by Poppy Harris
The bay curved round in a broad semicircle like a protecting arm. To the left and right stretched the flat rocks, and Bethany knew that the tide would have left rock pools full of small, ferny plants, delicate little seaweeds, limpets and the funny, inquisitive hermit crabs in their shells. At the edge of the rocks was a very brightly painted pole with a lifebelt attached, for throwing to anyone who might be in difficulty in the water. Bethany always thought lifebelts looked like big red-and-white doughnuts. She slipped her hand into her bag, where Hamilton was staying very still, and stroked the top of his head to reassure him.
Hamilton was clinging on with all his front claws to the inside of that bag. He could smell the warm, dry sand, and the urge to leap from Bethany’s bag and dig himself into it was almost overwhelming.
‘Grandie, can we play cricket?’ asked Sam.
‘Course we can!’ said Grandie, and they ran down to the firm sand nearest to the waves. Nan sighed and said she supposed she’d have to join in, but they all knew she actually loved playing cricket on the beach.
‘I’ll stay here and make a sandcastle,’ said Bethany, and she knelt where the sand was dry and warm. As soon as the others were busy with stumps and bales and talking about who would bat first, she said quietly, ‘Out you get, Hamilton.’
Hamilton leapt from her pocket, dived head first into the sand, and scrabbled. Soon only his hind paws and fluffy little bottom were sticking out, before they too vanished completely. Bethany could only see where he was from the shifting of the sand above him. At last, Hamilton’s pink nose popped out from a mound, followed quickly by the rest of him. He shook himself vigorously, scratched the sand from his ears, rubbed his face, then threw himself back on to the beach, rolling on his back and kicking for joy. Bethany thought she’d never seen him so happy.
‘We’re here for a whole week!’ she told Hamilton. ‘If it stays sunny, and Nan says it will, we can come here every day. I’m going to build you a castle, but what we need to do first is to find a stone, a special stone, one that looks different from the others. Stay there and don’t move from that spot.’
Hamilton wriggled into a sand nest and watched Bethany inquisitively while she hunted among the pebbles on the shoreline. He couldn’t imagine how a stone was going to add to the delight of sand burrowing. Bethany came back with a very pretty oval-shaped one, pink and grey and very smooth, quite unlike the others.
‘This is our stone,’ she said. ‘If you go for a dig, leave it on the surface and stay near to it so I can always find you. If you move, move the stone too. That way, I’ll always know where you are even when I can’t see you.’
Hamilton was impressed. Bethany might not be good at maths, but in some ways she was even cleverer than he was! It must be a different kind of clever. He put the stone in his mouth, where it fitted neatly into one of his pouches, and helped Bethany to build her castle.
It was a real storybook castle, with a moat, a keep and turrets at the corners. Hamilton helped her to dig out the moat but then couldn’t resist jumping on to the keep, which gave way underneath him. He held out his paw for the phone, but from the look on his face Bethany already knew what he wanted to say.
‘I know you’re sorry,’ she said, laughing. ‘It doesn’t matter – I’ll soon build it again!’
Hamilton scrabbled into the sand again, but just before he disappeared, he remembered the pebble, popped back up and left it as a marker for Bethany. This time, he was gone for several minutes, but he appeared again at last, wrinkling his nose and brushing sand from his whiskers.
‘I told you it got damp further down,’ said Bethany. ‘Perhaps you should stay near the surface … Oh! Hamilton! Hamilton, come and see what I’ve found!’
Hamilton sat up hopefully. Bethany sounded very excited. In stories, children found treasure maps near the sea. He knew this was unlikely, but a fossil or a previously unknown sort of shell would be good. He was disappointed to see that all Bethany was holding up was a small stick.
‘People shouldn’t throw lolly sticks away,’ she said. ‘It’s litter. But they do make very good flags. Look – you take a bit of sweet wrapper or an old ticket or something, then you can push the lolly stick through it – like this – and there’s a flag for your castle!’
She held out the flag to him. Hamilton pounced on it with both paws, held it high and waved it from side to side. Bethany was ready to laugh, but didn’t because she knew that he was being a knight, or maybe a herald, and she didn’t want to upset his dignity.
Hamilton was delighted with his flag. Not many things were hamster-sized, but this was, so he flourished it, held it high and finally scrambled up the sandcastle to plant it on a tower. The tower fell down, but Bethany quickly built it up again while he chewed at the lolly stick.
He was beginning to have a lot of respect for his hamster ancestors from the desert. Sand was wonderful but it was getting into Hamilton’s mouth, his ears and his eyes too, if he wasn’t careful. It was even between his teeth. He supposed those long-ago desert hamsters must have become used to it. Bethany didn’t seem bothered by it at all. Perhaps she felt as he did – sand was so lovely that it didn’t matter if it stuck to your claws and whiskers.
But afternoons on the beach don’t last forever, and when Bethany saw Nan, Grandie and Sam packing up the cricket things, she scooped up Hamilton and put him gently back in her bag.
‘It looks as if we’re going home soon,’ she said. ‘Stay there and keep still.’
Hamilton wasn’t used to taking so much exercise at this time of day. He stretched, had another shake, settled down – and was deeply asleep by the time they all reached home. Upstairs in her room, Bethany placed him very gently in his nest box. He blinked a bit, yawned, decided not to wake up and was still fast asleep when Bethany came to bed.
Dr Tim Taverner had never given up his quest to find the hamster with the microspeck. He knew that it belonged either to Bethany or to her friend Chloe, who lived in the same street, Tumblers Crescent, with her hamster called Toffee. Tim Taverner wanted that microspeck back and was determined to get his hands on the hamster. So far, all his attempts had failed, but unbeknown to Bethany and Hamilton, he wasn’t going to stop trying.
The day after Bethany and Sam went to Kettle Bay was a Sunday, so there was a lot of garden tidying and car washing going on, and Tim made a point of walking round Tumblers Crescent with a newspaper under his arm so as not to look too suspicious. When he heard two people talking, his ears pricked up. And when he realized that the voices were coming from Number 33, where Bethany lived, and that one of the speakers was Bethany’s mum, he hurried over at once, accidentally on purpose dropping his newspaper and picking it up again so that he could stop and listen to them.
‘Have the kids settled in all right with your mum and dad?’ asked the woman next door.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Bethany’s mum. ‘Bethany rang last night and they’re having a great time. The forecast for Kettle Bay is good for the rest of the week too, so they’ll be on the beach every day.’
Tim pretended to be struggling to sort out his newspaper as he listened with growing excitement. If the girl they were talking about, Bethany, was the hamster’s owner, this would be a great chance to steal it. Now that the child wasn’t around to stand guard over her precious hamster, he could get into the house, snatch it from its cage and run for it.
In his pocket, Tim carried a tracking device which could detect the microspeck, and he knew it worked because it had brought him very near to the hamster before. It had been broken on his last failed attempt to steal the hamster, but he’d mended it now. He reached for the tracking device, stood up and began to walk slowly down the street towards the house. But, for some reason, the tracking device wasn’t picking anything up. Where on earth was the hamster and – more importantly – Tim’s microspeck?
‘So I suppose you’re looking after the pets?’ asked the neighbour.
‘Funnily enough, no,’ said Bethany’s mum.
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br /> Tim stopped. He took off his glasses and polished them on his tie.
‘I’ve got Sam’s rabbit to look after,’ went on Bethany’s mum, ‘but Bethany took her hamster with her.’
‘Oh, bless her!’ said the neighbour.
‘I wasn’t keen on the idea,’ admitted Mum, ‘but my parents are happy with it, and you know what she’s like about her Hamilton – she won’t be parted from him!’
Tim put his glasses back on and continued walking down the street, so concerned to look innocent that he didn’t see where he was going and walked into a lamp-post. But even that didn’t spoil his excitement. So, if he’d got the right child, the hamster was on holiday at Kettle Bay!
When he had been a teenager, Tim had liked canoeing. He was sure Kettle Bay would be a nice place to start up his old hobby again. He hadn’t done it for years, but his old canoe was still hanging from the ceiling of his parents’ garage.
Tim didn’t often go to see his mum and dad – he felt more at home with computers than with people – but that same day he fitted a roof-rack on to his car, drove to his parents’ house and collected his canoe.
When he got it home, he saw how neglected it was. There were cracks here and there, but it seemed seaworthy enough. He’d go down to the DIY store and buy some Patching Up Your Canoe stuff and a new life-jacket. Oh, and some more batteries for the remote-control tracking device. Nothing was going to stop him this time.
By the time Tim went to bed that night, he had booked the first room he could get, in a bed and breakfast called the Hammock and Spinnaker.
He would stay at Kettle Bay as long as he needed to.
For Bethany and Hamilton, it was pretty much a perfect week. Every day, they went down to the warm sand, where Sam would play football, frisbee or cricket with Grandie. Sam had also made friends among the other boys who lived close by or who were visiting their families, and so he always had someone to play with.
Bethany, left to herself, would happily slip Hamilton out of her pocket so that they could build sandcastles together and make shell patterns in the sand. When the tide was out, they’d explore the rock pools. To Hamilton, they looked like small underwater countries, with forests of feathery seaweed and hillsides with shell houses made out of clinging limpets. Tiny fishes darted in and out among glowing sea anemones. It all looked so magical that Hamilton wished he could be a hamster-fish and swim in and out of the seaweed forests. As a Syrian hamster, however, Hamilton mustn’t get wet, but back at Nan and Grandie’s house, Bethany would tell him stories about a magic water hamster who lived under the sea and ran on a silver wheel. Hamilton, who loved aeroplanes, thought he’d rather be a flying hamster, but silver wheels were a nice idea, too.
Sometimes in the evenings, the family would get together to play a game, and Bethany would bring Hamilton down to watch. He found it all very interesting, but he could get thoroughly frustrated, too. If they played Scrabble, he could see great opportunities for words like ‘gustation’ (tasting something – Hamilton liked to do this if there were apples involved), ‘ziffius’ (a sea monster) and ‘excogitate’ (to work something out by thinking hard about it, which Hamilton also liked to do a lot). He had once read a story with a ziffius in it, and was pretty sure that they didn’t really exist, but you never know. ‘Apple’ was a favourite word of his, too.
If they played a murder-mystery game, Hamilton knew who’d done it, how they did it, what with and why long before anybody else did. The quiz programmes on television were too easy, but sometimes there were programmes with exciting music, and one night there was a documentary all about aeroplanes, which Hamilton loved. He watched Grandie and Sam playing chess, too, and tried to guess the moves they would make next.
In Bethany’s room, Hamilton and Bethany would sort out the shells and pebbles they had picked up on the beach. There was always sand in Bethany’s sandals and in her bag, and Hamilton would wriggle about in it, lifting it high and letting it trickle through his paws.
‘You can’t get enough of sand, can you, Hamilton?’ said Bethany. He ran up her arm to rub his face against her hand and put out his paw for the phone.
LAST DAY 2MORO, he tapped out.
‘I know,’ said Bethany. ‘So we’ll make it a really good day. We’ll spend every moment we can on the beach, all right? You’ll have to stay awake all day, if you can. And we’ll still have Saturday morning left, before we go home.’
Hamilton nodded sadly, ran into his cage and picked up the puzzle he’d been doing. Wherever you were, there was always Sudoku.
Hamilton did his puzzle and Bethany curled up with a book. But if they had looked out of the window, they might have seen a dark-haired young man with a black box in his hand walking slowly along the shore.
Tim was walking along the beach with the remote-control tracking device in his hand, watching to see if it lit up and listening for the quiet bleep that would tell him that his microspeck was nearby. This evening, he had walked up and down the main street in Kettle Bay and along the beach and there hadn’t been as much as a flicker or a peep out of it. Finally, he returned to the Hammock and Spinnaker, where he banged his head on a low beam over the front door. It was a very old house, the oldest in the village, and had been built in the days when people were shorter than they are now. It had a stone floor, dark wooden furniture and a glowing log fire in the lounge. Lizzie the landlady greeted him.
‘Did you enjoy your walk, Dr Taverner?’ she asked cheerfully as she dried glasses.
‘Oh, yes, thank you!’ said Tim, but he hadn’t really enjoyed it much. He hadn’t noticed the pleasant sea air, the shells, the waves, the rock pools or the dogs barking at the sea. All he cared about was that microspeck and he had had no luck whatsoever. There was no sign of it.
‘Can you call me at about seven in the morning?’ he asked.
‘Certainly, Dr Taverner!’ said Lizzie.
Tim went back to his small bedroom with the flowered curtains at the little low window. This time he remembered to duck, scowling. The room wasn’t made for six-foot-two computer scientists.
However careful you are about eating a picnic on the beach, you always get sand in the sandwiches. Bethany was thinking this as she sprawled on a rug in the sunshine, secretly slipping bits of sandwich into the sandcastle where Hamilton was hiding, nibbling them from her fingers. A piece of driftwood from the shoreline made a very good bridge across the moat and an excellent hiding place for Hamilton. He would rather have been out on the open sand, warming his fur in the sun – but as Nan, Grandie and Sam were all there, it was safer to hide under the bridge.
Hamilton found a bit of driftwood that had broken from the bridge and gnawed it. Lolly sticks were good for chewing on while you made them into flags, but not as satisfying as driftwood. Just that morning, Bethany had given him a new flag, but he wouldn’t dream of chewing that because she had made it specially for him. It had a picture of a golden hamster on a white background, and it was his newest treasure. He had it with him, hidden under the drawbridge. There was still a faint whiff of lemon about it, from when it had been a lemon ice lolly stick. Hamilton nibbled at the driftwood again – it was good for getting your teeth into, even if it could be a bit salty. He’d have to ask Bethany to take some home.
‘Are you looking forward to seeing your rabbit again, Sam?’ asked Nan.
‘Suppose so,’ said Sam. ‘I’ll take him some dandelions. I don’t know why Bethany wanted to bring Hammy on holiday. He just sleeps in his cage in the house all day.’
‘But you have him to come home to in the evenings, don’t you, Bethany?’ said Nan. ‘He really is a sweetie.’
‘Sweetie’? ‘Hammy’ was bad enough! Hamilton gave Bethany’s finger a gentle nip, not enough to hurt, but enough to say that he objected. ‘Sweetie’ was a word for brightly coloured things that were bad for the teeth. He wasn’t a humbug, a jelly bean or a pink-and-white marshmallow, was he? Why did people always say he was sweet?
Presently, Nan sai
d she and Grandie were going back to the house, as she needed to sort out some washing and Grandie was hoping to watch the cricket. ‘But you two can stay here, if you like,’ she said. ‘Shall I check on Hamilton for you, Bethany?’
‘No, please don’t,’ said Bethany quickly, and looked away because she could feel her face turning pink. ‘He doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s sleepy, and it upsets him, so he gets hyperactive and bites. I wouldn’t go near him just now, if I were you.’
Hamilton’s head butted her hand and she giggled.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Sam.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just thinking about hyperactive hamsters, that’s all. It’s no problem, Nan, if you and Grandie go back. I’ve got my phone and we’re only five minutes from the house.’
Bethany glanced around for Hamilton, but there was no sign of him. Their special pebble, however, lay on the surface near the sandcastle. She thought she could see the sand move as he wriggled underneath it. Sam had wandered over to the rock pools to look for hermit crabs.
Bethany left Hamilton to play and ran down to the shoreline, letting the small tickling waves run over her toes. Looking over her shoulder, she could just about see Hamilton’s pebble beside the sandcastle. The waves teased at her feet, and from the way they were moving steadily up the shoreline she could tell that the tide was coming in. By the evening, most of the beach would be under water. She ran back up the beach, picked up the pebble and scrabbled in the sand with her hands.
‘Hamilton?’ she said. There was a shuffling in the sand and Hamilton popped up. She held out her hand and he climbed on to it.