Wave Riders

by Lauren St. John

  There was something satisfying about seeing the book reduced to postage-stamp-sized pieces on the industrial carpet of the library.

  Jude wondered what would happen if he went further. He gave a tall, thin bookcase an experimental shove. It rocked, coughing up a shelf-load of books.

  Jude laughed. He gave it another shove.

  It wobbled and went over, smashing into its neighbour. The crash was thunderous. Like dominoes, each bookcase toppled another, which destroyed another.

  Dust choked Jude. Splinters pinged off him. Damaged books and debris piled up.

  Then he heard shouts and the sound of running feet.

  Jude was a boy in a nightmare, unable to move his legs.

  At the last conceivable second, he flew to the connecting door. It was unlocked. Slipping into the geography room, he waited for the cavalry to pass. Cries of horror greeted the devastation in the library.

  Jude ran.

  23

  NO SECRET

  Jess read the same paragraph five times before giving up and setting her mystery aside.

  Every afternoon she had the same problem. After years of wishing for stories, she finally had access to the best school library in London and a pile of longed-for novels that would have made yacht-dwelling Jess green with envy, yet she couldn’t concentrate.

  The most riveting locked-room puzzle couldn’t keep her attention. Whole pages blurred before her eyes. It drove her to despair. It was like finding oneself in Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory with a sudden allergy to sugar.

  It didn’t help that Letitia Huntingdon, her roommate, was practising her hockey dribbling technique in their room. She did that often. Her devotion to sport was religious.

  Other girls had brought cuddly toys, pop-idol T-shirts or family holiday photos to make them feel at home at Geraldine Rose School for Girls. Letitia’s bed was crowded with hockey sticks and mitts, tennis rackets, and ribbons and trophies that kept toppling off her shelf. Jess marvelled nightly that she was able to find a corner to sleep in.

  Before and after matches, Letitia practised hockey and tennis in and around their room and listened to matches on her digital radio. She used headphones, but they didn’t mute her melodramatic reactions to the successes and failures of her sporting heroes.

  ‘How do you stand it?’ wondered Flo, after witnessing Letitia’s meltdown when her favourite tennis star double-faulted to lose a game. ‘You can complain to Matron, you know. It’s enough to send anyone round the twist.’

  ‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said Jess. ‘Five months at sea in a cramped thirty-seven-foot yacht is a brutal lesson in getting along with people. My brother’s noisy and full of energy too. I used to moan that living with him was like living with an elephant. He took it as a compliment. Told me that elephants were famously quiet on the savannah.’

  She smiled at the memory. ‘That’s Jude. Irrepressible. Least he was. I’m afraid to think how he’s coping at Dragon Ridge. What kind of name is that for a school? Sounds like a boot camp. Jude’s too much of a free spirit to respond well to strict rules and bossy, yelling drill-instructor teachers.’

  ‘You must miss him,’ sympathised Flo, who came from a large, close-knit family and pined terribly for them.

  Jess didn’t want to say that, after being separated from her twin for five whole weeks, she felt as if half of her heart was in a locked box she couldn’t open. She felt guilty every day that the Blakeneys had enrolled her in wonderful Geraldine Rose, with its talented, generous teachers, infinite opportunities and pretty grounds, while dispatching Jude to the next thing to a kid prison.

  ‘Have you tried writing to him?’ Flo asked.

  Jess had. Two emails and a letter. All three had been met with auto-replies. Something about how, in the interests of fairness and the well-being of Dragon Ridge cadets, ‘no outside correspondence will be entertained’.

  Perhaps because she was missing Jude and Sam more than ever that afternoon, Letitia’s larking about with her hockey stick had started to get on Jess’s nerves. She was about to say something when there was a crash.

  Jess screamed.

  Her only reminder of her mother – the little framed oil painting – lay in pieces on the floor.

  Had Matron and a passing teacher not immediately rushed in, joining Flo, Zia and Letitia, who were all talking over one another while trying to placate Jess as she sobbed, someone might have noticed the corner of an envelope poking out from beneath the bedside table where it had slid when the picture broke.

  Unluckily, Flo kicked the envelope further under the table in her eagerness to console Jess.

  The next day, the boarding house cleaner, who was mostly very thorough, but had long since been defeated by Letitia’s sporting accessories, failed to pull out the bedside table to hoover beneath it. Jess and Letitia’s room received only the lightest of dustings.

  As a consequence, the letter that would have altered the twins’ destiny in an instant lay undiscovered, noticed only by a mouse.

  It was Mrs Atkins who suggested that Jess take her picture to the art teacher for repair.

  As it turned out, it could be easily fixed. When Jess returned to collect it a week later, it was as good as new. Better, if truth be told.

  ‘Good thing it’s an oil painting not a watercolour,’ said Ms Gregory, smiling at Jess’s rapturous reaction. ‘Oils are almost never framed with glass, which might have broken and slashed the picture. I’ve replaced the mount with museum-quality cream board and touched up the gold on the frame. Nice piece. Who’s the artist?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me. I wish I knew more about it. My mom lived in New Zealand, England and the US. Apparently, she travelled a lot. She could have bought it anywhere.’

  ‘Hmm, an art mystery. How intriguing. The artist’s style is familiar, but I can’t think where I’ve seen it before. Have you tried googling the title on the back, Dolphin Dreams?’

  Jess didn’t tell her that googling ‘Dolphin Dreams’ was the first search she’d done on her iPad after arriving at the school in January. Her screen had filled with images of dolphins leaping through tangerine sunsets, reiki practitioners and marine biology courses.

  She’d also done a search for HOPEFLI, the reference on Gabe’s bank statement, in the hope of finding who had been gifting Gabe thousands of dollars. That had gone nowhere too.

  ‘What about the cottage or the landscape?’ Jess asked Ms Gregory now. ‘I’m sure it’s a real place. I’ve always had this sense that it’s somewhere that was special to my mom because the painting was one of the only things she saved when she, uh, left the UK. Any idea where it could be?’

  ‘Hard to say. Could be Cornwall, the Outer Hebrides, Northumberland, New Zealand, somewhere in Scandinavia. The painting itself looks valuable, but the frame is cheap. It’s possible your mum bought it at a car-boot sale. I did notice one thing – an indent and a strip of yellowing tape on the inside of the back board I threw away. Was anything stuck to it when it broke? People often keep secrets hidden in paintings.’

  Jess stared at her. ‘What kind of secrets?’

  ‘Photos of loved ones, notes, secret maps . . . But there was nothing?’

  Jess thought of the crowd in her room. ‘Not that I saw.’

  ‘I’ll help you investigate the mystery of Dolphin Dreams,’ Ms Gregory said with a smile. ‘I fancy myself as a bit of an art sleuth. I’m sure I’ve seen a similar picture. I just have to remember where.’

  She picked up a brush. ‘If you enjoy art so much, why don’t you join my watercolour class? I’ll teach you to paint seascapes. I’ve done some sailing myself. You must long for the ocean, here in landlocked London.’

  Jess almost burst into tears again. In one deft phrase, the teacher had identified why she felt so empty. At night, she tossed and turned and itched and sweated, the way Jude did if he felt claustrophobic. Aside from missing her brother and their dog, she’d been unable to work out why she was so unhappy. Now she knew. Sh
e was lost without the ocean.

  She missed the sound of the sea and the mineral tang of salt in her nostrils. She missed the snap of the sails and the creaking of the mast. She missed freedom.

  Perhaps because Ms Gregory loved sailing too, she correctly intuited Jess’s thoughts.

  ‘I’ve always had the eccentric notion that it’s possible to paint dreams into being,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll give you an example. When I was your age, I wanted a Border collie puppy more than anything. I’d lost my mum, and my dad couldn’t afford one. I decided that if I couldn’t have the real thing, I’d draw my dream puppy.

  ‘So I did. I painted, doodled and sketched that puppy everywhere. I visualized him sitting on our front step wearing a red bow, with one ear flopping. I did that for eight months. One day, my dad collected me from school. We’d both had awful days and we were quiet on the way home, missing Mum and feeling down, but there, on our front step, was a Border collie with a red bow and one ear flopping. We never did find out who gave us that puppy.’

  She laughed. ‘Jess, the moral of the story is, paint the dog you want, the yacht you want, and your dream home on the ocean. You might just paint them into existence.’

  Up in her room, Jess comforted Letitia once more and reassured her that, yes, she forgave her, and that the restored painting was better than new. Letitia in turn promised to never again use their room as a hockey pitch.

  After Letitia left to take a shower, Jess did a fingertip search of the floor. She even braved the area under her roomie’s bed. She didn’t check beneath the bedside table because Letitia’s hockey boots were in the way, and Jess was keen to avoid a verruca.

  Jess went to sleep satisfied that she had done all the investigating she could for one day. As far as she could tell, the painting had concealed no secret.

  24

  LONE WOLF

  ‘Carpentry?’ repeated Jude in bewilderment.

  Greville Wallingford regarded him with intense dislike. ‘Yes, carpentry. You know, the art of working with wood? For reasons that escape me, Ms Flowers has this theory that, growing up in a boatyard, you might have developed some talent for it.’

  Jude was having difficulty processing this latest turn of events. When a senior had hauled him out of history mid-lesson and ordered him to the head teacher’s lair, he’d anticipated being given a Dragon Ridge-style punishment for trashing the library. Solitary confinement in a dank, rat-filled cellar, perhaps? Three thousand burpees in the rain? Afterwards he’d be sent ‘home’ to Blakeney Park in disgrace, barely a fortnight after leaving it.

  Fearing the worst, he’d arrived to find Ms Flowers sipping coffee in an armchair by the toasty fire. So far, Wallingford hadn’t even mentioned the library. Bizarrely, he had opened their ‘chat’ by asking about Jude’s woodworking skills.

  Jude couldn’t even look at the librarian. The fact that she was here meant she knew he was the culprit who’d destroyed her library.

  He felt ill with shame. She’d been his only ally at the school, and he’d repaid her by ripping up and smashing everything she loved and believed in.

  ‘Belinda – Ms Flowers – and I don’t always see eye to eye . . .’ Wallingford told him.

  ‘Next to never,’ the librarian agreed tartly.

  ‘But she came to me this morning with a radical and, dare I say it, visionary proposal. I’ll get straight to the point, Gray. Last night, we had an unfortunate incident in the library. The contractor who built the bookcases before our time was, it turns out, a woodwork and engineering dunce. A bookcase collapsed, triggering a domino effect that took out its neighbours. All of them. The devastation is quite something. On combat duty, I patrolled tidier bomb sites.’

  He focused on Jude like a sniper lining up a target.

  ‘Personally, I find it a stretch to believe that that level of destruction could have happened without human interference. Additionally, a security guard and two teachers reported hearing someone running from the scene—’

  ‘You were telling Jude about my radical and visionary plan,’ interjected the librarian.

  ‘Ah, yes. Ms Flowers thought that, rather than hiring an outside contractor, we could task one or two cadets with reimagining the Dragon Ridge library by building new bookcases. For the chosen cadets, it would be an immense but rewarding challenge.’

  ‘I can do it, sir,’ Jude said immediately.

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I love woodwork. From when I was small, I used to help my guardian – he was a shipwright – build and repair boats or loose boards in the jetty or whatever. And at the boatyard diner, if the manager needed shelves put up or a broken chair fixed, me and Al—’

  ‘Al and I,’ said Ms Flowers.

  ‘Sorry, Al and I would fix them for her. Mainly Al, but I watched and learned.’

  ‘Ms Flowers, what are your thoughts? Shall we give Gray a trial run at this? See if he can come up with a design that suits and then build some bookcases for you?’

  ‘I think Jude deserves a chance,’ said Ms Flowers, leaving Jude in no doubt that it would be his last one. ‘I’d suggest we ask Teddy to work side by side with Jude on the project. It’s a huge amount of work, and there are books to repair and catalogue too.’

  Wallingford snorted. ‘Edward Hamill? That boy is a total waste of space.’

  ‘I beg to disagree, Mr Wallingford. Teddy is the best library assistant I’ve ever had.’

  The head glowered but resisted comment. ‘Like you say, everyone deserves a chance. One chance. Don’t waste yours, Gray. You won’t get another. Rebuilding the library will be tough physical labour, so I’ll excuse you and Hamill from all sport and extracurricular activities until your work is done. No need to look so pleased about it, Gray.’

  ‘No, sir. I mean, yes, sir.’

  ‘Oh – and Gray, we’ll keep the library project between us for the moment. Just until it’s completed. I’m not sure that building bookshelves was quite what Blakeney had in mind when he enrolled you at Dragon Ridge.’

  In the cold light of day, the wreckage of the library was as grim a sight as the wreckage of the twins’ yacht. Somehow Jude had been responsible for both.

  He picked his way through the rubble to the librarian’s desk, stricken with guilt.

  ‘Good afternoon, Jude.’

  ‘How did you know it was me, Ms Flowers?’

  ‘You made the mistake of shredding the book you were transfixed by when you first came into my library.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do what I did,’ Jude said miserably. ‘I’m so ashamed and so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Everything got too much. I just sort of boiled over.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ put in Teddy, standing up from behind a broken bookcase. He’d been leaning against it, restoring a damaged adventure novel. He was another person who’d been kind to Jude and been blasted halfway to space for his trouble.

  Jude was mortified. ‘Sorry for yelling at you last night, Teddy, especially when you were only trying to stand up for me. I’m an idiot. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.’

  ‘Apology accepted.’ Teddy shuffled his feet and stared awkwardly at the floor.

  ‘Well done, boys,’ said Ms Flowers, smiling at their embarrassed attempts to bond. ‘I accept your apology too, Jude, although only as a down payment on the many weeks of hard work that lie ahead for you. I suggest that the three of us shake hands on it. If we’re to create the finest library in the land as a partnership, we need to turn a page on what’s happened and start afresh.’

  They did as she asked and grinned at one another. But just as Jude was heaving a relieved sigh at getting away with his crime relatively lightly, Ms Flowers opened a drawer in her desk. She took out a pristine copy of the book Jude had destroyed. Turned out, she had a spare.

  Jude stared at it in resigned disbelief. Lone Wolf was like a phoenix. Forever rising from the ashes, or the depths of Horseshoe Reef.

  ‘What was it about this p
articular book that made you “boil over”?’ asked Ms Flowers. She was staring at him intently.

  ‘Jess gave it to me when we were in the Virgin Islands.’

  ‘Your sister? I thought you were close. Was there something in the story that upset you?’

  ‘No – I never even opened the book. We had a fight about it right before the sea squall. I still feel bad about it.’

  ‘Would Jess want you to feel bad about it?’

  ‘No, she’s not like that. She forgives really easily. If we argue about something, she’s over it in about a minute. She’s not perfect, but she has the biggest heart of anyone. It makes me happy to make her happy.’

  ‘Would she be happy if you read more books?’

  Jude’s blood began to simmer again. As he’d suspected, the ‘library project’ was a trap to get him reading. ‘Yeah, she would, but I wouldn’t be happy, so what’s the point at that? I don’t want to read any book, but Lone Wolf most of all. It’s like it’s following me. It’s spooky.’

  Ms Flowers was looking fierce again. She’d been playing nice, like a lioness lazily watching a baby zebra, but now her metaphorical tail was swishing. One wrong move and he’d be brisket.

  ‘Jude, don’t go mistaking me for a doormat. You have two choices here. You can be part of something special, creating and crafting a library that will inspire and thrill other young people long after you’ve left this school. You can hone your carpentry skills and carry those with you always. Teddy will teach you how to bind and mend books, and I’ll show you how to shelve them.

  ‘You can do all of this in the warmth and comfort of the library, in the unrivalled company of me and Teddy – or you can spend every afternoon for the rest of term being shouted at on the track or getting your face mashed into the mud on the rugby pitch.’

  ‘Gee, let me think,’ Jude said with a grin. ‘Hmm . . . I choose the cosy library and your unrivalled company.’

  ‘Fabulous. I have one condition. You’re to read two pages of Lone Wolf tonight and describe them to me tomorrow. If, after that, you still feel strongly that reading’s not for you, I’ll free you from all future library commitments. I’ll tell Mr Wallingford that I’ve changed my mind and we’ll be hiring a professional carpenter.’