White Crow (13 page)

‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Ferelith says. ‘And all you have to do is lie down in it.’

‘No way.’

‘That’s your dare.’

‘What’s it even doing here?’

Now she knows what it is, somehow Rebecca can see it more easily. A grave. An open, unused grave, only partially dug, with the spoil from the digging piled to one side, covered in weeds.

‘It was being dug at the time the church wall collapsed. For someone from the village, I guess. They never filled it up again. It’s been here for years.’

‘I’m not doing it.’

‘It’s your dare. That, or the forfeit.’

Rebecca says nothing.

‘Your choice.’

She thinks.

‘For how long?’

‘As long as you want. But you have to lie down in it properly.’

‘Okay. But if I ruin these jeans you can buy me new ones.’

‘Okay. Deal.’

Rebecca crouches, and then slowly sits down, her feet hanging into the empty space. In reality the grave is not so deep, and she can feel the bottom with her toes.

She’s about to lower herself in, when Ferelith speaks again.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘There’s one other thing. You ought to see whose grave it is, first.’

‘What do you mean?’

And from nowhere Ferelith pulls out a torch, flicking it on and shining it at the head of the grave. The beam plays on something pale there and for a moment Rebecca is blinded.

She blinks and then she sees what Ferelith is showing her.

A gravestone.

A gravestone with a name on it, and a date, and an inscription.

It reads, In Loving Memory. She Departs This World.

The date is 13th August 2010.

The name is Rebecca Case.

She swears and then swears some more, and drags herself out of the gravehole, the Winterfold, the Norse foldaen, the entrance to the underworld, and she staggers off, away through the graveyard, swearing at Ferelith and starting to cry.

‘No!’ she shouts. ‘No way.’

Ferelith lets her go, but shouts one word after her.

‘Forfeit!’ she cries, triumphant. ‘Forfeit!’

I picked the right moment, I think.

And having done that, I also picked up the gravestone and tucked it under my arm, thinking it might be a good idea to take it home.

It was only two bits of painted cardboard stuck to a thick slab of polystyrene, but I have to admit in the dark it looked pretty good.

Very realistic.

I think it did the trick.

 

I don’t suppose I’ll ever really understand everything that happened that summer. But I guess it had something to do with the way I felt about Rebecca.

I loved her.

But I hated her too.

R
ebecca dozes late into the morning, listening to the sound of her father downstairs, making breakfast, the radio on in the background, gently talking to no one.

She sleeps, dreams of graves, then wakes again.

Vaguely, she hears the front door closing and assumes it’s her father going out, but a few moments later she hears footsteps on the stairs and for some reason, she’s scared.

She sits up in bed and is about to get out when her bedroom door opens, and Ferelith walks in.

‘Nice room,’ she says, going straight to the window and looking at the sea.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Rebecca asks, sliding out of bed and pulling her dressing gown on. ‘You can’t just walk into my room like that.You can’t just walk into other people’s houses.’

‘Like you just walked into my life,’ Ferelith says.

‘What? What are you talking about?’ Rebecca says, annoyed at having really walked straight into that one.

Ferelith shrugs.

‘So, then,’ she says, ‘Your forfeit.’

Rebecca doesn’t want to know.

‘That wasn’t funny,’ she says. ‘What you did last night. That wasn’t funny.’

‘Oh, come on. It was only a dare.’

‘But you set me up.You must have set the whole thing up.’

Ferelith walks over to Rebecca and puts one hand out to her waist, but Rebecca pulls away.

‘Stop it. I’m not happy.You scared the hell out of me.’

She sits down on the edge of the bed suddenly, and her head sinks into her hands.

Ferelith kneels by her.

‘Hey,’ she says. ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It was just for fun, you know.’

She soothes Rebecca, whispering to her, telling her good things, saying what she needs to hear, and Rebecca starts to cry properly now.

‘Hey,’ says Ferelith, ‘it wasn’t that bad, was it?’

Rebecca shakes her head.

‘It’s not that. Not really. It’s just . . . Everything. Everything is going wrong. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it all being so hard, you know?’

Ferelith puts an arm round her. To Rebecca, still warm from her bed, Ferelith feels cold, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

‘I know, I do know. But you’ve got me. I won’t let you down.’

Rebecca lays her head on Ferelith’s shoulder and lets herself be held for a long time.

‘Thanks,’ she says, at last. ‘It’s good to have a friend.’

Ferelith stands up.

‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘And as soon as you’ve done your forfeit, we can be friends again.’

And with that, she leaves.

I went up to the Lover’s Seat and sat by myself for a very long time.

It’s a strange thing, this world of ours, I know that. But I can’t work out if it makes more sense if the strangeness was created by someone (I’m talking about God here, the bad boy upstairs with the beard and the big smock thing) or whether the strangeness is just because the world is a totally random place.

And yet, the world is not totally random, is it?

Things are the way they are for a reason.

The cells of honeycombs are six-sided because a hexagon is the most material-efficient tessellation. That’s just the laws of geometry and so the bees have worked that whole thing out for themselves. Which is amazing in itself, but I think Darwin had a point, you know?

I watched the waves far out to sea rolling in towards me and I thought about the pull of the moon that makes the waves in the first place, and again I thought, everything is like it is for a reason. Things are the way they are for a reason, and things happen for a reason too.

It’s cause and effect.

And I think that’s truest of all with people. I do something to you which makes you feel something, which makes you do something to me, or to someone else, either then, or years later.

I was thinking about that.

About how my mother went away. She was there when I went to school and when I came back all the therapy in the world had failed, and she was being carted off. So she went to that place that only made her worse and then one day (on a day when, I’ve always thought, she was probably feeling more sane), she managed to get herself alone for long enough to hang herself with a twisted sheet from the hot water pipes that ran along the ceiling of her room.

They boxed all the pipes up after that (because now there was a reason to do that, too).

But what I was thinking as I sat in the hot sun on the Seat, was that even that happened for a reason. She killed herself because of a long chain of reasons.

I just don’t know what they were.

R
ebecca spends two days sulking and feeling cross with Ferelith.

She’s barely seen her father in the last week, and she wonders what he’s doing with his time. More than once she smells stale beer on him.

She thinks about taking a bus into town, and walks up to the main road to the bus stop, only to find that the bus comes once a week, and not today.

She plays with her phone. Makes herself put it away, but after about five minutes gets it out again and brings up her dad’s number. She doesn’t call.

She puts the phone away again, and as she’s walking down the shady side of the lane she’s suddenly aware of the sound of someone walking behind her and turns to see Ferelith.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says casually.

‘Same as you. Walking.’

Rebecca says nothing for a bit, then can’t help herself.

‘It’s just a stupid game.’

‘It’s not.’

Rebecca stops walking.

‘It is,’ she says firmly.

‘No, it’s not,’ says Ferelith, walking on. Rebecca catches her up.

‘Well, what is it then?’

‘It’s important. It’s about trust, isn’t it? I trusted you. You made me do things and I did them, and I trusted you to do the same, and now you won’t do your dare and you won’t do the forfeit.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Rebecca says.

‘Well, that’s how I see it.’

They walk in silence for a while, but the tension eases slightly and they fall into a slower step together.

‘And anyway,’ says Ferelith. ‘You’re scared.’

‘Don’t start that again,’ Rebecca says, and then laughs.

‘Sorry,’ says Ferelith. ‘But you know, you are full of . . .’

‘Okay!’ Rebecca says, laughing. ‘Okay, okay, okay! I’ll do it. I’ll do your forfeit and then we can leave it, yes?’