Cry of a Seagull (16 page)

Clutching the steering wheel tightly, hanging on to the only thing that could save her, Rose fought for her life against the forces that tried to drive her back. She was now in the middle of a sharp, sinister tide race. The waves were shorter and higher, topped with foam. They slapped against the boat, and the flat-bottomed whaler rose high each time and came down with a bang that jarred Rose from the soles of her feet to the top of her skull. Sometimes it jumped and banged and twisted at the same time. Rose was thrown off balance. She slid off the seat and skidded towards the dipping rail, and up from the sea came dripping, bone-white hands, clutching for her to drag her down. When she had lost her grip on the wheel, the tilting boat had swung to port. Waves washed over the side rail. It would turn over, and Rose would slide into the grasping, bottomless hell of the sea.

Evil, mocking voices rushed at her on a gust of wind and passed on, skittering like flat pebbles over the angry sea. After them came another voice, as a huge dark grey seagull swooped close to her head, then soared with its beak wide open to cry down at her, ‘Ro-o-ose!'

She threw herself upwards and sideways and was able to grab the metal edge of the windscreen with one hand, and hang on. Slowly, she pulled herself back until she was lying across the seat and could reach the wheel and turn it. She held it down to starboard and managed to pull herself upright. The boat lurched, and shuddered against the pull of the current. But it was making headway. Glancing back, Rose knew that the rocks were farther behind. The wind was still against her, but she was out of the sharp attack of the tide.

When she was able to turn the boat to port at last, the waves were long, slower rolls that were easy to steer into at an angle, as Ben had shown her. Ahead, the pale dawn colours had deepened through all the shades of pink. The promise of day spread across the water and glowed along the undersides of the clouds that gathered to welcome it, and as the rim of the great sun bulged the horizon, Rose saw in front of the boat Favour's noble head break through the crest of a wave.

For a moment, the rapidly rising sun outlined his crescent ears with gold. Then he was gone, and beyond where he had been the three dead trees showed up on the edge of the coast, the middle one in line with the distant dim shape of the water tower.

Safely round the treacherous headland, but still a long way to go. Rose could not even see the bluff she had to reach. Exhausted by the battle with the wind and tide, she could only slump on the seat and steer the boat as fast as she dared without letting it be hit head on by a large wave, or roll sideways in its trough.

Before long, she saw that she was offshore from the marsh and the rocks where Ben had seen the old iron ring. The same dark grey seagull – was it the same? – flew out from the feeding ground and circled her boat, with a gentler, mournful cry. This was the place where the body of Favour must have been swept
out to sea by the rampaging flood waters, and Rose was shaken with emotion for the whole heroic tragedy of the legend of the Great Grey Horse.

But it wasn't a tragedy, because although he had died, he had not really been killed. His spirit was alive, and it was with her now because she was his messenger.

The grey gull glided sideways above the boat. Two waves criss-crossed each other, and where they met they broke in a spread of lacy foam, like Favour's mane fanned out on the moving sea. He
was
with her, and Rose picked up strength from the energy of his purpose.

With the gull sometimes leading, sometimes following, she increased the speed, and was soon able to make out the dark shape of the bluff. She fixed her eyes on the growing hump of land. It rose quite steeply from the sea, and if Rose was right, the cliff under the camp site was somewhere just beyond, with Pebble Cove below.

Rounding the bluff, she saw the long high cliff, broken up by rockfalls, with several small beaches between the outcroppings of rock. Stunted pine trees crowded at the top of the cliff. She could see their umbrella shapes, blown flat by the wind and twisted backwards. Any one of those narrow beaches might be Pebble Cove. Rose pushed back her soaked, salty hair, and squinted through the spattered windscreen. A darker patch among the tangle of trees was the high, solid fence of the camp site.

Opposite that beach, Rose turned the boat and ran it towards the shore.

‘Ga! Ga!' the gull cried raucously. ‘Ga, Ga—' and a throaty squawk that sounded like ‘Gully!', before its wide wings carried it away over the land.

‘Hang on, Gully, I'm coming!'

The wind was at Rose's back. The waves seemed to sweep her towards the beach, as if the boat was riding to the rescue on the back of the grey horse.

As she came closer, she saw the rock where Joanne had pretended to be a mermaid, saw the patch of sand where her family had sat and grumbled, saw the steps climbing the cliff,
and the red bucket. And she saw, just as she had seen it in the scullery window, the dark, humped shape of the donkey lying among the rocks.

‘Take it easy,' Ben had said, when they were looking for the old harbour at the side of the marsh. ‘Dad will have a fit if we scrape the propeller.'

Rose put the throttle into reverse to stop the boat, left the wheel and moved to the stern to throw out the anchor. It hit bottom very soon. She made the rope fast, hopped over the side and found that she could stand, in water up to her chest. She pulled out the bag and, holding it high, waded to shore and ran over the pebbles to where Gully lay by a rock, behind which he had probably tried to shelter from the wind.

He was so still that Rose thought he might have died, and was only kept by the rocks from falling on his side. She was afraid to touch him. When she made herself put out a hand to his lowered neck, she expected to find it stiff and rigid. He did not move, but he half opened his eyes, dull and bleary, the white fur circles round them yellowed and sticky.

‘Oh, Gully.' Rose fell on her knees with a sob. She lifted his heavy head with one hand and managed to get the neck of the water bottle between his gums behind the long front teeth. When she poured in a small amount, it trickled out. She tried again. This time he held it in his mouth, until at last his thick throat convulsed in a swallow.

She gave him some more. Then she sat beside his head and tried him with a handful of peanuts. He blew down his nose at them, and then he moved his muzzle against her hand and mumbled at the peanuts with his loose old donkey lips. He was able to take a few into his mouth, and even chew them feebly, although some of them dribbled out on to the sand.

Rose gave him another swig of water, and then they both rested for a moment, Gully with his nose leaning on the palm of her hand, Rose propped against a rock. Her eyes closed when the donkey's did. She was exhausted from her long ordeal and from the incredible relief of finding him alive.

‘Here, this won't do.' She opened her eyes and woke Gully. ‘Try an apple.' But he could only nose at it. He did not have the
strength to open his teeth and take it, so Rose put it in a hollow in a rock near him, and ate an apple herself. She was starving, now that she thought of it. She ate another apple and opened the can of Coke.

‘Let's share it, Gull.'

She got up to fetch the red bucket, and poured half the Coke into it and drank the rest herself. When she held the bucket up to the donkey's muzzle, he stirred the Coke with his top lip, then sucked at it.

He was lying like a dog, with his back legs under him and his short front legs bent sideways. The top one felt all right when Rose ran her hand down it. Very carefully, she felt the one that had seemed to be broken. It was a bit puffy, but as far as she could tell it was not broken, and there was no open wound. Perhaps he had only bruised it.

Thank God. ‘I think you're going to be all right, Gully,' she dared to say. ‘Now we've got to get you going.'

She had hardly thought about how he could be got off the beach. She could not put him in the whaler, but someone might be able to lift him into a bigger boat, like the lobster fisherman's. Or could two men carry him up the cliff steps between them? He wasn't a very big donkey. Could they rig up some sort of hoist to haul him up the cliff?

The first thing was to get help, in some anonymous way that would not identify her with the donkey's discovery, since no one must guess who had found him. It could take her ages to get back to Wood Briar and telephone, and with the added time it took for rescuers to get to Pebble Cove, a few swallows of Coke and water and a handful of peanuts would not be enough to keep Gully going.

There might be a telephone at the camp site above her. She poured the rest of the Coca-Cola messily into Gully's mouth, gave him some more peanuts, and climbed up the steps.

The gate at the top of the cliff was much lower than the fence. Rose climbed it easily, and found herself in a large enclosed space of grass, with picnic tables and swings and a central building that had a sign: ‘Bellevue Camping', and telephone and electricity cables running to it from the road. The building
was locked, but this was a desperate crisis. Rose broke a window with a stone and got her hand in round the shards of glass to turn the catch and open it, so that she could climb in. The phone in the office was dead, but there was a public telephone in the passage outside. Even a ragged phone book.

There was his name. Reade, A. J. Riverside Lane, W. Newcome. Rose dialled the operator. Just before someone answered, she remembered that she must disguise her voice.

‘I – er, say, listen, I haven't got any money.' She copied Abigail's American accent. ‘This is a collect call.'

‘What number are you calling?'

Rose gave Arthur's number from the phone book. After a short wait which seemed like an eternity, the operator came back on the line to ask, ‘May I have your name?'

‘Just tell them it's about the donkey. They'll talk to me.'

Another maddening wait. Then the operator: ‘Go ahead, caller.'

‘Hullo.' Rose's voice cracked.

‘Hullo? Who is it?' Judy's voice, breathless.

‘I've found your donkey.' Rose added a lower pitch to the accent. Judy must not guess who she was. ‘He's on a beach below the Bellevue camp site, on the road at the top of the cliff, about four miles east of Newcome Hollow.'

‘How on earth did he get there?'

‘Don't ask me, lady,' Rose said roughly. ‘Just believe me.'

‘Oh, I do. Is he all right?'

‘I guess so. But someone's gotta get him outa there as soon as possible.'

‘How?'

‘Call the police, that's all I'm telling you. Call them now. O.K.?'

‘Yes, I will. Thanks. Thank you very much. Please tell me who you are.'

‘Don't matter. Just do what I say.'

Before she hung up, Rose heard Judy calling excitedly, ‘Granddad! Come here quickly. They've found little Gully!'

‘Sorry about the window,' Rose told the Bellevue Camping sign as she climbed out. ‘I hadda do it, pardner.'

She ran down the steps to the beach. She hated to leave Gully, but she had got to get back to the hotel before anyone found out she was gone. The donkey's eyes were closed again, and he seemed to be asleep.

‘Goodbye, old pal,' she told him in her Abigail accent. ‘See ya!'

She took the red bucket back to the boat as a souvenir of this great adventure.

There was some warmth in the sun now, and the day was fair. As the bow of the whaler cut through a calmer sea, Rose took off her anorak and peeled off one of the sweaters. By the time she reached the headland on her way home, the wind had dropped and the tide had slackened. When she turned the boat to pass the rocks at a safe distance and make the run in along the inner curve of Sandy Neck, there was not much difficulty in getting through the choppier waves.

Her journey home did not seem to have taken half as long as the journey out, but by the time she sighted the mooring she was half-dead with fatigue and the sleepiness that comes with tension relaxed and the luxury of relief.

It was not until she put the throttle into reverse that she remembered to look at the fuel gauge. Almost empty. She had been lucky not to have run out of petrol, but she must find a way to sneak out in the dinghy and fill up half the tank before Ben and his father got back.

Without much power in her muscles, she managed to make all the right moves to tie up the whaler and release the dinghy, and get herself and her clothes and the bag and the red bucket into it and put the oars into the rowlocks. It was still early. Looking back over her shoulder as she rowed, she could see only one or two people on the sand, and they were down at the other end. Nobody saw her beach the light dinghy and pull it up to the breakwater and tie it the way Ben did.

At the hotel, there was a light in the kitchen, and someone was moving about. After she had put the oars away and hung up the key, Rose went in through the side door that led up to the family apartment, and was in her room before her father was up.

She took off her wet clothes and pushed them and the red bucket under the bed until she could deal with them later. She fed the hamster and washed her hair, and had just finished changing into dry jeans and a sweater when her father knocked on the door and came in.

‘Great excitement,' he said. ‘I just heard on the local radio something about a donkey falling down a cliff, and they're taking a helicopter there to rescue it. It's along the coast by the camping place. Want to come and have a look?'

A lot of other people had heard about it too, and when they reached Bellevue Camping, the police had opened the big gate and there was quite a crowd on the grass camp ground, waiting for the helicopter. People were trying to get past each other to look down through the gateway at the top of the steps to see the donkey. Being small, Rose managed to squeeze among them until she could see down to the beach.

‘No one down the steps!' a policeman was shouting up. ‘Keep back, everybody. We don't want anyone else down here.'