‘That’s a child’s writing,’ Tressa said. ‘This is a den!’
She tried to prise the box open, but it was locked.
‘Do you suppose they light candles and have fires and everything?’ I said, picking up the matches.
In the darkest corners of the room, we found strange circles of things laid out on the floor. There was a ring of shells and another of stones; a ring of buoys and a ring of bones. Lined up along a ridge in the wall at one end, there was a row of fragile little skulls. I asked Tressa what kind of animal she thought they were.
‘The beaks might be a clue,’ she said. I remembered seeing a dead seagull in a tangle of seaweed and ropes at the other end of the beach.
When we’d had a good look around, we went back outside and stood blinking in the daylight. As we shut the door, we saw someone on the edge of the cliff above, looking down at us. We stepped back a bit, trying to see him better, but the sun was behind him, and all we could make out was a black silhouette. He looked a bit taller than me, but he wasn’t skinny, and he was holding a long stick.
‘Hi!’ I shouted up at him.
Two other figures appeared to his right. They looked like a boy and a girl, but it was difficult to tell as the sinking sun made silhouettes of them too.
‘We’ve found your den,’ shouted Tressa.
Without a word, all three of them turned away and disappeared back over the cliff. Tressa made one of her famous snorting noises.
‘Weird,’ she said. ‘It looks like things might just be starting to get interesting!’
Chapter 3
A meeting on the beach
Question:
Why did the pony clear his throat?
Answer:
Because he was a little hoarse! (‘Horse’—get it? A little horse!)
There were lots of ponies on the grass around the old wrecked van the next morning, when we set off to walk up the hill. Me and Tressa didn’t really want to. We’d much rather have gone back to the den, but we didn’t say so because then they might all want to come with us. We wanted to keep it secret.
But Matt insisted that the best thing to do, when you’re in a new place, is to go to the top of the nearest hill and get the lie of the land. It’s probably a geography teacher thing.
‘Onwards and upwards!’ he said, striding ahead.
You could tell that Milo didn’t really want to go either. As we passed the old van, he would’ve dived into it and stuck like a limpet, if Mum hadn’t grabbed his hand and kept him going in the right direction.
We knew from looking at the map that the island was shaped like a teardrop, with a ridge of hills running down the west side like a spine. We trudged across the open moorland towards the highest part of the ridge, and soon we saw a triangulation point on the horizon.
It was a sunny morning but not very warm, because of the wind, which got stronger the higher we climbed. Mum and Milo kept stopping for a rest, so Tressa, Matt and me were the first ones to the top. From there, we could look across the whole of the east side, as it sloped down from the hills and flattened out towards the sea.
We could see the jetty where the boat came in, and the houses dotted around it. Almost all the houses on the island seemed to be in that area, with only ours and a few old wrecks further along the track, and one right at the very end, where the track ran out to the north. Matt looked for it on his map. He said it was called Anderson Ground.
On the west side of the island, the land was rocky and rugged. Matt said there were high cliffs all the way along that side, with no beaches or harbours or houses.
‘One day, we should walk all the way round the coast,’ he said.
Watching Mum and Milo still struggling up the hill, ‘one day’ was probably a bit optimistic. You would have to allow at least a week.
Instead of going straight back down, we walked along the ridge to see if we could get a better look at Anderson Ground. The island was completely bare of trees, except for one or two small spindly ones, huddling behind houses or leaning low to the ground, bashed down by the wind, so we were really surprised to see a square plantation of trees nestling in the bottom of the next valley. It looked like a giant’s dark green handkerchief dropped down between the hills.
There was a house among the trees, still with its roof on, so maybe somebody lived in it. ‘That’s also called Anderson Ground,’ Matt said, squinting at his map. Considering there were only about fifty houses on the island, you’d have thought they could have thought of enough names without having to use the same one twice.
We walked back to the triangulation point, where Mum and Milo were sitting on some flat rocks having another rest. The sky was blue and the sea, all around us, was sparkling in the sunshine. The island was bigger than we first thought, so there would be plenty of places to explore. It felt like we were sitting on the top of our own little world.
Coming back down took half the time and, when we walked into the house, it felt warm and cosy because Matt had finally got the hang of making a fire with peat. We had beans on toast and straight afterwards Milo fell asleep on the rug in the middle of his cars.
Everyone was in a good mood, until Matt asked me and Tressa to help with the dishes. He said we would all have to pull our weight, since there weren’t any modern conveniences such as a dishwasher.
Tressa doesn’t so much pull her weight as throw it around, and she wasn’t having any of it.
‘Why should I?’ she said. ‘I never asked to go back to the Middle Ages!’
At least she didn’t hit him with, ‘You’re not my dad!’
Mum and Matt did that thing where old people tell you what it was like when they were young. They didn’t even have hot water to wash up in, let alone a dishwasher, and they got frostbite in their fingers blah blah blah. Soon they were talking to each other more than us, and Tressa walked out. Since no-one else was doing the washing up, I got on and did it myself.
‘You’re such a pushover,’ Tressa said, when we finally set off across the fields to the den.
I shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal. Why do you have to make everything into an argument?’
We followed the fence down through the field and walked along the edge of the low cliffs. Rounding the headland, we paused to look down across the amazing beach.
We heard them before we saw them. The three kids from yesterday were splashing about in a big pool among the rocks at the far end of the beach. We couldn’t go into the den with them watching us, so we went to say hello. They got out of the water as we approached, wrapping their towels around them.
‘Hello again! I’m Tressa and this is my brother, Jack,’ Tressa said. ‘We’re staying here for the holidays.’
None of them said anything. They just stood looking at us. The big stocky boy had close-cropped brown hair and pale blue starey eyes. The other boy was about the same height but much skinnier, with sandy-coloured hair.
The girl seemed super shy. She glanced at us out of the corner of her eye, and then quickly looked away. She had white blonde wispy hair down to her shoulders, the tips dripping seawater onto her towel. You couldn’t tell which one of them was the oldest.
‘Have you ever heard of trespassing?’ the big boy said.
So that was his problem.
‘We didn’t know it was private,’ goes Tressa. ‘The door wasn’t locked.’
‘Just because a door isn’t locked, that doesn’t mean you can go barging into someone else’s property.’
‘We didn’t touch anything,’ said Tressa.
I remembered her trying to prise the box open; it was a good job she hadn’t managed to. ‘We saw it was a den, so we just assumed it was for all the kids here, like a play-park or something.’
‘Well it isn’t,’ the big boy said. ‘And it’s not a den. It’s a meeting place.’
‘When do you meet?’ I asked, thinking it might be like Scouts or something.
‘It isn’t for people like you.’
Tressa was a
nnoyed. ‘You don’t know anything about us,’ she said.
When a conversation starts to feel tricky, the best thing to do is change the subject, and I did.
‘It’s lucky to have a rock pool big enough to swim in.’
‘They made it so school could have swimming lessons,’ the girl told me. Her voice was silvery soft, like a whisper.
‘What, and they let you swim in it on your own, no grown-ups?’ I asked, just so that I could hear that voice again. But she didn’t say anything. She turned to the big boy instead.
‘You can see where they blocked it off at the end,’ he said.
When he pointed it out, we realised that the flat bit at the seaward end of the pool was made of concrete. Their clothes were piled in three heaps along it, and the big boy’s stick was leaning across one of them. It reminded me of a joke.
‘What’s brown and sticky? A stick!’
I was going to pick the stick up, to make the joke work better, but I decided not to. They looked at me blankly, like they’d had a sense-of-humour bypass or something.
‘I can swim twenty lengths,’ Tressa said, doing that tricky-conversation-time-to-change-the-subject thing. ‘And that’s in a proper swimming pool.’
‘You couldn’t do twenty lengths here,’ the big boy retorted. ‘I bet you couldn’t even get in.’
It did look cold.
‘Yes I could—unless that would be trespassing, of course.’
‘This is our pool, and it’s our bothy,’ he said, glancing up the beach towards the den. ‘You can only come if you pass the test, and there’s no way you could do that.’
A flicker of surprise went across the girl’s face, like she’d never heard of this test before.
‘Ooh, an initiation,’ said Tressa. ‘Bring it on!’
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s games of chicken or dare, which it looked like this was turning into.
‘We don’t have to share their den if they don’t want us to,’ I muttered to Tressa, under my breath. ‘There are lots of other old buildings here. We could make our own.’
‘Well?’ said Tressa, taking no notice of me.
The big boy grinned at her. It wasn’t a nice grin.
‘If you want to join, come to the bothy this time tomorrow, and we’ll see if you’re as tough as you talk.’
We walked back up the beach.
‘They’re not very friendly, are they?’ I said. ‘They didn’t even tell us their names. Do we actually want to join their club?’
‘Look around you,’ said Tressa. ‘How else are we going to survive a whole summer up here?’
Chapter 4
The fruits of Morna
I told Tressa I didn’t like the idea of doing an initiation. We were walking down to the shop with Mum, Matt and Milo after breakfast the next day, to get some board games and buy some tins of fruit. Mum said we couldn’t live on rice and pasta the whole holiday or we’d get scurvy.
We were keeping our voices down and hanging back a little, so the others couldn’t hear what we were talking about. If Mum heard the word ‘initiation’ she would freak out.
‘They’re just making a point,’ Tressa said. ‘They’re cross with us for going into their den.’
‘I don’t even know if I like them though,’ I said, remembering those pale blue eyes, staring us down.
‘Once we’re in, they’ll be much friendlier, you’ll see.’
Matt was right about the whole lie-of-the-land thing. Now we’d seen from the top of the hill that almost all the houses on the island were scattered over the flat area round the jetty they felt more interesting somehow, and we were more curious to know who lived in them.
We said hello to a woman hanging out her washing, and had a short chat with a man pushing a wheelbarrow. We saw a few other people in their gardens who waved. They all seemed really nice, but really old.
The track carried on along the top of the beach where the boat came in, so we walked on a little way instead of turning off down to the shop and the jetty. There was a big building at the end which the map said was a hotel. We couldn’t see it properly because it was surrounded by a high stone wall, but we found a kind of window with rusty iron bars across it, so we managed to get a glimpse of the garden.
It looked like one of those gardens you go to with your gran and grandpa, where they have a tea-shop with cakes. All tidy lawns and fancy flower-beds. It felt out of place, like a bright parrot that had taken a wrong turning on its way to Africa and landed on a chilly little rock.
Anyway, the point is, we did a lot of walking that morning, so by the time we’d called in at the shop and been down to the jetty to see if we could see any fish or crabs, Milo should have been too tired to want to come out with Tressa and me after lunch. It never occurred to either of us that we might have to take him with us to the den.
But he was determined and we couldn’t really say why we didn’t want him to come. We wouldn’t have minded normally because though he’s much younger than us he can be quite funny.
‘I’m not bringing him back if he gets tired,’ Tressa said.
‘Just don’t go too far.’ Matt ruffled Milo’s hair. ‘Then he’ll be fine.’
‘I won’t get tired,’ said Milo, jumping up and down on the spot to prove it.
He bounded ahead of us down to the sea, and along the top of the low cliffs, keeping well away from the edge like we told him to. When he saw the beach, he raced down onto the sand, just like we had done on the first day. Then he suddenly stopped.
The children were already there, sitting on the grass outside the den. We caught up with Milo and all walked up the beach together. The girl looked worried and I smiled to try and cheer her up, but she didn’t smile back. Maybe she was just one of those people who always look worried.
‘This is our brother, Milo.’
The girl said to the big boy, in her whispery voice, ‘Isn’t he too young? He looks the same age as Meggie and Christa.’
‘Who are Meggie and Christa?’ I said.
‘Meggie’s my little sister, and Christa’s in year one. They don’t come to the bothy.’
The big boy shushed her with a look and said to Tressa, ‘Are you sure you want to take the test? It can be dangerous.’
‘If you’ve all done it, I’m sure we can.’
He gestured us to sit down. The other boy went into the den and came back with a piece of wood, shutting the door after him. It looked like the side of a fish-box, with foreign words stamped on it. He placed it on the grass between us.
The big boy took three berries out of his pocket and put them on it. They were small, round and black.
‘These are the fruits of Morna,’ he said. ‘They don’t grow anywhere else in the world.’
‘Are they poison?’ asked Milo.
‘They can be,’ the big boy said.
‘What do you mean?’ said Tressa. ‘Either they are or they aren’t.’
‘Well, now, that’s where you’re wrong. The fruits of Morna take different people in different ways. If one person eats one, it might make them really sick, but if someone else eats one they might just have horrible nightmares instead. Some people’s tongues might swell up and go black. But there’s always a chance you might not get any bad effects at all. It’s down to luck.’
‘Are you telling us we’ve got to eat them?’ asked Tressa. He said yes, that was the initiation: we had to eat one each.
Without hesitation, Tressa picked one up and put it in her mouth. She looked at me. I noticed that the girl wasn’t looking so scared any more; when the boy had got the berries out, she had actually seemed relieved. So I was pretty sure it was a trick, and I’d have taken one too if Tressa hadn’t suddenly scooped up the other two and popped them in her mouth.
‘There,’ she said. ‘I’ve done it for all of us. Now, let’s go in.’
But the big boy didn’t move.
‘The fruits of Morna can take twenty-four hours to work,’ he told her. ‘The test
will not be over until tomorrow afternoon. By then, you might not want to join.’ He got up. ‘By then,’ he added, ‘you might not be able to.’ With that, he led the others into the den and shut the door.
Tressa was cross. It wasn’t fair making us do a test and then not letting us have the prize. I was fed up with Tressa for eating mine as if, just because I didn’t grab it quick like her, I wasn’t going to do it at all. Neither of us had thought about what Milo would make of it.
‘You ate poison berries,’ he said.
‘No, I didn’t. The boy was just playing a trick.’
‘How do you know?’ said Milo. ‘What if it’s real?’
‘Look, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s. . .a game, that’s all. They told us about it when we met them yesterday, so we know it’s just pretend.’ Sometimes, it’s all right to tell a little white lie.
‘So can we eat those berries if we see some on the way back?’
Tressa and me looked at each other. We told him no; he should still always check with Mum.
‘Are you going to check with Mum tonight, about the ones you’ve already eaten then?’
If Mum found out that Tressa had eaten some berries when she had no idea what they were, let alone that she’d done it in front of Milo, Tressa would be in major big trouble.
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘I’ll check with Mum, so you don’t need to say anything.’
We both thought the berries must be OK. I mean, people don’t go around poisoning each other, do they? But you couldn’t help wondering what they were, and I for one was wishing a bit, by tea-time, that Tressa hadn’t eaten them.
When Mum served up a crumble for pudding made with tinned blackberries and apples, I had an idea. I asked her if blackberries grew in Morna. She said she thought blackberries grew in every part of Britain, and there were bound to be brambles growing in gardens and sheltered spots on the island, though they wouldn’t be fruiting yet.
The Binding Page 2