A Ravelled Flag (Strong Winds Trilogy)

by Julia Jones

  He hadn’t asked Great Aunt Ellen yet if that was right. Hadn’t had time. Only met her yesterday. Didn’t properly know anything about her. She was his family. He felt that she was kind. But why copy a flag from a pirate?

  And what did pirates do anyway? In real life and the twenty-first century?

  As he began, reluctantly, to pick up the bits of flag, Donny struggled not to blame his granny (Edith, not that cheat Eirene) for not telling him more about her youngest sister. He knew that Edith and Ellen had quarrelled over baby Skye. Edith had won: Ellen had left.

  All those people cheering when Strong Winds arrived at the lock gates last night – they’d known about her. Perhaps the person who’d done this was jealous? People who were famous did have to deal with freaks sometimes. Or maybe this nutter simply didn’t like dragons?

  Donny shivered and his hands felt clammy.

  Be honest. He was scared.

  GO HOME LÓNG

  He didn’t totally understand the words but he definitely got the message.

  Donny didn’t want to think what a knife like that would do to human skin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Who’s There?

  Wednesday 27 September

  “You’re telling me it’s not over? You’re saying that there’s still someone out there who’s trying to get at you or your great-aunt?”

  “At her ... I’m sure. There must be something I don’t know that’s in her past. And as I don’t know anything ...”

  He’d been waiting all morning to get Anna’s brain focussed on his problems. She was in Year Nine, the same as him, but Gallister High was a big school and their timetables were completely different. She and Maggi were in most of the same top sets and Xanthe was two years above. Donny was sort of middling academically and he hadn’t been there very long.

  He hadn’t seen either of the sisters today. He didn’t mind too much. Obviously he still felt terrible about Snow Goose but he didn’t want to talk about her any more. He wanted to talk to Anna about the Hispaniola and the flags.

  At lunchtime he grabbed his chance: used his plastic meal card to buy a sandwich and a drink from one of the vending machines and headed upstairs to the library. Anna was in her usual corner, skipping food to get maximum time on the Internet – or as much of it as the school’s system would allow her to access. She didn’t look entirely pleased to be interrupted but Donny wasn’t taking any notice. He needed her to help him understand what had happened.

  “It was her flag that they attacked. She copied it from some Chinese pirate – you know that, it was you who designed it. And if it is me they’re getting at then it works the same. Threaten someone I care about, it scares me off, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you care?” Anna hadn’t yet bothered to look away from her screen.

  “Of course I do! She’s my family.”

  “Yes ... but you didn’t even know she existed until your granny died. And you’ve only actually been living with her for two days. Plus she looked to me like someone who was pretty capable of taking care of herself.”

  How to put this? Donny floundered on. “Gold Dragon’s really tough and all that. She was excellent when we thought Snow Goose was going down. I wish you’d seen her ... except, of course I don’t wish that, because I wish the whole thing never happened. But it’s not totally one way. She doesn’t have a clue how to talk to Mum for a start and I can’t think how she’s going to learn. You really need two hands to sign. Not one and a hook.”

  Anna carried on working.

  “She’s come here because of us and so far all we’ve done is give her grief. So I sort of feel responsible. It might be to do with what happened before – you know, when they were children and all going off sailing and that. Great Uncle Greg and Granny were like the grown-ups and she was the baby. They were always leaving her behind.”

  “I don’t get all that playing at Swallows and Amazons stuff. Or your weird dreams. The point is what happened on that boat yesterday, not what was in some book a couple of lifetimes ago.” She looked at her screen again and scrolled impatiently through a couple more pages. “Are you saying that you haven’t even told her what happened to her flag? Your great-aunt is a round-the-world sailor, for godssake – not some ship’s baby!”

  “I couldn’t even decide whether to take the scraps away. If I did, it would show that I’d been there again. If I didn’t ... well, then I realised I didn’t want to leave them behind. The Hispaniola didn’t feel like a safe place any more.”

  “So? You didn’t exactly make it safer by taking a few bits of flag away.”

  “I suppose not.”

  His explanation wasn’t going very well. Maybe it wasn’t a very good one. Donny couldn’t always understand the way that boats made him feel. Yesterday the Hispaniola had felt sad and wrong and cruel. He wasn’t sure he’d reacted all that sensibly.

  After he’d found the tattered flag and read the KEEP OFF notice, he’d forced himself to walk all the way round her deck. He’d slept there once but it had been dark and he’d been exhausted. He hadn’t looked at it, not properly.

  The deck was metal, riveted together, he guessed, and with ridges to stop you slipping over maybe – if you were running to action stations in your regulation rubber-soled shoes, crouched beneath the gunwales and with the decks awash.

  Why did she make him think like this?

  It must be the paint. From the outside the Hispaniola was a dull crimson and white. The red was almost the same colour as the redundant light vessels scattered around the harbour. Her upper works were white too, the bits that people passing by would see. She was eye-catching, if a bit eccentric.

  But the deck paint told a different story. It was a very particular shade of grey, blue-grey, battleship grey – the colour his great-uncles Greg and Ned would have lived with all the years they served in the Royal Navy. Before they had both died. It looked as though the person who had re-painted the outside of the schooner to look like something out of a fantasy film hadn’t bothered with the decks – or had been working from an alternative script.

  The more he looked, the more puzzling the Hispaniola felt. Everything was metal. A bit rusted in places, where the rivets had wept, but tough as armour. Almost war-like. Except that you surely couldn’t go into battle with those three telegraph-pole- style masts? He couldn’t even see how the sails were meant to work.

  Then Donny had thought he heard ... fluttering?

  Trapped wings, frantic, beating against cage bars. Prisoners from far away, terrified and desperate in the cold dark.

  But when he’d stopped and looked around there was nothing.

  Not even a few late swallows gathering along the crosstrees to begin their long flight south. You could think of birds like spirits. He and Granny and Skye had always especially looked out for swallows but this year the birds had gone without him noticing them at all.

  He tried peering inside the Hispaniola through her deck-lights and cabin portholes. But all the glass had been painted over with thick black paint, including the wheelhouse. That didn’t seem quite normal, even for a boat that wasn’t being used any more. There were padlocks on the forehatch and the cabin door, metal bars as well. More notices in black paint. They looked fresh.

  TRESPERCUTERS WILL BE PROSACUTED

  TRESPARSERS WILL BE PROSERCUTERS

  Donny began to ask himself why all this was necessary? Okay, so he’d kipped on board two nights ago and here he was again. But he was only calling to collect his flags: he hadn’t been planning to move in. All these padlocks and notices – talk about overkill!

  Maybe it was the dodgy spelling, maybe it was his feeling that this was all way over the top, maybe he’d simply run out of energy for being scared. Whatever reason, Donny had stopped being frightened and turned awkward.

  He didn’t try explaining to Anna why he’d done what he di
d next.

  He went back to the base of the mainmast, where the flags had fallen, and picked up the KEEP OFF plank. He turned it over and pulled Xanthe’s rigging knife out of his jeans pocket. She’d sort of said he could keep it and it had a marlinspike that he could use to scratch a message of his own.

  “Croeso,” he wrote. “Wilkommen, bienvenue, fáilte, ola!” – as many words of greeting as he could remember from the multicultural welcome poster that had been on the doors of his primary school in Leeds. He couldn’t properly remember the Urdu or the Arabic but he was sure he’d got the Chinese welcome right. He liked character writing so he made it his main feature: spent extra time gouging out the graceful lines and curves with the rigging knife’s flat blade.

  Then he had spread out the red and gold national flag like a mat in front of the main cabin door and put the plank on top of it – his side up.

  He stepped back and looked at his installation. Okay, it definitely wasn’t as funny as when Maggi had painted jaws on Flint’s shark-boat but it was the best he could do for now. Whoever’d cut the signal halliards, put all these padlocks on the doors and daubed the threatening notices needed to lighten up a bit. Get more fun out of life. Make a few friends.

  Then he’d picked up the ‘U’ flag and the shredded gold dragon and scrambled down into Lively Lady. Shoved the flags into his bosun’s bag, hoisted the dinghy’s jib and let the flood tide and the evening breeze waft him easily back to the lock. The gates were standing open and the man in the office waved at him as he rowed through. The marina was beginning to feel positively home-like.

  Or it would have done, if he hadn’t happened to glimpse Snow Goose high out of the water like a tall, white, wounded bird.

  “Has Gold Dragon said where you’re all going to live?” asked Anna, bringing him back to the present with a jolt.

  He knew that the only reason she wanted to know about Great Aunt Ellen’s plans was because she needed somewhere she could come and use her computer. Even before he’d met her she’d been searching missing persons’ websites and asking careful questions hoping to find some information about her mother. She’d assembled her own computer in school DT club, but at the moment she couldn’t use it. Her carers, Gerald and Rev. Wendy, had found it and there’d been a big, totally unnecessary, row. They still didn’t know that she’d been using it to surf the internet.

  Anna had asked Mr McMullen, the DT teacher, to store her computer in his department. She was terrified of anyone checking its memory and discovering which sites she’d been visiting. The machine was incredibly slow and she’d only used dial-up but “Some of the best sites are a bit 18-plussy,” she’d told Donny. “I couldn’t encrypt. Didn’t have the memory. If someone like Flint or Toxic found out where I’d been searching ... ”

  “Well, has she?” Anna asked again. “Is she going to rent somewhere? Or can she buy?” She just about managed to look at him this time. Then she pressed ‘save’ and wrote something on her scribble pad.

  Donny glanced over. Another web address. Gold Dragon hadn’t said anything about houses. But he hadn’t asked her. To be honest he hadn’t even thought about it.

  What to say?

  “Maybe she thinks she ought to wait until after the SS meeting. I’m still officially in Wendy and Gerald’s care, remember, and they only got Mum out of that hospital by pretending she’d be living hygienically at the vicarage as well as me.”

  Anna smiled. (First time that lunch-break.) “It was such a great moment! When Rev. Wendy told us that she’d told the SS that humungous lie.”

  “You could have sunk me in a baling pan, as Xanth might say I’m feeling really bad about the Ribieros. Did ... did Xanth or Maggi say anything on the bus this morning? About ... Snow Goose?”

  Anna stared back at her screen again. Pressed her lips together as if she was trying to keep something trapped inside. “Not really. They told me what had happened. Um, how is your mum?” It sounded like a polite enquiry. Not as if she cared.

  “Dunno. Bit obsessive-compulsive. She keeps on trying to undo things. I only just stopped her pushing us off again this morning. I think Maggi was right. She’s sort of fixated on escape. She wants us all to leave. Says we’re surrounded by snatchers and crooked tongues.”

  “Do you think she should have stayed in the hospital?”

  “Course not! It’s the hospital that’s made her like this. All I need to figure out is how to help her stop. She could get us into so much trouble. Especially if she starts casting off anyone else’s boat. Gold Dragon’s going to have to watch her all day while I’m here. There are some really expensive yachts in that marina, you know.”

  “Boats, boats, boats!” said Anna, standing up suddenly. “That’s all any of you ever talk about. Don’t you realise that I’ve used practically the whole of this lunch-break listening to you talk about you and your family and boats? This is the only chance all day I have to get on the Internet and you’ve ... stolen it!” There were red splodges on her cheeks and the words came bursting out. “I wasn’t talking about boats when we were on the bus this morning – or I was trying not to! I was asking Maggi if I could maybe go round hers this weekend and use their computer. I wouldn’t have gone on any of the dodgy sites. But no, they’re going sailing all weekend. Sailing! There’s some dinghy racing championship and that’s going to take them all their time. Both days! Even though Xanthe’s got GCSE coursework.” Her fingers were shaking as she logged herself off. “I hate boats! I hate sailing! I need to get my mother back. Just as much as you needed to get yours. More, in fact. There’s the kids as well as me. Luke and Liam and Vicky – remember? You might try to give them a thought, if you’ve any water-free space in your head. Which I doubt. I know I was getting closer. I know I was. So what if Flint ripped up that silly dragon flag? I wish I’d never wasted my time making it.”

  The librarian had got up from her desk and was coming over to tell them to be quiet but Anna had closed down and was walking to the bag-park.

  Donny hurried after her. Her head was turned away from him and she missed the first time she tried to swipe her card through the monitoring system.

  He guessed she might cry but he didn’t care. As soon as they reached the corridor he grabbed her arm and made her stop. “What do you mean, getting closer? Have you made contact with your mum?”

  She took a deep breath, dashed a fist across her eyes and seemed to will herself to calm down. “No. I haven’t.” Every word was crisp and vehement. “I would have told you that. Even when you were going on and on about your bloody sailing. But I’ve discovered there’s someone else who’s looking for her too.”

  “How? Who?”

  “I don’t know. I met him in one of the places that I shouldn’t visit. I’m sure he’s a man and I think he’s seriously old. He was asking for ‘Lottie’ – that’s her real name! So I have to find out more about him, without him finding out anything at all about me. It’s not particularly easy. Especially when I only have forty minutes a day in a firewalled secondary school library. And then you come along and waste it talking about BOATS!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Just Formalities

  Friday 29 September, morning

  Anna certainly knew how to get her point across. After she’d finished chewing him up in the corridor that day, she’d spat him out with an ultimatum:

  “If you get me un-supervised, un-filtered Internet access, I’ll tell you about this man – if there’s anything to tell. I might even tell you a bit about my mum. Until then it’d be a waste of my time. And you’d be another person who might leak.”

  She hadn’t spoken to him since.

  Donny was thinking about Anna as he sat in the back of Sandra’s car being driven to the SS meeting. It was in Colchester, maybe about forty minutes from Shotley. Great Aunt Ellen was in the front and Sandra was doing her kindly best to make the journey interesting for som
eone who hadn’t been in England for the last fifty years. Skye was in the back with Donny. She couldn’t hear and he wasn’t listening.

  He still hadn’t any idea where Gold Dragon was planning for them to live and nothing she’d said had given him any clues. Until then he didn’t see what he could do to help. They didn’t have Internet on Strong Winds. If nothing was said in the meeting about houses, then he’d have to ask straight out on the journey back.

  Sandra kept insisting that this meeting was purely a formality. She told him that he didn’t have to come but Donny wasn’t taking any chances. If this was such a formality why did anyone have to go? Why were they bothering to have a meeting at all? There must be other things they could be doing.

  His tutor, Mr McMullen, had said that he should insist on his right to be present at meetings but it wasn’t always that easy. Anna had been in the system longer. She knew that they didn’t even invite you if they thought you had an ‘attitude problem’ or their decisions might ‘upset’ you. Then it was Professionals only.

  Statutory Services Care Assessment Meetings, Anna had said they were called. SSCAMs – scams! They’d had a bit of a laugh checking out the different acronyms: Statutory Services Care Review and Assessment for Professionals – SSCRAP or without the SS it just spelled CRAP. He couldn’t remember what this one was called. There was Review in it somewhere, he thought.

  He’d got to find some way of fixing up their friendship again. Okay so he had an attitude problem but, well, so did she.

  Donny squeezed his mother’s hand. If anyone should have been allowed to stay behind it should have been her. But they couldn’t have left her on Strong Winds on her own and Sandra had said that the whole point of the meeting was to recognise officially that Donny’s situation had changed: his great-aunt had arrived, his mother was out of hospital. He wasn’t on his own any more so he could come off the SS register. That would be a result!