“How does this healing thing work?” asks Violet, intrigued.
“I think it’s a bit like hypnotism,” muses Catherine. “He’ll probably give another talk about it soon. You can hear it, if you come to the school.”
Violet looks at the small, shy girl, and hopes that she gets to become her friend. Hopes, too, that she doesn’t spoil it. Hopes she doesn’t make her usual mistakes. Sometimes she loves so fiercely that it looks a lot like hate.
“If I come to this school, do you think I might stay at yours sometimes?” Violet asks, staring off. “You can show me around. Take me to meet Mr Sixpence …,”
Catherine laughs: a small, snuffling sound, like a shrew with a cough. “That’s out of bounds,” she says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “Mr Rideal takes you up to see him if he thinks it will help your development. There aren’t many rules at the school but we’re encouraged to let people heal in their own way so we don’t ask questions about how it works. Honey-Rose told me she doesn’t remember much of it any way. Just him talking in a deep voice and this constant drumming.”
“Sounds really weird,” says Violet. She picks up a bigger rock and throws it, forcefully, into the water.
“There are bodies down there,” says Catherine, quietly. “Because it’s so deep, they don’t decay. They just go white, like a statue. Like a candle, I suppose. Daddy said.”
Violet looks at the lake. She feels an overwhelming urge to clap her hands and shout – to make noise, to scream, to beat on the rocks and beg the world to notice her, to see her, to understand…
“We could have an adventure,” says Violet, trying to look excited. She comes across as manic: clown-like. “If you know where it is. We could sneak up, see what people are doing…,”
“They’d see,” squeaks Catherine. “He uses a slingshot to kill squirrels, that’s what Perdita in Form 4 said. And he can hear you coming. He has bottle-tops on a wire. Daddy said.”
“Daddy said, Daddy said,” mimics Violet, shaking her head. “It’s just for fun. But if you’re too scared?”
“I am,” agrees Catherine, without missing a beat. “It’s not nice up there. Daddy’s been and he said that Mr Sixpence just wants to be left alone. There are old mine workings in the woods up there, near the house where the boarders stay. He cooks on a campfire; reads books, plays music. He grows his own vegetables and plants flowers. He writes a lot. The last thing I want to do is disturb him. He’s always been very nice. When the children were staying with him it must have been very cramped.”
Violet flares her nostrils, disappointed her new best friend is so worryingly sensible. “He had pupils stay there to? I don’t know if I want that. I mean, he might be a weirdo.”
“He’s not,” says Catherine, forcefully. “He doesn’t do that much anymore anyway. Some of the pupils who weren’t suited for school, they’d go and learn forestry skills and how to take care of yourself and stuff. Daddy said it was too much for Mr Sixpence and so Mr Tunstall – the head – put a stop to it. Mr Rideal had all sorts of plans to start offering alternative therapies to the public but Mr Tunstall stood up to him.”
“And this Rideal? Is he the creepy one with the hair like Dracula?”
Catherine raises a hand to her face, shocked. ”You can’t say that! He’s the owner, yes. He’s put lots of money into this!”
“I’m sure he has. Still looks like Dracula though.” She gives Catherine a little nudge in the ribs, and is pleased to receive a similar one a moment later in return.
She suddenly knows that she and Catherine are going to be best of friends.
3
The phone feels awkward in Rowan’s injured hand: a bar of soap in a wet palm. He fiddles with the gaudy pictures on the cracked screen, flicking clumsily through the audio files. Such technical advancements have disenfranchised the traditional journalist. His skill-set is almost obsolete. There was a time when he could scribble down perfect shorthand in the pocket of his overcoat, a stub of pencil beneath his thumbnail - his jottings running neatly along the parameters of a betting slip or blank taxi receipt. Now all he has to do is press ‘record’ on his mobile.
Sulking, he sips his coffee. His niece will have to help him get dressed soon. Will have to wedge his toothbrush into his padded paw and raise the water-glass to his mouth. She’ll fasten the buttons on his shirt and lace his shoes.
“Did you get the thing?” asks Snowdrop, taking a cloth from a voluminous pocket and starting to scrub the condensation from the windows. The frames are flimsy, the glass thick, but they show the bleak, forbidding vista of the back way up Scafell Pike.
“The thing?” he asks, bewildered.
She turns to him, a little hurt. “I did you a present.”
“The coffee? Yeah, thanks …,”
Snowdrop tuts, hands on her hips, hair sticking out like a damp chimney brush. He feels like he’s being admonished by a cartoon. “Wait there,” she mutters, and runs briskly up the rickety stairs that lead up to the boxy, low-roofed bedroom. He hears the floorboards creak and a moment later she is back down, holding a large folder decorated with scraps of multi-coloured paper.
“I left it out for you to see when you woke up,” she says, holding it out. “I decorated it with stuff from the art box and some wallpaper samples. Do you like it? It’s got your name on.”
Rowan glances at the words on the front, written in black marker.
Portfolio
Rowan Blake
Journalist and Scribe
He realises he is smiling. He reaches out to take it then stops himself in case his ruined hands might stain the pages. He likes the word ‘scribe’.
“I’ll do it,” says Snowdrop, hurriedly. She opens the folder reverentially. Slipped within a transparent plastic sleeve is a picture of a well-dressed, dark-haired man in a neat white shirt, wool-tie, dark braces and a flat-cap. He’s staring up from the page enigmatically, as if he knows something that he might be prepared to share – for a price.
“That’s from your book,” says Snowdrop, unnecessarily. “I took a picture of it from Jo’s iPhone and we printed it out with proper glossy paper last night. It took ages. The rest of them are all genuine though. That’s okay, isn‘t it? I mean, you didn’t have plans for it all, did you? Jo said I should check but I wanted it to be a surprise.”
Rowan watches as she leafs through the pages. He glimpses headlines. Bylines. Black and white and black and white. Sees the word ‘Exclusive’ begin to repeat itself page after page.
“You did all this?” he asks, quietly.
She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “They were going to go mouldy.”
His old cuttings arrived a few days ago, along with the rest of his possessions. They’d been stuffed into boxes and bin bags and piled into his ugly, battered car. His latest ex-partner, Roxanne, had paid somebody she knew from work to drive it up to the Valley and abandon it on her drive. Rowan had encouraged his sister to set light to it – to let everything he used to be go up in a puff of smoke. Instead, she and Snowdrop set about sorting through it.