‘Go speak to Father Lee,’ Iris says to Theo. ‘It’s rude, leaving him in there alone.’

  ‘I’m not the one who invited him,’ Theo says. They stare at each other until Theo has to close his eyes again.

  Tristan takes a deep breath before heading into the living room. ‘Marcus!’ he calls. ‘It’s been too long!’

  ‘Tristan,’ Father Lee says.

  Theo takes one deep breath and then another until he can manage walking slowly into the next room and collapsing onto the couch. ‘So, how’s life at the kirk?’ Tristan says, downing half of his wine in one gulp. ‘Given any good sermons lately?’

  ‘I like to think all of my sermons are good, Tristan.’ A pause. ‘Which you’d know, if you ever came to worship.’

  ‘You know, I really admire your self-confidence. You just don’t see enough of it in older, white, male members of the clergy.’

  Theo snorts. Father Lee frowns, trying to work out whether he’s been insulted.

  ‘Another drink, Father?’ Iris calls.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. Thank you.’ Father Lee looks at Theo. ‘I hear you’ve been getting into trouble, Theofin.’

  ‘Pish! Trouble! What lad doesn’t get into a bit of trouble at this age?’ Tristan says, giving Theo an awkward punch in the shoulder. ‘I’m sure you got up to all sorts of things when you were a lad.’

  Father Lee looks at him blankly.

  ‘No? Well, slàinte mhath! Never too late to start.’ Tristan finishes the wine and grimaces. ‘Good Lord, that’s bad.’

  Father Lee looks at Theo again. ‘Your mother’s extremely worried about you, Theofin.’

  Theo imagines sinking into the couch.

  ‘Starting brawls, drinking, staying out until the wee hours.’ He drops his voice. ‘Is that really how you repay the woman who took you in?’

  Theo begins to sweat.

  ‘So, how’d you decide you wanted to join the clergy?’ Tristan asks, glancing quickly towards the kitchen before reaching for the bottle of whisky that Iris only brings out of the locked cupboard for Father Lee. He unscrews the lid and pours some into his wine glass. ‘I mean, did you always know? Were you drawing crucifixes with crayons in P1? Or did you have a transformative moment?’

  ‘I always knew I was …’ Father Lee looks thoughtful. ‘I suppose I knew I wanted to lead, but it wasn’t until I reached about fifteen that I knew the church was where I belonged.’

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ says Tristan. ‘I had a similar experience at fifteen.’

  ‘Oh? Powerful sermon?’

  ‘Bad mushroom trip, I think.’

  Tristan stays close to Theo throughout dinner and dessert, only pausing in his endless chatter to quickly devour the stew, bread and whatever alcohol is in arm’s reach (‘Oh! Father! Sorry – was that yours?’). When Iris finally gets up to see Father Lee off, Tristan sags down into his seat. ‘I am now very tired and very drunk.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Theo says. ‘They would’ve spent the whole night going on about … everything. All the ways I’m screwing up. I couldn’t have got through it … I would’ve …’

  ‘They’ll have another go at their little intervention. You know that, right?’

  ‘I don’t need an intervention. I’m okay. I just … I just need to get my head sorted.’

  ‘Question,’ says Tristan, leaning his head back on his chair. ‘Who’d you call before me?’

  ‘Min and Ewan.’

  ‘Darcy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think this would’ve been his worst nightmare,’ Tristan says. ‘I mean, between our illustrious Father Lee and that terrible wine, it would’ve been a lot of people’s worst nightmares. But he would have come, Theo.’

  Theo breathes out. ‘I know.’

  At the ghost house, Luda opens her laptop and stares at the most recent images she’s caught of earth, cracked and dry, on one of the more far flung islands. Sometimes she’s so preoccupied by the islands and the women that she barely hears what anyone says around her. Tonight she is pulled from her contemplations of erosion and drowned sheep and broken slate by the shape of Darcy lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling.

  Her muscles tense. She tells herself there’s nothing wrong – that there’s nothing wrong with her nearly grown son lying on the couch, thinking his unknowable, nearly grown thoughts.

  ‘You okay?’ she asks.

  He ignores her. He always ignores her.

  She sits down on the floor with her back against the couch. She is aware of Darcy studying the scars on the arm she is resting on her propped-up knee; her neck, the profile of her face. He has still never made any mention of being able to see the scars, but she knows that he can.

  He says something that Luda doesn’t catch.

  ‘Sorry?’

  A sigh. ‘I said, tell me about the women.’ A hesitation. ‘Please.’

  ‘Really, why?’ When was the last time Darcy had said please to her? Had asked anything of her other than to pass him the milk for his morning coffee?

  ‘I like the idea of them. Of all these strong women who didn’t give a fuck.’

  ‘It’s more complex than that. Some of them weren’t strong – they were victims of poverty and abuse and had no say in any of it.’

  ‘Story. Not a lecture.’

  She is losing him, tension creeping back into his body. This fleeting moment, as precious and unknowable as her best work, and she is letting it get away. ‘What story?’ she asks, her voice quieter.

  ‘The ones who called in the whales.’

  ‘There were four of them executed for that. One was also charged with summoning storms, another one with promising fruitfulness in nature. And the last two women, Susan and Magdalena, were also charged with raising a procession of the dead. What does that even mean?’ She sighs. ‘Maybe in the ruined cottages. I keep wondering, were they ghosts? Bodies? Bones? What does a procession of the dead mean?’

  ‘Maybe it was just a feeling,’ Darcy says, almost to himself.

  That sense of being watched in an empty landscape. Sounds with no source. She shivers. Faces through glass and fingers on her face. Sometimes she is sure she can hear their voices. They call her back from the darkest of her dreams.

  She is about to ask him what he means, but she knows. Swallows the words. Joshua flares up between them like a struck match.

  ‘You want a coffee?’ she asks.

  He’s quiet and she thinks that he’s ignoring her again. She stands up, moves into the kitchen, and then his low voice. ‘Warm milk with honey?’

  Luda’s mother had made warm milk and honey for Luda when she was young and unwell – a cold, a headache, a bad day at school. Luda had made it for both her children, too, but she cannot remember the last time she made it for Darcy; or, rather, cannot remember the last time it had been drunk. The sight of congealed milk and honey in a cold mug had been enough to make her eyes prickle.

  ‘Sure,’ she says, like it’s no big deal. Except that it is. Except he is suddenly a newborn, mewling into her damp skin. He is a toddler, pointing out letters before his second birthday. Older; he is studying other children at church, stroking baby Min’s hair.

  Curled up in that fucking dam. Luda’s camera in her hand.

  She makes the drink and takes it to him. He sits up, mutters thanks, and does not look at her.

  She wants to stroke the hair off his forehead; she wants to rest her head on his shoulder and breathe in that smell of his neck, like she had when he was young. Biscuits and playdough and paper and boy.

  He has so many unknown scars. She wishes she could drink in every mark of his skin until she knows it properly again.

  He has the skin of a stranger.

  Darcy cups his hands around the mug, flushed as though embarrassed. He is embarrassed, she realises. He is embarrassed over needing her. She wants to sit down next to him, she wants to ask him about what he’s feeling, how she can help him; she wants to tell him that she shouldn’t have taken that photo and that she should listen more when he talks. She’d ask him what he felt about Joshua. Whether Joshua still snuck into tiny moments, or whether Darcy had somehow left him behind in Narra.

  But there is nothing for Luda to clutch at. Nowhere to find purchase. Soon this time – which feels so infinite – will shrink to a flicker. Will become something she’s convinced she made up. Darcy never asked me for milk and honey!

  She thinks, instead, of the women who met here. She wonders about ghosts.

  Cassandra is dozing in her chair when Iris stomps into the room, drops a bag of cans onto the table and flops down onto the couch in a very non-Iris-y way. Cassandra blinks, feeling dulled by her medications.

  ‘You’re here unusually late, Iris.’

  Iris casts Cassandra a withering look. ‘Food delivery from the kirk,’ she says.

  ‘I see. Didn’t you have Marcus for dinner tonight?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And how did that go?’

  Iris scowls. ‘Tristan turned up.’

  Cassandra grins. ‘Oh, did he? So, you, Marcus, Tristan and Theo. That must’ve been fun. Was it fun?’

  Iris’s pulsing worry. Father Lee, letting himself be pulled off track by Tristan, over and over again. ‘Tristan was there for Theo,’ Iris says, reluctantly.

  ‘Aye. Polite to Father Lee, was he?’

  ‘He did that thing he does where he’s extremely, repeatedly rude in a very pleasant voice.’ A swell of anger. Iris wanting to claw at Father Lee’s skin (that pearly, barely marked skin). ‘Father Lee’s a good man, underneath it all,’ Iris says, her voice unwilling. ‘He’s just young.’

  ‘He’s not that young, Iris,’ Cassandra says, yawning. ‘He’ll never be Father Frank. Father Frank may have been a cocky little bastard when he first came here, but he always had depth to him. Father Lee … he doesn’t have that.’

  Iris picks up a can of soup and slumps back against the floral fabric of the couch.

  ‘You need to stop fighting his battles for him. He hasn’t improved since being here on the islands. He’s got worse. Surely you can see that.’

  Iris sniffs. ‘I don’t fight anyone’s battles for them. I fight my own.’

  ‘You let Tristan stay for dinner.’

  ‘Theo invited him, I could hardly throw him out.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Cassandra yawns again. ‘You want Tristan to keep researching the ghost house, don’t you?’

  ‘No. I don’t care.’

  ‘You want to know if there’s anything there,’ Cassandra continues. ‘You’re curious.’

  Iris frowns, says nothing. That choking suspicion; that wariness of anyone outside the kirk. Even Cassandra, who has known Iris for longer than anyone else.

  ‘Aligning yourself with the Father Lees of the world isn’t the answer. It never has been.’

  Iris turns the soup can over in her hands. They both think of the darlings in the gorse of Seannay. The darlings – the tiny remains of unbaptised babies, brought to Seannay to be buried. Iris had imagined them into friends when she was the lonely child of a wild, wayward mother. Between them, blurred and imagined, clouded with fear, the island sinking beneath the sea.

  Iris places the can back down on the table and stands up.

  ‘Iris.’ Cassandra shakes her head and sighs. ‘At least get me a dram before you go!’

  Chapter Eighteen

  FEBRUARY (THEIR SECOND YEAR)

  A woman scoops her child up from a tumble onto the cobblestones. She mops blood and kisses a salt-damp cheek. ‘Shh, don’t cry,’ she murmurs into the child’s hair. ‘C’mon, my brave lad. Deep breath.’ She wipes his tears. ‘There’s no need to cry.’

  That evening, Luda agrees to go to the Blue Fin to celebrate Tristan’s birthday. She smiles over her Australian chardonnay, as Tristan gets more and more emphatic with his gesturing; louder and louder in his passionate diatribe about the shortcomings of anthropologists. She watches Tristan roll up his shirtsleeves and play darts (very badly) and inexplicably take off one shoe. The others there to celebrate Tristan – erratic, generous, impatient Tristan – drift off and join other groups. It’s often this way at the pub – the way it had been back in Narra. People knowing each other; gatherings and catch-ups spilling over.

  Luda sits down with Cassandra, who drinks whisky in a corner booth, pausing to blow kisses to Louise’s red-haired cousin, Angus. He always blows them back, making Cassandra laugh. She and Cassandra rarely talk. A comfortable silence exists between them, as though all the necessary things have already been said (although Luda is sure they haven’t been).

  ‘You’ve been here a while,’ says Luda.

  Cassandra blinks. ‘Aye. A wee while.’

  ‘I keep seeing women in the gorse on Seannay …’

  Cassandra looks sad and unsurprised. ‘Women used to bury dead bairns there. Decades ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, hen. The babes weren’t baptised so weren’t allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. Happen Seannay’s always felt like a woman’s place. A place that would hold that sort of grief.’ She pauses. ‘Not all places do.’

  ‘No. They don’t.’ Luda turns her place mat over in her hands.

  Tristan sits down with them. ‘Iris came by the office today,’ Luda tells him.

  Tristan rests his cheek in his palm and looks at her. ‘Do not mention that name to me. Iris or Father Lee. I experienced more psychological suffering at that dinner than any decent person should be subjected to.’

  ‘And to think you could have had pizza. She wants you to tell her if you find anything in the ghost house. She said it was what her mother would have wanted.’

  ‘I thought she hated me nosing around the ghost house,’ Tristan says.

  Cassandra shrugs.

  ‘Happy birthday, indeed.’

  ‘Yes! It’s my birthday, isn’t it? I am forty-four. How’d that happen? I mean how’d that happen.’ He sinks down in his chair. ‘It’s pretty old. Practically pension age.’

  ‘Not quite,’ says Cassandra dryly.

  ‘What are you?’ He squints at Luda. ‘Like, forty?’

  ‘Thirty-eight.’

  ‘Jesus, so young.’

  ‘You’re both so young,’ says Cassandra.

  ‘Well, sure. It’s all relative and you’re … what? God, how old are you, Cassandra?’

  ‘Old enough to know it’s dreadfully rude to enquire about a woman’s age.’