When they left the house, it was with a furtive sense of running away. Nobody knew where they were going; nobody would miss them for hours. Their father was at work, their mother asleep. No neighbours were there to watch them go. They were completely free, just him and his sister, making her steps as long as she possibly could to try and keep up with him. He took her hand in his, slowing his pace so she wouldn’t have to scurry, and knew without looking exactly how her smile would transform her face.
The best route to adventure was the cliff-top, but he didn’t want today tainted with fear. They took the route through the village instead, passing thin rows of tall houses and pebble-dashed bungalows whose residents they’d never seen, and who they might live their whole lives without ever knowingly laying eyes on.
“Where are we going?” Ella asked, after a while.
“To the beach.”
“I thought this road only went to the shop.”
“No, silly. The road goes all the way through and out to the rest of the world. How do you not know that?” Ella shrugged. “Doesn’t Mum ever take you?”
“We go to the shop sometimes. Not every day, though. Only when it’s safe.”
“The cliffs won’t fall in this far inland. Look, you see at the end of the road there? Where the road goes left but the path goes right? That’s where we’re going.”
“Will it be the beach we went to before? That time we went all together?”
“Yep. Come on, keep walking.”
“But where do we go to if we keep walking down that road?” Ella asked.
“Along the coast.”
“Are there more beaches? Or are there only our one, the one we got stuck on I mean, and the one we went to with Mum and Dad?”
He tried not to laugh. “No, there’s loads.”
“If we walk down the road, will we find another one?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So, should we do that? For an adventure?”
The further they walked, the further it would be to walk back, and Ella would grow tired, and she was getting too heavy to carry. He thought about his parents, and the expressions on their faces if Ella told them he’d taken her off like this, without telling anyone where they were going.
On the other hand, since no one knew where they were anyway –
He knelt down in front of her and looked into her face, making sure she knew he was being serious. “We can only do it if you promise not to tell anyone.”
“I promise.”
“Seriously. Not anyone. Not even Mum or Dad.”
“Will they be cross with us?”
“Yes, they will. We’re not supposed to go off by ourselves. But we can do it this once, if you promise not to tell them. And you have to do everything I say. And not ask to be carried.”
“I promise.”
It was insane to put his trust in the promise of a child. But the road was inviting and both the school bus and his father always took a different route, so he’d never been along it.
“Come on, then,” he said, and took her hand again.
Within a few hundred yards there was no footpath, but the visibility was good, no fences or bushes to conceal oncoming traffic, so they walked on anyway, and climbed onto the scrubby grass verge whenever a car approached. They could smell the distinctive muddy scent of the sea, and he wondered if Ella realised how close it was, but she seemed oblivious, so he kept quiet. It was past twelve o’clock, time to eat the sandwiches he’d hastily flung together in the kitchen. But Ella didn’t complain, so they kept going, with no destination in mind other than the next slight curve of the road or a single tree, sculpted by the wind, that drew them on like a sentinel.
“Look.” At the top of what looked like a farm-track, Ella’s feet stumbled against a long wooden post, laid out like a felled tree. “A sign-poster.”
“Sign-post.” He knelt beside her and looked at the carved letters. To the beach.
“That says beach,” said Ella, after intense study.
“Well done.”
“A different beach, though.”
“Different from what?”
“From the other beaches. Maybe the sea will be farther away on that beach.”
“It’s nothing to do with that, it’s the tide. If the tide’s out then the sea’s further away.”
“Maybe the tide will be further out on that beach,” said Ella, with the obedient air of someone correcting a small lexical mistake.
“Maybe it will,” said Jacob, giving in.
“Should we go and look? And then should we have lunch? If the sea is – if the tide is far out?”
The felled sign might mean something. Maybe they weren’t supposed to use this path – perhaps because the beach wasn’t safe, perhaps even because it had been buried by a recent collapse. But the sun was so bright and the sense of freedom was so intoxicating and Ella was already stumping down the path. What could he do but follow? If it looked dodgy they could come back again. And if it was worth visiting, maybe they’d have it all to themselves.
The path kept up the illusion of being a farm-track for a while, then narrowed and became more sandy. Soon, they walked between tall pale dunes, insecurely anchored by thick woody strands of grass that grew strong and tough, in defiance of the poor soil and salty air. When Jacob tried to snap a piece off, the sharp edge cut his finger.
“Ow,” he said, more surprised than hurt.
Ella’s eyed widened. “You’re bleeding. Your finger’s bleeding.”
“It’s fine.” Jacob put his finger in his mouth.
“But it must hurt. Have we got a plaster?”
“Why would we have a plaster? Don’t worry, it’ll stop bleeding in a minute.”
“You’ve been wounded,” said Ella. “Now you need a potion to fix your finger and make you as strong as twenty men.”
“You can make me one on the beach,” said Jacob. “Look, we’re nearly there.”
The beach, unexpectedly, was utterly beautiful. Perhaps not in the way Ella might have dreamed of, an expanse of golden sand and rich rock-pools and with the sea several miles in the distance, but with a remote and slightly difficult beauty that made Jacob think of the word wilderness, and then the word wild, and finally filled him with a deep satisfaction that they had it all to themselves. He and Ella sat down in the lee of a dune and ate their sandwiches. They were only white bread and cheap ham and cheese so vividly orange it looked as if it was meant for making hard hats, but the long walk and the fresh air transformed their food into a feast of savoury flavours and satisfying textures. With the sandwiches gone, Ella looked at him hopefully, confident he had even more wonderful tastes to offer.
As an afterthought, he’d crammed in a giant packet of dry-roasted peanuts. He offered them dubiously to Ella, who tasted one in astonishment, then took a large handful and ate them one by one, licking salt from her fingers. The water had warmed in the bottles and taken on a faint plasticky flavour, but they were too thirsty to mind. He reached out for Ella and rolled her into the sand and tickled her, because she was small, and fluffy-headed from the breeze, and it wouldn’t be so long until she was too big to pull around like this, and because he’d so nearly not done this with her, had so nearly stayed in his room and wasted the day. She squealed and kicked him in the stomach, so he pinioned her arms and legs until she stopped wriggling. Then they lay curled around each other and watched the few thin clouds scud across the bowl of the sky.
“This is our adventure,” said Ella. “We’re on a quest to find the best beach in the world. Is that what knights did on quests?”
“Sometimes they killed their enemies. Or saved people from dragons. Or rescued princesses. Oh, and they looked for the Grail. That was like a special cup that was the greatest treasure in the world.”
“When I’m a knight,” said Ella, “I’ll do quests to find beautiful secret places. And I won’t show them to anyone. Except you. And this is our first one. So, now I’m a knight.”
> “If you like.”
“I need a sword, though. I can’t be a knight without a sword. Can I?”
“Hang on.” Glancing around, he spotted a long thin shard of stick poking from a dune. “See that stick? If you can get it out, that’ll be your sword, and you’ll be a proper knight.”
Ella rolled away from him, and began heaving at the stick. She pulled and pulled, getting louder with each attempt, as if being more noisy would make her more strong. He wondered if the stick was growing in the sand, living even though it looked dead. Perhaps he’d set Ella an impossible challenge. He got up to help her, but then she pressed down on the stick with all her weight and it broke at the base, tumbling her to the ground.
“I got it!” She was scarlet in the face with triumph.
“You did.” He took the stick and tapped her on the left shoulder, then on the right. “Arise, Sir Ella. Now you have to go off and kill a dragon.”
“Should I catcher the dragon and make it be friendly?”
“Capture, not catcher. Well, I suppose.”
“Is there a dragon in Mummy’s book?”
“What, in Vanity Fair? I shouldn’t think so.”
“She says her book is only for grown-ups. So, I think I’ll wait until I’m grown up and then I’ll read it. I hope there’s a dragon in it, though. Should I make a potion to make your finger better now?”
“If you like.”
“There won’t be any sea-water in this potion, though,” she warned him. “Because the sea isn’t our friend. And there won’t be any shells.” She looked around. “I could put some sand in the water – ?”
“No, don’t do that, we’ll want it to drink.”
“So what should I put in it?”
“Maybe you could pretend the ingredients.”
“All right.” Ella began taking pinches of nothing from the air. She sprinkled the ingredients over the water bottle, muttering and making mystic passes. “That’s it, I’ve made the potion now.”
“That didn’t take long.”
“It was quite easy. Hold out your finger and I’ll pour the potion.”
He held his hand out, and watched as she carefully tipped the bottle, allowing only a few drops of water to escape.
“You’re all better now,” she told him.
“That’s good.”
“This is the best beach in the world.”
Jacob took a handful of fine sand and let it trickle through his fingers. “It might be, actually.”
“But we can’t tell anyone about it. Because I promised.”
“Maybe we could tell Mum and Dad.”
Ella sat down on the sand and leaned heavily against him. He lifted his arm and let her rest her head on his lap.
“I don’t think we should,” she said. “The best bit about this beach is that only we know about it. So, we should hide the sign so nobody else reads it, and then only we’ll know the way.”
“Are you going to sleep?”
“No.” She yawned. “I’m just shutting my eyes for a minute.”
“You can if you want. But I want my book first.”
“I’m not going to sleep.” She yawned again. “But maybe you should get your book. Because I might need to shut my eyes for quite a long minute. And you can read while I have my eyes shut.”
He stretched out, captured the loose dangling strap of his rucksack and pulled it towards him. The sun had warmed it right through, so his book felt friendly in his hands, like a living creature. “I can’t read you this book, you won’t like it.”
“It won’t matter because I won’t be able to hear you because I’ll have my eyes shut.”
“You hear through your eyes?”
“Yes. And I see through my ears. And I don’t go to sleep in the day any more, because otherwise Mummy and me would both be asleep and there’d be nobody to watch out in case someone bad came.”
“You’re obsessed with bad people.”
“No I’m not. What’s obsessed?”
“It means you think about it too much.” When she opened her mouth to answer, he stuck his finger in it. She laughed and pulled away. “There aren’t any bad people here. And I’m awake. So stop worrying.”
“It’s so warm,” Ella murmured. Her head burrowed into the muscle of his thigh and her thumb crept towards her mouth. Trying to angle his book so it wouldn’t cast a shadow across her, he cautiously turned the pages. Another minute, and Ella was asleep.
He was stuck here now, with his little sister growing heavier on his lap and the sand not quite as soft and welcoming as it had seemed, and the sun in exactly the wrong position for him to read comfortably. None of it mattered. Just as some alchemy of taste and heat and exercise had made his shoddy picnic mysteriously delicious, these unpromising elements (empty beach, hot day, nothing much to do except watch his sister sleep) had created a brief secret paradise. If he was given his choice of anywhere else in the world, he’d choose to remain here.
Filled with a sweet lazy bliss, he laid his book down on the sand and stared blankly at the horizon. Ella pressed her thumb harder into her mouth, muttered something, then fell silent.
Out on the water, a small dot of movement drew his eye. With nothing but water to measure it against, it was hard to judge the scale. It could be a sea-monster scudding across the horizon. A small gull floating inland to hunt for sand eels and scraps of sandwich. A seal, turning and turning on its own axis as it watched him with bright liquid eyes. A mermaid, calling him to his doom. His legs were going to sleep. He pushed gently at Ella’s shoulders, trying to redistribute her weight.
When he looked up again, he saw something rising out of the sea, a slick black nightmare figure with terrible webbed feet and a dreadful smoothness to the head. As he watched, the figure bent double for a moment, pulled its own feet off and stood up again, and he realised he was looking at a woman in a wetsuit. It took a long time for her to make her way up the beach, long enough for him to feel awkward about staring, and reach for his book again as cover. Ella slumbered on, oblivious even to the breeze that ruffled her hair and tugged at the hem of her t-shirt. Was she warm enough? He rested his hand on the back of her neck as he had seen their mother do. She felt warm, but not too warm. When he looked up again, the woman in the wetsuit was someone he knew.
“You’re a long way from home,” Mrs Armitage said. She glanced at Ella. “No wonder she’s tired.”
“She wanted to have an adventure.”
He hoped Mrs Armitage would leave them alone and walk on, but she sat down in the sand, a slow process made difficult by the wetsuit.
“I usually have this beach to myself,” she said.
He tried to read her tone. There was no reproach in her voice, not even much surprise, just a bald statement of fact.
“The sign’s fallen down,” he said. “And the path looks like it goes to a field. That’s probably why no one else comes.”
“No one but you.”
“It’s not private, is it? I mean, does it belong to you?”
“No, it’s not mine. It’s a public beach. You’re allowed to be here.” She glanced at Ella and lowered her voice a fraction. “Isn’t she too old for a nap?”
“She’s seven. She walked a long way.”
“I know how old she is. She comes to see me sometimes.”
This seemed so unlikely that he couldn’t think of a thing to say in reply. Instead he stroked Ella’s hair, taking comfort in its familiar silky texture.
“You don’t believe me,” said Mrs Armitage, “but it’s true. Making things up is a great waste of time and effort. Ella comes to see me in the afternoons, when your mother’s asleep. She walks along the cliff-top to get to my house. Sometimes she draws me pictures. She often draws her house falling into the sea. You and she are holding hands as it falls.”
The words soaked into his bones with a slow sense of astonishment.
“But she’s terrified of the cliff-top,” Jacob said.
“Yes, I kno
w. But she comes anyway.”
What was he supposed to do with this information? He sat and looked at the distant sea and became aware of the occasional soft hiss of the dunes as the top layer of sand slipped down to pool at the bottom. He tried to think of something appropriate to say. Mrs Armitage seemed strangely comfortable with silence.
“It’s all right,” said Mrs Armitage. “I don’t expect you to do anything about it. If I minded I wouldn’t let her in the house. I just thought you ought to know.”
“Thanks.”
“And the sign hasn’t fallen down. I took it down. Because I didn’t want to share this place with anyone else. You don’t have to do anything about that, either. But I like to get things clear.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” He hated the weak sound of his voice, the bleating pathetic conformity of his words.
“Yes, I expect so, but nobody’s going to catch me. I’ve been doing it for years. Every spring they install a new sign, and three days later I take it down again. This is a special place.”
“It is,” he agreed, surprising himself, and then being surprised all over again by the warmth in her eyes.
“Most people don’t see it. That’s why I don’t like them coming. My husband died just within sight of here.”
He thought he must have misheard.
“His boat sank,” she said. “He was out with a friend and the boat went down. It was all very fast.”
“I – that’s – um –” Was his neighbour unbalanced in some way? How quickly could he get himself and Ella away if he had to? “I’m sorry for your loss.” Was that what you were supposed to say?
“It was a long time ago. But I still come back to remember him. You and Ella are the only people I’ve seen here since his boat went down.” She stood up and stretched. “I have to go now. It’s a long swim back to my boat.”
He stared out at the empty sea. “You came on your boat?”
“It’s moored around the headland. The sea’s too shallow to get closer.”
“I thought that’s what the rowing-boat was for.”
“It is. But I always swim in.”
“Why?”
She looked at him impassively. As if she’d planted it there, an image came to him; a man, half-dead but still breathing, dragging himself through the surf and collapsing thankfully onto the sand. An escapee. A survivor.
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