Skein Island

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘She never said all her children were girls,’ says Rebecca. ‘What are the chances of that? All four of them, mini-Kays.’

‘Why would she?’ I ask.

‘No reason.’ Rebecca shifts in the wicker chair and pulls at the deep V-neck of her black dress. Her encased left leg sticks out to rest on a matching stool, the plaster a grainy white. ‘It just makes me feel worse. Stupid, I know.’

I know what she means. The four girls had taken up the front pew of the church, with the eldest on the end of the row. A hymn had been chosen, one I didn’t know, about God accepting my heart, and during it the eldest girl had thrown back her shoulders and sang to the vaulted ceiling, and the pit of my stomach had moved in recognition of Kay’s genes, Kay’s mannerisms, living on.

But maybe Rebecca doesn’t mean that. Maybe she thinks that bereavement is harder on women than on men. I don’t know her well enough to understand her, and what I do know of her irritates me.

She pokes the strap of her black bra back underneath her dress – she can’t seem to stop fiddling with it – and takes a sip from her glass of lemonade. I would not have chosen her as a companion for this funeral. I didn’t even know that she was going to attend; we’ve not spoken since the island. I wasn’t certain I was going to attend until the last minute, but David persuaded me in the name of closure, and I had a new black suit for Vanessa’s funeral, so I thought I might as well get some mileage out of it.

How practical I am about these things. My father wouldn’t attend Vanessa’s funeral, and so I organised a bouquet of white lilies and signed his name on the card. Whilst performing these administrative tasks, I thought only of myself. It was an act of make-believe, the fantasy of a small child who can’t bear the reality of quarrelling parents. Even a pretend pact, signified by white lilies of all things, made me feel better, just for a moment.

But now, here, at Kay’s wake, that illusion has passed. There are no reasons or reconciliations in this death. I thought I might come to understand why Kay’s decision to get back on that motorbike, to live her life no matter what the consequences, became worse than inconsequential in the face of a statue, in a basement, on an island. I have been looking at her mother and her girls, to see if they have understood how ridiculous their arguments were. They all begged her not to buy another motorbike.

Standing here, in the conservatory of Kay’s mother’s house, I keep Rebecca company as we look out over the ordered garden, watching the rose bushes in the December rain. There’s an arbour, and beside it a large pampas. The empty raised beds are a churned dark brown, and the shining stones of the rockery look as if they would be so slippery underfoot. I turn and observe the mourners hold their faces rigid and whisper as if they are slowly turning to stone too, from the neck down. David is standing next to the buffet table, beside a metallic red plate that bears delicate slices of garlic bread. He’s nodding his head as Rebecca’s husband talks to him. Their eyes are locked, their body language engaged. They are obviously enjoying the conversation. I wonder what they are talking about. The husband is a surprise to me. Rebecca never mentioned him on the island. How is it possible to have a husband and not talk about him?

If I had my way I suppose David would not be here, and then Rebecca would have thought that strange, no doubt. So perhaps it is as well that he talked me into letting him drive. The fact that he is willing to stand a short distance away from me today is a step forward. Since he rescued me from the basement he has not left me. He loves me, and I love him, of that I have no doubt. That has never been in question. But he is no longer just my husband, and of that I have no doubt either. Touching the statue – touching Moira – has changed him.

‘You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?’ says Rebecca. While I watched our husbands, she was watching me. I feel ashamed of whatever might have just passed across my face. But I’m glad Rebecca has raised this topic; I realise I have something I want to say. ‘Thinking of Moira, yes. I’m having the house rebuilt. The basement will be excavated, if possible. If she’s down there, I’ll find her.’ Settling my mother’s estate is ongoing, but everything will eventually pass to me; the solicitors who held her Last Will and Testament have made that clear. The island will become my property.

I can’t get my head around that, but I’m certain that the house must be restored.

‘Are you thinking she’s still down there?’ Rebecca says, in that voice she uses – the patient tone of a therapist to those lowly individuals who don’t understand their own motivations. I wonder how her husband stands her. She must dissect every meal, every word, every sexual encounter they share.

‘Are you asking me if I think stone statues can move?’ I say, calling her bluff. I keep my eyes on David, wondering if he will look at me. But he’s talking, arms moving, making compact gestures as if describing an object. If he was the kind of man who cared about cars, I would say he was having that sort of conversation: how fast, miles per gallon. But he really never seems to care about such things. Maybe Rebecca’s husband does. I have to search my memory for his name; we were introduced before the funeral, briefly. It finally comes to me. I say to Rebecca, ‘Does Hamish like cars?’

‘What?’ she says. ‘No. Try to concentrate. This is important.’

‘At least we can agree on that.’

David and Hamish are smiling at each other, both talking, mimicking each other’s movements. They are in complete agreement about something. Around them, others are having the stiffer conversations that suit funerals better. If Kay were here she would have wanted to drive a motorbike through the living room and upset the carefully laid plates of garlic bread and sausage rolls, spilling them over the floor.

Kay’s mother is circulating through the crowd. She’s a tall woman with good posture, and she wears her white hair in an angular bob that looks fresh and glossy. She’s holding a silver tray upon which cluster flutes of white wine. Every time she stops at a group, the mourners draw together. She nods and smiles at them, and they respond in kind, but nobody takes a flute. As she crosses my field of vision I see annoyance flash across her face – Will nobody take a bloody drink? She is thinking. This tray is getting heavy. Why doesn’t she set it down and forget about it? Walk out of here, return later when everyone has left her house? Somebody would probably even do the tidying up and the dishes, out of guilt.

But mothers don’t leave, do they? Not even after death. Not the good ones.

‘I wish you were able to talk about this,’ says Rebecca. ‘Because—Because I really need to talk about it too. Hamish tries to understand but he’s…’

‘A man,’ I finish for her, and I know she hates it, the thought of this unbridgeable divide between man and woman that Vanessa has placed in our heads. But she doesn’t contradict me.

‘Since it happened he seems dead set on protecting me. Perhaps it was the thought of losing me. Everything we do now, every time I attempt to get up, he’s there, wanting to be my crutch.’

‘That’s pretty normal, surely?’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘But before, if he was having protective impulses, we could talk about it. He’d be happy to admit it, to see that it was irrational. Now we can’t even have a conversation. Whenever I raise it he doesn’t listen. It’s like I’m of the utmost importance in his life, and at the same time, totally irrelevant.’

Rebecca has a way with words. I recognise this feeling, this marginalisation. I feel it every time David looks at me.

It would be so good to tell Rebecca my thoughts and fears about this. But I know what she wants is to cast me back into the role of patient so that she can make herself feel better. So instead I say, ‘The preliminary reports on the house show the foundations were weakened by a natural spring that runs under the island.’

‘Really?’

‘Vanessa was tapping it. In the basement. Diverting the flow of the water and collecting it. Barrels of it. Don’t you remember the piping? It wound around Moira.’

‘The statue,’ Rebecca corrects me. ‘I don’t remember that. What for?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘A natural spring,’ she muses. ‘One pound fifty for a small bottle of Malvern water nowadays. She was sitting on top of a gold mine and died because of it. An expensive way to go.’

Vanessa filled those barrels for a reason. I wonder to whom she sold them, and what purpose they serve. It’s been intimated to me that I will soon become a very rich woman. Is it all left over from Amelia’s enormous fortune? Or had Vanessa found another way to add to the island’s wealth? Financial records – those not destroyed in the collapse – will eventually come to me, and then I will get some answers.

‘So what did you see?’ I find myself asking Rebecca, before I can stop myself. This is the conversation I didn’t want to have. ‘What did you see, down there? If you didn’t see the piping, or the barrels, and you didn’t see Moira?’

‘I knew it,’ she says. ‘You still believe it. That parlour trick Vanessa pulled.’

‘Forget what I believe. What do you believe?’

‘Your mother had real problems. I’d maybe characterise it as Stockholm Syndrome. She met a rich, brilliant, troubled woman who had lived through wars, seen terrible things, and that woman bound your mother to her, with lies. With stories. Then she died, and left your mother alone, and she wanted you back. To continue those stories. Keep them alive. So she set that whole thing up to manipulate you. She wanted you to stay there, on that island, with her. If you’re not careful, she’ll get her way. You’ll end up back there forever. Maybe not physically, but mentally.’

‘She never asked me to stay.’

‘She was getting to it!’

‘It took her seventeen years to get that far.’

‘People spend their whole lives preparing for certain moments, Marianne.’ Rebecca scratches her knee just above the cast. ‘Only those moments count, for them. The stuff that happens every day, that’s just marking time until the big scene. The reveal. We all live that way sometimes. Working towards a wedding day, the birth of a child. We imagine it, and prepare for it, even if we’re not engaged or pregnant. Perhaps it’s a female thing. We just don’t live in the present, do we?’

I think perhaps she’s right. But if Moira was an illusion, clever trickery with lights and effects, then what was my mother hoping to make me think?

‘I never should have gone to that stupid island,’ says Rebecca. ‘I knew it wasn’t going to teach me anything useful about myself. All I’ve learned is a phobia of damp basements.’

‘Here’s hoping that’s a life lesson that stands you in good stead.’

‘Marianne, I come from Yorkshire. All the basements are damp. I can’t even make it down the stairs to grab a bottle of red wine from my cellar. Now that’s an issue.’

I can’t help it. I laugh. She laughs too, the guilty sound of survival, and we don’t stop until David and Hamish come into the conservatory and stand beside us in a flanking manoeuvre.

‘We really should get on the road,’ says Hamish. He’s aged less well than Rebecca, a wiry, pale white-blond with a slight physique and very blue eyes. Beside him Rebecca looks more vital. ‘It’s a long drive back.’

‘Yes,’ she says, meekly.

‘I suppose we should as well,’ I say, and David nods. How handsome he is in his dark suit. How glad I am that he’s beside me, so that I don’t have to face these conversations alone.

Hamish says, ‘Great to chat with you,’ to David, and David replies, ‘You’ve got my email?’

‘Yes.’ Hamish pats his breast pocket, where I assume he keeps his phone. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

‘We should all say goodbye to Kay’s mother,’ says David. ‘She’s done a wonderful job here. Maybe we should check if she needs a hand tidying up.’ We all agree, and David turns to look for the poor mother, the right words no doubt already forming on his lips, taking the sting out of the situation for us all.

David and I travel home in silence. It’s not a strained silence. It’s comfortable, companionable. We are so pleased to have weathered these two funerals, and we are looking forward to recommencing our old life.

He’s driving. With the radio on soft jazz and the night already upon us, I remember the trip to the police station. That night feels so very long ago.

As we get closer to our junction on the M4, David takes one hand from the steering wheel and clicks off the radio.

‘How are you?’ he asks.

‘Good.’

‘Me too.’

‘Good. I’m glad.’

I think we can do this. I can go back to work in the library. They’ve rearranged the shift patterns so that nobody is ever left alone to lock up. I can work there, and look forward to a takeaway on a Friday night, and maybe I can give David children because there’s no doubt that he’ll make a wonderful father. We can be content, our family, in the knowledge that we’ve had our adventure and no more shocks await us.

‘What was Kay like?’ he says. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘She didn’t want to live for other people. She was taller than me, and she walked really quickly. She wasn’t keen on Italian food.’ It’s an odd list, and it includes everything I know about her. Suddenly I feel the movement of time, a jolt, like riding a galloping horse towards a fence, far in the distance, and realising that the jump is coming, coming, is so very nearly upon me.

We are home. David reverse-parks the car and then we get out, to a darkened house warmed through by the silent, pumping radiators. The neighbours have their Christmas decorations up, multicoloured lights strung around the small, bare cherry tree they keep in the middle of their front lawn. Already we have moved on. My mind turns to presents, and food, and the beginning of a new year. I want to get something special for David. I can’t think of anything that would do. Clothes, music, films: all too mundane. If he were a woman and I were a man, I’d buy him a ring. An eternity ring, worth a month’s wages at least, to seal the deal.

I follow him into the living room and watch him draw the curtains. Then he sits on the sofa and I sit next to him, side by side, our coats and shoes still on. He pulls me into his lap, and I kick off my shoes and relax into him. We are wrapped together in our womb of a house, and the certainty hits me that this is not the beginning of our happily ever after. We will have to grow up soon, up and apart, and face the truth about the divergent paths of our lives. I have things I have to do, mysteries that still need to be solved. I push that unwelcome revelation away and sigh into his neck.

‘While you were away I met someone who said she knew you,’ he says. ‘She’s a Community Support Officer.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘Outside the library.’

‘What were you…?’ I didn’t finish the question. I’m certain I’d rather not hear the things he’s trying to tell me.

‘He started all of this, you know that, don’t you?’ says David. ‘He would have—’

The words spring out of me. ‘Raped me. Burned me. Hurt me. Used me. Killed me. Fucked me. Cut me.’

‘Stop.’

‘I’m here with you. I’m fine. You need to let it go,’ I tell him.

‘Sam – the woman I met – she was desperate to catch this man, to stop him from hurting others. And you can come out of an attack, an earthquake, a meeting with the mother who abandoned you, her death, and you think you can simply let it all go?’

‘Not me,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t let it go. You can.’

He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, ‘I think I need you to accept that when things happen to you, they happen to me too. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but they do happen to me too.’

‘Yes. All right. I can see that.’ I move from his lap to the other side of the sofa. ‘So tell me. Tell me what you went through.’

‘It’s not a competition, Marianne.’

‘Then why do I feel like I’ve got a rival? This woman – Sam – who wants to be a heroine. Do you prefer that? What is she trying to prove?’

David crosses his legs. ‘I’m not interested in what she’s trying to prove.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

My body has become used to the heat of the house; I’m no longer warm. I take the throw from the back of the sofa and wrap it around my legs.

‘I think you need help,’ says David. He leans over and puts a hand on my thigh. ‘To talk this out with someone. Not just the library thing, but the thing with your mother as well. And I need the same, maybe. There’s too much to take on. So much has happened, so fast. There’s so much you’re not telling me.’

‘Can’t we just not talk about it? I think if we just…’ I make a smooth line with the flat of my hand, like a journey on calm seas.

‘Do you think that’ll work forever?’

‘It’ll work tonight. Tomorrow night. Maybe all the way to Christmas. That’s what I want. A happy Christmas. Can we have that? Please?’

‘And then?’ David takes his hand away and stands up. ‘Will you be ready to deal with it after that? If we do this entirely on your terms, because it seems that’s how everything has to be?’

His words, and the pain behind them, hurt me deeply. He’s right, then – we are interlinked. We have grown together, and any time those strands get pulled there is a twinge, a soreness, to the movement. ‘I’m selfish. Yes, I know it, and I’m so sorry. I can’t blame you for anything that happened while I was away, and I won’t. I won’t, as long as I don’t have to talk about it. Don’t tell me any more about your friend, or how you met her. All that matters right now is that you came for me. Everything else can wait. Because we love each other, it can wait. Right?’

He nods, and says, ‘Cuppa?’

‘Lovely.’

Normality is restored so easily. He wanders off to the kitchen, shedding his coat, and our love is a given once more.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Time passed for David in a slow haze. The bubble of life with Marianne protected him from the worst – and best – of his emotions. They both returned to work. She resumed library duties and he went back and forth to his office with no real understanding of what he was doing. He couldn’t remember the conversations he had there, or the daily commutes in the car. It seemed beyond trivial to him. If he had gone on making no effort and taking no interest at work, he was certain he would have lost his job, but in the final few days before Christmas it seemed that nobody was concentrating on such things.

Even The Cornerhouse was decked out with tinsel and paper chains, and a row of orange fairy lights ran along the optics, giving out a glow that could almost be described as welcoming. Although an effort had been made with the decoration, the place was deserted. The usual crowd of old men was missing, and a weary silence hung over the rough tables and chairs. The pull of the cubes had left David completely. He wondered if the other men felt the same.

David was about to leave when he heard a cough, and realised Arnie was still there, in his usual seat at the back by the fireplace. At the next table along was Geoff, the perennial loser at the cubes, still wearing his striped tie and nursing his pint with a bruised expression. David’s eyes caught a movement behind the bar, and Mags came forward, and leaned against the pumps with a raise of her eyebrows. She wore a black blouse, her hair loose, her breasts hanging low. She looked older and smaller without her usual audience.

David felt her watching him as he crossed the room to Arnie, tapping the envelope he held against his leg. He stopped in front of the table, not knowing how to begin.

‘What now?’ said Arnie, as if picking up a conversation from minutes earlier.

‘Marianne asked me to give you this.’ David held out the envelope. Arnie reached over without enthusiasm and took it, breaking the seal, sliding the Christmas card into view. It was the expensive type, stiff cream paper, with a picture of a holly leaf embossed with green and silver glitter, golden calligraphic greetings of the season surrounding it.

‘Nice,’ Arnie said. He didn’t read the message inside. ‘She’s still not keen on seeing me, then?’

‘She explained it,’ said David.

‘Yeah, it was a lovely telephone conversation. To be fair, I think she covered everything. Not a word was wasted. A talent she got from her mother.’ He put the card down next to the dregs of his pint of beer. Mags came over with two full pints, and said, ‘Pay me later,’ before stomping away with the old glass in hand.

What had Marianne said to her father? The night after her mother’s funeral she had taken the phone upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom with it. From downstairs, all he heard was the soft rumbling of her serious tone of voice. No shouting, no shrillness. Had she told Arnie that she couldn’t ever forgive him for his refusal to come to the funeral? Or was it the secrets he had kept from her that had led to this break from him? Did she tell him she never wanted to see him again? But no, David was certain that Marianne would never say anything so permanent. Right now, they were living their life here in Wootton Bassett as if it were only a temporary arrangement. Besides, the giving of a Christmas card suggested nothing so extreme.

After Christmas, that was when she wanted to talk about facing the past and constructing a future. Until then they were all just treading water. The metaphor made him think of Inger. David wondered where she was now. He hoped, for her sake, she wasn’t alone. She was the kind of person who needed someone to be strong for.

‘You been down the gym?’ said Arnie.

David shook his head.

‘I hear you pulled them out of an earthquake.’

‘A house collapsed.’

Arnie nodded, as if such things happened every day in his experience. ‘I’m not such a bad person, you know. I would have done the same thing. I would have pulled Marianne out of an earthquake. And Vanessa, too. Even Vanessa. So a house fell on her.’ He took a sip of his new beer. ‘Like the Wicked Witch of the Wotsit. Did her toes curl under? I’m just joking. It’s dead here tonight.’

‘No cubes?’ said David. He kept his voice as casual as he could.

‘Given up doing that,’ said Arnie, glumly. ‘Haven’t we?’

Mags called, ‘No more cubes, you bloody lot,’ from her usual place behind the bar. ‘Bloody men.’

Geoff stood up, and wobbled over to their table. He sat and scraped his chair right up to David, so close that David could smell the mustiness and old, dried sweat of his clothes.

‘What are we gonna do?’ he said. ‘Hm? What? She’s taken the cubes down. They’re not on the shelf any more.’

‘They stopped production,’ called Mags. ‘No more barrels. No more cubes. Not anywhere. Besides, you lot don’t need it any more. Busy making your own plans, aren’t you?’ She muttered something, then picked up a tea towel and ran it up and down the bar, forlornly, like the proud owner of a failing vintage car.

‘And no more favours for poor old Mags,’ said Arnie. ‘We all knew she was rigging it, a bit of sleight of hand to get her favours. She had us all cleaning her windows, getting her shopping, anything she wanted, just so she’d let us win every once in a while and have a taste of the stuff.’

‘But now you don’t want the stuff.’

Geoff shrugged. ‘It doesn’t seem so important any more. We don’t need to pretend, do we? We just… are.’

It was a difficult thing to take on board. The cubes had been bigger than The Cornerhouse, than Mags or Arnie or the old men who had based their lives around it. David thought of the pub in Allcombe, on the quay, with the fisherman sitting so still, and the cubes on the mantelpiece, the only decoration not covered in dust. How many pubs had played the game of the cubes?

‘What do we do?’ said Geoff. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come back. I knew you’d know what to do.’

‘So why did Marianne run away, then?’ said Arnie.

‘I don’t know,’ David said.

‘It wasn’t because of that attack? It was in the paper about it. Some bloke’s been hanging around the library.’

‘When was it in the paper?’

‘Four or five days ago. Mags, have you still got it? I read it and thought – I wonder if that’s Marianne. But I’m always putting two and two together and making fifty-eight. Mags, the Gazette, it was, have you got it?’

‘On the pile,’ she said, pointing to the small round table next to the slot machine. Geoff got up and wobbled over to the stack of papers upon it. He riffled through them with surprisingly quick flicks of his fingers.

‘Got it,’ he said. He came back to them, and put the paper in front of David. Arnie snatched it up, licked his thumb, then turned the first page and pointed to the top of page three. It was a small article, only one column, with no picture.

David stopped reading. ‘No. That’s not her. She wasn’t assaulted.’ He worked backwards in his head, checking the dates. This attack had happened while Marianne was away on the island. The man she had faced down had escalated his game. He felt a strong urge to tell her. ‘I have to talk to Marianne.’

‘You sure it wasn’t her?’ Arnie folded up the newspaper.

‘Certain. Look at the dates. She was attacked the week before. But she stood up to him, and he ran off.’

‘Ahh,’ said Arnie. ‘I knew it. I knew it. Same bloke, then. That explains why she ran away. All these poor women getting raped right here in our town.’

‘She wasn’t raped,’ said David.

‘Rapist living in Wootton Bassett and nobody tells us, do they? You’d think they’d give men the chance to deal with it themselves, protect their women. He could be out there, doing it again, right now, and he loves that library, doesn’t he?’ There was a malicious enjoyment to Arnie’s voice.

David stood up. Marianne was in the library, the quiet, bright library, a shining beacon in the darkness. The ugliness of the world was becoming so very clear to him. It had been moving into focus since he talked to Hamish at the funeral.

It’s all so wrong, Hamish had said. Criminal out on the streets, you know. I found out a paedophile lives down the road from us. Rebecca’s very sensitive to things like that; how can she relax, knowing he’s in the street too? We never had kids because of people like that. I know it’s really upsetting her.

How horrible to be in that situation, David had thought. He remembered feeling guilty over how relieved he was not to be in that situation himself.

But that situation was everywhere. That blackness of broken, selfish, dangerous souls had spread all over the world, and nobody was doing anything about it. ‘Pliers, that’s what you need,’ said Geoff. ‘Take a pair of pliers to the bastard’s testicles. Doing that to your wife.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ said David.

‘You don’t want to believe everything Marianne says,’ said Arnie. ‘She was always a good liar, that one. All of them are. And they all leave in the end.’

David strode over to Mags, laid a ten-pound note on the bar and met her gaze. She gave him a small smile, apologetic. ‘You don’t need any cubes now,’ she said. ‘Look at you.’

He left The Cornerhouse and ran for the library.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Can I just say…’ Patty hesitates in the doorway. ‘That we all think you’re really brave and when you feel ready to go back out on the front desk again, you just let us know.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘Thanks. I’m still a bit…’

‘Yes, of course.’ She looks at the kettle on the work counter, as if it is deeply interesting. Eventually she points to it. ‘You want?’

‘No, thanks Patty.’

‘Okay. I’ll be out the front, then.’

‘Give me a shout if there’s a rush,’ I tell her, safe in the knowledge that a rush of customers at 7:45 on a Thursday evening is the most unlikely of things to happen in this library.

‘Okay. You do your—’ She points at the spreadsheet I have open on the computer screen. She’s in her sixties and says she’ll never get comfortable with electronic systems. I have always liked that about her. She is determined to remain immune to modern life, and her vision of the world is intact, frozen, formed from Coronation Street, Panorama and the Silver Jubilee. I can feel, in her presence, that maybe everything isn’t out of control after all.

After she has left the back office, I switch from the spreadsheet to Google once more.

The news has become a code to crack. I start every day on the BBC website and I hunt for articles, through the Guardian and the Independent, on through CNN and Al Jazeera, even the Sun and the Star and the Daily Mail. The stories give me clues as to whether Moira escaped the island, where she might be, how her power to affect men is changing everything.

Because around the world, men are changing. They are becoming heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Today, in Kentucky, a fireman rushed into a burning orphanage and saved sixteen children, one after the other. Police think the fire was started deliberately by a serial arsonist who is now operating in the area. Today, in Lancashire, an old man lay down on train tracks and had to be forcibly removed. He had written on his face in indelible ink:

I DON’T WANT THIS

Today, in Kenya, Somalian pirates attacked a holiday resort. They rounded up all the men and divided them into four groups. They killed every member of the smallest group, and kidnapped the men in another. Two groups they left alone. Five men dead, six missing. Forty-eight ignored.

Were these things happening before? Not like this, not in such clear delineations, I don’t think. Or am I catching Amelia’s madness?

I think Amelia knew what unique and special thing she was hiding in that basement. That’s why she named her monster Moira. By doing that she left a clue that was easy to follow. All it took was a quick internet search to find the truth.

I looked up the derivation of the word monster. It comes from Middle English, leading back to a Latin root: monstrum. A portent, an unnatural event. Whatever Moira is, I don’t think she’s unnatural. And if she’s part of the natural order of this world, then that means men are meant to be more important than women.

I click on the bookmark to my favourite page: the Wikipedia entry on the Moirai, the Fates – the Greek idea of incarnations of destiny. Three women who control the threads of life for all men. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. But in Homeric stories and Mycenaean myths there aren’t three women who perform these roles. There is one.

Whenever I consider this, my hands begin to shake. It’s a terrible piece of knowledge to possess.

I look up Lady Worthington on Google. There are many sites that mention her; she is a romantic historical figure, I suppose. I click on one devoted to feminist pioneers:

The rest of the piece deals with things I already know. She lived as a recluse, and lived on the island she dominated. And then she passed the reins on to my mother.

I sit back from the screen. I can’t control my thoughts any more. Everything I learn sends me a new message I can’t ignore. The world is being filled with the stories of men: heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks. Women will be marginalised into minor characters once more. We will lose the freedom we never knew we had – a chance to make our own stories.

Moira is Fate. The Fates. Three women in one, making heroes, villains, sages and sidekicks in order to weave a tapestry of stories. Were all those myths true, after all? Odysseus, Hector and Achilles, Perseus, Theseus? And others, later: King Arthur, Mordred, Lancelot, Merlin. Thousands of stories, shaped by Moira for her entertainment. Weaving together the strands of men’s lives.

Each man delights in the work that suits him best, Homer wrote. They are all born with the seed within them to become one of four things. And now those seeds are growing.

David will think I’m crazy. But, after Christmas, I must attempt to explain it to him. And he will react as a hero should, he will attempt to protect me from myself. His desire to do this, to take control and make the decisions, will only get worse.

The feeling of foreboding, of dread, knowing that I’m about to be controlled, dominated – I am familiar with this. I felt it that night the stranger walked into the library and said, Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.

I can’t bear it, can’t sit here waiting for this to happen all over again. A part of me thinks my fear of it is the reason for its creation. I must be making this whole thing up in order to bring my fear to life. This is an elaborate construction of explanations, assurances, abandonments; is it of my own doing? Am I mad? Rebecca would find a textbook way of putting it. I’ve had a break with reality. I’ve rationalised a traumatic experience.

I push the doubts away. I am the strong one. I have worked so hard to be the strong one. I can’t even begin to rationalise it, but I know I have to tell myself that I am indomitable, have been ever since the day he came into the library and said Get in the back. Take off your clothes and lie down.

And I said—I said—

I wrench my mind away. My heart is a runner on a long, straight road. I am prickly with sweat, on my scalp, under my arms. The world is out of control, doesn’t anyone see it? Men set buildings on fire and other men run into those buildings. Men are divided and killed and born and they must be men of action, while I must lie down, take off my clothes and lie down, take off, lie down.

‘David’s here,’ says Patty. ‘He’s early.’

I am amazed at myself. I say, in a perfectly even tone of voice, ‘Oh good, I’ll come out to the front. You can take off now if you like, Patty, and I’ll lock up.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. David’s here.’

She accepts that with a grateful nod because, after all, David is a man. She knows he will protect me. She gathers her things – anorak, umbrella, woven shopping bag – and says, ‘Have a good Christmas, then.’

‘Are you working on the twenty-seventh?’

‘No, twenty-eighth I’m down for, afternoon and evening.’

‘Great. I’ll see you then. Are you cooking for everyone?’

She sighs. Every year Patty buys an enormous turkey and invites all the lonely members of her extended family to her house for Christmas dinner. She has a number of unmarried cousins and widowed aunts, along with an ancient grandfather who ruins everything if he gets the chance. Last year he spat his false teeth into the gravy boat. I wonder if Moira will have an effect on his villainous behaviour this year, and he’ll have some macabre masterplan in mind, such as demanding to carve the roast and then stabbing someone with the meat fork.

‘Good luck with that,’ I tell her, sounding so much like my old self that I have to resist the urge to reward myself with a smug smile.

Patty leaves, and I close down the computer. Then I follow her out. In the bright library, standing alone in front of the rotating display of slushy paperbacks, is David. He faces the window that looks out over the car park. I can see his reflection in the glass, his lips pressed together, his eyes moving over the darkness, as if scanning for something or someone.

‘Nearly ready,’ I say. ‘You’re a bit early. I’ve still got to shut down.’

‘I was with your father.’

Is that why he’s so anxious? ‘I know, I’m sorry, I will get round to speaking to him. I just can’t face it now, but I will go and make it up with him after Christmas, okay?’

David turns to face me. The way he looks at me is disquieting. He wants something from this conversation, and the energy in his expression scares me. ‘Arnie said another woman was attacked. The week after you. In the car park.’

‘The library car park?’

‘Right outside the building.’ He jerks his thumb into the darkness. I realise he’s angry. Beyond angry.

‘That’s terrible, but it’s the responsibility of the police to—’

‘She was assaulted.’

I wait for a moment, then say, very carefully, ‘That’s terrible. I gave the police a description of him. It’s up to them. If it’s the same man.’

‘I need to stop him. I want you to tell me what happened. Every detail. I know it’ll be difficult for you, but I’m sure you understand—’

‘I told you already.’

‘So he came in, you said no, he left? What was so different the next time, that it ended up in an assault?’

‘I don’t know! These people… progress. On to worse things. They get up courage. I was lucky. If you want to call it that.’

‘I just… I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth. I feel like you haven’t told me the truth in a long time.’ He looks sad, so sad, and it’s terrible to realise that I have done this to him. Not deliberately, never that, for he’s still my husband, but I should have realised that he would know on some level that I was feeding the world a pack of lies.

There must be a way to find words for the truth, for all that has happened to me. It would be impossible to spit it into sentences, recreate it in syntax, grammar, punctuate it with exclamation points. I did this, I didn’t do that. All those declarations on Skein Island, all the words that Moira took into herself – what did they mean? How can we tell the truth when it will change the lives of those who listen? ‘Are you ready?’ I ask David. ‘If you want the truth, I’ll give it to you.’

‘Will you?’ He sounds doubtful.

‘If you want me to. It won’t be—It’s horrible. The words don’t even begin to describe it.’

‘I need to understand it. Then I’ll know how to stop him.’

So I turn out the library lights and lock the door. We are shadows, lit only by the bulb from the back office, and I tell him, ‘It started like this. It was closing time. I was about to lock up when he came in, and stood in the doorway. He told me to go into the back office and take my clothes off. He wanted me to lie down.’ It doesn’t sound right to me. My voice is different, strained, with a saw-edge of fear. It’s the memory of it, coming to life, taking me over. The edges of that night and this night are bleeding together.

David stands perfectly still. He says, ‘No. Right? You said no.’

I shake my head.

‘What did you say?’

‘I asked him not to hurt me.’

David pauses, swallows. ‘What then?’

‘Then I did as I was told.’

I lead the way into the back office. We stand together under the strip light.

‘I took off my clothes,’ I say. I don’t whisper, or shout. I am calmer now, emptier. This is the moment I have been dreading, fighting against, but now it’s here and I am ready for it.

‘All your clothes?’

‘Everything. I folded them and put them on the desk.’ My white knickers, folded, on top of the trousers, the waistcoat, the shirt, the bra, in order: so neat. I don’t look at David. I don’t want to get caught up in his emotions. It is so much easier if I pretend this is not something that happened to me. I, I, I. It helps if I picture this as a story. So I find myself changing into a different form of speech. ‘She took off her clothes,’ I tell David. ‘But that’s not where the story began.’

I am a distant measurer of words as I tell him:

I stop talking, and the room is silent.

I am serene. I have never felt relief like it. The words are out of me and I have claimed my mouth as my own once more.

‘Is it true?’ says David. He has collapsed inwards, and looks like a smaller man. I never thought I could feel so good as he stands opposite me, deflated.

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you know you can tell me anything? It wasn’t your fault, no matter how you reacted. There’s no reason to feel that you weren’t brave enough. There’s no shame in being a victim of somebody like that.’

I shake my head. ‘You don’t understand. There is no shame. I lied for your sake. Because I knew it would become all you would see when you looked at me. I knew you’d be consumed by it.’

‘You did it for me?’

I put my arms around him. The moment that I knew was coming is here. I had hoped it would not appear until after Christmas, so that I could have that memory, but it’s too late for that now. We have tasks to do, and I must tell him where his future lies. ‘You need to find him. You need to deal with him. And I need to go back to Skein Island.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘No. I need you here. I can stop him. I understand that I need to stop him. But I need you here, to help me. To be waiting for me, after I’ve done this thing. Please.’

‘I can’t. Don’t you understand? I can’t be the victim at the beginning and the prize at the end of your story. There are things I need to take care of. The island needs me. There’s nobody there to run it.’

‘So what? Let it stop.’ He holds me, strokes my back through my dress and it feels so good. ‘We’re finally getting through this, all of this.’

‘No, David, we’re not. Trust me. On the island, things happened to me. My mother showed me a woman. A monster.’ I try to explain it, as best as I can, and I appeal to his bravery, to his desire to solve the problem. I do this deliberately, and not without guilt.

After I’ve finished, he says, ‘So you think I’m turning into a hero? A proper hero? Like in stories of old?’

‘You already are a hero in your own head. But I think that – if I don’t find a way to stop her – you’ll have no choice but to act like one all the time.’

‘So you’re trying to save me?’

‘Yes. Not just you. But mainly you.’

He kisses me. ‘Thank you, but I really don’t need saving.’

‘We might have to agree to disagree on that.’

‘A few weeks ago I would have assumed you’re having a breakdown, you know that, right? But something happened to me while you were away.’

‘Something… with Sam?’

He frowns, and says, ‘Sort of,’ and it hurts me so deeply that I can’t breathe. ‘She found me here, outside the library, waiting to kill him, that man who…’ He swallows, and continues, ‘I’d been in The Cornerhouse with Arnie, and they were playing a strange game. I had a… hallucination of some sort, and I was a hero in it, a knight, and there was a woman there, a… goddess. Like you described.’

‘A game?’

‘With four cubes, coloured cubes.’

I have no idea how this can be, but I’m already sure of the answer as I ask him, ‘Were they red, blue, green and yellow?’

‘How did you know that?’

So I tell him every detail of my week on the island, and he tells me about cubes, and the game, and the liquid he drank before he had dreams of Moira. We swap information, trade notes, and by the time we finally lock up the library, I think I understand the world a lot better.

We go home together, taking a slow walk, hand in hand. There is no reason to pretend that we can be together, no matter how much we might want that. We’re part of a pattern that must be played out. He will be the hero he was born to be, and I will attempt to find the monster from Skein Island.