‘Lunchtime,’ the boy called Joe says. ‘It’s baked beans. You’ve got to come back.’ I can’t help staring at him. He is the colour of our dining-room table. He has large, snaggly teeth.

  ‘Beans?’ The plump boy is complaining, spreading his hands wide. ‘Again?’

  He shakes his head, muttering, ‘Fish ’n’ chips would be more like it. We’re at the bleedin’ sea side aren’t we?’

  He’s stomping away from me, the other boy trotting beside him.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ I call after them.

  ‘Caravan park,’ the plump boy says over his shoulder.

  I watch the two of them making their way between boats and puddles, thinking of the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife. The plump boy stumbles into a puddle and I hear his distant swearing, the black boy’s laughter.

  I remember after they’ve gone that I never asked his name. ‘Merde!’ I say aloud into the rain. I am drenched and there is no sign of it stopping. The water looked different against Joe’s skin, brighter. Alice Redgrove once said that my sister had a touch of the tar brush. I hit her on the nose. A trickle of blood had run out of one nostril. She’d burst into tears and I’d had to stand in the corner of the classroom. Eva’s skin is dark, but not nearly as dark as Joe’s. She stands out because we are a blonde family. Eva once asked why her skin was different from ours and why her hair was black. Mum explained that she had a Jewish Portuguese great grandmother. Mum said that the great, great grandmother had been beautiful and exotic with olive skin, and that these things often skipped generations. I wished that I had inherited some exotic colouring, and then perhaps I wouldn’t burn in the sun and look anaemic. Granny told Mum that I should be taking cod liver oil, and Mum makes me swallow a spoonful every day.

  I think about the rowing boat–the heavy wooden weight of it–puzzling over how I’m going to drag it down to the water alone. Even if I borrow a trailer, I still have to get the boat onto it. My hood has come down. There’s no point in pulling it back up. I can’t get much wetter. Strands of my hair are plastered over my forehead. I wander slowly, my feet sloshing through puddles. Eva needs me. I have to find a way to move the rowing boat. A mother duck crosses the road with three ducklings following her. I stand with my hands in my pockets, watching them disappear through a hedge. Amongst the bits of tissue and biscuit crumbs in the gritty bottom of one pocket is the smooth curve of a fossilised shark’s tooth. Once, prehistoric sharks swam over this land. They left their teeth behind, brown and shiny, scattered across the coastline, dug into the mud. Joanna was lying when she said that a shark had eaten Eva. I know she was. Man-eating sharks don’t live in the North Sea. Not anymore.

  As I approach our house, the front door opens and someone slips out, his head bowed against the rain. I have already unlatched the garden gate, my hand resting on the sign that says Holt House. It’s too late to avoid him. I walk up the garden path. Straggly plants brush sodden tendrils and leaves against my legs. My heart jumps when I see that it’s Robert Smith. We meet halfway on the path.

  ‘Must be nice having Mummy and Daddy all to yourself,’ he says with a wink. I don’t know whether he is joking. ‘You haven’t seen me, right? I wasn’t here.’ His voice is harder. He pauses, and taps his nose. ‘Not a word, not if you know what’s good for you.’ His face is livid with spots. He has mean eyes that are too close together. He doesn’t move. I step off the path onto the drenched flowerbed to get past him. Thorns catch in my jeans.

  Inside, the dog starts to bark. I can hear him scrabbling at the kitchen door. He must be shut in. Sophie has a foot on the first step of the stairs. She looks as though she’s in a better mood. She puts up a hand to pat her messy hair into place, pulling a strand from her flushed cheek. She winds it around her finger and laughs, ‘You look… drowned.’ She raises one eyebrow. ‘Take a hot bath, no?’

  I stand in the hallway watching her sway up the stairs. I shrug my drenched coat from my shoulders and kick off my boots. A puddle has formed on the floor around my feet. Silver is whining. ‘Just a minute,’ I call, peeling off my socks, my toes cold on the floor. Upstairs I hear a door slam and the sound of a radio, pop music drifting through the house.

  10

  I have the curse. These are the worst, most humiliating days. I had to ask him if he could go to the chemist for me when it first happened. He’d blushed, ducking his chin. He won’t buy anything for me. Says he doesn’t have the money and anyway, it might attract attention. So I have scraps of old towel and a bucket of seawater to wash them in. The folded over scraps are scratchy and bulky, making it difficult to walk. This must have been what it was like for Victorian women.

  My stomach aches. At home, Mum would give me one of her pills and a hot-water bottle. I imagine the sensation of her fingers on my forehead. I can almost inhale her perfume: grapefruit, green leaves, yellow flowers. My mother. Once she was a girl who lived in Egypt whose parents were blown up by a bomb. I can’t imagine what it was like to have that happen to your parents, or to live in a white house with shuttered windows looking over a desert. From her bedroom window she saw camels and palm trees. I wish I’d known her then. I wish I could go back in time and ask her questions. I’d ask her why she lied to me.

  There is no working lavatory. I squat by the outer pagoda wall to pee, wet splattering concrete and weeds. Anything else and I have to tell him so that we can walk to the wire fence. It’s safe to dig in the shingle on the other side. I scrape out a hollow in the stones, scooping pebbles and grit with my hands. We have bits of torn newspaper to use. I long for rolls of white loo paper. Funny, I never thought I’d be saying that. I can’t have any real privacy. He always lingers somewhere close, alert for any sudden movement. Sometimes I think that I’m being punished for a reason: for being bad, for being ungrateful, for being dirty; or because I wasn’t supposed to be born in the first place.

  I am so bored. I would kill for a novel, or even better, my sketchbook. I wish for the thick pages between my fingers, the soft flip they make as I turn them. When it was warm enough, my favourite place for drawing was on the swing that Dad rigged up for us under the chestnut tree in the garden with rope and a piece of old boat seat. Granny Gale found me there, secateurs grasped in hands huge in gardening gloves. ‘Your diary?’ she’d asked. I shook my head, showed her what I was doing. ‘Ah, a different kind of diary,’ she’d said, nodding and looking over my shoulder. ‘You have a talent for observation.’

  I’d smiled, thinking of how I’d draw her neat figure, with the battered straw hat and the scarf trailing across her narrow shoulders.

  ‘Oscar Wilde once had one of his characters say that she never travelled without her diary,’ she’d said, ‘because one should always have something sensational to read on the train.’ She’d winked. ‘But you shouldn’t be parted from your pencils. A true artist never stops working, you see.’ She’d waved the secateurs. ‘Take your talent with you everywhere, Eva. Don’t leave it behind.’

  I didn’t understand what she meant at the time. I do now. Billy has a book called The Prophet. He turns thin pages slowly, licking his fingers, pausing to re-read passages. I watch him now, hunched into the nest of old blankets that he sleeps in, the rain falling outside. He sucks in his bottom lip as he concentrates, like a child. Sometimes his eyebrows move up his forehead slowly, two caterpillars crawling over his skin as if in disbelief.

  ‘What?’ He’s felt my stare.

  I drop my gaze, ‘Nothing.’

  He closes the book. ‘I suppose you’re a bookworm. One of them read-half-the-library types.’

  I shrug. ‘My favourite thing to do is draw. But I like reading. I like stories.’

  ‘I’ve never really understood the point,’ he says. ‘There are films, aren’t there?’

  ‘So why are you reading that?’

  ‘It could be in here.’ He taps the cover briefly. ‘It’ll be in code, so I have to read it slow and careful.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The message I’m waiting for. The one about you. She might have hidden it in here somewhere.’

  I gaze at the worn book in his hands and feel something shrivelling inside. He’s mad. How do you speak to a mad person? How do you reason with them? He gets up and comes over to hand me the book. ‘I’ve had enough for the day. You can read it for a bit, if you like.’

  Reaching up to take it, I accidentally put some weight on my ankle and wince.

  ‘Let me see.’ He gestures towards my foot. ‘Still troubling you?’

  I roll up the bottoms of my jeans to show him. My skin is puffy and flushed, the ankle shapeless and heavy.

  He touches me and I gasp. ‘I’ll get some more seawater.’ He frowns. ‘You should have said.’

  He’s locked the door behind him. I sit alone on the only chair with the book in my hands. I flick through pages, my eyes skimming swarms of black letters. I am so hungry for stories, for anything that will take me away from this empty room. But this isn’t a novel, it’s a bit like poetry and there are pictures. I’m surprised. It doesn’t seem to fit with Billy’s personality. He doesn’t seem the type to enjoy poetry. His lips move when he reads, silently mouthing the words, as if he’s struggling to understand.

  He lugs the bucket in, water slopping over the sides. He places it at my feet, indicating that I put my ankle inside. The seawater is cold.

  He tips his head at the book in my lap. ‘A bloke gave it to me when I was in the cells–said I needed it more than him.’

  Cells? I stare at him. This is the first time he’s mentioned prison. I open my mouth, but I don’t have the courage to ask him what his crime had been. ‘Tell me about the dream,’ I say instead. ‘The one about me.’

  He pulls at his beard. ‘The dream… I don’t know.’ He frowns and looks away.

  ‘Please,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m interested.’

  He shoots me a suspicious look and I hold his gaze, unblinking. The sound of the waves and the wind washes between us. He nods, as if I’ve asked him another question. ‘A voice spoke to me,’ he says slowly. ‘At the time I was in a bad place. Didn’t know where to go, or what to do. She told me to come here to the island.’ He tips his face towards the lofty heights of the pagoda. ‘Soon as I saw it, I knew this was the right place. You can see all around. Good for protection. Got myself a fishing rod. I could survive off the land for a while. I heard the voice again a week later. She told me that I would find a girl and save her life.’ He hunches his shoulders. ‘There was darkness and rain. I was running, searching, looking for the girl I had to save. But they were here too.’

  He looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘They’ve been following me for a long time. They’re close. Always watching. So we have to be careful. We’re protected here. As long as we do what the voice says.’ His tongue slides out, wetting his lips, and he nods. ‘I’m waiting to know what I have to do next. That’s why we’re not going anywhere. Not till she speaks.’

  I don’t know how to respond. I don’t want to provoke him. So I say nothing, curling and uncurling my toes on the gritty plastic bottom of the bucket. His words repeat in my head. A pulse beats at my temple, tightening in a band around my forehead, a headache like the ones that Mum gets.

  He’s sitting cross-legged at my feet and he nods at the bucket. ‘Let’s have a look at it now.’

  He takes hold of my wet leg and places my foot on his knee. The swelling has gone down a little. There’s a mild throbbing deep inside the flesh. He puts his fingers over my thickened ankle. Shocked, I hold my breath. But his touch is feather-light, barely touching at all. Softly, his fingertips circle my swollen skin. I feel a buzz of sensation running through me. He’s taken my foot in his other hand, and he begins to work his thumb and fingers around the edges of my foot and around each toe, pushing firmly into the crevices, massaging the joints and around the contours of each nail. My bones seem fragile inside his grasp. I’m rigid, staring at my bloated skin and blackened toenails. His hand is engraved with dirt, his nails battered and ragged. I am silent. I have an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach: a kind of unravelling.

  I don’t know what this means. I don’t know why he’s doing this. His touch makes me queasy. I am alert and wary, afraid of this intimacy growing into something else. I cross my arms over my chest, clamp my knees together. I will kill him if he tries anything. I will kill myself. Blood pounds in my head: a thick, dark storm. I’m aware that I’m gritting my teeth. The grating sound echoes deep inside me.

  He lets go of my foot, dropping it like a picked-clean fish carcass back into the bucket of water. He’s staring at me, his eyes glassy bright. ‘The angel sounded beautiful.’ His voice is hoarse. ‘I wait every day to hear her again. It’s like a pain here…’ He touches the scruffy navy jumper over the place where his heart beats. ‘I know she’ll come back.’

  There’s a fluttering over our heads, a scuffle of feathers, and we both look up sharply. A seagull has landed in the opening above us. I see the white of tail feathers and the shape of wings opening.

  I imagine his angel, something huge and glowing, a creature with a massive wingspan that hovers over the island at night while we sleep. I give her burning eyes and a low, deep voice. Perhaps she weeps when she sees what her words have made him do. Maybe she looks down into the pagoda and watches us huddled on our filthy blankets, and realises that she has made a mistake. Speak to him again, I beg. Tell him to let me go. Tell him that was the purpose of saving me. But there is no angel.

  He rolls my trouser leg down and unfolds himself, dusting at his own trousers ineffectually. He stares out at the still-falling rain and hunches his shoulders. ‘I’m going outside for a moment,’ he says. ‘I’ll be watching the door.’

  Billy’s footsteps fade away until there is only the insistent patter of rain and the distant thud and rattle of waves on the beach. I sit with my foot in the bucket, hunching forwards. I feel boneless, exhausted. Once scientists and soldiers crowded into this strange room to work; I wonder if their ghosts move around us, invisible, efficient, recording measurements and facts.

  I slide my hands over my aching stomach and close my eyes. I have to get away from this place. I’ll make another plan when my ankle is better, when I don’t have the curse. I want to go home. I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But I don’t have any red shoes. I focus hard, wishing myself home, and I’m spinning away from the pagoda, away from Billy, flying across the sea, across the river to our house where my spirit slips through the gap in my bedroom window.

  I’m going to see Mum and Dad and Faith. I’ll watch their faces light up with surprise when I appear in the living room. Silver will scent me first from his bed in the kitchen, his ears pricked, a low growl in his throat. I want to hold them all, smell them, feel them, but as I float down the stairs I begin to dissolve, bits of me scattering into nothingness. I can hear my family, but they are just around the corner, in the next room, out of sight.

  11

  Clara lies in the darkened bedroom, a damp cloth on her forehead. She’s taken a couple of her pills. They haven’t had any effect yet. Sharp light flickers at the edges of her vision. It hurts to open her eyes and so she keeps them shut. She is disappointed in herself. It’s the first time she’s been in bed during the day for weeks. It feels like a setback.

  It’s Saturday morning. Faith came into their room early with something curled in her hand. She’d opened her fingers to reveal a large black beetle, dead, and big as a cockroach. Clara had raised herself on her elbows, the morning light already too bright. A migraine scrabbled behind her eyes, something dragged from her dreams, a creature not unlike the thing that sat on Faith’s palm: oily black, sharp-footed, scaly.

  ‘Lovely, darling,’ she’d murmured.

  Max had re-drawn the curtains, fetched her a cloth and a glass of water and taken Faith downstairs. She’d heard their cheerful voices fading away, the dog barking, and then peace. Just wood pigeons outside her window. Even their soft cooing is uncomfortable. She craves complete silence, complete darkness. She thinks of Faith’s expression as she’d offered them the beetle to admire. Where had her youngest daughter’s obsession come from? Since she was a toddler she’s collected bones, strange-shaped pebbles and fossils, slipping them into her pockets, hoarding them in drawers. Faith shows no fear of anything wild. When they’d come across an adder at the side of the path, Clara and Eva had stepped back, instinctively wary, but Faith had leant over the snake. ‘It won’t hurt you,’ she’d said with a trace of scorn, ‘it’s more frightened of us than we are of it. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  Clara hears the sudden whirr of a hairdryer in another room. Sophie. It still shocks her that Sophie is living with them. She forgets sometimes that she is in the house, starting when Sophie appears quietly behind her. It’s odd to think that the girl is only a little older than Eva. She has the beauty of youth, just as Eva did, that rare bloom that lights up the skin from the inside. But unlike Eva, Sophie has a look of boredom on her features, a language in the slump of her shoulders and loose hands that says she’s seen it all before. But then perhaps it’s just as well that they have an au pair who is unfazed by any awkward silences or tensions. She seems to have fitted into the household surprisingly well, seamlessly really, and Clara is grateful for it, and guiltily grateful that Sophie slips away to her room when her duties are done. But she doesn’t appear to be lonely, just independent. She must have made some friends in the village as she’s out most evenings. Clara had worried that an au pair would be bored here, especially a girl from a city.

  Clara stretches in the double bed. Her bones grow heavier, sinking into the mattress, into the languid treacly depths of the pills. Noises outside the window fade: the throaty coo of pigeons, the crack of a branch on the acacia tree, the flutter of downy wings. The room retreats. She remembers sunlight, an afternoon from last summer.