Looking Glass Sound, page 2
‘Like Hawthorne?’
‘My last name’s Pelletier.’
‘I meant, Nathaniel Hawthorne the writer.’ He looks uncomfortable. I go on quickly, ‘I’m Wilder. It’s a weird name. You can call me Will.’ I’ve been waiting to try ‘Will’ out for a while.
‘Nah, it’s cool. Like a wrestler or something. You’re wild, but I’m wilder!’ He bares white healthy teeth in a snarl. It sits oddly on his friendly features.
‘I’m Wildah,’ I repeat, and really it doesn’t sound so bad, the way he says it. Like something from a play.
He punches me on the arm, fake mad and I laugh and he grins. ‘Don’t worry about Harper,’ he says. ‘She’s rich so she doesn’t need manners.’
I laugh again because he seems to be joking, but I think, she really didn’t seem to have any.
‘You want to swim with us later? We’re going late this afternoon. We’ll make a fire, sit out.’
I hesitate. I want to go but I’m scared too. I don’t really know how to talk to people.
I start to tell Nat no, just as my dad comes out of the post office and beckons to me.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say.
‘We’ll come by the bay around five,’ he calls after me, and half of me is so happy that he seems to want to be friends, and the other is unnerved because it all seems to be settled without my doing anything at all.
I won’t hang out with them, I know better. I’ll pretend I’m busy when they arrive.
Nat, Harper and I sit on the sand, silent and a little awkward, watching the tide go out. The wet sand of the bay is slick and grey. It’s obscene like viscera, a surface that shouldn’t be uncovered. Behind us on the beach, the bonfire smokes half-heartedly. As it turns out, we aren’t any of us much good at lighting fires. Harper looks even more beautiful in the long, low light. She has the smooth, angular face of a fairy or a cunning child, I think, and then immediately wish I could write that down to use later. I feel the beginnings of stirring in my chinos and after that I purposely don’t look at her again. I feel her presence next to me, warm like a small sun.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harper says. ‘I was horrid the other day.’
‘Oh, no problem,’ I say, cautious. ‘I mean, it was just kidding around.’ That’s always the best thing to say to people who might hurt you. It takes the pressure off of them.
‘No, it was mean. I get these moods. I try not to but I do.’ She pauses. ‘It was also somewhat confusing; you have very unusual—’ She pauses, and I feel sorry for her; she’s trying not to be rude again.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I get it all the time.’
People form opinions of me quickly because of the way I look. My eyes are very big, which is supposed to be good. But they’re too big, like a bush baby’s. And they’re pale. So pale it’s hard to even tell what colour they are. They almost blend in with my skin, which is also really pale. I’m planning to get a tan this summer – to look more like a regular guy and less like some kind of insect.
‘Yeah,’ Nat says. ‘The guy who lived here before you had the same eyes, the same – colour.’ He squints and leans away, looking at me. ‘You look like a younger version. He swam here in the mornings too.’ He pauses. ‘He was nice, we talked sometimes. He liked taking pictures of the coast around here.’
‘I thought he died,’ Harper says. ‘Are you a ghost?’
‘That was my Uncle Vernon,’ I say. ‘He did die.’
‘Hey, Harper.’ Nat’s voice is easy but she looks up and flushes.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I get a bit personal sometimes.’
‘It’s OK. I didn’t know him. My dad calls it the Harlow look. Big bug eyes, white skin.’
I risk a surreptitious glance at Harper. Her skin is white too, but creamy, scattered with golden freckles. She looks like a human being, at least, whereas I’m aware I kind of don’t. She shivers and I want to give her my sweater but I don’t. I’ve seen it done in movies, giving a girl your sweater, but I’ve never done it myself, or really even spoken to a girl, and I feel shy.
‘Where do you go to school?’ I ask them.
‘Edison High, in Castine,’ Nat says. ‘We live on the shore.’ I’ve seen those houses on the shore. They’re bleached silver, roofs often patched with aluminium.
Nat wears ragged denim cutoffs and a faded Red Sox t-shirt that’s too big for him. I feel the hot poke of shame. The kids at Scottsboro call me poor so often I’ve got used to it – my mom takes the pants on my uniform down each year instead of buying me new ones. I get a bursary for schoolbooks. But I am reminded now that I’m not poor.
Harper says, ‘I’m starting boarding school in the autumn.’ She sighs. ‘It’s a good one, and I’m so bad at school. I probably won’t last long there. I’ll probably end up at Fairview.’
I’ve heard of Fairview. It’s where rich people dump their daughters when there’s nowhere else left.
‘I belong at Fairview really,’ Harper says gloomily. ‘It’s a crap school for people who are crap at school. Everyone knows it. Even I know it.’ She frowns and pokes the sand with a stick. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Oh. Well, goodbye.’ My heart sinks. But I’ve had an hour with her.
‘I mean to the UK.’
‘I don’t think you’ll make it by dark,’ Nat says.
‘Funny.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t want to go to boarding school. I’m going to miss Samuel so much.’
‘Who’s Samuel?’ I keep my tone casual, even though jealousy is a hot lance in my side. I can’t tell if I hide it well or not.
‘Oh. My dog,’ Harper says. ‘He’s a dachshund. He’s small but he doesn’t act like a small dog. He’s got dignity. They’re giving him to the housekeeper, or that’s what they say. It’s probably a lie. Mama’s probably having him put down. He’s so lovely. He always knows when I’m scared. He always comes.’ She gets up and dusts her palms free of sand. ‘I suppose I do have to go now. It’ll be dark soon.’
‘Walk you back?’ Nat says.
‘Better not,’ she says. ‘They wouldn’t like it.’ They exchange a look. I burn with envy at the natural intimacy between them. Once again I wonder if they’re doing it.
We both watch her pick her way up the path in the fading light, crest the clifftop, and vanish into the purple sky.
Nat settles back down into the sand. ‘Harper got kicked out of every school in England.’
‘What for?’
‘What not for? Everything. She mistrusts institutionalised authority structures.’ His mimicry of her cut-glass tones is pretty good.
‘Have you two known each other long?’
‘A couple years. Her folks come out every summer.’
‘Is – are you two, like, involved?’
‘No.’
‘I thought maybe you were.’
‘No. But I’m in love with her,’ he says.
‘What?’ It is a shocking thing to say out loud, like someone taking off their clothes in public.
‘I said, I’m in love with her. I’m going to make her love me, one day.’
‘But you don’t just – tell people stuff like that.’ My fists are balled. I can’t hang my anger on anything rational, and that makes me angrier still. ‘That kind of thing is private, you keep it to yourself . . .’
‘Maybe you do, or try to,’ he says with a sudden flash of anger. ‘But you’re not so good at it. You look at her all the time when she isn’t looking. But you can’t even look her in the eyes; it’s embarrassing. Like you’ve never seen a girl before.’
‘You’re not getting anywhere either,’ I say. ‘How long have you been thinking about, like, holding her hand?’
‘I’ll still get further than you,’ he says, confident, and I know he’s right.
Before I can think my palm hits his cheek with a crack. He puts his hand up to the red print mine has left behind. ‘Did you just slap me?’ he asks slowly.
I rear back as his fist comes at my face and the punch lands on my breastbone just above my heart. My chest explodes into pain and I gasp. I go for him now, raining blows on his face and chest and everywhere I can reach. I’m not great at fighting but I don’t think Nat is either, because neither of us lands many good ones. But he gives me a black eye and I get him one on the side of the face.
We fight until we cough sand and it’s in every crevice of our bodies, until we’re panting and exhausted. Neither of us seems likely to win so we just kind of stop by common consent, roll away from one another and lie on our backs, spitting grit.
‘Sorry.’ I hesitate. ‘I really thought you two were – you know – together.’
‘Nope,’ he says. ‘We’re friends.’ He sighed. ‘I thought at first you and me could be friends.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I thought that too. But it can’t work if both of us are in love with her.’
‘I think we have to be,’ Nat says. ‘Friends, and in love with her.’ He’s right, it isn’t possible to stop either thing.
‘We can’t fight all the time.’
‘We have to work out some kind of, like, agreement.’
‘OK,’ I say, thinking. ‘So, rule one, no cheating, no going behind the other’s back. We have to agree that from now on, neither one of us tries to get her. Agreed?’
‘And we can’t ever tell her about it,’ he says. ‘That’s a rule too. Deal?’
‘Deal.’ I shake his hand.
He touches his cheekbone with a tentative finger and winces. ‘Good thing my dad’s night fishing. Sleeps in the day. He won’t see me in the sun ’til a week.’ He pauses. ‘That was fun, though. Good fight.’
We kick sand over the smouldering remains of the bonfire and go up the path.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he calls behind him.
I’m apprehensive about my parents seeing my black eye. I needn’t be, as it turns out. My mother puts arnica on my face and makes tutting noises.
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘We’re friends now. Me and Nat.’
‘You usually make friends by roughhousing?’ she asks, amused, and I realise she thinks it healthy for a boy my age – roughhousing.
The next day Harper and Nat are at the white fence after breakfast.
Harper stares at my eye. ‘Gnarly,’ she says, then, very English, ‘What a shiner.’ A sour scent hangs about her.
‘Like I said,’ Nat says, ‘I stumbled, grabbed Wilder and we both wiped out. Rolled down the path.’ Turning to me he says, ‘We’re going out on the boat. It’s down on the water.’
Harper picks her way down the shale path with exaggerated care. ‘Mustn’t slip,’ she says as if to herself, shooting me a look under her lashes.
The boat bobs on the water in the morning sun. She’s chipped and scraped all over, and you can see every colour she’s ever been painted, her past written on her like a record. Siren, reads the shaky black lettering on her stern. The outboard motor at the back leaks a narrow trail of oil into the water.
There are only two life jackets so after some argument we agree that the only solution is for none of us to wear one.
‘One dies, we all die,’ I say. It’s pleasing.
‘Seems like you two are doing a pretty good job at killing yourselves,’ Harper says. She watches me with bird-like focus. She takes off her big, clunky gold watch and puts it carefully in a Ziploc bag, then stows it in the locker beneath the bench.
The little outboard engine chugs against the waves. We put her nose out into open water, go out of sight of land, looking for great white sharks. When navy-blue water surrounds us in every direction Nat stops the engine. We take turns jumping off the side into the deep, gasping with shock at the cold, our breath coming fast, picturing monsters moving slowly in the depths below us. We don’t see any sharks and soon it gets to feeling lonely, nothing but water everywhere. When we sight the shoreline again we yell with relief, as though we’ve been adrift for many days.
We make our way slowly up the coast, passing houses perched on cliffs, hillsides rugged with dark pine forest, green meadows studded with ox-eye daisies. On a lonely stretch we surprise a family of seals sunning themselves on flat rocks in a sheltered cove. They watch us, tranquil, with their strange round eyes but don’t move. They know we’re no threat – we’re part of the ocean now.
Harper talks about Grace Kelly. She loves Grace Kelly. It’s like the words fill her to breaking point and have to be released. It seems almost an impersonal act, her talk – a mechanical release not meant as communication. ‘Such control,’ Harper mutters to the sea. ‘As an actor, as a woman. She told the truth all the time, but she was a castle of her own making. No one could reach the real her. It was perfect. She made herself safe in a dangerous world.’
‘Harp?’ Nat touches her gently with his foot and she starts.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I just think actors are holy, you know?’
Harper talks about her dog, too. ‘The thing I miss most about Samuel is the way he protected me from my dad,’ she says. Then she sits up abruptly and scans the cliffs. ‘Do you think the Dagger Man is watching?’
‘Ah, we don’t need to talk about that,’ Nat says. A rare flash of discomfort crosses his friendly face. ‘It’s freaky.’
‘I think he’s watching. I think he’s waiting for us to come ashore somewhere really remote and then he’ll come for us, quick as a shadow, holding his dagger above his head . . .’ She raises a fist behind her head as if to stab. Her red hair falls about her face, which has become dark and frightening.
I ask, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The guy who breaks into houses round here,’ Harper says. ‘The Dagger Man. Don’t you know? You’re not local, so I suppose no one tells you anything.’
I don’t point out that owning a large house you visit for a month a year is hardly being local. ‘You tell me, then.’
‘It happened last year,’ Harper says. ‘There were break-ins. Always visitors, no one local. But the thing is—’
‘—he takes pictures of people asleep,’ Nat says. ‘It’s not as big a deal as she’s making it sound.’
Harper says, ‘He only takes pictures of the kids. And it is a big deal. They think he does it to children because they’d be easier to overpower if they woke up. Then he leaves. Like I said, he doesn’t take anything, that they can tell. The family don’t even know they’ve been broken into, even.’
‘So how—’
‘He sends the photos to people,’ Harper says. ‘The Polaroids. At least, that’s what I heard my dad say. The police, the families. Sleeping children. And they say that in the Polaroids there’s a kind of dagger at the child’s throat. It happened to the Masons, and the Bartletts, I think some other family but I don’t remember who. Anyway it stopped when summer ended. But everyone’s wondering if it’ll start again.’
‘We’re not kids,’ I say. ‘We’re probably going to be ok.’ Unease is all through me. And some other feeling, too. I stare at her hand, which often squeezes her knee or thigh for emphasis, or as if for stability. Her nails are bitten to the quick and she has an old, greying Band-Aid wrapped around her thumb. There are tiny golden hairs on her legs, which occasionally catch the midday sun like fine wire. When I look up, Harper’s eyes are fixed on me.
‘His name,’ Harper says dreamily, looking at me. ‘I think of it as all one word. Daggerman, daggerman . . .’
‘Don’t. . .’ I feel like something’s going to happen if she says the name a third time.
‘Got one!’ Nat yells from the front of the boat and we both jump as if waking from a dream.
Nat pulls the writhing fish from the hook and hits it against the prow until its brains spray out in the bright air. Its body is long and beautiful and bloody. ‘Striper,’ he says, putting the fish in the cold box, laying the pole carefully down in the bottom of the boat.
We pull into a tiny white beach, no more than a spit of white sand. Nat finds oysters growing waist deep on the rocks beneath the surface. He opens them carefully with the oyster knife. ‘My dad carved this,’ he says proudly. ‘Cool, huh?’ The handle of the oyster knife is walnut, worn smooth with use, chased with a pattern of tiny fish. ‘He gave it to me for my birthday when I was, like, seven.’
‘My dad would never let me have a knife,’ I say, enviously.
‘He’s pretty cool,’ Nat says. ‘He catches seals sometimes, in the shark rig. That’s why he always keeps a boat hook in the Siren. What you do is come up beside it, knock it out with the hook, snare it in the shark rig, then pull it along beside the boat for a time, until it’s ready to do whatever you want. Then you take it somewhere else on shore to finish it.’
Without hot sauce or lemon the oysters are disgusting but I still eat two. We build a fire from driftwood. We’re a little better at it, this time, don’t put too much wood on at once to start. We gut the sea bass, wrap it in aluminium and cook it on the coals. The fish’s flesh is charred to black in some places and almost raw in others, but we devour it anyway. Spider crabs scuttle near on delicate legs. We throw them the fishbones and they swarm over the skeleton, picking it clean. We lie on our backs on the warm white sand, watching the thin corkscrew of smoke rise into the air. The sun burns above and our skins grow pink and sore.
‘This is the best day of my life,’ I almost tell them – but I don’t. I want to keep all this life corked tight inside me, bubbling and dangerous.
Harper pulls a bottle of Jim Beam out of her bag. It’s maybe a third full and we pass it between us, sputtering as the heat strokes down our gullets. ‘You might as well tell me,’ Harper says into the quiet. ‘Why you fought.’
‘We didn’t fight.’ I’m dreamy with whiskey. ‘Nat fell on the path, took me down with him.’
‘Whatever. You’re both terrible liars.’ Harper holds up the empty whiskey bottle. ‘Let’s spin it,’ she says.
My heart crawls up my throat into my mouth, a warm lump. I’ve never played spin the bottle, never kissed anyone. I wonder what it would be like to kiss Harper. I wonder if I’m going to throw up. Nat’s watching me. I wonder, through a white haze of panic, what this means for our deal.
‘Harper,’ he says, but she hisses ‘ssssssh!’ and glares at him.
‘My last name’s Pelletier.’
‘I meant, Nathaniel Hawthorne the writer.’ He looks uncomfortable. I go on quickly, ‘I’m Wilder. It’s a weird name. You can call me Will.’ I’ve been waiting to try ‘Will’ out for a while.
‘Nah, it’s cool. Like a wrestler or something. You’re wild, but I’m wilder!’ He bares white healthy teeth in a snarl. It sits oddly on his friendly features.
‘I’m Wildah,’ I repeat, and really it doesn’t sound so bad, the way he says it. Like something from a play.
He punches me on the arm, fake mad and I laugh and he grins. ‘Don’t worry about Harper,’ he says. ‘She’s rich so she doesn’t need manners.’
I laugh again because he seems to be joking, but I think, she really didn’t seem to have any.
‘You want to swim with us later? We’re going late this afternoon. We’ll make a fire, sit out.’
I hesitate. I want to go but I’m scared too. I don’t really know how to talk to people.
I start to tell Nat no, just as my dad comes out of the post office and beckons to me.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say.
‘We’ll come by the bay around five,’ he calls after me, and half of me is so happy that he seems to want to be friends, and the other is unnerved because it all seems to be settled without my doing anything at all.
I won’t hang out with them, I know better. I’ll pretend I’m busy when they arrive.
Nat, Harper and I sit on the sand, silent and a little awkward, watching the tide go out. The wet sand of the bay is slick and grey. It’s obscene like viscera, a surface that shouldn’t be uncovered. Behind us on the beach, the bonfire smokes half-heartedly. As it turns out, we aren’t any of us much good at lighting fires. Harper looks even more beautiful in the long, low light. She has the smooth, angular face of a fairy or a cunning child, I think, and then immediately wish I could write that down to use later. I feel the beginnings of stirring in my chinos and after that I purposely don’t look at her again. I feel her presence next to me, warm like a small sun.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harper says. ‘I was horrid the other day.’
‘Oh, no problem,’ I say, cautious. ‘I mean, it was just kidding around.’ That’s always the best thing to say to people who might hurt you. It takes the pressure off of them.
‘No, it was mean. I get these moods. I try not to but I do.’ She pauses. ‘It was also somewhat confusing; you have very unusual—’ She pauses, and I feel sorry for her; she’s trying not to be rude again.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I get it all the time.’
People form opinions of me quickly because of the way I look. My eyes are very big, which is supposed to be good. But they’re too big, like a bush baby’s. And they’re pale. So pale it’s hard to even tell what colour they are. They almost blend in with my skin, which is also really pale. I’m planning to get a tan this summer – to look more like a regular guy and less like some kind of insect.
‘Yeah,’ Nat says. ‘The guy who lived here before you had the same eyes, the same – colour.’ He squints and leans away, looking at me. ‘You look like a younger version. He swam here in the mornings too.’ He pauses. ‘He was nice, we talked sometimes. He liked taking pictures of the coast around here.’
‘I thought he died,’ Harper says. ‘Are you a ghost?’
‘That was my Uncle Vernon,’ I say. ‘He did die.’
‘Hey, Harper.’ Nat’s voice is easy but she looks up and flushes.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I get a bit personal sometimes.’
‘It’s OK. I didn’t know him. My dad calls it the Harlow look. Big bug eyes, white skin.’
I risk a surreptitious glance at Harper. Her skin is white too, but creamy, scattered with golden freckles. She looks like a human being, at least, whereas I’m aware I kind of don’t. She shivers and I want to give her my sweater but I don’t. I’ve seen it done in movies, giving a girl your sweater, but I’ve never done it myself, or really even spoken to a girl, and I feel shy.
‘Where do you go to school?’ I ask them.
‘Edison High, in Castine,’ Nat says. ‘We live on the shore.’ I’ve seen those houses on the shore. They’re bleached silver, roofs often patched with aluminium.
Nat wears ragged denim cutoffs and a faded Red Sox t-shirt that’s too big for him. I feel the hot poke of shame. The kids at Scottsboro call me poor so often I’ve got used to it – my mom takes the pants on my uniform down each year instead of buying me new ones. I get a bursary for schoolbooks. But I am reminded now that I’m not poor.
Harper says, ‘I’m starting boarding school in the autumn.’ She sighs. ‘It’s a good one, and I’m so bad at school. I probably won’t last long there. I’ll probably end up at Fairview.’
I’ve heard of Fairview. It’s where rich people dump their daughters when there’s nowhere else left.
‘I belong at Fairview really,’ Harper says gloomily. ‘It’s a crap school for people who are crap at school. Everyone knows it. Even I know it.’ She frowns and pokes the sand with a stick. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Oh. Well, goodbye.’ My heart sinks. But I’ve had an hour with her.
‘I mean to the UK.’
‘I don’t think you’ll make it by dark,’ Nat says.
‘Funny.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t want to go to boarding school. I’m going to miss Samuel so much.’
‘Who’s Samuel?’ I keep my tone casual, even though jealousy is a hot lance in my side. I can’t tell if I hide it well or not.
‘Oh. My dog,’ Harper says. ‘He’s a dachshund. He’s small but he doesn’t act like a small dog. He’s got dignity. They’re giving him to the housekeeper, or that’s what they say. It’s probably a lie. Mama’s probably having him put down. He’s so lovely. He always knows when I’m scared. He always comes.’ She gets up and dusts her palms free of sand. ‘I suppose I do have to go now. It’ll be dark soon.’
‘Walk you back?’ Nat says.
‘Better not,’ she says. ‘They wouldn’t like it.’ They exchange a look. I burn with envy at the natural intimacy between them. Once again I wonder if they’re doing it.
We both watch her pick her way up the path in the fading light, crest the clifftop, and vanish into the purple sky.
Nat settles back down into the sand. ‘Harper got kicked out of every school in England.’
‘What for?’
‘What not for? Everything. She mistrusts institutionalised authority structures.’ His mimicry of her cut-glass tones is pretty good.
‘Have you two known each other long?’
‘A couple years. Her folks come out every summer.’
‘Is – are you two, like, involved?’
‘No.’
‘I thought maybe you were.’
‘No. But I’m in love with her,’ he says.
‘What?’ It is a shocking thing to say out loud, like someone taking off their clothes in public.
‘I said, I’m in love with her. I’m going to make her love me, one day.’
‘But you don’t just – tell people stuff like that.’ My fists are balled. I can’t hang my anger on anything rational, and that makes me angrier still. ‘That kind of thing is private, you keep it to yourself . . .’
‘Maybe you do, or try to,’ he says with a sudden flash of anger. ‘But you’re not so good at it. You look at her all the time when she isn’t looking. But you can’t even look her in the eyes; it’s embarrassing. Like you’ve never seen a girl before.’
‘You’re not getting anywhere either,’ I say. ‘How long have you been thinking about, like, holding her hand?’
‘I’ll still get further than you,’ he says, confident, and I know he’s right.
Before I can think my palm hits his cheek with a crack. He puts his hand up to the red print mine has left behind. ‘Did you just slap me?’ he asks slowly.
I rear back as his fist comes at my face and the punch lands on my breastbone just above my heart. My chest explodes into pain and I gasp. I go for him now, raining blows on his face and chest and everywhere I can reach. I’m not great at fighting but I don’t think Nat is either, because neither of us lands many good ones. But he gives me a black eye and I get him one on the side of the face.
We fight until we cough sand and it’s in every crevice of our bodies, until we’re panting and exhausted. Neither of us seems likely to win so we just kind of stop by common consent, roll away from one another and lie on our backs, spitting grit.
‘Sorry.’ I hesitate. ‘I really thought you two were – you know – together.’
‘Nope,’ he says. ‘We’re friends.’ He sighed. ‘I thought at first you and me could be friends.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I thought that too. But it can’t work if both of us are in love with her.’
‘I think we have to be,’ Nat says. ‘Friends, and in love with her.’ He’s right, it isn’t possible to stop either thing.
‘We can’t fight all the time.’
‘We have to work out some kind of, like, agreement.’
‘OK,’ I say, thinking. ‘So, rule one, no cheating, no going behind the other’s back. We have to agree that from now on, neither one of us tries to get her. Agreed?’
‘And we can’t ever tell her about it,’ he says. ‘That’s a rule too. Deal?’
‘Deal.’ I shake his hand.
He touches his cheekbone with a tentative finger and winces. ‘Good thing my dad’s night fishing. Sleeps in the day. He won’t see me in the sun ’til a week.’ He pauses. ‘That was fun, though. Good fight.’
We kick sand over the smouldering remains of the bonfire and go up the path.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he calls behind him.
I’m apprehensive about my parents seeing my black eye. I needn’t be, as it turns out. My mother puts arnica on my face and makes tutting noises.
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘We’re friends now. Me and Nat.’
‘You usually make friends by roughhousing?’ she asks, amused, and I realise she thinks it healthy for a boy my age – roughhousing.
The next day Harper and Nat are at the white fence after breakfast.
Harper stares at my eye. ‘Gnarly,’ she says, then, very English, ‘What a shiner.’ A sour scent hangs about her.
‘Like I said,’ Nat says, ‘I stumbled, grabbed Wilder and we both wiped out. Rolled down the path.’ Turning to me he says, ‘We’re going out on the boat. It’s down on the water.’
Harper picks her way down the shale path with exaggerated care. ‘Mustn’t slip,’ she says as if to herself, shooting me a look under her lashes.
The boat bobs on the water in the morning sun. She’s chipped and scraped all over, and you can see every colour she’s ever been painted, her past written on her like a record. Siren, reads the shaky black lettering on her stern. The outboard motor at the back leaks a narrow trail of oil into the water.
There are only two life jackets so after some argument we agree that the only solution is for none of us to wear one.
‘One dies, we all die,’ I say. It’s pleasing.
‘Seems like you two are doing a pretty good job at killing yourselves,’ Harper says. She watches me with bird-like focus. She takes off her big, clunky gold watch and puts it carefully in a Ziploc bag, then stows it in the locker beneath the bench.
The little outboard engine chugs against the waves. We put her nose out into open water, go out of sight of land, looking for great white sharks. When navy-blue water surrounds us in every direction Nat stops the engine. We take turns jumping off the side into the deep, gasping with shock at the cold, our breath coming fast, picturing monsters moving slowly in the depths below us. We don’t see any sharks and soon it gets to feeling lonely, nothing but water everywhere. When we sight the shoreline again we yell with relief, as though we’ve been adrift for many days.
We make our way slowly up the coast, passing houses perched on cliffs, hillsides rugged with dark pine forest, green meadows studded with ox-eye daisies. On a lonely stretch we surprise a family of seals sunning themselves on flat rocks in a sheltered cove. They watch us, tranquil, with their strange round eyes but don’t move. They know we’re no threat – we’re part of the ocean now.
Harper talks about Grace Kelly. She loves Grace Kelly. It’s like the words fill her to breaking point and have to be released. It seems almost an impersonal act, her talk – a mechanical release not meant as communication. ‘Such control,’ Harper mutters to the sea. ‘As an actor, as a woman. She told the truth all the time, but she was a castle of her own making. No one could reach the real her. It was perfect. She made herself safe in a dangerous world.’
‘Harp?’ Nat touches her gently with his foot and she starts.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I just think actors are holy, you know?’
Harper talks about her dog, too. ‘The thing I miss most about Samuel is the way he protected me from my dad,’ she says. Then she sits up abruptly and scans the cliffs. ‘Do you think the Dagger Man is watching?’
‘Ah, we don’t need to talk about that,’ Nat says. A rare flash of discomfort crosses his friendly face. ‘It’s freaky.’
‘I think he’s watching. I think he’s waiting for us to come ashore somewhere really remote and then he’ll come for us, quick as a shadow, holding his dagger above his head . . .’ She raises a fist behind her head as if to stab. Her red hair falls about her face, which has become dark and frightening.
I ask, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The guy who breaks into houses round here,’ Harper says. ‘The Dagger Man. Don’t you know? You’re not local, so I suppose no one tells you anything.’
I don’t point out that owning a large house you visit for a month a year is hardly being local. ‘You tell me, then.’
‘It happened last year,’ Harper says. ‘There were break-ins. Always visitors, no one local. But the thing is—’
‘—he takes pictures of people asleep,’ Nat says. ‘It’s not as big a deal as she’s making it sound.’
Harper says, ‘He only takes pictures of the kids. And it is a big deal. They think he does it to children because they’d be easier to overpower if they woke up. Then he leaves. Like I said, he doesn’t take anything, that they can tell. The family don’t even know they’ve been broken into, even.’
‘So how—’
‘He sends the photos to people,’ Harper says. ‘The Polaroids. At least, that’s what I heard my dad say. The police, the families. Sleeping children. And they say that in the Polaroids there’s a kind of dagger at the child’s throat. It happened to the Masons, and the Bartletts, I think some other family but I don’t remember who. Anyway it stopped when summer ended. But everyone’s wondering if it’ll start again.’
‘We’re not kids,’ I say. ‘We’re probably going to be ok.’ Unease is all through me. And some other feeling, too. I stare at her hand, which often squeezes her knee or thigh for emphasis, or as if for stability. Her nails are bitten to the quick and she has an old, greying Band-Aid wrapped around her thumb. There are tiny golden hairs on her legs, which occasionally catch the midday sun like fine wire. When I look up, Harper’s eyes are fixed on me.
‘His name,’ Harper says dreamily, looking at me. ‘I think of it as all one word. Daggerman, daggerman . . .’
‘Don’t. . .’ I feel like something’s going to happen if she says the name a third time.
‘Got one!’ Nat yells from the front of the boat and we both jump as if waking from a dream.
Nat pulls the writhing fish from the hook and hits it against the prow until its brains spray out in the bright air. Its body is long and beautiful and bloody. ‘Striper,’ he says, putting the fish in the cold box, laying the pole carefully down in the bottom of the boat.
We pull into a tiny white beach, no more than a spit of white sand. Nat finds oysters growing waist deep on the rocks beneath the surface. He opens them carefully with the oyster knife. ‘My dad carved this,’ he says proudly. ‘Cool, huh?’ The handle of the oyster knife is walnut, worn smooth with use, chased with a pattern of tiny fish. ‘He gave it to me for my birthday when I was, like, seven.’
‘My dad would never let me have a knife,’ I say, enviously.
‘He’s pretty cool,’ Nat says. ‘He catches seals sometimes, in the shark rig. That’s why he always keeps a boat hook in the Siren. What you do is come up beside it, knock it out with the hook, snare it in the shark rig, then pull it along beside the boat for a time, until it’s ready to do whatever you want. Then you take it somewhere else on shore to finish it.’
Without hot sauce or lemon the oysters are disgusting but I still eat two. We build a fire from driftwood. We’re a little better at it, this time, don’t put too much wood on at once to start. We gut the sea bass, wrap it in aluminium and cook it on the coals. The fish’s flesh is charred to black in some places and almost raw in others, but we devour it anyway. Spider crabs scuttle near on delicate legs. We throw them the fishbones and they swarm over the skeleton, picking it clean. We lie on our backs on the warm white sand, watching the thin corkscrew of smoke rise into the air. The sun burns above and our skins grow pink and sore.
‘This is the best day of my life,’ I almost tell them – but I don’t. I want to keep all this life corked tight inside me, bubbling and dangerous.
Harper pulls a bottle of Jim Beam out of her bag. It’s maybe a third full and we pass it between us, sputtering as the heat strokes down our gullets. ‘You might as well tell me,’ Harper says into the quiet. ‘Why you fought.’
‘We didn’t fight.’ I’m dreamy with whiskey. ‘Nat fell on the path, took me down with him.’
‘Whatever. You’re both terrible liars.’ Harper holds up the empty whiskey bottle. ‘Let’s spin it,’ she says.
My heart crawls up my throat into my mouth, a warm lump. I’ve never played spin the bottle, never kissed anyone. I wonder what it would be like to kiss Harper. I wonder if I’m going to throw up. Nat’s watching me. I wonder, through a white haze of panic, what this means for our deal.
‘Harper,’ he says, but she hisses ‘ssssssh!’ and glares at him.
