Saving Sophia (5 page)

Last seen wearing…

Miss Sackbutt is rubbish at telling people off. I don't know why I've always been so frightened of it.

“And Charlotte – you shouldn't do things like this, you know, you nearly gave me a heart attack. Miss Wesson waking me like that in the night, peeling back my eye shades and shining a torch – well!” Miss Sackbutt flaps her hand in front of her face as if she's having another near heart attack.

“And so unexpected – YOU? The most sensible child in the class, of all children! It was the dog that found you, of course – clever little thing.”

I sit very still and hope it will blow over, which it does in about a minute, and before I've even had a chance to do tears and beg forgiveness she's given me a piece of her KitKat.

Miss Wesson tells off Sophia. I don't know what she says but Sophia's face is red and puffy afterwards, as if she did do tears, and I don't think there was any KitKat-sharing.

We have to sit separately at breakfast and Miss Wesson gets between us afterwards, so I can't talk to Sophia even when we're walking down to the wetsuit sheds although I'm dying to find out more about her mum, Pinhead and Wesson.

“Who's done it before?” asks tracksuit man, pointing at a kayak.

Everyone puts their hands up, except for me. Ned shoots me a glance. I have done it before, but I'm no good at it; I'd rather everyone thought I was a complete beginner.

It turns out Sophia is rather excellent at kayaking – one of her schools was on the shore of Lake Superior in Canada – so tracksuit man puts us together.

“But—” says Miss Wesson, her mouth open in disbelief.

“It's a health and safety issue, Miss Wesson,” says tracksuit man. “I can't send Charlotte out there on the sea without an experienced kayaker and I need to keep the instructors in boats on their own, so…” He shrugs and picks up a life jacket from the beach.

I send Miss Wesson a bright smile and she scowls back, but then she climbs into her kayak and waits for us to launch.

Sophia gets to sit in the back, steering, while I'm in the front, as “the engine”. The boat smells of old wellington boots, as does the wetsuit, but I lower myself in until the wetsuit cuts off my circulation and the lifejacket blocks my nose and mouth. Once the helmet's on too, I can barely see, move or breathe.

“Brilliant,” says tracksuit man. “Sea's nice and calm, see how you get on, paddle out towards the yellow buoy and then back to the orange one.”

We launch, and Miss Wesson launches a millisecond afterwards, the bow of her kayak bobbing along beside us. We leave her dog on the shore, barking.

I try very hard, but I don't think I'm a natural. The yellow buoy turns out to be miles away and
before very long I'm sweating, and the sandy bits in the wetsuit are rubbing my armpit, and the stupid helmet's slipped and is dangling over one eye. I can see the front of our boat but that's about it. After a short burst of rain, the sun comes out and boils the water that's fallen inside my wetsuit. If you like the feeling of sitting in warm wee, then it's nice. If not, don't go kayaking.

Sophia is talking to me but because of the stupid lifejacket I can't hear her properly.

I run through the plot of
Last Stand in Paradise.
The hero's just swum the river, and he's exhausted, and three more trained assassins spring out of the bush…

“Five more minutes,” shouts tracksuit man. Everyone seems to be racing now, kayaks are whizzing across our bow, the water's white with mad paddling.

I start to count.

One chimpanzee, two chimpanzees…

Back in Last Stand in Paradise the hero grabs at a piece of bamboo, sweeping the assassins off their feet… This is taking forever.

Five chimpanzees, six chimpanzees.

Someone clips our stern heading towards the
yellow buoy at speed.

“Hey!” shouts Sophia.

Nine chimpanzees, ten chimpanzees, eleven chimpanzees…

“Ow! You idiot!”

I crane my neck round to see who shouted, nearly decapitating myself on the sharp edge of the lifejacket. Miss Wesson's boat's gone. Sophia swings the boat around so that we can see what's happened. The motorboat seems to be next to a pair of kayaks, but someone's in the water and one of the kayaks seems to be upside down. All the other kayaks are charging towards it.

Tracksuit man's standing, shouting in the motorboat, and, just as the overturned kayak starts to right itself, we see him dive into the water.

I try to keep it in view, but I find keeping anything still about the kayak almost impossible.

“Quick!” Sophia yells. “Just paddle as hard as you can – I'll steer!”

Without thinking I paddle like a maniac, trying to copy what other people's arms have been doing, which is far more efficient than the thing that my arms have been doing. We whizz back towards the shore and then skirt around some rocks. The sea's slightly rougher here but Sophia steers through it,
and I try to keep up the speed. It's all hard work and the stupid helmet means that I can only just see the rocks bobbing in front of me.

“Sophia,” I shout. “Sophia, slow down!” I can't look back to see where we've come from, the lifejacket would saw my head off, but I can just about see where we're going.

To my huge relief, she rams the boat on to a sandy gap in the rocks, wriggles and clambers out, before grabbing me and hauling me out of the boat.

“Well done, Lottie,” she cries. “Are you OK?”

I nod – I can't answer, I'm too out of breath – so I lie for a moment staring at the sky. A bank of cloud is approaching from the sea and I can just make out the ragged edge of rain that must be coming our way.

“Sophia,” I breathe. “What have we done? What are we doing?”

“Escaping,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. I'd like to add, “I want you to be my friend but I wasn't expecting this,” but instead I say, “Of course. But is this a good way of doing it?”

“I want to see my mum. She's in the country, for a week – I have to talk to her…” Her voice fades away. Then, “Come on,” she says briskly. “We need
to hide this boat.” She scrapes the sand away on either side of the kayak so that it sinks into the beach.

I stand watching her, absorbing the leg-shaking enormity of what we've done. “But Sophia – we've just run away, by boat.”

“Yes.” She turns and looks up at me. “I know. And thanks.”

“But I haven't entirely agreed to it yet,” I say, struggling with the wet straps and tearing off the beastly life jacket.

She doesn't say anything, just looks up at me, and I can see that her eyes are brimming with tears.

“Oh, all right, I promise I'll help, but this is insane, you do know that?” I say, pulling the boat into a hollow in the sand and dumping a wodge of seaweed over it. I crouch down to join her, taking off my helmet and using it to dollop sand on to the kayak.

“Brilliant,” she says, copying me. “This is my only chance to see Mum, tell her what's going on… And I knew you were the right person to bring.”

“Not Ned, then?” I say, thinking of them sitting on the top of the wall, hand in hand, or skipping along cliff tops, careless of the drop below.

“Ned?” she laughs. “Why Ned?”

“No reason,” I say, allowing a tiny light of hope to flicker in my heart. A light that says that just as she means something to me, I mean something to her. “Just wondered.”

“There's no one else who I can trust and who's capable of it.” She looks with her almost black eyes into mine. The tiny light of hope becomes a steady flame. “Can you imagine Sarah-Jane doing this?” she asks.

I think of Sarah-Jane in my place, complaining, sitting helpless on the sand, clamouring for attention. Then in my mind's eye I see me, a strong silent me striding alongside Sophia, guiding her, giving wisdom to her in her mission. A heroic me. “No.”

“Exactly.”

We probably spend about ten minutes hiding the boat. When we've finished, we pile rocks and more seaweed on the disturbed sand, and watch as a sudden squall blows in from the sea and the rain destroys our footprints.

“Brilliant,” Sophia says, flicking her dripping plait to the side. “Let's get going.”

“Have you got a plan?” I ask, following her
over the rocks.

“We need to get to Mum before Pinhead finds us. This way, I think,” she says.

It's not exactly a plan, I think but don't say, as we scramble over boulders and through three small bays that nestle beneath the cliffs.

Soon, the mist that was out at sea rolls in towards us, and I can barely see my arm in front of my face.

“How far are we going?” I ask, out of breath. “Is this a long escape or a short escape?”

Sophia doesn't reply, but I can hear her feet on the stones in front of me, and I follow them through to another sandy bay.

“Sophia?” I ask. I'm just beginning to feel anxious. I'm not sure whether I want to see a coastguard helicopter scouring the sea for us, or whether I don't. It slightly depends on what Sophia is thinking of doing. I want to be a hero but what is there to eat, for example, or drink?

Flowers for Sophia

We stumble on for another hour or so, until the coastal path comes down to meet the shore. An orange boat appears just out to sea, joined soon after by a helicopter. We hide under a pile of nets until they go away, before walking some more.

In
Rendezvous at West Point,
Dr Tabitha Cross walks twenty-seven miles along rocks before wrestling her evil stepmother to the ground. Difference is, Dr Tabitha Cross was fit and wore shoes. My feet hurt and I’m out of breath.

She also had some idea of where she was going.

A couple walk past with their dog, and we collapse
on to the rocks in our wetsuits as if we were just out for a swim. I’m completely starving, breakfast was a really long time ago and if someone offered me one of Dad’s homemade squirrel sausages, I might even consider eating it.

We must be about six miles away from Bream by now.

I’m tempted to wander over to the couple and ask to use their mobile phone, but I glance at Sophia and lose heart. She’s looking really determined. She’s also looking like she might cry.

“Sophia,” I ask gently, “what exactly are we doing?”

She’s silent as a group of ramblers wander on to the beach and start chucking pebbles into the sea.

“We’re going to find Mum.”

“And where is she?”

She sits in silence, spinning stones across the beach.

“I think – I don’t know exactly.”

I’ve never been very good at whistling between my teeth, but it comes out sufficiently loud to make one of the ramblers turn sharply and fling a stone at his friend by accident. “So where do we start? Why don’t you tell me something about her?
What does she do?”

“She’s a singer…”

“Would I have heard of her?”

“Doubt it – she mostly performs in other countries – that’s why she’s never here. In fact I only know she’s here at the moment because I heard Wesson and Pinhead talking about her on the way down here. But that doesn’t matter. The point is that Pinhead knows where she is, so if we can get to his office, we can find out where she’s performing. If we get there soon, we can get to her first.”

“Couldn’t you just email her or something?”

Sophia shakes her head. “I don’t have her email address. Pinhead’s never given it to me, and he tries to send me to school in remote places where the internet doesn’t work. That’s why he sent me to Bream Lodge. Out of sight, and out of contact – he always wants me well out of the way.”

I thought everywhere had the internet these days, except for us, of course, but I pick weed from between my toes and try to imagine how I’d feel if I was kept away from my mum, how I’d feel if someone wanted to take all her money and I knew about it and she didn’t.

“If he wanted to defraud her, wouldn’t he do it miles away, in the Cayman Islands or somewhere?”

Sophia draws a heart in the sand. “He’s got cronies here. This is his turf.”

“Oh,” I say. This is a world I thought I knew about from my books. But perhaps I don’t.

“Of course, she could be dead,” says Sophia. “That could be why I haven’t seen her for years.”

“Surely you’d know if she was,” I say. “You’d have been told at school, you know, like in
The Twelve Fish Scales,
where Sarah Turnbull gets called into the Head’s office and told her parents have been killed in a terrible airship-meets-herd-of-cows calamity.”

She sniffs. “He might have kept it a secret from the school, too.”

“Oh!” I say. I can’t think of anything else. I throw some pebbles at a can, and miss.

“We could go back, get the police to investigate?” I say. “Tell them your mum’s missing, that you haven’t seen her in – what was it? Five years?”

“NO!” says Sophia, her face twisted with anger and tears. “They wouldn’t believe us, and he’d hide the evidence – I have to do it myself; if you want to leave I’ll just go on, alone…”

“Where’s his office?” I ask, looking around at the almost empty beach as if Pinhead’s office might be just round the corner, but really I’m dreading the answer.

“Bristol.”

“That’s quite a long way away,” I say, imagining the journey stretching across a map of the South West. “Maybe a hundred and fifty miles?” We sit in a long contemplative silence while I think about whether I can be hero enough to carry Sophia through all this, and help her find the truth.

I remember Irene, and the plane crash. She was alone, in a cold fog, hundreds of miles from home. “Do you know anything about Irene Challis?” I ask.

“Irene Challis?”

“She’s the old woman that died and left her house to Pinhead.”

Sophia shakes her head. “Never heard of her – I don’t know anything about his relatives – I don’t think he has any. I don’t think anyone could be related to anything as vile as Pinhead.”

“No, he does sound – unpleasant. What does he do? Except for dabbling in property development and keeping people apart?”

“Import and Export – that’s what he says to
people. But I think he’s a gun runner.”

My mouth suddenly dries up.
A gun runner?
And I’d thought he was something to do with pork.

Do I have enough of an inner hero? Can I, like Scarface McCready in
The Secret of the Lost Uncle,
do good in the face of extreme danger, unrecognised, warmed by the inner knowledge of extreme selflessness in the cause of justice and friendship? I feel a surge of righteous power and my little flame of courage bursts into a raging fire; Sophia needs me, she needs me to help her do SOMETHING EXCITING. Just me; only me.

I’m thinking of the changed me, the
something happened to me,
that I’ll have afterwards. It’ll be awesome.

“I’m hungry,” says Sophia. “And thirsty.”

Apart from our wetsuits, there really isn’t anything to eat, but if I’m going to be Sophia’s heroic best friend I need to find something. I look around. The beach is pebbly; at the top, some sad plants with yellow flowers struggle on the edge of a sandy cliff. I wander over. They’re that sea broccoli stuff – Dad once cooked it down at Portland with mackerel; it was disgusting, but it’s food.

Raw food.

I pick the flowers and try one. It tastes like cabbage. Peppery, disgusting, but not inedible. I bring back some flowers for Sophia.

She sticks one in her mouth and chews. I expect her to choke, or spit it out, but she says: “Thank you, Lottie. Thank you.”