Scarlett

by Cathy Cassidy

  I open the blade and slice the ribbon into manageable lengths, then watch him hide the knife away, lift the rucksack back into the tree.

  ‘What else’ve you got hidden up there?’ I ask him. ‘A toothbrush? A sofa? A fifty-piece dinner service?’

  ‘Stuff.’ Kian shrugs, sitting down on a rock at the water’s edge. ‘A bedroll, supplies, some food and hay for Midnight.’

  ‘OK.’

  I take the brush and start working through Midnight’s mane, smoothing out the tangles. When I was a kid, I dreamt of having my own pony – it was what I wanted more than anything. I used to imagine plaiting its mane with ribbon – now, at last, I can do it for real. The big black horse leans his face against my shoulder as I thread the thin red ribbon into his mane, weaving it in and out.

  ‘Know what I like so much about you?’ Kian asks, watching.

  ‘My wit, my charm, my gorgeous looks?’ I quip. ‘My skill with a horse brush and a bit of ribbon?’

  ‘Well, naturally’ Kian grins. ‘All of that. And the way you don’t ask too many questions. You just take me as I am.’

  ‘Weird, secretive boy who keeps all his worldly possessions in a tree? What’s to ask questions about?’

  ‘Seriously, though,’ Kian says.

  ‘Seriously. If you wanted me to know, you’d tell me, right?’

  ‘Exactly. And I don’t – I can’t. Not yet.’

  Midnight sighs, a huge, shuddering breath. I weave a dozen red-ribbon plaits into his mane, by which time the horse has just about fallen asleep on my shoulder, leaning heavily against me.

  ‘My turn now?’ Kian asks.

  ‘To fall asleep on my shoulder or have your hair braided?’

  ‘Either. I’m not proud.’

  I ruffle Midnight’s mane and blow softly on to his velvet nose, and the big black horse shakes his head and snorts and looks at me from liquid, long-lashed eyes. I plant a kiss on the white star on his forehead.

  ‘I’m crazy about your horse,’ I say lightly to Kian.

  ‘He’s crazy about you,’ Kian shrugs. ‘I’m a big disappointment to him these days – no ribbons, no apples.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I laugh, digging him in the ribs as we walk back up to the wishing tree. ‘I always wanted a horse, when I was a kid,’ I tell him. ‘A black one, like Midnight. I was going to convert the garage into a stable. I wished and wished for a pony, but I got a broken home instead. I gave up on wishing.’

  ‘Ah, but that was before you met me and Midnight,’ Kian grins. ‘We’re living proof that wishing didn’t give up on you.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I reply. ‘Everything and everyone else did, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Not me,’ Kian says, his blue-black eyes looking right inside my soul, making me shiver.

  ‘No, not you.’

  We fling ourselves down on to the grass, stretching out in the sun.

  ‘So, what’s new?’ Kian asks.

  ‘Nothing much. The schools have broken up, and Holly has a friend coming over. I’m hiding out here, staying out of the way!’

  ‘Don’t blame you,’ he grins. ‘I guess things will get busier now – kids off school, day trippers, tourists. This place may be quiet, but it’s still in one or two of the tourist guidebooks.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. We’d better make the most of it.’

  Suddenly, away in the distance, there’s a squeal of laughter and a crunching of twigs. We jump to our feet. Through the trees, I glimpse two bright figures weaving along, laughing, carrying a picnic basket.

  ‘No way’ I breathe, furious. ‘It’s Holly – and some kid from the school. I told her to stay away!’

  ‘Too bad she didn’t listen,’ Kian says.

  ‘I’ll get rid of her!’ I promise.

  I run into the woods, and Holly sees me and waves, crashing through the undergrowth. My anger flares when I see that Holly’s ‘friend’ is Ros, the dark-haired, geeky girl from the school.

  ‘Scarlett!’ Holly exclaims, her face all smiles. ‘I knew we’d find you! I was telling Ros, you spend all your time down here these days.’

  ‘I told you I wanted to be left alone!’ I say through gritted teeth.

  Holly laughs. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But you don’t mind now we’re here, do you? I asked Ros over specially, to surprise you!’

  Surprise me? That’s not the word that springs to mind. Ros has the grace to blush, but she can’t get a word in edgeways.

  ‘We’ve brought a picnic,’ Holly blunders on. ‘And we’re just dying to meet your friend Kian…’

  Before I can stop her, she steps out of the trees on to the grass beside the lough, scanning around her. ‘Oh. You’re on your own. I thought…’

  Ros and I step into the clearing too. My mouth falls open and a prickle runs down my spine. There is no sign of Kian, no sign of Midnight, even though they were here, right here, just a minute ago.

  They may as well have vanished into thin air.

  ‘I thought you said you were meeting him by the lough?’ Holly sulks.

  ‘Yup, I said that,’ I admit through gritted teeth. ‘I also asked you to stay away, didn’t I?’

  Holly rolls her eyes. ‘Aw, you just wanted to keep Kian to yourself. But he stood you up, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  ‘He did not!’ I blaze. ‘He was here, OK? And he’d still be here if you two losers hadn’t barged in on things, so thanks a bunch!’

  ‘Stressy!’ Holly laughs, but Ros looks embarrassed.

  ‘I didn’t realize,’ she tells me, tugging at Holly’s sleeve as though she can’t wait to get out of here. ‘Really. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You should be,’ I huff. ‘We talked about this, Holly – you promised you’d stay away from the lough!’

  ‘Well, I didn’t promise exactly…’ Holly says with a wicked grin.

  I remember what Clare said about taking a deep breath and counting to ten. It’s a little late for that now, but I try it anyway.

  By the time I reach ten, Ros and Holly are turning back towards the woods. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ Holly says over her shoulder. She looks a little hurt, and that makes me feel bad. I try to remember that she’s only nine. I got things wrong when I was nine, sometimes. And when I was ten, eleven and twelve, come to think of it. I may be getting things wrong right now.

  Kian’s long gone, anyhow. I take another deep breath and decide on patch-up tactics. ‘Wait up,’ I call after them. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper. It’s not the end of the world, is it? Why don’t you stay, now that you’re here?’

  ‘Really?’ Holly’s face lights up, but Ros looks uncertain.

  ‘Really,’ I promise. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘See?’ Holly grins at Ros. ‘I told you it’d be fine!’

  She starts unpacking the picnic basket. Ros shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other, biting her lip. If she didn’t think I was deranged that day at the school, she’s bound to now. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere than here. Well, that makes two of us.

  ‘So,’ I say as cheerily as I can manage. ‘School’s finished now?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she replies. ‘The last few weeks really flew past. Matty and I are moving up to secondary school after the holidays – it’ll be so big after Kilimoor.’

  ‘Just a bit,’ I agree. ‘Kilimoor’s tiny, not like any school I’ve ever known. It kind of freaked me out. You all knew each other so well, like a family or something – and I was the outsider.’

  Ros looks anxious. ‘We didn’t mean to make you feel like that,’ she says. ‘We wanted you to feel welcome, but – well, it was like you didn’t want to be there.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I admit. ‘I might have been a bit prickly.’

  ‘Maybe a bit.’ Ros grins.

  ‘Maybe a lot!’ Holly pipes up, and the three of us laugh and the awkwardness ebbs away. Holly stands a bottle of Clare’s home-made lemonade in the lough, wedged between a couple of rocks, and we flo
p down on to the grass. There’s a Tupperware box of leafy green salad with feta cheese and cherry tomatoes, along with granary bread, boiled eggs, apples and flapjacks. We fall on the feast like we haven’t eaten for a week.

  Three swans glide soundlessly down from the hillside, long necks extended, to crash-land awkwardly on the lough with much splashing and flapping of big, white wings. They gather themselves together as if slightly embarrassed, folding their unruly wings into cool origami shapes and curling their necks prettily.

  ‘What was that story you were telling me, about the swans?’ Holly frowns.

  ‘A wicked witch put some children under a spell,’ I remind her. ‘Do you think those are real swans, or enchanted ones?’

  ‘Enchanted, definitely,’ Holly breathes.

  ‘Honestly Holly, you’d believe anything!’ I scoff.

  ‘Will you be going to the senior school in Westport?’ Ros asks me as we watch the swans glide out into the lough. ‘I won’t know anyone in our year except Matty. I know some of the older kids, but that’s not the same, is it?’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ I tell her. ‘Give it a week and you’ll wonder what you were worried about – you’ll make tons of new mates.’

  ‘So you’ll be going?’ Holly says.

  ‘Holly, you know I won’t. The minute I set foot in a school, I get myself knee deep in serious trouble. Home-schooling’s safer – nobody can expel me!’

  ‘Don’t listen, Ros,’ Holly says staunchly. ‘Scarlett’s cool, honest. I want to be just like her, except I’m having a pierced nose instead.’

  ‘You are not,’ I argue. ‘We’ve been through all this! Tell her, Ros – it’s a bad idea!’

  ‘For sure,’ Ros agrees. ‘Imagine the hassle when you get a cold! Yuk!’

  ‘I’m going to do it.’ Holly grins. ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  I pick the shell off one of the hard-boiled eggs and flick it away into the grass. I’m sorry I dismissed Ros as a geeky country kid. She’s much nicer, much funnier than I remember, and if she thinks I’m mad, bad and dangerous to know, she’s hiding it well. I look at her shiny hair, her pale skin and goofy smile. She’s the kind of girl I’d have blanked, a month ago. The kind of girl I avoided like the plague because she reminded me of who I used to be.

  We could be friends, maybe. These days, I need all the friends I can get.

  ‘What’s home-schooling like then?’ she asks, biting into a cherry tomato. ‘Is it a skive?’

  ‘It’s cool,’ I tell her. ‘I have to do two pages of maths every morning, but I get to study the things I want to as well, like crazy old Irish legends with swans in them. Dad and Clare let me work out here by the lough too – they trust me, I suppose.’

  Would they still trust me if they knew I was meeting Kian every chance I got? Probably not.

  ‘Don’t you get awful lonely?’ Ros asks.

  ‘Not really. It’s good to have some time out. And it’s not like I don’t see anybody…’

  ‘So. This Kian – is he your boyfriend?’ Ros wants to know.

  ‘Kind of.’ He’s my best friend, anyhow. He makes me laugh, he makes me think, he makes me dream.

  ‘Sorry we spoilt your afternoon, chased him away,’ Ros says. ‘No wonder you were cross.’

  Holly takes a swig of icy-cool lemonade. ‘Aw, come on, Scarlett,’ she says. ‘He wasn’t really here, was he? Not really! You just said that to make us feel bad.’

  ‘He was!’ I protest. ‘He was right here, till I went into the woods to meet you. Honest!’

  Holly frowns. ‘Nobody could have disappeared that fast,’ she says. ‘We’d have seen him.’

  ‘I don’t know how he did it.’ I shrug. ‘And I wish he hadn’t, but I’m not going to argue about whether he was here or not, OK? He was.’

  ‘Fine,’ Holly sniffs. ‘It’s no big deal. I just wondered if Ros knew him, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Kian,’ Ros says. ‘He must be a visitor, or a blow-in – you know, like you, new to the area. I’ve not heard of any new families, though, and my dad runs Heaney’s Bar in Kilimoor. If someone sneezes ten miles off, he knows about it.’

  ‘I think he’s a traveller,’ Holly chips in. ‘A gypsy. He’s got black hair and a horse with feathery feet, hasn’t he, Scarlett?’

  That doesn’t make him a traveller,’ I point out.

  ‘No, but it might explain how he knows the place so well he can disappear practically into thin air,’ Holly muses. ‘And it might explain why he’s so secretive. C’mon, Scarlett, we’re not that scary – why did he have to leg it the minute he heard us coming?’

  I don’t have an answer for that. Being tracked down by Holly and Ros is not exactly the highlight of my day, but I’m coping. Kian could have coped too – he’d have made Holly and Ros laugh, told them stories, charmed them with his blue-black eyes. Holly could have had a ride on Midnight, fed him apples from the picnic.

  ‘Maybe he’s from Dublin,’ Holly muses. ‘An orphan, sent here to live with his grandparents. Or a runaway, a fugitive from justice, living wild in the woods, stealing eggs and trapping rabbits to survive…’

  I bite my lip, because this seems closer to the truth, even though Holly’s version of it makes me laugh. ‘He’s just a boy,’ I tell her. ‘No big mystery’

  Holly’s eyes widen. ‘He could be a ghost,’ she whispers. ‘The spirit of a boy who died back in the famine times, or maybe a tourist who got lost on the hills in winter, thirty or forty years ago.’

  ‘You’re nuts!’ I laugh.

  Holly chucks the last of the granary bread out on to the lough, and the three swans paddle furiously into the shallows, gobbling it quickly I scan them for signs of magic, enchantment, but they’re just big white birds, greedy, bad-tempered, with snapping beaks and ruffled feathers, hungry, flapping, scrabbling for bread.

  Finally, Mum has got the message. I won’t speak to her on the phone, so she stops calling and starts writing letters instead.

  I’ve been through this before. After Dad left, thick letters with bright Irish stamps would plop through the letter box. ‘Does he think he can win you round with a letter?’ Mum would scoff, ripping them into little pieces to drop into the pedal bin. Before long, I was doing it myself. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, letters, all went into the bin, like so much confetti.

  Now it’s happening all over again.

  I sit by the lough with Mum’s latest letter. I don’t want to hear about private schools or last, last chances and letting people down. Instead, I smooth the paper out, folding it this way and that until I have made a small, perfect, paper boat. I launch it into the water, and a soft breeze catches it, pulling it out into the centre of the lough.

  As I turn from the lough, there’s the sound of a car door slamming in the distance, a movement in the trees to my left. This has been happening lately, since the start of the school holidays. Like Kian said, Lough Choill is on the tourist trail for some very keen sightseers. They come to look at the wishing tree, to fish in the lough, to hike across the hills.

  When I’m with Kian, we steer Midnight into the woods, silently, or gallop away down the loughside, out of sight. We make ourselves invisible. Today, though, I’m still waiting for Kian to show up, and I won’t let the tourists chase me away. I take out my sketchbook and start to draw the little twisty hazel tree. Its branches are fluttering with wisps of rag and ribbon, and you can still see a red-and-pink sandal peeping through the leaves, if you know just where to look.

  The men come striding out of the trees, dark-haired and flint-eyed, smoking and frowning, their eyes scanning all around. They look like brothers, with the same tanned, weather-beaten faces, the same lined foreheads, the same sad, unsmiling mouths. One has a moustache, the other a wide-brimmed hat with a red scarf tied round the brim and a feather in it. Both have the glint of gold round their necks and wrists, and flashy rings on almost every finger. They don’t look like tourists. Not like
any tourists I’ve ever seen.

  I bend my head back to my drawing, and the men march past, as though I’m not even there. They walk right along the loughside, briskly, until they’re out of sight.

  Hazel, I label my picture. Coryllus avellana, in Latin. Choill, in Irish. The tree at the holy well.

  I open my notebook and write for a while, listing down all the things that Kian has told me about the tree and the spring. According to legend, the wishing tree is a gateway between this world and some ancient, make-believe world where time stands still.

  In that world, in my imagination, the women have long hair and trailing dresses made of velvet, and the men look like extras from Lord of the Rings, all bows and arrows and galloping ponies and hair that ruffles in the breeze. You might meet a king from under the sea, or a bunch of swans who turned out to be children, only bewitched. Magic still happens in that world, Kian says.

  Wish I could believe in all that stuff.

  When I look up again, I see that the two men are walking back, more slowly this time, as though they are looking for something. When they draw level with the woods, they walk along through the trees, kicking at the undergrowth as though something is hidden there, waiting to be discovered.

  They stop a few metres away, frowning.

  ‘Hello there, missy,’ the older one says. ‘Fine day we’re having.’

  I just stare. Missy? Please.

  ‘D’you live nearby perhaps?’ he asks. ‘You’d be local?’

  Their accent is strong, lilting. I nod my head, very slightly.

  The younger man, the one with the hat, steps forward, taking a crumpled piece of card from his shirt pocket. ‘We’re looking for someone,’ he says, his voice low and gentle. ‘A boy not much older than yourself, dark-haired, skinny. We thought… We thought he might be here, at Lough Choill. Have you seen him? Have you seen him at all?’