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It’s dark inside our cottage, after the brightness of the day. Conor goes around shutting the windows, locking the back door that we never normally lock. I watch him without saying anything. I’m trying to remember everything I can about the story Dad told me, long ago, about the man who vanished with a mermaid, and who had the same name as him.
“Conor,” I say at last, “time doesn’t work like that. One person can’t live for hundreds of years.”
“I don’t know… time in Ingo isn’t like time here, is it? Maybe there are all kinds of time, living alongside each other, but usually we only experience one of them. Granny Carne might be living in her own time, and it might be quite different from ours. Think of the way oak trees live for a thousand years.”
“Earth time,” I say, not really knowing why I say it.
“Yes. If she’s got earth magic, then she could be living in earth time. And Faro and Elvira are living in Ingo time. So what are we living in?”
“I don’t know. Real time? Human time?”
“They’re all real. But human time; yeah, could be. So let’s say there’s earth time and Ingo time and human time, that’s three kinds of time already, and there could be more.”
“Ant time, butterfly time, planet time, cream-tea time—”
“I’m not messing around, Saph. Wait a minute. Look at Ingo time. I don’t think Ingo time is fixed against ours. It’s not like one year of Ingo time equals five years of human time, or whatever. It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes Ingo time seems to run at nearly the same pace as ours, but sometimes it’s quite different… almost like water flowing faster or more slowly, depending on whether it’s running downhill or along a flat surface – yes, maybe that’s it, something to do with the angle of Ingo time to human time—”
I switch off. Conor will carry on like this for hours once he gets going. That’s why he’s so good at maths.
Josie Sancreed’s jeering face comes into my mind. “I wonder what they really said when that first Mathew Trewhella disappeared,” I say. Were there people like Josie living then? Probably.
“I bet they said he’d gone off with another woman,” says Conor. His face is hard. “Just like they say about Dad.”
So Conor knows.
“Did you hear about what Josie said to me, Conor?”
“It’s what everyone says behind our backs. Josie said it to your face, that’s the only difference.”
“But Dad hasn’t gone off with another woman! He hasn’t gone off with anyone. He would never do that to us.”
“Maybe not.”
“You know he hasn’t, Conor,” I say angrily. Conor has got to believe in Dad. We’re a family. Me and Conor and Dad and Mum.
Me and Conor and Mum.
“I don’t know anything any more,” says Conor. He shrugs. “Sorry, Saph. Everything’s upside down and inside out today.”
It’s so rare for Conor to have doubts about anything that I don’t know what to say. Conor’s my big brother, the one who knows things. If he doesn’t know where he is, then where am I?
“It’ll be OK,” I say doubtfully. “Maybe Granny Carne just likes telling old stories because she’s old.”
“She told us about that first Mathew Trewhella for a reason,” says Conor, in the same way as he’s always explained things to me, like who is in which gang at school, and why. I knew how the playground worked before I even went to school, because of Conor. “Don’t get scared, Saph, but I think Granny Carne believes we’re in danger.”
“How could we be in danger?”
“He never came back, did he? The Mathew Trewhella in the story, I mean. Maybe Dad won’t ever come back either.”
“Conor, don’t.”
Conor turns and grips my wrists hard. “They got Mathew Trewhella, didn’t they? I know what it’s like, Saph. You’re out there in Ingo, and they make you feel that everything back here on land is nothing. Even the people you love don’t count. You can’t even remember them clearly.”
“I didn’t forget you and Mum!”
“Didn’t you?”
“You just got a bit cloudy and far away.”
“I know. And so you go on, deeper and deeper into Ingo, until you don’t care about anything else—”
“Did you feel like that?”
“Of course I did! I would’ve stayed. I’d probably still be there now. It was the first time I’d got so close to the seals. Elvira said she was going to take me to the Lost Islands. But I heard you calling. I didn’t even want to hear it. I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard you. Can you believe it, Saph, me trying to pretend I couldn’t hear my own sister when she might’ve needed me? But you kept on calling and I was afraid something bad was happening to you, and you were calling to me for help. And so I had to come back.
But when I got up on to the shore, there was no one there. You’d totally disappeared. I waited for you for hours and hours, thinking you weren’t ever going to come back. I went up to the cottage, I searched everywhere, I came back down here – I even went back into the sea again to look for you. But I couldn’t get into Ingo again. Not without Elvira. I dived and dived but nothing happened. The water wouldn’t let me in. It pushed me up like a rubber ball every time I dived. The water was laughing at me.”
“But – but it wasn’t more than a few minutes after I called you that I came back. It can’t have been longer.”
“Believe me, it was. You were so deep in Ingo that it felt like minutes. But it was hours, Saph.”
I’m almost scared of Conor now. He looks like he did after Shadow had to be put down, the summer before last. Shadow was fifteen, which is old for a cat. We all loved Shadow, but Conor really loved him. I think of Conor searching along the shore, searching the cottage, trying to find me, running back to the cove, frantic, afraid that something terrible had happened to me.
“I’m sorry, Conor. I really didn’t know. I didn’t think I’d been away so long.”
“It’s all happening again, that’s what scares me,” says Conor in a low voice. “First, the olden-days Mathew Trewhella disappears. OK, it’s only a story that’s supposed to have happened a long time ago. But then Dad disappears. And then I can’t find you. I really thought I was never going to be able to find you again.
“I’ll tell you something, Saph, I won’t go there again. Whatever Elvira says, I’m not going to Ingo again. It’s too dangerous.
“Granny Carne doesn’t want us to go. She’s stopping us. I can feel it. You know when you try to push two magnets together, and they won’t? It’s like that.
“But Elvira wants me to go. And she didn’t want me to come back either. Do you know what she said? That can’t have been your sister’s voice. These currents make strange echoes. I didn’t hear anything. But I knew I’d heard you. How could I be wrong about my own sister’s voice?”
I hate the pain and confusion in my brother’s voice. I hate the idea that Elvira wanted to keep him away from me.
“Conor, listen. You won’t go up to Jack’s again today, will you? You won’t leave me alone here?”
“No,” says Conor. His face lightens. “Hey, Saph. Listen.”
“What?”
“Maybe you should cut off your hair.”
“Cut off my hair?”
“Because when it’s so long and you’re in the water, your hair spreads out all around you. It makes you look like a – you know, like one of them.”
“You mean, like a mermaid,” I say icily. How can Conor possibly suggest that I cut off my hair? He knows I’ve been growing it since I was six. I’ve got the longest hair in our whole school. I wouldn’t be me without it.
“Yes,” says Conor, quite seriously. “They might see your hair floating in the water when you go swimming, and get the idea that you’re one of them. That you ought to stay with them.”
“So let me know when I start to grow a tail.”
But Conor shrugs my comment away, as if I’m just the little sis trying to be smart. I’m about to snap back, when a strange feeling seizes me and I forget him.
How dark it is inside the cottage, with the doors and windows closed. You know that feeling when you come home after a holiday, and everything feels so familiar and comfortable, because it belongs to you and you belong to it? That’s the feeling I usually have when I come home to our cottage.
But not now. The walls seem to be pressing in around me. I’ve never realised before that the cottage is so small. There’s so little space that I can hardly move. I want to stretch. I want to get out. I want to leap and plunge and dive and be free, and I want the cool of the water rushing past my skin instead of this dry, scratchy air. Our cottage isn’t a home at all. It’s a prison.
Conor is watching me. “Saph, no!” he says warningly, as if he can read my thoughts.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I won’t let you, Saph. You’re not swimming off down any streams without me. I told Granny Carne I’d look after you.”
I hold on to the strength of Conor’s voice.
“Conor, listen. What else did Elvira say to you?”
“Everything I wanted to hear,” says Conor. “But I can’t describe it. You have to hear her voice.”
I think of Faro, and all the power of Ingo.
“I know,” I say.
“But I’m not going to Ingo again. If Elvira calls to me, I’ll put my headphones on and turn my music up loud so I can’t hear her. It’s the only way.”
Suddenly a thought cuts through me like a knife. “Conor! What about Mum?”
“What about her?”
“Mum might hear it too. You know. The singing. It might start to pull her. And then what’ll we do?”
“She won’t,” says Conor confidently. “Mum hates the sea. Can you imagine her in Ingo?”
“No – maybe not—”
“Mum wouldn’t even believe Ingo exists. And that’ll make her safe.”
In the cottage, with Conor there and Conor’s music playing loud, doors and windows shut, curtains drawn, lights on and a bolognese sauce bubbling on the stove, Ingo seems far away.
But even the loudest music has pauses in it, and into those pauses the noise of the sea can break through, drop by drop, then faster, a trickle, a stream, and now a flood-tide—
No. I won’t let it happen this time.
I make a huge effort. I close my eyes, my ears, my mind. Our cottage is warm and safe and friendly. It’s our home, where we belong. In a minute it’ll be time to drop the spaghetti into boiling water.
Ingo does not exist. Ingo is just a story, far away.
Yes, says a small, mocking voice inside my head. Ingo doesn’t exist. How true is a lie, how dry is the ocean, how cold is the sun? And I think the voice sounds like Faro’s.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_f381ddb3-f398-51ad-b72c-17834b85cd7b)
Mum straightens up and turns from the oven to the kitchen table where we’re all sitting. She places a pan of roast potatoes carefully on the heat-proof mat, next to the roast chicken which has been resting for ten minutes.
“The chicken’s having a good rest before we eat it,” Dad used to explain to us when we were little. “It’s hard work to be eaten.”
“Don’t fill the children’s heads with rubbish, Mathew. It rests so as to make the meat easier to carve, Sapphire,” Mum would say.
Dad’s not here, but we’re still eating roast chicken. Isn’t it strange that a meal can last longer in your life than a person? Sunday dinner, the same as ever. I stare at the golden skin of the chicken and the crunchy golden-brown roast potatoes. Mum always sprinkles salt on the potatoes before she puts them in hot oil to roast.
“I’ll just have potatoes and broccoli, Mum,” I say, when it comes to my turn. Mum has already heaped Roger’s plate with chicken breast and a leg as well, and he’s staring at it carnivorously.
“You’re not turning vegetarian again, are you, Sapphire?” asks Mum warily.
“I’m not turning vegetarian, it’s just that I don’t want any chicken.”
“Great-looking chicken,” Roger observes.
“It was better looking when it was running around, in my opinion,” I answer. I’m on safe ground here, because I know this is one of the Nances’ chickens, so I have definitely seen it running around many times. In fact I’ve probably even thrown grain for it, which makes the sight of it on the plate a little difficult.
“Is it better for a chicken to run around and have a good life and then die and be eaten, or for a chicken to be shut up in a box and never run around, and then die of natural causes?” asks Conor. Mum pours gravy on to Roger’s plate in a long stream. Her lips are pressed tightly together with annoyance. Her face is flushed from the heat of the oven on a hot day, and suddenly I wish I hadn’t said anything about the chicken running around.
“Lord, bless this food and all of us who gather here to eat it,” says Roger. We all stare at him. His face is calm and bland. He nods at me, picks up his knife and fork, and starts to eat.
“No disrespect to your workplace, Jennie, but this roast beats anything I’ve eaten in a restaurant,” he says, after swallowing the first few mouthfuls. I listen to his voice instead of the words and I hear something unexpected there. Mum never told us Roger was Australian. But his accent is not that strong. Maybe he went to Australia for a while, that was all. Diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
“I got gravy on my chin?” Roger asks, smiling. I must have been staring at him.
“No,” I blurt out. “I was wondering if you were Australian.”
Roger looks pleased. “Yeah, that’s right. I was born out there, in a little place in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. My parents emigrated there after they were married. But things didn’t work out for the family, so my mum came back here when I was ten years old. You can still hear the accent if you know what to listen for, I reckon.”
“I never knew that,” says Mum.
“Your daughter has a quick ear,” says Roger, and I can’t help feeling a bit flattered. I look down quickly to hide my smile. I don’t want Mum thinking I’m starting to like Roger.
“Eat your broccoli, Sapphire,” says Mum automatically, although I’ve already eaten it.
“She’s looking better, isn’t she?” Mum goes on. It’s not really a question to anyone, and no one answers.
“You’re feeling better, aren’t you, Sapphy?”
“Um, yes—” I begin, when I realise that I’m not feeling better at all. In fact I’m feeling very strange indeed, as if the Sunday table is rushing away from me. Conor’s looking at me worriedly. The room feels as if all the air has been sucked out of it, even though the kitchen door is open. The smell of food chokes my nostrils. Why are we all sitting inside when the sun is bright on the grass outside and the tide’s moving, tugging…
“The tide’s on the turn,” I say, before I know I’m going to say it. Roger glances at his watch.
“You’re dead right there,” he says, surprised. “Right to the minute. You keep your eye on the tides, then?”
