time.
“I’ll go on my own then,” says Dad. His face is hard. He turns away. “Don’t bother to wait up for me, Jennie.”
“Mathew!” says Mum, but the door swings wide and Dad’s vanished into the night. The door bangs.
“Go on up to bed now, Sapphy,” says Mum, in a tired, quiet voice.
I go up to bed. There are two bedrooms in our cottage. Mum and Dad sleep in one, and I sleep in the other. Conor has the best deal of all. There’s a ladder up from my bedroom that goes into the loft, where Conor sleeps. Dad made him a window in one end. When Conor wants to be alone he can pull up the ladder and no one can get him.
I get undressed, thinking sleepily about the bonfire, and about Mum and Dad arguing, then I put it all out of my mind. I roll into bed and snuggle down deep under the duvet and sleep comes up over me like a tide.
I don’t know anything yet.
I don’t know that this is the last night of me and Conor, Mum and Dad, all safe together. I don’t know that the two halves of my family are starting to rip apart while I sleep.
But I dream about the mermaid of Zennor. I dream that I’m tracing the deep knife cut that slashes across her body. I’m trying to rub it out, so that the mermaid will be whole and well again. I dream that she opens her wooden eyes and smiles at me.
Next morning I wake up late to the smell of cooking. Dad’s in the kitchen, frying mushrooms in the big black pan. He’s whistling softly through his teeth. Mum’s banging knives into the drawer.
“He didn’t come home until eight this morning,” Conor whispers to me.
The atmosphere in the kitchen is thick with anger. Conor and I retreat into the living room with a bowl of cereal each. As we eat, they start to quarrel again. Their voices grow loud. “Are you crazy, Mathew, taking that boat out at night alone when you’d been drinking?”
“I didn’t take the boat out.”
“Don’t lie to me. I can smell the sea on you. Look at the wet on your clothes. It wasn’t enough to risk your neck climbing down those rocks in the dark, you had to take the boat out too. I haven’t slept a wink. Are you out of your mind?”
Dad’s voice crashes back. “I know what I’m doing. I’m in no danger. Are you going to stay on land for the rest of your life, Jennie? If you’d only come with me—”
His voice breaks off. He’s angry with Mum, too, just as much as she’s angry with him. But why? Dad knows Mum hates the sea. She never goes out in the boat, and for once I’m glad of it. It makes me shiver to think of them both away out there on the sea, on the dark water. So far away that even if I called as loud as I could, they’d never hear me.
“You know why I won’t come,” says Mum. “I’ve got good reason to keep away from the sea.” Her voice is full of meaning. We’re so used to the idea that Mum hates the sea and won’t go near it that we don’t ask why, but suddenly I want to know more.
“Conor, why won’t Mum ever go out in the Peggy Gordon?” I whisper. It’s always, always been Dad who takes me and Conor out on the sea, and Mum who stays at home. Conor shrugs, but suddenly I see in his face that he knows something I don’t.
“Conor! You’ve got to tell me. Just because I’m the youngest, no one ever tells me anything.”
“They didn’t exactly tell me, either.”
“But you do know something.”
“I heard them talking one day,” says Conor reluctantly. “Mum was saying that she was going to cook a saddle of hare for Sunday dinner.”
“Hare! Yuck! I’m not eating that.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what Dad said. He said it was bad luck to eat a hare. So Mum said she didn’t care, she wasn’t superstitious. Dad said she was the most superstitious person he’d ever met in his life. And Mum said, Only over one thing, Mathew. And I’ve got a good reason to fear the sea.”
“What did she mean? What good reason?”
“I asked Dad later. I said they were talking so loud I couldn’t help overhearing. He wasn’t going to tell me, and then he did. He said a fortune-teller had told Mum’s fortune once, and after that she’d never gone out on the sea again. It was years ago, but she never has. Not once.”
“What do you think the fortune-teller said?”
“Dad wouldn’t tell me. It must have been something really bad, though.”
“Maybe the fortune-teller said that Mum would die by drowning.”
“Don’t be stupid, Saph. A fortune-teller wouldn’t ever say that to someone. You’re going to drown, that’ll be ten pounds please.”
“But she must have told Mum something terrible. Mum wouldn’t stop going in boats for the rest of her life otherwise—”
“Saph, please don’t go on about it or I’ll wish I hadn’t told you. And don’t let them know you know. Dad said not to tell you in case you got scared.”
Mum and Dad’s voices rise again. Why do they have to argue so much? I hardly ever quarrel with Conor.
“I’m going in to make some toast,” says Conor. “That’ll stop them.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Mum and Dad are standing by the stove. They go quiet when they see us, but the air prickles with all the bad things they’ve said. Sometimes I think that if adult quarrels had a smell, they would smell like burned food. Dad’s mushrooms are shrivelled up and black. He sees me looking at them, and he picks up the pan and scrapes the burned mushrooms into the pig bin.
What a waste. I love mushrooms.
The next night Conor and I bike up to see his friend Jack. We stay longer than we mean to, because Jack’s Labrador bitch has three puppies. We haven’t played with them before, because they’ve been too little, but now they’re seven weeks old. Jack lets us hold one each. My puppy is plump and wriggly and she sniffs my fingers, licks them, and makes a hopeful whining sound in the back of her throat. She is so beautiful. Conor and I have always wanted a dog, but we haven’t managed it yet.
“You are the most beautiful puppy in the whole world,” I whisper to her, holding her close to my face. She has a funny little folded-down left ear, and soft, inquisitive brown eyes. If I could choose one of the puppies, it would be her. She wrinkles her nose, does a tiny puppy sneeze, and then snuggles in under my chin. I feel as if she’s chosen me already.
Poppy, the pups’ mother, she knows us, so she doesn’t mind us playing with them. She stays near, though, looking pleased and proud and watchful. Every time a pup tries to sneak away to explore, Poppy fetches it back and drops it in the basket. I love the way Poppy makes her mouth soft to pick up the pups by the scruff of their neck.
We forget all about the time. When we remember, it’s getting late and we have to rush.
“Come on, Saph. Mum’s going to kill me if we’re any later!”
Conor’s up ahead, racing. My bike’s too small for me and I have to pedal like crazy, but it still won’t go fast. When Conor gets a new one, I’ll have his old one. Dad says maybe at Christmas Conor will get his new bike.
“Wait for me!” I yell, but Conor’s away in the distance. At the last bend he waits for me to catch up.
“You are so slow,” he grumbles, as we bike the final downhill stretch side by side.
“I’m just as fast as you are,