The Amber Cat

by Hilary McKay

“I could never have found so many,” said Nick, “nor so much wood.”

  “You don’t look at the right times,” said Harriet.

  Charley was very little use as a boat-builder. He was continually deserting the shipyard and running after Kathy, who, at the slightest hint of any secret, took to indulging in furious and spectacular sulks.

  “Please let’s tell Kathy,” begged Harriet, at the end of the second day.

  “Girls!” said Nick, whacking in nails at a tremendous rate, while skilfully avoiding his own fingers. “One in a huff and one in a flap!”

  “I hope you sink!” said Harriet.

  “You’ll sink too, then,” replied Nick cheerfully.

  “I’m not going on it,” Harriet told him.

  “Her not It,” replied Nick.

  “Her, then,” said Harriet.

  “Good,” retorted Nick, “all the more for me!”

  “Tell Kathy!” pleaded Harriet.

  “No,” said Nick, “and spoil the secret! Besides, I said I wouldn’t.”

  “Change your mind!”

  “I never change my mind,” said Nick truthfully. “Anyway, we’ve nearly finished.”

  “How are you going to make it steer where you want to go?” asked Harriet.

  “Oars,” Nick replied, after a moment’s surprised thought.

  “I’m sure it won’t row,” said Harriet. “It’s too flat and square!”

  “Rafts are flat and square!” Nick pointed out. “But perhaps I won’t be able to row. I’ll find a long pole and push it along like a punt.”

  “It’ll have to be very long, to reach to the bottom of the sea,” said Harriet doubtfully.

  “It won’t be deep, just floating round the coast. People swim out quite far from here.”

  “What if you get pulled out by the tide?”

  “I’ll do it when the tide is coming in.”

  “What if you fall in?”

  “I’ll swim,” said Nick. “Stop fussing! People’ve been across the Pacific Ocean on rafts.”

  “Have they?” asked Harriet, surprised. “How many?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nick crossly. “Thousands, I expect!”

  “How many drowned?” asked Harriet.

  “Harriet!” exclaimed Nick, completely exasperated. “Whose idea was it to build a raft, anyway?”

  “Mine,” admitted Harriet.

  “Well then,” said Nick, “stop acting like a girl!”

  Harriet, having tried but failed to think of a rude but at the same time unfeminine reply, left him to his hammering and went off to look for a punt pole. It was not an easy thing to find and she searched for a long time before she came across something that she thought might do. Nick found it the next morning, resting against the wall inside the cave and it was so exactly what he needed and yet so like somebody’s clothes prop that he had great difficulty in not asking where it had come from.

  With the arrival of the pole the raft was complete. It was large and square, a double layer of roughly sawn planks nailed together at right angles to each other and looped around with a necklace of oil-can floats. Harriet had strung the cans together by their handles on to a length of knotted rope and Nick had nailed it at intervals all around the edge of the raft.

  “It ought to have a name,” remarked Harriet. “All proper ships have names.”

  Nick looked fondly at his creation and said he would call it The Monarch of the Seas.

  “Oh,” said Harriet, who had been thinking that the raft might be called after Kathy, which would have been only suitable and fair, or perhaps even after herself, which would have been not only fair, considering the amount of work she had done collecting wood, but also flattering.

  “The Monarch of the Seas,” repeated Nick, who was neither sentimental nor grateful, “and I hope she floats for ever! It’s going to be an awful job getting her down to the water. She weighs about a million tons!”

  “How will you get off her if she floats for ever?” asked Harriet, watching as he struggled to lift a corner of overweight Monarch.

  Nick gave a groan of irritation.

  “How will you get off if she doesn’t,” persisted Harriet.

  “Harriet,” exclaimed Nick. “Shut up! Stop asking questions! Borrow my knife and go and finish carving your name or something! Anything you like, but stop going on at me! Why don’t you do something useful? Why don’t you come and help push?”

  “Are you going to put her in the water right now?” asked Harriet.

  “I’m just going to get her down to the edge. The tide doesn’t start coming back in until after eleven, but I want to have her there ready. Then I’ll get her afloat and sail her down along the edge of the beach to opposite Porridge Hall. You and Charley look out for me coming and when you see me, run in and find Kathy.”

  “We’ve got to get her to the water first,” said Harriet, who, having felt the weight of The Monarch of the Seas, was beginning to doubt that she would ever really float. After a long spell of hot and breathless tugging, she added, “If we wait until the tide’s nearly high, we won’t have to carry her so far.”

  “All right,” agreed Nick, who was red-faced and gasping with exertion. “We’ll leave her where she is and come back this afternoon. It’s not as if anyone could run off with her!”

  By four o’clock that afternoon the tide was nearly high and after a short struggle The Monarch of the Seas was hauled to the edge of the waves. There she dismayed her designers by sinking slowly to the shingle, so that all that was visible was an un-nautical-looking collection of bobbing oil cans. Nick sighed with disappointment but cheered up a moment later as a larger than usual wave came sweeping in and lifted the raft until she hovered just below the level of the water but definitely afloat.

  “Quick! Quick!” Nick shouted to Harriet. “Push her out and pass me the pole!”

  Harriet obediently pushed but before Nick could scramble aboard, The Monarch of the Seas was caught by an incoming wave, carried past the launching party, and deposited high and dry upon the shore. Nick and Harriet splashed back after her and tugged her out again and the same thing happened. They launched her six times, each time getting crosser and wetter and at the sixth time Harriet said, “You’ve made this raft all wrong!”

  “I made it just how you said,” answered Nick, catching his shins (not for the first time) on the sharp corner of a floating oil can. “It was you who wanted to put these rotten horrible useless stupid cans all around the edge.”

  “They’re the only bits that float,” said Harriet. “If you took them off, you’d have to call it The Monarch of the Bottom of the Seas!”

  Nick stubbed his toe and hopped frantically but did not reply.

  “Or The Rotten Wreck,” said Harriet. “Or The Soaking Sinker, or The Wet Nick, or …”

  “I suppose,” said Nick, “you’d have called her The Lady Harriet!”

  Harriet privately thought that this would have been a perfect name, but replied, “I shouldn’t. I’d’ve called her The Sniggering P …”

  “She’s floating!” interrupted Nick suddenly.

  “What?”

  “She’s floating,” repeated Nick.“Look!”

  Sure enough, The Monarch of the Seas was rising and falling gently on one spot, not drifting out to sea and not being carried towards the shore.

  “Why did she suddenly start floating?” asked Harriet.

  “The tide must have stopped coming in.”

  “Well, hurry up!” said Harriet impatiently. “Get on!”

  “Idiot!” said Nick. “The tide’s turned! It’s going out! I can’t go now!”

  “You can’t go!” exclaimed Harriet. “After all our work!”

  “I can’t go if the tide’s going out,” replied Nick, looking ruefully down at The Monarch of the Seas. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

  Harriet did not reply for a minute, but stood watching the waves breaking on the shore.

  “They’re going right up to the same
place,” she said. “The sea’s not going out. It’s just staying where it is.”

  “Is it?” asked Nick, uncertain but terribly tempted.

  “I suppose you’re scared,” said Harriet and knew immediately that that was the one thing she should not have said.

  “No!” she said in panic. “I know you’re not scared! Nick, don’t!” But it was too late, Nick was already wading back towards the raft.

  “Now who’s scared?” he asked cheerfully, and clambered aboard.

  Chapter Nine

  Mrs Brogan paused in her storytelling and Friday, who had fallen asleep on Robin’s knee, gave a sudden snort and woke himself up for a second.

  “Don’t stop now!” said Robin.

  “It’s very late,” said his mother. “Aren’t you tired? Friday is, poor dog! Look at him!”

  “Dogs aren’t bothered about ghost stories,” said Robin.

  There followed a silence that lasted several minutes, while each of them thought their own thoughts. Robin broke it by remarking, “I wonder if dogs ever see them?”

  “See what?”

  “Ghosts.”

  “They wouldn’t see them, they would smell them,” replied his mother. “Smell is their most important sense, not sight. For a dog, a ghost would be an unexplained smell, and for an animal whose hearing was its most important sense, it would be an unexplainable sound. Or an unusual vibration perhaps, for animals like whales. With oil rigs and ships and radar, I suppose the sea is a terribly haunted place for whales these days.”

  “If there was a ghost that you could see and smell and hear and touch, would it still be a ghost?” asked Robin.

  “That would mean we might all be ghosts,” said his mother. “How would you tell the difference?”

  “We haven’t died,” said Robin, looking hurriedly away from the photograph of his father that had recently appeared on the mantelpiece.

  “How do you know?” asked his mother.

  “How do I know?” demanded Robin.

  “For all we know, we have died,” continued his mother. “I’m sure we wouldn’t remember it if we had. We forget being born. I expect we forget dying in just the same way.”

  “Even if it hurts?” asked Robin, thinking of his father, killed in a car crash more than two years ago, and yet still so alive to Robin that he half expected him to walk through the door at any moment.

  “Being born hurts,” his mother told him gently, guessing his thoughts.

  “Does it?”

  “You’ve forgotten,” said his mother.

  Robin sprawled in his chair, hugging his dog, warm in a room full of firelight and the sounds of the wind and the sea outside, and he thought, This is happy. This is what it feels like. He grinned across at his mother and asked, “What happened to the raft?”

  “Pass me the pole!” ordered Nick. The Monarch of the Seas was still hovering in one place, but he had no idea how long this would last.

  “The pole?” asked Harriet stupidly.

  “The pole for punting!” said Nick. “Kathy’s mum’s washing-line prop!”

  “Oh yes,” said Harriet, suddenly remembering the clothes prop and handing it over. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Float down the coast, like we said. If it starts going out too far I’ll jump off. You keep up with me on the shore. Charley promised to keep a look-out for you. He’s going to bring Kathy down to the beach as soon as he sees you.”

  “I wonder what she’ll say,” said Harriet.

  “She’ll say we’re brilliant and fantastic,” replied Nick cheerfully, as he gave a tremendous shove with the pole to start The Monarch of the Seas on her voyage. “She’ll be impressed. She likes surprises. She’ll be really pleased!”

  As she splashed her way back to the shore, Harriet thought that of all Nick’s impossible dreams this one of Kathy, surprised, flattering and delighted, was the least likely to come true.

  Aboard The Monarch of the Seas all was going exactly as Nick had planned. She travelled slowly down the coast, lurching a little from time to time but never enough to dislodge Nick from his proud stance at the helm, always with her garland of oil cans floating and bobbing around her. She stayed so close to the shore, that Harriet’s shrieks of alarm whenever Nick looked as if he might fall in, were far too audible. Not many ship’s captains are pursued by females begging them to mind the water; they could not put up with it, and neither could Nick.

  “Stop squawking!” he ordered Harriet, and when, a moment later, The Monarch of the Seas rocked violently and she squawked again, he turned his back to the shore and concentrated on the horizon. It was comfortingly far away and nautical-looking and contained no squealing girls.

  By the time The Monarch of the Seas had been afloat for half an hour, Nick was in a state of bliss. To be at sea seemed the most perfect thing in the world. He could not imagine how he had managed to spend eleven years on dry land (except for his rowing lessons on the park pond) and he promised himself that he never would again. The only thing that was not working exactly as he had planned was the clothes prop. It was not working because he did not need it. He had expected to be punting all the time and if he had not been so fortunate as to be born fearless, as well as lucky, he might have been alarmed at the way The Monarch of the Seas had assumed command of the voyage. She was not following her course because Nick was guiding her in that direction, she was following it because she was caught in the current.

  Nick did not care. He was spectacularly happy. If The Monarch of the Seas had possessed a deck worth strutting, and if it had been possible to take a foot off the planks to do so, he would undoubtedly have strutted. Since he could not do this, he sang instead. Harriet heard the words of “What shall we do with the drunken sailor?” come floating across the water and she wished she had gone aboard.

  At Porridge Hall, Charley was becoming more and more anxious. Supper was at six o’clock, sausages and blackberry tart, and Nick had missed it. His sausages were now drying up in the oven and Kathy had eaten his pudding. Nick was devoted to Kathy’s mother’s blackberry tart and when he first tasted it had earnestly begged her to make it every day. She did not do this, but she made it quite often, usually on the days when she decided Nick was reforming into a better person and she always warned him in advance that it was a blackberry tart day, to ensure that he did not lapse into disgrace during the time that it was in the oven.

  “I do hope he’s all right,” she said worriedly. “He knows what we’re having for supper. He’s never usually late.”

  “He’s been very busy making a surprise for Kathy,” said Charley looking reproachfully at Kathy, who had forced down Nick’s helping of tart with great difficulty and was now feeling very uncomfortable.

  “Can’t say I relish the prospect of any more surprises from Nick,” remarked Kathy’s father. “I’m sure I’ve aged ten years this summer! Does he behave like this at home, Charley?”

  “Like what?” asked Charley, from which Kathy’s father rightly assumed that Nick did.

  After supper was over, Kathy went upstairs to lie down and regret her rashness and Charley returned to the beach. Still there was no raft in sight, and no Harriet either, as far as he could see. Evening was coming and the long shadows of the cliffs stretched out across the sand making it difficult to see properly. After a while Charley grew tired of waiting and plodded up the beach in search of the boat-builders.

  The current that was carrying The Monarch of the Seas followed a long curve, sweeping right in, almost to the shore, before turning and streaming out to sea. Nick and his raft were now on the outward curve. He did not become aware of this until, during a pause between sea shanties, he noticed that Harriet had at last stopped shouting at him. He turned to the shore to signal his approval and that was when he found that the shore was now far away and Harriet nothing more than a little moving silhouette on the sand. Even from so far away, Nick could see that she was waving quite desperately and he was suddenly alarmed. Seizing the c
lothes prop he prepared to head for the land as quickly as possible. A moment later he discovered that he was in deep water. There was no bottom to push against and the waves clasped the pole and took it from his hands as firmly as if they had possessed it for ever.

  Empty handed and alarmed, he turned to look back at the shore. He had told Harriet that if the raft went out too far he would abandon her and swim. Now, although he was sure that he was too far out, he was much less certain that he could swim the growing stretch of water between himself and the shore. While he hesitated, the distance became wider and wider and it was soon too late to think of swimming.

  The sea was choppy this far out. At one particularly violent lurch, Nick sat down and did not stand up again. Clutching the rough planks, he gathered his courage. The tide had only just turned, it would be going out for hours and night was coming, but even so, thought Nick, who was no coward, that was no reason why The Monarch of the Seas should sink. Eventually the tide would turn again and he would come back to the shore. Harriet would raise the alarm and people would come and look for him. He knew he was born lucky, and he still hoped it might turn out to be a wonderful adventure. Kathy’s mother would save him his blackberry tart. Kathy’s father would be terribly angry, and so, too, he supposed, would his parents, but Nick was used to that. Nor was he afraid of what his reception would be at Porridge Hall. Cold and alone on that grey sea, it was very comforting to think of the inevitable hot, bright anger of Kathy’s father.

  A wave pulled out one of the nails that was holding the string of floats around the raft and an oil can detached itself and bobbed away.

  “Kathy!” her mother called up the stairs. “Go after Charley and see where they’ve got to, will you? I don’t like them out on the beach this late.”

  Kathy got up reluctantly, pulled on a jacket and set off to look for the boys. Five minutes later she caught up with Charley, who was alternately peering along the beach and gazing out to sea.

  “Mum says it’s time you were in,” Kathy told him. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you till it gets here,” said Charley. “I promised Nick.”