Sometimes, Luda looks into his eyes and smiles at him. She offers him tea, which she makes laboriously – sometimes forgetting how to dunk the teabags or pour the milk. She asks him about Iris. She never remembers his job, but he’s unbothered. Other times she is in the middle of frantic, fractured conversations with people who are not there. Often, it’s about hexafoils and debitage. Other times it’s about cows and water and bruises.

  Occasionally, she seems to stop breathing. Everyone that Luda talks to in these moments, her eyes searching the air as though reading a complicated expression on a familiar face, is dead.

  Theo treats these moments as though Luda is in the middle of an important phone call. He smiles, waves and takes his leave.

  He sees how it affects Darcy and Min, though.

  Theo hears the caravan door open and close, as he always hopes it will. He bends back down over his sketchbook, oddly comforted by Luda’s voice coming in from the water.

  Darcy stops near him, arms crossed, staring out at his mother, as though she is the reason he has come out. She might well be. Theo opens a new page; begins drawing something else.

  ‘She won’t visit Tristan,’ Darcy says, and the sound of his voice, wary and awkward, emerging of its own volition, almost makes Theo slip off the rock. He looks up, and is surprised again; Darcy is looking back at him. God, he’s still so beautiful it makes Theo actually ache. As his unremembered childhood aches; a different present (a future) that he mourns.

  Her voice carries to them, raised in irritation. Darcy winces. ‘Those goddamn voices. You know she’s convinced that Tristan comes and visits her? That’s why she won’t go to the hospital to actually see him.’

  Darcy’s voice is raw. Theo wants to close his sketchbook; wants to drag Darcy to him so that he can feel Darcy’s body pressed against his own; wants to keep him there until Darcy stops hurting, even if that takes the rest of their lives. But, more than that, he wants to be what Darcy needs, and what Darcy needs is stillness. What Darcy needs is for Theo to keep his distance.

  ‘I know how much you miss him,’ Theo says instead. And from the corner of his eye, he sees Darcy react to his words, his arms tightening, his knees bending, his chin tucking inwards, as though weathering a blow. Fatherless boys recognise this about each other: the value of a man who loves you.

  ‘I trusted him,’ Darcy says after a moment, sounding confused.

  ‘I know. I know you did.’

  For a moment they watch Luda brushing her fingers along the sun-spangled surface of the water.

  Darcy draws in a breath and it catches, and that catch undoes Theo. He tosses his sketchbook aside and stands. A splash as Luda clasps a small stone for inspection and then returns it to the sea.

  Theo reaches for Darcy, and Darcy’s expression collapses. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Darcy …’

  ‘Don’t!’

  Distance. Distance. Distance. Theo tries to be still, to be patient. But everything he wants makes it too hard. ‘Why?’ Theo’s voice is loud, and trembles. And he expects Darcy to bite back, to say something cutting and cold, but Darcy just walks away.

  Darcy wishes he’d thought to ask Tristan about Theo. About all sorts of things beyond academia and the islands and ethics and exam prep. Darcy wishes he’d explained what happened when Theo was close to him. How sometimes an hour could pass in which he thought of nothing else, his eyes skirting over the same sentence in the page of a book again and again and again. He wishes he’d had the guts to lay it all out for Tristan, methodical, empirical, like a paper he wanted edited. ‘So, what do I do now? What do I do next?’

  But Tristan is not here anymore. Not really. And Theo belongs more to other people than he ever has, ever will, to Darcy.

  Luda stands in bright sunshine. For a moment, there is a woman next to her. A fine-featured face that shifts like sand in wind. Dark hair.

  ‘Did you call the whales?’ A pause, she bites at her lip. ‘Is Tristan there where you are?’

  ‘Of course not,’ says Tristan-from-the-in-between, furious now. ‘Of course I’m not there, wherever the hell there is. I’m here. I’m here with you.’

  He pokes at her arm, but she feels nothing.

  The woman watches them. Sand in wind. ‘Can you help him, at least?’ Luda asks her. ‘He’s not very happy here. Please.’

  There is a gust of wind, the sort that makes Luda stagger in this unfamiliar, strange body of hers in the After. She is sure, though, that the woman has spoken into the wind. Words Luda has not been able to untangle into meaning.

  ‘Go and see me,’ Tristan-from-the-in-between says.

  ‘I can see you now.’

  ‘The rest of me. For Darcy. Go for Darcy.’

  There is a raised voice. She and Tristan-from-the-in-between both look towards the shore. Theo and Darcy. Darcy striding away, Theo watching him and then throwing a rock hard into other rocks. Kicking at the water. He looks like the Theo she remembers from the Before – all sharp edges and fury and bloodied hands. She waves at him, this long-lost friend. But he’s still raging and does not see.

  Luda leaves the bay, Theo’s wordless frustration. Away from the water and the ghost house, she finds gorse woven into wreaths, left on the hillside in the place where she had seen women (the living, breathing kind from Big Island).

  Before.

  Luda shivers, suddenly cold. Hands. She can’t breathe.

  Later, Violet gives her a lift to the hospital so that she can visit the rest of Tristan. She clings to the underside of the passenger seat and finds, when they arrive, that she’s been crying silently for the whole drive.

  Violet does not come inside. Violet pulls out her whittling knife and settles back into the seat of her car.

  In Tristan’s room, Luda takes out a sewing needle and carefully carves a hexafoil into his skin. She has become unaccountably worried about others from the in-between finding their way to this space/body that he has left behind.

  It may not be Tristan, but it belongs to him and she will protect it. Him. She sits for a very long time. She presses more deeply, is contented in her work.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  Luda looks up, smiles at Darcy, who is enraged into stillness by the door.

  ‘Jesus, don’t smile right now, Luda,’ Tristan-from-the-in-between says. ‘He’ll yell more if you smile.’

  ‘Nothing.’ She lets her hands drop, but Darcy moves quickly across the room and Luda hears his breath hitch when he sees the marks that Luda has carefully added to the flesh of Tristan’s arm.

  Darcy looks away from her and dashes his hand across his eyes. Luda brushes Tristan’s hair from his face. How can she explain to Darcy that the marks are a gift? An act of love? How badly she wants him to understand that she is getting closer to untangling the magic of it all.

  Iris’s mother had cast spells – nights of candles and August muttering under her breath. She had tried to teach Iris, but Iris had never wanted to learn.

  Even then, right at the beginning, Iris had had a sense of how it would all end.

  Iris still joined in, though, when Cassandra and the others came over and told stories among themselves. The woman who could rein in raging wind and thick curtains of needling rain. August knew the stories of Athena and Artemis; Aphrodite and Persephone and Hera. Women, all women. All women, fierce and powerful.

  August and Iris would sometimes go to the kirk and Cassandra often accompanied them. Sometimes for worship and sometimes to poke around the echoing space, the upper levels, and the belfry with its view all the way to the sound.

  In the kirk, August would survey Haaken’s Hole and the hangman’s ladder and the manacles and the dock. Sometimes, if nobody was looking, August would take out a knife and carve symbols into the wood of the ladder and the dock. ‘Stop it,’ Iris would say, terrified of damaging anything in a place of God.

  Cassandra knows that, even then, Iris had known all about hell. That she could imagine it vividly and fretted about August and Cassandra and the others unleashing something of it with all of their candles and incantations.

  ‘There’s no hell, Iris,’ August would say.

  But that would mean that there is no heaven.

  Cassandra knows that Iris had tried to channel the power of these women whose tales she had fallen asleep listening to. When a wind roared, she told herself she had called it up, like a friend. When a particularly unpleasant man was blown off the cliffs and drowned by the tides, she had thought, Aye. Aye.

  The stale, chalky smell. Each Saturday, Cassandra would watch as Iris and her mother wore blacks and greys, made wreaths of gorse and seaweed, and left them around the tidal island, weighted down by rocks.

  Min often seeks out Cassandra. That old, old ache. She can’t explain the tug she feels, no matter where she is – the awareness of Cassandra on the other side of the island. Exhaustion. A memory stretching back and back and back and back. Sometimes, Min is aware of the sharp physicality of her pain.

  Min tells herself that her mother does not see ghosts, and yet the idea of them existing terrifies her in unnameable ways. Cassandra did not tell Min that she was a hero for diving into the water after her mother and Tristan. She did not ask Min how she did it or what it was like. Instead, she had pushed herself up onto her narrow, unwieldy legs and held out her trembling arms.

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ she’d said, and Min had almost cried. Cassandra. Holding Min tightly, rocking her. Or maybe it was just her trembling. Trembling, trembling. ‘My darling, darling Wilhelmina.’

  Min had flooded Cassandra with her memories of the water that day, and memories of the night before, until she worried that Cassandra could not take the burden of her sorrow and her horror anymore. But Cassandra was unyielding, willing to sit with Min in long silences or engage her in light chatter. Always, beneath everything she did. My darling, darling Wilhelmina.

  That night, Luda wakes to a woman leaning over her. Dark hair, a face that shifts like sand. Luda has an impression of great longing, of impatience. Soon. And then the woman disappears.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  APRIL (THEIR THIRD YEAR)

  It is Violet who tells Luda about the photographic exhibition sponsored by an offshore drilling company; it is Violet who suggests that she enter it. A photo depicting the islands; an aspect of island life. They sit in the empty kirk, as they often do, because Violet likes it here and Luda doesn’t much mind where she is, most of the time.

  Luda considers the idea. She studies the fall of light through the kirk window. ‘I haven’t taken proper photographs in a long time.’ She frowns. ‘Don’t even know if I could still work a camera properly.’

  Violet rolls her eyes. She rubs cream into Luda’s hands. ‘Of course you can!’

  Luda touches her fingers to her head and frowns. She feels as though she can perhaps still operate a camera – the memories of working them are vivid and full, the sort that she has found will act as a guide for her now. Her confidence in herself has been worn away like an island shoreline, a little each day – and occasionally a huge chunk – disappearing into frothing water. How people talk to her; how they don’t talk to her – instead talking about her, across her, as though she isn’t there. How people don’t broach anything complex with her anymore. Don’t ask her what she thinks.

  Violet tells her it’s a little like being trapped in grief. People talk to you as if you’re no longer one of them. As though some vital part of you is gone and they don’t know how to treat you without it.

  ‘How are you, Violet?’ Father Lee comes out and drops to his knee and takes Violet’s hands in his.

  She raises an eyebrow, but she has always been devout and he is still a man of God. She inclines her head. ‘Oh, not so bad, Father. And yourself?’

  ‘Fine, fine. This time of year’s always been my favourite.’ He smiles at Luda. ‘It’s cheering, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Luda, although she doesn’t much mind what the weather’s doing. The only type of weather she really takes proper note of now is the gale force wind that springs up more and more frequently around the islands. All these rare weather events, happening more and more. A flicker of her own voice from the Before: this is war.

  ‘Tell me, Violet, have you heard from Bryce?’ Father Lee asks, still holding her hands.

  ‘Aye, he writes to me. Beautiful letters.’

  ‘Grief does terrible things to a man.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘He loves you very much.’

  Violet smiles, but there’s steel under it. ‘Aye, and I him.’

  ‘He should be home with you.’

  ‘And maybe one day he will be, Father. That’s up to the good Lord to decide.’ Violet stands and Luda stands with her. Father Lee is left on the floor for a moment too long and rises hastily, straightening his shirt.

  ‘I wish Father Lee would stop pressuring me,’ Violet says as they walk slowly from the kirk towards Violet’s car. ‘I shouldn’t say it, but he really is a bit of a knob, isn’t he?’

  ‘Will you go back home with Bryce?’ Luda asks.

  Violet shrugs. ‘If it was just me he’d lashed out at when he was missing Allie, then aye. But it’s not just me he’s hurt.’

  Luda considers this. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘When I was a lass, I thought love was enough – that if you loved someone, things were simple. But it’s never simple, is it?’

  ‘No.’ Her ghosts. ‘No, it’s never simple.’ She pauses, struck by the fall of light near the car. Violet pauses with her, as she always does.

  ‘That day you came out to the farm and he lost his temper was the first time I realised I was scared of him. I wanted to stop him, but I couldn’t.’

  Luda’s finger twitches as she looks at the town. Twirling the focus of an imagined camera. A car rumbles past, too close. Luda does not like cars. She gasps and flails at every bump or dip in the road.

  The dark. The cold.

  She and Min, backing away from cars and flinching at the sound of loud engines. If Luda had thought to notice this, she might have called it kinship.

  Darcy drinks coffee in the little kitchen of the ghost house, Theo’s sea glass on the table in front of him. He watches his mother through the window, pacing with her camera. She had said it was work, but he knows that she has no work to do. Her sudden fervour makes him uneasy.

  Min is off with Ewan. She has grown pale, since the accident. Looks nauseous any time Luda mentions a ghost or starts those twisted, one-sided conversations.

  ‘Not real, not real, not real,’ she’ll mutter to herself. Damp palms. Caught breath.

  Over the last few days, Luda has started taking photos the way she had up until the cliff collapse: without thinking about anything other than what’s in front of her. Without delineating flesh from earth. It’s what had made her so good – so awful – at her work. It scares him, this sudden circling back. He thinks of the dam photo. His sprawled limbs, cracked earth.

  He swallows bile.

  It is not the fervour on its own. It’s also her growing collection of stones and animal bones and ale and stale bannocks. Little bundles of straw and water kept in glass bottles. Cloth. Herb. Salt. Thread. Rubbish that Min had pulled from the deep in sacks before the accident.

  At first Darcy had thought that his mother believed herself to be a witch. Lately, he’s realised that she’s studying the objects – puzzling over them and how they fit together. It is nothing like the clutter of Theo’s room; things frantically clawed from the sea to be sorted over later. Luda’s objects are carefully ordered. She discards what she deems of no further use. There is something scientific in how she fits them together, and this unsettles him more than anything else.

  Darcy tilts back in his chair, watching. Watching that pause. Soon, his mother will begin crouching and shifting, coaxing the scene, drawing it out into something beautiful. Something deserving of enduring on gelatin silver, beyond itself. She will be impatient with the scene, Darcy can tell. It will not yield to her the way that living things do. He knows that this new Luda will grow tired of the landscape, of old bones and cairns and frost on thick grass. He senses that she will soon come after them, as she has always done. She will demand that they yield to her and the cold eye of her camera. Softly, quietly, and in the very precise way that eroded beaches and flooded turf and wind-pitted whalebone cannot.

  Ewan takes Min out to the reef off the eastern edge of Big Island. He studies her, takes in her pale face, her overly bitten lip, swollen in the sunlight. He can read her now – she knows this. He can read her like the surface of the sea.

  She always seems somehow less when she emerges from the water. As though the most important parts of her have been washed away. The parts that make her most human.

  Min touches Ewan’s arm as she often does after diving; snaking her fingers up his sleeve if he’s wearing a jacket. His skin always feels burning hot and it brings her back to herself. Flickers of Cassandra’s front room. Her breathing changes. She hands him a piece of coral without a word. Next it may be a shell; a stone; a bone. Ewan will keep them all in his cabin, stowed in a small, dusty drawer. It is the same place where he keeps his grandfather’s compass; the rope he learnt to tie knots with as a lad.

  The small ones are fascinated by the razor clams. That’s when Luda feels them the most. It’s why she often forgets the buckets, sometimes leaving them to be swept out by the rising tide. She does not see them the way she sees Tristan-from-the-in-between and the others. She does not hear their voices. They do not have words. But she feels them. The prickle of gorse. The memory of tremulous hands.