Cry of a Seagull (2 page)

‘I jumped three feet today,' she said, but was obliterated by an affable bellow from Ben's father in the hall. She had to go down and let him hug her and tell her she had grown six inches which she hadn't, but he was an unimaginative, well-meaning man who didn't know when to stop saying the things that grown-ups said to children.

‘How was your winter?' he asked Mollie.

‘Not bad. It's summer now that you and Ben have come. We're hoping for a good season.'

Rose's mother had fair, softly curling hair and a bright smiling face. When she was being sunny, Rose's father was often gloomy. ‘Hoping,' Philip said dourly, ‘isn't the same as expecting.'

‘I
am
expecting it.' Mollie was always optimistic, even when faced with the myriad crises of running your own hotel.

‘The experts aren't,' Philip told Mr Kelly. ‘They're forecasting a rotten tourist season. All the hotels are gloomy.'

‘Except this one,' Ben said. ‘Come on, Rosie. Let's see if your table tennis has improved with age.'

Very early next morning, before she helped with the teas and breakfasts, Rose went running on the beach with Ben. He was a famous runner at his school, in training now for the spring marathon. Rose's job was to pace him, keeping level and steady, until he put on a spurt and left her behind.

Soundlessly on the clean hard sand where the tide had gone out, their feet made herringbone patterns all down Sandy Neck beach. They were out of sight of the hotel and almost to the stone breakwater before the harbour at Newcome Hollow, when Ben pulled ahead, and at the same time Rose saw the grey horse rise out of the ocean like a great thrashing sea animal. He stood with the water round his knees, and tossed his head: Come with me!

You never asked, ‘Where to?' When the horse appeared, you went with him, wherever he chose to take you. Rose ran out along the breakwater and climbed easily on to his wet back, burying her hands and face in his salty mane as he rose like a gull and headed out to sea. Looking back, she could see the toy-sized village and the boats in the harbour, and a tiny speck that was Ben, moving like a fly across a windowpane.

‘Roof! Roofie!' A small child's voice cut piercingly through the roaring rush of the horse's galloping flight, and Rose emerged from clouds on to a beach in bright sunlight. She was sitting on sand with her legs stuck out, wearing wide blue shorts that reached to the knee. The legs below them were tanned, and rather thick and hairy.

‘Roofie.' A demanding little girl in a romper suit tugged at her shirt. ‘Georgie wants a choc ice … wants you to … wants go home … wants go wee wee' – a garbled babble of wants to which nobody paid any attention; so Ruth, whose mind and body Rose inhabited now, didn't see why she
should either, although she was supposed to be the mother's helper.

It was a large, happy-go-lucky family, having a picnic on the beach. The mother was a relaxed, smiling lady, reclining on a deck chair with a book, while several children of all ages raided the picnic basket and spilled lemonade and scrapped over melting chocolate biscuits. From time to time she flapped a hand at them and murmured, ‘Steady on, duckies.'

Ruth was hungry for lunch. Good. Rose was always glad when people whose bodies she was visiting put food into their stomachs. It was a peculiar situation. She
was
Ruth, feeling what she felt, thinking her thoughts, and yet she was still Rose, who could observe as an outsider.

Ruth opened another hamper and took out untidy packets of sandwiches. The children fell on them with rude cries.

‘Banana and honey – ugh, I'll puke,' said Brian, the oldest. Simon said, ‘Where's the sausages?'

‘Peanut butter – that's for babies.' Marion made a terrible face. ‘Here, Georgie baby, this is your lucky day.'

Georgie took the messy bread with sandy fingers and then wouldn't eat it because it had sand in it. She made a grab at Simon's ham and cheese, and he slapped her, and she fell over with her face in the sand and came up bawling. Ruth took her down to the sea to wash her off. The water was too cold for swimming, but it was nice to paddle in.

‘Isn't this fun, Georgie?' But Georgie was having what her mother cheerfully called ‘a bad day'.

‘Not want go in water, Roof. Want go wee-wee.'

‘Do it in the sea. Your rompers are wet already.'

Georgie lost her balance, staggered outward instead of inshore, fell, and was submerged for a moment or two before slow, casual Ruth finally moved to pull her out.

Rose had been having fits trying to make her move more quickly, but although she shared Ruth's body and mind, she couldn't influence her.

‘Bit cold for bathing.' Ruth laughed and brought back the soaked child, who was spluttering and coughing too much to cry. Rose braced herself for a telling-off from an anguished
mother, but Mrs Thomas merely took the baby on her lap, wrapped her in a towel and told her, ‘The sooner you learn to swim the better.'

The three older children wandered off. Mrs Thomas didn't tell Ruth to go and keep an eye on them, so she sat with her arms hugging her hairy legs and looked around contentedly, which gave Rose the chance to try to see where she was, as a clue to what she might be doing here. The horse, being only a horse, could not solve the problem for her of who needed rescuing from what. It was her task as a messenger to fit together the clues she learned on each of these journeys.

This beach was less crowded than any popular beach of Rose's experience, and the people were dressed in clothes that suggested about twenty-five years ago. Baggy shorts like Ruth's, narrow sunglasses, skirted floral swimsuits and few bikinis, and Mrs Thomas's dress and hairstyle looked like an old picture of Mollie, girlish on her honeymoon with Rose's father.

The beach looked familiar though. Rose recognized the upper part of some of the houses beyond the sea wall, but the pier looked small and strange. Of course, this was Newcome beach, but still with the old dilapidated pier that had been pulled down and rebuilt before Rose was born. The snack bar shed was a different colour, but the same pungent smell of scorched hamburgers and hot dogs drifted from it.

Farther down the beach, where Brian and Simon and Marion had disappeared, there was a little group of donkeys, waiting to give rides. There hadn't been donkeys on this beach within Rose's memory. She had only seen them in old picture postcards.

Mrs Thomas and Georgie were dozing when the three older children hurtled back, demanding donkey rides.

‘Last year, you said it was boring, duckies.'

‘It is, but we want to.' Brian stood with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, bossing his mother.

‘There's a baby donkey there with its mummy,' Marion said. Georgie woke in an instant. ‘Baby ee-aw, Georgie ride baby ee-aw!' So the mother allowed herself to be pulled from
her chair and they all ran along the beach, Ruth and Rose carrying Georgie, because Mrs Thomas wanted to run in zigzags like the others and jump rocks and dash in and out of the sea. Her childish enjoyment reminded Rose a bit of Mollie, except that this woman was unpractical and pretty useless.

Georgie, excited, clutched Ruth too hard, and easy-going Ruth amazed Rose with a flash of temper and a vicious slap on the baby's wet rompers. Georgie bawled, and Ruth said, ‘Shut up!' fiercely, and Rose felt that she was tense with anger.

She got herself under control before they reached the others. Mrs Thomas had collapsed laughing against the little fence where the donkeys were tied. She leaned there and watched her children squabble over who would ride which donkey.

‘Now then, now then.' The donkeys' owner, a stocky man with a limp and a red, weathered face, sorted them out on to three grey donkeys, which went ambling unwillingly off, a lad with ginger hair and freckles alternately tugging at their heads and flicking at their uncaring behinds with a light stick.

The brown mother donkey was harnessed to a little cart like an armchair on wheels, with a high back and cushioned seat. She rested her patient nose on the back of the velvety dark brown foal who stood close to her. His huge violet eyes were ringed with soft white hair, giving him a clownish look.

‘Baby ee-aw!' Georgie wriggled out of Ruth's arms and toddled up to the foal, who jumped away and swung back his exaggerated ears defensively.

‘Now then, my love.' The donkey man took her hand. ‘You mustn't frighten little Gully.'

‘Georgie on baby ee-aw! Want it, want it, want it!' The child set up a clamour, and her mother said, ‘She's persistent, you must say that for her.'

‘We'll put her on old Neptune,' the man said, when Brian turned his donkey back because it was boring. He lifted Georgie into the felt saddle, and Ruth led her off, wobbling,
her round imperious face gone suddenly chalk white with alarm.

‘Better hang on to her leg.' Rose warned Ruth inwardly, but Ruth was wandering vaguely along, and when old Neptune stumbled in the soft sand, Georgie tumbled off, and the donkey almost stepped on her as he regained his balance.

‘Poor old Neptune.' The donkey man picked up the toddler and limped over with her to her mother. ‘He's getting on, like me. Weak on his pins. Have to put him out to grass, which is where
I'll
be next year if the Council has their way and moves my pitch further away from the holidaymakers. And now my boy Fred, he wants to leave Newcome, like they all do, so I don't know how I'll manage, with my leg.'

‘Life's hard,' Mrs Thomas agreed absently.

‘Too right, it is. This is a dying business. If I have to retire, there'll be no more donkeys on Newcome beach. And then perhaps the Council—'

Georgie shut him up by roaring, ‘Baby ee-aw!' and beating her mother about her uncomplaining face.

She put the child in the little cart, and the donkey man got in, put an arm round her, and slapped the reins on the furry brown back with the dark stripe.

‘Get up, Coral!' and off they jogged. The foal trotted alongside, bumping his mother from time to time, and then bounding away to put down his white nose and kick up his gawky back legs. When he got too far away, he stopped and brayed for her, with a sound like sawing wood.

When Fred came back with Marion and Simon, Ruth climbed on to Mermaid's back. Good. Rose had always wanted to ride a donkey. Ruth dangled her legs and trailed her feet in the sand. She wanted to go straight along the beach, but Mermaid pottered down to the water's edge, where she dropped her mouse-coloured head and stepped delicately on her small narrow hoofs into the sea.

She stood there, and nothing would make her move. She only wanted a salt soak for her legs, but Ruth was roused to anger by her stubbornness, and Rose again felt her lose control and go hot with vicious rage. She roared like Georgie.
She smacked the donkey's ribs with her hand. She leaned backwards with all her weight on the reins. She tugged the right rein savagely. She tugged the left rein. She see-sawed the bit so that the cheek ring went through the donkey's mouth, while Rose begged unheard, ‘Don't! Don't!' Finally Mermaid sagged at the knees and sagged at the back end and lay down blissfully in the shallow water. Ruth shrieked and cursed, and stepped off as she rolled over.

Rose came back into her own life standing in the sea with her shoes and socks full of water. Her journeys with the horse took no time, in terms of earthly time. She waded out on to the sand just as Ben turned to run back to her, and fell in beside him, hoping he wouldn't notice the squelching of her feet.

Ben and his father went off to Newcome Hollow harbour, and Rose was busy with the work of the hotel, but all day she puzzled and worried about the events on the beach, which must have happened long before she was born. What did it mean? The horse never took her anywhere without a purpose, and somewhere in that scene must lie the clue to what she had to do. One of those people was in great trouble or danger, and it might be any of them.

It might be Ruth, with her sloppy unawareness and her frightening flashes of vicious temper. If she was thirteen or fourteen then, she must be about forty now, and if she hadn't got herself together, she might have grown into a child batterer. Georgie might have got into some trouble because she was spoiled and wilful and not properly supervised. Perhaps she was even dead, and the poor mother still overwhelmed with guilt and anguish because it had been her fault. The donkey man seemed to have a lot of worries on his mind. Perhaps he was going to lose his livelihood, or become crippled. Perhaps freckled Fred was going to go to the bad.

‘Why is Favour so baffling?' Rose did not see Mr Vingo until dinner time, so she discussed the situation in snatches each time she came to his corner table.

‘Or, why are
we
so baffled? Thank you, Rose, that pie
looks delicious. Favour can't do all the work for you. The challenge is that by overcoming each difficulty and danger, you will find the knowledge and strength for the conquest of evil.'

The dining-room was busy tonight. As well as the hotel guests, several people had come from outside, as they often did, now that Wood Briar and Mollie's cooking were getting a local reputation. Rose, in her blue and white check waitress apron, was working with Dilys and Gloria. Doleful Dilys, who came at weekends, was a Newcome University student whose love life was always in a mess. Gloria was a cheery, energetic woman: one of the regular staff, who knew all the workings of the hotel like the back of her hand. They could never manage without her.

Rose was held up by the Howards, who had a granddaughter of her age and wanted to keep her chatting. Gloria always made her serve the dodos, so she had to spend time with Professor Watson, who dropped all his pills on the floor and fussed about his special steamed fish, and with the Miss Mumfords, who had never eaten a single meal in this hotel without complaining – not one single meal in all the four or five years they had been here. Finally, she could nip back to Mr Vingo's table with the excuse of offering him seconds of sprouts.