5

Lauren, 2019

The meter’s glowing digits climb in the gloom of the taxi. Less than a mile from Rock Point, Lauren can bear the unnecessary expense no longer and asks to be dropped off in the village, assuring the nice old cabbie she’s fine, knows exactly where she is. After the long journey she needs to walk. And work out how she’ll avoid the tripwires at Rock Point. She cannot risk having a panic attack in front of her high-functioning sisters. The humiliation of it. If she is to freak out, she’ll do it alone.

Head bent, the wind moving inside her puffer coat like a live thing, she edges past the little church and onto a winding unlit lane. The surrounding fields have a tremulous sheen, like the silky flank of a panting black horse. But she’s not scared. Not of the dark anyway. Herring gulls are another matter. And possibly that bloke on the train. She’d felt a spike of alarm when he’d got off at the same stop, then hovered on the platform, as if wanting to ask her something. She’d hurried away, taking no chances. He didn’t follow her taxi: she checked.

She looks around again, just to be sure. Lights twinkle in the village pub but no one else is out in this, a batten-down-the-hatches, boisterous sort of night with a storm snarling at its edges. After five minutes or so, the lane twists left, and the horizon blows open, reaching into all directions, a fish-eye lens. The sea is obsidian, smudging into the sky. It takes her breath away. Fills her heart. The landscape is ancient, yet in the first days of this new year it also feels fresh and unwritten, like a blank sheet of paper.

And tomorrow she will indeed click the lid off her favourite ballpoint and write. Dear G, Are you sitting down? You’ll never in a million years guess where I am … She’d give anything to see Gemma opening that letter in the Greenland science station. Her disbelief. The big wonky smile that presses a dimple into her left cheek.

Finally, Lauren has something to report after weeks of, well, nothing much. Working in the back rooms of the National Gallery’s exhibitions department; at weekends, the coach to Oxford, back and forth to the hospice where Mum died and Lauren now volunteers, feeling quite at home pressed closed to life’s tremulous fragility, its last prismatic shimmer before it all goes dark. Only the mosaic has kept her busy in her bedroom, sticking bits of glass to a board. Unable to face any parties, she completed a satisfyingly big mosaic section on New Year’s Eve – absorbed by the jewel-like chips, the emerging pattern – as fireworks tore through the London sky. She’d probably have carried on like that, burrowing into her sadness, weeks muddying into months, if it weren’t for Dad’s invitation. Her dying mother’s words chased her here too.

‘I can’t bear the thought of you alone, Laurie,’ Dixie had rasped, very near the end. ‘Promise me you’ll reach out to your sisters. Your Finch family. Promise me.’ Of course, Lauren had given her word, never suspecting a reunion at Rock Point would soon test it.

And there it is. A glowing lantern on the cliff top.

Fighting the urge to turn back, she walks on until she’s caught in a wrinkle of time, gazing up at the big white house again, enthralled and terrified, the leviathan thump of the waves vibrating through the soles of her boots. She’s not sure how long she stands there, transfixed, slipping between the shores of girlhood and adulthood, before snapping back – it’s January 2019, and she’s thirty-three years old – and remembering her plan. She needs to get on with it. Seek out the spot she most fears.

The garden gate never was locked. There was little point since its wrought-iron spikes were rather undermined by the circular aperture in its upper half – designed to frame the moon; ‘the rock’, as Grandpa called it – the width of a burly man’s shoulders. Lauren hesitates, her heart thrumming in her ears, then steps into the alley of ivy, weighted with fat winter berries, and into the garden. It smells loamy, mineral, wet. Solar lollipop lights run alongside the main path, weakly illuminating clumps of hydrangeas, their dried flowers grey as skulls. The conservatory spills a skirt of light across the lawn. She must avoid this, lest her family spot her skulking and think her a basket-case. More than they do already.

The sundial is still there. A cordyline palm. Spines of towering, desiccated echiums. Further on, the collapsed greenhouse, where Grandpa once grew his tomatoes. The old swing seat swims out of the gloom, its canopy shredded. And at the back of the garden, sheltered against the wall, under the shade of the pine, Lauren sees it. Feels it. A rectangle of black. A void, like an empty tomb. Her heart rackets, full of blood. The aviary.

Approaching slowly, she takes little sips of air. Feels tiny budgie feathers stuck in her throat, pointed hollow quills, sharp as fish bones. A familiar tightness in her chest is anxiety’s warning sign. Breathe.

Peering inside, Lauren half expects to see her younger self, bony knees pulled up, balled in the corner. Instead, just a deserted playground of rotting swings and perches. She can picture the budgies still: the sickle markings on their feathers, like the scales on tropical fish. But the morning of the eclipse is fragmented, incomplete: she’s never been able to hinge it fully open in her mind. All she really knows is what Kat and Flora – perhaps not the most reliable witnesses – told her afterwards.

Breathe. Touch it. Take away its power, Laurie: her mother’s voice in her head.

The cold metal fizzes against her fingertip. In her ears, a rushing sound. It takes a moment or two to process she’s okay. The aviary hasn’t swallowed her. Exhaling with relief, she glances up at the sky and hopes her mother is proudly watching, nose stud glinting like a star.

On the front porch, Lauren drops her bag with a thump, flicks her fringe out of her eyes and reaches for the doorbell. An avian screech stills her hand in mid-air. From inside Rock Point? It can’t be. Which means the bird – some sort of monstrous gull, oh, God – is nearby. Desperate to get to safety, she presses the brass bell with a frozen pink finger, and rings twice, long and hard.