“Death comes for everyone, Axe,” Da says, as if this is something that should make Axe feel better.
Instead, those words make him feel like he swallowed the stones he likes to skip from the bluff.
Mrs. Collins, who takes care of Axe and Hamish but also manages the girls, used to be pretty, but she is old now, with a slash of red lipstick and tall black heels. She is Pa’s “right-hand man,” but he never kisses Mrs. Collins on the lips like he does the girls when they’re dressed up for him in the great hall.
Mrs. Collins wears shirts buttoned all the way to her neck and pleated trousers. Sometimes her sleeves creep up her arm, and Axe can see raised jagged lines along her wrists. He imagines she was once bitten by a shark.
If anyone can survive a tussle with a shark, it’s Mrs. Collins.
All the girls call Pa Daddy, and the staff calls Pa Eldy—so Axe simply thought thatEldywas just another way to sayDa, too.
His brother, Hamish, who is five years older than Axe and knows many more things, tells him that it’s notEldy, ya stupid arse, it’sEl D—short for El Diablo, the Devil.
Then Axe really does feel like a stupid arse, because he still doesn’t understand. So he asks Hamish, the only person on the island willing to field Axe’s questions, though he knows he has to dole them out sparingly. He doesn’t want to test Hamish’s patience: “Why is Da the Devil?”
Hamish shrugs. “Because Da owns everything and everybody in Skara Brae, and if you get in his way, he will make your life so bad, you’ll wish you were dead. Now come along, Axe, let’s make a fort oot this bramble!”
The boys play forts a lot. Sometimes they’re soldiers and sometimes they work for Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force. Axe dreams of a day when he will get to fly a real plane. His whole life is Skara Brae, filled with girls who need to work hard for his da, and all Da’s friends, who look very happy when their big, fancy boats dock here. Da’s friends are rich, with large bellies taut like drums, and they are mostly old and smell like whiskey and tobacco. When they step onto dry land, they pronounce Axe’s home Heaven, which is confusing. How does the Devil live in Heaven?
Though sometimes Axe understands that this place is different, especially when he scrambles up rocks on the shore and lets the mist whip his face and talks to the otters that, like him, know how to camouflage. Especially when he prays to God in the chapel and watches the sun move through the stained glass and make rainbows on the dark oak floor.
Sometimes whole days will go by and no one will notice or talk to Axe.
The men are here to sit and drink wine and get massages, and the girls are here to serve them. They rub the men, who lie like large and greasy beached whales on the massage tables. No one can ignore their snapping fingers, the way they grab at everything as if the whole world belongs to them.
The girls wear skimpy see-through T-shirts and tiny thongs, and they bring food and drinks to the lounge chairs around the pool in an endless loop. If the Whales pinch their asses or shove their tongues down their throats, the girls act happy and excited, though Axe can tell from their eyes that they’re sad. That they want to be anywhere but here.
Axe gives the girls flowers because he wants to see them smile one last time before they stop smiling altogether. Their job here is to make Da and the Whales happy. They’re like teachers or camp counselors or nurses, Da says. They’re supposed to take care of people. That’s what they signed up for.
But Axe wonders who is supposed to take care of them.
Once, one of the girls offered to massage Axe if he’d help her leave, and he didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t want to be massaged, and he had no idea how to leave. He’d been here, on the island, every single day since he was born. He’d taught himself to read by sitting on the cold stone floor of the library, tracing the letters with his fingers.
He’d never watched the telly, though the staff often moaned about missing it most from “the real world.” As a child, he hadn’t really understood what it was, though Hamish had described it as a screen that tells a story, and at five years old, Axe took that literally, imagining the telly speaking directly to its audience like the old ham radio and the walkie-talkies he and his brother played with.
Now he knows better. Now he understands the telly doesn’ttalkto you—it plays out stories performed by beautiful, bonny folk.And he wonders if it’s anything like the castle, where everyone has a role to play.
Sometimes, late at night, Axe imagines slipping from the rocks into the churning ocean and swimming in the brutal water, pumping his arms until he finds another, better shore.
Fourteen
Josie
Axe wasn’t kidding. The document is fifty-two pages, and there’s even an entire section on “intimacy.” It’s all legalese, a language I don’t speak.
Not that it really matters. I’m out of options anyway.
When I got home yesterday, my mom ambushed me in the guesthouse.
“We’re already at our goal. Told you that you should have posted,” she said, all smug delight, and I was too tired to fight. My car’s got a shiny new tire, courtesy of Strike’s black Amex. Pocket change to him, but I’ll pay him back. I wrote down the exact amount, down to the penny, so I can Venmo him the second Axe’s promised signing bonus hits.
Work is work. I’ve been a store clerk for years, and I once spent a summer doing tarot readings at a fold-out table outside a coffee shop. I’ve been a waitress, a nanny, a gas station cashier, a barista. This job at SynthoTech is just another gig.
Grace—Honor’s twin—used to make extra cash as an escort, not that Honor ever knew. They had a lot of secrets between them, but they kept their own, too. Grace once showed me her personalad in the back of theShelton Free Pressand then put a finger to her lips, likeDon’t tell.
I didn’t judge her then, and I’m not judging myself now.
Grace earned her cash, no pity involved. And I’m so fucking done with pity.
