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  For Hannah, Olivia, Sam and Gabriel

  PROLOGUE

  It was April when I drowned, a month after my seventeenth birthday. We were out at sea when the sky darkened to black and a storm blew up out of nowhere. We worked fast to get the sails down and start the engine. At the tiller, Dad tried to hold the boat steady. The engine strained against huge waves, as we wallowed and rolled. There was a creak of fibreglass, and water washing over the deck. We’d never been out in anything as big. I should have been afraid. Except I didn’t believe that I was going to die. It wasn’t just that I had faith in Dad’s sailing; I was angry with him, and my rage made me feel superhuman.

  When the wave hit sideways I saw it from the corner of my eye: a wall of water towering over us. As it crashed down, the boom must have swung around and caught the back of my head, because I felt a blow against my skull, and I was falling, slipping across the tilting deck and over the side. I saw Dad reaching out, his hand opening in slow motion. Water closed over my head and there was nothing except darkness and cold.

  It’s odd, because I have no memory of waking, just of existing at a distance, hovering far above the ground. Moonlight spun around me. The universe was rich in stars, a great sweep of planets, and I floated with them. Below me I could see the white spume of breakers rolling onto a shore, a helicopter circling out at sea, and the lights of the village shining through the dark. I noticed a form lying on the pebbly beach: something thrown up by the waves. I couldn’t make out what it was: a coiled wet rug perhaps, or a large fish. Looking again, I made out the curve of a hip, an arm thrown back, hair spread like seaweed. A girl, curled on her side, motionless.

  An upright figure toiled into view: a solid shadow moving towards the dead girl, his feet rolling and crunching over the uneven camber. He jerked to a stop when he saw her, then lurched into a run, dropping to crouch beside her. I watched all this without any real interest. I felt detached and calm, with a lovely floaty sensation in my stomach, like the flicker of butterfly wings.

  The man moved the girl’s head and her neck fell back limply so that I saw her face and I was staring into my own features, darkened and smudged by the night, but definitely belonging to me. A distant voice in my head wondered at how strange it was to be up here and yet, at the same time, able to observe the details of my gaping mouth, teeth showing between slack lips, and my wet pointed eyelashes. I had a bruise on my cheek. I thought I looked peaceful. Empty.

  I watched as the man hunkered over my body. He threw his head back and shouted something into the sky. He looked ridiculous, desperate. Then he put his hand on my chin, tilting it up and his fingers slipped into my mouth, stretching it wider. I wanted to leave the two humans there: the dead one and the live one. But it was as if I’d become heavier. I’d dropped down through layers of night sky, closer to the man. I noticed the curly depths of his greasy hair, an unravelling elbow in the wool of his jumper. Underneath the man’s bent shoulders, I saw the girl’s chest shudder, the rise and fall of her ribcage. My ribcage. He pulled me back with his breath. It hurt. With a shock I became aware of the clumsy alignment of bone and cartilage under my skin, the density of flesh. I was disappearing out of lightness, sucked back into myself, squashed into the crushing weight of my body.

  I woke with him above me, his mouth covering my own. Rough, hot lips. My lungs burning inside my chest. His heat inside me. I struggled to gasp fresh air, raising myself onto my elbow; then I was retching and gagging. He sat back to let me be sick on the pebbles, salt in my throat, as an ocean flooded out of me. I was so cold. His hands were on my shoulders, fingers clenched tight against my wet jumper. He leant close, and I smelt musty clothes, unwashed skin. He whispered in my ear, ‘Thank God I found you.’ I struggled to understand. I was shivering so much I could hardly hear for the chattering of my teeth, but I thought he said, ‘She sent you. You’re mine.’

  PART ONE

  LOST

  1

  Suffolk, July 1984

  There are boys fishing for crabs off the quay. I stop dead in the sunshine, blinking and uncertain. Then it’s OK because it’s nobody I know. Just townie kids here for the summer holidays. They’re squatting next to buckets, poking at crabs they’ve caught on lines baited with bacon rind, strangers with pale skin and funny accents.

  It’s low tide, so I sit on the end of the quay, swinging my legs over the edge. There’s only a couple of feet of water around the slimy wooden base, clumps of brown bladderwrack tangling under the surface. Even if I was stupid enough to fall in, I’d be able to stand up, my toes squelching in the mud. It’s already hot. The sky is clear, and there’s a breeze strong enough to set masts clanking. Seagulls hover overhead, alien eyes swivelling for scraps of bacon fat, wings bright against the sun.

  Ted, the quay master, walks by with a coil of rope over his shoulder and ruffles my hair with his thick hand. ‘Not crabbing today, Faith, eh?’ he says in a normal, friendly voice, but the look he gives me is like all the other adults’–full of pity for the little girl with the drowned sister. I concentrate on watching a plump boy hauling up his line, hand over careful hand, leaning over to see if he’s caught anything. There is a barnacled crab at the end, hanging onto the bacon with pincer claws. Just as the boy is about to reach out and grab it, the crab falls with a splash. Crabs that have been caught before know exactly when to let go, escaping with shreds caught in their cunning jaws. I watch the boy’s face, how his mouth droops and his cheeks redden. He scowls at me.

  I shut my eyes with a snap and turn away, telling myself to ignore him: sticks and stones. I begin to hum under my breath. Hello Dolly, you’re still glowin’, you’re still crowin’, you’re still goin’ strong…

  The boats on the river flit past on gusts of wind. Red, white and brown sails flapping. It used to be Dad and Eva out there. You could hear him shouting from the shore. Mum said it was embarrassing. Dad has always had a temper. In a boat he was worse. Eva ignored him or shouted back, standing up to her knees in the river, Dad struggling with the ropes–‘Keep her steady, damn it!’ But then they’d go off and by the time they came back, wind-blown and red-cheeked, they were smiley and pleased with themselves, talking about how they went past the island and out to sea.

  Dad hasn’t lost his temper since the accident. He can’t remember what happened the day that he and Eva sailed into the storm. The boat capsized and Dad lost consciousness. He was fished out of the water by the coastguard but they never found my sister. The doctor says Dad’s put up barriers in his mind and I know that Mum is angry with him for keeping the barriers there when there are so many questions to answer. Eva’s lifejacket was found floating in the waves. Mum keeps asking why he let Eva sail without it and Dad swears that she must have been wearing it. Dad has sold the boats, says he’ll never sail again. I don’t mind. I’m not a sailor. Capsizing was the worst. But they were Eva’s boats too.

  Still humming, I shade my eyes to stare at the island. It lies beyond the mouth of the river, about half a mile offshore. A long time ago it was connected to a spit of land that runs along the other side of the river. But tides and waves have worn the spit away. Without the boats, without my sister, there’s no way I can go back there. It’s private, out of bounds. When Eva and I landed we had to do it in secret. The island squats on the horizon, the pagodas sticking up like weird chimneys. I screw up my eyes against the glare and think about the last time I was there with her.

  The boat flew over the water’s surface, spray kicking up under the prow. Stars rose from the glittering river to break against my gaze. The sail strained, fat with wind. Eva, sitting at the tiller behind me, was already ducking her head ready for the swing of the boom.

  ‘Hey Shrimp, going about!’ she yelled and I released the jib. The dinghy turned and slowed inside the choppy waves. Then with a snap, the wind caught the sail again. I yanked as hard as I could, my fingers tight around wet rope and we were flying across the water towards the island. I wasn’t frightened in a boat with Eva. She’s a good sailor.

  We sailed onto the gravelly beach. The boat made a crunching noise, stones grating against the hull, scraping the paint. Eva winced. Dad would be furious. We left the boat half-hidden, pulled up on the shingle, with a big stone over the anchor to keep her safe.

  ‘Race you to the other side!’ Eva called. It wasn’t a fair race. She’s seven years older than me and her legs are twice as long as mine. I followed her, slipping on mud, splashing through shallow rivulets and puddles. I was glad to be on land again, relieved by the feel of earth under my feet. The island slopes up from the shore, becoming stony and dry. Gorse bushes cling, withered and stunted, to the pebbly, windswept crest. And then the land falls away and there is nothing but the grey North Sea, seagulls wheeling and crying as if they’re flying over the edge of the world.

  Stripping off her shirt and jeans, Eva threw herself into the waves in her knickers and bra. I sat on t
he steep bank of pebbles, watching. I can’t swim properly. I can manage a doggy-paddle if I have to, swimming with my head clear of the water, mouth open to gasp air. I’m frightened by the waves. Whenever I wade into the sea, they push me over and drag me across sharp stones, splashing salt into my eyes, knocking the breath out of my lungs. I come out covered in bruises. I hate getting wet as much as I hate being cold.

  ‘You’ve got to stop being a wimp!’ Eva shouted. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. Just let yourself float. Let the waves do the work for you.’

  She couldn’t understand what it was like to be afraid of the currents or unseen fish slipping past her legs, or a wave taking her out to sea. When I was a baby, they put a lifejacket on me and tied a rope around my waist, letting me bob up and down at the end of the tether, believing that I’d learn to swim like Eva had. But I didn’t. I screamed and cried until Mum or Dad hauled me onto dry land, blotting the wet from my face, frowning at me anxiously.

  I shivered, watching Eva swim back and forth, battling through the big brown waves. Her arms gleamed as they powered up and over her head, pulling her along. She only swam for a little while. It was too cold, even for her. When she was swimming, her movements were exact and elegant, but it’s impossible to walk on shingle barefoot with any dignity and it made me laugh the way she staggered out, hobbling and wincing over the stones, limbs jerking like a rag-doll. To pay me back she flicked water from her dark hair at me as she knelt down, panting, her clothes in her arms. I could feel her energy, bright as the drops of moisture on her skin. Eva seems more alive than other people.

  She lay back on her elbows. It was just the two of us on the long deserted beach, as if we were the only ones left on a planet made of shingle, sea and sky.

  ‘What a mess,’ Eva was saying, gazing at the rubbish that had been thrown overboard: plastic bottles, yoghurt pots, corks and bits of rope and odd shoes caught up in twists of seaweed and driftwood at the tide-line. ‘Honestly–sometimes I wonder why we love it so much.’

  I followed her gaze. Sometimes really disgusting things like Tampax or nappies got washed up on the beach. But I couldn’t see anything revolting. She’d taken a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lit it with difficulty, cupping her hands around the match and turning her head away from the wind. Her fingers were pink-tipped and puckered by seawater. Inhaling deeply, she sighed. ‘Maybe ’cos it belongs to us.’

  The island didn’t belong to us. It belonged to the Ministry of Defence. It still does. We were trespassing. Half the island is fenced off by trailing wire and ruined by derelict huts, crumbling roads, rolls of razor wire and the concrete pagodas. People say they were laboratories, used for atomic-weapon research. The project’s been abandoned and the buildings lie empty and forbidden. I don’t like them, especially the pagodas. It feels as though things inside watch you, although there are no windows. Blank walls stare. Eva’s smoke made my nose itch. I turned my head away. She would be in trouble if Mum and Dad knew.

  ‘Actually, nobody should own this place,’ she continued, ‘not even us. It’s too wild to belong to anyone, isn’t it?’

  I lay on my front on the stones, turning my head to look at her. She wasn’t bothering to dry herself or get dressed, even though her lips were violet with cold and her skin prickled with goose bumps. Her knickers had ‘Monday’ appliquéd onto them. She had all the days of the week, wearing them at the wrong times. Her attention seemed to be on the slow movement of the cigarette to her lips, and the lazy drift of smoke out of her half-open mouth. She was practising her technique.

  ‘Watch out for the oil.’ Eva nodded to a sticky patch oozing over the stones as she stubbed the cigarette out on a bit of driftwood. I moved my hand. My warts looked worse in the sunlight. I got my first one when I was five. A lump that grew on my knee after I’d grazed the skin. More came, like mushrooms sprouting overnight on my knees and hands. I hate them.

  She pulled on her clothes and we started to make our way across to the far tip of the island, to where the seals basked. There was a dead fox near the gorse bushes and I squatted to examine the way his fur had come away in chunks, exposing rotting flesh. You could see the white of his bones pushing through, like the wreck of a ship surfacing. There were living things writhing inside him. They’d already eaten his eyes. Soon it would be picked clean. I wondered if I came back in a couple of weeks whether I could persuade Eva to let me take his skull home.

  ‘God!’ Eva turned away, putting her hands over her face. ‘It stinks!’

  Better to swallow this dead-fox smell, I thought, than nicotine fumes. Eva had changed. Her new interest in boys and cigarettes and parties blotted out other parts of her, making her behave like an idiot. She pretended she was afraid of spiders and dead foxes.

  ‘Guess what?’ she asked as we walked through the samphire towards the point. ‘I’ve met someone.’

  I was silent. The gulls were swooping low over the river and the tide was going out, boats turning the other way on their moorings.

  ‘He’s… different,’ she continued. ‘He’s really cool. Cooler than any of the boys around here.’ She examined her nails and glanced at me sideways so that I was flattered that she wanted to confide in me.

  I scratched around in my head for the right question. ‘Where did you meet him?’

  She grinned. ‘A club. In Ipswich. Mum and Dad thought I was staying with Lucy. He’s from London. He’s even lived in America. He’s a musician. He’s into gothic stuff.’ She flushed and nodded as if this was important information. ‘He’s called Marco. I’m not going to tell Mum and Dad about him. They won’t like him, just because he’s older than me, and he’s got a tattoo and dyes his hair black. His parents moved to Ipswich, but he hates it here; he’s planning to go back to London.’

  Thinking about him seemed to put her into a trance. She tipped her head back, squinting into the sky. ‘The way he makes me feel… I don’t know. It’s like being drunk without drinking,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It makes me feel like anything could happen. Anything at all.’ She grabbed my hands and began to dance the polka, ‘One, two, hop and turn,’ across the stones; and I was caught up in the whirling movement, stumbling and turning with our hair flying out behind us. Her fingers gripped hard. The sky and the beach blurred into a Catherine Wheel of blues and greens. And we were in the centre of it–the bright, turning centre. My stomach lurched as we danced faster, my head reeling with dizziness. Breathless, we broke apart, falling back onto the shingle. ‘Maybe I’m in love,’ she said.

  We lay panting, spread-eagled, gazing at shreds of cloud floating past, and the wheeling birds making shapes against the sun. I wondered what Eva and I would look like from up there, through a seagull’s eyes, imagining us as fixed dots inside the hard shine of its stare. Eva clambered back onto her feet when the beach stopped spinning, hauling me up. A few moments later we’d reached the point, and I could see fat bodies on the mud. ‘Seals,’ I mouthed, pointing, and she winked.

  Eva stopped. Her hair, dry now from the wind, blew in curls across her face. She looked serious. ‘Promise on your life that you won’t tell Mum and Dad about Marco.’

  She spat into her hand, a splatter of slimy bubbles, and put it out for me to shake. We locked fingers and I felt the wet of her spit.

  Dropping onto all fours, we crawled quietly through the bushy green, sharp pebbles biting into palms and knees. The wind was blowing towards us so we were able to get close enough to the seals to see their noses framed by whiskers like over-sized cats. Their eyes looked as though they were filled with tears.

  ‘Selkies,’ Eva murmured.

  ‘Do you think all of them are, or just some?’

  ‘Ah, well, we can’t know that,’ she whispered. ‘It’s only at night that the seals shed their skins and become human.’

  I’d heard this story lots of times. But I never tired of it.

  ‘And then they become women,’ her voice was dreamy, ‘slipping out of their seal form, and dancing on the beach all night with their webbed toes. If one of them falls in love with a mortal, some handsome fisherman maybe, then she’ll give up her seal shape and live as a woman.’ Eva smiled at me. ‘But her husband will have to hide her seal skin, or the sea will call her back.’