by Julia Jones
Except he wasn’t going to be there all night. It was near the top of the tide and getting dark. They knew he had school tomorrow. His books and uniform were on board. There was no chance of finishing the weekend’s homework. Monday tomorrow. They’d have to be back soon.
Donny read. And then he slept.
It was quite dark when he woke. He bumped his head on the boom as he sat up expecting to see Strong Winds’ anchor light across the water on the Suffolk side.
Nothing.
If they’d run aground the tide would have floated them off by now. If they’d had engine trouble Gold Dragon would have sailed home. If there were something the matter with the sails, she’d have used the engine.
There must have been an accident. They should never have split up. It wasn’t safe. Should he be calling the coastguard? What would he say? He hadn’t got a phone anyway. Or a portable VHF. He hadn’t any fuel for his engine and no friends nearby. Should he sail back to Shotley and ask the people in the marina office if they could help? They were open twenty-four hours. But then he might miss Strong Winds if she did come back.
He was so tired: he couldn’t decide. He ate the emergency chocolate and lay down again to think.
River Stour, Monday 16 April 2007
The next thing Donny knew was that he’d been invaded. Xanthe Ribiero was scrambling on board, calling out cheerfully to him to show a leg and she’d check it was a hairy one.
It was grey pre-dawn.
Again!
He’d thought there was an emergency. And Xanthe was making jokes ...? Donny tried to sit up and got into a complete tangle with the mainsail.
“Tucked up tight as a hermit in a whelk shell. Anna and the tribe came hollering for you hours ago but they were on the wrong side of the river and they hadn’t got a boat. Up Gallister Creek without a paddle – literally! So they called in the marines. And here I am in my war canoe.”
He disentangled himself and looked over Vexilla’s gunwale.
Xanthe’d arrived in an inflatable rubber dinghy with a couple of lightweight oars pushed through plastic rings on either side. She was already re-stowing his unfurled mainsail and shoving his shoes and rucksack at him.
“I thought you were at Weymouth.”
“All good things come to an end, Donny-man.”
“My mum? Gold Dragon? Are they ... dead?”
Now it was Xanthe who was brought up short.
“No way! They’re hove-to off the Long Sand Head. Outside territorial waters. They got done over by the bureau-rats – as Gold Dragon calls them. Some no-brainer of a paperwork problem. I didn’t really get it. Dad said it was a good thing you’re not allowed to swear in a VHF transmission or she’d have blasted them broadside.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“Dad has. Come on, Donny. Pipe to quarters! You and I are off to sea.”
She’d secured the mainsail, checked Vexilla’s mooring rope and was climbing back into her inflatable. Donny shoved his sleeping bag into the rucksack with his book and charts and scrambled after her.
He knew the Long Sand Head. It marked a shoal about fifteen miles off the coast beyond the Black Deep. Beyond the Cork Sand, the Gunfleet, the Shipwash and the Sunk. You could send yourself to sleep counting the wreck symbols in that area, thicker than flocks of sheep. Except they’d give you nightmares.
It was a good thing that the wind had dropped if they were going all that way in Xanthe’s rubber dinghy.
They weren’t, of course. The yawl, Snow Goose, was standing by, her engine running silky-soft to hold her in position as she breasted the dark ebb tide.
June smiled as Donny arrived on deck and Joshua touched him welcomingly on the shoulder. Then he and Xanthe were lifting the inflatable onto the cabin top, while June pushed the throttle forward and turned the yacht in her own length until she was slipping swiftly back down river.
Donny waited for someone to tell him what was meant to happen next.
CHAPTER SEVEN
City Lights
Xiamen, coastal Fujian, March 2007
Min hoped that his cousin would stay for the whole of the New Year holiday. He imagined saying goodbye to the village on the fifteenth night when the last of the glowing lanterns was drifting skywards. Perhaps they would take the familiar country bus down the winding roads to the market town the next morning, just as if he was starting a new school week. After that the adventure would begin.
But Chen Kai became restless as the days of festivity passed.
“You don’t know what it was like getting here,” he said. “More people are travelling by road this year because the trains are so crowded. So the traffic’s terrible and half the buses break down. We need to go soon. It’s going to be a problem getting you a ticket. Even from a scalper.”
Their journey south took sixteen hours. Twice as long as it should have done. There were three people to every double seat and people crushed into the aisles as well. No-one got off when the bus stopped – they couldn’t be sure they’d ever get on again. Kai had warned Min he’d need a bottle to pee into. Some people on the long train journeys bought adult nappies, he said.
“We all want to come home to have a holiday and see our families and then we all need to get back to the cities where we work. Chunyun – it’s the biggest migration of people on Earth.”
It felt like the loneliest as well. There were so many things Min wanted to ask but he and Kai got separated. He was pushed further down the bus until all that he could see was the back of his cousin’s head. He couldn’t see out of the window either. He was surrounded by people sleeping, people texting, people gossiping or swapping information about different jobs. There were people snacking and people being sick in plastic bags. Some older ones were sitting quietly and looking sad. Perhaps they’d left a child behind.
Min remembered his mother waving from behind the scuffed window of her bus. They’d made a special trip to town the previous week to buy a hard shell suitcase. So many hopes had been shut into that case and carried away.
He’d packed his own things in a rice sack. Just clothes, a small quilt, washing materials, pens and paper. He’d put his English textbook in but then he’d taken it out again. He wasn’t a schoolchild any more. He was a traveller.
It was night when they finally arrived in Xiamen and he so nearly lost Kai in the confusion of the bus terminal. When they came out into the city, it was as if they’d stepped into the middle of a spectacle. Buildings, taller than anything Min had ever seen, were patterned with colour: mauve and jade and scarlet and gold. A pair of searchlights sprayed yet more light into the fluorescent sky. A hotel had giant orange letters on its roof. Advertising signs hung from every other building: sky blue and acid pink, flashing silver, throbbing red and gold. It had been raining; reflected light blurred in the puddles. There were people wandering around, eating, drinking in the street. Min felt giddy.
“Is it still festival?”
“It’s tourist area and shopping streets. Lights stay on all night. Very expensive. Maybe we’ll come again and have a look. Or maybe not. Now we need to get out to Haicang.”
“That’s where you live?”
“And where I work.”
They caught a city bus across a bridge. It was long and graceful, shining. Min felt as if he was being carried across a mysterious void. Flecks of light far below.
“Mouth of Jiulong River and the deep sea port. We’re crossing between islands. Those are ships.”
Ships?
The city bus didn’t go far the other side of the bridge. There were only a few passengers left when it stopped and they were told to get off. They walked for a while along the edge of a highway then into a factory area. Most of the buildings were dark and quiet but there was faint bluish light from some of the windows.
“Opened already,” muttered Kai. He sounded anxious. “I have to leave you in the morning, little cousin. I need to get my job back.”
“Your job?”
Kai had been telling them in the village how well he was doing at work. Not stuck on the assembly line any more. He was repairing the machines. A technician now. His new factory made moulded plastic for sports equipment. All sold abroad. They were doing good business.
“Everyone got laid off before the holiday. That way the boss doesn’t have to pay us when we’re not at work. No money this month. And when we apply for our jobs again he doesn’t have to take on so many if we’re not productive.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t tell them everything at home. They don’t understand city life.”
Kai left school when he was fourteen. He said he couldn’t see the point of staying any longer. First he helped his mother on the farm and then, when he was sixteen, he moved to the city. Now his parents’ house was warm in winter and they could have medicine whenever they were ill.
They were past the factories now and into an area of apartments. These buildings were so close together that Min couldn’t see the tops. As Kai led them up a path between two blocks the lights went out.
“A power cut, that’s all we need. Looks like we’ll be finishing Grandmother’s New Year cake and eating oranges for supper.”
Min was too tired to eat. By the time they’d felt their way up twelve flights of stairs and into Kai’s apartment all he wanted to do was sleep. A Gaz light showed that there were other workers there. Kai pulled out a spare mattress. Min put his head on his sack of clothes and didn’t ask anything more.
His cousin was gone in the morning. One of the other men was there, still in his vest and eating reconstituted rice porridge from a plastic container. He offered Min some hot water with sugar in it.
“Chen Kai has gone to ask for his job back. If the boss says yes he’ll start at once. He works a twelve-hour shift so he won’t be in until this evening. He says please try not to get lost. I can show you how to let yourself in and out. You’re on your own after that. I’ve been at work all night.”
Min didn’t like to ask whether there was anything in the apartment that he could eat. Instead he ate two of Grandmother’s tea-marinated eggs and tried not to mind that Kai had finished the cake. There were still some of the oranges and rice-balls left and the ang pao, his red envelope of money, was in a belt round his waist, comfortingly close to his skin.
“Which way to the bridge?” he asked when Kai’s flatmate had taken him down to the ground floor and shown him how to manage the entry system. The bridge was the only feature he could remember from last night. That, and the wonderful lights in the shopping streets on the far side of the river.
“Half an hour over there,” said the tired worker with a large vague gesture. Then he set off up the stairs again. The electricity was back on this morning but the lifts still weren’t working.
Min stood with his back to the high-rise concrete block. He couldn’t see out. He was surrounded by tall apartment blocks. They all looked alike. His home in the village was made of wood and woven bamboo and the windows were translucent paper. It was very old fashioned. Some other houses in the village had bricks and tiles and glass but that was when there were outside wages coming home. Every spare yuan in Min’s family had been spent on his education. He had learned poems and how to write them in beautiful calligraphy. He had used them to decorate the entrance to their house, painted messages of good fortune, welcoming their neighbours and the New Year’s visitors.
There were no greetings pasted on this bleak doorway. If he moved away from it, how would he find his way back? If he didn’t move away, how would he begin the next stage of the journey that was going to lead him to the Country of the Ghosts?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Man Overboard
Thames Estuary, Monday 16 April 2007
Snow Goose hurried down the Stour and out of Harwich Harbour. They’d passed between Landguard and the Pye End buoys before the flood began helping them on their way and Joshua finally convinced Xanthe and her mother to go below and catch a couple of hours sleep.
Maggi was staying at the vicarage with Anna but the others had come straight to the yacht as soon as they’d arrived home from Weymouth. Yesterday had been a long day and there was a longer one ahead. As soon as Snow Goose had reached Strong Winds Gold Dragon was heading across the North Sea to Rotterdam and June was going with her.
Donny wrapped his hands gratefully round a mug of hot chocolate and struggled to shake the sleep out of his head as the Ribieros tried to explain.
There had been problems with the Strong Winds’ papers. Someone, somewhere, had noticed (or been tipped off) that the junk had been in England for longer than six months. Her right to remain had been challenged. Great Aunt Ellen needed to go to Rotterdam to deal with the problem as that had been her port of entry into the EU.
“Otherwise she has to go to Norway!” said Xanthe, excitedly. “As the nearest non-EU country. Horned helmets ahoy and light the beacon fires!”
Skye was going with her and needed her passport. That was what Lottie had been waving at Donny from the Pin Mill hard.
Skye also needed to say goodbye to Donny.
“What about me? Why can’t I go? I’m a good crew – and they’re my family. Strong Winds is my home.”
“You haven’t got a passport. Or if you have, Lottie couldn’t find it. She said she turned the camper van inside out, searching. Have you got one?”
Probably not. Coming to Suffolk from Yorkshire was the longest journey he’d made in his life – since he’d been carried back in Skye’s womb from the Northlands, wherever that was.
“There’s also the small matter of school. June’s coming back to England as soon as they reach Rotterdam but your great aunt may need to stay there until she can get legal advice from Edward. He’s somewhere in the Baltic, pike-fishing. And you know your Care Plan says that you mustn’t miss a day.”
“Midshipmen in Nelson’s navy did very well without school,” Xanthe grumbled. “Anyway I’m about to be on GCSE study leave. If I miss a day or two no-one’s going to mind much.”
This was clearly a row that had been running for some hours. Joshua muttered something rather firm about the discipline in Nelson’s navy being a bit of an advance on Gallister High and June reminded her daughter that she’d only been allowed on board Snow Goose on the condition that she went to sleep as soon as they’d collected Donny.
“You are going to school later this morning whether you like it or not. One more word and I’ll radio the harbour pilots to take you in custody as a stowaway.”
“Or an Excessive Baggage,” added her father.
Sighing, Xanthe followed her mother down the companionway and closed the varnished doors behind them.
“What about you?” Joshua asked Donny. “There’s Maggi’s berth if you’d like to get your head down. Our course from here is straightforward: 137 degrees or thereabouts to the South Cork, then north five or ten degrees to counteract the tide. June drove back from Dorset last night so I took some time out then. I’ll call you if I need a hand.”
“I’m okay. Really. I slept hours on Vexilla.”
He’d have to be a narcoleptic zombie not to want to go sea in the early hours of a Monday morning, when most shore-dwellers were still unconscious in their darkened bedrooms.
“I still don’t understand what happened to Strong Winds.”
“They were ambushed,” said Joshua, checking the compass course and settling himself comfortably into the windward corner of the cockpit. “That’s what my daughters would say and, for once, I don’t think they’d be over-dramatising. A Maritime Authority launch stopped them on their way back to the Stour and asked to see their Passage Plan. Everyone knows you don’t need a written plan if you’re staying within the harbour – which technically they were. But someone had been watching them on Saturday, apparently, and had seen Strong Winds go straight out to sea.”
“That would have been Gold Dragon stretching her wings. She gets so fed up having to sit around on the mooring the whole time because of
me and SS and the Care Plan.”
“Naturally. However, the officers decided to make an issue of it. I can’t imagine what had got into them. They demanded the Ship’s Papers and discovered that the import licence had only been valid for six months. Oh, and your great-aunt had no proof of Strong Winds’ VAT status.”
“VAT? But Strong Winds was built in China – ages ago. I don’t think they had VAT then.”
Donny’s brain hurt. It was a bit like the day he and his family had got trapped in a meeting with Flint and Toxic and Creepy Tony who kept slinging regulations at them as if he was counsel for the prosecution instead of someone who was meant to be protecting children.
“They threatened to impound the junk! It was utterly preposterous!” Even Joshua, tall, calm, steady-handed Joshua began to splutter. “I’ve already sent an email to the legal department at the RYA.”
Oh, okay, Donny’d got it now. This attack had Inspector Jake Flint’s slime trails smeared all over it. Whoever had actually been on board the Maritime Authority vessel when she hove up to challenge Strong Winds, the fat policeman would have been lurking in the background; bribing or bullying, abusing other people’s official powers for his own crooked ends.
Being grabbed by Toxic at the end of Friday afternoon must have been part of their plan. All that stuff about sending out ‘mai team’. She’d known that Edward was away. So either her lot would have come and made trouble if Strong Winds had stayed in Gallister Bay, or Flint’s lot if she moved. And Toxic would have guessed that the prospect of Flint’s Boxing for the Fatherless would have made him want to do a runner if the threat of fumigation hadn’t been enough.
She was meant to do welfare but her skill was the exact opposite. She made bad worse.
Lottie had told them how Toxic had visited her in hospital when she’d just given birth to Vicky. She had been sore and exhausted. Bill was in custody, the other children on the At Risk list and everything about to be taken by debt collectors. No-one had visited her with cards and flowers; no-one had helped her run a comb through her tangled hair and propped her up on the pillows for a celebratory photo. The nurses were busy. She was on her own.