At home, her mum quizzed her about what she had done with Silvis that day. Bea paused. Was now the time to tell them the truth? But in the world of the blind, light was a lie. Speaking proved nothing. Somehow, she had to show them.
She decided to wait until she had spoken further with Odi. Instead, she told them a pack of lies about a day at the park with Silvis. They seemed to swallow it.
That night, Bea woke up in the wee hours to see the fetish hovering in her room. It faced the window, muttering to itself in a hoarse whisper. Then it floated slowly round to face her door, as if it was following some presence outside the house. It made two or three slow revolutions of the room, always facing outwards, before waiting a long, long time, looking downhill. Then it hooted softly to itself and came to lie on her pillow, close by her. It smelt of pee and rum and mud. The whole experience had such a strange, dreamlike quality that in the morning Bea wasn’t sure if it had really happened or not.
By the time she got up, her mum and dad were drinking tea around the kitchen table. Bea had some breakfast and told them she was off down the park skating again – but they wanted to walk to town with her. Bea was disappointed – she had an appointment in Heptonstall. But there was no way out of it, so she went to put on her skater gear. Back in the kitchen, her dad noticed that she wasn’t wearing the necklace he’d given her.
‘Not when I’m boarding,’ said Bea. ‘It’s too precious.’ He looked so disappointed that she ran to put her arms around him. ‘It really is my most precious thing,’ she told him. ‘I couldn’t bear it if it fell off.’
‘It’s meant to be worn,’ he told her.
‘Go and put it on,’ her mum told her.
Bea went to do as she was told. Odi had said to be careful, not that she absolutely couldn’t wear it. It made her dad happy. He ran his fingers across the stones as they lay in the pit of her throat and smiled.
‘You can’t lose it,’ he said.
‘Don’t tell her that!’ exclaimed her mum. ‘Poor thing’ll be terrified. You can lose anything, especially when you’re thirteen.’
‘I didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to lose it,’ said her dad. Although what he did mean, he didn’t say.
The whole family set out down the hill, her dad to the shop, her mum to the swings with Michael, and Bea, with her board under her arm, off to the skateboard park. Baby Michael babbled in his pushchair while Bea and her mum and dad talked about school – in just five days’ time! Bea could hardly believe it.
But was she actually going to go? Her life was on a knife edge – everything could change at any moment.
They dropped her dad off at the shop and Bea left her mum in the park. She bent down to hug Michael.
‘Are you a witch too, baby Michael?’ she whispered. ‘Is it you and me together?’
‘Bea, Bea, Bea,’ cooed Michael back. Bea stood up. Suddenly she felt like crying.
‘What were you telling him?’ her mum asked.
‘Telling him I’m a witch,’ said Bea. Her mum laughed at her, and went to find a free swing. Bea headed for the ramps.
It was mid-morning already. The skaters were all there, practising their tricks, Lars among them. Bea joined in, but her heart wasn’t in it. He got cross about it. It was funny – he so much wanted her to be his follower.
‘What’s up with you?’ he asked, pulling her up by the arm after yet another fall. He gazed into her eyes, scowling as if there was a secret hidden there. There was. Bea stared steadily back at him, daring him to see her true self. But of course he couldn’t. Even had he been a witch, she wore the fetish Odi had given her in her pocket.
A little later her mum came to say she was going back. Bea gave her fifteen minutes before she made her way up the hill to be amongst her own kind.
She learned a lot more that day about the witches and the gifts they had. Tyra showed her more of the Grip – she set a spell on the front door so that they were all locked in for half an hour. Even throwing rocks at the glass didn’t work – the stones just bounced off. Frey showed her how to tuck plants into the earth and gave her a spell so they would hold tight to their fruits until they were properly ripe.
Jenny was a little better that day and Bea was able to spend time sitting with her in her room. Her ability to read minds came through a spirit from one of the other worlds that was able to sit in people’s brains and see what was in there. She conjured it up for Bea. It took the form of a Pakistani lady who sat on the end of the bed, and whenever a memory emerged that Jenny had forgotten, she reminded her of what it was. She stayed with them for maybe half an hour until Jenny fell asleep, when she hissed furiously at Bea, turned into a squirrel and jumped out of the window.
Odi came to join her for a while. He sat quietly until Bea left for the toilet. When she came back, she could hear him weeping by the bedside. She waited a while, popped her head through the door to say goodbye, and left him to it. He looked so tragic, sitting there holding his dying wife’s hand. Unfairly, she was surprised that love could spring so strong in a heart as old as his.
She spent a very enjoyable hour or so with Silvis and her voice, trying to open locks. It didn’t always work, though. Silvis could make the rabbit’s hutch spring open pretty well every time, and sometimes she was able to pop the locks on Frey’s chicken house and a few other things, but that was it. She put on a brave face, but Bea could see how disappointed she was.
‘It’ll get stronger as you get older,’ said Bea.
Silvis shrugged. ‘Odi says it may be because I lost my family so early. Either that or I’m just not very good. Someone has to be not very good, don’t they?’ she said sadly. Loyally, Bea refused to believe it.
Odi wanted to take another look at the fetish he had given her – he had some ideas of how to strengthen it, using a drop of her blood and some fragments of a mirror she had looked in. He had a little workshop at the back of the house lined with shelves where he kept all the things he needed. What Bea had seen in the caravan so long ago was just a mobile workshop – this was the full kit. He kept dried plant and animal material – human as well as beast’s – from all over the world in Tupperware boxes on racks and shelves up and down the walls. Feathers, bits of mirror, even pieces of machinery all had their role to play.
As he worked, he talked to her about her family.
‘You’re right to think you can’t explain things to them,’ he said, holding the mirror above the smoke from the singed hairs from some kind of animal. ‘The spirit world can’t be explained, it can only be shown, and only a witch can see it.’ He paused, watching the smoke drift across the surface of the fragments of mirror. ‘Of course, it’s your father we must consider first. We know that he has powers of some kind, however deeply buried they may be. The trouble is – how can we get him to recognise it?’
Odi finished his spells on the piece of mirror. He laid it flat on his worktop and tapped it with a stone so that it shattered. All around the room, the little fetishes he had hung up to cure jumped and shouted.
‘But if he is a witch, he must be able to see, mustn’t he?’ Bea insisted.
‘Not so,’ said Odi. ‘Most of us only ever see a fraction of what’s there, and three quarters of the world isn’t always there in the first place. Remember how much all this scared you? What if your father is afraid too? Grown-ups are often far more scared than children – they’ve just learned to hide it, even from themselves. Still – we must do our best with him. When do you think is a good time to get to him?’
They laid their plans, but first of all Bea would try to find out if he had seen or heard anything that night on the moors.
‘It won’t be easy for him,’ Odi said. ‘But if you get any idea at all that he knows what you’re talking about, bring him to the caravan. I’ll know you’re there.’