21 AUGUST

Four days before abandonment

21

After the street party, Blackthorn Ashes changed again. Not just the people – circling one another at a distance, staying indoors – the houses changed too. When Agnes walked home from the woods, Redthorn and Silverthorn seemed to turn away, hunching against the skyline. An undercurrent of violence ran from house to house, its high-frequency vibration charging the air. Blackthorn Ashes was on the brink of something.

Chloe Mason cried a lot since the incident in the sandpit, all her happy ferocity gone. Agnes was used to her piling out of the car after a day on the beach, sand in her hair, ice cream on her chin, bickering with her brother. Felix holding her toy just out of reach as she jumped and shouted, ‘Give it back!’ Baby Sasha lifted from her car seat, little head and legs lolling, fast asleep. Maythorn used to ring with the sound of them shouting and playing but now it echoed with the thin noise of Chloe’s weeping.

Most days, Agnes crept away as soon as it was light. To the beach or deep into the woods. The summer she was sixteen, she lived on the beach. Ruth, expecting a new baby, had no time for her when all they did was fight. Agnes knew she should be glad of the break in hostilities, that she was no longer the sole focus of her mother’s attention. But Ruth’s judgement – so quick and piercing – turned out to be the thing keeping her grounded. Without it, she began to spiral. It started as fretfulness, a small fraying at the edges of everything. Her hands shook, she got dizzy for no reason. She paced, picking things up then putting them down. Colours hit her in sharp little slaps, stinging the skin around her eyes. Smells and sounds did the same. Ruth’s sudden silence ripped a hole in her routine. Words she was used to saying or shouting died behind her teeth, leaving a foul taste. The beach was the best place to spiral. If she lay flat on the sand and shut her eyes, she could feel the world tilting under her, taking her with it. Grass was too soft and full of thrumming life. The beach was hard, impacted sand with no give in it. The beach was like Ruth.

Agnes didn’t sunbathe. She wore long-sleeved T-shirts and jeans, covering her head and face with a wide-brimmed hat. Like that, she could spend all day with the sun drilling down. It wasn’t good for her but she wasn’t looking for good – she was looking for the same.

‘Nice tan,’ Trevor joked when he saw her returning one afternoon.

The heat was draining out of the day, her limbs weak and trembling. He was on the path in front of her, smoking a cigarette. All of a sudden, she was freezing cold.

He reached a hand to touch the base of her throat. ‘Goosebumps.’ He lifted his thumb as if she should be able to see her goosebumps imprinted on his skin.

He wore bleached jeans and a white T-shirt that gleamed so hard it was fluorescent. He was long and lean and roped with muscle. She was afraid of him, for the first time.

The cigarette hung from his lips; she could taste it, bitter on her tongue. She could smell the sea’s salt in his hair. He slouched his hips, tucking his thumb into the belt loop on his jeans, holding smoke in his mouth before letting it stream from his nose. In the smoke, she saw dragons, and lizards on arid rocks. Dizzy from the sun, the tips of her fingers were cold and clenched.

Every evening, he was there waiting for her to come up from the beach. The first few times he pretended it was coincidence, talking about her mum and dad, the new baby that was coming. After a day or two, he stopped talking and started touching. Hardly at all to begin with, a finger and thumb plucking a thread of seaweed from her shoulder, a palm dusting sand from her sleeve. It was hard to find places he could touch bare skin, she was always so overdressed.

‘Don’t you get hungry?’ he asked after touching her throat. ‘You’re down there all day.’

She shook her head but her gut griped as if it had needed this reminder. Ruth was the one who prompted her to eat, and to take her meds. She was busy nesting, that’s what Dad called it, folding tiny vests and muslin squares, packing and repacking her suitcase for the hospital. ‘I was stupid to try and have you at home,’ she’d said. ‘A first baby and I was only nineteen. I know better now.’

Trevor leant nearer, tapping ash from his cigarette onto the stony path under their feet. ‘You must be hungry.’ He stayed close, half turning his head to look out at the sea, his profile taut. He smelt of leather. She saw hawks and gauntlets.

‘I should get back.’

Her skin was twitching, restless. Her throat burnt where he’d put his thumb. A strange pain sat in the pit of her stomach, the place she’d seen Ruth massaging with the palm of her hand. ‘The baby’s head,’ she’d murmured, as she massaged herself.

Everything was badly blended, colours and flavours running into one another, sweet and sour and salty all at once.

‘I need to get back,’ she repeated.

To Ruth and their holiday home, crowded out with the any-day-now new baby, the air parched and thorny. Ruth was so changed, monstrously calm. Sitting on the sofa as if the baby were already in her lap, her bump so big it was always in the way. Lying on the bed with her sweat running into the pillows, smelling of milk and blood. Everything about her was alien, frightening.

Agnes tried to move past Trevor but he was too solid, his shadow a long furrow of shade, looking like a place she could rest. He’d soaked up the day’s sun, his skin spicy with it.

‘Come back to my place,’ he said indifferently. ‘There’s beer in the fridge. I can cook steaks, give your mum a night off.’

The beers were frosty. She drank from the bottle, holding the glass to the side of her neck, under the fall of her hair. His caravan was bigger than theirs, all sleek silver surfaces. The steaks were bloody, rich with butter. Her chin, greasy, had to be wiped.

‘Come here,’ he said.

His fingers were hot and dry, moving over her. Pink paint had dried on the heel of his left hand. She put out her tongue to taste it. It tasted of the shelves Dad had built for her, back at home.

Christie was born the next day. Quickly, in the hospital. One minute Ruth was huffing out breaths while Dad held her hand, the next she was taken to the labour ward, leaving her last huff hanging with a feather from her pillow, turning slowly as it fell towards the floor. The next time Agnes saw the pillow it was propping her new brother to her mother’s breast. Christie was red and skinny, his face squashed into a terrible shape they said was normal, the shape he made coming out of their mother. Everything was worse after that. Mess and stains and strange noises in the night; Agnes was less afraid of Trevor than she was of Ruth and Christie.

In Blackthorn Ashes, baby Sasha was pink and sleepy, her head lolling in the car seat, a sunhat strapped under her chin. Agnes watched the Masons the way she always watched other families, searching for clues in the shapes they made.

Chloe and Felix trailed into the house, their mother following with Sasha. Barry locked the car, lingering over the task as if to delay the moment he’d join them in the house. Agnes watched him bend to brush sand from the car seats, opening the boot to check inside before closing it again, resting his hand there for a long moment. He looked as if he wanted to get back into the car and drive away, keep driving. He was poisoned, she found out later. They all were.

It explained the tiredness that came like a cloud to blot out the sales-brochure sunshine. Ruth’s sore eyes, Dad’s chest pains, Christie’s headaches. Maybe it explained the way Barry leant against the car that afternoon, looking as if he’d give anything to escape. If he’d known how near he was to losing his children, he’d have raced inside, holding out his arms to gather them one last time. It was terrible to think like that, of lost chances, moments you could never have back. Eleven years of seeing her father’s smile, of watching Christie grow, trying to mend what she and Ruth had broken. Eleven years of wishing she’d taken the turn on the stony path, away from Trevor and back to them.