Emma Tupper's Diary

by Peter Dickinson

  “It’s a right old mess,” he said. “Nip down and flood the forward tanks a little—that’ll bring the screw up to where I can get at it. Not too much, or you’ll go under; you’d better shut the hatch in case something goes haywire.”

  It was dreadful to go down alone, and prison yourself in, and turn the taps and listen to the water gurgle back, pulling the hull down. She let it happen in three-second bursts, with five seconds in between, until a double thump on the hull told her to stop. The tilt of the deck was quite marked as she climbed back and let herself out, to see Finn and Roddy rowing round the point.

  “I’ve got all that,” said Finn. “What’s up? The beast looked marvellous through the view-finder, but you surfaced much too early when you got up here.”

  Andy explained what had happened. Roddy listened with an expression that made even Emma want to throw things at him.

  “It doesn’t sound too bad,” said Finn. “I’ll go back and make a start on this lot. If I get going now we might be able to have a look at it this evening.”

  “Right,” said Andy between his teeth, and dived quite unnecessarily under water so as not to have to look at Roddy’s face any more.

  For some reason that was the best piece of film that Finn ever took, though Ewan and Emma did almost a dozen more runs, becoming more expert each time. Perhaps it was the very expertise which made the subsequent runs look too smooth and unreal, whereas the awkward plunging of that first run somehow made it look as though the creature were swimming with huge, invisible strokes. They watched the film after supper, Finn fussing at the projector, Andy lounging and scratching, Mary sitting bolt upright on a chair at the back of the room, Miss Newcombe also sitting bolt upright like a child at her first play, Roddy yawning. First, to focus the projector, Finn ran a different piece of film taken at a time when Andy had had several friends staying and they’d organised a midnight water-joust, lit from the shore by Finn’s floodlights. Miss Newcombe squealed with pleasure at every splash, and Roddy too began to whoop as the white bodies tumbled and the diamond drops rose like fireworks against the black water. During one sequence, when Finn had managed to get close to a bearded man as he fell and had taken his plunge slow-motion, Emma glanced over her shoulder and was astonished to see that Mary was sitting stony-faced. She was not normally a humourless or disapproving person.

  Then there was darkness, mutterings from Finn, a square of blinding light on the screen, more mutterings, and a sort of foggy pattern. Finn fiddled with the projector and the fog became the lake—just dull grey with dull grey shore in the foreground, drab and amateurish. Nothing happened for a bit. Emma didn’t even notice the first signs until they’d run the film through twice—a tiny blackness near the edge of the picture; then the head was well clear of the surface, the water rumpling behind it. The camera jerked and steadied and the head was now in the middle of the picture, not quite in focus, still coming up, the short curve of the neck going down to a wideness that might have been shoulders. The blurs sharpened and it was a beast from the deeps, tiny-headed, swimming purposefully with a slow dipping motion that suggested somehow the surge of large limbs beneath. The camera wavered, lost the beast completely, came back, and now you could see a curious disturbance some way behind the head, a dark curve that showed and vanished like the back of a dolphin, then came up in a different place, but smaller. The camera centred on the head again, wavered and came back. The beast, which had begun by swimming across the picture had wheeled slowly round and was now swimming almost away from the watchers, with the hummocks of its tail showing very clearly; and now it began to sink, still surging strongly forward. In half a minute it was gone and the lake was still. The film chattered for another minute, wildly searching the surface; then it fizzed, and the screen was a white glare.

  Roddy and Andy and Emma were all cheering and shouting. Emma saw Roddy stop, as though he’d only just remembered that he’d refused to have anything to do with the beast; Miss Newcombe was looking troubled.

  “Well done, Finn!” said Andy. “Well done everybody! That’s great!”

  “Is that one of your jokes?” said Miss Newcombe. “I mean, it looked just as if there was something horrible in our loch.”

  “It’s all right,” said Andy gently. “It was only Anadyomene with a head stuck on. It’s quite safe to swim still. But Poop, I want you to promise not to tell anyone what we’ve been doing. Promise?”

  “I promise. I thought it was only what you’ve all been up to, but it looked so real, didn’t it, Mary?”

  “Indeed it did, Miss Poop. Though it did not look very like what my grandmother was telling me.”

  Before Emma had time to be startled by the matter-of-fact words, Finn laughed.

  “You’ll have to re-think what your grandmother told you,” she said. “In fact we’d better get everyone together and coach them a bit, so they all tell something like the same story to the telly-folk. We want to show these lowlanders they don’t know everything.”

  “And they need showing,” said Mary.

  So that was the section of film which had been sent off to Glasgow, with a covering letter from Andy. Emma had rescued the rough draft from the waste-paper-basket, and clipped it into her diary:

  “Dear Alastair

  Dear Mr McTurdle,

  I don’t know if you remember me, but we met at a party of Gabriella Smith’s last autumn. I think the enclosed bit of film taken by my sister Finn Fiona might interest you. She was trying to photograph some divers grebes for my father, who is away. We have taken more film since then, but this is still the clearest bit.

  There have always been stories that we had a monster something like this in our loch. We’ve now seen it three days running, and so have several other people.

  The/oldest inhabitants say that its coming means trouble for the Clan, and that it last appeared in 1917 and 1944, when the world was too busy to pay attention. My theory is that it comes up at twenty-seven-year intervals. Anyway they say it swims about like this once a day for ten days and fifteen days and then disappears, so if you are interested you will have to be quick.

  If Gabriella’s still working with you, she knows the way here and we’d be glad to put you up. There’s plenty of room.

  If you aren’t interested, would you please let me know at once, so that I can have a go at the BBC people.

  Yours sincerely,

  Andrew McAndrew

  PS Love to Gabriella.”

  “That bit about the BBC will fetch them,” said Andy. “They’ll think I’m such a country cousin that I don’t know how much they hate each other. Gabby’ll ring up in three days to make sure we’re not pulling their leg, and they’ll come a couple of days later.”

  “Is Mr McTurdle Gabriella’s boss?” Emma had asked.

  “Not exactly,” Finn had said. “He’s the personality, and he knows it; he weighs about twenty stone but he’s got a mean little voice however much he crinkles his eyes at the camera. They send him out on stunts, like this, and he makes jolly jokes about being fat and asks mean questions between whiles. He usually works with a producer called Ken Gritt, and Gabriella’s Mr Gritt’s assistant. She says he’s nice and quiet and his real name’s The Honourable Kenneth Grant.”

  In fact they rang two days after the film was posted. You couldn’t hear the telephone from the sitting-room (a typical McAndrew arrangement) so it was Caitlin who came to tell Andy he was wanted from Glasgow. He was away several minutes and returned grinning with happy spite.

  “That was Gabby,” he said. “She told the others it was a leg-pull, but they think we couldn’t have faked it. She sounded pretty shirty. They’re coming tomorrow.”

  Chapter 6

  “I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING for three days,” wrote Emma. “I was too tired the first day and too ill after that.” She looked out to where the fine drizzle dimmed and unfocused land and water. It was like being in the inside of a cloud. The light all came from nowhere in particular, so that the surface o
f the loch, pocked by innumerable tiny droplets, seemed to have no depth beneath it. But there lay Anadyomene . . . And there . . . It was difficult to know where to begin.

  It began with being shaken awake. At one moment Mummy was walking in through the door of their house in Gaberones holding a huge bunch of sore-eye lilies—the big red powder-puff that springs up in the veldt, whose bulb is deadly poison and whose pollen can blind you—and Emma was trying to shout to her to drop them and wash her hands before she touched anything but the words wouldn’t come; the next moment she was in a blur of darkness, still full of the panic of nightmare, being shaken.

  Only it wasn’t quite dark and she was lying in her bed in The Huts, sure that she hadn’t had enough sleep. Roddy had stopped shaking her and was standing by her bed with his finger to his lips. He was fully dressed. The light must be the last remains of yesterday and not the beginning of tomorrow: Emma could believe in Roddy staying up, but not in his getting up.

  “Go away, she said crossly. “I was having a dream.”

  “I need your help,” said Roddy. “Please.”

  “Is something wrong? Are you ill?”

  “No. I want you to help me about Andy. I’ve got a plan.”

  “Go away. I’m neutral. The whole thing’s too stupid for words—besides spoiling my holidays.”

  “It’s his fault.”

  “It’s just as much yours. If you stopped needling him . . .”

  “Look. Just this once, and that’s the last time. I’ll declare peace, unless Andy starts it up again. I promise.”

  “You’re still being stupid. Of course Andy will start it up again. It’ll be his turn.”

  “But he won’t know. That’s the whole point. I’ll know, but he won’t.”

  Drowsily Emma struggled up until she could sit with her knees under her chin. She didn’t often dream about Mummy; but if she went asleep again she’d find herself in some other dream, and anyway it had been a nightmare. She still felt furious with Roddy, but he looked so serious, so much as though he’d managed to think of the right answer but nobody would believe him, that she felt a bit sympathetic with him too.

  “What’s your plan?” she said.

  “I want to take Anna out.”

  “Now! In the dark?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you wait till morning? It’s light by three, and . . .”

  “There wouldn’t be time to charge the batteries again. We’re bound to run them down a bit, and if they went flat when the telly-folk are filming, that’d spoil everything. I saw Andy go out and turn the generator off half an hour ago, but they’re still all connected up. I know how to start it, and I can nip out in the early morning and turn it off again.”

  “Someone will hear it.”

  “Andy won’t. He sleeps like a log. And anyone else will think it’s him fiddling about.”

  “But Anna in the dark . . . Anyway, what good would it do?”

  “He never let me touch her. He treated me like an idiot, just there to waggle a few levers. And in that voice! I want to know I can.”

  “What’ll you do? If I came, I mean.”

  “Drive her out into the middle of the loch. Do one dive . . .”

  “No!”

  “One short dive in the middle of the loch. One minute. There’s nothing there to hit. Then come home.”

  “But it’s dark. I mean it will be soon. It’ll be terribly dangerous, even like that. Anna isn’t a toy, Roddy . . . it’s a . . . I don’t know, when I’m in it I think it’s a trap, waiting to get one of us. I hate it.”

  “You didn’t have to . . . Oh, yes. I suppose you did. All right, Cousin Emma, I’ll try to think of something else.”

  He sounded as he turned for the door as if all the rest of his life had gone sour—day after sour day. Emma knew that whatever his something else was it wouldn’t be likely to be a declaration of peace. She was sick of the whole feud. It wasn’t like ordinary quarrels in a family—the McAndrews played to hurt. And now it would be worse; so bad, perhaps, that despite Finn and Miss Newcombe and the heavenly valley she wouldn’t be able to stand it any more; she’d pack and say good-bye and go back to the seething caravan-site in Dorset, where Uncle Dick didn’t really want her . . .

  “Roddy?”

  He took his hand off the door-handle.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll come if you promise me two things.”

  “Yes?”

  “We won’t leave the jetty till it’s really dark, and then we’ll see how dark it is. If there’s enough moon to see a bit ahead, we’ll go, but if there isn’t we won’t try. And when we go under, it’ll be for only a minute, right out in the middle—and only just under, too. That’s the first thing.”

  “OK. That’s what I was going to do anyway. There will be a quarter moon, too, I think.”

  “The other thing is that you really will call off the feud.”

  “I’ve said I will.”

  “I mean, even if he doesn’t stop at once, you won’t try to get your own back again.”

  “But . . .”

  “I’ll try and find a way of asking him to stop too. But if these TV people come and the plot works I think he will stop, provided you don’t needle him. It’s more your fault than his, it really is. You make him lose his temper just to show you can.”

  Roddy laughed.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll try and break the habit. It is a habit, you know; rather like picking a scab. I’ll wait for you on the verandah—climb out through your window when you’re dressed.”

  It didn’t take long, as she’d put the clothes she was going to wear next morning ready before she got into bed. But she got an extra jersey out of the bottom drawer and put that on too.

  As they were tiptoeing along the road in the pine-smelling night, one of the wild-cats miaowed far out across the loch, and the echo answered it. It was now truly night, with a crooked moon slant in the sky behind them and the pattern of stars ahead blanking off where the mountainous horizon stood blacker than the darkness. Yes, thought Emma, if no clouds came up there would be light enough to see. She felt that what she was doing was foolish but inevitable: if ever she had to explain it, Daddy would never understand, though Mummy might. Again a wild-cat called, the water making it sound surprisingly close, but as they were out of the line of the echo the sound only came once.

  Emma frowned. The time before she had simply accepted the second noise as an echo, but really it must have been another cat, unless it was actually swimming in the loch. She must be still half asleep—dangerous for a night excursion in an eighty-year-old submarine.

  “Shall we take the tail?” said Roddy, standing on the jetty and looking at the wicked fibreglass head that jutted up from the bulge of metal.

  “We’ll have to. You can’t take it off without swimming,

  “No. Andy fixed it after you tangled the propeller. There’s a shackle a couple of feet along the line. I can hook it out with the boathook.”

  “Well, if we did get into trouble it would be nice to be able to reverse, which you can’t with the tail there.”

  “OK, hold the torch. Push the switch to the right when I tell you, not to the left, and shine it down.”

  He handed her a big electric torch, the sort with a reflector in its side and a dome on the top, so that you can choose between seeing a long way in front of you or a short way all round. She put her foot on the ladder to steady it as he scuttled across; once there, he eased the beast forward on to its nose and disappeared down the hatch. In a few seconds he came back, carrying a sort of stick; Emma switched the beam of the torch on and shone it down on the hull, using her body to screen it from The Huts. When she had finished blinking at the light, bright as sunrise for the moment to her night-accustomed eyes, she saw that he was crouching on the slope of the hull and fishing for the tail with one of the stubby boat-hooks. Emma steadied the ladder again as he crawled back with the tail cord between his teeth. He tied it to a pier of th
e jetty, and immediately scampered off to the nearest boathouse. When he came back he was carrying a square slab.

  “Cushion so that I can see out of the porthole,” he explained. “Now I’ll disconnect the leads.”

  As he fed the cables up through the hatch Emma coiled them neatly on the jetty so that they could be re-connected without tangling and the batteries re-charged as soon as Anadyomene was home from this crazy trip. It was too late to back out now. No, it wasn’t. She only had to say “I’m sorry, I’m too frightened.” Five words.

  And then she was sitting once more in the familiar chair; apart from the dregs of her drowsiness it might have been bright day outside. The hatch clanked shut above her.

  “All right if I put the lights out?” said Roddy.

  “I won’t be able to see the level.”

  “You won’t need to while we’re on the surface. When we dive you can use the torch.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Here.”

  He reached round and handed her the big lantern. Emma settled it between her feet.

  “Ready?” said Roddy and switched the lights off. “Motor forward.”

  “Are your eyes used to the dark already?”

  He laughed. Mad though the enterprise was, it was pleasant to hear him so happy.

  “All right, Cousin Cautious, I’ll give them thirty seconds . . . Ready? Motor forward.”

  In the true dark the spark across the motor-switch leapt blindingly, and the hum rose along a slightly different curve from the one Emma was used to—probably because they weren’t towing the tail. The light ripples tinkled against the bronze. She felt it would have been a blissful night to go for a sail or a row, to watch the big outlines of the hills and smell the night air; instead of which she was back in this metal bubble, which smelt of nothing but engine-oil and rubber and vinegar.