Tide Knot

by Helen Dunmore

  For a long time I could convince myself that some mysterious force was preventing Dad from communicating with us, but I can’t make myself believe this anymore. If Dad wanted to speak to me, he would.

  “Nearly there,” says Granny Carne. “She did well.”

  “Brave girl,” I say. “Brave girl, Sadie,” and I make my voice warm and full of praise because she deserves it, even if my heart is cold and tired. Granny Carne has been walking between Sadie and me, but now she steps aside. Sadie presses up to me, the way she always does. I stroke her warm golden back. Minute by minute Sadie’s coming back to herself. Already her fur feels sleek, and her eyes are brighter. She turns her head and looks at me as if to say, “It’s all right, I’m not going to leave you.” Why are dogs so forgiving? My eyes are prickly, but I’m not going to cry. Sadie hates it when I cry.

  Here’s the gray stone cottage that looks like part of the granite hill. Granny Carne pushes open the door and we go inside. There’s just one large room downstairs, painted white, with a stove to heat it and a few splashes of brilliant color from the tablecloth and cushions. The room is very simple but not bare. Everything looks worn smooth by years and years of use. I remember the last time I came here, with Conor, that hot summer day when Granny Carne first told us about our Mer inheritance. It was the day Conor talked to the bees. That seems a long time ago.

  “I’ll bring down an old blanket for Sadie,” says Granny Carne. “She’ll need to sleep the night here, to get her strength back.”

  Granny Carne disappears upstairs before I can protest. Sadie can’t stay here overnight. We’ve got to get back before Mum realizes I didn’t go to school today.

  “You’ll be staying over too, Sapphire,” says Granny Carne, returning with a folded blanket. It doesn’t look like an old blanket. It’s made of thick, creamy wool, and it looks as if it came off Granny Carne’s own bed. She lays it down by the stove for Sadie.

  “I can’t stay, Granny Carne. I’ve got to get back before it’s dark. Mum thinks I’m at school—”

  “Sadie needs you here.”

  “But Mum—”

  “I’ll get a message to her. Soon as you’re settled, I’ll walk down to the churchtown and speak to Mary Thomas. She’s got a telephone.” Granny Carne says this as if telephones were something rare and undesirable. “Your mother will know you’re safe enough with me.”

  Granny Carne has two bedrooms upstairs, a large one and a smaller room, which she calls the slip room. That’s where I’m going to sleep. I’m resigned to it now; I can’t leave Sadie. There’s a china washstand with a jug of water that Granny Carne brought in from the trough where the spring rises. There’s no bathroom. When Granny Carne wants a bath, she heats water on the stove and fills an enamel bathtub, which hangs from a hook on the wall. It’s quite small with a shelf inside to sit on. Granny Carne calls it a hip bath. “Try it yourself, my girl,” she says, but I say that a wash will do me fine. There’s no toilet in the house either. The outside toilet, which Granny Carne calls the privy, is so cold that I hope I don’t have to go at night. She hasn’t even got any toilet paper, only cut-up squares of the Cornishman stuck on a nail.

  It gets dark early. Sadie doesn’t want to eat, but she drinks some water. Granny Carne has gone down to the churchtown, so Sadie and I are alone in the cottage. I wonder what Mary Thomas will think when Granny Carne tells her we are staying here. As far as I know, nobody has ever stayed overnight at Granny Carne’s cottage. People respect Granny Carne, but they’re also afraid of her because of all that she knows. There are a lot of stories about the way she can see into the future and heal wounds that ordinary medicine can’t cure. I don’t mean sicknesses like cancer; I mean sicknesses that are inside people’s minds. Granny Carne has a power with those.

  I still don’t know whether or not I really believe that Granny Carne can see into the future. I’m sure that she can see and understand things that ordinary people can’t. She has gifts that come from Earth. Years ago she might have been caught and burned as a witch because she knows too much. That’s what Dad always said.

  I follow Granny Carne in my mind as she goes down the path to the churchtown and then as she takes the road round to the track that leads down to our cottage and Mary’s. Our cottage will have lights on in the windows by now. It gets dark early in November. Granny Carne knows her way in the dark. I’m glad that I don’t have to walk past there and see other people living in my home. I wonder if the curtains are the same red checked curtains that Mum made when we were little. They always looked so welcoming with the light shining through them when we came home from school on winter afternoons.

  I wonder if the people who are living in our cottage ever go down to our cove. I wonder if they will ever catch sight of Faro or Elvira sitting on the rocks by the mouth of the cove, where Conor and I first met them. I hope they don’t. I’m not just being selfish in hoping that. If they see the Mer, their lives won’t ever be the same again.

  But Granny Carne’s cottage is at least two miles from the sea. I don’t know how far inland the power of Ingo can reach, but Granny Carne’s cottage definitely belongs to Earth. Maybe that’s why Sadie is sleeping so peacefully by the stove. I don’t feel peaceful, though. I’m going to stay because of Sadie, but I wish I didn’t have to. I’m not at home here.

  It takes a long time to get ready for the night at Granny Carne’s. I help her carry in more wood from the stack in her woodshed and fill the scuttle full of coal. The stove’s got to be kept going through the night. Before Granny Carne goes to bed, she riddles the stove out with an iron poker with a hook on its end. By the time she finishes, the hook glows red. I help shovel out the hot ash into the ash pan. Granny Carne says ash is good for the earth, and she’ll spread it on her vegetable patch tomorrow, when the ash is cold. She stokes up the stove with logs and a thick layer of fine coal and closes the damper on the front.

  Suddenly I remember something. “We had a stove like this when I was little, before Mum got electric heaters.”

  “That was the way everywhere before the electric came.” Granny Carne talks as if electricity had only just been invented. “They’ll never bring the electric all the way up here, but I don’t miss it,” Granny Carne continues. She has lit the kerosene lamps. I like the light they give. It’s soft and yellow, and it gives warm color to the white walls. She uses kerosene lamps downstairs and candles upstairs. “You don’t need a lot of light to sleep by,” she says.

  The cottage smells of candles and woodsmoke, kerosene and stone. There are big shadows in the corners of the room. It’s not a frightening place exactly, but it has too much power to be comfortable. I’m glad Sadie’s here. If I wake up in the night, I’ll hear her breathing, and if I say her name, she’ll wake up at once.

  Granny Carne gets slowly to her feet from where she’s been kneeling by the stove. She mutters something, too quietly for me to hear.

  “Now he’ll sleep through the night,” she says. “Praise fire, and he’ll serve you well.”

  “Does your fire ever go out?”

  “He’s been alive as long as I have, my girl. Sometimes he’s burned low, but he’s never died.”

  “Granny Carne?” I ask hesitantly. “How long have you—I mean—how many years—”

  She looks at me with her arms folded. Her fierce owl eyes are bright with amusement. She knows exactly what I want to know, because it’s what everybody in Senara has asked themselves, one time or another. How old is Granny Carne? How many years has she been living up there in her cottage, with people from the village coming to see her privately when they have troubles to which they can’t find an answer? Years…decades…or even centuries?

  “I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth, Sapphire,” she says. “Does that answer your question?”

  “No,” I say boldly.

  “You want more?”

  “Yes.”

  “You ask a lot of me, Sapphire.” Her voice has grown harsher. Her
tone changes. She is no longer an old woman, and I’m no longer a child. I stare into her eyes. People’s eyes don’t change.

  But everything else is changing. As I watch, the wrinkled brown skin around Granny Carne’s eyes grows smooth and soft. Color steals into her gray hair, which breaks loose from its knot and ripples lustrously over her shoulders. Long, dark brown hair, the color of the darkest earth and with red lights in it like fire. Her lips are red and full. Her body grows straight and slender as a young birch tree.

  “Granny Carne,” I whisper. But there’s no Granny Carne in the room. The young woman’s lips part in a smile, and then she lays a finger on her lips to silence me. This is Earth magic, and it’s too potent for me. I shut my eyes. When I open them again, the woman like a birch tree has disappeared, and Granny Carne is standing there.

  “Where’s she gone?”

  “There’s been no one in this room but our two selves, Sapphire. All I’m showing you is that time isn’t what you think it is.”

  “But how can you be old and young at the same time?”

  Granny Carne smiles. “Ask anyone with gray hair. Ask Mrs. Eagle if she feels any different inside from how she felt when she was eighteen. There’s little difference.”

  “Do you know Mrs. Eagle?”

  “I’ve known Temperance Eagle from a girl. Temperance Pascoe, as she was then. Wild, she was,” goes on Granny Carne thoughtfully. “Her father used to scour St. Pirans for her on a Saturday night, shouting that he’d take his belt to her when he found her. He was a strong Bible Christian.”

  But I’m not going to be diverted by tales of Mrs. Eagle’s youth. Mrs. Eagle is most definitely one hundred percent old now. Granny Carne’s old too, yet she changed before my eyes into a woman like a young birch tree. I know that I didn’t imagine it. What Granny Carne did is something completely different from an old person feeling young inside.

  “Mrs. Eagle can’t do what you did,” I say as firmly as I dare, “and no one else talks about time the way you do, as if they can go back hundreds of years and see what was happening then.”

  But suddenly I remember. Someone does. Faro talks about time in the same way as Granny Carne, as if history is still happening. As if he’d watched the Ballantine smash onto the rocks with his own eyes. And he made me watch it too when I saw into his mind.

  Granny Carne sighs. She looks very old now. “You ask a lot of questions, Sapphire. They’re hard questions too, and I can’t give you all the answers you want. Let me tell you this much. What you saw just now not many would see.”

  “Why did you let me see it?”

  “It wasn’t me letting you. It was you that had the power to see the old and young standing in the same place. You think all your power lies in Ingo, Sapphire, but that’s because you choose to make it so.”

  “But you said I had strong Mer blood, Granny Carne. You told me and Conor that last summer.”

  “Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Your Mer blood may be strong, but your Earth blood is powerful too. Not as strong as your brother’s, but strong enough.”

  “Is having Earth blood the same as living in the Air—being human, I mean?”

  “No. Most people live out their human lives without choosing either Earth or Ingo. They don’t need to. They’re happy as they are. They live in the present time and in one place. As far as they’re concerned, the past is rolled up like a carpet, and no one can touch it. And the future too. Perhaps they are the fortunate ones,” adds Granny Carne.

  “I don’t see what’s fortunate about not being able to go to Ingo.”

  “Ask your brother.”

  Conor’s words echo in my head: I’ve got to try to belong where I am. Conor really wants to be part of St. Pirans—surfing, playing guitar, hanging out with his friends—and yet all the time he’s secretly looking for Elvira. Maybe he wishes he’d never met her; maybe it would be easier for him if he hadn’t ever gone to Ingo, because he’d be able to belong.

  “Time to sleep,” says Granny Carne abruptly. She gives me a candlestick and lights my candle. “Sadie will sleep in my room tonight, Sapphire.”

  “But—”

  “No. She’s not strong yet. She needs to be with me. She needs Earth to make her strong. Don’t you feel that? Sadie’s an Earth creature. She loves you, and that’s what complicates it for her. Tonight Sadie will go into a deep sleep, like the earth’s winter sleep. It will heal her. You know how a bulb lies dormant in the earth all winter, Sapphire, growing strong for spring.”

  “Sadie’s not going to sleep all winter, is she?”

  “No. She’ll go through her winter healing in one night.”

  “You said Sadie loves me. I love her. I’ll look after her. I’d never let her be hurt.”

  “Never?” The candle flame leaps, and a shadow flies over Granny Carne’s face. Her eyes are hidden. “Never, Sapphire?”

  I left Sadie tied up to a post and went to Ingo. Sadie almost died…. But I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want anything to happen to her, it was just that Ingo was so strong….

  I don’t say any of these things, but Granny Carne knows them, I’m sure. She lays her hand on Sadie’s head, and Sadie doesn’t try to come to me. She looks at me with her soft brown eyes as if to say, “Try to understand. I can’t be with you tonight.”

  The door closes on Granny Carne and Sadie. I wash quickly and jump into bed. It’s cold. I wonder when someone last slept in this bed. Maybe it was hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I shiver.

  I wish I had gone down to our cottage. Just to see it. Granny Carne says that Mum won’t mind my staying here overnight, but suddenly I feel terribly lonely, longing for Mum and Conor and home. The little slip bedroom faces the side of the hill. It’s dark and quiet and earthy. I can’t hear the sea. I can’t smell salt.

  I’m sure I won’t be able to sleep. How many hours is it until morning? Hours and hours and hours. Time’s moving so slowly. It seems like a hundred years since I left St. Pirans with Sadie this morning.

  It’s cold in here, but it’s airless too. Stifling. Like being in a cave or a burrow under the earth. It makes me feel as if there’s a lid of earth on top of me. Like being in a coffin—

  Sapphire, stop it. You are not a prisoner. In the morning Sadie will be completely better, and we’ll get the bus back to St. Pirans. I expect Mum will be angry, even though Granny Carne says she won’t be, but I don’t care. I just want to go home.

  It’ll be better if I open the window and get some fresh air into the room. The air in here tastes so old—that was what made me start thinking of coffins. I meant to check under the bed before I got into it, but I didn’t. I always have a horrible feeling if I go to sleep without checking that there’s nothing under the bed. Or no one. But I’m not going to stay huddled in bed just because I’m afraid of what’s under it. That would be ridiculous.

  The candle! Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll light the candle. I’m not too keen on the shadows candles throw on walls, but it’s better than the dark. Oh, no, I haven’t got any matches. Granny Carne lit the candle for me. Why didn’t she give me any matches? What if I have to go down to the privy? I can’t feel my way through the cottage in the dark the way I can at home. What if I stretch out my arms and touch…something?

  I wish Sadie was here. She’s only in Granny Carne’s room next door, but it feels as if she is miles and miles away. Sadie’s getting better, that’s the important thing, Sapphire. Remember how terrible she looked when she lay down at the bus stop.

  I shiver. It’s very cold. I wish everything were different, completely different.

  I’m in Granny Carne’s cottage, up on the Downs above Senara Churchtown. I do wish I’d gone down to our cottage. Even though there are other people living there, it is still home.

  Suddenly a brilliant idea strikes me. Is Granny Carne right about time? If I really do have strong Earth blood as well as strong Mer blood, maybe I could try to move around in time in the same way that Granny Carne does.
What if I could go down to our cottage now and peep in through the window, into the gap where the kitchen curtains don’t close properly, and see time past? We might all be there—Mum and Dad and me and Conor—all round the table, eating our supper. I’d have to be very careful, though, because if the Sapphire of then looked up and saw the Sapphire of now, she’d be so scared.

  We would all be younger. They would be younger: that Dad and Mum and Sapphire and Conor. They wouldn’t know about everything that has happened.

  Perhaps it doesn’t have to happen. If you move back to another part of time, then the future hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps they should see me, before time starts moving on toward the time when Dad leaves.

  No. If they all see me, it won’t work. It’ll just be confusion.

  But if I could see Dad secretly—the Dad of the past—and he could see me, then I could tell him not to go. I could tell him about all the things that were going to happen. About the memorial service for him in Senara Church, and everybody crying, and the way Mum sat staring at nothing, and how we didn’t have any money, and how Mum met Roger and now they’re together, and how Conor nearly died in Ingo, and how we’ve moved away from Senara to St. Pirans, and all the other things he doesn’t know. And then he could stop them all from happening.

  I get up very carefully. I crouch on the side of the bed and then leap to the middle of the floor, landing as quietly as I can. Nothing grabs hold of my ankles from under the bed.

  The window must be about here. I fumble for the catch. Yes. It opens easily, and I push the window wide.

  Cold, fresh air pours in. It smells of earth. I lean farther out. Although I’m upstairs, the earth bank rises so steeply behind the cottage that I could easily jump out and land safely. It’s much lighter out there than it is inside. I can’t see the moon from here, but the stars are bright.

  A wild idea comes to me. Perhaps I really could do it. I could go down to our cottage now. Granny Carne found her way down in the dark. If time has slipped and we are still there in the cottage—me and Dad and Mum and Conor—then the spare key will still be in its old place under the slate by the front door. I’ll wait until they are all in bed and then open the door and tiptoe into Mum and Dad’s bedroom. I’ll wake Dad, and tell him everything that’s going to happen if he leaves us.