The Dark Isle Read online

  The tinny notes of Helen’s transistor radio whined through her open bedroom window. Jess and Helen had spent the afternoon smoking and doing the tarot, she reckoned. Helen was fifteen and in the last six months had taken to thick black eyeliner, punk and anything to do with the occult. Jess was thirteen and followed Helen’s lead. Helen had bought a pack of tarot cards from Martin, the hippy, who sold joss sticks and bags of weed to those in the know from his poky shop behind the shopping mall. Helen entertained her mates to tarot readings in her bedroom – the Devil, the Hanged Man, Death – Jess her willing assistant.

  Sam entered the kitchen, grabbed a glass, crossed to the sink. A presence behind made her turn. Jim.

  ‘It’s like the Sahara out there,’ he said.

  Her tongue clammed in her mouth, thick from the exertion of cycling. She filled her tumbler, took a sip, savoured the water, eyed him over the rim.

  ‘I spotted a camel wandering down the High Street when I was driving home this afternoon.’

  He was trying to be friendly, making up for shouting at her about hand signals. She wasn’t sure she was prepared to play along. He did sometimes take her side in arguments with her older sisters, though, which was more than could be said for Liz.

  ‘One hump or two?’

  ‘One. Never trust a camel.’

  Never trust anyone or anything, according to Jim.

  ‘Do you think it will ever rain again?’ she asked. The drought. Neutral territory.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘But why hasn’t it rained for so long?’

  He gazed out the window at the wilting garden, the yellow grass. ‘It’s the Fisher King. He’s sitting wounded by his dwindling stream, hoping somebody will help him break the curse.’ Jim often talked like that – answered questions with stories instead of facts. She was used to it. Accepted it as part of the way he was, his secrecy, his background she supposed, growing up with the joshing of the Glasgow bar where his father was the publican. Or, at least, that was the story he told about his childhood. She had no way of knowing whether it was any more truthful than any of the other stories he told; she’d never met any of his family and he didn’t have much of a Scottish accent so for all she knew he could have been making it up.

  ‘Who is the Fisher King?’

  ‘An ancient Celtic lord.’ He stepped to the sink, twisted the tap. The pipe spluttered. Jim caught some water in a glass, held it to the light. Brown particles whirred. Dirt from the bottom of the reservoir. Or were they insects? He sipped, swished the water around his mouth, swallowed.

  ‘He was guarding the ancient treasures of his clan. But he was attacked and wounded. Then his enemies stole the treasures and his land was cursed, and it became a barren wasteland.’

  Like water-restriction south London.

  ‘How did he break the curse?’

  ‘He didn’t. He’s still sitting there fishing, because he’s too badly hurt to hunt. He’s waiting for help. Hoping one of his children will come along and give him a hand.’

  She scowled when he said that, sensing he was manipulating the story, nudging the conversation around to some favour he was after, something he wanted to tell her. There was an awkward pause. She wanted to retreat to her room and read a book, but she felt obliged to stay. He asked, ‘Do you want a friend to do stuff with over the summer?’

  Why was he asking her that? She looked down, examined the cracked lino, a column of black ants marching across the floor with captured sugar grains clamped in jaws.

  ‘I thought you might like to meet the daughter of somebody I know.’

  What was he on about? She could find her own friends; she didn’t want anything to do with any of his arrangements. Although Helen and Jess weren’t much fun these days.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Anna. You’ll get on with her. She likes doing the kind of things you like doing.’

  How did he know what she liked doing? He was never there.

  ‘She’s the same age as you. She’s twelve.’

  ‘I’m ten.’

  ‘Close enough. She might be staying for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Why?’

  She suspected she was more likely to get a thick ear for impertinence than a straight answer.

  He replied, ‘Her dad has to go away. Anna and Valerie, her mum, need somewhere to stay.’

  ‘Why do they have to stay here?’

  ‘I want to help them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because her dad is a colleague. We’re all part of the same family.’

  The way Jim said family made her shudder.

  ‘Which family is that?’

  He hesitated. ‘The shadow family.’

  God, her own family was bad enough, she didn’t want a shadow family too.

  ‘Pierce. Anna’s dad. He’s always been a bit of a hero.’

  ‘Hero?’ That was a funny word to use and it didn’t seem quite right coming from Jim’s mouth.

  ‘That’s what I said. Hero.’ He was beginning to sound irritated. She’d better try a different tack.

  ‘Why does her dad have to go away?’

  ‘Because he’s damaged.’ He reconsidered the word he had used. ‘Injured. Wounded.’

  ‘Like the Fisher King?’

  He took another glug of water.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, like the Fisher King.’

  That was why he had told her the story; he wanted to let her know she had to be nice to this girl Anna because her father was sick. What was wrong with him anyway? Car crash? Cancer? Well, she didn’t care if Anna’s father did have bloody cancer, she still didn’t want her staying here, with them.

  ‘Anna’s got a bike. You can go cycling with her.’ He drained the last drops from his glass, pulled a face, spat in the sink. ‘Jesus, that tastes disgusting.’

  ‘I think it has insects in it,’ she said, but he was already sauntering away, left her feeling cross. Anna and Valerie. The names rattled around in her head and she played with the story Jim had told her; Anna’s father was the Fisher King and his wound had caused the heatwave. The drought. The grittiness in the air, the bugs in the tap water, the yellow grass, and the hose restrictions that meant they couldn’t even use the sprinkler. All because of Anna and her damaged father. Their fault.

  *

  THEY SHUFFLED AROUND to make room for Anna and Valerie. Her sisters weren’t happy with the arrangements. Jess had only just moved out of Helen’s room and now she had to move back so that Valerie had somewhere to sleep. Sam had to jam all her things in the corner cupboard of her box bedroom to make space for a mattress on the floor. Liz was indifferent. If they needed somewhere to stay, she said, they needed somewhere to stay, but she hoped nobody expected her to hang around every evening cooking. Jim said he didn’t expect her to do anything. It was a favour, a temporary fix while Valerie and Anna looked for something permanent. The sisters huddled in Helen’s bedroom to discuss the situation; the reek of hairspray and fag smoke tickled the back of Sam’s throat. Helen laid the cross of the tarot on the floor.

  ‘I don’t get why they have to stay here,’ Jess said.

  Helen said, ‘Because of Jim.’ She reached over, plucked the top card from her arrangement. ‘The Magician.’ She waved the card triumphantly. ‘The player of tricks. The deceiver. That’s Jim. He’s behaving like a right tosser at the moment.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because of the heat,’ Sam said.

  Helen pinched her bare arm. ‘Why are you making excuses for him?’

  *

  ANNA ARRIVED TWO days later. Sam skulked behind the window and watched the navy Volvo estate ease along the verge. She didn’t know much about cars but she knew that a Volvo estate was better than a crappy Cortina. If Valerie and Anna could afford a Volvo, why couldn’t they pay for a hotel? A titchy woman clambered out of the passenger seat. A pair of long legs ending in shorts and plimsolls emerged from the back. Anna was lanky. Sam glanced at her own muscly calves. She looked stumpy in
her shorts, not elegant. Not willowy. There was something confident about the way Anna slouched on the pavement, hands in pockets, and surveyed their house as if she were deciding whether it was good enough. She must have seen Sam’s face in the window because she stuck her tongue out. Sam’s stomach fizzed with anger. Sam returned the gesture, gave her a two-finger up-yours sign. Anna mirrored her V. Sam was about to intensify the hostilities, go for the one-finger salute when she realized Anna was laughing, which made Sam feel silly. She smiled too, although the anger was still bubbling away inside. Jim’s whistle heralded his descent from upstairs; one of his jovial tunes.

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ he said. ‘You can’t leave them standing outside on the pavement.’

  Sam opened the door, came face to face with Anna; porcelain skin, freckles bridging her nose, big front teeth with a gap between, unlike Sam’s overlapping fangs. Anna’s hair was short, dark and curly and her eyes were blue, like Jim’s, with black eyelashes and thick eyebrows. Sam’s eyebrows were pale and sandy, almost invisible in fact, which Jess said made her look like an alien. Or a Midwich cuckoo according to Helen, because her khaki eyes gleamed golden in certain lights. Maybe Sam was a cuckoo and Anna was the real daughter of Jim. She was being stupid. That couldn’t be right anyway because Anna was tall and lanky and Jim wasn’t. Neither was Valerie. She was a sparrow, a twitchy mouse. Jim took the case Valerie was holding. He waved the guests inside.

  ‘Jess, put the kettle on.’

  Anna and her mother edged through the porch, dragging their bags.

  ‘There are still a few things in the car, I’m afraid,’ Valerie said.

  Sam couldn’t help feeling sorry for her; she sounded so apologetic. Unlike Anna.

  ‘My bike is in the back,’ Anna said as if she expected somebody to fetch it for her. Bloody Princess.

  Jim directed. ‘Go and have a drink in the kitchen. Sam, help me with the rest of the cases.’

  She trailed after Jim, scuffing her plimsolls along the floor, hating Jim for ordering her around in front of Anna. She hung back at the top of the front steps, skulked underneath the twisted laburnum tree that was already dropping its poisonous seed pods on the pavement, the stress of the drought speeding up its natural cycle. The door on the driver’s side of the Volvo creaked. A tall and wiry figure appeared. He had to be Anna’s father. Pierce, Jim had called him. He walked around the back of the car to greet Jim. He was limping. Perhaps that was why he didn’t help with the cases. Was it the wound Jim had told her about? The damaged Fisher King. And he was like a king, Sam reckoned as she watched them talking; Pierce commanding, looking down on Jim. Her father stood at ease, sharing a few pleasantries, she supposed, with his colleague from the secret state.

  She crouched, tickled their cat that was sunning itself on the shrivelled marigolds and edged down a few steps, close enough to identify Jim’s voice, if not quite close enough to hear everything he was saying ‘...whatever I can do... until it’s safe...’ Pierce nodded, made some reply in a low voice she couldn’t hear and she guessed that was the end of the conversation, but then Pierce leaned over Jim and started talking in a sharper tone that struck her as out of order when her dad was obviously doing him a favour. She snatched at a couple of Pierce’s words. ‘...problem... not sure how...’ He must have caught Jim by surprise too because he shrank away. ‘It wasn’t...’ Jim said. Pierce interrupted. ‘I’m not saying...’ his voice dropped again ‘...whose fault...’ Her stomach lurched. I’m not saying... whose fault... She couldn’t tell whether he was warning her father about something or pointing the finger at him, accusing him of something for some reason. She strained to hear. ‘...used water...’ Pierce continued. Water. Was it something to do with the drought? The curse of the Fisher King? The cat purred, untroubled by the exchange. Pierce placed a hand on Jim’s shoulder in what looked to her like a friendly gesture, as if the concerns he had voiced had evaporated in the evening heat. Perhaps she had imagined the tension. ‘Thanks... I know I can rely...’ Jim didn’t reply. Or if he did, she didn’t hear him. She repeated Pierce’s words to herself and the sounds bounced around her brain. Water, fault, water, fault. They didn’t make much sense.

  ‘Sam.’

  Jim’s call startled her.

  ‘Come and take this bike.’

  She stood and smiled at Pierce but he had already looked away, limped back to the car without a smile or a hello and left her feeling invisible. Jim heaved a racer from the boot of the Volvo, plonked it on the pavement.

  ‘Come on, you dozy lummox. I don’t want to stand here all day.’

  She had a sudden urge to kick the bike and run away. She hated Jim. Hated his mates. Hated the way he treated her when he was in a bad mood, when he was with other people. Hated him full stop. Helen was right, she shouldn’t be making excuses for his behaviour. She took the bike, wheeled it up the drive and through the garage, the pedals catching her ankle, making her madder. A proper racer, with dropped handlebars and loads of gears, the saddle way too high for her short legs, she noted enviously.

  *

  JIM WAS IN the kitchen, making Valerie a cup of tea. Jess had ignored his order to boil the kettle.

  ‘Sam, show Anna her room,’ Jim said.

  It wasn’t Anna’s room, it was Sam’s room. Jim shouted for Liz to come down. No response. The door of Helen’s room remained firmly shut as they passed along the landing. Sam opened her bedroom door at the back of the house.

  ‘You’ve got the mattress.’

  Anna dumped her bag on the floor. She farted. ‘That’s a smelly one.’ She wafted the air with her hand.

  Sam suppressed her giggles, unwilling to reveal she was amused by Anna’s lack of stuffiness.

  Anna asked, ‘Does your dad always do that funny whistle when he answers the door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So does mine.’

  ‘What’s happened to your dad?’

  ‘Pierce? He has to go away.’

  Sam perched on the edge of her bed. Anna sat down next to her. Sam noticed the side of Anna’s thumbnail was bleeding where she must have nagged the skin.

  ‘Does your dad work for the police?’

  ‘No.’ Anna’s blue eyes glinted through her black curls. ‘He works for the Firm.’

  ‘The Firm?’

  ‘That’s what he calls it. Intelligence. MI6. He’s a spy.’

  The statement caught Sam off guard; she wasn’t allowed to talk about her dad’s work, and yet here was Anna casually mentioning that her father was a spy. She couldn’t decide whether she was annoyed or impressed by Anna’s brazen disregard for the rules.

  ‘My dad’s a spy too,’ she said. ‘He works for the Force.’

  ‘He can’t be a proper spy if he’s a policeman. That’s different.’

  Anna’s comment riled her. ‘My dad is a proper spy. He works for some secret part of the Force. He’s always going away on missions. Sometimes he grows a beard and I asked him once whether it was his disguise and he said it was. Actually, he said the disguise was when he shaved it off. But he said I wasn’t to tell anybody.’

  She’d never revealed so much about her dad’s work to anybody before; it left her with a hollow in her stomach. Still, Jim had said they were all part of the same family, so why should it matter if she shared their secrets with Anna?

  ‘Who does he spy on?’ There was a note of disbelief in Anna’s voice.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She dug around, searching for something to say, retreating from her openness. ‘He told me once he tries to stop people who use violence. He said that was why he did it, to stop innocent people getting hurt, and that’s why I shouldn’t say anything because otherwise we might get hurt.’

  A wood pigeon cooed in the back garden.

  ‘Who does your dad spy on then?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Arms dealers, terrorists. That kind of thing.’

  Sam wanted to say that was what her dad did too, but she wasn’t sure whether it was true. S
he said nothing.

  ‘That’s why Pierce has to go away. We’ve moved out of our house because it’s too dangerous to stay there. We don’t know where he’s going.’

  Anna lifted her thumb to her mouth, chewed her nail and Sam felt bad for being cross about her staying.

  CHAPTER 3

  Orkney, September 1989

  THE AIR WAS chilly beneath the clear sky, stars dusting the moonless night. She batted away the crane flies, torn between retreating to the cosiness of the croft and sitting here in the meadow a little while longer, making the most of the last few evenings before she returned to London. Peewits called from the shore below, waves gently lapped the shingle; the sounds of dwindling summer. She stared across Scapa Flow to Hoy, followed the beams of a car travelling north and attempted to identify the source of the magnetic pull. Was it Pierce or his daughter Anna? Or something deeper. She hugged her knees. Introspection made her edgy. Her father’s long absences, filled with anxieties about when and whether he would return, had taught her to cauterize her emotions – focus elsewhere; nature, school, protests, music, the best way to roll a spliff, anything other than her feelings. Be like a spy, keep your true self hidden. Her father’s sudden death had blown the lid off her cover and she had lost it for a while, swamped by grief and anger before she had regained her balance. She liked to believe, though, that she had emerged from the turbulence with a maturity that enabled her to reflect on the depths without sinking in sheer panic. And now, when she analysed her desire to follow the Fisher King, she could identify a shadow – a mark like a bruise inside herself. A fear about her father. Water. Fault. Had he done something wrong? Was he the cause of Pierce’s damage? She shuddered. She might have matured, but still she was gripped by unease when she thought about that summer. The tense conversations. Anxieties intensified by the heatwave. She pushed herself to her feet, trod the soft grass to the croft.

  *

  SHE ROSE EARLY, drank her coffee outside, the cool breeze clearing her mind. The sky overhead was sapphire, but in the far distance she could see the cumulus gathering. Showers later, she reckoned. She found her cagoule, stuffed it in her backpack, kickstarted the Honda and drove to Scapa Pier – the car ferry to Lyness took a different route on alternate days. She clanked over the gangplanks, parked the bike at the side of the car deck and went to sit on the passenger walkway above, kept her eyes fixed on the choppy water, blanked her mind, fearful of dredging up confusing emotions which might discourage her from seeing this through.