“Sorry,” protest Rowan, cupping a hand to his ear. He notices her looking at the glove and wincing in sympathy. She already knows what happened.
“I’m Vicky,” she says, raising her voice. “Do you need a lift somewhere? I’ve got a house to do down at Ravenglass but the lady isn’t back until tea-time so it’s not a bother.”
“You have a cleaning firm?” asks Rowan, taking a guess.
“Not exactly a firm,” smiles Vicky. “But yes, I clean. I’ve got three young kids and one big one at home so if I’m not earning money for cleaning I’m usually picking somebody’s stuff up for free.” She gives him a little grin. “What was it you wanted from Eve, anyway? She’s not the sort who enjoys a chat, though she’s always nice to me. I got tickets for a spa day at the Sharrow Bay last Christmas – I proper filled up when they fell out my card. My mate Violet said not to worry about it – that it was her way of putting up with being a cantankerous cow some days. She suffers, you see.”
“Suffers?”
“She’s not very well, I’m sure you spotted that. She won’t talk about it and she won’t accept a lift to her appointments but she’s been at the hospital a lot this past year. Still, she’s doing good for her age.”
“Violet Rayner, is that?” asks Rowan, guilelessly. “Small world. She’s a friend of Catherine’s, isn’t she? My sister too, of course. Have you heard from her on her big adventure?”
“Just what I’ve seen online,” says Vicky, shivering as a gust of wind finds its way into the car. “I hope she’s back soon though, because Eve’s house is going to start sinking under the weight of her bloody post. If it wasn’t for the wood-burner the recycling bin would have burst.”
“All right for some,” says Rowan, rolling his eyes. The car looks warm. Vicky does too.
“So?” she asks, invitingly. “I can’t leave you out in this.”
Rowan opens the door and ducks into the passenger seat, wiping the water from his face and muttering grateful thanks. Some tinny, cheesy pop music is bleeding out of the stereo. She switches it off, the sleeve of her fleece rising up to reveal a swirl of tree roots. Beneath the ink, he catches sight of thin white scars.
“I haven’t eaten,” says Rowan. “Would you get into trouble with any of your clients if I was to buy you a tea and a sticky bun?”
She grins, impish, and he sees smoker’s teeth and the glint of the silver stud which pierces her tongue.
“I don’t think I’d risk trouble for tea and a sticky bun,” she says, turning back to the road. The wipers carve a silhouette of Sydney Opera House onto the mud-streaked glass.
“How about a pint and a packet of dry-roasted?” asks Rowan, turning to face her. He’s suddenly enjoying this game.
Vicky smiles. “Sold.”
32
Sancton Bridge, Wasdale
The home of Violet Sheehan
January 8, 2020
The wall is cool against Violet’s forehead: damp, like a vodka bottle straight from the freezer. It’s a pleasant, sensual feeling. She rolls her head from side to side, as if grinding out a cigarette butt with her brow. Trundles her face from side to side, pressing first one cheek, then the other, against the clammy green surface.
Left.
Right.
She pulls back. Looks at the image her sweat has created. Sees a butterfly: two symmetrical wings patterned with circles, captured mid-flight. She leans in and draws eyes in the condensation with a bruised knuckle. Crafts a garish smile. Daubs imperfect teeth. Tusks. Smears the imprint into something vague and grotesque, a mess of meandering tracks and over-spilling features, trickling into and over one another. Sees wrinkles gathering at eyes, running into nose, mouth, dripping, blooming, to puncture and trickle into nothingness.
She feels dizzy as she stares, watching her likeness bleed and dissolve.
She feels a hand upon her back.
“It’s okay. Let it guide you. Flow. Be at one with your surroundings …,”
Violet remembers this feeling. This sensation of staring into one’s own eyes. Of skin kissing glass: glowering into his own features until they became alien and unrecognisable. She has done this many times. As a child, she used to like saying her own name, again and again, monotonously, never rising, never falling, over and over, eyes swimming in the edgeless pools of her own reflected vision, losing all sense of herself, just shapes and words, noises and textures, splitting, like single celled creatures beneath a microscope, halving themselves, again, again, becoming more and less than themselves….
The ayahuasca tastes bitter on her tongue. Bitter, like burning sage. But behind it there is a sweetness. A memory of nectar. Of something honeyed and warm and wholesome. She flashes on a memory. Sees images that fight for the surface like drowning sailors.
“Catherine,” she gasps, and for a moment she can see her friend, dressed in white, blue marking on her skin. She sees a girl with red hair and white lines carved into her arm. She can see a man with green toenails, standing above her, head coked, as a drum beats nearby like the heartbeat of the earth.
She has a moment of perfect clarity. She sees herself here. Now. In the little room at the back of her house on the quiet road between the valleys. She can hear the gentle, calming voice of the shamanic healer who strokes her back and guides her mind and tries to reach inside her to pull out the fractured pieces of her soul and the ripped pictures of her memory.
She needs to remember. It has been too many years. For three decades she has left a part of her mind boarded up and shut down. For thirty years she has tried to pretend that she believes what they told her about those nights in the forest. For thirty years she has told herself that eve Cater is her friend because she likes her, and not because she is staying close, looking for signs of her memory coming back – of one day recollecting perfectly what happened in that place beneath the ground, when she and Catherine woke to find themselves in a place of bones and broken glass; the body of Arthur Sixpence dangling from an iron ladder high above.
A scream rips upwards and out of her throat. The memory is perfect. Clear as day. She feels warm blood upon her skin. The Shaman’s blood. Sees herself clambering towards the light. She hadn’t stopped for Freya. Had just clambered, drunkenly, up the jagged slope and clawed her way into the darkness of the forest. She had lost sight of Catherine. And then something startled her, and she had lashed out, unthinking, just as she had when the pig-faced thing tried to touch her. She had hurt Eve. Had spilled her blood. Had ripped off her clothes and dragged herself through the roots and branches and fallen trees and hadn’t stopped running until she fell into the arms of the Mountain Rescue men. Catherine was with them, sobbing, terrified, eyes like skulls.
She had let them soother her. Calm her. Had given in to sleep. And she had let go of the memories: disappearing like flakes of ash above a fire.
She knows that she will not rest easy again until she finds Freya.
Finds her, and asks her why so many people lied to cover up the fact that she never came back. That she and Catherine had left her there to die. Left her with the body of two dead shaman, trapped at the bottom of an old mineshaft filled with bones.
33