The Tide Knot (3 page)

  They fight over such big issues as one surfer’s dropping in on another surfer’s wave. Imagine thinking that the sea belongs to you and fighting over waves. That’s another sort of St. Pirans craziness. I must tell  Faro about it. It would make him laugh.

  “Sadie!
Sadie!
” Suddenly I see that Sadie is way over the other side of the beach, bounding toward a tiny little dog. It’s a Yorkshire terrier, I think, skittering about by the water’s edge. Sadie won’t hurt the Yorkie; of course she won’t. But all the same I begin to run. At the same moment a girl of about my age sees what’s happening and jumps up from where she’s digging a hole in the sand with a little kid.

 
“Sa-die!”
 

  Is she going to listen? Does Sadie really believe that I’m her owner now? Yes! A few meters away from the terrier, Sadie slows and stops. You can see from her body how much she longs to rush right up to it. She glances back at me, asking why I’ve spoiled what could have been a wonderful adventure.

  “Good girl. You are such a good girl, Sadie.” I’m out of breath. I drop to my knees on the wet sand and clip on Sadie’s leash. The terrier girl picks up her dog, which is no bigger than a baby.

  “I thought your dog was going to eat Sky,” says the girl.

  She has very short, spiky blond hair, and her smile leaps across her face like sunshine.

  “
Sky
. Weird name for a dog.”

  “I know. She’s not mine. She belongs to my neighbor, but my neighbor’s got MS, so I take her for walks. Not that she walks far. Sky, I mean, not my neighbor,” says the girl quickly, as if she’s said something embarrassing. “Sorry,” she adds, “too much information.”

  I don’t even know what MS is, so I just say, “Oh. I see.”

  “Is this your dog?” asks the girl longingly.

  “Yes.” It still feels like a lie when I say that. It’s such a cliché when people say that things are too good to be true, but each time I say that Sadie is
my
dog, that is exactly how it feels. Much too good to be true. I worried for weeks that Jack’s family would want her back, but they don’t.
She’s
yours,
Jack’s mum said.
Dogs know who they belong to,
and Sadie’s chosen you for sure, Sapphire. Look at her
wagging her tail there. I never get such a welcome.
 

  “She’s beautiful.” The girl stretches out her hand confidently, as if she’s sure that Sadie will like her, and Sadie does. She sniffs the girl’s fingers approvingly. I give a very slight tug on Sadie’s leash.

  “We’ve got to go,” I say.  

  “I must take Sky and River back too. That’s River, over there at the bottom of the hole. He’s always digging holes.

  He’s my little brother.”

 
River. Weird name for a boy,
I nearly say. I stop myself in time, but the girl smiles.

  “Everyone thinks our names are a bit strange.” She looks at me expectantly. “Don’t you want to know what my name is? Or would you rather guess?”

  I shake my head a bit stiffly. This girl is so friendly that it makes me feel awkward.

  “Rainbow,” she says. “Rainbow Petersen. My mum called me Rainbow because she reckoned it had been raining in her life for a long time before I was born, and then the sun came out. My mum’s Danish, but she’s been living here since she was eighteen.”

  There is a short silence. I try to imagine Mum’s saying anything remotely like that to me and fail.
The sun came out
when you were born, Sapphire darling.
No, I don’t think so.

  The girl—Rainbow—looks as if she’s waiting for something. She picks up the terrier, and I say, “Well , ’bye then.”

  She looks straight at me and says seriously, “You know my name and my little brother’s name and Sky’s name.

  Aren’t you going to tell  me yours?”

  I feel myself flush. “Um, it’s Sapphire.”

  “That’s great,” says Rainbow warmly.  

  “That’s great,” says Rainbow warmly.

  “Why?”

  “I’m so glad you haven’t got a normal name like Millie or Jessica.
Sapphire.
Yes, I like it. What about your dog?”

  “She’s called Sadie.”

  The girl looks at me again in that expectant way, but whatever she’s expecting doesn’t happen. After a moment she says, “Okay, see you around then, Sapphire. ’Bye, Sadie,” and she goes back to where River is digging his hole.

  It’s only when she’s been gone for a while that I realize she wanted to know more about me. But there’s nothing I can do about that now, and besides, as old Alice Trewhidden always says,
It’s not good to tell your business
to strangers.
 

  You’d have thought I was Rainbow’s friend already, the way she smiled at me.  

  Conor’s gone fishing off the rocks at Porthchapel with Mal.

  Mum was right: Conor has got to know loads of people in St.Pirans already. I suppose it’s partly because he goes to school here, but it’s also just the way Conor is. I don’t know all his friends’ names, but they’re mostly surfers. Conor speaks surfer talk when he’s with them. He and Mum and Roger all keep telling me I should surf, but I don’t want to anymore. If you’ve surfed the currents of Ingo, why would you want to surf on Polquidden Beach or even up at Gwithian? It would be like being told that you’re all owed only one sip of water when you’re dying of thirst.

  Conor doesn’t feel the same. I tried to talk to him about it once, not long after we came to St. Pirans.

  “Saph, you’re not giving St. Pirans a chance,” he said.

  “There’s great surfing here. You used to like bodyboarding at the cove.”

  “That was before we went to Ingo,” I said.

  Conor looked at me uneasily. He doesn’t talk much about Ingo now we’re in St. Pirans. It’s as if he thinks we’ve left Ingo behind, along with the cottage and everything we’ve known since we were born. Or maybe there’s some other reason. I have the feeling that Conor is keeping something from me. Mum says he’s growing up and that I can’t expect Conor to tell  me everything now, the way he did when we were younger.

  “Don’t you feel it’s pointless, this kind of surfing?” I asked.

  I wanted to probe what Conor was really thinking. “I mean, compared to surfing the currents, it’s nothing. Once you’ve been in Ingo, you can’t be satisfied with messing around on the surface of the water.”

  Conor’s face was clouded. “I can’t live like that, Saph, not properly belonging in one place or another,” he said. He sounded angry, but I don’t think he was angry with me. “I’ve got to try to belong where I am. It’s no good to keep on wanting things you can’t have—”

  He broke off. I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure what he meant.   

  “I know you miss Senara,” he went on.

  “
Home
, you mean.”

  “All right, home.”

  “So, I miss home. That’s normal, Con!”

  “But other people are living in our cottage now. We can’t go back there, so it’s no use hankering.”

  “We could go back if we wanted. Mum could give the tenants notice.”

  “But Saph, Mum doesn’t want to. Can’t you see that? She was glad to get away from the cottage and the cove and everything that reminds her of Dad. Mum’s much happier here.”

  I know that really. I’ve known it for weeks, but I haven’t wanted to put it into words.

  “And there’s something else too,” Conor continued. “She wanted to get us away from Ingo.”

  “Mum doesn’t know anything about Ingo! She doesn’t even know it exists.”

  “We haven’t
told
her anything. But Mum’s not stupid. She picked up that something strange was going on down at the cove. She was frightened for us—especial y for you. She even asked me if I knew why you were behaving so strangely.”

  “You didn’t tell  her?”  

  “Saph, why are you so suspicious all the time? Of course I didn’t. Mum doesn’t
know
about Ingo, but she senses something, and since Dad disappeared she’s not taking any chances. Maybe she’s right,” Conor added, sounding thoughtful.

  “Mum’s
right
? Right to take us away from everything?

  Adults know they can get away with doing what they want, but that doesn’t make it right! Conor, how can you say that?

  It’s like—it’s like betraying Ingo.”

  “But if you are always on the side of Ingo, Saph, then
you’re
betraying something too. Granny Carne said you had Mer blood, but she didn’t tell  you to forget that you’re human.”

  I went up to my room. I didn’t want to talk about Ingo anymore. I was afraid that Conor might say, “Forget about Ingo, Saph. Put it all behind you, and get on with real life.” Yes, I do miss home. I only let myself think about it at night, before I go to sleep. I miss our cottage, the cove, the Downs, Jack’s farm. I miss watching the lights of the cottages shine out at night and knowing who lives in every one of them. I miss Dad even more in St. Pirans because not many people here ever knew him. They think Mum’s a single parent because she’s divorced, until we explain.

  Everyone in Senara knew Dad, right back to when he was a little boy, and they knew all our family. Even if Dad wasn’t there, he was still present in people’s memories.

  At least I still go to the same school. Conor’s transferred to St. Pirans school, but I didn’t want to. I don’t mind going on the school bus to my old school. I had to fight hard, though. Mum said that I should go to school here in St. Pirans so that I’d make friends locally and “settle in.” Strangely enough it was Roger, Mum’s boyfriend, who supported me. He said, “Sapphire’s had a lot of changes.

  She needs some continuity in her life.” Mum listens to what Roger says, and to be honest, Roger never talks without thinking first.

  That’s the trouble with Roger. It would be easier if I could just dislike him. Hate him even. But he won’t let me. He keeps doing things that trick me into liking him, until I remember that I mustn’t like him because it is so disloyal to Dad. But it was Roger who made sure I got Sadie. And it’s Mum, not Roger, who talks about “settling in” all the time.

  Roger says you have to give everything time and that we’ve all got to cut one another some slack, take it easy, and let things fall into place. Roger is very laid back about most things, but he can be tough too.

 
Settling in.
I hate that phrase so much. Even worse are the adults who tell  Mum that children are
very adaptable and
soon forget the past
.

  “Not Sapphire,” says Mum grimly when people tell  her how quickly we’ll get used to our new life. “Her mind is closed.”

  Is my mind closed? No. It’s wide open. I’m always waiting.

  Every day I go down to the beach, to the water’s edge, and listen. When we first got here in September, there were still tourists on the beach. Natural y, Faro kept away. I didn’t really expect to see him. But if I was going to see him on any of the St. Pirans beaches, it would be at Polquidden, the wildest beach. The storms crash in here from the southwest, and at low tide you can see the remains of a steamship wreck. I think Polquidden Beach is the closest that St.

  Pirans comes to Ingo. The rocks at the side of the beach are black, heaped up into shapes like the head and shoulders of a man. Sometimes when I’m down there with Sadie, I catch myself scanning those rocks, looking for a shape like a boy with his wet suit pulls ed down to his waist. A shape that is half human, half seal, but not quite like either of these.

  Faro. He came last night. If my mind had been closed, I would never have heard the voice of Ingo. That’s why I can’t settle into St. Pirans. I mustn’t. I’ve got too much to lose.

 
“Saph! Saa-aaphh!”
 

  I spin round. Sadie bounds forward. It’s Conor, running down the beach.

  “There you are, Saph. I’ve been looking all over for you.

  Come on.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Something amazing. Come quick—”

  My heart leaps. I know what Conor’s going to tell  me.

  We’re going back to Senara. Mum’s tired of St. Pirans.

  Maybe—maybe she’s splitting up with Roger. We’re going home!  

  “There’s a pod of dolphins in the bay. They’re playing off Porthchapel, close in. Mal’s dad, Will , is taking the boat out, and he says we can both come if we get there quick.”

  “What about Sadie?”

  “We’ll drop her at the house on the way.” Our house is in a street close to Polquidden, tucked away behind the row of cottages and studios that faces the beach. We leave Sadie there and race through the narrow streets. Even Conor’s out of breath. He ran all the way from Porthchapel so that I could get the chance of going out in the boat too.

  “Thanks, Conor!”

  “What?”

  “For not just going out…in the boat…without me.”

  “I wouldn’t go without you.”

  We cross the square, go down the Mazey, and we’re nearly there. Porthchapel Beach stretches ahead. There’s a little crowd of people and a bright orange inflatable boat in the water.

  “Come on, Saph! They’re ready to go.”

  Mal’s dad gives us each a life jacket, and we fix them on while he starts the engine. Mal splashes thigh deep in water, pushing the boat out.

  “We’ll take her out in the bay a bit; then I’ll kill the engine so we don’t scare them,” says Will . “Mind, they like boats. I reckon there’s about twelve of them in the pod, could be more. November—it’s late in the year to see them here.” There are a dozen or more people at the water’s edge.

  More are hurrying down the slope from the putting green. I shade my eyes and scan the water. Porthchapel Beach is sheltered, and the sea is always calmer here than on Polquidden. Suddenly I see what I’m looking for. The water breaks, and a dark, glistening shape breaches the water.

  The back of a dolphin, streaming with water as it leaps and then dives back into the sea. Another dolphin breaches, and then another. They swim in a half circle, in tight formation.

  Suddenly five of them leap at once, as if the same thought had come to them all at the same instant.