Dark Tides (7 page)

Mum turned me roughly and ushered me away, her hands bearing down on my shoulders so that I could feel the tension being transmitted through her body. I was still fingering the note when Mr Caine called out from behind.

‘Oh, Mrs Cooper?’ Mum halted and muttered something under her breath. ‘I almost forgot. Forgive me, but I have some urgent dictation that really must be transcribed this evening. I wonder, could you possibly work late?’

‘I have to get Claire home to bed, Mr Caine.’

‘Yes, I understand entirely. But afterwards, perhaps, could you pop back?’

The pressure from Mum’s hands seem to ratchet up several notches, then her arms sagged and her hands fell away from me.

Say no
, I willed her.

‘Of course.’ She snatched at my hand and dragged me towards the gate. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

I stumbled after her, feeling sickened and disoriented, but I made the mistake of glancing back at Mr Caine, and what I saw was something I’ll never forget. It wasn’t the sneer on his lips or the dark whorls of his flared nostrils. It was his sickly gimlet eyes. Swollen. Obscene. Triumphant.

And in that moment I knew – somehow felt that I should always have known – that I’d just made a catastrophic mistake, one that would end up costing me far more than I could bear to lose.

Scott was accelerating away from the prone sheep when he glanced in the rearview mirror and flinched.

‘Problem?’ Mark asked.

‘There’s a car behind us. I think they’re slowing down.’

‘Don’t stop. Get round the next corner. See what happens after that.’

Nobody suggested an alternative approach. Nobody challenged Mark’s instructions. Trouble was one area where he had a unique authority. We were all willing to defer to him. We were all prepared to believe that the consequences of our actions weren’t necessarily something we had to concern ourselves with, as long as he said so.

‘Even if they
do
pull over, they won’t know it was you who hit the sheep.’

‘We wouldn’t have hit it if it hadn’t run out in front of us.’

We. Us.
Scott was quick to share the blame. But then, none of us were telling him to stop and go back. Not even me. And sure, I was shaken. I was unnerved by the hostile look in the sheep’s eyes and the memories it had stirred, but I was aware of what was happening. I was alert to the unspoken pact we’d all agreed upon.

The sheep
had
run out in front of us. That was what we’d say if the police ever became involved. Scott might have claimed otherwise – Scott
always
claimed otherwise – but it was obvious that he didn’t have permission to be driving the SUV. Legally speaking, this was car theft, and we were fleeing the scene of an accident.

‘Faster.’ Mark was looking out the rear window over David’s shoulder, snatching one last glimpse before we swooped around the hairpin curve that marked the beginning of the steep descent into Tholt-y-Will.

Scott flipped his headlamps to full-beam. A line of reflective bollards winked back at us on our left, marking the edge of the violent, gorse-covered drop into the valley below.

‘I think they stopped,’ David half-whispered, from the boot.

Things I didn’t need to hear.

There were lights on in a little converted chapel down at the base of the glen. It looked completely isolated, as if it was alone on a concealed ledge in a bottomless cavern.

A hand rested on my shoulder and I wheeled round too fast, bone and cartilage crunching in my neck.

‘Easy.’ Rachel leaned forwards. ‘Are you OK?’

I nodded in the dark. Felt my eyes sting and water.

‘Those sheep roam all over the place, Claire. I bet it happens all the time.’

I bet it did, too. But why did it have to happen tonight? To us? And why did the sheep have to look at me that way? There’d been no misinterpreting the loathing in the creature’s eyes.

‘We’ll be fine,’ David said, but he sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as the rest of us. ‘Even if those people stopped, what can they do?’

‘Yeah,’ Callum echoed, and drummed his hands on my headrest. ‘It’s no big deal. We shouldn’t let it spoil our night. But just do us a favour, eh, Scotty? Try not to hit anything else.’

It wasn’t long before Scott’s confidence returned. His speed and his bravado ratcheted back up with every mile that passed, until by the time he pulled on to the rutted, potholed track cutting across the flatlands of the Ayres nature reserve, he seemed to have shaken off the entire incident as if it had never happened.

The car park was almost as empty as it had been two years before. The only other vehicle was an unhitched trailer that was canted over to one side, resting on a flattened tyre. It didn’t look as if it had been moved in months.

Eleven p.m.

Scott parked close to the weathered boardwalk leading through the dunes to the beach. There was no fog down here. We’d left it behind up on the mountain. The sky was a vast blue-black infinity, studded with stars and a nearly full moon. There was barely any breeze. For just a moment, it felt as if the island was holding its breath. As if, like me, it was waiting to see what might come next.

I stared off across the moonlit land towards the tangle of pines half a mile away. The trees were no more than a dense, inky blob.

I thought of the hand that had touched me there. The fear and the thrill of it. If I closed my eyes, I could still remember how it had felt. The memory wasn’t only in my mind. It was a physical sensation. Any time I wanted, I could conjure up the exact weight of the palm on my shoulder, the caress of the finger on my cheek, the urgent tingling in my nipple when the fingers closed on my breast.

I still didn’t know who’d touched me. Several months had gone by before I told Rachel about it, and when I did she looked at me as if I was mad. I wasn’t sure what she doubted the most: that it had happened in the first place, or if it had, that any of the boys could really have intended to touch me instead of her. I wasn’t in a position to argue. The whole thing seemed unlikely to me, too. Fantastical enough that sometimes I even wondered if the vodka and the darkness and my own traumatic associations with Hop-tu-naa had somehow combined to make me suffer a vivid hallucination. The hand had seemed real to me – still
felt
real to me – there was no disputing that. But what I believed to be real, and what had really happened, could be two quite separate things. Perhaps my perception had been off. Perhaps, for one night only, I’d gone a bit loopy.

It was possible, I supposed, and the strange thing was that I almost welcomed the explanation. I guess a normal person would have been devastated to think that their mental faculties could fail them so completely and unpredictably, but the truth is that I took some comfort in the idea. To me, at least, the alternative scenario – that someone had sneaked up on me in the middle of the woods, in the pitch black, to touch me without any explanation and without my uttering a single word of protest – seemed a lot scarier.

It didn’t make my version of events any more credible when nothing similar happened on the next Hop-tu-naa. Twelve months ago, it had been David’s turn to select a dare. He’d made us all meet him in Port Erin late on a wet and wind-torn afternoon, and then he’d surprised us by taking us out on his uncle’s fishing boat to the Calf of Man.

The Calf is a small island located just off the southern coast. It’s uninhabited, save for a cramped bird observatory with basic self-catering facilities that David had rented for the night. On the face of it, sure, it doesn’t sound all that wild. Unless you’re a bird fanatic, there really isn’t anything to do. But equally, there isn’t anyone to disturb you, and that means anything goes. Booze. Drugs. Sex. Earnest acoustic guitar playing.
Anything.

And what happened? Nothing remarkable. I worried a bit about not letting Dad know where I was or when I’d be back, but not too much, since he’d fallen into his annual Hop-tu-naa funk. Other than that, we drank too much, talked too much, smoked too much. At some point in the small hours of the night, when the kitchen walls had started to blur and spin, I was the first to stagger away to bed and, as I lay alone in the dark, burrowed deep in my sleeping bag, I confess that part of me wondered if the strange hand might find its way to me again. But it didn’t, and, weird as it might sound, I can’t deny a small jolt of disappointment.

What had changed, I wondered?

Whatever it was, during the past two years, none of the boys had made a move on me. Oh, there’d been plenty of posturing, a lot of jokey innuendo from Scott and Callum that probably wasn’t all that jokey, and at one time or another, I’d caught all the boys looking at me in that particularly earnest and searching way – not so much undressing me with their eyes as pretending that I didn’t have any clothes on in the first place.

There’d been occasions when I’d found myself sitting next to Mark in the back of a car or crowded around a table in a pub and it was hard to ignore the heady swirl of hormones and physical desire that twisted inside me. But if Mark was attracted to me, he’d never acted on it. I guess it didn’t help that I was only sixteen. He was two years older but so much more experienced. He lived by himself. He paid his own way. He’d had a string of casual girlfriends. I often felt like a kid in his company, stumbling over my words, convinced that anything I had to say was trivial or irrelevant.

It was different with David. We could talk for hours about books or stories in the news or places we hoped to travel to one day. I’d confided in him about my dreams of going to university to read English and how difficult it was for me to raise the subject with Dad. He’d told me that despite his strong A-level results, he planned to stay on the island and build a career at the airport – he’d always loved planes and had recently applied for a job as a management trainee there. One time, a few weeks back, he’d said that he hoped to marry someone someday. Someone smart and pretty. Someone he got along with. Like me.

I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know where he was going with it. I couldn’t behave as if I didn’t know that he was attracted to me. Everyone had commented on it. The subject had become an open joke among us – one with a punch line that I was scared might fall flat.

The problem was I liked him, too – so much so that it frightened me a little. There were times when he’d smile from behind his hand, as though still concealing the dental braces that were now long gone, or crack a joke at my expense while fixing me with his warm brown eyes, and I’d be so overcome by a sudden urge to go to him that it left me stunned.

It didn’t take a doctor to diagnose my condition. All of the symptoms were there. I was suffering from a classic teenage crush.

Rachel had noticed immediately. She hadn’t asked me if I fancied David – she just treated it as simple fact. At first I’d thought she’d be mad, but my moon-eyed routine seemed to perplex and amuse her. Now, whenever I mentioned David, she’d pretend to stick her fingers down her throat until she gagged.

And I understood why. It
was
nauseating, but it was also terrifying, because some time soon, he would ask me out, and I still hadn’t figured out how I’d react. Would I turn him down to try and protect our friendship and the unity of the group, or would I risk everything on the outside chance that teenage infatuation could build into something real and lasting?

Scott jarred me from my thoughts by jabbing at the SUV’s horn with the heel of his hand.

‘Dare time.’

‘Finally.’ Rachel shuffled forwards to poke her head between the front seats. ‘What do you have in mind?’

‘It’s over there.’

Cold panic writhed in my gut. But Scott wasn’t pointing towards the pines. His finger was angled to the left. Towards the lighthouse.

‘I want us to climb to the top.’

‘Isn’t it locked?’ David asked.

‘So?’

‘So we’d be breaking in.’ I stared at the pulse of blue-white light arcing out to sea. I didn’t know what it was exactly – the height of the tower, maybe, or my lingering guilt at what we’d done to the sheep – but I hated the idea. ‘Why would we do that?’

 ‘Because, it’s my turn to pick a dare this year and I say it’ll be cool. And if you weren’t totally lame, you’d agree with me.’

I didn’t reply right away. I let the silence build.

I couldn’t look at Scott because I knew what this was. The dynamic of our group was changing. Maybe the incident with the sheep had brought things to a head. Maybe we were all just growing up. But to my ears, at least, the suggestion sounded totally moronic.

‘No way,’ I finally said. ‘I’m not doing it. Count me out.’

I could feel Scott glaring at me. Could sense the vibrations coming off him. Betrayal. Anger. Hurt.

‘Well, I’m in.’ Rachel’s giddy tone jarred with something fragile inside me. ‘Sounds fun.’

I looked away through my window, towards the dunes and the reeds and the hidden ocean beyond. I felt sullen and cast adrift. Felt like that girl I’d imagined out there once, my tragic double, drowning in the freezing dark tides, with no one to call on and no one to come.

‘Me too,’ Callum added, which shouldn’t have surprised me. He was hostage to his hormones, after all. ‘Might as well take a look, at least. It’d be epic if we can get up there. And besides, it’s Scott’s dare. Those are the rules.’

‘Not for me,’ David said, and for a fleeting moment that drowning girl wasn’t quite so doomed any more. She could hear a distant voice calling from the shore.

‘Predictable,’ Scott muttered.

‘Mark?’ Rachel asked. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’

‘No.’ Mark’s response was a brilliant rescue flare that exploded across the night sky, lighting me up against the surging blackness. ‘I’m staying here with Claire and David.’

‘You’ll be a total gooseberry.’

‘Don’t care. If that place is locked, I’m not busting in. I’ve got a reputation to think about.’

‘As a burglar.’

‘Exactly. Won’t be anything worth stealing in there.’