EASTERTIDE: FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

In the morning, everything is clear, sparklingly so.

It may as well be December 25th, a different kind of Christmas, because the red-haired coycrock girl cannot sleep, cannot wait.

In her room at the old Reunyon Farmstead, she sits upright in creased and grubby bedclothes, pulling aside the faded green curtains one more time to check.

At the first inching of the sun, she tells herself, she can get up, but for now the fingernail moon still rules, glowing gently through the mist.

So, she changes the rules – why not? She put them there in the first place. Let the day turn at her pace. If she leaves now, the sun will have reached the horizon by the time she gets there, and maybe no rules will be broken after all.

She swings her feet onto the boards, steps over last night’s discarded clothes – the short, black skirt, the leopard-print coat, the lace-up boots all covered in dirt – and she finds socks and a jumper. She is too impatient to change out of her pyjamas or to clean her teeth.

She will not stand in front of the bathroom mirror and see her lips stained red from the night before.

She goes downstairs, pulls tight the drawstring fastenings at the top of two rucksacks that sit in the hall – one for her, one for her mother, just in case – then she runs back upstairs, to fetch the radio from its charging stand at the end of her bed, forgotten in her anticipation.

This is just a small error, not a portent. It is nothing to do with the date.

Her mother had come to fear Friday the 13th, to fear all omens – single magpies, a crack in a mirror, speaking proudly of something before it is done. But Viola believes the date is fortuitous. The number thirteen is made up of a one and a three which, when added together, become four – something real, something stable.

Earth, fire, air, water. North, south, east, west. Black, blonde, brown, red.

In a world that gives you many reasons to be frightened, every hour of every day, the thirteenth is a mere bagatelle – and Viola believes her mother is starting to realise this. She is beginning to resurface.

From her hiding place in the kitchen pantry, just weeks ago, Viola observed Deborah Kendrick march that young man, the doctor’s messenger, out of their kitchen, the spikes of a pitchfork trained at his chest, and Viola knows that if last night the headmaster and the doctor came calling, she will have done something equally brave and disobedient.

As is the mother, so is her daughter.

Though sometimes the daughter gets there first.

Viola grasped it early on: fears grow tall and prosper when you run and hide from them, and no matter where you go, they find you. Instead she has walked towards the things that scare her on Lark, talked to them, seduced them, sung to them, stolen from them, loved them, deceived them. She is still frightened, still capable of being harmed, but how much lighter she feels this morning, despite the violence of the night, how full of positivity she is, knowing that in the face of her fears, she has been daring.

The same horse that delivered death to town carries on its back a new hope.

Viola lifts Dot’s bright red lead from the hook by the kitchen door and snaps it onto the dog’s collar. She pulls on the maroon coat and drops the radio into her pocket.

When the incident happened, she was told to sit down to receive the awful news – her father and brother were dead. Viola did not allow death to creep up on her this time, tap her on the shoulder and make her jump; it did not find her hiding in the obvious place. Viola commanded death; she bent it to her will. She and the Eldest Girls harnessed their power within the protection of the Sisters’ Stones, and they brought about their own terrible and necessary fury.

Maybe someone does watch over us, after all, Viola thinks, as she steps out of the front door, closing it quietly behind her, ready to be the dog walker, the first voice in the story. Maybe everything we think and do is seen and judged. Maybe someone is keeping accurate scores. Perhaps the umpire is wise and fair.

The idea buoys her into the day and down the splintered wooden steps of the veranda, Dot gambolling at her heels, and for the first time in a long time, Viola feels that almost forgotten weightlessness of just being a child.