Dedication

For the Hot Tub Girls, with love x.

Prologue

The next time the child wakes, darkness has fallen. Through the chink in the curtains she sees the moon shining, a milky light behind the clouds. It’s quiet and still; an atmosphere as if thunder is gathering. The child listens to the rasping of her own breath.

Inside the room, nothing moves. On the wall, plaster Jesus, caught in the moon-glow, looks down from between deep shadows, one hand raised in blessing. The child wants her mother, but her mother is dead. All the child has is the locket that she keeps beneath her pillow, small and heart-shaped; a secret.

‘Dad?’ she calls, tentatively. There is no answer. She listens hard but hears nothing, not her father’s snoring, nor the tapping of the paws of his little terrier, Trip, on the lino downstairs.

She is completely alone.

The child pushes herself up, untangling her limbs from the damp sheets. Her throat has been cross-hatched by razor blades; the glands in her neck are plum-sized, hard as pebbles. Her glass is at the side of her bed but the bottle of lemonade that Mrs deVillars brought over earlier is on the chest of drawers against the opposite wall, Jesus watching over it. Slowly, carefully, the child slides her legs out of bed. The floorboards creak, warm and warped beneath the soles of her feet. She’s so hot she will melt like candle-wax, but at the same time she’s shivering with cold. Her nightdress sticks to her, drenched with sweat.

She moves to the window, which has been open for weeks to try to draw in any passing whisper of cool air, and puts her hands on the ledge. Outside, the night is black, with the texture of treacle. It tastes like the weed washed up on the mud and dried in the sun; the feathers of gulls. Distantly, ship lights glimmer on the estuary.

The moon is emerging from its hiding place amongst the clouds: a good half-moon chalked onto a humid sky with the distant Welsh mountains like inkblots below. In the moonlight, the child sees a movement on the mudflats at the shoreline. Someone is down there. For a moment, in her feverish state, she believes it is her mother and her heart lifts even though deep down she knows it can’t be. She watches the person as they go to the edge of the sea, and hold back their arm, and fling something far out; a silent splash as it makes contact with the water. Whoever it is stands for a moment, staring out over the sea until the moon retreats and then they turn and disappear back into the shadows.

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Thursday