Phosphorescence

by Raffaella Barker

  Praise for Phosphorescence

  ‘It will make essential summer reading’

  Observer magazine

  ‘Raffaella Barker’s first venture into young adult fiction . . . is finely balanced, tuning in to teenagers’ emotional wavelength’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘You won’t be able to put it down’

  Mizz

  ‘Poetically and lyrically written, Phosphorescence sings the praises of Norfolk beautifully’

  Eastern Daily Press

  For Aurelia and Tallulah with Love

  Contents

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Eastern Daily Press 20 July

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  Also By Raffaella Barker

  Also Available by Raffaella Barker

  Map

  EASTERN DAILY PRESS

  15 JULY 1969

  FUNERAL ANNOUNCEMENT

  The funeral service for James Jordan, aged 15, who was tragically lost at sea, was held on Friday 12 July at 3.00 p.m. at St Mary’s Church, Staitheley.

  Chapter 1

  It is the first warm day of April, the first possible day of spring, and it is impossible to watch any more telly. I feel as though I have woken from hibernation, and my senses are less slothful than they have been since I suffered the agony of having my ears pierced just before Christmas. Today I can actually smell spring mingling with the salt which is always present in the air here, and the village shop had primroses planted in tubs outside the door. Staitheley is quiet at this time of year, only fishermen are out at sea, and a handful of the heartiest sailors, but everyone else’s boats are moored out of the water and lashed with canvas to protect them from the elements. Only the masts clang, a sound as much a part of Staitheley life to me as the call of gulls and the constant rippling whisper of water in the creek.

  Staitheley is everyone’s favourite place in the summer, when there are holidaymakers and birdwatchers and nature lovers everywhere. The tide floods in and suddenly the sea fills up with boats and the tiny streets are full of people eating ice creams and having barbecues, and laughter echoes off all the cobbled walls as every garden seems to have a party going on in it. When the tide is in, people queue on the quay, waiting for the boats to take them to Salt Head Island and beyond it to Seal Point, to see the famous local seal colony, or as the tide recedes they stay, teetering on the brink of falling in, dangling orange nylon crab lines and scraps of bacon into the muddy water of the harbour. The six weeks of the summer holidays are when most businesses are making their money, but the rest of the time it’s dead quiet and I sometimes feel like I am the only living entity, and I have to go into Flixby, our nearest town, to remind myself that there are a few people on the planet beyond the Staitheley pensioners. I usually get Mum to give me a lift to the bus when I want to go and meet my best friend, Nell, there, but today, when I asked Mum, she just yelled, ‘You can go on your bike.’ Charming. In fact, I’d forgotten I had a bike until she mentioned it and then it took me a while to find it, or rather to get Mum to find it, because it was right back in the back of the garage under a torn sail from my old Laser boat and two rank-smelling lobster pots. Mum always knows where everything is if you keep asking her.

  ‘Look, if you want me to go on my bike, I need to know where it is,’ I pointed out, quite reasonably, when I had looked in the obvious places, like outside the back door and outside the front door.

  ‘Why am I the only person who does anything here?’ Mum shrieked as she strutted out to the garage. ‘It’s your father’s job to look after bicycles, not mine.’

  I think of Dad, out on the Sand Bar at the end of Salt Head, in his waders with his binoculars and surrounded by screeching birdlife, and I know that he is far too busy taking care of the nature reserve that is the island to ever give any thought to my bike or anyone else’s. He didn’t even teach me to ride it in the first place – Jack, my grandfather, did that when I was six, and I can remember pedalling along the quay towards Grandma and being full of swooping joy at the new sensation. Dad lives for his job; for him, being warden to the coastline is a vocation, like they say being a nun is. I hope I never get a vocation; I just want a job when I grow up, to get me out and away into the world. Mind you, Mum had a job being a television journalist in London and look where that got her – she met Dad when she came to the North Norfolk coast to make a documentary. They got married and she gave up work when she had me. I think she’s a bit frustrated now and it isn’t really surprising. She certainly went off on one about my bike today.

  ‘No one is asking you to look after it,’ I soothed, ‘I just need you to help me find it.’

  Mum yanked open the garage door, chucked a few boxes around and located my bike beneath the sail. Unfortunately, seeing the bike didn’t improve her temper, and she charged away towards the house again shouting, ‘There’s the bloody thing and I’m not mending any goddam punctures either.’ She should really watch her language. Anyway, I got it out and was delighted that there were no punctures, but no one has been looking after it, least of all me. But now I suppose it isn’t surprising that the bike is groaning and listing and its wheel is catching on something, and I’ve only got a few hundred metres away from home. While I’m glad Mum can’t see that I’ve already ground to a halt, I do also wish she would just drive past in her car and give me a lift to the bus stop after all because I’ve got to meet Nell, and now I think I’m going to miss the bus.

  I gaze up and down the High Street, and as usual there is no one about except a very old lady with a tweed hat on taking a dachshund for a walk. She is Miss Mills from Bridge House, and I hope she can’t see this far because I really don’t want to talk to her right now. There is a gang of old ladies in Staitheley and they are all friends, or all sworn enemies, of my grandma. She and Jack are not in the thick of it, as they live just out of the village in their house on the edge of the marshes, but she knows every ailment and every complaint that is discussed by the Staitheley ladies. Their three favourite topics are: illnesses, their own and one another’s; dogs, and whom they have bitten; and the vicar, Reverend Horace Wells, and what he has done wrong. I have been into almost every old lady’s house in Staitheley in the fourteen years of my life, and apart from the holiday-cottage owners who are never here, I know just about everyone in the village. It isn’t hard to know everyone because there are a few hundred permanent residents and my dad grew up here too, and my grandfather, so Staitheley is home to my family history as much as it is to me. This is one of the boring things about it.

  I would actually like to live in a town where no one has known me since I was a baby, and where cinemas, clothes shops, chemists and cafes lined the streets. It would be so great if I could go and buy a CD without having to make a special half-day pilgrimage on the bus to Flixby. And it would be great if no one ever made either of the following remarks about me again: ‘My, with all that dark hair and those big blue eyes you remind me of your daddy when he was small,’ or, ‘But look at you now, Lola Jordan, haven’t you grown into a fine young lady! I should ask your grandmother to buy you a nice new cardy, you seem to have grown out of that one.’ This comment usually comes with a bony old hand prodding my waist which makes me squeal, so the Staitheley grannies think I am a true joker among them and seek me out again and again. It is a big pressure being one of very few children in a very small village. I think it
was selfish of Mum and Dad to only have me. A brother or a sister would really take the spotlight off me. Mum is so not sympathetic; whenever I moan, she says I bring it on myself. ‘You know you could cover up your midriff when you go round to get Miss Mills’s shopping list,’ she points out. And she’s always telling me to take my coat when taking Enid Selby’s naughty West Highland terrier for a walk along with my own darling Jack Russell, and friend through thick and thin, Cactus.

  ‘I could wear old sacks all the time,’ I agree, ‘but then I wouldn’t be being true to myself, Mum.’

  That floors her, because Mum’s big thing in life is being true to oneself. And communicating. God knows how she manages with Dad because he never communicates anything. He hardly talks. Come to think of it, Mum doesn’t talk much to Dad, but she talks to me, and she talks on the phone to her friends in London, especially my Aunt Jane, her sister. Sometimes she cries after that. I think that even after all these years, she misses the excitement of being a working girl in a big city.

  Thankfully, Miss Mills has teetered away down towards the quay with Deborah the dachshund undulating along beside her, a bit like a worm on a lead, I always think, but each to her own. Cactus, who is more like a cement-filled rugby ball than a worm, because he is so greedy, is in my rucksack, but I’ve been hanging around too long and he has noticed a cat. Suddenly he wriggles out and dashes away after it. He vanishes down one of the little alleyways that criss-cross between walled gardens and courtyards which make up the heart of Staitheley and that I am sure must have been built by smugglers no matter how Dad insists they were just for taking coal to houses. Anyway, I can’t be bothered to go after Cactus. He’ll just go home when he’s finished hell-raising and I’ll see him when I get back. No one can get lost in our village, so I never worry about him.

  Staitheley is small. It still spans both sides of the creek but once, as Dad has told me more times than I can be bothered to remember, it was a great port. All that is left of the port now is the quay and the merchants’ houses that line it. They face out across the salt marshes to the limitless sea, as if protecting the flint cottages clustered between the two main streets, which reach back from the quay like arms wrapped around the heart of Staitheley.

  ‘There is nothing between us and the North Pole,’ Dad likes to tell me. In the winter I have no trouble believing him. Dad knows everything about this coastline and its web of creeks, which flow through the salt marshes, flooding them with the incoming tide and receding again when the tide ebbs so that mousse-thick mud oozes wherever you walk. It always feels to me like the marshes and the island, Salt Head, belong to Dad and not to the Trust for whom he works. Occasionally he puts on a tie with his tweed jacket and goes to their head office in Cambridge for a meeting, where they ask him stuff like, ‘Where is the erosion happening?’ or, ‘Do you have a policy on pollution?’ but mainly they just leave him to manage it for them and so the huge sweep of sometimes land (low tide) and sometimes sea (high tide) which stretches from the tiny village of Salt along the coast to the west part of Staitheley and on to Hinkley Marshes and Beetley Creek and the weirdly popular village of Burdon Water is Dad’s kingdom.

  When I was much younger, as soon as I could come back from school I would run up to Dad’s study, where the curved window and the large telescope gave a wide panoramic view of the marshes. If I saw his familiar figure somewhere out on the edge of the water, light dancing silver streaks around him, I would hurry out with Cactus, following the path between pink-tinged heather clumps, sometimes taking half an hour or more to reach him.

  These days I find some parts of Dad’s job really embarrassing: for example, in the summer he drives around with binoculars on the beaches and if he sees a plume of smoke he zooms across and throws sand over people’s barbecues.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s the Trust’s policy, and we’ve had problems with fire every summer,’ he always says. If they’re understanding and easy with him, he stands at a distance and lets them finish cooking, but if they’re rude or try to threaten him, he pours a bottle of water right into the flames and he doesn’t even move the sausages or whatever they’re cooking. I try to avoid going with him when he’s doing this sort of beach patrol, it’s just too cringe-making, and I don’t like to get involved when he takes school parties out on to Salt Head and he tells his repertoire of a whole lot of lame jokes which I have heard too many times before. But when we go out on our own together, and he shows me where the seals go to have their pups and he tells me how a sea mist comes in on a hot summer day when the wind is in the north, I am caught up in the magic of the coast that is my home and I succumb to its spell. Today is not magical, although spring beckons. A cloud like a purple bruise hangs over the village. The air is mild and the wind has dropped to a breeze which catches my hair and whips it into my eyes.

  I wiggle the front wheel of my bike hopefully. Perhaps it will fix itself in a minute. A boy skims past on a skateboard, but U-turns gracefully back to me.

  ‘What’s happened?’ He crouches by my bike. He has thick hair flopping over his forehead and I am struck too by the hollow of his cheekbone and his mouth. He looks at me and a grin bursts on my face involuntarily and unstoppably. I can’t stop grinning as he takes my bike and turns it upside down on the edge of the road. In fact I have to turn away and push my hair back from my face, dragging my hands across my eyes and mouth to make myself sensible again. A small self-administered slap helps, but I have a sneaking feeling that he might have seen me do it. So now he will think I am a total weirdo. I turn back to him, suddenly aware again that he is very kindly fixing my bike and needs praise and attention.

  ‘You’ve bent the wheel,’ he says, spinning it with his hand flat, hovering just above the ridged rubber of the tyre. ‘Come back with me, and I can fix it for you in the workshop.’ He gestures over his shoulder. I know where he is pointing. I know who he is. How could I not in such a small village? His name is Josh Christie, and his dad is a fisherman and a boatbuilder called Ian. The Christies used to live a few miles away in a smaller village than Staitheley but recently they moved into a big boatyard which sprawls on to the road between wide cobbled walls just along the quay from our house. I know all about them, or a version of them, because Ian Christie grew up with my dad, and they were friends once.

  Josh gives me his skateboard to carry, and he wheels my bike into the boatyard. In the open shed, the hull of a boat is suspended from ropes that are wrapped around the beams, and curls of wood shavings litter the floor. Outside, a line of different-coloured buoys glow red and orange against the flint wall. I have been to this boatyard many times, before the Christies came to live here, but now my dad prefers to drive to Salt. He avoids Ian Christie like a bad smell, and says I’m imagining it when I challenge him. I can’t be bothered with the way grown-ups fall out. It obviously happens more and more as you get older; just look at all my grandma’s cronies, arguing and having feuds. Everyone knows everyone here, and although I find it pretty annoying at times, mostly it is a friendly feeling.

  Josh has the wheel off my bike, and whistling absently he clamps it into a vice on the workbench.

  ‘How do you know what to do?’

  I wasn’t really expecting to bump into a boy today, especially not Josh Christie, although as he is the only boy anywhere near my age around the village, I suppose he is the only one I am at all likely to see. But me and Nell, who is the person apart from Cactus that I am closest to on earth, and who I have sat next to at school in every class since we started at primary together, have been eyeing him up on the bus for a while. Not that he’d have noticed us lowly fourteen-year-olds. But it’s so weird that now here he is, very interested in my bike but not actually saying anything to me. The silence yawns between us and I babble to fill it.

  ‘I’m catching the bus to Flixby to meet my friend Nell at the cinema. Do you want to come?’

  Ohmigod. I have to dig my fingernails into the palm of my hand to stop myself apologizing straight away, a
nd I bite my lip so as not to take the words back. That will only make things worse. Of course he will say no. What an idiot I am. Nell will crucify me. I can just imagine exactly what she’ll say: ‘You can’t just invite boys to come to the cinema with you! It’s like going on a date, to be anywhere near a cinema with a boy. You know that, Lola, don’t you?’

  Josh straightens up from gazing intently at the vice and the bent wheel and looks at me.

  ‘What are you going to see?’

  ‘Err, umm, yess . . .’ Oh God. Why did I say the cinema? I suppose it made sense because it is where I’m meeting Nell, but we haven’t planned to actually see anything. We might go to Woolworths and look through the CDs. Maybe buy one. But seeing a film? Not a priority today, not with only five pounds left to last me until the end of the holidays, unless I get a job. I could kick myself. Of course he would want to know what we are seeing. What might be on? Think of a film. There must be a film title somewhere in my brain. Any old one will do. I shift from foot to foot, rolling my eyes. Josh, looking perplexed, stares at me then turns back to the wheel.

  ‘I’ve straightened this, and I’ve moved the brake pads, so I think it’ll be OK now.’

  He begins to untwist the vice, spinning the bar, bouncing the tyre and whistling.

  ‘Oh no!’ Accidentally my thoughts erupt out of my mouth: the only film title to ping into my otherwise blank and panicking mind is a French one. The one I read the review of this morning in the paper. How could anyone possibly try to speak even two or three French words to a boy they have just met? I’ll have to get round it somehow.

  ‘It’s that French one about . . . about . . .’ Shit! I should never have pursued this line of chatting. Never. The French film is about kissing. Nothing else, just kissing. The reviewer was scathing about it. Said it was a teen flick all dressed up and nowhere to go and it would give you glandular fever just to watch it. Oops, how do I convey this to Josh without mentioning anything about snogging? Impossible. Gulping, I grab the handlebars of the bike as Josh tightens the last nut, and mumble, ‘Better go. Thanks. G’dbye.’