‘Did you drive here drunk?’ Surtsey said. ‘With the girls in the car?’
Alice narrowed her eyes and focussed. ‘Fuck you.’
Surtsey stepped forward and put an arm out towards her. Alice threw a hand wide and smacked the wine glass out of her hand. It smashed against the doorframe, showering them in shards, leaving Surtsey holding the stem and a ragged, curved star of glass. She noticed that the girls had bare feet.
‘Careful,’ she said to them. ‘Step back.’
Alice put an arm around Gracie. ‘Don’t tell them what to do. They’re nothing to do with you.’
‘Then why did you bring them?’ Surtsey said.
‘Because I have no one to look after them. My husband is dead. I have no one else.’
Surtsey wanted to reach out but she kept still. The girls were both nervous now, Belle woken into focus by the breaking glass.
‘Why don’t you let me phone you a taxi,’ Surtsey said.
Alice shook her head for a long time as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘I think you did it,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You killed Tom.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Surtsey said.
‘I spoke to the police,’ Alice said. ‘Told them what I know. Told them to look into you. They said you had an alibi, that you were here at home. Do you think I’m stupid? They might believe that shit but I know you had something to do with Tom on the Inch. I just know it.’
‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ Surtsey said. ‘You’re wrong.’
‘If the police won’t investigate you, I will, I’ll find some evidence.’
Surtsey thought about the phone in her pocket. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not going to leave this,’ Alice said. Her nose was running, voice trembling. ‘I’m going to make you pay.’
‘Mum,’ Gracie said. ‘Please.’
‘It’s OK, darling,’ Alice said. ‘I’m just talking to this…’
She couldn’t find the right word.
Surtsey looked at the cowering girls, thought about Tom.
‘You should leave,’ she said, the broken glass still in her hand. ‘Please don’t drive in this state.’
Alice shook her head, teeth tight. She pushed her thumbs into her fists, squeezing, barely containing her rage.
‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Think of the girls,’ Surtsey said.
Alice looked like she’d been punched. ‘I think of them every second of every day. Everything I do, every fucking thing, is for them. And now I have to do it alone. You have no idea what that’s like. I hope you do, some day, I hope you have everything taken away from you.’
Surtsey thought of her mum up the road, of Tom on the black sand.
‘What do you mean?’
Alice spoke softly. ‘I’m going to destroy you like you’ve destroyed me.’
‘That sounds like a threat.’
‘It is, believe me.’
‘Please leave.’
‘You’ll be sorry.’ Alice released her fists and stretched her fingers. ‘You’re going to be sorry you ever set eyes on my husband.’
She grabbed the girls by the shoulders and turned them away, then strode down the path, the girls scrambling after her into the night.
25
Too much grass, red wine and guilt. Surtsey lay on her bed and tried to focus. She looked at her bedside lamp but it kept drifting across her vision, trailing floaters. She closed her eyes and saw Tom, the gentle collapse of his skull. She imagined lifting a rock and making that dent, destroying the structure of his face. She knew the power of the earth, the weight of stone. She understood that. How thin the layer of each person was, just hair, skin, sinew, muscle, bone. When the barrier between you and the outside world was broken and your insides were spilling out onto the sand you became part of the world. You returned to the earth, finally home, your atoms mixing with the universe again, interconnected in a way you could never be whilst alive.
Shit, that grass was strong. She was thirsty.
She blinked heavily, then eased herself up like an old woman. Put her hands in front of her like a mummy from an old movie, touched the wall then the door, then went to the bathroom and filled a glass with water. The feel of it in her throat was electrifying. She drank and refilled then wobbled back to her room and thumped the pint glass on the bedside table, fell back onto the bed.
She tried to look at the poster of the Inch on her wall. Steam billowing into the sky from the blue-green water, lava flow glowing, throbbing against the black rock, a shard of lightning connecting the earth to the sky. She thought of something she’d seen in a documentary. When a bolt of lightning strikes from above, all these little tracers spark up from dozens of points across the land in the first few microseconds, each of them desperate to connect with the motherbolt. They raise their ionised hands to heaven waiting for the rapture, hoping to be the chosen one, to be connected and lifted to the sky.
She heard a ping and looked around the room.
She felt a charge move through her like she was one of those streamers reaching out to the lightning, waiting for the bolt.
She pulled Tom’s phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen:
Do you feel guilty?
She blinked. Blinked again. Started typing slowly:
I’ve done nothing wrong.
The phone felt hot in her hand as if it was faulty. It pinged:
That’s not what the police think.
She dropped it on the bed and stared at it. Picked it up and typed:
I’m going to tell the police about you. Give them this phone.
For a second she imagined again that it was the Inch itself sending the messages. The island knew her innermost fears and secrets, knew her inside out, saw everything she did there. She slapped herself in the face trying to clear her mind.
She stared again at the messages, the letters drifting in her stoned vision, left to right like she’d been on a roundabout.
The phone pinged again.
She closed her eyes, needed a moment before reading. She concentrated on her lungs expanding and contracting, interacting with the
