Moon Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he’s there. Besides, Lucas is okay.’ Ivy combed out her glossy hair. ‘I saw you checking him out.’
    ‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t.’
    Ivy only grinned. ‘No? One of the kid brothers would do for you. Whatshisname, Kevin. He’s cute.’
    ‘Shut the fuck up , will you?’
    May stared in fury. That’s how it was between them. They veered from being almost friends to raw-skinned irritation, and back again, without any episodes of moderation. Sometimes May wondered if their mother had been around whether she might have been the mediator, smoothing over the spikes of anger and making their attempts to like each other seem less clumsy. John didn’t do anything of the kind. He and Ivy seemed to occupy a different territory, adulthood maybe, which left May stranded somewhere apart. It intensified her loneliness and made her angrier still with both of them. Yet sometimes only Ivy would do: only Ivy understood anything.
    She slammed back into her own bedroom. She had spent the whole day in here while Ivy lay sunbathing. The cracks in the paper and the vertical shadows that ran like thin ribs in the grooves of the panelling had already become familiar. May imagined Doone Bennison sitting reading in this same armchair, or lying on her back making figures out of the spidery lines that traced the ceiling. Perhaps she had swung her legs off the bed like this and ducked down the stairs, and then gone out to sail the boat across the bay for the last time.
    What was it like to drown?
    May pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, experimentally stopping the air. Her heart fluttered against her ribs and she found herself gasping for breath.
    Ivy banged on the door as she passed. ‘You coming?’
    It was too late now for May to do anything about the way she looked. She could have fixed her hair, at least, or chosen a looser top to hide her fat.
    She vented some of the pressure of dissatisfaction with herself by kicking the skirting beside the base of the bookshelf. A neat section of it immediately fell forward and lay on the worn carpet with the unpainted splintery back exposed. There was a rectangular black space behind it.
    May knelt down and peered into the hole. Something was hidden in there.
    Carefully she reached in and drew it out. It was a hardback notebook with dusty black covers and a scarlet cloth spine. She opened it at the first page and saw girl’s handwriting not much different from her own. The first word on the top line was May .
    May licked her dry lips. The faint murmur of the sea swelled in her ears until the room seemed like a giant shell that amplified the greedy waves.
    The book was Doone’s, it had to be. This was her bedroom, and May had kicked against her secret hiding-place. Now Doone was writing from somewhere directly to May, and the roar of the sea rose up in her ears and almost deafened her.
    She read on with reluctant fascination, her fingers shaking as she turned a page.
    It wasn’t her name, she realised. It was a date: 15 May, last year. This was a diary. The dead girl’s diary, tucked into its hiding-place and forgotten.
    John and Ivy were calling her.
    May closed the book and blew the dust off the covers. She slid it back into the hole in the wall and pressed the loose section of skirting back into place. It fitted closely, with only two vertical cracks to betray its existence. No one would bother to investigate unless they accidentally dislodged the section as she had done. She scrambled to her feet.
    John was standing downstairs next to the smoke-blackened chimney stones. He had put on a clean blue shirt.
    May rocked on the bottom step, glaring her latest accusation at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about what happened to the Bennisons’ daughter?’ It was typical of May not to offer an introduction, just to launch straight into her offensive.
    John temporised. ‘All right, May, I should have done. Okay? But I didn’t want it to be a reason right off for you not to like the