Brodmaw Bay (42 page)

‘We’ll be safe here, for a while at least,’ Madeleine said. She bent and walked into the tunnel of the hollow tree trunk, a dank den of bark and decayed wood with toadstools growing palely in the thin loam on its floor.

It was a chilly little refuge, Olivia thought, kneeling rather than sitting down inside. It was quite dark, which was a blessing, given how dead Madeleine looked in daylight with her straw plaits and clothes now mouldering into rags.

‘Is it lonely, being a ghost?’

‘I’m a poor sort of ghost, Livs. It would be different had I been buried on land. I’d have more substance and wouldn’t be fading like this. The memory of life is far stronger on the land. But the sea claimed me. It is a struggle. I cannot do it for much longer. And in what little time I have left, I will be confined.’

‘Confined?’

‘To the bay, Livs. I cannot roam beyond the bay. I am now confined to a few favourite places from my life.’

‘Was this a favourite place?’

‘It was. I played hide and seek here just as you are doing. My life was very happy right up until my death. I missed my daddy, away a lot at the fighting at the front in the war. But I loved my mummy very much and we were happy when we moved here.’

‘You were not born in the bay?’

The thing that had been Madeleine Gleason laughed. It was an awful sound, to Olivia. It was an emptying drain of a sound. She had not known that a ghost could perish, but she thought she had just heard the laughter of someone undergoing a sort of second death.

‘We were fresh blood,’ Madeleine said. ‘That is what they told us, at the finish.’

‘I’m afraid, Maddy,’ Olivia said. She had not known she was going to say it until it was said and it was not Maddy she was afraid of and she knew it was true. Something was wrong and her dad was not around and she was frightened. She began to cry.

‘Hush,’ Madeleine said. ‘You must try to be brave, Livs. Your father is coming back and he might be in time.’

Outside their makeshift den, she could hear gleeful cries as they crashed through the glade. She turned her head to the noise. They had discovered her. They had found the trail of bruised and trampled undergrowth that must lead to this spot, left by her boots as she followed her imaginary friend.

She turned back again, but Madeleine had gone and she was alone now and felt it, felt alone and isolated and not a part of a game at all but prey, coldly pursued, hunted down like a timid woodland creature by hunters with only hunger and murder in their hearts.

Chapter Thirteen

Jack Greer was worried about his mum. She did not look happy to him at all. He thought that her distracted mood might have to do with his dad and what had happened in America. His dad had been working on that bloody game for ever. Jack had played a few prototype levels and thought it probably in his top three games of all time in terms of excitement and difficulty and the way the hours flew by when you were involved in it.

But the grown-up world was a ruthless place and his experience of football had taught him that his dad was not really a very ruthless man. Jack had played at the elite level for as long as he could remember. All his coaches had tried to instil in him the winning mentality. To a man they had been winners and they had possessed an edge he had never been aware of in his dad. He feared his dad might have been humiliated or given the run-around or just the bum’s rush in the States and his mum had got word of it. He hoped he was wrong.

Being a winner wasn’t everything. Robert O’Brien had been a winner and he had been a tosser too, messing about with a married woman, reliant on drugs to stimulate his imagination so that he could keep on writing his stories. The was the rumour, anyway. Alec McCabe had been a winner. But he had deliberately turned his back on a life of competition because he thought other things were more important.

It did not matter in the slightest to Jack whether his dad was a winner or not. He just wanted him to be happy. He wanted his mum to be happy too and she did not look it at the moment on the island, staring at the high, steep hill of driftwood they had constructed to burn as a bonfire later. They had draped it in fronds of kelp. Jack did not know why they had done this. Apparently it was a custom. He actually thought it was somewhat weird. It made the whole haphazard wooden construction look somehow alive. Perhaps it was just the way the kelp glistened and flapped in the breeze.

Jack dusted his hands together to get the sand off them and went over to his mum. He put an arm around her, surprised, as he always found himself these days, that he had reached her height and would soon be taller than she was even when she wore heels. He hugged and kissed her on the cheek and she smiled, returning his embrace.

‘What’s the matter, Mum?’

‘I’ve remembered something, that’s all. I’ve remembered something I should never have allowed myself to forget.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

She looked past him, her eyes flicking this way and that, uneasy to Jack, now, as well as unhappy. This was worrying. For the first time, he had the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach prompted by the realisation that they were among strangers and a long way from the place he had always thought of as home.

When his mum spoke, her voice was not much more than a whisper. ‘When I made my mistake with Robert O’Brien, I resolved that I would never lie to my son, Jack. And I won’t. But I don’t know if this is something I should tell you because I don’t yet really know what it means.’

‘Just tell me, Mum. We’ll worry afterwards about what it means.’

She gestured with a tilt of her head at the flapping, glistening hill of seaweed-draped wood that now towered above the beach. ‘That thing brought it back. I remember painting it. I painted it among the other images that ended up illustrating that children’s book your dad found in the hospital. That kelp and driftwood pyre brought it back to me.’

‘They didn’t use that one?’

‘No. They did not. I’d assumed I’d done the illustrations from photographs. Evidently they were done from memory.’

‘You mean you think you’ve been here before?’

She smiled. ‘When I came here with your dad? When Uncle Mark looked after you?’

‘Uncle Mark, the toxic avenger,’ Jack said. But the joke did not put the smile he had expected it to on his mum’s face.

‘The first words Richard Penmarrick said to me were welcome home.’

‘Jesus. Sorry, I mean heck.’

She looked at him. The look was serious. ‘We had an illustration tutor at St Martin’s that term, at the time I’ve isolated as the one when I must have completed that project. She was only there for the one term. She was very glamorous and always wore black clothes and red lipstick. I’d forgotten about her, too. Maybe I’d been encouraged in some way to forget. But I’m fairly sure now that she was Angela Heart.’

Jack could not reply to this remark. He would have done, but he saw that Richard Penmarrick was strolling along the beach towards them and Richard would have heard whatever Jack said and his instinct told him that would not be at all wise.

He had not worked out the implications of what his mum had just told him and did not know whether he was really capable of doing so. But it seemed ominous and wrong. It suggested the decision to go to Brodmaw Bay had not actually been theirs at all. They had not really chosen it. It was more as though it had chosen them. If that was the case, an awful lot of trouble had been gone to. You couldn’t help but wonder why. He felt an urgent need just to do something positive and useful. He said, ‘I’m going to find Olivia.’

Jack passed Richard Penmarrick with a curt nod and started to walk towards the centre of the island, but had covered only a few metres of sand when his sister emerged with a group of Mount year sevens from the bushes beyond. She looked much smaller than them, which she was. She was at the centre of the group, but to her brother looked separate and apart. It wasn’t just that she didn’t share the uniform. She was pale and apparently lost in her own thoughts, twisting a plait of grass between her fingers.

Livs did not look like she was having a very good time and it occurred to him that, actually, none of them was. He heard the band behind him strike up a tune, gathered near the edge of the water when he twisted and looked, facing it in a neat, three-tier formation, as though performing for the sea itself, which he thought bloody odd. Everything was odd, wasn’t it? It wasn’t even a question. It was a statement of fact.

He saw Megan Penmarrick over to his right, by the driftwood and seaweed monstrosity they had built, standing next to Ricky Sharp. They both had their arms folded across their chests and were openly staring at him with expressions that were neither friendly nor cheerful. He shrugged to himself and went and gave his sister a hug and she said, ‘We’re not locked on, Jack. We’re just not. I think we really, really need our dad.’

He took Livs by the hand and led her back to where their mum stood. Richard Penmarrick was standing next to her, smiling, looking at the band, listening to the shrill music pouring forth from their shiny brass horns and clashing cymbals and the discordant triangle someone kept striking out of time with the rhythm of the rest.

Their mum said, ‘In whose honour is the band performing?’

The smile did not leave Penmarrick’s lips. He spoke through it. Jack thought that he looked very smug. He said, ‘We honour the old gods.’

‘You mean the Singers under the Sea.’

‘If you know, Lillian, then why do you ask?’

‘My husband researched the legend before we came here. I did not realise that the old religion was still practised.’

‘This is a venerable part of the country. Our traditions go back even to ancient times and we value them.’

‘Who are the Singers?’

‘Spirits, evoked originally to protect us and help us prosper.’

‘Have you ever seen one?’

He laughed at that. ‘I don’t think seeing the Singers a very practical ambition, my dear. I have heard them and that is quite enough.’

‘You can see the Harbingers, though, can’t you?’ Olivia said. ‘I’ve seen them myself.’

Penmarrick frowned. He rocked in his boots. ‘You can,’ he said, ‘though it is not considered particularly desirable to do so. Seeing them does not bring good luck.’

‘Do we need good luck, me and my family?’ Lillian said.

He looked at her, she thought, frankly, for the first time since they had met. She suspected that the time for transparency had come. It was why she had posed the question. He glanced at her children, flanking her. He said, ‘My dear, I think you need a miracle.’

Jack looked back to the glistening bonfire. There was an effigy now at its peak. The figure of a man in a grey suit and a clerical collar had been tied up there to a plank of wood protruding at a slight angle. The angle undermined the figure, giving it a slightly comical aspect. It was as though he leaned drunk and about to fall. The head above the white collar was a mockery of a person, made of a stuffed pillowcase with crudely painted features and its hair a bunched crop of greying straw.

James was finally picked up by a minicab outside the hospital at
3
.
30
p.m. He was back with his car in less than thirty minutes and it took him less than twenty minutes to change the wheel using the spare and the hand-jack from the Jaguar’s boot. His tank was almost full, but he was gratified to see the four- gallon can of petrol he always kept there. He was good with mechanical things, precise and efficient. He found himself tightening the final wheel nut wishing everything in life was as straightforward and simply dealt with as machinery.

The traffic had increased in his absence from the road. It was always heavier as late afternoon stretched into evening. He crested the rise that brought the bay into sight at
6
.
30
p.m. There was still plenty of light. He braked sharply as he passed the stone circle on its plateau to his left only because he saw a small and ragged apparition there attired in purple and grey.

There was a reason she was there. She did not appear at random, did she? He switched off the engine and got out of the car. He could smell the salt of the sea so strongly it was almost like sluicing his throat and nostrils with brine. The scent of it assaulted him. He thought this probably the effect of the concussion. He felt febrile, vulnerable in the high, buffeting breeze. The grass seemed impossibly green under his feet when he gained the plateau and the looming stones screamed dumb questions about themselves to which time had forgotten the answer.