Trey has seen none of them, but when she’s on the mountain at night, she feels them there. The sensation has changed in the last year or two. When she was younger she felt herself glanced over and dismissed, too slight to be worth any time or focus, just another small animal going about its business. Now her mind is a denser, more intricate thing. She feels herself being noted.
She sits with her back to an old wall, watching dusk fill up the air with hazy purple. Banjo is slouched comfortably against her calf, his ears and nose up to track the progress of the evening. Farmhouse windows are sprinkled, neat and yellow, among the dimming fields below them. A lone car curves down the road, its headlight beams long in the emptiness. The small gray cottage where Rushborough is staying stands alone in the shadow of the mountain, unlit.
Whatever lives here, Trey expects to meet it in the next week. She’s used some of her carpentry money to buy five days’ worth of supplies, mainly bread, peanut butter, biscuits, bottled water, and dog food. She’s stashed them, and a couple of blankets and some toilet roll, in an abandoned house up the mountainside. Five days should be more than enough. Once she does what she’s about to do, Rushborough will be gone as fast as he can pack. And once the men find out he’s left, her dad will be gone in no time. All she needs to do is stay out of his way till then.
She doesn’t trust Rushborough, but she can’t see any reason why he would rat her out. To her dad, maybe, but not to the other men. If anyone asks why she was gone, she’ll say her dad came home raging because he’d slipped up and Rushborough got suspicious, and she ran for fear he’d take it out on her, which is close to true. She’s left a note in her bed saying “Have to go somewhere. Back in a few days” so her mam won’t worry.
She even remembered a knife for the peanut butter. She grins, thinking how proud Cal will be of her manners, till she remembers she can’t tell him.
Trey has been thinking about Brendan. She doesn’t think about him as much, these days. When she first learned what had happened to him—by accident, Cal said it happened, things just went bad that day, with the implication that that should make some kind of difference—she never stopped. She spent hours going back and redoing things in her mind so that she kept him from leaving the house that afternoon, warned him what to look out for, went along with him and shouted the right words at the right moment. She saved him a million times over, not because she believed it would change anything, just for respite from a world where he was dead. She stopped when she realized Brendan was starting to feel like someone she had made up. After that she thought only, ever, about the real him: she went over every word and expression and movement she could recall, tattooing them on her mind and pressing deep so the marks would stay sharp. Every one of them hurt. Even when she was doing something, working with Cal or playing football, what happened to Brendan was a cold fist-sized weight below her breastbone, dragging downwards.
Over time it’s eased. She can do things free of that weight, see things without that blackness blotting out part of her vision. Sometimes this makes her feel like a traitor. She’s thought of cutting Brendan’s name into her body, only that would be stupid.
What she hopes to meet on the mountain is ghosts. She has no idea whether she believes in them or not, but if they exist, Brendan’s will be here. She doesn’t know what form he might take, but none of the possibilities are enough to deter her.
Bats are out hunting, quick deft swoops and shrills. The first stars are showing. Another car sweeps down the road and stops at Rushborough’s cottage, barely visible now in the thickening dark. After a moment it sweeps away again, and the cottage lights flick on.
Trey unfolds herself and starts to make her way down the mountainside, with Banjo at her heel. She has the camera zipped under her hoodie, to leave her hands free in case she trips, but she won’t.
She watched Rushborough all yesterday morning, just like she’d promised her dad. Mostly he just wandered around the lanes and took photos of stone walls, which to Trey seem like an idiotic thing to photograph; once he scraped around in the dirt for a while, held something up to squint at it, and then put it in his pocket. He stopped a few times to chat to people he came across: Ciaran Maloney, moving sheep between fields; Lena, out walking her dogs; Áine Geary, watering plants in the garden with her kids pulling at her. Once or twice Trey thought she saw his head turn towards her, but it always kept on turning. It was worth a wasted morning to find out where he’s staying. When she reported back to her dad, at first he looked like he’d forgotten what she was talking about. Then he laughed and told her she was a great girl, and gave her a fiver.
