Cry of a Seagull (8 page)

Jim Fisher dealt with both, although he was off duty, and somehow dinner got cooked and served. Upstairs in the family flat, Rose turned on the television to the ballet
The Sleeping Beauty
. She didn't like dancing herself, because she was clumsier at it than Moonlight trying to do a collected canter, but she loved to watch other people. Her father kept interrupting, because it embarrassed him to see men in tights dancing, so Rose turned the beautiful music down low and sat very close to the set, so that he could not walk between her and the screen.

The Lilac Fairy was leading the love-sick prince through the thorny forest that shut the sleeping princess away from the world and away from the progress of time. Through the sweet, melodious Lilac Fairy theme, Rose imagined that she heard, very faintly, the rusty bray of a donkey. She turned up the sound a little. There it was again, the screech of indrawn breath, the hoarse bellow that came out with the air.

The moonlit wood on the stage changed to the moving sea, not at night time, but under a dawning pearly light. The dark object of the other visions was fighting to move through the small troughs and hillocks of the waves. And now at last, she saw what it was. A donkey's head. Dark wet fur, great ears
laid back, the white nose stretched out, barely keeping above the water. From time to time, a choppy wave washed over its head, and he coughed and gasped and struggled on, pitifully small in the wide ocean.

‘Oh, my God.' She whispered it, but her father heard.

‘Oh, my God is right. A simpering young man with a velvet T-shirt and a wooden sword pretending he can't get through a few cardboard bushes …'

For Rose, the donkey was still swimming on the screen, the donkey with the white nose from the paddock by the marina.

‘Don't stare so, Rose. Don't sit so close to the screen.' The image was gone. On the television, the prince burst triumphantly into the castle and leaned over the great bed where the princess lay in her tutu, and woke her with the immemorial embrace.

Rose switched off the set – ‘Thank heavens for that,' from her father – said goodnight and went to her room.

So that was it! A donkey was in danger. Rose opened the window without turning on the light and stood staring out, chewing the skin round her nails.

Somewhere, for some reason, a donkey was in the sea, swimming desperately for its life. Rose knew that because donkeys had originally been desert animals, all their descendants were terrified of water. How long could this one possibly survive? For the first time since this strange adventure had begun, Rose knew what her mission was. It wasn't Georgie or her mother, or the man with the limp, or Joanne, or any person. It was a donkey, the animal chosen by Jesus to carry him into Jerusalem, but neglected by most of the world, a gentle beast of burden, sharing none of the care and worship given to horses.

All the more reason why it mattered to Favour – and his messenger. But if she was going to save the donkey from the cruel sea, she must know where it was, and also
when
. Was it something that had happened in the past, or was it happening now, or was it something that had not happened yet, and she had to prevent it?

She must find out more. She must go on another journey. Her spirit was working itself up to that tense, breathless feeling of expectation that ususally led to a summons from the horse. Leaning out of the window, she could feel him waiting somewhere. The moor seemed to draw her like a magnet, but there was no moon tonight. It was too dark to go to the valley. But if she had to wait until morning, how could she possibly sleep?

When she saw her father's light go out, she went downstairs, unbolted the back door quietly and went across the turf of the lawn and the longer grass beyond it towards the dark mass of the trees, and the narrow white gate that led into the wood.

They always kept the gate shut, but now she saw that it was open. As she reached out to pull it shut, suddenly a yellow lantern swung from behind a tree, and the Lord of the Moor, cloaked and masked, stepped into the gateway.

‘Don't shut us out,' he warned. ‘Don't try, becauth you
can't
.'

Here? So close to her own home? What ghastly new game was this, to try to stop her?

The Lord raised the lantern, and she saw the red glowing eyes of the weasel crouched inside his wide sleeve. Behind, Rose could see other flickering lights moving among the trees. The wood was full of soldiers. One of them, his armoured chest misshapen by a bulging cuirass, came closer, and under the unkempt hair on his brow, Rose saw the lidless, deadened eyes of the boy outside the pub, the gang leader at the marina.

In a rising wind, the tops of the familiar trees whispered together in horror. The Lord spoke under his breath. ‘
We're waiting
,' she thought she heard him say. ‘
Now it ith near the time. Now we are waiting
.'

‘He knows,' the trees told each other.

He must know that Rose was nearing her goal. Now that she knew what it was, the evil ones would try harder to stop her, the dragon breath would be on her cheek, the hatred stronger. They had never come so close before.

But the horse came even closer. A luminous moon sailed out of the clouds. A fierce gust of wind blew shut the gate, and in a blaze of light the Lord and his demons were blotted out, and Favour pawed at the grass, not dapple grey now, but stark white like alabaster under the staring moon.

The speed of the horse's cosmic flight slowed to the more earthly speed of a roaring machine. Rose was deafened, partly by the noise, partly by a hard helmet that came down over her ears. She could not see anything except the back of a studded leather jacket. Her arms were round the waist of the boy who was wearing it, clinging to him, dependent on him for her safety.

The girl she had become was excited by the speed. So was Rose, but scared too, because she had never ridden pillion before, although to the girl it was a familiar thrill.

When they swerved off the road and stopped, the girl raised her head, and Rose saw the glaring yellow eye at the back of the boy's white helmet. She was the gang leader's girl, the one who had confronted Vicky's father in that other scene.

When the girl took off her own helmet, she ran a hand through her stiff hair to make it stand up on top. From the inside of her skin, Rose could feel the heavy, clogging make up, the lipstick greasy and tasting of cheap raspberry sweets. The mascara was so thick she could see her own lashes. It weighed down her lids and made her blink. This was why she had to keep her head down when she was on the motorcycle.

They were in the crowded parking space of a roadside café. Two other boys had pulled in behind them, each with a girl on the back of his bike. Rose recognized them all from having seen them when she was Vicky.

Rose's girl stayed outside with the boys, while the other girls went into the café to buy chips and Coke. They all threw cans and paper containers and empty cigarette packets down anywhere, which shocked Rose's tidy soul. They hung about the car park for a bit, bored, complaining about the world and the general state of their life, and to ginger things up a bit
they bent the radio antennas of a few cars and ran fingernails along the paint.

Rose's girl was called Lynette, and everyone called her boy friend ‘Evil'. That was why his helmet was painted like that – the evil eye. Lynette followed him closely and copied what he did, whether she wanted to or not. Rose could feel that she was fascinated by him, and yet she feared and sometimes hated him.

He talked to her as if she were dirt, and treated her roughly. Once he caught hold of her wrist and spun her round so that her arm was twisted behind her, his nails digging into the flesh. Rose could feel the agonizing pain. Lynnette screamed at Evil and stamped backwards with the high sharp heel of her boot. It caught him on the instep and he cursed and let her arm go, and would have hit her in the face if she had not ducked.

Rose was afraid she would get herself murdered – what would happen to Rose if a person whose body she inhabited got themselves killed? – but to Lynette, it was all in the day's work. She was Evil's girl. He was her bloke.

For a while, they all threw pebbles at the window of a disused shed to see how long it would take to break it. When the glass shattered, they yawned and said, ‘This place stinks – let's get out of here,' to disguise the fact that they wanted to run for it before they got caught.

‘Where to, Evil?' one of the boys called over the racing of their engines.

‘Our place. Come on.'

He started off before Lynette was ready, but she managed to hang on to him, and found the footrests for her feet. This was the life, she told herself. Hit one place, do a spot of damage to leave your mark, and then on to the next bit of aggro.

‘EVIL WAS HERE,' they sometimes wrote on a wall, or a poster, or in the dust on the back of a lorry, and then tore off somewere else. No one knew where Lynette was. Mum was always asleep by the time she came home, and never bothered to ask stupid questions in the morning.

When they got to the marina car park that they had adopted as their territory, it looked the same to Rose as it had on her last journey: twilight, a few cars and stored boats, the sun going down behind the town on the other side of the river. The only thing that was missing was the big luxurious motor yacht, the
Princess Vicky
.

Her berth at the dock was empty, but as Lynette wandered about with the others, looking under boat covers to see if there was anything to pinch, Rose heard a smooth chug, chug and saw the lighted boat sliding easily through the water. When the boat stopped, the girl stepped over the rail on to the dock, and her mother threw the rope, and her father shouted from the wheelhouse, ‘Look alive!'

Interesting
. Rose was watching exactly the same scene from a different point of view. It was coloured by the attitude of Lynette, who, like the rest of the gang, was watching the yacht and its captain and crew with a sour sort of envy, which expressed itself in automatic scorn.

‘Look at her,' they said to each other. ‘Who does she think she is? What a crummy boat. Got no sails nor nothing. Who'd be seen dead in that?' and other derogatory remarks designed to make themselves feel good.

Vicky was quite pretty, with short curly hair and a round, harmless face, but Lynette and the gang did not think much of her, because she allowed herself to be bossed by her totally awful father. They hung about in the growing dark to see what the people on the boat were going to get up to, not because it was of any interest, but because they had nothing else to do.

When Vicky crossed the gangplank and began to walk towards them, the father shouted to her in his toffee-nosed foghorn voice, ‘Come on, Vicky. I'd stay away from that lot, if I were you!'

‘Wouldn't fancy
her
,' Evil muttered. ‘I got something better.' He gave Lynette one of his painful squeezes.

When the father started to carry on about troublemakers and layabouts, and what he would have done with them in the Navy, Evil gave it him right back.

‘The Navy's only for morons,' he called out. Evil was not afraid of anybody. He told the old turkey, who was getting red in the face, that he could clear off the gang's territory.

Rose, experiencing all this for the second time, knew what was going to be said and done, but it was curious how this different viewpoint altered the scene. Even the words sounded different, the way Lynette heard them. Vicky's father sounded even more offensive, a dangerous enemy. What Evil shouted back at him was perfectly reasonable.

When the big man called him a baby, and that fool Anita tittered and the donkey brayed, Lynette felt angry enough to kill. Tears welled up behind the sticky black lashes. She raged at the man like a tiger.

Rose, as Vicky, had been afraid of this girl's power. But as Lynette, when the man only looked at her with contempt, she was powerless. It was the contempt of the whole world, telling her she was a nobody.

The most surprising thing to Rose was the knowledge of Vicky and Lynette's silent feelings about each other. Vicky had been shaken with envy for Lynette's wild freedom and dangerous entanglement with the gang leader. But now, as Vicky walked off with her parents towards the restaurant, Lynette was jealous of this sheltered girl who had all the security she lacked: the boat, money, parents who cared enough about her to be strict.

If I had all that, Lynette thought bitterly, I wouldn't need to put up with the way Evil treats me.

Evil was furious. His pride had been hurt and he wanted to get his own back on the stuck-up family.

‘Let's do a bit of damage here.'

The others were all for it. They debated various ways in which they could harm the boat, but none of them were practical. The yacht lay quietly by the dock, moored fore and aft, deck lights on, looking as impregnable as a battleship. ‘I know what we'll do,' Evil said. ‘We'll give them the shock of their useless lives. When they get back to the boat, they're going to find a surprise visitor on board.'

‘One of us?' Victor asked.

‘Get out of it.' Evil was looking at the little field, where the donkey still stood in the shadows watching, one ear back and one ear forward. ‘When the admiral gets aboard, he's going to find someone there who's a bigger ass than he is.'

He opened the gate of the field and went in. He took off his broad belt with the death's head buckle that Lynette had given him, and put it round the neck of the donkey, who followed him patiently out of the field.

The donkey in the sea
! What were they going to do to this poor animal? Rose thought it was awful, but Lynette thought it was hilarious, and having quite recovered her spirits, helped to push the donkey down the narrow gangplank and on to the deck of the boat.

Evil and Victor went with him on to the yacht, and Evil took the belt off the donkey's neck and put it back on himself, with an arrogant hitch of his tight black jeans. He strutted about the deck, giving orders in a plummy voice, and saying, ‘Put that man in irons,' and the others on the dock, for a laugh, untied the ropes that held the boat and pretended they were going to push it off. They pulled the gangplank up on to the dock, so that Victor and Evil, yelling blue murder, had to jump for it.