29

Lauren, 2019

Who is it? Stepping back to get a better view, Lauren’s bare foot sinks into silky, icy sand. She peers up, tracking the black dog along the rocky ridges until it vanishes from view. Her heart rises in her chest. She can’t see the owner. But standing there in the cove, she can sense their gaze: a roving prickle against her cheeks, as if someone is aiming a laser pen down from the cliffs. How is it possible to be in such a remote, empty spot and yet feel so seen?

London’s busy streets and tall buildings are her safety net. A constriction that holds her in place. Here, she’s exposed – and so are her nerve endings. Last night’s driver careered through her dreams. Notes too, fluttering, falling, like frosted leaves, with Gemma, laughing, running, reaching out with porcelain hands to catch them. She’d woken in a knot of dusty blankets and, for a sleep-muddled second, there was Jonah, standing in her bedroom doorway, very still, like a monolithic moor stone. It wasn’t him, of course. She’s not certain anyone was there. If she dreamed the soft click of the door’s latch too. And then at breakfast, she felt it again, a dark undercurrent beneath the homeliness of sun-faded chintz, a secret caught within Rock Point, the Finch family, like a brush hair in an oil painting, a tiny ridge under a varnished surface.

‘Come on!’

Lauren whips around to face the sea and waves at Kat, bobbing about in the grotto-blue Atlantic as if it were a heated Roman bath.

‘Get in!’ Kat yells.

Glancing apprehensively at the cormorant perched on a boulder – no signs of imminent ambush – Lauren sheds her coat, revealing a dull navy swimming costume, her white, chicken-skinned body, ungroomed and unwaxed for weeks. Walking towards the water’s edge, the curling catacomb tunnels of waves, she cannot believe she’s even considering this.

A drowned person is skeletonized in about four days, according to Gemma, the daughter of a fisherman. The body is eaten from the inside out by shrimps, then the bones bounce along the seabed until eventually ground into fragments, becoming part of the beach itself. Not a nice thought. But when will she get a chance to swim – or connect – with Kat again? Especially since Kat’s trying to get a flight this evening. Whatever lies beneath this place is flexing – they all feel it. She understands why her sisters might not want to hang around. And why she will stay.

With a warrior whoop, Lauren charges at the ocean, which shatters against her legs, like glass. She screams. It’s too cold to process, more like a burn, wiping out every other sensation, stealing her breath.

Kat’s grin is enormous, the riotous grin of old. ‘Respect, Lauren!’

Lauren laughs, filled with a wild, painful joy. After the initial shock, the gasping, she surrenders to the deep tidal rock. But then her feet can’t feel the bottom, the current lassoes her legs and panic bites like the cold. She plunges back to the shore and scrambles out, frozen but triumphant, buzzing, feeling as though a layer of skin has been scraped away.

‘Back in, back in!’ Kat rushes from the water, arms outstretched, and wraps Lauren in a wet bear hug. They fall to the sand, giggling silly teenagers again. It’s funny … until the moment it’s not, and time pops like a cork from a bottle, and she’s slipping out of herself, tipping from a ledge. She’s in the aviary, her fingers rattling the cage door, trying to breathe. The sun is black, with a diamond-white corona. Beautiful and cruel, it’s trying to make her look, but if she does it’ll blind her, and she fights not to see, not to remember.

‘Shit, Lauren.’ Kat pulls her up. ‘I’m sorry.’ She grabs Lauren’s puffer coat off a rock and drapes it over her shaking shoulders. ‘There.’

‘Thanks,’ Lauren manages, her teeth chattering, unable to explain that the morning of the eclipse sometimes feels like it’s being lowered back over her, like a cloche. ‘I’m f-f-fine,’ she manages, almost hyperventilating. The smile doesn’t work, though. Her lips feel glued to her front teeth.

‘You’re not. Fuck, Lauren. Sit.’ Kat lowers too, lifts the side of Lauren’s coat and they huddle under its wing, Kat’s arm over Lauren’s shoulders. It’s the closest they’ve been physically for decades. As her breathing regulates and the shaking stops, they sit quietly, watching the shadow of a storm cloud move across the ocean’s corrugated surface, like a shoal of fish. After a while, Kat says softly, ‘You need to get some help. I’ll pay. For the bereavement therapist. It’s the least I can do, Laurie.’

‘That’s very kind of you. But not necessary. Really.’ She’s protective of her grief, wants to hold it close, cup it in her hands, and keep it warm. It’s all she has left. Kat wouldn’t understand.

Grief may have stripped off a protective layer, but the issue is this place. On the train from London, the focus of her anxiety had been the aviary. If she could just face that, she’d be fine, Lauren had told herself, not realizing that the rocky landscape would crack open memories, wispy recollections that switch course like bonfire smoke; that her father would reach through the decades, and, like a hand rooting in a box of sharp, dangerous objects, yank out Angie.

‘It’s not a big deal,’ Kat says. ‘Everyone has a shrink, these days.’

In Kat’s world maybe. It was years ago that Lauren last saw Janet. Their sessions had been useful but also painful and exhausting. She’s no desire to do it again. ‘Bet yours is some sort of famous guru?’

‘Oh, I’m too busy for all that stuff,’ Kat says, with a brisk laugh. She stretches out one sinewy leg, digging a trench in the sand. ‘Work’s my therapy. And it pays me, rather than the other way round. Far more sensible.’

Before this week, Lauren would have believed that. But Kat had looked so vulnerable in the pub last night, sort of lost. Even if she’s recovered today, reclaiming her strident Kat-ness, she still seems slightly less assured. ‘What about Flora?’ Lauren asks.

‘What you saying, girl? Flora has the perfect life! And perfect lives have the habit of falling apart if you examine them too closely,’ she adds, with a wry smile in her voice but no malice. ‘And Dad, of course, well, Dad would much rather run starkers down the street than unburden himself on a psychotherapist’s couch.’

‘If you’re not cutting off your ear and posting it to a friend, you’re hunky dory.’

‘Ha.’ Kat’s laugh conducts down her arm. ‘Anything but the truth, eh?’

A chink opens in the conversation. Lauren knows she must try to push through it again. ‘Kat,’ she says carefully, picking up a razor shell, running a finger along its edge, ‘no one talks about what happened, which is kind of weird, right?’

‘That’s how the Finch family rolls.’ Lauren feels Kat’s muscles tense. ‘Anyway, all families are dysfunctional, Lauren. You know, they have dark bits.’ Kat broods on this, then says, ‘We were all so ridiculously young, weren’t we?’ She starts talking fast, emphatically. ‘So much a blur.’

‘Yeah. My memory of that day is shot.’ Lauren’s bare feet are changing from scalded red to vein-blue. She shivers. ‘That’s why …’

‘Look, if I could click all the dislocated bits into place, I would, honestly.’ Kat stands up, showering sand. ‘Right. I need to check on the flight situation. Have you seen the weather reports? The Beast from the East, they’re calling it. So much snow. The rest of the country is gridlocked.’ She smiles. ‘And, no, I’m not running away. I’m just heroically screwed if I can’t get back for the meeting, that’s all.’

‘Have you earmarked anything? From the house, I mean,’ Lauren asks. Flora has organized a sticker system, involving yellow mini Post-it notes inscribed with the first letter of their names. ‘It’s like pin the tail on the donkey!’ she’d said brightly, thumbing an F to the tall-case clock. Ls and Ks are scarce. It’s not that Lauren doesn’t love Grandpa’s brass telescope, binoculars, or the barometer on the wall, but these things belong here somehow. Every item is loaded, poignant. It feels a bit like robbing a grave. And she’s got no space or storage in her rental flat either.

‘Not much. The old maps. I like maps because they show you the route out,’ Kat says wryly. ‘I also feel like I should rescue Ugly Humphrey. But I probably won’t because it’s just a hideous stuffed fish, isn’t it? Not actually a relative. Although anything’s possible in our family.’ She starts patting down her coat pockets. ‘Bollocks. I’ve left my phone back at the house. First my phone, next my head, right? Jeez, this place. What do they put in the tap water? Actually, let’s not go there.’ She strips out of a sleek black costume without any self-consciousness, revealing an airstrip of pubic hair. Mid-towel rub, she looks up. ‘Is this about what Dixie said? When she was … ill?’

‘Dying.’ Lauren hates the euphemisms. ‘Passed away’, especially. As if the dead amble off down a sunlit country lane, when dying itself is so exhausting and physical – and binary. Lauren saw her own face reflected in her mother’s dark eyes, where she belonged, where she’d always lived, just the two of them. And then those eyes shut, and they never opened again. She didn’t look as if she was sleeping, like people said. She looked dead, very dead. And the world emptier and scarier. Her mother had gone. ‘Yes, it’s partly that.’ She fumbles inelegantly into her clothes, trying to hide her bush.

‘Perhaps it was just the drugs talking, Laurie,’ Kat says softly, as if addressing a child.

‘Maybe.’ Lauren thinks of a baby bird trying to tap its way out of its egg, trapped within the very thing that protects it. ‘Do you remember how Granny didn’t want me to hang out with Gemma any more?’ she asks, changing tack. ‘I was thinking about it earlier. I mean, that was odd, wasn’t it? I’ve never worked it out. All these things that didn’t quite add up that summer, I’d forgotten them until now.’

Kat kicks a leg, hard, into her sweatpants.

‘So you don’t have an inkling what it was all about?’ Lauren tries again.

‘Nope. Sorry.’ Kat zips her coat, the conversation too. Fully dressed, they start picking their way over the hillocks of seaweed, scattering sandhoppers, and up the path, briny gusts blowing their hair into stiff walls. Near the hermit’s hut, Kat stops suddenly and replies to a question Lauren hasn’t asked: ‘I really don’t have the answer, Laurie.’

And Lauren thinks, She’s lying.