‘I’m walking my dog,’ she tells him, indignant.

‘Right.’ He makes marks in the notepad, his eyes dancing from the page to Viola and back again. ‘Out here last night with the Eldest Girls, were you?’

She shakes her head.

He snorts. ‘Offering your naked selves to the gods?’

‘No!’

‘Begging for the devil to give you a good seeing-to?’

‘No!’

Viola begins to tremble and a low, sonorous hum reverberates through the morning air; a sound only she can hear – and seemingly Dot, who begins to whine. Viola gathers the shivering dog onto her lap, not caring about dirty paws on her mother’s coat.

‘The girls won’t let you join in, eh?’ He sticks out his bottom lip, mocking her. ‘Ah, what a shame.’

Viola squeezes her eyes shut, finds power in the thrum of the earth to bring them back to the meat of their conversation.

‘I’ve found a body.’

‘You said. Deer, is it? Badger? Big brown bear?’

She shakes her head, no acknowledgement of his joke, and watches as his smirk twitches, then falters. Panic strikes at the cords of his neck.

‘It’s not…’

Viola’s turn to grin. ‘No. It’s not her. She doesn’t come up here anymore.’

He licks his lips, the way an animal does after a fright, and returns to the distraction of his notepad. Viola knows his thoughts. There is no body. Viola is playing her games again. She experiences his process of judgement as if it is her own, feeling it absolutely. The weapon rests firmly in her hand – let’s say it’s a rock – and she holds onto it for a moment, considering its weight, the damage it could do. Then, she throws.

‘It’s one of your brothers,’ she tells him, ‘the body.’

The pencil freezes, suspended above paper. The notepad droops and Viola can see what is there on the page – not words. He has drawn an inelegant sketch. Of her.

She tips her head towards the beginnings of Cable’s Wood, where, with closer attention, he will see the white snowdrops and yellow colt’s foot wearing petals of uncharacteristic red.

‘What happened?’ he asks.

Viola shrugs. ‘How would I know?’ She waits for his gaze to return from the trees, adding: ‘Maybe the devil gave him a good seeing-to.’

The sea growls; it gasps. The mist has thinned and Viola can see for certain that she is in the presence of no spirit, just a man. He can see what Viola is too – what she always has been – just a girl.

‘I don’t have any brothers,’ is how he chooses to reply.

‘No?’ asks Viola. ‘Are you sure about that?’

Part One Solar Phase

PART ONE

SOLAR PHASE

June 2017

JUNE 2017

In the beginning, it was a heaven on earth.