Cry of a Seagull

by Monica Dickens

  Vicky felt horribly deflated and utterly childish. As her father walked on, she looked back at the girl who had turned into a tiger to protect her boy friend, and the violent, unreasonable envy swept over her again.

  Being Vicky, Rose could feel the fascination strongly, but being also still Rose, she felt revulsion and fear. He was the sinister boy on the street corner. Could he even be the one who had almost killed Mr Vingo?

  One of the motorcycles had been moved round. Before Vicky turned away and went meekly after her parents, Rose saw the back of the white helmet balanced on the seat. On it was painted a huge staring yellow eye.

  The eye grew to fill her vision, revolved and blurred like a spinning wheel. As Rose’s whirling senses calmed and levelled, she was sitting on the stone horse again, and the ironmonger was yelling through the gap in the boards, ‘I told you to get out of there!’

  Rose scrambled down, retrieved the brushes and soap and the bucket and hurried with them back towards the library. Passing the church, she saw Jim Fisher and the van come round the corner, so they drove back to pick up Mr Vingo.

  ‘Find what you wanted?’ Jim asked her.

  ‘Yes. Thanks. It was a useful bit of research.’

  ‘Looks more like a bucket to me.’

  ‘Oh, I – well, I like to bring back presents. I got this for Crasher.’

  Jim nodded, unsurprised. ‘She can’t smash that, anyway.’

  In the office, Rose took another look at the picture of the white horse, which was now St George’s horse again. The handsome young saint in armour was about to slay the dragon that threatened the maiden, and it suddenly came to Rose what the larger meaning of the picture was. There had probably never been such things as dragons, but the odious beast was a symbol of evil, the maiden was ordinary people, and the knight on the white horse was the power for good. The white horse was like Favour – perhaps had been Favour at that time, in one of his earthly incarnations, carrying St George to the rescue.

  ‘Guess what,’ Rose said to Mr Vingo on the stairs. ‘I think St George was a messenger.’

  ‘Of course.’ You couldn’t surprise Mr Vingo. ‘Nobler than you or me, but definitely one of our glorious company.’

  Mr Vingo guessed where she had been, but the bucket and brushes were a useful explanation to the librarian of why she had disappeared. At home, she put them in the storeroom where the cleaning things were kept and, in the passage, ran into Ben coming in from the back door.

  He and his father had pulled their boat’s dinghy up the beach and stowed the oars in the garage. He seemed his usual cheerful self. Rose had been worrying about how she would make up with him, but she didn’t need to. He asked her how Newcome had been and even said that if she had been with them she might have brought them better luck with the mackerel.

  One of the marvellous things about Ben was that if he had been angry he behaved afterwards as if nothing had happened. Abigail, after a row, would ring up other friends and not be available to Rose for a bit, and with Hazel, you practically had to beg on your knees.

  ‘Come on, Hay, don’t sulk. I didn’t mean it really. I do like you, honest I do,’ etc, etc, ad nauseam, while Hazel dragged out the sulks to wallow in the power she didn’t know how to get in any other way.

  But Ben’s anger was like the sun going behind a tiny, very dark cloud. For a short while, everything was blotted out, and then – bingo! The land was bright again, and if you said, ‘Sorry,’ he said ‘What for?’ and genuinely seemed not to remember.

  While Rose had been away, Smasher had broken five tea plates and the spout off one teapot and the handle off another. The Mumford twins had threatened to leave again because there was no lavender soap in the bathroom, and Professor Henry Watson actually had left, because he had indigestion and because he thought the photographer Bernard had cheated at backgammon. In the kitchen, Hilda was threatening a nervous breakdown.

  For the first time since Mollie had bought Wood Briar Hotel, Rose wished she were an ordinary girl of the Hazel variety who lived in a home where nothing happened. She wanted desperately to go away by herself and think about the journey. The sense of threat and danger in the marina car park was still with her very strongly. Bits of the scene kept coming back to grab at her attention: the feel of the boat’s deck under Vicky’s bare feet, the naval father’s red, blustery face, the tiger girl, the odd flat eyes of the gang leader, bleak and bitter; the donkey’s ear-splitting bray that seemed somehow to connect this with Newcome beach and the donkey man’s noisy foal.

  Instead of being able to concentrate on all this, she had to go and find her father and tell him that Crasher had clogged up one of the sinks by pouring into it hot fat that had now set. Hilda was in tears.

  ‘What can I do?’ Philip was in the garage, riding a stationary bicycle that was bolted to the floor, testing it for durability.

  ‘Go and calm her down. She likes you. Tell her one of your feeble jokes to buck her up.’

  ‘Can’t go now. Very important job.’ He pumped his legs round and round, going nowhere, like the hamster. ‘Got to complete this test by tomorrow. We’re almost up to a hundred miles.’

  He had not been on the stationary bike for days. Rose thought he was only pumping it so furiously to ride away from having to deal with Hilda and the clogged sink.

  Jim Fisher dealt with both, although he was off duty, and somehow dinner got cooked and served. Upstairs in the family flat, Rose turned on the television to the ballet The Sleeping Beauty. She didn’t like dancing herself, because she was clumsier at it than Moonlight trying to do a collected canter, but she loved to watch other people. Her father kept interrupting, because it embarrassed him to see men in tights dancing, so Rose turned the beautiful music down low and sat very close to the set, so that he could not walk between her and the screen.

  The Lilac Fairy was leading the love-sick prince through the thorny forest that shut the sleeping princess away from the world and away from the progress of time. Through the sweet, melodious Lilac Fairy theme, Rose imagined that she heard, very faintly, the rusty bray of a donkey. She turned up the sound a little. There it was again, the screech of indrawn breath, the hoarse bellow that came out with the air.

  The moonlit wood on the stage changed to the moving sea, not at night time, but under a dawning pearly light. The dark object of the other visions was fighting to move through the small troughs and hillocks of the waves. And now at last, she saw what it was. A donkey’s head. Dark wet fur, great ears laid back, the white nose stretched out, barely keeping above the water. From time to time, a choppy wave washed over its head, and he coughed and gasped and struggled on, pitifully small in the wide ocean.

  ‘Oh, my God.’ She whispered it, but her father heard.

  ‘Oh, my God is right. A simpering young man with a velvet T-shirt and a wooden sword pretending he can’t get through a few cardboard bushes …’

  For Rose, the donkey was still swimming on the screen, the donkey with the white nose from the paddock by the marina.

  ‘Don’t stare so, Rose. Don’t sit so close to the screen.’ The image was gone. On the television, the prince burst triumphantly into the castle and leaned over the great bed where the princess lay in her tutu, and woke her with the immemorial embrace.

  Rose switched off the set – ‘Thank heavens for that,’ from her father – said goodnight and went to her room.

  So that was it! A donkey was in danger. Rose opened the window without turning on the light and stood staring out, chewing the skin round her nails.

  Somewhere, for some reason, a donkey was in the sea, swimming desperately for its life. Rose knew that because donkeys had originally been desert animals, all their descendants were terrified of water. How long could this one possibly survive? For the first time since this strange adventure had begun, Rose knew what her mission was. It wasn’t Georgie or her mother, or the man with the limp, or Joanne, or any person. It was a donkey, the animal chosen by Jesus to carry him into Jerusal
em, but neglected by most of the world, a gentle beast of burden, sharing none of the care and worship given to horses.

  All the more reason why it mattered to Favour – and his messenger. But if she was going to save the donkey from the cruel sea, she must know where it was, and also when. Was it something that had happened in the past, or was it happening now, or was it something that had not happened yet, and she had to prevent it?

  She must find out more. She must go on another journey. Her spirit was working itself up to that tense, breathless feeling of expectation that ususally led to a summons from the horse. Leaning out of the window, she could feel him waiting somewhere. The moor seemed to draw her like a magnet, but there was no moon tonight. It was too dark to go to the valley. But if she had to wait until morning, how could she possibly sleep?

  When she saw her father’s light go out, she went downstairs, unbolted the back door quietly and went across the turf of the lawn and the longer grass beyond it towards the dark mass of the trees, and the narrow white gate that led into the wood.

  They always kept the gate shut, but now she saw that it was open. As she reached out to pull it shut, suddenly a yellow lantern swung from behind a tree, and the Lord of the Moor, cloaked and masked, stepped into the gateway.

  ‘Don’t shut us out,’ he warned. ‘Don’t try, becauth you can’t.’

  Here? So close to her own home? What ghastly new game was this, to try to stop her?

  The Lord raised the lantern, and she saw the red glowing eyes of the weasel crouched inside his wide sleeve. Behind, Rose could see other flickering lights moving among the trees. The wood was full of soldiers. One of them, his armoured chest misshapen by a bulging cuirass, came closer, and under the unkempt hair on his brow, Rose saw the lidless, deadened eyes of the boy outside the pub, the gang leader at the marina.

  In a rising wind, the tops of the familiar trees whispered together in horror. The Lord spoke under his breath. ‘We’re waiting,’ she thought she heard him say. ‘Now it ith near the time. Now we are waiting.’

  ‘He knows,’ the trees told each other.

  He must know that Rose was nearing her goal. Now that she knew what it was, the evil ones would try harder to stop her, the dragon breath would be on her cheek, the hatred stronger. They had never come so close before.

  But the horse came even closer. A luminous moon sailed out of the clouds. A fierce gust of wind blew shut the gate, and in a blaze of light the Lord and his demons were blotted out, and Favour pawed at the grass, not dapple grey now, but stark white like alabaster under the staring moon.

  Chapter Seven

  The speed of the horse’s cosmic flight slowed to the more earthly speed of a roaring machine. Rose was deafened, partly by the noise, partly by a hard helmet that came down over her ears. She could not see anything except the back of a studded leather jacket. Her arms were round the waist of the boy who was wearing it, clinging to him, dependent on him for her safety.

  The girl she had become was excited by the speed. So was Rose, but scared too, because she had never ridden pillion before, although to the girl it was a familiar thrill.

  When they swerved off the road and stopped, the girl raised her head, and Rose saw the glaring yellow eye at the back of the boy’s white helmet. She was the gang leader’s girl, the one who had confronted Vicky’s father in that other scene.

  When the girl took off her own helmet, she ran a hand through her stiff hair to make it stand up on top. From the inside of her skin, Rose could feel the heavy, clogging make up, the lipstick greasy and tasting of cheap raspberry sweets. The mascara was so thick she could see her own lashes. It weighed down her lids and made her blink. This was why she had to keep her head down when she was on the motorcycle.

  They were in the crowded parking space of a roadside café. Two other boys had pulled in behind them, each with a girl on the back of his bike. Rose recognized them all from having seen them when she was Vicky.

  Rose’s girl stayed outside with the boys, while the other girls went into the café to buy chips and Coke. They all threw cans and paper containers and empty cigarette packets down anywhere, which shocked Rose’s tidy soul. They hung about the car park for a bit, bored, complaining about the world and the general state of their life, and to ginger things up a bit they bent the radio antennas of a few cars and ran fingernails along the paint.

  Rose’s girl was called Lynette, and everyone called her boy friend ‘Evil’. That was why his helmet was painted like that – the evil eye. Lynette followed him closely and copied what he did, whether she wanted to or not. Rose could feel that she was fascinated by him, and yet she feared and sometimes hated him.

  He talked to her as if she were dirt, and treated her roughly. Once he caught hold of her wrist and spun her round so that her arm was twisted behind her, his nails digging into the flesh. Rose could feel the agonizing pain. Lynnette screamed at Evil and stamped backwards with the high sharp heel of her boot. It caught him on the instep and he cursed and let her arm go, and would have hit her in the face if she had not ducked.

  Rose was afraid she would get herself murdered – what would happen to Rose if a person whose body she inhabited got themselves killed? – but to Lynette, it was all in the day’s work. She was Evil’s girl. He was her bloke.

  For a while, they all threw pebbles at the window of a disused shed to see how long it would take to break it. When the glass shattered, they yawned and said, ‘This place stinks – let’s get out of here,’ to disguise the fact that they wanted to run for it before they got caught.

  ‘Where to, Evil?’ one of the boys called over the racing of their engines.

  ‘Our place. Come on.’

  He started off before Lynette was ready, but she managed to hang on to him, and found the footrests for her feet. This was the life, she told herself. Hit one place, do a spot of damage to leave your mark, and then on to the next bit of aggro.

  ‘EVIL WAS HERE,’ they sometimes wrote on a wall, or a poster, or in the dust on the back of a lorry, and then tore off somewere else. No one knew where Lynette was. Mum was always asleep by the time she came home, and never bothered to ask stupid questions in the morning.

  When they got to the marina car park that they had adopted as their territory, it looked the same to Rose as it had on her last journey: twilight, a few cars and stored boats, the sun going down behind the town on the other side of the river. The only thing that was missing was the big luxurious motor yacht, the Princess Vicky.

  Her berth at the dock was empty, but as Lynette wandered about with the others, looking under boat covers to see if there was anything to pinch, Rose heard a smooth chug, chug and saw the lighted boat sliding easily through the water. When the boat stopped, the girl stepped over the rail on to the dock, and her mother threw the rope, and her father shouted from the wheelhouse, ‘Look alive!’

  Interesting. Rose was watching exactly the same scene from a different point of view. It was coloured by the attitude of Lynette, who, like the rest of the gang, was watching the yacht and its captain and crew with a sour sort of envy, which expressed itself in automatic scorn.

  ‘Look at her,’ they said to each other. ‘Who does she think she is? What a crummy boat. Got no sails nor nothing. Who’d be seen dead in that?’ and other derogatory remarks designed to make themselves feel good.

  Vicky was quite pretty, with short curly hair and a round, harmless face, but Lynette and the gang did not think much of her, because she allowed herself to be bossed by her totally awful father. They hung about in the growing dark to see what the people on the boat were going to get up to, not because it was of any interest, but because they had nothing else to do.

  When Vicky crossed the gangplank and began to walk towards them, the father shouted to her in his toffee-nosed foghorn voice, ‘Come on, Vicky. I’d stay away from that lot, if I were you!’

  ‘Wouldn’t fancy her,’ Evil muttered. ‘I got something better.’ He gave Lynette one of his painful squeez
es.

  When the father started to carry on about troublemakers and layabouts, and what he would have done with them in the Navy, Evil gave it him right back.

  ‘The Navy’s only for morons,’ he called out. Evil was not afraid of anybody. He told the old turkey, who was getting red in the face, that he could clear off the gang’s territory.

  Rose, experiencing all this for the second time, knew what was going to be said and done, but it was curious how this different viewpoint altered the scene. Even the words sounded different, the way Lynette heard them. Vicky’s father sounded even more offensive, a dangerous enemy. What Evil shouted back at him was perfectly reasonable.

  When the big man called him a baby, and that fool Anita tittered and the donkey brayed, Lynette felt angry enough to kill. Tears welled up behind the sticky black lashes. She raged at the man like a tiger.

  Rose, as Vicky, had been afraid of this girl’s power. But as Lynette, when the man only looked at her with contempt, she was powerless. It was the contempt of the whole world, telling her she was a nobody.

  The most surprising thing to Rose was the knowledge of Vicky and Lynette’s silent feelings about each other. Vicky had been shaken with envy for Lynette’s wild freedom and dangerous entanglement with the gang leader. But now, as Vicky walked off with her parents towards the restaurant, Lynette was jealous of this sheltered girl who had all the security she lacked: the boat, money, parents who cared enough about her to be strict.

  If I had all that, Lynette thought bitterly, I wouldn’t need to put up with the way Evil treats me.

  Evil was furious. His pride had been hurt and he wanted to get his own back on the stuck-up family.

  ‘Let’s do a bit of damage here.’

  The others were all for it. They debated various ways in which they could harm the boat, but none of them were practical. The yacht lay quietly by the dock, moored fore and aft, deck lights on, looking as impregnable as a battleship. ‘I know what we’ll do,’ Evil said. ‘We’ll give them the shock of their useless lives. When they get back to the boat, they’re going to find a surprise visitor on board.’