A few broken chunks of stone protruded from the earth here and there. The remains of a wall, marking the edge of someone’s land? Or maybe part of a sheep-pen, which would lead me round in a loose circle. Perhaps part of someone’s house. There were no clues. Everything had been swallowed by the trees.
At that point I began to feel frightened. Not because I was alone or possibly lost – neither were new experiences for me – but by the evidence of history around me; of time reclaiming the land. A hundred years ago there’d been people living here, but now there was nothing left, except the faint tracery of the walls they’d built. It shocked me to think that time would eventually sweep away the fragments of my own life, the crooked trees tangling over everything that made me unique and memorable.
I had the sudden urge to drop to my knees and dig down through the mud. Buried somewhere must be a few lost remnants of the people who’d gone before.
Later – weeks, months, years later – I would piece the day back together from fragments of memory, looking for signs and augurs I should’ve spotted. There must’ve been something to warn me my life was about to change. Was it significant, the way the wind dropped to an eerie calm, or how the wild geese chattered somewhere off in the distance, or how I spotted those clumps of bogbean – that beautiful, delicate white flower Mum had told me to look out for – growing in sudden abundance in an overwise unremarkable clearing?
It was the flowers that made me pause. The trail I’d been following had petered out to nothing. Ahead, the ground looked boggier, like it might not take my weight. I stopped. The bogbean flowers on their slender stems nodded in the gentle breeze. They poked up between a tangle of sticks in a muddy pond. The sticks were whitish grey, stripped of their bark. I thought of the wallabies that’d chewed Mum’s fruit trees.
I studied the jutting curve of the sticks where they emerged from the water. It took me a surprisingly long time to recognise it as a ribcage.
I’d never seen one in real life, of course. But I’d seen the plastic skeleton at the St John Ambulance headquarters, where my schoolfriend Amanda went to Badgers. I’d spent a long, bored time fiddling with the artificial joints of the skeleton, nicknamed Boney M, while I waited for Amanda to finish training so her mum could give us both a lift home.
What I was confronted with now didn’t look much like Boney M. The ribcage, if that’s what it was, was squashed and malformed, with half the ribs bent at the wrong angle. The bones were discoloured to the same greenish grey as the lichen on the trees. An arm – a possible arm, I told myself – was loosely attached at the shoulder by tatters of greyish material. The hands could be under the water, tucked up beneath the chest. Sleeping. Peaceful.
I brushed aside a few bogbean stems and found what might be the skull. It was partly submerged. Above the water was a smooth curve, part of an eye socket, and the edge of the jaw, complete with a few grimy teeth. The lower jaw had fallen open, or fallen away. One of the molars at the back had a filling in it, grey metal, like the ones my aunt showed when she laughed too loud.
I straightened up, suddenly dizzy. It was a person. I’d found a person.
An unpleasant tingle of surprise worked its way through my stomach. What should I do? In movies, if someone discovered a skeleton, they screamed, or cried, or threw up, or ran away. None of those reactions seemed justified right then, in that sun-dappled clearing, with the birds calling from nearby trees. This wasn’t someone who had died yesterday or the day before or even a week ago. No one was looking for them. And neither was it someone alive and hurt who needed me to run and get help.
This person had been dead a long, long time, perhaps even as long as the farmland had been flooded. Nothing about the scene made me want to scream or cry. There was no blood, no guts, not even a particularly bad smell – or at least, no worse than the rotted-vegetable smell of the mud itself.
Instead of fear or disgust, I felt only sadness. Who was this person? How come they were here? Had they worked in these ancient fields, before the land was reclaimed by trees?
I took a step closer and my boot sank deep into the mud. I jerked back in a hurry. The mud sucked at my boot as I pulled it loose. I stumbled back, breathless.
The first sting of fear hit me then. This was such a lonely place for someone to die. What if the person had been just like me, a little bit lost and a little bit abandoned, and she’d stumbled into the mud and couldn’t get out?
If I got stuck, would anyone hear my shouting? How long would Dallin and Beth search for me? What if I was never found?
I eyed the mud. The divot my boot had made was already filling with scummy water. How deep did the mud go? Could it swallow me whole, as fast as sinking sand? Would I disappear forever, like Mum had warned, held close in a freezing, muddy embrace?
It was that thought that sent me stumbling away, onto a barely-delineated trail that switched back and forth and sometimes vanished altogether. I walked as quickly as I dared. My boots clomped over roots and stones. I almost blundered into another deep pocket of mud, and, after that, I forced myself to go slower. With each step I eyed the ground. Several times I stopped and prodded the mud ahead of me with a stick I’d picked up, to check the ground would definitely take my weight. I took long circular routes around even the smallest ponds.
I had no way to measure time. Later, a great many people would tell me I’d been wandering out there for almost three hours. At the time, the minutes blended together, until it felt like I’d always been walking. My legs ached and my calves were chafed red raw by the top of my wellies.
When I at last stumbled out onto a road – far from where I’d thought I was – I was so numb and exhausted that I kept walking for another half-dozen steps before I noticed I was no longer amongst the trees.
Then a woman I didn’t recognise snatched me up and started shouting, ‘She’s here, Rosalie’s here, we’ve found her,’ like I was an Easter egg that’d been hidden too well, rather than a ten-year-old girl who was so tired she could barely stand.
Someone put a warm jacket around my shoulders. Someone else gave me a packet of biscuits – a whole packet, just put them in my hand and told me to eat, eat as many as I wanted. And then Mum was there, crying and gasping like she’d been drowned, pulling me into a crushing embrace. The biscuits were squashed between us and ended up mostly as crumbs.
‘Where were you?’ Mum asked into my tangled hair. ‘Where did you go, pumpkin?’
I pulled away so I could see her face, and said, ‘I found a dead person.’
The police were already on the scene, having been called by Mum an hour earlier, when Dallin had finally found the courage to go home and tell her he’d mislaid his little sister. I could see the bright police car blocking the road near the car park. There were eight or nine other cars, I realised, clogging the road and parked in the passing places. I would later discover that over two dozen people had turned up to look for me.
‘I found a dead person,’ I said again, because Mum was staring at me like she hadn’t heard. It was important everyone should know.
‘Hush,’ my mum said. She pressed my head back to her shoulder. ‘Hush.’
The police searched the curraghs for the skeleton I’d seen. They kept going until the light faded, and then continued the next day, and the day after. They found nothing.