by Julie Mayhew
‘Isn’t that a bit cruel?’ she went on, gently, politely. ‘I mean, doesn’t it make them sad?’
The man snorted. ‘You talk like they have souls.’ He leant over the pen, as if checking what damage she might have caused.
‘Souls?’ Viola was taken aback at the swift philosophical turn of their conversation but pressed on. ‘And don’t they?’ she asked. ‘Have souls?’
He laughed at the question. He hadn’t been speaking philosophically at all, it seemed, only stating the facts as he saw them, but Viola’s sincere response had a sobering effect. He went from delivering a firm stare to looking anywhere but at her face.
‘I should get going, if I were you. You don’t want any trouble.’
‘Trouble from who?’ she wondered aloud.
‘The gamekeeper.’
‘Who’s that then?’
‘That then,’ he replied gruffly, ‘is me.’
Other days, she ventured as far as the cobbles of the harbourside, considering it a search for the island’s potential, the secret it had yet to offer up. She gripped tightly to the doomed hope of discovering a coffee shop, somewhere to sit and have a milkshake, but found only a smokehouse with herring and mackerel turning gold on their racks, a tiny, hardly ever open library in one of the lanes, and a pub that was more of a men’s social club, since it didn’t admit women until the weekends, and under-eighteens, never.
There was the Counting House, with its upstairs computers, the sort of building that would have been populated by lithe women with yoga mats on the mainland, but on Lark was the venue for (according to a poster in the marbled lobby) ‘fascinating and informative’ sessions with Dr Tobiah Bishy, MBBS, MRCGP, including ‘Correct Usage of the Island’s Defibrillator’, ‘Know Your Blood Pressure’ and ‘A Walk-in Skin Clinic (Lancing of Boils, etc.)’.
The island’s only shop, the Provisions Store, had been charming in its strangeness to begin with, but soon fulfilled its destiny to disappoint – nothing but a warehouse piled with stock, smelling of ripe cheese and even riper fish, lorded over by a brace of fierce, middle-aged women. Viola ached for the shiny persuasions of a Tesco Extra.
On one visit an argument broke out in the fresh produce section, providing a brief glimmer of interest. A pretty blonde girl around Viola’s age was standing with her mother behind a pyramid of plums. They were debating urgently in a language that sounded like Swedish, or Danish maybe. Viola feigned interest in a tray of walnuts, so she might edge closer, hear more.
The girl, at the height of her exasperation, switched the quarrel to English. ‘You’re not listening to me!’ she hissed. ‘That’s not what I’m saying, Mum, I’m not saying that at all.’
The woman, her hair cut into the same neat bobbed style as her daughter’s, snatched the girl’s wrist, looking worriedly about them for eavesdroppers. ‘Then why say it?’
The girl drew breath to speak again and the woman, frantic to make her quiet, drove her nails into her daughter’s skin.
‘Ow!’ She wrenched her wrist away, catching the corner of a crate of apples as she did, sending the fruit to the floor, bringing one of the fierce women running from her position behind the counter.
Viola craned to watch the girl flee the scene, her flat, buckled T-bars slip-slapping against the concrete.
‘And you can get rid of that filthy animal, ’n’ all,’ said the attending fierce woman, turning on Viola in the chaos. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing, bringing that thing in here?’
That Viola had a dog – as a companion, as a familiar – was very strange to the residents of Lark, she quickly realised. The cats were feral, not pets, kept fat on the island’s plentiful supply of mice – creatures Viola and her mother did daily battle with, forced to place a rock on top of the bread bin at night to stop them breaching the lid. The stares Viola endured on the cobbles were never greater than when she crouched to scoop up Dot’s poo. They were the same looks you received on the mainland when you did the opposite – walked away and left it, indifferent.
So, Viola took the left-hand path at the bottom of the farmstead track for a while, heading away from the harbour, to walk Dot in the anonymity of the woods.
As they progressed uphill, the scrubland was taken over by great swathes of ferns, the distance between the pines growing smaller. The world turned denser, browner, the trees enclosing them, making the clatter of a bird’s wing come blanketed and soft. Viola’s boots crunched against the needled path, a satisfying soundtrack, convincing her it wasn’t voices she craved so much, just a different kind of quiet.
The peace, though, was short-lived.
He came jogging up behind her one afternoon, arrived seemingly from nowhere, his breathing laboured when he reached her side. Viola recognised the St Rita’s uniform from her excursions to the harbour – knitted navy jumper, red-and-black striped tie – and the boy wore his with a grey wool duffel coat, toggles bobbing.
‘You’re the redhead!’ he gasped, matching her pace. ‘I’ve been dying to meet you!’
His hair was liquorice black above a high forehead, above a large jaw – a face best suited to gloom. When he smiled therefore – this being so unexpected – it was difficult to resist smiling back. But Viola did resist.
‘Is it like birdwatching?’ she enquired tartly. ‘Do you need to tick “redhead” off your list?’
He looked confused. ‘Birdwatching?’
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is not “the redhead”. It’s Viola.’
‘Oh!’ he said, catching on – perhaps – and they did not speak for a while. Viola waited for him to get bored, to trail away, but he stayed beside her, leather satchel banging against his hip. They paused in unison when a small herd of deer tripped anxiously across their path, and once they had resumed their walk, the boy said: ‘Do you know, I hate Violas!’
Now Viola was confused. She had never met anyone who shared her name. There had been a Violet in the year below at her mainland school, and a precocious Violetta at a drama club she tried once and immediately hated. How had this boy encountered enough Violas on an island of 253 souls to form such a strong opinion?
‘I mean the flowers,’ he said.
‘Oh!’
‘They look like they have faces.’
‘Yes.’
‘Weird eyes that creep you out.’
He was younger than her, Viola deduced, fourteen, fifteen maybe, though it was hard to say for sure. The kids at the harbour who looked to be her age physically, seemed young in their behaviour, childish – except perhaps for that blonde girl at the store. The island did it to them, Viola presumed, built them heartier, kept them innocent. You could only blame the lack of internet.
‘I’m named after a character in a play,’ she told him, trying to impress.
‘Oh, yeah. Which one?’
He was definitely younger. Either that, or more of a dunce than her.
‘The Shakespeare one,’ she enunciated.
‘Well, he wrote a ton of plays, didn’t he?’ the boy countered. ‘You’re going to have to narrow it down.’
‘The one with Viola in it,’ she said, toying with him.
She didn’t fancy him; she wasn’t flirting. There was just an easy familiarity between them – big sister, little brother – and she liked being teasingly superior, used as she was to being the younger one, if only by a few minutes.
‘Has it got sex in it?’ the boy asked. ‘The Viola play?’
She wondered if he had misunderstood their rapport, if he was flirting with her, but his enquiry seemed genuine.
‘Not really. Just a bit of cross-dressing.’
‘That’ll be why then,’ he said.
Why what? she would have asked if he hadn’t leapt in and flipped the subject.
‘So, are you heading for the Sisters’ Stones too?’ he asked. This was followed by a monologue about the perfect circle of nine Neolithic stones that lay beyond the wood, and a deconstruction of all the hypotheses for why it had bee
n built in the first place – time-telling, worship, the strange proclivities of ancient druids. The tenth stone in the centre of the circle – a hollow stone – had healing properties, he said, if you crawled through its middle.
‘Have you tried it?’ Viola asked, triggering another lengthy speech from the boy, this one on local legends, including the giant’s bite story. He told a tale of how the sea surrounding Lark claims a child every seven years, then something about black-haired virgins – the word ‘virgin’ making him blush profusely – before he arrived at his point.
The Sisters’ Stones, as their name suggested, belonged to the women of the island. Everything else on Lark belonged to the men, which they could share with the women, if they chose to, but the stones … The boy couldn’t go near that hollow rock, even by invitation.
‘It’s bad luck for a man to enter the circle,’ he said gravely. ‘It invites a terrible fury.’
Dot strained impatiently at her lead. Viola hadn’t gained enough knowledge of the landscape yet to let her run free. Everywhere was the risk of an unexpected cliff edge, a drop into the sea.
‘Where does the fury come from?’ Viola asked. ‘From God?’
‘No!’ The boy looked shocked. ‘Oh, no!’ He crossed himself. ‘Not Him! Not Him!’
‘Then who?’
‘I don’t want to say it aloud,’ he replied. ‘I’m a good Christian and that’s pagan nonsense.’
‘But you said –’
He interjected, diverting her with another soliloquy. This time: about how he was going to be an archaeologist when he was older, discover more about Lark’s ancient cultures. He scooped up a fir cone and methodically stripped it of its scales. There was no precedent for this kind of career on the island, he told her, but that was no obstacle; the lack only indicated a demand. Once the island got a telephone mast and everyone had wi-fi (Did Viola know what wi-fi was? Had she heard of it?), he would be able to study an online course very easily.
Then he flipped the subject again, onto his older brother, Luke, who had just moved out of the family home and into the Billet House. He had begun an apprenticeship to the gamekeeper, which the boy explained was a ‘really very powerful role on the island’.
Viola thought of the stooped, white-bearded man who had yelled at her for bothering his dogs. He had been grumpy certainly, but powerful … ?
‘His daughter’s been given one of the cottages on the harbourside all to herself!’ the boy exclaimed. ‘And she doesn’t even have a husband!’
A rare pause opened up into which Viola thought she should offer some information of her own, a juicy detail of life on the mainland, quid pro quo, but he steamrollered her again with talk of fishermen and a tragedy at sea that had killed a load of them, way back when.
For someone ‘dying’ to catch a glimpse of the new redhead, he had no interest whatsoever in anything that redhead might have to say.
‘And you’ll have to take your dog back to your house, now,’ he said, as if this was a logical continuation of the story. ‘He’ll get in the way of the spying.’
‘She,’ corrected Viola. The woods were thinning now. There was the close-by sound of the sea. ‘And who are you to be telling me what to do?’
‘Oh, I’m Michael,’ he said, apparently immune to her resentment. He thrust forward his hand for her to shake, a gesture too late and too grown-up. It was oddly endearing. The boy meant well, Viola guessed. His rudeness, his social hopelessness, could only be born of interacting with the same handful of people every day. She shook that hand.
‘I’m named for Michael who leads the armies against Satan,’ he told her.
Viola grinned. ‘Oh, yeah, which play is that in?’
‘Oh, it’s not in a play,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Then why did you –’
‘Spying!’ she threw in, employing the boy’s own tactics on himself. ‘You said spying. Who are we spying on?’
‘The Eldest Girls, of course.’ He pointed to the needled ground beneath them. ‘Look, they’ve left a trail to lure us.’
There were rose petals there, red and bruised, a scattering leading away from the wood.
‘Well, me,’ Michael clarified. ‘It’s men those girls are after.’
ORDINARY TIME: AUTUMN 2017
So, what were the Eldest Girls doing at the Sisters’ Stones?
This.
Britta held the book and called out the orders; she always liked to take the lead. Picture her: shoulders back, chin raised, thrusting the manual forward in one hand, looping the other arm casually across her waist. This was the stance she adopted when reading poetry aloud in class, as if she thought herself a holy orator, a female pope.
Or it was Anna who bent over the pages of that book, instilling the words with her trademark authority and reason, golden hair falling forward, shadows playing across her face. It wasn’t hard, since her tantrum in the Provisions Store, to imagine her in that dimmer light.
Or it was Jade-Marie. She could have been the one to read aloud, to call the shots, a bitten nail working its way along the words, her delivery stumbling, doused in amazement.
Whoever it was, they were in it together. One was as bad as the other.
They were united in their task, despite their disagreements about the right way to do things.
Should they loop around the Sisters’ Stones three times deosil or widdershins? they asked one another. Jade-Marie thought it unlucky to go against the way. Anna argued: how could it be? The world turns anti-clockwise and God created that.
His name came into their discussions often, never with a hint of shame.
‘It won’t matter,’ said Britta firmly. ‘It will work whichever way around, if our intentions are right.’
There was no shame in the saying of this either – the suggestion, the conviction, that what they were doing was right and good.
The circling done, they laid down knives, purposely crossed. They placed a stoppered bottle of water on the most westerly stone.
Another argument.
‘The wood is to the east, so that stone is the west.’
‘Wrong! The wood is south-west of here.’
‘No wonder you’re always getting us lost on the way back, Jade-Marie Ahearn. Do you even know your backside from your elbow?’
Nervous laughter, quickly fading out.
Tealights were lit in strict contradiction of the Closed-months Rationing rules regarding candles. If it was dry enough, they collected scrub and made a small fire, in strict contradiction of Article 5 of Lark Council’s Woodland and Pasture directive. They could not claim ignorance as their defence. The TV and VHS were rolled out of the school cupboard on their trolley at regular intervals to play the safety video. Its message was clear: messing around with fire was no joke. One spark and the whole of Cable’s Wood could go up. One fire with the right wind and the whole island would roar alight. Jade-Marie, more than anyone, should have known better; her mother was in the volunteer fire force.
They dressed in white, pulling old nightdresses from the bottom of their satchels and tugging them on over their uniforms. There were visible mends on the garments, suggesting age, but that hardly narrowed down who had given the girls their ghostly robes. Everyone on the island knew to make good and pass on. The dresses were large, drowning them, and from that detail, perhaps, the culprit might be found. Someone had to be helping, putting ideas in their heads. This wasn’t purely the stuff of instinct, their lying in the grass, star-shaped, hair spilling, black, brown, blonde.
Palms to the sky, they offered themselves, brazenly.
‘Visualise yourself becoming one with the earth,’ a voice intoned. (It was hard to see whose mouth was moving when they were lying down like that. From a distance, all three voices sounded alike.)
‘Let this terrible foulness seep into the soil.’
(They knew that’s what they were – foul.)
‘It’s not ours to carry, we can let it go.’
> (Wishful thinking.)
‘And now we sing!’
They sat up.
Another argument.
‘I don’t want to do any of the songs we know.’
‘Why not? We can take them back. We can make them our own.’
Anna began a teasing verse of ‘Lord of the Dance’.
Jade yelped and covered her ears.
Britta lifted her mouth to the sky and began to howl, coiling vowels, the sound startling the others into silence.
‘Ooooooaaaahhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhh!’
‘What on earth is that supposed to be?’
‘I’m making it up, aren’t I? Our new kind of singing.’
The other two shrugged – why not? – and joined in. They added their own discordant harmonies to this hymn sent upwards to a tracing-paper moon.
On other occasions they kept their silence and knelt, eyes closed, writing on pieces of paper resting on their laps. Blinking awake from this trance, the girls read aloud their scribbles, sounding astonished at what was there, believing they’d played no part in the composition.
They joined hands. They made up chants.
Clean we are, pure we be
Our minds fall open and we can see
Take the dark, turn it to light
Wash this away before the night.
They summoned the dead, wearing headdresses made from the fat spiked leaves of the hawthorn tree.
A prayer was said for Bethany Reid, the girl who was swept away from the dogleg jetty to a watery grave in 2011. The sea surrounding Lark claims a child every seven years, so in the coming year, they all knew – time’s up. There had been doubts that Bethany’s death counted; she had turned sixteen the summer before, so was a woman, not a child. Would the sea be a stickler for its conditions? No one was sure. Mothers held children’s hands very tightly until the calendar turned to 1 January with no other soul lost. Rejoicing went on behind closed doors. Bethany was the sacrifice after all! God save the rest of us!
The Eldest Girls asked Bethany to speak to them via a swinging pendant – a small chunk of green stone strung on a silver chain. Britta held the piece of jade aloft; Anna asked the questions.
