by J. M. Hewitt
‘Jesus, Karen, call the fire brigade,’ her neighbour instructed his wife. ‘Carrie, come over here.’ He held his hands out to lift her over the fence, but Carrie backed away.
‘Mum’s inside, she’s in bed,’ she said. ‘I have to get Hattie’s drawings.’
She heard his shouts, heard his curses as he tried to vault the waist-height chain link fence but got his jeans caught on the little metal spikes.
Carrie darted back inside the kitchen.
It was all over, less than an hour later. The kitchen black, Hattie’s drawings burned to ashes. Her mother lay on a bed in the back of the ambulance, not really aware that her home was gone. Carrie rubbed at her face and studied the black that came away on her fingers. Pete, the neighbour, an oxygen mask on his mouth and nose, leaned his hands on his knees while his wife rubbed his back. His wife, Karen, her eyes red and watery, darted glances at Carrie, sitting alone in the driveway.
Blaming me, no doubt, thought Carrie, for almost getting her husband killed.
Carrie thought about apologising, admitting her mistake, that she should have been content with having another can of beans, shouldn’t have wanted the fancy chips.
They took her away for good, that night. Before she went, a small crowd of official people arrived and stood in groups. Carrie wandered among them, listening, unnoticed as always.
‘But she never looked neglected,’ hissed a voice she recognised.
Carrie glanced up. Miss Graff, her school teacher, her face red, her voice defensive.
Miss Graff went on, ‘Her hair was always neat and tidy, she was clean, showered, I wouldn’t have known what was going on, not by looking at her.’
The slow burn of fury again.
Of course I never looked neglected, she thought. I’ve been doing my own hair and washing myself since Hattie came along. Hattie was the one my mother chose to look after. I looked after myself.
But she didn’t say anything. Through her eight-year-old eyes she could see Miss Graff needed to feel better about herself. And even though her inner irritation wanted to punish Miss Graff, a little bit of Carrie felt sympathy for the older woman.
They had all failed, she realised, and by looking at their faces, their quiet, hushed whispers, they all knew it.
Carrie allowed herself to be led away.
She didn’t look back at the house that she would never live in again.
Ten years later she went back to the house where she had grown up. A new family lived there now, evident by the bikes abandoned near the gate. The windows sparkled again, the way they used to when Carrie and Hattie were little.
Her therapist had thought it might be a good idea to return when she was released from care. It was her first stop on her new journey as an independent adult.
The front door of the house beside Carrie’s old home opened. A woman stepped out, tall, blonde, instantly recognisable. Her eyes darted to Carrie, just the way they had a decade ago.
‘God, little Carrie, oh, look at you.’ Karen smiled, but there was something in her eyes that Carrie couldn’t identify.
Carrie walked over to her. ‘I…I wanted to say sorry, for what happened, for making your husband come in the house after me. I was stupid, I could have killed him, and I don’t blame you for being angry at me.’
Karen blanched, and her eyes grew rapidly red. ‘My God, Carrie, I wasn’t angry at you. I was angry at myself, for not realising that your mother was in such a bad way. I was furious with myself, not you.’ Karen took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘Never you.’
‘Oh.’ Carrie scratched at her head, unsure what to say. ‘Thank you.’ She forced a smile on her face. ‘Please give my best to Pete.’
She walked away, raising her hand in a small gesture of goodbye. She was almost at the end of the road, heading towards the bus stop when she heard pounding feet behind her. Stopping, she turned.
Karen halted, her face red, as she stretched out a hand to Carrie’s shoulder.
‘We asked the authorities if you could come and stay with us, fostering, like, after that night.’ Karen let go of Carrie, twisted her hands together. ‘They said it wasn’t a good idea, being so close to your old home. I just wanted to let you know that we tried, once we realised, we did try.’ She paused, her words thick now. ‘We did care, Carrie.’
Impulsively Karen moved forward, Carrie’s hands shot out and she gripped the older woman’s elbows to prevent her arms encircling her. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply.
She walked away, past the bus stop, back to the little council flat that served as her own halfway house.
She didn’t visit the old house again.
30
Melanie slipped out of the cottage before anyone woke up and made her way to the wood store where the mask still lay. Someone had to come for it, she theorised. Someone had put it there for a reason, it hadn’t been discarded. If the owner had wanted to throw it out, they would have set it on fire, buried it, or tossed it into the sea where the tides would have taken it far, far away. It had been in the wood pile, hidden.
It had to be Ben the boatman, Melanie reckoned, because if it were her father, or Gabe or Lenon they would have returned to the store to collect it by now. It was strategically placed, she deduced, not carelessly dropped or fallen from a pocket. It had been deliberately hidden.
She’d had an idea of searching the men’s colours for the culprit. They would stand out, she imagined, they would tell her the truth. And so she did; she stared at each of them every time she saw them, but to her horror her father’s and Gabe’s and Lenon’s colours, all of them, were muted, dull. Grey and a deep, dark purple, shot through with flashes of scarlet. She turned to the women, and to Willow, and saw fear and depravity in them, apart from her own mother. Alice was a marbled grey with the occasional pulse of pink excitement.
Melanie turned away in disgust. Everyone on the island was unhappy apart from Alice. And Alice was only happy because of the man who would come and visit her.
Melanie wondered what her own colours were, and not for the first time she was dismayed that they were never visible to herself.
She looked over her shoulder as she sat in the shade of the oak tree to wait for the mask-wearer to put in an appearance. Would today be the day she identified him? Maybe, but it occurred to her then, once she did know who it was, what would she do then?
‘I’m sleeping with the man who brought us over here on the boat.’ Alice said the words out loud, turned to Liz next to her on the bench to watch the woman’s reaction.
Liz said nothing. Her eyes remained fixed on a point in the distance.
Alice leaned closer to her, the unwashed scent of Liz heavy in her air. ‘I’m fucking him,’ she said.
Nothing.
Alice felt her own face redden, scandalised by the words that had come out of her own mouth. She looked down at her feet, bare still, because the second toe on her right foot was too swollen to fit into any of her shoes. She reached across the bench and found Liz’s hand. She held onto the other woman’s fingers, squeezed them a little.
Sometimes Alice felt like she was losing her mind. She knew how Liz must be feeling, or must have felt. It no longer occurred to Alice to wonder why nobody was doing anything. Nobody was doing anything for Liz, that was just the way it was. Alice considered how long it would be until she, too, no longer spoke and nobody spoke to her. Already it had started. Melanie had been aloof for days, Harry was quietly angry about her outburst. And the other kids, Lenon and Willow, had never spoken to her anyway.
We will be an island community that doesn’t communicate and we will carry on living here until we all quietly die, she thought.
She raised an imaginary glass in a silent toast to Harry and his island living.
‘Cheers,’ she said to herself.
She looked at the arm of the wooden bench, and the scratches she had made to mark the days. It would be another day before Ben came to visit. She needed to have a bath before then, maybe
wash some clothes and try and force her foot into a shoe.
Her heart thudded at the thought of him, of her, of all of them. In her mind the clouds parted, the sun beamed through and Alice sat up straight.
She could sail back to Manchester with Ben.
She slumped. Melanie wouldn’t go with her, Melanie would never leave her father here alone. And Alice couldn’t leave Melanie here.
Could she?
The thought made her shiver.
From the lounge window Harry watched his wife as she sat on a bench with Liz. They had their backs to him, and he wondered what they were talking about. Alice spent a lot of time with Liz now, more than she did with him, her own husband, or even her daughter.
He frowned in annoyance. It was what he had wanted, for Alice to strike up a friendship with Liz, but not like this, not to the extent where it shut everyone else out.
He saw a smudge on the window pane, rubbed at it with his sleeve. They’d cleaned this house from top to bottom when they moved in, but it was dirty again, and Alice seemed to have lost interest in cleaning. He supposed it was to be expected, he had always been the home-maker, not her. It wasn’t in her nature, really. But it was something he’d hoped would change about her out here on the island.
He squinted at her, at the cut-off jeans and grubby T-shirt and the bare feet. He used to love looking at Alice in her heels, in her crisp, designer suits.
She’s changed, he thought, almost beyond recognition.
Harry moved into the bathroom and slipped the bottle of pills from the little ledge behind the toilet tank. He shook them, enjoying the satisfying rattle.
They were no Fluoxetine, but they were good pills. Relaxing, he’d found, when he took the first one the evening of the big fight with Alice. And every time he found himself growing concerned with his island community and the fractures, he took another one.
He thought of the dirty mark on the window pane, and Alice’s dirty clothes and bare feet and he tipped a pill into the palm of his hand and swallowed it down.
It was much warmer now, decided Melanie as she shed her cardigan and let the sun blaze down through the trees on her bare arms. She hoped the good weather would bring everyone out of their moods, including herself. They were like hibernating animals, she realised, waiting for something to bring them alive again.
She blinked as she considered that the revealing of the masked man might do just this. They could banish him, whoever he was, and the island would be a better and safer place.
A worry niggled, who would believe her? She’d been accused of fantasies before by her parents, Alice more than Harry though. Her colours, for one thing. Her mother worrying that it was some sort of medical concern, like a brain tumour or something, but really knowing deep down that it was actually a part of her. Alice’s warnings not to speak of the colours she saw. It would make people look at her like she was different.
Melanie pouted. She was different, and she didn’t speak of the colours, yet still she didn’t fit in anywhere. Not back at home, not with Tanisha or Kelly, and not here on the island.
The sound of a twig snapping brought her out of her reverie. Melanie gasped as she threw herself to the mossy ground. A memory caught at her, down on her stomach as she watched her dad trap the rabbit. Melanie closed her eyes briefly.
‘Please don’t let it be my dad,’ she whispered.
And taking a deep breath she opened her eyes and watched as the man emerged from the shelter of the trees and made his way into the wood store.
It took hours for Melanie to move. She stayed concealed behind the tree, scrubbing at her face with her hands. A little part of her had thought it might be a fantasy, the ‘creative side’ of her, but it was real, the mask was real, and the man who wore it was real.
And he was here.
And she knew who he was.
When the sun moved in the sky to beat down upon her Melanie struggled to her feet. Putting her head down she ran, jumping over hillocks and scraping her knees as she slipped on the uneven earth. She slowed unwittingly as she recalled the man, dusting off the mask, fussing over it, stroking it fondly. She gagged, thumped at her chest and forced her feet to run faster.
She knew where she was headed, to find the twins, and she knew where they hid out all day, in a rocky cave underneath the highest point of the island. It was a place she had followed them to before, but she hadn’t let them see her. They seemed to want to be alone all the time, and she’d thought – after that first night of looking through their window and seeing the way they slept together – that they had something going on like her mother and Ben. She had respected their privacy, embarrassed for them, and ashamed. But not now, because she needed them now, because the adults were falling apart, and the twins were the only people left on the island who could actually do something.
They were there, huddled together, joined at some part of their bodies like they always were. And she realised this was the first time she’d seen them in days.
‘Willow?’ Melanie craned her head into the darkness, could just about make out their silhouette. ‘I need to talk to you.’
Two pairs of eyes turned to her, gleaming in the darkness. Melanie moved into the cramped space. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she frowned.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked, her discovery forgotten for a moment as she peered at Lenon, doubled over, one hand on Willow’s arm, the other clutching his stomach.
‘He’s not well,’ snapped Willow.
Melanie took a deep breath. More sickness: first Liz, no, before that her father, his illness, the whole reason they were here. Now Lenon.
‘I need to talk to you,’ Melanie whispered again, urgently this time.
Willow glared at her. ‘Lenon’s ill,’ she hissed.
Melanie sat back in a corner. Normally she would leave, run, for Willow scared her, more than Tanisha or Kelly ever had. But now, with this news and with nobody else to turn to, she stayed put.
‘I’m all right.’ Lenon’s voice was weak, stilted.
‘Can I bring you anything, some water from the stream?’ Melanie whispered, ignoring Willow’s harsh stare.
Lenon shook his head, muttered something that might have been a ‘thank you’.
‘I found something,’ Melanie started, ‘I think we’re in danger.’
The temperature in the little cave seemed to change. The space grew lighter, Melanie’s eyes widened as she realised that Willow was aglow. Suddenly, Melanie understood so much.
‘It’s why Lenon’s ill, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed.
Willow shushed her. ‘Quiet,’ she murmured. ‘Keep your voice down.’
Melanie stared at Willow, lost in her light. ‘What did he do?’
Willow’s eyes bored into Melanie’s. ‘He doped him. He needs him calm, disabled, pliable. Lenon thought he’d avoided it, he never ate or drank anything he made, neither did I, but something must have slipped through the net.’
It was the most words Melanie had ever heard Willow say at any one time. And she wasn’t yet finished. ‘What did you find?’ she asked, as if only just remembering what Melanie had said.
Melanie closed her eyes before slowly opening them. ‘A mask, one that he wore, when he…’ she tailed off, unable to finish.
Willow nodded, and her mouth twisted bitterly. ‘That fucking mask,’ she spat.
Willow knew about the mask. ‘Why does he wear it?’ Melanie whispered. ‘Is it like a disguise?’
Willow uttered a humourless laugh. ‘It’s part of his game. It scares the kids, literally makes them freeze.’ She concealed a shudder which made her colours tremble and shake. ‘If the kids are frozen by fear, they’re easier to handle.’
Melanie remembered inside the house, Kelly, above her on the landing, moving in slow motion. She remembered herself, immobile on the stairs. Frozen.
‘Why is he doing this?’ Melanie burst out, her voice scratchy and thin as though tears were close to the surface.
&nb
sp; ‘He wants me.’ Willow tilted her head to one side as she regarded Melanie. ‘He probably wants you too, actually.’
Melanie gulped, her fingers worked at her mouth. Words, for the time being, were lost to her. All she had were memories; the hand grabbing her friend, and visions; of what could become of her.
Willow moved, gently shifting Lenon to lean against the wall as she reached across to Melanie.
‘It’ll be okay,’ she said softly.
Melanie’s eyes filled with tears which she let fall. ‘How?’ she asked, her voice grew louder and louder. ‘We’re trapped, he’s getting to everyone, one person at a time, soon there’ll only be you and me and––’
A hand clapped across her mouth, Melanie struggled against it.
‘Quiet,’ demanded Willow. ‘He’s been wanting me for ages, but me and Lenon we knew what he was doing, what his plan was. And he’s not got me yet, has he?’
Melanie felt her breathing return and she nodded to indicate Willow could remove her hand.
‘If you knew what he was doing, what he plans to do, why did you come here?’ Anger flared, directed at the girl sitting across from her.
Willow smiled, though it never reached her eyes.
‘I brought him here,’ she stopped, reached for Lenon’s hand, ‘we brought him here, because we’re going to stop him, for good this time.’ She paused, let her eyes settle on Melanie’s. ‘We’re going to kill him.’
Silence that stretched on, broken only by Lenon’s wheezy breathing. Melanie sat back, and watched as Willow’s colours shone like the sun, while Lenon’s thinned and turned to a deep, dark, grey.
31
Ben dithered, making calls, consulting his tide app on his phone, checking maps in the hull of his boat.
Carrie stood behind him, clutching tight to a shelf in the hull of his boat, staggering slightly as the water beneath them rocked the boat.
