A Map of the Sky

by Claire Wong

  Finally given the opportunity to tell someone about the mysteries, Kit blurted it all out. “Everyone here says I should stop asking questions. Mum, Juliet, even Bert told me to stop asking. But my dad always says it’s good to ask questions all the time. That’s how we learn.”

  Beth’s chair slowed to a halt. “I suppose he’s right – at least when it comes to learning about long words and far away countries and old kings. But when it comes to learning about other people, the rules are a bit different. We should learn at the pace that person chooses. When we met, I didn’t ask you to tell me all your secrets, did I? And you didn’t ask me mine.”

  “Do you have secrets?” Beth was confusing at times, but Kit had never seen her as someone who was hiding information on purpose – not in the way his family was.

  “I should think everyone does.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” said Kit, but then he thought about the unfinished map and his quest to help Beth. It wasn’t exactly a secret, since he had told Juliet about most of it. But he hadn’t told her about his plan to use the map to bring his father here and reunite his family in their new home. He imagined the four of them together in the same room, working their way through all the board games they owned, and the satisfaction he would feel in knowing that he had made this picture possible.

  “They’re all being weird,” he said, changing the subject away from himself and his own schemes. “First of all, Mum and Dad said we were moving up North. That was back in January, right after Juliet finished her mock exams. I remember because she locked herself in the bathroom for hours after the last one and wouldn’t come out even for dinner. But they said it would be during the summer holidays. We went and stayed at Grandma Fisher’s house for the weekend while they went to look at houses. It took a really long time for them to choose the right one. But they found one: it’s in Utterscar, near here, and the people there said we could have it at the start of August. It looks cool in the photos, the bedrooms are really big.

  “But then one day Mum announced that we couldn’t stay in London any more and it felt like she was on the phone to my school for days, getting them to agree to me leaving before the end of term. Dad said she nagged them into it in the end. I missed sports day and the play and Toby’s birthday party. And we had to pack suitcases, but leave lots of our stuff behind because the house wasn’t ready. Dad said some of our stuff would go into storage, and some of it he’d bring when he came up to join us. He said something about his job needing him to stay a bit longer. I had to leave loads of my books behind, and Juliet was no help; she just sat in her room moping all the time and phoning her friend Amy, who’s horrible. I don’t know why Jules likes her at all – she laughs at everyone and makes up nasty stories about them. So we had to come and stay here at Askfeld instead of going to our house. I mean, I like it, because I met you, and Bert, and even Maddie seems nicer than people say. But none of it makes any sense. Why did we come here early? And why isn’t Dad with us?”

  Beth made a “hmm” noise and did not say anything for a while. It was a relief, just being allowed to unload all his questions without being told to stop talking. “I’m afraid I’m no more able to answer any of those things than you are, Kit.”

  “I think I wouldn’t mind not knowing, if we were all together. If Dad was here. He’d know what to do: he always does.”

  He had expected Beth to reply that she was sure he would be here soon, and it was likely just work keeping him busy, which was what his mother always said, if she said anything at all. Instead, Beth looked sympathetic. “You must miss him.”

  She was right. Kit did miss him. Kit’s dad was the kind of father who took you to the park to play football on weekends, or would let you help with gluing together all the tiny parts of a model plane and not tell you off if you accidentally stuck your jumper to the worktop. He worked long days, often coming home after Kit had gone to bed in the evenings, though Kit liked to stay awake to hear the click of the front door and the low voices in the hallway, but on Saturdays there was always time for them to have fun together. Kit’s mum was the one who told them when to tidy up before dinner and reminded Kit he ought to be grown up and helpful, not always running around like a child.

  That night the clouds slipped away, having no more rain to hurl down on the coast, and by morning the horizon was a clear blue line under a bright sky. The breeze blew in over the waves, brisk with the promise of fresh new things. Kit leaned out of his bedroom window to fill his lungs with the cool air. It was the perfect day for pursuing a quest. The only difficulty was that both his secret missions, completing Beth’s map and solving the Fisher family mystery, required the unwitting co-operation of others. He would have to be clever if he was to succeed.

  “Mum, can we go out today please?”

  Catherine did not look up immediately, but finished signing off her email and hit the send button first. As she re-read it, she automatically raised her hand to her left ear, forgetting that she had not put in her signature gold earrings the last couple of days.

  “What’s that, Kit?”

  “Can we go somewhere? It’s stopped raining.”

  His mother checked her inbox again, as if expecting a reply already. The message counter remained at a resolute zero.

  “I thought you were happy reading.”

  “I was. But I finished the book about the knights of Camelot. And Juliet’s bored and keeps getting me to tell her stories, and then she tells me that the stories are rubbish.”

  She closed the laptop and stood up. “You know what? You’re right. We have been cooped up in here for a while, haven’t we? It would be a shame to miss out on this lovely warm weather. We probably won’t see so much of it here in the North, you know! Where would you like to go?”

  Kit bit back the urge to tell her, as Beth had explained to him, that the differences between the North and South of England were stereotypes rather than rules. Instead, he grabbed at the opportunity to move forward with his quest.

  “To the sea.”

  She laughed. “Kit, we’re right next to the sea. Look, you can see it from the window.”

  “But we can’t get to it. Not without going down the steep path you said Jules and I weren’t allowed on without you. Can we go to where we can actually walk up to it?” He leaned on the back of the chair, rocking it forward, while she considered the idea.

  “A trip to the beach. Why not? But only if you promise not to run off by yourself this time.” She waved across the room at Juliet to get her attention, because she had her headphones in. As they talked through the plans, Kit ran to fetch his coat and shoes from his own room. On the landing, inspiration struck him.

  “Can it be Scar Bay that we go to?” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  “Scar Bay? Where’s that?”

  “Really close to our new house,” he said, impressed with his own cunning. “I saw it on a map.”

  “Oh yes, that map Sean lent to us was useful, wasn’t it? I should buy a guidebook from the shops in Utterscar so we don’t have to keep borrowing it from him.”

  The car park was still some way from the sea, and from there a narrow path stretched down towards the coast. Clumps of grass either side of the track waved about in the wind, breaking up the sandy slope at irregular intervals.

  “Let’s go!” Kit cried, inhaling the salty air and racing towards the shore.

  “Kit, wait. What did I say about running off?”

  Begrudging their slow pace, Kit dawdled alongside his mother and sister on the winding steps down to the beach. He blamed their leisurely descent for his unwelcome realization that the path was in fact quite steep, and some of the steps uneven enough to send you toppling forward if you didn’t pay attention. He reached for the wooden handrail, annoyed at his new nervousness of heights. He could not forget that sickening feeling at the lookout point, when his feet had dangled over the edge of the cliff.

  They were only three miles north of Askfeld, but here the cliffs had steppe
d back to create a spread of clay-coloured sands, stretching out along the foot of the rock face. He was itching to run across them. At last they reached the bottom of the stairs and stood level with the sea.

  “It’s so huge!”

  The tide was out, exposing broad bare sands stretching so far that Kit was filled with an impulse to run at breakneck speed from one end of the beach to the other. How else could you properly drink in so much wide open space? The shore was riddled with reflective pools where water had collected. He took off his shoes and socks and dug his feet into the soft sands. They sank into the waterlogged ground, leaving clear imprints of his heels and toes.

  “Mum, can you take a photo of us and send it to Dad?”

  “Oh, yes, that’s a nice thought. I’m sure he’d like to see where we’ve been. Stand still then, Kit, or you’ll be a blur in the picture. Smile, Juliet.”

  At the instruction to smile, Juliet’s whole body stiffened and she scowled. It might have been because she didn’t like being told what to do, Kit guessed, as it couldn’t be that she didn’t want to be here. How could anyone not love the feeling of curling their toes into the sand and looking out all the way to the watery horizon? But then, at the last moment before the photo was taken, Juliet changed her whole posture. She relaxed, flicked back her hair, and smiled sweetly.

  “Lovely,” their mum said, when she had taken the picture.

  “Will you send it to Dad now?” Kit asked eagerly. The photograph would be a breadcrumb on the trail he was creating to convince his father that life here was good.

  “Later. The signal’s not great here. I’ll send it when we get back.”

  She pocketed her phone and smiled at the sight of the sea. With measured steps, she wandered along the sands away from her children, calling back over her shoulder to remind them not to stray too far. Kit was looking in the opposite direction; he had spotted something in the rock. It looked almost like a doorway leading into the cliffs. He attempted to run towards it, and found it was harder to move quickly on the beach, the sand weighing in around his feet the same way deep snow did.

  The doorway turned out to be the dark entrance to a cave in the cliff. Around the black arch the ground was littered with stones of different sizes. He crouched down to pick one up. It looked like an ordinary pebble, worn smooth and glistening by the waves’ erosion. He wanted to find a fossil to take back for Beth. According to her map, collecting them was something she used to do, back when she was able to go exploring. But he was unsure how to tell what was a fossil and what was a rock.

  “Jules!” he called to his sister, who was writing something in the sand with a long stick she had found.

  “What?”

  “D’you know anything about fossils?”

  Juliet walked over so she wouldn’t need to shout. “Only what we did in geography last year.”

  “I want to find one. What do they look like?”

  She smirked. “Fossils can look like all sorts of things, Kit.”

  “Oh.” Kit could not hide the disappointment in his voice.

  She must have felt sorry for him, because she added, “Ammonites are really common. They’re spiral-shaped, like snail shells. I guess you might find some; the conditions look good for fossils. Lots of sedimentary rocks – see all the striped layers in the cliff there?”

  Kit picked up a handful of stones and began sorting through them for anything that looked shell-like. When he had finished checking them all, he threw them back and gathered another batch to examine. Juliet watched him for a moment, and then joined in, methodically picking up stones from her right and putting them down to her left to avoid confusion.

  “Can’t see anything like an ammo-whatsit,” said Kit, “except this – is this one?”

  “That’s a real shell, not a fossil. It’s pretty, though. Maybe a periwinkle?” It was white with brown rings around it, and gathered up to a central point. It felt thin and fragile, as if it would shatter if you held it too tightly. Kit set it down carefully on the ground, then moved nearer to the cave and looked inside. It was hard to see anything in the darkness there, but he could hear water dripping from the walls. He stepped forward, accidentally kicking loose some of the stones on the floor. One of them looked as if it had a strange mark on it, so he took it out into the daylight.

  “Hey, Jules, what about this? It’s not a shell, but I think it’s something.”

  The mark he had seen was an indentation in the rock. It was shaped like an animal’s footprint, something with claws. It reminded him of when their neighbour Mr Kendrick in London had resurfaced the driveway, and a cat had walked through the cement before it was dry, leaving an imprint of its paws for posterity.

  “Yeah, that looks like a trace fossil. Where did you find it?” Kit pointed towards the cave. “Better not let Mum know you went in there.”

  Now that she had pointed it out, Kit thought the cave did have an ominous black look about it. He decided not to go back in. It was funny how he hadn’t noticed it until now.

  “I didn’t really. Just as far as the entrance.”

  Juliet fastened her coat. Kit had been too preoccupied to feel the encroaching cold until now. Grey clouds were rolling in and the sea had turned dark. Looking down the length of the beach, Kit could see his mother walking briskly towards them. She seemed to be calling something, but the wind carried her voice away.

  “Cool. Those waves are getting higher,” said Kit, and he ran down to the shoreline to stand where the cold water splashed around his ankles. His feet sank into the sand, and when he lifted them up, the imprints became puddles. Further out, the sea was growing restless and throwing white foam into the air. “Look how it hits those rocks over there! I bet ships crash on them when it’s stormy.”

  Juliet stood a few paces behind him, anxiously eyeing her sand-caked shoes as the water drew nearer. She pulled her hood up as the wind grew louder, but she stayed and watched the waves crashing. Here where they stood, the water advanced and withdrew less violently, like a cat taking a swipe with playful paws. Kit occupied himself for a minute or two by jumping over the encroaching water; he was a daredevil facing down the risk of wet feet, but he timed each of his jumps perfectly with the tide.

  “Beth says this sea stretches all the way to Denmark.”

  “Yes, that makes sense. And in that direction –” Juliet pointed north up the coast – “I guess you could sail even further without coming to any land, until you were in the Arctic Circle.”

  The tide drew in towards their ankles, but Kit was thinking about the dark icy waves hundreds of miles to the north, and how vast a thing this sea before them was. It built sandy beaches for them and uncovered fossils here in Yorkshire, but somewhere far away he pictured icebergs jostling one another, nudged aside by surfacing humpback whales. By comparison, he was so small and powerless. He shivered, and felt tiny goosebumps spread over his arms.

  “It’s kind of mesmerizing, isn’t it?” Juliet murmured. It was the first time Kit had heard his sister say anything positive about their new home. Maybe she felt it too: that electrifying sense that the world was wide and full of wonderful things. Her long hair kept escaping from under her hood and whipping wildly around her face, but she stayed completely still, transfixed by the movement of the sea.

  “I’ve been calling you from halfway down the beach!” Their mother had finally caught up with them and sounded hoarse from shouting against the wind. “It’s going to rain; we need to get back to the car. Come on!”

  Reluctantly, they tore themselves away from the sight of the stormy waters.

  “To think this is supposed to be summer!” She marched them back up the slope to the car park so abruptly that Kit had to climb the steps with his laces untied and his socks still in his coat pocket. Despite her sense of urgency at the changing weather, Catherine insisted they all beat the sand from their soles before climbing back into the car.

  “It is beautiful, in a dramatic, wild kind of way.” Juliet cast a la
st look back at the darkening horizon before she claimed the front passenger seat.

  “We’re too close to Brontë country, that’s the trouble,” their mother muttered as she slammed the door shut a second before the rain began.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EXILES

  DAY EIGHT

  Before we moved up here, I think we only ever went to the seaside once before. Juliet and I built a massive sandcastle – not like the little ones you get from turning a bucket upside down; this had a moat and a garrison and a keep behind the defences. The tide came in and filled up the moat, but it also knocked over our watchtower.

  Dad gave us some money to spend and Mum let us buy ice creams from a van. Mine tasted salty, but I think that was just the spray from the sea getting on it.

  Kit burst into the room. In one hand he brandished a sketch he had worked on that morning to plot out yesterday’s trip to Scar Bay, and in the other he held a borrowed book and the fossilized paw print from the cave.

  “I’ve got the next part of the map!”

  Beth did not react.

  “Beth?” He wondered if she was lost in a daydream, although if that were the case it did not look like a good one. Still she did not turn to look at him.

  “Sorry, Kit. Not today,” she said, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead. She had turned herself away from the view through the window, which Kit surmised was because it was all but obscured this morning. Askfeld was shrouded in white fog, which lingered over the old farm buildings and kept the guests indoors again. It had prowled in from the sea just before dawn, like a wild creature set loose over the coastal lands, and showed no sign of letting go of its grip.