by Julia Jones
“There’s my dad’s fishing dinghy.”
Luke tried to run back to Lowestoft Lass. He couldn’t keep a straight line and the dinghy wasn’t there. He thought it had been moored by the kayak.
“Kayak, Ants? I don’t think I…”
He knew he’d be hopeless.
“Good idea,” Miss Grace agreed. “Then we’ll need a long light warp.”
Luke and the man she didn’t know looked at her as if she was speaking in a foreign tongue but the red-headed girl was onto it. She untied the kayak and was ready as soon as Miss Grace had found the long thin line that had been lying on the cabin top of the barge and had fastened it to the nearest of the moored boats.
“Take it straight across to the other side. Let it pay out as you go. You others get over there and pull hard as you can when she passes it across. You can surely manage that much.”
The fire had taken two more of the small boats. You could feel the heat on your face. It was so noisy. Luke hadn’t known fire made such a noise. As if all the devils in hell were munching popcorn.
“Don’t just stand there! Get on with it!”
The fire engine arrived, followed by fastest of the creekies. There was plenty of help now. Miss Grace was tying boat after boat together as Angel paddled urgently across towing the long line. The newly-arrived saw what was happening and ran round to take over from Luke and Mr Vandervelde as they struggled to pull a flotilla of small boats one after another against the tide and out of the way.
They’d made the firebreak.
“There’s petrol at the end.” Miss Grace told the firemen.
“Petrol? Thanks for the information. We’ll use foam.”
Angel wondered whether she should tell someone about the dinghy that she’d moved. She’d looked at every one of the boats they’d pulled to safety but it hadn’t been there. She wished she could find the older girl. Her dad had gone completely weird and Luke was being sick again.
***
The banks of Fynn Brook had been reinforced with sandbags and cement to carry the weight of the road. It was a blind drop into the black water beneath the bridge. Helen hit the floating lion as she fell.
This was the last time she’d ever enter this hateful stream with its faint smell of rot and chemicals leached from the fields. Her hands shook as she retrieved the stolen punt and tied the trophy to its stern. The steady flow of the current was already pulling at the boat and the bundle. The water was so much deeper than usual and the night was so dark. No breath of wind, no gleam of light slipped through the overarching trees and high scrub-covered banks.
She’d asked for a head torch but had been refused. Why had she obeyed? It would have been just another theft. No one was going to see her here.
The wrapped prize floated awkwardly. It was much bigger than it had looked when it had been fastened to the pub wall. It kept rushing her from behind and hitting the stern of the punt, then getting across the current of the stream and pushing the punt off course. She had only a single oar. Normally the brook was too narrow for sculls.
She and her mother had worked here night after night to clear fallen branches, oil drums and other debris from the stream. She couldn’t believe how many snags remained. Again and again she was climbing out of the punt to free the carving from some half-hidden obstruction. It felt as if the lion had a will of its own and it didn’t want to take this voyage.
She was wet already. She might as well wade and tow them both. Never mind how often she’d stub her foot on some underwater rock or embedded rusty can. She looked at her watch. It was almost high water in the creek and she hadn’t even reached the reed beds yet.
Peter padded anxiously along the path that ran parallel to the stream. He was struggling to find words to fix his memories. Words which he could use to tell Maroosia what he’d seen. The stranger waiting by the sluice. The water trapped and rising. The two shapes tipping their burden into the stream beside the bridge.
How could he explain the explosions and the warship? His grief for his lost mind overwhelmed him and he howled.
Helen lost her footing in the soft mud and went completely under water. She had reached the next stage where the stream came out from the trees and into the expanse of reeds. There were no more stones and she was out of her depth and that old madman should be safely in his hut.
When she broke surface in the darkness she couldn’t see the punt or the prize at all. The water had risen so fast that the shape of the stream had been lost. The feathery tops of the reeds stuck up around her as if they had been startled. Where was the punt? Was it ahead of her, caught by the current, towing their trophy towards the sluice on its own?
Where was the sluice anyway?
Helen forced herself to think. Madman must be somewhere along the path through the wood. There was no other dry land within earshot. So madman was south and the current was pushing east. Okay, she had a fixing.
Except that meant that the wild orange glow ahead must be coming from the moorings.
Helen trod water as she tried to understand. The sky above the creek should be dark. More dark than usual. The bonfire and fireworks had finished hours ago. Her mother’s task was to offer nightcap to any creekies still awake, then trip the main electricity.
Something heavy came bumping past. It was the punt. She reached to grab it then something even heavier collided solidly at an angle with it and they both whirled away with the flood. If that second big hunk of timber had hit her, she would have been unconscious. It was the carved lion and it was gone.
The madman howled again and Helen was tempted to reply. She continued struggling to stay logical. The fact that she was physically out of her depth must mean that she was still in the main channel. However fast the flood had risen over the last seven hours since Elsevier closed the gate it couldn’t have raised the entire level more than a metre overall. She could see the tops of the reeds. There would still be shallow places.
She’d crossed this swamp so often, returning with her mother along their secret paths. She remembered how wildly the stream meandered as it approached the flood wall. The punt and the trophy would surely stick round one bend or another. As long as she continued to swim where it was deep, she knew she’d find them. They’d be trapped in some side stream or dead end.
Poor sad old man. She’d never heard his loneliness with such clarity before.
Fireships! That’s what her mother had done. She’d copied some vile seventeenth-century battle plan and set a boat on fire. Her mother was out of control. She’d end up killing someone.
***
Luke came out of the toilet block and headed towards Lowestoft Lass. He was dizzy and exhausted. He’d reach his bunk and then he could sleep.
The fire wasn’t so frightening now it had nowhere to go. The burned end of the decking still glowed red but tide had turned and the charred and melted dinghies would soon settle onto the mud. The main electricity supply had failed and the continuous violent blue flashing from the fire engine seemed to make everywhere darker still.
Ants’s dad – who kept asking him to call him Mike – had told his daughter to go down into the cabin and not look out. This was because of her sensitivity to strobe effects and Ants had gone without argument. Helen’s mum said that she’d told Helen to stay below because the situation was too dangerous. That seemed like a mistake when Helen would have been so much more use than him or Mike in helping to reduce the danger.
There were two or three fire-fighters keeping watch and talking to Miss Grace. They were trying to put together some report on what had happened. The initial alarm call had come from the owner of Drie Vrouwen but they hadn’t got much sense out of her since. She’d waved her arms around a lot and said that her daughter must remain for ever in the cabin and they would be leaving on the next tide.
Good, thought Luke.
Then he heard Peter
howling.
***
Elsevier sat beside the sluice wrapped in her thick cloak and waiting for the girl. She had underestimated the volume of water that would build up in the hours since she had closed the gates. It had been a wet autumn and the brook, which ran past the pub and under the road bridge and through the reeds, had been collecting run-off water from fields and streams for almost twenty miles before it reached the flood wall. The ditches were already full.
Elsevier was angry. Not with herself, of course, but with the girl who was late and the cow who had caused so much additional chaos that the fire-fighters were still at the moorings. The water on the land side of the wall was no more than half a metre from the top. On the creek side the mud was uncovering fast. She needed that girl to arrive. And soon.
The high, trapped water would help them pull the punt and the trophy over the wall so they slid down the steep slope on the far side. Then she would open the sluice gates and release the flood into the channel that led down the creek. The girl could float the prize to the barge and wait in the dark until the authorities were gone.
Elsevier had mastered the tides. She relished the power and brilliance of her plan.
The grazing land on the far side of this shallow valley would be flooded – Elsevier didn’t worry about animals – and the weight of water piling up against the wall must be considerable by now. It was possibly surprising that there was water continuing to flow out from the shallow lagoon on the creek side. At this stage of the ebb that lagoon should be dry. It didn’t trouble her. She knew that she was in control.
The current was rushing her the wrong way. Helen had found the punt and the prize caught on an abandoned plank round a shallow bend. She’d climbed back into the punt without difficulty, retrieved her single oar and began navigating as directly as she could towards the mid-point of the wall. It was almost visible – a black line against the dull glow in the sky. She thought she could see the metal railings on either side of the sluice gate. The Kapitein would be waiting there.
Suddenly the water had begun to take her sideways. She was being carried towards a section of the wall that was nearer the trees. This was wrong. However hard she struggled she couldn’t make the punt change course. The trophy was riding up hard against its stern as if it were urging them towards catastrophe.
There had been a breach – she could see it now. A part of the flood wall had given way and the water was cascading over and down into the shallow semi-enclosed lagoon where the old man’s boat lay on its side among the rushes.
Helen had seen what happened when these walls collapsed. There’d be a mass of broken stone and concrete blocks on the further side. The elderly punt would be smashed to matchwood.
She didn’t have time to think what would happen to her if she too went over in the torrent with the heavy trophy tumbling behind. All her fears were focussed on the lion. Would the tarpaulin protect the ancient carving? Even if it survived the fall, the water would dissipate across the wide space of the lagoon. Their prize would be stranded where it fell. Trapped for all to see until the next high water – which was in the middle of the following day.
She knelt in the bows of the punt working the paddle with all her strength. It had a thick shaft and a narrow blade. Completely inefficient design. The wood was rough: her palms burned. Her back and shoulders ached. The punt refused to respond.
The water seethed white as it poured through the breach. Helen didn’t grasp what that meant. With a final desperate pull – and an unexpected side eddy – she swung the bows of the punt leftwards and rammed into a section of the wall that had remained intact.
She jumped out and heaved at the short front rope trying to heave the punt further along the wall towards the sluice and relative safety. She didn’t expect this to work. She expected that at any moment the cord would be jerked from her hands as the prize plunged down into the lagoon dragging the punt behind it.
The wrapped lion swung sideways. And it stuck.
Only the top layers of the wall had been washed away. The rest was still there – for now. The flood water was pouring over a shallow sill. That was why it was churning white. The figurehead lay wedged across the gap as if it was a boom to make a dam.
More water began to pile up. This couldn’t last. Soon the lion would be lifted over or the lower sections of the wall would give way.
She pulled frantically on the rope. The punt was anchored by the weight of the trophy. Another heave and the fastening pulled away from the rotten wood.
She tried pushing from the side but the boat was stuck fast. If she couldn’t move the punt, she had no chance at all of shifting the prize.
There was only one possible course of action. She must run to Elsevier and get her to open the gates. That would reduce the pressure, lower the water levels, give her a chance to pull the prize away from the gap and move it along the wall to the sluice. Perhaps the Kapitein would help?
***
Luke headed straight for the plank pathway that led out into the reeds. That was surely where the old man would be. Maybe he was ill: maybe he was trapped and afraid. Confused by the sight of the fire.
Luke used the backlight of his phone to pick out the cheap blue plastic rope that was knotted round the tree. He gripped it firmly in his right hand. The makeshift jetty lurched randomly from side to side as if someone was pressing the rotate button on a controller.
It wasn’t the jetty, it was him. He’d never been ill like this before. He had to stop quite often, stand completely still and hold tight. Concentrate on feeling the planks beneath his feet. Gravity was a miracle.
The reeds rustled all around him, whispering their comments in their own alien language. Luke didn’t call out. He told himself that was because he didn’t want to risk startling the old man. His mouth had gone dry and it tasted disgusting.
The boat at last. The hull of a yacht. She must once have been painted white like Maggi and Xanthe’s beautiful Snow Goose but now she was a dim and pale skeleton. No moon to light her and her name faded away beyond the first two letters – Ra’.
As soon as he touched the deck he knew that the wood was rotten. Surely Peter shouldn’t come here?
“Hi,” Luke whispered very softly, almost as softly as the reeds. “It’s … Vanya. Hi, Peter, are you okay?”
He found the empty cockpit and shone his light into the deserted cabin. Miss Grace had been right. There were more books here. Soggy books and mildewed charts.
Now Luke could hear voices blowing across from the far side of the lagoon. He needed to get back across that jetty, urgent. That sweaty, shivery feeling. The hot flush and the pain.
***
The old man had already reached the Kapitein. What instinct for trouble had sent him nosing round towards the sluice? He must have crossed that section of wall only moments before it crumbled. Now he was standing there, facing Elsevier, pointing to the water and then to the gates, unable to find words. Helen knew what he was trying to say. She said it for him.
“You must open the sluice, Kapitein. There’s breach further down and the prize is caught fast across it. Until the pressure is reduced there’s nothing I can do to shift it.”
“You’re late.”
“I am.”
“Why should I do as you ask. A girl who can’t keep to time or to a plan.”
“Because if you don’t, the prize is lost. Morning will come and it will be grounded in plain sight.”
“And this old fool?”
“Is old and will forget. No-one listens to him.”
Elsevier flounced and she stamped and she swore but she did it. She cranked open the metal grille and watched the water stream through into the empty creek.
This immediately began diverting the current away from the breach and back into its regular course. The punt and the prize were no longer pressed so hard against the wall. Elsevier
would do no more but the old man came with Helen and helped her to manhandle them along towards the sluice. He seemed to have an instinctive understating of floating objects and their ways.
He also appeared to be congratulating her for having cleared the item that had been dumped beside the bridge.
“Maroosia will be pleased,” was all she understood – and that made no sense either.
Wordlessly he assisted her to heave the punt and the prize over the wall and down into the creek. The escaping water was carving its way along a runnel between the mud banks. Helen climbed down into the punt and knew she had the depth she needed for the final leg of her journey to Drie Vrouwen.
A certainty flashed into her mind. The old man had seen too much. He was inessential now. She shouldn’t leave him alone with Elsevier.
CHAPTER TEN
Troublesome Reach
Thursday 6 November, dark of the moon
Helen, Angel, Luke, Mike
“People who mess with their heads are so…un-Dutch.”
“What about people who mess with other people’s heads then?” Helen didn’t see why she should be polite any longer. It wasn’t she who’d brought the hallucinogens from Amsterdam and she’d done her best to prevent her mother accessing the English alternatives.
“They were a present. She’s worked hard for me.”
“Bring her flowers or a box of choccies then.”
“I told her they were for later.”
“And I told you that she’s got no control any more. It’s a pity that you’re such a great speaker that you only ever listen to yourself.”
She saw the older woman’s dark eyes narrow, her cheeks flush red. She raised her hand. Helen wasn’t having that.
“And if you think of hitting me – or if you touch me just once in any way at all – I’m out of this boat and I’m telling the authorities.”
“No more little house on the polder and rowing races on the Bosbaan for you in that case.”
“Prison for you, I hope.”