I thought ahead, added some painkillers to the bag I would take out of the house if I had to. This sort of weather might bring on Eric's migraine, and he might need some relief. I hoped he didn't have one.
I yawned, widened my eyes, ate another apple. The vague shadows under the clouds turned darker.
I woke up.
It was dark, I was still in the chair, arms crossed under my head, resting on the metal surround of the skylight. And something, a noise inside the house, had woken me. I sat for a second, feeling my heart race, feeling my back complain about the position it had been in for so long. Blood made its painful way into the parts of my arms the weight of my head had restricted the supply to. I spun round in the chair, quickly and quietly. The loft was black, but I didn't sense anything. I touched a button on my watch, discovered it was after eleven. I had slept for hours. Idiot! Then I heard somebody moving about downstairs; indistinct footsteps, a door closing, other noises. Glass smashed. I felt the hair on the back of my neck go up; the second time in one week. I clenched my jaw, told myself to stop taking fright and _do something_: It might be Eric or it might be my father. I would go down and find out. To be safe, I would take my knife.
I got off the seat, went carefully to where the door was, feeling my way round the roughness of the chimney bricks. I stopped there, took the tail of my shirt out and let it hang over my cords, concealing the knife where it hung from my belt. I eased myself silently down into the dark landing. A light was on in the hall, right at the bottom, and it cast strange sets of shadows, yellow and dim, up over the landing walls. I went along to the banisters, looked over the rail. I couldn't see anything. The noises had stopped. I sniffed the air.
I could smell the smoky, pubby smell of drink. It must be my father. I felt relieved. Just then I heard him come out of the lounge. A noise washed out behind him like an ocean roaring. I came away from the rail and stood listening. He was staggering, bumping off the walls and tripping on the stairs. I heard him breathing heavily and muttering something. I listened, let the smell and sound come up. I stood and gradually I calmed myself. I heard my father get to the first landing, where the phone was. Then unsteady footsteps.
'Frang!' he shouted. I kept still, said nothing. Just instinct, I suppose, or habit born of all the times I've pretended not to be where I really am, and listened to people when they have thought they were alone. I breathed slowly.
'_Frang_!' he yelled. I got ready to go back up to the loft, shifting back, on tip-toe, avoiding the places where I knew the floor creaked. My father hammered on the door of the first-floor toilet, then cursed when he discovered it was open. I heard him start up the stairs, towards me. His steps pattered, irregular, and he grunted as he stumbled and hit a wall. I went quietly up the ladder, swung up and on to the bare wood floor of the loft, lay there with my head a metre or so from the hole, my hands on the brickwork, ready to duck behind the flue if my father attempted to look into the loft from the hole. I blinked. My father hammered on my room door. He opened it.
'Frang! he shouted again. Then 'Ah... fuck....' My heart leaped as I lay there. I had never heard him swear before. It sounded obscene in his mouth, not like the casual way Eric or Jamie said it. I heard him breathing under the hole, the smell of him coming up through it to me: whisky and tobacco.
The steps again, unsteady down the landing, then his door, and it slamming shut. I breathed again, only then realising that I had been holding my breath. My heart was pounding fit to burst and I was almost surprised my father hadn't been able to hear it booming through the floorboards above him. I waited for a while, but there were no more noises, just that distant white sound from the lounge. It sounded as though he had left the television on, between channels.
I lay there, gave him five minutes, then I got up slowly, brushed myself down, tucked my shirt in, picked up the bag in the darkness, attached my catapult to my belt, felt around for my waistcoat and found it, then with all my gear on crept down the ladder and on to the landing, then along it and softly downstairs.
In the lounge, the television sparkled its colourful hiss to an empty room. I went to it, clicked it off. I turned to go and saw my father's tweed jacket lying crumpled in a chair. I picked it up and it jingled. I felt through the pockets as I wrinkled my nose at the stench of drink and smoke coming off it. My hand closed around a bunch of keys.
I brought them out and stared at them. There was the front-door key, the back-door key, the cellar key, shed key, a couple of smaller ones I didn't recognise, and another key, a key to one of the rooms in the house, like the key for my room but a different cut. I felt my mouth start to dry up, and saw my hand start to shake in front of me. Sweat sparkled on it, beading suddenly in the lines of the palm. It might be his bedroom key or....
I ran upstairs, three at a time, only breaking rhythm for the noisy ones. I went up past the study, up to my father's bedroom. The door was ajar, its key was in the lock. I could hear my father snoring. I closed the door gently and ran back down to the study. I put the key in the lock, and it turned with well-oiled ease. I stood there for a second or two, then turned the handle, opened the door.
I put the light on. The study.
It was cluttered and full, stuffy and warm. The light in the centre of the ceiling had no shade, and was very bright. There were two desks, a bureau, and a camp bed with a mess of sheets lying twisted on it. There was a bookcase, two large tables standing together covered with various bottles and pieces of chemical apparatus; test tubes and bottles and a condenser linked to a sink in the corner. The place smelled of something like ammonia. I turned, stuck my head out of the door into the hall, listened, heard very distant snoring, then took the key and closed the door, locking myself in and leaving the key in the door.
It was as I turned away from the door that I saw it. A specimen-jar standing on top of the bureau, which was placed just to the side of the door and would be hidden from the hall outside by the door when it was open. In the jar was clear liquid - alcohol, I assumed. In the alcohol was a tiny, torn set of male genitalia.
I looked at it, my hand still on the key I had been turning, and my eyes filled. I felt something in my throat, something from deep in me, and my eyes and nose seemed to fill and quickly burst. I stood and I cried, letting the tears trickle down my cheeks and into my mouth, salting it. My nose ran, and I sniffed and snorted, and I felt my chest heave and a muscle in my jaw tremored uncontrollably. I forgot all about Eric, about my father, about everything except me, and my loss.
It took me some time to pull myself together, and I didn't do it by being angry at myself or telling myself not to act like some stupid girl, but I just calmed down naturally and evenly, and some sort of weight left my head and settled in my stomach. I wiped my face on my shirt and blew my nose quietly, then started searching the room methodically, ignoring the jar on the bureau. Maybe that was all the secret there was, but I wanted to be sure.
Most of it was junk. Junk and chemicals. The drawers of the desk and the bureau were filled with ancient photographs and papers. There were old letters, old bills and notes, deeds and forms and insurance policies (none for me, and all expired long since anyway), pages from a short story or novel somebody had been writing on a cheap typewriter, covered in corrections and still awful (something about hippies in a commune in the desert somewhere making contact with aliens); there were glass paperweights, gloves, psychedelic badges, some old Beatles singles, a few copies of Oz and IT, some dry pens and broken pencils. Rubbish, all rubbish.
Then I came to part of the bureau which was locked: one section under the roll-top hinged at the bottom with a keyhole in the top edge. I got the keys from the door and, sure enough, one of the small ones fitted. The flap hinged down and I took out the four small drawers set behind it and set them on the working-surface of the bureau.
I stared at their contents until my legs got shaky and I had to sit down on the rickety little chair which had been half-undemeath the bureau. I put my head in my hands and I was shaking again. How much was I going to have to go through this night?
I put my hands into one of the little drawers and took out the blue box of tampons. Shaking fingers brought out the other box from the drawer. It was labelled 'Hormones - male'.
Inside it were smaller boxes, neatly numbered in black biro with dates going about six months into the future. Another box from a different drawer said 'KBr', which rang a bell somewhere in my mind, but only at the very back of it. The remaining two drawers contained tightly rolled bundles of five- and ten-pound notes and Cellophane bags with little squares of paper inside. I had no spare capacity for trying to work out what any of that other stuff was, though; my mind was racing with an awful idea it had just formed. I sat there, staring, mouth open, and I thought. I didn't look up at the jar.
I thought of that delicate face, those lightly haired arms. I tried to think of one time I had seen my father naked to the waist, but for the life of me I couldn't. The secret. It couldn't be. I shook my head, but I couldn't let go of the idea. Angus.
Agnes. I only had his word for anything that had happened. I had no idea at all how much Mrs Clamp could be trusted, no idea what sort of hold either of them might have over the other. But it _couldn't_ be! It was just so monstrous, so appalling! I stood up quickly, letting the chair fall back and whack on the wood of the uncovered boards. I grabbed the box of tampons and the hormones, took the keys, unlocked the door and charged out, upstairs, stuffing the keys into one pocket and drawing my knife from its sheath. 'Frank'll get you,' I hissed to myself.
I stormed into my father's room and swtiched on the light. He was lying on the bed with his clothes on. One shoe was off; it lay on the floor under his foot, which dangled over the side of the bed. He was on his back, snoring. He stirred and flung one arm over his face, turning away from the light. I went over to him, took the arm away and slapped his face twice, hard. His head shook, and he cried out. One eye, then the other , opened. I put the knife up to his eyes, watching them focus on it with drunken imprecision. The smell of drink off him was foul.
'Frang?' he said weakly. I jabbed the knife at him, just stopping short of the bridge of his nose.
'You bastard,' I spat at him. 'What the hell are these?' I brandished the tampons and the hormones box in front of him with my other hand. He groaned and closed his eyes. 'Tell me!' I screamed, and slapped him again, using the back of the hand holding the knife. He tried to roll away from me, across the bed under the open window, but I pulled him back from the hot, still night.
'No, Frang, no,' he said, shaking his head and trying to push my hands away. I let the boxes go and got hold of him by one arm, tightly. I drew him near to me, pointed the knife at his throat.
'You're going to tell me, or by God....' I let the words hang. I let go of his arm and moved my hand down to his trousers. I slipped his belt out of the little guides round the waist. He tried to stop me in a fumbling way, but I slapped his hands back and prodded him in the throat with the knife. I undid the belt and pulled the zip down, watching him all the time, trying not to imagine what I might find, what I might _not_ find. I undid the button at the top of the zip. I pulled his trousers open, pulled his shirt up and out. He looked at me, lying on the bed with his eyes red and gleaming, and he shook his head.
'Wha' you goin' t'do, Frangie? Am sorry, am really really sorry. Was an experimen, sall. Juss an experimen.... Don' do anything' t'me, please, Frangie.... Please....'
'You bitch, you _bitch_!' I said, feeling my eyes start to blur and my voice shake. I pulled his/her underpants down with a vicious tug.
Something screamed outside, in the night beyond the window. I stood staring at my father's dark-haired, large, rather greasy-looking cock and balls, and something animal, out there on the landscape of the island, screamed. My father's legs were quivering. Then came a light, orange and wavering, where no light should be, out there, over the dunes, and more screams, bleatings and baas and screams; everywhere screams.
'Jesus Christ, what's that?' my father breathed, turning a shaking head towards the window. I stood back, then went past the bottom of the bed, looking out of the window. The awful noises and the light on the far side of the dunes seemed to be coming closer. The light was in a halo over the big dune behind the house, where the Skull Grounds were; it was flickering yellow with smoke-trails in it. The noise was like that the burning dog had made, but magnified, repeated and repeated, and with another edge to it. The light grew stronger, and something came running over the top of the big dune, something burning and screaming and running down over the sea-face of the Skull Grounds dune. It was a sheep, and it was followed by more. First another two, then half a dozen animals came charging over the grass and the sand. In seconds the hillside was covered with burning sheep, their wool in flames, bleating wildly and running down the hill, lighting up the sandy grass and weeds and leaving them burning in their fiery wake.
And then I saw Eric. My father came shakily up by my side, but I ignored him and watched the skinny, dancing, leaping figure on the very top of the dune. Eric was waving a huge burning torch in one hand and an axe in the other. He was screaming, too.
'Oh, my God, no,' my father said. I turned to him. He was pulling his trousers up. I pushed past him and ran to the door.
'Come on,' I shouted at him. I went out, ran downstairs, not waiting to see if he was following. I could see flames through every window, hear the wails of the tortured sheep all around the house. I got to the kitchen, considered getting some water as I ran through, but decided it was pointless. I ran out through the porch and into the garden. A sheep, burning only above its back legs, nearly collided with me, running through the already blazing garden and swerving at the last second from the door with a terrified baaing, then jumping over the low fence into the front garden. I ran round the back of the house, looking for Eric.