A Map of the Sky

by Claire Wong

  From Miss Entwhistle, Class 4B

  Beneath it was a collection of folded pages, covered in lines of large, untidy handwriting. He glanced over them briefly to be sure that they were all good messages. While Kit knew it was wrong to read other people’s letters, he wanted to check there was nothing in there to upset Maddie. She had enough to be sad about already. But every page was from a child who had clearly loved her and wanted the best for her now. Some told her they missed her, while others shared their news from the school. Not one of them mentioned Elsie, which meant it was safe to show the letters to the pilgrim. He put them all back in the brown packaging and hid them under his coat when they drove round to Askfeld later that day. Sean had said Catherine was welcome to come back and use the wifi until the house was connected. Kit had to admit that since the day his mum had taken the flowers for Beth, Sean had seemed much friendlier towards them all.

  While Catherine found new reasons to email her former employer, and Juliet caught up on all that she was missing out on via social media, Kit searched the guest house for its veteran residents. He found Bert first, hunched over a pad of paper, scribbling a list of bullet points in illegible scrawl.

  “Hullo. Almost didn’t hear you come in there,” he said as he noticed Kit. “Just writing some notes on an idea I’ve had – for a new paper I’m going to write and hopefully get published next academic year. Only this time round I’ll have learned from past mistakes to be more careful with my data. High time to move onwards and upwards, I think! But what’s got into you? You seem to be hopping with excitement today. Not your birthday, is it?”

  Kit shook his head and grinned. He was buzzing with the knowledge that he had at last done something that would make a real difference to another person here. He might have failed to find an albatross, or bring his father home, or even finish off the map, but he could not wait to see Maddie’s face when she read the letters. Surely then she would be able to finish off her pilgrimage and go home.

  “Do you know where Maddie is?”

  “Finishing lunch in the next room, I believe.”

  Kit ran next door, with Bert following him at a slower pace. Maddie was sitting alone at a small table, chewing on the crusts of her cheese and pickle sandwich and turning the teapot almost upside down to be sure she had poured out every drop.

  Kit thrust the letters at Maddie, forcing her to put down the pot.

  “What’s this?” She looked at the pile of papers in her hands.

  “From your children. The ones you’re missing.”

  Maddie frowned, and turned over the first of the letters. As she unfolded the paper and caught sight of the uneven handwriting, her frown faded and her whole face changed.

  “How did you…” she began to articulate, but then lost interest in explanations as she read the words in front of her.

  “‘Dear Miss Morley,’” she read aloud, “‘I hoop’ – she means hope, but Holly’s always found spelling a bit tricky – ‘I hope you are happy and have lots of friends to play games with like we used to. Love from Holly.’ Bless her!” As she moved on to the next letter, a small smile began to grow across her face. With it, the life flooded back into her complexion, softening contours that had seemed harsh before. Kit watched the transformation and for the first time could see what Maddie must have been like in her old job. The woman in front of him looked kind and caring, not solemn and strict. Her eyes were beginning to shine where tears were forming in them.

  “Charlie got his swimming badge after all!” she murmured, too delighted with the news to keep silent. Her eyes glistened as she drank in the words on each page.

  “Looks like you might have found the cure there,” the birdwatcher said with a nod of approval, moving towards the door to leave now that he had seen the outcome. Kit stayed behind to watch his success play out, extremely satisfied with the effect of the letters. He pictured Maddie being able to go on with her life, no longer worrying about her children. He had done it! He had managed to help someone in the end.

  Maddie had come now to the longest letter, the one Hannah from Year Six had written in perfectly neat handwriting, with little stars in place of the dot above each letter. Her eyes flicked back and forth along the lines, but something was not right. The frown returned and the muscles in her face tautened. She leaned forward over the page.

  “What? No, no, she can’t have.”

  “Is something wrong?” Bert had spotted it too, and paused in the dining room doorway.

  “After everything…” Maddie seemed to be reading the letter a second time, perhaps to make sure she had understood it, then she let the paper fall into her lap. “She’s left.”

  “Who’s left?”

  “The woman who took over from me. The one who wanted me out.” Her voice was shaking and she had turned pale. Kit felt a sharp jolt in his stomach as he realized that when he checked the letters for any mention of Elsie, he had forgotten that it was a made-up name. “Just for a moment there, I thought… but no. I went quietly because I didn’t want to upset the children. I thought it was best for them to have as much stability as possible, and here was someone so confident that she was the one to provide it. But apparently, after a year in the job, she quit, and they’re having to find someone new.”

  “Ah well.” Bert tried to sound bright and reassuring. “That just goes to show you were made of sterner stuff than her. Not just anyone could do your job.”

  “But it means it was all for nothing.” Maddie spoke each syllable through clenched teeth. “She convinced me I was doing the right thing by leaving her in charge. That it was best for the children. But it wasn’t. Because now they’ll have to get used to someone new all over again.”

  Chair legs scraped over the floor as she stood up from the table, gripping the letters in one white-knuckled hand, while she placed the other on the gingham tablecloth as if to steady herself.

  “I’m sure she didn’t plan for it to be like this,” Bert said. “She probably wanted what was best back then too. Circumstances change –”

  “She took my children from me!” Maddie slammed the flat of her palm on the table so the cutlery rattled. Her interruption startled the others by its shrill volume, and the dining room fell silent. She seemed to take herself by surprise too, because she put a hand over her mouth and hurried out of the room.

  “Oh dear,” sighed the birdwatcher. “Who could have seen that coming? Where are you going now, Kit? I wouldn’t follow her if I were you.”

  But Kit ignored him. He was to blame for Maddie’s distress, and he needed to find out how to fix it. He came into the hallway just in time to see the front door slam. When he opened it and looked out, Maddie was striding away at an impressive pace. Kit followed her, but at a distance, because he had no idea what to say when he caught up with her. He wanted to explain that he had meant well, that he had wanted her to know that the children had not forgotten her. It would be little comfort now.

  The content of the last letter, and its impact on Maddie, still confused him a little. But he had understood enough. He of all people could see that Maddie had made it her quest to protect her children. But her attempt to find purpose in that quest had been thwarted, and now her story made no sense to her. So where was she going? Perhaps she had finally decided to finish her journey to Whitby. If that was the case, though, she was taking the wrong direction. She still had not noticed Kit following her, and he decided to hang back behind the dark gorse. If she spotted him now, he was not sure what he would dare say to her.

  They came at last to a place where the path opened out into a wide field where the dry grass was golden and almost waist high. Kit recognized it by the shape of the broken rowing boat protruding over the top of the grasses. Maddie waded out into the middle of this space until she stood beside the wreck and looked around her. There was no one else in sight, and Kit stayed hidden behind the gorse. The land stretched flat and the sky was clear and distant. She must have been satisfied that no one was around, beca
use suddenly her whole demeanour changed. First her shoulders sank and she put her hands to her head. Then she fell to her knees in the middle of the sea of grass and began to scream: a sound full of rage and pain and futility. Kit understood then that this was something he was not supposed to see or overhear, and he slipped away quietly, leaving Maddie alone under the sky to pour out her grief.

  He wanted to return to Askfeld unnoticed. The failure of his latest scheme stung, but more than that he felt he owed Maddie the kind of privacy that would be destroyed if he underwent a grilling about what had just happened.

  But when he opened the sturdy front door that was always unlocked during the daytime, he found Beth sitting behind the reception desk, talking to Juliet and Bert. It was too late to sneak away quietly; the three of them spotted him at once.

  “Best laid plans, eh?” The birdwatcher shrugged and smiled, but his brow was furrowed.

  Juliet was less forgiving. “You never know when to quit interfering, do you?”

  For a moment, Kit wondered if she knew he had accused Sean of trying to dispose of his wife, but he did not think Beth had been angry enough to tell others about his mistake. Juliet folded her arms as if to form a barrier between herself and her brother’s stupid actions.

  “I only wanted to cheer her up,” he said.

  “Why do you have to be the one to fix everything? Why does it have to be Kit the Hero? If you stopped for a second to ask someone for help, maybe you wouldn’t keep making these messes for everyone else.”

  It reminded him of the quarrel between Beth and Sean. She had told her husband he needed to ask others for support instead of doing everything alone. But the whole point was that Kit was supposed to be the helpful one. “I –

  I guess…”

  She took a step closer, making full use of the fact that she was a good six inches taller than him to look down as she continued. “You don’t get it, do you? You think if you just find something big and impossible to hope for and you call it a quest, then it’s bound to work out the way you want; that people will magically get better or find things they’ve lost or be happy again. But sometimes impossible hopes are just that – impossible – and you need to learn to just leave them alone.”

  She stalked off to return to her reading. Kit’s shoulders slumped downwards, and he looked to the two adults present for any sign that he should not take his sister’s words to heart.

  “I haven’t made that big a mess, have I?”

  Bert scratched the back of his neck for a few seconds before answering. “Well, it’s hardly for me to say, of course, but I suppose it’s possible – that is, I often find it’s best to let other people be, rather than to give them false hope. But you know, we’re all different. Now I really must go, lots to do today.” He hurried away upstairs, muttering to himself, “Yes, yes, that’s right. Lots to do. All for the best.”

  “Why is hope a bad thing?” Kit asked Beth, who had been studying the guest-book entries. She closed the book and rested her hands on top of it with a sigh.

  “Hope is a wonderful thing,” she answered, “but sometimes it can feel terrible and cruel too. Especially if it’s followed by disappointment.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, when I first got ill, I thought every time I went to the doctor that this was the day they’d give me a drug that would make it better, or that they’d find me a specialist who understood. But it didn’t happen. And having hoped for things to improve made it harder to be content when they stayed the same, or when the pain got even worse.”

  “What happened then? Did you give up hope?”

  “Never. But I decided I could learn to live with things the way they are, while also wanting them to get better.”

  Kit sighed and leaned forward so his chin rested on the reception desk. How could he accept things as they were, when he was the cause of so much trouble?

  “I told Bert there might be an albatross round here. I made him hope and now he’s sad about it.”

  Beth nodded. “I expect he liked the idea of impressing all his friends with the story. There’s an old rumour about an albatross being sighted round here years ago, though no one’s ever proven it. My dad claimed he saw it once, down over the cliffs. He used to tell the story whenever we had visitors round. In fact, that’s where you got the idea from, isn’t it? I put it on the rough version of the map. You should have asked me about it. I could have warned you there was no evidence it ever existed.”

  So it wasn’t even a confirmed sighting. He had pinned everything on a maybe. But Kit wasn’t sure it would have made much difference, even if he had known that before. A maybe could be enough.

  Beth narrowed her eyes the way she always did when trying to remember something. “‘At length did cross an Albatross, Through the fog it came.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “A poem I read at school, many years ago, perhaps even before you were born. There’s a dreadful thought. By… Coleridge, I think. I used to be able to recite quite a bit of it, but since then my brain has had to make space for more pressing information.”

  Kit wondered what he might forget when he grew older: whether the stories of Camelot’s knights would melt away, or the memories of this summer at Askfeld. He shuddered at the idea of it all becoming obscured. Then again, he might prefer not to be for ever dwelling on his mistakes.

  “Juliet’s right. I’ve made everything worse.”

  Beth shook her head. “Don’t you believe that for a second! You wouldn’t let me give up on the map. Without you, I might never have been able to share a lifetime of memories with my child. That’s a gift beyond value.” Her voice was so full of emotion that he found his own eyes stinging. He ran around to the other side of the desk and hugged her tightly. She made a noise of surprise.

  It had been a summer of impossible things, whatever Juliet might say. He had learned to map memories like cities, and found allies in strangers. Whatever happened, he was glad to have made a friend in Beth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE THING WITH FEATHERS

  Things I must never, ever forget, no matter how old I am:

  1. How to skim stones, fly kites, and have sword fights (with pretend swords, because Mum worries that I’ll take somebody’s eye out one day).

  2. My friends: Toby, Beth, and Bert. Maybe even Maddie if she forgives me for the letters.

  3. How to be helpful and brave for other people – never giving up on a quest or refusing to save someone in need.

  “Today’s the day, then,” Kit’s mother said with a nervous smile across the table at breakfast. “What time will you be able to see your results?”

  “School will email this morning. They said it’ll be from eight o’clock,” Juliet replied, not looking up from the avocado she was pushing around her plate.

  “Perfect! I have a video conference call at eight-thirty, so I can stay with you when you get your grades. Darling, don’t look so anxious. I’m sure you will be fine. Sean has said we can use the internet at the guest house for my call, since they still haven’t connected us here, so we’ll drive over after breakfast. Kit, make sure you bring a book to read or something, otherwise it might be a dull morning for you. Juliet, I’ll make you a camomile tea before we go – I find that always calms me down.”

  The more their mother talked, the paler and quieter Juliet became. It was as if there was only enough brightness and noise for one person in the kitchen that morning, and Catherine was using it all up. Kit went up to his room to pick out some books.

  Nobody spoke on the journey over to Askfeld, so Kit gazed out of the car window up to the brooding August sky. Dark clouds were gathering all along the coast, lining themselves up in readiness. He listened to the whir of tarmac passing under the tyres, and then the bumps of the stones and puddles in the rough track, and finally the crunch of gravel as the car stopped.

  Beth was sitting at the reception desk; her stick was leaning against the wall behind her. She
was talking on the guest house landline and did not see them come in.

  “So the payment has come through? Good. And you’ll send me an official receipt of that? Even better. Now that’s all cleared up, I should warn you that we will be using our newly solvent status to hire security staff, and if you ever send someone round to threaten my husband again, they will be marched off our land and kicked squarely into the sea. Are we clear?”

  They had never heard her sound like this before. Catherine, who had approached the desk on arrival, took a step back now and murmured, “Oh dear.”

  “It’s all right, Mum. It’s good news.”

  She had done it. Beth had saved Askfeld. In spite of all the bad days of fog in her head, she had wrestled the finances back into shape. Only she had believed Sean and his father could be reconciled, or that she and Sean might find help from someone so hostile. And she had been right – she must have been, since now the debts were paid.

  The phone now replaced on the desk, she sighed, leaned back in her chair, and greeted the guests before her.

  “You got rid of that man! Are you really getting guards at Askfeld?”

  “No, that wasn’t true,” Beth admitted with a wink, “but it did feel good to say it. However, I’m going to need a lie down to recover from that. As soon as Sean finishes getting the rooms ready. We’ve had a couple of last-minute bookings.” The strain of the phone call was evident in her face. She looked tired and pale, but the triumph of seeing off the debt collectors seemed to have lifted a weight off her shoulders.

  It surprised him that Beth had lied. He imagined her incapable of such misdemeanours. Then again, this summer had seen him keep all manner of truths hidden from his family. The guilt of having lied to his mother about writing a letter to Toby had prompted him to actually write one, and thus redeem the fabrication. It was only a couple of sentences, but it felt good to have reassured his friend he was not forgotten.