Skein Island

CHAPTER SEVEN

The swimming pool is closed.

Maybe it’s too early. But my watch says ten minutes past ten. And I couldn’t wait around the bungalow any more, sitting at that table surrounded by toast crumbs and cups of cold coffee, watching Rebecca pace and listening to Kay read aloud from the declaration I stole.

Something is wrong on this island. Something that lives in a small room next to the library of declarations, behind a door marked with four squares. I don’t know what it means, and I don’t know what to do. I can’t run; there’s nobody to take me from this island.

Rebecca doesn’t believe it, anyway. ‘They’ll find out that you broke in, and they’ll come for you,’ she said over the noise of the rain. She was applying jam to her third piece of toast with absolute precision, up to each corner. Behind her, Kay stopped pacing and pulled a face.

‘Maybe she’s not dead after all,’ she said. ‘Maybe Amelia faked her own death. For some reason. Maybe she’s crazy.’

‘She was obviously crazy,’ said Rebecca. ‘But that declaration could have been written years ago. Does the handwriting match the signature on the letter you received, Marianne?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

Rebecca raised her eyebrows at me. ‘What are you trying to convince yourself of? There’s no conspiracy. There’s you and Kay, breaking the rules. And they will catch you.’

I thought she was right. But I waited for hours. Where are they, the nameless ‘they’? When are they coming? Eventually I couldn’t wait any more. I came here, to the pool, wanting the empty expanse of the water to hide in. I can’t deny that I’m looking for an ally, and Inger looks like just the kind of person who might step in and save me, if saving is needed. Would she turn her calm, capable face to them, and tell them that they can’t take me?

I’m letting my imagination run away with me. I’ve always loved a good story, and now I seem to be spinning one for myself. There has to be a simple explanation for all this. A confused old lady with Alzheimer’s. A fable, a figment of imagination, someone pretending to write like Amelia would have. There are many alternatives, but none of them work at driving out Amelia’s words. Of dispelling the feeling that crept over me as I stood next to that small door marked with four cubes.

And the swimming pool is still not open.

I knock on the glass door, but nobody comes.

I start a slow walk up to the white reception building. If there’s no swimming today, perhaps there’s an alternative – yoga, or creative writing. The rain is, unbelievably, intensifying, but it doesn’t matter; I’m already soaked through. The drops are smashing into my face like a punishment. By the time I reach the reception I have been hammered into a wet mess, my clothes sopping, my head and hands numb. The automatic doors admit me, and I squelch over to the main desk and look over the laminated timetable that is pinned to the display board.

The receptionist emerges from the door behind the desk and glances at me. She stops walking, and the glance becomes a stare. I can feel her deciding on what she’s about to say. This is it. The moment is here.

‘Marianne Percival?’

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Makepeace is looking for you. She’s just gone over to your bungalow, about ten minutes ago.’

‘Mrs Makepeace?’

‘The director. Of the island.’ There’s a flurry of rain and noise behind me. A woman is standing by the entrance, her long blue raincoat dripping, her hood pulled up, obscuring her face. She’s a few inches shorter than me. Her raincoat skirts the ground, and the sleeves cover her hands. It was made for a much larger woman.

‘Here she is,’ says the receptionist, with acres of relief in her voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say to the woman in the raincoat. ‘Is there a problem?’ Now the moment is upon me, I’m determined to play it cool, to not admit to anything.

She pinches the hood between her thumbs and forefingers and slowly pulls it back before giving me a good look over. She’s older than I expected, with big brown eyes and a blunt, businesslike fringe to her short hair. She has lines on her face, visible even from across the room. They run from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her mouth, as if she has spent years doing nothing but smiling. She looks intelligent, and charming, and like she could hold her own in an argument.

‘Hello hello hello,’ she says, staccato-fashion, ‘I’m so delighted you’re here. I was just about to organise a search party, which is ridiculous on an island this size, really, isn’t it? I should be able to just go and stand outside and whistle, and everyone should come running. But, of course, I can’t in this rain, can I?’ She moves closer to me. ‘I tried your bungalow but they said you were at the swimming pool, and then the pool was closed, which it’s really not meant to be today, so that’s something else I’m going to have to look into. But it turns out you’re here! How lucky! You’re soaked through. You really could do with a better coat for this weather. I need a few minutes of your time, Marianne – would that be okay?’

About halfway through her speech, I realise that she’s nervous. I also remember that her name isn’t Mrs Makepeace, whatever she might claim. Her name is Vanessa. Vanessa Spence. Or it was on the day I last saw her.

I’m looking at my mother.

Funny, but even as one part of my brain keeps repeating that fact, the other part manages to respond, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ and my feet are following her around the reception desk, and into the small office behind it. My mother is saying, ‘Oh good, well, let’s not drag ourselves up to the main house right now, not in this weather. Why don’t we just come through here, will this do?’

‘Yes,’ I say. I take off my coat and put it on the back of the seat on the nearside of the desk. She unbuttons her own coat quickly. Underneath she’s wearing a double-breasted jacket with a short skirt in matching blue – another outfit that looks too big on her. She sits down opposite me and clasps her hands, interlacing her fingers on the desktop. Her fingernails are very short and unvarnished.

‘You broke into my house last night,’ she says. ‘What were you looking for?’

I have no idea what to say. She’s suddenly direct, and dynamic. She looks like she wants an answer, and quickly, but I can’t provide it. Eventually, I manage one word. ‘You.’

‘I thought so.’ She nods. She doesn’t speak for a long moment. ‘There’s a lot to explain,’ she tells me, as if I didn’t know. ‘I’ve tried to get it straight. When I heard you’d arrived I wanted everything to be clear, in my mind, so it would be ready for you. It would make sense. But I couldn’t decide what bits I should tell you.’

‘Tell me all of it.’

She smiles. ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea.’

I can’t call her mother, but I need to be sure. No – it’s not that I’m unsure. It’s that I need her to acknowledge it too. So I say, ‘Vanessa?’

‘Yes, I know, you want to be told what happened. That’s why you’re here. I never came back because I got a better offer. You’re a wife now, too, aren’t you? That’s what you wrote on your form. You can’t have been married for long so perhaps you won’t understand this yet. Or perhaps you’re just beginning to see how reductive terms like wife and mother can be. Is that why you acted on the letter I sent you?’

‘You sent it?’

‘Well, really, it’s from Amelia, I suppose. The spirit of her. But I wrote it and signed it. It’s difficult to explain. But it’s all very important, so I’m going to have to try harder, aren’t I? I’ve been waiting for this moment for years, and, forgive me for saying so, but you’re not making it any easier.’

I don’t remember hating her, before, but it would be very easy to start hating her now. She doesn’t even pretend to care. She uses a slightly disappointed tone of voice on me, as if she deserves to. ‘You waited for this? While you were in Bedford?’

‘Bedford? Why on earth would I be in Bedford?’

‘You wrote and said—’

‘Ah.’ She holds up a hand. ‘Arnie. I’m guessing Arnie set that up. I should have realised he’d feed you some lies rather than let you find out what happened for yourself. Always attempting to control the situation, that was Arnie. Too clever for his own good.’

I bite back the instinct to remind her that he’s not dead yet. I dare say she doesn’t actually care. ‘You never wrote any letters to me from Bedford? None?’

‘I couldn’t explain it in a letter. Not then, not now. It’s the kind of thing that has to be done face to face.’

‘So here I am. Better late than never. Perhaps you’d like to get on with it.’

She takes in a breath, as if I’ve shocked her. I’m glad. It makes me feel like her equal. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘It’s like this. Last night you took a declaration made by the founder of this island. So you know she was an amazing woman. I’m here because she asked me to take over the task of caring for this island, and reading aloud to the statue in the basement. I wouldn’t choose to start there, but you saw the door with the four painted squares. You even opened it, didn’t you? So it seems ridiculous to start anywhere else.’

I should feel something, but I can’t conjure an emotion. Too many shocks in one morning, perhaps. ‘You keep the… statue down there?’

‘I go down to it with a pile of newly completed declarations from the week before, and I read the words out loud. Amelia always believed it prefers fresh stories.’

‘So Amelia is dead? And you read to a statue because she asked you to?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Well done. You’ve got the basics.’

I look around the office: the white walls with one framed picture, a Vettriano print of a dancer in a flame-red dress; a traditional grey filing cabinet in the corner next to the window, where the venetian blind has been pulled, leaving the room in grainy semi-darkness.

Would it be better to simply walk away? I wish I had less self-control. Then I wouldn’t have to rein in this instinct. I would leave the room and never talk to her again. But first I would say, no, shout—You let a statue take priority over your child? Over me?

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says, ‘and I certainly wouldn’t have picked that as the first piece of information I’d give to you. Not if you hadn’t read it for yourself. But you did, didn’t you?’ She sits back in her chair.

There’s a light tapping at the door, and the receptionist pokes her head around. ‘I just wanted to check if everything’s okay?’

‘Yes, thanks Carol.’ My mother’s pleasant face is back in place. ‘We won’t be much longer.’

‘There’s tea and coffee making things in the top drawer of the filing cabinet, if you want drinks.’

‘Lovely, that will warm us up. You get on now, I’m fine to make it.’

Carol closes the door, and we’re alone again.

‘She’s wondering what’s going on. It’s a strange day,’ says my mother. She stands up, opens the drawer and brings out a small travel kettle. She checks it for water, then puts it on the carpet next to the skirting board and plugs it in. While it boils she fetches two mugs from the drawer, and shakes instant coffee from a jar into both. I watch her perform these actions as if we sit together this way every day, knowing each other, perhaps working together in this office, comfortable in this sudden silence.

The kettle boils. She pours water into the mugs and hands one to me, not even asking how I take it. She takes a sip of her own and sits backs down, leaving the kettle on the carpet. ‘I came here for a week off,’ she says. ‘To sit around, do nothing, meet other women in unhappy marriages and have a good moan about it. Moaning is therapeutic, did you know that? I’ve seen it work here. A week of dedicated moaning about the sheer awfulness of their husbands, fathers, sons, and they’re quite happy to take the ferry back to it all. I would have been too. I could have gone back to your father and stuck it out for decades. I might still be there now. I really mean that.’

I try to keep up with this monologue. She’s beginning to relax into it, to say things the way she wanted to. We must have hit on how she pictured this meeting – her talking, me hanging on every word, mugs of coffee in hand. ‘Back then, Amelia – Lady Worthington – still lived in the white house. She had built up this collection of rare things, beautiful things, that she loved to show off. I’ll give you the tour, if you’d like. She held drinks twice a week, up at the house. Buying Skein Island from the government, setting it up, that was all her. It was a feminist statement back then, to come to the island. The world’s most intelligent and dynamic women came here to talk to each other, to learn, and to be able to say that they’d been here. She was disappointed with how it ended up. The island became a joke, didn’t it? People laugh about the idea of the place? They poke holes in it. No politics. No reality, I suppose they say.’

She sips her coffee, seems to remember the thread of her story, and her voice lowers once more. ‘So Amelia asked me if I was enjoying the week, and I said yes, and we talked. Mainly small talk. It had been a hot week, and the other women had tans. She asked me why I didn’t, and I remember I told her that nobody ever discovered the meaning of their existence whilst sitting on a sun-lounger. She thought this was hilarious. She never went out in the sun herself. She asked me about Arnie, and I described him. I told her Arnie would have loved to have been in charge of the world, with all his big ideas, and having to be a gardener in a small town outside Swindon was slowly killing him. And that’s why she offered me the job. To be her Personal Assistant.’

It’s as if the story has skipped forward, leaving out a vital piece of information. ‘Sorry, why?’

‘Because I understood what type of man he was, and what type of man he was never going to be,’ she says. ‘It made the whole process easier for Amelia to explain. As soon as she told me, I knew I had to stay, you see. I gradually took over running the whole operation. The island, the statue, the cubes. Amelia told me there are only four types of men in the world: red, blue, green and yellow.’

There is another light tap at the door. Carol appears once more. ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ she says. ‘The coastguard is on the phone again.’

‘No probs, Carol, we’re done here,’ says my mother. She gives me a kind, impersonal smile. ‘Listen, Marianne, I’d love it if you could come to dinner tonight, up at the white house. We can carry on chatting. I really have to take this call, you see.’ My mother stands up, and picks up her coat from the back of her chair.

‘They’re looking for someone,’ says Carol, with an excited squeak in her voice. ‘A man was out fishing yesterday and went overboard.’

‘He won’t wash up here,’ says my mother, throwing Carol a look. ‘The tide will take him on to the rocks further up the coast, past Allcombe. Shall we say five o’clock, Marianne? I’ve got into the habit of eating early. Yes, okay, Carol,’ she says, as the receptionist flaps her hands at the thought of the coastguard waiting on the phone. The two of them bustle out of the office in a tangle of wet coat, leaving me alone.

I stand up, leaving the coffee untouched, and put on my sopping coat. As I walk past the reception desk I hear my mother in business mode, saying, ‘I can appreciate that, but the rules here are absolute, and we have a number of influential backers who would be most upset to hear that we were being forced to… Yes, it would be much better if you were able to manage to conduct the search without landing, unless you have female crew members? No, of course not, so in that case we should aim to keep disruption to a minimum—’

The double doors slide open and the sound of her voice is cut off by the wind and rain. It’s so fierce that I can’t think of anything but the struggle to stand up, to walk forward, to make it back to the stillness of the bungalow so I can try to find the words for this evening, so I can try to understand why my mother left me for the sake of an old lady, a statue, and a scary story.

CHAPTER EIGHT

David woke up in a soft bed, a pastel blue duvet pulled up to his chin, the thick noise of rain on the roof overhead, and for a moment he thought he’d dreamed the boat, the quay, everything. But then the pain in his head stamped down and told him it was all true. It had happened.

He couldn’t imagine how he was alive. But he was, and so he tried to be thankful for the headache. Even so, he wanted strong paracetamol, and some answers. He threw back the duvet and found his boxer shorts and trousers, freshly washed and dried, on the end of the bed. The room was another one of those feminine sanctuaries, with cushions and mirrors and an embroidered throw arranged over a small chair. The wooden roof sloped, and a skylight overhead gave him a view of dark, fast-moving clouds. He dressed as quickly as he could, heard a sound at the door, and realised a blonde woman was standing there, watching him. She was very attractive in a serious kind of way, with a straight line for a mouth, and frosted pink lipstick. Her white T-shirt and navy blue tracksuit bottoms looked like a uniform.

She held out a glass of effervescing water and said, ‘Soluble aspirin.’

He took the glass and pressed it to his forehead. The icy touch of it made him gasp.

‘It works better if you drink it,’ she said, with her perfectly straight lips. So he drank it, the whole glass, in a few gulps, and then handed it back to her.

She nodded, and said, ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’

The phrasing was odd. Did she mean he was lucky to be alive? He said, ‘Yes. Where am I?’

‘Do you remember any of it? You were confused when I found you.’

‘On the rocks?’ he ventured.

‘Yes. You were on the rocks. I swam out to you, helped you to the beach. I saved you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said again.

‘It’s my job.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m a lifeguard. Here on the island. My name is Inger.’

He noticed she had an accent, and put it together with her height and her white-blonde hair. He didn’t understand what was happening, but at least he felt he had the measure of her. ‘I’m on Skein Island, then?’

‘Of course. You must be the first man to stand on this island for years. Although you shouldn’t be standing at all. After what happened to you. You look very… healthy.’

‘I don’t feel it,’ he said.

She touched his head with the back of her hand, like a nurse. ‘I’m certain you shouldn’t be walking around. I thought you had a concussion.’

‘I’ve got a tough head. Actually, I’m starving.’

She assessed him with her gaze, then nodded. ‘Come to the kitchen, then.’

He followed her out of the bedroom into an open-plan space, wooden and echoing. At the far end was a fitted kitchen and a rough oak table with two low benches. He sat on one of them, and watched her retrieve eggs from the fridge, and a saucepan from an overhead cupboard. Her capability, her economy of movement, was very calming. He could have watched her for hours.

‘How did you – you couldn’t have carried me?’ he asked her, once the eggs were cooking.

‘No, no, you were conscious when I found you. Just a little confused. You called me Sam.’

‘I’m sorry if I was—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was fine.’

He didn’t want to think about what it meant to have said Sam’s name. He hated that he could remember nothing about it.

Inger had somehow managed to deal with him, get him here, take off his clothes, put him to bed. ‘Did you call a doctor? There’s a doctor on the island, right?’

She slid his omelette onto a blue-rimmed plate, then took cutlery from a drawer and handed it to him. ‘Yes, there’s a doctor, but I—Men aren’t allowed on the island.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But… yeah, okay.’

‘I could get into trouble. For helping you. There are strict rules. I shouldn’t have touched you. But I had to help you.’

‘You’re saying you should have left me?’

‘I’m saying I know I couldn’t leave you.’ She enunciated each word precisely. ‘And you’re fine. Because I didn’t.’ She turned away and washed up the frying pan: the hot water tap, a squeeze of fairy liquid, the dishtowel rubbed around the pan in smooth, circular motions. He recognised her compartmentalisation – what she could handle, what kind of conversation she was prepared to have.

‘So what now?’ he said.

‘It’s getting late. Stay here tonight. Think about it in the morning.’ She dried her hands on the dishtowel. ‘But I think I might be able to get you on board the ferry on Saturday. There’s a half-hour window after the boat docks before the guests are taken down to board. I can probably sneak you on, if the Captain is amenable. I think he will be.’

‘To bribery, do you mean?’ He thought of his backpack, his wallet, lost to him. ‘I don’t have any money. Anything.’

‘I know. Don’t worry. I have.’

‘Why? I don’t understand why.’

‘Because I save people,’ she said, as if that made everything clear.

The greyness of the day had thickened into early evening. Before long it would be dark. It was difficult to see Inger’s expression clearly as he said, ‘I need to get to my wife.’

She turned to him. ‘Is that why you were out on the boat?’

‘She’s called Marianne. She’s here.’

‘Yes, of course. Marianne.’ She smiled. ‘So you both like the water, then.’

‘What?’

‘She comes to the swimming pool. Where I work. You’ll see her on Saturday.’

‘I need to see her now.’

‘That’s really not possible.’

‘Please,’ he said. He couldn’t take her objections seriously. ‘Please, if it could have waited until Saturday don’t you think I would have taken a rain check on jumping into the sea and getting smacked in the head by an enormous rock?’

‘That would have been the sensible course.’

Despite her resistance, David found he liked her – her calm way of handling things, thinking them through. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m begging you.’

‘Perhaps I can persuade her to come here. In the morning. But only if she wants to see you. Now I think you should go back to bed and rest.’

‘That’s fine,’ he said. He got up, fought a moment of dizziness, then went back to the bedroom and climbed under the duvet without removing his clothes. He felt the need to be ready, ready for something. Sleep seemed like an impossibility. It was an unwelcome surprise to feel his body relax into the mattress so willingly.

He was woken, in the dark, by the sound of a shutting door, and wondered if Inger was on her way to find Marianne.

David turned on his side, felt the tender muscles contract, but even as he winced the pain lessened, faded away to nothing. What would Inger say to Marianne? Would she tell her that he had thrown himself into the water? He couldn’t imagine what words she would use.

His body was filled with energy, crackling, fizzing. He got up, stretched, walked around the bed, walked back. He had to do something. The thought that Marianne might refuse to come to him was unbearable; he had never even considered it until Inger had put the idea into his head. But now, for the first time, he wondered if he had really committed an act of intrusion, of violation. It was agonising to think she might consider this to be another example of the male need to dominate, to control, just like the attacker at the library. All he wanted was to hold her, to take her home. It was impossible to change his desire for her, and he couldn’t escape the thought that to come this far and not see her would damage him permanently. Making sense of everything depended on her – surely she would see that? And yet, Inger’s calm face would not stress the urgency of it. It would be easy for Marianne to dismiss Inger, to decide that real life could wait.

He found himself jogging out of the door, into the night. The cold and the rain did not change his mind. He shrugged them off, ran faster. He felt stronger, more powerful, for moving, making his lungs and legs work. The gleam of Inger’s torch was his beacon.

CHAPTER NINE

‘Amelia’s collection of Egyptian artefacts is really stunning, and it’s amazing how few women choose to come and visit it, really. I mean, the details are in reception and it’s open at all times, just upstairs. I’d be happy to take you around the upper floors later. It’s a museum dedicated to her and there’s so much to learn, there really is…’

Finally, Vanessa takes a breath. I’m so grateful for that pause; my ears were beginning to hurt. She talks too loud on this, apparently her favourite subject. She’s been talking about it ever since Rebecca brought it up, which was the second we got here.

‘What’s wrong?’ Vanessa says to me. ‘Don’t you like Greek food?’ She’s put together a spread of Greek meze: dolmades, stuffed olives, hummus, souvlaki, rice salad. It covers every inch of the enormous, rectangular glass table. I’ve no idea how she managed to get the ingredients, but the food is abundant and the four of us will never make a dent in it. When I think of the fact that Vanessa was not actually expecting Rebecca and Kay to turn up as well, this banquet becomes inexplicable. Is it meant to be a sign of wealth? Of her ability to spoil herself? Or perhaps she’s like a nervous mother who has overprepared for her child’s birthday party, laying on far too much food and too many games, determined to do too much rather than not enough.

‘It’s lovely,’ I say, not able to think of anything else that begins to cover it. Kay, sitting on the opposite side of the table, has adopted a bemused, entertained expression, barely on this side of polite. I wish I could do the same.

‘Did you recognise the quote on the letter? And in reception? Homer. Quite significant.’

‘Of what?’

‘The male sex.’

‘So, Vanessa,’ says Rebecca, ‘I think it’s so great that you’re really happy to open up about the statue monster thing. When did you first meet it?’

‘I can tell that you don’t believe in it, and really, I can understand that,’ Vanessa says to her, meeting her eyes directly, ‘because you aren’t important, are you? I don’t mean that in a cruel way. It’s just very obvious to me that you’re a bit player in this story, trying to elevate yourself to centre stage, hopping up and down in your desperation to control everything and failing quite dismally. But really, you’re too old for this shit, aren’t you? If I can be forgiven for that cliché.’

Kay makes a coughing sound through a mouthful of dolmades.

Vanessa turns to me. I get a sense of her frustration and annoyance in the way she leans over the table, her hands clenched. I recognise myself in her body language. ‘I don’t know why you found it necessary to invite your new friends.’

I’m not sure either. I don’t think that I did, exactly. When I got back to the chalet they were waiting for me, the two of them, desperate to tell me that the manager of the island was looking for me, that I was in serious trouble, and what was I going to do? Their excitement, their tension, was the reason I told them about meeting my mother, and that act seemed to have established an inviolable group, whether I liked it or not. It was taken as read that they would accompany me to dinner. I can’t say I don’t want them here, exactly. They are muddying things, perhaps, but it’s beyond me to judge it. I had no idea what to expect from tonight. The Greek food alone has thrown me completely.

‘As you say, it’s not about anybody but Marianne, is it?’ says Rebecca. ‘Marianne asked us to be here. So here we are. For her.’

My mother looks at me and raises an eyebrow.

‘Lovely meal,’ says Kay. She’s the only one left eating. ‘Did you have all this stuff delivered?’

‘The Sea Princess brings over the supplies every Saturday. I sometimes put a few bits and pieces on the list. Perhaps I went a little overboard when I found out Marianne was coming.’

‘You wanted to impress her?’ said Rebecca.

‘Is that so strange?’ Vanessa snaps back.

‘After eighteen years, some would say so.’

Vanessa falls into a thwarted silence. Does Rebecca see herself as my champion? I can’t stand the thought of it.

‘It worked,’ I say. ‘I am impressed. It’s very tasty.’ This awful repetitive circle we’re following: the food, the food, the food. Suddenly I hate myself for playing by the rules. ‘If you wanted me to think of you as a good cook rather than as a good mother, then yes, it worked.’

She says, without any hesitation – I suppose this is more like the kind of conversation she prepared for in front of the mirror – ‘Well, at least I’m a good something.’ And I find myself liking her, just a little, in the way that I might like a stranger who has said something witty and cool back to a rude acquaintance.

But then I remember her choice to stay here, and I’m wary of her all over again.

Kay has finally stopped eating. She looks around the dining room as if seeing it properly for the first time: the long purple curtains, the table, the chandelier and the obediently burning fire in the fireplace. There is, unbelievably, a stuffed white cat on a tasselled red rug before the fire. It is curled into a ball, but also elongated and flattened, as if it has been sat on a few too many times.

‘This place is bizarre,’ says Kay. ‘I love it.’

‘I wouldn’t have felt comfortable changing things,’ says Vanessa. ‘I didn’t feel it was my business. Everything is just how Amelia left it. It really reflects her personality, you know, precisely. The… rich, illusory bravado of it.’

‘What an interesting description,’ Rebecca says to the stuffed cat. ‘Illusory.’

‘Old women living alone like to pretend they’re still young.’ Vanessa sighs. ‘I find the photographs the most interesting part – pictures taken of her with so many rich and famous people. She knew everyone.’

‘Sounds like you should open this place up properly. To the public, not just the women here on holiday. You’d make a fortune.’

‘Oh, we could never have that. Besides, we don’t need the money.’

‘Ah…’ says Rebecca, as if a locked door has just been thrown open wide. ‘Of course. No men allowed. Because of the monster. Can I call it that?’

‘I prefer to think of it as a statue.’

‘Why? You know Amelia’s story. You’re reading to it, you’re refusing to let men near it, so obviously you believe in it.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ says Vanessa, wincing.

‘Why not? It’s only your emotions complicating it.’

I want to shout at Rebecca, make her stop this attack, because all it is doing is making me feel sorry for my mother, defensive towards her, and that is the last thing I want.

‘The statue is—It’s not just a statue, that much is plain, but I never experienced anything like—’

‘So you think Amelia made it up? In that case, don’t you need to admit to yourself that you’re using this statue as an excuse to not face up to the consequences of your actions?’

‘That’s it.’ Vanessa stands up. ‘Come and see it.’

‘Pardon?’ says Rebecca.

‘The statue.’

It’s the first time I’ve seen Rebecca lost for words. Perhaps nobody ever called her bluff in a counselling session before. She blinks, and shakes her head.

‘Seriously?’ says Kay. She stands up too, and scratches her neck, a masculine gesture, like a builder being asked to give a quote. ‘I’m up for it. In the library, right? Through the door with the four coloured squares. I have to tell you, I believe in monsters, but I don’t expect to see one down there. Still, I’d like to have a look, if that’s okay.’

Everyone turns to me. I have become the focus of the room.

The unspoken question is – do I believe in monsters?

I know there is something behind the white door with four squares, and I don’t want to face it.

I could side with Rebecca. She’s waiting for me to announce that I won’t be buying into this delusion, that my mother needs professional help, that we need to get her off this island before we can even begin to form a normal mother–daughter relationship. Where does that kind of help get you? The kind where somebody takes your own ideas from your head and stuffs in fresh ones instead?

Do those new, shiny thoughts mean that monsters no longer exist? Does it mean the rapist isn’t breathing hard outside the door?

I don’t believe that every monster, real or imaginary, needs to be faced. But the one in this house does.

So I stand up. ‘Let’s go.’

For one moment, it looks as though Rebecca is going to cling to her principles and stay at the table, but then she pushes back her chair and smoothes her skirts. ‘Perhaps this is the best course of action,’ she says. ‘Facing it head-on.’

‘The monster?’ asks Vanessa in an amused voice.

‘Whatever you think it is.’

‘What a very delicate way of putting it.’ Vanessa strides out of the dining room and we follow after her in a snake: Kay, Rebecca, me. We march through a minimalist living room, the fire unlit, into a long draughty hall with black and white tiles on the floor and walls. Underneath the wide staircase, carpeted in a scuffed and faded red, is a door, painted black. Vanessa turns the handle and we follow her farther, down into the basement. The stone steps, so bare in contrast to the décor of the house, are lit by small electric lights running the length of the sloping ceiling, strung on two bare wires, but even though the way is clearly visible, I can’t bring myself to close the black door behind me. I don’t want to lose that opening, that possibility of escape.

At the bottom of the steps we enter familiar territory: the corridor, and then the library, with the rows of shelves holding empty declarations. Vanessa slows her pace, and strolls down the ‘A–G’ aisle, running one hand along the folders. She reaches the small white door with the four squares, then takes off her green jacket, folds it and puts it on the floor, and rolls up the sleeves of her cream blouse, even though it’s freezing. She picks up a folder from the tray next to the door, then traces her finger along the squares. ‘Red for heroes. Blue for villains. Yellow for sidekicks, and green for wise men. Or wizards, if you like. Sages. Sage green. I’ve often wondered if that’s where the saying comes from. Amelia told me they were as old as the statue, those definitions.’ She swings back the door and steps into the darkness.

Kay is the first to follow. Rebecca looks at me. I return her stare calmly, much more calmly than I feel, and then I walk through the doorway too. I hear Rebecca following after me. She manages something I could not; she shuts the door behind her. The light of the library is snatched away, and Kay makes a small hissing sound. I stop walking and wait for my eyes to adjust. I have no idea if I’m in a tiny room or a cavernous space. Although I know there can’t be a lot of room down here, under the house, I have the idea that if I lift up my hands I wouldn’t scrape my knuckles across a low ceiling, but would find only air.

There is a greenish glow coming from the wall on my right. As the seconds pass, I make out more colours, coming from where the walls give way to natural rock. I see red, blue, and yellow too, faintly, giving just enough light to let me see the outlines of shapes, and to stop me from stumbling as I walk forward to stand next to Kay. Vanessa is ahead, turned towards us, her face barely visible. There is the sound of water, trickling. I shiver, and there’s the sudden sensation of pressure between my shoulder blades.

‘I can’t see anything,’ whispers Rebecca, next to my ear. She is holding on to my jumper, I think; I can picture her fist bunching the wool.

Vanessa turns around, shows us her upright back, her blouse reflecting the dim light. ‘Hello, Moira,’ she says.

The sound of trickling water is not strong, but I have the impression we are close to the source of it. There’s dampness in the air, and I think the uneven floor might be wet. I feel as though I’m standing in a shallow puddle, but my walking boots protect my feet. Isn’t Rebecca wearing high heels? She’s still holding on to me. I resist the urge to turn to her, to ask her if she’s okay, if her feet are wet, anything at all just to get her to let go of me.

‘It’s a woman,’ says Kay, and her voice trembles, resonates with fear, and that tone would be enough to make me run if Rebecca wasn’t pressed up against my back. Her grip is relentless.

Kay has stopped moving. I manage to walk up to stand beside her, and she whispers to me, ‘It’s a woman. Is it?’

In front of us, in an alcove set in the back of the rough cave, she stands. Behind her the rocks glow red, yellow, blue, green, dimly. I can only just make out her features; she is beautiful, I think. She radiates age and intelligence, and it is humbling to be near her.

‘Meet Moira,’ says Vanessa. ‘That’s the name Amelia gave to her.’

The statue doesn’t move. Of course. How could it move?

And yet my strong feeling is that she’s not carved from stone. She is encased in it, a thin layer of it; it has grown on her. The reality of her is just under the surface of the rock. Very close to waking, as if she could stretch and the stone would fall from her. She is waiting.

I don’t know what she’s waiting for.

‘It’s a statue,’ says Rebecca, and the fact that she really believes that shines through her voice. She just doesn’t get it. ‘It’s just a statue.’

I say, ‘No.’

But now she has planted the doubt, it begins to grow inside me. What is Moira? Are my senses lying to me? Why should my perception be different to Rebecca’s?

Moira’s face alters. Not discernibly, not so a person could take a photograph and point out differences, but there is no mistaking a change from beautiful to ugly. The nose is now severe rather than straight, and the mouth is loose rather than generous. I now feel I’m looking at an older woman, one whose hard life has written itself on her face.

‘She changes all the time,’ says Vanessa. ‘I watch her for hours.’ She walks up to Moira with a nonchalance that shocks me. Has she really been in Moira’s company for so long that she is able to touch her without feeling profoundly uncomfortable? But Vanessa stops short of touching her. She walks behind her and taps something attached to the wall. I take a step to the right and see a length of pipe jutting from the rock, leading down to a squat barrel from which the trickling sound emanates.

‘We sell it,’ says Vanessa.

The piping runs around Moira’s feet, like manacles, and seems to come from inside the rock, just below her knees. There is a sense of wrongness to it. I have to fight the urge to attempt to rip it from her.

‘Like a spring?’ says Rebecca. ‘A natural spring, on the island?’

Vanessa doesn’t bother to reply. She pulls something from her pocket and a moment later there is a pinpoint of light in her hands – a miniature torch. She puts it between her teeth so she can open the folder she brought in from the pile by the door. Then she shifts the torch to her left hand, holds the folder in her right, and begins to read aloud.

Vanessa stops reading.

When she spoke those words, they made a different sound. Resonant. Deeper and stronger. Not like it sounds when Vanessa says, ‘She’s feeding off them now. Off Kyle. The idea of him. What he could have been. All these declarations, and so many women find themselves writing about what men want, what men need from them.’

Flat words; they have no substance. I don’t believe them, and Moira is disinterested in them. But when Vanessa read to her, there was avidity. The ugly face was intent. Now it is serene and heavy with age.

‘This is elaborate, isn’t it?’ says Rebecca. ‘This act. All the things you’re doing to make Marianne believe you.’

‘Rebecca, can you really not feel it?’ says Kay.

‘Feel what?’

Kay flips her hand at the statue, at Moira, and in response Rebecca’s tone hardens into belligerent, obstinate belief: ‘You’re seeing a carefully prepared room. You know that, right? Lighting, effects, like a film. It works on you, just like a film does, standing here in the dark. But it’s not real. It will do you no good to believe in this. If it was genuine, don’t you think Vanessa would turn on all the lights, show it to you properly? Everything always looks different in the light, doesn’t it?’

‘Women never mattered, did they?’ Vanessa says. She is warming to her subject. She gestures with the folder and the torch, and throws back her head as her voice gets louder. ‘Not in the great tales of heroes and villains. Women were the prizes and the punishments. Moira isn’t interested in us, you see. Men feed her, make her stronger, so that the entire world gets caught up in her.’

‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ says Rebecca.

‘Don’t you see? She’s real. She’s real. I had to be here. Don’t you understand, Marianne?’

‘There’s a crack,’ says Kay. Vanessa drops her hands.

‘What?’

‘A crack. In her neck.’

Vanessa puts her face next to the curve in Moira’s throat. When she shines the torch upon it, I can clearly see the crack that runs through the stone, from below the left ear to the clavicle. There’s a soft sound, like a ripe fruit hitting a hard floor, and as I watch the crack widens, deepens, approaching the breastbone.

‘What’s happening?’ says Rebecca.

‘I don’t know.’ Vanessa switches off the torch. There is a tremor of movement under my feet. The ground is trembling. A noise is building, a low roaring. The piping behind Moira groans and begins to rattle against the rock. ‘I don’t know. This is wrong. There must be a man nearby. Amelia said she would only change if there was—’ She pauses, head tilted to one side, and then she turns around and looks straight at me.

‘Run!’

The ground splits apart.

There is no time to react, to think of what should be said or done. I push backwards with my legs as the floor begins to give, and my head hits something hard as I fall. I scrabble behind me, touch the door, grab the handle – how did I get so close to the door? It can’t be real. But it is solid, it stays solid, as the rest of the room sags, drops away, screaming, grinding, shouting so loud at its disappearance. I can’t see Kay or Rebecca, but I can see Vanessa. She is holding on to Moira, who remains upright, an island in the centre of the moving ground. Vanessa’s terror is palpable, and so is Moira’s amusement, written on her face, and through the fretwork of cracks that now cover her, life pulses, reaches out: more than life, more than flesh. She glows. Vanessa is shouting something at her; I can’t hear. Moira’s hands are golden, and they move, they move, so slowly, up to Vanessa’s open mouth, and they close around her lips and pull apart, stretching, stretching the skin until they are ripped free of Vanessa’s face, and there is so much blood, and then the door swings back, into the corridor, and snaps from its hinges, so that I am shaken free of the handle to land on something cold and hard underneath me.

I realise I’m shouting the word no, no, no, over and over. I can’t hear myself but my own lips are saying it. I’m in the corridor, the lines of the walls are angular, sloping inwards to meet just above my head, and the stairs at the far end have formed a concertina, squashing, shrinking, and then I can’t see them any more as the air thickens with dust, and breathing becomes so hard that my mouth stops moving and my chest hardens into a stone of pain.

CHAPTER TEN

He watched Inger knock on the door of the wooden chalet, wait, then knock again. She moved to a darkened window, cupped her hands to the glass, and looked inside. Then turned, and saw him. She pulled a face: a caricature of the disapproving mother. He couldn’t help but laugh.

She stamped up to him. ‘I don’t find this funny.’

‘Sorry.’ But David couldn’t stop smiling at her. The night was so clean, making his skin tingle with its freshness. He had never felt so well. Maybe this was a by-product of all he had gone through in the last few days. Catharsis had taken place, and he was now a better version of himself. He felt it.

‘She’s not there, anyway,’ said Inger, putting her hands on her hips. ‘Nobody’s there. She was sharing with two other ladies. The only organised activity on a Monday night is massage therapy with Janet. Could she have gone to that?’

‘She’s not a massage person.’ He’d tried to rub her feet when they first got married, and she’d clenched them up into birdish claws and told him she was far too ticklish to enjoy it. Could that have been a lie?

‘I don’t know, then,’ said Inger. She puffed out her cheeks, then said, ‘We should go back.’

David looked around. Something was building. He felt it in the darkening sky, the curves of the ground. He remembered the round, white house, visible in the distance. It had struck him as the hub of the island, around which all things rotated. He’d felt the pull of it. It would sound ridiculous to Inger, so instead he said, ‘Come on,’ and set off back the way they came, following his instincts, wondering where this new confidence in them sprang from.

‘No—’ said Inger, and he heard her running after him. He felt the strength of it, being in charge, making the decisions once more. She wouldn’t be able to stop him for all her heroics.

When she caught up to him, David said, ‘What’s in the white house?’

‘Mrs… Makepeace…’ She was out of breath already. He realised he was jogging. It put no strain on his lungs, his body.

‘I’m not meant to be here, I know, but I just need to look through the window. Nobody will know, and then I’ll come back with you and lie low, I promise, honestly.’

‘But—’

‘Honestly,’ he said. He didn’t slow down. The night was no impediment to his speed; his feet found the right path, even though Inger stumbled. He saw the white house up ahead and aimed straight for it, faster, stretching out his legs.

‘I can’t…’ Inger fell behind. He found he was sprinting. The sleek strength of his muscles was a surprise; he felt like an animal. He found he had rejoined a path that led up to a wrought iron gate, which he simply climbed over, not bothering to check if it would open or not. The path widened until it formed a semi-circular gravel space in front of the pillared facade and a large, blue front door.

David looked behind him. Inger was nowhere.

He ignored the door and moved to the nearest window. Inside was a pattern of black and white tiles covering the walls and floor. David put his hands to the glass and it trembled at his touch. No – the glass wasn’t trembling. Something else, something under the ground, had come alive. It shuddered and squirmed at his touch, then groaned, so loud, so lonely.

He pulled back his hand and covered his ears.

The house reared up, and the windows split apart with great cracks, the glass falling into splinter shards that pelted down in dust and tiles and plaster.

And the ground opened.

It swallowed half the house in a second. The rest of the house fell over and lay on its side; David watched it, felt certain it would attempt to get up. It creaked and complained on, and gouts of steam erupted from the black mouth of moving earth into which the house had fallen, just beyond his feet.

Inger was pulling at his arm. He realised she was shouting at him.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Come back! Come back!’

She was strong – he could feel her muscles pulling against his – but he didn’t step away. There was something he was here to do. It came to him as a revelation. He had to go down into the hole. Marianne was in there. He was not about to be defeated, not when he was so close to her.

‘I have to go in,’ he said.

‘Back!’ shouted Inger, still tugging at him. He turned to her and saw enormous eyes, fear-filled, liquid. Beautiful. He took her hand from his sleeve and kissed it.

She snatched it back, and David stepped forward, felt the earth begin to slide under his feet. He kept his balance and rode it to the tilted house. The window he had been looking through had lost most of its glass and shape to become a squashed rhombus of an opening. He climbed through, felt the remaining shards catch on his tracksuit bottoms, and then he was in the black and white tiled hall, turned at an angle so that, to stay upright, he had to lean against the wall and crab down the corridor to where the next doorway lay, burst outwards, with only rubble piled high beyond it.

‘Marianne?’ he said.

He listened, and heard nothing beyond the groans of the dying house. Shouting seemed ridiculous; he was certain she was there, so he put his hands on the stones and started to throw them behind him. More flowed out of the gaps he made, and he suspected it was an endless task, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He would have done it for eternity.

Inger was calling his name. He didn’t turn around. After a few minutes of shovelling with his hands, he heard her scramble down the corridor, and say, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ at his back, as if that meant something.

‘Marianne,’ he said again, and Inger said, ‘No, no.’ He felt irritation at her decision to react rather than act; wasn’t she meant to be a saviour of those in distress? But then she knelt down and started to pull at the stones around his feet, and he realised all she had needed was a moment to read the situation.

They worked together.

‘It might collapse,’ she said, after a while, in between breaths.

David concentrated on the rhythm of his hands. Someone was screaming outside.

‘I’ll go and see,’ said Inger, and started back down the corridor.

He pictured a group of women standing around the house, their hands over their mouths, portraying shock and terror. Soon, with Inger’s help, they would get over it, start to organise themselves, build themselves into a team of good intentions. He suspected they would attempt to pull him clear for his own good. And his hands were a mess of cuts; his blood was making the stones slippery. The window of opportunity to save her was closing. What would he do if he couldn’t save her? He would be a waste of a man, a dead end of the possibilities he had been born with. He thought of Arnie, and the other men who slumped in The Cornerhouse, waiting for a win on the cubes for a few moments in a dream.

He heard himself saying, ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ in time to the widening of the hole, each stone in turn. He had to save her. It was his destiny.

A hand poked through, clutched at his. A voice he didn’t recognise said, ‘Please,’ and he squeezed the fingers, felt the skin, realised it was Marianne at the moment she said, ‘David?’ How could he not have recognised her? He felt hot, feverish with guilt, as he scrabbled at the stones until they gave and he pulled her up and out, falling backwards, so that she came into his arms and he was holding her, listening to her cry, wanting her to cry because nobody else had ever cried like her. She yelped and snorted, and always got the hiccups afterwards, and David waited for the hiccups to start, then stroked her face as she alternated between them and trying to talk.

‘How—you—you—you,’ she said. He picked her up. She felt heavier than he remembered, and there was no blood on her, no rips on her clothes. She seemed intact, weighed down by the dust that cloaked her. Every second that he held her cemented her back to him. He could feel her, prickling, singing with life, like a part of his body waking from numbness after too long being still. Life was returning to them both.

Inger awaited them on the other side of the window. David helped Marianne through, watched a knot of women tie themselves around her with towels and torches. A light rain was caught in the beams of light, like the moment was frozen.

‘Come out,’ said Inger.

‘What’s happening?’ he said.

‘The emergency services are on their way. But it’s going to take time, coming from the mainland. Ten minutes for the helicopter. They said stay out of the house. It’s unstable.’

Marianne was being led away by the women. He watched her shake her head, turn, point at him. No, not at him, at the house, her gaze rigid with fear, expectation. The women piled towels on her shoulders and dragged her on.

‘Are there others?’ David said.

‘Come out,’ said Inger, again.

He said, ‘I’ll be careful,’ not meaning it. He had no intention of doing less than any hero should. He ran back to the remains of the doorway and squeezed himself through, into the darkness beyond.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Now the island holds men. They walk around as if they’re stepping on any normal, sane stretch of land: hillocks of wild grass, dark brown crusted turds of sheep. Their feet squelch these things down, and they don’t understand they are violating this place. Or perhaps they know and don’t care. There are more important things in life than the sanctity of Skein Island. This is, after all, an emergency.

I’m aware that, in my head, I sound like my mother.

But Vanessa is being put in a helicopter right now, so maybe I feel like I should step into her shoes until she can resume her responsibilities. She was carried out by David, unconscious, but now she is awake and annoyed, her eyes stretched wide, making frantic statements at me over the top of the plastic mask they’ve clamped over her nose and her intact mouth. Whatever I saw down there wasn’t real. Her mouth is proof of that.

The paramedics have tied her to the stretcher. She was clawing at them, and she even scored a cheek with her long nails. She looks fine, if furious, but the way the two paramedics have marked her as a priority, even before Rebecca with her broken leg, is giving me the feeling that her outrage is a blanket under which is hidden all manner of failures – failure in her body, in her duty, failure to keep us all safe, failure to keep this island under her sole control. Perhaps this is a long enough list of failures to defeat her.

She clenches and unclenches her fists rhythmically, so I take one of her hands in mine and walk alongside her stretcher as they take it to the helicopter, away from the crater that was once her house.

She doesn’t let go of me, and she has a grip like steel. The paramedics turn, and the stretcher is taken to the right, away from the helicopter. My wrist twists awkwardly as they put Vanessa down in the field, then step away and begin a quick conversation, their mouths close to each others’ ears. I look behind me, putting more pressure on my aching arm, and I see another stretcher, other men sprinting with it to the helicopter.

One of the paramedics follows my gaze, and beckons to me. I lean over, and he shouts, ‘Worse off.’ It must be Kay. But I find myself considering the possibility that it’s Moira, revived to flesh under the rubble, and I feel such fear, strange fear, as I imagine what she might be about to do to these men surrounding her. Moira, kept prisoner for years in that basement, chained to the wall, encased in stone. Turning men mad in her presence so they rip each other to pieces. But why would she need hospitalisation? She’s not human, is she? And besides, I tell myself, she’s a statue, a statue, a bloody statue.

Vanessa is watching my face. She opens her mouth under the mask and then can’t seem to shut it again, because her tongue is protruding through her lips, just the tip of it, as if she has just eaten something spicy and is waiting for a glass of water to arrive.

I picture the meze: dolmades, olives, scattered food, thrown over the wreckage of the floor, being trodden into the remains of the carpet by the men, who are everywhere, swelling in numbers, multiplying in response to this emergency. I find myself retching. I shake free of Vanessa’s grip, crouch down and lean over the grass, but nothing comes up. Have I already digested tonight’s meal? Are we already moving on in time, skittering away on an icy sheet of minutes spent?

‘You’re not empty,’ I hear myself say. Or maybe I just hear the words in my head, because the helicopter is taking off and the wind is fierce and deafening. I stand up and watch it go, and as it becomes smaller, shrinking to a speck, the world is returned to sound, and Vanessa has somehow got her mask off and is trying to speak, but her lips slap together without form, without control. The paramedics are moving around me with a new urgency. They snap the oxygen mask back over her face, so I can no longer clearly see the struggle in the lines of her mouth, even as she fights on.

Does she want me to find Moira? I turn around and scan the crowd, half-expecting to see the living statue standing there, smiling. The ground is an open wound, bleeding clots of dirt, spurting steam. The house is a weapon jutting from the gash. I’ve never seen anything so horrible. As I watch, David emerges from the wound. He is filthy, his clothes are ripped, his hair is plastered to his head. He looks alive. I see the other women – the island visitors now gathered in a knot to this tragedy – watch him too. I’m not surprised. He is no longer the David I knew. He’s a golden icon of a man. We women are now beneath him.

Once I saw potential in him, a greatness glimmering under the surface. Now he has unfolded into a hero. He comes to me and puts his arms around me, wrapping me in the smells of mud and smoke, and I love him again, oh I love him. He kisses me and he is reverent. It is like the kiss he gave me in front of the altar. We have resealed our bond, and I could never leave him again. I don’t want to be anywhere else.

He says, ‘Thank God, thank God. I’m here. I’ve got you.’ I realise I’m telling him I’m sorry.

‘No, don’t be sorry. I found you.’

‘My mother.’ Why has she worked her way into this moment? But it seems vital to say, ‘She’s been here all the time.’ Calm now, prone, on the stretcher she lies. I look at his face. I can tell he’s moved by the sight of her. He saved her too, brought her out of the ground, carrying her.

‘She was trapped,’ he says.

‘Under a statue?’

‘It was heavy. I managed to move it eventually.’

‘You touched it?’

‘I was amazed she was alive at all.’

Something in his tone alerts me to what I should have seen. I make myself examine her face. Her eyes are open. Her chest is still. She does not fight any more because that option has been removed. She has been overcome, and conquered.

‘We had to prioritise the other woman,’ says the businesslike paramedic, who is suddenly at my side.

‘No,’ I say, ‘she hasn’t explained it yet, not properly. I don’t understand it yet. No, that’s not how this is meant to be.’ My voice is so loud, getting louder. I’m never normally this loud. I’m a softly spoken person, that’s who I am, but these words just won’t come out quietly because nobody seems to be understanding them and I have to be louder, louder, louder, so I am shouting in the face of something that’s not listening to me.

David pulls me closer, shushes me, rocks me, until something clicks shut inside me.

We have reached the end of a pattern, a cycle of discovery. It’s time to go home and take slow, deep breaths until the meaning of all this becomes clear.

I take in the morning sky. It is clear and pink, and the rain clouds have disappeared, for now.