She comes home to a dark house, and she feels surprisingly disappointed. After three years of turning on the lights herself, it’s been nice to find someone else there when she opens the door.
She switches on the hall light and hangs up her coat. Takes a breath to call out, but something stops her. This quietness is like the quietness when they first arrived. When she would come home to the house uneasy and still and they would emerge from one bedroom or the other, always together, and greet her with that spooky smile. There has been less of that lately. She’s started to look forward to their presence. Sometimes they will even have made a start on dinner. Ilo, it turns out, is a good cook, and she’s eaten better since he volunteered that information than she has since Liam left.
But now the house is cold and quiet.
And then she hears a sob.
Sarah freezes in the hallway, the very hairs on her body listening. As her ear tunes in, she hears voices.
Who’s crying? It sounds like Eden. And then she hears hissing, angry tones of accusation, and Ilo’s light, breaking tenor, propitiating.
Sarah hangs on the bottom step. Of course she has known that this would come eventually. But they didn’t do tears in the Maxwell household, especially once the tempestuous moods of the rebel daughter had been dispatched. Liam said that there was something wrong with her. Women cry, he told her. It’s what they do. His little girlfriend cried all the time, she’s sure of it. Cried to display her womanhood, cried to persuade him that his wife had no emotions. But, if your early training teaches you that tears bring penalties, you learn not to show them unless you’re alone.
What do you do with tears? She’s not trained. No one has ever cried in front of her in her life – well, not anyone who mattered, about anything that mattered, and it sounds as though this matters. She has no idea what to do with it.
Despite her covenant with herself that she would not be dishonest with them, that she would not be the sort of person who spied on children without their knowledge, she creeps to the top of the stairs and listens.
The sob was an angry one. Definitely. ‘You’re meant to look after me, Ilo,’ she says. ‘Where were you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was in the entrance hall. Waiting for you.’
‘Well, that’s no bloody good, is it? You’re meant to look after me.’
‘It was crowded,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t anywhere to stand.’
Eden makes a sound of frustration. Of contempt. ‘You’re fucking useless,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’ll do better.’
A wail. Despair. ‘It’s too late now! Oh, my God, what am I going to do? I will die without it, Ilo! I will die! Don’t you understand?’
Sarah tenses. The hyperbole of adolescence, or should she be worrying? Eden sounds ... deranged. What’s made her this way?
‘I’ll get it back,’ he says.
‘How? Go on – how?’
‘I’ll ask.’
‘Ask? They’ll laugh in your face. You won’t even get close. Ilo, I’m going to die without it. Don’t you understand? You don’t seem to have the first idea how dangerous it is out here, for someone like me. I’m nothing without it. I might as well ... just do myself in now ...’
‘Eden, I – no – maybe if we ask someone ...’
‘Who are we going to ask?’
‘I don’t know. Aunt Sarah?’
‘And what’s she going to do?’
‘Eden, she’s meant to be on our side.’
‘Oh, come on,’ snaps Eden. ‘Nobody’s on our side. We’re on our own, Ilo. It’s just you and me, so really it’s just me, isn’t it?’
‘Eden—’ he begins, but she cuts him off.
‘You’re nothing,’ she says. ‘If I die and the world ends, it’s your fault.’
Sarah feels a sting of hurt. All that effort and Eden, at least, clearly trusts her no more now than she did at the beginning. And then she has a pang of conscience about what she’s doing. You should have learned your lesson about eavesdropping in the toilet on Monday, she thinks. Serves you right. And if they don’t trust you, you need to put more effort in to make them trust you.
She retreats to the foot of the stairs and calls out. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’
A ringing silence. The way cicadas go quiet in the night at the sound of a predator. Then the door opens, and there they are, smiling. Smiling, smiling. No sign of ill temper on Eden’s face, no apology on Ilo’s. They’re totally playing me, she thinks, then no, come on. They just don’t know you yet. You’re the grown-up. It’s up to you to gain their trust, not the other way round.
‘Hello, Aunt Sarah,’ says Eden. ‘You’re early.’
‘Friday,’ she tells her. ‘Poet’s Day.’
Little frowns of incomprehension cross their faces.
‘Piss off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,’ she says, coming back up the stairs, but not even the mild cuss word seems to amuse them. ‘I was getting a bit worried for a moment. You were so quiet I thought you’d run off and left me.’
‘No,’ says Ilo. ‘We were just ... up here.’
‘How was your day?’
Come on. Trust me. Tell me. How are we going to move forward if you don’t trust me?
‘Okay,’ says Ilo, and Eden says nothing.
‘Are you all right, Eden?’ she ventures.
Eden’s hand paws at her breastbone, where that ugly little pendant usually lives.
‘Have you lost your necklace?’ she asks.
Eden turns round and slams her bedroom door closed. Ilo stands awkwardly on the landing.
‘Is she okay?’ asks Sarah.
He looks forty years old. ‘She will be,’ he says. ‘She’s stronger than she thinks. It’s okay, Aunt Sarah.’
‘Would it help if I—’
He shakes his head. ‘Not right now, I think.’
Don’t push it. It’s the difference between cats and dogs, she thinks. You go to dogs, if you want them to love you. Cats, you have to allow to come to you.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
‘D’you want to come and give me a hand? We can take some up to her if she doesn’t want to come down.’
Ilo even seems to like cooking.
‘Perhaps you’ll be a chef,’ she says. ‘You’re so skilled already.’
He brightens with the praise, dispatches an onion at the speed of light, his blade flashing as he chops. ‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘Did you cook much, at Plas Golau? You’ve got amazing knife skills. You’re practically professional!’
Seems a bland enough sort of question to bring up the subject with.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘In the Guard House. I wasn’t much use for anything else, as I’d only just joined. But it’s good practice.’
‘I can see!’ she says. ‘So I have to ask, Ilo. Has something happened at school? I can’t pretend I haven’t spotted that Eden’s upset.’
The knife pauses, carries on. ‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Just stupid stuff. She gets upset. It’s difficult for her. Harder for her, being normal, because of who she is. It’s easier for me. I was never particularly special.’
‘Who she is ...?’
The knife pauses again. ‘Sorry. I thought you knew she was Lucien’s?’ he asks, as though that were explanation enough.
‘Oh.’
How many questions is too many? At what point does it stop being interested and start being intrusive? I must remember that this stuff is still real to them.
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Has something happened, though? She seems like ...’
‘She’s lost her medallion,’ he says.
‘Her what?’
‘The medallion she wears round her neck. It’s important to her.’
‘How important?’
‘It’s a ... symbol, really. All of Father’s children wore them.’
‘A sort of amulet – a good luck charm?’
He considers. ‘Sort of. It’s hard to explain. They’re part of them, those medallions, from the day they’re born.’
‘So she feels naked without it?’
Ilo nods. ‘Yes. Like that. Exposed.’
‘Oh, God. When did she lose it?’
‘In the playground, today. As we were coming out to go home.’
‘Did you find it?’
Ilo gives her a look that reflects how stupid the question is.
‘Sorry. I mean, did you look?’
Again the look. Back off, old person. If you’re going to ask questions, ask intelligent ones, at least.
‘I’m sorry. Is it valuable?’
‘I don’t suppose anyone on the Outside would think it was. But she does.’
‘Okay. I’ll put an alert on when we go in in the morning. Put a notice up on the noticeboard ...’
Ilo pulls a face. ‘Someone’s got it, I think,’ he says.
‘Well, that’s stealing,’ she says, firmly. ‘There are punishments for that.’
He pulls another face, scrapes his onions into the casserole dish to fry.
Eden comes down to dinner, and she’s cleaned her face and plastered that smile on again, but she refuses to look at her brother, ignores him when he puts a plate in front of her at the table, like an Edwardian lady in a restaurant. I’m not going to get anything out of her tonight, thinks Sarah, and tries anyway. ‘Eden,’ she says, ‘if there’s something going on that’s upsetting you, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? It’s what I’m here for. To help.’
Her voice rises and takes on a tone of command. ‘It’s Ilo’s fault, Aunt Sarah. It’s up to him to sort it out.’
‘But,’ she protests, ‘you don’t have to do this stuff on your own, Eden. It’s what I’m here for. There are rules, you know. If you’re being bullied, if someone’s picking on you, they’re breaking them.’
Those clear blue eyes, gazing straight at her. ‘Oh, in the end, I don’t mind that,’ she says. ‘I want my medallion, but I feel sorry for them. For all of them.’
‘Why’s that?’ asks Sarah.
‘Because they’re stupid,’ says Eden, ‘and they will all die screaming.’
Once they’ve retired to bed, she goes out into the garden for her evening cigarette. She allows herself two a day, as much in defiance of rules as for the actual pleasure they bring.
She sits on one of her parents’ green-painted cast-iron chairs at their cast-iron table and smokes as slowly as she can, tapping her ashes into her mother’s green-and-beige St Ives School cachepot. I’m no good at this, she thinks. Who do I even ask? Everyone I’ve talked to sees the whole Ark thing the way I do, as some sort of crazy world organised around theories we don’t really understand that don’t make sense, but God knows the world’s full of catastrophists waiting for the sky to fall. They’re hardly the only ones. I need help here, and it’s not finding someone I can talk to, it’s finding someone they can talk to. Someone who won’t constantly be biting their lip or saying the wrong thing because they don’t understand what they believe. There’s always going to be a degree of mistrust if I can’t show them in some concrete way that I’m on their side.
She gets out her wallet and looks through the notes section. Finds her niece Romy’s address. Stares at it as her cigarette burns down to the filter, then makes her decision as she stubs it out.