Ingo (4 page)

I
’VE NEVER CLIMBED DOWN
the rocks so fast, even though they’re wet and slippy. The sea’s only just been here, but now the tide’s turned, and it’s falling, dragging me with it.

I jump down onto the sand. Another minute and I’ll be in the sea. I kick off my sandals. My toes are in the water, then my ankles, my knees….

The sea is dazzling. I lift my hand to shade my eyes, and as I do, I see him. It’s Conor, far away, sitting on the rocks at the mouth of the cove. I recognize him at once, even though he’s turned away from me. His hair is slick with water. He’s been swimming! But we never swim here alone, because we know how dangerous it can be. Why did Conor come without me?

Cold. I’m cold. I look down. Already the water is up
to my waist. My hands trail in the water. That’s strange. I didn’t think I had waded so deep. And I’m still wearing my shorts and T-shirt. The tide is falling fast, and it’s pulling more and more strongly, as if it wants me to come with it. It’s like a magnet. If I didn’t dig my feet into the sand, the tide would carry me away with it.

But what’s Conor doing, sitting on the rocks at the mouth of the cove, where the water’s deep? He must have swum out there.

He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s still got his back to me. I open my mouth to call him. But suddenly Conor turns his head as if he’s—

—as if he’s talking to someone.

I push hard against the tug of the water. I’m not going to let it pull me in deeper. I’m not going to call to Conor. I turn round, and the tide sucks my legs hungrily as I force my way back into shallow water. The sea doesn’t want to let me go, but it has to. Its power is broken.

Knee-deep in the water, I wade toward the left side of the cove. I’ll be able to see Conor better from there. I don’t want to attract his attention now. In fact, I’m hoping that he won’t see me. From over here I should be able to get a good view of the rock.

And now I can see them clearly. No, Conor’s not alone. There’s a second head outlined against the edge of the rock. A sleek, dark head. It turns, so I see the profile and the long, wet hair. It’s a girl. Her hair is long, right
down her back, like mine. And now I realize that what I thought was part of the rock is part of the girl’s body. She must be wearing a wet suit. She and Conor are close together, talking like old friends who’ve got so much to say that they don’t notice anything or anyone else.

They haven’t seen me. Conor hasn’t even looked up. What are they talking about? They’re much too far away for me to hear their voices.

I’ve never seen her before, I’m sure of it. But I know everyone who lives round here. Who can she be?

Maybe she’s a tourist. Not many tourists come down to the cove because it’s so hard to find. Maybe this girl asked Conor to help her find the way down, and then they got talking and went swimming together…without me.

No, I don’t want them to see me. Conor will think I’ve been following him and spying on him. He didn’t want me here, or he’d have told me he was going down to the cove. We always swim together, not just because it’s dangerous to swim alone but because we like being together.

I wade right out of the water. It pulls at my heels, but feebly now, as if it knows it’s not going to win. My wet shorts and T-shirt stick clammily to my skin. Maybe I should go back to the cottage and change? No, I don’t want to leave Conor right out there. It isn’t safe.

I wander up and down the tide line, feeling cold even though the air is still warm. I pick up shells and tiny white pieces of driftwood and let them drop again, and every few
minutes I glance out to the rocks at the mouth of the cove.
They
are still there, Conor and the strange girl who doesn’t live round here, still sitting close together. And they haven’t noticed me at all. They only notice each other.

And then suddenly, the next time I look, the girl has vanished, and Conor is alone. He’s standing right on the edge of the rock, staring down into the deep water. But where has the girl gone? He looks down at the water, and his body flexes, as if he’s about to dive in. A wave of panic sweeps over me, from nowhere. Before I know what I’m going to do, I’ve yelled out his name.

“Conor! CONOR!”

He looks up, stares around. I run along the water’s edge, waving and calling.

“Conor, it’s me!
Conor!
”

He turns and sees me. For a long moment we stare at each other across the water. We are too far away to see each other’s expressions. And then, slowly, he raises his hand and waves to me.

“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 toward me. He’s frowning—not in an angry way, but just as he frowns when
he’s doing his toughest mathematics 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 realize 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 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 favorites 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 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,” Conor goes on, 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 backward, 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 toward the horizon. I watch him realize 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, toward 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, toward the window. The slap of bare feet, and then silence. He’s by his window, looking out toward 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 wet suit, 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 anymore. She said it was too good for every day, 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 anymore.

Conor’s up there in his loft room, not moving, not sleeping, staring out 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 thornbushes 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 were 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.