“I know her,” he said, plonking a finger on the photo.
“How come?” asked Louie.
“Met her just a minute ago. She never said she was head of the school.” Her remarks made more sense now and left Daniel with an uneasy feeling.
“You don’t mean you actually had a conversation with someone?”
“I didn’t start it,” Daniel admitted. “She thinks we’re going to go to the school.”
“What?” said Louie, horrified.
“She just assumed it. Never said I would be.”
Louie’s cheeks flamed red. “There’s No Way I’m Going to School.” The promise of home education was the only thing that had made her cooperate with this move to the island. Louie would rather hide out on the moors and live in a ditch than set foot in a school again. A wave of sickness rose up and the back of her throat burned. “Mum promised.”
“Well, that’s OK then,” said Daniel, a trifle impatiently. “We just keep our heads down, keep out of trouble. How hard can that be?”
Chapter 4
MUM SEEMED IN no great hurry to begin her home education project, which suited Daniel and Louie just fine. “We need a few days to settle in, get our bearings,” she said over ‘breakfast’ the following afternoon. (None of them were early risers and breakfast was often overtaken by lunch.)
Daniel had spent a restless night, kept awake by the unfamiliar smells and noises of the house and by the unbroken darkness of the countryside. Just before going to bed he had stepped outside to fetch his book from the car and found the garden path swallowed up in blackness. There were no shadows, no shapes; just deep, thick, solid darkness. He’d felt a prickle of fear, much worse than what he sometimes felt on the street in London at night. There you could see trouble coming. Then, just after midnight, he’d been wrenched awake by a noise from the garden. He lay there, heart hammering, confused by his strange surroundings and unable to work out where he was. For a few terrible moments he thought he was still inside Lissmore, that his release and everything since was just a dream. The idea almost made him cry out in panic. Then the noise came again – an owl screeching in the trees – and he remembered he was at The Brow. Even so, he had to get up and try the door, reassuring himself that he wasn’t locked in.
“You might as well go and have a wander,” his mum advised, once breakfast/lunch was over. “I’ve got things to do.”
“Are you going to get the computer set up?” Louie asked.
“Well, I’ll try and sort something out. I’ve got to make phone calls,” Mum said vaguely.
“I bet there’s no internet connection out here in the back of beyond,” said Louie, who hated being offline even for a day. Already Louie had turned on the ancient TV in the living room, and found the screen a blizzard of grey dots. “What the hell’s wrong with this thing?” she demanded, thumping the top of the set.
“There’s probably no reception,” said Mum with the infuriating casualness of someone who doesn’t watch TV. Adjusting the aerial had made it slightly worse. The only thing that brought any improvement in picture quality was standing on a particular floorboard by the window, behind the TV.
“Stay there while I watch Hollyoaks,” Louie instructed Daniel. “Don’t move.”
“But I can’t even see the screen,” Daniel protested.
“That’s OK. You don’t like Hollyoaks, anyway.”
Another let-down was the piano in the back room. Daniel no longer had lessons because he hated doing grades, but he’d reached a decent standard before quitting. He still liked playing and sometimes, especially if he was feeling stressed or down, he would sit at the piano for an hour or more, picking out a tune that he’d heard on the radio, chord by chord until he had it just right. They couldn’t bring the Yamaha from London, but Daniel’s mum assured him that there was definitely a piano at The Brow as her grandfather used to play.
He’d tried it out that first evening after their dinner of tinned soup. It looked like a relic from a saloon bar in the Wild West. The wood was warped and stained, as if by generations of spilled beer, and the keys were chipped and yellowish, like witches’ teeth. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a few bullet holes in the side. He pressed middle C and it let out a woolly plunk and stayed down. Oh well.
Since there was nothing to do indoors, Daniel and Louie agreed to go for a walk. As they left the house a guy of about twenty with shaggy hair and a furtive expression was walking across the grass towards the front door, carrying a cardboard box. “Eggs,” he said, thrusting the box into Daniel’s arms and lurching off without waiting for a reply.
“Kenny-next-door,” Louie said, as he crashed through a gap in the bramble hedge as though being chased by a pack of dogs.
“Thanks,” Daniel called after his departing back.
“Do you think he’s a bit weird?” Louie asked, without troubling to lower her voice.
“I dunno,” muttered Daniel. “Probably.” He shook his head. “This place.”
“We’re going to be all right though, aren’t we?” said Louie, looking to him for reassurance.
“Yeah. Course we are. Anyway, it’s better than…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Lissmore was never mentioned. The word was as unspeakable as cancer.
They set off, following the path inland, keeping Chet on the lead in case he started chasing sheep. It was a hot, still day and the sun was pressing down from an empty sky. Louie must be boiling in that sweater, thought Daniel. But she would never wear short sleeves, however hot it was. Another unmentionable. Perhaps if they could find an empty beach like the one yesterday, with no one around, she might be persuaded to put on a swimsuit and go in the sea. She used to like swimming before the business with her arms.
The footpath led them through fields of sugar beet, rapeseed and neatly furrowed soil parcelled up into tidy squares by dense hedgerows, on to the moor. On a distant hill what appeared at first to be a crucified man revealed itself to be a sagging scarecrow guarding a bare unploughed field. Above their heads birds with long forked tails wheeled and soared gracefully.
“What are those birds called?” Louie asked.
“Dunno,” said Daniel. “Birds all look the same to me.”
After twenty minutes of steady walking the path divided, offering Stape to the left or Darrow to the right. Daniel remembered the name Stape from the previous day and turned automatically left, along a dirt track marked by the imprint of horses’ hooves. They wound their way upwards, beating off clouds of midges hovering at face level. From the top of a stile they had a panoramic view of brown moorland criss-crossed by footpaths and one snaking road. Beyond and below the moor lay the village of Stape, dominated by a large brick-and-glass structure that was unmistakably the school. It was surrounded by lush playing fields, on which groups of children appeared to be crawling around as if hunting for something.
“I didn’t think term had started,” said Daniel.
“Why would anyone go back before they had to?” Louie replied with a shudder. The thought of school, any school, made her queasy. Even the architecture depressed her.
“What are they