by Julia Jones
“In that case, remind me to provide a locker-full of rope fenders for her to deconstruct.”
It wasn’t exactly an answer but he didn’t take it as a no.
The tide had turned against them by the time they reached Lowestoft. The flood was running strongly north to south across the harbour entrance whilst the wind was blowing fierce in the opposite direction. Shoals on either side of the main channel set up complex cross currents and the whole area seemed a mass of broken water and white spindrift. The pilot book advised against entry in these conditions. They did it anyway.
“There’s HOLES in the water!” yelled Luke. He didn’t seem at all frightened. Polly Lee found safety harnesses for everyone and showed them where to clip on. Luke’s hair was bristling with salt, his face stinging pink with spray. “This is WICKED! Way better than the death ride at Pontin’s!”
Donny wasn’t so certain. Strong Winds was plunging like a bronc and the task of holding her steady as they waited outside the harbour for the entrance lights to turn green was taking all his inherited skill – and then some. Polly Lee stood poised beside him, saying nothing. Skye was being miserably sick.
It was hard to find words for his relief when they finally slipped between the white pagodas on the pier heads and into sheltered water.
They moored in an enclosed space presided over by an old- fashioned clubhouse. As soon as she had spoken to the duty manager, checked all the warps and seen the sails neatly stowed Gold Dragon changed out of her oilskins into her shore-going jacket. She needed to get to the shops before closing time, she said. She was as matter-of-fact as if they’d arrived by bus.
Luke, Skye and Donny had a quick look round then settled in the main cabin eating apples and heaps of bread and jam and drinking hot, sweet tea. They felt as if they’d been half way around the world instead of forty miles up the Suffolk coast. Luke said that even the amusement arcade and the candy-floss stall looked different when you came to them off a boat. And those white pagodas were awesome. He seemed a lot more cheerful about being here since he’d arrived with spray on his face.
There was a gentle tapping on the ship’s side. When Donny went on deck he found a Chinese girl smiling and dimpling and offering him a take-away menu for some local restaurant. He wondered whether she’d come because of Strong Winds being a junk so he took the leaflet and asked her if she’d like to come on board. She shook her head and stepped back looking, for a moment, terrified.
Then she paused and smiled again and ran away from the harbour and down the esplanade giving out her leaflet to the few excursionists who were wandering around now that the rain had cleared. Donny glanced casually at the mass-produced flier. He was glad to see he’d got his welcome sign pretty well spot on.
The restaurant was called the Floating Lotus and it seemed they were expected. There was a map on the back of the flier that led them away from the main street into darker, narrower lanes. Luke hadn’t wanted to leave the harbour but Donny persuaded him that explorers always had to venture inland to seek fresh water sources and replenish their supplies.
Gold Dragon was going anyway. If they wanted any supper they’d better put their best feet forward.
“Anna’s mum didn’t like us goin’ down this way. It was all right for her an’ Dad but not for us.”
“Hostages go where they’re dragged.”
That reassured him, of course and he cheered up completely once they had reached the Floating Lotus and met its owner, Ai Qin Pai.
Ai Qin was probably quite old but she didn’t look it. She was as petite and erect as Great Aunt Ellen herself. But where Great Aunt Ellen’s skin was weathered by years at sea, Ai Qin’s face was peachy smooth and her black hair gracefully styled. She wore pressed black trousers, a crisp white shirt and a silk embroidered waistcoat with matching bow tie. She placed herself at an angle to their table where she could supervise her restaurant whilst also talking quietly.
A waitress brought them a pot of jasmine tea and five tiny cups, which Ai Qin offered with her compliments. Then she helped each of them to order their meal – all in perfect English – and sipped her tea as she began a long, incomprehensible, exclusive conversation with Gold Dragon.
Sometimes one or other of them wrote something on a paper napkin. Ai Qin covered the writing when any of the waitresses came near and, at the end of the meal she tore both napkins delicately to shreds. Then she teased the remnants into two randomly sorted piles, took one for herself and offered the other to her guest. Donny got the odd impression she might be worried about security.
It was a strange way to have a meal together. Skye, Donny and Luke talked to each other – Donny began to teach Luke how to sign – but they were mainly just repeating things they’d already said. They were all pretty tired.
There was one moment when Ai Qin had to tell a man to leave. He’d upset one of the younger waitresses and had had too much to drink. He was with a couple of friends and looked as if he could be planning to argue with the small, female proprietor. Gold Dragon was half out of her seat to go and assist when the Floating Lotus chef appeared from his kitchen.
He was an enormous man with a scarred face and he happened to be carrying a seriously scary cleaver. There was something odd about the way he walked but the troublemakers didn’t stop to discover what it was. They were gone, apologising urgently and shoving money at Ai Qin to pay for their unfinished meal.
“Son of a Chinese sea-cook – she’s got her personal Long John Silver!” said Great Aunt Ellen appreciatively.
Donny laughed and so did Luke a couple of seconds later. Skye smiled too when Donny translated. Treasure Island was one of the classics Granny had read to them when she was alive. When she was still, uncomplicatedly, his granny.
Somehow the evening went better after this even though Ai Qin came back to their table to continue her private conversation. The man with the prosthetic leg could definitely cook as well as providing such an immense back-up service. Donny’s stomach felt soothed and filled by the bowls-full of sweet and spicy noodles curled inside him as contented as a warm cat.
As the four of them walked homewards to Strong Winds he decided that there couldn’t be any harm if he asked his great-aunt about the language she’d been speaking.
“It’s Mandarin. It has many different dialects. Ai Qin and I both speak a rather old-fashioned version so we understood each other tolerably well. When we were unsure we used the character alphabet.”
“Were you telling her news from Shanghai?”
If she tried to pretend they’d been exchanging favourite recipes for shark’s fin soup he wasn’t going to believe her. Skye wasn’t the only one who could pick up on body language. Gold Dragon and Ai Qin had been discussing something that had made them angry and upset.
The cold air had blown Luke’s sleepiness away and he looked interested too.
“Do you know anything at all about China?” she asked them. “Er ... nope.”
“Then it’s not a story for tonight. And it’s certainly not a story anyone would ever have told me when I was a child your age.”
She quickened her steps. Donny hadn’t heard her speaking like a traditional great-aunt before. He swiftly revised his priorities. “Tell us about Eirene then. Tell us about Skye’s real mother.”
The Chinese stuff didn’t matter: it wasn’t anything to do with them.
There were always watchers near the Floating Lotus. When news of the Dragon’s visit was passed to the Tiger he spoke at once to his friends among the Ghosts. These visitors were dangerous. They must discover the place of greatest weakness and use it to make the sweet waters of life turn to poison in the strangers’ mouths. Hai Lóng must be driven out.
Great Aunt Ellen didn’t answer Donny straightaway. After they’d returned to Strong Winds she said she needed to watch the stars for a while. He looked out after about ten minutes and saw her sitting al
one on a bollard, smoking an old-fashioned tobacco pipe as she gazed across the harbour towards the deserted trawler basin.
There was nothing to look at and no stars either. The basin was empty and the former fish-packing sheds were shuttered and silent.
He and Luke played a game of cards: Skye was fiddling with one of Strong Winds’ boxes within boxes. When Great Aunt Ellen finally rejoined them, she turned off the main electric light and lit the oil lamps so the saloon cabin shone like a story-telling cave.
Caves have dark places. Gold Dragon chose to seat herself in the shadows of the cabin corner so her face couldn’t easily be seen. “My sister Eirene was the special one,” she began. “The heart of our family. She could be sensible with Greg and Edith or go make-believe adventuring with Ned. I loved Ned.” Her old voice softened. “I miss him even more than I miss her. They almost drowned me when they were crossing the Red Sea and then Eirene forgot me while she was inking in a map. I was captured by savages, then chopped into the pot to make eel stew.”
“Wish I’d been there,” said Luke.
Great Aunt Ellen nodded. “The best holiday I ever had. There was another friend who was always writing stories but she didn’t let other people into them with her like Eirene did.” She paused for a moment. “It was strange. Their friend grew up to be famous. Whereas Eirene ...”
“Yeah, Eirene, what happened to her?” Donny didn’t give a toss about these friends: he wanted to know what had happened to Skye’s actual mother.
“Eirene grew up very beautiful.”
“Did she look like Mum?” Donny hadn’t meant to interrupt again but this time he couldn’t help it. Even when he was little he’d sort of noticed that Skye and Granny didn’t look like each other at all. He didn’t look like Skye either, and Gold Dragon looked exactly like her sister Edith – except with a hook and a plait and her wrinkles in different places. Maybe this Eirene was the missing link?
“No. Not in the least. Skye looks like her father.”
“Her father?” He’d failed to hoist in that a newly discovered grandmother must mean an unsuspected grandfather as well.
“Yes. Skye’s father, Henry. He was an Ojibway Indian from Ontario province. The resemblance is powerful. It gave me quite a shock when I saw your mother that first night in the marina. Henry was a sachem.”
Donny looked across at Skye. It was so completely obvious. How come he’d never seen it? Not that he knew what a sachem was.
“Your father was Ojibway,” he signed to her. “Gold Dragon says you look like him. She says he was, um, a great man ...”
“Mudjekewis,” she answered, but Donny wasn’t really listening.
“So how did Eirene meet this ... Henry?”
“Henry had joined the Canadian army. After the war he stayed in Europe working for the UNHCR.”
“What’s that?”
“United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Eirene was with the Red Cross. I can’t explain how much she suffered. Especially at the end when they were going into the camps. The few times she came home she looked like a victim herself – all skull and bone but still those blazingly expressive eyes and her lovely way of moving. I thought she should have been a dancer if we’d all had different lives.”
“I sometimes think that about my mum. Except she should have been an artist.”
Gold Dragon looked curiously at Skye. “Maybe that’s my clue. I’ve been trying to find my sister in her but I get stuck. Eirene was such a word-person and ...”
“And you think Mum isn’t,” Donny finished for her. “But you don’t know whether she is or not because you don’t understand her words.”
Donny wasn’t necessarily as confident as he made out. Some things always got lost in translation.
“Gold Dragon says that your real mother had deep feelings. She loved stories. She could have been a dancer.”
“Beautiful Wenonah was my mother,” Skye signed back unhesitatingly.
This time Donny noticed. “Beautiful Wenonah? Eirene ... but Granny!”
Donny stopped. This was Hiawatha-land. His mum had got into a complete muddle. She was in the wrong world, not just a different language. Mudjekewis and Wenonah were characters from her favourite poem. They weren’t his long-lost relations.
Yet her father had been an Ojibway. That was weird. How could he explain it? Gold Dragon might as well have handed him a stack of Turk’s Head knots and ordered him to knit them into lambswool jerseys.
Skye didn’t miss many of Donny’s expressions. She leaned forward and took one of his hands, signing straight into it in the special way they’d worked out when he was very small indeed. “Beautiful Wenonah was my mother. Not Nokomis.”
Nokomis had been her word for Granny.
“You knew? That Granny wasn’t your birth mother? All this time?”
“In my dreams,” she signed back.
“So why didn’t you tell me? I’m your son! Unless I’ve got that wrong as well.” He felt angry with her now. He pulled his hand away.
“Who is this who lights the wigwam, with his big eyes lights the wigwam?” she signed, quoting.
“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean it. But that was just a poem.”
“Poems are like my dreams. In my dreams I know things differently. Too many of them are bad dreams. I try to guard us from them.”
By making dream-catchers or not telling me things? Donny wanted to ask. He felt he’d been excluded. Treated like a child.
Then he noticed the concern on Great Aunt Ellen’s face and the bewilderment on Luke’s. He remembered that finger-spelling was as incomprehensible to the others as Mandarin had been to him.
“It’s okay. Mum says she knew. About her parents.”
Great Aunt Ellen looked relieved; then she frowned again. “Does she know what happened to them? Why they left her?”
“What happened? To Wenonah and Mudjekewis? Why were you living with the old Nokomis?”
“They took the longest road. They never returned or sent a sign.”
“Yes,” Great Aunt Ellen agreed when he translated. “That is what happened. She does know. But I don’t know if she knows why. I don’t suppose it matters.”
“It does to me,” said Donny.
Luke nodded too. “We doesn’t know why Anna’s mother went. So we doesn’t know if she’s coming back.”
“Wahonowin! Wahonowin! Would that I had perished for you, Would that I were dead as you are! Wahonowin! Wahonowin!”
Donny shivered. Had to shake himself alert. Skye was right. Poems were a bit like dreams, the way their words came blowing back to you. Made you think of outcasts, far across the lonely waters.
“We knew we wouldn’t see Eirene and Henry again. Not in this life.” Gold Dragon shifted further back into the cabin shadows. “They met and married in the camps. Then they went home to Ontario. To Henry’s people. Soon after they arrived the Ojibway were attacked by a virus. A European virus. It was only a strain of rubella, only German measles, but Henry’s people had little protection. Several of them died. Eirene got a slight temperature and a few spots but ...”
“But that was when she was pregnant with Mum?”
“In those first crucial weeks.”
Donny should have stopped signing then. Should have guessed that this new knowledge would be too much for Skye. She was not yet strong enough. But Great Aunt Ellen’s story was answering questions that he hadn’t ever thought to ask. His hands just kept on going.
Henry believed that he and Eirene had brought the fever to his people, Gold Dragon explained. That they were responsible for the deaths.
He was almost certainly right.
Then he began to experience a series of dreams that convinced him that he and Eirene should set out again across the oceans, carrying away their contagion and their burdens of guilt and grief.
“Some Native American people take dreams extremely seriously,” she said. As if Donny didn’t know that!
So Henry had begun to build a sea-going canoe, the Houdalinqua, and Eirene returned to England to have the baby and say goodbye to her sisters. Ellen was preparing to go abroad herself. She wanted to visit Australia where their mother had grown up. Gregory and Ned and their parents were already dead and Edith was heart-broken at the prospect of being the only one of all their family still left in England.
“But of course she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t. It was only after the birth went wrong in the hospital, and the baby was born so weak and ill and starved of oxygen, that Edith pointed out what was howlingly obvious. Skye had no chance at all of surviving a long voyage in a semi-open canoe to an unknown destination. She would certainly die. Her own parents would have killed her. If Henry was determined to go, then Eirene had to choose between him and their baby.”
“He wouldn’t change his mind?”
“He believed there were some things that had to be done.
Duties that you couldn’t avoid without losing your soul.”
What a freak! Donny felt furious with Henry for putting Eirene in this situation. Selfish git!
“And she chose him?”
“Yes, in the end she did. And you have no right to say that she was wrong. Henry came to bless his daughter before they left. We all met. And then we said goodbye. They knew the baby would be Edith’s treasure for as long as she lived. Mine too, perhaps ... ”
The story was over. Great Aunt Ellen made them all some Ovaltine.
“No dallying tomorrow morning if we’re to make Pin Mill at the top of the tide.”
Donny and Luke set off to use the facilities at the clubhouse. Gold Dragon began to move around Strong Winds, checking all was shipshape for the night. Then she noticed that her niece was silently distraught. Skye was sitting in the cabin, arms folded around herself, Ovaltine untouched, rocking mutely to and fro, grieving for the parents she had never known.