Stormswept (31 page)

Authors: Helen Dunmore

BOOK: Stormswept

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“Why are you telling me?”

Jago laughs a hoarse laugh which turns into a cough. “Cos you already know, my girl. They gave you your name out of the old language, and rightly so.
Morveren.
Yes, that’s what you are.
Sea girl.
I was miles out on the water when I seen you. But I’m saying nothing. Only you mind and keep your sister safe. She’s not one of you and never will be.”

I don’t answer. I am shocked and full of questions and yet at the same time, deep down, I’m not surprised. Jago Faraday’s long dislike of me had a reason, after all. He can see the Mer, and maybe hear them too. Maybe he knew, even before I did, that one day I’d find them.

Jago draws deeply on his pipe. Its red glow lights up his seamed, cantankerous face. I don’t like him any more than I ever did but I know him now, just a little.

“Can’t a man smoke his pipe in peace?” he asks in his old, cross voice. “Get on back inside with you, Morveren Trevail.”

It’s a long, long time before Jenna and I go to sleep. We both squash into her bed, the way we used to when we were little. Neither of us wants to be alone. We talk a bit about what happened, but most of the time we just think. At last a rim of grey light begins to show around the shutters, and I hear Jenna’s breathing go slow and quiet, and I know she’s asleep. Jenna asleep, Mum and Dad sleeping exhausted in their room, Digory dreaming, still wrapped in his duvet. He fell asleep downstairs and Dad carried him up. All our neighbours are at home in their own beds. Very carefully, so as not to wake Jenna, I creep out of bed, go over to the window and open the shutter just a little so the light won’t fall on her. It is grey and still outside. I can hear the sea. You can always hear the sea even on the calmest days. I wonder if Malin’s awake now, and if he’s thinking of me, as I am of him.

There’s a movement. A figure slips round the corner of the cottage opposite ours. He has his head down and his hands in his pocket. Bran. He stands there, staring up at our window. He must have been awake all night, like me. I don’t move, but he sees me even though the shutters are only open a little bit. He raises his hand, a bit awkwardly. He wants me to come out.

I pull on my jeans and a warm top, tiptoe as lightly as I can across the floor, open our door and creep down the stairs. Really I should become a burglar, I’m so good at getting in and out of houses without disturbing anybody. The front door squeaks a bit with damp. I freeze, listening, but no one stirs upstairs. I put the lock on the latch and let the door close very very gently behind me.

“Bran?”

He signals to me to follow him. There’s a porch on the side of the village hall where kids hang out sometimes, and that’s where he heads. Once we’re there, though, face to face, he doesn’t seem to know what to say. But for the first time ever, Bran’s looking at me without hostility.

“Is your Jenna all right?”

“She’s fine. She’s sleeping.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither. Are you staying at your nan’s, Bran?”

He shrugs. “Got nowhere else to go, have I?”

I wonder if he’ll ever be able to go back to his dad’s. It’s better for him if he doesn’t, I suppose. But all the same, to lose your mum and then your dad is harsh.

“Won’t he come back for the pick-up? Your dad I mean?”

“Nah. He’ll send a couple of the guys over with a tractor to tow it back. He won’t come here after what’s happened.” Bran looks terrible. Pale, with black rings under his eyes. “He won’t come,” he says again, “He’ll stay on the mainland doing what he has to do, and I’ll stay on the Island. You got to make your choice.”

“Yes,” I say, thinking of last night and all the choices that were made. Bran’s here on the Island, because he decided to please his father by betraying Malin. But it didn’t work out like that. It all led to him making a different choice, and that’s why he’s here and I’m here too… It’s so confusing. It makes you wonder about what life would be like if just one thing went differently, out of a whole chain of events. Everything that happened afterwards would go in a different direction and you would end up a quite different person.

Jenna and I aren’t the same sisters we were before I found Malin in the sand dune. We’re closer, but at the same time we know more about how different we are. Conan’s fiddle has gone. It’s not lying safely on top of the bookshelves as it has been since I was born. I’ve got so used to waiting for Digory to be old enough to play it. It’s not gone for ever, I tell myself quickly, and the Mer will take good care of it. If Bran hadn’t followed us and spied on us and then taken that photograph of Malin to show his dad, everything would have been different. And then Bran changed direction and Malin escaped instead of being tied up in the back of Aidan Helyer’s pick-up truck and lugged over to Marazance and then who knows where. Wherever there was the highest market for a Mer boy, I suppose. Bran stopped it from happening, and the consequence is that he’s lost his father, at least for now. He can’t go home.

I chose too. Jenna over Malin, the Island over Ingo, and so now I’m here instead of far away in Ingo where I wanted to be. Where I still want to be.
Where I would always wish to be, until the day I die,
says a voice deep in my mind. I’m at home on the Island but I don’t feel at home. Dad said,
We don’t want to lose you either.
Maybe he guessed something. I don’t want to lose him either, or Mum, or anyone here. Jago Faraday said
your people,
and I was glad he thought that I belonged to them, but I knew it wasn’t the whole story. Mum, Dad, Digory, Jenna. Above all, I can’t risk losing Jenna. But why can’t I put the two parts of my life together and make them into one?

Because it doesn’t work, that’s why. They were pulled apart a long time before I was born, when the flood came and the blind fiddler passed on his instrument to Conan. The two worlds began to separate then. Different languages, different customs. Forgetting some things and remembering others. My ancestors became Islanders, and Malin’s became Mer. But we’re joined somewhere, way back. Maybe one day all that long chain of differences will knit up again… It’s something to hope for, anyway. A world when I can have my sister by my side and Malin and I can swim free. An impossible world, if you look at it logically.

Maybe Bran and I are alike, in a weird way. We both want things which can never fit together. He almost pulled himself apart, trying to make his father love him.

“Your Jenna,” Bran says at last, with difficulty, “she won’t be wanting anything to do with me now.”

“But I thought you sorted all that out last night. She said she’d talked to you. She’s not angry with you any more—”

“Yeah. But that’s only the way Jenna is. Nice about everything, because that’s her nature. She’s not going to want to have anything to do with me, not for real, not after what I did. We won’t ever be friends like we were.”

He thinks he’s lost everything. His dad and his home, and Jenna’s friendship too.

“Jenna’s not like that,” I say, and Bran looks at me with a flash of hope in his face.

“You reckon?”

“I know her. She’s very…” I try to put into words the quality about Jenna which is different from nearly everybody I know, and is the reason why people want to be with her. “She doesn’t hold things against people. She starts again, every day.”

“You think she’ll start again with me?”

“I know she will.”

He looks down so I won’t see his expression, and then shakes his head, not in denial but as if he wants to clear all the bad stuff out of it.

“I used to hate you,” he remarks.

“I know. I could tell, strangely.”

He glances at me suspiciously in case I’m laughing at him, but sees that I’m not.

“You heard the music too, didn’t you?” I ask, in a flash of daring. Somehow it’s easier to ask a question like that out in the cold grey dawn, when it doesn’t seem to be real time yet.

“What music?” he asks, so quickly and defensively that I know I’m right.

“You know what I’m talking about. Not our music, not Ynys Musyk. The other. Digory told me you heard it, when you and he were down on the shore that day.”

Bran looks away. He’ll be remembering that day and how he threatened Digory, and how I probably know everything that he said.

“Oh,” he mutters. “
That
music.”

“Yes,
that
music. Those musicians you heard that day – well, they played again at Adam Dubrovski’s funeral, when we were all out in the churchyard. I heard them. Jenna was there, but she didn’t hear anything. Not a note. I was watching her.”

I watch Bran just as carefully as I did Jenna that day. I catch it: a flash of recognition as Bran grasps what I’m telling him. He’s always been clever – cleverer than me and maybe even than Jenna. I expect him to pretend that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he surprises me. A slow smile crosses his face.

“No, she wouldn’t hear it. Never will. Not Jenna. She’s a hundred per cent got her feet on the ground, hasn’t she?”

He’s right. Jenna is planted on earth. She belongs to it. She won’t be torn in half by longing when she hears music coming from far out at sea. She won’t hear anything to disturb her.

“Yes, Jenna’s certainly got her feet on the ground,” I agree, and Bran nods.

“Not like us,” he says, so quietly that at first I’m not sure I’ve heard right.

“What?”

“Like us,” he repeats patiently, “You and me both. I said it already, Morveren. I did hear that music, and maybe once you’ve heard it there’s no going back.”

I have no idea what to say. Fortunately, Bran doesn’t seem to expect a response. He whistles softly to himself. It’s a sweet and tuneful whistle and I recognise the melody.

It’s the music of Ingo.

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Children’s Books
2012

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Helen Dunmore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

HB ISBN 978-0-00-742492-4

TPB ISBN 978-0-00-7455416

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007468003

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