Between Sea and Sky Read online

  She looks round the table, as though wondering whether to go on. Dad’s slumped further into his chair.

  “With more food security, we’d have to worry less about Central.” Sora gives another cautious glance to Dad. “We’d be less reliant on it. I know your mum had some very exciting aims, when she was involved at the Uplands.”

  I tense up. Sora’s got no business talking about Mum like she knew her.

  “We feed Aurora already,” Clover chimes.

  “Aurora?” Sora asks.

  “The ship,” Clover says. “That’s her name. When she was a cruiser. When she was still grand. George says people were served lavish meals under crystal chandeliers and had loud parties and danced in ballrooms ’til past midnight.”

  “He didn’t put it quite like that!” I say.

  “Did George always live in Blackwater Bay then? Before?” Sora tilts her head to one side. “His apartment’s right at the edge of the compound. He keeps himself to himself.”

  “George has been in the bay his whole life,” Clover says, her eyes still burning with longing, dreaming about that ship. “I wish I had lived then!”

  “What? In the Greedy Years?” I say scathingly.

  Clover sighs sadly. “It would have been nice at the time. To dance past midnight.”

  Sora looks at Clover indulgently, a twinkle in her eyes. She’s caught Clover’s charm. “I’m sure you will dance after midnight one day, Clover. I feel certain of it.”

  Clover smiles back adoringly, like Sora might be just the person to make her wishes come true.

  “Things will get better again, I’m sure,” Sora goes on, though it’s me she’s looking at now. “I know you girls have been through a lot. Your mum is missed at the Uplands too. I wasn’t lucky enough to meet her, but from what I’ve been told by colleagues, she was quite a woman. A pioneer. People were really sad about her passing.”

  Dad, Clover and I stay silent. Passing makes it sound like Mum got on one of the big ships to somewhere else. Not that the land poisoned her.

  Sora smiles. “But I’d love to know more about your lives now, and what kind of creatures you have round here. Your ledger could give me a head start with all this, Pearl.”

  I stare down at the table, feeling everyone’s gaze back on me. Even Dad’s watching now.

  “I know we must feel like intruders. But we haven’t come to interfere. I’ve come to learn from you, that’s all,” Sora presses.

  There’s a hot, uncomfortable quiet.

  “The ledger’s a mess. You couldn’t use it for science,”I mutter.

  Clover stares at me but doesn’t say anything.

  “You’re not eating,” I say to Dad, to deflect the attention away from me.

  “It’s this foot,” he says annoyed. “I’m going to sleep it off.”

  Dad clambers up awkwardly. Clover carries on parroting about life before the Decline. Things from the books she’s read. And things she’s just made up because they sound good. Sora listens politely but her eyes follow Dad as he limps away noisily. When did he start looking so old and worn out?

  “I think he should take antibiotics,” Sora says after Dad’s gone. I look down at my bowl, because I know Sora’s directing it mostly to me. I’m the oldest, the big one.

  “Do you know what antibiotics are?” Sora asks.

  I scowl at her. “Of course we do.”

  “The winch your Dad’s foot got trapped in. It was awfully rusty,” Sora goes on. “The foot could get infected. It’s not worth the risk… I offered him some tablets, from the first-aid kit I brought with us, but…”

  “Dad doesn’t take medicine,” Clover says quietly. She stirs her remaining soup intently.

  “But if it helps,” Sora presses.

  “Doesn’t matter if it helps, Dad doesn’t take medicine.” Clover’s shoulder blades hunch together as she speaks

  “He does sometimes,” I start to say.

  “Not real medicine,” Clover says dismissively. “Not from land. He thinks anything from land is bad. He won’t even eat the butter. Even Pearl eats the butter!”

  Sora’s face creases uncomfortably.

  “I’ll help Dad with his foot,” I say. “I’ll wash it with seawater. The salt will stop the infection.”

  There’s an awkward silence. Sora opens her mouth to speak again but then stops. She smiles brightly. I listen to Clover’s spoon circling her empty bowl.

  I push the plate of samphire in front of Nat pointedly. “You haven’t tried it. I picked it specially.”

  “What is it?” Nat asks, looking queasy.

  “It’s a sea vegetable. Marsh samphire. It grows on the flats,” I say.

  “It’s delicious,” Clover says, smiling now. “It’s the saltiest thing ever. I promise you’ll like it.”

  Nat’s face goes slightly green.

  “Go on,” Sora says, laughing. “I think you will actually like it.”

  We all watch as Nat picks up one of the green nodules and drops it into his mouth. He pulls a face but doesn’t actually spit it out. “Hmmm, yeah, it’s salty all right,” he says through gritted teeth.

  Clover laughs. “That’s why Pearl and I love it so much. It tastes just like the sea, doesn’t it, Pearl?!”

  “And that’s a good thing?” Nat says, grimacing but laughing back at her.

  I get up from the table, scraping my chair hard against the floor.

  “Pearl!” Clover voices. “Don’t go! I wanted to play dominoes, all of us together!”

  I shake my head. “I’m tired.”

  “I’ll play,” Nat says.

  “I knew you would!” Clover answers happily, already sweeping the bowls aside to make room.

  The sun’s a low orange blaze in the sky. A reflected trail of light shimmers back in the water and I’m tempted to leap right into it, to wash off today. The visitors. The crinkled illegal creatures the boy brought from land. Dad’s accident. All of it.

  But I have to check Dad’s OK. I can hear him as I get closer to his cabin, groaning with pain through the night air. His door’s ajar and I stand in the doorway, in the dim light.

  “You should wash your foot. I could do it for you,” I offer.

  Dad grunts from his bed. “Ah, it’s nothing.”

  “She thinks it could get infected, Sora does. She said so.”

  His voice is angry. “Of course she does. She’s from land. Diseases and poisons are everywhere there.”

  I step further inside the room and Dad’s voice softens a bit, and slurs. “I washed my foot in the sea, Pearl. We know that’s the best medicine there is, don’t we? Vitamin sea!”

  I smile weakly. “So you don’t need anything?”

  “Sleep. Peace! I’ve been with that woman all afternoon, answering her questions. She wanted to see your mum’s old papers. What right does she think she has?” He gives another yelp of pain as he stretches his leg out. “Maybe get me another bottle or two from the larder. Would you do that for me, big one?”

  I bite my lip. “You should sleep. Those bottles won’t help.”

  “They always help,” Dad says.

  I walk out but not to the kitchen. I’m not going back there, to Sora and Nat’s pity and Clover’s desperate attempts to win them over.

  I jump into the sea. The water folds around me, smooth and cool.

  I won’t take Dad another bottle, to drown his pain and his sadness, and make him sleep even later tomorrow, leaving the new visitors to me and Clover to deal with. It isn’t fair. No wonder Clover’s got so fed up with him.

  I swim the perimeters of the platform. Counterclockwise like the moon around the earth.

  It’s getting darker and we’re not meant to swim on our own in the dark. That was the first rule once – safety in the water – but Dad never checks any more.

  Clover’s dominoes game didn’t last long – I can see her in the greenhouse now, with Nat. She’s lit a couple of storm lamps for them. They’re sat on the bench, laughing. Sor
a’s in the cabin, washing up.

  I swim round and round in the dark until the lights go off on the mainland, then I pull myself up out of the water, grabbing a towel from the line we’ve strung up outside the cabin.

  The platform’s quiet. Everyone must be sleeping. Two extra heartbeats where there should only be ours.

  Inside the cabin, the empty mussel shells remain on the table. Clearly Sora didn’t know how to deal with them, and Clover didn’t stick around to help. I take them to the edge of the platform, where I drop them down to the bottom of the sea.

  Clover and I are on the wide expanse of sand that has revealed itself, fresh and wet, after the water has been pulled back out to sea. The mudflats.

  There are tiny fish, darting in shallow pools of water. “Do you eat them?” I ask, bending down to get a better look.

  Clover laughs. “What, the tiddlers? They’re not even a mouthful!”

  I feel myself turn beetroot-red.

  “Besides,” Clover says, more seriously now, “we don’t go after the fish, not really. Dad says that’s why the porpoises come here, because no one’s after the fish.”

  She catches a brown fish in her palm and we watch it go still. Warm mud oozes up between my toes. Clover made me leave my trainers in the little wooden boat she brought us in. “The mud will ruin them,” she insisted.

  I was scared about how it would feel to walk on the sand, but it’s better than the boat at least. Clover laughed at how green I went, even that short distance.

  “Playing dead,” Clover says, indicating the fish. “Because of our shadows, see?”

  She moves her hand out of the darkness our bodies create, and the fish starts swimming again in her palm, wanting to be free. Clover pours it back gently into the shallow pool. The water’s hot. It’s only mid-morning but the sun’s already boiled it right up.

  “It’s clever,” I say. “The fish. It’s doing the opposite thing to the chrysalises. They moved when we touched them. The fish goes still.”

  “Does your mum want to restart the fishing?” Clover asks, looking at me, her brow all furrowed. “And Ezra? Is that why he sent you?”

  I shrug. “I can’t speak for Ezra Heart, I barely even see him, but not my mum. That’s not why she’s here.”

  Clover smiles with relief. “That’s why Pearl didn’t want to show your mum the ledger. Pearl draws everything. Fish, crabs, birds, shellfish, tiny things, not just the porpoises. Pearl’s worried if your mum sees the ledger she’ll just see things for catching.”

  I shake my head. “It’s the seaweed Mum’s interested in most, because it captures carbon. And the oysters. Mum says they clean the sea. And because you can eat them both, I guess. Everyone needs to eat, don’t they?”

  I watch the little fish, the tiddler, darting in its ring of water. Funny how it got left here by the tide. If all that water got evaporated by the sun, what would happen to the fish then?

  Clover holds up a piece of glimmering blue stone. The girls have jars of it in a cabinet above their kitchen table, separated out into different colours – blue, green, white, brown, violet. “Sea glass,” Clover says. “Rolled and washed and smoothed by the sea over hundreds of years.” She hands the piece to me. “It’s yours,” she says. “Your first ocean treasure.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask, turning it over in my fingers. It feels like an actual piece of sea.

  “Yours,” Clover repeats, and lies on her back to absorb the heat. “Our mum had plans for all of that stuff,” she says almost shyly, like she doesn’t think she should talk about it. “The seaweed especially. She was the one that made us grow it. Properly grow it, in lines and everything. I found papers with Mum’s diagrams and notes when I was cleaning out her office for you.”

  “My mum would love to see all that, I bet. They still talk about your mum, at the Uplands…” I hesitate, sensing I’m on precarious ground.

  Clover looks at me almost hungrily. “Do they really?”

  I nod. “Mum gets frustrated with Ezra because he doesn’t try hard enough. To change things. She says he was different when we first came to the bay.”

  “Did you come from Central?” Clover asks excitedly.

  I shake my head. “Nah, just some other district inland. We were moved on because they needed more workers here. Central’s demands were already growing. Maybe that’s what wore Ezra out. Mum thinks he should fight back more. It’s like he’s given up.”

  “Why did he send you here then?” Clover says, turning to me, her head on one side. “If he’s given up?”

  I shrug. “The yields in the farm have been falling. The plants aren’t as strong as they used to be. Ezra still has to feed the entire compound. He has to think of other ways.” I smile. “Though I’m not sure landlubbers would take to eating seaweed and slurping oysters.”

  Clover feigns outrage. “I don’t slurp!”

  I laugh.

  Clover frowns suddenly. “Pearl shouldn’t call you that,” she says.

  “Landlubber?” I say. “She doesn’t like us, does she, your sister?”

  Clover shrugs. “Pearl’s not used to other people. She’ll come round. She’s good, you know. Kind. She doesn’t mean to be … well, like she is.” She’s making patterns in the mud with her index finger.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I say nonchalantly. “Providing she doesn’t spill about the butterflies.”

  “I hope she’s not mean to your mum today,” Clover says, looking out to sea.

  “Mum can stick up for herself,” I say. “Look how she persuaded Pearl to take her out.” I look for Mum and Pearl too, but their boat must be hidden behind the oyster platform.

  Clover shakes her head dismissively. “Pearl just didn’t want Dad doing it. Not after yesterday. She blames herself for him hurting his foot.”

  I nod silently. Atticus was still in bed when we left the platform. It didn’t seem unusual from the girls’ reaction.

  I think about Mum, when her Uplands shifts start early, even in winter when it’s pitch-black when she wakes and pitch-black when she comes home too, and she always leaves me food out for every meal. I’ve always just taken it for granted – that Mum will make sure I don’t go hungry. She wants my childhood to be happy, before my shifts start. But she must get tired. She’s always working so hard.

  “Shall I show you the whale?” Clover asks, leaping back on to her feet and turning a sudden cartwheel on the sand.

  “A whale?” I ask with astonishment.

  “We call him Moby Dick. After some book Dad used to read, about a boy and a whale.”

  “A whale?” I ask, stunned. “I thought they were all dead. Pearl said—”

  Clover’s face falls. “Oh, it is dead!”

  The word hangs heavy in the air.

  “I didn’t mean to get your hopes up,” Clover ventures. “I thought you knew… The porpoises are an exception. A miraculous one, but…”

  She looks at me dolefully. Pearl’s words yesterday ring in my ears. “Don’t you know what your people did? What they destroyed?” Even though it was a hundred years ago. I don’t see why I’m any more to blame than she is. We’re both human.

  “So it’s a dead whale then?” I say to Clover, trying to recover the situation since she looks so stricken. “That sounds a bit gruesome!”

  “It’s a skeleton. You’ll like it, I promise. The sea’s washed it clean.” Clover’s eyes light up again. “This way! Follow me!” She runs across the sand like her feet have wings.

  “Is it safe?” I call after her, looking back at the wooden boat. The water’s changed around it. The boat’s stranded in the middle of the mud – we’ll have to drag it to the waterline when it’s time to go back.

  “You’re fine on this bit,” Clover calls back. “You’ll be all right if you follow me.”

  “You’re sure?” I ask, remembering the stories from the Hunger Years, which some of the compounders tell, when people used to climb over the sea defences to gather cockles. People we
re stranded. Drowned.

  “Run!” Clover calls at the top of her voice. “I dare you!”

  I tear after her, the sand crackling beneath my feet, and a cry comes from deep inside me, loud and wild and alive.

  Clover leaps into the air and cries back to me. “We’re as fast as the gulls!” she yells.

  “Faster,” I cry. “We’re flying!” I imagine pairs of bright butterfly wings flying next to me. Surely even Pearl will be impressed with them then.

  I slow as we get closer to land. Thick stubs of grass prick at the soles of my feet, and broken shells, sharp and jagged.

  “Ow!” I cry. “How can you walk on them?” I ask. “It’s like walking over knives!”

  Clover laughs. “You get used to it. Be lighter on your feet.” She leaps up and down to demonstrate, like there’s barely any weight to her at all.

  We pass wreckages of cars and other washed-out bits of land rubbish that look vaguely familiar, but I’ve no idea what a whale skeleton will look like. I’ve never seen the skeleton of anything before.

  It’s half buried in the sand. Elegant white arches like someone crafted them out of stone. Clover crawls inside.

  “This was the ribcage,” she says, from the whale’s inner chamber. “And that’s the tail.” She points down a line of pillars, sticking up out of the sand. “And the head,” she says, of the beaklike structure in front of the ribcage.

  I run my hand over the smooth arches. This giant creature that used to swim the sea. “So they were real then, whales?” I say. “They seemed impossible, when the older compounders talked about them. None of them had actually seen one. Sometimes I wondered if they were—”

  “Make-believe,” Clover cuts in.

  I nod.

  “Pearl thinks this was a fin whale,” she says. “Because of its size. Or it could have been a blue whale. They were even bigger. They were the biggest mammals that ever lived.”

  “How do you know all this?” I ask.

  “Because of the ship’s library,” Clover says assuredly. “There are books on everything there. Anything you could imagine.”