Kraken (18 page)

“I have to go, or I’d stay here all day.” Cy brushed a hand over Will’s back, testing the grazed skin. “And take it easy today, okay?”

Will heard Cy shut the sliding door behind him and clomp down the porch stairs. Will’s skin felt tight and itchy. Was it just Cy leaving that had him so unsettled? He wandered back out to the living room. There were no books, no television. His laptop still sat on the table from last night, the battery now flat. Where was his bag? He rummaged in the back of the wardrobe for it, unzipping it to display folded city clothes that seemed unfamiliar, alien. He dug through them to find his tablet, but it seemed there would be no checking of emails: a spider-web of cracks radiated out from a single impact point on the LCD screen. Okay, Proust it was, then. His hand dug into the side pocket. The book was gone, but his fingers touched a crisp envelope. He pulled it out, perplexed. It was addressed to him.

Will,

sorry doesn’t seem to be enough, but I am sorry I hurt you. I never meant to replace you with Sina. I did love you, but you always kept yourself so sealed off from me. I hated how you flinched when I touched you unexpectedly , and that you always thought you had to be someone else for me to love you. I want you to know that you’re amazing. You are enough, just as you are. I guess I should have tried harder to tell you that. I want you to find happiness, and I don’t think that’s going to be with Cyrus. Please leave: we both need to move on.

Yours, Parker.

Parker had been wrong about a lot of things, and he was wrong about Cy, too. Finally someone loved him; for Cy he
was
enough. But it was an unsettling realization that Will hadn’t missed Parker for one second of the last 36 hours; hadn’t thought about him at all since the awful scene in the store. Shouldn’t he be grief-stricken?

At a loss, he curled up on the bed and pulled the quilt over his head. He felt nauseated, and pinpricks of agony jabbed the back of his eyes when he closed them against the world. What was wrong with him? He fell into an uneasy doze, sweaty and full of bad dreams. Each time his body wanted to wake him he refused to rouse, sinking back into torpor.

When he could no longer ignore the day the light of the sun was coming from overhead. He’d been serious about needing something else to eat: his body was barking for oranges or mangoes. He crawled out from under the bedclothes and shuffled out into the kitchen, scratching his hip. His skin seemed ill-fitting and his hair hurt.

He opened the fridge door, but it was empty except for a block of butter and half a pack of free-range bacon. There was no fruit, but there were four tomatoes in a cereal bowl. Will shrugged. Tomatoes were fruit, right?

He bit into one, the seeds running out the side of his mouth, stinging against the tender skin. He walked to the door and was brought up short by the sight of Aiden on the other side of the glass. He gaped at him for a minute, wet seeds from the tomato running down his hand.

“Oh, gods, sorry,” Will said, reaching for the door handle. It wouldn’t open.

“Go around the other side,” he said through the glass, pointing to the other side of the cottage. He staggered over to the other door. It wouldn’t budge. What the hell? He pulled at it harder, tugging the handle back and forth, but there was no give in it.

Aiden walked up the door from the porch. His voice was muffled through the glass. “You know you’re naked, right? Not that I mind, but I just want to make sure you’re aware of the situation.”

Will looked down. He’d forgotten. He held one finger up to Aiden. “Just wait there.” He skittered back into the bedroom, digging his last t-shirt and jeans out of his overnight bag.

When he came back out Aiden was leaning against the door. He turned at Will’s footsteps. “Can’t get it open, huh?”

“Yeah, I can’t figure it out. Is it broken?”

He fiddled with the handle, while Aiden looked on patiently. His head throbbed, and his fingers were clumsy, and for long seconds he thought he just wasn’t doing it right. But when he actually looked at the lock he realized the latch had been cut through, close to the base, in the locked position. There was no way to open the door from inside. That was strange. He stared at the lock, unable to register what to do now.

“Will,” Aiden said.

Will looked up.

“I’m only floating this as an idea, you know. But is there any chance Cyrus could have locked you in?”

“What? No! That’s ridiculous!” Cyrus loved him. There’s no way he’d do that.

“Are you sure? Like I said, he doesn’t share. He might have thought you were better out of harm’s way.”

“Well, what are you doing here then?”

Aiden grinned at him. “I wondered if you’d like to go visit your old place. Nothing wrong in that, is there?”

Will breathed in, deeply. Mr. Falconer had suggested that very thing. Why hadn’t Cy offered? “Yes. Yes, please. But I have to work out how to get out of here first.”

Aiden waved him back. He put one hand on the handle, one flat on the glass, gripping it with the pads of his fingers. He jerked upwards once, twice, and the abruptly the door lurched off its tracks. Aiden moved it to the left, leaning it against the wall. “Oops.” He smiled. “Terrible for security, these things.”

“How did you know how to do that?”

“One of the many advantages of a misspent youth. Come on, let’s go. You got shoes?”

Will’ grabbed his shoes from the porch on the way down to the beach. The water was cool against his calves as he waded in and hoisted himself over the side of Aiden’s boat. Within seconds they were flying across the harbor, thudding over the top of the small crests. The wind buffeted them as they stood shoulder to shoulder, and Will smiled at Aiden through the hair whipped in his face. His head seemed to clear a little, and his stomach settled.

In a few minutes they were at the other side. There was a tiny stump of a wharf, and Aiden tied up while Will hopped straight out onto dry wood decking the color of bleached linen.

“You seem a lot happier with water,” said Aiden.

“Oh. Yeah.” Will frowned to himself. “I guess I’ve kind of had to get over it.” That was a good thing, right?

A level sweep of ground led from the jetty to a forlorn garden seat, guarding the remnant of a path of crushed shells that led up to the house. The air was cloying from the tall clumps of wild lilies.

A rickety wooden porch lurched drunkenly away from the front wall. Fleck of red paint still clung tenaciously to the faded door. Will stepped cautiously onto the porch and tried the handle, but it was either locked or stuck fast. The whole exterior looked to be sagging to the left.

“There’s a back door,” Aiden said. “Come on.”

One of the side windows was broken, but it was too high off the ground for Will to climb through. At the rear a tall wooden fence surrounded the remains of a kitchen garden, and two tall stakes sagged toward each other, holding each end of a faded plastic clothes line. By the back door a vast lemon tree was in blossom. The doorknob was gone but Aiden put his shoulder to the peeling surface, and kicked the bottom right corner firmly, several times. A teeth-grinding graunch accompanied its slow opening.

The dark hallway rippled with floorboards bent and bowed under the carpet. Aiden fished in his pocket for his phone, and illuminated the ceiling. A fernery of dark mold crept across the paint. It smelled like something had died and lay unmourned.

“The roof upstairs caved in about two years ago. That’s when I stole your books. I’m surprised the place started to go so quickly.”

“It was already old, I guess. What do you think, 1920s?”

“Yeah.”

The kitchen was through the first door on the left. Dark mottled plaster showed where water from the ceiling had cascaded down the back wall, and a long narrow hole extended through the damp floorboards at its base. An ancient wood-fired stove took up one wall. Will walked ran a hand over a peeling Formica bench top, jumping back as something many-legged and brown skittered out from a crack and disappeared into the sink.

“Oh, grandma would be so disappointed. She loved this bench. She picked it out in the 70s. She always said she was so amazed you could get Formica with yellow daisies.”

Aiden laid a hand on Will’s shoulder. “So you remember this?”

Will looked at him in wonderment. “Oh. Oh, yes, I do. She would make me griddlecakes on the stove. And bake her own bread.”

Will turned around.

“Where’s the table? There was a table . . . a huge old kitchen table. With shallow drawers. The legs were white, but the top was bare wood. She’d scrub it with baking soda.” He could see the two of them sitting at it. A slim woman with short white hair, who walked for miles and made amazing pies. And his grandfather, big and warm and full of hugs and teaching.

Aiden looked sheepish. “Oh, um . . . I stole that too. I’m sorry.”

“That’s not at your place, is it?”

“No, I, ah . . . I sold it on eBay. I had it shipped by barge to the mainland. It went for thousands. With the chairs, of course. Late Victorian. I caught a good moment on the market.”

“You what? What about the rest of it?”

“Ah . . . “

Will dashed out of the kitchen, sticking his head into the small bedroom across the hall. The bed was still there, but hadn’t there been a dark mahogany lowboy next to it? And a bright rag rug on the whitewashed wood floor?

The next bedroom had been his grandmother’s, and he paused with his hand on the doorknob. Suddenly he couldn’t bear to look inside, to expect to see her sitting upright in her stern single bed - the nun’s bed, she called it - and to have those hopes dashed. She’d had an ornate Victorian dressing table too, with drawer handles like tiny lion’s heads, the mirror de-silvered in places. No doubt that had fetched a good price in the market too.

Days ago, Will hadn’t known this place existed, and now he’d found it again it was all wrong. Changed. Gutted.

He went back into the kitchen.

“Is it all like this?”

Aiden nodded his head. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d come back. And no one was using it. It was just sitting here. By the time I came here three years ago, the roof upstairs was already gone. I took your books first. Your bedroom was— “

“My bedroom was upstairs.” Will’s voice was only a whisper.

Aiden nodded. “I waited a year. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought it was a waste. And I was trying to scrape together enough money to buy the land for the development.”

Will walked slowly over to the stove. There were large oval stones on the floor, dusty and cobwebbed now, but under that, worn smooth and slippery from the action of sea and sand. He picked one up, cradled it in his hands. The cool stone was calming against his tender skin.

“We used these instead of an electric blanket. Or a hot water bottle. Hot rocks. My grandmother learned it from her grandmother. No central heating here, of course. And in winter the wind would rip straight up the harbor, freeze the balls off a brass monkey, she always said. So she’d put these on the stove for us before bed, heat them up, then wrap them in a fresh towel and we’d each take one to bed with us. They always smelled of sage. She couldn’t get lavender to grow in her garden, but she had plenty of sage.”

He sagged.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand what happened. I grew up with my mother. Just the two of us. I don’t know why I don’t remember anything about being on the island, but I know I remember this. I remember here.”

Will’s voice caught in a hiccough. He pressed the fingers of one hand against his eyes. Everything itched, his head hurt, his body ached, and he’d fallen into someone else’s life. Now it seemed it was supposed to be his life all along. “Fuck, I don’t even know what I’m doing here. Why am I still on this fucking island?”

Will raised his voice in a shout, and hurled the stone across the room, missing Aiden by a foot. It thunked into the back wall, knocking a deep dent. A broad section of plaster trembled and gave up its grip, crumbling to the floor.

“And I don’t even have a fucking chair I can sit on!” shouted Will, “Because you’ve fucking stolen my childhood.”