The Lion of Sole Bay (Strong Winds)

by Julia Jones

They none of them noticed that the boatyard wasn’t empty. There was still a bloke there, black woolly hat and a donkey jacket, clearing up before he left.

  If people were on their own they didn’t normally tangle with the hard-lads. They shouted from a safe distance or got out their phones. But this bloke stopped what he was doing and came walking over towards them as if he had something to say, something to explain maybe.

  Whatever it was they didn’t get to hear it.

  Angel had found the lowest boat of all. Little yellow one – Gingerbread Man – she liked that name. “You can’t catch me!” she’d yelled and she’d gone under really fast. Her head right down, crouched flat to the handlebars. She’d felt the underneath of Gingerbread Man brushing the back of her hoodie.

  One of the big lads was right behind her. Tanking it. Then he saw he wasn’t going to make it under and he bottled. Spun his bike hard round and hit the first of the three telegraph poles that were chocked against the boat for legs. Hit it straight out.

  Gingerbread Man lurched sideways.

  The lads shoved Angel off the bike. They grabbed it and then they ran. Over the gate and across the railway line and…gone.

  Angel saw the second leg begin to slide and she double-somersaulted backwards. The bloke in the donkey jacket couldn’t have looked properly. He was running towards the boat with his arms out as if he thought he could stop the fall. She might have blanked for a minute, or maybe she just shut her eyes.

  The man caught the boat all right. It came right down on top of him. Would have squashed him completely if the poles hadn’t still been there. They were lying flat but they were thick and solid. They kept Gingerbread Man just that last bit off of the ground.

  It wasn’t a big boat but big enough. The man was stuck under the part towards the back where it started curving up again. Angel could only see his top half.

  “Guys!” she screeched. “Come back!”

  But the lads were gone and the bloke on the ground wasn’t saying anything and it was, finally, getting dark.

  “Help, somebody help!”

  There wasn’t anyone and she didn’t have her phone. She forced herself to crawl over to the man. She could see that he was totally trapped. She couldn’t see whether he was alive.

  “Hey!” she said, not loud. “Hey, mister?”

  But he didn’t answer. He was breathing which was something. There wasn’t much more. His face was sort of whitey-green and his eyes didn’t open. Not even when she leaned right close.

  Angel tried to get her hands in his pockets case he had a phone on him. Knew it was urgent for an ambulance. Couldn’t reach though. Bloody boat was in the way.

  She stood up and screamed for help again. She sort of sensed that the lads hadn’t all gone. That a couple of them might’ve stopped and turned back, needing to see what they’d done.

  “Call an ambulance,” she shouted into the shadows. “If you won’t use your own phones, get into their office and use that. He’s hurt really bad. You’ve got to or he might not make it. And tell them they need lifting gear. I don’t know you. You don’t know me neither.”

  She guessed they’d do it. Specially now it was dark and they could break into the office. They wouldn’t have used their own phones – too scared to get caught.

  It might be ages before the ambulance came. You turned their head didn’t you? Case they were sick.

  His head was heavy and the ground was lumpy with pebbles. Angel sort of propped his head on her leg while she pulled off her sport-sack and got her blazer out. Made him a pillow with it. Kept his face off the damp.

  She couldn’t think what else. There was one of his hands available so she hung on to that.

  Then Angel tried to say sorry. Tried to tell him it was going to be okay.

  ***

  Luke’s Quest got put on pause once he’d crossed the gangway onto Lowestoft Lass and stepped down onto her scuffed grey deck. She felt safe. Like home, even though she wasn’t.

  The tide had lifted her out of the mud and he could see more than halfway down Fynn Creek. It was almost high water. The shallows were hidden and only the positioning of the red and green marker buoys revealed what a winding channel you had to follow if you wanted to reach the River Deben beyond.

  Bill had had to bring Lowestoft Lass into the creek on the top of a spring flood to manoeuvre her safely into her berth. Luke wondered, fleetingly, how the long Dutch barge next door had managed to get in at all. She was from Amsterdam: Hooge 52 tonnes. That meant weight, he supposed. Her name was Drie Vrouwen.

  It was a good spot where the moorings were. Right at the top of the navigable creek before the Fynn became non-tidal and changed its name from Fynn Creek to Fynn Brook. Luke and Liam had chased each other across the flood bank at the west end. Then they’d dared each other to climb down to check out the metal sluice that controlled the water flowing in from the brook to the creek. It was just a trickle at low tide but when the tide was high or there’d been a lot of rain it came surging through. You could see why there were DANGER notices.

  Fynn Brook arrived through reed beds with lots of different streams joining together. There was plenty of exploring to be done. Adventures, probably.

  The high, sloping wood on the south side sheltered the moorings from the prevailing wind. There was a clutter of miscellaneous vessels secured to stakes and jetties. All sorts but mainly small. The people who came here a lot called themselves the creekies. They seemed a cheery bunch. There’d been barbecues in the summer.

  Bill mainly liked Fynn Creek because it was cheap and you could get on with your work without being disturbed. If he’d kept Lass in Phoenix Yard there’d always have been people wanting him to help with all their jobs and his dad didn’t seem to know how to say no. It was typical he wasn’t back yet. He’d still be clearing up after everyone else had left to start the weekend.

  His dad spent most of his free time on Lowestoft Lass. Didn’t seem to want to come home to the rest of them in the big house at Bawdsey. Not unfriendly. More out of place.

  Same with the holiday. It had been organised by Anna, who wasn’t anything to do with Bill. She was paying but Luke was sure she’d asked Bill if he’d like to come. Asked as if she meant it. But his dad had said no.

  Didn’t matter. He hadn’t gone to Italy either. They were going to have dads’n’lads this half-term. He’d never slept on Lowestoft Lass before. Been visiting on board and playing about with Liam but not slept. He could imagine the days when she’d been buffeting out in the stormy seas. Away from home for weeks at a time, seeking her finny fortune.

  Bill had been a fisherman before any of them had been born. And his family before him. When he bought Lowestoft Lass, he’d also bought a solid, flat, plastic dinghy and then he’d got some nets as well and he’d gone fishing in the summer evenings in the warm shallow water at the edge of the river.

  Luke had been there when he’d caught a half dozen tiny sea bass. They were twisting and struggling in the net. Gills opening and shutting, desperate, like tiny wings that couldn’t fly. His dad had tipped them all back. Said it was because of their size but it could’ve been because he saw Luke couldn’t cope.

  Luke was going to have to man up this week. Try not to think too much. Forget Land of Legends, maybe. All that stuff with heroes and monsters.

  He got out his mobile to text Lottie:

  Safe. Love u xx

  But it wouldn’t send.

  He decided to make him and his dad some tea. Wasted loads of matches trying to light the gas before he realised it was off at the cylinder. Then he remembered he’d left all his bags at the top of that slope, including milk and stuff. If he ran up there to fetch them, using the asphalt track this time, his phone would get reception. His message to Lottie would ping off from the top and he’d be back with all the food and luggage before Bill could begin to wonder where he’d
got to. They might meet. He wasn’t sure which way his dad came home.

  Luke shivered suddenly – violently – though he wasn’t cold.

  He’d told Liam that if you shivered like that it meant someone walked over your grave. But Anna had got cross and said that was superstitious rubbish. An involuntary muscular reflex was all it was, she said.

  It was a good thing, Luke thought, that his step-sister was always right. He couldn’t see anyone as he left Lowestoft Lass and it was starting to get dark. There were birds flapping in the trees like trapped spirits; branches cracking like crushed bone. If he emptied his mind and forgot Halloween and didn’t think of graves and ran until he was onto the asphalt path, he probably wouldn’t shiver again.

  It was like trying to make yourself stop having hiccups just by holding your breath. It didn’t entirely work.

  ***

  Angel was holding the man’s cold hand and talking to him and listening out for the ambulance and trying to see which bits of him the boat was squashing. And she was sort of praying – which was something she’d never done before – and she was feeling the pebbles sticking into the side of her leg and the other foot getting pins and needles and wondering how long this was going to be and whether the man would die and if she could move without making things worse and what her mum and dad were going to say and hoping they would never find out.

  She was thinking angry thoughts about the lads who had run off and envious thoughts wishing she’d run off with them.

  Her whole body was starting to jump and to fidget like it did at Sunday lunch or in assemblies but she knew that this time she was going to sit still and she was going to channel all those tickly feelings into one bright stream. And that bright stream was gold and scarlet and warm and it was going to run together out of every bit of her and across into the man’s cold hand. Then it was going to flow up and along his limp arm like molten metal until it brought the life back into his heart and brain. She wasn’t going to allow this crushed man to freeze away.

  Angel’s foot wanted to kick something. There was an itch nibbling at the middle of her back. Her shoulder twitched. Mentally she grabbed the whole lot of them and pulled them into line. They were to go down her arm and into the man’s hand. No argument.

  She carried on talking to him. Made it louder and more definite. Promised him he was going to be all right.

  His breathing was weird and it was too dark for her to see his face any more. She felt that he was growing colder.

  Angel was small but she was supple. Without disarranging her hand for a moment or stopping her flow of words she wriggled her whole body close to his body, pulled her skirt out of the bag and draped it lightly over his chest. Then she held him without hardly touching. Angel had funny feelings about touching. Her mum was normally the only person who got near her. Except in a fight.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she told him over and over. “You’re totally, definitely going to be okay. Take it from me. OK. Gold Star Promise. That’s the ones I really keep.”

  She was concentrating harder than she’d ever concentrated. Every bit of energy she had she was giving. She was concentrating so hard that it was a huge shock when she heard the ambulance sounding its way across the railway line and into the yard. Its headlamps dazzled her as they swung round and settled on the pale hull of the fallen boat.

  The flashing blue light was doing something funny to her head.

  No! Not here!

  Angel jumped to her feet, her arm shielding her face. Then she bent down, grabbed her skirt back off of the man’s chest and pulled the mask from her bag.

  A small witch fled into the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Halloween II

  Friday 31 October, moon entering the last quarter

  Luke, Angel, Helen

  Blppp! Luke’s text to Lottie got sent from the phone in his pocket just as he reached the lane on the far side of the gate.

  This was where her car had left him. All he needed to do was follow his own trail until he reached the place where he’d hidden the bags. That shouldn’t be hard. Along the grass, keeping the hedge to his right. Ignoring the wet grass and the whirring shapes that might be bats. Why hadn’t he brought a torch? Because it was in his bag, of course.

  The dark was closing in as if someone was twisting a dimmer switch. He got to the edge of the wood and couldn’t see anything. He remembered how the supermarket carrier had pushed a bow-wave through the leaves. He’d worried that it was leaving a massive trail. Now he hoped it had.

  Luke knelt down and started patting the leaves, feeling for the swept track as he waited for his eyes to adjust.

  His ears were sharp enough. They heard too much. Not just his own panting breath and the squashy rustle of the leaf cushion but other unidentified sounds; sudden calls and sharp, quick scuffles – like claws. Birds or maybe squirrels would be okay but not badgers, stoats or foxes. And he definitely didn’t need any ghouls or monsters. Not flesh-eating hairy spiders either. Or giants. He heard an owl. It was only an owl. The sort of thing you could get in a picture book. It wasn’t a disembodied spirit and if it was hunting something, it wasn’t hunting him.

  Luke’s groping hands felt tree roots. He wished he’d never thought that they could be bones. Then his bare hand pressed down on something that was seriously prickly. Baby porcupines? Then he remembered the spiny balls he’d seen earlier. Of course they weren’t explosive and he’d only been playing when he used an invisibility philtre to hide his bags.

  “Revelatio!” That wasn’t right. “Speculandum!”

  Oh come on –

  He’d been crawling as he searched. Now he sat back on his knees to get his bearings.

  Plop. There was something random falling from the trees. Why wasn’t there even a moon?

  He listened again. From beyond the wood he could hear water birds settling for the night and beyond them a rumble that must be traffic. End of the week. People going home. Normal people. With plans and families.

  The damp was soaking through his jeans, his hands felt stained with leaf mould, the sweet wet smell of rot and fungi was going up his nose and into his brain.

  He heard sirens.

  Lottie and Anna and Liam and Vicky would be at the airport by now. He was going to have to leave the bags until tomorrow when it was light and get back to Lowestoft Lass. He didn’t want his dad to worry.

  Luke stood up, brushing his hands on his fleece. Took a couple of steps and did a header straight onto his cache. The sleeping bag and the buoyancy aid and the backpack and the supermarket carrier were still lashed together by the scarf and the thermals. He couldn’t get the knots undone but he wasn’t bothered. They could spread them out on the wheelhouse table and sort everything together.

  Best to hurry. He should have written a note. As straight down the hill as he could and then left at the creek. Arms full of bags: foot careful. An unexpected glow suggested there might be some building that he hadn’t noticed earlier. The light was so dim it was almost brown.

  Lowestoft Lass was dark when he reached her but so were the other liveaboards. Not a glimmer anywhere except from a set of three carved orange pumpkin heads grinning from the black Dutch barge.

  Where was his dad? He ought to be home by now. He wouldn’t have gone straight out looking for him, would he?

  Luke found the switch for the wheelhouse light and began to sort though the mess of crushed biscuit, broken eggs and leaking milk. Get it all clean and put away before Bill came back. He’d need to hurry.

  Luke had time to mop up every drip of spilt milk; time to eat the most broken of the biscuits and pick out every last slimy piece of eggshell. He had time to find a metal spike to push into the centre of those over-tightened knots and time to wriggle it backwards and forwards until they finally worked loose.

  He had time to get properly frightened.r />
  WHERE WAS HIS DAD?

  ***

  Angel had enough sense left to pull off her mask when she was almost home. She kicked it under a parked car and tried to calm her breathing like they’d showed her in those sessions. Then she walked up the path between the faded smiles and the weathered cheeks of her mum’s collection of garden gnomes.

  She let herself in quietly trying to remember what she’d said that she’d been doing.

  “You’re late,” said her mother.

  “You didn’t answer your phone,” said her dad.

  Then they looked at each other and tried again.

  “So, how did it go?”

  Did what go? Angel stood and shuffled in the hallway feeling desperate.

  “I used to love dancing when I was your age. Of course it was quite different then. Irish traditional was what we used to do – though they say it’s coming back. I expect you and your friends do that modern style in leotards. Makes me think of cats, black cats usually. I hope you’ll let us see.”

  Her mum had a line in cheery patter that really got on Angel’s nerves. Next minute she’d start on about whether Angel had had any tea and what she’d like if not.

  Her dad had been watching some programme on the History Channel. If he’d been working he wouldn’t have heard her at all. He paused the programme and asked again about her day. He always asked about her day. He didn’t seem to notice that she never answered any more.

  She used to. Used to pour it all out: every mistake, every hope, every rejection, every thrill and every hurt.

  Not now she was in Year Eight.

  “It was okay.”

  “Come and sit down then. We can change the channel.” He was trying his best. “Find something you’d enjoy as well. Watch it together. Let Mum fetch you a bit of tea?”

  She stayed in the hallway. “I’m going to bed. I’ll take my pills myself. I might read a book or something.”

  Her mum came hurrying towards her. “Are you sure you’re all right?”