Arcadia (17 page)

“Hello.”

He jerks his head up as if he's been kicked.

Someone else is standing there.

She's got her hands stuffed down in the pockets of a navy blue anorak, which makes her shoulders hunch. The hood of the anorak is pulled up. She's wearing scuffed black wellies and crinkly waterproof trousers. She could be any of the women rugged up for working outside, but she's not. The face in the hood is a strange face. It's dark with something more than just the shadows inside the hood, but its eyes are clear and sharp as sea spray.

An expression of inexplicable wonder fills those eyes for a moment, and she murmurs something to herself in a foreign tongue.

“Who are you?” Rory says, because someone's got to say something. The woman goes on staring at him as if he's the most amazing thing in the world, not the other way around. He gets it. He gets where she must have come from. She probably doesn't speak English. “Italian?” he says.

The wonder blinks away.

“I don't have a country,” she says, in English, though the sounds are slightly wrong:
cahnntry
. She's a foreigner. “My name is Silvia. Do you remember me?”

“What?”

“Silvia,” she repeats. She pushes back the hood. Her hair's greasy and completely black and her skin's the color of the autumn heath. She's young, not an old woman but young like Kate. She says it again, as if reminding him of something: “Silvia. No?”

He's too baffled to answer. She smiles. Her teeth are yellowed but they look bright in her dark face.

“What's your name, my friend?”

“Rory,” he says.

“Rory.” In her mouth both
r
s have a tiny musical up-and-down roll. “Of course. Rory.”

“It's Scottish.”

She makes her eyebrows arch. Her face is quick and lively. “Ah. Well, then. Thank you, Rory.”

“For what?”

“For your light. So we could row to land. Lino says you were very brave, very clever.”

“Lino?” Saying it makes him understand: Oochellino. She's his friend.

“Little bird,” Silvia says. “You know that's what it means?”

If it wasn't for the ache in his heart he'd think he was dreaming. He's trying to remember that he just ran away from his mother and is waiting for her to catch him up and yell at him. It doesn't connect. It's like the strange young woman has stepped out of thin air.

“
Uccello
in Italian is ‘bird.' So,
Uccellino,
that's, like, ‘little bird.' ”

“Oh,” he says. “OK.”

She hasn't taken her eyes off him. She's very still. Everyone he knows in the world always stands slightly bowed, aware of the world's weight. Not this woman.

She tilts her head a fraction. “You were running here,” she says. “You look angry.”

“I wasn't.”

“You are like this.” She hunches her shoulders up and makes a tight-lipped sulky face. “Something's wrong, I think.”

“I'm all right.”

“Really?” Her eyebrows bob again. “OK then.”

Across the heath comes a wind-muffled shout:
Rory?

It's his mother. He's not dreaming. He crouches tighter against the wall even though he's perfectly well hidden. “That's my mum,” he says.

Silvia's taller than the ruined wall. She doesn't duck. She doesn't even look away, or show any surprise or alarm at all.

“Near the beach where we land,” she says, “there are many buildings together. Brown. With all the broken windows.”

“You mean the Hotel?”

She snaps her fingers. “A hotel, of course. Do you know, inside the biggest building, there are stairs down?”

Rory? Rory!

“Yeah,” he says hurriedly. He's not sure he knows anything at all at the moment but if she doesn't stop talking to him soon and go away his mother's going to find the two of them.

“Down there is a room. That's where we are.”

“Who?”

“Me and Lino and Per.”

“Who's Pear?”

“Our other friend.”

“Why's he called Pear?”

“Hmm?”

“Like a fruit.”

She takes a moment to get it. “No, no. Pee Ee Are. Per.” She smiles again. “He doesn't talk so much. I'd like you to meet us. Can you come there? By yourself?”

“You're like a gang?”

She makes a face like laughing, though without the sound. “That's good. A gang. The four of us.”

“There's another one?”

“Of course.” She juts her chin at him. “You.”

Rory!

“My mother's coming,” he says.

At last she crouches down and hides herself. She crouches very close to him. She smells of somewhere else, beyond the world. Her cheeks have little scars and scratches. Close up she feels magnetic, as if he couldn't move away unless she let him.

“You should go out,” she says quietly, without any hurry. “Or your mother comes here and sees me. That would be difficult.”

“What are you doing here?”

“We talk about it when you come.”

He shuffles across to the empty window cut in the wall and peeks out. His mother's just come over the horizon. She's calling in different directions, spinning and staggering as if she can't hold her course in the wind.

“Now you should go,” Silvia says, gesturing out of the Castle with a roll of her eyes. Her eyes are what make her look so strange and young and magnetic. They're pale and faintly green, too light for the rest of her. Rory can't help staring.

“How come you speak English?” he says. “You're not from here.”

She looks away for the first time. “I had a good teacher,” she says. “Go now.”

“Rory!” His mother's quite close now. “Are you hiding in there?”

He takes a deep breath.

“See you later,” Silvia says very quietly.

He stands up.

  *  *  *  

Everyone's unhappy. The whole island's gone wrong, it's not just him. People have whispered conversations which stop when they see someone else coming. No one seems to want to talk to him and his mother at all. Kate and Fi and Missus Shark and Ali have gone off to search the island. The rest of them all look thin and weak and old, even Laurel and Pink. Leaning over the grindstone, carefully dribbling grains into the hole in the middle while his mother and Viola take turns spinning the heavy wheel, Rory suddenly feels the sheer desperate hopelessness of the work. It's such a feeble trickle of flour oozing out from the grooves, even though the stone goes round and round and the women grimace and rub their arms. How could he ever have thought these were all the people in the world?

At lunchtime Laurel plonks herself down on the garden wall next to him while he's eating his fish. The sailing boat his mother went and got from Maries is still anchored off the south end of the island. They stare that way together.

“So where are you going to go?” Laurel asks.

“Dunno.”

Laurel heard everything that happened. There was lots of arguing at the Meeting, she said, especially when his mother asked for enough fuel to cross over to the Mainland. Diesel's about the most precious stuff they have. They've been all over every room and every cellar and cupboard of every abandoned house and barn and shed all across Home, collecting every drop of diesel from every tank and drum they could find, hoarding it, saving it for life-and-death emergencies and for tasks they can't muster strength for even when they push themselves to the edge of collapse. The four-wheel-drive ATV is the difference between survival and extinction because they haven't yet found any other way to pull a plow. They push the ATV to and from the fields and barely touch its throttle on the downhill passes but even so everyone knows that one year it will drink the last of the fuel. Rory doesn't know how much closer his mother's request will have brought that year. A lot closer. She's asked the people of Home to sacrifice their future so that two of their number can abandon them. Laurel doesn't have to spell any of this out.

“I heard people on the Mainland eat each other,” she says.

He wants to tell her to shut up but he doesn't have the heart for it. His fish tastes of nothing. The whole world feels flat, like it's already been taken away. The only things in the world with any life, any weight, are Silvia and Oochellino and Her, and they feel like people in the comics, so brilliant and beautiful they don't touch anything else.

“Are you still coming to say good-bye to Ol?”

“Suppose.”

Fi and Missus Shark come back from their search. They haven't found anything. He overhears them talking about the Hotel. They've searched it but they haven't found the Italians. He can imagine Silvia and Oochellino pulling their anoraks around them and saying magic words and making themselves disappear. People don't go to the Hotel. It was ruined very early on, when everyone started fighting over vanishing supplies. Something bad happened there. Esme says it's an evil place. Ol dared Rory to explore it once but even if he hadn't been terrified he wouldn't have been able to get very far into its wilderness of rampant nettles and smashed gutters, and that was last winter before things got even more overgrown.

He'll find a way, though. He's finished with his mother and all the weary old women. He's going to go and join the Italians.

Kate and Ali come back. They haven't found anything either. They discuss who's going to row out to the wreck. Rory almost smiles to himself, because he knows they won't find anything there either. The gang are safely ashore, thanks to him.

“Laurel, can I chat with Rory for a minute?”

It's Kate. He didn't see her approaching. Laurel slides off the wall without a word and goes inside to wash her hands.

“Hi,” Rory says.

“Rory.” Kate settles beside him. No one else is in earshot but Doreen, who's taking her turn looking after the fire, and she's deaf as a post. “What's going on?”

Rory feels his cheeks go scarlet.

Kate leans close. “I understand you might not want your mum to know. This is just us talking now.”

He clamps his jaw tight and stares at his feet.

“More food's gone missing,” she says. “Fi's quite certain. And I went and had a look around Parson's just now. Just me, Ali wasn't there. I noticed one of your coats smelling of apples. I had a look in the pockets and found this.” She unfolds a hand and shows him the matchbook from the Pub. She tucks it away again immediately, like a secret.

She stares at him for so long he has to say something.

“I dunno how that got there.”

Kate looks away. “All right,” she says, wearily. “I just want you to know that I know something's up, that's all. And I think you'll feel better if you talk about it. No one else will have to hear about it.”

“There's nothing,” he mumbles.

“Because any day now you might be—” Her voice catches. She says the last word in a sort of hiccup. “Gone.” He looks up and is horrified to see her eyes turning wet. She leans in again quickly and gives him a fierce hug, stinking of sweat and dirty clothes, and then hurries away.

Laurel passes her on her way back.

“What was all that about?” she says.

“Nothing.”

  *  *  *  

It takes much longer than usual to get all the jobs done because they're having to think about locking up behind themselves. Nevertheless, it's been agreed that this is the afternoon when they're going to gather together and cross the Channel to the church on Briar to say good-bye to Ol, whatever that means, and once it's been agreed everyone has to stick to the plan.

No one wants to. It's obvious. The bad feeling hasn't gotten any better as the day's gone on.

“We ought to put it off,” Viola says, but she's muttering to herself. They have to do it for Molly. No one wants to be the one to tell her that Ol doesn't matter anymore.

So once everything that needs doing has been done they all gather on the Beach, hauling dinghies down from the sheds, some on trailers, some dragged across the sand. The tide's below halfway and falling. The wind's beginning to ease. Rory's been watching the wind all afternoon, hoping it'll blow harder and harder, all winter long, forever in fact, but the chop in the Channel is already softening to ripples. It's just the evening calm, he tells himself; it'll blow back up by morning. But what if it doesn't? What if the very next sunrise comes clear and still, and by this time tomorrow, the very next afternoon, he's gone, gone from Home and everyone he knows, gone from Her with her beautiful arms and her voice like water humming, gone from the miraculous superheroes who want him to be in their gang? What if by this time tomorrow he's dead? No one survives the sea. His mother must have gone mad. He can't look at anyone. People try to chat with him and he can't answer. The dread of what might come has sucked his insides away. His mother tries to hug him while they're standing on the beach waiting for the older women to get into the dinghies. He twists away from her arms.

“Rory!” she snaps, angry and embarrassed.

“Let him be for a bit, Connie,” Viola says.

Every other conversation stops.

They all clamber in eventually and get themselves launched. It takes five boats to carry them all. Rory's in the biggest one with Laurel and Pink and Viola and his mother. The two women sit side by side with an oar each. They push out past the Harbor wall, around the rusting wreck of the ferry with its wide skirt of trailing seaweed, into the Channel. The sky's still a jumble of speeding clouds, though there's a flare of western light between them and the brow of Briar, touching the overgrown hill with gold. He's sitting in the stern with Pink, opposite his mother.

“Listen to me,” she says in an angry half-whisper, rocking backwards and forwards with the oar. “This afternoon is about Molly. We're doing this for her. So I want you to stop sulking and—”