Abram leant over to his granddaughter. ‘Hey, watch this,’ he said. He wafted the napkin from his lap to cover an empty eggcup on the table before him. When he pulled it away again, an egg had appeared. Laurie grinned, then frowned in concentration as Abram held up a hand. With the restraint of an orchestra conductor, he tapped at the tip of the egg with a butter knife. Then he prised away its uppermost part and daintily retrieved a plastic dinosaur from it.
‘Grumps, that’s brilliant!’ Laurie lifted and peered at the egg, which seemed to Nina to be otherwise normal and untampered-with. She paraded the plastic dinosaur around the table, roaring.
Rob had always done magic tricks like that for Laurie too – he must have learnt them from Abram. Until now Nina had never thought to wonder how much preparation went into these sorts of illusions.
* * *
Hope Island was only two miles across at its widest point, but the woodland along its central spine made the journey from west to east coast slower than Nina expected. The breeze made the air colder; she chided herself for wearing a skirt. Laurie strode ahead, clad sensibly in denim, swiping at red spruce with a stick and knocking cones to the forest floor.
‘We’re nearly there,’ Laurie called over her shoulder.
Nina jogged to catch up. When she returned to Salford she would reactivate her lapsed gym membership. Too much standing around at work, then consecutive Netflix addictions in the few waking hours at home. Rob had always been careful not to flaunt his healthy social life – his evenings out at the snooker club or the pub – and had always understood about Nina being so tired after work.
‘Nearly where?’ she said.
Her question became redundant as they pushed through a final boundary of foliage and suddenly the world fell away before them.
Beyond the cliff, the Atlantic was a vast, uninterrupted plane and the sky its mirror. Nina remembered something she had once been told about ancient civilisations having no word for the colour blue, instead using terms like ‘wine-looking’ or ‘shield-like’. At this moment neither the ocean nor the sky appeared blue, even though objectively she perceived that they were dazzlingly so. Instead, they were twin voids.
She was struck by the thought that this trip might really be a positive turning point. The water sighed and the wind caught at her jacket, and she imagined her problems as dandelion seeds on the cusp of being blown away. The outside world was larger than it appeared on the monitors of her TV newsroom. There was beauty in it.
Without turning from the ocean, Laurie snaked her right arm around Nina’s waist, drawing the two of them gently together. They were almost the same height. Nina wished that Laurie had inherited her dark hair, or that she herself could be granted the same tightly curled blond hair as her daughter. She wished that they were more identifiably family.
There was no sense in waiting. This was the ideal moment. The revelation about Laurie’s father abandoning her would be put into perspective, measured against the scale of the ocean.
‘Did you know there are three Hope Islands?’ Laurie said, interrupting her thoughts.
‘What?’
‘Dad says there are millions of islands off the coast of Maine. And three of them are called Hope Island. Isn’t that funny?’
It didn’t seem at all funny to Nina. A strange idea occurred to her: that each of the alternative Hope Islands might be dedicated to only one of the wonky trinity comprised of her, Rob and Laurie. Clearly, this Hope Island belonged to either Rob or Laurie. It wouldn’t be kind to her.
She tried to shake off the feeling. ‘Laurie. I’m happy that we have some time together.’
Laurie squeezed her tighter. ‘Yep. Come on. You wanted me to show you around.’ She shrugged herself free and darted towards the cliff edge.
‘No!’ Nina yelled.
Laurie spun around at the precipice. ‘Don’t be silly. It’s nowhere near as steep as it looks.’
Nina followed and sure enough, the ground sloped away shallowly to the bare rock. What she had assumed was a cliff was actually a pile of huge boulders that appeared frozen in the act of tumbling down to the water’s edge.
Laurie had already begun to make her way down, sliding gracefully on her bottom to land lightly at the next level of boulders.
‘And your father lets you do this?’ Nina called out.
‘He never said either way. Isn’t that an American thing? Don’t ask, don’t tell?’
Nina shuffled to the edge of the first boulder and slid down, copying her daughter’s route precisely. Her bare thighs rubbed painfully against the pitted stone.
‘Where are you taking me?’ She pointed down to the waves hurling themselves at the sea-level boulders. Each one connected with a slap. ‘We’re not going all the way down there.’
‘No, we aren’t.’
Instead of clambering any further down, Laurie hugged a boulder to her left and then edged sideways along a flat, narrow outcrop. Below it the piles of rocks were less staggered, producing a sheer drop. Soon she was out of sight.
‘Laurie?’ Nina whispered.
‘Still here,’ Laurie replied, her voice made small by the rock barrier.
A few moments passed before Laurie screamed.
Nina lost her footing immediately. She grabbed at the rock behind her but couldn’t find any purchase. She yelped as her flimsy sandal caught in a fissure.
‘Laurie!’ she shouted. ‘Laurie!’
Her daughter’s scream became something deeper, something thick and drawn up from deep within her body. Nina fumbled her way along the same slim outcrop, her belly pressed against the stone, not looking down.
Laurie’s shouting continued uninterrupted. Dimly, Nina noted that it still came from the same location; Laurie hadn’t fallen any further down.
The outcrop narrowed to a point. Now Nina realised that there was no longer anything pressing against her stomach. She bent awkwardly to examine the rock she had sidestepped around to discover a cave-like depression and, within it, her daughter. Laurie peered up at her impishly. She stopped screaming.
‘What the actual fuck was that about?’ Nina snapped.
‘Sorry. It’s just what I do.’
‘Is it? Screaming like a lunatic is what you do?’
Laurie fluttered a hand to wave Nina away. ‘There isn’t room in here for two. Go back around and I’ll follow you. Then you can have a go.’
Lacking any other option, Nina obeyed. Within seconds Laurie reappeared, navigating the outcrop with ease.
‘Go ahead, Mum.’
‘I’m not doing that. And what were you doing, anyway?’
‘Primal screaming. It’s ace. I used to call this place the Crow’s Nest, because I liked pretending to be on lookout, but these days I like it for the… what’s the word? Not echo, exactly. Acoustics. Try it?’
The rising inflection was meaningful: a request more than an invitation. This was a personal thing. Perhaps it was the way to earn Laurie’s confidence.
Nina made a show of huffiness. ‘If you absolutely insist.’
Once again, Nina worked her way around the outcrop, then rotated her body carefully and eased herself backwards into the depression Laurie had vacated. The outcrop path disappeared from view. All that she could see was sea and sky.
Vertigo was something she had heard about but had never experienced. Now it was as if she slumped forwards on an axis without having moved, and suddenly the hidey-hole became a vertical tunnel, and she was hurtling towards the flat solid slab of the ocean, and in her panic she wondered whether she would crack through its surface and plunge into its depths, or whether she would skim like a flat pebble far away and out of sight. She braced herself against the uneven walls of the cave, pushing and pushing to prevent herself from being sucked into the vortex.