The Girl Who Lost Her Shadow

by Emily Ilett

  “I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you…”

  The footsteps were slow at first. Then they began to hurry. Even as they drew closer, Gail knew they weren’t Mhirran’s. She froze, mouth agape. He’d find her here. He’d get her too. Then the chest shook again, like an earthquake was inside it, and Gail hesitated, torn between Francis and her sister’s shadow.

  But then she ran.

  She ran from the beat beat of the chest. She ran from the salt sharpness of the sea and the trembling of Kay’s shadow. She ran from the cold dark shed and flung herself towards the bike, jamming the helmet as far as she could over her hair.

  “Hey! Wait! I’ve been looking—”

  Gail ran past him, pushing the bike, then her feet were spinning on the pedals as she reached the road and could no longer hear him shouting behind her. She cycled until the only thing she could hear was the thump of her heart and the beat beat of the shadow-filled chest inside her skull.

  Gail slowed to a halt and slumped forward on the handlebars, her chin resting on the lamp which spun eerie shadows into the road ahead of her. She’d run away. Just like Mhirran said. Just like Francis knew she would. She wasn’t brave. She wasn’t strong. She wasn’t a gale. She’d run from her own sister’s shadow. Her arms and legs jellied and everything hurt.

  “It’s over.” Her words floated into the night like scraps of dark paper, torn and lost. “I can’t do it.”

  And she cycled back down the road with moonlight glinting off her cheeks and the trees leaning away from her, like they knew everything she wasn’t.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Soap suds melted on Gail’s arms as she rinsed the plates slowly. Cake crumbs bobbed in the water. Behind her, Kay’s chair scraped back and Gail heard her leave the room. Her mum called something after her but Gail didn’t catch it. She let out a long slow breath and leaned down into the lukewarm water, her hand squeezing and releasing the sponge, over and over.

  “I’ll do that, honey.”

  Gail started at her mum’s hand on her shoulder. She shrugged her away.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Gail.” Her mum steered her gently from the sink. “It’s your birthday. You don’t have to do that.”

  Gail dried her hands and sat back at the table. A yellow stain marked where Kay had dripped curry sauce and smudged it with her elbow. Her mum had cooked so much there were piles of leftovers on the side. Like her dad was still here to eat his portion.

  Kay had sat opposite Gail, her head low so her hair swung over her eyes. She’d asked Gail how her day had been in the clipped, polite tone of a stranger, and nodded at her mum’s comments, pushing sauce in circles around her plate. And Gail had avoided her questions, chewed down her food, and tried to put smiles into all the lies she told her mum about Rin and the fun she’d had on her birthday. Her mouth tasted sour and her head hurt. And over the crackling silence between her and Kay, her mum had talked and talked as if that would fix everything. As if everything would be okay as long as she didn’t stop talking, as long as the silence was kept away. But it never went away. It just grew and grew between them. And into the silence, the beat beat of Kay’s shadow trapped inside the box sounded inside Gail’s mind like her own heartbeat.

  Gail stared at her mum’s back, leaning over the sink.

  “I miss her.” The words fell out of her before she realised she’d said them. They grew in the room until she was sure they’d burst.

  Her mum turned. Gail saw the tea towel squeeze and stretch in her hands. “Oh honey.” And Gail knew what she was going to say. “I know you do. But…” Her mum’s eyes glimmered and Gail noticed for the first time how the dark glow had faded from her cheeks and the lines had deepened around her mouth. She walked over and stroked Gail’s fringe gently away from her forehead.

  “Gail. She hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  But Gail shrugged her touch away. It wasn’t true. Kay had gone. She’d left her.

  Gail turned from the liquid worry in her mum’s eyes. The pufferfish prickled her stomach as she stormed upstairs. No one understood. She needed Kay to come back. She needed her. On her own she was helpless. How could she save Kay from sinking when she couldn’t swim by herself?

  She would have walked straight past if her eye hadn’t been caught by the drawing. A sketch of a hawksbill turtle, inky brushstrokes carefully marking its narrow beak and overlapping scales. It was tacked to Kay’s bedroom wall, near her door. Gail had never thought to ask where she got it from, but now she noted the F scrawled in the corner and her eyes widened.

  “Did Fem—?” she began to ask as she pushed open the door. But then she saw her.

  Kay was standing by the window, staring at the grey blank wall of the newsagent. Her arms were wrapped close around her body, as if to hold something in, or out. And she was crying. It was the first time Gail had seen her cry in years.

  “A storm’s coming,” Kay said softly, as if to herself.

  Gail swallowed, her fingers tightening on the door.

  Kay’s voice was wet and tired. “We were going to find the Storm Sisters at the next storm. Don’t you remember?”

  Gail nodded, though Kay didn’t see it. At the place where the two giants joined, a hollow had formed and it was said that you could hide inside the Sisters during a storm, right on the edge of the island, and hear it roar and rage around you without getting a drop of rain on your head. They said at times like that, it was the safest place to be. It had been Kay’s idea to find them, to hide inside the rock through the next storm.

  Kay turned, wiping her cheeks.

  Gail opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. She stood there with her mouth hanging open and her sister crying and all she could think of was Kay’s shadow, trembling inside the chest.

  “I’m sorry about the poster,” she said at last.

  Kay nodded and sat on the edge of her bed. She looked slowly from Gail’s feet to her own, and a burn heated Gail’s cheeks and pricked her ears. She’d failed. She stared hard at her own feet in accusation. The carpet was old and blue, and Gail scrunched her toes into the itch of it. When they were younger, they used to play a game where the carpet was the ocean and they had to step on different objects to reach the door without drowning, or the sea monsters would get them. Gail looked across the carpet to her sister. It felt like the whole ocean was between them now. Miles of deep, deep water. Her feet stopped at the edge of Kay’s room and she couldn’t make herself step inside. She’d never felt so far away from her.

  Then Kay spoke, and it was as if she’d read Gail’s mind. Her voice was so low, Gail could barely hear it. “Do you remember when we’d make this whole carpet the ocean? The North Atlantic, miles and miles of it, swimming with sea turtles and manatees and butterflyfish and striped dolphins and all the things that bite and spike and sting.” Gail held her breath at the soft awe in Kay’s voice. “All that water. So alive.” Kay uncurled one foot from beneath her and swung her leg over the side of the bed. “The whole carpet was the ocean and we’d have to get across it without getting wet, without touching it. So the lionfish didn’t get us, or the tiger sharks.” Kay drew one toe across the carpet as if she was dipping her foot in the water.

  A cautious smile crept onto Gail’s face. “You always fell in,” she said. “You said you weren’t afraid of them. You wanted to swim with the whales.”

  Something flickered across Kay’s face. A ghost of a ghost of a smile. Gail swallowed and stretched out one foot over the doorway, her toe brushing the blue carpet, and, just for one moment, they both had their feet in the same ocean. And in that second, something slow rippled between them. Something huge and magical and alive, swimming just beneath the surface. Like the ancient trombone of a whale’s song, calling out across the depths. Gail glanced at her sister and their eyes met and she knew they both heard it, deep and aching and beautiful. The song shook her bones and fizzed through her hair. Gail felt determination rise through her like a storm.

/>   “I’ll get it back, Kay,” she said, the words tumbling out of her. “I promise.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was still dark outside when Gail woke the next morning and slipped on her boots. Her rucksack was packed with apples and biscuits, and the mussel shell and pearl jangled in her pocket. Last night, she’d hunted for something to cut the rope round the shadow swallower and now a pair of sharp scissors were wedged tightly between her extra socks and a bottle of water. Kay and her mum were still asleep, and she stepped on the edges of the stairs so as not to waken them. “This time,” she promised the silent house, “I won’t come back without it.”

  Ben Fiadhaich was capped in a blur of cloud and the road was empty of cars as Gail pedalled out of the village towards Mhirran’s. The wind had risen in the night and it pushed against her as she cycled, her knees aching from the strain. When she reached the house, dawn was pinking the sky and Gail could see that there was already a light on in an upper window. She held her breath and watched it, but couldn’t make out anyone moving. Was Mhirran awake? Her heart sank. Or Francis?

  On the gravel driveway, every footstep she took crunched loudly and Gail winced as she leaned the bike against the wall and inched towards the shed. The bird painted on the door was just visible in the early light; Gail’s breath was thick in her throat as she pushed it open. But when she stepped inside, the wooden chest had gone.

  Gail stared at the empty space, willing it to appear. She was ready. She could cut the rope. How could it have gone? Then she heard the brittle crack of twigs and the brush of leaves and spun towards the sound. Someone was moving down the path that led from the house into the woods. She could see their silhouette against the growing light. An odd hunched shape. It was Francis. And he was carrying the shadow swallower on his back.

  Gail hurried after him without thinking. He was already moving fast away from her: there was no time to tell Mhirran. He was walking steadily downhill, into the trees, which clutched at each other with long finger-like branches. The night crouched in the woods as if hiding from the dawn, spinning its own eerie noises in Gail’s ears, and her palms prickled as she hastened after him. Out of breath and tense with fear, she soon gave up trying to be quiet.

  When Francis reached a wide flat loch and finally stopped, the sun was almost risen. Gail hung back at the edge of a forest clearing, seeing the water glow an eerie blue like the underside of a sea swallow. The wind tiptoed ripples across it and the first gleam of the sun licked at its edge.

  Gail watched as Francis straightened then strode on towards the loch, the chest creaking on his back. She could feel the pull of the shadow swallower, even from here. She inched closer, and her eyes widened as she saw that Francis was walking towards an old woman, perched on a low flat stone.

  Wrapped in a dark cloak, the old woman sat with one toe dangling in the water. She was knitting and her needles were click-clicking like an animal chewing on the night. She looked up at Francis’s approach and smiled. Her smile was sharp and hard like a tooth. Between the knitting needles, tiny lightning bolts flashed and burned.

  Gail stared. The woman’s face was full of shadows. Not in shadow exactly, it was more like there were shadows drifting between the folds and wrinkles of her face, like thunderclouds gathering. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, and her cloak was weighed down with water, though it wasn’t raining.

  Gail stepped forward, out from the shelter of the trees. She couldn’t help herself. There was something horribly magnetic about the woman. Something darkly fascinating, like a river overflowing, and Gail’s nostrils flared at the metallic taste of thunderstorms in the air.

  Francis was standing metres from the woman. Gail could see he was talking to her but couldn’t hear what he was saying. Every now and then, he would gesture to the woman’s cloak, thick and close around her, and she’d suck her teeth and tap the needles and her eyebrows would dart to the shadow swallower on Francis’s back.

  Finally, she nodded.

  Gail froze as Francis turned around. She was clearly visible, halfway between the loch’s edge and the trees. But he wasn’t looking. He’d turned to pull the shadow swallower from his back and place it on the ground a short distance from where the woman continued knitting. Gail inched backwards but stopped when she saw that Francis was opening the chest. The rope was already flung on the ground and he was loosening the final buckle. Why? Was he giving Kay’s shadow to the woman?

  Gail heard the sound before she realised it was her own throat making it. A fierce cry edged with fear, as she hurtled forward, calling to Kay’s shadow to run. Run, run and escape! But before Francis had time to react, the old woman had jumped neatly from the stone, and as soon as both her feet were off the ground, a stream of dark shadows poured from her cloak like thunderclouds rolling across the sky. The shadows streamed towards the chest, and Gail stumbled to the side, afraid of the smoke-like tendrils that reached out from the swirling mass.

  It was then that she saw a shape drift away from the rest, and her heart leapt up in recognition. One shadow, swirling and rippling across the ground until, for one moment, it formed the shape of a huge manta ray, its fins moving like wings over the earth. Gail held her breath. A flying swim, Kay called it. Kay watched them in documentaries with her mouth half-open and her eyes glistening. Over and over again. Then she’d tell Gail for the hundredth time about the way manta rays would leap out of the water, almost nine feet up, and nobody knew why. She’d rewind the documentary to the part where it showed them leaping and her feet would twitch, and Gail would watch Kay watching the rays and be invincibly happy.

  The shadow shifted, curling away from Francis, and Gail raced towards it. It wasn’t a manta ray any more. The silky darkness grew and stretched as it swept towards the loch, until at last the familiar frizz of her sister’s hair fanned out from the shadow’s edges and Gail felt something bright as a butterflyfish light up inside her.

  Kay’s shadow had escaped.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gail ran after Kay’s shadow, hurtling past Francis and the old woman. Panting, she raced towards it as the shadow streamed closer to the loch, moving away from her.

  “Wait!”

  Gail leaped forward, and the tips of her shoes just touched the soft edges of the shadow. She gasped in relief, looking down into the shifting darkness, but her breath faltered in her lungs. She’d reached Kay’s shadow but it felt all wrong. It writhed at her feet, trying to break free. She could feel the urgent tug of it, the purpose. Why was it pulling away?

  Gail grit her teeth. She had to hold it. But how?

  She knelt down inside it, her hands flat within the shadow’s grey swirls, cold soil pressed against her knees. She remembered how she’d escaped the rock-shadow in the cave, when the tunnel had echoed her name back to her. And the time she was trapped in the tree-shadow she’d recognised herself in the cat’s glowing eyes.

  What if all I need to do is to remember Kay? To remember her so much that she’s everything I’m thinking about? Gail squeezed her eyes shut and dived towards the first memory that came to her.

  It was night. They were in Kay’s bedroom. Kay was sitting up against the wall with the bedcovers by her feet. Her eyes were empty, like someone had turned them upside down and rinsed them out. Gail couldn’t look at them. The silence was an eel in the room, sliding between them. Kay was refusing to come down to dinner. Her face was as grey and blank as the wall of the newsagent and with everything Gail said, she drew further and further away. The pufferfish grew and grew inside Gail’s stomach until all the helplessness and anger burst out of her. Get out of bed, Kay! There’s nothing wrong with you. What about Mum? What about me? What about me, Kay?

  “No,” Gail whispered. Not that memory… She could see Kay’s shadow pulling further away from her. Gail pressed down into it, squeezing her eyes shut in concentration, trying to hold it close. Another memory, any other one.

  The next was from before Kay’s sinking. They were swimming
. It was early, so early the birds were just shuffling into song. The water was dark and bitter cold and Kay’s lips were blue as she backstroked towards Lighthouse Rock. The rock was small, only a metre across, and it didn’t have a lighthouse. Kay had called it Lighthouse Rock because she said that when Gail stood on it, she lit up the ocean. Gail had squirmed at her words and made a sick-face with her tongue, but her fingertips had tingled with a sudden warmth and the name for the rock had stuck.

  Kay had stood on Lighthouse Rock on one leg, spinning and daring Gail to join her. She’d laughed as she spun, her mouth open wide, and it was so long now since Gail had seen her laughing that the memory stopped and trembled uncertainly, and in that frozen moment, something pulled at the shadow, ripping up the ocean and the rock and Kay’s bright smile, wrenching it from her.

  Gail forced her eyes open.

  Francis was squatting on the ground close by. His sleeves were rolled up, and next to him the shadow swallower was eating the old woman’s swirling streaming shadows as if they were sweets. Liquorice laces.

  Gail gulped for air. “No,” she cried out. “Stop it!” She tried to hold on to the memory, she tried to hold on to Kay’s shadow. But the funnel sucked it towards the chest with the others and Gail could do nothing to save it.

  “Francis!” she screamed. “She’s my sister!”

  But Francis didn’t flinch as his machine swallowed the flailing darkness of Kay’s shadow, trapping it once more.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The loch glowed with the dawn, trees danced in the wind and the old woman was nowhere to be seen. A leaf fell onto Gail’s face, and the sun rose higher and higher. It was too pretty for right now, for how this felt. Anything would be.

  The water lapped against the ground like a mistake. Gail had found her sister’s shadow and lost it in the same breath. And in that memory, Kay spinning on Lighthouse Rock, she’d felt closer to her sister than she’d let herself feel for a long time.