A Talent for Trouble

by Natasha Farrant

  “Where have you been?” he shouted at the others. “Help me!”

  Fergus crumpled to his knees. Alice tried to pull him up. He moaned and curled up in a ball in the wet sand. Jesse dropped his stones and ran toward them.

  “Get up!” Alice shouted at Fergus (she may have kicked him a little). “GET UP!”

  “What happened?” cried Jesse.

  “I think he’s got food poisoning!”

  “What? But he hasn’t eaten anything!”

  “Just help me, Jesse!”

  Together, Alice and Jesse hauled Fergus off the ground, then turned toward the tent . . .

  “Oh no,” said Jesse. “Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .”

  The tent was gone.

  The weight of their three rucksacks had prevented it from flying very far. But a strong squall had inflated the fabric like a sail, dragged it across the campsite, and flung it in a sodden heap against the wall.

  Jesse let go of Fergus and ran. Alice, after a moment’s hesitation, went after him. Fergus, left alone, doubled over and retched.

  “How bad is it?” shouted Alice.

  “Bad!”

  The tent was wedged into the wall, the guy ropes tangled around the rungs of the gate. Alice and Jesse tugged and pulled, picked at knots with frozen fingers. Part of the fabric had caught on a rusty rung. As Jesse struggled to wrestle it off, another squall slapped it across his face. Even in the gale, they heard the sound of fabric ripping.

  They had to face the truth.

  No one was ever going to sleep in it again.

  They were alone, far from home, on an island, in a storm, with water running down their necks, through their clothes, and into their boots. Nobody knew where they were, and they were scared.

  For a few seconds, which felt much longer, nobody said anything. Then Fergus sneezed, and Jesse shook himself and hauled the rucksacks from the folds of the ruined tent.

  “We’ll have to go back to the village,” Jesse said. “We’ll ask for help at the pub.”

  It was the end, and they all knew it. No pub landlord would take in three lost, drenched children without asking questions. The adventure was over before it had really begun, the Challenge was lost, Barney would not be met on his island. Of the three, Alice felt the regret the keenest, but all their hearts were breaking.

  Wearily, silently, the runaways turned back along the road. Jesse shouldered his own rucksack and Fergus’s. Alice carried hers. Between them, they supported Fergus. They stopped at the entrance of the campsite to put the tent in the trash. It wouldn’t fit. Jesse swore.

  “Just leave it,” said Alice.

  “And have it blow into the sea and get eaten by some poor whale, or strangle a dolphin?” asked Jesse savagely. “I don’t think so.”

  A jag of lightning tore open the sky. A rumble of thunder responded. There was a shriek, and a terrible splintering sound. A shadow rushed toward them.

  A hundred meters ahead, a tree thumped across the road, exactly where they would have been if they had not stopped.

  For a few moments, again, nobody said a word. Then, shaking, Jesse said, “We’ll have to walk around it.”

  “No!” Alice put out a hand to hold him back. “The rain! Remember when we got stuck on the orienteering exercise? Look at the ground! The track’s almost a river. Those are marshes around us, Jesse, we’ll sink!”

  “WELL, WHAT, THEN?” Jesse yelled.

  Another flash of lightning. For a few seconds, the silhouette of the house they had passed earlier appeared, darkly lit against the sky.

  “There!” Alice shouted, and half ran, half stumbled toward it.

  Thirty-One

  Mega-Super-Fun

  Calva. That was the name of the house, painted in white on a black sign nailed to the wooden gate. The three staggered up a short unpaved drive to a small porch and hammered on the front door.

  Nobody came.

  “What now?” asked Alice.

  “Let’s look round the back,” said Jesse.

  Still supporting Fergus, they walked through a tangled garden to a lawn overlooked by large sash windows.

  “HELLO? HELLO?”

  The rain fell harder. Still nobody came.

  “No locks,” said Jesse, pressing his face to one of the windows. “And the catch looks old. Stand back.”

  The others watched, astonished, as he seized the handles of the upper sash and yanked it downward. Nothing happened. He yanked it again—and again—and again. The flimsy catch cracked and gave. Jesse pulled open the window.

  “We’re in!” He grinned. Then, seeing the others stare, “What?”

  “Where did you learn to do that?” asked Alice.

  “I didn’t! I mean, it was obvious. Wasn’t it? Oh God, I’m a housebreaker!”

  Fergus said, “You are officially no longer Captain Fussypants,” and vomited into a flower bed.

  One by one, they climbed through the window into a large room with stone floors and thick curtains and sofas arranged before a stove and bookshelves lining the walls. It was, if anything, colder than outside, with the damp and musty smell of a house that has been closed for too long. Fergus sneezed again. A sour, fetid smell reached their nostrils.

  “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I couldn’t hold it in. The oyster’s coming out the other end now.”

  The living room opened onto a stone passageway, with a door into an old-fashioned farmhouse kitchen, at the end of which they found a utility room with a shower, a washing machine, a tumble dryer, and—thankfully—another door to a toilet. Jesse shoved Fergus inside.

  “Do your worst,” he said. “I’ll get the shower working.”

  It is surprising how quickly you can adapt to a life of crime when you are desperate. At first, Alice and Jesse tiptoed around the house, hardly daring to touch anything. Little by little, as Calva revealed its marvels, they grew bolder. Jesse found a hot-water switch. He and Alice washed away the worst of the mud and sand and poop and vomit with cold water. Then, once it had heated up, they all showered again for ages. They put their dirty clothes in the washing machine and the clean ones in the tumble dryer with their sleeping bags, and they found bathrobes in the rooms upstairs to wear in the meantime. They had no idea how to make the radiators work, but there were piles of logs by the stove. Shameless now, Jesse built up a fire, and he and Alice made a bed for Fergus in front of it on one of the sofas, with duvets taken from the bedrooms and hot-water bottles found in another bathroom upstairs, and stole tea from the kitchen, brewed it, and made him drink it, spoonful by spoonful, until his teeth stopped chattering. When Fergus had warmed up, Jesse heated a tin of beans and sausages for himself and Alice, with a tin of peaches and one of custard for dessert, all also stolen, while Fergus drank yet more tea and observed that he would probably never eat again.

  “But I don’t mind,” he said. “I used to think that food was an essential source of happiness, but right now I find that not being rained on while trees crash down around you and your body empties itself from every orifice is enough.”

  Jesse snorted and said they were all relieved about that, and that tomorrow they would try to find a doctor if he was still ill.

  “I tried to call, but the telephone line isn’t working. Nor is the radio. But they’ll probably be all right again tomorrow. If they’re not, I’ll go into the village.”

  “And tell them we broke into a house?”

  “They’ll understand.” Jesse sounded uncertain. “We should probably call school too.”

  The others stared at him, appalled.

  “But we’re going to the island tomorrow!” cried Alice.

  “Alice, Fergus is green!”

  “I’m not as green as I was,” Fergus argued. There was absolutely no way he was going to let the plan fail because of his parents’ habit of eating raw wild shellfish. “I’m getting less green by the minute. Jesse! We’ve survived a giant storm and a poisonous oyster and that long, long walk. What else could go wrong? This is su
per-fun, isn’t it? I think it’s super-fun, and I’ve just been leaking from my bum and my mouth at the same time.”

  Alice’s gaze turned from horrified to pleading.

  “It is fun,” Jesse admitted.

  “Super-fun,” Fergus corrected.

  “Mega-super-fun.” Jesse smiled.

  “So we’re all agreed?” Fergus insisted. “We’re not going to the doctor, or calling school, or doing anything stupid like that? We’re carrying on with the plan?”

  Alice nodded vigorously.

  “As long as Fergus is better,” Jesse warned.

  “Oh, I will be better, my friend. I will be one hundred percent absolutely better.”

  It felt like a step too far to use the bedrooms, so they all lay in their sleeping bags in front of the fire, feeling drowsy but still too full of the day to sleep.

  “Do you remember the first time we met?” Fergus yawned. “You would never have thought, would you, that it would all lead to this?”

  “I’m not that surprised,” Alice said. “You’re always getting into trouble, and Jesse—”

  “Jesse never gets into trouble—until today, that is, when he’s gotten into more trouble than in his entire life. You could never have guessed Jesse would do this.”

  “Thanks for making me sound so interesting,” said Jesse.

  “What I was going to say, before you interrupted me, is that Jesse is always looking after people.” Alice turned to smile at him. “Remember when you shared your picnic with me on the train?”

  Jesse smiled back. Of course he remembered! Euston, his brothers, the first time they’d met—it felt like a lifetime ago. He saw himself again, bowing to the door in his berth, plucking up the courage to explain to her the truth about his peeing habits. “I can’t believe I was so embarrassed,” he said without thinking, then cursed himself when Fergus asked, “What were you embarrassed about?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was silly.”

  “What was it?”

  “I said, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It really doesn’t, Fergus,” murmured Alice.

  “But I want to know! We’re a team! We don’t have secrets!”

  “ONCE WHEN I WAS FIVE MY BROTHERS TICKLED ME AND I PEED IN MY PANTS!” A shocked silence greeted his words. “Sorry,” Jesse mumbled. “It’s just that sometimes Fergus is so annoying.” They laughed so hard they nearly wept, even Jesse. To be honest, they laughed so hard, they all nearly peed. In fact Fergus did pee, just a little bit, though he wouldn’t admit it. He’d released enough embarrassing fluids for one day.

  It felt good, the laughter, after the day they’d had.

  Thirty-Two

  Issue a Full Description

  No one could remember a storm like it at Stormy Loch. Wind howled through the pass and tore a trail of destruction through the woods. Tiles flew off the roof of the boathouse.

  The loch growled darkly.

  Inside the school, Matron threw economy to the wind and made emergency hot chocolate. And high in his tower, the major spoke on the telephone to Madoc at the youth hostel at Grigaich.

  “I’ve collected almost all the groups,” Madoc said. “There’s room for all of them to squeeze in here.”

  “When you say ‘almost’ . . .”

  Madoc winced. “I’m afraid the final group never arrived at their site. They were actually meant to be camping a few miles from here tonight, and should have come through the village, but I’ve asked everywhere and no one has seen them. Dr. Csintalan and Professor Lawrence have traced their route as far as they can, but there’s no sign of them. I’ve had to call the police.”

  “Which group is it?”

  “Fergus Mackenzie, Alice Mistlethwaite, and Jesse Okuyo.”

  Well, well, thought the major. Jesse, Fergus, and Alice. Why was he not surprised? He had wondered about the wisdom of putting those three together—two trouble-prone children and one badly in need of breaking a few rules. But he had thought they might help one another. Of course, there was nothing to say they weren’t doing so, he reflected as thunder rattled his window and the terrified kittens shot under the sofa. It was only a bit of weather . . . Not exactly a war zone. Another crash of thunder rolled in, and he was reminded that weather can be as dangerous as any enemy. More dangerous sometimes, he thought, remembering a flood in Southeast Asia, an Australian desert fire . . .

  “The only potential sighting we have is from a ferryman who took three children to Lumm,” said Madoc. “But he thought they were French.”

  “French!”

  “Yes, sir. Two boys and a girl, in orange waterproofs.”

  “What the blazes are they doing on Lumm? Oh, never mind that! Can you get over there?”

  “Not tonight, sir. I’ve asked. No boats going out in this weather.”

  The major glanced out the window. “And I doubt I’ll get very far either, even in the Land Rover. All right, Madoc. I’ll call their families, and then I’ll get to you as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I want the police and the coast guard informed and briefed. Issue a full description. Someone must have seen them.”

  The rain lashed and the wind swept. All over western Scotland, families locked doors and bolted windows and gathered to tell stories. Livestock huddled under trees, birds clung to their nests. From a crowded youth hostel in a small village, Madoc made his calls, and on a windswept coast, Barney Mistlethwaite listened to the sea roar. At an old-fashioned country hotel on Lumm, a small woman dressed in black paced about her room.

  In a garden, in a stolen house, three exhausted runaways slept.

  What else could go wrong? Fergus had asked.

  Quite a lot, my friend. Quite a lot indeed.

  Thirty-Three

  It’s That Global Warming

  Alice woke with a start, certain that she was being watched, and looked fearfully toward the windows, pale in the light of dawn. No one was there. Still she could not shake the feeling. Her nightmare of the empty hallway had returned in the night and left her anxious. When she remembered that today was the day she was to meet Barney, her heart raced even faster.

  She checked the time. It was half past five. The boat for Nish left in two hours. Jesse had set an alarm for six. There was no way she could sleep again, or even lie still. Careful not to wake the others, she slid out of her sleeping bag and, taking it with her, went into the utility room to use the bathroom and gather her dry clothes into her rucksack.

  And there, at the bottom of her pack, nestling among her socks, was Barney’s parcel.

  This is not, I’m afraid, the moment when you find out what’s inside. Be patient—I promise you’ll find out soon. For now, though, Alice just felt the parcel, as she had in her room at school, and tried once again to guess its contents. She did not allow herself to ask why she wasn’t allowed to open a parcel addressed to her, or to wonder why Barney, who never wrote so much as a letter, had gone to the trouble of sending it by mail. She knew only that her tummy was so full of butterflies, she felt almost sick.

  It was nearly six o’clock. She went back into the living room. The boys were both still deeply asleep. Jesse was on his front, snoring, but Fergus lay on his back. She tiptoed over to look at him. Even in the semi-darkness, she could see that he was still very pale, with bruised smudges under his eyes.

  What if he wasn’t well enough to travel? Jesse had said they wouldn’t go. Alice didn’t think she could bear that.

  Suddenly, without thinking or weighing up the consequences or all the other things you are supposed to do before making a momentous decision, she made up her mind.

  Very carefully, she retrieved Jesse’s phone and turned off his alarm, then went back to the utility room, where she dressed as quickly and quietly as she could. She picked up her rucksack. There was a key hanging by the back door. She let herself out, closed the door quietly behind her, and slipped, quite alone, into the garden.

  The wind had calmed but the rain had not, and she was glad for her school waterproofs. T
he air smelled of earth and damp, and the road and surrounding fields were slick with water. She came to the fallen tree and skirted it, watching every step, keeping her hand on the trunk for safety in case the ground turned into a bog and she sank. She tried not to think of Jesse and Fergus, and their reaction when they woke to find her gone. Already, guilt was sitting heavy alongside the butterflies in her stomach.

  She arrived at the quay with half an hour to spare and stood by the water’s edge to wait, watching the rise and fall of the waves. These clouds, the low mist, the dark and stormy sea . . . It occurred to her that she still had no idea in which direction Nish lay. Jesse would know, of course, but she didn’t want to think about him. She turned her mind instead to Barney, wondering if he was already on Nish, or on his way, or even—the thought struck her like a thunderbolt—about to get on the same boat as her?

  She heard footsteps—someone was coming, and now her heart was in her mouth as she imagined . . .

  “All right, lass?” It was not Barney, but an old bearded man in heavy oilskins. Alice tried to steady her breathing.

  “I’m waiting for the boat to Nish,” she told him.

  “Waiting for a boat?” The old man shook and his chest wheezed. He seemed to think she was hilarious. “There’s no boat to Nish today, lass, nor to anywhere, not even a ferry to the mainland, not with the sea the way she is out there. Did you not hear the storm in the night?”

  “N-no boat at all?” stammered Alice.

  “It’s that global warming, they say,” the old man rambled. “Weather getting worse and worse, and oceans rising, and—”

  “Until when?” Alice demanded. “Until when are there no boats?”

  The old man sniffed at the interruption. “Maybe tomorrow?”

  “But I have to go today!”

  “Well, you can’t.” The old man narrowed his eyes. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”

  Suddenly she realized how suspicious she must look—a girl out alone on a school day, in the driving rain.