For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

But that was a different life. This island is now her clock tower, and the only intrusion on her seclusion she has to worry about are her publisher’s courier and the private deliveries, both of which use the bothy by the pier as a drop-off point for her supplies and correspondence on set dates, aiding in her solitude.

The small wooden hut emerges in the distance. She stops to pour soapy water from a flask over her hands, rubs them into a lather, rinses them with un-soaped water, then presses on. You have to keep your hands clean in a place like this. She looks out at the surrounding islands as she marches through the undergrowth. Thin streaks of land smear the horizon, far enough away to look like mistakes on an oil painting, close enough to shoot a shudder up her spine at the thought of the eyes, those agonising knife-eyes just a short maritime leap away. She tears her gaze away to survey the skies for any sign of storm clouds. The weather looks promising, but here on Neo-Thorrach that can change in a meteorological instant. Still, today is courier day, not delivery day, and so all she can expect to have to carry back to the cottage is correspondence from Highacre House Publishing (maybe they’ve edited her new manuscript) and possibly more warnings from her accountant. Next week will require a few trips with her handcart to carry the delivery of supplies back from the pier. Oh, but she must remember the clock is ticking on the generator’s engine isolators and fuel valves, and she still needs to see about getting someone out to replace the filter housings of the water purifier, not to mention—

You don’t have the income for this anymore.

She pushes aside the words from her accountant’s last letter as she steps over a dried up rivulet and hastens her pace towards the rocky beach. Her boots crunch on the gravel and shale as she makes her way past the disintegrating pier and approaches the hut, its door swinging freely in the gathering gale.

She slips inside and, as usual, finds no change in temperature. Nevertheless, she values this brief moment of shelter from what is becoming a stinging wind, and usually takes a moment before making her way back to—

She spots the parcel.

Sitting next to an A4 board-backed envelope from her publisher is a long, thin package wrapped in red and green paper, adorned with images of mistletoe and snowmen. She looks at the postal mark on the envelope and, for one of the few times in her ten years on the island, realises it’s nearly Christmas.

She reaches for the scribbled note by the parcel, in which the courier explains he came via a neighbouring island where some resident children begged him to bring this Christmas present to the lady on Neo-Thorrach. Warmth begins to rise in her chest as she picks up the package, until it quickly sinks back down as she examines its shape and weight. She rips the mistletoe and snowmen from around the gift. She rises to her feet, staring at the witch’s broomstick in her hands.

The door creaks and clatters in the wind.

Tonight, the fire rages.

She resets the clasp in her hair, fixes an extra clip, then coaxes the logs in the grate with the iron poker. The Aga stove usually gives off enough heat to warm the room, the same room she almost exclusively sticks to, but a little extra is needed some nights. However, fuel is running low; they didn’t name the island after the Gaelic word for ‘infertile’ for nothing. She’s positively scraped the barren rock of all it can offer, burning its scraps of peat and flotsam, as well as the few sources of wood she’s located. Extra fuel has always been filled out in her deliveries, a ready supply of paraffin for the Tilley lamps and coal for the Aga regularly included amongst the chicken feed and petrol for the generator. However, it’s been an expensive business, and as the accountant likes to keep reminding her: You don’t have the income for this anymore.

She likes to think of herself as self-sufficient, but having canisters of petrol and bags of coal shipped out is hardly living off the land. She mostly needs the generator to run the purifier, but if she can make further use of the constant rain then she can probably manage to make the switch to sediment filtering and distillation of seawater, thereby doing away with the generator and its petrol requirements. But that still leaves the Aga fuel, and if she doesn’t invest in some more livestock soon then her diet of tinned and dried foods is probably going to give her scurvy or something. This place isn’t meant for living. Life isn’t meant to be a battle for fuel. She knows she should get on the grid, even some place in the countryside would do. But the knives, the eyes…always the eyes.

The flames in the grate renew, rising and twisting before her. Once, there had been another fire in another house in another world. The amnesia from the crash

not a crash it wasn’t a crash

had stripped the teenager not only of the incident itself, but of much to have come before. The memories of her life had returned slowly, drip fed during her fifteen years in care,

not normal not a normal hospital

the dread of the Wakefield residence emerging back into view with every passing year.

She’d shared none of the bad memories with her doctors, and the fact that nothing of the crash whatsoever had come back to her hadn’t worried them in the slightest. They may even have seemed relieved. She’d told them she was so pleased to finally remember her mother and father and brother and her life in Millbury Peak, but in reality had spent countless sleepless