This Dreaming Isle Read online

  ›•‹

  The woman behind the bar – gloriously fat, with smudged black eyeliner and dyed red hair – caught Rachael’s eye as she leafed through the menu.

  ‘I can’t serve her,’ she said, ‘not even a shandy. They’d hold me personally responsible.’

  She smiled apologetically.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’m actually rather glad that you didn’t,’ Rachael said, and laughed, as if she was making a joke she was relying on the woman to understand.

  ‘Soup is lentil and tomato,’ the red-haired woman said,‘but there’s not much left. You camping?’

  Rachael blushed. Camping – and not even in a proper campsite. It was probably against the law.

  ‘Just for the night. My friend said… well, it was a bit impromptu. If you could tell us who owns the land…?’

  ‘I don’t care about that,’ the woman said, and laughed. ‘You’ll want to be careful going back though.’

  ‘Really?’

  Rachael wanted her to wait: to save her stories of the pixies and haunted wells and boggarts and ghosts of witches from times past until Mae came back. ‘Tell Mae,’ she wanted to say. She’d enjoy that. But perhaps she wouldn’t. Maybe Mae was too old for ghost stories now.

  ‘No street lamps on the lane. You’ve not seen proper dark till you’ve been out here at night,’ the woman said, and laughed. Rachael ordered sandwiches and chips and returned to her seat.

  ›•‹

  Did he know, this man, that Mae was only fourteen? That was probably part of the attraction. The time for delicacy had long since passed. She’d said as much to the school: ‘My daughter’s boyfriend is twenty-eight years old and he is raping her and I believe his friends also,’ and again, to social services, who were overstretched – and anyway, Mae came from a nice home in a nice part of town and her schoolwork wasn’t suffering, not that much, not really, and she was a good weight, and the police, also, who weren’t able to do anything without proof, and proof was what Mae would not provide – not a word against her boyfriend who had been banned from the house, from the street, but who would park up by the swings and to whose car Mae would flit in the night, out of a locked window, through a locked door – had threatened, in fact, to set the house on fire if the locks were applied again, and Rachael believed her.

  It might be worse, though, she thought, watching her daughter come back from the toilet, wiping her wet hands on the front of her shorts. It might be worse if she felt herself a victim. Felt that a great wrong had been done to her – as it had. Perhaps better for her to feel she was part of a great romance and have Rachael around to gather the pieces when they fell?

  Mae sat down and started flicking impatiently through an abandoned newspaper, thrumming with boredom. Was it better to wait for this man to lose interest in her? Wait for Mae to grow up? These two were the same thing, most probably. She was on the pill. At least there was that; the GP had prescribed it without turning a hair. And could all broken things be mended? The keyworker had been silent on this matter. Had only advised that home should be, above all, a place of peace and calm and safety. A refuge to which Mae could always return.

  ›•‹

  ‘We can walk tomorrow. Right up the hill if you want to. Or just… chill out? Near the tent. Did you bring a book?’

  Mae snorted. The table they were sitting at was next to a rack of leaflets of tourist attractions that were no good unless you had a car, and hikes, which were no good if you didn’t want to do them. Mae abandoned the newspaper and started to rake through them.

  ‘We don’t have to decide right now. We could just play it by ear?’

  The woman with the red hair appeared with their sandwiches, smiling.

  ‘There’s a lot that camp up there,’ she said, ‘you won’t get into any trouble about it. Don’t fret.’

  ‘We weren’t planning to light a fire,’ Rachael lied. Mae glanced at her meaningfully and rolled her eyes, which the woman noticed, and giggled at.

  ‘You can have a fire if you like. You’ll probably want one.’

  ‘The dark. Yes, you said. It gets very dark at night,’ Rachael said stiffly.

  ‘And Old Trash, he don’t like the fire,’ the woman said, and winked. Rachael knew she was supposed to ask who Old Trash was – some local legend, a flasher or a hobgoblin or a sprite. The hills were soaked in these types of fictions, their walking guide packed with them, as if one could follow a public footpath right to the site of a ghost and call it up to arrive for inspection, just for your pleasure. But she’d changed her mind about the potential for these stories to entertain Mae. The woman was being entirely too familiar and she wasn’t going to play along.

  ‘What’s Old Trash?’ Mae asked, delighted, and Rachael hated her. She should make her mind up. If she wanted the bedtime ghost stories and the petting and admiration from strangers, she couldn’t have the phone and the boyfriend and the bottles of vodka. It was one or the other. She was either a child, or she wasn’t. Rachael sipped at her water, the fizz burning the roof of her mouth – and kept silent.

  ›•‹

  Peace. Calm. Safety. Rachael had flushed with shame when the keyworker had mentioned this, and the woman had handed her a tissue.

  ‘I do try to keep things as calm as possible,’ she’d said. But Rachael had not mentioned the most recent scuffle over the mobile phone. Had not outlined the way she and her daughter had actually come to blows over the thing. Rachael had tried to prise it out of Mae’s hands, Mae had kicked her, hard – and before Rachael had time to think about it, before she’d consciously decided what she was going to do, Mae had thrown the phone onto the floor and Rachael had her hands full of Mae’s hair and was pulling at her, shaking her around like a doll. Mae had hit her in the face and the two of them had come apart from each other in the hallway, panting, Rachael nursing a red mark on her cheekbone that a day later would come up in a bruise. Even as it happened Rachael knew the whack to the face could be some kind of comfort to her, because it was proof Mae was stronger than she looked and could defend herself from this man if she ever felt the need to. But Mae only screamed – so loudly the neighbours on both sides and beyond could hear.

  ‘You’ve hurt me! You bitch! You bitch!’

  Rachael, still panting, saw the hair that was still clinging to her fingers, hair she’d ripped from her daughter’s scalp.

  She dropped to her knees, scrabbling for the phone, which Mae reached first, scooped up, and ran out of the front door with, slipping away like water down a plughole. She didn’t come home for three days.

  She had not told the keyworker about any of that. She’d only taken the tissue and dabbed at her eyes. There was a poster taped to the wall, something to do with drugs. There was a helpline number. The poster was crooked and Rachael felt a sudden overwhelming desire to get up from her chair and straighten it. She turned her gaze down to her sensible lace-up shoes and her second-best pair of tights. She’d thought about what to wear for this meeting carefully, wanting to look professional and neat, but also motherly. There was no man of the house, but there was no need to look as if she had resigned herself to being left on the shelf permanently, now was there?

  ‘Yes. Peace and calm. Of course. She does always know she can come home. I never lock the door on her. I’d never do that.’

  ›•‹

  One of the books she’d read over the last year had advised ‘love bombing’ a wayward child, a technique that cults used on the damaged and down-at-heel to get new recruits, but which was also supposed to repair a splintering bond between parent and offspring. The gist of it was to let the child get their own way for well-defined periods of time each week – to reverse the normal order of things – to cherish them and meet their every demand, as you did with a newborn baby. Accordingly, Rachael had let Mae order two different types of dessert and play as many games of pool with the redhaired woman behind the bar as she wanted. She’d watched her daughter and this woman bond – Mae lau
ghing at all of her jokes and being entertained by her tall tales about the Pendle witches and their familiars: cats and goats and even, according to local lore, a dog called Old Trash that still roamed Fell Wood, baying at the moon, chewing up sheep and generally making a nuisance of himself. He was, according to the woman (Triana – and what kind of name was that?), the Devil himself in canine form.

  ‘We’d better get going. Can I pay the tab?’ Rachael asked stiffly, having exhausted all the leaflets, the newspaper and as much of an abandoned Catherine Cookson novel as she could stand.

  ‘Already?’ Mae’s expression darkened.

  ‘The light’s going,’ Rachael began, and the woman interrupted.

  ‘Your mother’s right, sweetheart. You want to get back early enough to make your fire. Get yourself tucked in. But come back tomorrow if you like. We’ll do you a cooked breakfast. Real coffee. How about that?’

  Mae, mollified and in one of her rare talkative moods, headed towards the door and Rachael followed her. It was all Triana this, and Triana that, and Rachael trudged behind her, nodding – not that Mae was paying any attention to her.

  ›•‹

  The light went suddenly: probably because of the hill. With it, the heat. As they found the footpath where it cut into the lane and clambered over the stile, Mae started to shiver.

  ‘Maybe we should have that fire,’ Rachael said. ‘We could make tea?’

  ‘We should definitely have a fire. Triana says—’

  ‘Old Trash. Yes, I heard.’

  Mae laughed. ‘I’d love to see him. A great big slavering dog.’ She lifted her phone. ‘I’d take a picture of him, then leg it.’

  ‘Would you?’ Rachael imagined her tone was mild, faintly interested.

  ‘There’s a group, apparently. That goes out at night looking for him. Triana says you can pay the guide, and go out on a walk at night. We should have done that.’

  ‘Maybe next time?’ Rachael said, hopefully.

  ‘Definitely.’

  Definitely! She wanted to come again. It was like being in love, this – hopelessly, horribly in love – then finding a note from the boy you’d had your eye on in your school bag and realising that he’d had his eye on you all along. Rachael’s head fizzed with plans: they would come back soon. Maybe in a fortnight or so. As soon as Mae wanted to. And this time, they’d avoid the bloody pub.

  ‘Apparently he sends you nuts if you see him. Barmy. Triana says there’s people who have been up on the hill at night,’ she gestured vaguely, ‘and end up walking miles without knowing where they are. They come down in the morning and they’ve gone fucking nuts. He gets into your head and Triana says—’

  ‘Triana says a lot. I wonder if she’s part of the business that runs the walks,’ Rachael began, and Mae laughed and swatted her on the arm – a little too hard to be playful.

  ‘It makes sense,’ she says. ‘All the witches. They must have been onto something…’ she flicked her hair away from her face: Rachael saw it move in the dark, a pale ripple, and smelled cigarettes again. Where was she getting them from? She’d turned her room upside down.

  ‘Well. We’re here now. Old Trash or not, I’d like a fire.’

  ‘I’m going to go through the woods,’ Mae said. Informing, not asking. That was her way now. There was barely enough light to see by – the reservoir to their right, the steep bank of Fell Woods sloping upwards to their left. ‘Triana says if you go up to the top, where the trees clear a bit, you can get a good signal. She says it’ll only take five minutes. You boil water if you want, I’ll be back before it’s ready.’

  They were in sight of the tent now: brash and orange and oddly shaped, as if built to withstand a terrible storm – the type of which never happened in England. The man in the shop had said it was a good tent. Easy to put up and take down on your own. But looking at it now, it seemed flimsy and cramped and Rachael wondered if they’d get any sleep at all, or if they’d lie awake all night, elbowing each other and shivering.

  ‘I’m not sure you want to go crashing around in the dark, do you?’ she said, as mildly as she could muster. They were there now, and Mae knelt, unzipped the tent, crawled in and emerged with a sweater.

  ‘I’ll bring you back some sticks for your fire,’ Mae said, indulgently. As if she were the one doing the love bombing, not Rachael, and she were the one delaying answering difficult questions in order to avoid the nonsense of a silly confrontation.

  ‘There’s nothing so important on your phone that it can’t wait until tomorrow, can it?’

  ‘Don’t… start.’

  ‘Mae?’

  She was already off, striding up the bank that became wooded. Rachael heard her, the twigs and leaves underfoot crackling, and then – when she turned on the torch setting on her phone – saw her, the cool bright light swinging around through the branches of the trees. It wasn’t a big hill. And it wasn’t a heavy wood: nothing like the woods in fairy tales. It was just a rise – a little rise with some trees on it. And at the top, there would be a signal, or there wouldn’t, and Mae would answer her text messages and post a picture of herself posing against the deepening dusk on her Instagram, pretending to look scared – pretending to have seen the witches’ dog, then she’d Snap-talk or whatever with the man she was seeing – and there could be no real harm in that, not when she was here, and he was – well, wherever he was, doing whatever he did. Rachael didn’t want to think about him. And anyway, as Mae had so often reminded her, what exactly was Rachael going to do about it?

  ‘Don’t be long…’ she called, and her voice spooled away across the surface of the reservoir and echoed back to her and there was no answering call from the trees. She walked along the edge of the woods, gathering fallen sticks for her fire.

  ›•‹

  After half an hour, it was full dark and Rachael had the fire going and the water boiling. She made tea. She set the two metal cups – brand new from the camping shop where she’d bought the tent (love bombing was expensive) – on a stone and poured from the pan into them. She watched the steam rise and waited. Mae was always a little elastic around time: could get caught up easily in her online life. She was probably safer up alone at the top of that hill – less than quarter of a mile away – than she was at school, or wherever it was she went when she was supposed to be at school. Rachael walked to the edge of the woods and called up to her. Once, twice. And of course there was no answer. She held her breath and listened. Was it Mae’s voice she heard? Or perhaps a thin stream of water running through the concrete channel down the hill and to the reservoir? Or birds, settling in for the night? Birds, most likely.

  She sat on her rucksack in front of the tent, the ground quite cold now – and, beyond the light of the fire, found herself unable to pick out the edge of the reservoir, the shape of the hill against the sky, or much of anything else. The fire crackled and popped, loud in the wide silence she waited in, and she drank her tea. Suppose Mae didn’t come back? What should she do then? Should she wait an hour, or more? Mae could easily sit up there and chat for an hour, and she’d be furious if Rachael overreacted and it would spoil the whole trip. They still had tomorrow. Tomorrow they’d wake up together in the tent, and it would be light and quiet, and they wouldn’t go back to the pub for a cooked breakfast, they’d have another fire and boiled eggs and bananas slit open and stuffed with chocolate and warmed inside tin foil. Rachael listened again. There were sheep – or a sheep, perhaps – nearby. She heard its baby-voiced bleat. And nothing else except the fire.

  She could go up the hill herself. Go and retrieve her and risk the fight. She was talking to that man. The man who had a car. Who was perhaps even now in it, and picking up Mae’s location from her Find Your Friend or whatever it was – the app both he and Rachael used to supervise her – and coming to collect her. The road they came in on curved around the back end of Fell Wood; the bus had dropped them off there and all they’d needed to do was carry theirpacks downhill half a mile. He could ju
st as easily… Rachael stood up. But it would be foolish and perhaps unsafe to leave the fire, and not be here when Mae came back, wanting her tea and her bed.

  Another fifteen minutes passed. She could walk down to the pub if it came to it. Would Triana be there? Cleaning, perhaps, after the serving hours were over? Or maybe even sleeping there, in a room upstairs? She could wake her up and use the telephone and call someone. Who? Mountain rescue? It was hardly a mountain. And what would they do? Laugh at her, probably. Triana would make her a coffee and try to have a woman-to-woman chat about the raising of teenagers, about giving them their freedom, about making sure home was always a place of peace and calm. ‘You’ve got to let her come to you,’ she’d say, and Rachael would have no option but to nod, humbly, and take the blame. Even imagining this speculative kindness sent Rachael into a rage. She gathered more sticks, and built up the fire. Itwould be quite visible now, in the dark. It would help Mae to get back if she’d got muddled in the woods and come down the hill too far along the path.

  ›•‹

  Mae loved bananas with chocolate. For a while, when she’d been a toddler, it had been the only thing she’d reliably eat. Bananas, mashed up and warmed in the microwave with pieces of chocolate mixed in. Not melted, only softened. Rachael had consulted the doctor about this, who had listened, and examined little Mae, fat and happy and grabbing at his tie with her pudgy fists, and had only made a speech about how impossible it was to force a child to do anything.

  ‘You can’t make them sleep,’ he’d said sympathetically, ‘you can’t make them eat. You can’t make them do muchof anything, not really. Don’t believe anyone who says you can. Bananas and chocolate are fine. She’ll grow out of it.’

  Rachael had protested, he’d asked her how she was sleeping and eating (her, not Mae!) and in the end, had offered her antidepressant tablets. ‘Lots of mothers take them,’ he’d said, pen poised above the prescription, which he had already printed. Rachael had been furious, and forced to change surgery.