by Julia Jones
“Is seldom wasted.” It had been one of Granny Edith’s main mottoes.
He saw Gold Dragon smile through the dark. “All naval families know that one,” she said. “Learned it from the Vikings, probably. Reconnaissance is exactly what I need to do. And this could be the boat to do it in. Steady enough to take Nimblefingers and a whole tribe of Scallywags. I’ll offer them a fistful of doubloons if she’s still on the market.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Vexilla
Mid-November
He was learning to hate roads. And tracks, lanes, paths and corridors. All the closed-in places that you had to go down even if you saw your enemies waiting at the other end, or guessed they were going to step out in front of you or come up quickly and jump you from behind.
When the white van drove too close and soaked him the first time he had assumed it was an accident, like the time he’d been walking home with Anna. When it seemed to be coming straight at him, fast and menacing, in the growing darkness of the next three evenings, he began checking his map for alternative routes.
Many of the back roads between Gallister High and Erewhon Parva were twisty, single-track lanes, sunk deep between high banks and hedges. Donny dreaded meeting the van round any of these corners. Each night he chose different turnings so he never made the same journey two evenings running. He pushed his bike down footpaths and round fields. It took longer and he was more and more tired and he was ashamed of himself for avoiding the confrontations.
But what chance did a boy on a bike have against a speeding van? And who could he ask for help? The police? Police meant Flint as far as Donny was concerned. He’d rather end up in casualty than go anywhere near Flint.
So he wore his cycle helmet and florescent strips almost willingly and pedalled around the unlit lanes at the end of each day feeling apprehensive and humiliated.
He knew he’d seen the van before. As if this could be its regular route – a journey to work maybe? It had a logo and some writing but it was always coming so fast that Donny couldn’t read what it said. Otherwise he could maybe have rung up the driver’s employers and reported him for dangerous driving.
Who’d listen? He was only fourteen and there were white vans everywhere. Even the company who cleaned the pub had a white van.
Corridors were bad too. The Year Ten well-hards didn’t seem to spend much time in lessons and it felt as if someone had handed them his exact time-table. By now he should have been settling in and making more friends. He’d got his Allies for break and lunch-times but walking between lessons was normally an easy way to get chatting with people you didn’t know who were in the same sets as you. You could maybe mess around a bit.
No chance of that, when every time he came out of a classroom, there’d be a couple of drop-outs waiting to call him a girl or a pee-doh or do their grotesque impressions of Skye.
Most students avoided them. They were certainly expert at swinging their school bags to knock other people over. And their bags were so heavy you’d think they’d been specially weighted with encyclopaedias.
Spitting was one of their favourite weapons. Anyone who walked with Donny would soon get a slimy yellow gobbet in his or her face. He didn’t now what they chewed but their spit was disgusting. And there were endless glugging-from-plastic-bottle routines which he didn’t understand but which were somehow the most infuriating of all.
He finally lost his temper and went at two of them with his fists. A crowd quickly gathered and a few people cheered him on. He got put in isolation by the student managers and had to admit that it had been him who hit out first.
The student managers made him sign a letter, which they were going to send home to his parent or guardian. Any more offences and he would automatically be suspended. That would be the end of his 100 percent attendance record.
Gold Dragon wouldn’t be too pleased. She was keeping her part of the Care Plan. So was Skye. Well, at least she was going to the doctor and taking the pills. He would be the one who’d messed up.
But the letter never arrived.
They never got letters now, except a few for Polly Lee.
Donny realised that the bullies would have won if they provoked him into another fight. But he couldn’t help feeling a bit pleased when he remembered the moment that his knuckles had connected with the first well-hard face. Its owner had looked so shocked.
He thought about cycling the direct route home again. And being ready to take the white van’s number.
He’d left the bike in the vicarage woodshed as usual and was walking the final mile down the narrow lane to the Hard when he was mugged. Someone jumped him from behind, pulled his rucksack off, kicked him in the small of the back and ran swiftly away into the darkness.
Donny was flung forwards and saw nothing. By the time he’d picked himself up and had chased back up the lane, there was nothing much to see.
Except for his rucksack which had been chucked onto the verge immediately before the main road and Inspector Flint, twenty metres further on, chatting to some resident who Donny recognised as being part of the local Neighbourhood Watch.
He wasn’t sure what he should do. He picked up the rucksack then hesitated. Should he say something to the resident? Surely he and Flint would have seen the attacker?
He didn’t want to. He wanted to go straight home. There was the Flint factor for one thing – and also he thought the man had been one of a group of people who’d come to see them after the first time Skye got so drunk. They said that they would be keeping an eye on her. Maybe it had been meant kindly; it hadn’t sounded that way.
But what if somebody else got mugged in the same place? Got hurt even? Some nice old lady – like their friend, Mrs Everson?
He should have saved his breath. Neither man had seen or heard anything. Made it sound like his fantasy. Apparently there’d had been an SS worker with them but he’d just left.
Flint said he’d be sure to let Education Welfare know that Donny’d been in trouble, again. Then he went on about Problem Families and Some People’s misdirected charity. The resident agreed sourly and nodded towards Erewhon Parva vicarage.
Donny had to force himself to go down the lane the following night. He kept in the middle of the road, stopping and staring right round, then running as hard as a salmon in spate. The next night he went round via the footpath through the woods. It had been raining and he couldn’t see the boggy bits because he didn’t want to use his torch. That meant that he got black leaf mould on his socks and up his trouser legs as well. Skye tried asking him what had happened but he wouldn’t tell her.
The only good thing was that Great Aunt Ellen had bought the Viking boat. They were all going to spend the weekend helping to fit her out.
He’d asked the boatyard a few times whether there was anything he could do to help with Snow Goose but they’d always said no. Now that Gold Dragon was a Customer it was different. She’d rented space in their shed where everything was dry and there was light if they wanted to work late. It was a pleasant place, with sawdust and shavings on the floor, and plenty of trestles on which to rest the boat and her equipment.
The new boat was white inside and out. She looked okay after a pressure wash, but dull. The white was slightly yellowing and stained in a few places. Skye ran her fingers over some tiny cracks.
Luke had come to help with the first day’s work. He and Skye stood together and frowned.
“They sells paint here,” he said.
Skye chose a rich deep red and used it to gloss the top strake all the way round. Luke fetched a pencil and paper from Strong Winds and drew two fierce unblinking eyes, which he said that they should paint on either side of the new boat’s bow when the red had dried.
“Eagle-eyes. So’s she can see her enemies.”
Donny had noticed that several of the Thames barges and the older fishing smacks that visited
Pin Mill Hard had beautiful scroll work either side of their bows. None of them had eagle-eyes though.
“Maybe they ain’t too quick to spot trouble coming. Us lot ... we’ve gotta be well sharp.”
“What do we do?” Donny asked. “When we’ve spotted trouble?”
Luke looked at him in surprise. “Fight ’em if we can. But there’s too many or too big, then we dodge off. Like being a little ’un at school.”
He spoke matter-of-factly, as one who knew. Fight or dodge: a practical, everyday decision, not something to make you feel ashamed and sick.
Gold Dragon chuckled. She said that if her simple scouting skiff was turning into a fully-fledged man-of-war, then they should re-paint the rest of the hull as well. A dull grey undercoat first, but tomorrow a gleaming navy blue. And now the new boat had grown so grand, she supposed they’d want to raid her stock of gold leaf when they came to inscribe her name.
“Did the man in the office tell you what she’s called?”
“There’s no record. It’s over to us.”
Donny’d been wondering about Wild Cat, which was the name of the yacht that the Swallows and Amazons were sailing at the beginning of Missee Lee. Unfortunately she’d blown up and sunk. Also Wild Cat had been a bright green schooner with space for about nine or ten people to sleep on board. Not an open, fibreglass day boat with a single lugsail, one pair of oars and fittings for an outboard motor if required.
Luke suggested the Black Pearl, but only half-heartedly because their boat was going to be almost every colour except black. Then he said that Gold Dragon should choose because she’d was so old she must have seen every boat there ever was. She set him wire-brushing the anchor for that.
It was late evening before Donny took Luke back to the vicarage. He called in to see Anna who was in the sitting room covering pages of Maggi’s notebook with calculations. Work on her great-uncle’s puzzle seemed temporarily to have taken the place of her search for her mother. Perhaps she didn’t think there was much she could do with no Internet access.
Or was she hoping that there might be some connection?
“Anna ... when Oboe was trying to get your mother’s attention by sending out those messages, why did he say he was signalling from Mars?”
“I asked Gold Dragon that one when we were coming home from Cambridge. She said it was more Arthur Ransome stuff. She said that Cal and his sister were almost as obsessed with the Swallows and Amazons stories as her brothers and sisters were.”
“Makes sense, I suppose. If they were all such friends.”
“Might be infectious, you think? I’d better get myself vaccinated. So I’m assuming that he might have read Mum some of the stories or taken her sailing when she was a child – though she didn’t ever mention it.”
“Seems that there’s a lot in our families that never gets mentioned.”
“Yeah.” Anna put a pair of brackets round a set of numbers and started some complex multiplication sum. She didn’t sound all that interested.
Donny got his bike out of the shed and hurtled home down the narrow lane. Great Aunt Ellen had ordered takeaway fish and chips and by the time he’d parked in the pub yard and knocked on the serving hatch, they were ready to collect.
There was a big pot of workman’s tea on the cabin table and Skye and Great Aunt Ellen were waiting hungrily.
Those fish and chips were the best ever. No-one said much for a while but then they began on the name question again.
“Maggi and Xanthe always call their dinghies after famous round-the-world boats. But I think this boat needs a name that’s completely her own.”
“Next you’ll be demanding her own flag. What happened to that handsome dragon your friends Anna and Maggi made?”
Donny’s heart gave a lurch. He’d been signing the conversation to Skye, in between swigging tea and scooping up the last flakes of fish from the crumpled, salty paper. Now he’d have to tell them how he’d found the black and gold flag slashed into tatters on board the Hispaniola. And explain why he hadn’t said anything about it at the time.
He fetched his bosun’s bag and pulled out the remnants.
Skye hadn’t ever seen the Allies’ dragon flag. She’d been in hospital on its day of glory. She told him to wash the grease off his hands while she cleared the table, then she made him spread it out for her, fragment by fraying fragment, until she could guess at Anna’s dramatic design. She smoothed each individual piece, slowly, as if she were thinking through her fingertips.
Gold Dragon sat ominously quiet.
He told them that he’d found the signal halliards cut, two of the flags bundled together and the third slashed. He mentioned the TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED notices, the over- painted windows and the padlocks on the doors. Nothing else.
When he’d finished Skye gave Donny’s cheek one brief, loving caress – just as that Chinese cleaner had done, he remembered, weirdly – gathered up the remains and took them to her cabin.
Gold Dragon looked hard at Donny. “Was that it, Sinbad? No other messages?”
The message was in the viciousness of the cutting and the way the Hispaniola had made him feel that day. The sense of fear and wrongness. He couldn’t explain all that.
“There was a sign that said GO HOME LONG, with a sort of splash over the O. I didn’t get it.”
“That’ll be meant for me – LÓNG means dragon.”
“Oh.”
“Nothing in character writing?”
“Nope.” (Except what I did, he didn’t say.)
“You did a quick recce, collected the spoil and left.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
She frowned. “There’s something going on here that I don’t like. I wonder whether I did the right thing coming back. I could have shipped you out to me. But I needed to cut cables ...” She was almost talking to herself.
“Don’t let it get to you. That was mainly why I didn’t say anything.”
“We weren’t acquainted then. I think your mother’s guessed that you’ve been holding out on her. She’s quick, you know, when it comes to picking up other people’s feelings.”
“Do you think it makes her drink?” asked Donny suddenly.
“Blunting the pain? No idea ... and I don’t see that there’s a lot we can do about it. She’s addicted and she’s found a supplier and we don’t know who or why. Still, you’ve come clean on this one and she’s stood down happy. We can but hope.”
Skye’s cabin was empty when they called her for breakfast the following morning.
Without saying anything to one another Donny and Great Aunt Ellen hurried ashore and begun checking the bus shelter, the seats by the pub, the nearest stretch of foreshore – wherever she might be sprawled unconscious, cradling a vodka bottle.
This thing was so random. They didn’t get it at all.
There was Skye fully dressed and alert, walking down the lane with her dark hair plaited, and a thin, tissue-wrapped package in one hand. She smiled as if she were pleased to find them there, and gestured that they should follow her into the work-shed. With one proud look at the new boat, she opened her parcel.
It was a swallow flag.
Eirene had made it, more than seventy years ago: a triangular white flag cut from remnants of canvas and with a blue serge swallow let in to the fabric so that it looked the same from both sides. It had a little wire flagstaff so it could be hoisted to the top of a mast.
Skye had found it in the back of one of Granny’s drawers and had stowed it in the camper van when she packed for their journey south.
“But I thought you gave everything away,” Donny objected. “Or you burned it in the garden before we left. You said that Granny’s spirit should travel without burden on the long road westwards.”
“The flag was different,” his mother answered. “The flag did not belong to Nokomi
s.”
“No,” said Gold Dragon, “That flag was left for me. Eirene should have taken it with her in the Houdalinqua but ... she hoped I’d have a special use for it.”
“Special use?”
“She’d guessed how I felt about Cal. I don’t know how she worked it out because I certainly never said anything. He thought dinghies should have bird names and she hoped that we might hoist our flags together one day. I was still a girl then. Not a dragon.”
Another relic tucked away, thought Donny. Something else I didn’t know.
“I’ve set my sights upon a name,” she said abruptly, when they were all three back at work, slicking on the dark blue gloss.
“You’re going to call her Swallow?”
“Certainly not! I’ll take a small bet that there’s already a Hirundo or a Hirondelle waiting on the Norfolk Broads for your friend Anna. I’m going to name our boat Vexilla. It means flag – but a battle standard rather than a signal flag. We may yet need one.”
“Vexilla ... so that’s Latin?” It wasn’t a language he’d ever learned but ...
“Aha!” she said. “You’ve made a start on Missee Lee. Consider it History!”
She went suddenly silent and painted with extreme concentration. When she next spoke it was as if she’d been talking all the while to herself.
“ ... Anyway we’ll need hard evidence. Once Vexilla’s launched, Nimblefingers can sail me down river. Take a closer look at that Hispaniola of theirs.”
“You won’t go on board, will you?”
She sort of shook herself and laughed. “No, no, my days of bobstay-scrambling are past. And I don’t expect her owner’ll be rolling out the welcome mat for me.”
Donny’s stomach lurched as he remembered the silly classroom poster message he’d left outside this unknown person’s wheelhouse. But he didn’t say anything more that day and neither did Gold Dragon.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN