Dark Tides (8 page)

I watched Scott, Callum and Rachel walk away across the grass until they disappeared among the dunes and the darkness. It was getting cold inside the SUV. We couldn’t run the heater because Scott had taken the keys with him. I guessed maybe he was afraid that we’d drive off and leave him. I couldn’t blame him for that. It was the kind of thing Mark might suggest and, if he did, I wasn’t inclined to argue. David probably would. He was the responsible one and Rachel was his cousin. He wouldn’t leave her behind.

I wrapped my arms around myself and shuffled down in my seat. I was wearing a body warmer over a thick polo-neck sweater and I had on two pairs of socks. It helped, but not as much as I might have liked.

‘We’re going to freeze,’ Mark said, from behind me. ‘That lighthouse is easily a mile away. It’s going to take them long enough to walk there and back. And that’s supposing they don’t get caught poking around. Someone lives there, you know.’

‘In the lighthouse?’

‘Nah. There are some old keepers’ cottages attached to it. Two, maybe three.’

‘Does Scott know?’

‘If he doesn’t, he’s about to find out.’

I tucked my chin down into the soft wool of my jumper.

‘We could find somewhere to light a fire,’ David said, from the boot.

‘With what?’ I asked him. ‘It’s been raining the last couple of days.’

‘Not a problem.’

He grunted and I heard the slosh of liquid inside a plastic container. I turned to find him lifting a jerrycan of fuel. He winked at me and it made my heart flip.

‘Oh, sure. Because that’ll be totally safe.’

I stayed inside the SUV for twenty long minutes. I was feeling melancholy and let down. I was fed up of people abandoning me on Hop-tu-naa. And yes, I was being irrational. I was being unfair. I could have gone to the lighthouse. I could have helped David and Mark with the fire. I knew that I was indulging in my Poor Claire routine. But I didn’t especially care.

I stared blankly at the featureless dark all around, then I cracked my door and listened to the surf and the whispering breeze and the faint murmur of Mum’s half-forgotten voice on the wind. Things she’d said to me – broken phrases, half-remembered sayings – messages from a distant past that felt as if it belonged to someone else entirely, someone not unlike me, but not the person I’d now become.

Words she’d never say to me again.

I shivered. Suddenly, the darkness drifting in through my door seemed to carry with it a threat. I thought of closing the door. Thought of locking the car. But the darkness would find me here soon enough, alone and vulnerable, within sight of the deformed pines and whatever mischief lurked among them.

I flung my door open and stepped out into the gnawing cold. I stumbled towards the boardwalk, bent low at the waist, my hands burrowed deep in the pockets of my jeans, the darkness closing in on me until I caught sight of a haze of burning embers spiralling upwards from behind a mounded dune.

I came over the reed-fringed ridge, the sea frothing and spitting down against the shore, the lighthouse glinting in the far distance, and I immediately felt the heat against my face. I slipped downwards, sand cascading around my feet, and collapsed next to where David and Mark were slumped.

Mark was resting on one elbow, smoking a joint, and the hot, baked air smelled of rotten candy. David was drinking from a lager can. There were more cans in a plastic shopping bag near his feet. I took one, popped the lid and guzzled the frothing suds.

The heat was fierce, the light intense. They’d built the fire on some sort of wooden pallet with driftwood piled on top. The bluish shimmer at the base of the flames suggested a lot of petrol had been needed to get the inferno started, and that the fumes hadn’t fully burned off just yet. Later, Rachel would tell me that she could see the blaze from the top of the lighthouse.

‘Take a hit?’ Mark offered.

‘Not tonight.’

He bobbed his head and took a contemplative pull. ‘We were just saying, this must be a rough time of year for you.’

I gazed down at my feet, digging my fingers into the damp sand.

‘Rachel told us about your mum,’ David told me. ‘We knew some of it already. I remember it was in the papers when we were kids.’

I nodded and felt my throat close up.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

I didn’t know how to answer that question. It wasn’t often I talked about Mum. I’d try sometimes with Dad, but he was quick to shut down most conversations. Every now and again, something would happen at home that would trigger a memory – a tune on the radio, or a glimpse of a photograph – and he’d be caught unawares. We might smile or laugh. We might share something more. But then the pain would flood in and I’d watch it consume him, and it was as if he had to stop talking, stop engaging with me, because it took all his energy and concentration to swim back to the surface. Sometimes, I sensed that if I said one more word he might drown in his grief.

The toughest part for both of us was that there was never any closure. We had no explanation for what had happened to Mum. Some days I felt as if we’d be able to move on if we found out what had become of her. But that supposed the answer was less terrible than the not knowing, and in my darkest moments, I was afraid that could never be the case.

There’d been occasions when I’d confided in Rachel about all this. There were certain days in particular that were always tough. Mother’s Day. Christmas. Mum’s birthday. But nothing compared to the pain and dislocation I experienced every Hop-tu-naa. Nothing could ever take away my guilt.

‘Honestly,’ Mark said, ‘I don’t know how you’re not a lot more messed up.’

‘How do you know that I’m not?’

He shrugged. ‘You’re still at school. You get good grades. Look at me – my parents let me down and I did loads of stupid things because of it.’

‘My mum didn’t let me down, Mark.’

‘No, I know. It’s just . . .’ He shrugged again. Took another hit on his joint.

‘What
did
happen to her?’

I turned to look at David. The coiling flames were lighting his face a vibrant red, and for just a second, I was reminded of the devil’s mask he’d worn on that first Hop-tu-naa.

‘It’s OK if you don’t want to talk about it. We just worry about you, you know? All of us. It feels like we’re always avoiding it, pretending there’s nothing weird about tonight for you. And I think we can get past that. I think it might help.’

Would it? I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t know how much I could say. Where would I start?

But then, almost before I was really aware of it, I found that I’d already begun. I stared into the fire, into the twitching heat, and I gave my words over to the flames. Maybe I wasn’t telling it to Mark and David so much as I was telling it to myself – talking it through in a way I hadn’t ever done before, as if it was just a story with a character that happened to share the same name as me, a mother who looked and acted like my mother, and a plot as grim and unforgiving as the classic fairy tales that had bewitched me as a kid.

‘Brutal,’ Mark muttered, when I was done. He’d finished his joint and now he was lighting a cigarette from a burning twig, one hand cupped around his jaw.

‘And nobody knows what happened to your mum?’ David asked. ‘She just . . .
vanished
after she put you to bed and left your house?’

I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. They felt hot and swollen. I wasn’t crying but I really should have been.

‘She was never found, no.’

‘Could she have run away?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘What did the police say?’

‘Ultimately, they thought she must have left us. They spoke to some friends of hers back in Barrow who said she’d been arguing a lot with my dad. They’d moved back to the island to try and make things work. And my nan said something once – she pretty much told me Mum had suffered from depression when I was little. I got the impression she thought that maybe Mum had killed herself. That she’d done it somewhere, or in some way, so that her body hadn’t been found, or her identity wouldn’t be known. Maybe the police thought that, too.’

‘And your dad?’

‘I’m sure he thinks she’s dead. He acts that way. I think he blames himself for it, too. I think he believes he should have made her stay home that night. That somebody got to her, took her. I don’t think he can bring himself to believe that she walked out on us.’

‘And you?’

‘Me?’ I felt the words gathering on my tongue, crowding my mouth. I hadn’t told anyone this before. Had never allowed myself to say it aloud. ‘I think somebody hurt her. I think they killed her and hid her body and went on with their life as if it meant nothing to them.’

‘What about Edward Caine? Do you think it could have been him?’

‘He said Mum never returned to his place after she left with me. He said he never saw her again.’

‘I bet the police went easy on him,’ Mark said. ‘I bet they were
told
to. A rich guy like that. Lots of connections on the island.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. They questioned him several times. They searched his home more than once. They couldn’t find anything.’

‘But that’s not what I asked.’ David put his head on an angle, the fire casting ghoulish shadows across his face. ‘Do
you
think it was him?’

I thought back to that night, to the eight-year-old me standing in front of Edward Caine, mocking his dead wife, hungry to wound him. I remembered how I’d felt the next day when Dad had told me that Mum was missing, and I’d flashed back to that song, that weapon, and I knew – beyond all doubt, with a terrible certainty – that when I’d been standing before Mr Caine, leering those words at him, about mothers
gone away
, somehow, unintentionally, I’d cursed myself and cursed Mum. I thought of his awful yellow eyes, the vengeful spite in them, and I saw it then, saw that there were dark things in this world that I could never begin to explain – mysteries like the creepy unknowable touch I’d experienced that October night among the warped pines just a little way from where we were now.

‘Yes,’ I answered finally, with a voice that no longer sounded like my own. ‘I think he killed her. And somehow, I have to live with knowing that he got away with it.’

The first anniversary of Mum’s disappearance was one of the strangest days I’ve ever known. In truth, it was more like a non-day, a date that Dad and I had wordlessly agreed shouldn’t be allowed to exist inside the walls of our home. That was fine by me. If I’d had my way, it would have been erased from the calendar that was hanging on the back of our kitchen door altogether. Better still, it should have been removed from all calendars – a forbidden Thursday that simply ceased to exist.

We’d given it our best shot. Between us, we’d done all that we could to deny that Hop-tu-naa was happening. There’d be no costume-making this year. No carved turnips. No sweets or silliness.

By breakfast time, I was already sick with dread at what the evening might bring. Once darkness fell, groups of kids were bound to come to our house. They’d start singing that song,
the
song, and I didn’t know what I feared most: that Dad would open the door to them and pretend everything was normal; or that he’d ignore them altogether, no matter how loud their singing became.

Trick or treat.
Mum had made it clear to me that it wasn’t a Manx tradition, but I’d heard kids at school talking about their plans. Some had said they’d throw eggs if anybody refused to answer the door. Others had talked about squirting Silly String through letterboxes. It wasn’t the mess that worried me. It was Dad’s reaction.

He hadn’t been himself since the night Mum vanished. He looked almost the same. Smelled the same. Wore the same clothes. But he never laughed any more. If he ever smiled, caught unawares by something stupid I said or did, it was with a fleeting, weary regret that made him look somehow reduced, as if he’d haplessly given me something he couldn’t afford to part with. His eyes were flat and lightless, his sockets sunken and heavily pouched. His voice had changed, too. There was a broken quality to it now, a wayward hitch in his throat that he seemed unable to control. He was harried, beaten down, his hair greying at the temples, the collars of his old shirts a size too big. Sometimes, I’d watch him blundering around me, grappling with the vacuum cleaner or cursing the oven for burning our dinner, and it felt as if I was living with an actor who’d been subtly miscast in the role of playing my father. Even at the age of nine, I knew that he’d stepped back from the world around him.

At work, he spent his days moving families into new homes where they’d embark on new lives together, filled with optimism for the futures that lay ahead. Looking back now, I can see that he must have had to bite his tongue to stop himself from telling them how quickly and savagely those futures could be snatched from them, for reasons that might never become clear. I wonder how he didn’t erupt with rage or walk away from the job, and it scares me to think that perhaps he almost welcomed the pain, that each time he witnessed the happiness of somebody else, he felt the loss of Mum anew, and maybe feeling something – anything – was what kept him going.

I’d been told that things would improve some day. My grandparents on Mum’s side of the family were both dead long before I was born, but my paternal grandmother had taken special care of me since Mum had gone. Nan was a formidable woman. From a very early age I understood that she was the poster girl for battleaxes everywhere. But she was always devoted to me, and several months ago she’d pulled me aside and told me that although Dad still loved Mum very much, and missed her terribly – as we all did – eventually the pain in his heart would heal. Mum would always be here in some way, never forgotten, always spoken about, but Dad would begin to feel less sad, just as Nan had recovered from the loss of Grandpa when I was small.

How, though, I wondered? What would trigger this magical transformation? And in the meantime, how would he react tonight if some kids showed up at our door, unaware of our loss, singing gleefully about mothers never coming home?

The Coco Pops I was eating had congealed in my throat. I couldn’t swallow, almost choked. I lowered my face and dribbled chocolatey milk into my bowl.

Dad leaned out from behind the newspaper he was reading to frown at me.

‘What are you going to do this morning?’

I shrugged and stirred my cereal with my spoon. Truth was I had no idea. It was a school day but Nan had told Dad to telephone them to say that I wouldn’t be coming in. Part of me was glad about that, but a small and not very virtuous part was a little disappointed. I was pretty sure that my teacher, Mrs Henderson, would have fussed over me. The other kids would have noticed, too.

‘Your nan thought we could do something this afternoon. Drive to the south, maybe. Walk around Port St Mary. Your mum liked it there.’

His voice caught at the end and he thumped his chest, coughing into his spread newspaper. It was last week’s copy of the
Manx Independent
. He’d read it at least once before.

‘Do we have to?’

‘Your nan thought you’d like it. Maybe we’ll take some flowers. Say a few words.’

Like a funeral, I thought. Nan had been badgering Dad to hold some kind of family memorial. She thought it would help him to move on.

But he didn’t want to move on. Neither of us did. Mum had fallen into some kind of crack in the world was all. She’d disappeared for a time. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t come back. Not if you wanted it badly enough. Not if you wished for it hard.

I pushed my bowl aside. ‘What about this morning?’

‘Somebody’s coming here to talk to me.’ Dad ducked behind his newspaper, as though I was interrupting his precious reading. ‘You’ll need to play upstairs.’

But with who? Or what? I didn’t have any friends that I could call on, even if they weren’t at school. And all of my toys were tainted in some way. Every one of them had been touched, at one point or another, by Mum. Playing with them risked unleashing all kinds of memories.

I slid down off my chair and tiptoed out of the room. But as I was creeping upstairs, I made the mistake of glancing back into the kitchen and I saw that Dad’s head was bowed, his shoulders quaking, the newspaper rustling in his hands.