Death Wish (The Ceruleans: Book 1) Page 3

  Serious now, he leaned forward. ‘I’m very glad to meet you,’ he said, ‘… Scarlett Blake.’

  Word sure spread fast about the new girl in town. ‘You know of me?’

  ‘I know you,’ he replied in a low voice. He looked at me intensely and then added, ‘You and Sienna have the same eyes. Green like the jewels of glass that wash up on the beach.’

  I drew in a sharp intake of air. He knew Sienna. Feelings swamped me. Grief at the very sound of her name. Delight that already I had found someone who knew her. Fear of what this boy may know.

  All at once, the day was too hot, suffocating, and this boy, this stranger, was too close. I moved to stand, but wavered as my throbbing elbow complained at taking my weight, and before I could push it away his hand had encased mine and was pulling me up. His touch sent shivers of warmth up my arm. Quickly, I wrenched my hand away. Then, without another word – because I couldn’t think of any explanation for what I was about to do – I turned and walked away, across the graveyard, away from this boy who made me feel.

  I did not look back.

  When I reached the car, I got in shakily, leaned my head back on the headrest and took a few breaths, then eased off my cardie to inspect the wound on my elbow. Only when I twisted the arm, there was no pain. And when I examined the skin over my funny bone, I found no blood, not even a hint of damage.

  5: I AM I, AND YOU ARE YOU

  Back at the cottage, I stripped slowly before the full-length mirror in the bathroom, gingerly peeling off my clothes and letting them pool on the floor. I examined my body carefully, exploring every angle in the early evening light that shone through the slatted blinds, but could find no suggestion of injury, just the usual smooth, pale skin. I checked the clothes – no stains, no rusty odour. Frowning, I replayed the events in the graveyard. I was sure I’d felt blood bonding skin to fabric right up until the boy pulled me up. It must have just been a little moisture from the gravestone, I reasoned.

  The realisation that I’d just been sprawled on a gravestone made me shudder, and I stepped into the bath and put the shower on full heat despite the humid day. It took half a bottle of shower scrub before I felt ready to emerge from the cloud of steam.

  Ten minutes later I was sitting on my bed, preparing to comb through my tangled hair, when a knock on the front door made me start. For a moment I was bewildered – I had no neighbours out here, and the lane that led to the house was a dead end, so no through traffic passed. Whoever was here meant to be here. But who…? Then I remembered the Dan’s Dive Shop delivery. Cursing, I threw on an old zippie and ran downstairs.

  Flinging open the door, I expected to see one of Dan’s cronies, a burly Dave or Bob type perhaps. Man with van, he’d said. Well, the van bit was as envisaged – a red Transit with muddy wheels – but as for the man…

  ‘Hello again,’ said Luke pleasantly.

  It took me a moment – too long – to place him. My early dawn misadventure had got entwined in my mind with the vivid dreams of the morning, and somehow the mental image of my rescuer since had become blurred, mythic, like an abstract painting – a looming figure in black with two cobalt-blue streaks for eyes. Now, his true form came flooding back, and with it a good dose of reality – for there stood just a nice-looking, normal bloke in scruffy trainers, well-worn jeans and a washed-out t-shirt.

  I was opening my mouth to say ‘Hey’ or something equally uninspired when his eyes flicked downwards momentarily and took in my bare legs. Mortified, I tried to tug down my Tweety Bird pyjama shorts and made some effort to comb out the tugs in my hair with my fingers.

  Abruptly, he turned and crossed to the back door of the van, which he had left open. He emerged with a box, swung it easily up and strode back to me at the door.

  ‘Where do you want it?’

  I gestured mutely to the hallway, and Luke stepped in and placed the box – full of surfing paraphernalia, I now saw – on the floor. Before I could thank him he was back at the van and then emerging with my surfboard, which he eased through the door and laid against the staircase. In the small, cramped hallway the board looked massive and I gulped, suddenly realising the enormity of my plan.

  There was a long and awkward silence during which Luke waited expectantly, surveying me with serious eyes.

  ‘I… um… I didn’t realise it was you. Man and van, I mean,’ I attempted. Funny how the word ‘man’ made me want to giggle like a ten-year-old.

  ‘Evidently,’ he said wryly. ‘Given that you told me you weren’t going back out there.’ He thumbed behind him, gesturing to the sea beyond that was sparkling under the lowering sun.

  ‘Yes, well…’ I cast about desperately for some excuse that wouldn’t make him think I was just some idiot kid with no appreciation of what he’d done for me that morning. Then: ‘Surfing lessons!’ I declared triumphantly. ‘I thought about what you said earlier, realised my skills are, well, a little underdeveloped, so I decided to get lessons this summer.’

  He listened soberly without breaking eye contact, and I had the disturbing sense he could see right through my lies, right to the heart of me.

  ‘Sound idea,’ he said. ‘So, who you going with?’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘For lessons?’

  ‘Oh, right. I hadn’t quite got that far…’

  He leaned against the door frame. ‘Well, there’s only one decent qualified surf instructor in the area. So if you want to learn – and going out without an instructor again would be madness…’ He gave me a hard look. ‘… you’d better get in there and book for the summer.’

  ‘Is that right? How much is the going rate?’

  ‘Ten an hour.’

  ‘Ten is fine,’ I said quickly. One hundred would have been fine; I had no intention of actually booking lessons. ‘Do you have the instructor’s number?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I took my phone from the hall table, entered my passcode and neatly cleared an alert informing me I had missed a call from Mother. Again. ‘Okay, ready.’

  He reeled off a number with fluid ease.

  ‘Name?’ I questioned.

  ‘Luke.’

  I looked up at him and smiled. ‘Smart arse. Instructor’s name?’

  He smiled back at me. ‘Luke Cavendish.’

  ‘Oh!’ Suddenly, I got it. Luke was the surf instructor. Well, it made sense; what I’d seen of him on the waves that morning showed that he was more than competent on a board. And I’d unwittingly just agreed to lessons with him.

  I narrowed my eyes at him, and in return his widened in innocence.

  ‘Well, you do want lessons, don’t you? Because I wouldn’t want to see you out there again otherwise…’

  The tone was polite, but there was an unmistakable note of warning in it.

  I thought quickly. Sneak about, or let him teach me? The thought of accepting help, of letting anyone be near me, was difficult to swallow. It was bad enough that I would be braving the waves again, frightened as I was of the sea; but let someone else come close enough to see my vulnerability? Still, this morning had proved that there was a lot more to surfing than I’d thought, and if I was really going to experience what Sienna had, I’d have to learn, and fast. Lessons hadn’t occurred to me before, but perhaps this had been a stroke of inspiration. Although his offer was strange. What was in it for him?

  ‘Why do you want to teach me?’ I asked. ‘You can’t have seen much potential this morning…’

  ‘Money would be useful,’ he said. ‘If you can afford to pay.’

  I thought of my plan to find a summer job; and of course there was always my bank account to fall back on. ‘Not a problem,’ I said. ‘But, well, I’m not sure how easy a student I’d be to teach. When it comes to sports that require poise and fearlessness, I’m not exactly a natural.’

  He grinned. ‘I never could resist a hopeless cause.’

  All at once, the idea of spending hours in the company of this guy seemed like a pretty good one
, and I found myself grinning back.

  ‘Okay then. But I’ll need an intensive course. By the end of the summer I need to be able to hold my own.’

  ‘Well, that’ll depend on you and how hard you’ll work. A lesson a day. I work days usually, so it’ll have to be early morning or around this time.’

  I thought of today’s early morning start and immediately said, ‘Evenings it is. But I don’t want babying. You have to teach me to handle the big waves.’

  He frowned and shifted uncomfortably. ‘Okay. But you have to do something in return, or I’m not taking you out on the water.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You do as I say. No power plays. No pushing the limits. No crazy kamikaze crap.’

  We both winced at the word, and I found myself wondering how much he knew about Sienna. Local gossip, or had he known her too? Only one way to find out, and that was spending more time with him. If it weren’t for the bit where I had to conquer the ocean that terrified me, I’d have rather looked forward to it.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You’re the boss.’

  A smile split his face once more. ‘’Kay then. I’d better be off. I’ll see you tomorrow, on the beach, six p.m. Oh, and bring the board.’

  ‘Got it,’ I said.

  I watched him walk back to the van and drive off down the lane. Then I went inside and closed the door. Sitting on the staircase, I scrolled through my phone until I reached ‘Luke Cavendish’. Smooth how he’d managed to cast himself as my surf instructor and give me his number in one move. The obvious conclusion would be that he liked me.

  It had been so long since I’d had any male attention. Being educated at an all-girls boarding school didn’t exactly leave much scope for flirting, and to date the grand sum of my romantic experience was a few cringeworthy dances at school discos attended by the neighbouring all-boys school and a couple of stolen kisses with a local lad while holidaying in Tuscany last year.

  I thought about Luke. Could I like him? Certainly, he was attractive, and quick to smile. He seemed pretty easy-going, but he had an edge of no-nonsense about him that I respected. And given his connection with Grandad and Nanna, surely I could trust him. Which is more than you can say for that other boy from the churchyard, said a voice inside. Mentally, I stood Luke and Graveyard Guy side by side – broad versus lithe, brown versus blond, blue versus grey…

  Shaking myself out of the fog, I told myself sternly to snap out of it – I wasn’t here for a summer romance, but for a serious purpose, the most important and difficult of my life. And besides, it made no difference whether I could like Luke, or even the other guy. It was always Sienna who attracted the attention, with her flirting and hip-swinging and hair-flicking. Without her, I was simply a shadow no one could really see, let alone love.

  *

  That night I slumped in the largest, squishiest armchair in the living room, balancing a plateful of somewhat charred toast on my knee. I flicked through the channels on the flatscreen – the one nod to modernity that Mother had installed – until I found an old black-and-white movie. As Fred Astaire swept Ginger Rodgers around a dance floor, crooning of heaven and a heart beating so that he could hardly speak, I wondered whether there was ever a time when life was really like the Golden Era of Hollywood.

  When the grandfather clock chimed half past nine, I pulled myself out of the chair and, leaving the crumb-strewn plate on the arm to deal with in the morning, dragged myself up the stairs to bed. On the landing, I looked into my grandparents’ room, took a deep breath of the powdery talcum scent that lingered there and smiled fondly.

  My room was ten paces down the hall, opposite a door that had stood closed since my arrival. Last night, I had deliberately avoided any potential source of pain, but now I found curiosity pulling me along. The metal door knob was stiff to turn, and when the door opened the rusty old hinges gave complaining shrieks.

  The last light of the day lit the space softly. The room was slightly smaller than my own, but with a better view. Like mine, it contained a single wrought-iron bedstead, a white wardrobe, a weathered desk, an old armchair and a bookcase crafted in the shape of a boat. My eyes scanned the room quickly, looking for traces of Sienna – a hairbrush left on the desk, perhaps, or a jumper flung over the chair – but surfaces were clear. I crossed to the wardrobe and creaked the door open slowly, half-hoping for old relics, half-dreading their discovery, but only the scratched back of the wardrobe greeted me. Clearly Mother had been here – or, more likely, one of her staff.

  Were it not for the hand-stitched patchwork quilt – blue, like mine – and the books crammed into the bookcase, the room would have been eerily sterile. Amid the faded and battered Enid Blytons and Roald Dahls and LM Montgomerys on the bookcase, an old leather-bound book caught my eye, and I pulled it out. Flicking through the yellow pages, I breathed in the bible’s rich old-book scent. It brought to mind sitting in a pew at St Mary’s, sandwiched between my grandparents and gazing up at the stained-glass windows with no more care in the world than whether I’d be allowed seconds of gravy on my Sunday roast. A page fell open, the book of John, and my eye was drawn to a passage highlighted by a line and an asterisk in the margin; my grandfather’s confident stroke of the pencil.

  Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.

  What was it the vicar had said at Sienna’s memorial service?

  Death is nothing at all… I have only slipped away into the next room… I am I, and you are you… Whatever we were to each other, that we still are.

  I’d cried then, when I first heard those words – that had been delivered by Canon Henry Scott Holland in a sermon a century ago and since spoken at countless funerals. And I cried again now to recall them. I ached with the desire to go back, to be that young girl in church with her grandparents once more, when God was real and I was willing to trust in his existence; when death was a simple falling asleep and I knew I would be reunited with my pet hamster Scallywag in a glorious heaven someday. Now, I wanted very much to believe Sienna was but a room away. Sometimes I even convinced myself I could still feel her out there, in the way I had always felt her – sad or happy, angry or frightened – our whole lives. But she was gone, I knew that.

  Still, once I was all cried out and had tucked myself into my own bed in my own room, beneath the patchwork quilt just like my sister’s; once I’d gone over the plan for tomorrow and talked myself out of and back into surfing lessons with Luke several times, and wondered yet again just who that boy in the churchyard was; when reality finally blurred at the edges and the vivid colours of dreams dazzled me, then the final lines of the vicar’s eulogy haunted me:

  I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well… Nothing is lost.

  6: THE ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

  It was the stuff of nightmares. The beast was enormous, easily my own weight, with paws that could fell me with a tap and huge eyes that betrayed more than a hint of the crazies. As I stood, frozen and slack-jawed, it began to lope towards me with determined intent, panting and drooling. Then, suddenly, the gigantic creature halted its advance, barked joyously and threw itself, belly-up, at my feet, offering its vast stomach for scratching.

  Laughing, I obliged, and the dog wriggled delightedly.

  ‘I told you, old softie’s a total teddy bear,’ said the beast’s master. ‘And he sure likes a pretty young lady.’

  I rolled my eyes at the shameless flattery, but grinned my acknowledgement that I too was enamoured with this mighty canine.

  Determined to keep up momentum with my plan, I’d wasted no time this morning in calling the number on the dog-walking job advert. The man who answered the phone identified himself as
Bert, and at once put me at ease with his charming old-rogue patter. After a few minutes’ chat (during which I’d assured him I was indeed a ‘stout lassie’, had heaps of experience caring for dogs and was an energetic, outdoors type), Bert had invited me over at once for tea and biscuits and a meet-and-greet with his dog, which he described as ‘just a wee scrap of a thing’. An hour later I’d turned up, expecting to find a lively old soul and his Chihuahua or Westie or Terrier. Instead, I’d been met by a shrunken, ravaged-looking old man for whom answering the door had clearly been a mighty effort and his really-not-small-at-all Old English Sheepdog, Chester.

  Bert settled himself into his armchair and, with a couple of intermingled chortles and coughs, made the introductions. He was delighted by his ‘joke’ in misleading me into thinking his dog was a titch.

  ‘Should’ve seen your face, girl! Priceless. Still, you’re not quite what I was expecting either…’

  He crooked an eyebrow, and I gave a sheepish smile. Clearly, there was no need to ’fess up. With one look Bert had deduced that the dog and I weren’t far off each other in weight, that I’d never walked a dog in my life, and that the only outdoors activity I was accustomed to was sitting under a leafy tree reading a novel.

  ‘Why dog walking then, love?’ he quizzed me. ‘Perhaps a nice job in a shop would suit you better, eh?’

  It was a get-out-of-jail-free card served up on a plate; subtext: if the dog’s too much of a handful, here’s where you graciously exit. But I had no intention of admitting defeat. I wanted the job, which would give me the perfect excuse to explore the village and meet the villagers. Plus the pay for the number of hours was generous, Bert was a hoot and Chester – well, the laugh he’d elicited from me was my first, I realised, for a long while.

  ‘I really love dogs,’ I attempted feebly. ‘And fresh air. And walks. And Chester seems, well, lovely…’

  ‘He’s a good dog,’ nodded Bert. ‘Does as you tell him. You’ll have no trouble with him, long as you show authority.’