The Monster's Wife(30)

A trio of girls with their skirts hitched up round their hips danced over the flat stones fringing the shoreline, bare feet slapping the wetness. At the centre of everything sat Stuart and May, her dark head resting on his shoulder, his sun-brown fingers stroking her calf.

If May had seen Oona, she showed no sign. She drank long and thirsty from the cider jug. “It could be Frenchies,” her stage whisper hissed over the stones to lap against Oona’s ears, “or it could be some kind of wicked creature, a monstrous thing, disfigured.” A monstrous thing. Had May seen the scarred man too, even though she’d denied it? The whole world had gone mad and nobody could be trusted!

Stuart’s answer fizzed with condescension. “Monstrous? I think you’ve had your fill.” He peeled May’s fingers from the jug one by one while she gaped at him in mock horror. “I don’t think it’s Frenchies or things that go bump in the night. You know what I think and I tell you, I’ve got a few questions for Doctor Frankenstein if he ever roams from the big house,” Stuart’s voice was low and terse with suppressed violence. “Things have changed since he got here - the fish in the firth - others may say it’s the French, but I have my own ideas.”

“He hunts every morning.” May’s snort. “Well when I say hunts, he lays snares out in the valley along the peat road and he catches up what’s been limed there during the night - conies and stoats and great fat rats. He has little cages for ‘em...” Her voice sank low.

Oona realised she had been craning her neck and shrank back into herself, snatching glances at the girls dancing in the shallows with their skirts bunched in raw-knuckled fists, their faces shining with sweat. They looked around constantly to see if the men were watching them.

Stuart frowned and drew back from May. What she said had displeased him, it seemed, or at least not had the effect she’d hoped for. “I suppose you know all about his comings and goings, working up there day in day out.”

“Well, I mainly stick to the polishing and the pots and pans, but the other day, Oona—”

Stuart cleared his throat. May’s face swung in Oona’s direction. Her eyes were coals in a shifting fire.

“Speak of the Devil.” Stuart smirked and pressed his lips to the jar.

The dancing stopped. All eyes were on Oona. She wanted to turn tail and run to Granny’s, even if it meant a thrashing, but May was beckoning her over, smiling sweetly, her sharp-tongued demeanour melting from her. She patted a space in the sand beside her, already hollowed and smooth from the shape of another bum.

“Come sit with us.”

Body tensed beyond bearing, Oona obeyed, her eyes turned towards the ground as if she’d never seen grains of sand before, as if the pebbles fascinated her, though really all she saw was Victor alone up there in the big house with creatures not dead nor alive.

Something dark was brewing between the islanders and the doctor. She could taste the anger in the air. He wouldn’t be expecting it, not when the island was so new to him and so familiar to them.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Stuart bundling May onto his lap, tickling her as if she were a child. He didn’t need to try so hard. She knew what he meant. May was his.

Someone sat down opposite her. She saw a pair of pale feet, the ginger hairs on the toes gleaming in the firelight. It was Andrew. If she looked up and met his eyes, he’d stare at her and stutter some clumsy words. She had never been interested in boys that way. What was the point?

She lay back and stretched out her arms on either side, sculpting an angel in the sand. Above her, the sky had shed its red coat and grown a darker one, endless and velvet studded with tiny pearls. Sprites of fiery ash leapt from the crackling flames.

A slender body shuffled into the crook of her arm. Hair tickled her cheek and she heard a confiding whisper she knew well from nights spent squeezed into a too-small bed, sweating in the summer heat.

“Seen your Granny yet?”

“No.” Oona was reluctant to think about what would happen when she walked through the door.

“I told her you took ill at the big house and went to bed. She wasn’t too huffy, but if you stay here you might catch it, wicked girl.”

“Perhaps.” Oona shrunk into herself. May was being tiresome.

“I have been wicked too.”

“Oh?”

It was the same May as always, well, as some of the time: the dark head on the pillow next to Oona’s, invisible except for the gleam of wide eyes; the red lips murmuring secrets, recounting dreams, details Oona hungered for then wished she had not heard.

“I know I should wait until I am wed, but... You won’t tell, will you?”

“Not if you don’t.”

A pause, then, “How do you feel?” Although the words were sympathetic, May’s voice was bright and hard, not choked like before in the big house. “You look better, but... Have the effects of the drug worn off?”

“I believe so. I helped Victor after I rose. He brought Orpheus back.”

“To life?” May whispered the words, her eyes flicking towards Stuart.

Oona nodded, her mind moving from Orpheus to the dead frog, its second chance spent, not well or knowingly but carelessly frittered away as her life was. The sight of its body had shifted something in her. Now she saw how her life was wasted in small jobs and the avoidance of them. Her days were like berries on a daydreamer’s tongue, swallowed unthinkingly. She thought of Victor’s mother, his lament for her. She barely knew life.