It’s a stiff pull to the high ground beyond the copse at the rear of Eden Hall. Worth it, though, for the view across the valley. Forested hills lie in all directions, so you could almost imagine yourself back in a landscape from the time before humans.
Shiv sits down. Her breathing steadies. Green is meant to be good for you, she recalls, gazing out over the countryside – soothing for the spirit. Lying back on the grass, she shuts her eyes, sleepy and a little weepy after Write, setting down page after page about Declan. The whole reason for coming up here was to leave him behind for a bit. She visualizes a locker, her thoughts of her brother as so many school books scattered on the floor. Pictures herself picking them up one by one, stowing them away in the locker, closing the door and snapping the lock shut.
It’s an old-style counselling technique, not Korsakoff Method.
With each passing day, Shiv finds herself more confused by the contradictions between the two therapies, old and new. The previous counsellor encouraged Shiv to separate herself from Declan but it didn’t help at all; if anything it made her worse. This place, which is helping, wants her to fill every minute of every day with him. Which is all very well but when she eventually checks out of the clinic and returns to her real life, Dec won’t be there. He won’t be anywhere.
Shiv drops off. Not that she’s aware of doing so, only of waking up afterwards. Gummy-mouthed, panicky. It’s OK. Checking her watch, she sees there’s still time to hike back down and freshen up before dinner.
She stands up. Yawns. Stretches. Glances up to see a figure at the end of the ridge. The Declan-like boy. He is descending the slope at the back of the escarpment, oblivious to her.
Too late she calls out, “Hey! Hey, wait!”
But he is lost from view over the brow. Without a thought, she follows him.
Over the ridge the ground drops to an area of woodland. The boy has already entered – she can make out his white shirt between the trees. Again, she calls, but the breeze whips the words from her mouth so that she can barely hear them herself.
In the woods the ground is choked with ferns and brambles. She pauses to call again, seeking another glimpse of him. Nothing. Just trees and more trees. Venturing deeper, forcing her way through the undergrowth, she heads first this way then that. But he has vanished. Even so, Shiv presses on into the heart of the woods.
Catches herself yelling, “Declan! Dec, where are you?”
Close to tears, breathless, Shiv finally gives up. She looks around to get her bearings and figure out a route back to the ridge – but this part of the woods looks much the same as any other. She is lost.
Idiot. Stupid, stupid idiot.
On all sides, the towering trees stand in silence, like troops waiting for Shiv to issue orders. She picks a direction at random.
The woods must connect with the ones she knows from Walk because Shiv eventually finds herself on the bark-chip trail that leads to the Make area.
Good. She isn’t lost any more.
She hears a grunt, a little way off. Fox? Badger? There it is, along with scuffles of movement, of exertion, that mark the sounds as human. Curious, Shiv follows the trail towards the clearing where they take their breaks. Entering the glade, creamy in the early evening light, she doesn’t see anyone.
Then – Mikey.
He’s wearing his yellow jumpsuit, standing hands on hips at the base of the steep mud bank that runs along one edge of the clearing. He has his back to her and is breathing heavily. He bends down to grapple with something at his feet – a sawn-off chunk of tree trunk, big as a car tyre, which he raises with a grunt. The log clutched tightly into his midriff, he sets off up the slope, legs bent, straining with each clumsy step. She’s sure he’ll drop the log, or stumble to his knees, but he makes it all the way to the top of the bank and lets the log thud to the earth.
After a moment to recover, he stoops to pick up the log and sets off back down the slope.
“Mikey.” She’s waited till he’s at the bottom.
He spots her across the clearing and glares. “What’re you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the exact same thing.”
He’s drenched in sweat, hands torn and blistered, twitching. He must’ve been up and down that hill quite a few times.
“Sisyphus,” Shiv says.
“What?”
“The guy who had to keep rolling a rock up a hill. In Greek mythology, yeah?”
Mikey clearly has no idea what she’s talking about.
They’re sitting on a felled tree at the edge of the clearing. She starts to explain how she came to be here – the hike, then getting lost in the woods, but not about the boy – but Mikey doesn’t seem interested. Was it him she saw up on the ridge? No. He’s been here for a while, as far as she can tell; besides, he’s wearing a blue T-shirt and yellow jumpsuit, not white.
Her eyes are drawn to his hands again. She points. “They must hurt.”
“A bit,” he says, looking at his hands as though they don’t belong to him.
“A bit of a bit, or a lot of a bit? Or a lot of a lot?”
He plays along. “A bit of a lot.”
“That wasn’t one of the options.”
Mikey gives her a look.
“For a second there, I thought you were going to crack a smile,” Shiv says.
“You thought wrong, then.”
After a pause, she taps her watch. “Technically, it’s still Buddy Time. You’re meant to be nice to your Buddy.”
“You ain’t my—”
“Yeah, yeah, you already said. I could be, though – if you’d let me. ’Cos, I dunno, it must be bloody lonely being you, Mikey.”
He goes to speak, then falls quiet. His grubby-blond hair is tousled, his face paler than ever; his eyes give no clue to his feelings. She knows that Mikey wouldn’t hesitate to get up and leave or tell her to sod off. That he does neither, she takes as a good sign.
She wants to fill the silence but can’t think what to say for the best. Talking to Declan could be like verbal chess; with Mikey it’s more like a game of Swingball.
She gestures at the surrounding woods. “Dec loved to climb trees.”
“Your brother?”
“He was like a monkey.”
Mikey just nods, studying his tremulous hands.
“Without the tail though, obviously,” she adds, giving him a sidelong look. “And not so hairy. And he hated bananas.”
A definite smile this time; he turns away to hide it. She lets another hush settle, not wanting to push. Mikey folds his arms, shoves a hand in each armpit and clamps them to his sides; leans forward, then back again, sets up a rocking motion.
She wants to tell him to stop, but she says nothing.
Eventually, he becomes still. “You know the rope-pyramid – in playgrounds, yeah?” he says. “Feebs could climb right to the top of it when she was six.”
He turns to look directly at her, as though daring her to disbelieve him. Shiv nods, tries to appear suitably impressed. She is impressed – when she was six years old, she cried if Mum pushed her too high on the swings.
“What colour hair did Phoebe have?”
He goes on staring. Suspicious. “Brown, like Mum’s. Sort of wavy.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Pretty? She was my sister.”
Shiv changes tack. “What did she like to do? What was she into?”
Mikey thinks about that. “Sylvanian Families,” he says. “She used to play with them in her room for hours.” He starts to explain but Shiv interrupts to say that she collected the little animal dolls too. “The squirrels were her favourites,” he says.
“I made houses for mine out of old shoeboxes,” Shiv says.
Feebs didn’t do that. “She got too grown up for them in the end,” he says. In the end. When she was nine, he means. By the time she died. “So she said,” he adds. “She kept them hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe in case her friends came round after school.” He smiles. “But I knew she still played with them sometimes.”
Feebs was the fastest girl in Year 5; a better runner than most of the boys, too. The best in her class at Maths. She got a merit in her Grade 1 piano.
Shiv listens. Nods, smiles.
Mikey hasn’t spoken about his sister at Talk; has broken the silence just once, to rant at Assistant Sumner about what a waste of time Talk is. Some of the others resent him for it – We speak, why should he be any different? Shiv wishes she could’ve recorded what he just said and play it back to everyone. See, he is the same as us.
Shiv could easily set herself in opposition to the whole regime here, as he has done. Detach herself. Give in, smash things, lash out. But she doesn’t want to be that person any more. She doesn’t want Mikey to be, either.
“I almost got her.” He mimes grabbing something, his messed-up hands raised like a pair of monstrous paws. Then, shaking his head, as though a wasp is bothering him, “I should’ve. I should’ve held on to her.”
With a bit of prompting, he tells Shiv about the river. How it was Dazza’s idea to wade out to the island but that didn’t count for shit, ’cos Mikey was meant to be watching out for Feebs and he ought to have said no. Or just told Feebs to stay put. Not to follow them. ’Cos, him and Daz, the water only came up to here – he does a karate-chop motion at his belly – but with Feebs it was right up to her armpits.
“And the current…”
Mikey can’t finish. He doesn’t need to.
Shiv can picture it as clearly, as horribly, as if she was there on the riverbank, watching a nine-year-old girl with wavy brown hair losing her footing, being swept away, shrieking, her brother diving after her, grabbing hold of her arm with both hands … but not strong enough. Nowhere near strong enough. Pictures him clutching at nothing as the fast-flowing water carries Feebs off, then under. Did he swim after her? Did he almost drown trying to find her, pull her to the surface, save her?
She imagines he did.
Maybe that’s what the log was all about – hauling it up and down the hill to prove his strength; the strength that wasn’t enough when he really needed it. Or maybe he was punishing himself for failing to save her.
She thinks of how Declan died. Her part in it. Her failure.
“You’re not s’posed to cry over Feebs,” Mikey says, looking oddly at her.
Shiv wipes her face. “No, I know. Sorry.”
He goes on studying her before shifting his gaze again. Towards the base of the hill, the log on its side where he left it. For a moment, she thinks he’s about to go over there and carry it up the slope once more.
“It’s all over in a few seconds, isn’t it?” Shiv says quickly. “They’re there, and then they’re not – and you can’t ever have those seconds back. That moment when you could’ve made things turn out differently.”
Mikey won’t meet her gaze; she can tell she has his attention though. She starts to explain what happened the night Declan died but he cuts in.
“I know. It was on the news.”
Shiv shakes her head. “What they said on TV and in the papers—” she breaks off. Tells him the true version – the one where she’s to blame.
They are silent afterwards. She checks her watch; late for dinner but so what? She could go on sitting with him like this for ages – until it’s cold and dark and they’d merge into the gloom of the woods as surely as if they were draped beneath a cloak of invisibility.
“We should go back,” she says, reluctantly. “Before they send out a search party.”
Mikey frowns, as though only vaguely aware that someone is speaking to him.
“They didn’t find her for two days,” he says. “Some bloke fishing spotted her – nowhere near where she went in.” He sniffs, swallows. “First off he thought it was a dead dog. ’S what he said. A dead dog floating in the water.”
That night in her sleep she is in the woods near Aunt Rosh’s place, with Dec. They’ve run on ahead of the adults, scouting for trees to climb.
It starts off as an actual memory two summers ago: Declan picking out a large sycamore and making it almost to the top before panic sets in. He doesn’t call for help – just clings to a high branch that bows with his weight, like he’s in a trance. Shiv has already scrambled back to the ground and is gazing uselessly up into the canopy.
When the others catch up, Shiv expects Dad to kick straight into action, or Aunt Rosh, the athlete, but, before either of them grasps the situation, Mum has shrugged off her rucksack and is hauling herself up the tree.
“I’m coming, Dec. You just hold on tight as you can and I’ll be right there.”
Positioning herself below Declan, Mum reassures him, coaxes, reaches up to guide first one foot then the other to a lower branch – again and again, all the way down to the ground, where Dec stands stock-still, face bleached with shock, while their mother tidies his clothes and hair, like getting mussed up is the worst of it.
In her dream, though, things happen differently.
Shiv is the one on the high branch, not Declan. The tree sways in the wind and an icy, numbing rain lashes down and – bizarrely, impossibly – there are no lower branches by which she might climb back down. Or by which anyone might clamber up to rescue her.
Worse, two large dogs prowl around the base of the tree – lean as timber wolves – baying dementedly, waiting for her to fall.
“I could’ve died,” Declan said that evening, back at Aunt Rosh’s.
Dad shook his head. “Not today, Dec. It wasn’t your turn.”