by Julie Mayhew
She’d not talked to anyone about it before – not even her friends back home, the ones brave enough to come to the house. Maybe it was because they seemed a little too curious, in love with the idea of such horror. Viola didn’t believe that the Eldest Girls were more likely to understand, not at all. She knew they wouldn’t even try to, and this, in itself, was the relief.
‘My mum took me out of school because she started to believe that it was dangerous for me to be anywhere but home and then she decided that where we lived was dangerous too, so we came here, halfway across the Atlantic, because the radio said that Lark was very safe.’
The girls had just listened, observed. They didn’t take her awful story and mould it into something recognisable, familiar enough for them to sympathise. Instead they pulled her into an embrace, a small and wonderful enclosed world built by the warmth of their bodies, and it was only when Viola was encircled like this, that the feeling struck – that she had spoken too much and not listened enough in return. She asked them, ‘What bad things have happened to you?’
They reported it with peculiar detachment, which made their confessions all the more shocking. It was as if they were reciting memorised phrases; they used their school assembly voices.
‘So,’ said Britta, ‘with your mainland view of things –’
‘As a girl,’ Jade-Marie cut in.
‘– does that sound right to you?’
Viola could barely speak. ‘It sounds… impossible,’ she managed.
‘Are you doubting us?’ said Anna. ‘Are you saying we’re lying?’
‘No!’ said Viola. ‘No! I’m saying it’s impossible that this has been allowed to go on.’
For that reason alone, Viola knew that she would have to be the one to do it, to make payment for the heart.
She was stunned that evening in December when they had been caught unawares in the glare of the flash, their naked bodies captured, digitised, stored. She was appalled, of course she was, but at the same time she knew it meant less to her. To the Eldest Girls it was yet another violation, a scar upon a scar. To Viola it was a fresh attack, a new battle, and she had the confidence of the beginner.
‘You like what you see, do you?’ she’d called out to their trespasser, goading him.
He did not reply. He kept the phone held up, reframing and refocusing, so Viola had walked towards him, swiping a white nightdress from the ground to cover herself as she went.
Jade-Marie begged her to come back.
Britta’s voice came like a bullet across the breech. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she warned him. ‘Men aren’t allowed. It brings on a terrible fury.’ The sea joined in with her – a Greek chorus. It boomed against the caves in the cliffs below, loud enough to shake the bones in their chests.
When Viola reached him, was able to look him in the eye, she saw that he was handsome. She could imagine the girls at her old school getting excited about someone like this, discussing his every feature in whispers on the bus – his eyes, his lips, his everything.
Viola spoke directly, with a confidence she didn’t know she owned. ‘Are you looking for some close-up action?’ she asked.
He shrugged, smirked, then stepped forward as if he might claim his winnings right there and then.
‘Hey!’ She stepped back, putting up her palms.
The situation slowly turned, Viola reframed it – she must give herself this credit. Hadn’t they, only moments before he arrived, expressed their wish to push things further? She had outlined an idea of how they could do this – what they would need. Was it really such a coincidence that he had turned up then, as they lifted their hands to the sky, making a promise to do whatever was required of them?
His being there, Viola decided, was not a problem; it was a gift.
‘We need you to do something first,’ she told him.
He slid the phone into the back pocket of his jeans, freeing his hands for the qualifying task, thinking it could be done there and then.
‘We need you to fetch us a heart.’
He snorted, thinking this a joke.
‘A real one,’ she clarified, ‘an animal one, from a cow or a sheep.’
He was the one to suggest it: ‘Or a goat?’
They’d shook on it, made a deal. He would give them what they wanted, and they would give him what he wanted in return.
Viola knew that she would have to be the one to make the payment. The others were already sure they were going to hell for what they got up to at the stones.
‘The Lord helps those who help themselves,’ Viola told them as reassurance. ‘It says so in the bible.’
‘That’s not from the bible.’ Jade-Marie had shaken her head and pulled a face.
‘It sounds like it should be, but it isn’t,’ said Anna, always ready with a footnote. ‘There’s generally more scripture to support the idea that the Lord helps the helpless, actually.’
‘Well, that’s also you, isn’t it?’ Viola suggested.
‘Make your mind up, will you, coycrock!’ This was Britta – the word coycrock a term of affection in her mouth.
In their lower moments, the girls would go so far as to ask themselves if they deserved it – if, in some way, what was happening to them was punishment for a sin. Viola would never stand for this line of talk.
‘So, in that case, it’s my fault that my dad and brother were killed?’
‘Maybe,’ said Anna dispassionately.
‘No!’ exclaimed Jade-Marie. ‘No one is saying that!’ She clutched Viola to her, mothering her with a stroke of the head.
‘Then, what sin is it,’ Viola asked, ‘the one you think you’re being punished for?’
Britta immediately had the answer. ‘The sin of being a girl.’
From there, Viola suggested the harmonies. It was something active, positive, loud. It would demonstrate their holiness to the island and, more importantly from the girls’ point of view, God would hear them.
Viola had an ear for music. In the school and church choirs, she’d sung solos, boarding minibuses to perform at events across the country, returning with a hoarse voice, mostly from hollering along to the Now compilations on the journey back. She missed it.
When the mothers seized upon the girls’ singing display, thrusting them to the front of chapel, to show how good, how heavenly, their daughters were in the aftermath of Peter Cedars’ death, Viola had to ask, ‘So, your mums, they know?’
This brought about desperate exclamations of no and you must never say anything and I couldn’t bear it if my mum thought of me like that and they think this is just about spells.
Not a soul on the island knew what was going on except them, they said. Viola countered this, forced them to concede that some people might; that they could be too scared or too toadying to do anything but look away. This was when Miss Cedars’ name would bob to the surface – the main villain. Oh, she definitely knows, they’d stress, it’s not like we haven’t tried to tell her enough times. They mocked her with unkind impressions, especially of the way she clung to Mr Hailey. She’s brainwashing him, they’d say, making him believe it’s all okay.
Viola couldn’t help but think that telling the truth would be the simplest way to end it all. We wouldn’t be believed, was their response, even with our mums onside, it would be buried all over again, we would be punished even more. Viola tried to imagine herself in the same situation – her mother would be the very last person she’d go to, and after her, who was left?
Then, in a way, Viola was in their situation. She had offered her body to a pervert in the woods in return for his slaughtering an animal that she was too squeamish to slaughter herself. She saw how easy it was to lose sight of the line – the one that said, on this side is the victim and on this one, the perpetrator. She saw how hard it was to see yourself as blameless.
Viola would have to be the one to do it, or else she would join that list of potential eye-averters and collaborators – the people who just did nothing. She
would be as bad as Miss Cedars. In some twisted fashion, it had also occurred to Viola, that if she did do it, she would better understand the girls’ pain, and that would bring them closer together.
The finding of the heart, the girls’ curfew, the death of the gamekeeper – all of this gave Viola a hiatus in which to prepare.
She visited Saul Cooper in his back office at the Customs House. She had a plan.
He would make her a cup of tea, and then, while he was in the middle of a talk on the various capabilities of his radio equipment, a subject in which Viola had expressed an interest as a pretext for her visit, she would throw herself at him. As practice. So she wasn’t completely unprepared for what she was about to do at the stones. So that her first time was with someone kind.
This is how it would go: she’d would move from the chair to the camp bed and pat the space beside her, ask to see what was in his sketchbook and then… What would she do? She would close her eyes and kiss him, focus on his positive qualities, imagine he was physically someone else, younger, substitute his weaselly face for that of a celebrity, if Viola could remember what any of them looked like without a working phone or TV. She could trust him, she thought, to be gentle.
‘Mr Cooper,’ she said, interrupting his lecture on Marine VHF, how it bounced its signal from mast to mast to gain distance across the ocean.
‘Saul,’ he corrected, which was good, a move towards familiarity.
She looked up at him, standing at the counter in front of that great sea-filled window, his fingers resting on the buttons of one of the communications devices, eager to carry on with his lecture – and Viola lost all courage.
He really was kind and didn’t deserve to be used. He deserved to be happy, so she found herself blurting out, ‘I think you’d make a good dad.’ The saying of it made her squirm; how swiftly her thoughts had travelled from one idea to another, how easily she could embarrass herself.
He gave a quick splutter of laughter. ‘Oh, yeah, what makes you say that?’
‘Well, Leah said it, actually.’
Viola was stunned by how easily these fabrications came, one lie after another. Why was she doing this? Because we don’t like Leah Cedars hanging around with Mr Hailey, she told herself. Viola could be the one to put an end to that. Saul deserved better than Leah, but what the heart wants, the heart wants. Viola was a cherub, Saul had said so himself. Viola could play Cupid.
‘That’s where Leah’s mind is at right now,’ Viola continued, feeling a certain light-headedness to be talking this way, so far from the truth. ‘She’s all about settling down and having babies, and of course she wants to do that with someone from the island. And, well, after what you did for her at the Council meeting the other night…’
The man beamed, literally beamed, light from the window glancing off his skin – a child awarded a gold star. Viola waited for guilt to stab – it didn’t. No one was being hurt, after all. Having Leah would make Saul happy. Having Mr Hailey free from Leah’s grasp would please the Eldest Girls.
Saul’s expression changed then, a shift to something more meditative.
‘I’ve been thinking about how you like to wander about the island with your dog,’ he said carefully, measuring out his words, ‘and I’ve been thinking about how Leah likes you and how you’re also friends with those girls.’
Viola put down her tea, sloshing it onto the desk. Was he about to point out how incompatible these friendships were? Was he going to catch her in her lie? Dot started to lick at the tea that dripped from desk to floor.
‘So, I was wondering if I could give you this.’ He plucked a black radio from a charging station on the window ledge and offered it to Viola. She turned it over in her hands, twisting at one of the dials.
‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘leave it on channel eight. You’ll reach me on that one.’
Then he got down on his knees to unplug the charging station, wrapping the cable through the prongs of the plug and handing this piece of kit to Viola too.
‘What’s this for?’ she asked.
‘I wondered if you could keep an eye on…’
‘The girls?’ Viola put in.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Just like Leah said, but…’ He drove his hands into the pockets of his black trousers, took them out again, twitched at the epaulettes of his shirt, then at the end of his tie. ‘But also an eye on Leah, if you see her.’ Viola nodded slowly – this was the crux of it. ‘Report back, you know. Tell me anything that seems… I don’t know, worrying.’ He couldn’t look Viola in the eye.
‘Spy on her?’ she clarified. Before adding, meanly, ‘Spy on your girlfriend?’
‘No, no, no, no, that’s not… It’s not like I have to… That’s not what I’m…’ He pinched at the whiskery region of his mouth. ‘You’re a sensible one, a smart one, I reckon, despite your death wish around the water, and those girls that Leah thinks need protecting, well… I can see her trying to talk to them, you know, go up to those stones once their curfew’s up. Without telling me. And after everything she said at that meeting and everything that’s happened in between…’
Viola didn’t really know what had happened in between. She had not seen Michael or the girls for some time now; she had been living on an island within this island. Viola had drawn some conclusions from the alarming splash of red paint across the front of Leah Cedars’ cottage. Punishment for her sins, was the phrase that came distastefully to mind. The men of the Council had been correct on one point – Leah Cedars didn’t know what she was talking about in that meeting room. She could not have meant what she said about taking the girls under her wing, or was at least being disingenuous. The Eldest Girls had made it clear that woman was not on their side.
‘What it is, you see,’ Saul stumbled on, ‘is that, I think Leah – and you, naturally – you both need protecting.’
Viola nodded stiffly and looked warily at the radio in her lap. More protection, more safety.
Saul took a steadying breath, came to the point. ‘Those girls have proved themselves to be, not witches but capable of… willing to… I mean, we can’t be sure what they’ll do next.’
An urge for violence rose within Viola, a desire to throw the radio back at him, let it strike him across the temple, bring blood. Maybe the man wasn’t kind, after all.
She would have done it too, hurled that radio at him, if a memory of Seb hadn’t come, bright and immediate as a message from the past – they are on the PlayStation, Seb coaching her through a new game, telling her to collect everything she finds as she goes – wood, medicine, an axe, a radio… ‘What will I ever use it for?’ Viola is asking. ‘Who knows!’ Seb says, wide-eyed before the screen, his tongue working at one corner of his mouth. ‘Whatever the game throws at you next.’
So, she let Saul teach her how to press the button and speak into the thing, and told him thank you, pocketing the radio as she left.
When she finally caught up with Michael, some days later at the shell arch, they spent their initial moments together in silence, picking at the render, trying to free a periwinkle or a dog whelk. He was still sulking about the way she had spoken to him at Peter Cedars’ funeral, but Viola wanted him to apologise first, for suggesting that she was some kind of murderer. It was Viola who broke the stand-off, desperate as she was for the latest on the lovely Miss Cedars. Michael’s eyes gleamed as he imparted this drama to new ears.
‘Suspended!’ he announced with dark joy, explaining how Mr Crane had told the pupils at the end of chapel one morning that Miss Cedars had decided to take an ‘extended break’. After that, the teacher was seen ranting in the streets on at least two occasions before disappearing: ‘To her mum’s probably. They’re both as mad as each other.’
‘Who threw the paint at her house?’ Viola asked.
‘Reckon she did it herself,’ said Michael. ‘She’s completely dotty now.’
He looked down at the dog. ‘No offence to the Dotty here present,’ he said, and Viola fumed inwar
dly at his willingness to say sorry to an animal and not to her.
They fell back into their shell-picking silence and Viola knew she must act soon, else her confidence would slip away.
‘You know how you said the Eldest Girls were looking for boys to have sex with at the Sisters’ Stones?’
She was off; it would be done.
‘Yeah?’ He tried for a casual response – he failed.
‘Well, it could be you, and if that’s the case then you’ll need to get in some practice, so you don’t make a complete idiot of yourself.’
The boy gulped. Viola could see his mind leaping frantically from one thought to the next.
‘Practice?’ he said. ‘How?’
‘I’ll do it.’ She too tried for a casual response – she succeeded. ‘I don’t mind.’
Then, before she could question the sense of what she was doing, she launched herself forward and kissed him. They worked their mouths against one another for a while. His lips were dry, uncoordinated, the movement both forceful and boring. Viola opened her mouth and felt him resist this new development. She pulled away.
‘You’re supposed to use your tongue,’ she said.
‘O-okay,’ the boy stammered, and as they leant in to resume their kiss, Viola probed his mouth in demonstration. He clumsily replicated.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘put your hand up my jumper’ – an offer he didn’t need to be given twice.
This was as far as Viola had ever gone, but despite Michael’s vast stores of encyclopaedic knowledge, she figured she was still the expert; she knew what was supposed to come next. She made herself do it – reach down and clutch at the front of his school trousers, feeling for the bulge that was supposed to be there, and was.
It was like a jolt of a thousand volts to the boy. He leapt to his feet. The leather satchel that was still slung across his body snagged him at the neck, and he readjusted it primly, pulling it forwards to mask his crotch.
