The Binding (11 page)

‘You look a bit flushed, Tress,' he said.

She hates it when he calls her that.

‘It's being out in all this lovely weather!' said the shopkeeper, smiling.

There were only a few spots of rain as we walked back up to the house, and the sky was looking brighter. Matt asked us what was the most amazing place the island children had shown us, because he was going to have to get out the big guns if he was going to persuade Mum that she wanted to stay.

‘The beach with the seals,' Tressa said, without hesitation. ‘We can show you on the map.'

She did that when we got home. There she was, chatting to Matt, as if all this creeping around being good and pretending had magically made her really like him.

Me and Mum decorated the cake and when we'd finished I found Tressa lurking in the hallway, waiting for a chance to get in and peel her stolen carrot, chop it up and put the pieces in a sandwich bag.

But after all our distractions, by lunchtime they were back at it again. Matt mentioned the seal beach and Mum told him that the queen of the seals herself, all dressed up in diamonds and furs, could not entice her outside in this filthy weather.

‘Enough's enough,' she said. ‘We're leaving.'

Matt looked at her. Then he glanced at each of us.

‘OK, if that's what you want,' he said. ‘But I think, if it's all right with you, I'll stay on.'

Chapter 7

Hidden things

‘I'm not going home!' Milo said, through a mouthful of beans.

Tressa shot him a warning look. You could see she didn't want to go either, but we had to do what our parents told us, that was the rule. I know Duncan said Matt counted as a parent, but if they didn't agree about what we should do, surely Mum would count more?

Before the birds, I would definitely have wanted to stay, too. The bothy, the candles, the sea-pool, the beach, the Binding—it was weird and exciting and
you just wanted to keep going back. But now, it didn't feel safe. At any moment, you could think you were doing the right thing and find yourself out in the cold, waiting for your punishment. You could think, ‘Walking across a field—that's no punishment!' and find yourself down on your knees in the mud, with everyone laughing at you.

‘Will you be all right here on your own?' Mum asked Matt.

I suddenly imagined it—all of us getting on the boat except Matt, and him waving to us from the beach. If that happened, it might be the beginning of the end for him and Mum, and although Tressa made such a fuss about it, the fact was that things had been much better since he had moved in. Whatever we decided about staying or going, the most important thing was that we all did it together.

Milo abandoned his beans and got down, which we're not normally allowed to do without asking, but Mum didn't tell him off. In fact, she got up to clear the table, so Tressa and me had to wolf down our last few mouthfuls.

‘Can I leave the washing up to you two?' asked Mum.

‘Of course,' said Tressa.

‘Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?' said Mum, with a smile.

After we'd done the washing up, Tressa went upstairs and I was about to follow, when I heard Mum and Matt talking in the living room. I felt bad about eavesdropping, but I told myself it wasn't really listening behind the door so much as overhearing something and not moving away.

Mum was saying, ‘I shouldn't have said that about the children missing their father.'

‘No, it was a fair point,' said Matt. ‘I should have thought about it myself. This is all a bit new to me.'

Mum said whether it was a fair point or not, she still wished she hadn't said it. It was just that she'd thought her wanting to go home would be enough to persuade him to come too, and when it wasn't, well. . .

I couldn't catch the next bit, so I moved up really close and put my ear to the door.

‘I didn't want to say anything in front of the children,' said Mum, ‘but I'm feeling uncomfortable about them going off on their own all the time. I know it's irrational because what harm can they come to, but it just feels odd.'

‘You're used to being more in control,' said Matt.

‘I'm supposed to be—I'm their mother.'

They were talking much more quietly now, and I had to really press my ear against the wood.

‘I think something's going on,' Mum said. ‘I just can't put my finger on it.'

Matt said he had to bow to her greater knowledge, what with him not even being a parent, let alone our parent. He hadn't spotted anything different, except that Tressa seemed to be warming to him, which was actually another reason he quite wanted to stay.

‘So, what are we going to do?' asked Mum. ‘Let's either both stay here or both go home.'

I started breathing again, then stopped, in case they heard me.

‘You love being here so much and you're right, the children do seem to be having a wonderful time. . .'

‘Yes, but you know your children better than I do. . .'

They went even quieter, and I tried to move closer to the door, but then everything went fuzzy like it does when you hold a seashell over your ear, you just hear a whooshing of waves. I suddenly realised they'd actually stopped talking, which meant they might be
on the move any minute. I backed away and slipped upstairs to my bedroom.

I know you shouldn't earwig a private conversation, but I wasn't sorry I did. It was a big relief to know that Mum and Matt wanted to stick together, either staying or leaving early, so now it was simply a case of which one was going to back down. I might not know Matt very well, but knowing Mum, I was pretty sure it wouldn't be her.

So this feast might be one of the last times we went to the Binding, and I wanted it to be nice. It was a shame, but I couldn't take the cake because there was no way I could have smuggled a whole cake out without Mum knowing; everyone would know I'd asked instead of stealing, and then things could get nasty again.

Tressa might still tell on me, of course, but Milo couldn't because he didn't even know I'd told Mum about the feast, being as how he was busy sampling all the stuff in the cupboards at the time.

So I put the cake in a Tupperware box and hid it in one of the sheds, in the grass-box of an old lawn-mower. Later, when Tressa gave me her and Milo's stash to put in Matt's day-sack, neither of us mentioned it.

We found Duncan and the others sitting on the grass outside the bothy. It wasn't raining, and there were little patches of clear sky between the shifting clouds. They had laid all the food out on an old cupboard door that had been washed up on the beach a few days before.

As well as the food, there were six cans of cola that Duncan had brought from the hotel bar and two empty plates, waiting for our offerings. I handed the sandwich bags to Tressa and Milo, and they arranged the food on the plates. Then she looked at me expectantly.

‘What?' I said.

She frowned, but she didn't say anything. We went down onto the sand and helped Duncan, Hamish and Elspeth to make a ring of big stones. Then we gathered armfuls of driftwood from the pile behind the bothy and stacked it up nearby.

Duncan gave Milo his stick and told him he was in charge of keeping the seagulls away from the food while the rest of us were building the fire. Hamish put a match to half a dozen sticks inside the ring of stones, and we sat round waiting for it to catch. As the fire grew from a few pale flames to a warm red glow, we took turns adding larger pieces of wood.

When the fire was burning strongly, we carried the old door with all the food on it down onto the sand, and we had the feast, and still Tressa didn't say anything. Milo told the others proudly about all the things he'd found, and his adventures in taste-testing. He said Tressa had made the cheese sandwich, and they'd both saved their crisps and bananas instead of eating them.

‘What about Jack?' Duncan asked. Then, turning to me, ‘What did you bring?'

Tressa straight away cut in.

‘Jack got the carrot. He took it from right under their noses in the shop this morning. He stuffed it up his sleeve!'

‘I didn't know that,' Milo said.

‘You were asleep on your car mat,' said Tressa.

You'd have thought Duncan would be impressed by my apparent shoplifting, but he just looked at me steadily. I tried to look straight back, but his eyes were like blue searchlights that could see right inside your brain.

When all the food was gone, we gathered more closely around the fire, and Duncan told us stories about Morna from across the mists of time. He told
us about the monks who came from the mainland, putting out to sea in an open boat with no oars, trusting God to bring them safely to land. Wherever they landed, he said, they believed that was where God wanted them to be.

He told us about the Vikings who came with their three great leaders, Haakon the Hairy, Olaf the Unyielding and One-eyed Erik. He described them so well that we could almost see them, coming up the beach with their horned helmets and shields gleaming in the fading light.

He told us about his own ancestor who came over the sea from Ireland to rule as the first king of Morna. He built his castle on the site where the hotel was now, and although the castle was long gone, there was still a dungeon underneath the ground that you could get to through a secret passage.

Duncan said that one of his ancestors was a seer, which meant he could tell the future, and he could also look right into a person's soul and see all the things they tried to keep hidden. Such abilities, he said, could be passed down.

The fire burned red and the beach grew darker, and the moon appeared in a patch of sky where the clouds
had opened up. I hadn't even realised it was there.

All of us had tried to hide things from Mum and thought we were getting away with it, but it turned out she knew something was going on. Now Tressa and me were trying to hide something from Duncan, and he knew too.

I thought about my cake, hidden in the shed. I wondered if rats had found it and eaten through the plastic box, or maybe ants could have come and crawled under the lid. That was the problem with hidden things. Somehow or another, they always got found out.

Part Three: Ashes on the water

 

Chapter 1

The re-naming

I had three dreams that woke me up, three times in the night. In the first one, we were swimming in the sea pool and everything happened the same as it had in real life. We ran down the beach, I put the ball on the edge and the fake dog poo behind it; they all jumped in, then Tressa jumped in and I went in after her.

We swam up and down fast to get warm. I threw the ball in, we played some games, and then Elspeth saw the dog poo. She screamed, Duncan said we'd have to bury it, and I went to pick it up. Only, in my
dream, it wasn't fake. It was real dog poo, and my fingers squished right into it.

I pulled my hand away but it was covered in sticky, stinky poo. Everyone jumped back in disgust, and the smell was so bad I wanted to chuck. That's what woke me up, the smell. It made me retch.

When I went to sleep again, I seemed to go back into the same dream, running down the beach, jumping into the pool, everything the same as had happened in real life, only this time it wasn't the fake dog poo that I hid behind the ball—it was my cake.

We played some games, and then I went to pick my cake up, but it was all soft and squishy, so my hands sank right in. The cake collapsed and turned to mush, and both my hands were covered in it. ‘That looks like sick,' Hamish said. Then I realised it was sick. It smelt like sick, and it was the sick-making smell that made me wake up.

The third dream was very short. I was standing on the edge of the pool, trying to force myself to jump in. But the water was icy blue, and I didn't want to. I looked across at Duncan and his eyes were the same colour, and all of a sudden they sucked me in like a giant whirlpool, whoosh! I was swept into that icy-cold blue, and I went right under. I was drowning.
I struggled and struggled to get back to the surface, until I woke up gasping for breath.

Duncan knew I was hiding something and he would keep staring me down until I cracked. Or maybe he would see into Tressa's mind like his ancestor the seer could do and force her to fess up, even if she didn't want to.

And I didn't think she did want to because the thing about big sisters is that although they might not always be nice to you themselves, they don't like it if someone else is mean to you. When Duncan had made me walk across the field to the south light, that was mean, and it was kind of Tressa's fault for telling.

One way or another, Duncan would find out I told Mum about the feast, and I couldn't stand the suspense. I just wanted to get it over with. So the next afternoon when we set off for the bothy, I put the cake in the bottom of the day-sack under the hats and gloves and mini-football. We were going to play some beach games and then have our meeting in the bothy. Duncan said it would be a review of our time in the Binding.

When we arrived, they were down at the water's edge, skipping stones. We played three-a-side, which worked surprisingly well, considering we had Milo.
He would normally be a handicap, but as Duncan, Hamish and Elspeth had never played before, they were nearly as bad as him.

Hamish and Elspeth went to prepare the bothy for the meeting, and the rest of us lay down on the dry sand at the top of the beach to wait until they were ready. When we finally went inside, I suddenly remembered the first time, how surprising and magical it had felt with the candles twinkling all around the edges and the fish-box chairs arranged in a circle round the driftwood table. Elspeth opening the box, her butterfly fingers fluttering over the black cloth and the big candle, and Hamish lighting it, and the way the flame lit up our faces. . .everything so perfect.

We made the circle, round and round, can't be unbound, and sat down in our places. Then Duncan asked each one of us to talk about something we had enjoyed during the time we had been in the Binding. Tressa remembered the day they took us to the wrecking rocks, and Milo the six candles, when he got to light his own. Hamish remembered the Fruits of Morna. ‘That was really funny!' he said.