Between Sea and Sky Page 6

  “I do remember,” Clover says indignantly. “You and Pearl always say that, but I do. I remember everything.” Clover stretches ‘everything’ into an accusation.

  “Tally said there were two of you,” I murmur, still gazing between them, from one to the other. “When we saw you in the distance, out on the mudflats. We thought you were a ghost!”

  Atticus tuts loudly. “Haven’t I told you girls about getting too close to land?”

  Clover ignores him. She’s smiling proudly. “Did you really think there was a ghost? Is Tally one of your friends?” she asks, savouring the word. “What a brilliant name!”

  “Pearl’s a lovely name too,” Mum says kindly. “Like the stones you find in oysters, yes?”

  Clover waves her hand dismissively. “You don’t find many pearls. They’re pretty much a myth, like mermaids and selkies. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  Pearl looks like her younger sister, except taller and darker – where Clover’s hair is gold, Pearl’s is almost black. The expression on her face, that’s darker too. “This was our mum’s room,” she says.

  “Pearl,” Atticus says warily. “Your mum would be glad to see what a nice job Clover’s done.”

  “Would she? Do you honestly think that?” Pearl steps towards me and I stumble back. “And do you like it?” she asks.

  She has a necklace made of shells – that’s what the clacking is as she moves. She smells of salt and seawater and her feet are bare. “Clover spent days getting it ready for you. Days! And those shells aren’t as easy to find as you might think. You should be grateful.” She flicks her hair back off her shoulders. There’s actual seaweed twined through it. She stoops over Clover like she’s protecting her from something. From us. From me.

  “I think it’s lovely,” Mum’s saying tactfully, behind me. “I think you’ve done a very good job indeed, Clover. We’re honoured, aren’t we, Nat? And very pleased to meet you too, Pearl. It’s kind of your family to have us.” Mum looks at me pointedly, telling me to make an effort.

  Pearl doesn’t even look at Mum. She’s already decided who she’s picking her fight with. I get this flash of Tally, how she was in the days after Barnaby was taken. Angry, coiled up, ready to pounce.

  “It’s not kindness,” the girl says. “It’s compulsory. Ezra Heart made us.”

  “Ezra Heart made us too. We didn’t want to come to your weird sea farm,” I retort.

  “Nat!” Mum admonishes. “I wanted to come. I’m excited about finding out what you do here.” She turns to Atticus and smiles apologetically.

  “Pearl’s nervous about it all. About what it means for us,” Atticus says in the doorway.

  Pearl stares out of the window deliberately. Next to her, Clover’s tearful and disappointed. This obviously wasn’t what she had in mind when she got our cabin ready.

  I pick up a shell from the bed. I press my fingers into it and it doesn’t yield. When the sea turned acidic it dissolved shells and killed loads of creatures, but this one’s like stone. I run my finger over its ridges. “What’s it called?” I ask.

  He’s slid the box under his bed thinking we’re all too stupid to notice. Dad tells Sora he’ll show her the rest of our farm before the tide goes back out. Some of the molluscs get harder to reach at low tide.

  “Are you ready, Pearl?” Dad asks me. “I’ll need you to bring up some of the lines.”

  “No, thanks,” I say coolly. “I’ll leave the diving to you today.”

  Clover suppresses a stream of giggles. It’s a good couple of years since Dad went down. He trained us up good and proper so he wouldn’t have to.

  Dad looks surprised at my refusal. “She’s here specifically to see the produce.”

  “Well, you’d better get on with it then, hadn’t you?” I say.

  “We could go tomorrow instead, if that’s better for Pearl,” Sora ventures.

  “No,” Dad says, shooting me a look of fury. “I’ll show you myself. There’s no point stretching this out.” He storms out to the main platform where the motorboat is.

  Sora looks back unsure then smiles at her son reassuringly, before she heads out after Dad.

  Clover plonks herself down on the bed next to Nat. “That one’s a plain old scallop,” she says about the shell in Nat’s hand. “And look, these white spiral ones are whelks.”

  “Do you eat them?” he says, pulling a face.

  “Only the inside bit!” Clover says laughing. “And you fry them up first, in the skillet. They’re good, I promise, especially if you use some butter.”

  I draw in a breath, angrily. Butter! Clover adores it but we only get a small packet once every couple of months if we’re lucky. Why’s she offering it up to him?

  They carry on going through the shells together. Cockles. Periwinkles. The purple-blue mussels. The boy says the oyster shells are ‘iridescent’ inside and pronounces the pearly top shells to be ‘like jewels’. I wonder what jewels he ever saw. It feels strange, watching his landlubber hands on them.

  “These are my favourite,” Clover says, “and they’re too small to eat.” She holds up one of the tiny tallins on the tip of her finger. “They come in different colours. Look! Aren’t they the prettiest?”

  She gathers up a few – pink, grey, orange, green, like a subdued rainbow. Sometimes you find them open in the sand, like tiny wings, but they almost always separate once you’ve picked them up.

  The boy nods. “They’re nice.”

  Nice?! He picks up a long straight shell that looks a bit like a knife. “What’s this one?”

  “It’s a razor, isn’t it, Pearl?” Clover says, trying to include me. “Pearl’s learned them all. She goes to the library. There’s a whole section of books there about sea life.”

  The boy’s face crinkles, confused. “In the library?”

  “Not your compound library,” I say dismissively. “Out there, on the ship. They have a proper library with real books.” Nat looks through the porthole where I’m pointing. You can see the prison ship on the horizon, the rusting, barnacled bulk of her. She’s weighed down with the biggest anchor around.

  “The prison ship!” Nat breathes. “You go there? What about Benjamin Price?”

  Clover shudders at the name of the ship’s governor. Benjamin Price runs that ship with an iron fist.

  It started off as a detention centre, for people coming across the sea from flooded lands, who thought the bay might be a safe place to land. Then after siege state laws were brought in, other people started to be sent there too.

  “Course!” I say, trying to sound casual, pleased to have the chance to impress him after the way he looked so dismissively at our farm. “Who do you think our shellfish are for?”

  I don’t say that the governor has land food taken across for his own plate. He won’t touch our produce.

  “Aren’t the shellfish full of poison? Don’t they make you sick?” Nat asks.

  “Do we look poisoned to you?” I snap.

  The edges of the boy’s lips curl up again in that funny lopsided smile. “I guess not.” He kneels on the bed and puts his face up to the porthole window. “I can’t believe there’s a library out there. At sea!”

  I shrug. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? There are people there. People want to read. Know things.”

  Clover looks at me strangely. I know what she’s thinking. Most of those prisoners never set foot in that library. Olive’s only allowed because she’s skilled at cataloguing.

  “But to have books about sea life?” Nat says. “I was told there wasn’t…” He stops and blushes. “The librarian at the compound told me there aren’t books about old things.”

  I look at him scornfully. “Of course you don’t have them. Your books got washed away. No point making books now about dead things, is there?”

  “Not everything died,” Nat says, staring at me. “The clover’s come back, like Mum says. And other things. I could show you one day, if you wanted.”

  “Pearl
doesn’t go to land,” Clover says, matter-of-fact.

  Nat looks at me oddly.

  I pull at my necklace. I feel the blood rush to my cheeks – little pricks of heat. I frown at Clover, irritated. “I can’t, can I? Not since you started going. People can’t know there are two of us.”

  “But you go to the ship?” Nat asks.

  “I do the ship, Clover does the land,” I say.

  “Maybe I could come with you one day, to see the library?”

  I stare back at him disdainfully. “Benjamin Price would have a field day if a regular landlubber like you clambered on board. You might never get off.”

  “Pearl!” Clover says, shocked.

  The boy doesn’t look bothered. “How come you’re allowed into the library anyway?” he asks. “The library doesn’t need shellfish, does it?”

  I toss my hair back. “I got special permission.” Pride edges into my voice.

  “She made friends with a crazy prisoner,” Clover explains.

  “She’s not crazy!” I say. “And you shouldn’t use that word. None of us know what she’s been through.”

  “No, but everyone thinks she is. You did too, Pearl, don’t lie.” Clover turns to Nat to explain. “This old prisoner barely talks to anyone. She works in the kitchen where Pearl delivers our shellfish and seaweed. Pearl made friends with her, which is a miracle as Pearl’s the most antisocial person you could get!”

  “Her name’s Olive,” I say, ignoring Clover, because the boy does actually look interested. “She noticed the log—”

  “That’s Pearl’s record of what produce we take to the ship,” Clover says, jumping in to explain. “Olive saw she was good at recording things.”

  I shrug. “She wanted help sorting the books out. They were all over the place. The whole room full. A big room too. She’s letting me catalogue them with her.”

  “Catalogue them?” the boy asks.

  “You know, group them. Put the right ones together. We’re still going through them.”

  “You should have seen them, in the beginning,” Clover interrupts. “There were mountains of them, thousands, about everything you could ever think of. And there are stories too, old ones. Proper novels. They’d been ignored for a hundred years, but Benjamin Price started to think they might be worth something. At least that’s what we think he thought.”

  “He keeps the books prisoner too,” I say bitterly. “Like everyone on the ship.”

  “Are there books on insects?” Nat asks.

  I look at him curiously. “Entomology,” I say.

  His face crumples into confusion and Clover giggles at him. “Ento what?” he says.

  “Entomology,” I repeat. “The study of insects. Why do you want to know?”

  Nat looks out of the window again, towards the ship. “No reason. I just saw something. Something I wanted to know more about.”

  “In the solar fields?” I ask.

  He shakes his head quickly. Too quickly. “Just something I remembered from school once.”

  “I’ll show you round the rest of the farm, Nat,” Clover says, gathering the shells and arranging them back on the pillow. She’s grinning. “I’ve been waiting for this moment!”

  My face falls. I wanted to check on the creatures. They’re hanging from the tops of their jars now, already in their cocoons. It felt cruel to put them on that rocking boat that stank of fish. I wanted to check they survived the journey.

  “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” Clover says quickly, clocking my face and turning red.

  “I do. I do want to,” I say, guilty now. I’ve obviously offended her. “This place is going to be my home for the next few weeks, isn’t it? That’s what Mum says.”

  The smile returns to Clover’s face. “This way then,” she says. “I’ll give you the guided tour. I’ve got it all planned.”

  “Great!” I say. The caterpillars will just have to wait. At least looking round the farm might give me an idea where to hide them.

  I expect Pearl to slink back to wherever she came from but she follows us. She doesn’t trust me enough to let me out of her sight.

  It’s a relief to step out into the fresh air again after the staleness of our ‘quarters’. I look back the way we came, to the main platform where we landed, where our bags are waiting for us. It has a living area in a kind of hut. The walls are made of wood and the roof looks like tin, except for a structure built on top of it – there’s a ladder up the side of the hut, to a high little hideout on top.

  Half of the hut is faded pink, the other half fresh and yellow like the sun.

  “We call that the cabin,” Clover says, following where my eyes are looking. “That’s where we cook and read and draw and hang out. We’ve been painting the walls bumble-bee yellow. And can you see our crow’s nest on top? That’s our pirate lookout. You’ll see it properly later. We’ve got a special dinner planned. Let me show you the outlying areas first.” The words spray out of her.

  “Outlying areas?” I say, laughing. “You make it sound like a whole country.”

  Clover smiles. “Pearl and I pretend that it is, sometimes.”

  “Do peacekeepers come?” I ask.

  “Nah,” Clover says easily. “We’re off their radar out here.”

  Each area of the farm is held together with rope and you have to jump from one section to the next or, if it’s too big a jump, make your way along the rope.

  Clover watches with concern as I try and tightrope to the next boat. My stomach twists and turns. It would be so easy to slip under one of the boats if you fell in. It feels like you could disappear forever down there.

  “We’re so used to using the ropes, we didn’t think about other people,” Clover says doubtfully.

  “It’s OK, I can manage,” I bluster.

  I feel Pearl’s eyes burning into me.

  “If you put your hands out, you can balance,” Clover says. “Like a bird, wings outstretched. You know what a bird looks like when it flies, right?”

  “Course I do. I can manage,” I say again loudly, then swear under my breath as I slip and grasp at one of the vertical poles in a cold sweat. The girls look on piteously.

  My cheeks burn furiously. If only they could see me on my bike, freewheeling through the solar fields!

  Here the ground’s not entirely steady and the dark water beneath laps higher when I put my weight on the rope, like it’s trying to get at me.

  I take a running jump instead and land on the next section – another platform which tilts unnervingly when I land, and which is mostly empty save for coiled-up piles of rope and netting and a couple of cages. The smell of fish gets stronger.

  “Look,” I yell suddenly, noticing something in the water. Something big, with a triangular, glossy black fin. I run to the side of the platform. “A dolphin!” I cry.

  Clover laughs. “It’s not a dolphin. That’s Grey. He’s a harbour porpoise.”

  “A porpoise?” I say. I’ve never even heard that word.

  “It’s similar to a dolphin. Ish,” Clover says kindly.

  “There are no dolphins left,” Pearl says starkly behind me. “Don’t you know what your people did? What they destroyed?”

  “Pearl, don’t say that.” Clover sighs. “It’s not Nat’s fault, is it, what people did a hundred years ago?” She turns to face me and smiles. “Ignore her! A porpoise is a type of cetacean. An air-breathing sea mammal.”

  “Why does it live in the sea if it breathes air?” I stare at the glossy creature weaving in and out of the grey water like it’s part of it.

  Clover shrugs. “The sea’s its home. It belongs there and that’s where the fish are. Grey loves fish. Oh, look!” she says, pointing out across the water.

  I follow her finger to Mum, out in the boat with Atticus. You can hear the motor thrumming across the water. Mum’s peering over the edge of the boat, trailing her hand in the water. It makes me feel odd watching her, my airbreathing mother in the middle of the se
a.

  The boat’s stopped by one of the yellow balloons that are dotted around the bay, and a small cloud of gulls circles overhead. Noisy. It sounds like the compound courtyard after school closes.

  It’s the last day of school today – Mum took me out early. I barely got a chance to say goodbye. Just to Tally and Lucas, who snuck out at break to find me. Tally gave me new leaves in a sealed bag for the caterpillars.

  “What are those things?” I ask, watching the yellow balloons bob in the water.

  “Seagulls,” Clover says easily.

  I can’t resist laughing. “I know what seagulls are. We do look at the sky sometimes! I mean the yellow floats.”

  “Oh, them! They’re buoys,” Clover says.

  “Boys?” I repeat uncertainly. The boat’s on the move again, making new waves which lap higher up the platform. I take a couple of steps away from the edge.

  “Buoys,” Clover says, giggling now. “With a U. B-U-O-Y.” She writes the letters in the air with her index finger. “The buoys mark the tops of the lines where the shellfish are. That’s why the gulls are following – they think Dad’s going down for a harvest.” She pauses. “They’ll be disappointed – that line’s seaweed!”

  “Seaweed?” I repeat.

  Clover nods. “We grow it. The cook on the ship makes it into noodles.”

  “Mum’s talked about seaweed,” I say thoughtfully. “But not to eat.” I grimace at the prospect of that. “Mum thinks we should be using it on land, for the Uplands. To feed the crops.”

  I feel Pearl stiffen behind me. I decide to ignore her if she can’t be bothered to make any effort to be nice.

  “So the seaweed’s underwater?” I ask Clover. “I thought it just washed up on the sand.”

  Clover nods enthusiastically. “There are ribbons and ribbons of it. Like an underwater forest. It’s like swimming through trees. We can get the boat out later and show you. You’ve got to see our farm from the edges to really get it.”

  “You’ve got to go down to really see it,” Pearl says, coming forward. “You do swim, right?” Pearl says it darkly, like it’s a dare.

  I shake my head, surprised. “Why would I have needed to swim?”