The Gloaming Read online

  But most of the people in the pub were not strangers. They’d known Mara since she was nine years old. They knew Peter and Signe. They’d known Bee. Mara’s face was familiar to them, but now it could never really be familiar. Her scar ran in a bracket from the outer corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth, splitting her cheek. When she thought of nothing and her face was still, the scar lay pale and flat, barely visible. But with any emotion, any thought, any movement in her eyes or mouth or cheeks, her face distorted. Her eye pulled almost shut, her mouth twisted to one side, her scar deepened. The line running through its centre tugged snow-white, reddening the skin around it. Mostly people were torn between staring, and proving how much they didn’t care about it by directly mentioning it in a helpful sort of way. Mara had heard every home remedy for reducing scarring, and had tried exactly none of them.

  The pub had always been called Bennett’s, just as the shop had always been called McConnell’s, though it wasn’t always the same Bennett at the pub, and as far as Mara knew it had never been a McConnell at the shop. The current Bennett was Ida, 24-year-old daughter of the older Bennetts, trusted to run the pub while her parents enjoyed a sort of retirement, spending their days experimenting with Indian cooking, collecting old vinyl, and watching for seals in the harbour. Everyone on the island had at least three jobs, but now the Bennetts had none at all.

  ‘Help me restock?’ asked Ida. Mara nodded and followed her into the storeroom.

  As well as running the pub, Ida also did palm reading and crystal healing, and could do any vintage hairstyle you cared to request. She was dark-eyed with a dimple in her chin. She smiled a lot. When she was nervous, she fidgeted with the way her fringe lay across her forehead.

  They restocked the shelves in silence. Mara wasn’t sure whether the silence was companionable or awkward, but it didn’t matter as she couldn’t think of anything to say to break it.

  ‘Hear from your sister much? What’s she up to these days?’ said Ida, hands chinking-full of tiny bottles of tonic.

  Mara shrugged. ‘She calls. She’s busy.’

  It was true, sort of. Islay had called a few times, though their conversations were laboured and clock-watching. Underneath every word that Mara said to her sister was what she did not say: come home. She wouldn’t say it. She wouldn’t even think it. She could handle this, all of it, alone.

  ‘And your mum? Your dad? Haven’t seen him in here for a while.’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  Mara knew how the islanders gossiped about her family. She didn’t blame them; she’d do it too, if it was someone else’s fascinating tragedy. Although everyone has lost someone, there was extra depth to the gouge left in the Ross family. Such a small boy, gone so strangely. The younger girl was there, did you hear? She pulled him out of the sea. She says he was already dead, but who can know? And how did he disappear, if she pulled him out? She always was an odd one.

  ‘Right,’ said Ida, shoving the last box into the corner. ‘Great chat. That’s my shift over. See you later.’

  Mara resumed her place behind the bar. She and Ida could be friends. Probably they should be friends. But they weren’t. Soon her shift would be finished, and Ida would come to take over, and Mara would go back to the house. She’d walk home in the dark, and if she looked up, the stars would be as tiny and distant as the passing boats far out to sea. She’d help Signe to paint something or scrape something or paper over the cracks in something. Her exam results were still stuck to the fridge: a promise, a hope for the future, a daily reassurance to them all that she would help to run the guest house when it was finished. Someday, someday.

  Mara wished for a storm, for the clap and slash of the splitting sky. She wished for something to break, to change, to be undone – so that it could all be over; so that she could go up onto the cliff and be still forever. But until then – she reached for her latest book, ready to read and unread another death.

  Tumshie

  WHEN MARA WAS Bee’s age, Islay told her that sugar was made of ground-up teeth, and if you ate too much of it then the tooth fairy would come and pull out your teeth and grind them up to replace all the sugar you’d taken. Islay felt a spiky, slippery sort of pleasure in seeing that Mara still had to blow all the powdered sugar off the tops of pastries before she could eat them.

  Islay told her that if you put a part of an animal in your mouth, you could speak its language. Mara spent a week collecting hedgehog spines and cat whiskers, holding them in the pockets of her cheeks, sliding her tongue along their lengths, trying to twist their sharp edges inwards. Neither of them ever told Signe why Mara ate her dinner so hesitantly, her mouth aching and swollen with cuts.

  Islay told her if she bit her nails then a goblin with knives for fingers would come in the night and cut off her hands, and that if she took extra portions at dinner then her stomach would explode, and that if she told tales to Mum and Dad then her tongue would turn into a slug. Mara believed all of it – well, why wouldn’t she? Islay was big, and she knew everything.

  And then they grew a little bigger, and moved to the island, and life felt endless. Magic was real and the girls roamed wild as cats. The sea encircled the entire known world. The grimy remnants in the shed. The chalky float of steam in the bathtime air. Pieces and jam for supper. Stacks of books on the hall floor, used as stepping stones over shark-infested seas. A dead bee put to rest in an acorn cup. Bright orange lobster creels piled clattery in the harbour. Crabbing on the quayside with bacon and string. Marshmallows held over candle flames, toasted hot enough to blister.

  The days stretched slow as toads. Stitching squares for a quilt, the jab of the needle into a thumb, blood beading bright. A stray cat at the harbour, licking fish guts from the stone. Crows biting out newborn lambs’ tongues so they can’t suckle and die the day they’re born. At low tide the land changed, the waves sucking back to reveal caves and shores gaping wide like open mouths, the sharp jag of rocks that weren’t visible before – but they were always there, ready to rip at your sea-kicking feet, waiting to tear the bottom out of your boat.

  And among it all: two girls, ten and twelve, not ready yet to be women, but ready to think about starting to try, if not now then very soon. Then came Bee. They both told him stories, but not the stories that Islay had told Mara. They told him tales of friendly sea-creatures, tales of lovely objects washed up on the shore, treasures meant only for him. Only pretty things. Sweet things. For Bee, they would remake the world, newer and better. A world worthy of the bright gold of him.

  Bonny

  THE FIRST DAY of a new year, much the same as all the other years, except that it was Mara’s eighteenth birthday. As a gift to herself, she had traipsed through the snow to the library bus. The spines rainbowed out before her. Still more deaths to be read and unread. She breathed in the cold air and sighed out a white cloud of happiness. She reached for the next week of books.

  She paused. Just for a moment, she thought she heard faint music. But when she strained her ears, the sound was gone. Snow did funny things to sound: muffled it, or amplified it, so that things said miles away could be overheard, and a whisper close to your ear was lost. Then, a noise she definitely didn’t imagine, but one she couldn’t understand: the squeal of the bus door opening.

  Mara turned, her arms full of books. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman standing in the doorway of the library bus.

  Mara stared at her as she stared back at Mara. The woman was tall, dressed all in black. Her hair was cut in a smooth bob, sleek to her head, emphasising the rounded curves of her cheeks and the long line of her throat. A few scattered snowflakes crowned the top of her head.

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman again, but this time with a smile. ‘You’d better come into the house. I was just making tea.’

  Mara swithered by the shelves, all her muscles twitching. Her face burned. Should she put the books back? On the shelves, or on the floor? Or should she bring them with her? But th
e woman had disappeared from the doorway, so Mara crammed the books back onto the shelf and followed her outside.

  The world was white, snow-blanketed, and of course there wasn’t a house, there had never been a house, it was just the hill and the bus and the slushy-beating loch, but the woman in her sleek black clothes and her sleek black bob was swaying through the snow and into the lee of the hill – and she was walking towards the hill, and she was opening a shadow, and then the shadow congealed into familiar shapes and there was a door set into the side of the hill. And there was the music, released from inside. The woman lingered in the doorway, waiting for Mara. Against the snow, her skin was the colour of pennies. Mara felt dizzy. She followed the woman through a tiny wood-panelled hallway and into a kitchen. A fire flickered in a wood-burning stove, its window silver with ash. The music swooned from a record player balanced on a kitchen chair. Everything in the room felt old, as if had been there for a long time – and yet temporary, as if no one really lived there. There were no windows – Mara realised that the house must have been built right into the hill. A hidden home, with a ceiling of turf; a true part of the island. Candles in glass lanterns lit the room buttery-soft.

  ‘Take a seat,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll get the tea.’

  Mara slid into a kitchen chair and tried to stare at the woman without making it obvious that she was staring. She looked a few years older than Mara. Her black clothes clung to her curves, and her neck and wrists were layered in fine silver chains hung with tiny charms. The dark line of her fringe framed her eyes. But – those eyes. Mara couldn’t help staring then. One eye was blue, one brown. Earth and sea.

  Mara wanted to read the woman. She wanted to stop blinking so that she could look at her more and more and more. Then she realised that if she was close enough to scrutinise the woman so intimately, if she was close enough to see the colour of her eyes, then the woman could see her in detail too. Pores, scars, flaws. She hunched her shoulders and let her hair fall forward to hide her face.

  ‘I’m Pearl,’ said the woman. Mara watched as she lifted a copper kettle off the stove. Her skin was dark, but at the join between each finger it was silver with scar tissue.

  ‘Pearl. I’m Mara.’

  Pearl paused, the kettle still steaming in her hand. She was gazing at Mara. ‘Say that again,’ she said, her voice low and soft.

  ‘Mara,’ said Mara. She tried to pronounce it clearly in case Pearl couldn’t understand her island accent.

  ‘No, not your name. Mine.’

  Mara frowned. ‘Pearl?’

  Pearl closed her eyes and smiled. ‘The way you say it,’ she said. ‘That rolled R. The rounded middle.’

  Mara felt huge and clumsy. She resisted the urge to raise her hand and cover her scar. ‘Am I saying it wrong?’

  ‘No! No.’ Pearl seemed to wake. She poured the tea and set the kettle back on the hob. ‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘it’s just that I like hearing my name said like that.’ She took a chair next to Mara, so close their arms almost touched.

  They sat in silence, sipping their tea. Mara felt her muscles relax, her jaw unclench. She straightened her spine and let her hair fall away from her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she was comfortable with a silence. The pub was forced noise; the house was forced silence. Here it was warm, sleepy-making, and without thinking whether it was rude, Mara pulled off her coat and hung it on the back of the chair.

  ‘So,’ said the woman. Pearl. Her name was Pearl, and Mara rolled the name around in her mouth as Pearl spoke. ‘You’ve been nicking all my books.’

  ‘No! It’s not like that. I didn’t mean it to be like that. I’m not a thief.’ Mara realised that technically she had been taking things that didn’t belong to her, which was the definition of theft. ‘I mean, I did take them. But I only wanted to read them. I kept them as good as I found them – I didn’t turn down the page corners or crack the spines. And I brought them all back.’

  ‘I’m teasing. Help yourself – not as if anyone’s using them. I like a book with a cracked spine. Better they’re getting read than just sitting there rotting. So what books did you read?’

  ‘All of them. Or, almost all. I still have a couple of shelves to go. But I prefer the ones with –’ Mara stopped herself, not wanting to look like a freak in front of Pearl.

  Pearl grinned. Dimples deepened in her cheeks. ‘Ones with what? Dirty bits?’

  Mara could smell the scent from Pearl’s throat: salt and spice and something she couldn’t name. She sipped her tea and put her cup back on the table, but that didn’t help – now she could feel the heat from Pearl’s skin. Her head spun.

  ‘No. With – with deaths.’

  ‘Crime novels? Mysteries? I don’t have that many out in the bus, I don’t think, but I could find –’

  ‘Not crimes. I mean, it doesn’t have to be crime. It doesn’t have to be murder. There just has to be a death.’

  Pearl stopped grinning. ‘You only want to read books about death?’

  ‘It’s not that. You can’t tell from what it says on the back, but most books have a death in them somewhere, so you have to read all the way to the end. And in the book they die, but then you can go back to the start and they’re not dead.’

  ‘Ah. I see.’

  Mara wished she could sew her mouth shut. She drained her teacup. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday. I’m eighteen.’

  ‘Many happy returns,’ said Pearl. She was still looking at Mara, but now her head was tilted, thoughtful. Her grin hadn’t returned, but she didn’t look annoyed or disgusted, and Mara could be content with that.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mara, and she was getting up from her chair, and she was pulling on her coat, and she was blundering through the wood-panelled hall, and the music was fading, and the air outside burned frozen in her lungs, and –

  ‘Wait!’ Pearl called.

  Mara turned back, heart beating too fast.

  ‘I have something for you.’

  Pearl disappeared down the hall. Unsure, light-headed, Mara followed. Through the blood-warm kitchen with its woozy soundtrack and flickering candlelight. Through a cold hall to an open door that led to shadows. Mara lurked in the doorway. Pearl’s bedroom could only be called that because it had a bed, of sorts: a sofa almost hidden under the pile of faded floral duvets and bedspreads avalanching off it. A trio of silky pillows was propped on one arm. The walls were bare, the floor unwaxed boards. The room smelled of Pearl, that salty, spicy, mysterious thing.

  But what mattered was Pearl, her skin warm in the dim light, bending over a book-stuffed crate beside the sofa, picking up a slim paperback. ‘Here,’ she said, holding out the book to Mara. Its title, in silvery capitals on a black cover, was Mine. ‘It’s a birthday gift,’ said Pearl, smiling a dimpled smile. ‘No one dies.’

  Laldie

  THE ROSS GIRLS were raised on fairy tales. The kind of books that would curdle your blood. Ravening beasts and handless maidens and hacked-off toes. Stepmothers dancing to death in red-hot shoes. Mermaids turning into sea-foam, ugly sisters having their eyes pecked out by birds, little red-hooded girls being eaten by wolves. All sorts of lovely things.

  Signe read them the stories – but the stories she told weren’t the same as the ones in the books. Every single tale she told was given a happy ending. Terrible things happened, of course they did – a story couldn’t be a complete lie, especially not a story told to small girls, who are very good at recognising the grate and catch of a lie. But the terrible things weren’t the endings. No matter how dark things looked, there was always a happily ever after.

  Islay and Mara spent a lot of time acting out the fairy tales they’d heard. They were most interested in the part just before the end, where the princess dies. They weren’t quite so interested in the part where she comes back to life and gets married and lives happily ever blah blah blah. They mostly argued over who got to play the dead girl. It was clear that the dead girl was the most-
desired one.

  Islay was the best Snow White; her cry of pain and sudden swoon after she bit into the apple was so perfect that Mara got nervous that she really had died. She was also great as the Little Mermaid; she could stay underwater for so long, and under the waves her red hair looked like an illustration from a book, like a pool of spreading blood. She was perfect as Beauty (the one with the beast) and also Beauty (the sleeping one).

  One of Mara’s happiest memories is of the time she was allowed to play Rapunzel. In the story that Signe told, Rapunzel didn’t technically die, but Islay had read somewhere that a corpse’s hair keeps growing after death, and it was clear to them that a single lifetime couldn’t be enough years for a girl to grow hair long enough to reach out of a tower and all the way to the ground. She must have been dead for an awful while for her hair to grow so much. Mara lay on her bed of leaves for hours, her hair spread out, making her breath slower and slower so her chest barely moved. She stayed there for so long that Islay got bored and wandered off to play something more fun. But still Mara lay there, playing dead, playing beautiful.

  Skelf

  ANOTHER AFTERNOON SHIFT at the pub. Outside the winter wind tantrummed at the windows. Inside the dust glittered and settled. When it was this quiet Mara could sneakily read a book under the bar, and she was now on the third read-through of Mine, the book that Pearl had given her. Usually she’d only read a book once before returning it to the library bus, but this one was different.

  It was a short book, and a strange one: a sort of fable set in a huge city-size tower. At the top of the tower, a small group of women were concubines to an emperor and wore masses of dazzling, sharp-edged diamonds. One woman, desperate to leave, escaped by shaving her head and then worked her way through many hardships to the bottom of the tower, where she spent her days sooty and claustrophobic but free, mining the diamonds she used to wear. But she couldn’t be happy with her new life, as she was in love with one of the other concubines still in the tower. So she left the mine, and had to work her way back up the tower to rescue her. Meanwhile, the other woman realised she was in love with the woman who’d left, and escaped the tower to find her – so while one was going down, the other was coming up, each trying to save the other. Finally they met, so scarred and changed by their quest that each believed the other couldn’t love her any more. The book ended with these lines: ‘They didn’t live happily ever after, like a couple in a story. But they were happy for a while, and perhaps that’s all we can ask.’ Pearl was right: no one died. But Mara found she didn’t mind that.