Moon Island

by Rosie Thomas

  There was a surge of delight when he began to kiss her back. She sucked the inside of her cheeks to stop her lips curving in triumph. It was not a matter of scraped mouths and clashing teeth, which was all she had known of kissing before. It became simple and imperative, like drinking when you were thirsty. Only it made you thirstier still. It wouldn’t be enough, even if you drank until the water ran out of your mouth.

  Lucas stretched himself on the ground in the shelter of the hollow and drew May down in the circle of his arms. She measured herself against him, gleefully registering soft and hard. His hand found a breast. ‘How old did you say you were?’

  ‘Uh, fifteen, nearly sixteen.’ He had forgotten; she had told him the truth once before.

  ‘Jesus.’ He breathed the word into her mouth but he didn’t lift his hand. His fingers teased in a slow circle so that her back arched upwards to meet him as he leaned over her.

  She opened her eyes and saw the stars again. Don’t move, she warned them. Stay frozen like this for ever.

  Lucas’s long leg rested over her hip now. His hand was in her hair, she was fastened to him. There was a trace of sourness in his mouth. His fingers were busy at her shirt front.

  I touched him everywhere, and there.

  May knew what she should do. Lightly, with her breath locked in her chest, she trailed her fingers down to the belt of his jeans. Don’t let me fumble, she prayed.

  Was this what Doone had done?

  The leather tongue was awkward, clamped in the buckle’s ridges. One-handed, Lucas undid it for her. A minute’s exploration yielded folds of cloth, then what she had expected to find. Only more solid than in her imaginings and somehow more brutal.

  She didn’t know what to do now. She had forgotten how to breathe and her stomach was churning. Her mouth dried and she drew her head back a fraction. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a movement between the trees. She struggled to sit upright as words broke out of her mouth. ‘There’s someone there.’

  Lucas lifted himself on one elbow and scanned the silent woodland. ‘No, there isn’t. There’s nobody.’

  ‘Someone was watching us.’

  The note in her voice made him shield her with his arms. He found that she was shivering. ‘It’s okay. C’mon, look. We shouldn’t be doing this, anyway. I’m really sorry.’

  Whatever it was must have been in her imagination. May threw herself down again into the mould-scents of dead leaves, knowing the thread was broken, torn between despair and relief. Lucas lay back too and held her against him. He had done up his jeans and now he began to button her shirt for her.

  ‘Don’t be kind,’ she begged. ‘I don’t want you to be kind.’

  A door had opened on to a new landscape and had slammed shut again before she had a chance to take in the view.

  He smoothed her hair, tidying strands of it away from her open mouth, the embodiment of kindness. ‘Why not? You’re really nice, aren’t you? Much nicer than your sister.’

  The clarity had all gone. Her face felt swollen and a tide of nausea and longing and revulsion swelled inside her. She lay still in order to contain it, and made herself listen to the sea and the minute crackling and sighing of the woodland. She was wrung out by this confusion of the explicable and the unknown. After a while Lucas’s hand faltered, then stopped in mid-stroke of her hair. From the rhythm of his breathing she could tell he was falling asleep. ‘Talk to me. Tell me about something.’

  ‘Sure.’ His voice was blurred. ‘Tell you about what?’

  ‘Last year.’

  ‘Uh. What about it?’ He was yawning under his breath. There was no shadow, no weight pressing on him – there couldn’t be.

  ‘Doone. Will you tell me what she was like?’

  They were lying so close that his twitch of surprise passed straight into her. ‘Doone, why? She was kind of just a kid. I didn’t really know her. It was sad when she drowned but – you know, it was an accident. It was exactly a year ago, come to think of it.’

  ‘I know,’ May said.

  I made him touch me. Everywhere, and there.

  Only now she understood that somewhere along the way, somehow, she must have made a miscalculation. Lucas wasn’t hiding anything, he couldn’t be. He wasn’t clever enough to act so convincingly. His detachment was genuine. Whoever he had been for Doone, it couldn’t have been Lucas.

  The certainty made her feel suddenly lighter. They were separate after all, the two of them – what she knew now wasn’t what Doone had also known. Perhaps none of it was significant, none of Elizabeth’s disturbing old stories, the island, the pale-faced woman. Lying down with Lucas it was easy to dispel the thoughts of them. What was real and yet fantastical was here and now. The ribbed collar of his faded sweatshirt that curled under her cheek. The rivets on the pockets of his jeans revealed to her fingertips, the faint grease scent of his hair. Finding herself in Ivy’s place. Love lodged itself uncomfortably beneath May’s breastbone like a lump of undigested dough. ‘What did you do a year ago tonight?’

  ‘Pittsharbor Day? Let’s think. Softball, like today, and the girl I was with didn’t get in a snit about it like your sister. We swam, I think, and drove over to the Star Bar for a burger. Yeah, that’s right, I remember Beth got carded. There were a bunch of people over there, it was a good night.’

  ‘Did you see Doone?’

  ‘No, of course not. In the afternoon I saw her on the church green, when I went up there for a half hour. I didn’t speak to her or anything and I only remember seeing her then because of what happened the next day. What is all of this?’

  There was the choice of telling him, or keeping it zipped within herself. Either he would think she was nuts, with her diaries and codes and fears of slipping out of herself and into someone who was dead, or else she was normal, like everyone else. Or maybe even better than that, in the way Ivy always managed to be. ‘Nothing,’ she managed to say. ‘I just feel sad about her. You know I’m sleeping in her bedroom?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  She pressed on, knowing that she should be quiet. ‘I wondered if people, all of you who were at the beach last summer, can still see her in your memories? Like today, if remembering the way she was last year somehow gets overlaid on this day that’s empty of her, so it seems like she is still here?’

  Lucas thought about it, but not for very long. He sounded bored. ‘I guess if you knew her at all, you might feel something like that.’ And beneath May’s cheek his shoulder twitched in dismissal. She felt a tiny flake break loose from the block of her admiration for him and drift away into a space of disappointment.

  The recklessness that had come after the wine was diminishing too. There was a cramp in the arm that lay buckled underneath her and she didn’t want to move her legs in case it made him let go of her. She forced herself to lie completely still instead, thinking, l can make him go back to where we were. Ivy would, in her cool, self-sure way.

  Everywhere and there, only what happened now wasn’t dictated by Doone. It was between herself and Lucas.

  She moved her free hand, sliding it over his hip to rest in the hollow of his waist. If he had been drifting into sleep again the movement reawakened him. He rolled half on to his back and stared up at the sky. Awkwardly May bumped herself closer and hooked her knee over his leg. When he didn’t respond she hoisted herself higher, almost to lie on top of him, and nuzzled his jaw with her mouth. Even as she did it she knew it was all wrong.

  Instead of drawing back she rolled further across him and tried to reconnect the thirsty kiss. There was a weightless second in which he might have responded. But instead he sat up abruptly and May sprawled sideways. Her teeth snapped on a sliver of skin inside her lip and the pain of it made tears sting in her eyes.

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His voice had changed, back to the way it had been when he told her on the beach to fetch a towel and keep warm. ‘May?’

  �
�What.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that, before. It was dumb of me, I wasn’t thinking.’ He touched her shoulder, tried to turn her head so he could see her face, but she kept her neck rigid. ‘You’re really nice, May. Too good to be treated like that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for? It’s nothing.’ Humiliation almost choked her, tasting like acid in the back of her throat. She wanted to bury herself under the blanket of leaves, burrowing down into rotten blackness.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Blood roared in May’s ears, much louder than the sea had ever sounded. She nodded hard, thinking that she had to get away from him immediately before any more shame descended on her.

  He said, so kindly that she flinched under another stab of misery, ‘Come back to the beach.’

  ‘No. You go and find Ivy. She’ll want you to.’

  ‘Perhaps. I’m not sure I want it.’

  Yes you do, it’s all you do want. ‘Go on. I’m just going to sit here for a bit.’

  ‘I can’t leave you on your own in the dark.’

  May scrambled to her feet and spat at him, ‘Just go, will you.’

  The shrill words vibrated endlessly until the salt air at last damped them into silence. Lucas was as embarrassed as she was. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want.’

  He turned abruptly and crashed down the path towards the beach.

  When she couldn’t hear him any more May sank down again into the leaves. She lay back, but immediately the branches over her head knitted together and began a whirling that made her stomach heave. She sat up and concentrated on not being sick. As the ground levelled again and the trees slowed in their rotation May remembered the movement she had seen between the black pillars of the trunks. It had been no more than an instant’s flicker like a pale flame, but without Lucas’s protection fear expanded in her chest and rose into her mouth, more stifling than any nausea. She saw the island woman’s face again but now the eyes stared wide and the jaw hung open.

  A scream began inside May but it died before it reached her throat. Unsteadily she hoisted herself on to her feet and looked dazedly around her for the way home. She couldn’t remember which way to go and she staggered for a dozen yards uphill before turning and running wildly down the path. Long before she reached the beach she was gasping and sobbing, and her ankles and calves were ripped with thorns. At last she burst out on to the slope of shingle and her terrified rush slowed to a stumble before she stopped and hung her head, panting for breath and soaked in a clammy sweat. She had rushed almost to the water’s edge and now a wave gathered itself and broke over her feet. She hardly noticed that her shoes were filled with water.

  The moon had risen and it laid a silvery streak across the water. In its light the beach was empty and unthreatening. The Beams’ sailboat swung gently at its mooring and the light wind teased out a metallic rattle from the mast. Beyond it the island was a featureless black hump.

  May shivered. Turning to look at the houses she saw that there were cosy lights in all of them now, including the upstairs windows of the Fennymores’.

  Her terror slowly drained away. In its place a lumpen misery remained.

  In the Captain’s House John would be sitting on one of the chesterfields, reading his book. May found she couldn’t bear the idea of going in to face him, or Ivy’s inevitable absence. She moved back out of the range of the wavelets and flopped down on the stones. All her undigested love for Lucas had turned to a knot of disgust with herself. She drew up her knees and resting her chin on them she let the tears run.

  Even Doone, her alter ego, had deserted her tonight.

  In the grip of her loneliness May understood how much of an eerie companion she had made of the dead girl.

  She didn’t hear the footsteps behind her until they stopped a yard from her shoulder. Then she spun round and saw Marty Stiegel. He was breathing hard as if he had been running and his face in the moonlight looked pale and sweaty. ‘May. It’s you.’

  He didn’t sound as he usually did, one of the knit-together group of adults who played tennis and grilled shrimp on beach barbecues.

  ‘Who did you think?’

  Marty shook his head, then looked more closely at her. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Just, you know.’

  It would be such a luxury to talk to someone. Marty was friendly and he had been kind to her; May valued that.

  ‘I’ll walk you back up to your house,’ he offered.

  ‘Can I come up and have a drink with you? Like I did the other day?’

  Marty hesitated but she hurried on, extemporising, ‘There’s been a fight. Family stuff. I’d kind of like to be out of the house for a while.’

  ‘Sure. Okay. I remember fights with my mom and old man like you wouldn’t believe, when I was just about your age. But we got over them, you know. We’re good friends now, and you and your dad and sister will be too.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I know so.’

  They crossed the beach in front of the Beams’ house and climbed the Stiegels’ steps. Justine’s stroller lay folded in the seagrass at the top of the wall and Marty picked it up and carried it like a shield.

  The room was empty although the door on to the deck stood open and all the lights were on, as if Marty had hurried out on to the beach without a backward glance.

  He told her that Judith and Justine were asleep, that he must go up himself in a minute. But at the same time he moved around the room, turning off some of the lights, switching on some music that sighed in the background. He heated some coffee for May and poured wine for himself. Then they sat at opposite ends of the sofa. Through the half-open doorway May could see the room he used as his study, where the sheaf of photographs of Doone rested neatly squared in the concertina folder.

  ‘I got a copy made of the volleyball picture for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  May drank her coffee, letting it warm her. She didn’t feel any longer that she might be sick at any moment, but a blunt finger of pain prodded behind her eyes.

  ‘What happened to your mouth? Here?’

  Marty leaned forward and dabbed it with a Kleenex. She winced at the pressure where she had bitten the inside of her lip. He showed her the red-brown bloodstain on the pink tissue and at the same time glanced at the Elastoplast on her hand.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s nothing. I climbed up on the headland and fell over a log or something. Bit the inside of my mouth. Dumb.’

  Now a silence grew in the room. It spread, lapping into the corners like an incoming tide until May shifted against the cushions. Then Marty asked gently, ‘Do you want to tell me what’s wrong? I’m a good listener. There is something, isn’t there?’

  ‘I guess there is,’ May whispered.

  She rested her aching head against the high back of the sofa. Instead of closing her eyes she began to talk in a low whisper.

  She told Marty about not wanting to come on the family vacation to Pittsharbor with her father and sister, because they were only pretending to be a family nowadays. She told him about the bedroom in the Captain’s House and the French bed, and the way she sometimes felt safe and sometimes trapped in there.

  Tentatively at first, then in a stream of words so fast they tangled themselves in her mouth she told him about the woman on the island and Elizabeth’s story about her, and about her fear, and her conviction that Doone was separated from all of them only by the thinnest dimensions of time and space, which shivered and paled, and threatened to dissolve.

  Marty was right, he was an excellent listener. He took in the flood without moving or interrupting, watching May’s face.

  ‘I thought I saw something moving in the trees up there.’

  He nodded. ‘I understand exactly. I feel the same, sometimes. In fact I thought I saw Doone on the beach tonight,’ he murmured. ‘But it was you. Moonlight plays tricks.’

  A tremor passed through May. Marty took hold of her hand and patted it in reassura
nce. ‘Imagination is a powerful force, especially in a place like this, which is governed by tide and wind and fog. Of course it works to shift reality into a different dimension. The effects of a vivid imagination like yours or mine can be fearful or delightful. Or both.’

  It was only imagination working. That was better to hear than Elizabeth’s unsettling bits of history and personal experience. ‘Can I tell you what I was really afraid of?’

  He came closer. ‘Go ahead.’

  Here in the pleasant room, with Justine’s baby toys in a basket and the music playing, it was almost easy to admit to it. May half smiled at herself. ‘I thought… I was afraid that somehow I was becoming Doone. That the differences between what we are and what we did were so blurred that she was taking me over. I thought, you know, that I liked Lucas because she had done. I thought everything was connected together and I started worrying about what was going to happen to me in the end.’

  Marty was smiling too. ‘You’re nothing like her.’

  The reassurance was welcome even though she had heard it before. She sighed with the relief of having confessed her fears and in doing so making them seem small and irrational. Her headache made her roll her head sideways and Marty helped her to cushion it on his shoulder. May let the comfort of his attention wash over her. He was like her father, without the collisions and misunderstandings that governed her relationship with John.

  May said, ‘I found her diary hidden in our bedroom.’

  Marty settled his chin against her hair. She heard the gentle exhalation of his breath. ‘Did you?’

  ‘It was hidden in a hole in the wall.’

  ‘Did you read it?’

  ‘Yes. After I’d tried not to for a couple of days. That was when it began, when I started feeling that she was too close to me.’

  ‘Why was that, do you think?’

  ‘Half of it was stuff about school and friends, and her mother. Just like I’d write if I kept a diary. Except about my mother. But the rest of it was different. She was in love and she wrote about it so weirdly. For her it was either despair or wild happiness. I thought the guy must be Lucas.’