I must have been asleep for several hours when I heard a soft sound. I opened my eyes and shouted in alarm.
A figure sat on the floor a few feet from me, his—her—knees drawn in front of her. I threw one of the quilts at her. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Just looking.”
“That’s a good way to get cold-cocked.” I stumbled to my feet and glared at her. “You’re lucky I didn’t put your lights out.”
Sam brushed a sweep of black hair from her eyes. “Is that what happened to your eye?”
“No.”
I crossed to a window and peered down into the yard. It looked to be late morning. Bedraggled chickens picked their way between the tractors. The shaggy cow stared over its barbed-wire fence. Most of the snow had melted, but the distant crags of Carn Scrija were dappled white. Watery sunlight streamed between lichen-gray clouds, brightening to gold as a burst of rain fell.
I grabbed my camera. I’d used up my last roll shooting Quinn, so I’d have to reload. But if I moved fast I might catch the light.
Sam stared, fascinated, as I dug into my satchel and pulled a plastic canister of Tri-X from a ziplock bag. “What are you doing?”
I strode to the little door. “Loading my camera.”
“Can I watch?”
“There’s nothing to watch. You have to do it in total darkness, otherwise the film’s ruined.”
“I’m not afraid of the dark.”
I opened the door and peered inside. The apple smell was stronger here. Threads of light spun from holes in the roof, igniting dust motes. I turned to Sam. “Hand me one of those blankets.”
“Can I—”
“Yeah, whatever! Just give me that blanket and get inside. Quick. Shut the door.”
She grabbed a blanket and scrambled after me into the storeroom, pulling the door tight behind her. I angled myself as far from the door as I could—it was close quarters—then draped the blanket over my head and settled onto the floor. I could feel Sam bump up alongside me.
“What are you doing?” She sounded excited.
“Putting film in my camera. Here, hang on to this.”
I stuck my hand out from under the blanket and gave her the empty film canister. I opened the Konica, removed the roll I’d shot of Quinn back at Canary Wharf, pocketed it, and slipped the virgin Tri-X into the camera. I drew the camera to my face, inhaling the lactose-sweet scent of the emulsion, and threaded the film onto the sprockets of the take-up spool, then closed the camera back and hit the shutter a few times to advance the film, making sure it had loaded correctly.
“Okay,” I said at last, and tossed the blanket aside. Sepia light and slowly moving dust turned the storeroom into a frame of grainy film, with Sam’s stark white face, black hair, and inky eyes superimposed on it. She hugged the blanket to her thin chest and stared at my camera.
“I don’t get why you have to do it in here,” she said.
I made my way back into the garret. “I told you, because it’s dark.”
“That’s where they used to keep the apples.” She dogged my heels to the window. “A hundred years ago. Why does it have to be dark?”
“Shit.” I stared outside. “I lost the light.” I turned to her. “Do you even know what film is? Do you even fucking care?”
She stared at me with those hard black eyes. “My grandfather was a famous director.”
“He was a famous cinematographer. Did you know him?”
“No. He died a long time ago. Before I was born.”
I wondered if mastery of light was an inherited trait. I held up my Konica. “This is an SLR camera—single lens reflex. Not digital. There’s film inside it—do you know how that works?”
Sam started to nod, stopped. “No.”
“It’s a very thin piece of plastic with special chemicals on it. Different kinds of chemicals interact differently when they’re exposed to light, especially silver salts, which is what you use in black-and-white film. I only use black and white, so no matter what I shoot, it comes out in black and white. You could scan it into a computer and Photoshop it or something like that, but the original product is good old monochrome.”
“That’s weird.” Sam stepped beside me, transfixed, and gazed at the camera.
“Here.” I popped the lens cap and indicated the viewfinder. “You look through that. This is the shutter release, but don’t touch it—I don’t have much film left.”
I handed her the camera. She squinted through the viewfinder. “How do you make it bigger?”
“You don’t.”
“It’s all blurry.”
“There’s no autofocus. There’s no auto anything. You have to know how it works.”
“Can you teach me?”
I took the camera from her. “No.”
She appeared crushed. “Look, it’s hard,” I said. “It takes a long time to learn how to use it, focus and depth of field and correct exposure time, what F-stop to use—that kind of shit. Then on top of that you have to know how to develop the film, how long to leave it in the processor and adjust for any imperfections in the contrast or…”
I looked at her: I might have been speaking in tongues. I sighed. “Don’t you have a smartphone or something? A digital camera? They’re supposed to be really easy to learn.”
“Then why don’t you have one?”
“Because I have to do everything the hard way.” I slung the camera over my neck and picked up my bag. “I’m going to see if I can rustle up some grub.”
The doors to the other bedrooms were shut. Sam followed me downstairs, where the cottage was silent and very cold. The brown soccer ball now sat in front of the fireplace. I saw no sign of Adrian, but when I entered the kitchen, Krishna stood in front of the sink, washing her face. She straightened and eyed me suspiciously.
“Where you been off to, then?”
“Sleeping,” I said.
“Surprised you could,” retorted Krishna.
Sam glared at her. Krishna glared back, but her gaze softened as she took in Sam’s frayed cargo pants and ragged hair. “Don’t they take you out ever?” she asked.
“Fuck off,” Sam said, and opened the fridge.
I went outside to retrieve the other bottle of wine from the Land Rover, skirting chicken shit and puddles in the brick-colored mud. The cold made the scar beside my eye ache, but it was exhilarating, too—the wind bore the smell of the sea, the calls of birds skirling high overhead and a low, moaning cry from the broken towers of Carn Scrija.
Back in the kitchen, Krishna was gone. I raised an eyebrow at Sam. “You scare her off?”
“Take more than that,” she said. “She looks like a vampire.”
I took the bottle of wine from my bag, filled a chipped white mug, and drank. Adrian’s backpack sat on the wooden daybed, where the blankets had been neatly folded. A brace of dead rabbits hung beside the stove.
“I was supposed to skin those for dinner,” Sam said. “Till I forgot.”
She set bread and Nutella on the table, along with a carton of milk, then dragged an old electric heater alongside her chair. Its cord was dangerously frayed. She switched it on: The grill glowed orange, and I held my hands in front of it.
Sam made herself a sandwich, took a bite, and looked at me. “You want one?”
“Yeah, sure.”
We sat across from each other at the battered kitchen table and ate. After a few minutes I asked, “Where’d Krishna go?”
“Krishna?” Sam looked puzzled, then scowled. “You mean that crazy sket screaming at my dad?”
“That would be her.”
“Dunno. Ran off. She’ll be in a bog out there. Dead,” she added with relish.
I refilled my mug with wine. Sam opened the milk, sniffed it, and poured it down the sink. She got a jelly glass and picked up the wine bottle.
“Hey,” I said, “how about asking?”
“Can I have some?”
“Aren’t you kinda young to be hitting that?”
“No.”
“What about your dad?”
“He doesn’t care.”
I shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
She filled her glass to the brim, and I grabbed the bottle back from her. “Christ, you really are gonna knock yourself out. Pacing, kid.”
We finished our sandwiches in silence. Sam drank most of her wine, pushed her empty plate away, and walked, a little unsteadily, toward the bathroom. I drank what remained in her jelly glass and stuck the bottle into my camera bag. Adrian was right. The bag was starting to get heavy.
After a few minutes Sam returned and sat. When she saw her empty glass, she shot me an accusing look. “Did you throw out my wine?”
“No. I drank it. I don’t want you puking. How old are you, anyway?”
“You can drink here when you’re sixteen.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’m twelve. I’ll be thirteen in January.”
“Wow, only two years and eleven months till you’re legal. What’s the deal with your grandmother?”
“She went to Penzance a few days ago. She got caught in the storm.”
“How far’s Penzance?”
“About ten miles. But it takes a long time because of the roads.”
“You’ve been alone here all this time?”
Sam dabbled a finger in some spilled wine on the table, drew a circle. “I like to be alone.”
“Don’t you have school?”
“I don’t go to school. I used to, when I was with my dad in Islington. He was living with a bunch of anarchists from Occupy. Some of them got arrested. My dad wouldn’t let me go.” As she spoke, she kicked the table leg distractedly. “My school, everyone there was a cunt. They beat me up and said I was a freak.”
“Why?”
“Cause I look like a bloke.”
“So? Who gives a fuck?”
“My dad went in and got in a fight with my teacher. They called the police, they were going to take me away, so we came back here so I could stay with Tamsin.”
I grabbed her foot. “Stop kicking, it’s driving me nuts. How can you live here?”
“Same way I lived in London.”
“I mean, how do you pay the bills? Buy food, stuff like that.”
“Tamsin sells stuff. She knows a dealer in Penzance—she brings him things and he sells them online.”
I looked around. Nothing even remotely resembled an antique that might be worth more than a few pounds. “What kind of stuff?”
“Things that get plowed up in the fields. Flints. Beads. Broken pots.”
“You can survive on that?”
“It’s getting harder to find things.” Sam kicked the table again, then stopped. “The ground’s been so worked over for so long. You can still find things on the moor, but you have to be lucky. I had a metal detector, but it broke. We never found any metal, anyhow, except once a bronze ring. Tamsin says it used to be you couldn’t kick a rock but you’d find an ax head or a little statue.”
I feigned surprise. “Really? What happened to them?”
“People stole them from her.”
I looked around. “You’d have to be a pretty hard-up thief to break in here.”
“It was people she knew. I don’t know how they stole them, but they did. It was a long time ago.”
I nodded and stared out the window. The clouds had lifted. Beyond the dour granite compound, the open moor stretched green and gold beneath an azure sky. On the western horizon, slanting rain fell from massed charcoal clouds onto the ruins of a building atop a towering hill.
“Is that the manor that burned down?” I pointed, glancing back to see Sam’s nod. “Can I go there?”
“I’ll take you.” She jumped to her feet. “Wait while I get my coat.”
I didn’t want a kid tagging along, but I was afraid that if I left, she’d wake Adrian and I’d have someone else dogging me. I stepped outside and took a shot of the hillside while I waited for Sam. She came running out, wearing a black anorak way too big for her skinny frame, and knee-high Wellingtons.
“This way,” she said.