Clara remembers getting out of the car on the day they arrived from London. Max had been flushed with excitement and nerves. He’d bought Holt House without her. She had been too busy and preoccupied with Eva to house-hunt. She’d stayed in the flat, making up formula milk and staring into the twitching, mewing face of her baby.

  Eva was in Clara’s arms that day, swaddled in a shawl, carried carefully against her chest. The house was pale stone, much bigger than she’d imagined. A Georgian front attached to an older, rambling back. She’d walked in through the front door and up the central staircase with the beautiful, turned spindles and curving banisters. The back staircase leading to the kitchen had been straight and steep, and she’d worried about Eva, imagining her as a toddler, slipping and falling on the sharp stairs, landing on the flagged floor of the kitchen.

  Eva had never fallen down the stairs. No one had, except Max once, when he’d tripped and banged his head on the low lintel of the kitchen door. She’d worried so much about the children. And now the worst that she could imagine has happened and she feels numb and unable to worry anymore. Yet Faith is still here, and needs looking after, needs her parents to be parents. Clara puts the teddy down, arranging its wobbly head carefully against the pillow.

  The house is crammed with seventeen years of their lives. She’d better make a start on the enormous task of sorting through it. There are a couple of old boxes in the garage, bin bags under the sink. Clara pushes herself off the bed, rolls up her sleeves.

  When Max gets home he finds Sophie in the kitchen ironing. There is the smell of clean laundry and damp cotton. The iron hisses as she runs it across one of his shirts. She looks up briefly, observing him without any obvious feeling. She returns to the shirt, banging the iron down, pressing it hard across the white collar. He backs out, feeling, again, that he is somehow in the wrong.

  Clara is on her knees in their bedroom. The dog is lying on the floor nearby. His tail moves against the floor in acknowledgement. Clara has piles of clothes on the floor. She’s emptied boxes from the attic on the bed. He sees ancient files, photo albums, an old plastic dolls’ house, and a sack of baby clothes. She looks up, distracted and dishevelled.

  ‘They’ve made an offer,’ she says, pushing hair from her forehead. ‘Only three thousand under. I’ve told them we’ll take it. I’ve made a start. Sorting things out. For the move.’

  Max looks at the dolls’ house, remembers the birthday that they gave it to Eva, her face as she’d torn away the wrapping paper. He’d stayed up until the early hours of the morning putting it together, bruising his thumb, and losing screws under the kitchen table as he’d struggled to follow the incomprehensible instructions spread out before him.

  ‘Well,’ he says, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘So it’s really happening. I’ll help you with…’ he gestures towards the piles of things, ‘with all this.’

  ‘There’s a surveyor coming tomorrow.’ Clara throws a handful of papers into a plastic refuse sack. Her voice is strained. Tearful.

  ‘Clara,’ he says. ‘Let’s leave it for now. Come and have a glass of wine. We can do some clearing at the weekend. Get Sophie to help.’

  Clara shakes her head. ‘It has to be done. There’s so much… I don’t know how we’ve collected so much… stuff.’

  Max sits heavily among the objects on the bed; he strokes the dusty roof of the dolls’ house, feeling an aching sorrow in his gut. He can’t bear the thought of throwing this away–or anything else. It seems to be marking the end of their life with Eva. But it was his idea to move. It was his need that had forced the decision. Now he feels nothing but doubt and loss and a dragging weight of grief and exhaustion.

  40

  He says he thought I was going to die. I don’t remember much. Strange dreams. Vultures. A desert. I know he looked after me, fed me sips of water and chicken soup. I imagine that he stole a scrawny hen from some farmer’s yard, wrung its neck and stuffed it into a sack. There are feathers on the floor near the pit: a soft scattering of russets, curls of white.

  When I was ill nothing existed outside the edge of my skin. What went on here in the pagoda was like a vague dream, and the dream world became my reality. I remember fragments from that landscape; brightly coloured moments, odd, out of kilter things, like seeing everything through the prism of a fairground mirror.

  Billy strolls over to me, puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out an orange, presenting it to me on his open palm like a magician. I peel it slowly, inhaling the bitter tang of the peel, the sweetness of the juice. It is strange to be awake, sitting up, back to the simple existence of waking life. There are so many hard edges and the daylight hurts my eyes. He watches me separate it into segments. My fingers are unsteady.

  ‘Here,’ I offer him one.

  He shakes his head.

  I let the fruit burst slowly on my tongue, working the flesh between my teeth, nibbling the spongy pith, sucking the pips before spitting them out. I have learnt to concentrate on one thing at a time. I can make the eating of an orange last for ages, savouring every single part of the fruit.

  I cough. Remnants of my illness hide in my body; I feel them as a catch in my breathing, soreness in my muscles. There is sunshine through the door and I want the warmth of it on my face, heat seeping into my aching bones. ‘Can I sit outside?’

  He finds me a spot against the sloping concrete wall of the pagoda, facing the ocean side of the island so that I’m out of the wind. He doesn’t tie my wrists. I look at the familiar deserted huts, the old concrete road, the drooping razor wire and the straggly line of gorse bushes. Beyond the rise of the shingle is the sea. I can hear it raking against the pebbles. He puts my blanket around my shoulders, tucking it in almost tenderly with clumsy fingers. He sits beside me, legs bent, and takes a last deep drag of his rollie, grinding the stub under his heel. ‘Thought I was losing you,’ he shakes his head.

  I fiddle with the frayed edges of the blanket. ‘Then why didn’t you take me to the hospital?’

  He squints. ‘I was near to it a couple of times.’

  I’m not sure if I believe him. ‘And now…’ I begin.

  ‘I saved your life,’ he says. ‘Again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been ill though, if I’d been at home.’

  He shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

  There’s a hole in his trousers and I can see a patch of pale grimy skin, a sprouting of hair. ‘Who is the girl that looks like me?’ I turn to him. ‘You talked about her again, when I was ill.’

  At first I don’t think he heard me. He picks up a stone and plays with it, rubbing the surface with his fingers, rolling it across his leg. ‘Her name was Marie O’Connor,’ he says eventually. ‘A schoolgirl. Lived with her family in Belfast. She had four brothers.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry. How… how did she die?’

  ‘I killed her.’

  My spine is rigid. I hold the blanket tighter around me as if it could offer protection. I’m struggling to pull air into my lungs. I can’t look at him. I stare straight ahead and I hear him swallow, the gulp of his Adam’s apple. He shudders, as if he’s cold out here under the sun.

  ‘It was a routine night VCP,’ he says in a distant voice. ‘But then we got a tip-off that someone big was coming through. We were to stop them and take them straight to the Ray.’ His hand closes around the stone. ‘Every driver was a suspect.’ He stares into the middle distance, his eyes widening as if he can see something lurking there. ‘And then this one car, it wasn’t stopping. It was making straight for the barrier, headlights blinding me. It veered across the road, mounted the pavement. Coming towards me.’ He swallows. ‘I took my rifle. Very calm. I took aim and fired. Windscreen shattered. I fired off a couple of rounds. The car smashed into a telegraph pole. Head-on collision.’

  He’s still holding the stone. I see his scarred knuckles whiten, tendons tight as he squeezes tightly. He hurls it away. It lands with a muted rattle. A speckled gull swoops down and up on a flap of broad wings.

  ‘I approached the car,’ he says, ‘opened the door. Driver dead. Slumped across the wheel. He was only a kid.’ His voice is thick. ‘Then I looked in the back, aiming my torch at their faces. Two more boys. And a girl. A girl lying across the seat, slumped to the side.’ He takes a ragged breath. ‘She’d got this pale skin and curly black hair like that girl in the fairy tale. Her eyes were open, looking right at me. Very blue eyes. The torchlight made them shine. But she’d got a hole in her head.’ He taps the centre of his forehead. ‘Just here.’

  ‘But you thought…’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I thought. They weren’t IRA. They were kids out on a joy-ride. Stupid. Stupid.’ He strikes himself hard on the temples with the heel of his palm. ‘She was seventeen.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I was arrested. Taken back to England for my trial.’ His head falls forwards, and all I can see is the slide of his matted hair. He wraps his arms around his legs, burying his face against his knees. ‘I’d killed three people. I was a murderer. But I was hustled out of the country, taken to a military court over here. They acquitted me, then wanted to send me straight back to Ireland. Another tour of duty. I couldn’t do it.’ His voice hardens. ‘They meant for me to kill those kids. It was a conspiracy. Why would they have told me the IRA were coming through?’ He’s talking to his knees, to the ground. ‘They thought I’d be their creature after that.’ His shoulders tremble. ‘I killed her. Jesus. I fucking killed her.’

  I move my hand, thinking of touching him. But I can’t. Slumped next to me with his bones sticking through his jumper, he seems vulnerable in a way he never has before. And I feel a shift in our relationship, a change in him.

  He sits up, wiping his face with the back of his hand. ‘You’re the only person I’ve talked to about it,’ he says.

  ‘Billy,’ I try pitching my voice, aiming for a reasonable tone. ‘It was a mistake. You didn’t mean it. Look, we can’t hide here forever. Maybe it’s time to leave,’ I say quietly. ‘Take me to the mainland and I’ll never tell anyone what happened. I’ll never speak about you.’

  He sits up straight, staring over the shingle towards the sea. He’s chewing the inside of his lip, working his mouth silently inside all that hair. ‘It’s not over yet. I can’t do it, Eva. I can’t let you go.’ He sounds almost sorry.

  I think about the girl in the car. We’re nearly the same age. And we’re linked through Billy. A boy we should never have had contact with if things had been just a little different. I wonder what led her to get into the car that night. Perhaps it was her boyfriend at the wheel and she’d been persuaded or bullied to come along for the ride, or perhaps she did it for love. It makes me dizzy to think of all the decisions that have been made by people over the years that have led me here to the island, to be trapped with him. I can feel a hot prickling under my lids.

  ‘She’s here with us,’ he says, putting his hands over his eyes. ‘The angel. I have to wait for her voice. She’s very close. I know it.’

  My chest rattles with the effort of breathing. My limbs feel weak, hollowed out. I clench my fists. Tilting my face to the sun, feeling its warmth, I think of Mum and Dad and Faith. I can’t find their faces anymore. I’m losing them. They’ve become vague shapes flickering at the edges of my memory.

  41

  I don’t leave by the school gates. Joanna and Ellie will be hanging around, waiting for me. I slip out of the back, across the playground. After the last person has collected their bike I climb onto the bike-shed, grazing my knees as I haul myself up. There’s a ploughed field behind the school. Brown earth shines in freshly turned furrows. It seems like a long drop, further than I thought. I hang my feet over the edge and reach for the fence that runs across the back of the school grounds. It’s made of wire and I test my weight on it, clinging onto the edge of the bike-shed roof. Then I close my eyes and jump.

  It’s soft underfoot, but the ground comes up with a jolt. My knees smack into my cheek. Eyes watering, I roll sideways, dirt in my mouth and ears, hands and knees wet and sticky, plastered with clay soil. I crouch for a moment, breathing hard. I’m half-hidden by the hedge. When I can stand up, I make my way around the edge of the field, going at a trot, bent over to stay under cover of the spiky hedge.

  There are only three caravans left on the site. The woman with the Alsatian has gone. The bins are no longer overflowing, but the broken deck chair is lying on its side in the overgrown grass. The stripy seat lolls like a tongue.

  I knock loudly on the door of the boy’s caravan. There’s no answer but I can hear crying. I take a guess that it’s Penny that’s making the noise. I rap my knuckles again and this time it opens. Fred looks at me, grinning, with a jam sandwich in his hand. ‘What have you done to your cheek?’ he asks. ‘You’re in a state.’

  Sandra stops telling Penny off and straightens. ‘Hello Faith,’ she says. She glances to her left. ‘Look who’s back from hospital.’

  Joe is sitting at the fold-out table next to Penny. A bandage makes a sling around his neck. His cast isn’t white anymore. It’s smudged with scribbled messages and names. He can use his hand though, because he’s twiddling a Rubik’s Cube with it.

  ‘He’s the only person I know who can do the blasted thing,’ Sandra says.

  Joe looks embarrassed and nods at me, pushing the cube away. Sandra is in the middle of feeding Carol in her high chair, and getting Penny to eat her fish-fingers. Joe and Fred have finished their tea, but Penny’s bottom lip sticks out and she looks at me tearfully, her food congealing and uneaten. Sandra has a streak of ketchup on her chin and a blonde wedge hangs over one eye. ‘We’re off tomorrow,’ she tells me, brushing her hair back, leaving crumbs in the bleached strands.

  She won’t let the boys come down to the river with me. She folds her arms and says, ‘No further than the castle, or else.’ She shakes her head when Penny asks to come with us, which makes Penny’s quivering mouth open wider. Her pigtails, tied at the ends with pink bobbles, wobble like a pair of deely-bobbers as she yells.

  Sandra sets her face and pushes a slab of fish-finger onto a fork. ‘Here, Madam.’ She prods the fork towards Penny’s resisting lips. ‘You’re not going anywhere until you finish your tea.’

  ‘Quick,’ says Fred, grabbing my hand, ‘before she changes her mind.’

  We’re walking through the caravan site, Joe lagging a little behind. Fred’s fingers are hot and sticky with jam. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s got his fingers entwined with mine. He’s chewing his last mouthful of sandwich. I glance around, not wanting to be seen by anyone from school.

  ‘What are you holding hands for?’ Joe asks.

  I feel my face flush and tug my fingers away, wiping them on the back of my school skirt. I stop to pull up my socks, crouching over my bent leg, using it as an excuse to hide my flaming cheeks.

  ‘Are you glad to be going home then?’ I ask, not looking at them.

  ‘Don’t want to go back to school much,’ Fred says, ‘but it’s all right. Be nice to see me mates.’

  Jealousy twists inside. I hadn’t thought that he’d have other friends besides me. Feeling stupid, I keep my eyes on the ground and make a gargling noise in my throat.

  Joe asks if I want to write on his plaster. He pulls the grubby bandage back so that I can read the scribbles of black and green and red. Fred suggests that I write my address on it. It occurs to me that we may not be living at Holt House for much longer and I feel like crying. I find a pen in my school bag and write my name in a space near his elbow. I underline Faith Gale and draw a smiley face next to it. He’ll have the cast cut off his arm soon. He says they’ll use an electric saw. I imagine the sharp bite of steel teeth, a whirring noise and the plaster falling away in two halves. Inside Joe’s arm will be wasted away, weak as a baby bird. A nurse will throw the plaster remains into the bin. The lid closing on a jumble of sliced-up plaster with the scribbled messages: my name and address lost and forgotten.

  ‘Give us something to write on and I’ll leave you our telephone number,’ Fred is saying. ‘We’ll probably be back next summer.’

  I watch him inscribe the number on the first page of my maths book and I feel better. He props the book on his knee, bending close to the checked blue and white paper. His tongue protrudes from the side of his mouth. And I remember that I have Marco’s address written down at home. Now I can add Fred and Joe’s number to it.

  At the castle, we run up to the flat roof. ‘You can see the island from here.’ I point across the marshes and river.

  ‘Do you still think your sister’s there?’ Fred is panting. He wipes a drip off his nose on the back of his hand.

  I nod. ‘But I don’t know for how much longer.’ It’s a thought that sprouts inside my head like a fungus. What if she’s taken off the island before I get there? What if I miss her and it’s too late?

  ‘What do you think she’s been eating all this time?’ Fred wrinkles his forehead.

  I stare at him. ‘Maybe the Wild Man catches her fish.’

  The boys look at their feet. Joe says, ‘You’ve got to rescue her.’

  ‘I know.’ I watch a flight of swans flying over the allotments. ‘I’ve got another plan.’

  ‘Sandra won’t let us help though.’ Fred sounds sorry.

  ‘It’s OK. I can do it on my own.’

  He touches my shoulder.

  Joe starts for the door. ‘Come on. We don’t have long.’

  We run down the stairs, our feet slamming into the worn stone, bruising our shoulders against narrow curved walls. Even though it’s the wrong time of year and the hill is damp and muddy in places, the worn grass offering less bounce, Fred and I roll down the hill. Joe stands at the top whooping encouragement. I open my eyes to see the flicker of light and dark as I turn over and over, my hip hitting a hard lump, my hands grabbing at clumps of grass. Fred and I land in a heap at the bottom, laughing. He has mud on his clothes. Sandra won’t be happy.