by Suzi Moore
Would I tell? No way, I thought, I’m not Casper. I’m not a telltale at all. I frowned at him and tried to get the words out. I wanted to say, ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ but in the end I just raised my finger to my lips and drew a cross over my chest.
‘Awesome!’ he said and I watched him clamber over the rocks, and before he jumped down off the last enormous boulder he turned round and waved.
Zack Drake, I thought as I climbed back up the path towards the waterfall. Zack Ethan Drake who told me that he used to have a dog called Otter and I wanted to ask what happened to it. I’ve always wanted a dog, but Dad won’t let me. He actually got quite cross the last time. He suddenly sighed, stood up from the kitchen table and said, ‘No means no.’ The really weird thing is that Florence said that Aunt Aggy had said the exact same thing to her about getting a dog, but, when she had asked her mum to tell her why, Aunt Aggy said something about an accident, but she wouldn’t tell Florence any more. It was really weird.
As I wandered back along the path, I started to feel scared. What if Mum and Dad knew where I was? What if I got caught? Then another thought came into my head. A much worse thought. I had forgotten all about it. Being on the beach with Zack had been so much fun that I hadn’t thought about the horrid thing that was happening. Urgh, I thought. My soon-to-be little sister was sure to be there by now. I felt my heart sink and my legs get slower and slower until I was standing in front of the gate, but I couldn’t move any further. Culver Manor would not be my special place any more. I was going to have to share it and I didn’t like the way that made me feel. It made me angry and sad and I knew, right then and there, that everything was about to be very different.
No sooner had I closed the door behind me than I heard shouting. I heard my dad calling my name and I knew I had to run really fast before he saw me. I raced back through the orchard, the rose garden, the walled garden, along the side of the tennis court and, by the time I reached the cedar tree, I was panting and gasping for breath.
‘Alice! Alice!’
Dad was standing on the terrace at the back of the house and I just had time to change direction so that it looked as though I was walking up the lawn instead.
‘Alice – there you are! I’ve been looking all over for you! Come on, your sister has arrived!’
I looked up at my smiling dad and, as I walked up the hill towards the terrace, I saw that he was grinning his big Christmas Day grin. I thought about how Mum and Dad always used to say that the day I arrived was the happiest day of their lives and I got slower and slower. Was this going to be the happiest day of their lives instead? It felt as though the ground was sinking beneath my feet and when I looked back up towards him I thought I was going to cry.
‘Come on, Alice, don’t drag your heels. This is a happy, happy day.’
I followed him back inside through the hallway and up the stairs to my parents’ bedroom. It’s a big bedroom and has the sort of princess bed you sometimes see in fairy-tale books. Mum says it’s called a four–poster, but Dad calls it her Sleeping Beauty bed and it’s so big and tall that I have to climb on to a little stool to reach it. It has these heavy red and yellow curtains that you can pull all the way round it, and when me and Florence were little Mum let us sleep in it sometimes when she stayed with us.
I walked across the wooden floor until my toes touched the rug at the foot of the bed and I peered over the mountain of white towels, sheets and blankets. Mum looked hot and sweaty, and her cheeks were so pink I thought she might be ill. She sat up slowly, holding a finger to her lips, but I didn’t see a little sister at all. I just saw a white bundle of blankets and then Mum held out her hand towards me. For a while I didn’t move at all. I didn’t want to look. If I didn’t look, I could pretend it wasn’t there, just like my dad once told me to do when I got really upset about a spider in the corner of the bathroom.
‘Pretend he’s not there,’ he’d whispered when I pointed at the large eight-legged creature that was hiding on the other side of the toilet. ‘Pretend he’s not there and you don’t need to be scared.’ It had worked, sort of. And, as I had my hair washed and splashed around in the bath, I did forget all about the spider.
As I stood next to Mum’s bed, I tried to do the same thing. I kept my head up and tried not to look down at the white bundle that was moving. Then it made a noise, a gurgling kind of cry, and Mum held the thing up higher so that it was lying on her chest and I could see its face.
I must have been frowning really hard because Mum said, ‘Alice, come here, don’t frown. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
I peered over the covers to take a better look and stared at my sister for the very first time. Her eyes were closed tightly and her tiny hands rested on my mum’s finger so that I could see just how little she was. She was so small. Smaller than I thought she’d be.
Had I been that small? Had I lain on my other mother like she did? I knew I was born on a rainy day. I had been taken away immediately from my other mother, but my little sister was born into a bath of golden sunlight and was able to sleep next to her REAL mother in a beautiful princess bed. It made my hands clench into fists, and a feeling that I had never felt before got bigger and bigger in my stomach, so big that I knew all I wanted to do was turn round, run out and never look at her again.
I stayed in my bedroom until the sun went down and the sky was so dark and clear that the moon lit up the garden below. Dad begged me to come and have some dinner with him, but I didn’t want to. I just shook my head and in the end he left a tray of sandwiches outside my room. I heard him talking on the telephone and realised quickly that it must be Aunt Aggy so I went to the door and listened.
‘But Alice won’t talk at all. There’s nothing wrong with her and we’ve tried everything. Sophie said that, when she went in to see the baby, she wouldn’t go anywhere near her or the baby. She said she just glared at her so much that it scared her a bit. It’s just jealousy. Alice is jealous . . .’
I didn’t hear anything else because I ran back to my bed, grabbed the photograph from the table and jumped under the duvet. I didn’t hear Dad softly knock at my door. I didn’t hear the words he said or feel him stroke my back as I cried.
Was I jealous? Was that what this horrid feeling was?
Mum and Dad like to talk about feelings a lot. They say that it’s better to show a little of what you’re feeling than bottle it all up inside. Mum once told me that if you were feeling sad and you wanted to cry you should just cry until the feeling stopped. Dad said he would much rather I shout and stomp around a bit when I’m cross than sulk in silence, and when I asked why they said: ‘If you don’t cry when you need to or get angry when you have to, you won’t ever know how.’
But I hadn’t spoken for six months so I hadn’t told them how I was feeling. I didn’t even know what the feeling was until now, and Mum once told me that being jealous was not a good thing to be. AT ALL. She said it was a very bad thing to be. I once heard her say to Dad that jealous people can be the worst kind of people, and I remember it really well because I was eating an apple at the time.
‘When someone starts feeling jealous,’ she’d said, ‘they find it hard to stop. It sort of eats them up like a worm inside an apple.’
Was I the worm inside the apple? Or was the jealous thing like a worm inside me? Would Mum and Dad want to send me back to the place where they’d chosen me from?
I suddenly felt very afraid. Remembering what Mum had told me about Dad and Aunt Aggy. I felt a fizzing noise in my head. Would they send me back?
18
Alice
That night I cried myself to sleep, but then my little sister cried me awake and she did that every night for five nights. Mum and Dad looked so tired that they stumbled around the kitchen as though they were still asleep. The only good thing about them being so distracted was I got to sneak out of the house and run down to Culver Cove nearly every day, where I could forget all about the screaming, crying little sister wh
o so far didn’t have a name.
Mum and Dad said they couldn’t decide. They said I was an Alice from the moment they saw me, but they just couldn’t agree what my little sister should be called which was fine by me. They had the screaming baby and I had the beach.
Zack always turned up after me, and even though at first I was angry to see him there, the more we met, the more I realised that him being there with me made the cove even better. He’s told me nearly everything about himself. Actually, he talks quite a lot, for a boy that is. He told me that he was named after a world-famous mountain climber and when he told me that it was a bit like he kind of wanted me to be impressed or something.
But there are so many times when I want to ask questions. Like the time he told me about kicking a policeman. I wanted to say something to make him feel better. I wanted to say that I’d never been on a plane, but might be scared to. I wanted to ask if he’d said sorry or what happened when they missed the plane. I wanted to, but the best I could do was to look like I didn’t understand. Only that didn’t work and I had to listen to him tell me the whole story all over again and it sounded even crazier the second time around. So I got out the notebook and after I drew a really rubbish picture of a shell I wrote another list.
Things I like about Zack
He doesn’t ask me why I’m not talking.
He doesn’t make fun of me when I won’t jump off the rocks.
He’s an amazing swimmer.
He found the perfect pink shell on the beach AND he let me have it.
He has really nice eyes.
He tells funny stories about things and places I’ve never heard of.
Things I don’t like about Zack
He talks a bit too much.
He farts and burps too much.
He sometimes says mean things about his mum.
He doesn’t like watermelon.
He is VERY greedy.
One day, towards the end of our first week on the beach, I watched him climb on to the large rock.
‘Alice, come here quickly!’ he shouted at me.
I put my drawing book down and ran across to him. He helped me up on to the rock and I realised that while he was quite small for a boy that was nearly thirteen he was very strong. He helped me on to the top of the boulder where we both sat side by side with the sun on our faces.
‘Look! Look, Alice, the seals that led me here are back,’ he whispered, pointing at a black shape in the water.
I squinted and after a moment two roundish grey and black heads popped up from the water and started swimming on their backs towards us.
‘Come on then!’ And with that Zack slid into the water towards the seals, but I didn’t. I can swim really well, I’ve got all my badges and everything, but as the seals got closer I could see that they were a lot bigger than they’d seemed. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be too close. I watched them dive under the water alongside Zack. It’s like he’s a mermaid boy or something. I don’t know anyone that can hold their breath as long as he can, or do backflips off the rocks, or cartwheel off them into the sea like he does.
Whenever we would meet, Zack didn’t say much about me not speaking, but he sometimes said he wished his mum wouldn’t talk so much. Actually, he said quite a few mean things about his mum and the cottage that they were living in. Sometimes I wondered if he wanted to just run all the way back to London and his best friend Lou.
A week after my sister with no name was born, I got down to Culver Cove a bit later than normal. Zack was already there and he had brought something with him. I put my rucksack down and walked over to where he was standing.
‘This is a bodyboard, Alice. We’re gonna have a blast.’
I grinned back at him and that afternoon we spent the whole time surfing into the shore, being dunked under waves and getting salty seawater up our noses, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that the sand was in my ears or that I had sunburn on the tops of my ears. And I was really proud when Zack watched me spin round on the bodyboard all the way to the shore and he sort of jumped up in the air.
‘Whoop! Whoop! Alice, you’re a proper surfer now!’
Zack is very greedy. Even when he brings twice the amount of food as I do, he nearly always wants some of my picnic too, but one day he didn’t bring anything to eat. I wandered down the beach to look for shells and when I got back Zack had gobbled nearly my entire picnic and in his hand he had my notebook. I watched him stuff the last Jaffa cake into his mouth and then he burst out laughing.
‘Ha!’ he said, looking up. ‘I have nice eyes, do I?’ He fluttered his eyelashes.
I felt my cheeks get hot, but Zack just laughed and laughed.
‘Ooh, Alice thinks I have nice eyes!’ he said in a silly voice, dancing round the towel. Before I knew what I was doing, I had grabbed the notebook out of his greedy hands and smacked him over the head with it.
‘Oh my God, Alice, that really hurt! Are you mental?’
I said nothing and started packing my stuff away.
‘For God’s sake, Alice! I was only teasing!’
I turned round and glared at him, but I felt my bottom lip trembling.
‘Typical!’ he shouted. ‘Typical girl! Can’t take a little joke! How am I supposed to know what you’re like if you don’t even speak, you total lunatic!’
A lunatic? What was a lunatic? Was that someone that was crazy? I felt myself get more upset. I tried to blink away the tears, but it was too late.
‘Oh great! Great!’ Zack sort of sighed, looked up at the sky and raised his hands in a way that made him look like he was totally fed up. ‘Go on! Cry! Cry if you like. I’m used to it. Mum’s always crying. But you won’t see me cry!’ he said, getting angrier and more shouty with each word. ‘My dad never cried and I’m not about to start either! I’m not as brave as him, I never will be, but he always used to say that sometimes being really brave is saying the thing that you’re too scared to say. So here’s the real truth, Alice! You need to grow up and stop being such a baby. I don’t know why you’ve decided not to speak, but it’s pretty damn stupid. It’s stupid and childish and I can’t be bothered with it!’
We stood on the beach, staring at each other for ages. The tears rolled down my cheeks and I saw Zack’s angry face frowning deeper and his hands clenched so tightly into fists that the skin went sort of white.
I almost said something. I opened my mouth to speak and this time I realised that I could. I just didn’t know which words to use first. I wiped the tears from my face and looked up at him once more, but a dark shadow came across his face and I felt scared, so I picked up my bag and went and sat on the other side of the beach next to the waterfall. Every so often I looked over at him, but when he tried to say something I put my hands over my ears. We sat like that for ages, but when the tide started coming back in Zack got up and left without saying goodbye.
But I didn’t want to go home and back to the crying baby so I sat on the beach, watching the tide come in.
Finally I realised I had to go home, or they’d discover I was missing and ask lots of questions, so I stomped up the path quickly, swatting flies away from my sticky, sweaty face. When I got to the little stone seat, I was so hot and out of breath I had to sit down and rest for a while. I could just make out the top of Zack’s head as he scrambled along the stony beach back towards the harbour, and I felt a bit bad that we’d left each other in such a bad mood.
I dusted the sand off my legs, shoes and bag, so that there’d be no beachy evidence, and then I reached out to open the garden door. I tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried again and still it wouldn’t move. I pulled and twisted, but it was stuck. The rusty old bolt was stuck! My heart started pounding and I felt sort of sick. How could I get back into the house? How would I sneak back in without being caught? I looked at the walls on either side of the door; I’d never be able to climb up there. They were twice as high as the boulder on the beach and I’d needed Zack to help me get on top of that.
>
I felt panicked and scared and I tried to shout for help, but it was as though a giant was pressing down on my throat. If Mum and Dad knew I’d been to the beach, I’d be in trouble. So much trouble they’d stop me leaving the house at all, and then I’d never see the cove again. What was I going to do? I looked for a way round the door, then I heard the waves crashing on to the beach below and suddenly I had an idea. I could walk round the headland just like Zack! So I turned and quickly ran back down the path towards the cove where I could follow Zack’s footsteps back to the harbour, through the village and be home in no time.
As soon as I got down to the shore, I saw there was a big problem. As I ran down the beach towards the water, my heart sank. The tide was now really high and I could only just see the top of the boulder that Zack had climbed over. What was I going to do? I was locked out of the garden and now I was trapped on the beach! I took my rucksack off and sat down at the edge of the water. Perhaps I could wait until the tide went back out and I could walk safely round the rocks. Perhaps someone would unlock the door and I could sneak in through the garden again. I sat for ages trying to decide what to do and then I suddenly spied a black shape by the headland. I stood up to get a better look. It was a seal. One of them had come back. Zack had said that they’d guided him here, so perhaps it was telling me what to do too?
I looked back up the beach to the waterfall and decided that if I wanted to get home I was going to have to be brave. I would have to swim faster than I’d ever swum before. So, carefully, I tucked my rucksack behind one of the rocks at the top of the beach and, with one eye on the seal, I waded into the water and set off for the headland.
I tried breaststroke because that’s my favourite, but the water kept splashing into my eyes and in the end I ducked my head under the water like Zack always did. I kicked and splashed as fast as I could. I had my thousand-metre swimming badge, I could swim a long way, but this was different. It felt like I wasn’t really getting anywhere. I took a big gulp of air and saw the tip of the boulder. Not much further, I thought, just a little more. I saw the seal out of the corner of my eye, but it dived under the water and disappeared. It was leaving me! I was alone in the dark, deep and cold waters.