Between Sea and Sky

by Nicola Penfold

  “You all right, Nat? Are the steps sound?” Lucas’s voice trembles slightly. He hates flag days. If it were up to him, we’d leave all our flags in the compound.

  I put my hand on the iron rungs to the next floor and give them a shake. They groan, but don’t wobble enough that I can back out.

  “What’s it like?” Tally calls.

  “Dark. Dusty,” I say.

  “And? Is there anything there?” she says impatiently.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Some old sacks. Names on the wall.”

  “Names?” Tally shrieks. “Someone’s been up?”

  I laugh quietly at her indignation. “Not for ages. They look old. Carved in the wood.” I run my fingers over the letters. I shiver – it’s like fingers walking down my spine. “Billy’s here,” I whisper.

  “What?” Tally shouts.

  “Billy,” I repeat, louder, uncomfortable now, like I’m trespassing somewhere sacred. “His name’s here.”

  “Billy Crier?” Lucas asks.

  “Just Billy. And his mates, I guess.” I read them out. Billy’s last on the list. Jones, Yusuf, Mara, Olive, Billy. The names are written together, but in different writing, like each of them scratched out their name themselves.

  BILLY. The letters are jagged and deep. It could be any Billy, but I know it’s him. I feel it. Billy Crier, up here one summer’s day with his mates, or at night, after the windmill operator had gone home. Billy, carving out his name by torchlight. Never imagining what would happen.

  “Nat, you going on up?” Tally says. “We don’t want to hang around longer than we need to.” She sounds nervous.

  I’m almost on the third floor when there’s a scrambling noise below. “Nat! Nat!” Lucas shrieks. “Someone’s coming. Uplands people. Hide!”

  Tally swears loudly. “How did we not see them coming?”

  “Lucas? Lucas!” I hiss. But there’s silence below. Tally and Lucas have already scarpered.

  I’m about to leg it back down when I hear footsteps outside. Voices.

  I pull myself up the rest of the way on to the third floor, wincing when the ladder creaks. The voices outside carry on uninterrupted.

  I crawl along the wooden floor to where there’s a little window at floor level. I lie horizontal and peer out to the ground below.

  There are two people. A man and a woman. They’re both workers from the Uplands, I recognize them. They’re wearing white, wipe-clean, seamless suits, that are anti everything – bacteria, virus, fungus, general grime. The woman’s got a box and is looking down into the thistles like she lost something. She picks something up with gloved fingers and holds it out to the man. I can’t make out what she’s saying.

  They seem to be transferring leaves to the box. The man keeps pulling a face and rubbing his hands on his legs, like he’s touching something unpleasant. The woman lifts up a leaf to her face and stares at whatever she’s seeing on it.

  “That’s all of them, surely? Don’t know why Central are so bothered. Not if the things die anyway,” the man says, louder now. He sounds bored.

  The woman gazes to the top of the windmill. “I swear I saw something. Some movement.”

  I retreat back into the darkness, willing myself invisible.

  The man’s looking now too. “They say this mill’s haunted. That boy who was strung up on the sails, back in the Hunger Years.” He laughs nervously.

  “Billy Crier, poor lad,” the woman says sadly, before they both head off down the maintenance track with their boxful of whatever it was they were collecting.

  I jump back down the ladders. Both flights to the first floor, then a final leap down and out into the sunshine. My eyes blink after the dark of the windmill.

  “Tal? Lucas?” My voice sounds emptily across the fields. There’s nothing but the hum of the panels.

  I crouch down next to the thistles. I’ve never noticed the leaves before. They’re pointy, with prickly hairs on them, like the nettles that grow round the compound, before maintenance come and rip them all out.

  No one would come out here for thistles. What was it they were collecting?

  I rifle through the plants. They’re just leaves. I’m about to spring up, to get away from this place, when I notice it. A creature – moving, living. A tiny black thing with miniscule hairs. It’s inside a sort of webbing. It looks a bit like a maggot, the kind you see when the vacuum packs of meat are left open too long. But from the way the woman was looking at the creatures, boxing them up, they can’t be maggots.

  There’s a prickle on the back of my neck, as if someone’s watching, and I look round again for Tally and Lucas, but they’re nowhere in sight. There’s no one there, just me, and Billy’s ghost.

  I go through the thistles again, quicker now. There are more creatures further on, huddled together on a fresh set of plants. The man and woman must have missed them.

  I drop one of the creatures from the leaf on to my palm. Its little, segmented body soft against my skin. It tickles.

  There are always scary stories about pests or fungus coming to the bay. About the Hunger Years coming back with a vengeance. Mum gets angry when I don’t take them seriously. “You don’t know what it’s like, Nat. To know hunger like that.” The adults have the Hunger Years etched deep in their heads and their bellies. That’s why they put up with all the rules.

  “Are you dangerous?” I whisper to the tiny creature.

  I take out the red flag from my pocket and spread it over the ground and then transfer the creatures into it. There must be two dozen or so. I add some leaves, because from the holes in them, I think that’s what the creatures eat.

  I don’t know why I take them. Perhaps it’s because the Uplands people want them. Or maybe it’s something to show Tally, to make up for not hanging out the flag.

  We’re painting the exterior of our cabin – yellow against the blue sky. It’s weather protection, but we might as well make it colourful. Clover picked up the paints from the hardware shop on the mainland. She chose a whole rainbow but her enthusiasm is less bright than yesterday, when she had clattered off the motorboat with a toppling stack of cans.

  “It’s the hottest it’s been in ages, Pearl. I want to go swimming.” Clover’s looking over the water longingly. There are four sleek, grey bodies breaking the surface – turning like little wheels.

  “We have to paint a bit every day, otherwise it will never get done. Like Dad says.”

  “Does he?” Clover says, furrowing her eyebrows. “Does he really say that any more?”

  There are snores from inside the cabin and I blush on Dad’s behalf. He’s flat out on the sofa.

  Clover’s voice sings out. “I can’t remember the last time Dad helped with anything.”

  “He took you ashore yesterday, didn’t he? He just needs more time, after that winter…”

  I shudder, thinking about the winter. Ice formed all the way round our platform. We had to break it up with axes to get to the oysters. Even in April, we were still breaking up the ice.

  “It’s been warm for ages now,” Clover says dismissively.

  “I know, but the cold gets to Dad more because he’s older, and…” My voice trails away. I inhale a deep breath of sea air. It’s thick with salt. Tangy.

  If you look towards land, the mudflats are already appearing, like a magical kingdom rising up from under the sea, all green and gold. It’ll be glorious out there today. A perfect day for mudlarking, where we find washed-up treasure in the sand that’s exposed when the tide goes out. The finds twinkle extra sparkly when it’s sunny.

  “I’m going to do a wishing,” I say. “Later. When the tide’s full out.”

  “You’ve got to leave off with the wishing, Pearl. You’re getting too old,” Clover preaches in someone else’s voice. Somebody from one of her books maybe. Clover’s always imagining a life other than our own. She wasn’t so annoying before she could read.

  I pull a face. “Mum wished.”

  “It was a g
ame, Pearl. She was playing a game for us,” Clover says, kindly now. My ten-year-old little sister, telling me I should have grown up by now and found some other way of forecasting our future than using the things that turn up in the mud.

  “Grey!” I say, looking past her. Clover runs to the edge of the platform and throws herself flat on her front, her fingers trailing down into the water. Grey nudges up to her, wanting fish.

  You shouldn’t have favourites, but Clover and I love Grey best. The round, smiling bulk of him.

  “The wishing brought Grey, didn’t it? And the others,” I say.

  Clover rolls on to her back, her head hanging over the side of the platform, yellow hair streaming into the water like beams of sunshine. She’s laughing and Grey’s prodding her. “Maybe. Maybe it did,” she says playfully.

  When Grey first came, Clover had wished for a friend. It was a couple of years ago now. She did it out of spite because we’d argued, but it was still a bona fide wish. She’d used her best treasures. Things we’d found on the flats, larking – the cracked face of an old porcelain doll, a broken comb, a swirly black marble. She’d laid them in a ring of periwinkles and left them for the tide to take, whispering out her wish to the sea. “A friend who’ll understand me,” she’d said, looking at me deliberately as she spoke.

  And that was the day they came, gliding in from beyond the prison ship, like they’d always been here.

  Clover noticed them first. She’s never forgotten that the first two mammals in my sea ledger were her spot.

  “Mermaids!” she’d yelled certainly across the deck. Dad was inside, sleeping. Even back then he’d sleep a lot. I’d been shucking oysters, so intent on the knife in my hands that I hadn’t noticed the squat little bodies surround our sea platform, breaking the surface with their triangle fins.

  “Mermaids!” Clover had screamed again, jumping up and down with delight.

  Dad had guffawed when he made it out on to the platform. “They’re not mermaids! They’re a type of cetacean. Porpoises.”

  I’d repeated the word softly. Porpoises. Harbour porpoises, Dad had said. All I really knew about were the bivalves we farm in the lantern nets under our platform, and down in the cages on the floor of the sea. I hadn’t set foot in the prison library back then.

  We weren’t sure what else might exist. I don’t think we thought anything else could, so much had been lost in the Decline.

  “Harbour porpoises?” Clover had said curiously.

  “That’s right. Sorry to disappoint you, my little legume.” Dad had used her favourite pet name and flung her up into the air. He’d had more energy then. “You and Pearl are the closest this bay will ever get to mermaids.”

  “Are they sisters, like Clover and me?” I’d asked excitedly, but Dad had shaken his head. It was a mother and a child, he’d told us, and Clover and I had gone all solemn.

  “It’s a blessing to have them back,” Dad had said, as he tucked us into our hammocks that night. It was a happy thing, but Dad’s voice had been sad. “You should be recording this, big one.” Big one is me, and because Dad doesn’t issue many instructions, and because the porpoises seemed so happy, I had started my ledger the next morning, backdating it one day for accuracy.

  Grey’s the little one, all grown up now. His mum swam on at some point, but Grey’s never gone away.

  Once I found my way into the prison library during a delivery to the ship, I found out all sorts about our new friends. Olive, a prisoner who sorts the books, found the perfect book. Cetaceans of the UK – Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises. The books in the mainland library are all new – any old ones were washed away in the floods – but the good thing about a library on a ship is that it floats. Their books may be yellow and ancient, but they survived.

  Sometimes Clover will bring back more up-to-date reading material when she goes ashore with Dad for supplies. Some pro-compound propaganda pamphlets about working your shifts, the greater good, not wasting food, loyalty to Central. Clover studies them like they’re engaging even though I can tell she’s bored. She’s much happier with the old novels I sneak back from the ship.

  Cetaceans breathe air, like we do. They’re aquatic mammals and give birth to live young. The writer of Cetaceans of the UK says harbour porpoises are shy and retiring, but ours aren’t. There’s nothing shy about porpoises when they want food. They come for the schools of fish that gather under our farm. Dad says our farm’s a veritable coral reef.

  The book says people used to call porpoises puffing pigs because of the noise they make when they breathe. I never heard a pig, but I can imagine them from hearing the porpoises.

  I can hear Grey now. Choo, choo, choo, like he’s sneezing.

  Clover strips off into her pink cotton swimsuit.

  “You can’t!” I cry aghast. “We’ve got to finish this paint coat. Storms don’t stop because it’s summer!”

  She beams. “They will if you command them to, Pearl. Can’t you wish for that? A summer of no storms?”

  “Clover! You know it isn’t like that!”

  “Can’t you wish anything you want if you leave the right offerings?” She puts her hands into a prayer sign.

  “Clover!” I repeat, though I’m already loosening the ties on my shorts.

  “Come in with me! The painting will wait. Look at that sky!”

  Clover raises her arms up above her head. She flicks me a smile as she dives down into the water, where Grey’s waiting to greet her, snorting away.

  I can’t help but smile too, looking up, looking all around us, because when you live at sea the sky’s everywhere. It’s a fifth element. And today there’s not a cloud in sight. Clover’s right, the painting can wait.

  I press the lid tight on the yellow paint pot, then I’m diving in after her, unable to ignore the sea’s call any longer.

  We swim round the platform. We swim in circles and figures of eight. Butterfly, backstroke, front crawl, breaststroke. All the ways Mum taught us to propel ourselves through the water.

  Grey doesn’t stick around for long, and nor do the others. The fish must have moved on. “Farewell, Grey. Goodbye, Smile! See you later, Salt! So long, Snort!” Clover calls.

  Dad laughed at us for not picking more eloquent names, but I think they suit the porpoises.

  We lie on our backs like starfish before diving down, pulling ourselves deeper along the rope lines of the scallop nets and mussel socks, to the oyster cages and clams at the bottom. With a big enough breath of air, we can make it right down to the seabed where there’s barely any light left.

  Some of the cages are full – crammed with big, fat shells, hardly any space between them. We need to bring them up; they’re ready for harvest.

  I gesture to Clover at the cages. She was meant to have separated these oysters out last week. She told me she had.

  I shake one of the cages pointedly and the water darkens around us. Clover pulls a funny forgive-me face and starts making her way back up to the light.

  I wait for a moment, the pressure of the sea drumming against my ears. Clover and I used to have competitions to see which of us could stay down the longest. We’d count out the seconds, holding hands, gazing into each other eyes. I learned every fleck of green in her blue irises.

  Clover’s lost interest lately. She’s always up first, wanting to surface.

  I kick my way up, after her.

  “Race you!” Clover cries, as I break the surface, and she shoots on by towards the flats. Butterfly stroke, fast, to make me laugh.

  “We have to do those cages,” I say when I reach her, sprawled languidly out on the mud. “The algae’s bad again.”

  Clover pulls a face. “Later, though? We’ll do it together, after larking.”

  I nod and take her hand to pull her up. We can never resist the flats on a day like today.

  Clover and I used to mudlark all the time with Mum. Even when she was sick, Mum would summon up the energy for larking. She said the finds gave her energy. />
  I think she was looking for the right thing. She didn’t know what it was, or at least she wasn’t able to put it into words, but maybe if it had washed up on the sand before her, that would have been the turning point. Then she’d have started to get better.

  Only it didn’t turn up, whatever it was she was looking for, and the doctor from the compound hospital came and said there was nothing left for him to do. He told us Mum ought to go to the mainland so they could better manage her condition. Only they didn’t actually mean that, they meant better manage her dying. Even though it was the land that got her sick in the first place.

  “Look, Pearl. A face.” Clover’s voice is clear as a bell.

  I tremble a fraction. We get our fair share of faces, though now it’s almost always just the bones underneath. The floods washed so many people away they’ll be washing up forever. Eventually they’ll be fossils.

  But Clover’s not found anything ghoulish. She’s sunk on her knees and is digging with her fingers.

  It’s an old doll. Plastic. The eyes have long washed away, so there are just two hollow sockets and a little snub nose, which is surprisingly intact. The doll’s got two arms but only one leg, and even that’s missing a foot. She’s in need of a mermaid’s tail. I’ll carve one out of driftwood before I send her on her way again.

  “You could paint it,” Clover says. “It would be good for your wishings.”

  She’s smiling at me sweetly and I nod, trying not to notice how she always calls them my wishings now, when they used to belong to us both.

  After years of larking you end up with too many of certain things. Mum started the wishings as a way of giving them back to the sea. We’d lay things out at low tide and wait for the water to take them, sending our wish as they went.

  In the beginning, we laid the offerings in circles, but after Mum died we got more adventurous. We found an old book in her office. Rituals, Magic, Witchcraft. It’s about white magic, or Wicca, which is magic to do good. The book’s damaged – whole pages bleached out from seawater or sun – but somehow the gaps make the surviving sections more important.