Cry of a Seagull

by Monica Dickens

‘Have no fear.’ Mr Vingo waved his thick ashplant stick. ‘See you here in a couple of hours then?’

  Jim put the van into gear. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!’

  With Rose tugging at his arm to hold him back, Mr Vingo approached the boys with the innocence of a baby.

  ‘Excuse me, but would you happen to know the place where the old cattle market used to be?’

  The boys did not even look at him. The tallest one, who had flat, shallow eyes and who wore a heavy black leather jacket, studded like the door of a fortress, pursed up his lips under the scrappy beginnings of a moustache, and began a monotone whistle that was more ominous than silence.

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Mr Vingo raised his hat and walked on, Rose pulling his arm forward now to hurry him away.

  The studded leather jacket, heavy as armour plating, looked identical to the one worn by the motorcycle rider who had almost run down Mr Vingo in the road outside Wood Briar. Was it possible …? When she was in the middle of an adventure with the horse, anything was possible. The familiar became strange. Coincidences had meaning, and events that seemed unrelated suddenly formed themselves into mystical patterns.

  Georgie and her mother and the donkey man, Joanne and whiny Derek, the statue of the horse, the librarian, even the invasion of the coach party, which had put Frank Foley into the scullery with time to talk about what he knew – all these were somehow connected, if only she could find the links. The sinister boy in the black jacket. Why did he happen to be on just that street corner?

  ‘Come on.’ She tugged at Mr Vingo’s arm. She was frightened and excited. They had to find the statue of the horse now. Now. The electric shivers were doing swooping circuits in her inside, and if she had not had Mr Vingo puffing in tow, she would be running fast.

  They went through some rather seedy streets and came to a square behind the church, with more people about and a few shops: a grocer, an ironmonger, a newsagent, a small garage with petrol pumps. One side of the square was partly closed up by a battered hoarding. The gate was broken and they could see piles of refuse and scrap metal and the skeleton of a car. Frank Foley had talked about a junk yard. Rose and Mr Vingo went inside.

  Grass and weeds had grown over mounds of rubbish. Prams had been abandoned here, and piles of worn old tyres. This yard had been a dumping ground for so long that some ragged bushes and even a small tree had grown up, one of those heroic town trees that fight for their lives in impossible circumstances.

  ‘Look!’ Rose grabbed Mr Vingo’s arm. From behind the tree, Favour looked at them.

  It was a small statue, about half life-size. The horse had no ears, and only half a tail, and the hoof of the proudly raised front leg was gone. The stone that might once have been white was pitted and filthy, patched with greenish-grey moss. Chunks were chipped off the crested stone mane. The plinth on which he stood was blackened, and half-buried in rubbish and rusty metal.

  But it was Favour. No mistaking him. The short strong back. The arched tail – what there was of it. The small Arabian head carried with just that high, magnificent tilt.

  Rose and Mr Vingo stood in awe. Then Rose went cautiously forward and stepped up on to a rusted tank to put her hand on the horse’s side. The stone was rough, ingrained with filth, but the line of the sculpted bone and muscle under her hand was clean and familiar. On so many flights, her leg had lain here, behind the shoulder. She rubbed with her hand, and scaly dirt came off.

  She turned round to Mr Vingo. ‘It’s wicked, letting him get into this state. Doesn’t anyone care?’

  Below her, Mr Vingo shrugged. ‘They’ve forgotten, Frank Foley said. Or they never knew.’

  ‘But we do.’ Rose stepped down, tripped over a plank and arrived at his side in excitement. ‘We can’t leave him like this. Let’s clean him up.’

  ‘Groom him, as if he were a horse?’

  ‘He is a horse. Come on, I’ve got some money. We can buy scrubbing brushes and soap at the ironmonger’s.’

  Getting Mr Vingo across the littered yard had not been easy. Getting him out again and then back – with the brushes and scouring powder and a bucket they had filled with water from the garage – was only possible because he was as enthusiastic as Rose.

  He stood on a wooden crate and worked away at the statue’s legs, while Rose perched on a rickety stepladder and scrubbed as much of the body as she could reach.

  ‘Hey, you there!’

  Rose nearly fell off the ladder. It was the ironmonger, a wrathful man with a bristly haircut, shouting at them through a gap in the hoarding. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  He didn’t want an answer. He wanted to rave at them. ‘Ruining an ancient relic – what do you thing you are? If I’d known what you was up to, I’d never have let you have the goods. On sale, too. I’m going to report you, that’s what I’m going to do, for defacing an ancient monument and making free with municipal property. Ought to be arrested, you two did. They lock up people like you.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Mr Vingo squinted up at Rose. ‘I’ve never been in prison, have you?’

  ‘Not yet.’ But if the horse had that in mind for her …

  ‘I ought to call the police.’ The ironmonger went on shouting. Interested faces appeared in the gap behind him. Rose and Mr Vingo had created quite a stir in this dreary little square.

  ‘Look here.’ Mr Vingo turned cautiously round on his box, and steadied himself with a hand on the horse’s raised knee. ‘It’s really all right, you know,’ he said soothingly. ‘We’re improving this treasure of the town, not ruining it.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘We’re antiquarians.’ As the man became more threatening, Mr Vingo became more gracious. ‘If you will kindly check with Mr Foley, the librarian at the Newcome Library, not too far from here, he will vouch for us, I know.’

  ‘I’m calling the police.’ The ironmonger’s shoulders and bristly head disappeared from the gap.

  ‘We’d better go and warn Frank.’ Rose and Mr Vingo stepped down, pushed the bucket and brushes out of sight, scrambled for the gate and ran as fast as Mr Vingo could jog across the canal and towards the large buildings nearer the middle of the town.

  Getting him up the stairs to the librarian’s office was the final effort. He sank into a wide leather chair, and Rose did the explaining.

  ‘So if we get arrested, will you stand up for us?’

  Frank Foley laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell them I asked you to rescue the statue. The town will probably give you a medal.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Rose said quickly. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to know.’

  ‘They won’t. It will all blow over. That man will never do anything. With his reputation, the police are the last people he wants to have anything to do with.’

  ‘That’s a relief. Thanks.’

  ‘A pleasure. Now, tell me why you’re so interested in the statue.’

  ‘Well, you see.’ Rose looked at Mr Vingo, getting his wind back comfortably in the armchair. ‘Mr Vingo is a composer.’ He had not let her tell Frank this in the scullery, but she must now. ‘Quite a famous one, actually,’ she added in a whisper. ‘He’s working on a wonderful piece of music about the horse, and how he saved the people of the valley from the flood that was caused by the Lord of the Moor cutting down the trees on the riverbank for his own gain.’

  ‘Yes, that’s part of the legend.’

  ‘It’s true, and Mr Vingo has told it all again in music.’ Mr Vingo waved a protesting hand at her, but she went on. ‘It’s called The Ballad of the Great Grey Horse. He’s working on the last part of it now.’

  Frank Foley was fascinated. When Mr Vingo was rested, he asked him more about it, and Mr Vingo, who found it hard to believe that anyone was interested in his work, shyly invited him to come to Wood Briar and hear some of the ballad.

  Tea was brought, and while they were talking, Rose wandered round the office, looking at the books and pictures.

  There was o
ne picture she kept coming back to. It was Saint George in full armour, riding a wonderful rounded white horse with a small head and delicate ears. In front of them, a hapless maiden trembled, her hands tied with a silken cord. The horse had its foot on a loathsome dragon with a fiery jaw full of crocodile teeth, pinning it down while Saint George prepared to plunge his lance into the writhing monster.

  The white horse’s head was turned round, as if to watch its rider. As Rose stood and stared, the full round eye looked straight into hers, and the horse was Favour, and his message unmistakable.

  She mumbled an excuse and went out of the room and down the stairs, and hared back through the streets to the dingy little square, where she slipped through the gate in the hoarding without being seen. She climbed over the junk and up to the plinth of the statue, and on to the horse. He was growing in size even as she settled in to the familiar well-muscled back that was now warm and alive, the dirt gone, the coat bright and glossy. The stone mane had become thick blowing hair for her hands to grasp. The junk yard was left behind, the roofs, the broken top of the church spire, the ant-sized people plodding about their boring daily business. If only the ironmonger could see her now!

  But nobody could see her being carried away into another realm. The secret of the flight was hers alone.

  Chapter Six

  The pulsing energy of the horse merged into a steady floating movement, with a slight vibration under Rose’s bare feet. She was leaning on a polished wooden rail, and water flowed slowly past below her. In the dusk, she could see that she was in the estuary of the river that ran into Newcome bay beyond the town and the pier and the beach.

  Across the river, the sun had set, and lights were coming on all over the town. Ahead on Rose’s side she could see one of the marinas that had been built for yacht people all along the estuary: small jetties sticking out from a main dock, and moored boats rocking gently to the clink, clink, clink of halyards against metal masts.

  Rose was on a motor yacht, an expensive affair like a miniature trawler, with a wide deck and steps leading down to a lighted cabin with curtained windows. She had never been on such a grand boat before, but the girl leaning on the rail, whose body Rose was temporarily inhabiting, was calm and matter-of-fact, as if the Princess Vicky were a second home. Rose could see the boat’s name on a white lifebelt hanging on the deck rail.

  They eased alongside the dock. There was a car park with some closed-up sheds and small boats stored on trestles; farther along the bank beyond the jetties, the lights of a riverside pub, with tables out in the garden. It was a pretty little marina, unspoilt, with two or three white cottages, their gardens displaying the same spring flowers that were in the garden now at Wood Briar, so it must be the same time of year. Might even be the same year. As well as taking her backwards and forwards in time, Rose’s journeys sometimes took her sideways, to her own time, but a different place. One of the cottages had a donkey in a fenced paddock, neat and tiny as a child’s toy farm. A dark shadow in the dusk, the donkey grazed quietly, close to the fence.

  ‘Look sharp there, Vicky!’ the girl’s father called from the wheelhouse. ‘Stand by to make fast!’

  The boat, obviously named after the girl, was coming alongside the dock. Vicky swung a practised leg over the rail, stood her toe on the outside edge of the deck, swung over the other leg and stepped across the narrowing gap of water to the shore. Her mother, in a blue seaman’s sweater and white trousers, threw a rope over the stern rail, and Vicky and Rose had to make it fast round an iron bollard.

  ‘Look alive!’ The voice from the wheelhouse was pitched as if it had an army of sailors to order about. The mother ran to the bow of the boat, and Vicky ran to the forward bollard and tied the other mooring rope round that.

  ‘None of your granny knots.’ The father came out on deck in a yachting cap. ‘Let’s see a proper round turn fore and aft, and two half hitches.’

  Vicky did some complicated things with the ropes that Rose tried to remember, to impress Ben when – if – he took her out in his boat.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Vicky called from the dock. ‘Let’s go and find a place for supper.’

  ‘Hold hard.’ The father talked to both his daughter and his wife as if they were sailors. ‘Get back on board and finish up your jobs. And put some shoes on, for God’s sake. A barefoot crew is a sloppy crew.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Vicky gave her father a salute, as Rose did to Philip when he was overdoing being The General.

  Back on board by way of the gangplank which her father had put out, she had to tidy the roomy, comfortable cabin, stack away books and papers, and wash up coffee mugs in the galley sink. Then she went down more steps to the sleeping cabins, which had bunks and portholes and little basins that closed up like cupboards. When her father came down to inspect, he nagged and fretted, because her bunk was untidy and there were clothes lying about in her cabin.

  She had made it like a girl’s bedroom, with ornaments and a poster, furry animals on the pillows and wedged up anywhere there was a strut or a ledge. Rose took a quick look at the photographs. Vicky’s mother in a summer wedding hat, her father being given a silver cup for something or other, girls in school uniform grouped outside an imposing school like a brick castle, and a picture of a boy who looked a bit of a creep, with a chin running into a long skinny neck, and eyes that were vague, behind glasses.

  ‘Place looks like a ruddy boudoir.’ Vicky’s large father moved about in the narrow cabin like a bull in a tea shop. ‘You’ll have to get all this nonsense stowed away and the place made shipshape. China cats, snapshots – one good wave on the port side and they’ll all go for six.’ He picked up some of the photographs and put them in a drawer.

  ‘Don’t, Dad.’ Rose took the picture of the vague boy away from him. Rupert was hers. Everyone in her year at boarding school had a boy friend, or pretended to. Rupert was the best Vicky could do. He was quiet and amiable, did what she wanted to do, went where she wanted to go, asked her advice. Sometimes she felt he was her child.

  It was almost dark by the time Vicky’s father had finished fussing about the boat and coiling ropes and rubbing off seagull mess and checking gauges and locking doors, and in general carrying on as if they were leaving for months, instead of just for supper.

  The tide was going out, and the level gangplank now sloped slightly upwards to the dock. The moon was up, and a fresh night breeze was blowing across the estuary. The car park was lighted. Vicky, who liked animals, live or stuffed, was going towards the donkey’s paddock, but some teenagers with motorcycles were hanging about in that corner, and her father called out to her loudly, ‘Come on with us, Vicky. I’d stay away from that lot, if I were you.’

  There were three boys in the group and three girls, all dressed in the same dark clothes, like a gang, leaning on the bikes, or just standing about smoking and shuffling their feet. They all turned round and looked at Vicky and her parents.

  Her mother started to walk towards the path to the restaurant, but her father would not let it alone.

  ‘Pity they haven’t got anything better to do,’ he said, still too loudly. ‘Troublemakers, the lot of them. If I had my way, I’d shove ’em all in the Army.’

  ‘You and who else?’ One of the boys took a step forward and spat on the ground between them.

  ‘Come on, Jack.’ Vicky’s mother took her husband’s arm, but he shook her off.

  ‘By God, if I’d had you layabouts under my command in the Navy, you’d have been sorry.’

  ‘So would you, mister,’ one of the other boys muttered, and the one in front, who seemed to be the leader, said, ‘The Navy’s only for morons. Why don’t you push off in your toy boat? This is our territory, see? No one comes here we don’t like.’

  Vicky’s father had his fists clenched, and was red in the face under the peak of his cap.

  ‘Jack, please.’ His wife urged him towards the path, and Vicky pulled at his other arm. ‘Leave them alone. They don’t mean an
y harm.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ He stood his ground. ‘Drugs and booze – I know what goes on. This country’s going to the dogs because of useless louts like these.’

  As the gang leader took another step forward, Rose saw that he wore a black leather jacket weighted with metal studs. Well, so did all of them, but this one had a half-grown moustache and those leaden, almond-shaped eyes that seemed to have no lids. Was he the boy outside the corner pub?

  One of the girls stepped forward with him. She was always just a pace behind, touching him, watching him. She might be Rose and Vicky’s age, she might be ten years older. She was thickly made up, with a sulkily painted mouth and odd-coloured hair chopped into spikes at the front.

  Vicky had seen how roughly the gang leader treated her, shoving her around, and jerking up an elbow to shut her up if she said anything. What would it be like to have a boy friend like that, instead of Rupert who was sick with shyness at the feeble school dances? For a moment, she was shaken with a crazy jealousy of this girl and her wild, dangerous life, and Rose cried to her inwardly, ‘Don’t be crazy!’

  The boy took another step towards Vicky’s father. ‘Don’t mess with us,’ he said threateningly.

  Vicky’s father faked a wide yawn. He was sick of it now and wanted to get in the last word and go and have his dinner.

  ‘Oh, grow up, for God’s sake,’ he said patronizingly. ‘You’re like a little baby trying to scare someone by going, “Bogey, bogey”.’

  He turned away in triumph. Someone in the gang guffawed. The leader swung round. At the same moment, the donkey, who had his white nose over the fence, let out a creaking bray, and one of the girls tittered. Because the leader had lost his grip, his girl went charging after Vicky’s father.

  ‘You’re all the same!’ she shrieked. ‘Think you own the earth. You don’t care nothing for no one else. I hope you rot in hell!’

  Vicky wheeled round instinctively. ‘Don’t you dare say that to my—’ she began, but the Navy man put his large salt-smelling hand over her mouth and said, ‘You keep out of this.’