Arcadia

by James Treadwell

  His mother’s still holding his hand, so when she stops again he has to as well.

  “Whatever happens,” she says, “it’ll be all right if it’s you and me together, won’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he answers, cautiously.

  “You won’t tell anyone what I said, will you? About Molly. It’s not her fault. I shouldn’t have said it. Poor Molly.”

  “I won’t.”

  “It was always going to happen. Eventually.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and then, “What was?”

  “Oliver.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Always going to happen,” she repeats. She shakes her head, gazing across towards Briar. “Stupid to think anything else. Just a matter of time. No matter how careful she’d been.”

  He waits.

  She sighs and wipes her eyes. “I’m sorry. We all think about poor Molly and forget it’s hard for other people too. You must be feeling sad about it too.”

  “Yeah,” he says, wondering whether he is or not. It’s odd thinking about Ol not being there anymore, but he doesn’t know if that’s the same as sad.

  “They’re so cruel.”

  “Who d’you mean?”

  This was a stupid thing to say. She turns to him, welling with the beginnings of anger.

  “Who do you think? Who’s taken away so many people we loved?”

  “Sorry, Mum.”

  “Your own father.”

  “Dad and Jake and Scarlet might have made it,” he says. He and his mother say this to each other quite often, at bedtime. They smile at each other when they say it, to feel better.

  “Of course they didn’t make it.”

  Rory feels it like a blow.

  “No one made it. No one’s ever come back. Don’t you understand they’d have come back if they could? People only ever leave. They drowned like everyone else.”

  He stares at his feet, eyes stinging. After a bit she says, “Rory, Rory,” and tries to hug him, but he’s too busy fighting off tears. Then she starts talking about what a good sailor Scarlet was, and how Jake and Dad would have hid belowdecks while she steered them safely to the Mainland. She’s forgotten that this version of the story was his idea in the first place. He got it from a comic story about a Greek hero who tied himself to a mast to listen to the Sirens while everyone else plugged their ears and rowed past. It’s too late for the lie now, there’s no comfort in it. As they come past the Club and out by the Beach he looks up the narrowest part of the Channel to the big rock off the shore of Briar, where the gibbet is. He imagines a glistening white body dangling there, turning back and forth in the wind, and feels sick at heart.

  * * *

  Back at Parson’s his mother gets the stove lit using the electric clicker and makes scrambled eggs with bits of spring onions and some flakes of fish scraped from yesterday’s bones. They eat slowly, chewing for a long time. She watches him carefully, as if she’s gone back to checking that he chews each mouthful at least ten times, though he learned to do that ages ago. Normally when they’re having breakfast they talk about the things that need doing that day and who’s going to end up doing what. This morning she doesn’t say a word. Normally when they’re finished they stand up and she stretches and then he does the cleaning and tidying up while she gets their clothes ready to go over to the Abbey for the Meeting. This morning the plates stay dirty on the table and she’s staring into space.

  Finally he asks, “Isn’t there going to be the Meeting today?”

  “I’ll go in a bit,” she says, vaguely. She’s obviously thinking about something else.

  “I could go back to Briar,” he says. The Meeting’s when they decide (or in fact Kate and Fi decide) who’s going to have which job that day. If they’re going to miss it he’ll have to think of something to do on his own. Everyone has to do something. “There’s lots of good berries over there still.”

  She slams her hand over his wrist so hard it makes him jump.

  “What are you talking about?” she says. “I thought you understood.”

  He bites his lip.

  “Listen to me,” she says, which is stupid, because it’s not like he has any choice. “You’re not to go to Briar on your own. Ever. Or over the east side. Not anymore.”

  “But—”

  “Never! Never, ever. Understand?” She shakes his wrist. “Understand?”

  He mumbles yes because he has to. But he knows she’s feeling something he can’t feel, her own special anger and despair, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever understand that. Maybe when he’s grown up.

  3

  For the next couple of days it’s as if no one’s looking at anyone else properly. He remembers what it was like when he was smaller and What Happened had just started happening, and everywhere you looked there was someone missing and someone else crying or shouting or fighting, and he had the dreadful realization that the adults were no less helpless and bewildered than the children. He remembers creeping in and out of their house, passing his mother sitting like a zombie at the kitchen table, wanting to ask her what was happening but knowing if he did she’d go hysterical. There’s a little bit of that feeling now.

  He’s afraid of running into Molly. Everyone talks about her in hushed voices, as though if they say her name too loud she’ll break. Even Laurel’s on edge. The two of them (Pink’s too little) are set to work wheeling barrows back and forth between the north fields and the Club, carrying loads of cut barley and spelt to the big shed. Rory pushes the sliding door aside one time and finds Laurel sitting on the bare floor with her legs and arms crossed, staring furiously at nothing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The place smells of dust and straw.

  “I hate them,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “All of them.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “They think we’re lying. Me and Pink.”

  “About what?”

  “Missus Anderson said Ol would never have gone to Briar by himself. I heard her. They think we made him go. Everyone just wants it to be my fault.”

  Rory feels a flush of uncomfortably hot shame. “It’s not your fault.”

  “’Course it’s not. I’m not the one killing people. But they can’t do anything about Them so they blame me.”

  “Sorry,” Rory says.

  “They’re just stupid old women.”

  Rory tips the barrow out, sending up another dirty cloud of dust.

  He says: “You know what Missus Grouse said?”

  “What?”

  “About catching one of Them. Hanging them.”

  “Stupid cow.”

  “They couldn’t really do that, could they?”

  Laurel chokes out a contemptuous laugh. “Can you imagine?”

  He’s spent the last couple of days trying very hard not to.

  * * *

  It’s another whole day before he finds a chance to slip off on his own. His mother’s gone to the Abbey for a Meeting, adults only. Everyone will be inside for a while. Pink and Laurel aren’t allowed at the Meeting, which means they’ll go to the place they found at the back of a laundry cupboard upstairs in the Abbey, where there’s a hole in the wall that lets them spy on what the adults are doing. He went with them once or twice but it was so boring he couldn’t see the point. He’s told his mother he’s going to stay at Parson’s and read comics.

  Once he’s sure the coast is clear he goes out up the Lane and takes the path at the top past the north fields. It’s a gustier day, grimmer, with spots of thin rain, and grey showers moving around in the distance. They always look like they’re hardly moving at all but he knows how different it is if they catch you. He keeps a nervous eye on them. There can’t be any wet clothes around when his mother gets back.

  It feels like summer’s over for good. In The Old Days, every day had its own name and number. Like Thursday the Seventeenth, or the Twenty-Fourth of April. Despite being invisible these labels were terribly imp
ortant, and told you whether it was summer or not, whether it was the week or the weekend. It’s impossible to imagine now. It’s like trying to tie words to the wind. Missus Anderson claims to know “what day it is” still—she says she’s kept count, though no one believes her—but Rory can’t see the point: this is the day it is, these stately drifting clouds and pellets of rain. They used to know what the weather would be like before it happened, he remembers that too. It used to organize so much of what he did, which clothes he put on, where and when he could go and play, whether Dad was going to get the boat out after school. When he concentrates on The Old Days that’s the impression he gets most strongly: patterns, timetables. At School there was a piece of yellow paper pinned to a board. The paper had a grid on it which parceled up each day into rectangular chunks and told you what you were supposed to do in each chunk. Everything was like that. First it was time for this, then that, then time for something else. Particular things happened in particular places, separately. Their house was different from other people’s houses and their stuff was different from other people’s stuff, even if it was the same stuff. There were invisible divisions everywhere, like the straight black grid lines on the yellow paper. They’ve all blown away now. The world’s just what it is, without labels.

  The north end of Home is high ground like the hilltops on Briar, except that it’s not a hill but a whole plateau, a wide flat heath. Once he’s past the scrubby trees which protect the north fields from the wind he’s in a totally different landscape. Even in The Old Days it was empty and bleak up here, just dead-looking ankle-high heather in every direction. It’s brown instead of green, peaty soil and bristly stunted plants. Nobody ever comes this way (which is a good thing since he’s completely exposed). You can’t grow anything to eat here, there’s no wood to cut for burning. Ol can’t come up here because it’s high enough that you can see the open sea. (Couldn’t.) All that’s here is the ruins of the Castle, but nobody except Rory’s interested in them.

  The ruins look particularly tragic this afternoon. Everyone calls it a Castle but it couldn’t have looked anything like the ones in the comics even before it was ruined. The doorways are tiny. Viola says people were smaller long ago, when it was built. He usually stops to have a little poke around its roofless stone rooms, but not today. The Meeting’s guaranteed to take a pretty long time—he knows how much the women love talking—but still, he’s absolutely got to be back at Parson’s before his mother. He can’t dawdle.

  The paths up here are like channels cut in the heather. Nothing grows on them except patches of some moss that’s nearly black. There are still a few tiny flowers among the scrub. He strips off a small handful and holds them in his fist.

  Past the Castle you suddenly become much more aware of the sea. The top of Briar curves away on one side and the Channel becomes open water. Now there’s surf below, the relentless swell driving directly against the islands. Eastwards, on the opposite side to Briar, Martin’s a long scar across the horizon still as black as the moss even though the fire was more than a year ago. Between Martin and Home lies a wild smattering of shoals and sandbars and grass-tufted outcrops, all shadowed by the rocky fists of the northern islands where the water’s always in a fury. As the promontory of Home narrows around him, the sound he thought was the wind turns step by step into the constant grinding of the sea. The air’s full of noise and movement, spinning gulls, the flavor of salt. He might as well be on a different island from his mother and Laurel and Pink and everyone else. It’s a sea-place here at the north end of Home, a bird- or seal-place, not a place for people.

  The tide’s about halfway. He clambers down the last slope over stone and tough grass until he’s overlooking a small cove of shelving rocks. He’s learnt the best way across them by now, hopping from peak to slab while the sea slithers and hisses through gaps below. Once he’s out as far as he can safely go he pulls his clenched fist from his pocket, checks the breeze, and tosses the handful of minuscule flowers into the water.

  “I’m here,” he shouts. He doesn’t know whether it makes any difference but he always does it anyway. He’s well hidden down in the cove, and even if someone else was walking around the north end, which no one ever is, they’d never hear a thing over the racket of the gulls and the waves.

  For that matter he doesn’t know whether the flowers (or it might be an interestingly patterned stone, or an apple core, or, if he’s daring, a nail or something else useful) help either. People do this kind of thing a lot anyway. Esme plaited a doll out of straw and hung it from a tree when they were planting in the spring; it was gone the next day. Laurel says Libby has special places where she pees on the ground.

  He’s never tried peeing in the sea. He’s pretty sure that would be wrong. He sits and waits.

  He doesn’t know how long a minute is, or an hour. Invisible grid lines laid over days and nights: all gone. He waits quite a long time, and then She’s there.

  He can never catch the exact moment when She comes up from the sea. It always happens too quickly, or when he’s not looking. She’s pushed up like spray, skimming over and through the tumbled rocks, and by the time he realizes it’s Her she’s still again, balanced at the edge of solid ground while the water twists and surges and slaps behind. She stands as if her feet barely touch the rock, as if she hardly weighs anything. She always makes him feel shamefully heavy and slow.

  “Hello again,” she says.

  Her eyes are the only bit of her that have any color. Her skin’s a flat white like cooked fish, faintly veined with lines too grey to count as blue. Her hair’s that nameless shade things go when they’re slick and wet. If she stays long enough and it dries enough it’ll turn another kind of white, like old straw or shells. Her lips and the nipples on her droopy puddle breasts have no more color than her nails. Where her belly meets the bit between her thighs there’s a soft-looking dark patch. Once he and Pink played a game where she’d show him hers if he showed her his; she didn’t have anything like that there. He feels safest looking back at her eyes, even though there’s something scary about their glassy blue pallor, as if they’d be hard to the touch.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “I think you’re taller,” she says. “Or your face is changing.”

  No one else sounds like Her. Sometimes when he’s by himself in a small echoey room he tries to imitate her voice. He can’t even get close. Whispering’s too flat and soft, hissing’s too blunt. She sounds like a pool of water humming.

  “I’m growing,” he says. He can never think of anything clever to say when he’s with Her.

  “Yes,” she says. “And one day you’ll be a man.” She reaches her right arm out towards him. She does this almost every time but he’s never dared touch her. He takes a half step back.

  “Not for ages,” he says.

  Her arm drops. She lies down as smoothly as water flowing and spreads flat on her back over the rock. If he tried it all the sharp points and edges would be torture but she makes it look like she’s in bed. “That’s all right,” she says. “I can wait. I can wait days and days and days, it doesn’t matter.” She blinks slowly and makes a kind of cold smile. “I’m very patient.”

  “All right,” he says. To be honest, he’s often not exactly sure what She’s talking about. Especially right after she’s just appeared he’s usually feeling a sort of dizzy thrill, which makes it hard to pay attention.

  “It’s a relief,” she says, “you know. Being patient. In the sea you don’t really feel that there’s such a thing as time at all. Everything just flows.”

  “Yeah. I bet.”

  “You’d like it. It’s easier.”

  He laughs, slightly awkwardly. She does this sometimes, talking like he could be one of Them, though she obviously knows he isn’t.

  “I’d get cold. I’d need one of them wetsuits.”

  Her smile widens very slowly. It’s not a proper smile: it uncurls, like a starfish’s arm.

  “You’re funny,�
� she says. “Rory.”

  The dizzy feeling tingles and buzzes inside him.

  “What have you been doing?” she says, letting an arm trail lazily over her head, as though she can see the top of the wave arriving to skim her fingertips. “What sorts of things have been happening to you these days?”

  “Nothing much,” he says. “Same as usual. Except Ol died.”

  “People are always dying, aren’t they?” She says it the same cold calm way she says everything.

  “He was my friend,” Rory says, a little stung. He thinks of Molly’s wrecked and drained face, and Viola saying I wonder why They hate us so much.

  “That boy.”

  “Yeah. Ol. He’s got a name, actually.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Tell me what he was like. What sort of boy he was.” She shifts a little, almost sleepily. She’s asking him about Ol the same way she’d ask him about what he’d had for breakfast.

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t care at all. I just like hearing your stories.”

  Rory stares at her. One of Them, the enemy. If anyone knew that since the end of winter—since he first came here hiding from Pink, who was chasing him around being annoying, and saw Her (or didn’t quite see her) rising from the waves—he’d been coming to talk to her pretty much as often as he could, they’d probably kill him. They’d probably hang him from the gibbet like a Traitor. But he can’t stop coming.

  “That’s mean,” he says.

  “Is it?”

  “You’re supposed to care about people. ’Specially if they just died.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Was it you? Who took him?”

  “Of course it was us. Silly.”

  “I mean you. Actually you. I saw . . .” The tingle turns into a flush of shame. “I thought I saw you.”

  “Maybe,” she says. She’s not teasing. She doesn’t do things like that. She sounds like she can’t remember, or can’t be bothered to remember.

  “Why d’you do it? Why d’you kill him?”

  “I’ve never killed anyone. Only you do that.”