had feared. ‘John, bring me a bowl of water, some cottonwool, anything.’
May’s fist was clenched and the curled fingers were mired with blood. Leonie swabbed at the lacerated knuckles and May bit the inside of her cheeks to stop herself moaning aloud.
‘Look, see, you’re okay. Open your fingers. Show me, May, please let me help.’
John came with a bowl of warm water and offered it up. Leonie rinsed out a cloth and swabbed the cuts clean. Gently she prised the curled fingers loose. The veined wrist was miraculously unscathed, the palm was sticky with blood but uncut. Leonie bowed her head with silent relief.
‘May, do you know what you just did? Do you know what you could have done, severed an artery?’ John’s voice was loud and Leonie could hear the raw vibration of horror in it. He gasped for breath and the loss of control told Leonie more clearly than all their hours of talk how deeply he cared for his daughters. ‘You could have bled to death.’
‘John …’ She tried to calm him but May sat upright.
‘I don’t care. I wouldn’t care if I did die. Like Doone Bennison.’
John made a movement that was so quick and violent Leonie thought he was going to hit the child. Instead he enveloped her head in his big hands and pulled her face against his chest. He tried to rock her, murmuring, ‘No, no.’
Slowly Leonie stood up. She wanted to leave them alone and to spare herself from seeing this. But May snatched at her wrist with her undamaged hand. ‘Stay,’ she commanded.
She was so angry with her father for what she had just seen that she wouldn’t be alone with him, even if it had to be Leonie who was the buffer between them.
Leonie hesitated and saw John unwillingly nod. ‘I’ll dress those fingers,’ she said.
There was a first-aid box in one of the cupboards. She fetched it, checked the lacerations for splinters of glass and swathed May’s hand in bandages. May sat silent, uncomplaining. At the same time John swept up the broken glass and wrapped the jagged fragments in newspaper. He found a piece of a cardboard carton and cut it to fit over the hole in the window, then taped it securely in place.
At last May sat nursing her bandaged fist in her lap. Leonie made a cup of tea and gave it to her, and the child obediently drank it. Then she put the empty cup aside and stared through the window with its disfiguring patch of card at the velvety sky beyond. There was a bruised quiet.
John sat down on the chesterfield at May’s side. ‘Do you think we should talk about this? About what you saw happening between Leonie and me?’
May turned her head stiffly. She darted a look at Leonie, not her father. ‘Not now. I don’t want to.’
‘Why did you try to hurt yourself?’
‘I don’t know. I just did it.’
Leonie sensed that it was the truth. Also that there were too many other things that May did not know or understand.
‘You won’t do it again,’ John said.
‘No,’ May answered quietly. After a moment she added, ‘I think I’ll go upstairs now.’
They waited until they heard the door of her bedroom close and the faint creak of footsteps subside overhead.
John dropped his head into his hands. ‘Jesus.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry she had to see what she did. But doesn’t she have to learn to accept sooner or later that there’s a world beyond her immediate wishes and concerns?’
‘Yes. But I don’t know how that happens.’
They sat in silence after that, occupied with their separate fears.
May felt calm, as if breaking the glass and shattering the image behind it had been a catharsis. She walked the thirteen steps across her room and back again, then touched the tips of her fingers to the door, checking that it was firmly closed. She turned again and saw the three books innocently lying in their place on the shelf.
Without thinking she picked one up and awkwardly flipped the pages with her bandaged hand. It was the whaling book and she looked with indifference at the heavy old-fashioned type until she noticed some pages near the end that were marked with pencil. Words were faintly underlined, not consecutive words, nor did they make any sense when she read them in order, but still some faint association nagged in her mind. She frowned at the brown-edged pages, then at the pencil marks themselves because they seemed to contain some familiarity that maddeningly swam just beneath the surface of her consciousness. She riffled through the pages in the opposite direction and found nothing. She was about to discard the book again when frustration made the connection for her.
She had flipped the pages of Doone’s diary in this way and felt just the same baffled impatience with a secret she couldn’t unlock. The skin at the back of May’s neck suddenly prickled with cold.
She placed the whaling book open and face up on the top shelf, and picked up the red-and-black diary. Some of Doone’s last entries, the coded ones scribbled with such heat that the groups of numbers were gouged into the underlying pages, were written in pencil. The same soft, blunt pencil.
May stared at the trios and pairs of numbers. She realised that her mouth was open and her breath snicked audibly in her chest. Eagerness fought with an impulse to throw the books aside and never look at them again. With exaggerated care she smoothed both sets of pages, glancing from one to the other.
Then she remembered the birthday present. It had been a gift from an English relative of Alison’s when Ivy turned thirteen. The great-aunt hadn’t seen Ivy or May for a long time and the present was much too young for Ivy, whose interests had long ago switched from toys to nail polish and sleep-over pyjamas. May had inherited the book. She remembered the laminated white board covers and bold tide lettering quite clearly. It was Great Games, Puzzles and Quizzes for Kids. One of the pages was headed ‘Secrets to Share: a simple book code’.
May licked her dry lips. That was what it was, of course, Doone’s secret code. Simple, once you knew which book she had chosen. The trios of numbers were page, line and word. Where there were only pairs of numbers she had found the word she wanted on the same page.
May chose a group of numbers at random. Her bandaged fingers and the way her hand shook made it hard to turn the pages of the Dolphin book. The first set of three numbers – page, line and word, she murmured to herself as she laboriously counted them off – yielded I. The second gave her followed and the third, which she knew would be proof that her guess was right, was him.
I followed him.
Breathlessly she took the next chunk of numbers and slowly counted out their placings too. She was staring at it so intently that the book’s sullen typeface began to blur in front of her eyes. It took her several minutes to decode Doone’s words but at last she had He turned around and saw me.
She glanced up briefly at the bare room. There was the rug covering the burn mark in the haircord carpet, the faint outlines on the walls where Doone’s posters had been taped, the French bed.
Now, May thought. Now I’ll know.
