The Opposite of Amber

by Gillian Philip

  For Sarah Molloy

  (and for Jamie & Lucy,

  because it always is)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  counting games

  Summer

  One

  Two

  Three

  counting games

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  counting games

  Nine

  Ten

  Winter

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Summer

  counting games

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Winter

  Twenty-two

  counting games

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Gillian Philip

  Imprint

  counting games

  They found the fifth girl right after the snow melted.

  There hadn’t been a body for a while, and there had never been two in the one place before. He’d left them all over the country, up till then. All over the country and all over the years.

  The fifth girl was caught under the water, under the bank, where the flow was fast and it washed everything away, all the traces. That’s why they could say for sure it was the same man: because it was the same neck of the woods as the fourth girl, and because she was in water too.

  The fourth girl they’d found in the sea. Not far out. They found her bumping gently against the rocks, tumbled in the shallows, her hair all tangled with green weed like a mermaid. A child might have thought she was a mermaid, with her pale greenish skin rippled in watery sunlight, but it wasn’t quite summer, so it wasn’t a child who found her, and everyone said that was a blessing at least, and it could have been worse. The dog that stood and barked and raced up and down and raised his hackles and refused to fetch his stick – at least he belonged to a retired lady doctor who might be assumed to have seen a bit of life, and a bit of death to boot. And that was a mercy.

  It seemed less of a mercy when they found who she was, when they saw their mermaid was still a child herself, or very nearly. And later, a good bit later, they said she was a mistake. When they saw it all more clearly, they said he’d got it terribly wrong with the fourth girl: it was a double tragedy because she was a normal girl, she wasn’t like the others, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it seemed like that had shocked him into sanity for a bit, because he didn’t kill anyone else for a long time, or not that they ever discovered.

  In the end, though, it seemed he couldn’t stop himself. In fact they wondered if he’d had to go and do it again to make it right, do it properly this time and to the right person, and that was why there was a fifth girl in the same town.

  Because he got it right the fifth time – I heard a woman say so when I sat behind her on the bus last week – he got it right and went back to his pattern, and the fifth girl was just a prostitute again. And to keep it right, to make it the same, he put her in the water too.

  Not the same water, that’s true; but it’s a good idea, if you don’t want to leave traces, to put a girl in water. It’s the opposite of amber.

  Not that the fifth girl wasn’t quite well-preserved, because the place where he left her was winter water, crazed with ice-feathers and dusted with snow. The traces from her body were gone, the ones that said his name, but she had an extra skin of ice that protected her. The water’s surface was an icy coffin lid, like the one that covered Snow White, and she looked perfect like Snow White, or nearly.

  Not altogether, of course. You can’t look so very perfect, and nobody’s kiss was bringing her back, but she looked as good as she could. Her blonde hair was full of ice and it glittered when they pulled her out into the sun; and quite honestly, the man who found her looked so pale and drained and shocked to stillness, she looked almost better than he did.

  Summer

  One

  ‘Nobody pushed him,’ said Jinn. ‘It’s nobody’s fault but his. Silly arse.’

  This was simplistic beyond even my big sister’s standards, but I didn’t say so.

  I wasn’t inclined to say much about anything. The Alex Jerrold incident had only confirmed this policy. Open your mouth – and I know this isn’t a nice image – you open a can of worms. Keep it shut, and you are less likely to make some tosspot throw himself off a roof.

  You see, the thing about Alex Jerrold is that he might have jumped anyway.

  The thing about me is that I’ll never know.

  This is because I’m never going to ask him. I could ask him, because even jumping off a roof he couldn’t get right. He’s lying there in his parents’ house like a broken doll, waiting for me to ask him. But I wouldn’t like his answer.

  I didn’t want to discuss Alex Jerrold and his incompetent suicide attempt, and I didn’t know why Jinn had to bring it up, not on a day like this. We were watching the tide race upriver but there weren’t any benches free in the Dot Cumming Memorial Park, so we were on our backsides in the grass. We didn’t mind because the grass was dry, and the black-glossed benches looked almost sticky in the heat; on one of them, just to the right of us, a woman’s flowery bottom had spread as if it had begun to melt. There was a good chance she was fused to the wood and would never get up again. She was that big. It was that hot.

  Jinn had got us ice creams and a bottle of cider that was already losing its refrigerator chill. My cone had a flake: I didn’t want it but I couldn’t exactly chuck it in the river, not while Jinn was looking, not when she’d spent extra on it just to make me happy. She had bitten off the pointy end of her cone, the way she always did, and used it to scoop out a miniature ice cream from the top. I watched her put the baby cone whole into her mouth and crunch it, shutting her eyes to chew. I loved watching her do that; it was my favourite part of ice cream. That was what made me happy, not chocolate flake. Jinn had forgotten I’d grown up. Also, she always kind of forgot I was too old for ice cream. Which was great.

  A fighter jet from the airbase screamed overhead, followed a couple of seconds later by another, but the deafening roar faded fast and left me with no excuse for keeping my mouth shut. Jinn wasn’t saying any more because she knew I’d have to say something in the end. I didn’t want to disappoint her so at last I said, ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not what, Rubes?’

  ‘Not his fault.’ My tongue stuck to my mouth. It was the heat. I licked at my ice cream. God, it was hot. ‘There was a few people –’

  ‘Shouting at him to jump?’ She shrugged. ‘Oh yeah, I know. They didn’t mean it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘And anyway,’ she said again, ‘nobody pushed him.’

  My mouth was dry already from too much talking. ‘He wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Jinn cocked her head at me. ‘You weren’t inside his head.’

  Shows how much you know, I wanted to say. ‘Why would they tell him to jump if they didn’t mean it?’

  ‘Dunno. Got a bit up themselves? Got excited? Wanted to impress somebody?’

  I gave Jinn a sharp look, but she didn’t return it. Jinn had never asked me right out about Alex. I think she was respecting my privacy or something. Waiting for me to want to talk about it. Well, she’d die of boredom waiting for that.

  She sucke
d the last of the melted ice cream through the hole in the bottom of her cone, threw it towards the river, and flopped back with a happy sigh. A seagull caught the scrap of cone before it hit the water. That reminded me of Alex Jerrold, but then everything did. Nothing dived through blue space to catch Alex, white wings slicing the deadly emptiness. Alex landed.

  I sat up sharply, punched in the stomach by a visual memory. ‘Can we do something else?’

  ‘Like what?’ Jinn opened one eye.

  ‘Beach?’

  ‘You can’t sit still these days,’ she complained.

  No, indeed. But then if it was up to Jinn, we’d never move our arses from July till September; we’d just lie in the grass, her telling stories, me listening. Jinn loved summer. Nothing bad happened in summer, she said.

  She had a point. Lara died in winter, because it was dark. And this last winter, of course, Alex Jerrold jumped off a roof and broke two vertebrae, a femur and both hips. Mind you, that wasn’t something you could blame on the light conditions. Everybody could see fine.

  I was itching to get to the beach now, but for a while Jinn fooled around, refusing to get up, going all heavy and limp when I tried to drag her. At last, when I could stop laughing, I prised her off the grass and we sauntered towards the river, Jinn swinging the cider bottle at her side. It was a bit of a hike. At Breakness the river was wide and shallow, flowing in a wide extended loop that cut off the beach from the town. The pretty high street had shops on one side only and the little Dot Cumming park on the other. After that, in the VisitScotland brochures, it looked like you could step right on to the beach, but in real life there was the broad curve and delta of the river mouth. Only beyond the river could you get to the peninsula of dunes and the flat white beach and the sea.

  Oh, we had to work for our beach summer in Breakness, we did. So did the tourists, which was probably why they stopped coming. That and cheap flights to St Lucia, of course. At Breakness you found a parking place in the crammed High Street, unpacked your barbecue and your windbreak and your Swingball, and then you either staggered round to the rickety bridge, or you took off your shoes and waded across. Life, if you weren’t born here, was basically too short.

  At this point in the day, though, the water only came halfway up our calves, so wade is what Jinn and I did. Because the tide was surging inland, the flow towards the sea wasn’t too strong, but the two currents were squabbling and the surface was churned into violent little waves. My feet sank in the sand. It was so soft it was almost like floating; no hard rock to ground on. And compared to the cold grip of the river on my ankles, the yielding sand was warm between my toes. I loved that sensation.

  ‘Watch out for the quicksand,’ said Jinn.

  OK, I loved that sensation up to a point. I shoved her, annoyed that she’d broken the floating spell, and she stumbled and giggled.

  ‘Oh, Rubes, there’s no quicksand here. You know that fine.’

  ‘I know,’ I lied. All the same I hurried through the river and out, splashing my rolled-up jeans. What did she know? Quicksand lived in estuaries. It could just appear. I was fairly sure about that.

  Neither of us was in the mood for walking far, so as soon as we’d scrambled up through the sandhills, we sat down to look across the sea, wriggling our backsides into the shifting dune to make ourselves semi-permanent. Jinn took a long thirsty swig of cider before passing the bottle to me. I tilted it to my lips but it was warm and I never was crazy about the taste. Jinn took it back quite happily.

  ‘I shouldn’t encourage you anyway. You’re underage.’

  Ice cream and cider had made me sleepy. The sunlight was an unrelenting white blaze, the glitter and thump and rush of the waves hypnotic. There were swimmers and bodyboarders in the water, and kids on the shoreline, emaciated by the dazzle. I could hear the fizz and thump of someone’s radio beyond a striped windbreak. God’s sake, why did they need a windbreak in this weather? A kite sagged on the end of its line, refusing to rise further in the windless air, hovering, then nosediving to earth.

  I wished Jinn didn’t have to go back to work in the afternoon. I wished she was still at school so we had the whole holidays together like we used to. Shit happened, for sure, but I objected more than anything to shit’s bad timing. If Lara hadn’t died when she did, Jinn could maybe have gone to university and then she’d have had the holidays too, same as me, or nearly.

  ‘Nah,’ Jinn would say. ‘I’d’ve had to work the holidays. That’s what students do.’

  True. And anyway, thinking of possible good outcomes from Lara’s silly death made me feel kind of bad.

  I had to keep reminding myself that I missed her. She was flaky and impossible and absolutely the most incompetent mother I could imagine, but she was there, and she was fun, and she made absolutely the best hot chocolate in the universe: the kind with marshmallows and squirty cream so thick and tottering, you could hardly get your mouth to the chocolate underneath. And the cream is so cold out of the fridge, it’s almost a shock when the chocolate below it is hot. And that actually is the absolute best hot chocolate, though she would never have wanted to hear me say that, because Lara took the mickey out of people who overused words like ‘absolutely’ and ‘actually’. I didn’t overuse any words, but I’m not sure she was so crazy about that either.

  Hey, she couldn’t have it both ways.

  Actually my mother’s name was Lorraine. She didn’t like that name (she didn’t like ‘Mum’ either) so she insisted on being called Lara (in honour of Lara Croft, not the Russian babe in Dr Zhivago). If she’d fallen out with someone, and whoever it was wanted to wind her up, they’d go back to calling her Lorraine. This would drive her demented, so she’d cut the culprit dead in the street, and the spat would become a miniature feud till both sides got over their dudgeon and so-and-so started calling her Lara again.

  I liked my mother’s new name and I was a little jealous that she hadn’t saved it for me, but instead I was named after one of her favourite country and western songs. This was not a bad outcome: if I’d been a boy I was going to be Elvis, and I’m not sure Elvis Carmichael works.

  Jinn’s real name was Jacintha, and she hated it. Jacintha was a character in one of Lara’s favourite soaps: some martyr of a female doctor with an eternally unfulfilled crush on a male one. Jacintha the Doormat was still aching after this man when I started watching Medics at about the age of seven: that’s how long the scriptwriters had spun it out. A couple of years ago Jacintha the Doormat finally fell under a bus and died in the arms of the devastated thick bloke, which was a relief all round. When she was eleven Jinn swore to me, in the light of an LED pen-torch under the bedclothes, that she would never follow the Path of Jacintha, and that she was changing her name forthwith. We sealed the pact with blood pricked from our thumbs. Lara didn’t mind this act of rebellion, since even she had tired of Jacintha the Doormat by then. She didn’t even mind the thumbprints of blood on the sheets, but then Lara never did mind household technicalities.

  So Lorraine became Lara, and Jacintha became Jinn. I was the only one in my family who kept my name the same. Ruby Intacta.

  I had my eyes closed against the sea-glare by now, but I wasn’t asleep, so when a shadow blocked the sun, I knew it. As soon as the vivid rash-red inside my eyelids was gone, so was the day’s warmth, and a shiver ran across my skin like a whisper. I didn’t especially want to open my eyes, but I was too nosy not to. Rubbing the prickling goosebumps from my arms, I blinked and propped myself up.

  I was the one in his shadow, but he wasn’t looking at me. It was my air he’d sucked the warmth out of, not Jinn’s, but I might as well not have been there at all. Jinn, still in the sunlight, had her hand up to shield her eyes, and she was smiling at him.

  As my eyes adjusted I could see why. There wasn’t much I could see of his face but at fifteen I knew a nice outline when I saw one.

  ‘It’s muck, that stuff.’

  ‘Aye. Horrible. Want some?’ Jinn wiggled the b
ottle.

  She and the boy were talking like I’d come in in the middle of a conversation, so maybe I had been asleep after all. As he slumped in the sand beside Jinn, I twisted round to get a better look at his face.

  Not all-get-out handsome, and a bit skinny, but his golden eyes were sparky in that you-know-you-want-to way, and he gave good teeth. His smile was broad and catching. It was all for Jinn, though.

  ‘Hi, Jinn.’

  ‘Hi, Nathan. Long time no.’

  Oh. Right. Not the middle of the conversation, then; or perhaps it was just that the conversation had been on hold for a few years. I crinkled my eyes to give the boy a second, closer look. Oh yes indeedy. Nathan Baird, the unmistakeable. I thought he was gone for good. But I suppose Nathan Baird never did anything for good.

  ‘Is that your wee sister?’ Like he’d only just seen me.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Jinn put her arm round me.

  ‘Ruby Red. I like your hair.’

  I’d smiled back at him before I realised what I was doing, so I had to twist my face into a scowl double-quick, as if it had only been going into some sort of spasm in preparation for a deadly glare. I couldn’t stop my hand going to my hair, though, and pushing it up in spikes. Ruby Red actually was the colour it said on the bottle; that’s why I’d picked it, because it had my name on it. I wondered if Nathan knew that. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  My hair was a dark, vivid, unnatural red, too dramatic for my pale skin. I liked it that way. I’d enjoyed the whole process. My hair’s choppy and tangled and short, so there was plenty of dye and I was careless and the colour had trickled down my face like blood. I looked like something out of Stephen King, and I went on looking that way for a few days, because the dark scarlet trails left stains, as if I had an invisible axe lodged in my skull. The blood trails had of course long faded, but I’d shortly be dyeing it again. I’d got a real kick out of all the funny looks.

  I didn’t want to discuss my hair with Nathan, so I ignored him, and he got the hint and ignored me back. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave. I was hot and sandy, and I’d have liked to go and cool my feet in the water’s edge, but I didn’t like Nathan Baird, never had. He so clearly wanted to be alone with Jinn that I wanted to thwart him.