‘I don’t think we learned anything at all from watching that nonsense,’ says Lily when it is quiet again.
‘Maybe not,’ says Rose, putting down the remote. I stare at it and can’t help wondering if she stopped the tape just now, and whether there might have been more to see. ‘But this will be the first hour that someone didn’t . . . go missing. So I think we did the right thing by staying together in one room.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Lily.
‘Well, Nana was . . .’ she looks at Trixie and censors herself ‘。 . . found at midnight. Dad at one a.m. We . . . found Trixie at two—’
‘You can all stop pretending. I’m not a child,’ says Trixie. Though in pink pyjamas and with her mess of curls, she does look like one. ‘I’ve guessed that I didn’t just faint and that something happened to me too.’
‘We didn’t want you to be scared,’ says Lily.
‘Why not? It’s obvious you all are,’ Trixie replies, staring at her mother.
‘If Rose is right, and someone planned to do something to one of us on the hour, every hour, then we’re due another . . . incident,’ says Conor.
‘Well, I make it three-oh-three, so maybe we’re safe now,’ says Lily.
‘Maybe,’ Rose replies, sounding uncertain. She stares at Poppins, who is lying upside down, stretched out in front of the fire. It’s one of the old dog’s favourite spots in the house. Poppins hasn’t moved or made a sound for quite some time. We exchange looks, and then Rose speaks in that special voice she only uses for animals.
‘Poppins?’
The dog doesn’t move.
‘Poppins?’ Rose tries again.
Nothing.
‘Wakey wakey, Poppins,’ says Trixie.
Rose turns a whiter shade of pale when there is still no response.
‘Poppins,’ she tries one last time. ‘Do you want din-dins?’
The dog goes from upside down to up on all fours and wagging her tail in seconds, and we breathe a communal sigh of relief.
‘Thank god,’ says Rose. ‘It’s less than three hours until low tide now. We just have to stay calm, then we can all get out of here. Together.’
Conor starts checking that the doors and windows are locked again, it’s Lily’s turn to pace up and down the room, and Rose sits in Nana’s purple armchair, quietly playing with the ring on her right hand. It’s made of three interlocking bands, of bronze, silver and gold, and was a gift from Nana on Rose’s sixteenth birthday. It’s something that I’ve always been jealous of, like so many of the things my sisters had that I didn’t. I remember that birthday and that year very well. It was 1986.
Nana and Nancy were both wearing aprons – which was a recipe for disaster seeing as Nana didn’t like anyone else in the kitchen when she was cooking. But Nancy insisted on helping with her daughter’s sixteenth birthday cake. Lily – the lover of all things sweet – marched into the room where I had been sitting quietly and stuck her hand into the bowl of chocolate icing, before licking her finger clean. Lily still had short hair, but it had grown into a bob by then, so she looked like a miniature version of our mother.
Rose was allowed to have a sleepover at Seaglass with some of her closest friends for her sixteenth birthday. She would soon be attending a different school, and I think in many ways it was a chance to say goodbye. Things were never quite the same between my sisters after the hair-cutting incident. But Lily was not looking forward to life at boarding school without Rose, and clung to her side that summer like a barnacle. She was our sister’s shadow but was never in it. She followed Rose everywhere, always wanting to be one step ahead. But she couldn’t follow Rose to a school for gifted students because she wasn’t one.
I remember the conversation Nana and Nancy had about my dad, and for the first time I didn’t really care whether he made an appearance or not. He wasn’t there for all of my birthdays.
‘If he said he’ll be here, he’ll be here,’ said Nana, defending her son.
Nancy sighed. ‘Well, it isn’t long before the kids arrive, then the tide will be in, and then he’ll be too late. You can’t be there for one daughter’s birthday and not there for the other. Rose will feel so let down if he’s a no-show again.’
‘Just be patient,’ Nana said. ‘And as for the other one, he’ll be back. Men don’t like being told off; it makes them sulk like the little boys they’re pretending not to be.’