Secret of the Sirens

by Julia Golding

  “Well, I want you to change your plans.” Oh no, thought Connie. “A friend of mine, Lavinia Clamworthy, has a grandson who’ll be in your class at school. I want you to meet him so you have at least one friend when you start next week.”

  Connie was surprised that her aunt had even thought of the idea; it was the first time she had done anything to suggest she considered Connie as any more than a lodger, eating meals and sleeping under the same roof as her. But a boy who did not know her, who probably did not even want to meet her, had been destined by his grandmother and her aunt to be her ‘friend’?

  “I’m happy to wait till Monday,” Connie replied desperately.

  “No, no. We will get this over and done with today,” her aunt said remorselessly. “I’ve arranged to meet Mrs. Clamworthy and Colin at a tea shop this morning. You’re coming with me.”

  Connie grimaced down at her bitten fingernails, shredding the petal into confetti. So her fate had been settled and there was no point in resisting. With a sigh, she looked up and gave her aunt a small nod.

  The Copper Kettle was an old-fashioned tearoom, much beloved by the senior citizens of Hescombe. There were chintz frills and lace curtains to hide behind; plates of homemade cakes tastefully displayed on doilies; strictly no background music. Evelyn Lionheart stood out conspicuously from the other adults, like a black swan amongst ducks: she was forty years younger than everyone else and was dressed in a black denim jacket and red Doc Martens, her hair bunched back in a crimson scarf. Connie could not think why her aunt had chosen this for a meeting place.

  Connie sat making a tower out of sugar cubes with a growing sense of doom. She had already pessimistically sketched out for herself the most likely scenario: anyone who agreed to accompany his grandmother to this place must be a sad geek whose friendship would be a social handicap from the start. She was destined to spend her first few weeks at Hescombe Primary School hanging around the computer room with him and his equally geeky friends, pretending she cared about the relative merits of Play-Station versus Xbox. That’s if they let girls into their sad little club—which she doubted.

  “Hello, Evelyn,” said a voice that fell like soft rain upon the hushed atmosphere. Connie looked up. It was the old lady she had run into only yesterday. With her was a boy wearing wraparound sunglasses. From his casual stance and the way he dressed, Connie instantly recognized him as someone with the coolness she had always lacked—the kind of boy with whom she would never normally exchange two words. There must be some mistake.

  “You’re looking lovely today,” the lady continued. “Been visiting your friends?”

  Evelyn gave Mrs. Clamworthy the sort of smile that Connie would have loved to receive from her: both warm and affectionate. It made her look like quite a different person—one that Connie might even want to live with. “Thank you, Lavinia. Yes, I’ve been up to see them. How did you guess?”

  “You don’t get to my age without knowing a thing or two about these things, dear,” said Mrs. Clamworthy, patting Evelyn’s wrist. “I’m not surprised. And this must be Connie? Didn’t I bump into you yesterday on High Street?”

  Connie smiled and nodded shyly.

  “I hope you like my favorite watering hole? Evelyn’s too polite to tell me she hates it, but I was hoping I could make a convert of you.”

  Mrs. Clamworthy settled herself comfortably next to Connie, wafting the sweet scent of lavender into the air as she rearranged the silky stream of her scarf over her shoulders. Her round, good-natured face was surrounded by a cloud of white hair, like the halo encircling a moon seen through mist.

  “And there are no prizes for guessing that this is my grandson, Colin—though apparently he prefers to be known as Col these days. He will be in Mr. Johnson’s class, too, you know,” she continued, nodding encouragingly at Connie.

  At ease even in these surroundings, the boy slumped down in a chair opposite Connie and took off his shades, slinging them on the table. He ruffled his short brown hair with both hands, yawning broadly. She raised her gaze to meet his eyes. To her astonishment, Connie found herself looking into one green eye and one brown. She could not stop herself.

  “Wow, you’ve the same...!” She tailed off. Something odd was happening. The moment the four of them sat around the same table, new energy tingled through her, a feeling she normally only got when playing with her animal friends. She felt drawn to the Clamworthys—and even to her aunt, she realized with a shock—as strongly as she had to the group she had burst in upon yesterday.

  Col laughed. “Between us we make two regular pairs of eyes.” He jerked his head towards his grandmother. It struck Connie that he had the twitchy, darting movements of a robin. “I blame the old lady: it’s her genes that did it to me. How about you?”

  Glancing quickly at her neighbor, Connie saw that Mrs. Clamworthy also had different colored eyes, but in her case the variation was less startling: a gray and a blue.

  “Sorry?” she said, rather thrown by his question.

  “Where did you get your eyes from: your mom or dad?”

  “No one, as far as I know.”

  “Great aunt,” cut in Evelyn, pouring the tea matter-of-factly. “And before that, her great-great grandmother.”

  Connie realized her mouth was hanging open. She shut it quickly.

  “The hair as well,” Evelyn added as an after-thought.

  Completely floored by this unexpected rush of information, Connie let the others conduct the conversation while she rearranged her thoughts. Why had she not been told this before? Come to think of it, what were the odds of meeting someone else with the same mismatched eyes? Her brain ached even to imagine the mathematics involved in working it out.

  “It’s one in ten million, I’d guess,” said Col.

  “What?” said Connie, abruptly dragged back from her reverie.

  “The chances of meeting someone else with the same odd eyes as me.”

  “How did you know I was thinking about that?”

  “I didn’t,” he said with genuine surprise. “I was just thinking about it myself.” There was a pause. “Y’ know what, Connie? I think we share quite a lot of things....”

  “Like what?”

  “Like stupid last names, for a start.”

  She laughed. Yes, Colin Clamworthy was possibly even more embarrassing than Connie Lionheart. Maybe school would not be so bad after all.

  When Monday morning arrived, Connie found she was looking forward to seeing Col again. The only problem was that Evelyn, under orders from Connie’s father in case his daughter tried to bolt in misery as she had at her last school, insisted on walking her to the gate and even into the classroom. Fortunately, they were early so Connie did not have to go through this ordeal in front of the class.

  The school was built around a Victorian building with separate entrances marked ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. Modern classrooms crowded around their more severe predecessor, their expanses of glass winking cheekily at the old high windows in the morning sunshine. Evelyn led Connie to one of the more recent buildings.

  “Mr. Johnson?” called her aunt to a short man with the comfortable girth and stature of a Shetland pony, who was writing the date up on the whiteboard.

  “Evelyn! Delighted to see you. It doesn’t seem so long since I had you in my class,” said Mr. Johnson, rubbing the marker pen off his hands and coming forward to greet them. Evelyn gave a laugh like a silver chime, relaxing her guard in the presence of someone she knew and liked. Connie instantly warmed to the teacher, heartened by the effect he had on her aunt. “I’d like to say you haven’t changed a bit, but that’d be a lie. You never used to tower over me: I must have shrunk as you’ve grown.

  “And you must be Connie? Welcome to Hescombe. There’s a peg with your name on it outside in the cloakroom, and your drawer is over there. We don’t have particular places as we all move around a lot in my class, but why don’t you start on this table here, near the pet corner? I seem to remember your aunt wa
s particularly fond of sitting there.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Connie murmured to Evelyn, panic fizzing inside her like froth out of a shaken can.

  “’Course it is. I called and told Mr. Johnson about your difficulties in your other schools. You can trust him not to make a fuss about animals liking you,” her aunt said breezily on her way to the door. “He never did with me.”

  There were no animals in the pet corner at the moment to look at, so Connie sat down and waited for the human wildlife to arrive. There was a hard knot in her stomach—a dread that she was going to fail again. She had great difficulty answering Mr. Johnson’s questions about her favorite subjects as he walked around the tables distributing pristine workbooks. Just now she couldn’t think of anything she had liked about school.

  The room gradually began to fill up. Three girls came in and glanced curiously over at the new pupil. One gave her a hesitant smile but no one ventured to sit next to her. Connie felt her fragile early confidence ebbing away. It was going to be like all her other first days: she would soon be singled out and isolated because everyone would find her strange. Just then a dark-haired girl, dressed in a turquoise Indian tunic and leggings, staggered in carrying a gerbil cage, heading straight for the pet corner. Connie, sitting directly in her path, could not help but get up to assist her.

  “Thanks,” the girl said, collapsing with a dramatic flourish into the chair next to Connie, her row of bracelets clinking merrily as she brushed her river of black hair out of her eyes. “You’re the new girl?”

  “Yes, Connie—Connie Lionheart,” she replied tentatively.

  The name passed over her neighbor without the slightest indication that she found it in any way amusing.

  “I’m Anneena Nuruddin. My family owns the Indian restaurant on High Street. Do you know it?” Fanning her face with her slim tawny hand, Anneena looked at Connie properly for the first time. “Hey, do you know that you’ve got eyes just like Col Clamworthy? Are you related?” Connie shook her head. “Wow, the odds that the two of you end up in our class must be—”

  “Astronomical—don’t even think about it.” Connie was pleased to see that she had made Anneena smile.

  On cue, Col came into the class and sauntered over to Connie’s table.

  “I see you’ve met Anneena. You’re set then. Anneena knows everyone and everything about the school,” he noted. Connie hoped for a fleeting moment that he would sit on her other side. If he was close to her, would she feel again that strange energy she had sensed in the tea shop? But he turned and took a seat with some boys at another table as the attendance was taken and, watching him go, she realized that she had probably been foolish even to think that someone like Col might sit near her.

  “Col has his own horse and a boat,” remarked Anneena, following him with her eyes speculatively, “well, his grandmother’s boat, at any rate.”

  “What about his parents? Doesn’t he live with them?” asked Connie as Col shared a joke with a big guy with short blond hair, causing their entire table to explode with laughter.

  “Simmer down, Col,” said Mr. Johnson tolerantly, not even having to look up to know where the source of the disturbance lay.

  “They don’t seem to be around much,” said Anneena in a whisper. “He lives with his grandmother. He’s really popular.”

  And thank goodness for that, for his strange eyes and odd name had made hers seem totally unremarkable; no one was going to notice her with someone like Col in the class. The tension she had felt since arriving in Hescombe eased a little. For the first time in her life, Connie dared to hope she was going to fit in.

  At break, Anneena showed her around the school which was bustling with business as the children settled back in after the holidays—lines at the secretary’s window, territorial disputes in the playground, gatherings for gossip in the girls’ bathrooms. They finished up back in the pet corner as Anneena wanted to change the gerbils’ water.

  “I looked after them over the summer,” she told Connie. “I love gerbils, you see, but my mom’s always said they’d be too much trouble. I knew she wouldn’t mind me borrowing the class ones, though, and I think I’ve managed to change her mind and she’ll let me get my own. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Do you like them?”

  Connie had never given gerbils much thought before, having had so many other animal friends. She knelt down by the cage to take a closer look, carefully breathing in the smell of sawdust and learning the creatures’ secrets about their hoards of seeds. The gerbils immediately rushed to her side and began to weave around in what she knew to be their welcome dance.

  “Hey, I’ve never seen them do that before!” Anneena exclaimed.

  “No? I think they’re just saying hello,” Connie replied, swaying slightly in response to the gerbils’ dance, politely thanking them for their good wishes. Anneena looked at her strangely, a little unnerved by this unexpected behavior.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Saying hello back.” As she said this, Connie felt her heart sink. Was this the end of her short friendship with Anneena? She kept her eyes on the intelligent faces of the gerbils, afraid to look up. But then Anneena began to copy her.

  “That’s cool,” Anneena said with delight as the gerbils raced to her side of the cage and bobbed up and down in front of her. “You’ve got a real way with animals, you know.”

  Meeting her new friend’s admiring look, Connie shrugged and grinned.

  Connie left school that afternoon quietly satisfied with the day. She and Anneena had got on well after the gerbil incident. Anneena had told the whole class in her breathless manner about Connie’s handling of the class pets. Even Col had seemed impressed. Anneena had then introduced her to her group of friends at lunchtime. Connie had hopes that some of these might turn out to be her friends, too. She particularly liked Jane Benedict, a tall, shy girl, one of the brightest in the class. Connie’s only disappointment was that Col had kept his distance. She thought they had made friends at the tearoom, but it seemed this did not carry over into school. Pushing the gate of Number Five open, Connie decided that she could not blame him really. He was clearly way out of her league: so popular and funny.

  She found her aunt rushing around the kitchen, packing what looked like a picnic.

  “How was school?” Evelyn asked distractedly.

  Connie sat at the kitchen table and helped herself to a slice of bread.

  “Fine.”

  “Good. Now, I have to go out again this evening. Mrs. Lucas next door said she’d keep an eye on you for me. Find something in the fridge for supper and put yourself to bed, will you?”

  After the effort her aunt had made that morning, Connie had expected her to be more interested in how things had gone at school. Did Evelyn ever spare a thought for her?

  Silence fell, broken only by the noise of Evelyn’s preparations. Connie measured out the moments, hoping her aunt would redeem herself by showing some interest in her. But as the seconds ticked by, it was clear that Connie’s tactic of a dignified silence was not working. Her aunt did not seem to have even noticed.

  “Where’re you off to?” Connie asked in a hurt voice. Evelyn failed to register her injured tone.

  “To a Society meeting,” she replied, ferreting in the fridge and pulling out a large cellophane-wrapped trout.

  “What society?”

  Darting to the back door, Evelyn added a raincoat and wellingtons to her pile and, as a final thought, the scarlet ear protectors.

  “What society is it?” Connie repeated.

  But her aunt disappeared out of the door to load her ancient Volkswagen and either did not hear, or did not want to hear, the question.

  A small blue boat chugged out to the rocks guarding the entrance to the bay. The stone pillars dwarfed the vessel, towering like giants cloaked against the elements. Col cut the engine some sixty-feet short and put on his ear protectors. His passenger, an elderly man with ging
er-streaked white hair, sitting with a flask balanced on his lap, followed his example. They had rehearsed the next few moves back on shore in the safety of the Anchor Tavern. All they had to do now was wait for the other two boats to catch up—then they would be ready to face the worst, maybe even death.

  Col watched Dr. Brock calmly pouring himself some tea. It was a beautiful if breezy evening: the sky still light, though it was almost nine, a sign that summer was not yet forgotten. He wished he could enjoy it as serenely as his passenger, prove his readiness for the test by keeping his nerve under pressure, but he could not stop his heart galloping like a runaway horse as he contemplated the dangers ahead. Their mission was vital: they suspected that men had already lost their lives, lured to their deaths by the irresistible power of the creatures hiding in the rocks. There was a distinct possibility that neither he nor Dr. Brock would return. In a few minutes, they might be driven out of their senses and drowned in the merciless waters that surrounded them. With this prospect before him, Col gave up on any attempt at tranquillity and allowed himself to shiver as he gripped the wheel.

  Two more boats came into view. At the wheel of the first stood Evelyn Lionheart with Col’s grandmother. Both already had their headsets on, taking no chances. Col thought back wryly to the discussion in the Anchor as to whether he was too young to come on such a dangerous mission. His grandmother had argued that Col should learn what he might be up against before he had his first encounter. On shore, Col had been flattered by his grandmother’s recognition of his growing maturity; now at sea, bobbing about under the threat of a hidden peril, he had a creeping regret that he had argued so eagerly to come.

  He waited as Mr. Masterson, the skipper of the third boat, followed Evelyn Lionheart on a course avoiding the sandbars that fringed the Hescombe Channel. Mr. Masterson was standing at the wheel in his wellington boots, ill at ease. He was far more at home steering his tractor on his farm than on a boat. His passenger, Horace Little, an elderly West Indian man with grizzled white hair, sat in the stern with binoculars clamped to his eyes, on the watch for any movement in the sky.