Sky Run (3 page)

That's my sister there by the mast, looking soulful, and that's my gran at the tiller – or, more strictly speaking, my great-great-grand-aunt (apparently). Her name's Peggy. Sometimes I call her Gran, sometimes I call her Peggy, sometimes I pretend I can't hear her, and sometimes I pretend she's not there. Sometimes I pretend I'm not there. Sometimes I pretend nothing's there. I just close my eyes and make it all go away, just like that.

Peggy says she's a hundred and twenty years old. But then she says a lot of things, and I don't believe half of them either. She might be a hundred and twenty years old. She might be a hundred and fifty years old. She looks it some days. And she sure isn't twenty-five any more. But I don't know. And that's the trouble – so Peggy says. Peggy says we don't know much at all, and that's why we need an education.

She says some people say that whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow and that ignorance is bliss – but it isn't. She says ignorance is a pain in the butt. But I don't know if that's right either. Because I don't have any pains in my butt, and I'm supposed to be about as ignorant as you can get. According to Peggy. But my butt is an ache-free zone – except when Gemma kicked it once, but that's sisters for you. (And I waited my time and kicked hers right back too, as retali-ation is best when it's unexpected.)

The problem, as I see it, is this: just say ignorance really is bliss … Well, the only way to find out if it is or not, is to get educated, and then you can make what Peggy calls ‘an informed decision'. But if you then decide that ignorance is bliss after all, well, it's too late. Because by then you're already half educated. And you can't un-educate yourself or de-educate yourself, can you? So as far as being blissfully ignorant goes, you've had it. You're just going to be educated and miserable and longing for that far-off happy land, back when you didn't even realise that two and two made four. (I do know that much; we've covered basic arithmetic.)

So I just hope Peggy's not putting us wrong here. I just hope she knows what she's talking about this time. Because that's why we're sailing off into the blue and leaving everything familiar behind – to get an education. So it had better be a good one. As I was quite happy where I was. And if it turns out there's nothing in this education business, I'm going to be mighty peeved. Because I could be back there right now, on Peggy's island, fishing and mooching and doing what I always do, just being in the sun and letting the time go by, and no worries at all. No dramas.

‘You're dreaming your life away, Martin, my boy,' Peggy would say to me, regular as meals coming round. But what if I was? Was there something wrong with that? Is there something wrong with dreaming? Can't a boy have a hobby and an interest? There's nothing wrong with dreaming. It keeps you out of trouble; it costs nothing; you can do it anywhere, and you don't need any special equipment: just your head and somewhere soft to rest it, and then your dreams.

‘Dreamers are in for rude awakenings, Martin. Those are my words and you mark them.'

Yeah. Well, anyhow. So there we are and there we were. I'm not much on tenses. Peggy says I can get past, present and future all mixed up. But what's the difference? Yesterday, today, tomorrow – they're all much the same to me. Things happened or things are happening or things are going to happen. What does the when matter? It's the happening part that counts.

Some things I remember and some things I forget – it's like I wasn't even there, though I was, but I have this knack of being able not to pay any attention. Peggy says I could sleep through a war, and I probably could if it was a short one. But I wasn't asleep or daydreaming when we set off in Peggy's old boat that day. Because it was a big and memorable occasion. It isn't every day you leave home and go travelling. City Island, we were heading for. Peggy said it might take a few weeks to get there and it could be something of a rough crossing at times.

Peggy says a lot of things and you don't always know whether to believe them. But sometimes she's right. Only too right. Sometimes she's bang on the nail.

OK. Well, it started off all right. There we were: me, Gemma, Peggy and Botcher the sky-puss – otherwise known as big, fat and useless. Well, maybe Botcher is good for something – making everybody else feel useful. He's good for your self-esteem. You only have to compare yourself to Botcher and you feel you're on a winning team and have big talents. But what he's best at is lounging and eating, though not necessarily in that order.

The sky was as blue as I'd ever seen it the day we set off. There was nobody to say goodbye to us except old Ben Harley, who is Peggy's nearest neighbour and is all white hair and whiskers and bits of red complexion and a nose that somebody maybe trod on by accident once upon a time, or swiped with a hammer.

We could see him in the distance, waving a goodbye by swinging an old pair of trousers back and forth. And we could hear him calling, ‘Take it easy!' and, ‘See you soon, Peggy!' And I reckoned that for all he and Peggy made out they didn't get on, in fact they did, and all this being crotchety towards each other was nothing but a show. I thought that he was going to miss her terrible and that she was sad to see him there waving his old trousers at her too.

Old Ben also shouted something that sounded like ‘Bum foidge!'. When I asked Peggy what he was saying that for, she said he was saying, ‘Bon voyage', which she said was one of the old world languages – French – and it meant ‘Have a good journey', and that when we got to City Island and got educated we'd know all about stuff like that and be talking French like naturals. But Ben could just as well have said, ‘Safe journey!' and then we'd have understood him straight away and wouldn't have needed to learn French. So I don't know why he didn't do that, unless he was showing off.

So that was the farewell party assembled to see us off – just old Ben Harley waving his trousers like a flag and shouting at us in French. And nobody else in the whole universe knew or cared that we were on our way to City Island to go to school and get educated and ‘have a future' as Peggy called it.

But wouldn't we have had a future anyhow? I wondered. You didn't need to go to City Island to have a future. You could get one of those no matter where you went.

Soon old Ben was nothing but a shadow and Peggy's island was a distant stone. All there was around us was the blue of the sky and the specks that were faraway islands. There wasn't a cloud anywhere, not one, it was just blue, blue, burning blue – so blue it made your eyes ache and you longed for another colour, only there wasn't one, except the flash of a bright green sky-fish flying by, or the fluttering of an orange sky-clown, or the flabby white shape of a sail-fish, seeming to wander off in all directions at once.

‘Martin!' Peggy shouted at me. She sounded annoyed.

‘What?'

‘You're the lookout, remember.'

‘Huh?'

‘Lookout. You're supposed to be looking out. You don't look like you're looking out to me. You look like you're just looking.'

‘I was looking.'

‘Yeah, well, you're supposed to be looking out!'

‘Yes, dumb-head –' (That was Gemma butting in. Peggy never called you names or worked up to insults or was ever really rude to you. You need a sister to do all that.) ‘You're supposed to be looking out on your side and I'm looking out on mine.'

‘Well, I was looking out,' I said. Which was a lie, but I don't mind telling the occasional one. ‘And even if I wasn't, there doesn't seem much to look out for.'

Peggy gave me one of her older-and-wiser looks.

‘There never does until you see it,' she said.

‘Well, what am I supposed to notice? What am I supposed to bring to anyone's attention?'

‘Anything suspicious, anything dangerous, anything that looks like trouble.'

‘There's her,' I said, pointing at Gemma. ‘She looks like all of those. Especially the trouble.'

‘Get lost, Martin.'

‘Here? How? There's nowhere to get lost to.'

‘Then try falling over the side –'

‘OK, that's enough, you two. Just keep an eye out, Martin, all right? These are dangerous skies.'

‘They look safe enough to me.'

‘That's what's dangerous about them.'

‘If you say so.'

‘I do. So keep them peeled.'

So peeled is how I kept them. At least I did until they started closing. I saw nothing too interesting either, except a sky-shark, chasing its prey, and I thought to myself: Isn't that always the way of it, one thing wanting to eat another? And I've also noticed that the thing doing the eating is usually bigger than the thing being eaten. Not always, but most of the time. Unless it's bugs or sky-fleas, of course. But parasites eat you without necessarily killing you, whereas predators do the whole job in one.

And then, I guess, I just stopped peeling them and I maybe dozed off. When I opened up the eye hatches again, the sky was just the same bright blue, as blue as all monotony. Peggy's island had gone from view and old Ben waving his trousers was a snapshot in an album somewhere. I did wonder if I would ever see any of them again – Ben, the island, or the trousers.

But then I saw something else, looming up and looming large, and it was a little too late to avoid it.

‘Land ho!' I shouted.

Peggy was down below. The boat was on autopilot. Gemma was trailing a fishing line over the rail at the back.

Peggy came up on deck.

‘Land ho where?'

‘Right there, Peg.'

I pointed to where we were heading. If I'd been keeping them alert and peeled like I was supposed to, we might have had time to take a little evasive action. But it was too late now. We were sailing along between two islands. The port-side one looked barren and empty. The starboard side one was just as barren-looking but it was definitely inhabited. You could see that because there was a huge sign there, erected at the end of a jetty.

The sign had been hand-painted with what must have been a scraggy brush and a hand that was none too steady. It read
THE TOLL TROLL IS:

And next to that there was a rack to hold another sign, which could be changed around as needed. The sign at that moment read
IN
. I assume the other side of it bore the word
OUT
.

But we were unlucky. The
IN
was up.

Next thing we saw was that slung between the two islands was a huge net. It could be lowered or raised by means of slackening or tightening a couple of ropes. We were unlucky with that too. The net was up and if we carried on sailing we'd have sailed right into it and have got tangled up like a shoal of fish in a sky-trawl.

‘What the –?'

Peggy treated herself to some cursing.

‘What's going on, Gran?' Gemma said.

‘I don't know. But cut our speed or we'll be right into that damn net.'

Gemma reeled the sails in and Peggy shut the solar down.

And then the noise started. It was quite a racket. It sounded like someone taking a look at a sky-cat's intestines while the cat was still conscious. Botcher seemed to get the same idea, as he leapt up and scurried under a sail bag and tried to put his paws in his ears.

‘For the love of –!'

The man on the shore was big and broad and he was wearing a skirt, or maybe it was a kilt of some kind, and he had large, muscled arms, covered in freckles and red hair. And he was playing some sort of bagpipes. But it was obvious, from the way he was playing them, that lesson number two in the Teach Yourself the Bagpipes correspondence course had not yet arrived.

After about thirty seconds, the ear torture ended. He stopped playing in order to swat at a whole swarm of insects that were bothering his beard. But no sooner had he swatted them away than they came back, like they couldn't live without him. So he gave up on the pipes and he bellowed at us, long and loud.

‘Ahoy! You there!'

‘What is it you want?' Peggy yelled back. ‘We're just travelling. We're an old lady and two kids. We don't have anything.'

‘Everyone's got something! And if you want to sail between my islands, you've got to pay.'

‘Just told you, we don't have anything. Lower the net and let us pass.'

‘No way, old timer. You pay the toll or you don't go nowhere.'

‘“You don't go
anywhere”
,' Peggy corrected him. ‘You don't say “
you don't go nowhere
”. That's a double negative. Watch your grammar. I'm trying to get these children to speak nicely, and bad examples of common usage don't help that.'

The big beardy one didn't answer her. He put his bagpipes down, swatted away a few more of the insects that were bothering him, picked up a large harpoon that could have come off a sky-whaler, and fitted it into a gun fixed to the jetty.

‘You pull to, or you get blasted.'

Peggy swore some of her swears again.

‘I need this like a hole in the head, you red-bearded idiot!' she yelled at him.

‘You don't pull over, you'll
get
a hole in the head,' he yelled back. ‘This size.' And he pointed at the harpoon.

I saw Peggy look at me with what had to be reproach, but she didn't say anything. Maybe she knew I hadn't been keeping my eyes as peeled as I might have. Maybe the situation could have been avoided if I'd been a better lookout, but we couldn't avoid it now.

‘OK,' she said. ‘I'll bring the boat over.'

She turned the wheel and guided us towards the jetty.

The red-bearded, muscly one stood watching us come in, one hand on the harpoon gun, the other swatting the insects away. Maybe it was his beard they were in love with, or perhaps they liked to nestle in the undergrowth that thatched his arms. Either way they bothered him silly. It was no wonder he seemed in a bad mood.