One of the policemen is photographing everything; another takes clear plastic bags from a briefcase and starts collecting everything up. Evidence.
‘I’ve thought of something,’ I blurt out, through ragged breaths. ‘I know where Paul went. He’s at Seal Island. He used to call it the land beyond the sea, and he’d talk about how magical it was, with beaches all around…’
‘No,’ says Jed. ‘Seal Island is too far for anyone to swim. There are currents too. If he tried…’
‘Don’t,’ says Eva, biting her knuckles. She looks out at the grey shadow of island, and her eyes fill with hope.
‘He’s there,’ I tell them again. ‘I know he is. We have to go and look.’
One of the policemen pats my sleeve. ‘We will, pet,’ he says. ‘We’ll be checking out all the possibilities. We’ll keep looking.’
‘Now, though,’ Joey cuts in. ‘We need to look now.’
‘All in good time,’ the policeman says. ‘Our search teams are already combing the beaches, and we’ve called out the coastguards too. They’ll be here soon.’
‘Best thing you can do is wait at the cottage,’ Jed says. ‘Stay by the phone, in case there’s any news.’
We turn away.
‘He’s there,’ I mutter. ‘I know he is.’
‘So we’ll find him,’ says Kit.
CHAPTER 25
Kit breaks into a run and we follow, scrambling up across the dunes to the field behind Beachcomber Cottage, the field where Jed’s skanky old rowing boat lies upside down against the drystone wall. Krusty is crouched on the wall above it, her back arched, her tail swishing.
‘We’ll find him,’ Kit says again. ‘OK?’
I want to believe him, I really do.
He rolls the boat over, grabs up the oars and chucks them inside. As the dinghy rocks gently on the scrubby grass, Krusty lets out a long mewling noise and jumps in too.
‘Not this time, little cat,’ I tell her, but when I try to lift her out she slides through my fingers and jumps out of reach.
We grab on to the boat, hauling it down across the field, across the dunes, past the tideline, down over the damp sand and out into the water. The dinghy floats, swaying dangerously as Joey and I get in. Kit hangs on to the stern and pushes it out into the waves, dragging himself aboard once we’re out of the shallows. He clambers on to the middle seat next to me and grabs one of the oars, while Joey sits hunched up in the bows, peering out towards the island.
‘Get that cat out!’ Kit huffs, but Krusty clings tight to my lap, burrowing in beneath my jumper. The boat turns slowly as we push the shoreline further and further away with each stroke of the oars.
‘You kids!’ a policeman roars from the beach. ‘Get back here right now! One lost teenager is bad enough! Get back!’
We close our ears and row on. If we look back to the shore we can see the police search teams, in fluorescent yellow jackets, moving slowly along the sand to the left and the right of our beach. They have snifter dogs: big gruff German shepherds. They have already found Paul’s bag and boots and sweater. What else can they be looking for? I block the question out of my head and pull on the oar.
It takes a long time to row to Seal Island, and as we row the hope ebbs away from me. Jed is right. It’s too far for anyone to swim, even a strong swimmer like Paul Currents pull us off course several times. How much worse would it be for a swimmer, tired and cold and numb, inside and out?
‘What’s that?’ Joey calls out as we draw close to the island. A big dark shape is slumped on the rocks to one side of the beach. It’s big enough to be human, still enough to squeeze my heart with fear.
The boat nudges ashore beyond the rocks, and we drag it up across the sand before sprinting over to the rocks. There’s a heavy splash and the dark shape is gone.
Only a seal.
There is no sign of life, except for a few curious seagulls wheeling overhead. No sign of Paul.
‘Which way?’ Joey asks. It’s a tiny island, more of a rocky outcrop than anything else. If Paul is here, we’ll find him. Krusty trots ahead, bottom wiggling, and Joey and I follow. Kit takes the opposite direction. We walk for five minutes and find nothing, and then I see it – a single white feather with a circle of white stones round it. My heart thuds.
‘He’s here,’ I say ‘He is!’
A few steps further on there’s a pyramid of driftwood sticks with a seaweed flag fluttering from the top, then a spiral of those tiny pink fingernail shells, pressed into the damp sand. My brother is up ahead, crouched on a rock, talking softly, like you would to a little kid you’re trying not to scare.
I follow his gaze and see Paul, hunched up and shivering, his face grey, his thin shirt and trousers stained dark with the sea and white with the salt, his bare feet blue-white and crusted in sand. Even his green hair looks bleached out, more grey than emerald. There’s a steep rock face behind him, and he leans back against it, curling into himself, hiding. His eyes are blank and empty, like there’s nothing behind them.
‘Paul, c’mon,’ Kit is saying. ‘It’s time to go now. C’mon with me.’
Paul doesn’t seem to hear.
Just get him,’ Joey says, exasperated, but Kit grabs on to her sleeve and pulls her back. She hasn’t seen the flick knife in Paul’s hand, the same knife I used to cut bubblegum from his hair a couple of weeks back. I know how sharp that knife is. I wish I didn’t
We’re frozen to the spot, terrified to move in case it scares Paul into doing something stupid. I bend down and scoop Krusty up, gently but firmly.
Somewhere behind us there’s the roar of a motor boat, and looking back towards the mainland I can see the big, grey coastguards’ launch scudding across the waves towards us. Too late.
‘Paul,’ says Kit gently ‘put the knife down.’
Paul strokes the blade across his palm, his wrist, teasing. Suddenly I know why Paul always wears long sleeves, why he keeps his sweatbands on even in the swimming pool. I know what the knife is for, and my heart flips over.
‘Put the knife down, mate,’ Kit whispers.
‘You’re not my mate,’ Paul snaps, and his eyes flash with hurt briefly before the emotion drains away again.
‘Paul, I’m sorry,’ Kit is saying. ‘I let you down. I got scared. I got nervous. I didn’t know how to handle things. I messed up big style.’
Kit tries to edge forward, but Paul huddles further into the rock face. ‘Stay away,’ he says, bringing the knife blade up to his lips.
Then Krusty squirms out of my grasp and bounds across the sand to Paul. She doesn’t play safe, she doesn’t hang back, she just runs up to Paul and claws her way up his legs, her tail swishing, and Paul drops the knife and reaches out to stroke her fur, lifting her up to his face, his shoulder.
‘Hey, hey, little cat,’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’
It’s only when my breath comes out in a whoosh that I realize I’ve been holding it at all. Kit, Joey and I run forward, and Paul turns to face us like he only just realized we were there.
‘Kind of early in the year for a sea swim,’ Kit says, smiling.
Paul blinks, frowning, and then his green eyes hold Kit’s gaze. ‘Nah, it was no hassle,’ he shrugs. ‘What are you, some kind of wuss or what? Piece of cake.’
I bend down to pocket the flick knife, and Paul struggles to his feet. He’s exhausted, shivering and unsteady on his feet, so Joey and I fling an arm each round him and together the whole bunch of us walk down to the water’s edge, just as the coastguard launch runs ashore.
CHAPTER 26
It happened just the way Paul said it would. The social workers, when they turned up, said that the foster placement with Jed and Eva was clearly not working. Paul was a very disturbed boy, they said, more mixed-up than anyone had realized. He’d be better off back in Glasgow, at the children’s home, where he could be reassessed, offered one-to-one counselling and helped to come to terms with his past. They planned to teach him in some kind of
special unit for kids who couldn’t cope with proper school.
Jed and Eva appealed against the decision, of course, but the odds were stacked against Paul. The social workers talked to Kit and got a full statement about the bullying, from start to finish. Kit was honest about it, even though it showed him up in a pretty poor light. The social workers talked to the teachers at Kirklaggan High too. They mostly said that Paul hadn’t really fitted in, hadn’t tried to, with the exception of Miss Quinn who said Paul was the most talented student she’d had the privilege to teach for a very long time.
They kept asking Paul why he hadn’t asked for help, but he just kept saying that he didn’t want to wreck things, didn’t want to go back to the children’s home. That was why he’d stayed quiet, but guess what? They took him back anyway.
That was a while ago now.
I didn’t cope so well after Paul went away, not at first. I felt so guilty, so bad. I couldn’t help thinking I could have done something different, something that could have stopped it all from going wrong. I hung around at the beach and collected feathers and shells and bits of seaglass to weave beach-magic spells, but nothing worked. Nothing seemed to cut through the fog of regret those first few weeks.
Then one afternoon I got home from school and found a skinny tortoiseshell cat curled up in the washing basket, and from then on the fog began to lift. Mum had finally caved in and talked to Eva, and that was that – Krusty moved in.
She always was my cat, right from the start.
I’d like to say she is perfectly behaved and that my mum has grown to love her, but that wouldn’t be true. Krusty climbs the curtains and sharpens her claws on the furniture, and sometimes we come down in the morning and find feathers or tails or other scary things on the kitchen floor.
‘Not another takeaway,’ Dad says, and Mum huffs and gets out the disinfectant spray.
Krusty doesn’t care. She snuggles in round my neck like a soft fur scarf, or curls up in Mum’s shopping bag or on top of the TV, where it’s nice and warm.
Last week I came downstairs to find Mum feeding her fresh cream and sardines for breakfast, which isn’t so bad for a dustbin kitty. She’s kind of irresistible, Krusty. She purrs and pushes against you, and looks at you with those big dark eyes, and that’s that – you’re in love, like it or not.
A whole lot of stuff has changed around Kirklaggan since Paul left. The high school has a brand-new anti-bullying policy. McKenzie wasn’t so bad in the end, once he realized what had been happening right under his nose. Kit and Murphy and Fergus and Tom were excluded from school for a week for bullying, which shocked everyone. As McKenzie always said, they were supposed to be bright, popular lads, a credit to the school. Nobody expected they could be bullies too.
Mum and Dad were horrified, and grounded Kit for a month, but he just shrugged and took it on the chin; I guess he thought he deserved it. He wrote a letter to Paul, saying sorry for his part in the bullying, but Paul never wrote back. Kit said he didn’t expect to be forgiven, but that he was sorry all the same, and I believe him.
Anyhow, McKenzie came up with this new scheme where you have trained pupil counsellors who can sort out bullying problems before they get out of hand. Kit, Joey and I all trained, and so did a bunch of other kids, and it seems to be working pretty well so far. We have safe rooms too, like the art room, and specially designated teachers, like Miss Quinn, who can help when stuff gets too complicated for us to sort. I think Paul would have found it a whole lot easier to speak out, the way things are now. I hope so.
Kit is kind of a reformed character these days, but he didn’t get back together with Joey. He started dating Karen McKay instead – scary, huh? Still, as Joey said, she’s the one who has to stand on the sidelines at footy practice in the pouring rain with her mascara running, her carefully tonged hair getting tangled in the wind and her cream suede kitten-heel boots sinking into the mud. Shame.
Joey reckons she’s through with boys, anyhow. She’s going to concentrate on her career from now on. Surprise, surprise, she came top of our year in just about every end-of-term exam. What with her part in the anti-bullying policy too, she ended up getting a special award for Pupil of the Year.
There would have been a prize for Paul too – his painting of Krusty and me won the regional final of that art competition. When the picture came back Miss Quinn had it framed and hung it in the school foyer. Ouch. I didn’t want to be invisible, but, hey, be careful what you wish for – I didn’t want to be quite that visible, either.
Paul wasn’t around to collect his prize, obviously, but Joey had to go up on stage on the last day of term so McKenzie could present her with the Pupil of the Year plaque. She wore black hipster bootlegs with a black crocheted poncho over the top as a skirt, a black-and-red tie-dyed vest top that she claimed was her PE T-shirt, and red fishnet fingerless gloves. Her stripy hair was backcombed into a huge, fluffy ponytail, with a school tie wrapped round it like a ribbon. Cool.
McKenzie made another announcement that day – we are now, officially, a non-uniform school. McKenzie said he was tired of fighting a losing battle, and that if we chose to look like a tribe of wild Pictish warriors that was our problem, not his.
Jed and Eva thought he felt bad about giving Paul a hard time over the green hair, and that he finally realized that individuality was not a crime against humanity. I think he just realized he’d never outwit Joey Donovan, so he changed tactic and stopped trying.
Was Joey pleased? Well, not so’s you’d notice. She reckons half the fun of school was working out ways to bug McKenzie, and that’s all over now. She thinks he scrapped the uniform code just to spite her.
There’s no pleasing some people, is there?
I sit on the dunes behind Beachcomber Cottage, looking out across the ocean, sipping Cherryade. Seal Island is a moss-green rock, half shadowed and dramatic in the evening sun, lapped by water so blue it looks like wet paint. The tide is going out, and the damp sand is dull and hard-packed, ridged from the waves like the ribcage of a giant from times long gone.
Down by the tideline, there are a couple of beach-magic offerings, stars and circles of shells and seaglass with feathers and twigs and fronds of seaweed spiralling out across the sand. It’s not that I believe in beach magic these days – not really. It’s just that I know Paul would have liked it this way
To my right, someone has gathered a whole pile of driftwood sticks, heaped up like a bonfire and ringed with big rocks. Bits and pieces of driftwood that nobody wants, bits that can’t be rescued and turned into something useful, something beautiful, something new – they may as well burn as go back to the sea.
The driftwood’s me, Paul said once, and I remember wondering how anyone could feel so lost, so lonely, so far out to sea.
Sometimes, I try to imagine a driftwood branch, torn from its tree, its roots, in a storm. I imagine it drifting out on the tide, where the wind and the rain and the salt and the water bleach away the colour, smooth away the roughness. The driftwood branch washes up on a beach, along with a dozen other driftwood branches, with seaweed, tangled string, plastic cartons, old shoes and dead jellyfish. Will somebody pick it up, see its beauty, turn it into something new? Or will they just walk on by, leaving the branch for the tide to take again?
I can’t go near the beach, these days, without rescuing at least one piece of driftwood.
I take a long gulp of Cherryade and drain the bottle, shaking out the last few drops beside me. For a moment, they lie there like little specks of blood, and then they sink into the damp sand and fade away before my eyes. I pick up a white gull feather, flecked with brown, and push it into the empty bottle. I drop in some tiny shells, a nugget of green seaglass, a small white pebble mottled with pink like coral. I add a pinch of sand, a sprig of seaweed, and then I kick off my shoes and walk down to the water’s edge to scoop up a few drops of ocean.
Paul always reckoned that a message in a bottle needed a letter, a note, but I think that wishes ar
e purer, stronger, when you don’t write them down. I blow a little puff of breath into the Cherryade bottle and screw on the lid tightly. Then I wade out into the icy surf and close my eyes and fling the bottle as far as I can. The tide will take it out beyond Seal Island, far out to sea and to the land beyond the sea.
I watch the bottle bob and dip on the waves until it’s no more than a glint of light in the distance, and then I turn.
Far away, up on the sand dunes, a lone figure is standing. He walks towards me, his frayed jeans trailing on the sand, his baggy jumper rippling in the breeze. His hair is the colour of toffee, and although I’m still too far away to see, I know that his eyes are blue-green, the colour of the ocean.
‘Paul!’
We run towards each other and collide in a muddle of hugs and whoops and squeals, because I never really believed it would happen, not for sure, not till this very moment. But it’s happening.
Jed and Eva never gave up. They kept on with the appeals until the social workers finally listened, and because it was what Paul wanted too they took it seriously It took a while to get the paperwork sorted, but Jed and Eva made sure it happened. They are experts with driftwood, after all.
Paul will have to see a counsellor, and he’ll be home-schooled, to start with at least, but he’s here. He’s home.
Jed and Eva and Mikey and Joey are on the beach now, waving, laughing, shouting down to us. They light the bonfire, and a long pall of smoke drifts down across the beach as the flames take hold. Eva spreads a blanket on the sand, unpacking a big basket of goodies. She threads marshmallows on to long kebab sticks while Joey fusses about, tucking her CD player into a hollow in the dunes and switching the volume up to max. Mikey kicks about at the high-tide line, hunting for something to play football with.
Driftwood Page 12
