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Five
    B UT AS THE earth warmed up and birds started singing, Alison, exhausted by her night’s bawling, fell asleep abruptly in her mother’s arms. Mum crept to the kitchen door and mouthed, “I’m going back to bed for a bit.”
    “Good idea. I’m going too,” Prill told Colin. “I feel as if I’ve been awake all night.” She was thinking, Dad’ll be phoning at ten o’clock and I’m going to ask him to come back. I can’t bear it here.
    Colin sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, looking out over the sea. He felt quite cold suddenly, but it was going to be another beautiful day. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and the stillness in the air promised another scorcher. He still had hunger pains so he made himself some toast and another mug of lemon tea. Then he found the sleeping bag that Dad had stuffed under the stairs, unrolled it over the dampmattress and fell soundly asleep.
    At eight o’clock they were all still sleeping, except Oliver. He got up at seven, dressed stealthily, and crept round the kitchen looking for something to eat. Jessie whined and nosed at his feet. He refilled her bowl with fresh water, holding it at arm’s length in case she bit him. He was frightened of dogs. Then he went outside, selected a spade, and started to dig his hole. His uncle David had told Colin on the phone that he was allowed to dig, provided he left the earth in a tidy pile.
    The other two didn’t get up again till half past ten and by then Colin was ravenous. He sat at the kitchen table eating cornflakes, toast, eggs and bacon. All the windows were wide open. They could hear Oliver scraping away at his hole and talking to Kevin O’Malley who’d walked down with the milk. Mixed with the smell of fields was the tang of the sea.
    “There’s not much wrong with you ,” Prill said. “I don’t know how you can eat all that.”
    “I was hungry,” Colin said simply. “It woke me up in the night.”
    “Was that all that woke you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, you were in the kitchen at five o’clock.”
    “So were you.”
    They stared at each other, Prill with a look that said, “You first”. Colin pressed his lips together. Prill was nervous sometimes. When they were little he used to get into awful rows for jumping out at her and making spooky noises. Shestill slept with the landing light on.
    “What was the matter?” she asked him.
    He hesitated.
    “Come on, Colin!” her voice was strained, almost angry. It wasn’t like Prill. He was supposed to be the moody one.
    “Well, it sounds so stupid… It was weird. I woke up because I was too hot, and my bed felt terribly damp, and… there was a kind of, well, mould all over it.”
    “ Mould? ”
    “Yes, honestly, and it smelt peculiar too, horribly musty.”
    She stood up. “Show it to me.”
    “It’s no good, Prill, not now. Sit down, will you? I can’t. It wasn’t there when I woke up just now. Everything had, well, you know, gone back to normal. The sheets are a bit dirty, that’s all. I was probably dreaming.”
    She was silent. A wave of fear rose inside her then ebbed away, leaving her numb and cold. “That makes it worse,” she said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The fact that it’s all so…ordinary this morning. It’s like that smell on the beach. It was there. But you just said I must have imagined it.”
    “You didn’t imagine it. I could smell it too, last night. I was nearly sick.” He paused. “What woke you up, the same thing?”
    “No… no. It was Alison, yelling her head off. Then, when I did get to sleep, I had a kind of nightmare. It was about Donal Morrissey but he’d, sort of, turned into a woman. Shelooked more like a skeleton. Ugh, it was horrible.”
    She wouldn’t say any more. Shaking her head violently, as if this would shatter the picture in her mind of the woman crawling over the field, she went to the wall-phone and started dialling.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Phoning Dad.”
    “Why?”
    “I want