The Gloaming Read online

  The sea had taken him.

  The sea takes everything.

  PART 1 ½

  Birling

  AT FIRST THERE were helicopters. Hospitals. Police and needles and stitches and search dogs. A persistent high panic whining through the house. Rooms usually populated only by mice and the upturned bodies of dead beetles were opened and searched. Every cupboard was checked. It was unlikely – impossible – that a small boy would have prised the nails from the door frames, forced open the heavy wardrobes, crept past three locks into the attic. But maybe, maybe – and so they checked, and checked again.

  Nobody found Bee. Not in the house, and not outside it. After a week the search became slightly less frantic – by then, it was not a rescue effort to save a living boy, but to find a body. Crime was almost unknown on the island, and Bee hadn’t left, because the fishing boat was the only way on or off and he hadn’t been on it. But accidents can happen anywhere. Every islander knew of someone lost to the sea.

  After two more weeks the search cooled. After two months it stopped – not officially, but in practice. For a while no one on the island let their children out of their sight. All the island men were interviewed. Signe and Peter were interviewed. Islay and Mara were interviewed. Posters were put up, the gappy grin of Barra Ross on the wall of the shop and the cafe and the pub. Everything came to nothing. The sea had taken Bee, and it would not give him back.

  There was no funeral. No memorial service, nothing to mark the cut-out space left behind. Signe wouldn’t allow even the mention of it. The missing did not need funerals, they needed to be enticed home. He’d crept away from her and was surely hiding somewhere. Deep down she knew that he –

  She knew that he –

  He must be somewhere, run off in a huff, his tiny temper burning bright – but all of him fine, all of him safe. This must be true, because any other thought was too terrible. All she had to do was get the house right – get it perfect, the perfect home, everything perfect from the top of the chimney to the end of the garden. She would be the perfect mother in the perfect home, and then her perfect boy would come back.

  She worked on the house from the moment she woke. Every time she blinked, she felt a coarse scraping in her eyes. Every crease of her body itched with dirt and paint flecks. Every muscle felt stiff and hot, as if they had rusted. She arranged old sheets along the bottom edges of the walls, tipped paint into trays, pushed fluffy rollers through greys and blues and pale pinks, put the kettle on, left the mug in the sink, hefted in more paint tins, left the brushes in turps. She put bricks in a wheelbarrow, wheeled a grubby trail through the kitchen, tipped the wheelbarrow out into the back garden. She sanded floorboards and mixed plaster and screwed in new switch plates. She painted ceilings and wiped drips of paint off the floor where the dust sheets had slipped.

  The days fell away, and Bee did not come home.

  Everything that Signe made, Peter unmade. He had decided on his own deal: he would give back what he had taken from the island. He would make the house exactly as it had been when he had found it. Then perhaps he would get back what had been taken from him.

  His was a sneaky destruction. There was no tearing up of floorboards, no smashing of walls. It was important for Peter to pay attention to exactly what Signe did, and undo it all again. In the same order, if he could.

  It was all going well, until it wasn’t. He’d thought his work would soon overtake Signe’s – after all, isn’t it always easier to destroy than to create? But every day, Peter got slower. His bones ached. His joints shrieked and cracked. Powdered stone snowed from him each time he moved. He pushed his body harder, but it was no good; the ghost of his son hung around his neck, and pulled.

  Islay moved among all this making and unmaking. If she saw an open door, she closed it. If she saw a lid left off a paint tin or a jam jar, she replaced it. A sticking plaster is no good on a broken back, but what more could she do? What bothered her most was how mundane it all was. This terrible thing had happened – this huge, life-changing thing that meant the world would never be the same. But outside their house, whose life had changed? Even inside the house, what, really, had changed beyond repair? They still had to get up every morning. They still had to eat breakfast. They had to pay bills and buy toilet paper and smile at the postman. They didn’t wander through moonlit rooms tearing at their hair. They didn’t curse an unfeeling god. The whole world should have shifted on its axis, should have shaken the petals from every flower, uprooted every mountain. And here they were, going through the motions, as if they’d lost a pet cat or a set of keys.

  Islay said none of this to her sister. Before long, they weren’t saying anything much to one another; just pass the pepper and I borrowed your top and it’s fine, I’ll wash up. It wasn’t that they were relying on telepathy, some secret sisterly code. Inside their heads was silence.

  Summer bled into autumn, the trees fell bare, and in the lengthening red nights Islay lay outside on a bed of crunching leaves, watching the glint and dart of insects over her head. She let them flit across her face; let them tangle in her hair. After a while, a single thought settled on her: if I don’t leave here now, I will never be anything but the sister of a lost boy. She was eighteen. She could do what she wanted. She packed in the silent moonlight, then left before dawn to catch the morning boat.

  Signe came down to the kitchen a few hours later and found Islay’s note on the table. She read it once, then folded it up and put it in her pocket. She’d need to take the butter out of the fridge now, to let it soften enough for pancakes. She’d do eggs too, and crispy bacon, and perhaps there was some bramble jelly at the back of the pantry. A breakfast wouldn’t bring back a daughter or a sister, but it was all she had to give Peter and Mara. The Ross family – what was left of it – carried on.

  Stravaig

  TO MARA, THE months before they lost Bee felt like the last real summer. For the rest of the season, she wandered the darkened house. She needed to heal, and her stitches itched worse in the sunlight. Loss felt cold and quiet, and the world through the windows looked too hot, too bright. It would hurt her eyes to see things lit so clearly. The house closed in around her, silent, velvet.

  Before, Islay would have slipped into bed beside her every morning and together they’d do their schoolwork. Now, they worked in silence in separate rooms, heads down, eyes aching. Before, they had an enthusiastic but unstructured education from Signe: the stories of ballets, the use of flowers as medicine, Renaissance painters, the wildlife of the taiga, the history of space exploration, Achilles tendon stretches, how to gut a chicken for roasting. But there were other lessons to be learned now. Maths, English, languages: when the guest house was finished, someone would have to do the books and speak to the tourists.

  Somewhere among it all, J left the island. Maybe he didn’t want a sheep farm after all. Mara forgot to say goodbye.

  Mara and Islay did their exam papers together and sent them off to the mainland. They passed. Signe stuck the certificate to the fridge. Islay left. Mara stayed in bed.

  Some days she watched the first pale line of daylight expand to paint the whole room gold. Some days she watched the leaves on the trees outside redden and fall. She smelled cut grass and fresh paint. She left her bed twice a day to go into the kitchen, open a tin of soup, and eat it lukewarm from the pan.

  When the world outside the window turned white, Mara put on her coat. Her boots scrunched on the snow. Every breath burned ice in her lungs. She cupped her hands around her eyes and tilted her head to the sky, letting snowflakes fall into her open eyes. When her eyelashes were jewelled, when the snow fell so heavy that she couldn’t see further than her own feet – then she started walking.

  That was the beginning of her island exploration. Everything looked unfamiliar, the houses and hills shrouded. The packed snow on the paths supported her, and she stepped as light as a bird. There were white mounds off to the side where only gullies had been before, and she knew that if
she stepped on them, she’d end up hip-deep and numb. Sheep stared as she passed. Birds rose like smoke from treetops. Her leg muscles ached, and her breath came harder, and it felt good. Walking the island’s perimeter took four hours, though on the days of the thickest snow it was more like six. Every day Mara changed her route, spiralling in to the island’s centre, traipsing through gardens and across roads. The snow erased all the boundaries.

  Right at the centre of the island was a loch. Under the grey clouds the water reflected silver. The surface was salted with snow, lying for a moment before melting. Mara stepped closer to the water. What a shame it would be to spiral all the way round the island and then have to stop just before reaching the centre. Chains of white stones gleamed in the shallows like a string of pearls. The middle of the loch was black, reflecting nothing. Mara didn’t know how deep it was – the water was too peaty to see far, even if you were to dip your face under the freezing surface, but it was certainly too deep to ice over completely. The edges were uneven, the slow beat of the waves sounding in a slushy whisper. The ice here, although broken up, seemed like it might go deep. If she spread her weight … if she stepped fast … Mara inched forward. The ice split under her foot, revealing black water under the white, soaking through the stitch-holes of her boot. She stepped back onto solid ground. Her foot was already numb. She limped away, back to her house, stamping to get the blood going.

  But she couldn’t stay away from the frozen loch. She was pulled to it with as much force as she was pushed away from the sea. Day after day she returned, never going further than the slushy bank, never again dipping her toe into the icy water. She stood on the edge until her hands turned blue inside her mittens, until her feet felt like blocks of wood, until her ears numbed and thawed in painful needlepricks. The loch was dark and deep and if she cupped her hands around her eyes and looked right into the middle of the water, she could almost pretend it was the sea. The sea, but safer.

  After two weeks of padding around the shore of the loch, Mara found something she’d never seen before. Rounding a hill, she stepped onto what looked like hard-packed snow, but wasn’t. She thudded knee-deep into the loose drift. By the time she’d managed to extricate herself, winded and exhausted, all she could do was lie back in the snow and catch her breath. She saw now that the hill was hollow, and there was something inside. Something big and boxy, taller than her head. Toy-bright colours were just visible under the patchy drifts. She approached with gentle steps, not wanting to sink again. With a mittened hand, she scrunched snow off the metal surface, letting it stutter in clumps to the ground. RARY, in bright painted letters. She swooped the arc of her hand wider. LIBRARY.

  Mara couldn’t help laughing. A library bus, suddenly, now, where before she had seen nothing. Where before, she was sure, there had been nothing. So the island still held secrets after all. And here was the door, and here were three steps leading up to it. Inside, the bus smelled of cold and metal and the sweetness of old paper. Every shelf, floor to ceiling, was crammed full of books. Mara tapped on the roof; it felt firm, though the metal panels on the sides let in starpricks of light. She took a step inside. The floor creaked, but held – and she took another step, and another. Tiny beams of light slid across her body as she walked. In here, she couldn’t hear the loch, or the birds, or the crunch of snow under her boots. She couldn’t see the sky. In here, hidden, contained, it was just her and the books.

  Mara slid the first book off the first shelf and read the first page. Everything disappeared. The island, the loch, her placid father, her frantic mother, her absent sister, her scars, her sadness. Gone. She sank into the familiar invisibility of stories.

  Over that winter she read a hundred deaths – and when the book ended, she could turn to the first page again, and the death was undone. Every Sunday she went back to the library bus and exchanged seven old deaths for seven new ones. She finished the first shelf and started on the next.

  When she wasn’t reading, she was working on the house. When she was stripping paint, when she was sweeping up bent nails, when she was screwing on new cabinet handles, she wasn’t seeing any of it. Behind her eyes, stories flickered – death after death, forwards and backwards, nothing done that couldn’t be undone.

  The year slipped away and winter came again. Every week Mara walked across the island, back to the library bus for more new deaths. She hadn’t counted, but she guessed there were a few thousand books. Someone’s lifetime of reading, waiting to be found. When she emerged with her new armful, she could ignore the loch. She knew it lay there, black-centred, just on the other side of the white hill. A tiny trapped sea, calling to her. But she wouldn’t respond. She couldn’t help noticing, though, how the whispering slosh of the ice chunks matched itself to the rhythm of her footsteps, the water calling to her.

  PART 2

  Fae

  THERE WAS A time, a few generations ago now, that there were four fine houses on the island: one at the northernmost shore, one at the southernmost, one at east, one at west. The house on the southern shore sat snub at the top of a hill, all sandstone and curved picture windows. It was owned by a grand lady, heir to a fortune accumulated from a popular brand of tinned soup. Even in the early days, most of the houses on the island clustered in a semicircle on the south-east shore, looking out to the mainland – which was just another island, looking south-east to another mainland. As the island’s population grew, the new-built houses crept up the hill, closer to the big house, like saplings sucking all the water from an old tree’s roots. Who could say why that house fell down? The sea brought up a storm, the foundations were shaky, the stones were poorly made. All anyone knew was that it fell.

  The easterly house was knocked down to make room for a new mansion. A multimillion pile designed to look old, but in a new way. Perfect for a family who wanted to escape the rat race, move to a quaint and pretty little island where life would be simpler, better. The owner, who was not an island man, went bust halfway through after one of his uninsured cargo ships sank in the middle of the Pacific. He abandoned his half-finished home. It still sits there, roofless, empty-bellied, left to the seabirds and the sky.

  The westerly house looked out across the sea over days and days and days of nothing. It was a stark and stern thing, flat white walls and tiny-eyed windows. It was built as a home for a man who soon realised that it was not, and never could be, a home. He finished construction, setting the costs as a loss through some accountant alchemy. But he couldn’t stand to stay for more than a night in its cold, dark rooms, and caught the first boat back to the mainland. The house still stood, and for a while there was talk of turning it into a prison – the location ensured no prisoners would be able to escape to the mainland, though it would have to be minimum security, for the safety of the islanders. It hadn’t happened, and the house stayed empty.

  And then there was the northern house. Built as a folly, a rich man’s gift to a wife who was not as silly or as girlish as he thought. As soon as she saw its pink granite walls, its smiling doorways, its little white-hatted turrets at each corner, she refused to ever live there. The rich man, unfazed, finished the house and promptly sold it. After that it passed from hand to hand, employed as storage or underused civil service buildings. It crumbled, but not as much as you might expect. Perhaps it was waiting for the right person to take possession. But you’ve already visited that house, because now it belongs to the Ross family: the fighter, the bird, the beauty, the changeling, and the golden boy.

  Islands are about balance, and they each have their own rules. It’s tricky to get it right: the sea always wants things to change, the land wants them to stay the same. Everyone finds their own balance, and sometimes they get it right. But sometimes – far more often – they get it wrong.

  Drouthy

  MARA HATED DAYTIME shifts. The pub slouched. Everything was grey and brown. Everything was aimless noise: the bleep of the quiz machine, the thud of a glass on a beer mat, the lethargic conversations. A sing
le line of sun struggled through the skylight, brightening a square on the bar. Mara could spend hours watching the dust glint in that beam. Even when she was roused to pull a pint, refill the orange juice, slap a packet of crisps on the bar, count out change, answer questions about how her mother was faring – still she was dazzled. After she’d performed her role, she resumed her position in front of the optics, watching the sunbeam.

  ‘Pint please, love.’ The man winked at Mara as he put his money on the bar. Mara winked back, then regretted it as she felt the tug of scar tissue in her cheek. She still didn’t know what had caused the injury, and no one could tell her. She remembered two moments of sudden, burning agony: one when she was in the sea – splinter-edged debris from a boat, maybe, or a handful of mussel shells kicked up by the waves – and one when she was running through the trees, the snapping and slapping of branches in the wind. She could blame the sea, or she could blame the island. But it didn’t matter. Knowing the cause of the injury didn’t take away the scar.

  She pulled the pint. The man looked at her for a bit, then made a point of not looking at her for a bit, as if her face was just like any other face. Mara tried so hard to stand straight and hold her head high that her spine twinged. She smiled achingly and passed the pint. The man thanked her and sloped back to his seat.

  To strangers, Mara displayed her face with hostile bravado. She held their gaze a few seconds longer than necessary. Let them stare. Let them keep staring. She’d never see them again – these tourists who came in all seasons to watch birds or eat scallops or hope for Northern Lights. A dozen new faces a week braved the wind and the waves, suffering through a rollicking trip on a fishing boat just to get to this little paradise full of quaint and kind islanders living the good old-fashioned life. Fuck them. Let them stare at the angry scarred girl. She smiled so wide that her face twisted into a mask.