The Binding Read online

  Jenny Alexander

  Contents

  Part One: Coming to the island

  1The backbone of a jellyfish

  2Trespassing

  3A meeting on the beach

  4The fruits of Morna

  5A new moon is a magic moon

  6The eyes and ears of the Lawmaker

  7Six candles

  Part Two: Darkness in the sky

  1The Day Star

  2Good secrets, bad secrets

  3Swimming

  4The punishment

  5In the manner of the word

  6A cake fit for a feast

  7Hidden things

  Part Three: Ashes on the water

  1The re-naming

  2Outside looking in

  3Seeing Elspeth

  4One word and it’s over

  5Running in the mist

  6A really big secret

  7Ashes on the water

  Copyright

  Part One: Coming to the island

  Question:

  What’s the difference between a teacher and a train?

  Answer:

  The teacher says ‘Spit your gum out’ and the train says ‘Chew, chew, chew!’

  Now, what’s the difference between what you think it would be like to spend the summer on a tiny Scottish island and what it’s really like? Answer. . . Where shall I start?

  Chapter 1

  The backbone of a jellyfish

  ‘Think about it, Dee,’ said Matt. ‘It would be amazing!’

  Mum actually did seem to be thinking about it. They both pored over his laptop, looking at the pictures. Her idea of a great holiday is somewhere hot with a swimming pool, but Matt was too new to know that yet—he’d only been living with us for a couple of months.

  ‘What?’ said Tressa, coming up out of her book like a submarine surfacing. ‘What would be amazing?’

  ‘Jean next door has just offered us her cottage on Morna for the whole summer,’ Matt said, turning the laptop towards her. ‘She can’t go this year because of her ankle.’

  Tressa shot me a look, like it was my fault Jean fell off her ladder, just because I happened to be holding it at the time. I personally don’t think people older than your granny should go up ladders, but she had insisted and I was only trying to help.

  ‘Well it’s a stupid idea.’ Tressa downed periscope and sank back into her book.

  Milo brm-brmmed his ambulance across his car-mat. There had been a horrific pile-up right outside the supermarket, involving about ten cars of all different shapes and sizes.

  ‘I don’t think we should dismiss it out of hand,’ said Mum, who would definitely have done just that when Dad was around, if it was him who had suggested it. You could tell she was trying to think of a way to get out of it though, without upsetting Matt.

  ‘So you’re saying you actually want to go?’ scoffed Tressa, surfacing again. ‘I don’t think so!’

  ‘We’re just talking about it, all right?’ said Mum.

  Milo abandoned his medical emergency, picked up Nee-na and sat back on his haunches. Other five-year-olds have cuddly toys but he has a police car with doors that open. It’s small enough for him to hold in his fingers while he sucks his thumb, which he isn’t supposed to do any more now that he’s started school.

  ‘There’s a shop on the island,’ Matt said, obviously thinking that might be a selling point with Tressa. ‘Jean says it stocks everything you could possibly need.’

  Tressa glanced at the picture he had brought up on the screen and snorted like an indignant hippo. The kind of shop that stocked everything she needs would have to be a mile-long mall. Milo stuck his thumb in his mouth and watched them over his fist.

  While Matt went on trying to convince Mum, with things like ‘It’s got a library,’ and ‘The children will love it,’ Tressa went on snorting and tossing her hair, and I dropped down onto the floor beside Milo.

  ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot,’ I told him. ‘We’ll just end up staying here as usual.’

  We hadn’t been away in the summer holidays since Dad moved out to live with Donna, which was three years ago. I didn’t mind, though—we had sleepovers and camped in the garden and stuff like that, plus Dad came down several times to take us out for the day. He and Mum don’t talk to each other, which is bad, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be when they did.

  Milo smiled, and his thumb slipped out. But then. . .

  ‘All right—let’s do it!’ said Mum.

  My eyebrows shot half-way up my forehead and seemed to get stuck. Milo gave me a horrified look. Tressa snapped her book shut.

  ‘Well, you can go, I don’t care. But I’m not going!’

  For someone who’s supposed to be clever, Tressa can be really stupid. I mean, everyone knows that if you’re twelve, you can’t stay at home while your family goes on holiday. What was she thinking? That she could stay with Dad? In his one-bedroom flat with Donna, who Tressa one hundred per cent hates?

  Or did she think she could stay with her friends? Maybe some people could, for a week, but not for the whole summer, and anyway Tressa hasn’t really got any friends unless you count Lana and Jodie, and she doesn’t seem to like them all that much, except to boss around. She’d much rather spend her time trawling through books, scooping up long words she can use for showing off with, such as ‘ingest’, which doesn’t mean, as you might think, ‘only joking’ but ‘take food into the body,’ or as any normal person would say, ‘eat’.

  ‘Just take a pile of books with you,’ I said. ‘All you’re going to do in the holidays is read anyway, so what difference does it make where we are?’

  It was annoying. I mean, sometimes you just have to suck it up. It wasn’t as if she’d be missing out on good stuff such as playing footie in the park or swimming at the lido or making rope-swings and zip-wires in your best mate Benjie’s back garden (don’t tell Mum).

  ‘We’ll get to go on two planes and a boat,’ said Matt. ‘It’ll be a real adventure.’

  Way to get Milo onside! I actually quite liked the sound of that myself, plus it reminded me of a joke. ‘What did the water say to the boat? Nothing—it just waved!’

  Tressa jumped up and turned her fire on me.

  ‘Everything’s a joke with you. I hate you, Jack!’ she said. Then, bang! She flounced out, slamming the door behind her.

  I wish that Tressa was a sulker. Then if she didn’t get her own way, she’d go off in a huff and everyone could just ignore her. But it’s really hard to ignore someone who’s in a massive strop. She kept it up for the whole of the rest of term, even after Mum and Matt had got the tickets and there was no way any of us were going to get out of it.

  She was furious with Matt for wanting to go, with Mum for caving in and with me for not saying anything. ‘If you’d taken my side, they’d have had to listen,’ she said. Like that would have made any difference.

  She kept it up even when the rest of us started to feel excited.

  ‘Just give it a chance,’ said Mum. ‘The island really does look beautiful.’

  But, see, here’s the first difference between how we thought it was going to be and how it was—when we got to the island, it didn’t look like Jean’s photos at all. Or rather, it did, but only in parts.

  On one side of us, as the boat came alongside the jetty, there was a gorgeous white sandy beach, but on the other was a kind of gulley which was full of broken plastic bottles and smashed-up rubbish, with a rusty old cooker on the top.

  There were two buildings near the shore, which looked as if they’d once been houses. One seemed to be used as some kind of store, and the other had half its roof missing and all the windows boarded up. There were three rusty wrecks of cars at one end, with all th
e windows out and grass growing on the seats. The whole place looked as depressed as a goalie who’s missed a penalty.

  Matt said obviously Jean wouldn’t have chosen the tatty bits to take pictures of, but we could do like her, and just focus on the lovely bits.

  ‘Was that a rat?’ said Mum, as a streak of brown disappeared in the seaweed bundled up at the top of the beach.

  The second difference was that things weren’t the way we’d imagined from Jean’s descriptions. Most people round where we live, if you say there’s a shop that sells everything, would assume you mean a really great shop.

  The island shop wasn’t a proper shop at all. It was somebody’s house, just up from the jetty, and it didn’t even have any set opening times—you had to go in and shout.

  ‘The door’s always open,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘No-one locks their doors here.’

  She wiped her hands on her apron, which looked as if she’d wiped them on it lots of times before, and stood behind the counter, waiting for us to choose. All the food was behind her, on dark wooden shelves that covered the whole wall, floor to ceiling.

  The choice seemed to be things in tins, dried stuff like rice and pasta, long-life milk, and a billion sorts of biscuits, from ordinary ones like cream crackers and bourbons, to oatcakes and something called ‘butter biscuits’ in plastic bags, which looked as tasty as cardboard.

  There were two boxes of eggs on the counter and a sack of potatoes on the floor in front of it, beside a box of carrots and a big bag of onions. While Mum and Matt were getting the food, me, Tressa and Milo started looking through the bashed-up books and board games in a big bookcase behind the door.

  ‘Help yourselves to anything you fancy from the library,’ the shopkeeper said. It wasn’t exactly the kind of library we had been expecting.

  When we’d got everything, someone called Jimmy came to take us up to Jean’s house. We put our bags and shopping on the back of his tractor and followed him up there.

  When someone says ‘tractor’ you think of a big, shiny machine that blocks up country lanes, but this one was about the size of a quad bike with a little trailer, and it looked nearly as old and ramshackle as Jimmy. We didn’t have to worry about keeping up, as its top speed was snail’s-pace, and it kept completely stopping.

  In Jean’s pictures, the sea and sky were bright blue, and everything seemed to sparkle in the sun, but the day we arrived was all-over grey, and as cold as December. Matt said never mind—it just meant we’d feel all the more cosy in our snug little cottage.

  Which brings me to the third big difference between what we imagined it would be like and what we found. Jean’s house, which looked white and shiny from a distance in the pictures, when you got close up, looked damp and shabby. Inside, instead of being quaint and historical, everything looked old and out of date.

  There was a dog-eared exercise book full of information and instructions about things like how to light the peat fire and where the candles were kept. Yes, candles. Morna didn’t have a proper electric supply like everywhere else in the universe, just a generator that came on for a few hours in the evening.

  You couldn’t use electric kettles or toasters or fan heaters, because they took too much power to run, and the fridge and freezer were in an outbuilding because they went off overnight. There was no mobile connection and the internet was patchy.

  Matt said, ‘We’ll manage for a month. We can get some board games from the shop!’ but even he was sounding doubtful now. Milo was the only one who looked happy, and that was because he had spotted a wrecked old van in the field behind the house.

  ‘Can I go out and play?’

  ‘We’ll all go and have a look around outside,’ Mum said. ‘We might as well. It can’t be colder than it is in here!’ She made it sound like a joke, but if it was Dad instead of Matt who’d brought us to a chilly, tatty place like this, it would have been a full-on massive grumble.

  Tressa and me trailed out after them.

  ‘This is your fault,’ she hissed. ‘You’ve got the backbone of a jellyfish!’

  Not that again! Just because she was always up for a fight.

  ‘What’s the point in making a fuss over things you can’t change?’ I said. ‘Anyway, maybe I wanted to come!’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  If I’d known any jellyfish jokes, I’d have said one, to annoy her, but I didn’t. I do now though.

  What kind of fish goes well with ice cream?

  Jellyfish!

  Chapter 2

  Trespassing

  Milo wanted to go straight to the van, so we all walked across the concrete yard, between the sheds and out into the field, which sloped up towards the hill behind the house. It looked like autumn, with brown leaves strewn all over the grass, until you realised there weren’t any trees.

  What looked like dead leaves turned out to be sheep’s droppings. They were everywhere, but then, so were the sheep. They weren’t fat and fluffy like sheep are supposed to be, but scrawny and small, with little stick legs and bits of dirty wool trailing under their bellies like rags.

  The van had no tyres on one side so it leaned right over, and the driver’s side door had fallen open. Grass was growing around the bottom edge, so it was completely stuck. Mum and Matt tried to close it but they couldn’t. They went right round the van, pushing and pulling at various bits of it, before deciding it was safe for Milo to play in.

  Mum let him stay out there on his own while we did an inspection of the outbuildings, so that Matt could locate the peat store and she could make sure there weren’t any hidden dangers, such as open trapdoors or rat poison or ladders. She said that here, on this island in the middle of nowhere, with no traffic and hardly anyone around, it would be perfectly safe for Milo to play outside on his own, once she’d done some basic checks.

  ‘Same goes for you guys,’ Matt said to Tressa and me, quickly adding, ‘If your mum says so, of course.’ He’s always dead careful not to act like he thinks he’s our dad, ever since Tressa went off on one when he and Mum were talking about him moving in. ‘I don’t want him here!’ she’d yelled. ‘He’s not my dad!’

  Mum smiled and nodded at Matt, then said to us, ‘It’s impossible to get lost on an island, so feel free to go off and explore.’

  Free. I liked the sound of that, and Tressa actually cracked a smile.

  We crossed the stony track in front of the house and headed down towards the sea. It was late afternoon by then, and the clouds had lifted. The sun was pale and low in the sky.

  It didn’t take us long to reach the shore. The cliffs were not high or steep, and we could easily have clambered down onto the strip of rocky beach, but we stood at the top to take in the view.

  We could see the mainland, like a thin rumpled ribbon of blue, stretched out along the horizon. Gulls were swooping and gliding low over the water, sometimes dropping suddenly to dive for fish.

  ‘Why do seagulls fly over the sea?’ I said. ‘Because if they flew over the bay, they’d be bagels!’

  Tressa didn’t laugh, but she didn’t bite my head off either, so things were looking up, strop-wise.

  ‘Which way?’

  We decided to go left, in the opposite direction from where the boat came in. Rabbits grazing on the edge of the cliff looked up as we passed, but didn’t bother to run away. Sheep continued on their ambling tracks. It felt as if no living person had ever walked there before.

  After about ten minutes, we rounded a headland, and suddenly the shore flattened out. The grass sloped gently down onto a wide pebbly ridge, above a beach of white sand with not a footprint on it.

  Tressa started running, and I ran after her, all the way down to the water’s edge. We played leapfrog and hop-skip-jump, and looked for shells, and we didn’t even notice the building until we started back up the beach to go home.

  It was huddled under the low cliff at the far end of the beach, where the land began to rise again. We crossed the sand and crunched over the pebbles. A
t the top of the beach, the stones got bigger and the short grass growing in the gaps looked like water flowing round them. Up by the building, all the stones had been cleared away and there was a small strip of tufty, bright green grass.

  The building was long and low, with two small windows, one on each side of the door. When we got closer, we could see that the roof was held down by wires attached to wooden pegs that had been pushed into cracks in the stone walls. There was glass in the windows, all grimy and cobwebby, and the door looked as if it might have once been blue, but the paint was mostly worn away.

  Tressa put her hand on the handle.

  ‘We can’t go in!’ I said. ‘That’s. . .well, that’s. . .’

  ‘Trespassing?’

  Trust her to remember the word.

  ‘It’s only trespassing if the door’s locked,’ she said. ‘If you don’t lock your door, you’re just asking for people to come in.’

  ‘What if someone’s inside?’

  On the upside, she didn’t call me a jellyfish, but on the downside, she didn’t take any notice of me either. She turned the handle and pushed. The door wasn’t locked. We couldn’t see anything inside until our eyes got used to the dark, because hardly any daylight could get in through the tiny windows in the thick stone walls.

  The floor was bare earth, and there wasn’t any ceiling, just rafters under the uneven slates of the roof with, here and there, a few little chinks of daylight blinking through. The walls looked the same inside as outside, just stones with gaps and cracks between.

  It was all one room, with a fireplace at one end. There was a pile of driftwood in the hearth. You could tell that someone had been there, and not very long ago.

  There were three fish-boxes in the middle of the room, facing in like a ring of chairs, with a table in the middle made of a piece of driftwood balanced on four big stones.

  ‘Look at this,’ Tressa said.

  She had found a square recess in the wall with a weather-beaten piece of wood rammed into it to make a shelf. On the shelf, there were matches and candles, a plate and a knife, and an unopened packet of digestives. Underneath the shelf there was a tin box that someone had written some words on in white paint.