Button John nodded his pointy chin in the direction of Dominic’s house. “You want to go over there, don’t you?”
“No!” I jolted. “Not when anyone could just look out the kitchen door and see me climbing the fence.” My thoughts swirled, and then settled on the surface of that weird feelings soup in my stomach. “I couldn’t anyway. I can’t.”
Button John shared an unhappy look with me.
“Even if it didn’t matter what the whole island thought?—”
“It doesn’t,” Button John said. “Fuck ’em.”
“You know it doesn’t work like that.”
“It doesn’t because we don’t let it,” Button John said. “You think Red Joe gave a shit what people thought when he shacked up with Eddie? If he’d cared about any of that, he’d still be grouchy and single.” He wrinkled his nose. “Though he is still pretty grouchy.”
“That’s different,” I said, leaving aside the fact that most people were grouchy with Button John because they’d learned through experience that when he turned up he brought disaster on his heels. “Red Joe is Red Joe Nesmith, and Eddie’s not a copper.”
“Yeah, it’s different,” Button John said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.”
“He’s a copper,” I said. “I don’t even care what the island thinks about that. But if he found out about the other stuff...”
“Oh,” Button John said, like the penny had dropped at last. He gave a sympathetic twist of his mouth. “Oh, shit, yeah.”
We leaned there in silence for a while as the sunset painted the sky above the lean-to with streaks of vivid pink and purple. The long shadows cast by the low sun crept slowly across the yard, merging in soft pools of shade that settled into a deeper darkness as the dusk drew on. A light came on in Dominic’s kitchen, and I felt a tug in my chest when I thought of cooking mudcrabs with him. I wondered if he was cooking one tonight, and then I almost laughed at the thought. Of course he wasn’t. He’d be making a toasted sandwich or eating something out of a can. Like, I wasn’t going to be auditioning for Masterchef any time soon, but at least I could scramble some eggs.
“Come on,” Button John said at last, nudging me with his elbow. “Your Milo’s getting cold.”
We went inside.
There was nobody in the kitchen. Nipper Will’s fishing gear was lying on the floor in damp folds of orange PVC, and the shower was running upstairs. From the living room, I could hear Aunt Jane and Big Johnny talking. I swallowed down my irritation and picked up Will’s gear, stepping outside briefly to dunk it in the tub before going inside again to wash my hands at the kitchen sink.
I headed into the living room. Aunt Jane and Big Johnny were on the couch, and Button John was wedged between them drinking the rest of my Milo. His empty mug sat on the coffee table. I sat down on the little padded footstool that was probably almost as old as the house itself; it creaked under my weight, but it held. I left the armchair for Nipper Will. It had been our dad’s once, and, though I only had the vaguest memory of it, our granddad’s before that. Nothing on Dauntless got thrown away, not if there was still some life in it. We even held onto all our ghosts.
“Okay?” Big Johnny asked me gruffly.
I nodded and picked at a thread hanging from the hem of my shorts. “Is she getting worse?”
“It’s up and down, love,” Aunt Jane said, and I was suddenly and acutely aware that I’d missed most of this while I was at school. I only saw the smooth surface of the ocean, not the highs and lows of every tide that crept up the harbour wall and then receded again. When Dad died, everything had felt strange and off-kilter for so long. I’d barely noticed how bad Mum was, because I hadn’t been much better, and because I’d been a kid, and because there had been adults looking after her. So much of it had fallen on Will’s shoulders, then and when I left for school, and that was another thing I hadn’t noticed. During school holidays I’d been so happy to be home that I’d only noticed Will was bad-tempered. It had never occurred to me that he’d spent the last ten years trying to keep everything together.
I fought down that old, familiar spark of anger—I could lighten his load if he let me on the fucking boat, and we could pay someone to watch Mum while we were out there!—and drew a deep breath and held it for a long time before releasing it. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t be here every second of every day. I can’t?—”
“We know that,” Big Johnny said, and then looked to the doorway.
Nipper Will stepped inside, his hair still wet from the shower. He sat down in the armchair—slumped, more like—and stared at the floor. “I don’t fucking know. There’s this place, on the mainland?—”
“We can’t send Mum away from Dauntless!” I exclaimed. “We can pay someone to be here for when I can’t be.”
“And where the hell do we get the money for that?” Nipper Will dragged a hand through his hair, and his stare dared me not to say the obvious.
“We can manage for now,” Aunt Jane said. “Between me and Big Johnny, and Agnes, and the girls.”
“And me!” Button John said.
Aunt Jane patted him on the head. “We can manage for now,” she said again.
And what was there to say to that? Big Johnny and Aunt Jane had their own work to do, and so did Aunt Agnes. Addy and Emily would help out, but they were looking for paid work the same as every other young person on Dauntless. The same as me and Button John were. It wasn’t a long-term solution, because nothing on Dauntless was. There were no hospitals here, no nursing homes or care centres. There was just us, and today had proven that sometimes we weren’t enough—and that was something no Dauntless Islander liked to realise.
I could tell by Nipper Will’s expression that it was sitting as heavily in his gut as it was in mine, even if he’d been the one to bring up some place on the mainland.
Nipper Will met my gaze, and pressed his mouth into a thin line as though he was trying to hold back some words he knew would be better off unsaid.
