by Mark Lowery
“Go around with the hat. Quick,” she hisses, pushing me toward the terrace as the crowd goes wild. She puts the torches out on her tongue and holds up Big Guy’s arm. He gives her a kiss on her cheek. And meanwhile I’m on the patio, edging between bodies, tables, chairs. Money rains into the hat ching-ching-ching. Big Guy’s friend even drops in a tenner and the hat’s getting heavier till Hen yells, “Martin. Go. Police.”
And the people part to let me through and we’re sprinting through the streets, laughing our heads off, the hat clutched to my chest. All I can think about is one thing; Charlie would LOVE this.
Stage 9
Newquay to St. Bernards
31 miles
Taxi
Quiet and Cookies
The taxi swings through the suburbs of Newquay, and soon we’re out onto the main road. It’s dusk now, and the other cars are putting on their lights. The euphoria of the juggling and the money didn’t last long. Back at the station, it was time for business. Huddled on a bench, we counted the money—sixty-two pounds including what we already had. Not bad, said Hen. She asked if I wanted some grub or anything but I said no and we were straight into the first cab in the line, price agreed and off we went.
Now here we are. I feel nervous and a bit subdued. I haven’t said anything in the ten minutes since we climbed inside. To keep myself going, I’ve looked at my mileage chart and added up all the distance we’ll have traveled today. It should’ve been three hundred and seventy but it’ll be more like four hundred and twenty-one by the time we get there, if I count all the walking and running as well.
My backpack is on the seat next to me, with Hen on the other side. She squeezes my hand over the top of it and smiles to me. The clock in the cab blinks six twenty.
“How long will it take?” I say.
The taxi driver rubs his neck. “Hard to say that, boy. ’Nother forty-five minutes, give or take?”
I bite my lip.
Hen’s got her phone in her hand, spinning it around in her fingers. A couple of times she taps it, and her finger hovers over the glowing screen. Then she pulls it back to her chest and screws up her face.
Charlie’s voice is tiny now. A thin, reedy whisper somewhere near my heart. “Will we be there in time, Marty?” he says.
“Don’t worry,” I say. Hen glances at me, but I think she knows who I’m talking to. “High tide’s at seven, but the water’ll still be in for a while after that. We’ll see it. I promise.”
But can I promise this? Will the dolphin be there? The ocean’s not an aquarium, remember.
No. Got to be positive. Got to believe.
I want to write a poem to settle myself down, but I can’t. There’s only one page left in the book and I feel like it needs to be something special. Something to round everything off.
“Can I have one of them cookies now?” Charlie says, and I laugh to myself, wiping a tear from my eye.
Hen glances at me for a moment, and she looks like she’s about to cry too. At first I think she must’ve heard Charlie as well, but then she taps her phone again and holds it to her ear, biting her thumbnail.
“Hi, Mum,” she says, her voice straining. “It’s me. Henrietta. I just wanted to say I . . . I’m . . . sorry, Mum.”
She breaks down in tears, and I squeeze her hand. Her shoulders are shaking, and she can’t speak. Then she wipes her eyes before she goes on. “I’ll come home and see you tonight. No. I want . . . I’ll try to stay this time. It’s . . . I met someone. I’ll tell you later. I can get the train. Wesley’ll pick me up. Mum . . . I . . . I love you.”
She hangs up and leans her head onto my shoulder. When I glance down, I can see that her face is flooded with tears.
Arriving and Parking
I remember the outskirts of St. Bernards perfectly. How could I forget them? The RV sites and supermarkets that slowly melt into the arcades and hotels and beach shops and art galleries and pubs and cafés.
“Where d’you wanna be, then?” says the driver. It’s the first thing he’s said for about a half hour.
“Harbor, please,” I reply, and he sucks his teeth like I’ve asked him to drop us on the moon. We make our way down a few steep, narrow streets, avoiding the late-season tourists who walk along the middle of the road. At one point, we take a wrong turn down a one-way. The driver swears, reverses, and pulls over outside a shop. “Harbor’s two minutes down there. This is as far as I’ll go.”
We pay him, grab our bags, then sprint down to the harbor. It’s getting much darker now. The sun is low. Its rippling reflection turns the water into liquid gold. The memories of the town flood back to me. The smell of fish and chips. The hoards of greedy seagulls. It’s like the last year never happened.
But it did of course.
I slip my backpack off and hold it to my chest. The cookie tin is hard against my ribs. Not yet. Not yet.
I press myself against the fence and scan the harbor. Nothing. I stare and bite my lip and I can’t see it. Why isn’t it there?
But then.
“What’s that?” asks Hen, beside me.
Sure enough. A knot of people farther along are pointing out to sea, making the telltale whoops and gasps. I follow their fingers. And there it is! The dolphin! It’s back! Skimming through the sparkling water, its fin slicing the gold. But hold on . . . there’s a small shape alongside it.
“A baby as well!” whispers Charlie inside my heart. His voice is crackly. Almost silent. “A baby, Martin! Look at it.”
“I’ve never . . . It’s . . .” says Hen, but she can’t finish the sentence because the dolphin is swimming toward us and Hen’s totally mesmerized.
I can see a dark stripe, a scar, on the mother’s tail, just above the fluke. “It’s the same one!” I shout. “It’s Charlie’s dolphin!”
And the bag is on the floor. And the special- leftover-from-Christmas cookie tin is in my hands. And my fingers are under the lid. And I’ve lifted it off. And—
“Martin! What are you doing?!” cries a loud voice behind me.
I spin around and freeze. Mum, Dad, and a policeman are striding toward us.
Cookies
“What are you doing?” she repeats as she clutches me tightly, the tin hard between us.
“I . . . I . . .” I begin but before I know it we’re both shaking and crying.
“I’ll leave you to it,” says the policeman. He tips his hat to my mum and dad then strides off. Nobody acknowledges him leaving.
“We’ve been so worried,” sobs Mum, and the words come tumbling out breathlessly. “The alarm on your phone was going off but you weren’t there and I found the paper with the train times. Then I remembered how that teacher rang up last week saying he was scared you’d do something like this.” She takes a breath, then carries straight on. “So I ran to the train station and they said they’d seen you. Then the police put out a call and a policewoman traveling down south said she’d seen you acting funny. Then we called the train companies and—”
“We went straight to the airport,” says Dad, his hand resting on my shoulder. “We knew where you were going, son, and there was a flight so . . . you know . . .”
And just as I’m thinking that this is the longest conversation I’ve had with my mum and dad in a whole year, Mum lets go of me. Her eyes flick downward. There’s a moment like she’s realized something she knew all along. Then, very gently, her hands slip over the sides of the special-leftover-from-Christmas cookie tin, and she tries to pry it out of my hands.
“No!” I say, yanking it back from her and shoving the lid back on. I’m surprised by the power of my voice. “You’re not having it!”
Mum stares at me in shock.
“Come on, son,” says Dad, but I struggle out from under his hand.
“Please, Martin,” begs Mum, and I look at her, really look at her, for the first time in a year. Oh. She’s aged. She used to have plump cheeks, but she’s lost so much weight they’re hollow. And her skin is pale and du
ll from being indoors all year. And there are rings around her eyes, and now she’s crying, her weak shoulders shaking with each sob. “Please. Please.”
“Jeez, Martin. Just let her have a cookie,” says Hen, like I’m the cruelest person in the world. And somewhere, deep inside me, I can just about hear Charlie sadly laughing.
“They’re not cookies!” cries Mum, turning to face Hen. “That’s my son!”
The Truth
Hen’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of her head.
I say nothing.
“How could you?” howls Mum. “How could you . . .”
Suddenly she’s whacking my chest and I’m just standing there, gripping the box and taking it until the blows get lighter and lighter and she breaks down and Dad pulls her off me and holds her to him.
“You should never have done this, Martin,” says Dad, over her shoulder.
And that’s it.
The final straw.
I’ve had enough.
“I did it for you!” I shout. “I did it for the family! I did it for us!”
“Don’t you shout at me,” snarls Dad, finger up toward my chest.
Hen steps in front of him. “Leave him alone.”
Dad looks down and seems to notice her for the first time. “What’s it got to do with you?”
Hen ignores the question. “What’s he done? I don’t get it. Why are you screaming at him?”
Dad’s body stiffens.
There’s a tense silence. I take a deep breath. And then I tell her. Slowly and softly. “I stole Charlie’s ashes. From the jar . . . the urn on the mantel. I put them in the cookie tin. And I ran away.”
“How could you?” sobs Mum again.
“You don’t get it, do you?” I cry. “Charlie’s dead. Dead.”
“Stop it!” cries Mum, burying her head in Dad’s chest.
But I won’t stop. Not now. “He wouldn’t want to sit there on the mantel in a stupid urn. He’d want to be . . .”
I cast my arm across the harbor. Behind me, the sun is sinking lower. The dolphin is still there, splashing around just feet away from us. The tourists are still pointing at it and cooing like we don’t exist.
“No!” says Mum. “No. He needs to be with us. With his family.”
“But he’ll always be with us,” I said. “We’ll never forget him, will we? How could we? He’s in all of us, all the time. But we’ve got to say goodbye.”
“No!” says Mum, and her hands are on the tin again but now her grip is weaker.
“He’d want us to live, Mum,” I say. “He’d want us to be alive like the dolphin.”
A few moments pass. Then Dad looks at me and his face folds into a frown. “Hang on,” he says. “The alarm going off on your phone to wake us up. The train times right next to it. The way you left the lid off your brother’s urn so we’d see what you’d done. The tin gone, but the tray of cookies left behind. . . .” He pauses. “You wanted us to follow you, didn’t you?”
The question stops me like a hand in the chest. I open my mouth and my lips try to form an answer, but the truth is that I really don’t know. Maybe I did. Maybe I wasn’t running away from Mum and Dad at all. Maybe I was running toward them.
Dad gently places his hand on my shoulder, and Mum tilts her head to one side and looks at me, a bit like how Charlie used to do.
I feel my eyes drawn to the water. And for the first time, Mum and Dad seem to notice the dolphin. It’s right by the harbor wall, playing with its baby. They’re flipping and twisting and corkscrewing over each other.
I’ve no idea how long we’re standing there. Time doesn’t seem important to me anymore. But, ever so slowly, Mum’s fingers slip off the tin and she turns to me. There’s a terrible moment when I think she’s going to scream again, but then she just leans forward and kisses the tin and whispers goodbye; then she nods her head and puts her hand over her mouth. I realize that everything has changed.
“Do it quick,” she whispers, her eyes screwed up and her shoulders shaking. “Do it quick, Marty.”
“Go on, son,” says Dad grimly, and he pats me on the arm. “For Charlie.”
I turn to Hen. She’s wiping her eyes. Her makeup has run down her cheeks, and she smiles at me through her tears.
And Charlie’s there again, right there, in front of me, in my heart, and all around me. And his voice is as strong as ever. “Can I swim with the dolphin now, Martin?” he grins. “Can I?”
I rip the lid off the tin, and I stare at the gray powder inside that used to be my brother. Then, without looking at anyone else, I turn and tip it out over the railings. And a gust of wind catches Charlie’s ashes and swirls them out over the water in a beautiful silver cloud.
Then something incredible happens. Or maybe it doesn’t happen. Maybe I imagine it. But it doesn’t matter because, for one beautiful moment, what I imagine and what’s real are one and the same thing.
With an enormous splash of spray that catches the light, the baby dolphin leaps out of the water and into the sky, right through Charlie’s cloud. It hangs in the air for a moment, whipping the ashes into dancing whirls that mingle with the golden drops of water, before it plummets down and disappears into the dark sea. A spray of tiny droplets scatter down onto the water afterward, churning and rippling on the surface.
And now I know what my final poem will be.
Leaping Dolphin, Part 2
Your life is a leaping dolphin.
A brief moment of
Exquisite beauty and possibility
Before you return to blankness.
Blackness.
But after you land
And disappear,
Those tiny golden droplets of water
That each carry your reflection
Shower down,
Creating endless ripples
That spread out forever,
Colliding endlessly
And mingling together to form
A permanent reminder of who you are.
Charlie.
My brother.
By Martin Tompkins
Age 13