The Binding Read online

  Duncan lit the first one, and gave the matches to Hamish. Hamish lit the second one. Elspeth lit the third one, and passed the matches on to Tressa. We weren’t exactly used to striking matches when Mum, Matt or Dad weren’t around, or even when they were around, come to that.

  When I’m a bit nervous, I always seem to think of a joke.

  ‘Why did the elephant eat the candle? Because he wanted a light snack!’

  Tressa lit her tea-light, no bother. I broke four matches, but eventually I got mine to light too. I looked at Duncan. Milo couldn’t light his own. . .could he?

  Duncan took the matches. He showed Milo how to light one, blew it out, and handed him the box. The first few times Milo tried, he wasn’t pressing hard enough and nothing happened. So he pressed harder, and the next few matches broke. When he finally managed to get one to light, he lost his nerve and dropped it on the dirt floor.

  He looked at Duncan. ‘Keep trying,’ Duncan said. ‘You can do it.’

  I didn’t actually think he could, and my attention was starting to wander. By the light of the five we had already lit, I could see lots of objects stuck between the stones in the wall. An orange rubber glove, a little cork float shaped like a doughnut, a scrap of fishing net with a dead crab hooked on by its claw.

  All sorts of pebbles and shells were in that wall, and pieces of coloured glass ground smooth by the waves. On a low ridge, the row of tiny skeletons we’d noticed on the first day looked ghostly pale, the light picking out their beaks like shiny beads.

  Milo finally got a match to light, and managed not to drop it. Elspeth guided his hand down to the tea-light, and when it lit he literally jumped for joy. Boing, boing, look what I did!

  ‘Before, there were only three of us,’ Duncan said. ‘Now there are six. Now we can close the circle.’

  We joined hands around the big candle on the makeshift table and did the rhyme. Round and round. . .can’t be unbound. . .the Binding.

  Part Two: Darkness in the sky

  Chapter 1

  The Day Star

  I definitely did not like the idea of Duncan telling us how we should behave at home. On the other hand, I definitely did like the effect it had on Tressa. If Matt forgot that he was likely to get his head chewed off and accidentally asked her to do something such as, for example, taking her muddy shoes off or passing the jam, she did it. No you’re-not-my-dad or anything. Then, while Matt and Mum were exchanging astonished glances, she would shoot me and Milo a secret smile.

  I liked the effect it had on Milo too. No more massive arguments when Mum said it was bedtime; no more mega-tantrums when he couldn’t have thirds of cake or lost a car under the dresser. Just those astonished glances and secret smiles.

  I didn’t think Duncan’s rules would make any difference to how I behaved—I mean, I wasn’t stroppy to Mum and I actually liked having Matt around—but then there was the rule about not arguing. It’s amazing how much you can argue with someone and not notice. As soon as I started noticing, I discovered how fed up I was with Milo half the time. He could be such a baby, and so annoying.

  ‘We can get that car out with a stick,’ I said. ‘I’ll help you.’

  Astonished glances, secret smiles.

  Matt and Mum thought it was the simple island life and all that lovely fresh air which was making us less argumentative. It was the one thing Mum actually liked about being on Morna. She said yes, it was beautiful, and yes, it was relaxing and all that, when Matt was being a one-man Morna fan-club, but you could tell she was just saying it. She liked Matt, but she no way liked the island, and it didn’t get any better when the sunshine disappeared.

  After a week of bright but chilly weather, a lid of cloud closed over the island, cutting off the tops of the hills. Mum didn’t want to go out for walks any more so she stayed at home with her Kindle. Matt was getting into photography, which meant he didn’t care about the weather. He went out with his camera in the daytime and played about with his pictures on the laptop in the evenings.

  Me, Tressa and Milo had a sort of project too. Duncan and the others were showing us ‘the secret places of Morna’. The cloud stayed on the hills for days, so there wasn’t any point going inland because we wouldn’t see anything anyway. So we explored the coastline, taking a different section each afternoon, all the way down the low-lying east side of the island. Duncan would stride ahead, beating down the nettles and thistles with his stick, and sometimes the flowers too, making their bright heads fly up into the air.

  On the first day, they took us to the seal beach, which didn’t seem to have any seals. But when we went to the water’s edge and sang some songs, suddenly there they were, bobbing about in the water, coming to investigate what was making the noise.

  On the second day, they took us to a little lake—they called it a lochan—on the top of a cliff, right close to the edge, where the water spilled over and splashed down onto the narrow stony beach below.

  ‘This is the leap,’ Hamish said.

  ‘Why is it called that?’

  Instead of answering, he went to the neck of the lochan where the waterfall started, and jumped across. If he had slipped on the wet grass, he would have fallen over the cliff. Duncan jumped across after him. Then Elspeth. Then Tressa did it, so I had to as well. Milo wanted to, but Duncan said his legs weren’t long enough, and then we all jumped back.

  Another day, they took us to the wrecking rocks, where the islanders long ago used to light fires to guide ships into harbour on stormy nights, only there wasn’t a harbour, and the ships would run aground on the rocks in the dark. All the sailors and cargo would be thrown into the sea, and driven towards the next bay by the tide, where later, when the storm was past, the islanders could go and pick up wood from the broken ship for their fires, and bag what they wanted of its cargo.

  ‘They had to pick through the dead sailors to find what they were after,’ Duncan said. ‘Then they left the bodies there for the crows.’

  You could never tell whether he was making it all up, but who cared? If they were just stories, they were brilliant ones, and being there where they were supposed to have happened made your hair stand on end.

  Like when we went to the priest’s stack. It was a huge column of rock standing in the edge of the sea, capped with grass. The sheer edges were full of noisy seabirds, and the smell of their fishy poos was worse than the public toilets in Grove Road Park.

  Duncan said once upon a time the only people who lived on the island were three monks, but then the Vikings came. They killed two of the monks but the third one got away. While the Vikings were stealing and wrecking in the monastery, the last monk ran down to the shore where we were standing right now and swam out to the stack. He hid in a cave on the far side where no-one could see him, but there wasn’t any food and years later, all they found was his bones.

  Everywhere we went, Duncan had a blood-curdling story to tell, and in just the same way as stories seemed to be everywhere for Duncan, jokes were for me. A cow in a field reminded me, ‘What do you call a cow eating grass? A lawn-mooer!’ Rabbits on the cliffs reminded me, ‘How can you tell that carrots are good for your eyes? You never see a rabbit wearing glasses!’

  Thistles, hedgehogs, chickens, spiders, mud, clouds. . .everything reminded me of jokes. A lone tree huddled in a cranny made me think of ‘How do you catch a squirrel? Climb up a tree and act like a nut!’

  ‘What’s a squirrel?’ Elspeth said.

  Me and Tressa laughed. Hamish and Duncan didn’t. It looked like they didn’t know what a squirrel was either. Come to think of it, there weren’t going to be any squirrels in Morna because there were virtually no trees.

  ‘Seriously?’ goes Tressa. ‘Haven’t you ever seen one in a book?’

  You could see that Duncan was annoyed, and he went striding off.

  The longest walk for us was the day we went to the south light. Elspeth and Hamish met us on the track near our house, then we all went to pick up Duncan at the hotel an
d struck out from there around the coast towards the southern tip of the island.

  Considering the north light was just a small automatic light and not a proper lighthouse at all, I don’t know why I thought the south one would be bigger and better, with red and white stripes all the way to the top, like lighthouses are supposed to have, and buildings at the bottom for the lighthouse keeper to live in. Which reminds me, why did the toad become a lighthouse keeper? He had his own frog-horn!

  The south light was exactly the same as the north one. We saw it as we rounded a headland, a little white marker on the highest point of the cliff. We could have walked across the open moor straight to it, but Duncan insisted we had to stay on the coast and walk round the cliffs, which was much further. I didn’t mind for myself and Tressa, but it was tough on Milo, what with him only having little legs and everything.

  The light was barely bigger than a triangulation point. We sat on the stony ground around the concrete base, looking out at the white-topped waves breaking over a line of rocks as sharp as crocodiles’ teeth that stuck up from the sea.

  ‘That’s where the Day Star ran aground,’ Duncan said. ‘Right there on those rocks.’

  I remembered the news stories, and Jean next door talking about it, when she got home from her summer in Morna—this big oil tanker breaking up on rocks right underneath a lighthouse. The captain didn’t see the light because he’d got drunk and fallen asleep.

  ‘It happened in the daytime,’ Hamish said. ‘There was a force ten gale.’

  ‘The wind whipped the oil up into a vapour, and then this black mist got blown across the island,’ said Elspeth. ‘Everyone had to stay indoors and keep their windows shut so they didn’t breathe it in.’

  ‘But most of it stuck to the rocks and beaches like thick black treacle,’ Duncan said.

  ‘It swallowed up the seabirds and seals,’ said Elspeth. ‘It was terrible.’

  Duncan said the worst thing was the invasion of incomers that came afterwards, when the mist had gone and the whole shoreline was dead under the slick.

  ‘They came with their detergents, trying to save birds that were going to die anyway, breaking up the slick on the water by spraying chemicals and trying to clean it off the rocks, but they were just adding poison to the poison.’

  The incomers couldn’t make the shoreline clean again, and half the oil was still there when they left. But after they’d gone, nature started its work. More gales came and broke up the slick; they churned up the waves and scoured the beaches clean.

  ‘Incomers don’t understand anything,’ said Duncan. ‘They think they have the power, but nature is stronger. Incomers have no power here.’

  Chapter 2

  Good secrets, bad secrets

  The noise of rain drumming on the windows woke me up. It was like a gigantic power shower, pointing straight at the front of the house. Mum made bacon sandwiches for breakfast to try and cheer us up, although the only person who really needed cheering up was her.

  ‘When it’s raining, there’s absolutely nothing to do here,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘If it doesn’t stop, I’m afraid we might just have to pack up and go home early.’ She did her best to look sad.

  ‘I think it’s easing up,’ said Matt, peering out at the rain. ‘It’ll just be a passing shower.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ goes Mum, looking like she’d found a penny and lost a pound.

  Matt put the ketchup on the table and went to stand behind Mum at the cooker, sliding his arms around her waist. Tressa didn’t even say one little ‘yuck!’ She didn’t make a face or stick her fingers down her throat either. She was sooo sticking to the rules!

  ‘When it stops,’ Matt said, ‘let’s go to the hotel for lunch.’

  ‘That would cost an arm and a leg,’ said Mum.

  ‘My treat,’ goes Matt.

  But lunchtime came and the rain still hadn’t stopped. We’d played all our board games and hangman and one-word-at-a-time-stories and everything else we could think of, and still it was pouring down. Mum plonked some bread and cheese on the table for lunch. Presumably, she thought we were past cheering up by then.

  We were just finishing off the last of the bread when Matt said, ‘Shh! What can you hear?’

  We all fell silent, listening.

  ‘Nothing,’ whispered Milo.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matt. ‘It’s stopped raining! We’ll be able to go down to the hotel for afternoon tea.’

  Afternoon tea means cakes, which is always good, but that wasn’t the only reason me and Tressa were dead keen to go to the hotel. We might meet Duncan’s mum and dad, and they might be as weird as him, and what would it be like inside? Would there be candles everywhere? What if he was there? Would he pretend not to know us? Would we have to pretend not to know him as well?

  We could do that. Tressa was proving to have world-class acting skills, I was nearly in her league, and even Milo was doing a fair job of pretending not to be a great big baby full of strops and tantrums.

  Just walking through the gate into the hotel’s walled garden felt like entering a magic land. Outside, everything was wild and windswept, grass and rocks and bogs, but inside, there were flowerbeds and bright green lawns. There was a pond with a fountain, and a patio with white-painted metal chairs; a climbing rose against one wall and actual palm trees in pots on either side of the front door.

  Matt rang the bell in the lobby and a big stocky man with close-cropped dark ginger hair came out. He absolutely had to be Duncan’s dad.

  ‘Come in, come in! Welcome!’ he boomed, shaking Matt’s hand so hard it looked as if he was trying to pull it off. ‘Edward Fairfax, at your service! Come on through!’

  Mum grabbed Milo’s hand and put her other one on my shoulder, so Mr Fairfax couldn’t shake her hand too. What a chicken! But she didn’t get off scot-free because as soon as we got into the dining room and she dropped her hand from my shoulder, Mrs Fairfax strode in through another door and grabbed it. Shake, shake, shake! ‘Come in, come in, come in!’ She was nearly as big as her husband, and talked just as loud.

  The dining room was posh and old-fashioned, with white tablecloths and faded pictures in gold frames on the walls. It had a high ceiling with a chandelier in the middle and fancy mouldings of leaves and flowers all round the edge.

  Mrs Fairfax sat us at a table near the window, looking out over the fountain, and went to get our tea. Mr Fairfax stayed to chat with Mum and Matt, looming over them as straight-backed as a soldier on parade.

  ‘And how are you enjoying life on our little island?’ he asked. Matt said it was wonderful. Such fantastic scenery! Such amazing wildlife! And so lovely for the children to have so much freedom.

  Mr Fairfax beamed. But since Mum hadn’t said anything, he turned to her and said sympathetically, ‘Harder for the ladies, I think. They do need a bit more company. Gossip and news and suchlike.’ You could tell Mum wasn’t warming to him.

  ‘It is a bit lonely sometimes,’ Mrs Fairfax agreed, catching what he was saying as she brought in the tray. ‘But we’ve got a big party coming in tomorrow. You must pop down and say hello.’

  She put the silver teapots on the table in front of Mum and cleared some space for a plate of sandwich triangles with the crusts cut off. Then she disappeared again, coming back straight away with a cake-stand three layers high. On the bottom layer there were slices of fruit cake and cherry cake and Madeira. On the middle layer, there were little cupcakes with bright coloured icing and silver balls, and on the top layer there were squares of fudge and shortcake and chocolate brownies.

  ‘Now we’ll leave you to enjoy your tea,’ she said. ‘Just ring the bell if you need anything.’

  The sandwiches and cakes were the best ever, but as we worked our way through them I couldn’t help feeling just a bit disappointed that we hadn’t seen Duncan. Then Mum rang the bell for some more hot water, and Duncan walked in.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ he said, sounding just like his dad. ‘My mother a
nd father said you were here—“the family from Jean’s house,” they said.’ He grinned at Tressa, Milo and me.

  ‘Duncan Fairfax,’ he announced, offering Matt his hand. He shook Mum’s hand too, as if he was a grown-up, and it was his hotel. ‘My friends and I have been showing Tressa, Jack and Milo round, and they’ve been teaching us French cricket and that kind of thing.’ He made it sound so normal. ‘When Tressa, Jack and Milo have finished their tea, would it be all right for them to come out and play in the garden?’ Duncan asked Mum. ‘We’ve got croquet.’

  Tressa jumped up. ‘We’ve finished now!’ she said.

  The three of us followed Duncan down a long hallway and out the back door. Milo wanted to know what croquet was.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Duncan. ‘I just wanted to get you on your own for a minute to tell you about tomorrow. We’re going swimming in the sea pool!’

  ‘What, in this weather?’ goes Tressa.

  It wasn’t raining any more but the air was cold and everything felt wet, from the squishy grass to the raindrops wobbling on all the flowers and leaves.

  ‘Rain or shine,’ said Duncan. ‘Come after lunch, and wear your swimsuits under your clothes. You won’t need towels.’

  ‘But. . .’

  ‘If you bring a towel, your mum will know you’re going swimming, and she might say you can’t. Am I wrong?’

  ‘No, but. . .’

  Duncan’s dad suddenly burst out of the back door and came striding across the grass. ‘Mother tells me you’re going to play croquet!’ he boomed. ‘I’ll help you set it up.’

  I didn’t know what croquet was but I can tell you now, it’s about as exciting as standing at a bus stop. You walk around knocking balls through metal hoops, and then wait forever while everyone else has their turn. It might be all right on a scorching hot day when you just want to lie around, but on a chilly day it’s torture by slowly freezing.