Between Sea and Sky Page 4

  “That’s obvious, isn’t it? Central don’t want proof that the Recovery’s begun, not out in the districts anyway. They want things to stay the same – us stuck here, our parents working in the growing towers, while they get the best of everything. It’s working out fine for them, isn’t it?” Tally bangs her forehead deliberately into the glass. Her fists too, knuckles pressed white. “They don’t want butterflies in the bay, they want to keep them all for themselves. They’ve probably got glass palaces full of butterflies in Central, collected from pathetic districts like ours, so we can be kept down. I can’t stand it. And our useless District Controller’s not going to change anything, is he? Old Ezra!”

  She turns round and stares at us. “Those caterpillars are our chance to do something! Nat? Lucas?”

  I get this shiver of excitement. We’ve never had chance to do anything before.

  “It doesn’t mean you’ll get Barnaby back,” Lucas says quietly, still at the computer, staring down at the keyboard. “Even if those things are butterflies, all it says is siege state laws will be relaxed. It doesn’t say revoked or anything. Central will make it mean what they like.”

  Tally stiffens but doesn’t say anything.

  “I just don’t think you should get your hopes up,” Lucas says, his face red. “That’s all.”

  Tally turns her head to me, pointedly. “I’ll see you by the bike sheds after school, Nat. To get more thistles.”

  She doesn’t even look at Lucas as she goes by.

  Dad’s playing with the oysters on his plate. He’s not meeting our eyes. I know he’s got something to say, because if not he’d up and leave back to his cabin. I can’t remember the last time we sat down and had lunch together.

  Clover’s not noticed anything is wrong. She’s reading a new pamphlet from the compound library. Rosa’s Resolve. Some insipid tale of working hard in the districts and making the best of what you’ve got, written by some person in Central who’s probably never even seen the sea.

  I wonder when Clover’s going to bring up school, or whether she will at all. If I can persuade Dad to start with the teaching again, she might let it go. I should at least get the textbooks out of the trunk. Clover’s convinced education is her path off our farm.

  “I’ve some news for you, girls,” Dad says finally, slamming his hands down either side of his plate.

  Clover looks up, surprised.

  “We’re going to have visitors.” Dad’s voice is flat.

  “Visitors!” I say, my jaw dropping in astonishment. “What do you mean, visitors?”

  Clover shuts her book and sits up straighter. “People, Pearl! You know, of the Homo sapiens variety! Who, Dad?”

  “Some researcher from Edible Uplands. And her child. They’re going to stay with us for the summer.”

  I stare at Dad open-mouthed. “Stay? You mean, live here?”

  “Guests!” Clover’s squealing. “New people!”

  “What about us?” I cry. “No one can see us together. No one! You’re the one always saying it!”

  Dad glances across at me with downcast eyes. “It’ll be all right, Pearl!”

  “What do you mean it’ll be all right?” I scream, my heart racing. “We’ll be discovered!”

  Dad sighs. “Ezra Heart says no confidence will be breached. He cornered me the other day on land. We can trust her, he says. This scientist of his.” He slams his fist on the table again, softer this time, defeated.

  I breathe new air. Taste salt on the roof of my mouth. “No confidence will be breached… You mean he knows?” My voice rises hysterically. “Ezra knows about us? About me and Clover?”

  Dad nods miserably.

  “How can he know?” I fire back.

  Dad gives a tired shrug. “Your mum worked there, didn’t she, at the Uplands? Vita was their researcher once. Their best one.” Dad’s voice crackles with pain, splits open with it. “Anyway, she’s coming. This scientist and her child too. I can’t stop it.”

  “What are their names? How old is the child?” Clover’s saying. She puts her book down and sidles closer to Dad. She’s drumming her feet on the floor and the platform rocks a little faster than usual.

  Dad purposefully doesn’t look at me. “It’s a boy,” he says. “Your age, or maybe closer to Pearl’s age. He goes to school at the compound.”

  “A compound child, to tell tales on us and call us sea witches? And we’re letting them come? Just like that? Landlubbers!” I splutter.

  Dad winces. “Don’t call them that. Like they’re a different species.”

  “Well, they are, aren’t they? As good as!” I say. It feels we evolved differently out here, Clover and I. Seal skin, strong lungs, mermaid’s hair. Sometimes I look down at my toes and imagine them webbing together.

  Before Clover goes to the mainland, she washes her hair out. She washes it with desalinated water and tugs a comb through it, complaining about the seawater that has tangled it up into knots. I love how my hair is black like the mussels when they’re wet and thick with salt and wind. I flick it back now over my shoulders.

  “I don’t know where they’ll sleep,” Dad mutters.

  “The old office,” Clover pipes up. “I can clean it out for them. And there are those old mattresses in the store. We can put them on the benches for them to sleep on, and—”

  “That’s Mum’s space,” I cut in.

  Clover stops mid breath. We both look at Dad for support.

  “It is, though, isn’t it?” I press. “Dad?”

  Dad stays silent.

  “Not any more,” Clover says quietly. “It hasn’t been for five years. Has it, Dad?” She grips his arm, willing him to be on her side.

  “Easy, girls,” Dad says wearily, looking from one of us to the other. “We just need to bear these visitors for a month or so. Maybe less. Maybe they’ll discover our oysters are useless to them and go home sooner!”

  “I think it will be good for us,” Clover says haughtily. “It’ll stop some of us living in the past. Some of us forget there’s a whole world out there. Anyone would think we were on the prison ship, the way we live.”

  “Clover, Clover!” Dad says, trying to soothe her.

  My eyes mist with angry tears and I look out through the oblong windows of our cabin house. The sea rocks slowly from side to side, like a picture edging its way out of a frame.

  Clover’s eagerness for new people in her life makes me queasy.

  “I don’t know what Grey will think. And the others,” I say. “Strangers will scare them away.”

  “No, they won’t,” Clover says quickly. “Not while there’s fish to be had.”

  “Girls.” Dad sighs. He looks at me, his eyes still lowered. They’re red and his brow is glistening with sweat. I wonder how long he’s known about all of this. George the boatman has been bringing letters for weeks now. Yellow ones, stamped From the District Controller – is this what they’ve been leading up to? Dad refused to even open them. Ezra must have had to corner him on land.

  “Dad?!” I say again, plaintively.

  “I don’t want them to come either, Pearl,” Dad says. “But we don’t have a choice. Ezra Heart has spoken.”

  “But that’s not fair!” I yell. “If other people come out here, they’ll ruin it again. The sea’s only just starting to get better. It’s ours, Dad. It’s ours.” I run my fingers through my hair. How can Dad be saying all this? Dad hates the land and landlubbers more than I do.

  He leans forward, shaking his head. “No, Pearl. It isn’t. That’s where people went wrong before. The sea doesn’t belong to anyone.”

  My fingers clench at the shells I wear threaded round my neck. “The platform’s ours, though, isn’t it?” I say. “This place. Why are you giving up on it? Why do you give up on everything?” My voice falls into a sob and Dad’s face breaks up desolately.

  “Pearl,” he says softly. “Big one.”

  “I’m not the big one,” I scream. “You are!”

 
I slam my hands down on the table like he did and stride out of the cabin to the edge of the platform. I don’t even bother pulling off my clothes. I dive into the water, my tears mixing with the sea. Saltwater and saltwater.

  “Watch the tide!” Dad’s voice calls after me. “It’s already on the turn.”

  Dad’s right – the tide is already on the turn, but he doesn’t follow. I don’t look back, knowing he’s not even watching as I swim to the flats, my clothes dragging heavy after me. The argument will have been too much for him. He’ll be turning into his cabin to sleep away another day.

  I scream into the air. Sometimes I’m as angry with Dad as Clover is.

  The gulls answer in a cacophony of screams.

  I rip off my sodden T-shirt and shorts and hurl them on to the mud. Underneath, my swimsuit’s blue, or it was when I made it last summer out of an old dress of Mum’s. Part of our gradual appropriation of Mum’s wardrobe, because Dad forgets facts like daughters grow.

  The swimsuit is duller now, more grey than blue. Clover will dye it some new colour when she inherits it. Some violent shade of pink or orange or yellow.

  I ache inside, thinking of my sister. The less we see of Dad, the more Clover and I have to argue about. And now she’ll get what she wants – new people to be on her side. She’ll barely need me, and one day she’ll leave the bay for good.

  I walk along the mudflat, parallel to the land so I don’t have to look at it. When the tide comes in, water floods in from either side, but this sandbank will still be exposed for a while. Not quite solid but not quite liquid either, until some tipping point is reached and the water surges in fast, deeper than you’d ever think possible.

  Every so often, I look back to our platform – a clash of colours on top of the sea. Mum used to feed us stories, that our sea farm with its rusting section of oil platform and tied-together old boats was a moated castle. She said Clover and I were halfway girls. Not mermaids or selkies, but not land people either. She said there was a magic to this place. She said it would keep us safe. That Clover and I would be safe here forever.

  I head over to the wreckage on the foreshore. Things from the Decline and the Greedy Years before that. Old doors. Shopping trolleys. Metal cars, two of them. The open ribcage of one of the last ever whales.

  Sometimes the wreckages will disappear – the sand will shift and suck them further down, or bank up over them, and I’ll wonder if they’re finally gone. But after a storm, or quite by accident, they’ll reappear like they never went away. Or they’ll turn up in a new resting place. The flats are always being remade.

  The sea’s pooling around me, like liquid moon. It’s warm and makes the sand softer. My feet sink into it. I listen to the crackling of the mud shrimp. A million lives under my feet. It sounds like water draining away, like the whole sea is evaporating, but really it’s the shrimp snapping their claws to stun prey.

  I coil a strand of emerald-green seaweed round my hair, to keep it out of my eyes, as I climb into one of the old cars.

  Dad calls the cars vehicles of destruction, but I’m strangely drawn to them. Sometimes I think they’re as beautiful as the whale. All rusted and barnacled and covered in algae. They’ve given themselves up to the sea entirely.

  There are always finds to be had in the cars. I reach down into the gloopy mud to pick things out, one by one.

  A burnt gold button.

  A child’s yellow building brick.

  A shiny metallic packet. Walkers, letters spell out faintly on the silver foil.

  A small tube of clay pipe.

  A rusty old nail.

  I line the things up on the sand. I’ve got to do something.

  Landlubbers coming to sea. Land rules encroaching on our farm.

  And Ezra knows about Clover. Ezra Heart, lawkeeper for the whole South-East District, knows about Clover and me. That there are two of us. Maybe he’s blackmailing Dad with it. Maybe that’s why Dad can’t say no to the scientist coming.

  Dad should have given me those letters Ezra sent to wish away. Blot out the words with seawater, or let them burn.

  I trace a pentangle in the sand and pick one thing for each point.

  The packet I put as earth – for the walkers, their feet heavy on solid ground.

  The clay pipe represents air.

  The nail is fire. The thick ancient nails would have been forged by a blacksmith, Mum told us, when we first started larking. Fire hot enough to melt wrought iron. Imagine that, girls!

  The toy brick I put as spirit. I wonder what child played with it and what things they built, and where their spirit is now.

  Water’s easy – I pluck a black periwinkle out of a tiny tidal pool. Little horns retreat back into the spiral when I pick it up. It’ll leave the pentangle when it’s ready, but it’ll play dead for long enough.

  The centre has to be something special, for the wishing to be a success. I dig down into the buttoned pouch I sewed into my swimsuit. Some finds I keep on me always.

  Pieces of sea glass.

  A section of pottery with a woman’s face on.

  I take out the wentletrap. The intricate, tightly wound spiral shell, perfectly intact and beautiful. I found it with Clover one hot day last summer, when we’d been swimming with the porpoises for hours. Dad had been in his best mood for ages and we’d barbecued scallops on the flats in the late-night sun. Clover and I had choreographed elaborate dances.

  It had felt like Mum was watching us. That she was almost with us.

  “Is it really worth the wentletrap?” a voice says behind me. Clover. She’s surveying the offerings, her head to one side thoughtfully. “We haven’t ever found one as complete as that. You don’t really think you can stop those people coming?”

  She’s not cross any more. Clover’s moods go in and out with the tide. “It isn’t real magic, Pearl. You do know that, don’t you?”

  I look away. “Yeah, well,” I say non-committedly.

  “We were never going to hide out here for the rest of our lives without anyone coming. Look at this place, Pearl!” Clover sticks out her right arm and does one of her 360-degree spins. If Clover was growing up in a normal age, she’d be a ballerina. She was made for people to watch.

  “People were always going to come here. It’s too beautiful to leave alone, isn’t it?” she says, and gives me her biggest grin. Like sunshine.

  I smile back instinctively, because no one gets this place like Clover and I do. Not even Dad.

  “They ruined it before. They’ll do it again,” I say helplessly.

  Clover shrugs. “It wasn’t them. Most of those people weren’t around back then.” She’s bending down and pocketing shells. Empty ones – mussels and periwinkles and the tiny tallins you have to be careful you don’t crush as they’re so delicate. “You’ve got to be future-thinking, haven’t you?”

  I flash her an angry look. “You got that from one of those compound pamphlets, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t!” Clover retorts fast, so I know she’s lying. “I’m going to make their cabin up. Guest quarters,” she says proudly. “I’m going to decorate it with shells. That wentletrap would be perfect.” She eyes it greedily, bending down to caress its spiral.

  “Don’t you dare!” I yell. “It’s too good for them. And what do you mean, guest quarters? We don’t want them to be too comfortable.”

  “I do,” Clover preens. “I want them to stay long enough to teach us things. Land things.”

  “I don’t need to know land things!” I exclaim indignantly.

  “You might, one day. Dad won’t want to stay here forever,” Clover says nonchalantly.

  “Of course he will!”

  Clover arches out her back, her belly up, and tips her hands over her head back down to the sand. She walks sideways on all fours like a crab. “Then why does he spend all day in bed, snoring? He’s not happy. And I’m not either.”

  She collapses cross-legged on the sand, watching me.

  I go
on with the wishing, walking round my pentangle, chanting.

  “Mother Sea,

  Sister of the Moon.

  We are your daughters,

  Our tears are proof of it.”

  “Are you really sure about that shell?” Clover says after a while.

  I glare at her. “The sea’s taking it,” I say. Even though part of me does want to snatch it back. Keep it.

  In the prison library, there’s a book about old churches. That’s what the wentletrap looks like to me. Like an old church spire, before the sea tore them all down. The shell really is a special thing to let go, but then our farm has never come this close to being invaded before. I go on with the chant.

  “Leave the sickness on land,

  Take the infection back to shore,

  Leave us clean and pure.”

  Clover stands and stares at me without saying anything, then turns and walks, light-footed as a wader, across the incoming sea. I turn my back to her, lowering my eyes so I don’t have to look at the land. If anything was going to destroy the magic, the concrete ramparts and banked-up rocks of the sea defences would.

  “Cleansed and blessed by the salt,

  Take our treasures

  As proof of our devotion.

  As we say it, let it be.”

  I scatter sand over the offerings. It’s meant to be pure salt. Salt to purify, it says in the Wicca book. But salt in a swimsuit pocket isn’t practical.

  Seawater’s good anyway. Whenever Dad took me to visit Mum in hospital, we had to immerse ourselves in the sea before we got back on the platform. Fully clothed, to wash off the land, so nothing of its poison could infect us.

  Dad and Clover never bother with that any more after their trips. Maybe breaches like that have allowed land people to come here.

  I think of an Uplands scientist on our platform. Picking through our cages, pulling ribbons of seaweed out of the water. Maybe it isn’t the oysters they want. Maybe it’s us, our whole way of life.

  “Make her go away,” I whisper frantically. “Turn her round and send her straight back to land.” I stand watching for a while, as the sea washes around my ankles. The treasure is already lifting up at the edges.