Chapter 1
August 2004
If the weather had been better that summer I wouldn’t have found the body in the wetlands. We were only outside that day because, after four solid days of rain, our mum chased me and Dallin out of the house as soon as the clouds broke.
We were allowed to play in the curraghs, the sprawling acres of boggy marshland that began almost on Mum’s back doorstep, so long as we kept to the main paths. Mum had told plenty of stories about how easy it was to get lost, or worse. Some of the boggy ponds were so deep, she said, that if a girl stepped into one it would swallow her forever. I was mostly convinced the stories weren’t real.
My brother Dallin was twelve; two years older than me. He’d spent countless hours playing in the curraghs and reckoned the bog-land held no secrets from him. He never missed an opportunity to lord it over me, this advantage he’d gained by living full-time here with Mum, while I was stuck in Douglas with our dad.
So it was only natural we should follow him without question. Dallin went racing ahead down the main path. His was all legs and arms, like a disjointed puppet. Right behind him was Beth, who’d been in the same class as Dallin since they were at playschool. Her parents had dropped her off at Mum’s house earlier that day. Beth was a quiet soul, as if she’d long ago decided Dallin would be the brash, noisy one. Her brown hair hated being confined to a ponytail and was always escaping in wisps and tufts. Beth and Dallin would never call each other best friends, but only because they never needed to voice such things. When Beth was with us, I felt superfluous.
‘This way!’
Dallin ducked off the main path, vaulted a water-filled ditch, and set off into the trees on the other side, without checking to see if we were following. The trees were spindly and twisted, as if there wasn’t enough substance to the ground to anchor them, and one grew above fifteen feet tall. But that was tall enough. Once we were amongst them, I could no longer see the mountains to the south, my only point of reference on that flat stretch of land.
‘This is more muddy than last week,’ Dallin said over his shoulder. ‘But you’d expect that, right? After all that rain, it’s gonna be like a proper swamp in here, we better not take a single step off the path—’
He chattered away as we walked. Dallin was always talking, always making noise, always restless. Sometimes it was exhilarating to be caught in his slipstream. Other times it was exhausting.
Today I didn’t have much tolerance for him. Maybe it was because we’d been cooped up in the house, or maybe it was the calm press of the trees, but I found I didn’t want to listen. I walked slowly, putting a little distance between us. Beth glanced back once and smiled at me. One of those understanding smiles she was so good at. She was beautiful, I realised in surprise, with golden sunlight caught in wayward strands of her hair. It was the first time I’d noticed.
The path we were following ran along the top of an old dry-stone wall. A hundred years ago, this whole area had been drained for farmland, and these flat-topped walkways had stood waist-high along the boundaries of the fields. But the farmers left, the waters returned, and the trees reclaimed every inch of land. Tree roots climbed up and over the broken stone of the walls to bind them tight. I picked my way over a gnarled surface made of a dozen warring roots.
‘Look, Rosalie,’ Beth said, pointing. ‘Wallaby.’
I hadn’t believed Dallin when he’d told me there were wallabies living wild up here in the north of the island. According to him, they’d escaped from the wildlife park on the other side of the curraghs about fifty years ago, and had been living here ever since. It sounded like one of Dallin’s stories, but Mum had backed him up, for once.
‘They’ve been here longer than any of us,’ she’d said with good-natured annoyance, ‘so I suppose they have the right to go wherever they want. But I could do without them getting into my garden and chewing the bark off my fruit trees.’
It’d been a few years since Mum had snapped our family in two by moving out of our Douglas home and buying the farmhouse up here in the middle of nowhere. The summer holidays, when I was parcelled out to her for up to three weeks, were marked by my sullen silences and unshed tears. At age ten, I blamed her for everything wrong with my life.
Over the last two summers, I’d spotted several wallabies while we were out in the curraghs. They were always at a distance, sitting so still they could be mistaken for broken tree stumps. There was something vaguely sinister, I thought, about the way they watched us. Like sentinels of the swamp.
I followed Beth’s pointing finger and saw the wallaby. It looked bigger than the ones in the wildlife park. Obviously it had spotted us, because it was staring straight at us both, keeping a cool eye on what we were doing.
‘She’s got a joey,’ Beth whispered.
Beth’s eyes were much sharper than mine. I had to squint before I made out the tiny woolly head poking from the mother’s pouch. I wouldn’t have seen it at all except it was restlessly shifting around.
‘Neat,’ I said.
Beth flashed another smile at me.
We kept walking. I glanced back a few times but the mother wallaby was quickly lost to sight. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that others were watching us.
The track stepped down off the remains of the wall and wound off through the trees. I kept my eyes on my feet. The path was reassuringly solid, but the ground on either side was muddy and soft. My blue wellies left perfect imprints. On either side of me, standing pools of water gave off a sweet-stagnant smell. The air was heavy and damp with humidity. I looked up. Above the treetops there was nothing but the round bowl of the sky, dotted with clouds. It made me dizzy. Better to concentrate on my feet.
It was maybe five or ten minutes later when I raised my eyes and realised I was alone.
I paused to listen. Dallin would still be talking, I knew. His voice had been a constant drone throughout the summer holidays, half comfort and half annoyance. But now I couldn’t hear him. The only noise was soft birdsong, water dripping from leaves, and the murmur of the wind in the trees.
Dallin and Beth must’ve been somewhere ahead. I’d fallen behind a little, then a little more, until they were out of sight. But soon enough they’d realise I was being slow, and they’d wait for me.
I kept walking.
It didn’t occur to me that I might be lost. The wetlands weren’t that big or sprawling. Probably they were no bigger than the plantation of pine trees near Douglas where me and Dad went out for walks. And I’d never managed to lose myself there. But maybe that was because the plantation was on the slope of a hill. The thousand or so pine trees in their regimented straight lines drew clear pathways back to safety. Even if I got turned around there, I could walk downhill until I found the road.
The curraghs were different. Everything was flat, with no landmarks. There were plenty of paths – dozens of them – but many led in circles or disappeared into bogs.
I walked for some time, thinking – if I was thinking at all – that I was bound to catch up with Beth and Dallin soon. I figured I would come around a clump of trees and there they’d be, waiting for me with a sarcastic remark. But I kept walking and I remained alone.
In the mud off to one side I spotted several elongated, parallel footprints. Wallaby tracks. They led off along an ill-defined trail that headed in what I thought was the direction of the road. I stepped off the path to follow the trail, even though it soon became little more than a line of slightly firmer ground between the stagnant mud puddles.