He unhooks the key and goes to unlock the box. There’s no padlock.
He stands looking at it for a bit, surprised. Maybe someone forgot to lock it last time, or maybe they don’t care anymore. He opens the box. There’s all sorts of matches in there. He takes out one of the little purple matchbooks from the Pub. After he’s replaced the key he looks at it outside, in the light. THE NEW INN, it says, and then a row of numbers, which by forgotten instinct he identifies as a telephone number a few moments before he can remind himself what a telephone number was actually for. The numbers look pointless now, random doodles or an indecipherable code. He puts it in the pocket with the raisins.
The ash goes in a shed a bit farther back. He tips it out very carefully. He loves its soft, cloudy slither. Quiet as secrets.
* * *
His mother says they’re going back to Parson’s that night. He’s immensely relieved. He was dreading being shut up in a room with Pink and Laurel. They don’t even hang around at the Abbey to eat with everyone, which is unusual. It’s even more surprising that no one presses them to stay for supper. Perhaps they’re all too exhausted. With the weather clear they all worked until dusk and now they’re spent. But Rory thinks there’s something else as well. He has the feeling everyone’s being a bit quiet around him and his mother.
She’s finished being angry, or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t have the energy for it. He’s acutely conscious of the lumps in his coat as they walk back to Parson’s but she never looks like she might notice. She’s preoccupied. They have cold mashed vegetables mixed with a bit of salty fish oil and then they clean and tidy up and it’s bedtime.
Rory’s not quite asleep when someone thumps the door. He sits up in alarm, thinking of the stranger, but when a voice calls out it’s a woman’s.
“Connie? Are you still up?”
It’s Kate and Missus Shark. Rory goes downstairs in his pajamas, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders like the stranger did. Kate’s carrying the little night-light cube again. His mother sits them down in the kitchen.
“Is something wrong?”
“Rory,” Kate says. She’s put the night-light in the middle of the table. “You took a load of ash to the pile earlier on, didn’t you?”
“What’s he done?” says his mother.
“Nothing,” Missus Shark says, “I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” Rory says to Kate. He doesn’t like the sound of this.
“You didn’t see anything unusual up there, did you? By the dump?”
“No.”
“What’s this about?” his mother asks.
“Just a sec.” Kate’s not easily interrupted. “Did you see anyone else on the way there? Or on the way back?”
“No.”
“What about hearing anything.”
“Like what?”
“Anything you noticed. A bang, a loud noise.”
“No.” They wait. “Nothing like that.”
“OK, so.” Kate folds her hands and leans back. “Someone’s been in the Toolshed.”
“The lock on the matchbox was broken,” Missus Shark said. Rory can’t help glancing towards his coat. It’s hanging on the wall just by Missus Shark’s head.
“Broken how?”
“The padlock’s gone,” Kate says. “And the metal of the catch is twisted, someone must have snapped it right off. And there’s a knife missing, and the bottle of lighter fluid. Someone rummaged around in the tools as well.”
After a short silence his mother says, “I don’t understand.”
“No one’s said they took anything,” Missus Shark says. “We’ve asked everyone else.”
“You don’t know anything about it, do you, Connie?”
“No. No, of course not.” She sounds angry for a moment, before the implications sink in. “But . . .”
“So then,” Kate says. She doesn’t have to spell it out.
“Well,” his mother says. “Obviously someone must have been in there.”
“Yes,” Kate says, and “Exactly,” says Missus Shark. Kate turns to Rory. Her shaved head looks like a statue in the gloom. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t know what happened to those things in the Toolshed?”
“No,” he says. “I mean, yeah. I’m sure.”
“Hang on,” says his mother.
Missus Shark leans in towards Rory. “Because if there are things you’re worried you might need, it would be best to discuss that with everyone.”
“Are you accusing Rory of stealing?”
“Nobody’s accusing anyone of anything, Connie,” Kate says.
“He doesn’t know the plan,” his mother says, very coldly. “I haven’t told him.”
“What plan?” Rory says.
“Never mind.”
“It’s just that nobody else went up that way today,” Kate says. “The rest of us were busy all afternoon.”
“Lighter fluid,” Missus Shark says. It’s a reproach. Anything flammable is precious.
“Perhaps someone came over from Maries,” his mother says. She’s beginning to get a little angry. “Have you thought of that?”
Kate slumps, sighing. “I don’t know what to think,” she says. “They might have. I just hate the idea of people stealing from each other. I suppose we’ll have to start keeping a lookout again.”
“It’s better than thinking one of us took something and won’t say so,” says Missus Shark.
“Rory isn’t like that, Asha, and you know it.”
“All right,” says Kate, standing up. “We’re not here to cast doubts on Rory, or anyone else. I just wanted to ask if you’d seen anything, that’s all. You’re right, Connie, it’s probably someone from one of the other islands. We’ll have to think about what else needs locking up.”
“The rest of us will,” says Missus Shark, looking at his mother.
“If you remember anything,” Kate says quickly, looking at Rory, “please tell me. All right? Remember, you can come and find me any time and we’ll talk.”
He can’t make out her eyes but he knows what she’s thinking. She’s already found him stealing food. She won’t say anything in front of anyone else, she doesn’t need to. He can feel her disappointment without words.
“I don’t,” he says. “Remember anything, I mean.”
After they’ve gone he’s going to ask his mother what the plan is she hasn’t told him about, but she says “Go back to bed, Rory,” and he can hear in her voice that she’s shaking with anger. He’s safest by himself, under the covers.
For the first time in a long time he thinks about his father.
8
For more than a year Rory and his mother have been getting up every morning soon after it’s light and having breakfast and then going to the Abbey for the Meeting. This morning it’s different again. The rhythm of the world is broken.
He wakes up to the sound of talking below, and when he goes downstairs Fi is there. Both she and his mother look terrible, bleary, anxious. He was going to get his mother to explain the plan she wouldn’t tell him about last night but he never gets a chance.
“You’d better come and see,” Fi says.
They turn the wrong way at the door, not left over the crest of the Lane towards the useful side of the island but right, past the church, in the direction of the Old Harbor and the Hotel and all the worst of the ruins. Rory’s still cold after waking up in a hurry and when he sees his mother and Fi setting off that way a pit opens in his stomach and he thinks, They know about the stranger and now he’s going to kill me. But they walk past the looted church and the overgrown playground, past the spot where the stranger offered Rory the apple, without saying anything. No one’s talking. It’s a breezy morning and the air has the chill of the sea.
The houses around the Old Harbor were pillaged a long time ago, when lots of people were still living on the island. No one likes to talk about that first spring after What Happened, when the TVs went blank and the ferry stopped coming. No one even likes
to think about it. The wreckage they’re walking beside now is enough of a reminder. Gaping doors and windows have filled with weeds but they’re still dark, dripping, edged with broken wood or glass like they have teeth. Fi leads them between a collapsed fence and a row of ruins towards the Old Harbor quay.
“Are we going somewhere?” Rory says, suddenly nervous. Before he fell asleep he was thinking about his mother’s plan, and some other things he’s heard people say the last few days, and a nasty thought had struck him, though he’d dismissed it quickly because he knew it couldn’t be right; now it surfaces again, even less plausible in the daylight, and yet somehow even nastier too. But he forgets it almost as soon as he’s spoken, because they step out onto the quay and there’s other people there.
Viola and Laurel and Missus Anderson are standing in a tight group by the shelter, except that the shelter’s not there anymore. Instead of the wooden hut where people used to wait for boats there’s a charred heap, shapeless as the mounds of bramble.
“There,” Fi says. She’s not pointing at the burned shelter. She’s peering offshore, towards Martin, the same way Viola and Laurel and Missus Anderson are looking.
Out in the shoals between Home and Martin another black wreck has appeared overnight. A squat fishing boat is beached at a bad angle on the edge of a knuckle of rock. It’s listing so far over that the triangle of sail on its stubby mast is being slapped by the tops of waves.
Before last winter there were a lot of wrecks. Usually it was bigger ships. He’d see them from his lookout post on top of Briar Hill, tankers so big it hardly looked like they were moving at all, drifting like clouds, passing out of sight unless they came to rest on the outer rocks at the very edges of the world. Occasionally something smaller, a yacht or a fishing boat, would float aimlessly into the Gap on a rising tide and end up foundering in the shallows or on the shores of one of the islands. Not anymore, though. The winter must have finished off the rest of the empty vessels, and no one’s crazy enough to risk the cursed ocean now.
This wreck looks like a ghost ship. The rock where it’s run aground is halfway across to Martin, but even at that distance Rory can see its boom lurching and slapping, a dead limb swinging in the wind. The hull’s as black as the rock.
“Any sign of anything?” Fi says. She’s digging a black leather case out of an inside pocket.
“Laurel thinks she might have seen something,” says Viola.
“I’m not sure,” Laurel says. “It could just have been a bird.”
“What else did you think it could have been?” Fi says. She’s from Scotland, which Rory thinks makes everything she says sound as if she’s slightly disappointed. She opens the case. There’s a pair of binoculars inside.
“I dunno,” Laurel says. “For a moment it looked like there was somebody there.”
“Really?”
“I dunno.”
“Laurel’s got good eyes,” Viola says. Fi raises the binoculars and spreads her legs for balance. She examines the boat for a long time then passes the binoculars to Laurel.
“Can you read the name?” she says. “I can’t quite make it out.”
“What happened to the shelter?” Rory says.
“It burned down in the night,” Missus Anderson says.
“It didn’t burn down.” Viola’s tense and angry. “You make it sound like it did it by itself. Someone burned it down.”
“Well done for sleeping through it, Rory,” Laurel says, without turning away from the binoculars. “Everyone else has been up all night.”
“Why’d anyone do that?”
“And,” Laurel says in her sarcastic older sister voice, “aaaand . . .” He misses the point entirely. “Congratulations.”
“That’s enough, Laurel.”
“Bee Ee Zee something?” Laurel says. “Is that an E?”
“That’s what I thought,” Fi says.
“Wait,” Laurel says. She leans forward, as if that’ll help. “There’s one of those things on the E. One of those slopey lines. An accent.”
Fi takes the binoculars. “So there is. Well done, Laurel.”
“Does that mean it’s French?”
“Must be.”
“Oh no,” Missus Anderson says, “someone found us.”
“There’s no need to panic,” Fi says.
“It must have been Them?” Of all the women, Missus Anderson’s most prone to what Ol calls—called—wittering. “Who did this? Someone’s got on the island.”
Rory’s fists clench in his pockets. Adults never notice anything, but he suddenly feels like Laurel’s staring right into his brain.
“That would explain the business with the Toolshed,” his mother says.
“Possibly,” Fi says, still watching the boat.
“They might have been right here,” Missus Anderson says. She’s wringing her hands. “While we were dealing with the fire. Right here, watching.”
“We don’t know,” Viola says wearily. “You can’t jump to conclusions. That boat might have just drifted here empty.”
“But the shelter,” Missus Anderson says. “You said yourself, someone must have done this. Who’d do a thing like that? It’s such a waste.”
Fi lowers the binoculars. “I don’t like it either,” she admits.
“They might not have anything to do with each other,” Viola says.
“But there’s the business with the Toolshed too.” Fi doesn’t witter and she doesn’t snap at people. She’s quieter than Kate but everyone knows she’s the other competent one. “Think about it. Yesterday someone takes matches and butane, then in the night there’s a fire. An obviously deliberate fire.” She pokes her toe into the charred grey heap which is all that’s left of the shelter. “That’s never coincidence, is it.”
Missus Anderson’s eyes go wide. She stares out towards the wreck again. “But that means They must have been here since yesterday!”
“If it’s Them,” Viola says.
“Who else can it be? None of us would do a thing like that. Oh God. People sneaking around the island in the night.”
Rory’s throat is going very dry. What if they find the stranger? He’ll think Rory told them about him, and then he’ll kill Rory like he’d kill a rat.
“It would help,” Fi says, “if we had some idea how long that boat’s been there. You’d think someone would have mentioned it if they’d seen it in the last few days.”
Rory sees his chance and grabs it before he can think. “It wasn’t there yesterday,” he says.
Everyone looks at him.
“So,” he says, beginning to feel suddenly hot. “There’s probably no one here. No one foreign, I mean.” The way Laurel’s looking at him is making him lose his train of thought. It seemed like such a good thing to mention but he’s struggling to remember why. It’s because . . . “If someone off that boat took the stuff in the Toolshed they’d have been here yesterday,” he says in a rush, “but they can’t have because it wasn’t. It must have drifted in in the night.” He faces Viola, slightly desperate now. “Like you said.” They mustn’t start searching the island. He’s got to stop that from happening.
It’s only when his mother says, in an alarmingly cold voice, “How do you know?” that he realizes his mistake.
“What?”
“How do you know? How do you know that boat wasn’t there yesterday?”
He knows because he came around the ruined side of the island to deliver the bags of food and clothes to the stranger, and he’d have seen it among the shoals if it had been there. But he can’t say so. Of course he can’t. He was supposed to be picking in the woods with Pink. He told everyone he’d gone for a poo.
“I . . .” Every eye is turned on him and he can feel each one like a weight. He knows his face is going heavy. “Actually, I’m not sure. I just thought.”
There’s a silence.
“Thought what,” his mother says.
“Thought I saw that, that it wasn’t. But actually, I dun
no.”
“Where did you go yesterday?”
“Nowhere. Just for a poo. I,” he scrambles to recover his footing but he knows it’s too late even as he comes up with the lie, he can feel the ground slipping away beneath him. “I went up to that place by the north fields, you know, and I turned round to look at the sea on my way, and I saw it wasn’t there. I mean I didn’t see anything. I would’ve, if there’d been anything. I think. Maybe I’m not actually sure.”
Laurel snorts.
His mother bends over him. “You need to tell us the truth, Rory.”
“I am!”
“Where did you go after you told Pink that horrible lie? Where did you really go?”
“Easy, Connie,” Fi says.
“Yeah,” Laurel says. “Might be too hard a question for him.”
“Laurel, shut up,” Viola says.
Laurel turns angrily on her aunt. “Rory’s been acting really weird lately. You know he has. Anyone can see he’s lying.”
His mother snaps at Laurel. “That’s not helpful.”
“I think,” Fi says firmly, “we should go back to the Abbey and get this all sorted out.”
* * *
He’s got a bit of time as they walk over there to work out what he can and can’t say. The only important thing is not to say that there’s anyone else on the island. He clings to that one idea as hard as he can. It’s not just that he’s afraid of the stranger’s threats. There’s something else about his secret too, something which makes him want to keep it to himself, like Her. It’s a thing he owns, in this world where no one has any possessions anymore. It feels precious.
It’s a good thing he has a bit of time to think about all this because once they’re all at the Abbey and finished with breakfast and cleaning up and tidying away Kate makes him stand up in the middle of the big room by himself, with everyone listening, and asks him all about yesterday. She smiles kindly and says it’s to help him concentrate and not be distracted but he knows it’s actually to make him tell the truth, because how can he make anything up with all the people in the world staring at him like that? Fortunately, though, she doesn’t seem too interested in the bit where he does actually have to lie, when he says what he did after Pink’s stupid jabbering made him run away. She cares most about what happened when he took the ash to the pile up by the Dump, and all he has to remember is not to mention going in the Toolshed, which is easy because he hardly went there at all, just took one tiny matchbook, which doesn’t even count as doing anything, not really. Despite that he can feel how red he’s going and he can hear himself mangling words. He tries not to look at Laurel but she’s glaring at him and her eyes are accusing as plain as anything, Liar.
Arcadia Page 9
