ORDINARY TIME: AUTUMN 2017In the beginning came the end: the moment Jade-Marie Ahearn sang too loudly during morning assembly.
Father Daniel, gentle and grey, in appearance and in word, had introduced the liturgy without incident. Mentions were made of the day’s saint – a man who had done the required amount of preaching, healing and converting of pagans, but little else to martyr him above all the others – then the eagle-head lectern was passed to Mr Crane.
‘So, now we are alone,’ said their Council leader, their headmaster, his smile inviting their complicity. The small congregation of St Rita’s pupils, infants to seniors, along with their teaching staff, no more than fifty all told, laughed obligingly.
He was referring to the ships. The August one had been and gone, bringing the islanders the last batch of supplies from the mainland. The days were still bright, the sun making teasing promises to stay a while, but soon the fog would descend, making Lark unreachable. Unleavable. There would be no more ships until April.
‘Closed-months Rationing’ began at the Provisions Store at the weekend to ensure all 253 residents of the island remained well fed until spring. Now it was 1 September, time to knuckle down to a new school year, so Mr Crane’s subsequent homily was on the importance of hard work. Thessalonians was used to strengthen his case. ‘For we hear there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies…’
The Eldest Girls of St Rita’s did not mutter at his speech, nor roll their eyes. Back then, at the start of September, Britta Sayers, Jade-Marie Ahearn and Anna Duchamp were still, for the most part, good girls, not worthy of attention. The teaching staff had given them each a brief up-and-down for uniform compliance. The younger senior girls, who were feeling mature having just risen a year, glanced the elder girls’ way – a reminder that there was yet more growing up to do.
All three of the Eldest Girls had come of age, Jade-Marie being the last to turn sixteen in the middle of the holidays, and there had been a perceptible filling out of their bodies, new angles forming from the sharpening of their features. The boys who were old enough appraised these changes with furtive curiosity, as if peering through the glass of an oven door to judge the rising of a cake.
But none of this was done in chapel. The boys would have seen the girls in July and August, lying on their towels on the small beach offered up by the harbour at low tide, as exposed as they’d ever be, in rolled-up denim and coloured vests. They’d have watched the girls devour the summer’s delivery of magazines from the mainland, sliding sunglasses down their noses to examine the few passing strangers, searching them for hints of what life was like in that distant outside world.
Three visitors came that summer: one couple (middle-aged walkers in audible, wet-wicking fabrics) and a solo traveller from the telephone company, trying yet again to convince the islanders of the benefit of installing a mast. The widow Esther Deezer put them up in her spare rooms, serving breakfasts and dinners sparse enough to encourage them never to come back, driving home the message that isolation was neither a tourist attraction nor a problem to be solved. The question of the mast was put to the men of the Council once again in July and as in previous years received a unanimous no.
Until Jade-Marie sang too loudly in chapel, the girls were a mere novelty, known by their collective moniker ‘the Eldest Girls’ – and long before their time. The font of St Rita’s had sat dry and unused for four years now and there had been a similarly disconcerting absence of new babies on Lark between 1998 and 2000. This meant that the three girls, all born in 2001, became the most senior pupils at the end of Year Eleven. Or the ‘Fifth Form’ in old money, the kind of currency the school of St Rita’s understood.
There was Britta Sayers, the true islander, a ‘pure catch’, distinguished by her long ropes of lucky black hair. There was Jade-Marie Ahearn, with her wild brown mane, a legacy of her missionary father, Neil, who’d arrived on Lark in the 1990s, departing it in the Great Drowning of 2002 while Jade was still a babe in her Larkian mother Mary’s arms. Then there was Anna Duchamp, who would be forever marked out as a coycrock – an incomer – by her exotic blonde bob, scissored neatly to curl beneath the ears. Anna arrived on the island at the impressionable age of four, with her French father, her Scandinavian mother and her little brother, Julian.
And now there was another coycrock girl on Lark, arrived on the recent June ship. She too was born in 2001 and with her particular shade of hair, which was considered a bad omen by those who heeded the old ways, she might create a ‘full set’ with Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie. Black, blonde, brown, red. If three became four the inauspiciousness of the girl’s coppery hair might be reversed. That’s what was said; or rather what was not said.
Superstition singled out four as a powerful number – stable, real, encompassing north, south, east and west. A union would make the girls a formidable combination of earth, fire, air and water as they took their seats at the long desk in the north-facing classroom. Mr Crane taught the Sixth Form, alongside his running of the school. Those girls could become their own talisman.
But the small, pale coycrock with the red hair was not present at that first morning worship. She had not turned up for the first day of term.
During the second verse of that morning’s hymn, the point in the song when the dancing spreads to the fishermen, Jade-Marie raised her voice to match the registers of the younger children. By the third verse, when the dancer in all unreasonableness is strung up after curing the lame, Jade-Marie was no longer singing but bellowing the words, engulfing the operatic harmonies of Mr Crane’s wife, Diana.
Britta and Anna, standing either side of Jade, lowered their hymn books, held only for appearance’s sake as they knew the words off by heart, and they stared. It was Britta who laughed, just a small cough of embarrassment, though she soon turned serious and ashen like Anna. An understanding began to throb between the three girls as the fourth verse arrived, as Jade-Marie’s voice grew yet wilder with pain:
When the world turned black –
It’s hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
A tear spilled down Anna’s cheek. Britta’s chest rose and fell in hitching gasps.
This was when Miss Cedars, the nice, polite teacher of the GCSE pupils, leapt from her pew and, with uncommon ferocity, yanked Jade-Marie from her place, the girl’s hymn book hitting the stone floor with a slap. Teacher and pupil then wrestled their way down the aisle, Jade-Marie screaming the last lines of the fourth verse, as if issuing a final threat:
They buried my body
And they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance
And I still go on.
Then she was pushed out into daylight beyond the ironwork door.
Mrs Stanney at the organ continued to play at her usual sprightly pace, but the infant classes, who had never seen such behaviour in their entire lives, fell silent, their mouths forming little Os. Mr Crane slammed the spine of his hymn book against the lectern, issuing a clipped instruction to ‘Sing!’ The infants leapt in unison, then shrank small, searching for the words for verse five – words that would soon, like so many hymns and prayers and quotations, become second nature to them.
One of the boys who walked close to Britta and Anna along the cliffside path back to school after worship, said that the girls had discussed, in whispers, not returning to their classroom. They would fall behind the last teacher, slip into the graveyard, make a hiding place of one of the tilting tombs, then skirt the edge of the nunnery to make their escape across estate land… but this plan was discarded as hastily as it was put together.
They had to go back. They had to be there for their friend. She was in the headmaster’s office, with Miss Cedars her jailer. Mr Crane would return, Miss Cedars would be asked to leave, and then what?
And then what?