Ingo

by Helen Dunmore

  “Did you see me too?”

  “No. He didn’t say anything straightaway. I guessed something was wrong because of the way he went all still and tense, but I don’t know him well enough to ask. Then after a while he turned round and said he’d seen something that couldn’t possibly be there. A girl underwater. Not a drowned girl, but a real girl looking up at him. And then he said: ‘You’re not going to believe this, Conor, but she looked exactly like your sister. She could have been her twin.’ And then he started saying that stuff about light rays bending and images refracting. But I knew he didn’t really believe it; he was just trying to convince himself. So I said that there have always been mermaids around here, and maybe you had a mermaid double. That made him laugh.”

  “He laughed at the Mer?”

  “Sapphire, please. I was trying to make him laugh. I wanted him to think it was all crazy and impossible and so he couldn’t have seen anything. He said, ‘Well, one thing I know for sure is that your sister isn’t a mermaid. I’ve seen her walking, and she definitely has two feet.’

  I can’t stop myself. I glance down at my legs to make sure, and yes, there are my feet, safely inside my shoes. Relax, Sapphire, relax. Conor is on your side. He’s only trying to cover up for you and make Roger believe that he can’t have seen you down there in the sunwater.

  “I’m sorry, Con,” I say. “I know you still do.”

  “Still do what?” asks Conor blankly.

  “Still care about Dad. Still want him to come back.”

  “Of course I do,” says Conor impatiently, as if he’s forgotten all about our argument. “But, Saph, listen—”

  “What?”

  “You don’t need to be so against Roger. He’s all right.”

  “He is not all right! He’s a diver. He’s the enemy of the Mer.”

  Conor doesn’t answer for a little while. He watches my face very carefully, and then he says, in a cautious voice, “But Sapphire, you’re not Mer, are you? You belong to the Air. You’re human. Like me and Mum and Roger.”

  “I’m not like Roger!” I spit out, before I know what I’m going to say.

  “But you are like me, aren’t you?” Conor goes on, still in that careful voice, as if he’s not quite sure what I might do or say next. “We’re brother and sister. Same genes. Human genes, Saph.”

  “Yes,” I say uncertainly. Of course I belong with Conor, my brother. But I’m remembering what I said to the dolphins. I belong in Ingo too. Even though Faro is right, and what I know about Ingo is as small as a grain of sand, I don’t feel like a stranger there. I feel different when I’m in Ingo. More alive. More—more myself.

  “Conor. Tell me truthfully. Do you truly believe that we’re all Air and not Mer at all? You and me, I mean?”

  “But Saph, what else could we be but human? We’ve got a human mother and a human father. That makes us a hundred percent human. Why do you want to believe anything different?”

  “I don’t know.” Suddenly I feel tired all over. Conor is standing right next to me, but he’s far away. “I don’t know why I believe it, but I can’t help it. I feel it, Conor. When I’m in Ingo, I’m free. I can go anywhere, wherever I want.”

  “Only if you’re holding on to Faro’s wrist,” says Conor sarcastically. “I don’t see what’s so free about that.”

  “But I don’t need to do that anymore.”

  “What? You don’t need to do that anymore?” repeats Conor slowly. “No. Of course you’re right. It’s true. You can’t have been with Faro when Roger saw you; otherwise Roger would have seen him too. You mean you can breathe and move and do everything on your own, all the time you’re down there?”

  “Yes. If I want to go really fast, though, I hold on to Faro or we get the dolphins—”

  “You should never have gone back there, Saph. It’s dangerous. It’s changing you. Each time you go, it draws you deeper in. I keep trying to make you understand. Why won’t you listen?”

  “No, Conor, why won’t you listen for once? You should have been with us today. You don’t understand what it’s like. We rode on the dolphins, and I nearly understood what they were saying. It doesn’t hurt at all to go into Ingo now, not like it did the first time. And Faro and I—” I stop. I’d been about to blurt out that Faro could hear my thoughts.

  “Faro and you what?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Faro and you what?”

  “Conor, it’s nothing. Don’t look at me like that. It’s just that he can—I mean, we can—we can see into each other’s minds. Just a bit. I can see his thoughts, and he can see mine, the way fish do in schools. They share their memories, did you know that?”

  “I do not believe I’m hearing this. Sapphire. You…are…not…a…fish. You are not even partly a fish. Get over it. You are my sister and you live in Senara Churchtown, West Penwith, Cornwall, the Earth, the Universe. Not in *&@#!%* Ingo!”

  “I wish Mum could hear you swearing like that.”

  “Why don’t you swim off and tell her? Assuming you can still remember enough human words? Mum can’t share your thoughts like Faro, remember. She’s only human.”

  “Conor, we mustn’t!”

  “Mustn’t what?”

  “Argue.”

  “I’m not arguing.”

  “Nor am I.”

  Face to face, not arguing, we can’t think of anything else to say. But without saying anything, I know that something has shifted. Conor is my friend again. Maybe that sounds a strange thing to say, because how can your brother not be your friend?

  “All the same, Saph,” says Conor after a while, “I am going out with Roger again. I do want to learn to dive. Roger’s going to fix up a course for me. He’s got a mate who’ll give me the course for nothing, in exchange for a favor Roger did him. It’s really interesting, what Roger does. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to do one day.”

  “It’s dangerous,” I say, and then I realize I’m echoing what Conor’s just said to me. “The Mer don’t like it, Conor. And in their own world—in Ingo—they’re powerful. We aren’t.”

  “I know, I know. Can you please stop being the Mer Broadcasting Company for two seconds? Listen. Roger’s not trying to do harm. He’s not working for an oil company or anything like that. He knows loads about marine ecology, Sapphire. He cares about it. That’s what he’s interested in. You ought to talk to him.”

  “Don’t go out with him, Conor.”

  “But why not? You’ve been out in Dad’s boat hundreds of times, and nothing’s ever happened. Well, not much anyway. So have I. What’s so different about Roger?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t say. It’s feels like—I don’t know. Like bad weather coming when the sun’s still shining. But you can see the storm moving in from the sea. And you feel the pressure inside your head.”

  “Okay, I promise, if it’s bad weather, or if it even looks like bad weather, I won’t go,” says Conor. But it wasn’t bad weather I was talking about. It was a different kind of storm. If I could put what I’m afraid of into the right words, then surely Conor would understand.

  “And Roger won’t go out if there’s a bad forecast. He’s very careful. Divers have to be. Come on, Saph, we’d better go downstairs.”

  I’m not finding the right words. But at least Conor won’t be going out again with Roger for a while, so I’ll have time to persuade him.

  “Hurry up, Saph. Mum’ll be waiting.”

  “She won’t. She’s happy talking to Roger. Anyway, you’d better change your jeans first, hadn’t you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you told Mum they were wet. And it’s a good idea for Mum to keep on thinking that at least one of us tells the truth.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ALL THROUGH TEA I’M on edge in case Roger says something about seeing me underwater. I can’t eat more than half my slice of cake, even though it’s one of Mum’s best, and Mum is trying to feed me up. After Roger’s eaten two fat slices, Mum ask
s if he’d like a fresh pot of tea.

  “You sit down,” he says, “I’ll make it, Jennie. You deserve a rest.” Then he turns to me and Conor. “Your mother is an amazing woman,” he announces, sounding like a character in a TV sitcom. “The best waitress in town, best cook I know—finest coffee-and-walnut I’ve ever tasted, Jennie.”

  “Is that all I’m good for? Baking cakes and running around the restaurant?” asks Mum, but she doesn’t sound cross. Her voice is full of teasing laughter.

  “I think you know that’s not the case,” says Roger, and they laugh together.

  For several reasons this conversation makes me prickle. We know that Mum is a good cook. We know how hard she works. Isn’t that why we try all we can to help her? We don’t need Roger to tell us. It’s our life, not his—none of it is Roger’s business at all—and yet the way he laughs with Mum makes me feel as if I’m the one who is left out. I try to catch Conor’s eye to see what he thinks, but he’s on his way out already.

  “Got to fetch the milk, Mum. See you in a bit.”

  “I’ll make that tea,” says Roger, dragging his eyes away from Mum.

  “Sapphire’ll help you, won’t you, Sapphy?” says Mum, settling herself luxuriously in her chair and closing her eyes. “Now this is heaven. All the meals cooked, nothing to do for the rest of the evening…Sapphy, love, show Roger where things are in the kitchen.”

  Roger and I traipse into the kitchen. As soon as I’m alone with him, I suddenly realize how big he is. Not heavy, but broad and strong and tall. He has to duck his head to go through the kitchen doorway.

  I don’t like being alone with him. I’m scared of what he might ask, so I start to gabble to fill up the silence. “We keep the tea bags in this tin up here, and the kettle’s over here. It doesn’t switch itself off because the switch is broken. Mum’s going to buy another kettle when she’s been paid. If you fill it up to five, there’ll be enough for a pot.”

  “I have seen a kettle before,” says Roger mildly. He is watching me. He’s going to say something, ask me something. I must get away—

  But I only get as far as the fridge before he asks casually, “Sapphire, how far can you swim?”

  “I don’t know, quite a long way, I mean, not all that far, depends how flat the sea is—”

  “Your mother tells me that you and Conor aren’t allowed to swim outside the cove.”

  “No, because of the rip. Only if we’re out in a boat with…with someone. Sometimes we swim off the boat.”

  “Have you been out in a boat with—someone lately? In the last day or two?”

  “No,” I say firmly, and I look Roger in the face because I can prove this isn’t a lie. “I haven’t been out in a boat since—since—” But I can’t say it. Not to Roger.

  “Since what?” he insists. Anger springs up in me. Roger’s trying to act like my father, as if he has a right to question me.

  “Since Dad took me out in Peggy Gordon,” I say. I feel my face burning, but I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to let Roger see me crying.

  “Oh. I see.” Roger is quiet for a while; then he says, quite formally as if I’m an adult like him. “I’m sorry, Sapphire. I didn’t mean to distress you.”

  His face is troubled. For a moment I can’t help believing that he really is sorry. But I don’t want to believe it, or I might start having to—well, to tolerate Roger.

  “’S okay,” I say grudgingly.

  “No, it’s not okay,” says Roger slowly. “None of this is okay, I know that. Your dad dies; a year later I come along. It’s not easy for anyone. Have you thought about how hard it is for your mother?”

  “Dad is not dead,” I flash out furiously. Roger stares at me. “He is not dead,” I repeat, more quietly but with all the force I can find. If only Roger would believe me, how much trouble it would save.

  “You’re a complicated young lady,” he says slowly. “And I wish—I wish I could see inside that head of yours.”

  “Well, you can’t. We’re human. We don’t share our thoughts. The kettle’s boiling. I’ll wash the mugs while you make the tea.”

  I’m not sure if I’ll get away with this, but I do. Roger and I finish making the tea in silence. But just before we take it in to Mum, Roger asks, “Sadie. The dog you were walking. She’s one of the neighbor’s dogs, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What breed is she?”

  “Golden Labrador.”

  “Nice breed.”

  “Yes, she’s—” Suddenly Sadie is so clear in my mind that I can almost feel her warm golden body, her soft tongue licking my hand, her quivering excitement when she knows she’s going for a walk.

  “You like her. You ever had a dog of your own, Sapphire?”

  “No. Mum says it’s too much work.”

  “Well, that’s true, a dog is a lot of work. I had one as a boy myself, and I found out the hard way that my dad meant what he said when he told me: ‘If you get a dog, then it’s you that’s got that dog as long as it lives.’ But Rufie was the best thing in my life, after we came back from Australia and I found myself stuck in Dagenham. You and Conor could take care of a dog between you, I reckon.”

  “Except when we’re at school.”

  “There’s no one in the neighborhood who’d keep an eye?”

  I have never thought of this. Never thought beyond pushing against Mum’s prohibition by telling her over and over again that Conor and I will do everything.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Worth thinking about, it seems to me,” says Roger. “Your mother would feel easier that way.”

  “What kind of dog was Rufie?”

  “Black Labrador. Beautiful breed. They get problems with their hips as they grow older; that’s the only thing.”

  I nod. I already know that, and that Labradors don’t live as long as some other dogs.

  “But for good temper and loyalty there isn’t a breed to touch them. Beautiful breed,” says Roger thoughtfully, and he opens the door for us to carry in the tea.

  It’s late at night now. I’m in bed, and everyone else is asleep. Roger’s gone back to St. Pirans, and Mum went to bed early because she’s doing the breakfast shift at the restaurant tomorrow. There’s no sound from Conor’s loft. I heard his light click out a long time ago.

  I feel like the last person left awake in the world. If I had my own house, I’d let my dog sleep in my bedroom. Dogs wake up the instant you stir. If Sadie was here, she’d know I was awake, and I could talk to her.

  I’m not going to think about Roger anymore. It’s all been going over and over in my head for hours. Mum, Roger, Dad. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a child, and then I could be like them and make my own decisions and my family would just have to live with them.

  I’m going to think about Ingo. Dolphin language and sunwater, basking sharks and gray seals, sea anemones, shrimps and cowries and schools of jellyfish, wrecks and reefs and the Great Currents taking you halfway around the world. Ingo. Ingo. Once you’re through the skin of the water, it doesn’t hurt anymore. You dive down, and there’s a whole world waiting for you. Blue whales and right whales and minke whales, schools of porpoises leaping in perfect formation as if each one knows what the others are thinking. Maybe they do.

  Thong weed and cutweed and sugar kelp, all the names Dad taught me and all the creatures we’ve ever seen. By the-wind sailors, shore crabs and hermit crabs, bass and wrasse and dogfish and squat lobsters, rips and currents and tides. I wish I was away in Ingo, I wish I was away in Ingo… and as I’m saying these words, I fall into sleep.

  I wake with a start out of deep dreams. Something’s woken me. I push the duvet off me and sit up, listening, but now everything’s quiet. I’m certain I heard something. My skin prickles with fear as I climb out of bed, cross to the window, pull back my curtain, and see the moon, strong and riding high.

  “Ssssssapphire!”

  I open the window to hear better. The voice is as soft as a breath, as
if it’s traveled a long way to get to me. As soon as I hear it, I know it’s the voice that woke me. It’s not Conor’s voice, or Mum’s. It’s eerie and full of mystery. My skin prickles again, and I shiver all over. I don’t think it’s a human voice at all. It’s like the voice the sea would have if the sea could talk.

  How I wish I could speak full Mer. Can the sea really talk? Can it tell you all its secrets? I’m sure the sea is trying to tell me something now.

  No sound comes from Mum’s room or from upstairs, where Conor’s sleeping. Nobody else has woken.

  “Ssssssapphire!” The voice is urgent now. It wants to get close to me, but it can’t. The sea can’t reach you on land. It can only come as far as the high-water mark. Granny Carne said that Ingo is strong, but I’m sure it isn’t strong enough for the sea to come to me, washing up the cliff and across the fields and flooding our garden so that waves break below my window.

  “Ssssssapphire…Ssssssapphire…”

  It sounds like waves breaking. All at once I’m completely sure that I’m hearing the sea’s own voice. I can hear salt in it, and surging water, and the roll of the tide. It’s sea magic, talking to me.

  Granny Carne stopped me going to Ingo, but that was in daytime. Sea magic might be stronger than Earth magic when the time’s ripe. I stand still, bracing my feet on the floorboards. What’s the time in Ingo? My watch shines on my wrist. The hands point to five past seven, the time I first walked into the water.

  From the other side of the room my dressing table mirror gleams back at me. Moonlight picks out the pattern of a starfish in the mirror’s shattered glass. Even though the mirror is broken, I can still see my reflection. It looks like me, and yet not like me. My hair is tangled like weed; my face shines like water.

  “Ssssssapphire!”

  I can’t keep silent. I have got to answer. But just as I turn back to the window and open my mouth to speak, two things happen.

  An owl swoops past my window. Its wings are spread wide, and as it passes, the owl turns and stares straight into my room. Its fierce amber gaze burns into my mind and then is gone. At the same moment a volley of barks bursts across the night. It’s Sadie! I know it’s her. I’d recognize her voice anywhere. It’s Sadie, barking wildly, as if she’s heard an intruder and is desperate to wake the whole house. Oh, Sadie, I wish you weren’t so far away! I wish I was where you are; then I’d know what’s wrong.