by Julia Jones
There was a carrier bag beside the stair-gate. It held a big bottle of water, some bread and bananas. He knew it was for him. She’d already got Vicky screaming in the kitchen and it sounded as if Liam and his football had broken something major.
“Shall I make the nice Inspector a cup of tea?” he heard her say – in her sweetest, most dangerous voice.
Out of the window. Down into the garden. Mud on the duvet covers. Tough. Collect the bags. There was chain-link all round the garden. No chance of getting to the field path that way. Donny crept to the corner of the house and peeped into the drive.
Flint was parked right across the entrance. He must have blocked it deliberately after Rev. Wendy had left.
There was Anna bringing Flint a cup of tea and Luke beside her with the box of the special chocolate biscuits that Wendy and Gerald kept in the study – more to look at than to eat. They were carrying their offerings to the police car as if they were in a solemn ritual. As well as the biscuits, Anna proffered a tray and a large china cup, a milk jug and a sugar bowl with tongs. She was volunteering to be allowed to count the sugar grains into the cup and virtually drip in the milk so she could be certain it was exactly as Flint liked it.
Luke waited beside her in total silence. How had she managed that?
Anyone who knew how sick with terror Anna felt whenever she had to go close to the fat policeman would have understood how brave this was. Donny knew she wouldn’t be able to keep her hands from trembling. He guessed that Flint would relish her fright, would leer over her and try to make her feel more and more wobbly and nervous. He would be ready to bellow at Luke, trample anything he said, enforce what he called Respect.
Donny tiptoed a few metres from the corner of the house to the laurels on the other side of the drive. Then he got down and crawled. Up to the rear of the Range Rover and underneath. If the car moved now he’d be crushed.
He knew Anna knew he was there but he didn’t dare glance at her or at Luke. Couldn’t risk a flicker of distraction. Let the bloated bully dither between double-choc truffle-crunch and butterscotch-crackle cream cookie. Or savour the gourmet delights of oppressing a fantastically clever and gallant thirteen-year-old girl – and a kid on his first adventure.
Donny was on his stomach now, struggling to pull his bags along without making any noise or touching the underside of the vehicle. His rucksack was centimetres away from its carbon-encrusted exhaust.
Someone called Flint’s car-phone. But by then Donny was out on the empty road. He was hidden by the evergreen hedge and running as if a fleet of 4x4s was in pursuit, while the rucksack bumped on his back and the plastic carrier and bosun’s bag swung madly by his side. He didn’t slow down when he reached the field path though it got harder to run on the rutted, summer-baked ground.
Donny had no idea what Flint was accusing him of doing. Maybe someone really had vandalised the shark-boat – Xanthe would have been keen enough.
Or maybe the policeman was lying in order to get Donny banged up so he couldn’t reach Shotley tomorrow. Except that Toxic was already on the case – and Flint had looked genuinely furious.
All he knew for sure was that the policeman wouldn’t give up easily. And it wasn’t nearly dark yet.
The good outcome of his hasty exit from Erewhon Parva vicarage was that he arrived at the river about three hours earlier than planned. There was water almost up to the beach.
What wasn’t so good was that Margery was lying there, too, hauled up onto the sand and anchored companionably close to Lively Lady. Which must mean that the big-nosed lady was checking up on her mother. And that mother, with her spooky habit of popping out from nowhere, would be checking up on him. He needed to get Lively Lady’s equipment without them seeing.
Donny walked carefully round to the back of the cottage. Maybe they were having an early supper or watching ‘Songs of Praise’ or something. Oars, rudder, daggerboard. It was hard to manage everything. He dropped the carrier bag.
“I say!”
With a gigantic effort Donny controlled his urge to drop everything else and run.
“I say! Did you know you’ve lost your water?”
He looked towards the beach. It was okay, tide-wise. No mud, yet. Not too far to push the dinghy. As long as he didn’t hang around.
“Would you like me to refill it?”
So that’s what she’d meant. The top had come off his plastic bottle and the precious fresh water had spilled onto the cottage path. The big-nosed lady was trying to help.
“Going far?” she asked, screwing the top firmly back onto the refilled bottle and helping carry the oars and rudder as they walked to Lively Lady.
He hadn’t got a lie about him. Anna would have been ashamed.
“Not really.”
“Plenty of kit, though.”
“I’m, um, checking up on someone. My great aunt.”
“Ah,” she said, watching him break out the dinghy’s anchor and coil the warp away. She was quite wrinkled, close up, but she had big burly shoulders and he was reluctantly glad of her strength as they swung Lively Lady round to face the river. The wet sand was surprisingly sticky and Lady felt cluttered with his bags and her disorganised equipment.
“Setting your sails here?”
“Just the jib. Need to get off really.”
He laid the oars straight, fixed the rowlocks and made sure Lady’s rudder and daggerboard were ready to be lowered. Then he pushed with all his strength. Margery’s owner went further forward, got a grip of the gunwale beside the mast and lifted.
Slowly the dinghy began to move.
Come on! You could see why people used launching trolleys.
The big-nosed lady lifted and pulled. Donny pushed. At last they reached the river’s edge. She held Lively Lady steady while he fixed the rudder and scrambled in. As he went over the stern he gave one farewell kick at the shore. The river was the place to be.
“Thanks,” he remembered to call back, as he let down the daggerboard. The untidy lady was already plodding up the beach to her mother’s cottage.
He didn’t go far at first. Just let the tide and the early evening breeze take him down and across to a shallow patch on the opposite bank – where his map told him there was no road access. There he dropped anchor again and changed his clothes. If it had occurred to Flint to look for a boat, he’d be searching for a yellow dinghy with red sails and a scruffy charity kid, not a slate-grey dinghy with Kevlar racing sails and a young helmsman dressed in all the proper gear.
Unless he decided to question the mother and daughter in their cottage. Why had he said ‘great aunt’? He was going to have to kick his truth habit.
Xanthe had left everything on board: wet suit, pull-ups, rubber shoes, gloves and a buoyancy aid. He put them all on. The clothes were much more comfortable than they looked. They helped build his confidence in his ability to face the night ahead.
He rolled his old clothes into a sausage and stuffed them away with the food and the rucksack. Then he hoisted Lively Lady’s mainsail, pulled up her anchor and headed downstream, thinking.
There was a lot to think about. How to keep out of sight until it was dark enough to board the forgotten Hispaniola and raise Anna’s flags? Where should he go after that? How could he hide himself while staying within full view of Felixstowe and Shotley? He’d be waiting all day to identify a woman he’d never met arriving at a time he didn’t know. And surely when a Looked-After child went AWOL, all sorts of extras would join the hunt?
The rhythm of the sailing took over his body. Problems of shore started to seem far away. Soon Donny stopped thinking about anything at all – other than his next tack and the set of his sails. That magical feeling of connectedness had returned.
He stopped planning. He’d sail for as long as the tide was with him. Then, when it turned and the daylight began to fade, he too would turn and come blowing back. If the ebb took him out beyond the harbour, so much the better. He was longing for a glimpse of the se
a.
This non-plan worked better than he probably deserved. There was no dramatic exit to Harwich Harbour, no traffic lights or control towers, just a widening of the horizon, a gentle increase in the motion of the waves until Donny, bearing away to starboard, assumed he must be at sea but wasn’t sure exactly when he’d left the river.
The breeze was dying with the light. A steady stream of cruising yachts and motorboats passed the boy and his dinghy. They were contented weekenders making their late way home. Donny brought Lively Lady round and followed them, increasingly glad of their navigation lights as night closed swiftly in. The wind fell away to nothing and he got out his oars. By the time he was among the small boat moorings off the Harwich shelf it was dark.
Lively Lady seemed to have shrunk now she was no longer flying along under sail. Donny hung close to the shore as he crept past the Navyard. Every so often he rested his oars so he could twist around and check where he was.
It was a relief when he identified the quick-flashing Shotley Spit buoy. It had seemed unmissable when he sailed down earlier – imposing even. Now it was no more that a pinprick of light against the towering side of a container ship.
A pilot boat shot out of a high-walled dock and the dinghy rocked in its wake. There was a prolonged hooting from somewhere up the River Stour. Donny saw what seemed like a city of moving lights. It was a cruise ship setting off down the deepwater channel on some long, exotic voyage.
Donny took the dinghy even closer inshore and was shouted at by some men in a fishing boat who were cutting the corner to get back to their own mooring behind the Halfpenny Pier.
He realised that invisibility was not what was wanted just now. He allowed Lady to drift while he found Xanthe’s torch and fixed it as high up the mast as he could. Then he looked around him intently and repeatedly and settled to row the half-mile across the harbour as soon as the liner had passed. That pilot boat would be on its way to meet some other mammoth vessel. Donny didn’t want to be caught in the middle when it arrived.
He had no power beyond the strength of his own arms, and the confused pulling of the tide. The cruise-liner’s wash had left everything rolling in her wake. Even when she was finally out of sight new turbulences continued criss-crossing the inky water. Lively Lady jerked and rocked as Donny struggled to keep straight.
The clang and clatter of the Felixstowe container port sounded a thousand times louder that it had during the day. Powerful arc lamps lit up the dockside area and made the night seem darker everywhere else. Where there were no reflections the water was oily black. No moon tonight.
He could see the lights of two tugs in the distance waiting to pull some new monster into position beneath the busy cranes. Then, when he glanced round at the Shotley shore, he saw nothing. His eyes weren’t adjusting and every time he looked behind him his rowing went crooked.
Night work was scary. Donny thought of John in Swallows and Amazons dashing to and fro under sail in the darkness with rocks on either side. No wonder his mother had thrown a strop when she heard what he’d been doing. Rowing was safer but such hard work. And so slow.
In Swallows and Amazons they’d left a sister waiting on the island to light lamps at their harbour entrance. The sister with the odd name – Titty. Donny wished there was someone waiting for him. Then he remembered that he did have Allies. The kids at the vicarage were probably being given a hard time now he’d disappeared. Probably Xanthe and Maggi were being questioned too. He wasn’t on his own, not really. They’d done all they could.
To use leading marks, or lights, you had to get both lights in line and keep them there – as he’d said so confidently to Joshua Ribiero, that day on Snow Goose. He supposed he might as well give it a go. Not to get into lockgates but simply to stay straight as Lively Lady wobbled across the vast darkness.
It was hard selecting two lights from the dazzling array on the Felixstowe side. Harder to keep them dead in line. Even harder to remember which way he needed to turn to correct his course when they moved apart. It forced him to concentrate, stopped him feeling quite so helpless.
He missed the Hispaniola on his first attempt and found he’d almost run ashore. That meant he was across the harbour and safe in shallow water. Donny abandoned his leading lights and rowed more calmly, searching for different densities of black.
Eventually he found himself groping along the schooner’s cold dark sides, reaching for the same dangling warp that Xanthe had found. He pulled hard to check it was secure, then attached the dinghy’s painter and inched forwards until he could reach the iron chain that sloped up to the schooner’s bowsprit.
He wasn’t feeling very Treasure Island-ish now but he had no choice. Donny stowed his oars, shoved the bosun’s bag and the carrier into his rucksack and looked for handholds. Lively Lady swung away as he stepped out of her and he gripped the schooner’s chain so tightly that the links dug into his palms.
Black water lapped beneath him.
One hand was already on the bowsprit. Come on – it really wasn’t hard. Forget the cold dark river. Think tree – or playground even. Donny made himself look up. Brace, stretch, pull. The climb was effortful but quick. Once astride the bowsprit he had only a short distance to wriggle before he was securely on board the forgotten Hispaniola.
Shotley Marina wasn’t far away, perhaps a hundred metres, but it lay almost completely concealed behind its breakwater. Donny could see the control tower beyond the lock and some subdued light from within but he had no fear at all that anyone there would see him. He crouched down behind the schooner’s high bulwarks and knew that he was completely hidden. He ate a bit of Anna’s food to celebrate then dealt with the amazing complexities of Xanthe’s waterproof clothing to have a pee.
He’d asked her what was meant to happen if he needed to do anything else when he was on board Lively Lady. This problem hadn’t been mentioned in either of his books. She’d laughed and said he could use the ship’s bucket if he was really desperate but to rinse it out thoroughly afterwards. Donny’d wished he kept his mouth shut.
The Hispaniola’s signal halyards didn’t feel rotten, and the flags went up easily: first the red flag of the People’s Republic of China with its yellow stars; then Anna’s masterpiece, a rampaging double-headed dragon, gorgeously gold on a black silk background, and finally the simple crimson and white quartered signal flag – U – Uniform – ‘You are Standing into Danger’.
They dangled limp in the still night. He hoped there’d be enough breeze tomorrow to enable them to spell out their message when Gold Dragon – a.k.a. the legendary Polly Lee – arrived across the other side of the harbour.
How brilliant that his great aunt was a famous sailor! How extra brilliant that Flint hadn’t been able to find her name on his official lists! Lubber! For the first time Donny felt real excitement at the prospect of meeting this person who Xanthe and Maggi spoke of as a heroine.
He sat on the Hispaniola’s broad deck to plan his next move; decided that he could think better if he was lying down – and was instantly asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Strong Winds
Monday, September 25th, morning and afternoon
Donny woke confused and stiff. His rowing muscles ached and the palms of his hands were sore. His nose and ears, even his fingertips, dripped.
Everywhere was wet and white. A dream-world. The schooner’s deck was glistening with moisture and he could scarcely see her bows or stern. Above him her masts vanished after only three or four clouded metres.
Fog.
It must be morning because it was light. He had no watch so he’d no idea of the time. If he listened hard, he could still hear the rattle of the gantries and a distant ship’s hooter. Where were they? Donny stood up and tried turning his head to listen in different directions. Nothing made sense.
Then he looked over the side. Water. Swirling past.
But no Lively Lady! Donny hurtled for’ard, his rubber shoes gripping the slippery deck.
“I’m coming, Lady, I’m coming,” he said aloud. He ran back along the half-seen deck and collected his few pieces of equipment.
Hungry but only time for a swig of water. He needed to be away from here. Couldn’t see the flags but guessed they’d be hanging dark and limp as old dishcloths.
This was not going as planned.
Before he climbed into Lively Lady Donny worked his way cautiously along the bowsprit to check exactly where her mast was stuck. Tried to push it away without success, then realised that his own weight was making matters worse. Once he was down in the dinghy, she sank deeper and the mast sprung free. Able then to swivel her round, lean his full weight on her stern and release her from the schooner’s anchor chain. Her bright varnish had been badly scraped by the rusty links but there seemed to be no worse damage.
Donny breathed a sigh of relief so immense it should have blasted a channel through the mist.
It didn’t. If anything the fog seemed even thicker now. The hull of the schooner was blurred above him. Elsewhere there was nothing but the dense white vapour, curling round and over him, reducing the entire world to a ghostly capsule. Donny guessed that it must still be early. Maybe four or five o’clock? A mist like this could lift astonishingly fast when the sun rose higher or a breeze sprang up. He mustn’t be caught clinging to the Hispaniola’s side like some stranded starfish.
There was still no wind so he’d have to row. And as soon as he left the schooner he’d be lost. His best chance of lying low for the day was on the Harwich side. But that meant re-crossing the harbour. If it was as early as he guessed, this tide was still the ebb. So if he missed the opposite shore he could be swept blindly out to sea.