The Binding (2 page)

‘Help yourselves to anything you fancy from the library,' the shopkeeper said. It wasn't exactly the kind of library we had been expecting.

When we'd got everything, someone called Jimmy came to take us up to Jean's house. We put our bags and shopping on the back of his tractor and followed him up there.

When someone says ‘tractor' you think of a big, shiny machine that blocks up country lanes, but
this one was about the size of a quad bike with a little trailer, and it looked nearly as old and ramshackle as Jimmy. We didn't have to worry about keeping up, as its top speed was snail's-pace, and it kept completely stopping.

In Jean's pictures, the sea and sky were bright blue, and everything seemed to sparkle in the sun, but the day we arrived was all-over grey, and as cold as December. Matt said never mind—it just meant we'd feel all the more cosy in our snug little cottage.

Which brings me to the third big difference between what we imagined it would be like and what we found. Jean's house, which looked white and shiny from a distance in the pictures, when you got close up, looked damp and shabby. Inside, instead of being quaint and historical, everything looked old and out of date.

There was a dog-eared exercise book full of information and instructions about things like how to light the peat fire and where the candles were kept. Yes, candles. Morna didn't have a proper electric supply like everywhere else in the universe, just a generator that came on for a few hours in the evening.

You couldn't use electric kettles or toasters or fan heaters, because they took too much power to run, and the fridge and freezer were in an outbuilding because they went off overnight. There was no mobile connection and the internet was patchy.

Matt said, ‘We'll manage for a month. We can get some board games from the shop!' but even he was sounding doubtful now. Milo was the only one who looked happy, and that was because he had spotted a wrecked old van in the field behind the house.

‘Can I go out and play?'

‘We'll all go and have a look around outside,' Mum said. ‘We might as well. It can't be colder than it is in here!' She made it sound like a joke, but if it was Dad instead of Matt who'd brought us to a chilly, tatty place like this, it would have been a full-on massive grumble.

Tressa and me trailed out after them.

‘This is your fault,' she hissed. ‘You've got the backbone of a jellyfish!'

Not that again! Just because she was always up for a fight.

‘What's the point in making a fuss over things you can't change?' I said. ‘Anyway, maybe I wanted to come!'

‘Yeah, right.'

If I'd known any jellyfish jokes, I'd have said one, to annoy her, but I didn't. I do now though.

What kind of fish goes well with ice cream?

Jellyfish!

Chapter 2

Trespassing

Milo wanted to go straight to the van, so we all walked across the concrete yard, between the sheds and out into the field, which sloped up towards the hill behind the house. It looked like autumn, with brown leaves strewn all over the grass, until you realised there weren't any trees.

What looked like dead leaves turned out to be sheep's droppings. They were everywhere, but then, so were the sheep. They weren't fat and fluffy like sheep are supposed to be, but scrawny and small, with little stick legs and bits of dirty wool trailing under their bellies like rags.

The van had no tyres on one side so it leaned right over, and the driver's side door had fallen open. Grass was growing around the bottom edge, so it was completely stuck. Mum and Matt tried to close it but they couldn't. They went right round the van, pushing and pulling at various bits of it, before deciding it was safe for Milo to play in.

Mum let him stay out there on his own while we did an inspection of the outbuildings, so that Matt could locate the peat store and she could make sure there weren't any hidden dangers, such as open trapdoors or rat poison or ladders. She said that here, on this island in the middle of nowhere, with no traffic and hardly anyone around, it would be perfectly safe for Milo to play outside on his own, once she'd done some basic checks.

‘Same goes for you guys,' Matt said to Tressa and me, quickly adding, ‘If your mum says so, of course.' He's always dead careful not to act like he thinks he's our dad, ever since Tressa went off on one when he and Mum were talking about him moving in. ‘I don't want him here!' she'd yelled. ‘He's not my dad!'

Mum smiled and nodded at Matt, then said to us, ‘It's impossible to get lost on an island, so feel free to go off and explore.'

Free. I liked the sound of that, and Tressa actually cracked a smile.

We crossed the stony track in front of the house and headed down towards the sea. It was late afternoon by then, and the clouds had lifted. The sun was pale and low in the sky.

It didn't take us long to reach the shore. The cliffs were not high or steep, and we could easily have clambered down onto the strip of rocky beach, but we stood at the top to take in the view.

We could see the mainland, like a thin rumpled ribbon of blue, stretched out along the horizon. Gulls were swooping and gliding low over the water, sometimes dropping suddenly to dive for fish.

‘Why do seagulls fly over the sea?' I said. ‘Because if they flew over the bay, they'd be bagels!'

Tressa didn't laugh, but she didn't bite my head off either, so things were looking up, strop-wise.

‘Which way?'

We decided to go left, in the opposite direction from where the boat came in. Rabbits grazing on the edge of the cliff looked up as we passed, but didn't bother to run away. Sheep continued on their ambling tracks. It felt as if no living person had ever walked there before.

After about ten minutes, we rounded a headland, and suddenly the shore flattened out. The grass sloped gently down onto a wide pebbly ridge, above a beach of white sand with not a footprint on it.

Tressa started running, and I ran after her, all the way down to the water's edge. We played leapfrog and hop-skip-jump, and looked for shells, and we didn't even notice the building until we started back up the beach to go home.

It was huddled under the low cliff at the far end of the beach, where the land began to rise again. We crossed the sand and crunched over the pebbles. At the top of the beach, the stones got bigger and the short grass growing in the gaps looked like water flowing round them. Up by the building, all the stones had been cleared away and there was a small strip of tufty, bright green grass.

The building was long and low, with two small windows, one on each side of the door. When we got closer, we could see that the roof was held down by wires attached to wooden pegs that had been pushed into cracks in the stone walls. There was glass in the windows, all grimy and cobwebby, and the door looked as if it might have once been blue, but the paint was mostly worn away.

Tressa put her hand on the handle.

‘We can't go in!' I said. ‘That's. . .well, that's. . .'

‘Trespassing?'

Trust her to remember the word.

‘It's only trespassing if the door's locked,' she said. ‘If you don't lock your door, you're just asking for people to come in.'

‘What if someone's inside?'

On the upside, she didn't call me a jellyfish, but on the downside, she didn't take any notice of me either. She turned the handle and pushed. The door wasn't locked. We couldn't see anything inside until our eyes got used to the dark, because hardly any daylight could get in through the tiny windows in the thick stone walls.

The floor was bare earth, and there wasn't any ceiling, just rafters under the uneven slates of the roof with, here and there, a few little chinks of daylight blinking through. The walls looked the same inside as outside, just stones with gaps and cracks between.

It was all one room, with a fireplace at one end. There was a pile of driftwood in the hearth. You could tell that someone had been there, and not very long ago.

There were three fish-boxes in the middle of the room, facing in like a ring of chairs, with a table in the middle made of a piece of driftwood balanced on four big stones.

‘Look at this,' Tressa said.

She had found a square recess in the wall with a weather-beaten piece of wood rammed into it to make a shelf. On the shelf, there were matches and candles, a plate and a knife, and an unopened packet of digestives. Underneath the shelf there was a tin box that someone had written some words on in white paint.

‘That's a child's writing,' Tressa said. ‘This is a den!'

She tried to prise the box open, but it was locked.

‘Do you suppose they light candles and have fires and everything?' I said, picking up the matches.

In the darkest corners of the room, we found strange circles of things laid out on the floor. There was a ring of shells and another of stones; a ring of buoys and a ring of bones. Lined up along a ridge in the wall at one end, there was a row of fragile little skulls. I asked Tressa what kind of animal she thought they were.

‘The beaks might be a clue,' she said. I remembered seeing a dead seagull in a tangle of seaweed and ropes at the other end of the beach.

When we'd had a good look around, we went back outside and stood blinking in the daylight. As we shut the door, we saw someone on the edge of the cliff above, looking down at us. We stepped back a bit, trying to see him better, but the sun was behind him, and all we could make out was a black silhouette. He looked a bit taller than me, but he wasn't skinny, and he was holding a long stick.

‘Hi!' I shouted up at him.

Two other figures appeared to his right. They looked like a boy and a girl, but it was difficult to tell as the sinking sun made silhouettes of them too.

‘We've found your den,' shouted Tressa.

Without a word, all three of them turned away and disappeared back over the cliff. Tressa made one of her famous snorting noises.

‘Weird,' she said. ‘It looks like things might just be starting to get interesting!'

Chapter 3

A meeting on the beach

There were lots of ponies on the grass around the old wrecked van the next morning, when we set off to walk up the hill. Me and Tressa didn't really want to. We'd much rather have gone back to the den, but we didn't say so because then they might all want to come with us. We wanted to keep it secret.

But Matt insisted that the best thing to do, when you're in a new place, is to go to the top of the nearest hill and get the lie of the land. It's probably a geography teacher thing.

‘Onwards and upwards!' he said, striding ahead.

You could tell that Milo didn't really want to go either. As we passed the old van, he would've dived into it and stuck like a limpet, if Mum hadn't grabbed his hand and kept him going in the right direction.

We knew from looking at the map that the island was shaped like a teardrop, with a ridge of hills running down the west side like a spine. We trudged across the open moorland towards the highest part of the ridge, and soon we saw a triangulation point on the horizon.

It was a sunny morning but not very warm, because of the wind, which got stronger the higher we climbed. Mum and Milo kept stopping for a rest, so Tressa, Matt and me were the first ones to the top. From there, we could look across the whole of the east side, as it sloped down from the hills and flattened out towards the sea.

We could see the jetty where the boat came in, and the houses dotted around it. Almost all the houses on
the island seemed to be in that area, with only ours and a few old wrecks further along the track, and one right at the very end, where the track ran out to the north. Matt looked for it on his map. He said it was called Anderson Ground.

On the west side of the island, the land was rocky and rugged. Matt said there were high cliffs all the way along that side, with no beaches or harbours or houses.

‘One day, we should walk all the way round the coast,' he said.

Watching Mum and Milo still struggling up the hill, ‘one day' was probably a bit optimistic. You would have to allow at least a week.

Instead of going straight back down, we walked along the ridge to see if we could get a better look at Anderson Ground. The island was completely bare of trees, except for one or two small spindly ones, huddling behind houses or leaning low to the ground, bashed down by the wind, so we were really surprised to see a square plantation of trees nestling in the bottom of the next valley. It looked like a giant's dark green handkerchief dropped down between the hills.

There was a house among the trees, still with its roof on, so maybe somebody lived in it. ‘That's also called Anderson Ground,' Matt said, squinting at his map. Considering there were only about fifty houses on the island, you'd have thought they could have thought of enough names without having to use the same one twice.