The Guest List(39)

I won’t use the torch yet. It will make me stupid in the darkness. I stand here, listening intently. All I can make out at first is the slam of the water on the rocks and an unfamiliar, susurrating sound which I finally identify as the marquee, the fabric rustling in the gentle breeze some fifty yards away.

And then the other noise begins again. I’m better able to recognise it, now. It’s the sound of someone sobbing. Man or woman, though, it’s impossible to tell. I turn in its direction and as I do I think I catch a shimmer of movement out of the corner of my eye, in the direction of the outbuildings behind the Folly. I don’t know how I saw it, it being so dark. But it is hardwired into us, I think, into our animal selves. Our eyes are alert to any disturbance, any change in the pattern of the darkness.

It might have been a bat. Sometimes in the early evening you can see them flit above in the twilight, so quick you’re not sure you’ve seen them. But I think it was bigger. I’m sure it was a person, the same person who sits weeping cloaked in darkness. Even when I came here all those years ago, even though the island was inhabited then, there were ghost stories. The grieving women mourning their husbands, brutally slain. The voices from the bog, denied their proper burial. At the time we scared ourselves silly with them. And in spite of myself I feel it now, the sensation of my skin shrinking over my bones.

‘Hello?’ I call. The sound stops, abruptly. When there is no answer I click my torch on. I swing the beam this way and that.

The beam catches on something as I move it in a slow arc. I train it on the same spot, and guide it up the figure that stares back at me. The beam marks out the dark wild hair, the gleaming eyes. Like a being straight from folklore – the Pooka: the phantom goblin, portent of impending doom.

In spite of myself I take a step back, the torch beam wavering. But gradually, recognition dawns. It’s only the best man, slumped against the wall of one of the outbuildings.

‘Who’s there?’ His voice sounds slurred and hoarse.

‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Aoife.’

‘Oh, Aoife. Come to tell me it’s time for lights out? Time to get into bed like a good little boy?’ He gives me a crooked grin. But it’s a half-hearted affair, and I think those are tear tracks that catch in the beam.

‘It’s not safe for you to go wandering around the outbuildings,’ I say, all practicality. There’s old farm machinery in there that could cut a person in half. ‘Especially without a torch,’ I add. And especially when you’re as drunk as you are, I think. Although, oddly enough, I feel as though I am protecting the island from him – rather than the other way round.

He stands up, walks toward me. He’s a big man, drunk and more besides – I catch a sickly-sweet vegetable waft of weed. I take another step away from him and realise that I’m gripping the poker hard. Then he grins, showing crooked teeth. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Time for Johnny-boy to go to bed. Think I had a bit too much of the old, you know.’ He mimes drinking from a bottle, then smoking. ‘Always makes me feel a bit off, having too much of both together. Thought I was fucking seeing things.’

I nod, even though he can’t see me. So did I.

I watch as he turns on his heel and lurches his way towards the Folly. The forced good humour didn’t convince me for a second. Despite the grin he seemed caught between miserable and terrified. He looked like a man who had seen a ghost.





The wedding day


HANNAH


The Plus-One


When I wake, my head aches. I think of all that champagne – then the vodka. I check the alarm clock: 7 a.m. Charlie’s fast asleep, flat on his back. I heard him come in last night, take his clothes off. I waited for the stumbling, the swearing, but he seemed surprisingly in control of his faculties.

‘Han,’ he whispered to me, as he got into bed. ‘I left the drinking game. I only did the one shot.’ That made me feel a bit less hostile towards him. Then I wondered where else he’d been, for all that time. With whom. I remembered his flirting with Jules. I remembered how Johnno had asked if they’d slept together – and how they never answered.

So I didn’t reply. I pretended to be asleep.

But I’ve woken up feeling turned on. I had some pretty crazy dreams. I think the vodka was partly responsible. But also the memory of Will’s eyes on me at the beginning of the evening. Then talking in the cave with Olivia at the end: sitting so close in the dark with the water lapping at our feet and only the candle for light, passing the bottle between us. Secret, somehow sensual. I found myself hanging on her every word, the images she painted for me vivid in the darkness. As though it was me up against the wall, my skirt pushed up over my hips, someone’s mouth upon me. The guy might have been a dickhead but the sex sounded pretty hot. And it made me remember the slightly dangerous thrill of sleeping with someone unknown, where you’re not anticipating their every move.

I turn to Charlie. Perhaps now is the time to break our sex drought, regain that lost intimacy. I sneak a hand beneath the covers, grazing the springy hair that covers his chest, moving my hand lower—

Charlie makes a sleepy, surprised noise. And then, his voice claggy with sleep: ‘Not now, Han. Too tired.’

I pull my hand away, stung. ‘Not now’: like I’m an irritation. Tired because he stayed up late last night doing God knows what, when on the boat over here he spoke of this as a weekend for us. When he knows how raw I feel at the moment. I have a sudden frightening urge to pick up the hardback on the nightstand and hit him over the head with it. It’s alarming, the rush of anger. It feels like I might have been harbouring it for a while.