A Ravelled Flag (Strong Winds Trilogy)

by Julia Jones

  “We can use the backlights off our phones,” said Maggi, giving Anna a quick hug. “Cheer up, Anna. This is what adventures are like. Probably.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Messages from Mars

  Thursday 28 December, late afternoon

  The traffic outside Lowestoft station was being diverted every which way. It seemed as if half the streets were being dug up and the other half blocked off. Several times Luke led them down roads that he was sure he remembered, only to run up against wire fences with forbidding notices from private security firms.

  “Reminds me of that time we went to Ipswich,” Donny remarked to Anna. He knew she was feeling tense. He thought maybe conversation might be good. “They were digging up places there as well. Do you remember that railway line that ran under that fence and those containers that looked like they’d been dumped but probably had people living in them?”

  “They were minging. And I mostly hated this place too when we lived here.”

  Luke was taking them round the empty trawler basin that they’d seen when they were here on Strong Winds. Not many lights. Very few people.

  They were almost to the sea. The wind was blowing directly on shore and it was cold. They could hear the waves. Couldn’t see them yet. Suddenly they were startled by a completely new noise somewhere above their heads. It was an intense hissing, whirring noise that none of them could recognise.

  A huge wind turbine towered over them, its three pale arms whirling in the rushing air. Donny’d seen it from a distance last time, but he’d sort of got the scale all wrong. It was so much bigger from underneath and more dramatic. It looked stark and white and lonely. As if it might at any moment come to life.

  “There’s a whole gang of ’em off shore,” Luke told Xanthe. “We saw ’em from the boat. I reckon this one got split off and it’s wavin’ to get back to its mates.”

  “Could be,” Xanthe agreed. “Or it’s calling the others to come marching inland and take over the town – like in some weird horror movie.”

  “Cut it, Xanth,” Maggi’s voice was sharp. “Just now I don’t need your horror stories.”

  They were almost there. Occasional municipal lights revealed a rusting gasometer, another fenced-off industrial unit and a small car park. They saw a gap in the seawall, with heavy metal floodgates ready to close it off. The finger post said ‘Ness Point’.

  Donny and Xanthe switched on their torches and the five of them walked cautiously down the access slope onto a lower promenade. There were railings round the outer edge of the promenade. Beyond that, a breakwater of rocks, splattered with ‘No Climbing’ and ‘Danger’ notices. Defences in the on-going battle between land and sea.

  It was littered like a battleground too. Because of the way the tides ran round the east coast of England, high water Lowestoft was about two and a half hours earlier than on the River Stour. The water had flooded right over the promenade and dumped a sodden mess of seaweed and dead crabs, which it was leaving behind as it was sucked reluctantly away.

  The Easternmost Point wasn’t a spectacular natural feature or anything. It was a snub nose shoved stubbornly into the sea: a jut of coastline sticking out against erosion.

  The onshore wind was Arctic-cold. Dark waves erupted in crests of angry foam and wild gusts of water were blown back across the promenade.

  “What did we come here for?” worried Anna. “What did Oboe want me to see?”

  “You’d have thought there’d be some sort of monument,” said Xanthe. “An obelisk or something.”

  “The chart showed two cardinal marks about twenty metres off shore,” offered Donny. “That must be what we can see flashing straight ahead.”

  “I’m definitely not volunteering to check them out,” said Maggi, jumping backwards from an unexpected spurt of water.

  The place was completely deserted. Apart from the hazard warnings, and some graffiti on the seawall, they couldn’t see any notices either.

  “There’s a sort of round pavement thing,” Luke remembered. “They brought us down from school to do tracings on it.”

  Donny and Xanthe pointed their torches downwards and searched around the point of the ness. Once they were looking in the right direction it wasn’t too hard to see the large flat compass rose set into the promenade. West, North, East, South, they read as they walked around it clockwise.

  East was the scariest because it was closest to the sea. You couldn’t really look down at the words because you had to be ready to dodge the spray. After only a few moments everyone retreated westwards and clustered round the torches. There was a lot more writing round the edge and it wasn’t particularly easy to read.

  Donny’s torch was going yellow so he switched it off. At first they tried not to kneel or lie on the stone surface – it was so damp and so cold – but they soon found they had to. Most of the writing was embossed on metal so you could feel it as well as read.

  Luke’s ‘round pavement thing’ was a Euroscope. All the way round its perimeter it gave the direction and distance to capital cities: Lisbon 1086, Madrid 873, Helsinki 1038, Moscow 1468, Brussels 158, Berlin 490. In daylight they might have run from one name to another, calling out the information. This evening, huddled round Xanthe’s torch in the biting wind, it was hard to get excited.

  “It’s just Europe, isn’t it?” said Xanthe. “Nothing beyond.”

  “Yeah,” said her sister. “That’s all it’s meant to be. But if you stood here long enough it could make you think of everything else that’s out there, all round the world – if you carried straight on, as the crow flies.”

  “Except it wouldn’t be crows, would it?” said Anna. “I mean I don’t think crows fly all that far. I think it would be cranes or swifts or Arctic terns. Maybe that’s the reason Oboe wanted me to come here. To feel the globe sort of sloping away into the distance and the air masses and the different lines of force bending round it.”

  “And stuff bouncing down from satellites or whatever.”

  “But not the sun.”

  They’d piled on all the clothes Gold Dragon had packed and Maggi and Xanthe had brought along some extra scarves and gloves. The wind cut straight through the layers, especially anywhere that was wet. Wherever it could find a gap it sort of chewed its way in like some busy rodent with a thrusting wet nose and icicle teeth.

  They stood on the stone circle in the dark and felt the cold, each one wondering how long they could bear it. Behind them the giant turbine whirred ecstatically.

  “You have to sort of think outwards from yourself and try to guess where the wind was last,” said Donny, suddenly remembering the day he’d stood by the reservoir, the day his life had changed. “What it might have touched before it touched you.”

  “Dogger Bank Fishing Grounds,” said Maggi after a while. She’d crouched down again and was using the backlight of her phone to read another inscription.

  “That’d be where my Grandpa was born,” said Luke. “An’ where he died. I s’pose my dad’d have gone there too if the fishin’ hadn’t finished.”

  “Sole Pit Gas Field ... Leman Gas Field ... Indefatigable Gas Field ...” Anna was tracing her way further round towards the East. “That’s where my father was killed. There were other people killed as well. I don’t like this place. I don’t want to stand here any more. Come on, Lukey, let’s go home. Forget all the dead people in the past. Forget Oboe too.”

  She put her arm round him, probably for the first time in her life, and walked back towards the seawall. There was an overhanging parapet that offered some almost imperceptible shelter.

  “Can we stop here just a couple more moments, Anna?” Donny asked. “Great Aunt Ellen gave me a watch for Christmas. I want to try measuring the flashes off those navigation buoys. I’ll be really quick.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  There was a scene in Winter Holid
ay where some of the children had been playing some game called Signalling to Mars. Donny had just read the book: Oboe must have read it as well. It had been in one of the email messages he’d been sending out to Anna’s mother. Those books were the link between their families. They had mattered to Great Aunt Ellen’s older brothers and sisters and they had mattered to Anna’s great-uncle and her grandmother too. They were the centre of their friendship.

  “I remember what the crumbs were. In the book, not in your message. It was something in an imaginary story. The brother and sister were outcasts on some lonely shore, sharing their last few crumbs.”

  “That’s nice, I suppose,” she said bleakly. She still had her arm round Luke.

  Donny was thinking desperately hard. As Anna’s Oboe was such a boff – and she was too when she wasn’t freezing cold – was there anything in the flashing navigation lights that he’d expected Anna to pick up? Morse code or something?

  He pulled out a notepad and started trying to jot down the different timings.

  The spray soaked into the paper; the lights seemed totally random and he sensed that the others were getting seriously fed up with him.

  Xanthe had already turned away and was using her torch to examine the concrete wall. “Classy graffiti in your part of the world,” she commented to Luke. “I mean, get an eyeful of these stick people with their flags ... we know they’re only scribbles but get an art critic onto them ... ” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yeah,” said Maggi. She’d switched her phone’s backlight on and was trying to support her sister. “Significance and all that.”

  “I j...j...just like the b-bird,” said Luke. His whole body was shaking now with cold but he was on Xanthe’s fast-track list. “It’s ... well g-good.”

  “Significance?” Anna’s mind was coming back to them. “You mean ... like hidden meanings? Where?”

  “There’s another bird here,” said Xanthe. “He’s flying in. Sort of marking off the people. Avast your flash-counting, Donny-man. I’m having an Ornithological Moment! You hold the torch; I’ll draw.”

  Xanthe grabbed Donny’s pad and pencil, tore off the wet top sheet and started copying the row of little stick figures that extended from Luke’s bird to her own.

  He watched her in dawning amazement. “I know what this is,” he said. “It’s not Morse.”

  “It is so not Morse,” she agreed. “It’s semaphore – like in the books – and I know what it says! At least I thought I did. I got the first two words straight off, I’ve read them before – like I might even have written them, I know them so well. They say THREE MILLION. But, according to me, the next word should be CHEERS ... and it’s not. I gotta think, Donny-man.” She’d finished copying now and they gathered round staring at the line of flag-wavers dancing merrily across the notepad in the torchlight.

  “Xanthe,” said Anna. “Could you write the letters of the words you do know directly underneath the figures you got them from? THREE MILLION. Yes, I see. So the last word’s something O, something N, something S. God, I sound like Gerald trying to do the crossword! But there aren’t any clues. Please, Xanth, try to remember!”

  “Okay, okay, don’t hassle me.” Xanthe stood up and began whirling her arms as if she were some sort of amateur wind turbine. “Mags,” she said, “You’ve learned this too. Watch me. Use all the torches and the phones. I’ll do the alphabet, you check against the drawings ... A ... B ... C ... D.”

  “Stop!” shouted Maggi and Anna. “D! The last but one letter’s a D!”

  “Write it down then!” said Xanthe, still signalling manically. “If I stop, I’ll forget.”

  They were breathless with excitement.

  “P!” Everyone shouted together. “The first letter’s P and ... the letter before last is ... U! So the whole word is ... POUNDS! THREE MILLION POUNDS!! Stuff three million CHEERS – this message spells Money!”

  They all stopped and stared again.

  “So we still don’t know what it means,” said Anna.

  “No,” said Xanthe, “we don’t. But, dunk me if I’m wrong, I think we’ve got what we came for. This must be what Oboe meant you to find?”

  “Yup,” said Anna. “It’s another mystery. Can we go now? Luke’s completely frozen and so am I. Don’t suppose anyone looked at the train times for getting home?”

  “Well, actually, no,” said Maggi. “But, luckily, the parentals seemed to think that that it would be easier to get here than get back.”

  Xanthe shoved the notebook deep into her pocket.

  “So – no offence to the Native Guide, obviously – but we’ve got directions to the Floating Lotus. They’ve booked a table and the vicarage lot are coming as well – Rev. Wendy and Gerald and Liam and Vicky. Lifts home afterwards. Dad thought we might have had enough of independent travel. And Mum said we’d be needing an Oriental Banquet if we’d ventured this far East.”

  “I love your Mum,” said Donny. “Is Skye coming too?”

  “Everyone’s coming.”

  And the code-breakers vacated their Easternmost Point without a backward glance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Room at the Floating Lotus

  Thursday 28 December, evening

  How totally over-the-top luscious could it be – a Chinese eat-as-much-as-you-like banquet?

  They found fourteen places, including a high chair, already laid in a side room away from the main restaurant. It was a colourful room including a tank of exotic fish, holographic silk pictures of flying duck that shimmered as you looked at them from different angles and a vase of tall striped lilies with their strong, sweet, scent.

  Donny wasn’t that bothered about the décor – it was the sight of food that made the room look lovely. The centre of the large table was already covered with warming trays and, as soon as everyone was sitting down, the younger Chinese girls began bringing in dish after dish of steamy noodles and rice, sweet and tangy fish, meat, fruit and vegetables, crispy prawn crackers, spring rolls and a basin of chicken satay which Liam said was the best thing he’d tasted in his whole life, ever.

  “Then I hope you live very much longer and enjoy much more.” Ai Qin Pai was dressed in her black satin trousers and starched white shirt, with an even more ornately embroidered waistcoat than Donny remembered from before. Her make- up was immaculate, her round face radiating goodwill and she seemed to be treating this meal as some sort of special occasion.

  The other adults also seemed quietly festive. You’d think that the code-breakers had been trekking for months in survival conditions instead of being on their own for eight hours (not much longer than a school day) and journeying about fifty miles on two trains. June embraced everyone; Rev. Wendy beamed and Skye ... well, the fact that Skye was there said enough. Joshua’s deep voice sounded somehow delighted and Donny even saw Gerald give Anna an awkward hug.

  “Why fourteen places?” asked Anna. “Do Chinese people think thirteen’s an unlucky number as well?”

  “No, that is not a problem” replied Ai Qin. “The fourteenth place is for a guest who has had further to travel. Perhaps he is here now?”

  Donny flinched. He guessed Anna had felt a pang of hope that the place had been left for her mother.

  A tall man in a dark overcoat and homburg hat sidled in. He carried a briefcase and a rolled umbrella and looked round awkwardly. Donny watched Anna swallow her disappointment as if it was the tail-fin of a tiger prawn. She took a single deep breath, then stood up and walked across the room to shake hands. This was the lawyer she and Gold Dragon had met at Oboe’s funeral in Cambridge.

  She helped him with his hat and coat, couldn’t quite manage a smile but changed her place politely so that he could sit beside her.

  The lawyer looked pleased. His name, it turned out, was Edward.

  No-one was drinking alcohol because of Skye but Edward obviously did
n’t know about that. He asked Ai Qin for a glass of house champagne and raised it to Anna.

  “Congratulations, Miss Livesey. You de-coded your great- uncle’s directions.”

  Anna looked surprised. “It was mainly my friends and I don’t understand why it mattered. How did you know anyway? You’ve only just arrived.”

  “Ah well,” Edward sipped his champagne. “Much as I’d like to claim omniscience ... Some weeks ago I asked your carers to contact me as soon as you expressed any desire to visit Lowestoft Ness. I didn’t offer any explanation and they didn’t ask for one. I’ve been holding myself in readiness ever since. I wanted to be the first person to congratulate you.”

  “Um, thanks.”

  “You did find the message, the graffiti on the wall behind the Euroscope? We assumed you’d recognise semaphore even if you didn’t know it. Perhaps it was too dark for you to read? The Euroscope shows three distinct positions for dawn at different times of the year, you know.”

  “We didn’t see that,” said Anna. “They must be on the far side. The East side. We couldn’t see that side very well because the waves kept breaking over the wall.”

  Edward looked slightly disappointed. “Callum knew that he wouldn’t live until the solstice. He donated a substantial sum to the Friends of Ness Point when I made the arrangements. They’ll be able to do considerably more than clean up our graffitti. Of course it was a sentimental idea. But rather fun. I drove him up here very early one morning, fairly rattling with aerosols ... Our last lark!”

  Donny tried to imagine this dry lawyer and Anna’s dying great-uncle arriving on the deserted promenade to have a go at street art.

  Edward carried on explaining to Anna. “He regretted that he’d not been allowed to get to know you. He’d attended your parents’ wedding and met you when you were a baby. But time had passed too quickly and then your father’s death and your mother – so distressed and also ... angry. He’d held your inheritance in trust and hoped, when the time came to hand it on – when he would himself be dead – that you might sometimes look eastwards out to sea and think of him.”