A Talent for Trouble

by Natasha Farrant

  “It is the right road.” Jesse shoved the map at the others. Alice, sensing his irritation, stared at it politely. Fergus yawned. “This is the bridge, and this is the stream, and this is where we are now. So we walk along here for about two hundred meters—Come on, walk!” They jumped, and followed as he set off with his nose in the map. “And there’s a hump in the road, and we go over the hill, and we come to a gate, and we go through that and there’s a path into these woods and . . . Ah.”

  In his life, Jesse had never felt so mortified.

  Which, in a way, turned out to be a good thing, because the other two noticed, and were sorry.

  Twenty-Five

  Somewhere a Lark

  They had indeed come to a gate, and there was indeed a path, and there were woods, but there was also a big wooden sign saying KEEP OUT in big red letters, with another sign underneath in only slightly smaller letters saying CONTROL YOUR DOG OR WE WILL SHOOT IT. On the other side of the gate, a herd of deer were grazing in a field surrounded by an electric fence.

  “Doesn’t it show private property on the map?” asked Fergus.

  “It’s meant to be a public footpath.” Jesse could have cried with the unfairness of it. “Sometimes landowners don’t respect the rules. We’ll just have to go around the field.”

  But the field stretched on forever.

  “Or we could just go over the gate,” suggested Alice. “Like we’re meant to.”

  “The sign says Keep Out!”

  “We don’t have a dog,” said Fergus.

  “No, but they have guns.” Jesse sighed. “It has to be the field. Look, there’s a path. Sort of. Let’s go.”

  Faced with their first real setback, the dynamics between the children shifted. Jesse, forced to accept he was not invincible, realized that the other two were not quite as hopeless as he had thought. Fergus, seeing Jesse’s genuine distress about the closed footpath, became less peevish. Alice stopped daydreaming and focused on the task at hand.

  They set off, Jesse first, then Alice, then Fergus. They did not complain, not even when the sort-of path turned out not to be a path at all but a sheep track even worse than the one by the stream. When their shoulders brushed the overgrown ferns that edged it, releasing clouds of midges, which got into their hair and clothes and up their noses, they just pulled their jackets close and their hoods up. The sun beat down and they roasted and the midges got in anyway, but they never so much as squeaked.

  Roots tripped them. Brambles tore at their hands and clothes. Jesse, looking at the compass, walked into a tree and cut his temple. Fergus was devoured by the intrusive midges, and Alice got a rash where her rucksack rubbed her shoulders. But when, twenty minutes later, the fern forest spat them out into the open—bloody, puffy, and raw—they felt like a team.

  For now.

  “The good news,” Jesse said, “is that after this, it should be open country.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “We’ve walked about three miles in the wrong direction.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  Jesse held out the compass. “We go that way, to the sea.”

  Empty moorland, crisscrossed by streams and dotted with clumps of heather, stretched before them toward a horizon of hills.

  “Are you sure?” Fergus asked.

  “Fergus!” Alice scolded, holding back a smile. “The compass never lies!”

  They passed a stream and filled their water bottles, and while they waited for their purifying tablets to dissolve, they soaked T-shirts in the current and wrapped them round their heads to cool down.

  “We look like the three kings,” said Fergus. “You know, from Christmas? They crossed mountains and deserts with gifts.”

  “Two kings,” corrected Alice. “One queen.”

  Jesse took a swig of chlorinated water.

  “If I had a gift,” he said, “it would be lemonade, made with real lemons the way my dad does in the summer.”

  “If I had a gift,” said Alice, sniffing delicately at her shirt, “it would be a bath.”

  “If I had a gift,” said Fergus, yawning, “it would be a bed.”

  And they lay side by side and looked at the sky, and thought how lovely it was.

  Then up they got and on they trudged, across the plain and up a first hill and then a second and a third, bending under the weight of their rucksacks. Their heels and toes blistered, their muscles ached, and their stomachs rumbled. It seemed quite impossible that this morning had begun at school, and that tomorrow would take them somewhere else again. They walked in a trance, in which only now existed, up and up, one foot in front of the other until—finally—they reached the top, and a path that Jesse said was the one they were meant to be on all along, and . . . Oh!

  Sometimes the beauty of the world . . .

  The major was right. It could leave you breathless.

  The landscape on this side of the hill was different again. The ground falling away beneath them was lush and green, dotted with copses of trees and clumps of blazing yellow gorse. Flowers grew in the grass, golden buttercups and purple thistles, wild hyacinths and wispy cotton grass. Rabbits scattered before them as they walked, white tails bobbing.

  Somewhere, a lark was singing.

  “Look!” said Fergus.

  Far below, a white crescent of beach. On the horizon, purple islands rising out of the mists. And as far as they could see, beyond the beach and the islands, blue, blue, blue.

  They had found the sea.

  * * *

  It took them another hour to reach the beach, but walking felt easy now that they could see where they were going. The light on the water, playing tricks, turned the sea gold as they came down the hill. The beach—not sand, but tiny crushed shells—sparkled. As they reached sea level, they passed a brook, falling the last few meters in a rainbow waterfall where sparrows bathed. They saw a copse of trees and, tucked among them, an old fisherman’s hut with no door and only half a roof.

  “Yes!” Jesse fist-pumped the air. “Exactly what it says on the itinerary! Who’s the best map reader EVER? WHO? WHO?”

  He strode into the cottage through the space where the door would have been, and out again into a walled patch of grass that had once been the garden.

  “This will be a perfect camping spot. Right, team! Let’s pitch the tent! Who wants to dig a fire pit? We need water for . . . Guys?”

  The others had not followed him into the garden.

  “Alice? Fergus?”

  Nothing. Jesse felt a sudden, unreasonable fear that they had left him.

  “Guys?”

  “We’re here!”

  His jaw dropped as Alice ran out of the cottage in a swimsuit, followed by Fergus in a startling pair of royal-blue polka-dotted boxer shorts.

  The swimsuit, by the way, should have been a clue—why would Alice have packed one, if she didn’t know she was going to be near a beach? But Jesse didn’t think about that till later. For now, he was too busy panicking.

  “Come swimming!” Alice cried.

  “Swimming?” They were mad, Jesse thought. They would die, or at least get hypothermia! And they were hours from anywhere!

  “Come on!” Alice insisted. “We’ll wait, but hurry because I’m getting cold!”

  “But it’ll be even colder in the water!”

  “STOP BEING SUCH A FUSSYPANTS, JESSE, AND GET YOUR CLOTHES OFF!” yelled Fergus.

  They pounced, a two-pronged attack, ignoring his cries of protest. They grabbed his hands and dragged him toward the shore, and when he saw they weren’t going to give in, he gave up and ran toward the water with them, shedding his clothes along the beach as he went.

  All together, they ran into the sea. Jesse screamed as the cold hit him. Fergus almost immediately turned blue.

  “It’s like ice made of diamonds,” Alice shouted. “I’m going under.”

  She dived into a wave, and then of course they had to do the same. The cold stole their breath and clamped thei
r brains. Every pore of their skin tingled; every hair on their heads stood on end. Afterwards, to warm up, they chased each other through the shallows, kicking up water and shouting, with no one to hear them but the gulls, and there was no place for plots and Challenges, only laughter.

  The beauty of the world will do that for you.

  Twenty-Six

  The North Star

  Alice loved it here, she loved it. But the major could have told her that just as fear is a part of courage, so loss is a part of love. Alice knew only that she had set out from school thinking of the old life that lay ahead, but now that she was gone all she could think about was the new life she had left behind. And despite the euphoria of finishing the walk and the wild joy of the swim, she felt suddenly and unaccountably afraid.

  Once they were dry, with warm fleeces pulled over salt-tight skin, Fergus—feeling guilty about what was to come—insisted that he and Alice would put up the tent, leaving Jesse free to fish off the rocks at the end of the beach.

  “No,” Jesse said. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “We are honestly not as useless as you think,” Fergus said. “Go and fish! Enjoy yourself!”

  Jesse, feeling very daring, went fishing.

  The bendy poles that held up the tent did not bend in quite the way Fergus thought they should, and there was a bad moment when Alice realized she had forgotten to pack the tent pegs, but with a little prodding and coaxing and improvising with sticks, the tent went up—a little flappier than it should have been and not quite straight, but definitely up.

  “Hurrah!” Fergus was delighted. “I said we could do it! Oh, and look—Jesse’s caught a fish!”

  At the end of the beach, Jesse, quite wild with excitement, was performing a sort of victory dance in his boxer shorts and orange waterproof jacket, waving a large silver fish. Fergus waved energetically back.

  “Wave, Alice! Poor guy, even I feel sorry for him, having to deal with us all day. Alice! Why aren’t you waving?”

  Alice, lost in thought, was gazing across the sea at the islands. She started as he prodded her in the ribs. “Sorry, what?”

  “Jesse! He caught a fish! Wave! You’re miles away!”

  “I was just . . . Fergus, are we mad?”

  “To be running off to find your dad?” he asked cheerfully. “We’re more than mad, we’re insane! Plus, it’s really unfair to Jesse.”

  “Be serious!”

  They were walking along the beach now, above the high-tide mark. Fergus reached down to pick up a piece of driftwood and considered his answer.

  “Where do you suppose this came from?” he asked.

  “I don’t know! America? Fergus!”

  “Or Greenland?” he said. “Or Norway, or Sweden? Or Russia! I think, tonight, we should make the biggest bonfire any of us has ever seen, and burn it.”

  “Fergus, what are you going on about?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest. Nonsense, probably. I suppose I just mean we’re here now, so let’s enjoy it.”

  And they did.

  They cooked Jesse’s fish over a small fire and agreed that, even with all the sand they ate with it, it was the best meal they’d ever had. Three seals swam into the bay as they were eating, three sleek black heads bobbing in the quiet waves just offshore, with silvery whiskers and bright, curious eyes. They put on a show as the three humans watched, diving and bobbing back up, turning lazily in the water, then disappeared as suddenly as they’d come, into waves turned indigo and gold by the endlessly setting summer sun. The children ran down to the water to look for the seals. The seals did not return, but Jesse swore that he had seen a flipper, waving.

  When they were sure the seals were gone, they gathered armfuls of driftwood and built the cooking fire into Fergus’s giant bonfire, which burned in a great blaze on the sand, the salt on the wood catching in a shower of blue sparks.

  “Do you know what the French word for bonfire is?” Fergus asked.

  “What?” asked Jesse.

  “Feu de joie,” said Fergus. “It means ‘fire of joy.’”

  “Fire of joy,” said Jesse. “I like that.”

  Across the sea, the evening mist was rising, shrouding the bruised islands. The air grew cold, even by the fire. Stars came out. Jesse pointed at the brightest one.

  “The North Star,” he said. “The one sailors use to find their way home.”

  Home. Alice felt a pang as she thought of the major, his hand on her head like a blessing. This is your home, he had said. What would he say if he found out about their plan? Suddenly, it felt impossible that he would not. She made herself think of Barney instead. She tried to picture herself running toward him across a beach like this one, throwing herself into his arms so that he could swing her high into the air the way he always used to do when she was little. He was probably by some quay right now, getting into a boat, sailing, surrounded by seals, across a star-strewn sea toward the purple islands to wait for her. But for once, her imagination failed her.

  The problem was, she wasn’t little anymore.

  In that moment, she wanted more than anything to abandon her plans. But then she reminded herself of something else the major had said: To be fearless, we must first banish our fears, and to achieve that, we must look them in the face.

  She was terrified—not of the trip itself, but of what she might find at the end. And she didn’t know if she was being brave or reckless, but she knew she had to see this through.

  “That swim! And those stars! The bonfire! The fish—the seals!” The ceiling of the flappy, pegless tent lurched dramatically over where Jesse lay on his back, staring straight at it, but he was too drunk with the day’s events to even notice. “Guys, this is awesome!”

  “Long day tomorrow, Jesse,” said Fergus, with a sidelong glance at Alice. “Try to get some sleep.”

  “I can’t,” Jesse confessed. “It feels like my head’s exploding. I mean, I knew orienteering was going to be great, but this is amazing.”

  “It’s not the orienteering that’s amazing, it’s the beach.” Fergus yawned. “Orienteering’s just a load of maps.”

  “Just a load of maps?” Jesse flipped onto his side and stared at Fergus, astounded. “Just a load of maps? Maps are like . . .” He searched carefully for the right words. “Maps are what make the world fit together. You can go anywhere you want if you have a map. Which means . . .”

  He paused, astounded by a sudden realization.

  “What?” asked Fergus.

  “Which means that maybe,” Jesse said carefully, “if you can go anywhere you want, you can be anything you want as well.”

  Alice, who had been listening in silence, asked, “What do you want to be?”

  “Not a violinist,” said Jesse.

  “Well, no,” Fergus agreed.

  Alice frowned, then raised her eyebrows, as if to ask, What about you, then?

  “Oh, I’ll be a genius,” Fergus said. “I just need to decide what sort.”

  “I’ll be a writer.” Even as she said it, Alice knew that just saying a writer wasn’t enough. It was beginning to dawn on her that there are as many different sorts of writers as there are different sorts of stories. Sooner or later, she was going to have to choose which stories she wanted to tell, and how.

  “Jesse?” asked Fergus. “You haven’t said.”

  “I don’t know! Something outside.”

  “You should be an explorer,” Alice said quietly. “You’ve got a real talent for it.”

  Fergus laughed. “Spoken like a true Locker.”

  An explorer! The more Jesse thought about it, the more he liked it.

  “All right,” he said. “I will.”

  Lost in thoughts of their brilliant futures, they fell asleep, lulled by the song of the sea, while farther north, on a shadowy quay, Barney Mistlethwaite looked around for a boat to steal.

  Twenty-Seven

  The Great Explorer

  If you are planning to ask someone to do something a
s a favor to you that they really don’t want to do, you’d best have a convincing argument ready. And if you are embarking on a highly illicit expedition, you’d do well to have a clear idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your plan. It will help when you encounter those inevitable obstacles.

  Jesse and his orienteering skills were the great strength of Alice and Fergus’s plan. His absolute determination to win the Orienteering Challenge and his well-known strict adherence to school rules were its fatal weaknesses.

  On the morning of their second day, Jesse emerged from a long, deep sleep in excellent spirits, which were lifted even further when he discovered that Alice and Fergus had risen before him, that they had made tea and porridge, and that the porridge was actually good. Even the weather, which had turned cold and gray overnight, could not dampen his mood.

  “Not such a long walk today,” he said, shoveling down his breakfast. “Two hours south along the coast, I reckon, then three hours inland, but all on tracks and roads. Add in a stop for lunch, and a couple of rests, that’s six hours, plus we’ve got to pack up here and the weather’s not . . . What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Tell him,” said Fergus.

  And so the second betrayal began.

  Alice fed Jesse the same unconvincing lies she had told Fergus—Barney and the castle where she was to meet him, the island paradise he longed to show her, the puffins . . . Jesse’s reaction went from bafflement—“Island? Castle? Puffins? What are you talking about?”—to hurt—“You’ve known all this time and didn’t tell me?”—to flat refusal—“I’m not going, and I’ll tell school.”

  “Please, Jesse,” said Alice. “We need you.”

  “Need me?”

  “You’re the best orienteer. A great orienteer.”

  “Don’t try and flatter me! How long have you been plotting this?”

  “Not long,” lied Alice.

  “Ages,” admitted Fergus.

  “Why are you doing this?” demanded Jesse.

  “I do wonder, sometimes,” said Fergus. “But it’s important to Alice.”