She is standing there, both hands by her sides, her feet in a puddle of water. The water is coming from her dress, which is soaking wet. She sees the drips dotting the puddle. It’s not Mumma but the Sad Lady, and as she lifts her head a little the moonlight reaches the features of her face and Gaia opens her mouth to scream because she looks like a monster and her eyes are missing and in their place are two endless holes that reach to the bottom of every grave right down to the bottom of the earth.

   15   

THE BOTTOM OF THE EARTH

Now

I felt anxious after the conversation with Maren about Tom. She’d hinted that Tom’s return to the very site where Aurelia killed herself less than a year earlier was indicative of some sinister character flaw. My relationship history had proven that I was rather wanting in the Character Judgement department, but I’d discerned that Tom was a still waters kind of guy. That is to say, most of the time he was an affable, tea-drinking middle-class architect, but occasionally he’d have a meltdown over the slightest thing – an offhand remark, a piece of wood cut a centimetre too thick, a missing pencil – and hurl a torrent of abuse at everyone in sight until the error was corrected. His face would turn red, veins would bulge in his neck, and sometimes he’d punch the doors in frustration.

Even Gaia seemed a little nervous around him. She seemed more nervous in general, now that I think about it, and her drawings were getting more Gothic. The same horrific figure with big black holes for eyes, drawn over and over. When I asked her about it she would just give me the side-eye and talk about porridge and elks and her mumma going for a swim.

But now that Derry was back, I felt safer. She was super buff. Her arms looked like stockings filled with melons and she had the thighs of a racehorse. She rose at five each morning to clamber down the ladder that ran down the cliff to run ten miles along the fjord. While I was shuffling like Igor after Coco around the playroom at dawn, yawning into my fist and counting the seconds until I could neck a coffee, Derry was bounding back into the house, sweaty as a farm horse and lithe as a pipe cleaner, the sound of The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ pumping out of the earbuds around her neck as she stretched out her piriformis. Even last thing at night she was still radiant with inexplicable jubilation, her smile so broad that you could see both rows of teeth all the way back to her shining white molars.