The Art of Not Breathing(8)
He waits for a car to pass, then runs across the road. The boy with the Adidas trainers waves at me. I think Dillon must’ve told them to be nice to me. I wave back, then shove my hand in my pocket and look at the ground.
Now I’m alone, I’m at the mercy of the handbag girls. These are the girls who carry handbags to school instead of backpacks. I don’t know where they put their books. When I’m with Dillon, they don’t pester me, but when I’m alone they close in, commenting on the way my hair hangs or the tightness of my trousers. The leader of the handbag girls is Ailsa Fitzgerald. Ailsa is mean to nearly everyone, but I’m her favorite target, ever since the day we first met and a boy from another class pushed her into the school pond. I wanted to help, I tried to, but I was afraid of falling in and being sucked under. I couldn’t even speak because of my Laryngitis. I ran to get a teacher instead, but by the time I returned, half the school had seen her covered in pond slime. She’s been punishing me ever since, mocking my cowardice and silence that day.
Ailsa slams into me, nearly knocking me into the road.
“Ergh, you’re still here. We all hoped you’d died over the holidays,” she says.
I walk on. Sometimes I do wish I were dead, but then who would look after Eddie?
8
FORTROSE IS THE BIGGEST TOWN ON THE BLACK ISLE, but it’s still small. It doesn’t even have a cinema or a bowling alley. The high street wiggles through the middle of it with poky shops crammed next to each other, selling buckets and spades in the summer and umbrellas in the winter. The only useful shops are Superdrug, Co-op, and the bakery. The people here like to know everything about everyone. Nearly everyone in Fortrose knows who I am.
“You’re Elsie Main, right?” they ask. “You’re Colin’s wee one.”
My father knows a lot of people, women mostly.
Sometimes I lie and tell them they must be mistaken, but they just tilt their heads in sympathy.
Despite being small and full of busybodies, Fortrose does have plenty of places to hide. On one side of the town is Rosemarkie beach, where jagged rocks line the coast and the otters hang out. On the other side there’s a small harbor hidden from the main road where a handful of fishing boats are moored. Dillon and I aren’t supposed to go near the water unsupervised—at least, we never used to be allowed. Sometimes I think the rule doesn’t stand anymore because Mum and Dad don’t say much, but every now and then one of them will freak out if we’re home late and accuse us of going swimming. It’s an insane rule anyway, because how can we not go near the water? We’re surrounded. I have my own rule: it’s okay to go near the water; just don’t go in it.
Dillon goes off with Lara after school, probably to avoid my questions, so I head straight to the harbor—and the boathouse. Set back against the trees that shade the narrow pebble beach, the boathouse is a tall wooden structure with big arched red-painted doors and a corrugated iron roof. Right next to the boathouse is a rickety old clubhouse on wooden stilts that used to belong to the sailing club. The sailing club moved to the shiny new harbor in Inverness a few years ago, so now the clubhouse is all boarded and the boathouse no longer in use. This is my secret hiding place.
As I walk along the beach, a seagull nearly flies into me, making me turn toward the water.
That’s when I see the boat.
It’s a small one with a loud, jittery engine, which chucks out a plume of black smoke as the boat pulls up to the harbor wall alongside the other fishing boats. There are four boys in it, joking around, shoving each other. They’re older than me, maybe seventeen or eighteen. I sit on a bench and pretend to gaze out to sea. Three of the boys are wearing what I first think are leggings, but then notice are actually wetsuits with the arms dangling down like extra legs. One of the boys is bare chested, and even from here I can see he’s muscly. Two are wearing T-shirts, and a fourth boy is dressed in black from head to toe: black jeans, a thick hoodie, and sunglasses. They all seem to be experiencing different weather conditions. They clamber up onto the stone jetty via a rusty ladder bolted onto the wall. The boy at the front, in the hoodie, carries a heavy-looking bag over his shoulder, and two pairs of flippers. Their laughter carries out into the dusky evening, and I feel sad that I don’t have a group of friends to hang out with. Hoodie Boy looks in my direction, and I turn away. When they have their backs to me, I crouch down under the clubhouse and crawl across litter and pebbles to the loose panel in the side of the boathouse. It’s just big enough for me to squeeze through.
Inside the boathouse, there’s one boat—a moldy kayak that must have been orange once but is now a peachy-white color. The kayak sits near the arched doors as though it can’t wait to get back in the water. The rest of the boathouse is empty, with wooden beams across the walls and ceiling where I suppose other kayaks used to hang.
It’s dark inside today, but the afternoon light pushes through the cracks in the front door, making pale triangles of yellow on the floor. It smells musty too, like old wood and moss, but over the last couple of months I’ve made it quite homey—with blankets on the floor and one to wrap around me when it’s cold like today. There’s a small cupboard that I found discarded on the beach one day and managed to drag inside. This is where I keep my stash—Coke, sweets, matches, cigarettes (if I have any), pens, paper, and playing cards. I play solitaire if I’m bored, but mostly I sit and listen to the wind and rain outside. Sometimes the fog makes its way inside.