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“Conor, come back! Tea’s ready!”
He waves again, and begins to pick his way carefully back across the wet, slippery rocks at the side of the cove. It would be quicker to dive in and swim across to me, but he doesn’t do that. He scrambles all the way back across the rocks that line the edge of the cove, and only jumps into the water when it is shallow. Knee-deep, he splashes towards me. He’s frowning – not in an angry way, but just as he frowns when he’s doing his toughest maths homework.
“What are you doing here, Saph?”
“Looking for you.”
“But it’s not time for tea yet, is it?”
I look down at my wrist, and then I realise something terrible. I must have walked into the water with my watch on. My beautiful watch that Dad got for me in Truro. Now I remember my arms trailing in the water. I forgot all about my watch! I can’t believe it. The hands point to five past seven, but the second hand isn’t moving. I shake my wrist hard. Nothing happens. My watch has stopped.
“Oh, Saph. You went into the water with it on,” says Conor, looking at my wet shorts and T-shirt.
“It’s broken.”
“Maybe it’ll be all right if we dry it out. I’ll take the back off and see,” says Conor. But we both know it won’t be all right.
“It’s broken, Conor.” Thick, painful tears crowd behind my eyes. Dad helped me to choose the watch, but he didn’t choose for me. The shop assistant had laid my three favourites out on the counter. A watch with a blue face and gold hands, a silver watch on a silver wristband, and this watch. My watch. Dad waited and didn’t say anything while I tried them all on again, for the third time. I held my wrist out to see how each one looked, and then I knew. This one was mine. I loved it. But it was the most expensive of the three. I took it off and put it down.
“I think I like the blue one best,” I said. I’d looked at the price labels, and I knew that was the cheapest one. But guess what Dad did then? He picked up the one I liked best and said, “Don’t look at the prices, Sapphy. You only have one birthday a year. It wasn’t the blue one you liked, it was this one.”
“How did you know, Dad?”
“You can’t fool me. I know you too well, Sapphy.”
He knew me too well, because we were alike. Me and Dad, Mum and Conor. It wasn’t that I loved Dad more than Mum, but—
“Don’t cry, Saph.” Conor puts his arm round my shoulders. “You didn’t mean to break it. But listen. You mustn’t come down here and swim on your own. You know we promised Mum we wouldn’t.”
Mustn’t come down here and swim—Indignation shocks my tears away. “What about you? Look at you, your hair’s all wet. You’ve been swimming with that girl, haven’t you?”
“What girl?”
I stare at him. “What girl? The girl who was sitting on the rock talking to you, of course. The girl with long hair like mine.”
Conor looks at me with the elder-brother look I hate. “How could you see her hair, if we were right over on the rocks?”
“I could. I could see her quite clearly.”
“The trouble with you, Saph, is that you see one thing and then you imagine something else.”
“I don’t. I don’t make up stuff. I used to when I was little, but I don’t now.”
“If you say so.”
“I don’t, Conor. Not much, anyway. You’re only saying that to stop me asking about her.”
“All right then. I went swimming after I cleaned out the shed. Maybe I should have told you I was going, but I didn’t. Just for once I wanted…”
I feel cold inside from fear of what he’s going to say. What did Conor want, that I couldn’t give him?
“…I don’t know,” goes on Conor, as if he’s talking to himself. “I wanted some space, I suppose…”
“Oh.”
“And then, after I’d been swimming, I sat on the rocks to get dry. End of story.”
“But Conor – it was this morning that you cleaned out the shed. It’s way past seven o’clock in the evening now. Probably past eight. Mum went to work hours ago. You’re telling me you’ve been here swimming for seven hours?”
“What?” Conor seizes my wrist and stares at the face of my watch.
“It stopped when I went into the water,” I say.
“It can’t be that late. You must have been messing about with your watch.” He shakes my wrist as if the hands of the watch might suddenly run backwards, to match the time he thinks it is.
“Get off me, Conor. It’s evening, can’t you see that? Look at the sun. Look how low it is.”
Conor stares around. He gazes at the mouth of the cave, where the sun is low and golden as it sinks towards the horizon. I watch him realise that I’m telling the truth.
“Maybe I fell asleep,” he says slowly. He looks lost, confused, not like my brother Conor at all.
“You were talking to someone. I saw her. She must have gone off across the rocks,” I say, but this time I say it quietly, not because I want to win an argument with Conor, but to make the truth clear. And this time Conor doesn’t answer.
“Who was she?” I ask, not even expecting him to tell me. And he doesn’t. Conor’s face is pale. Tired out, the way you’re tired out after a long day in the sea. He doesn’t want to talk. Side by side, we walk back up the sand, towards the rocks, the boulders, the way that leads home. I feel shaky all over. There was a girl there, I know there was. One minute she was sitting on the rocks with Conor, and then she was gone.
In bed that night I lie awake. Conor’s upstairs in his loft room. He can’t climb down the ladder without me knowing. I’m afraid to fall asleep in case he creeps past me, down the stairs and out of the cottage. But why would Conor want to do that? I can’t think of a reason, and yet I can’t stop being afraid.
There was no reason for Dad to leave us, either.
I know Conor’s not asleep yet, because a minute ago I heard his feet stepping lightly across the floor above me, towards the window. The slap of bare feet, and then silence. He’s by his window, looking out towards the sea. I know it for sure. My eyes are stinging with tiredness but I can’t let go and drop into sleep. Not yet, not until Mum comes back.
We both promised Mum that we would never go off swimming alone in the cove. It’s so quiet and lonely there that if anything happened, there would be no chance of help. We’ve always kept our promise, until today. It wasn’t just Conor who broke it, either. If I hadn’t seen him on the rock, I would have gone on walking deeper into the water, with the sea pulling me like a magnet.
How far would the sea have pulled me? Maybe there’s sea magic too, the same as Dad once said there was earth magic. Granny Carne’s magic was mostly benign, Dad said. But what about the sea’s magic? The sea’s strong, and wild, and if you make a mistake the sea will make you pay. Sometimes you pay with your life.
Dad used to say that the sea doesn’t hate you and it doesn’t love you. It’s up to you to learn its ways, and keep yourself safe.
But I didn’t even think about keeping myself safe today, down at the cove. All I wanted was to go with the tide. I didn’t even think of Mum or Conor, because the sea was pulling me so hard.
Is that how Conor felt? Did he forget about all of us, so that hours passed like minutes? He was talking to that girl. He was. I didn’t imagine it. She was wearing a wetsuit, and her hair was long and wet and tangly, hanging over her shoulders and hiding her body. They were laughing and talking. She and Conor didn’t look as if they’d just met for the first time.
My watch! Mum will go crazy when she finds out that my watch isn’t working any more. She said it was too good for everyday, and I should put it away and only wear it on special occasions.
“Dad said I could wear it every day,” I argued. In the end Mum agreed.
“But you’d better look after it, Sapphy. You can be so careless.”
She sounded like my school report. Good work is spoiled by carelessness. Sapphire needs to concentrate, and stop daydreaming in class.
Mum said, “It’ll be a miracle if that watch is still on your wrist in six months’ time, Sapphy.”
“It will be.”
“Good. I’m hoping you’ll prove me wrong.”
Mum was wrong. My watch is still on my wrist, and more than a year has passed. Maybe she won’t notice that it isn’t working any more.
Conor’s up there in his loft room, not moving, not sleeping, staring out of the window. All I want to hear is the tread of Conor’s bare feet back over the floorboards to his bed. But he stays at the window. I pull my curtain open, and see that the moon is rising. Even ordinary things are starting to look mysterious. The thorn bushes look like bodies that have been bent and bowed. Those white towels on the washing line that I forgot to bring in look like ghosts. It is so bright that you could find the path down to the cove quite easily by moonlight. Sometimes the moon makes a path on the sea and it looks real and solid, as if you could walk out on it to the horizon.
I hear a creak. It’s Conor, pushing his window wide. Maybe I should go up to him? No. He’ll be angry. He’ll think I’m following him around. But I’m not. I’m just looking out for him. Trying to look after him, the way Dad said we had to look after each other.
“As long as you two look out for each other, you’ll be safe enough.”
I can hear Dad’s voice saying those words, exactly as if he was here in the room. If I shut my eyes, it will be almost as if he were here…
No. If I’m not careful I’m going to fall asleep, and then Conor could creep down the ladder and out of the house, without me knowing. I sit up in bed and very quietly switch on the little lamp by my bed. As soon as I hear Mum’s car up by the gate, I can quickly turn the light off before she opens the gate and drives down the track and sees it.
On my bedside table there is a green and silver notebook which I used to keep my diary in. I’ve torn out the diary pages, because they were all about things that happened a long time ago when our life was different. Now I write lists.
I pick up my favourite black and silver pencil.
List of things that might have happened to Dad:
1. One of those factory fishing boats came too close inshore. Dad’s boat got dragged in its net and he was drowned. They untangled his boat and dropped it overboard so no one would have any evidence, because it’s against the law to be fishing where they were fishing.
This is what Josh Tregony says his dad says.
2. There was a freak squall and the boat went down.
This was one of the things they suggested in The Cornishman, but everyone remembers that it was flat calm that night.
3. Dad never went in his boat at all. He took her out as far as the mouth of the cove then he let her go on the tide and he swam back and went off another way. He had his own reasons for wanting folk to think he had drowned.
Someone said this in the Miners’ Arms. I heard it from Jessie Nanjivey, in my class. She said Badge Thomas said he would ram the teeth of the man who said it right down his throat if he opened his mouth again. The man was from Towednack, Jessie said. No one who knows Dad would ever believe it. He would never let the Peggy Gordon go on the tide. He loves her too much.
4. “Was your husband worried about anything? Debts? Problems at work? Did he seem depressed or unlike himself? Had he been drinking?”
These are some of the questions that the police asked Mum. Conor and I guessed what the police were trying to find out, but it was all rubbish. Dad was happy. We were all happy.
5. “You remember what happened to that other Mathew? Could be it’s the same thing come again.”
“You don’t really reckon, do you?”
“Well, they do say—”
This was Mrs Pascoe and her cousin Bertha talking in the post office stores. They saw me come in and they bit off the rest of what they’d been going to say. I hung around the birthday-card stand pretending to choose one, but the women just paid for their stuff and went out. They could have been talking about something else, but I don’t think so. I could see from their looks that they’d been talking about us, and there’s no other Mathew around here except Dad. That other Mathew – what did they mean?
I look down at the list I’ve written, and cross out three and four straight away. That leaves one, two and five. Josh Tregony’s dad told him that a factory fishing trawler did once pull down a small boat off the Scottish coast. The small boat got caught in the nets and dragged down, and the fishermen drowned. So maybe it could happen here. I don’t believe the freak squall theory. I remember that night too well, and how flat the sea was. So number two can be crossed out as well.
That leaves one and five. I don’t understand five at all, so maybe I’d better leave it on the list for the time being, until I find out more.
Suddenly I hear three sounds at once. The crunch of Mum’s tyres on the stony track up by the gate. The creak of a window shutting upstairs. The slap of Conor’s feet on the boards as he runs back to bed.
I slam my notebook shut, snap off the light, and dive under my duvet.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_201a5647-0f23-5e28-b296-c826feae0bea)
When I wake the next morning, there’s heavy white mist outside my window. I can’t even see the garden wall. I push my window open and lean out. There’s a mournful lowing sound, like the moo of a cow who has been separated from her calf. It’s the foghorn, calling to warn the ships.
So many ships have run aground and broken up on the rocks around here. Dad used to tell me a long list of their names: the Perth Princess, the Andola, the Morveren, the Lady Guinevere. Some of the wrecked ships were homeward bound from wars more than two hundred years ago, Dad said. You can still find driftwood from ships that sailed to fight Napoleon and never reached home again. Dad once showed me a piece of driftwood with a hole where a ship’s brass nail would have fitted.
I held it up and put my finger over the nail hole. I tried to imagine what it was like when the ship sank. The noise of the wind screaming and the waves pounding. Men would yell out orders on deck, trying to save the ship. But the wind and current were stronger than the power of the men, and the ship was driven on to the black spine of the rocks.
The rocks ripped the hull and water gushed in, on top of the people who were struggling to escape. There was nowhere to go, except into the wild black water.
Boys Conor’s age worked on those ships. Maybe they climbed the masts as high as they could, trying to save themselves. They clung to the spars as the ship tossed this way and that like a horse that falls at a jump and breaks its back.
They had no chance. The sea knows how to break up any ship. Those rocks are too far out for people on shore to throw lines and save them. In that raging sea you could never launch a boat for rescue.
The foghorn lows again. Danger, it says. Keep away. Danger. I hope the ships are listening today.
Mum’s up. I can hear her banging around in the kitchen. No sound of Conor.
My heart jumps in fear. Barefoot, I tiptoe to the loft ladder. I grasp its sides and climb up as quietly as a squirrel, high enough to see Conor’s bed.
He’s there. I can see the back of his head poking out of the top of the duvet. He’s fast asleep.
I climb down the ladder, go to the bathroom and then pull on my jeans and a sweatshirt. If I’m quick, I’ll get the chance to talk to Mum before Conor wakes up. Maybe I’ll be able to tell her what happened yesterday – ask her what we can do—
But as soon as I see Mum, I know I can’t say anything about Conor and the sea and the girl, and why it frightens me. In the daytime world, none of it makes sense. Mum won’t understand why I’m scared.
“She’ll have been one of Conor’s friends from school,” Mum would say. “Conor can’t spend all his time with you, you know, Saph. He’s growing up.”
Mum’s busy, making coffee, ironing a dress for work, and finishing off peeling the potatoes, all at the same time. She’s got the radio on and she’s humming to a song called Happy Days, which is getting played about twice an hour this summer:
Happy days babe,
I got them for you,
The morning sunshine
The sweet dark too,
Yeah the sweet dark too…
It’s the kind of song people Mum’s age love. Her face has gone soft and dreamy, listening to it. She lifts the iron and the steam sizzles, then she smiles at me.
“Hi, Mum. Wow, is that strawberry tart for us?”
