The Girl Who Lost Her Shadow

by Emily Ilett

  Chapter Eleven

  “It’s so beautiful,” Mhirran breathed as she stared wide-eyed at the pearl rolling in Gail’s palm. It glinted like the river which swam through the forest alongside them.

  Gail frowned at the pearl as she walked. It was cold in her hand, a small cold planet, but it glowed like the cat’s eyes, luminous as the moon. Full of secrets. She closed her fist firmly around it and returned it to her pocket.

  “It’s bad,” she said. “It’s wrong what Femi’s doing, killing mussels for their pearls.” Her hand grazed the old empty shell in her pocket.

  “And the map was the same as the one you found by Oyster Cave?” Mhirran asked as Gail steadied her on the uneven ground. Trees leaned over them, branches clicking like fingers, as they edged awkwardly along the riverbank.

  “No, it was the whole island that he drew. He’d put a cross on the southern tip, where the island comes out in that thin point, and that’s where the pearl was. And when I looked at the map from the cave, the outline matched. So that’s what the map shows, the sharp southern tip, where they’re pearl fishing.” Gail paused. “And he’s leading them. That’s what the other one ‒ Euan ‒ said. Femi’s showing them the way. So why did he leave the map for Kay? She’d never have fished for pearls.”

  “Can I see it?”

  The thin paper flapped in the wind as Gail handed it over, and Mhirran took it with her good arm, holding it inches from her nose to peer at it. They walked in silence for some minutes, the only sound the squelch of their shoes in the mud.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Mhirran said at last. “I’ve seen Femi in the caves sometimes. He was the first person I met down there, weeks ago. You were the second.” She grinned at Gail. “But he’s always by himself.”

  Mhirran’s voice was soft, remembering. “He does the most amazing drawings. He was doing a leatherback sea turtle when I met him. They’re so huge. He drew it twice as big as me. Did you know some sea turtles speak to each other? Everyone thought it was impossible, because they don’t have vocal cords. But they do it. And the babies even talk from inside their shells. In hoots and clicks.

  “Then after that I kept seeing him or his drawings. He did this sea lion and its whiskers were like my uncle’s moustache, and one morning there was a whole reef of coral sketched down a tunnel from one end to the other. It must have taken him forever. And I saw the manta ray. He’s not drawn that before. It was beautiful. Are you sure it was for Kay?”

  Gail nodded. “I’m sure.” She paused, feeling a decision wrap itself, kelp-like, around her. Her hand tightened around the shell in her pocket. “Mhirran, I’m going to come back,” she said determinedly. “After we get Kay’s shadow. I’m going to come back and follow him. What they’re doing… It’s not right and I don’t understand it but…” The harsh ridges of the shell were rough in her palm. “…But maybe I can stop it.”

  Mhirran shot her a glance. For a second, Gail thought she saw something like relief flicker in her eyes. “Then I’ll help too,” she said. “You might need me. Did I tell you I can do bird calls and Morse code and semaphore?”

  Gail rolled her eyes. “And speak Dolphin,” she added, and Mhirran began a string of whistles and clicks, eyes winking at Gail to join in until the trees rattled with dolphin chatter and they were both clutching their stomachs and gasping for breath, their grins as wild as their voices.

  “What’s it like?” Mhirran asked suddenly, when she could speak again. “I mean…” She caught Gail’s eye and reddened. “Where do you think it’s going?” She glanced at Gail’s feet.

  Gail’s fringe fell into her eyes and something cooled inside her. She watched Mhirran’s shadow swing casually by her shoes and stared down at where her own should be. What’s it like? The question rattled inside her, and the answer rose from all the hollow places where it ached. Lonely. It’s lonely, she thought. It’s like being left behind. First by her sister. Then by her shadow. Her eyes stung and she rubbed at them angrily.

  She shrugged Mhirran’s question away and urged her legs to go faster. “Cold,” she said, forcing a tight smile. “My toes are cold.”

  ***

  By the time they reached the waterfall, Gail was exhausted. The clouds had cleared, and the river glistened in the sunlight, stones shining like eyes from its depths.

  The water fell metres from where they stood. Rocks stuck out like teeth around it and the ground sloped treacherously upwards. Gail struggled through the stones and gorse, her knees sinking into mud when she slipped. Mhirran followed slowly behind, her mouth a thin line of pain as her wrist jangled in its makeshift sling.

  As soon as she bridged the slope, Gail clapped her hands over her ears. The water thundered inside her head and through her bones, crashing and churning her stomach. She fell to her knees, spray clinging to her eyelashes and dripping off her nose. The sound rolled and rolled inside her, over and over.

  She was tired, so tired, and so far from home.

  Gail crawled forward on her hands and knees, Mhirran still picking her way through the stones further behind. She just wanted to be out of the spray. Just somewhere she could curl up. So she could forget everything. Forget her shadow. Forget Francis. Forget Femi. Forget Kay’s broken eyes. Just for a moment.

  The water roared around her, thundering into the river in an explosion of white foam, and Gail dragged herself towards it, closer and closer, until she saw the ledge she was hoping for, and slipped into the dark space behind the waterfall.

  ***

  It was like a dream. Or, Gail thought, it was like watching a film of a dream. Like the old projections Miss Flint showed in class. The water fell in a curtain in front of her. The stone ledge was narrow and Gail saw dark-green algae clinging to it, like the stripes in Kay’s hair.

  Meet me behind the waterfall. It was their code. They’d never been behind a waterfall before. Gail hadn’t known that there were any waterfalls on the island, apart from the dribble on the way down to the beach. But they couldn’t even fit a foot behind that one. Meet me behind the waterfall. They’d whispered it when they’d discovered something that had to be shared in secret, or when they were sad, or when their mum was tired and quiet, or their dad’s friends lingered too long, and touched their hair while telling them that they were just too cute. Then Gail and Kay would retreat to their bedroom and crawl under the bed and pull the duvet over the edge and Kay would make waterfall noises sometimes, or Gail would.

  “Meet me behind the waterfall.” Gail whispered it softly now, as she curled into herself and forgot about Mhirran and her swollen wrist. Forgot about Femi and Francis.

  “Meet me behind the waterfall.”

  She closed her eyes and, just like that, just as she asked, there she was: Kay in a stripy swimsuit, aged nine and a half, staring at her with her cheeks puffed out and her eyebrows higher than her forehead.

  Gail was sitting opposite her in the bath, counting. “Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven…” and on thirty-eight, Kay let out the breath with a spurt of laughter. Their nan was painting her own nails bright orange and dousing the girls with the shower at random intervals. They loved it when she arrived from Barbados, bringing instructions on how to treat a man o’war sting (with green pawpaw), and stories of flying fish and recipes for macaroni pie and conkies that put their mum’s to shame.

  “Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six. Forty-six!” Kay shouted as Gail gurgled her victory and grinned, her smile an equator going around the world and back again.

  She’d always been able to hold her breath longer than Kay could. Bigger lungs, Kay always said, and prodded her in the chest with a mixture of pride and envy.

  In bed, Gail would hold her breath and try to beat her own personal best. She read that the record for a mammal holding its breath underwater was the Cuvier’s beaked whale at one hundred and thirty-seven minutes. Gail kept trying.

  It was summer, that time in the bath. Gail remembered the sunlight glancing through
the window and their nan saying it was hurricane season back home while she painted Kay’s nails green and Gail’s salmon-pink. She said the hurricanes were worse than they’d ever been. That they were destroying people’s homes. And that the coral reefs were dying. They’d listened to her, open-mouthed, small fires of outrage burning in their chests at what was happening to the Caribbean island, itching to fix it, with the water drying slowly on their skin.

  And that evening, while Kay was brushing her teeth, their nan had taken Gail’s hand and followed the fate lines along it and said, “The sea en’ got no back door, Gail. Remember that when you’re swimming. Remember that you can hold your breath longer than Kay.”

  Gail squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her knees into her stomach. Her head was filled with the deep, beautiful lines around her nan’s eyes and Kay’s finger prodding where her lungs would be and Gail, lying in bed when she was six years old, letting her nan’s words roll around and out of her like water. Because why did she need to remember that she could hold her breath longer than Kay? Kay would always be stronger. She would always be there. She would always be swimming…

  Chapter Twelve

  “Gail!”

  Water thundered around her ears.

  “GAIL!”

  It dripped down the rock onto her face.

  “GAIL! GAIL!”

  Gail forced her eyes open. Mhirran was on her knees at the edge of the ledge, her wrist held gingerly in front of her. Her face was so pale it looked green and her eyes were huge with worry.

  “I thought you’d fallen in,” she said. Pieces of her hair were being tugged inside the waterfall’s curtain.

  Gail untangled her arms and legs and shrugged. She hoped that the shrug said everything she couldn’t say.

  Mhirran leaned heavily against the dark rock. “We’re close now.” Her eyes were closed and her face was squeezed up as if she could stop the pain that way. “I used to come here with my mum.”

  For the first time, Gail realised that Mhirran had never mentioned her parents. She called her uncle’s house ‘home’. The thundering of the waterfall and everything Gail didn’t know about her swept between them.

  Gail stared at Mhirran’s sling and the torn holes of her jeans. She inched forward. “Mhirran, how long can you hold your breath for?”

  Mhirran’s face cracked into a faint smile. She shook her head slightly. “Not long. You?”

  Gail sighed. “A long time,” she said. Longer than Kay.

  Water-soaked light cast slippery shadows onto Mhirran’s face and caught in her orange hair so that, for a second, it looked like it was on fire.

  “Did you know that the longest time a mammal has held its breath underwater is one hundred and thirty-seven minutes?” Mhirran asked.

  Gail grinned and straightened. Gently, she helped Mhirran off the ledge.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “I knew that.”

  ***

  Mhirran was right; they were close. Once they’d clambered up the rocks by the falls and stumbled through a patch of heather they saw the stepping stones, which shone out of the river like the backs of dolphins breaching. And rising out of the trees, just over the water, a tentacle of smoke spinning and twisting upwards marked where Mhirran lived.

  Gail gasped. “But we’re here!” She was pointing to a thin slip of road just visible between the trees. “How are we here?”

  On the other side of the road, she could make out the red smudge of a telephone box. Peeling and out of use, it has been turned into a miniature library by the islanders, and Gail had borrowed books from it more than once. It only took an hour to walk there on a path which curved around Ben Fiadhaich. Landmarks spun and shifted in Gail’s mind as she realised she’d swung in an arc back towards the village, and a wash of relief flooded her. She was almost home.

  It was late now. The light was trickling out of the sky and the trees reared tall around them as Gail crossed the last of the stepping stones. It must be gone six, and the lateness chewed at her insides. Her mum would be worried. She quickened her pace as she followed the swaying glimmer of light that marked Mhirran’s house. The light flickered as it dipped behind tree trunks. Now Gail could see the building, and as she stopped to stare, she realised that the flickering light hadn’t stopped when she had. It was moving. As if someone was holding it.

  Mhirran saw him before Gail did. She pushed her beneath the thick spiky branches of a conifer, where they could crouch out of sight.

  “Don’t let him see you,” she whispered as she clung to Gail’s coat.

  “But he’s got her shadow,” Gail hissed, straining against Mhirran’s grip.

  Francis wasn’t so far ahead, his torch licking at the ground and his whole body arched forwards over it. He moved stealthily, picking his path as if cautious of frightening something or someone. When a bird crackled the branches of a nearby pine, he started and lurched towards the sound, his torchlight slicing the dim grey of the tree neatly open. Gail could feel Mhirran’s breath warm and fast on her ear.

  “Don’t let him see you,” Mhirran murmured again as Gail inched closer, the rustle of her coat loud in the silence. The pufferfish felt small and cold in her stomach, like a dropped penny, an empty wish. Suddenly Francis turned towards them, and she froze. The conifer was dense enough to hide them, but his torchlight crept close and they held their breaths as it passed and he carried on through the trees.

  Mhirran interrupted the silence. “He’s looking for us.” Her voice was flat and hollow as she stared after her brother, and Gail glimpsed a flicker of pain across the young girl’s face that had nothing to do with her wrist.

  “He’s looking for me,” Gail corrected, as she watched him round the corner of the house, the shadow swallower a heavy bulk on his back. “Where will he take it?”

  Mhirran scrunched her face up in answer. “It changes,” she answered heavily. “Mostly he takes them to his room. Other times he uses the shed, or the garage.” She winced. “It looks like he’s going inside though.”

  Gail’s mouth twisted. “I can’t get Kay’s shadow if he’s there, Mhirran.” She raised her eyebrows in a question and Mhirran nodded.

  “I’ll go first,” Mhirran said. “I’ll spin a story about how I lost you in the forest when I fell and hurt my wrist. I’ll get him away from his room somehow. There’s another door at the back,” she said. “Head for that and I’ll whistle when it’s clear.”

  Gail followed slowly and crouched beneath a window as she waited. She grimaced as a blister burst on her heel, and pictured her journey across the island in her mind. A strange sweeping curve, when she’d been sure she was heading south. But she was almost home. And she’d take Kay’s shadow with her.

  She ducked at a sudden beat of wings above. But when she looked up, it was just the wind slapping cardboard labels against four jars wedged onto the window sill. Each jar was half-filled with water. The one on the left was so murky Gail couldn’t see through to the other side. The one on the right glinted. The labels were written in thick black pen:

  Gail frowned. The names sounded familiar but she couldn’t puzzle out why.

  The whistle curled around the edge of the house, long and low like the ocean’s hum, startling Gail away from the jars. The all-clear. Half-crouched, she inched forward beside the wall, crunching along the short gravel drive where she bumped painfully into the handlebar of a bike. Every three steps, she’d stop and listen, her heartbeat high in her throat. But she heard nothing. It was as she reached for the back-door handle that a loud thump spun her around and she straightened, bracing herself to face Francis.

  There was no one there.

  Thump. A door clapped against the wall of a shed, opening and closing as the wind buffeted it thump thump onto the wood.

  Gail hesitated. The wind had shifted. It had rhythm. It roared with the boom and whine of the ocean. And there was something in the air. Something salty. Gail’s nostrils flared.

  The shed door banged open and closed ag
ain. It swung on old hinges, makeshift and ramshackle. Paint peeled off it, though she could still make out the shape of a bird on the red door panels, pictured as if in flight.

  Gail glanced back at the house. She knew she should slip inside now while Mhirran was distracting Francis. But she couldn’t. It felt like there was a wave at her back, pushing her towards the shed. She had to see what was in there.

  As she crept closer, something unnameable creeped into Gail’s stomach, curling itself around the spikes of the pufferfish. Something cold and scaly. Something with teeth. Stepping inside, Gail squinted to make out anything in the gloom. The shed was cobwebbed and stacked with spades and forks and other tools, looped and swaddled by pieces of old blanket. But then she saw it. Low to the ground like a creature about to pounce. The shadow swallower. Francis had brought it here after all.

  She fell to her knees, tearing at the straps, her hands trembling. She’d found it. She’d got Kay’s shadow. She pushed the straps out of their holes, the leather flapping like tongues around her. Dust beat up in clouds as the chest shivered and jerked on the stone floor, a shadow shaking within.

  “I’m here, Kay. I’ll get you out.” Gail’s voice was ragged with effort as she tugged at the rope which slicked across the chest, binding it closed. Her fingers strained at the knot, dense and thick as her own fist. But it was no good. It only tightened against her efforts. Again and again, Gail felt the chest shudder against her body. Something was trying to get out.

  Gail placed one hand on the flat top of it. “I know, Kay,” she choked out, her voice thick. “I’m trying. I know.” She yanked again at the rope, the roughness of it burning her palms in red stripes. But it didn’t move. She couldn’t open it. Eyes stinging, she fell back in despair and exhaustion.