Arcadia (2 page)

“I won't tell anyone you were here if we go now.”

“I bet you're scared you'll get in trouble.”

“I'm not.”

“Liar. I know, let's play something. We could have a war for this hill.” Ol turns around quickly, inspecting the lie of the land.

“No!” Rory's head is a fog of panic.

“Go on. You start at the bottom and I'll be the defenders.” Ol's studying the clumps of gorse, eyes down. “We can use pebbles for ammo. Ten hits and you're dead.”

By some miracle Rory spots his one chance through the fog. “You go down,” he says. “I want to be defenders.”

“You're crap at it.” Ol crouches and scratches up a handful of pebbles. “You always give up.”

“I won't this time.”

“Yes you will.”

“I swear I won't.”

Ol's not really listening. He's thinking about places for ambushes. “And no saying I missed you when I didn't.” It'll be all right as long as he concentrates on the earth and the gorse and the crannies he can hide in, as long as he doesn't look out across the bay. “There's more than one way up here, isn't there?” he says, straightening, shading his eyes against the bright water beyond Briar, looking out across the bay.

“Ol,” Rory says, but that's all he says. He's not Molly. He's not an adult. He doesn't know how to tell someone to do something so they have to. He's the youngest person in the world apart from Pink, and he can't even order Pink around because she only listens to Laurel. “Ol,” he says again. “Let's go.”

Ol's stopped looking around. He's standing there, both hands shading his eyes now, squinting into the distance, where the white shape is.

None of this is actually happening. It's not allowed. It can't be.

“What's that?” Ol says. He sounds funny.

“Nothing,” Rory says. “Come on.” He tries to tug Ol around.

Ol almost loses his balance before he notices what Rory's doing. “Oi!” He smacks Rory's hand away. “Leave off.”

“You mustn't look,” Rory says. “You can't.”

But Ol's looking. He's looking with his eyes and his mouth and his whole chest. He's sort of swallowing. His mouth's hanging open and the top of his sweater's going up and down, up and down.

“Is that . . .” he says. He sounds a bit confused.

“No,” Rory says. “It's just waves.”

Ol looks down at him, then back towards the scattered jagged islands in the bay. He spots the place where the other path descends the hill, down its far side. He pushes Rory away and sets off in that direction.

“Ol?” Rory trails after him. Any moment now an adult's going to appear out of the bushes and fix all this. Any moment now. “Ol? Where're you going?”

“There's something over there,” Ol says. Fingers of gorse scratch at his heels.

“We've got to go home. It's getting late.” Everything Rory says just bounces off Ol's back. Something bad is now actually happening, and all he's doing is following it, watching it skid and slip down the path, telling it to stop though it won't listen. The path's suddenly steep. He tries to grab Ol's coat but he can't, or he doesn't try hard enough. “If you don't go back now everyone'll know you're gone. They'll kill you.”

They'll kill you
. He's said it aloud. He meant something else, but the words came out. Rory loses his footing, drops to the ground in shock.

“Only be a minute,” Ol says, vaguely, going on ahead.

Rory looks at his scuffed and dirtied hands. That's when he realizes he's not holding the plastic bag. He must have let go of it at the top of the hill when he tried to grab Ol. He's got to go back and get it. He can't go home without filling it up, both of them. It might have blown away by now or got caught in the gorse and been torn. He remembers his mother saying:
Whatever you do, don't let the bags get torn. Understand?
His mother's not Nice like Molly.

Ol slips around a spray of bramble ahead and goes out of sight, just like that. The bramble's thick with purple fruit. Rory stares at the space where Ol used to be, breathing hard.

“Stop,” he says, not very loudly.

He can hear Ol slipping his way down the hill. Now he's on his own again. No one's in sight. He's got two bags to fill before he rows back across the narrow Channel between Briar and Home, and he might even have lost one of them. You can't lose anything useful, that's another Rule. You just can't. In The Old Days you could buy another one but now if you lose something, that's it, it's gone forever.

He stands up. Below him he can see rooftops of houses where people used to live, mostly covered in ivy. Beyond them, hidden behind trees, is the Farm, where Laurel and Pink are busy doing the things they have to do. Everyone's got to do the jobs they're given, or none of them will survive.

Nothing else is to do with him. It's not his fault.

He scampers back to the top of the hill. The plastic bag's impaled on a fist of gorse. A pair of dunnocks are flitting around it; they dive away as he approaches. It's been punctured below the handle but it's still usable.

Rory doesn't want to look over towards the Western Rocks but he does anyway. The slender white shape has moved. For a moment he thinks it's gone, but then he sees a wave with a white crest coming towards the Briar shore, a white crest which never breaks. Something about the shape of the crest makes his palms tingle and his mouth feel dry.

The gulls on Sansen are screeching by the hundreds.

All the best berries are around the foot of the hill, and sloes are on the shoreline near the church. He hasn't even started picking and the light's already thinking about turning yellow. He sets his face away from the west and concentrates only on where he's putting his feet.

H
e's up in the Drying Room washing blackberries one by one in a tiny basin of fresh water when his mother clatters open the door below and puts her head up the staircase.

“Rory?”

“What?”

“Have you seen Ol?”

Rory carefully places another berry on the perforated tray and wipes his fingers on his trousers.

“No?” he says: like that, like a question.

“Do you know where he's got to?”

“No,” he says. “Why?”

The Drying Room is a long open space on the first floor of what used to be a restaurant for the Club. It's used for drying now because the wall on the side facing across towards Briar is all double thick glass, catching the sun. In the summer it's almost too hot to work in even if all you're doing is washing fruit. It's well-sealed too, built not long ago with a tight floor and a good roof like all the Club buildings. In The Old Days Rory never set foot in it. The Club wasn't for people who lived on the island. But he cycled past thousands of times and remembers the glass being clean, even in winter when the restaurant was closed. Now it's salt-smeared and spotty. The sun's gone down behind Briar; it's dull in the room. He's pretty sure his mother can't see his face properly.

“We can't find him. No one knows where he is.”

“Really?”

“He didn't tell you he was going off somewhere?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” Her voice has that hurry in it, which means she's stressed. She's not like Kate or Fiona or Viola or even Molly or Missus Anderson. His mother Can't Cope. He heard Laurel say that to Pink once when they didn't know he was listening. “He must have said where he was going to play. Think, Rory!”

He waits for a moment so it seems like he's thinking, then says, “I didn't hear him say anything.”

“Somewhere inside. Around the hotel, maybe? Could that be it?”

He can tell she's not really listening to him at all, so he just says “Dunno.”

From outside someone shouts, “Connie!”

“I'm in here!” she shouts back. The door clatters again and in comes Missus Shark, whose name isn't actually Shark but the kids call her that because it's close to her name, plus she's very ferocious. Rory could have identified her by the sound of her feet even if she hadn't shouted. It's a small world.

“Anything?”

“Rory hasn't seen him.”

Missus Shark's head comes up the staircase too. “Since when?”

Rory really has to think this time. “I saw him by the Pond this morning. Playing in the Hide.”

“This morning,” Missus Shark says.

“Yes.”

She turns to his mother and lowers her voice. “The blue dinghy's missing,” she says.

“What?”

“The blue dinghy. It's not on the beach. Someone took it.”

There's a nasty silence.

“Which boat did you take?” his mother asks him, though she knows which boat he took since she was waiting on the Beach when he rowed back from Briar. She's getting worked up and can't think straight.

“I took
Rat
. Remember?”

“And the girls took the yellow one.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh God,” his mother says, to no one, unless it's actually to God. She clutches the banister. “Oh God.”

Missus Shark says, “We mustn't panic. We don't know what happened yet.”

“I want you to go back to Parson's,” his mother says.
Parson's
is the house they live in now. Neither of them call it
home
. They had their own house once, where they lived in The Old Days, with Dad and Jake and Scarlet. It's a shell now, full of sand and nettles. “Right away.”

“What about doing the berries?”

“Forget the sodding berries!”

Missus Shark puts a hand on his mother's shoulder. “Connie.”

“Parson's,” says his mother. “Now.”

Missus Shark looks at Rory with an expression he can't read. “He'll be all right. Let him finish.”

There's another Rule. They learned it the previous winter, when things kept going wrong and Missus Stephenson and Missus Hatchard died. The Rule is that whenever you're doing a job to do with food or fuel you have to do it properly until it's finished, no matter how long it takes or what else you think of. It's only a bag of blackberries; when they're dried they'll just be a few handfuls. But there'll be days in the coming winter when those morsels of sweetness will feel like the difference between giving up and going on.

“I want him inside,” his mother says. Her voice is sort of scraping.

Missus Shark gives Rory a sad look. “Tell you what,” she says. “You stay here with him. There are enough people looking.”

His mother tightens her grip on the banister. In the silence they all hear a terrible sound, a distant scream which makes Rory think of the illustration in one of his books showing people with the wrong religion being burned at the stake, teeth bared and eyes popping out. “Oliver!” It's Molly, somewhere up the lane, howling across the island. “Ol!” Rory turns back to the tray, dips another berry in the basin, gently shakes it out.

  *  *  *  

His mother sends him to Parson's as soon as everyone else is out of sight. As he's climbing the Lane he looks back across the Channel towards Briar, though she told him not to stop. It's getting dusky, and there are torches bobbing around on the far shore. No one uses torches unless it's an absolute emergency. They'll run out one day, like the toothpaste.

He guesses they've probably found the dinghy by now.

  *  *  *  

It feels strange sitting up in bed, reading by candlelight, alone in the house. His mother said it was all right to light one of the candles, but it's been burning a long time now: he's finished seven comics already. Usually his mother sits at the end of the bed while he goes to sleep. That's what's supposed to happen after dark. She's always calm then. She talks about how they're going to be all right.
We'll manage,
she says,
you and
me
. He doesn't know whether he should try going to sleep on his own. Eventually he snuffs out the light because he's used up half a candle all in one go. He lies down like he normally would. He's not even slightly sleepy. He lies in the dark thinking about the fact that there is no more Ol. After a while he finds himself thinking about his father and brother and sister as well, remembering what it was like when they too stopped being there.

He must have dozed off anyway because he doesn't hear Viola come in. The first he knows of it is her murmur at the door.

“Rory?”

She's got a candle in a glass lantern. It casts weird shadows on her face.

Rory sits up. “Where's Mum?”

Viola doesn't come in. She stands in the doorway like she's embarrassed about something. She's wearing warm clothes, coat and gloves and boots. The smudgy light makes her face a sad mask.

“Everyone's at the Abbey,” she says. “I said I'd fetch you. Your mum's with Molly.”

Viola is Laurel and Pink's mother. Actually she's their auntie but she acts like their mother. She's not Nice like Molly, exactly, but she can definitely Cope, she doesn't get stressed out the way his mother does. Tonight she's full of mysterious gentleness.

“You'll need to get dressed,” she says. “It's too dark to bike. We'll walk over.”

Rory changes from pajamas into the clothes he was wearing. While he's pulling on an extra sweater Viola says, “I'm sorry, Rory. We found Ol's clothes. His sweater and his shoes. On Briar, on the far side. Right at the edge of the bay.”

“Oh,” Rory says.

“He won't come back,” says Viola. “You know that, don't you. I'm so sorry.”

He bends down and does up his shoes. “Am I going to sleep at the Abbey?”

Viola holds her lantern up higher to look at him. “We decided we all ought to be together tonight.”