Death Wish (The Ceruleans: Book 1) (3 page)

Back at the cottage, I stripped slowly before the
full-length mirror in the bathroom, gingerly peeling off my clothes and letting
them pool on the floor. I examined my body carefully, exploring every angle in
the early evening light that shone through the slatted blinds, but could find
no suggestion of injury, just the usual smooth, pale skin. I checked the
clothes – no stains, no rusty odour. Frowning, I replayed the events in the
graveyard. I was sure I’d felt blood bonding skin to fabric right up until the
boy pulled me up. It must have just been a little moisture from the gravestone,
I reasoned.

The realisation that I’d just been sprawled on a gravestone
made me shudder, and I stepped into the bath and put the shower on full heat
despite the humid day. It took half a bottle of shower scrub before I felt
ready to emerge from the cloud of steam.

Ten minutes later I was sitting on my bed, preparing to comb
through my tangled hair, when a knock on the front door made me start. For a
moment I was bewildered – I had no neighbours out here, and the lane that led
to the house was a dead end, so no through traffic passed. Whoever was here
meant to be here. But who…? Then I remembered the Dan’s Dive Shop delivery.
Cursing, I threw on an old zippie and ran downstairs.

Flinging open the door, I expected to see one of Dan’s
cronies, a burly Dave or Bob type perhaps. Man with van, he’d said. Well, the
van bit was as envisaged – a red Transit with muddy wheels – but as for the
man…

‘Hello again,’ said Luke pleasantly.

It took me a moment – too long – to place him. My early dawn
misadventure had got entwined in my mind with the vivid dreams of the morning,
and somehow the mental image of my rescuer since had become blurred, mythic,
like an abstract painting – a looming figure in black with two cobalt-blue
streaks for eyes. Now, his true form came flooding back, and with it a good
dose of reality – for there stood just a nice-looking, normal bloke in scruffy
trainers, well-worn jeans and a washed-out t-shirt.

I was opening my mouth to say ‘Hey’ or something equally
uninspired when his eyes flicked downwards momentarily and took in my bare
legs. Mortified, I tried to tug down my Tweety Bird pyjama shorts and made some
effort to comb out the tugs in my hair with my fingers.

Abruptly, he turned and crossed to the back door of the van,
which he had left open. He emerged with a box, swung it easily up and strode
back to me at the door.

‘Where do you want it?’

I gestured mutely to the hallway, and Luke stepped in and
placed the box – full of surfing paraphernalia, I now saw – on the floor.
Before I could thank him he was back at the van and then emerging with my
surfboard, which he eased through the door and laid against the staircase. In
the small, cramped hallway the board looked massive and I gulped, suddenly
realising the enormity of my plan.

There was a long and awkward silence during which Luke
waited expectantly, surveying me with serious eyes.

‘I… um… I didn’t realise it was you. Man and van, I mean,’ I
attempted. Funny how the word ‘man’ made me want to giggle like a ten-year-old.

‘Evidently,’ he said wryly. ‘Given that you told me you
weren’t going back out
there
.’ He thumbed behind him, gesturing to the
sea beyond that was sparkling under the lowering sun.

‘Yes, well…’ I cast about desperately for some excuse that
wouldn’t make him think I was just some idiot kid with no appreciation of what
he’d done for me that morning. Then: ‘Surfing lessons!’ I declared
triumphantly. ‘I thought about what you said earlier, realised my skills are,
well, a little underdeveloped, so I decided to get lessons this summer.’

He listened soberly without breaking eye contact, and I had
the disturbing sense he could see right through my lies, right to the heart of
me.

‘Sound idea,’ he said. ‘So, who you going with?’

I looked at him blankly.

‘For lessons?’

‘Oh, right. I hadn’t quite got that far…’

He leaned against the door frame. ‘Well, there’s only one decent
qualified surf instructor in the area. So if you want to learn – and going out
without an instructor again would be madness…’ He gave me a hard look. ‘… you’d
better get in there and book for the summer.’

‘Is that right? How much is the going rate?’

‘Ten an hour.’

‘Ten is fine,’ I said quickly. One hundred would have been
fine; I had no intention of actually booking lessons. ‘Do you have the
instructor’s number?’

‘Sure.’

I took my phone from the hall table, entered my passcode and
neatly cleared an alert informing me I had missed a call from Mother. Again.
‘Okay, ready.’

He reeled off a number with fluid ease.

‘Name?’ I questioned.

‘Luke.’

I looked up at him and smiled. ‘Smart arse. Instructor’s
name?’

He smiled back at me. ‘Luke Cavendish.’

‘Oh!’ Suddenly, I got it. Luke was the surf instructor.
Well, it made sense; what I’d seen of him on the waves that morning showed that
he was more than competent on a board. And I’d unwittingly just agreed to
lessons with him.

I narrowed my eyes at him, and in return his widened in
innocence.

‘Well, you do want lessons, don’t you? Because I wouldn’t
want to see you out there again otherwise…’

The tone was polite, but there was an unmistakable note of
warning in it.

I thought quickly. Sneak about, or let him teach me? The
thought of accepting help, of letting anyone be near me, was difficult to
swallow. It was bad enough that I would be braving the waves again, frightened
as I was of the sea; but let someone else come close enough to see my
vulnerability? Still, this morning had proved that there was a lot more to
surfing than I’d thought, and if I was really going to experience what Sienna
had, I’d have to learn, and fast. Lessons hadn’t occurred to me before, but
perhaps this had been a stroke of inspiration. Although his offer was strange.
What was in it for him?

‘Why do you want to teach me?’ I asked. ‘You can’t have seen
much potential this morning…’

‘Money would be useful,’ he said. ‘If you can afford to
pay.’

I thought of my plan to find a summer job; and of course
there was always my bank account to fall back on. ‘Not a problem,’ I said.
‘But, well, I’m not sure how easy a student I’d be to teach. When it comes to
sports that require poise and fearlessness, I’m not exactly a natural.’

He grinned. ‘I never could resist a hopeless cause.’

All at once, the idea of spending hours in the company of
this guy seemed like a pretty good one, and I found myself grinning back.

‘Okay then. But I’ll need an intensive course. By the end of
the summer I need to be able to hold my own.’

‘Well, that’ll depend on you and how hard you’ll work. A
lesson a day. I work days usually, so it’ll have to be early morning or around
this time.’

I thought of today’s early morning start and immediately
said, ‘Evenings it is. But I don’t want babying. You have to teach me to handle
the big waves.’

He frowned and shifted uncomfortably. ‘Okay. But you have to
do something in return, or I’m not taking you out on the water.’

‘What?’

‘You do as I say. No power plays. No pushing the limits. No
crazy
kamikaze
crap.’

We both winced at the word, and I found myself wondering how
much he knew about Sienna. Local gossip, or had he known her too? Only one way
to find out, and that was spending more time with him. If it weren’t for the
bit where I had to conquer the ocean that terrified me, I’d have rather looked
forward to it.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You’re the boss.’

A smile split his face once more. ‘’Kay then. I’d better be
off. I’ll see you tomorrow, on the beach, six p.m. Oh, and bring the board.’

‘Got it,’ I said.

I watched him walk back to the van and drive off down the
lane. Then I went inside and closed the door. Sitting on the staircase, I
scrolled through my phone until I reached ‘Luke Cavendish’. Smooth how he’d
managed to cast himself as my surf instructor and give me his number in one
move. The obvious conclusion would be that he liked me.

It had been so long since I’d had any male attention. Being
educated at an all-girls boarding school didn’t exactly leave much scope for
flirting, and to date the grand sum of my romantic experience was a few
cringeworthy dances at school discos attended by the neighbouring all-boys
school and a couple of stolen kisses with a local lad while holidaying in
Tuscany last year.

I thought about Luke. Could I like him? Certainly, he was
attractive, and quick to smile. He seemed pretty easy-going, but he had an edge
of no-nonsense about him that I respected. And given his connection with
Grandad and Nanna, surely I could trust him.
Which is more than you can say
for that other boy from the churchyard,
said a voice inside. Mentally, I
stood Luke and Graveyard Guy side by side – broad versus lithe, brown versus
blond, blue versus grey…

Shaking myself out of the fog, I told myself sternly to snap
out of it – I wasn’t here for a summer romance, but for a serious purpose, the
most important and difficult of my life. And besides, it made no difference
whether I could like Luke, or even the other guy. It was always Sienna who
attracted the attention, with her flirting and hip-swinging and hair-flicking.
Without her, I was simply a shadow no one could really see, let alone love.

*

That night I slumped in the largest, squishiest armchair in
the living room, balancing a plateful of somewhat charred toast on my knee. I
flicked through the channels on the flatscreen – the one nod to modernity that
Mother had installed – until I found an old black-and-white movie. As Fred
Astaire swept Ginger Rodgers around a dance floor, crooning of heaven and a
heart beating so that he could hardly speak, I wondered whether there was ever
a time when life was really like the Golden Era of Hollywood.

When the grandfather clock chimed half past nine, I pulled
myself out of the chair and, leaving the crumb-strewn plate on the arm to deal
with in the morning, dragged myself up the stairs to bed. On the landing, I
looked into my grandparents’ room, took a deep breath of the powdery talcum
scent that lingered there and smiled fondly.

My room was ten paces down the hall, opposite a door that
had stood closed since my arrival. Last night, I had deliberately avoided any
potential source of pain, but now I found curiosity pulling me along. The metal
door knob was stiff to turn, and when the door opened the rusty old hinges gave
complaining shrieks.

The last light of the day lit the space softly. The room was
slightly smaller than my own, but with a better view. Like mine, it contained a
single wrought-iron bedstead, a white wardrobe, a weathered desk, an old
armchair and a bookcase crafted in the shape of a boat. My eyes scanned the
room quickly, looking for traces of Sienna – a hairbrush left on the desk,
perhaps, or a jumper flung over the chair – but surfaces were clear. I crossed
to the wardrobe and creaked the door open slowly, half-hoping for old relics,
half-dreading their discovery, but only the scratched back of the wardrobe
greeted me. Clearly Mother had been here – or, more likely, one of her staff.

Were it not for the hand-stitched patchwork quilt – blue,
like mine – and the books crammed into the bookcase, the room would have been
eerily sterile. Amid the faded and battered Enid Blytons and Roald Dahls and LM
Montgomerys on the bookcase, an old leather-bound book caught my eye, and I
pulled it out. Flicking through the yellow pages, I breathed in the bible’s rich
old-book scent. It brought to mind sitting in a pew at St Mary’s, sandwiched
between my grandparents and gazing up at the stained-glass windows with no more
care in the world than whether I’d be allowed seconds of gravy on my Sunday
roast. A page fell open, the book of John, and my eye was drawn to a passage
highlighted by a line and an asterisk in the margin; my grandfather’s confident
stroke of the pencil.

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe
also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I
have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a
place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am
you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.

What was it the vicar had said at Sienna’s memorial service?

Death is nothing at all… I have only slipped away into
the next room… I am I, and you are you… Whatever we were to each other, that we
still are.

I’d cried then, when I first heard those words – that had
been delivered by Canon Henry Scott Holland in a sermon a century ago and since
spoken at countless funerals. And I cried again now to recall them. I ached
with the desire to go back, to be that young girl in church with her
grandparents once more, when God was real and I was willing to trust in his
existence; when death was a simple falling asleep and I knew I would be
reunited with my pet hamster Scallywag in a glorious heaven someday. Now, I
wanted very much to believe Sienna was but a room away. Sometimes I even
convinced myself I could still feel her out there, in the way I had always felt
her – sad or happy, angry or frightened – our whole lives. But she was gone, I
knew that.

Still, once I was all cried out and had tucked myself into
my own bed in my own room, beneath the patchwork quilt just like my sister’s;
once I’d gone over the plan for tomorrow and talked myself out of and back into
surfing lessons with Luke several times, and wondered yet again just who that
boy in the churchyard was; when reality finally blurred at the edges and the
vivid colours of dreams dazzled me, then the final lines of the vicar’s eulogy
haunted me: