A Map of the Sky

by Claire Wong

  “Can I help you?” It was meant to be a kind of holiday, and he did not like to see his mother surrounded by so much work.

  “That’s sweet of you, but it’s all very complicated, I’m afraid. I’ll just have to keep working through my list until it’s all sorted out. When it’s done, I promise we can go out and do something fun.” She drew in a deep breath, readied her manicured nails over the keyboard, and began to type.

  “OK,” said Kit. “Jules, want me to help you revise?” He tilted his head round to try to make out the title of her book. Sometimes she would let him read out quick-fire questions to test her. It wasn’t the most exciting game, but over the last few months he had learned a lot about cloud formations and the Cold War this way.

  Today, however, Juliet shook her head and continued sticking fluorescent-orange notes to the chapter she was reading.

  He sighed in frustration. Everyone was being so boring.

  “I bet Dad wouldn’t carry on working all day if he was here.”

  “All right, that’s enough! If you’re going to be this difficult, then go back to your room and find a book or a game to keep you busy.” Catherine’s eyes had hardened, the familiar set of her jaw telling Kit that there was no negotiation to be had on this. Was it the accusation that she worked too much, or the mention of his father that had annoyed her?

  He shrugged and left the room. It had been explained to him on more than one occasion that his parents had very important jobs. His mother was head of a department in a recruitment company, and his father was a management consultant. When Kit had asked what that meant, his dad said he solved other people’s problems for them. It also meant that his parents were busy and could not always attend school plays or sports days, but Kit was proud of them all the same. “Fishers work hard.” He must have heard those words a hundred times. “If we didn’t work so hard, we couldn’t go on fun holidays or have such a big house in this part of London.”

  But they weren’t in London any more. They were in a centuries-old farmhouse with only a short stretch of grass between them and the cliff edge. They had no friends’ houses to visit or cinemas to go to: just acres of sea and sky stretching out beyond them. It was wonderful, and yet, on days like today, he wondered if it had the potential to be a little dull too. Certainly his family’s response to it was uninspiring. After all the talk of this move being an exciting adventure, a fresh start for them all, they might just as easily have been shut away in a hotel room down the road from their old house.

  Back in his own room, he sat down heavily on the bed and picked up the book about Odysseus’ voyage. When his back grew stiff and his legs ached from staying still too long, he stood up and stretched. He needed to walk around, or he might go mad with cabin fever, so he went downstairs.

  All Askfeld’s rooms were airy and cool, largely because the front door was often propped open during daylight hours to let in the breeze. The smell of salt water and sea kelp clung to its walls. There was no one in the guests’ sitting room this morning. Kit had hoped to see Bert again, though he was relieved there was no sign of Maddie Morley. Still, there was one other person he would like to speak to, so he left the sitting room.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Sean stopped sweeping sand and dust from the floor tiles and straightened up to block Kit’s way down the corridor.

  “To see Beth.” He decided to stay resolute in face of this question. Beth had, after all, said he was allowed to come back. If Sean was surprised that Kit knew his wife’s name or that she was in the out of bounds room, he did not show it.

  “Not so fast. I told you that room was private for a reason. Beth’s not well. She needs lots of rest. That’s why she has her own sitting room away from everyone else. I don’t want you going and making her exhausted with all your noise and running around.”

  It was the first time Kit had seen Sean look stern, and he wondered for a moment if he dared answer back. It seemed wiser not to, so he ran up the stairs and sat on the landing with his face pressed between the bars of the bannister railing, listening to what went on below him. He heard Sean go into the kitchen, and come back out again a few minutes later, rolling up his sleeves and laughing at something the chef had said. He reached the reception desk at the precise moment Maddie stepped through the front door.

  “Good morning.”

  “Does this place have DIY tools available for guests to use?” Maddie scraped her boots clean on the doormat and did not return the greeting. There was a pause, probably as Sean processed this strange question. Kit tried to imagine what this angry woman could be building while on holiday.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “As I expected. Well, do you know where I might hire or buy some?”

  “What are you looking for exactly?”

  Maddie raised her voice. “Look, if you don’t know or won’t help me, just say so! There’s no need for this interrogation and deflection.”

  Kit actually felt slightly sorry for Sean, who was once again the target of Maddie’s anger. However, it had all played out in his favour, since he was also now confident that Askfeld’s owner was too busy to notice someone sneaking back downstairs. Kit seized his opportunity and tiptoed all the way to the door of Beth’s room. He was almost surprised to find that Sean had not locked it to keep out unwanted visitors after their last conversation, but once again the handle turned easily and he tapped against the frame as he stepped inside.

  Beth seemed more lively today, though she was still in her wicker chair supported by lots of cushions. An easel was set up in front of her. The broad piece of paper it displayed was painted as brown as coffee or parchment and there was an ornate compass in the top right corner, but the centre remained largely blank, like a wilderness of uncharted territory. Beth was not looking at this map: she was hunched over a sketchbook on her lap, scribbling notes round the edge of something she had drawn.

  “What are you doing?” Kit asked from the doorway.

  “Come in, Kit. I’m just trying to remember something.”

  “What have you forgotten?”

  “A lot of things, thanks to a brain that gets easily confused these days. But specifically, right now, I’m trying to remember the shape of the lake where I used to skim stones with my dad when I was your age.”

  Kit stood beside Beth’s chair to watch what she was working on. The sketch she was adding to was a rough outline of a map much like the one on her easel, but with more detail. He took a closer look and saw that the north-east part of the page was all sea. Along the wavy black line of the coast were small pictures and notes. One read Find fossils here, while another said Secret short cut to the lookout point, but had a couple of arrows and question marks pointing to different locations on the paper. It was when he spotted a small sketch of a house with the word Askfeld next to it that he realized what he was seeing.

  “It’s a map of here!”

  There was the guest house, perched high on the cliffs, and the wavering line where the land met the sea. Spreading out from here were notes about the best beaches, and arrows towards places of interest. But from the look of Beth’s scribblings, she was having trouble getting the map right. There were question marks and crossings-out where she had changed her mind about where something should be. Some of her notes had been transferred to the map on the easel, which sported a beautifully intricate border and calligraphic annotations, but the much busier sketched version remained a mess of uncertainty.

  “I’m trying to plot out all the places I used to play when I was younger. I’ve had so many adventures, down by the sea or running across the moors, and I want to record them all.”

  “Because you can’t go out and see those places any more?”

  “Exactly. And most of all, I want to pass on those memories to this one,” she patted her bump, “so my child can enjoy all these places too. Sean can take him or her out for walks, and then when they come home I’ll get to hear the stories of what they’ve done and seen.”

/>   It had not occurred to Kit before, but it suddenly struck him as very sad that she might not be able to run around outside with her child when he or she was old enough, or play hide and seek. Beth squinted at the easel and pressed her lips together, and then began to paint a ship onto the sea. Before Kit’s eyes, it grew into a longboat with a striped sail and a dragon-like figurehead at the prow.

  “But you can’t remember where all the different places are, or what they look like?”

  “No,” she sighed, dipping her brush into a pot of gold ink and then dotting it along the side of the ship. “It’s frustrating for my memory to let me down now. I remember all the games and the exploring, even the parkin wrapped up in tin foil my dad would bring for us to eat on the walk home, but not the useful details. Like this lookout point, for example. I know there’s a hidden path from the road, with trees either side. It’s not an official path, so it’s not on the Ordnance Survey I’ve looked at. You have to be small or else crouch low to fit through it in places, but you come out on the top of the cliffs and it’s the most incredible view out to sea, with the headland in the distance to the south. I suppose I’ll make my best guess as to where it is and one day my son or daughter will come and tell me whether I was right.”

  “So when will you get better?”

  She balanced the brush over a water-filled jam jar. It dripped paint onto the sketchbook. “Well… It’s not like when you have a cold or chicken pox; this is different.”

  “Different how? Are you going to die?” He was suddenly gripped with anxiety that his new friend would meet a tragic end before the summer was out.

  Beth laughed. “No, it’s not like that. There are some illnesses that don’t act like the ones you’re thinking of. They aren’t the sort that kill you, but at the same time there isn’t a medicine you can take to make it all go away. And I might get better one day, but I might not.”

  This made Kit uneasy. He had never heard of such a thing before. Illnesses were either slight enough to mean that you got a day off school, or serious enough to involve trips to hospital and solemn voices. In books they were normally the latter, whereas in real life he had only experienced the first kind. But here was something unsettling and new. What was he to do with an illness that just lingered, making no promises about its endpoint or trajectory? And what should he think of Beth now, whose story might be neither a happy ending of recovery nor a terrible tragedy, but something slower and more confined?

  Still, if there was one thing that reading myths and adventure stories had taught him, it was that a hero should never give up hope, even when the situation looked impossible or unchanging. Odysseus kept persevering to get home, even though it took him ten years of storms and monsters. In that moment, Kit made a decision: he would not let this mysterious illness win. He was going to help Beth finish her map. If she could not go out to find the places she half remembered, then he would discover them for her. It would be a surprise, so he said nothing, but studied the picture very hard to memorize as much as he could.

  Day two of my adventures, he later wrote in his book. I have identified my quest.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  VIEWS AND VILLAINS

  TOP FOUR THINGS A HERO NEEDS FOR HIS QUEST:

  1. Something to find (like Excalibur or a place on a map).

  2. Someone to rescue from trouble (Beth).

  3. A friendly and helpful sidekick (in the past I’d have said this was Juliet, but she’s not as friendly or helpful these days. I wish Mum had let us get a dog).

  4. A villain or monster to defeat.

  “Isn’t this nice?” Catherine said for the sixth or seventh time. “What a lot of fresh air and beautiful scenery!”

  It might have been Kit’s imagination, but he thought she watched Juliet’s expression each time she said it, as if looking for a particular response. Juliet said nothing. Their mother glanced to her left and right as if searching for something else lovely to remark upon and continue the conversation. Absent-mindedly, her hand went to one of her gold earrings and turned it around, as she often did when she was thinking; as if she were turning the cogs of her brain.

  “It is pretty cool,” said Kit, supplying an answer to fill the silence. And it was. Sean had lent them a guidebook to the Cleveland Way, the far-reaching coastal path that passed through Askfeld’s grounds, and they had decided to walk a short stretch of it leading south from the guest house. To their right lay green fields edged with lichen-flecked stone walls. In some the grass was grazed short by flocks of sheep with black faces and horns that curled like seashells, while others grew tall and unkempt with purple thistle heads and delicate stars of shepherd’s needle. To the left, a narrow line of gorse and low, wind-beaten trees was all that separated them from the cliff edge plunging down into the North Sea. On a cold day it might have been bleak and shelter-less, the perfect spot for a brooding walk while you agonized over your misfortunes with an upturned collar against the pelting rain, but today was clear and fine. Insects hummed among the grasses and birdsong warbled down from the trees.

  In spite of her unwillingness to sing the Cleveland Way’s praises, Juliet was relaxed enough to list for their mother the things she wanted to bake as soon as they were moved into their own house with a proper kitchen. Kit was not especially interested in macaroons or choux pastry, so he ran on ahead.

  The best thing about being at the front of the group was that you could imagine you were exploring uncharted territory. The path became a track through the overgrown wilderness, and Kit was discovering it all for the first time. There might be any number of wild beasts lurking nearby, ready to burst out of the gorse in a flurry of claws and teeth, or the ground might suddenly give way and hurl him down onto the rocks below. Kit Fisher: intrepid explorer sounded rather good. His grandmother had always said he had the sort of name that he could go far with, and now they certainly were far from home.

  There was an added delicious secret to today’s exploring: Kit was on a mission. Every stride he took was full of purpose. As he delved around in this new terrain, he paid particular attention to the vegetation on his left. Beth had spoken of a narrow pathway leading to a viewpoint on the cliff edge, somewhere south of Askfeld. It had to be near here. Maybe he could find it. He ran his hand over the uneven surface of the low wall and was surprised to find its stones were warm under his fingers where they had soaked up sunlight.

  “Shall we turn back now?” his mother called ahead. It was a rhetorical question, and Kit knew he was supposed to agree without further discussion, but he still had not found the path, so he decided to feign misunderstanding.

  “Just a bit further!” he called back. There was something up ahead that might be a gap. He ran up to it, ignoring the shouts that followed him. He crouched down. There was definitely a space between the slender trunks of two buckthorn trees. Kit squeezed between them, realizing that there must have been a good many years for the tunnel to become choked with spiny branches and thick greenery since Beth could have crawled through it as a child, if it even was the same one she had described.

  As Kit clambered on, the tunnel grew wider and the thicket began to draw back, until abruptly it opened out and at once he knew he had found the right place.

  He was at the top of the cliffs. The sea before him was a deep dark blue, flat and serene under the clear sky. The wind was blowing in off the waters, and the smell of salt and seaweed hit him more squarely here where it was unfiltered by the gorse. Gold grasses bobbed their feathered heads about his knees, and the gulls wheeled and swooped down to the waves with shrill yikkering cries to one another.

  The strange mix of being alone before a breathtaking view and knowing that he had succeeded in his mission to find the secret path made him giddy with triumph. He would bring news of this place back to Beth and it would make her illness easier to bear, knowing she could pass on the knowledge to her child. He laughed aloud into the wind and the cackling calls of gulls. But the noise was overheard, and his family’s vo
ices came drifting through the gorse, sounding concerned and impatient.

  “Kit, where are you? Come back!”

  He could not stay here, in this window onto a world where anything was possible. If he did not return to the path, the others would worry. He turned his back on the sea, pivoting on the ball of one foot in a perfect spin. But the ground between the grasses was softer than it looked, and betrayed him.

  Kit skidded back through the mud and fell sprawling forward. In a panic, he flung out his arms to grab at anything nearby, but only felt thin stems brush between his fingers. How close had he been to the edge? How far was he falling? He wanted to cry out, but something stopped the sound in his throat. With a thump, he hit the ground face first, his fingers tightly wound round clumps of yellow grass. It’s OK, I’m on solid ground. I can’t have been that close to the edge after all. Just breathe slowly and don’t make any noise to scare the others. Still clinging to the vegetation, he turned his head to look backwards, and felt his stomach lurch: he might have landed safely, but his feet were dangling in mid-air over the side of the cliff!

  He dragged himself forward, dislodging loose stones that bounced off the cliff and made no audible sound as they collided with the ground far below. Pulling his legs in, he sat on the grass and took a deep, steadying breath. Now that he knew he was safe, a curious, or maybe morbid, impulse compelled him to take one last glance over the edge: to know exactly how far he would have fallen. His stomach churned. It must be over a hundred metres down to sea level and the dark rocky platform that would have marked the end of his descent. What would it have been like? He had never been afraid of heights, but suddenly an instinct for survival kicked in and he found himself scrambling back from the edge as fast as he could.