A Map of the Sky

by Claire Wong

  Their mother gathered together registration forms for the local doctor’s surgery and reviewed her shopping list while Kit gleefully thought about where they might go and what they might find for Beth’s map, even though they weren’t at Askfeld any more. Juliet, however, would not agree to anything until she had seen the route they would be taking.

  “Come on then, where are we going? I’ll look up a map. And a weather forecast. That way for once you won’t end up running home hours late in the rain.”

  She knew that he had been in trouble the day he and Bert went searching for the albatross, but she had not used that knowledge to dig at him until now.

  “Um, OK. Can you see a lake near here?”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I’m not sure of the name. But I heard there’s one not far from Askfeld. Can you find it?”

  Juliet sighed and opened a map of the local area, zooming in and out in search of a patch of blue.

  “I can’t believe I’m using up my data allowance here and you can’t even tell me the name! Wait, there’s something called Skate Tarn here – is that it?”

  Kit looked over his sister’s shoulder. It was a blue blob on the map, shaped a little like a teardrop. It wasn’t far from the house.

  “I think tarn’s another word for lake.” He held his breath as he watched his sister consider this. If he appeared too enthusiastic, it would only bias her against the idea.

  Juliet checked how long it would take to walk there before finally nodding. “OK, we can go there if you like.”

  “Make sure you take waterproofs with you,” their mother said, “and there are some cereal bars in the cupboard if you want snacks for the walk.”

  Though it was now the height of summer, the day was overcast and cool, and the light had a pale dusky quality to it. The air was still and silent but for the muted distant cries of birds and farm animals. Juliet checked the route again on her phone and strode ahead down a muddy path that ran along the edge of the fields. At first Kit was happy to half skip to keep up with her, but he soon became tired.

  “Jules, slow down!”

  “Why?” It was a genuine question. Juliet did not seem to have realized the speed at which she had been marching.

  “Your books aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be there when we get home.” Kit had spotted a long branch on the path, the right size for a walking stick or wizard’s staff. He picked it up and leaned his weight on it as he studied his sister’s haste.

  “What? No, it’s not that. I’m not really in a hurry.” Juliet checked herself and tried to slow her pace.

  “Yeah, sure.” Kit mimicked the sarcasm his sister had perfected over the last couple of years. He tried raising one eyebrow to complete the effect, but ended up squinting oddly at her instead. Now that she was walking normally, he was able to keep pace with her while still brandishing his staff.

  “It’s just… I like to walk quickly, I think. And listen to music at the same time. Otherwise, well, you’re stuck on your own with your thoughts, aren’t you?” She quickly added, “And that’s pretty boring.”

  Kit felt sorry for his sister, whose imagination must be much smaller than his if she could find solitude boring. Maybe it was something that happened as people got older. Juliet looked down and absent-mindedly began chewing her fingernails. She must be very anxious about the risk of boredom.

  “Do you have your earphones with you?” he asked, and Juliet nodded. “Well, I guess we can listen to music while we walk, if you like.”

  She smiled, and plugged her earphones in, passing one to Kit and putting the other into her own ear. Now they had to walk more slowly and watch one another’s step to keep pace and not yank the wires.

  “Is this song OK?” Juliet asked as the guitar chords started. Kit did not recognize it, but he didn’t mind. Juliet cared a lot more about music than he did. She actually learned the lyrics to songs, and sometimes sang along to them in her room when she thought no one could hear.

  “Yeah, it sounds good.”

  They walked like this along the track, awkwardly manoeuvring their way around a big puddle without losing balance or earphones. The path entered an area of woodland, cutting a straight line between the trees and then winding round to follow a beck downhill. At last they found the tarn.

  The water was still and flat, reflecting the cool grey of the sky. It was surrounded by dark pine trees and the ground up to the water’s edge was stony. There was no one else around.

  Kit ran straight to the water to see how clear it was. He could see all the way to the bottom of the lake. He turned round to find Juliet arranging stones and taking close-up photos that he guessed would shortly be posted online with artistic filters.

  “Want me to take a picture of you by the lake?” he offered.

  “Oh, no thanks. I look awful today.”

  Kit shrugged. Juliet said things like this. Her friends from school, the girls at least, used to come out with similar phrases. He didn’t really understand the tiny details that distinguished looking good and looking terrible to them. As far as he was concerned, she always looked like Juliet, and there wasn’t much variation unless she was really tired or upset. Sometimes he was very glad he wasn’t a girl.

  “You don’t take as many photos of yourself as you used to in London.”

  “Um, I suppose not. I’m half thinking about deleting my accounts anyway.”

  He stared. Juliet had spent the last three years obsessed, in his opinion, with curating her online image. Now she wanted to erase it. He was torn between concern that this was out of character and hope that his sister might be better company if she were less distracted. Hope won, and he decided this was a good choice.

  “OK. Do you know how to skim stones?” he asked. “I asked Dad if he’d teach me, only…”

  He thought back to the phone call, and then wondered what his dad was doing right now. Was he trapped in an office, desperately wishing he could escape and join his family? Or was he happy to still live in the city?

  “I don’t.” Juliet looked down and kicked at the ground. “There was a boy in my class – Richard – who knew how to. He showed everyone on a school trip to the reservoir once. He made one stone bounce six times before it sank. But he wasn’t someone many people listened to, or liked. You know the kids who always say odd things, or the wrong things? He was super-enthusiastic about all these weird hobbies, and people tended to ignore him. They’d do impressions of him when he wasn’t around, and everyone would laugh. So I didn’t ask him how he did it. But maybe we could figure it out. I can look it up.”

  “What do you think?” she asked, when the video had finished. “It looks a bit tricky.”

  “I want to try!” Kit grabbed a handful of pebbles and sifted through them to pick the flattest one. He threw it at the tarn’s even surface, and it immediately sank into the water, sending ripples radiating out from the spot. Undeterred, he found another stone and threw it, with exactly the same results.

  “You’re throwing it wrong,” Juliet told him. “It’s supposed to be underarm, and flat over the surface of the water. Something like, um, this… OK, not exactly like that, obviously, but that’s the general idea.”

  It occurred to Kit, as he passed another stone to Juliet, that he could not remember the last time he had seen his sister fail at something.

  “OK, so flat and underarm, like this?” He tried again. The pebble still sank, but this time it felt more like the motion they had seen the American man demonstrate. He repeated the movement, and this time the stone jumped once off the surface of the tarn before sinking.

  “You did it!”

  Juliet cheered and Kit shrieked. “Did you see that? It bounced!”

  “OK, show me how you did it now,” Juliet said, standing back to observe with arms folded. Kit threw another stone, and this one bounced three times in a straight line across the lake. Juliet copied him, but her stone was swallowed up by the water. She sighed.

  �
��I can’t do it!”

  “It’s OK, Jules, keep trying.” Kit collected a few more flat stones for them to use. They carried on throwing them, Kit’s dogged determination maintaining both his own enthusiasm and his sister’s when she wanted to stop. Eventually Juliet managed to skim a stone for two jumps, and her face broke into a broad grin. Kit double high-fived her to celebrate her victory.

  “I hope I get a chance to tell Beth about this!”

  “What’s Beth got to do with it?”

  “She’s the one who told me about the lake and the stones.”

  “Wait.” Juliet frowned. “Has today been about you finding more stuff for your map again? Is that why you dragged me out here?”

  When she put it like that, it did sound a lot like Kit had deceived her. But that had not really been the point. He regretted having told her about the map now.

  “But it was fun, right? We had to test it out to see if Skate Tarn really is a good place for skimming stones. And now we know!”

  Juliet gave a disgruntled nod. “I guess she’s saved us a lot of work in looking up places to visit.”

  Kit looked back at the path that had brought them here. “You’re going to say we have to go back now, right?”

  Juliet looked at the map on her phone. “You know, we’re about halfway to Askfeld here. If you want to, we could walk the rest of the way and you can tell Beth about the lake.”

  Kit was afraid that if he hesitated, Juliet might change her mind, so he grinned and bounded back to the path with a shout of “Turn left!” following him.

  At Askfeld’s sturdy front door, Kit hesitated.

  “What is it?” Juliet asked.

  “Sometimes Sean doesn’t like me going to see Beth. What if he stops us today?”

  “Well, you said that Beth is ill. And you can be pretty… energetic. Let me talk to Sean.”

  She led the way into the house with Kit trailing behind her. Sean was at the reception desk, counting out stacks of coins and ten pound notes from the till. The tide and weather had been updated on the slate behind him.

  “Good afternoon, Sean,” said Juliet. Just like that, she had gone into what Kit called her “grown-up mode”.

  “Afternoon,” he replied. “What are you two doing here? Your mum OK?”

  “Yes, thank you, she’s fine. We’ve been out walking. It’s lovely weather!” Juliet almost faltered for a second as she glanced outside at the grey looming clouds she had just described as “lovely”, but she ploughed on. “How are things here? Have you had any new guests arrive?”

  “A couple. But you’ll still recognize some of the faces here.”

  Maddie must have extended her stay again. Kit wondered if she would ever leave Askfeld and finish her journey up to the abbey. Bert would still be going out with his binoculars and notepad, hoping to see something interesting. Kit hoped he was not too disheartened from the day they failed to find an albatross.

  “And how is Beth?”

  “She’s doing well this week.”

  “Is she well enough for us to quickly say hello before we go back home?”

  Sean paused, and Kit smiled at Juliet’s cleverness. It would be hard for Sean to claim that his wife was too tired or ill to see anyone when he had just admitted how well she was. He might have imagined the scowl he thought he saw Sean flash at them as he nodded and they walked past the reception to Beth’s room.

  “Kit! This is a nice surprise. I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon.” Beth put down her book, sliding in a watercolour sketch to mark the page where she had paused. “And you must be Juliet. I’ve heard a lot about you from your brother and your mum. Come and sit down, both of you.”

  She took her feet down off the footstool so that they could squeeze onto it, side by side.

  “Is it a good day today?” Kit asked. Beth weighed this up.

  “Pretty good, I think. Certainly enough that I’m very happy to have some visitors. So tell me what you’ve been up to since the move.”

  “We learned how to skim stones!”

  “Did you? I used to do that when I was your age. My dad and I would go over to this lake and we had to make it to seven skips before we were allowed to go home. Did you go to the tarn near here? I think I remember there’s one not far away.”

  “We did; it’s called Skate Tarn and it’s shaped like a raindrop and there are lots of good stones by it. You told me about it the first day we came to Askfeld, but you said you couldn’t remember what it looked like. So we found it for you. Juliet, show Beth on your phone where we went.”

  Juliet obliged and showed Beth the route they had taken.

  “We can put it on your map!”

  Beth pulled out her sketchbook and copied down the shape of the lake from Juliet’s phone. Juliet, meanwhile, had seen the real map propped up on the easel and now wandered over to take a closer look. Since Kit’s last visit, the sea had come to life. It was not a single sea, but a pattern of its many different moods. At the top of the painting it was the colour of storms and shipwrecks, while at the bottom it was the deep serene blue of a clear day. In between was every other face it might reflect back at the changing sky: from overcast grey to starlit indigo, all marbled together.

  “It’s… it’s quite unusual, isn’t it?” she remarked. At once Kit wished he had not brought his sister here. Of course she would look through the eyes of a geographer, measuring it against the rules of cartography and seeing all that was technically wrong with it. That was how Juliet saw the world. She would care more about gridlines and scales than the fact that there might just be a lone albatross out there on the sea. He readied himself to defend Beth’s work.

  Juliet straightened up. “Kit told me the map is for your baby.” Kit relaxed as he realized she was keeping her criticisms to herself.

  “That’s right. A childhood’s worth of adventures, plotted out on paper. Though I’m not sure how we’ll get on with skimming stones. Sean doesn’t know how to, and I may or may not be able to manage the walk.”

  “I’ll teach him when he’s old enough!” Kit declared. “I’m quite good now.”

  “Are you having a boy?” Juliet asked.

  “I don’t know yet, but Kit has decided that’s what he wants it to be.”

  “It’s got to be a boy,” Kit said resolutely. “With all these cool adventures planned for him, how can it not be?”

  “Girls can have adventures too,” said Juliet. “After all, most of these are things Beth has done.”

  Kit tried to picture a younger Beth running around outside, barefoot on the dunes. He could just about remember a time when Juliet had been interested in playing ball games or hide and seek, before she had become so careful and serious. But even back then, she had never wanted to climb trees or pretend that they were saving the world from an evil sorcerer. Kit had played out those games by himself.

  An idea occurred to him. “What does Sean think of the map? Can he help you finish it off, now that we’re not staying here any more?”

  He was sure of the answer, but he wanted to see if Beth or Juliet shared any of his suspicions. He watched their faces carefully.

  “He knows about it and thinks it’s a nice idea. He was the one who bought me the materials to make it. But he’s got a lot of work on, running Askfeld. We’re short staffed, and Sean’s main way of dealing with that is to try to do everything himself.”

  So Beth knew her husband was not willing to help with the map. Her tone of voice said that she did not mind, but Kit was satisfied that he had made a good start towards helping her see that Sean might not be all that he seemed. Perhaps he could gradually introduce the idea so that it would not be too much of a shock. He didn’t want to do anything that might make her illness worse, not since the day he saw her in so much pain.

  Would Beth’s child understand the difference between good and bad days? Would he be able to spot the signs early enough to know what to expect from one day to the next?

  “Is it the fog?”r />
  “Is what?”

  “Is it the fog that makes you iller? It was all grey and cold last time you felt really bad. I noticed.”

  Beth considered this with a thoughtful smile. “I suppose it’s connected, in a way. The chill in the air and the damp hurts my joints.”

  “And when it’s foggy you can’t go places – you can’t see far enough ahead. I remember playing tag at school once and we had to stop because it was so misty we couldn’t see and were scared of running into each other. So on foggy days you have to sit still, right?”

  “Right. And sometimes it feels like the mists have got into my head too, stopping me from being able to think clearly or feel the sunlight.” She paused, smoothing out the folds of the blanket over her legs. “They have a name for it, round here, the mist that rolls in off the North Sea. They call it the fret.”

  “Fret?” Juliet repeated. “I thought that was another word for worry.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Maybe it’s because worry is like mist – you can’t get hold of it or chase it away.” Kit shuddered at the thought of fog creeping into Beth’s room and clinging to her.

  “It must be so hard for you,” said Juliet. “How do you keep from getting overwhelmed by it all?” It was an unusually earnest and forward question from his sister the etiquette expert.

  “The most important thing for me is to keep on reminding myself that I’m no less worthwhile a person on the days when I can’t get out of bed. Whether I rattle through a to-do list or stare at the ceiling all day doesn’t make the slightest difference to who I am or what the people who matter think of me.”

  The idea appealed to Kit, but he couldn’t see it sitting easily with the Fisher family mantra. Juliet, Catherine, his dad, they all worked hard every day. That was who they were.

  “How did you get on with Robin Hood, Kit?”

  So far it had not been the source of any nightmares, the way the villains of King Arthur haunted his dreams. “I’m only halfway through, but I like the idea of all the outlaws living in the woods. I think that would be difficult, having to find all your own food and stuff.”