“Oh, sorry… I’ll go … I didn’t see you …,”
Violet turns. The girl who emerges from the woods matches her intonation perfectly. She’s a fragile little thing. Frizzy brown hair and glasses speckled with raindrops. She’s probably the same age as Violet but looks younger. Her clothes look considerably older: a big Salvation Army duffle coat is fastened up to the top above a knee-length skirt with shiny wellington boots. She holds herself close: elbows tucked in, like a roosting bird. She makes Violet think of premature kittens – the litter that Midnight had last Spring – just bones and patchy fur, dead in a cardboard box. Daddy had let her keep one overnight, the better to help her say goodbye. She’d held it until it went stiff. Even then she’d continued to try and manipulate the limbs; to open its closed eyes and to push her finger into the squeezed-shut mouth; the pad of her finger searching for the tiny sharp points of teeth.
“I’m Violet,” she says, introducing herself in a loud, proud voice, the way Daddy has told her to. She puts out a hand for the frail girl to shake but quickly withdraws it, feeling silly. Her own hands are powerful – to take this girl’s paw in her feeling like closing a fist around a handful of crisps.
“Are you with the tour?” asks the girl, and Violet notices how wide her eyes are, like freshly cracked eggs on a dainty side-plate. “Are you coming here? You should, you really should. I started last term and it’s not like other schools.”
“I’ve noticed,” smiles Violet, and the girl seems delighted by this small act of fellowship.
“I’m Catherine,” she says, though she doesn’t seem entirely sure about the truth of the statement. “My Daddy’s the vicar in Seascale so I don’t board. He’s very happy with how I’m getting on here. What about you? Where are you coming from?”
“South,” shrugs Violet, and pushes her hand through her mound of honey-coloured hair. “They think the witch doctors here will make me stop going off like a bottle of pop.”
“Do you have control issues?” asks Catherine, sympathetically. “We’ve got a teacher here who’s good for that. Well, not exactly a teacher but somebody who’s good at helping people. He’s a healer. Mr Sixpence he’s called, but don’t be put off. He’s not a weirdo, or maybe he is, but not in a bad way. Anyway, he’s good at making you feel better. Positive visualisation is part of it but there’s meditation and something called mindfulness on offer three times a week. Have you heard of Reiki? We do that too. It’s weird but it kind of helps. You get all emotional and these tears come out that you’ve been holding in since you were a baby. Mam says they’re the tears we weep for the sins of mankind, but she chuckles when she says it so she might just be pulling my leg.”
Violet feels grateful for Catherine’s presence. She’s not great at making friends. She can be too loud. Too boisterous. She loves too hard, that’s what Mum says.
“Is this what you do at playtime then?” she asks, sitting down on a fat rock at the water’s edge and gesturing for Catherine to join her. “Is there a playground? I didn’t see one. I like the ones where you hang upside down.”
“I’m not allowed to do that,” says Catherine, sitting down primly. She smells like an old lady and she seems to give off an air of constant cold. Her teeth chatter a little as she talks, though it doesn’t seem to cause her any discomfort.
“Not allowed to do what?”
“Hang upside down,” explains Catherine. “There was a little playground for a while but Mr Rideal wanted that turning into a nature garden so it’s gone. Like he said, we’ve got the trees and the lake so why did we need it? But I get problems with my balance so I don’t go upside down. I don’t swim either, though I did try with one of those bright red caps on. People said I looked like a match.”
Violet laughs, an obnoxious, donkey-like bray. It lands between them like a rock thrown into still water.
“Daddy says I need to stop letting things get on top of me,” explains Catherine. “I’m not one of the special pupils but he wants me to think about seeing Mr Sixpence. Maybe have a healing.”
Violet picks up a handful of pebbles and starts tossing them into the water. “A healing what?”
“It’s a thing we do here,” says Catherine, and she wriggles on the rock as if she’s uncomfortable. “Like I say, Mr Sixpence isn’t really a teacher. He sort of looks after the woods and the grounds. He used to be somebody quite high up but now he lives in a little …well, it’s like a bus or a van or something, but all painted up and made cosy and filled with his weird stuff. He sometimes comes in to give talks to the class about places he’s been and things he’s done.”
Violet nods enthusiastically. “The witch doctor! I said there was one. Daddy said I was being silly but I saw him in the background in picture in the brochure. He looked like, I dunno – something from a film. Have you seen Sword in the Stone? He looked like Merlin!”
“That’s funny,” says Catherine, her voice a little less fragile. “Daddy says that some of the blokes in the pub in the village actually call him Merlin. Others say he’s a - what’s the word? – a Druid, that’s it. He’s a very quiet person but when he talks to you it’s like you’re the only person in the universe.”
Violet isn’t sure how to respond. At her old school, anybody talking this way about an adult to whom they weren’t related would have had their school bag emptied into the toilets and their heads stuffed down shortly afterwards. Violet would have been in the thick of it, high on pack mentality, shouting encouragement without dirtying her hands. She doesn’t want to be that person any more. Catherine seems nice.
“How does this healing thing work then?” asks Violet.
“I don’t really get it but one of the people who stayed with us – they went to him and seemed a lot better afterwards.”
“Better than what?” asks Violet, intrigued.
“Than before. Sometimes we put pupils up at our house when the boarding hall is booked out or it’s been hired by one of the Scout or Guide groups that come to learn about flora and fauna and homeopathy and stuff. It’s just part of being a vicar’s daughter – you get used to it. This one girl, Honey-Rose, she was really nice one moment and then this complete raving demon the next. That’s Mam’s words, not mine. She’d get a bad phone call from home and start hurting herself. Like, really hurting herself. I saw her coming out of the bathroom once and the backs of her legs looked like she’d been sitting in a wicker chair. But she hadn’t, they were all scars. Daddy said I shouldn’t mention it to her. He said people had been bad to her but she was getting better. Mr Sixpence was helping her but herself back together.”
Violet sits quietly, processing it all. She watches the surface of the lake. It looks like liquid mercury. A spot of rain lands on the stone by her hand. She glares up again, the reddish hue of the Wasdale Screes looming in the corner of her vision, plunging down from the long ridge between Ill Gill and Whin Rigg. She wonders if Mum and Daddy are looking for her.
“It’s a funny name,” muses Violet. “Sixpence.”
“Like I said, he used to be somebody important. A psychiatrist, I think that’s what Daddy said, though I always get that confused with psychopath. Daddy says he went to the same university as Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal but he was a - what do you call it? - a drop-out. Went travelling and saw the world. He got caught up in a war once – he spoke about it at assembly, though we could barely hear a word he was saying. He mumbles a lot, but when he’s healing people his voice is clear as anything.”