“What is that?” Mum said.
“Shit,” I said.
“Is that what I think it is?” She licked her finger and started rubbing at a little scroll of flowers and butterflies that spiraled up from my hip.
“Ow,” I said, “arm.”
“Is that a tattoo? A real tattoo? I mean an actual tattoo?” The pitch of her voice was rising steadily. “What on earth were you thinking? You actually got a tattoo? I don’t believe it.” She looked directly at Willa. “Did you know about this?”
Willa’s eyes widened and she blinked rapidly.
“Okay,” Mum said, “forget it, I’m not asking you.” She turned on my dad. “You?” Dad instantly assumed the mild, doleful look he used when Mum was on the rampage. He shook his head. It was true, he didn’t know, although he had, in fact, signed the form giving parental permission. I’d told him it was something boring I’d needed for school. Picking my moment—his head under the bonnet, oil dripping everywhere, wrench in hand—I’d pointed out where he needed to sign, indicating the exact spot with my hand just so, coincidentally covering up the text.
“It is a bit of a surprise, Robyn,” said Dad.
“You do realize tattoos are permanent, don’t you?” said Mum. “You realize they’re made with needles?” I attempted an expression that fell somewhere between Gosh needles, who knew? and Well, obviously that’s not good. “Good grief. I can’t believe it.”
“I quite like it,” Michael said. We all turned to look at him. He pointed at a small butterfly just below my ribs. “That one there’s a Marbled White—Melanargia galathea. Those checkerboard markings make it fairly unmistakable, though it’s not always easy to tell the difference between the males and the females. The females have a slightly more yellowish hue. I suspect you’ve got a male there. They have false eyes on their underwings. They like grassland mostly, but recently I saw a female on some gorse, just yesterday, actually.”
At moments like that I loved my brother more than ever.
***
Days later, when a blanket of heat lay on the hill and it was too hot to breathe, too hot to sunbathe, too hot to think, Dad invited Willa and me into the pottery. Except for when he fired up the kiln, it was always cool in there. He needed our help, he said, with a small project. His studio was a few paces across the yard. It comprised an old stone building facing the moor with a long porch across the front and, its defining feature, the single word teas painted in meter-high letters on the roof. It was a word that could, on a clear day, be seen from a great distance. Tea Mountain, the locals called us. For them we were a useful landmark, but for tourists and walkers that word was a beacon, a shining invitation, beaming out at them across the hills. They weren’t to know the old barn hadn’t been used as a tea shop since Victorian times. Needless to say, we had a lot of random guests.
It was Willa’s first time in the pottery, and while my dad showed her around I helped myself to some crank from the clay bins and attempted to model my family using my one remaining hand: my mother, short and round with thick glasses; my dad, tall and skinny and a little stooped, as if he were always just about to duck through a door; my brother with his lovable beaky face. I thought about making Willa too, but somehow clay wasn’t the right material for her. She needed something more fragile, gossamer and glass. Something to capture all that flyaway hair and pale freckly skin. She was the most beautiful girl I knew.
Dad was showing Willa the rows of drying gray vessels, the warm brown ones already once fired and the finished ones ready to sell. He opened jars of powdered glaze, showing Willa their dusty contents and explaining how the various combinations of manganese, bone ash and tin would magically transform in the heat of the kiln, how copper was green and cobalt was blue and antimony was yellow, and not to touch that last one because it was absolutely lethal.
My dad never hurried anything. Slowly the tour of the pottery worked its way over to the bench where I was using a clay knife to get at the unremitting itch beneath my cast. He laid out the pieces of my mother’s favorite bowl.
“So here’s the thing,” he said. “There’s a Japanese process for mending pottery with tree sap which I’ve always wanted to try, where the cracks aren’t hidden away, but made a thing of, made deliberately visible. What happens is you dust the lines of the repair with a powdered precious metal—gold, copper, whatever. The idea is that repairing something—something loved, something treasured—makes it even more beautiful. A nice idea, no? It’s called kintsugi. What d’you think? Want to give it a go? I need you two to help hold the pieces in place.”
“Fine,” I said, deciding for both of us. It was too hot to do anything else. “Let’s do it.” I held up two large shards, pushing them together to see if they’d fit. They did not.
“You ever worked with clay before, Willa?” Dad asked after a while. She shook her head. He glanced at her fingernails, bitten to the quick.
“You’ve got the right nails for it. I could teach you to throw, if you like. We could have you making a half-decent pot in a couple of days. Robyn here can do it in her sleep.”
I saw a momentary flash of delight fly across Willa’s face, then it was gone. “Are you sure?” she glanced from him to me. “I’d hate to, you know, get in your way or something.”
“Nothing better than a willing student.” Dad was focused on a slab of pottery, drawing a careful line of glue along its edge. “I’ll bet you’re used to a bit more action, generally, aren’t you? I’ll bet Robyn didn’t tell you how cut off we are.”
“No, that’s right, Dad, I completely got her here on false pretenses,” I said. “I told her we lived in a castle—”
“I’d hate to think of you getting bored here, stuck out in the sticks.”
“With servants. And a hot-air balloon.”
Willa opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, her cheeks flushed. Her eyes met mine.
The bowl grew slowly, piece by piece. It turned out to be strangely satisfying, working out how each slab would fit with another, returning each bit to its rightful place. The time slipped by.
“I reckon this is how dreams work,” Dad said. “Your mind picks up all the pieces of your day and puts them together to see how they fit. That’s how dreams end up being so strange. It’s when you put two bits together that don’t belong.”
I caught Willa’s eye and grinned at her. “I do so love your ponderous little soul, Dad,” I said. “You’re a natural philosopher.”
By the end of the afternoon a quiet had fallen on all of us, something calming and meditative. Afternoon light sloped in through the window. Outside, swifts looped above bone-white grasses in air filled with the bright specks of insects. Bach nuzzled our feet. Yap curled up in a chair. Dad unrolled two little brown-paper twists and their contents flashed in the light. Inside was real powdered silver, real powdered gold. He offered Willa the choice. I would definitely have picked gold.
“Silver,” Willa said, straight off.
“Silver it is.”
And, finally, it was done. The bowl was transformed. Little silver-white lines wound around its surface, merging, dividing, and all of them reflecting the late-afternoon sun. Against the sandy rim they looked like the passage of water through a desert. Dad had been right. The bowl really was more beautiful than before.
“You can fix anything, given the right tools,” Dad said. His voice was gentle and he was looking directly at Willa. I widened my eyes and glared at him. Willa said nothing. She was still looking down at the bowl, her almost-red hair falling across her face. Perhaps she thought he was speaking to me. You never really could tell with Willa. She gave so little away.
***
“Tell me about your sister,” I said to her that night. We were lying in the grass with the dogs, bundled up in blankets, pillows under our heads, both of us looking up at the star-mottled underbelly of the sky. I’d known Willa almost a year by then, and never once asked her that question, not in the early days when she’d first pitched up at my boarding school, not since. We’d all worked out who she was. We’d seen the aerial shots of the house.
At first I didn’t think she’d heard me. Or, worse, she’d heard me, but wasn’t going to reply. I realized I was holding my breath. I was about to whisper Sorry when she cleared her throat and started to speak.
“Chatty, friendly. Kind. She had a really strong sense of right and wrong. And she loved animals. She would have loved these two.” Yap was nested between the two of us, she stroked his ears, and he yawned in appreciation.
“And she was funny.” Her voice sounded raspy and thin. “Witty, I mean. Quick-witted. Clever-funny. She was never at a loss for something to say, even when everyone else—anyone else—would have kept quiet. Not like me.” She turned her head to look at me. “I always need to think things over first, you know? Like I’m always trying to work out if I’m wrong or if I’m going to offend someone, and by then the conversation’s moved on. I’ve always been like that. Laika was the complete opposite. Whatever she was thinking, she just said, any old how. Dad always said she never stopped to think. But that wasn’t it. She was thinking all the time. She was properly clever, I mean, not just bright but really, really bright. Gifted. That level of bright.”
“You’re bright. You’re the most academic girl in the school.”
