‘Isolte,’ he says.

  She nods. She swallows, speaking slowly, her words catching in her throat. ‘I can’t believe it…’ Her hands rise and fall away.

  ‘How strange to find you here… such a coincidence.’

  She blushes again. She’s saying the wrong things. Other words hang unspoken between them. What have you done? He smells of horse, and the musky, feral smell the twins had–the mix of bark and earth and sweat. She feels nervous and dizzy with the past rushing up to meet her as if she’s falling from a height.

  ‘Viola?’ He looks over her shoulder as if he expected to see her sister standing there.

  ‘She’s…’ Isolte pauses, ‘she’s not here. She’s not well at the moment. She’s in London.’

  ‘Not well?’ He looks anxious.

  ‘It’s all right. Nothing serious,’ she lies.

  Shouldn’t she hug him? Shouldn’t she be filled with joy?

  Instead, she is awkward, uncertain of how to behave. She’s embarrassed. She can’t quite accept the reality of this adult John. His prison clothes make her feel uncomfortable. He does nothing to make her less nervous. He hasn’t smiled once. She stares at him.

  He is familiar and strange. He’s not as tall as she imagined he’d be, only a bit taller than her. But his broad shoulders are thickened with muscle. He stands with a straight back, limbs tensed as if for sudden flight. Sunlight catches burnished cheekbones, skin like an outdoor worker’s, coarse and tanned by days of sun and wind. He shuffles restlessly and looks behind him. ‘Well then. I should get back to work.’

  Isolte clears her throat. ‘Where’s Michael?’

  But John is already walking away. He doesn’t answer her. She knows that he must have heard.

  By the time Isolte gets to the row of cottages she is hot and thirsty. Her sandalled feet are coated with dust, making her toes itch. She hooks her hair behind her ears, licks dry lips. Inside the neat garden, the white-haired woman is hanging washing on a rotary line. She reaches up to peg a pair of jeans to it. At her feet there’s a basket of damp clothes.

  ‘Judy,’ Isolte calls.

  The woman starts and twists, lets the jeans drop. She begins to turn, as if to walk away. But then she changes her mind and swings round to Isolte, chin up, her expression closed.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk to you for a moment.’ Isolte opens the gate. ‘Please?’ Judy inclines her head in a curt nod and walks off. Isolte follows her into the kitchen. Judy stoops and picks the child up out of a playpen. She holds him close to her chest as if he’s a shield, and looks at Isolte.

  ‘Well? I don’t have long.’ She glances towards the garden. ‘You can see I’m busy.’

  The child’s head falls back loosely on his neck. He smiles vaguely, his features twitch and tremble. His fingers clutch at his mother’s shirt, pulling it open so that Isolte sees the thin curve of her collarbones, the white expanse of chest.

  ‘I won’t keep you long.’ Isolte crosses her arms, and then uncrosses them. ‘I’ve just seen John.’

  Judy looks down at her child, smoothing his hair away from his damp forehead with gentle fingers.

  ‘Judy, what happened? Why is John… What did he do?’

  What’s it to you?’ Judy looks up, holds the child tighter. ‘You weren’t here.’

  Isolte takes a deep breath. ‘We had to go,’ she says briefly, ‘after Mum died.’

  Judy shakes her head, glances away with rolling eyes.

  ‘They used to talk about you all the time. Issy this and Viola that.’ She laughs, a short, humourless sound. ‘Dad told them they were daft to think you were their friends. Said you were too posh for them.’

  Isolte blinks. Judy has lied to her; she feels indignation tightening her chest. ‘You told me you didn’t have twin brothers.’

  ‘Well, I don’t, do I?’ Judy bends to put the child down in the pen again. His legs crumple beneath him and he begins to cry. A thin, strangled wailing. ‘Not any more. Michael’s dead.’

  Isolte grips the back of a chair tight. ‘What?’ She’s not sure if the word makes any sound.

  Judy looks at her hard. ‘John.’ She pronounces his name as if it doesn’t fit in her mouth.

  ‘I don’t… I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Of course they were both wasted. Pissed.’

  Judy comes close, and Isolte sees clumps of mascara clinging to her pale eyelashes, notices dry flakes peeling like dandruff from her chin. The flesh across her cheeks is mask-like.

  ‘He won’t say what it was about,’ she says, her voice low and dull. ‘Can you believe it? The fight. The knifing. The argument. John says he can’t remember any of it.’ She looks at Isolte. ‘But he stabbed Michael. Killed his own brother.’

  It’s like being punched in the stomach. The loss of breath. The room tipping and spinning. Isolte swallows, lowers her eyes, mumbles words of regret, hardly knowing what she’s saying.

  The only thing that she can focus on is getting out of that room, away from Judy’s blank face, from the memory of John and Michael as boys standing there, proud of their catch, cloudy fish dead in their hands.

  24

  ‘Come on, Vi,’ John says quietly. ‘Help me feed the ferrets.’

  Isolte and Michael don’t look up from the table–they are sticking matches into a cribbage board. ‘Cats are better,’ Issy is arguing. ‘They have souls… not like dogs just following people around.’

  Their voices trail us out into the still air. I hear Issy’s laugh.

  The ferrets’ noses push up to the wire, small eyes glinting. I shove a carrot through mesh; feel the tug as the animal takes it in his sharp teeth. John stands close, his arm brushing against mine.

  ‘Vi,’ he says in a funny, gruff voice. ‘Do you want to be my girlfriend?’

  His words hover in the air. I quiver with pleasure and anxiety. What should I say? I don’t know the proper response, only that I want to be with him so much that it hurts.

  I nod eagerly, my smile spreading wide.

  He takes my hand in his grubby one and presses our fingers together. His are warm and rough around mine.

  Later, I repeat the word to myself–girlfriend. It is unfamiliar and thrillingly adult. All my feelings find a place inside it. Issy and Michael don’t know. We don’t want them to, they will only make fun of us, tease us and set traps. ‘This is just about me an’ you,’ John says. ‘Let’s leave them two out of it.’

  I have a boyfriend. John is my boyfriend. He calls me Vi, which sounds soft and warm, like a sigh. The excitement keeps me awake at night, pleasure welling up when I think of him.

  Isolte and Michael are bobbing in the water, the waves catching them like driftwood, throwing them up and down. They are shrieking and splashing. Isolte keeps screaming and grabbing hold of Michael’s head, half drowning him. There are no boats today, just the vast expanse of water, the rush of sea and air and the gulls swooping overhead.

  John is covering me with pebbles, sometimes placing sun-warmed stones carefully on my skin; sometimes digging down to heap big handfuls, cool and gritty, over my arms and legs.

  ‘Your sister has a pair of lungs on her,’ he says, putting a pebble on my chest. ‘No chance of her being swept out to sea without the whole county knowing it.’

  As I breathe the pebble moves up and down, slides into the slight scoop between my small breasts. His fingers trail my skin as he repositions it and I have goosebumps.

  ‘I’d rescue her, if she was,’ I say. ‘If she was drowning, I mean.’ Trying to keep my voice level.

  He nods. ‘We made a pact last year, me and Michael,’ he tells me. ‘We agreed that if either of us ever gets crippled–you know, in a motorbike accident or something–then the other one will put him out of his misery. Clean kill.’ He makes the motion of a knife across a throat. ‘Like a rabbit.’

  I shudder. The pebbles are heavy on my legs and I have a sudden desire to move them. ‘That’s awful,’ I say.

  ‘No.’ His voice is surprised. ‘That’s what you’d do fer someone you love.’ He looks at me, but the sun is in my eyes and I can’t see his expression. ‘Before I met you, Michael was the only person in the world I’d do that fer,’ he goes on quietly. ‘But now, I’d do it for you, Vi. It’s like you’re a part of me. Like Michael is, but different.’

  My heart starts to beat so loudly that I think he’ll hear it echoing through the stones. Does that mean he loves me?

  He says it a few days later. Aloud. And he takes me by surprise as he always does.

  ‘I love you, Viola,’ he says, scratching his fingers at the stone of the tower.

  I’m not sure if I’ve heard him properly. The other two are already inside. I’m standing by the dangling rope with John. My heart beats faster and I blush, uncertain and embarrassed by the possibility of getting it wrong. But he says it again, louder, and this time he looks at me. ‘Do yer love me too?’

  I nod and put my finger on a faded green stain below his eye.

  His skin is surprisingly soft, it yields to the slightest pressure.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I whisper.

  He shakes his head. ‘Takes more’n that.’

  *

  My fingers are shaking as I hold the needle inside the small flame. Silver blackens, and there is a smell of hot metal. The Sex Pistols on the turntable. Black vinyl spins and crackles under a needle, spitting angry words into the room. The noise helps to mask the mutter of voices from downstairs. Isolte has brought three friends back from school. They shriek and call out to each other. All fourteen-year-olds sound the same. Except me. I know exactly how Isolte will be tossing her hair, what voice she’ll be using. I’ve shoved a chair under the handle of the door, just in case.

  The ice cube has melted against my skin. Water drips into my hair, smudging cheap dye in grey streaks. I squeeze my earlobe to check that it is numb. Carefully, I place the hot metal point of the needle against the fat part of my lobe. But the skin doesn’t break when I press. There’s a trick with an apple a girl at school told me about. Only it’s hard to balance an apple behind an ear. The round, waxy contours are too slippery. Holding my breath, concentrating, I can hunch my shoulder to wedge the apple in place.

  Pain wells and bursts. Streams of fire run across my face, shooting deep into my brain. I touch my throbbing earlobe. Fingers come away bloody, sweetened with apple juice. Breathe slowly.

  Don’t faint. The room spins, tilts beneath me.

  Trembling, I stare at myself in the mirror. I fix my gaze there until the room settles. My face is white. My eyes are black holes. I feel sick. Carefully, wincing, I’m guiding a thin silver hoop into stinging flesh.

  25

  After Frank’s comments about mushrooms, Mummy discarded the wild food manual in favour of a recipe book by Elizabeth David. It was her new cookery bible. This kind of cooking required cream, butter and exotic ingredients like avocado and aubergine. We lived off bread and porridge all week so that we could feast at the weekends. Every Saturday and Sunday Mummy laboured over crab soufflé, polpette of mutton or duck with cherries, serving them at meals where Frank told bad jokes with forced jollity, and they tried to trap me and Issy into conversation. We answered in monosyllables and went to bed with aching stomachs.

  Frank liked to entertain us at his house as well, perhaps to prove that being a widower had taught him domestic skills. On these occasions, Mummy was nervous, fiddling with her hair and putting on blue eye shadow and pink lipstick that made her look more ordinary, more properly grown-up. She squashed her feet into shoes and chewed parsley to disguise the tobacco on her breath. She couldn’t give up completely, compromising with pin-thin rollies, smoked outside the kitchen door when Frank wasn’t there; ‘hardly a cigarette at all really,’ she’d say, picking a stray fragment of tobacco from her lip.

  She stroked our arms before she rang the doorbell. ‘Be good, girls,’ she pleaded. ‘And for my sake, smile.’

  So we endured sitting in the neat living room, which smelt of polish and stale air. We sank into the squashy sofa, our knees pressed against horrible green and yellow flowers, feeling resentful.

  Trooping around the house after Frank, while he pointed out the furniture he’d made, we set our jaws, staring with stony eyes. Mummy gave her breathless laugh. ‘How ingenious,’ she said, pretending to admire the headboard on Polly’s bed; she ran her fingers over a bookcase, and gasped when he pointed to a window frame. ‘Goodness! How on earth did you make that?’ Frank knocked his knuckles on the kitchen table. ‘Believe it or not, this is actually an old barn door,’ he told us. ‘See this? Can’t get wood like this any more. It’s so thick I broke two saws on it.’

  Polly’s music certificates were framed on the wall of the dining room and the clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly. Lunch was on the dot of one o’clock; it was always roast lamb, potatoes, carrots and peas. We pushed the bloody bits of meat around in greasy pools of gravy and longed to be outside in the forest or down by the sea with the boys. And I missed John silently; that pain separating me from Issy.

  One hot Sunday there was a long, slow trip to Southwold in Frank’s Morris Minor to have a picnic. We sat crammed in the back with Polly in the middle, insisting we play cat’s cradle with her.

  ‘First one to see the sea!’ Frank shouted cheerfully.

  ‘Gosh, I can’t wait to feel sand between my toes!’ Mummy wound down the window and her hair flew out like silver ribbons.

  We rolled our eyes at each other over Polly’s head. Why did we have to suffer an hour’s car journey when there was a perfectly good beach ten minutes away from our front door?

  And then Mummy began leaving Polly with us. ‘Just let her tag along with you for a while,’ she’d tell us. ‘Frank and I need to pop into town.’

  The Vespa sat unused on the garden path. Frank liked to drive Mummy in his car. He opened the passenger door for her, waited with his head on one side for her to slide into the seat.

  Then he shut the door with elaborate care, as if she didn’t have the wits or the ability to do it for herself, as if she was an old, old lady, or the Queen. We hated it. Watching them drive away, it felt as though she’d never come back.

  Isolte complained. ‘But Mummy, why do you like him? He’s boring!’

  ‘I don’t want to hear you talking like that.’ Mummy looked at her sternly. ‘He’s not boring,’ she said. ‘He’s actually very clever. But even more important, he’s kind. And reliable. And practical. God, you have no idea what a relief it is to be with a man who can change a fuse, make a chair, for heaven’s sake!’ She tossed her head. ‘You have no idea… I’m sick of men who lie around contemplating their navel fluff, bloody sick of them.’

  Polly wanted to do things with us. She followed us everywhere.

  My frustration grew. It was hard enough to snatch time alone with John when Issy and Michael were always watching us. But with Polly around too, it was impossible. I longed to tell her, ‘Because of you I can’t see my boyfriend!’

  She was determined not to let us out of her sight, staring with hungry eyes, tipping her round face at us; she seemed babyish and pathetic to me. She doesn’t know anything! I thought furiously, she has no right to interfere with our life, with our summer. ‘Look,’ I snapped, ‘stop hanging around all the time.’

  She cried then, big tears welling up, sliding across her cheeks, wetness creeping around her nose and chin. To my surprise, she didn’t run off and tell tales–she stayed with me, trailing after me with slumped shoulders, dejected as a scolded dog. I moved my hands uncomfortably, my fingers working out a way to touch her. Perhaps, I thought, I should slip my arm around her shoulder. But before I could, she recovered and began her incessant chatter again, and none of our stony silences or sarcastic remarks could shut her up.

  ‘But why don’t you have a toilet in the house?’ she asked for the hundredth time. So we explained through tight mouths that not all houses had indoor bathrooms and that Mummy liked the outdoor privy because it was ‘authentic’.

  ‘It’s scary,’ Polly whispered. ‘I don’t like the dark. Or the spiders.’

  ‘Well, don’t go then,’ Issy said. ‘Cross your legs.’

  ‘Or wee behind a bush,’ I added.

  The privy was a hut across the yard. It was wooden and there was no light inside. Large spiders crouched in corners. It had an earth floor. In wet weather, rivulets of water flooded under the door and turned it to mud. We didn’t like the outdoor privy much either.

  One wet afternoon when we’d been left alone with Polly again, we got out the drawing things. Summer rain battered at the windows, the cat came in shaking her damp fur. Isolte hunted through the boxes of broken pencils and dried-out felt-tips, handed out paper torn from an old exercise book. At the back of the cupboard I found a scrap of paper with John’s pirates and crocodiles on it. I smoothed the paper with my fingers and tucked it in the back pocket of my jeans. I hadn’t seen him for days. Missing him felt like homesickness.

  Polly sat on the floor, a curl of tongue protruding in concentration. Her first picture was supposed to be a house. But really it was just a black square with tiny windows. ‘You’ve forgotten to put in a door,’ Issy pointed out. Polly looked at her drawing and began to scribble over it like a baby until her pen cut through the paper. We ignored her and began to draw princesses. This time Polly managed to make a decent effort. Sniffing, she leaned over the paper, taking care not to colour over the lines. Her princess had long brown hair and felt-tip tears fell from her eyes.

  ‘Why is your princess crying?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my mummy.’ Polly’s moon face stared up at me. ‘She’s a princess in heaven. She’s sad because she can’t see me any more.’

  I swallowed, embarrassed. Mummy had said that we should love Polly. We knew that Polly’s mother was dead, and that was a very sad thing; but nobody had told us what she’d died of or when. I opened my mouth and closed it again. It was impossible to love someone as irritating as Polly.