Lola had been too young to visit the island when she had been younger. While she was staying at with Aunt Emily, her cousins and the other boy used to dare each other to cross the bridge, getting closer and closer to the temple every time. Eventually Leon would give up, opting instead to sit on the safe side of the bridge, occasionally beckoning Lola to sit by him, and they would watch as Cee and... Robbie, that had been his name, would dare each other to keep going, closer and closer every time, each one determined to out do the other. They would keep going until they were past the bridge, into the tall grass on the other side, until Leon would have to strain his neck to see up past it, to make sure that his sister was still there.
Somehow, through the haze of her emotions, the anger boiling just under her skin, Lola had know which way to move under the light of the moon. The lake, and the island in the middle of it, home to the mysterious temple that Lola had never cared to gather information about, was down the stretch of the lawn. Lola made her way down there quickly, recalling the mysterious island and the promise of shelter.
She wasn't looking for the boys, knew that one of the others, the adults, would eventually find them, and that they would be alright, and looked after, and cared for, and that she would be forgotten.
Lola followed the ground as it levelled out, coming to a stop in front of the bridge. The last time she had visited, she had been old enough that everyone no longer cared whether she went across to the island. That visit though, it had just been here and her mother, Hermione had disappeared into grown-up conversations with Aunt Emily and a young Briony was somewhere in the house, hidden from her, from the world it seemed. She had been looking forward to coming back. She remembered seeing Cecilia, an older girl, who did her own hair, chose her own clothes, even wore make-up. She was gone now, off in college somewhere, but Lola could be that girl for Briony. Briony would look to her. But the girl was lost to the world, and nothing would recall her. Emily had promised that Briony would be out soon, just to give her the rest of the afternoon. Lola had waited patiently, changed her clothes, touched up her make-up, but there was still no sign of Briony. Instead of staying in the house, waiting to become an adult, at least in someone else's eyes, she went out to the island.
That was the only other way that she could think of to give herself some value. She had viewed the island, for as long as she could remember, as a right of passage. The older kids had played there when she had been forced to sit and watch. This time, she could, she was old enough and the island hadn't been included in the briefing that she had been forced to sit though when she arrived at the house.
When she got there, though, the island looked smaller that she remembered, less important somehow. The grass was still just as wild, over grown, but it looked less lonely, her subconscious was making sense of the small hints that told her that someone was visiting the island with more frequency that anyone ever had before.
The burrs from the wild grass would stick to her socks, get caught in the hem of her dress, and the sticks would tangle in her hair, forcing it out of the style into which she had wrestled it and spinning it back into a chaotic bird's nest.
Suddenly she didn't want to go across to the island. Perhaps something had actually happen to change it from the place of her memory, the place which was fraught with dangers that could only be averted or acknowledged by an adult eye, keener and clearer that the cloud of her memory. She stood on what she had once considered the safe side of the bridge. She considered sitting down, but that would destroy the seat of her dress, and that was more important, when your an adult you cant just sit on the grass, you have to think about these things.
She didn't sit there now. Instead she moved on past the spot where she had sat as a child, knees drawn up in emulation of her older cousin, up over the bridge and into the bush. It was dark, and the ground was uneven. Under the light of the moon she could see the island temple, but it was farther than she had thought and before she got there the grass had caught on her ankles and she could feel them stinging. She had stumbled again and again, making sure not to damage her dress beyond repair. Hough it would make a better sight to turn up with a ripped dress, legs and arms bloodied. The scratches on her arms stung, but they covered up the long bruises that had already began to form.
She felt her legs go weak and pushes that thought deep down where it couldn't look at her any more. She sat, and pulled her knees up to her face, feeling the dirt push it's way into the haze of green material. Her knees had survived most of the beating, protected by the flaring of her skirt, but further down her legs ached.
She would stay there, and she would stay out longer than her brothers. She would stay out until it was her that they were searching for, and then she would let herself be found, and someone would put a blanket, an arm around her shoulders.
It was typical. Their world was falling apart, they had no home left to run to, yet the boys decided to throw themselves out into the night. They had no place to go, all that they could do was to go back to the house. Or did they expect to get all the way home? As far as Lola knew, all that they had were the pieces of fruit that they had stolen from some where in the kitchen. Lola took a minute to admire their courage. They were terrified of Betty. Yet they had found some way to sneak into her kitchen. They would have been terrible, knowing that they were in a dangerous place. Knowing that in any moment there could come a lot the person that they feared.
Lola wished that she could have that kind of courage. Or just the small amount of courage that it would take to tell the truth. She should have told Briony. The girl had been looking at her, actually attentive for once, and Lola could have told her then. Could have described the way that a man's blunt fingernails felt against bare skin, the skin of an arm,or told her about the way a man's weight feels when they're pressing you into the floor, the hard wood underneath pushing up to meet the pressure from above. She could have described the feeling of it, of watching his hands fidget as her teeth broke the green surface of the chocolate. But that would mean thinking about it, and thinking about it meant being alone again, in that room watching him watch her as she tried flirting, as she saw adults do from time to time. All it took was the right combination of words, a slightly adjusted stance. It was something that adults did, and nothing ever happened to them. What had she done wrong? What had she done to warrant the feel of the wood beneath her pressing hard against her shoulder blades, and the burn as her arm twisted in his grasp as she tried to spin away?
So she had told Briony that it had been her brothers. And it might as well have been, because no one would even know the truth. The words whispered in her ear as she had been released, no one will believe you. No one would believe her. She was the tragic victim of a domestic war, emotions and judgement jumbled into a tangle as wild as her hair. She would lash out at the unfamiliar male, perhaps seeing him as a substitute for the disembodied man, who was only mentioned behind closed doors, or hands cupped in a facade of secrecy, when they thought that the children couldn't hear them.
Then Briony had told her about Robbie. Lola had at once been relieved. She didn't know what the word meant, but the hush in the younger girls voice, even as she took the precaution of spelling it out backwards, and the girls way with words, persuaded her that the girl knew something that she didn't. When she spoke about the attack in the library, the truth was brought to the tip of her tongue. She was not alone. This was not something that just happened to her, it happened to other adults too. It happened to Cecilia, who was tall and had gone to school, who knew much more than Lola knew about the world of adults. Maybe this was something that could be stopped, and her heart could stop racing and the tears could stop falling from her eyes, because it could be stopped.
"He's a maniac." The words slipped from Lola, in an awed whisper. She had seen him, the light in his eyes, the smile on his odd face, and she knew that he was a maniac As Briony kept talking, Lola could feel her own excitement rising as she spoke of her own maniac. Sex existed only in the adult domain, but the two girls sat in the falling darkness and took their first glimpse in to it together, permitted entry by the word maniac. Maniac, maniac, maniac. The word wrapped around her in the dark. She felt warm in it. It wasn't her, it was him, all him, and she was safe here, away from him. In the dark, when he was inside, or somewhere on the other side of the ground. No one came to the island. No one knew she was there.