Dark Tides (5 page)

David shifted around in the boot. ‘Claire, are you OK?’

I didn’t respond. I was still testing my movement, wincing at the blockage in my neck.

‘It just came out of nowhere,’ Scott mumbled.

‘You were going too fast,’ Rachel said. ‘Claire told you to slow down.’

‘Yeah, mate,’ Callum added. ‘She did warn you.’

I lowered my hand to my side and unclipped my belt. The strap retracted and I fumbled for the door handle and stepped into a deafening hush that made it feel as though the world had been abruptly muted. The tang of burnt rubber hung in the air. Misted wetness settled on my face and hands.

The road surface felt too hard beneath me and my movements were stiff and ungainly, knees jarring as I stumbled around the front of the SUV and passed through the low, spiralling headlamp beams.

The sheep had been shunted towards the side of the road where the tarmac fell away into a dewy grass trench. The tall pines teetered overhead, sodden and blurred in the wintry fog.

The creature drew a halting breath as I approached and then exhaled shallowly, its torso trembling, faint twirls of vapour escaping its nostrils.

I was about to move closer when I heard a door opening behind me. Scott got out and knelt down at the front of the SUV, inspecting the damage. The bodywork didn’t seem to have crumpled or deformed at all. The bull bar had done the job it was designed for.

‘What are you doing, Claire? Leave it. We should go.’

I crept towards the sheep. Perhaps it would be OK, I was thinking. Perhaps it would scramble up and hobble away. We hadn’t hit it as hard as we might have done. Another few feet and we’d have stopped before the impact. But even supposing the sheep’s injuries weren’t severe, I knew that animals could suffer very badly from shock. I’d heard it was what killed a lot of cats that got clipped by cars.

I edged closer. The sheep just lay there, its breathing irregular, its thick woolly chest rising and shuddering. One of its hind legs was poking up at a freakish angle.

‘Claire. Come back.’

I dropped to one knee on the cold ground, my arms crossed over my thigh. The sheep watched me, its roving yellow eyes sparkling in the headlamp glare.

Another door opened behind me. I heard footsteps on the road.

‘Claire?’ It was Rachel, speaking softly. ‘Claire, we have to go.’

The sheep trembled.

‘Claire?’ Rachel reached for my arm. She tugged me away.

I’d like to be able to tell you that I resisted. I’d like to say that I shook her off to offer some comfort to the luckless sheep. But I didn’t. I allowed her to drag me to my feet. I let her turn me and lead me back towards the others.

But before she ushered me into the SUV, before she pressed down on my head and guided me inside like a suspect being manhandled into a police car, I turned and glanced back over my shoulder. The dark glitter of life still lurked in the sheep’s swollen yellow eyes. The slitted pupils were fixed on me, unflinching and brimming with hostility. And for one heady moment I was taken unawares.

I’d seen that look before.

The black sugar paper was making my scalp itch. Mum had stapled the paper into a tapered cone, then jammed it down on top of my head. Before fitting the cone, she’d fed my head and arms through the holes she’d cut in a black bin bag, bunching the plastic around my waist with a sash cord. I was standing before her now, my glitter wand gripped in one fist, my other hand resting on her shoulder as she knelt on the floor and helped me to step into my black school plimsolls.

I was eight years old and I thought I made a pretty awesome witch. The bin bag was decorated with silver cardboard stars and moons, my cheek was branded with a rub-on tattoo of a bubbling cauldron, and Mum had blacked out one of my front teeth with an eyeliner pencil. This was my first Hop-tu-naa and I was determined to make an impression.

Mum was the one who’d got me excited about the whole thing. She and Dad were Manx, but we’d only moved back to the Isle of Man in the summer. I’d been born in Barrow and had spent the first seven years of my life in the Lakes. Now that my parents had returned to the island, they’d gone nuts for educating me about my roots. I’d been walked around Peel Castle, where Dad had told me about the Moddey Dhoo, the phantom black dog that prowled the battlements. I’d been taught to say hello to the Little People whenever we drove over the Fairy Bridge in the south, or risk being cursed with bad luck. But as far as Mum was concerned, none of that could compare to Hop-tu-naa.

Already, I was inclined to agree with her.

The other kids had been talking about it for weeks at school. I knew a few of the girls were dressing up as angels in matching outfits from a clothing catalogue. I’d come home wanting the same thing, but Mum had told me Hop-tu-naa wasn’t about angels – it was about ghosts and monsters and witches and wizards. And besides, she’d added, there’d be no fun in just buying a costume. The idea was to make your own. Something unique. Something we could do together.

It sounded great in theory but I’d been sure she’d forget the idea, or more likely it would become just one more thing she didn’t have time for. Turned out I was wrong. Over the weekend, she’d cleared a space on the dining-room table, laid out all my craft things and worked with me to create my ensemble. And Mum was right. It
had
been fun. Better than that, it had felt special. We’d talked. We’d smiled. We’d even laughed.

Not very long ago, that wouldn’t have been so unusual. Everyone thinks their parents are special, unique in some particular way. I felt that way about Mum, but trust me, with her it was as close to true as it ever gets. For starters, she was beautiful. And not in a showy or a threatening way. She’d been blessed with the genetic jackpot of high cheekbones, big hazel eyes and flawless skin, and if she was ever aware of the effect she had on most men in her company she never acknowledged it. Plus she had an energy about her, an aura, that could dazzle in even the darkest room. In any social situation – at parties, in the school playground, even just walking down an aisle in the supermarket – people would cluster round her, reach out to touch her, wanting to bask, for just an instant, in her glow.

It was the same with other kids. I was aware from a very early age that I was blessed with a cool mum. When she helped out on school trips, my classmates would fight to be in a group with her. They’d dance round her, confide in her, reach for her hand. And afterwards, they’d gush to me about how lucky I was, as if it was something I couldn’t possibly appreciate for myself.

And she was
funny
. Really. I’ve never laughed as hard as I used to with Mum. She was forever cracking stupid jokes, inventing silly rhyming songs, tickling me until I writhed and kicked on the floor.

Lately, though, all that had changed. She’d become quiet and subdued, her shoulders permanently hunched, the animation gone from her face, and there’d been a strange glassiness in her eyes.

Worse, several times in recent weeks I’d been woken late at night by arguments between my parents, the like of which I’d never heard before. It used to be that Mum hugged and kissed Dad all the time, smudging his cheeks in her hands, staring longingly into his face. Whenever I’d caught them like that, I’d squeal with disgust and Mum would come running after me, making big, exaggerated smooching noises, calling herself the kissing machine. Not any more. It felt like ages since she’d done anything silly or playful. She didn’t kiss or hug Dad very often, and when she did it was fleeting, her hands slipping away as if she had no idea what had once made her cling to him so tightly.

Most confusing of all was the morning I’d found her alone in my bedroom. Sunlight was streaming through my window, lighting my Pocahontas duvet cover and shimmering off Mum’s auburn hair, and she was sitting on the end of my bed, clutching something in her lap, rocking gently to and fro. I ventured into the room and she turned, eyes red, nostrils glistening, until I saw that she was cradling one of my oldest toys.

‘Why’ve you got Bun-Bun?’

She sniffed and looked down at the little grey rabbit, lifting one of his limp ears.

‘Mum?’

‘Not now, Claire.’ The crack in her voice seemed to open up a crevice in the floor beneath my feet. ‘Please, sweetheart, not right now.’

I’d been hearing that phrase a lot since we’d moved to the island. I didn’t care for it one bit. Not now meant not ever. It meant ‘Stop bothering me.’

But with the coming of Hop-tu-naa, Mum’s inexplicable sadness had suddenly lifted, almost as if it had never been there at all. And though I couldn’t begin to explain why, part of me knew that it had something to do with the costume we’d made. Between us, we’d created something out of nothing, and now, it seemed, both of our transformations were complete.

Back in my bedroom, Mum turned me to face the mirror, then gasped with laughter and raised her hand to cover her mouth.

‘Perfect.’ Her eyes quivered as she looked me up and down. ‘You’re my perfect little witch.’

And that was when I knew that it had worked. Like magic. Like a spell. Mum – my
real
Mum – had come back to me again.

Dad waved us off from the house and we walked away into the darkness holding hands. Mum was wearing her thick down jacket and soft leather gloves, and she was carrying the turnip lantern Dad had made for me the previous evening.

I’d been leaning against the kitchen table as he’d taken a knife and hacked off the top of the turnip to form a lid, then removed all the flesh from inside by using a hole cutter attached to his electric drill. He’d been humming as he worked, but he began talking to me as he carved a face into the turnip. He was doing that thing adults do so badly – trying to act casual when you can tell they want to find out something important. He kept his eyes on the turnip, his tongue probing at the corner of his mouth, and then he asked me – as if the question had only just popped into his head – what Mum and I had been laughing about recently.

‘Just . . . stuff,’ I told him.

‘Stuff? Like what?’

‘I don’t know.’ I twisted awkwardly, knotting the hem of my T-shirt in my hands. ‘My costume. Things Mum used to dress up as for Hop-tu-naa. Stuff like that.’

‘Not me then?’

‘Yes,’ I said quickly, and he looked up with an expression of such hope on his face that my cheeks burned with shame for the lie.

Dad was a big man. He was over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and muscles in his arms that strained the material of the lumberjack shirt he had on. Whenever he lifted me up I felt as light as a doll, but right then he looked weak.

‘Let me guess, she told you how handsome I am?’

He pulled a silly face, squishing up one eye and letting his mouth droop at the corner, holding the carved turnip up alongside him with its two diamond-shaped holes for eyes and its crooked, gapped teeth.

I giggled despite the hitch in my stomach and he tussled my hair and laughed his big fake laugh, like he used to when I clambered on to his lap and made him listen to me read a bunch of zingers from my
Ha Ha Bonk
joke book.

 Now, as we left him behind, the tea light spluttering dimly inside the turnip lantern, I wished that Mum had asked him to come with us. The cold autumn wind blustered and swirled so hard that I had to hold my hat to my head. It had rained earlier in the evening and the pavements were slick with damp and greasy with fallen leaves.

Mum led me along the street towards the home of some of her friends, who lived in a Victorian terrace much like our own. The houses were painted in a pastel spectrum of seaside colours that looked drained and anaemic in the yellow wash of the street lighting. The wintry air was thick with soot from all the coal fires burning in the neighbourhood.

I paused at the gate to the front path, eyeing the pumpkin balloons that had been tethered above the bay window. A group of older kids were huddled together at the end of the street. They were wearing scary rubber masks and carrying red plastic tridents, holding carrier bags that bulged with sweets.

A few houses along, two young kids were singing to a woman in a lighted doorway. The boy was dressed as a robot. The girl was a witch. The moment I saw her, I had instant costume-envy. She was carrying a broom and she had on a black floor-length cloak and a purple felt hat with a black band and a gold buckle. A man and a woman were standing arm in arm at the end of the path. The woman had painted her face to look like a cat. She smiled briefly at Mum, then down at me, and I caught a tightening in her face and saw something flicker across her eyes. Pity, maybe.

My shoulders sagged and my hat tipped forwards.

Mum squeezed my hand, bending down so that I could smell her perfume. Notes of lemongrass and pine. I can’t tell you how much I miss that scent. Sometimes, in my dreams, I can still smell it, and when I wake I feel its absence like a hole in my heart.

‘Remember Claire-Bear, they didn’t make that costume.’ She pinched my cheek. ‘They cheated.’

Mum’s turnip lantern swayed on its twine handle, casting flickering shadows on the yard wall just in front of us.

‘Now, are you ready to sing your song? You remember how it goes?’

I paused. I did remember. Mum had taught it to me over and over. We’d been singing it a lot while we’d been working on my outfit. But all of a sudden, I didn’t want to sing it by myself.

‘I’m not sure.’

She pushed her mouth over to one side and squinted hard at me in a way I’d grown used to over the years, as if she were trying to diagnose some mysterious condition I might be suffering from.

I miss that look, too. But then, I miss every look she ever gave me. If only I’d known then what I know now, I would have stared harder, more fiercely. I would have locked on to her eyes and told her to take me home. Right there. Right then. No arguments.

‘How about if I sing along with you? Would that help?’

I sniffed. Then I nodded.

‘Lovely. We’ll show them.’

And with that, she guided me forwards in the light of the turnip lantern and rang the doorbell.