‘By the way,’ she said, ‘please don’t bother to try and find positive things to say about my performance. I know I’m terrible,’ she looked at him, chin lifted. ‘Acting isn’t my thing at all.’

  ‘Then why do you do it?’ he asked hesitatingly. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Like it?’ She laughed. ‘You can’t be in this business for a wishywashy thing like “liking”. No, I don’t like it. I love it. I mean, what’s not to love: waiting and waiting for the phone to ring; auditions where they give you three minutes before calling “next”; boarding houses with dripping taps and lumpy mattresses?’

  She looked up at him with one eyebrow raised.

  He smiled. ‘OK. I’m confused. Explain it again.’

  ‘I love it because,’ she spoke slowly as if he was a little hard of hearing, ‘I can pretend to be someone else.’

  ‘Don’t you like being you?’

  ‘Not really.’ She shrugged and then flushed as she added, ‘Joking apart, one of the best things about acting is the sense of camaraderie. When you’re in a performance together, you’re a kind of family. For a while, anyway. And I do love that.’

  He told her that he was doing articles, but how he secretly worried that he wasn’t tough enough or sharp enough to be a good solicitor. ‘Really, I just want to be a sailor,’ and she began to relax, eventually curling her feet up underneath her. She nodded and smiled in all the right places. ‘I’d like to see it,’ she said, when he described the Suffolk coast with its marshes and wild pebbly beaches.

  ‘I spent my early years in Egypt,’ she told him when he asked. ‘I left it when I was ten.’ She blinked and looked away. ‘After that it was boarding school and holidays with an elderly aunt and uncle in Wiltshire.’ Her lips lifted in a half-smile. ‘I didn’t really belong in any of those places. I never did go back to Egypt. Strange, but that’s the place I think of as home.’ He noticed how narrow her hands were, how her watch slipped around her wrist. And he had the urge to circle that small bone with his own fingers.

  The next day he took her to the Gondolier espresso coffee bar. It was dark, cramped, the air heavy with cigarette smoke, a juke box playing ‘Return To Sender’ over and over again. They drank bitter coffee from glass cups, adding spoonfuls of demerara sugar. He stirred too hard and spilt his. Clara blotted the mess with tissues, without a fuss, even though there were coffee splatters on her cream cuffs. They sat close, their knees pressing together under the table. ‘It’s sad; I think I’m better at understanding plays than performing them,’ she said, cradling the cup in her hands. ‘When I read the text, I feel I know the characters I play. Sometimes I really love them. And then the words come out of my mouth and it’s so disappointing. It’s as though I’m letting them down.’ She was wearing a shift dress with over-sized buttons down the back. He thought about how they would feel as he fed them through the buttonholes, the satisfying curve between his fingers, and how he’d like to lean forward to kiss the skin over the top of her spine where necklaces fastened. He longed to bury his face in her hair, smelling what kind of soap she used, what kind of shampoo, discovering her true scent underneath.

  ‘Maybe you just haven’t discovered the right role yet,’ he said. ‘You know, the one that will define you. Like,’ he struggled to think, ‘like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said, her eyebrow raised, ‘I’m not sure that’s the kind of role I had in mind, much as I love Judy. Sadly,’ she smiled, ‘you can’t get by as an actress only playing one part.’

  She was leaving for Birmingham the next day and he had to get back to London. Outside on the frozen pavement, they stood revealed in the cold daylight. The end of her nose was pink, her cheeks chapped. A seagull wheeled above them, white feathers almost invisible in the pale air. He bent down and found her lips, and she kissed him back, urgently, with a hunger that he hadn’t expected.

  7

  Joanna Price is not my friend. But Mum thinks she is. So Joanna has been invited for the day. She arrives with her mother and I watch them walk up the garden path from behind my bedroom curtain. Both of them have pale red hair and small, watchful eyes. Mrs Price is fat as a Russian doll, her face blending into her round body with no pause for a neck. She wears a dress with scarlet flowers bursting over it. Joanna has very short shorts in pink that hardly cover her bottom and a yellow top with lace around the neck. The clashing colours make me screw up my eyes.

  ‘Hard to keep them occupied in the holidays, isn’t it?’ Joanna’s mother is asking mine. ‘These summer holidays, they just seem to go on and on. Joanna is ever so pleased to come over, aren’t you, Jo?’

  The three of them are standing in the hall, and Joanna turns to watch me walk down the stairs. I step slowly, clinging to the banister. She glares when I offer her a ‘Hi.’ Silver is growling and barking from the kitchen. He hates strangers. His hackles will be up, his ears back. I wish Mum would let him out. He wouldn’t bite them but I’d like to see their faces.

  ‘Good guard dog, isn’t he?’ Joanna’s mother nods towards the kitchen nervously.

  ‘Sorry about the row.’ Mum smiles. ‘Actually, it’s all just a front. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  I raise my eyebrows. He eats flies. Snaps them up and holds them in his mouth. You can hear the wings vibrate behind his teeth. Silver was Eva’s dog, a big, loping lurcher. She rescued him from travellers. For weeks after the accident, Silver waited in Eva’s room. He settled on the floor by her bed like a sphinx, still and watchful. Silver had refused to eat at first, but gradually, Mum had tempted him into the kitchen and the food she left out disappeared.

  Joanna wanders around my bedroom picking things up. ‘Don’t you have any Barbies?’ she asks. ‘I’ve got the new Peaches and Cream Barbie. She comes with extra shoes and a hairbrush.’

  I decide that I won’t show her my collection of treasures. It remains hidden under my bed in its cardboard box; the bird’s skull and crab’s claw are safe from her poking. I shrug. ‘Mum won’t let me have Barbies.’

  Joanna looks at me pityingly. I don’t tell her that I’m not allowed Trolls either. The other kids at school have whole families of them that they keep in their desks, sneaking them onto their laps in lessons to comb long green or orange hair, swapping them at break-time.

  Joanna is staring at the poster of the human skeleton on my wall. Dad brought it back for me from the Natural History museum. She curls her lip. ‘Doesn’t that give you nightmares?’ She chews her nail and stares. ‘What about music? Do you have any records?’

  ‘Um,’ I flip through the small pile of singles on the floor, ‘Ella Fitzgerald?’ I offer.

  ‘Ella who?’ She scowls. ‘What about Sheena Easton or Bananarama?’

  I shake my head, letting Ella slide back onto the floor.

  ‘You don’t have anything to do here,’ she complains. ‘It’s boring at your house. I didn’t want to come.’

  ‘We could go down to the river,’ I suggest, glancing out at the sunshine and the water shining on the horizon.

  Mum tells me to take Sophie with us. When I knock on her bedroom door and put my head round, she lowers the magazine she’s reading and frowns. I don’t want her to come with us anyway. ‘Just going out for a bit,’ I say and she ignores me and goes back to her magazine.

  Joanna has followed me along the landing. ‘How many bedrooms have you got?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘If you’ve got so much money, why is everything so scruffy and old?’

  I look at her blankly. I’d never thought about it. It was just home.

  ‘What have you got a nanny for?’ she asks as we wander the track down to the marshes. Joanna has a pair of white leather scalloped sandals on. My brown sandals seem boyish and babyish in comparison. They have scuffed toes.

  ‘She’s not a nanny. She’s an au pair.’ But I can see from Joanna’s expression that this doesn’t make it any better.

  We’ve reached the marshes where soft sedge plumes give way to mud banks dense with samphire, speckled with purple sea lavender. Narrow creeks wind inland, carving out tiny islands, opening out into pools of glistening mud. Wader birds pick their way across the surface, sketching tracks behind them like a code. Oystercatchers and sandpipers poke long beaks into the black. Squinting, I count three yachts moving slowly on the river: a Mirror and two Wayfarers. There isn’t much wind today. Their sails billow and droop.

  Joanna points to the river and beyond that, the sea. ‘I wonder if your sister’s skeleton is floating around somewhere, or if it’s broken apart into different bones by now?’ She could be discussing the weather. She snatches a look at me from below her lashes. ‘Or maybe something ate the whole of her. There are sharks in the Channel. My uncle is a fisherman and he told me. Big ’uns.’ She holds her hands wide. ‘Get caught in the nets sometimes.’

  I collapse onto my bottom because my legs have gone weak. Tufts of samphire make a spongy cushion. The mud on the path is cracked and dry; it splits into star shapes. I lower my head, so that my hair covers my face, leaning over to scratch a finger against the stars. Joanna lowers herself beside me, checking that she won’t get mess on her pink shorts.

  ‘My mum reckons that your dad pushed her in,’ she continues. ‘They was always rowing, weren’t they, your dad and Eva? Everyone could hear them yelling blue murder.’

  ‘He didn’t push her in. The boat capsized.’ My fingernail is black-rimmed. Dried earth packed in tightly between flesh and nail. It feels itchy. I have carved a letter in the surface.

  ‘But your sister was a one, wasn’t she? Enough to wind anybody up.’ Joanna angles her head to look at me. ‘Trouble with a capital T, my mum says.’

  I kick off my sandals and step into the pool of wet mud. It gives beneath me slowly, slippery against my skin. There are the squiggled heaps of casings left behind by ragworms and razor shells. I wriggle my toes. The mud slurps and pops, pushing up through the gaps between my toes like folds of plush velvet. Beneath the greeny brown surface is the oily black underneath. I taste the smell of fish guts and hidden things.

  ‘She’s not dead.’ I say.

  ‘Course she is. She’s been gone months.’ Her nostrils flare. Joanna’s nose is tiny and short, like a Barbie doll’s. It doesn’t look right inside the round moon of her face.

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘She’s been taken by selkies. Or the Wild Man.’

  ‘You’re nuts.’ Joanna laughs. ‘That’s just a load of rubbish. Fairy tales.’

  I look out over the mud flats and the sea wall towards the shape of the island. ‘She’s over there on the island,’ I whisper.

  ‘What?’ Joanna’s mouth is open in a gaping smile. Her eyes narrow. ‘What did you say, Nutter?’

  ‘Coming in?’ I look at her. ‘It feels lovely and cool.’

  ‘No chance.’ She grimaces. ‘It smells.’

  I grab her plump wrist and pull. She falls with surprising ease, toppling from her perch on the bank. For a second, she is an unresisting lump. Then, as her knees hit the slime, she screeches and starts to struggle, fighting me, scrabbling for a hold.

  ‘Look what you done!’ She slips on the mud, black smeared over her white legs and pink shorts.

  Skidding at my feet, she kicks out sharply, catching my ankle, and I topple over, landing on top of her, pinning her down. She gets a hand free and swings it up, catching me under the chin. It hurts. A jolt to my teeth. I think I can taste blood. I am filled with a clear, ringing sense of rightness. It almost feels like joy as I grab her flailing wrist and push it down, down into the sucking mud. She’s trapped. I have both of her hands prisoners. I’m sitting astride her, and she is writhing and screaming under me. There are splatters and streaks of black all over her. I am covered too. Her hair is spread out in tangles. Browny mud looks green against the red of her hair.

  ‘You cow!’ She’s yelling. ‘Wait till I tell on you!’

  Her mouth is a slobbery pinkness, opening and closing. I grab a handful of mud and ram it in to take away the noise. She snorts and chokes. I watch her eyes crinkle and close, her face going pinker and pinker. Her plump body bucks violently under me, as if electric shocks are shooting through her spine, and I fall to the side. She’s rolled over, coughing and coughing.

  She crawls across the slick surface, bedraggled, like a strange mud monster. I can’t see even a tiny patch of pink on her shorts. In fact I can’t see her shorts, only the wrinkles of them and the line where they meet the swelling rise of her plump thigh. She crouches over on the bank, spitting and retching. Dark spittle hangs from her chin. All around us are the tracks of our fight–gouges of deeper darkness in the muddy surface.

  She’s stumbling away. I can hear her breathless voice calling out between sobs, ‘You’re mental you are… warty hands… I’m gonna tell my mum on you…’

  It’s fading away: the heaviness of her footfalls and the screech of her voice. The air calms and settles, obliterating traces of Joanna. I lie back on the bank, wet and sticky. The sun is hot, drying the mud into a tightening embrace on my skin. I can hear all the proper things now: wash of waves, seabirds calling and the flap of distant sails. Underneath that there is the pulse of the sea, pull and push of water over shingle, the flit and swish of fins moving through deeper reaches of the ocean, movement of bigger creatures, stealthy webbed feet and fingers pushing through water and reeds.

  I sit up. There is nobody here. I take deep gulps, letting the air soothe me like a glass of milk. The tracks of our fight are fading as the mud takes back its form, softening and sinking into a smooth, flat surface. Soon our struggle will be gone. Flies gather over the mud pool. A dragonfly skims the tops of the reeds, wings glinting green gold.

  Lying down again, I roll onto my tummy in the samphire. I think I’m there for a long time. The mud is hard on my skin, less an embrace, more a brittle armour. Insects hum and whirr. I continue to scratch out letters inside the crusty surface of the path. EVA I spell out, over and over again, her name becoming a pattern. Lying with the sun on my back I sing Love is the sweetest thing–what else on earth can bring such happiness to everything… love is the oldest yet the youngest thing, humming when I forget the words and imagining Granny’s voice singing with me. That’s better. Another song. I suck my bottom lip, thinking, and begin I wish that little girl could see… why was I so careless of that basket of mine! I picture a girl with swinging plaits in a gingham dress, hands on her hips, her lost basket set down under an apple tree.

  I know that I could be friends with a girl like that. I can see her in an orchard, sunlight dappling her dress, waiting patiently for me to find her.

  Mum surprises me. She comes silently through the long grasses. She is breathing hard, so I know that she has been running. I thought she’d be very angry. But she drops down beside me and pulls me close. I can feel her swallowing, the slide of saliva in her throat. She makes a gulping sound and kisses my forehead. ‘I was worried.’ Her voice is tight.

  I clench my fingers into balls and lie stiffly in her lap. I would like to cry, but it’s as if someone has sewn up my throat.

  ‘Come on,’ she says in her matter-of-fact Mummy voice. ‘You’re filthy. I’m going to put you in a bath.’

  I stand up, my legs feeling odd and shaky, and put my hand in hers. It is good not to think, to be led away by her, to be a baby again. I want to get smaller and smaller, like Alice in Wonderland. I want to shrink into an acorn-sized baby that my mother will hold inside the warm, dark hollow of her mouth.

  I’m naked in the bath, the room fuzzy with heat, mirror misted with steam. Mum gets up to open the window, ‘Like a sauna in here,’ she says. My limbs are pink and glistening, sticking out of grey water. Mum has soaped and scrubbed me, her sleeves rolled up. ‘I’ve never known such tenacious mud,’ she says. I don’t know what ‘tenacious’ means. I’m too tired to ask and I’m too busy enjoying having Mum looking after me, having all her attention. It feels warm and comforting, like the bathwater swishing around me.

  Mum says the first she knew of it was Mrs Price banging on the front door and Silver barking like a lunatic. Mrs Price had been raging on about me, and saying she’d send us the bill for Joanna’s ruined clothes. But all Mum could think of was me, alone by the river, because I couldn’t swim properly.

  ‘What was it about?’ she asks.

  ‘Joanna was rude. She said mean things about Dad.’ I bite my lip. ‘And Eva.’

  Mum frowns. ‘What did she say?’ She sighs and leans closer over the rim of the bath. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. This is a small village, darling. People will talk. They have nothing better to do.’ She pushes some hair from my eye. ‘You must try and ignore them. They are in the wrong for saying those things. But you put yourself more in the wrong when you react.’

  Her mouth twists and she turns her head away. I remember our bathtimes when we were little. Mum knelt beside me as she is kneeling now, soapy froth on her hands. Eva and I often shared a bath, Eva crouching by the taps, splashing me when Mum’s attention wandered. I see Eva’s thin brown fingers stretched out, holding bright bath toys, rubber ducks and plastic cars, one after the other, laughing as I reached for them.

  ‘Do you want to try swimming lessons again?’ Mum asks, swilling her hand through the dirty water. ‘We could sign you up for a course in the pool in town.’

  ‘Don’t want to.’

  ‘But you have to learn sometime.’ She touches my shoulder.

  ‘We don’t sail anymore,’ I argue.

  ‘No,’ Mum agrees slowly, ‘but the water will always be there, Faith.’

  ‘Don’t make me.’ I look at her and glance away.

  I was five when we capsized. The boat pitched over, all of us falling into darkness, green bubbling everywhere as I opened my eyes into gritty swirls of water. I couldn’t see the others. I was alone, sealed off from the outside world. A shape emerged out of the gloom beneath me, a figure with arms and legs. It reached for me. Fingers closing on my skin, a tug on my ankle. Water was in my eyes and my mouth and up my nose. It was salty and sharp and blinding. I flapped my arms till I broke the surface, gasping, and saw sails on the water, white and dead as a broken bird. Dad and Mum were shouting. Sounds burst into my ears: slap of waves, screaming of gulls, a motorboat’s roar. Dad grabbed at my orange lifejacket, hauling me in.