The island knew her innermost fears and secrets, knew her inside out, saw everything she did

Surtsey looked at the cowering girls, thought about Tom. “You should leave,” she said, the broken glass still in her hand. “Please don’t drive in this state.” Alice shook her head, teeth tight. She pushed her thumbs into her fists, squeezing, barely containing her rage. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said. “Do you understand?” “Think of the girls,” Surtsey said.

Alice looked like she’d been punched. “I think of them every second of every day. Everything I do, every thing, is for them. And now I have to do it alone. You have no idea what that’s like.

“I hope you do, some day, I hope you have everything taken away from you.”

Surtsey thought of her mum up the road, of Tom on the black sand. “What do you mean?”

Alice spoke softly. “I’m going to destroy you like you’ve destroyed me.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It is, believe me.”

“Please leave.”

“You’ll be sorry.” Alice released her fists and stretched her fingers. “You’re going to be sorry you ever set eyes on my husband.”

She grabbed the girls by the shoulders and turned them away, then strode down the path, the girls scrambling after her into the night.

Collapse

Too much grass, red wine and guilt. Surtsey lay on her bed and tried to focus. She looked at her bedside lamp but it kept drifting across her vision.

She closed her eyes and saw Tom, the gentle collapse of his skull. She imagined lifting a rock and making that dent, destroying the structure of his face. She knew the power of the earth, the weight of stone. She understood that.

How thin the layer of each person was, just hair, skin, sinew, muscle, bone.

When the barrier between you and the outside world was broken and your insides were spilling out onto the sand you became part of the world.

You returned to the earth, finally home, your atoms mixing with the universe again, interconnected in a way you could never be whilst alive.

Wow, that grass was strong. She was thirsty. She blinked heavily, then eased herself up like an old woman. Put her hands in front of her like a mummy from an old movie, touched the wall then the door, then went to the bathroom and filled a glass with water. The feel of it in her throat was electrifying. She drank and refilled then wobbled back to her room and thumped the pint glass on the bedside table, fell back onto the bed.

She tried to look at the poster of the Inch on her wall. Steam billowing into the sky from the blue-green water, lava flow glowing, throbbing against the black rock, a shard of lightning connecting the earth to the sky.

She thought of something she’d seen in a documentary. When a bolt of lightning strikes from above, all these little tracers spark up from dozens of points across the land in the first few microseconds, each of them desperate to connect with the motherbolt.

They raise their ionised hands to heaven waiting for the rapture, hoping to be the chosen one, to be connected and lifted to the sky.

She heard a ping and looked around the room. She felt a charge move through her like she was one of those streamers reaching out to the lightning, waiting for the bolt.

Secrets

She pulled Tom’s phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen: Do you feel guilty?

She blinked. Blinked again. Started typing slowly: I’ve done nothing wrong.

The phone felt hot in her hand as if it was faulty. It pinged: That’s not what the police think.

She dropped it on the bed and stared at it. Picked it up and typed: I’m going to tell the police about you. Give them this phone.

For a second she imagined again that it was the Inch itself sending the messages. The island knew her innermost fears and secrets, knew her inside out, saw everything she did there. She slapped herself in the face trying to clear her mind.

She stared again at the messages, the letters drifting in her stoned vision, left to right like she’d been on a round-about.

The phone pinged again.

She closed her eyes, needed a moment before reading. She concentrated on her lungs expanding and contracting, interacting with the atmosphere at a microscopic level.

Opened her eyes: No you won’t. They wouldn’t believe you anyway.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound convincing. Ping: Returning to the crime scene wasn’t smart.

Surtsey rubbed at the skin beneath her eyes. Pushed at the sockets until her focus blurred. Felt tears come.

She looked around the room then touched the screen, slow, fingers clumsy: Who are you?

Send.

She sat looking at the screen waiting for an answer, but no answer came.

She was an ancient god made of stone, held captive in the core of the earth.

Slowly the magma melted her chains until she broke free, swimming in the molten rock, upwards towards the surface, faster and faster, the pressure around her lessening until she burst into water.

Then open air, her fists held high, lava and rock and steam surrounding her as she soared into the atmosphere and gazed down on the planet from space, marvelling that only minutes before it had been her prison.

A ringing.

She bumped out of sleep, head in a fug, the raw rasp of grass sticking in her throat and mouth.

Formality

Phone. It was a ring not a ping, a call not a message. She clambered for Tom’s phone, pulled it from under the pillow. Nothing. She stared at it, the ringing still in her ears.

Not Tom’s phone. Hers.

She found it on the floor next to the bed. St Columba’s.

They never usually called. In fact, she couldn’t think of a time they’d ever called her. Her stomach slumped and her skin prickled.

She didn’t answer straight away. Six rings, seven. Ten. She pressed the button.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Ms Mackenzie?”

The formality confirmed it.

“Yes.”

“This is Deborah Steel, the registered nurse at St Columba’s Hospice. I’m afraid I have some bad news.” “Yes.”

“I’m sorry but your mother Louise passed away in the night.”

“Yes.”

Like she couldn’t say anything else, like she was stuck on “yes” for the rest of her life.

“It was peaceful,” the nurse said. “In her sleep. I’m so sorry.”

More tomorrow.