"You're a funny boy," she said. "After all these years I still don't really know where I am with you. Oh, all right. Off you go. Don't be more than an hour."
"Can you send out for a pizza, please? The one with the anchovies?"
"I'd better get the big one."
The tide was about halfway in, with a big moon just rising. He left Dodgem nosing into sea wrack and crunched down across the shingle and the gritty, shell-strewn sand until he reached the gently lapping waves. For a while he simply stood there gazing at the moon, not thinking but feeling, letting his sense of relief and thankfulness and happiness flood up through him and fill him to the brim. The evening breeze, from the cooler sea onto the sun-warmed land, blew gently in his face.
Without thinking about it he knew he was on the edge of things, between sea and shore, between night and day, between Grandad's life and Grandad's death, between his own world and the selkie's. This was the right moment, the right place. They would never come again.
He raised his hands and spread them in front of him.
"Thank you," he whispered. "Thank you very much."
He waited a long while, hoping the selkie would appear, but knowing she almost certainly wouldn't. He just needed something more, he didn't know what, but something to tell him it was truly over. Nothing happened. He'd said he'd be back in an hour. With a sigh he turned away and started up the beach. Ahead of him Dodgem lifted his nose out of a mess of sea wrack and stood staring out to sea with strips of seaweed dangling either side of his muzzle. He barked. He was pretty well blind to anything more than a few yards off, but automatically Gavin turned to see what he was looking at.
Now, from this slightly higher viewpoint, though it had hardly begun to get dark, he could see the pale moon-path across the ripples. There was something there, right in the middle of it. The selkie, after all? No, that wasn't how seals moved, and it was too far out of the water.
Next moment he knew what it was.
He turned and walked a few paces farther up the shore to a dry rock, where he sat down and took off his shoes and socks. He went back and waded into the water.
The breeze brought Selkie smoothly to him, sailing like a dream.
The big hospital in Aberdeen is called the Royal Aberdeen Hospital, but they're busy people at the RAH and I didn't like to bother them with a mass of questions about exactly how they do things there, so I've made that part up and changed the name. Even so, there was a lot of medical stuff I didn't know and couldn't find in books, so I'm enormously grateful to Lucy Curtice for helping me out with that.
Otherwise everything in and around Stonehaven is as real as I could make it. Two of my grandsons live there, and they're sure to let me know if I've got anything wrong.
PETER DICKINSON is the author of many books for adults and young readers and has won numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal (twice), the Guardian Award, and the Whitbread Award (also twice). His novel Eva was a Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction Honor Book. Eva was also selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, as were his novels AK and A Bone from a Dry Sea. The Lion Tamer's Daughter and Other Stories was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal. The Ropemaker was selected as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His most recent book was The Tears of the Salamander. He has four grown children and lives in Hampshire, England, with his wife, the writer Robin McKinley.
Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books
a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Text copyright © 2004 by Peter Dickinson
Illustrations copyright © 2004 by David Johnson
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eISBN: 978-0-307-53259-6
June 2005
v3.0
Inside Grandad Page 10
