by Julie Mayhew
‘What are you doing?’ he yelped.
‘I thought… You said you wanted to… I thought we were going to… have sex?’
He blustered and scoffed. He was embarrassed, she could tell.
‘Well, that’s as may be,’ he said, playing the adult, ‘but that’s not how it happens. You were doing it all wrong.’
‘Sorry,’ she found herself saying reflexively, immediately doubting herself.
‘No, that wasn’t right at all,’ he went on, growing in assurance.
She straightened her jumper and the bra beneath it, humiliated. ‘Why wasn’t it?’ she dared to ask. ‘Why wasn’t it right?’
‘You are supposed to be more ladylike,’ he said, speaking with utmost confidence now. ‘Sex is something a man does to a woman, not the other way around.’
THE BOOK OF LEAH
It was a blessing in disguise. The end of something is always the beginning of something else. They had gifted me time to focus, to renew my belief in the lectures I delivered to departing friends – Lark is not the problem, because we are Lark. We are its future!
This was my opportunity to make it so.
I had to accept that teaching was no way for me to shape the young, just as Saul Cooper, Robert Signal and Father Daniel had discovered that a seat on the Council was no way for them to steer the island. We were relying on old systems, creaking at the joints, manipulated and used. It was time to build something new, if we were ever to be rid of the rot, to be free from our very bad apples.
To my enemies, I was a delusional woman who shouted in the street, a woman too scared to stay in her own cottage because of a splash of red paint. I could be easily dismissed, and they would never see me coming.
My mother and I began to pack. We knew someone would come soon to tell us that our tenure at the gamekeeper’s lodge was up. We didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing us taken by surprise. By the time that Council dogsbody arrived, grubby fingers on some piece of spurious paperwork, everything of ours would be in boxes, ready to go.
‘But where will we go?’ my mother asked, as we wrapped artichoke-shaped candle-holders and bubbled-glass vases. I lifted down my framed teacher training certificate from the living-room wall, revealing a rectangle of light-starved wallpaper. I tried not to think about whether I would use this qualification again. I hushed the echo of Paul in my head asking, Will you actually be a real teacher?
‘Do you mean, where do we go for now,’ I said, ‘or for good?’
‘Both.’ She had plucked from the mantelpiece the postcard Paul sent on his arrival on the mainland. It came on the August ship, in the last post of 2017. It was a photograph of two cliff faces and the sea between. Jaunty white script across the front declared, And so the adventure begins. On the back, he’d written a phone number starting 0208. London. From isolation, he’d thrown himself into a city of millions.
‘Well, if we need to,’ I told her, ‘you can come and live in the harbour cottage with me, and then –’
She leapt in. ‘And then we’ll catch the April ship?’ She was holding the postcard in both hands, pressing it against her chest.
I was shocked.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Leah,’ she said. ‘I have no one now. All those women, they don’t care about me, they weren’t true friends, and I will not give them the satisfaction of shrivelling up into some reclusive old hag like Margaritte Carruthers.’
I could have replied, But you have me, Mum. I should have defended Margaritte. I might have pointed out that Paul clearly cared less than the women of Lark; he’d sent no further mail after that postcard, no news, no fixed address. He still didn’t know that his own father had died. My mother had gone to the Customs House to use the international phone, standing out in the bluster at the cusp of the dogleg jetty, so as to be in clear sight of a satellite, weeping as she punched in the digits on the back of his postcard. Yet again she was greeted by an automated voice saying, Sorry, the number you have dialled has not been recognised, please hang up and try again.
‘It’s the same with my Tom,’ Hope Ainsley had told my mother at the funeral, ‘too busy on the mainland now to speak to his old mum’ – as if this self-pity would console her.
I didn’t remind my mother of any of this. There were more than two months ahead of us before the ships started running again, plenty of time to change her mind. I put down the jug I was wrapping, the one with the kingfisher handle that she liked to fill with daffodils in our brief spring, and I hugged her, told her everything was going to be all right, that there would be a place for us on Lark, a better place. I said it because she was crying, and I said it because I wanted to believe that it was true.
On February 14th, as my mother and I sat opposite one another at the kitchen island drinking tea, there came a knock. We looked up from our books and exchanged nods. My mother stood, brushed herself down and patted at her hair. Susannah Cedars was adamant that she would look presentable, nay, majestic, when our eviction came. We would be observed walking away down that hill, bags in hand, lackeys carrying our possessions in our wake. We’d been careful to box and seal as much as we could, so the detail of our lives would not be on display, picked over.
That lamp will have cost her a pretty penny in shipping.
A frying pan so big! No wonder he had a heart attack.
I expected the Cater brothers to be standing there as messengers, or perhaps we would suffer the ignominy of Luke Signal informing us that the lodge was now his and that us ladies were to show good grace and step aside. Mary Ahearn had, of course, capably taken over the management of the land after the funeral; she had, in some ways, taken over years ago, picking up the slack as my father’s health deteriorated. Yet we still did not know if she would officially be named his successor. After my suspension from school, and her daughter’s disgrace, the idea of Lark appointing its first-ever female gamekeeper seemed ever more absurd. The elder Signal boy was growing daily in confidence and wore a curl to his lip that suggested he knew something that we didn’t.
When I opened the door, there was no one there – no Luke, no Mark or Andy Cater.
In the porch lay an object, the shape of it making me recoil at first. I picked it up. It wasn’t completely smooth, the chiselled scoring of its creation was still visible, nor was it entirely even in shape, though symmetry had probably been the intention. I liked it precisely because of this unfinished and irregular quality. It was a St Valentine’s Day gift. A carved wooden heart.
When word reached Ben of what had happened at the Council meeting, he had visited me at my cottage in the way that he had used to – by tapping on the back door at midnight. We’d kissed in the kitchen, begun to tear at each other’s clothes right there. I felt like a prisoner with access to their lover for just one night; I had to drink my fill.
Lying upstairs in the mess of one another, he said to me: ‘I need to keep my job.’ He pulled me closer, those narrow eyes of his darting left and right, herding me into his gaze. ‘I have nothing here if I lose that. You at least have this roof over your head, you have your mother, her place, friends …’
‘History,’ I added, in agreement, but yet again I was hearing a person I loved reel off an inventory of all the things they had with no mention of me. Did it go without saying that my name was on their list, or was I of no value at all?
‘I think you need to stay there too,’ I said. ‘We need someone good on the inside. You could stay close to Ruth.’
He nodded. ‘So, if anyone asks …’
‘You can tell them we’re over,’ I said.
He had grinned at this. ‘You’re dumped, Leah Cedars,’ he told me, then he’d pushed his mouth onto mine, pulled his body on top of me again.
I wanted to give him a gift in return for the heart, leave something on his doorstep. This was the ritual of teenage crushes, something I’d missed out on. I felt a juvenile thrill at the idea of what I might do. I waited until my mother was asleep before pulling on
the bobbled sweater and the wide-legged trousers, then heading out into the night.
Back at the harbour cottage, I felt like a trespasser in my own home, the steep, dark stairs creaking beneath my tread, the bedroom as smooth and still as a stage set. I pulled open the top drawer of my dresser and retrieved the phone, placing it on the windowsill and plugging it in. I watched it glow to life and beyond, through the window, I saw shadows shift along the harbour wall. I moved closer to the glass. Cats? Foxes? No. People.
I jerked backwards, flipping the phone face down to mask its light; I didn’t want to be seen. Red paint had done me no harm, but what would come next? A brick, fire, men themselves?
I took a breath and peered out again. The figures were moving away from the harbour, towards the smokehouse. Not men – three girls, one of them with blonde hair, picked out by the shine of the waning moon. The Eldest Girls were breaking their curfew, walking swiftly towards the track that led up past the East Bay. That route would take them towards the farmstead, to Viola, or else through Cable’s Wood and on to the stones. I felt a vicarious sense of triumph that they were not doing as they were told, but also I was fearful for them. Didn’t they realise they could fall from a cliff edge in the disorienting dark, or be caught as prey?
As the phone gained its charge, I brushed my hair and put on some lipstick, smudging some of the dark cherry redness onto my cheeks.
There was a way to take a picture of yourself, to flip the lens. This was a ‘thing’ on the mainland, Ben had told me – a phrase he used all the time. One of us in the staff room would mention a seemingly common happening on the island, remark on someone’s behaviour or describe a particular type of food we’d eaten, and Ben would chip in with, ‘Is that a thing, then?’
Back home, he said, the kids at school – girls mostly – took endless photos of themselves, pouting, posing, deleting, retaking, filtering, embellishing, turning themselves into alien beings. Then they posted these images online, beginning the desperate wait for approval. Ben had commented more than once on how astounding it was, how strange, to be in a school – to be in a place – where everyone wasn’t staring downwards all the time at a device in their hands. People looked up when they walked about on Lark, they considered one another.
‘Perhaps too much,’ I’d replied.
To which he’d countered, ‘Better than doing it anonymously or via an online profile that is curated and contrived.’
I assured him that it was still a ‘thing’ to be curated and contrived on Lark, just with no help whatsoever from a mobile phone.
I took off all my clothes and contemplated my naked body in the mirror of the wardrobe, the pale, soft flow of me. Did my body make sense, join up? Was it sufficient, plenty? The only pictures of me as an adult were the ones on the wall of the school corridor, in work skirt and blouse, the pupils the main focus. I didn’t know if I was beautiful: I’d never considered the question before, not properly. I’d never had to. I knew that the blackness of my hair made me special, a pure catch, and that had always been enough. Until it wasn’t.
Standing in front of that mirror at midnight, like the evil queen in the story, it was suddenly very important for me to know: was I the fairest of them all? Would Ben still want me if we had met on the mainland with its bounty of women? The idea that I was desirable made me feel exhilarated; the idea that I was not, was a precipice looming at my feet. Was this the ‘thing’ I was to grasp about photographing yourself, the intoxicating cocktail of vanity and shame?
I detached the phone from its charger, lay on the bed, flipped the lens and took the pictures.
The Billet House lay beyond the stables and the dog kennels. I took the brick path through the estate, torch in one hand, the phone in the other. Every so often I would accidentally nudge the home button, casting a ghostly blue light across the scene as I made Ben’s lock screen blink into life. It was a photo of him sandwiched between his mother and sister, all three of them open-mouthed, laughing.
Doubt crept up on me slowly as I headed north. Are you sure he wants to see you like that? Doubt slipped its arm across my shoulders and leant in to ask the burning question: Are you sure you can trust him with those photos?
I’d read articles from the mainland, accompanied by studio shots of frowning women, stories of how naked pictures taken on phones, intended for just one pair of eyes, had spread like a virus. Would my pictures find their way into that fabled stash of dirty magazines and videotapes that were rumoured to pass from man to man on the island? Would Saul Cooper get his hands on them, giving him even more of a hold over me?
I stopped on the path and typed in Ben’s passcode, unlocking the phone. I searched the bright squares for the one that would allow me to look at my pictures again, to reassess. A tessellation of me swooped onto the screen, thumbnails of my face, my body – all those different versions of Leah.
Then above me, more naked images. Not of me.
Dread flared hot in my throat, my limbs slackened. Mainland girls, from before, I thought. Then, desperately, Please let them be mainland girls, please let them be mainland girls…
But also I could hear Ben telling me how he really needed to keep his job. I could see three faces scowling at me across the school canteen, and a phone being slid onto the dusty top of a bookcase in the Billet House. Just out of reach, beneath a bed, lay a pair of bloodied horns.
I clicked on the images, blurry, gritty, some obscured by a finger or a smudge of green, the flash blanching their bare skin as they shielded themselves – not posing, not pouting. Then the frame was trained on one girl alone, progressing closer and closer to the lens with each swipe of my thumb, a white nightdress being brought up to cover her body, higher, higher, her breasts now obscured.
Viola.
Viola and the Eldest Girls.
I asked for nothing in return when I dropped that phone into the depths of the well. The deal was that you surrendered something you held dear in return for knowledge, and I had not fulfilled my side of the bargain. A phone was worthless on Lark with no signal to serve it. The conversation I’d recorded was of no interest to anyone. The versions of me it held were stupid and gullible.
The phone landed with a distant crack against the piles of gold and the bones of all those forsaken wives.
I knew what I had to do next. Ask once again for forgiveness.
I cut across the openness of estate land, the moon guiding me, then onwards under the cover of Cable’s Wood, where I came upon a deer and her young, startling them to their feet, meeting the dark blaze of the mother’s eye before she was swallowed by the trees.
The wood thinned. The moon took charge again and I practised my words for when I arrived. Forgive me, forgive me, for I did not know what I was doing. I could hear their voices above the boom and shudder of the waves clashing with the north cliffs below.
I could hear the timbre of a man.
My instinct was to run back to the lodge, to my mother, but I could no longer be that version of myself – the one who looked away. I ran towards those voices, towards my final disappointment, my shins slicing through the ferns, until I caught sight of the Eldest Girls, huddling at the base of the hollow central stone.
Viola was separate from them, shaking, half-naked, standing just outside the boundary that was not to be crossed by men. A figure was stripping her of her clothes – a figure wearing the spiralling horns of a goat.
FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018
Leah Cedars is always in Viola’s way. She has a skill for it, these untimely appearances. She stands now in the middle of the brick path, her face ugly with tears. She is the troll on the bridge. You shall not pass.
‘How could you?’ Leah wails as she makes her way downhill, as she comes for Viola. ‘How could you do this to me?’
Viola exhales in disgust. This is not the first time she has heard Leah shriek these words. It is the woman’s most nauseating feature, her ability to make everything about her.
Viola backs
away, calculating a new course to the Big House. She can’t be wasting time arguing with a hysterical Leah Cedars.
‘It was nothing to do with you,’ Viola says, looking left and right, evaluating her exits. ‘You should have stayed out of it. It wasn’t your battle.’
‘And what made it yours?’ Leah Cedars’ voice gathers its spikes. ‘You’re not from here. This isn’t your problem to solve. You’re nothing but a coycrock, an unlucky one – that piece of superstition proved true, didn’t it? Just look at you, just look at what you’ve done!’
‘I’ve done what all of you should have done a long time ago.’ Viola feels sure in this statement, but Leah Cedars is shaking her head.
‘I’ve been to the stones. I’ve seen with my own eyes. I’ve seen …’ Leah doubles over, sobbing. ‘You killed him!’ She manages between shuddering breaths. ‘You killed him!’
It seems hypocritical to Viola, this expression of horror, this melodrama. She has heard Leah threaten violence, murder too – and convincingly so. Viola closes the gap between them. Why should she be the one to retreat? The uphill path is the quickest way to the Big House. Leah Cedars will just have to get out of her way.
‘That’s right,’ Viola says, walking decisively towards the sometime teacher. ‘Blame everything on me, on the Eldest Girls. Tell us we brought it all on ourselves.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ Leah snaps. The need to be right sobers her. ‘You know that’s not what I’m saying. I did everything I could to help you.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ says Viola, brushing past.
Leah Cedars is selfish; Viola was never sucked in to believing otherwise. All Leah cared about was her public image and revenge for the way she’d been treated. All she wanted was Benjamin Hailey, no matter what he’d done.
‘Why lie to me?’ Leah snatches Viola’s arm, looking her up and down: the muddy boots, the pyjama trousers, the torn nylon of her mother’s coat.
‘I told you there was a body,’ says Viola. She allows herself to be smug. Leah the proud deceiver has been deceived in return. ‘That’s all. You just filled in the rest.’
