It makes no difference which girl finds the strength at the last. As one man will stand for all the others, one girl will stand for all those present at the stones that night, for all those who came before and all those who will come after.

She moves, this girl, not barefooted, but sturdy-booted, into the ferns, feeling out the shape of him with her toe, searching for his throat – the Adam’s apple. Then she raises her heel and she brings it down, hard.

A final stamp. The snake is dead.

Eastertide: Friday the 13th – April 2018

EASTERTIDE: FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

In the morning, everything is clear, sparklingly so.

It may as well be December 25th, a different kind of Christmas, because the red-haired coycrock girl cannot sleep, cannot wait.

In her room at the old Reunyon Farmstead, she sits upright in creased and grubby bedclothes, pulling aside the faded green curtains one more time to check.

At the first inching of the sun, she tells herself, she can get up, but for now the fingernail moon still rules, glowing gently through the mist.

So, she changes the rules – why not? She put them there in the first place. Let the day turn at her pace. If she leaves now, the sun will have reached the horizon by the time she gets there, and maybe no rules will be broken after all.

She swings her feet onto the boards, steps over last night’s discarded clothes – the short, black skirt, the leopard-print coat, the lace-up boots all covered in dirt – and she finds socks and a jumper. She is too impatient to change out of her pyjamas or to clean her teeth.

She will not stand in front of the bathroom mirror and see her lips stained red from the night before.

She goes downstairs, pulls tight the drawstring fastenings at the top of two rucksacks that sit in the hall – one for her, one for her mother, just in case – then she runs back upstairs, to fetch the radio from its charging stand at the end of her bed, forgotten in her anticipation.

This is just a small error, not a portent. It is nothing to do with the date.

Her mother had come to fear Friday the 13th, to fear all omens – single magpies, a crack in a mirror, speaking proudly of something before it is done. But Viola believes the date is fortuitous. The number thirteen is made up of a one and a three which, when added together, become four – something real, something stable.

Earth, fire, air, water. North, south, east, west. Black, blonde, brown, red.

In a world that gives you many reasons to be frightened, every hour of every day, the thirteenth is a mere bagatelle – and Viola believes her mother is starting to realise this. She is beginning to resurface.