NOVEMBER 2017The path was clear, no Michael in her way, but Viola’s conviction dimmed.
Her mind was two wild horses – one galloping remorselessly forward in pursuit of friendship; the other fleeing, certain of rejection. She had heard the Eldest Girls call out for a sun god, for mother moon, for the ghosts of Lark’s past. How disappointed they would be when Viola, a mere mortal, rose from the ferns.
She decided to prepare an offering. A task that would take her away from the stones for a while, from the anxiety they now caused her. A simple procrastination.
She sifted through books at the farmstead, still sitting in boxes, awaiting shelves and her mother’s enthusiasm. Viola had been momentarily buoyed by the sight of green shoots in the tilled plots outside, until she realised it was November, not the time of year for that kind of thing, and these were nothing but hardy weeds. If this continued, there would be more visits. First the headmaster, then the doctor – who would come next?
‘What are you looking for?’ her mother called distractedly from the veranda, disturbed by the sound.
Viola sat amongst piles of mildewed Penguin editions and dictionaries in various languages.
‘Do we have any books on, like, magic and spells and stuff?’
No answer drifted back.
Viola considered handing the girls the Kendricks’ copy of Macbeth. Maybe it was one of the Shakespeare texts that Michael had hinted were forbidden. There was no cross-dressing in the play and only a suggestion of sex, as far as Viola could remember, but there was plenty of double, double toil and trouble.
Viola had seen how the congregation quivered over that letter about ‘mystic cards’ and ‘polished stones’. A similar letter (minus the fire and brimstone) had gone out to parents at Viola’s old school when an obsession for Ouija boards swept through Year Eight, but the parents back home had scoffed at it – necromancy and fortune-telling were bunkum, and the girls having nightmares needed to snap out of it, quit attention-seeking.
What exactly would Viola be saying by giving the girls a copy of Macbeth? That there was a parallel? Three Eldest Girls, three weird sisters. She threw the play text back into its box.
She trawled the estate land next, hoping to find a stone in the shape of a heart or a lucky clover with an extra leaf. She could press the sprig between the pages of the heavy atlas, then affix it to a neat piece of card, explaining its auspiciousness when handing it over (just in case four-leafers didn’t have the same meaning on Lark). She would be like one of those colonial explorers ingratiating themselves with an isolated tribe before engaging in their local rituals.
But she found nothing, only attracted, once again, the attention of the stooped and bearded gamekeeper. He pulled up alongside her in his tarped-over Land Rover, asking her why she was out on the hills alone.
‘You reckon it’s a good idea, do you, wandering about like this?’
His questions confused her, containing as they did echoes of the mainland rules, the ones that made it Viola’s responsibility not to put herself in a vulnerable position, not to make herself easy prey – the ones that weren’t supposed to apply here.
‘I’m just walking my dog,’ she told him.
‘Well, keep it away from the cattle,’ he replied.
‘Oh, she doesn’t chase anything that big, only rabbits.’
‘I’m thinking of the diseases she’ll have from that mainland of yours.’
There was a rugged-looking woman in the passenger seat beside him, about the same age as Viola’s mother. She wore a thick green jumper, her black hair scraped back into a perfunctory bun.
‘Leave her alone, Peter.’ The woman tutted, nudging him in the ribs.
He gave a grunt in response before pulling away, his eyes on Viola as he went, not on the landscape ahead.
His phrase – ‘that mainland of yours’ – had struck Viola. Like a priest was God’s representative on earth, the Kendricks were the mainland’s representative on Lark, defender of its principles, accountable for its actions, unless of course they chose whole-heartedly to convert. Would Viola be up for that? Could she ever be convinced to call Lark her true home?
She made the Provisions Store her next stop, thinking an offering of chocolate or cake – a literal sweetener – might charm the girls, if there was an allocation in the Kendricks’ ration for that kind of treat. Remembering how the bullish women behind the counter felt about Dot, Viola tied her dog to the wooden stocks before going inside and walking among the flat pallets of tins and packets, peering into the fluorescent insides of the refrigerated cabinets. Nothing appealed. She picked up a pomegranate and squeezed it thoughtfully – wondering where on the island it could possibly have grown. There was a myth Viola had heard once, or a ritual, involving the fruit, the dropping of it maybe and the spilling of its seeds, but she couldn’t recall it exactly. Anyway, she swiftly put it down when a snaggle-toothed woman wearing a shop apron bellowed that there was to be no ‘looking with your fingers’. Viola left, shame-faced, empty-handed.
Outside, Michael was on the cobbles, petting Dot. Passers-by stared at his roughhousing of the dog’s ears, and the way Dot spilled onto her back, spreading her paws and baring her gums, submissively offering up her pink-grey belly.
Viola’s heart sank lower. Michael would ask her how she was getting on with the Eldest Girls, expose her for her dithering.
She leapt in first. ‘So, what’s the word on thingumebob and whatshername?’
‘Leah Cedars and Saul Cooper?’ he whispered.
‘Yeah, Leah and Saul.’ She said it at full volume, making him hiss at her to shush as he checked over his shoulder to see who might have heard.
Viola untied Dot’s lead from the wooden stocks, thinking how, in any market town on the mainland, they might have served as a bike stand, but the inclines on Lark made cycling an impossibility.
‘I’ve found an intriguing pattern,’ Michael said, as they made their way towards the white sculpted chimneys of the smokehouse. ‘One that tells me they’re definitely doing it.’
He reached into his satchel for a notepad, flicking to a neatly drawn table of dates and times, filled out comprehensively with light pencil dashes and hard Xs.
‘I’ve been tracking her every move.’
He thrust the notepad into Viola’s face as proof.
‘Great,’ she said, pushing it away. ‘But you’re not being weird about it, are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re not, like, stalking her?’
‘But that’s what you told me to do.’
‘No, I said…’
What had she said? Viola did not want to spar with Michael, have him demand, if you’re such an expert on all this, better show me what info you’ve collected so far.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘You’re doing great.’
‘You told me I should follow Leah so that you could speak to the girls alone.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Viola began to walk faster.
‘So, you could get in on whatever they were doing and –’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I know!’
Then, the skies opened, instantaneously, as they were wont to do, and Viola had never been more pleased. Mother Nature was playing for her team. She would get soaked right through to her underwear before she reached the cover of home, but it would stop Michael following her there.
She started to jog. Michael, madly, joined in.
‘So, how’s it all going?’ he said. ‘What have you found?’
There was a great flash of lightning and that, at last, brought him to a halt.
Everyone on the island was scared of the electrical storms, the swift, metallic ferociousness of them. Viola had witnessed a strike at sea not long after they’d arrived – a pink zag of light across the water – but it was land these firebolts were really after, or people, a means to earth themselves.
Was this support from Mother Nature, she asked herself, or a scolding for her inaction? Stop hiding in the ferns and do what you must, or else I will take aim!
‘I’m really hitting it off with them!’ Viola called back to Michael as the thunder sounded. ‘I have so much to tell you.’
She began to run, full pelt for home, because there was another reason lightning came, and that was to strike down liars.