by Julie Mayhew
That body.
Viola doesn’t want to think of it as a real person with a name. It is easier that way. Anyone could be lying dead in the ferns. Don’t take it personally – that was the phrase the boys at her mainland school used if a girl was ever upset by an insult. Why do you have to take everything so personally? Calling a girl a sket or a ho was no excuse for that girl to think she was something special. All girls are skets and hos, if boys decide they are. The insult is universal, and so, in that case, is the body in the woods.
Viola lets Dot leap onto the bed this time and nestle beside her thigh. She pets the animal’s head as an apology for shouting.
Beside the bottle on the bedside table there is a wooden jewellery box. Viola lifts the lid, fingering through the few silver pieces there, plucking out a brooch shaped like an arrowhead, set with green stones.
She puts it in her pocket. It feels like a fair exchange. Or rather, it’s not quite enough. For now, Viola will take it as part payment.
THE BOOK OF LEAH
It was my birthday and my mother had invited me to lunch. I had to go, if only to lay foundations. News of Ben and me would reach them soon, and though my mother might be pleased, my father would not. I was challenging his authority, being the rebellious teenager at last, but I couldn’t stand the thought of rejection, that he might cut me adrift. Somehow, that felt like a possibility.
Ben and I agreed to take things slowly this time – ‘rewind’, as Ben put it. He came for dinner at my house and I saved my meat rations to make something special. I lit candles. We stretched out on the living-room floor – just like teenagers – and worked through my small collection of records and CDs. Ben said that he would bring a cable and his phone next time, link it to my hi-fi system, so he could play the music that he liked – all the bands and songs that hadn’t reached us yet.
He didn’t stay the night; we kissed on the doorstep. This felt more momentous than what we had done by moonlight in my bed. We were working towards a commingling of minds, a more intimate endeavour. The uniting of bodies was something, I had ably proved, that could be done with anyone. The flesh was easily pleased, easily fooled.
Saul Cooper had certainly been misled. He had taken to leaving the Customs House for a walk at the same time as I left the cottage to go to school – an accident he repeated every morning. I was civil, I said, ‘Hello’, but he wanted more.
‘Leah,’ he called after me. ‘Leah, Leah, Leah’, as I walked on and ignored him.
His bitter edge had gone, pared away by what we’d done. He smiled, and not sardonically. I’d achieved an uneasy peace with the events of that night, but it had been hard won. I could not let in fresh guilt, let myself believe that I owed him.
I set him straight.
‘It’s Miss Cedars,’ I shot back one morning, swivelling on my heels. The rain was heavy, water gushing down the hill and swilling around our feet. Michael Signal was there, out early as seemed to be his way, too fascinated by our exchange.
‘My name – Mr Cooper – is Miss Cedars,’ I said, making clear to all present the nature of our relationship, then I continued up that path that flowed like a river.
Ben and I took lunch together in the school canteen, although not too often. When a piece of your personal information becomes pupil currency, there is a power shift in the classroom; you lose control. The Eldest Girls noticed these lunch dates, of course; they obsessively tracked Ben’s movements. He had generously given them his ear and now they seemed to think they owned him. When we sat together to eat, the girls positioned themselves at a table in my eyeline and regarded me solemnly, picking at their food, rubbing at the indelible tattoos now healed at their wrists.
‘They’re watching us,’ I whispered across the table.
‘Who?’ he asked. ‘The Russians?’
I didn’t understand that this was a joke.
‘The Eldest Girls,’ I said, a hand across my mouth so they couldn’t read my lips.
‘You’re imagining it,’ he replied.
But I wasn’t. I wasn’t imagining it.
He changed the subject, by asking me to go to the Billet House for our next date.
I refused. ‘No, that will be far too weird, being in that house full of men, having them all laugh, Reuben Springer and –’
‘Reuben’s not like that,’ Ben cut in.
‘– and Abe Powell and Saul Cooper and –’
I tried to make it sound casual, but he grabbed at the name: ‘Saul Cooper?’
There was an awful pause.
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering how I might confess, how it could ever be made to sound acceptable. We had broken up, and I was drunk, and you have slept with other people before me so…
‘There’s no Saul Cooper living with us,’ he said.
‘Yes, there is!’ My voice had risen. It came in a series of squawks. ‘I mean, where else would he be living?’
‘How should I know?’ Ben protested. ‘And who’s Saul Cooper anyway? Have I met him yet?’
I fished for an answer, my mouth opening and closing.
‘Oh, he’s, he’s, no one very interesting,’ I said eventually.
I agreed to the date at the Billet House and began mentally preparing myself. I pictured a crude dwelling, lacking the basics of table and chairs. There would be a dirt floor, a fire and the straw beds of a lions’ den. Luke Signal would circle me with the rest of the pride, ready to report back to my father. She’s not steering clear of that coycrock teacher like you told her to, you know.
I had never not followed my father’s advice.
‘Keep your head down, do as I say, and you’ll be fine.’ This was the refrain of my teenage years and I didn’t question it. I was starting to realise what Paul had meant when he said Dad was making sure everything worked out all right for me and not for him. There had been no corresponding mantra guaranteeing Paul’s safety in return for obedience.
On the day of the lunch with my parents, I helped Dad check the snares. Mum was fretful that he would otherwise miss this meal and not see his own daughter on her birthday, so preoccupied was he with his war against the ever-burgeoning fox population. Mary and Luke had worked too many weekends lately. Dad couldn’t ask them again without having to explain himself to the estate for the extra overtime expenditure.
With my help, the job would be done faster and I could – as per Mum’s instructions – stop him from getting engrossed in the fixing of something else, steering him home by 1 p.m. I could also stop him wandering into the workers’ shed by the dog runs for a tea break that would lapse into a quick nap. Mary had let slip to Mum that Dad had been caught regularly sleeping on the job.
We parked up on land beyond the old Reunyon Farmstead, where the red-haired newcomers had moved in. There had been complaints that the woman and her daughter had not done any of the work they had promised, but even from this distance, progress was clear. Beds of soil had been shaped and turned, wild hedgerows tamed. Wood cladding still hung loose from the face of the building and the balusters of the veranda remained broken and splintered, but that was a huge task to undertake – too much for just one woman and a child. I wondered why the Council hadn’t offered to send over Mark and Andy Cater to help. The brothers could have lodged in one of the many spare bedrooms, given the women some feeling of security out there on the isolated west coast, then maybe she’d have felt happier letting her girl go off to school.
My father and I zipped up our jackets against the piercing cold and got out of the cab, heading for a patch of overgrown land that abutted the once beautiful tiered gardens of the estate. Seals sometimes basked in the cove below, but there was no sightline to their colony from the land, the cliff was too sheer. You had to rely on the reassurances of the fishermen that the animals had returned each year.
I carried the lump hammer in one hand, enjoying the weight and swing of it, and in the other I brought the tool bag, should any snares need resetting. I followed Dad’s wax-jacketed back down the funnel-through, hi
s breath making clouds as he called over his shoulder – ‘Careful not to make any fresh paths, Leah!’ He spoke as if I hadn’t done this a hundred times before.
The two snares we’d already checked had been still standing erect, unbothered, and I prayed, if only for Dad’s mood, that this next one would have something in its loop, so he could make use of his rifle. When I heard him curse ahead of me, the kind of language he never used when Mum was around, I knew he was to be denied. This snare was empty too, but worse – the loop was flat to the ground. It had dropped or been knocked over – or, in all likelihood, not been set correctly in the first place.
‘That stupid bloody boy!’ My father kicked up a divot of soil in frustration. ‘I swear, if he fell from a great height he couldn’t be trusted to hit the ground.’
‘Let me, Dad.’ I pushed past him and knelt, spreading out the tools. I urged him to return to the cab, to wait there – he was so furious he was wheezing – but he wouldn’t go. He watched over my shoulder as I worked, my fingers numbing quickly in the cold, and he chipped in instructions that I didn’t need.
‘Put your pliers down by the ground anchor, Leah. They’re brightly coloured and they’ll make sure you don’t lose your spot.’
I bit my tongue.
We got back in the cab in time to hit Mum’s lunchtime deadline, but Dad said, ‘We need to pop in at the farmstead, let them know about the snare, so they don’t catch a foot.’
‘They won’t wander there, Dad,’ I assured him, ‘it’s too wild.’
‘That girl gets everywhere,’ he replied, taking the decision from my hands, turning up the track that led to the Reunyon Farmstead.
The mother was sitting outside on that splintered veranda when we arrived, even though the temperature was dipping near zero. At the sound of our engine, the girl came out too, crashing the door back on its hinges, running down the veranda steps as if she might launch herself at my father when he stepped from the cab, for an embrace perhaps, or to bundle him aggressively to the ground. I stepped out too, driven by a protective impulse. Was this why I wasn’t so sure about listening to his advice anymore, because our roles were reversing? Was it my turn to look after him?
‘I haven’t been anywhere near your dogs!’ the girl yelled. ‘And Dot hasn’t been anywhere near the sheep!’
This was the first time I’d got close to her, heard her speak. Her accent was similar to Ben’s but not quite the same; the vowels rang flat. Her face was startlingly pale, the freckles picked out, like they are on the cheeks of Lark girls at the end of summer.
‘I came to warn you of a snare,’ said my father.
‘Oh.’
She was extinguished just as swiftly as she had caught fire, my father’s words the wet thumb against the flame. She pulled the too-long sleeves of her sweater over her hands and glanced at her mother who was pushing herself to standing, angling for a better view. The girl gave her a neat shake of the head that translated quickly – no need to worry – and the woman sat down again.
‘What’s a snare?’ asked the girl, returning her attention to us.
‘It’s for catching foxes.’
Her eyes widened at this.
‘Don’t you or your dog be getting caught up in it.’ Dad pointed towards the west cliffs. ‘It’s set in the thick of the brush, that way.’
I knew that voice – the extra gruffness put there to hide a tenderness beneath. It was unnerving to hear it being used on someone who wasn’t me. Would he tell the girl to keep her head down next, to do as he said so everything would be all right?
She nodded her understanding. We climbed back in the cab and drove away.
The clock slipped past one as we bounced down the steep hill towards the lodge, to Mum and to lunch, to the small parcel I’d seen wrapped on the kitchen sideboard that would be a piece of jewellery made by Charity Ainsley, Hope’s sister – an arrowhead of silver, decorated with some foraged jade. We would not be on time, but we would be close.
Then we came upon the goat, lying in a pool of its own blood, its body ripped in two.
Dad stopped the Land Rover and we got out to examine the carcass, its gaping chest and ravaged head, the congregation of flies.
‘Foxes, do you think? The girl’s dog?’
Dad was ashen. ‘A goat this big? This amount of damage? No way. And look – the tear down the middle is clean.’
The edges of its slitted pelt were straight, knife-cut. The lungs had been pulled free of the ribs, along with a spill of its other organs.
‘Not the girl herself?’
‘No! No!’ he said, and I bristled at his swift shielding of her from blame. How did he know what she was capable of?
‘Well, she was pretty defensive from the moment we pulled up,’ I suggested.
‘No,’ he said again, certain.
‘Why would she say all of that stuff then, just out of nowhere, if she wasn’t guilty of something?’
‘It wasn’t out of nowhere.’
‘What do you mean?’
He dipped his head and sighed. ‘She isn’t a bother, really,’ he said, no straight answer at all. ‘It’s just she’s on her own and she can be … She just needs …’
‘Needs what?’
Fear rose within me – had something terrible happened between them?
‘She needs someone looking after her,’ he said, avoiding my eye. ‘You saw the state of the mother. She’s poorly, no matter how Bishy puts it.’
I laughed sharply, anything to avoid my real emotion. I knew absolutely how Paul had felt now – his envy, the injustice.
‘But she’s a coycrock,’ I spat. The bigotry I’d been brought up with swelled easily to the surface. ‘And you know she’s been seen up at the stones with the Eldest Girls too, getting mixed up in their nonsense. The kids in my class have been talking about it.’
My father stared at me levelly. I felt ugly under this scrutiny, exposed.
‘Same might be said for your coycrock teacher,’ he replied, returning fire. ‘Hasn’t he been getting mixed up with those girls ’n’ all?’
I was breathless. He already knew, understood that I had taken his advice and discarded it. I wanted to say sorry, to beg his forgiveness, and at the same time I wanted to defend Ben – He teaches them science, only science! – but we were stood either side of a bloody carcass, the grassy stench of it rising up, so I said nothing. The situation felt messy enough.
‘Let’s get some tarp from the back,’ said my dad, ‘get this thing into the truck.’
We worked quietly, carefully testing that the animal’s limbs could take its own weight before we grabbed a pair of hooves each and lifted.
‘Can you see its missing horns?’ asked my dad. ‘Or any of his insides? I don’t want any remains being found.’ We poked around at the edges of a nearby copse but there was no trail of sinew, nothing to suggest an animal had dragged part of the goat away to chew on later. We gave up, Dad latching the end of the vehicle’s load bed.
‘You’ll be telling no one about this,’ he said as we got back in the cab. His tone was fierce. ‘Or else I’ll have Elizabeth Bishy working everyone into a frenzy, saying there’s a wolf on the estate, or a big cat, or some such. I’ve got no time to be patrolling for mythical beasts, not with real bloody foxes to contend with.’
We stayed silent all the way to the incinerator behind the Big House. We both knew it wouldn’t be ‘wolf’ that Elizabeth Bishy cried if she got word of this. She’d say it was a ritual slaughter, part of some ceremony or spell, proof that supernatural practices were alive again on the island. From what we had seen – the goat’s belly neatly sliced, the removal of its organs, the torn-off horns – would we be in any position to deny it?
My mother reprimanded us for arriving late, for the smears of blood on our clothes and the bacon-like smell of the incinerator in our hair.
‘Got one that put up a fight, did you?’ she asked, after delivering orders to change our clothes quickly so that lunch didn�
��t spoil.
‘One daft bastard, yeah,’ said my father, loosening his boots. ‘They’re clever beggars, foxes, but you’d think they’d work out that keeping still in them snares was the best way not to get hurt.’
It was smooth, his lie, astonishingly so.
The Billet House was as minimal and characterless as I had been led to believe. The walls and floor were panelled with strips of treated pine, giving the place a temporary, unfinished air, a nod to its rapid construction all those years ago. Still, it was neater than I had anticipated. A log burner beamed warmth from the corner and on the dining table, alongside a vase of clumsily arranged anemones, music played from a small speaker connected to the thinnest, sleekest computer I had ever seen.
‘It’s… nice,’ I said, unable to keep the surprise from my voice. ‘Tidy.’
‘I’ve been cleaning all day,’ Ben replied. ‘Don’t look under anything, will you? Don’t open any cupboards or you’ll be killed in the avalanche.’
I listened for the other residents as he took my coat, could smell the musky recent presence of them under the high notes of furniture polish.
‘They’re at the Anchor,’ Ben said, seeing my gaze twitch towards the open-tread staircase that presumably led to the bedrooms. ‘I bribed them.’
He had only just showered, I noticed – I could see the afterglow of it on his skin – and it made me ache for the intimacy of his body again. Would it be so bad, I asked myself, just to give in?
‘Wine?’ he asked.
‘Please! And who did you bribe to get a bottle outside of Christmas week?’
‘It’s stolen,’ he replied, enjoying my shocked expression. ‘Reuben helps himself to a few bottles at the Anchor when he’s helping out.’ He leaned close. ‘Just don’t tell his brother.’
We sat together at one end of the glass-topped dining table, eating an adequate spaghetti Bolognese that Ben proudly called his ‘signature dish’. As the songs coming through the speakers changed, he announced the names of the artists and gave a short summary of their backlist, their origins, and so on.
‘Is there going to be an exam at the end of all this?’ I teased, and he winced.
