The metal heart.
‘I thought it might help you remember.’
A duck thuds skywards. The peregrine falcon plummets.
‘I don’t remember anything,’ I say. The heart – Dot’s metal heart – is cold and heavy in my hand. I remember the first time she had held it and passed it to me: it was warm and we’d both laughed with delight at finding something so beautiful.
It’s a promise, she’d said.
I didn’t have to ask what the promise was for. But now that promise is chill against my fingers.
The peregrine strikes. The duck doesn’t make a sound.
John’s smile wavers. ‘Tell me about when you saw Angus last night.’
I close my eyes and picture grappling with him on the barrier. I imagine his hands around my arms. His voice was loud. Then the push, the drop, the cold water.
I don’t want to remember more than that.
The heart is about the size of my clenched hand. Cesare told me that each man’s heart is the size and weight of his own fist. My heart cannot be the same weight as this, surely. It feels so much heavier, thudding relentlessly in my chest.
‘When did you last see Angus?’ John asks. His expression is earnest, kind. Perhaps I could tell him everything I remember. But then what? Once you’ve told part of your story, it so easily grows and changes in other people’s minds, in other people’s mouths. Once you have told your story, it no longer belongs to you.
‘I can’t remember,’ I say again.
John O’Farrell walks away and I follow him, even though I feel light-headed now.
‘I feel faint.’ I turn away from him and from the thought of the heart. Then there’s the sea: waves like a heartbeat, bubbles of air, the smooth surface, as though nothing has happened. My mouth is parched. I close my eyes. I feel a surge of nausea.
‘Are you well?’ O’Farrell takes my arm. ‘Here, sit. This heather is dry.’
I sit and he crouches next to me, his eyes creased with worry. I take deep breaths and keep my eyes closed for longer than I need to. I can feel him watching me.
‘Are you strong enough to walk on the beach? I know you want to rest, but I need the truth from you. You must try to recollect, Con.’
I nod and he helps me to my feet.
As we start to walk, the peregrine sweeps past, towards the cliffs, where its scrape will be. In its claws, the limp, dark shape of the duck it has killed. The peregrine soars, elegant and beautiful: from this distance you cannot see the blood masking its beak and face.
The sea has dropped, sinking back onto the mud flats, exposing the wrecks of old ships and leaving a broad line of seaweed to mark the point of high tide.
I step onto the sand and walk down towards the sea, stopping between the line of seaweed and the sea – between the tide lines.
O’Farrell doesn’t follow me but stays back above the seaweed that marks the high tide.
‘I didn’t know you were superstitious,’ I say.
There is an old proverb that things of the devil have the most power in the stretch of sand between high and low tide, because the land there belongs neither to the earth nor the sea.
I can feel O’Farrell watching me carefully as I walk over the smooth patch of sea-scoured sand. Back where O’Farrell is standing, there are strings of bladderwrack, as well as things the sea has heaved up: pieces of metal, a scrap of cloth from a shirt, a man’s leather boot, dug into the sand as if mid-kick. It seems to me that the superstition is wrong: the high-tide line is the thing that should be feared. That’s where all the bad luck lands. That’s where things lost in a storm would wash up. My skin crawls.
I beckon to O’Farrell. He hesitates, then shakes his head and walks down to stand next to me.
‘I want to know what happened,’ he says. ‘If you tell me the truth quickly then I can help you.’
‘I don’t know the truth.’
I don’t tell him that no one can help me. It is only a matter of time now, and I am spinning out the hours like gold, hoping to save my sister, hoping to avoid the rope.
‘Come on, Con,’ John says, and there is a touch of impatience in his voice. His hands clench for a moment, although when he sees me notice, he puts them into his pockets. I fight down the quick, dark terror that clutches at me. I remind myself that he means me no harm. He is simply a man, with a man’s big hands and strong muscles. He doesn’t understand how the slightest movement from him might seem like a threat. He doesn’t know how a man’s muscles might frighten a woman into silence, or might make her nod yes, when every nerve in her body is howling no.
John’s eyes are fixed upon mine, and I know he is frustrated, though he thinks he’s hiding it. And he won’t understand how my whole body is thrumming with the knowledge that he could, if he wanted to, crack my skull like an egg, or cut off my airway with one of his hands. He may say things to me, like Quickly, Con, or, Come on, Con, and he may not mean them as threats. But threats they are, all the same. If I wanted to make myself equally menacing to an angry man, I would need to carry a knife. I would have to remove it from my belt during conversations, and slowly sharpen it while he trembled.
John reaches out to me now. ‘You’re not well.’
I tense my arm and flinch away. ‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Con,’ he says, his eyes shocked, his voice soft. ‘I would never hurt you.’
And he reaches for my arm again, and my breathing is loud, because all I can think of
