by Julia Jones
He felt a bit shaky as he said that. He hadn’t even realised that the sea-cook had only one leg until he saw it torn away from him.
Hoi Fung had dragged himself up into the container café. Min had pulled the rear doors shut as if they were closed for the day. He’d picked up a couple of the chairs and lit a lamp. Hoi Fung was drinking home-brewed rice wine.
“I didn’t keep the money. I left it with Ai Qin to help others return home to China.”
“People like my mother?”
“It’s possible, but you don’t know where she’s working and we’ve no more time to wait. Those men will be back and they’ve seen you. You’ll have to travel now. My network will help – if it’s not been broken. You get to Suffolk and you find Ai Qin at the Floating Lotus. Then you ask her to take you to the Dragon ...”
“Who’s he?”
Tigers and Dragons! This was beginning to sound like one of Grandmother’s fireside tales. Except that Hoi Fung’s breath was rasping where the attackers had kicked his ribs. His face was swollen, one eye shut and his artificial leg was crushed into the dirt.
Min was bruised and aching too.
“Jin Lóng, Gold Dragon as she is called in English – or Hai Lóng, dragon of the sea – was trained by the greatest of the Chinese pirates, Madame Li Choi San. But Jin Lóng never fought for gain. She was a legend of my boyhood – the Englishwoman who helped fugitives. Even against her own country’s ships. Then she took a new name and sailed round the world. There is no-one else for whom I would have done this. You must go to Jin Lóng. And you must go now. I’m sorry for your cousin but it’s best you don’t go back to him. We’ll leave tonight from the new port.”
“Are you coming with me? To the Country of the Ghosts?”
Min wouldn’t be afraid at all if he and Hoi Fung could travel together.
“No, my friend. You saw those men. I put us both in danger. I will see you into the care of an old sea-scorpion. He sails tonight for Rotterdam. It’s far from here but near to Suffolk. That is Ai Qin’s province and also the new home of Jin Lóng. She is a powerful lady. I’m sure she will protect you.”
“But what about you?”
“I am a falling leaf. It’s time I returned to the root.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Defoe
Erewhon Parva Vicarage, Wednesday 18 April 2007
A single dream-catcher, cobwebbily suspended over the sliding door, reminded Donny of the summer when this camper van had been his and Skye’s home. Maybe he should move in again? But Wendy and Gerald had assumed that he’d be using his old bedroom in the vicarage and someone had even managed to organise him a temporary bus pass so he could travel to and from school with Anna. That must have been Lottie because they’d have had to pay for it. He hadn’t spent any time in the camper since he’d helped Sandra, the social worker, collect their clothes, bedding and books when the van had been released from the police pound last autumn.
Luke and Liam used it as a den. There were crumbs and three-quarters-empty plastic bottles and completely empty crisp packets. They collected junky toys and plastic weapons left unsold at the end of jumble sales or donated to them by the tidy parents of more sophisticated children. They hoarded guns and cowboy outfits, indestructible monsters from forgotten TV programmes and elderly copies of the Beano. They’d dumped all their camping stuff inside the van and someone, probably Lottie, had taken everything out of the bags and had spread them out to air. Donny was surprised how much mud and grass they seemed to have brought home from Mrs Everson’s field; bits of string and sweet wrappers too.
Donny sighed, and began searching through a box of papers that hadn’t been taken on board Strong Winds. Lottie must have been through it already when she was looking for his passport. Had she looked in this folder, marked ‘John’ in Granny’s small neat handwriting and with a papoose pictogram?
A papoose! His hands shook a bit. If he found his birth certificate, surely he would discover his father’s full name? Did they do addresses on birth certificates?
The certificate was there. All the spaces relating to his father were blank.
Donny felt that same sick sense of loss and anger. How could Granny and Skye have let his dad get ‘lost’? All that stuff about dancing in the Northlands and the breaking of the chain. He didn’t understand his mother’s story and he didn’t care. His dad should have known that he had a child. And he should have known his dad.
The cushions in the camper van were faded by the sunlight and flecked with mould. Donny chucked them across the crowded space, pushed a couple of sleeping bags aside and plonked himself onto the bench. He noticed Granny’s blackened old kettle: the one that had stood by the door of their bungalow in Leeds, the place where they kept their house-key. They used to take that kettle on holidays with them. It was special to Granny in some way. He didn’t know why. You wouldn’t exactly want to use it.
There were other things in the folder: some baby teeth, a fair curl – his, presumably – plus a shrivelled, black thing in a plastic peg. With a shock Donny realised that this must be some vestige of his umbilical cord. Ugh! How could Skye keep these grisly souvenirs and lose his father?
There were papers too: all the letters to solicitors, letters from Leeds SS, medical records, Assessments and Re-Assessments – all weapons from the bitter fight Old Nokomis had fought to save him from being taken away from his mum and adopted. All the reasons why he should be grateful to her and not angry.
A worn brown file contained newspaper articles about the Baltic Revolution in the 1990s. That seemed a bit random. Donny read a few headlines. Then he got more interested. Some of the protests had involved lines of dancers.
There had also been police charges, violence, arrests and deaths.
When Donny opened the last file – the one that contained copies of all the letters that Granny Edith had continued sending to authorities in Riga and Tallinn, almost until the day she died – he finally began to make some sense of Skye’s story.
It took a while. The camper van battery was flat but he had a torch in his rucksack. Granny had written to ask about ships in Baltic ports, crew lists, police detainees and casualties. She’d gone on asking for years and years but no-one had sent her anything except silence and dismissals. She’d subscribed to a slim newspaper called the Baltic Eagle, presumably so she could check it for Hermanns. Occasionally a face in a photograph was circled but then crossed out.
Donny began to feel certain that something bad had happened the night that his dad and mum were separated. This was definitely not the sort of holiday romance he’d imagined.
He was sitting there, staring at pages in the dark, when Anna came rattling at the door.
“You’ve missed supper,” she said. “But there’s some left in the kitchen. You missed a call from Toxic to Rev. Wendy – wanting to make it quaite clear that there would be no public funding for your stay at the Vicarage this taime – it’s so funny seeing how Wendy doesn’t give a toss about Toxic any more. When you think what she used to be like! You missed June Ribiero as well. She rang to say that Gold Dragon’s still too ill to be visited. She’s in intensive care but they think she’ll pull through. It’ll take a long time and she won’t ever be the same etc etc. I expect they always say that. Anyway she and Skye are staying in Rotterdam and they’ve met up with that bloke again, the rescue-man. He’s a hydrographer mapping tidal streams – which is why he and his team happened to be buzzing about in a helicopter when the coastguard needed someone. There was some reason to explain why he’d also had medical training but I can’t remember what it was. The thing is that he’s been drawing pictures for your mum. June wants you to ring her back as soon as possible. She urgently needs to ask you what the pictures mean. She wants to know if Skye could ever have had a brother?”
Rotterdam, Holland, Wednesday 18 April 2007
“My mother was a story-teller.” June and Skye and the winchman were sitting in the lounge of a hotel on the Haringvliet, as ne
ar to the port hospital as they could afford. He had soft cartographer’s pencils and a large pad of paper headed The Delta Project. He was using it greedily to communicate with this woman who he had dreamed for so long. He hadn’t known she couldn’t hear. It didn’t matter.
He sketched a man, a woman and a child. He gestured that the child was himself. “My mother called me Ned,” he explained to June. “But I prefer Defoe.” he drew his family living in a fertile clearing amidst luxuriant vegetation. “The Cocos Islands. Before they were made a national park and all the human inhabitants had to leave.”
The older man was standing apart looking away into the distance. He was brown-skinned with long black plaited hair like Skye herself, or like the winch-man, except that Defoe’s long hair was pulled high and sleek into a pony-tail. The woman had plaits but she was small and pale and her plaits were fair, or possibly even grey.
Defoe drew a curving line right out of his picture. He began to sketch the outline of Strong Winds and Gold Dragon lying on the deck. The line twisted into a question mark. It was obvious he was trying to connect Ellen to the small fair woman. “My mother,” he said to June. “Eirene. Her name meant peace. They had crossed the ocean to find peace. She would never tell me why and neither did my father. He was a seer and he had built a sailing canoe, the Houdalinqua. Since they died I have spent my lifetime studying the ocean currents, wondering why they settled on an unknown shore, like castaways. Wondering if they had left anyone behind them. My mother told many stories of children. Especially stories of two boys and three girls who loved sailing and camping and making more stories. The Swallows and their adventures with the Amazons, two girls and with the Ds, a girl and a boy.”
He was drawing as he spoke; an island and a lake, tents and dinghies, children in old-fashioned shorts and aertex shirts; a fat man, tumbling from a plank, squashed into a cage. Skye was watching his every line. “When I saw the junk earlier that day – you were crossing the TSS – I was certain that she had sailed straight out of one of those stories that my mother told me. I was never sure which of them were made up by someone else and which ones were her own.”
He drew another curving line, pulling Strong Winds towards the story-pictures. Again it twisted into a query.
He looked at Skye, wanting her to understand. “There were other stories. Stories of two brothers who had died in the icy sea and two sisters left to guard a treasure. One sister was given a blue flag with a swallow: the other had a campfire kettle. The third sister sailed away. She took nothing with her.
They weren’t such good stories. As if my mother wasn’t certain what had happened in the end. She never told them when my father was there. I think they’d made a promise to each other that she sometimes found hard to keep. I told her about my dreams. My dreams of you,” he said to Skye, drawing the contours of her face with complete certainty, then curving a connecting line back to the figure of the father as if to say you look like him.
“My father understood much in dreams,” he said to June. “My mother needed words.”
Skye had taken the pencil from him and was sketching dark, cruel scenes of disease and death. Two people fleeing from grief into emptiness. A canoe launched into the waves. A baby left behind. An old woman bent over the child; a kettle on the campfire. They weren’t detailed pictures but they were powerful.
June had seen the swallow flag, flying at half-mast in Strong Winds’ rigging but she didn’t know anything about Skye’s parents, Henry and Eirene. She’d never met Granny Edith or seen the blackened kettle. She couldn’t draw the final line that took the Houdalinqua from leaving baby Skye in England with her aunts, far across the Pacific ocean to the Cocos Islands and the birth of a second child. Not until Donny had rung her from Rev. Wendy’s study that night and told her the story that Great Aunt Ellen had told him in the quiet of Strong Winds’ cabin.
Then all of them understood.
His mother had a brother. No wonder their skins had matched when Skye had laid her brown hand against Defoe’s brown cheek.
Donny had never seen anyone who looked like Skye as Defoe had looked like her. And no-one who’d ever looked at Skye in the way Defoe had looked at her.
“And, if my mum’s got a brother,” he said excitedly to Anna, “Then I’ve ... got an uncle!”
Gallister High School and Rotterdam Port Hospital, April 2007
To begin with, Donny’s grand new acquisition didn’t make a heap of difference to his everyday life. Skye and June stayed in Rotterdam until they had seen Gold Dragon and given her the wonderful news that her sister Eirene had found a new life and had had another child. Then they returned to England: June to campaign for access to the hospital’s cleaning records and nag Xanthe about her revision: Skye to share Donny’s small bedroom and spend as much time as possible with Anna’s little sister, Vicky, and Hawkins, the rescued canary.
Defoe spent every moment that he wasn’t at work sitting by Ellen’s bed in Rotterdam’s Havenziekenhuis trying to get used to the fact that he had found a family. He was in such a daze of happiness, so eager to hear her retell some of those childhood adventures, that he didn’t notice the other uninvited visitors. The silent, hostile watchers who never introduced themselves and who might, had it not been for Defoe’s oblivious presence, and the vigilance of the nursing staff, have been tempted to pull some vital tube from Gold Dragon’s arm, or slip a pillow over her face and hold it there.
When Mr McMullen had seen Donny at registration, that first Wednesday morning back, he’d been decent about the absence authorisation, but as implacable as ever about the need to catch up with the work Donny had missed during his two days off.
Only two days off schoool? For all that!
“You still have to take SATs next month and I don’t want to hear from a single one of my colleagues that you’ve blagged your way out of homework with the excuse that you weren’t there when it was set. Use Miss Livesey’s planner.”
He’d smiled at Donny from within his bushy beard. But Donny didn’t smile back. If his tutor was truly friendly, he’d have bothered telling him that he wasn’t going to be at the school much longer. Like Edward bunking off on his fishing holiday or Joshua chucking in his job and preparing to take his family away as if it didn’t matter to anybody else. The word ‘homework’ had made him remember the art lesson. ‘Draw your Dad!’ There wasn’t an adult male in his life who he could be bothered to look at for the length of time it would take to sketch the single outline of their untrustworthy heads.
Or so he had thought then. Once he knew he had an uncle he’d changed this mind as swiftly as if he’d been roll-tacking Maggi’s Laser round a racing mark.
Someone, probably Lottie, had bought Gerald a teachyourself Sudoku book – presumably to wean him from his hopeless attempts at cryptic crosswords. Every evening he and Rev. Wendy were to be seen sitting next to one another at the wiped kitchen table, their mugs of horlicks growing steadily colder as they struggled to put numbers into squares. Donny guessed that Wendy must be skipping meetings but he didn’t like to say anything as the two of them appeared so strangely happy.
Not that they were doing well at Sudoku. He heard their embarrassing Wizard Whimstaff / Miss Snufflebeam joke once or twice, but generally both brows were furrowed, and Donny could glimpse lots of rubbings-out and lines of numbers in margins with question marks. Occasionally Anna was driven to offer help but Wendy turned her down quite snappily.
“It’s our senility that needs sending into remission, not yours. Er, thank you, dear.”
That’s when he could do his homework and sketch Gerald. Gerald, who would always Be There for them, fussing away about meals and hygiene, struggling to keep up with the washing and recycling systems and regularly prevented from listening to his beloved Radio 4 by Luke and Liam’s temper tantrums. There wouldn’t be a lot of texture in his bleached, clean-shaven face and fading hair but it would do. Maybe he could con the two of them into attempting a Killer Kakuro, accentuate those
furrows a bit ...
How old were Gerald and Wendy anyway? Did they have a family? He’d never seen any photos.
“Who did you draw for Art?” he asked Anna. It wouldn’t matter if she’d done Gerald already. Art was one of the very few subjects that he maybe had the edge. Not that he was talented or anything but he was a bit more patient than she was, didn’t get so irritated if it wouldn’t come right first time.
“I was going to ask Mum for a photo of Dad but then I thought I’d surf the net for a picture of my great-uncle, Oboe.” She pulled her new Macbook out of her bag, sat down on the living room sofa and opened it as if she’d remembered something urgent. “Both of them are dead, so I’d only be observing the texture of a more or less poor-quality image, whichever I chose.” She was already logging on. “As far as I’m concerned, my dad’s death was a pretty well unmitigated disaster whereas Oboe’s has actually helped quite a lot. So (a) I owe him enough to be interested in what he looked like and (b) I’m less likely to splosh tearmarks over the page. Okay?”
Donny wouldn’t have dared to disagree.
“Maggi sketched some random sailing instructor. She called it study in purple and blue. It was so cold she didn’t even take her gloves off when she was doing it. She and Xanthe are so fed up with their father that they’re refusing to be in the same room as him. Except he’s been away from home so much, they’re not sure he’s noticed their protest. I do wonder whether anyone will tell that stupid teacher how much grief she’s managed to cause. It was obviously some spur-of-the-moment idea because she’d forgotten to think up a proper assignment. Usually when they want us to look at texture they get us to collect rocks or driftwood or something.”
“Mmmm.”
Maybe he’d go find the other kids or read Secret Water or something. There was this crazy little person sort of leaping about inside him, flourishing something that looked remarkably like Skye’s ravelled standard on its bamboo pole and chanting, “I’ve got an un-cle! I’ve got an un-cle!” over and over.