Arcadia (18 page)

“Oh!” It's a shriek from the first boat. It's Missus Grouse. She's pushing herself up unsteadily from the bow, pointing. Everyone turns to look.

“Oh my God,” Viola whispers.

Every oar's hanging motionless, dripping, and every head is equally motionless.

There's a conical spur of broken rock down the Channel. At low tide it's attached to the beach outside the Club, part of Home. The rest of the time, like now, it's a tiny black island of its own, with a fringe of barnacles and unkempt grass and a barren top.

On that top a naked girl's sitting. She's silver-white, her long tangled hair the colorless blond of stubble or bone.

It's Her.

Missus Grouse's cry echoes away in the horrified silence. Then Rory's mother leaps up. The oar crashes out of her grip and the dinghy yaws. “Don't look!” she shouts at Rory, and throws herself on top of him, almost knocking him overboard. “Don't look!” He's being squashed under her. He's suffocating. He hears Missus Grouse shout “Get away, you horrible thing!” and then everyone's shouting at once. He squirms and shoves and finally manages to push his mother off. She scrabbles at his shoulders, trying to force him down into the bottom of the boat, but before she gets hold again he manages another glimpse of Her, watching them from her perch, her legs folded under her, the afternoon light making her shine. Molly begins to howl. Kate's bellowing instructions to all the boats: “Keep going! Ignore it! Keep rowing!” Rory's mother grabs his head and jams his face into her shoulder, gripping him tight. He pushes and struggles but she won't let go.

“Connie,” Viola says, “it's all right. Careful with him.”

“Shut up!” his mother shouts.

“Shall I row, Auntie Vee?” says Laurel.

“Connie, you'll suffocate—”

He manages to yank his head away to get a breath. She whacks his ear painfully as she tries to get hold of him again. He curls himself up on the bench and yells “Leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone” at the top of his voice. It echoes between the islands.

“Keep on.” Kate's voice is clear across the water. “Don't give it the satisfaction. Don't even look at it.”

It,
he thinks. A savage rage is curled up in his chest.
It
. He's thinking of how She slips featherlight from the sea and lies on the rocks with her hair slowly drying out and tells him stories about the big house she used to live in and the books she used to read (he loves imagining houses and books under the sea). And now Kate's calling her
it
like she's a thing, a fish, and they're falling over and screaming at each other because they're frightened of her even looking at them.

“What was They doing watching us, Mum?” Pink's like a frightened baby.

“Just ignore it,” Viola says. “It can't hurt us. It's all right, it's gone now.”

“No one's ever seen Them in the Channel before, have they?” his mother says.

“I don't know why you care,” Viola says.

Rory listens to himself breathing. No one tries to touch him. Eventually the boat scrunches against sand.

“All right, Rory love?” his mother says, cautiously. He stays curled up.

“Let me,” Viola says.

“He's my son, thank you very much.”

“For God's sake, Connie. I'll bring him along soon, I promise.”

He listens while they all stumble out of the boats, all the old women. Some of them are talking about him. The voices ebb away across the beach eventually, though he's aware of Viola sitting beside him. She rubs his back from time to time.

“I'm so sorry,” she says, when everything else is quiet.

He has no idea what she means but it's better than everyone shouting at each other, and her hand feels nice on his back.

“Why don't we go up,” she says. “You were Ol's best friend. He'd have wanted you there.”

“I don't care about Ol.”

Her hand hesitates only for a moment.

“Do you remember Hugo?” she says after a while.

Hugo was Laurel and Pink's brother, the middle one. He's dead, of course. Lots of people whose names he remembers are dead, so many that it's not really even like remembering, any more than you'd remember the slice of a loaf you've just eaten or the piece of wood that just burned in the fire.

“I think about him every single day,” Viola says. “Things he said. His little face.”

He tells himself he doesn't care.

“I'm not whining about it. You lost your father, and Scarlet and Jake. It's the same for all of us. We can't spend all our time grieving, I know that, but sometimes we have to remember. It's not for them, it's for us, you see. They're at peace now; they're all right. It's for Molly. That's why we're doing this, to help her feel not so alone.” She bends over him. Her hair tickles. “Can you do that, Rory? For Molly? And for all of us? Just for this one afternoon?”

He lifts his head. The light makes him blink. He looks back down the Channel but She's not there anymore.

“There you go,” Viola says. “You'll be all right now. Come on.”

He lets her take him up to the church. It's tiny, much smaller than the one on Home, but you can still use it for things like this because it's OK inside, though it's almost swamped now by the jungly growth spilling out of the hedges behind it. Even in The Old Days hardly anyone lived on Briar. They didn't go wild and smash everything up after What Happened, they just upped and left quietly, going off to be drowned, like he's going to be whenever his mother thinks they're ready. In the church windows are pictures made of colored glass, flowers and waves and puffins, and words from some kind of poem:
THEY TOIL NOT NEITHER DO THEY SPIN
. Rory has to sit on the high-backed benches next to his mother. She tries to hold his hand but he snatches it away and stuffs both in his pockets. She bends and hisses in his ear. “Stop. Sulking.” Missus Anderson turns round from the bench in front and glares.

Kate stands up at the front of the church and starts talking. Molly begins sobbing almost straightaway. Rory doesn't pay attention to what Kate's saying. She talks about being sad. They're all so miserable, all the women, so miserable and hopeless, but they're wrong. They live surrounded by wonders; they have no idea. He spoke to Silvia only for a little bit but whoever she is he knows she'd never be like this, sniveling and talking rubbish about how Ol's constant good humor was a beacon in the dark days. Kate's not saying anything about Ol being a bully who made jokes about everyone behind their back.

Other people get up and talk about Ol. Even Pink. She's red-eyed and mumbly and all she says is “You were my best mate, Ol, and I really really miss you!” before bursting into tears and sitting down. Molly gives her a feeble smile and hugs her.

“Rory?”

Kate's looking at him. Everyone is, in fact.

“Do you want to say something?” Kate asks. His mother kicks his foot.

“Let's not mind about Rory,” Esme says peaceably, but his mother kicks his foot again and gives him a sort of nudge. He stands up.

“I don't want to go,” he says.

Every face is turned to him. Every face loses its encouraging weepy smile at the same instant. Some wince, some look horrified. Most just look away, anywhere else.

“I want to stay here,” he says. “I won't be like Ol. They won't kill me. I know They won't.”

His mother's up and dragging him to the door. Viola tries to stop her; she elbows her out of the way. Before she shoves him outside he catches a glimpse of Molly's face. She looks like people in the comics when they're being shot, wide-eyed and grimacing:
aaargh!

His mother spins him against the outside wall. “How can you be so bloody selfish?” Her breath puffs over him, smelling fishy and rank. “Can't you ever think of anyone except yourself? Stay out here.” She jabs her finger into his chest. “Right here. Until we're finished. You can say sorry to Molly afterwards.”

Kate puts her head around the church door. “Connie—”

“Leave us alone!” his mother spits. Kate frowns but withdraws inside.

“Right here, do you understand?” She's breathing hard. She's doing that thing where she's shouting but whispering at the same time.

“One step from here before we come out and I swear you'll be in some proper trouble. You hear me? Not one step.” She goes back in the church, slamming its door after her. A battalion of small birds scatters out of the wild hedge, startled.

He gulps back the threat of tears. He's tingling all over, like he's on fire. At least he's finally on his own. He can hear the talking start again inside, without him.

On his own.

He looks along the deserted road back to the beach.

He's going to be in the worst trouble he's ever been in, he realizes, but he doesn't care. He may never get another chance. If it's still calm in the morning there may not even be a tomorrow.

Silently for the first few steps, then at a run, he goes down the road to the beach.

  *  *  *  

He's taken the smallest dinghy,
Rat
. He's halfway across the Channel when he hears the first wild shouts from Briar. He braces himself and rows harder.

Some of them have got in the boats and started across by the time he touches ashore on the Beach. They're all waving at him and shouting. They can't row nearly as fast as he can run, though. He'll be far out of sight before anyone else gets across to Home. He doesn't bother pulling
Rat
up onto the sand, he just jumps out as soon as he can, sprints across the Beach, and then into the Lane and up over the hill.

He's a tiny bit worried about where exactly to go once he reaches the Hotel. He doesn't actually know his way around in there at all. But as he's puffing and panting his way past the Old Harbor towards the vast shattered warren of scarred buildings on the promontory, he rounds a corner and there's Oochellino in the middle of the road, beaming, the evening sun crowning the patchwork of stubble on his scalp.

“Clever boy,” he says.

O
ochellino leads Rory over the foreshore rocks to a side door almost lost behind a rusting pile of big metal drums on wheels. Rory can just about hear people shouting in the far distance. Oochellino completely ignores it. The door says
STAFF ONLY
. It opens into a place of broken steel machines and dangling black tubes, pipes and taps and spouts, gloomy in the light of a high mold-spotted window which is cracked all over so the glass looks like spiderwebs made of ice. At the back of that room's another door, open. The corridor beyond it is totally dark. Oochellino steers Rory into it. He puts Rory's right hand on the wall and makes him walk along like that, following only a step behind. It's dark as death, as nothing. He could be walking into empty space. Only Oochellino's mutterings and prods keep him moving. They negotiate a corner and go on for what feels like an eternity.

Then Silvia's voice calls out “Lino?”

“
Si. E il ragazzo
.”

And then there's light, a thin rectangle of it around the frame of a closed door ahead. A moment later and it swings open. They must have a fire going inside, though there's no sound. The room beyond glows with a deep shimmering orangey warmth. Silvia's standing in the doorway, the greasy tumble of her hair unhooded, her face in shadow.

Absolutely none of it feels like it's really happening.

His brain tells him they've snuck into a concealed room in the downstairs floor of the main Hotel building, and he's hidden there while his mother and everyone else start running around the island looking for him. His heart tells him he's crawled through lost caverns into some space not of the earth, a tomb of strange gods.

“Welcome,” Silvia says. Rory notices how pretty her accent is. It lilts like a dance. When she speaks English she turns it into a different language from the one everyone else in the world uses. She makes Pink sound like a goat. “Come in.”

The room beyond her is a low-ceilinged oval. Big fancy armchairs are arranged around glass-topped tables. A complicated chandelier of twisty metal and crystal droplets hangs in the middle. The glass and crystal and metal sparkle and glimmer with reflected firelight. The whole space is swimming with the light, though Rory still can't hear or smell a fire. Silvia steps back from the door to let him past and the mysterious light catches her too. Her eyes glint like an animal's.

“Come and join us,” she says. Oochellino says something in Italian, and she smiles.

He gets one step inside the doorway and stops. It's not fear, exactly, or astonishment. He can't get as far as being frightened or astonished. It's more like the whole scene has stopped happening to
him
at all.

There's another man sitting in one of the armchairs. He's enormous. He's wearing heavy shapeless overalls and his hair goes everywhere like a Viking's. He's holding a bulky walking stick between his knees, and the top of the stick is on fire.

Except it's not. There's no heat or sound. There's no fire anywhere in the room. A sort of orange-red smoke is wrapped around the head of the stick, curling and winding. It glows like bright embers.

“Sit.” Oochellino's dropped himself into one of the chairs. He's so short he has to tuck his legs underneath himself. There are piles of clothes beside the chairs, and some open canvas duffel bags. The weird glimmer from the big man's stick flickers like the flame of a candle and makes everything appear to be moving: everything except the big man himself, who sits stock-still and stares at Rory.

“This is Per,” Silvia says. “And Rory. Per doesn't speak English so much.”

“What's that he's got?” Rory says.

“Ah.” She sits in a chair next to Oochellino, leans back, stretches her legs out. “You know, Rory, there are many stories in this room. Long stories. Yours too, I think. We don't have time to tell them today. Maybe another day.”