The Amber Cat

by Hilary McKay

  “Until what gets here?” demanded Kathy.

  “I don’t know how fast they go,” said Charley, ignoring Kathy’s question. “It’s taking much longer than I thought.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Kathy crossly. “How fast what go? Not another horse?”

  “Rafts,” said Charley, unhappily.

  “Rafts?” asked Kathy. “What rafts?”

  “Nick’s raft,” said Charley.

  “Charley!” exclaimed Kathy. “Are you telling me Nick has got a raft?”

  “He’s been making one with Harriet,” confessed Charley. “I thought we ought to tell you and so did Harriet, but Nick wanted to keep it for a surprise. He’ll be furious with me for telling you.”

  Kathy stared at him in horror. “Where is this raft?” she asked.

  “Out there,” replied Charley, waving his hand vaguely at a hundred miles of ocean. “He’s sailing it down this afternoon.”

  “He couldn’t be so stupid!” exclaimed Kathy.

  “Harriet was going to come and tell me when he was nearly here, so that I could fetch you.”

  “Harriet!” repeated Kathy, too shocked for a moment to do more than echo, and suddenly in the distance Harriet appeared. Even in the fading light and from so far away they could see that she was in distress. When she saw them, she waved and waved and pointed to the horizon and Kathy, following the direction of her arm, suddenly saw a small dark shape in the water, far out to sea, appearing and disappearing as the waves rose and fell.

  “That can’t be him!” she exclaimed. “Look, Charley! Right out there! But it can’t be!”

  “I can’t see anything,” said Charley, after peering desperately out at the grey water. “I never can see as well as you. Do you really think it’s Nick?”

  “It must be,” replied Kathy. “Charley! Go and find my dad! Tell him Nick’s got a raft and is out at sea and Kathy is watching it from the shore. Go now! And run!”

  Charley heard the frantic note in her voice and turned and ran. That was how he was not there when Harriet met Kathy and explained (between sobs) how Nick had taken the raft they had built and gone out to sea on a falling tide (“Because I dared him,” admitted Harriet in shame), and had ignored her shouts and drifted out further and further (“Singing,” said Harriet) until the raft gave a sudden lurch and he disappeared from view.

  “So I waited and waited,” said Harriet, “because he said he would swim, but he never came … can you still see the raft?”

  “Yes,” said Kathy, who had not taken her eyes from the sea all the time that Harriet had been speaking.

  “Can you see Nick?”

  “No. I can just see a bit of black that I think might be the raft.”

  Harriet sobbed.

  “Don’t!” said Kathy, reaching out a hand but still not daring to turn aside to hug her.

  “I should have stopped him building it,” said Harriet, sobbing worse than ever. “I shouldn’t have helped. I should have told you. I wish I hadn’t said he was scared.”

  “Dad will telephone the coastguard and he has a friend who keeps a motor boat round at the harbour,” said Kathy, trying very hard not to sound furious with Harriet.

  “Can you still see the raft?”

  “Not now. I thought I did a minute ago.”

  “Poor Nick,” sobbed Harriet. “I’m sure he’ll drown. He thought you’d be so pleased.”

  “If you make me cry, I can’t look.”

  Harriet said no more, but her sobs grew worse than ever; so bad that Kathy had to blink her eyes and rub them and blink again. Harriet saw what she was doing and turned suddenly and fled.

  Charley passed her as she ran weeping along the beach and called, “Harriet! Harriet! Come back, Harriet!” but she did not stop.

  “Kathy!” panted Charley, arriving breathless at her side. “It’s all right! Your dad rang the coastguard and they said they’d send a boat straight away and now he’s calling his friend, who he thinks might be nearer and will get here sooner, and your mum’s coming as soon as she finds the field-glasses and she said to try and keep your eyes on the place you last saw him. Why did Harriet run away? She was crying.”

  “She thinks it’s her fault.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It is, partly,” said Kathy, “but it’s much more Nick’s.”

  “Don’t let’s get Harriet into trouble,” pleaded Charley, and Kathy nodded in agreement.

  A moment later, Kathy’s mother arrived with the binoculars and after having focused them where Kathy directed, sighed with relief and offered them to her daughter.

  “I saw him quite clearly! I could see him waving!” she told them thankfully. “Kathy! Whatever is the matter? Kathy, darling! Charley! Not you as well!”

  Overwhelmed with a mixture of anger and relief, Kathy had collapsed into tears and Charley was not long to follow.

  “Stop it, both of you!” commanded Kathy’s mother. “Here come the boats! He’ll be all right now. At least,” she added, suddenly furious herself now that the danger was over, “he’ll be all right until I get my hands on him!”

  Chapter Ten

  Nick was safe, tucked up in bed with hugs and hot drinks and now fast asleep. Kathy’s father sat beside him, partly in case he woke suddenly and was afraid, but mostly because he did not trust Nick out of his sight. In the morning the boys’ parents would be coming to collect them. Kathy’s father had telephoned Nick’s father and told him that enough was enough.

  “We’ll always be glad to see him once you get moved into your house up here,” he had said, “but I can’t be responsible any longer!”

  Nick’s father said ruefully that he quite understood.

  Downstairs, the kitchen was full of people. There was the coastguard (now off duty), the doctor who had arrived to check Nick over, friends and neighbours and Kathy’s mother, all drinking tea and talking together. Although it was nearly midnight, nobody had thought to send Kathy and Charley to bed. They hung around, listening to the conversation.

  “He’s not the first to do it and he won’t be the last,” remarked the coastguard. “Holidaymakers! Let’s hope he learns a bit more sense when he comes to live here! I shall tell him I’m not fishing him out twice! That raft was about gone when we got to him. He must have been born lucky!”

  “He was,” said Charley.

  “Hello!” said the coastguard, noticing Charley for the first time. “Who are you? One of the boat-builders?”

  “Nick’s my brother,” Charley told him. “I didn’t help build the raft, though. Harriet did.”

  “Harriet?” someone asked.

  “Some girl they’ve been talking about all summer,” explained Kathy’s mother. “Was she with you, Kathy? Did anyone see that she got safe home?”

  Kathy, who in the relief of getting Nick back safely had completely forgotten Harriet, blushed a guilty red and admitted that she did not know.

  “She was crying and she ran away,” said Charley.

  “Poor little soul!” exclaimed someone. “Somebody ought to check she got home all right.”

  “Where is her home?” asked Kathy’s mother.

  “Summerhill,” said Charley.

  “Summerhill? That old ruin?” asked somebody else, amazed.

  “Summerhill?” repeated the coastguard. “Harriet from Summerhill?”

  Charley nodded.

  “And when did you find out about Harriet from Summerhill?” demanded the coastguard.

  “What do you mean?” asked Charley. “We’ve known about her all summer. We’ve been playing with her. Do you know her, too?”

  “I knew Harriet,” said the coastguard. “I knew her fifty years ago, when I was a boy …”

  “How could you?” asked Kathy, but the coastguard continued, not noticing the question.

  “I remember when they told us she’d died of measles at that school they sent her to, as clear as if it was yesterday. And if you’ve been making a game of her name
all summer, I tell you straight, I don’t think much of that!”

  Kathy and Charley stared at him, speechless, while their world reeled around them.

  “Raft-building is mischief and nothing worse,” he continued. “That other is meddling and I don’t like it and I wish you goodnight.”

  People were nodding in agreement and looking at Kathy and Charley with something that might almost have been dislike. The coastguard collected himself together and stood up to go home and it seemed to be a signal for the room to begin to empty.

  “Oh,” said Robin.

  “Yes. Oh,” agreed his mother, “but you’d guessed, anyway. You guessed a long time ago.”

  “I remembered the little stone in the churchyard, by the wall,” explained Robin. “The one with the sea shells on it. That belongs to a Harriet. But it’s very old.”

  “Nearly eighty years old,” replied his mother. “People have always noticed it, because of the sea shells, I suppose.”

  “What happened next? Did you tell everyone?”

  “No,” said Mrs Brogan. “And nobody mentioned it again. My father came down and sent us to bed. It had been too much of a day. We were tired out and confused and startled and I don’t know what.”

  “Frightened?” asked Robin.

  “Very frightened,” said his mother. “At least, I was anyway. We didn’t doubt for a moment that our Harriet was the coastguard’s Harriet. Charley came tiptoeing into my room that night and said, ‘She’ll never come back. I know she won’t’.”

  “Good,” said Kathy, shakily.

  “Poor, poor Harriet,” continued Charley. “She was crying. I saw her. She thought Nick would drown and that it was her fault. She doesn’t know that he’s all right.”

  “What does it matter now?” asked Kathy, wearily.

  “Of course it matters,” said Charley. “Where do you think she went?”

  “Please don’t talk about her,” begged Kathy.

  “I think she must have gone back to the cave,” said Charley. “Her special place. I bet she’s there now.”

  “Don’t,” said Kathy. “I’m never going there again.”

  “She’ll be miserable,” said Charley, “and she won’t have come out to see Nick rescued, even if she could see that far round the coast from the cave. She wouldn’t want anyone else to see her. And there was a moon up by then. It’s very bright tonight.”

  He paused, hugging his knees and staring thoughtfully at the moonlit square of window. He was silent for so long that Kathy decided that he had gone to sleep but he roused himself before she could speak and said, “We ought to go and tell her.”

  “WHAT!” exclaimed Kathy.

  “Tell her,” repeated Charley, “that Nick’s quite safe and all right, so she stops worrying. I can’t bear to think of her being sad.”

  “Charley!” said Kathy, appalled.

  “I’m going,” said Charley. “I’m going now, before I get scared. Will you come with me?”

  “Did you?” asked Robin.

  “No,” said Mrs Brogan.

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. He went that night. He slipped out of the house and ran down the beach …”

  Charley’s brave heart failed him at the final barrier of rocks before Harriet’s cave. The whole moonlit beach seemed to be silent and listening. Even the sea, once more moving inwards with the tide, made no noise except for a sound like an intake of breath, a small, regular, stifled gasp of regret. Charley had intended to go right up to the cave but he found that he could not. Instead he shouted, “Harriet!”

  His voice was louder than the whole, dark, breathing night. It gave him courage.

  “It’s all right, Harriet!” he called. “Nick’s back. He’s in bed asleep. He’s quite all right.”

  The silence was even greater than before.

  “It wasn’t a bit your fault,” called Charley, suddenly forgetting his fear in his desire to comfort his friend. “Kathy knows it wasn’t. You mustn’t worry. Nick’s always getting into trouble.”

  There was no reply. Charley had not expected any. He knew that he would never see or hear Harriet again. She would not return to terrify anyone, especially not somebody who had loved her.

  “Harriet!” called Charley for the last time. “Nick was born lucky! You need never worry about Nick! And Kathy will be all right, if Nick’s all right. And thank you for teaching me cricket!”

  Suddenly Charley was tired. Overwhelmingly, light-headedly exhausted. The next morning when he told Kathy his story, he could not remember saying goodbye, or climbing down from the rocks, or walking home. He could not remember how he found his own bed, but he did find it and clambered in and fell asleep, and awoke in the morning almost perfectly happy.

  “And that’s why I don’t like rafts!” said Mrs Brogan.

  “And that is a private story for you. Not for Dan or Perry and the rest, and definitely not for Sun Dance!”

  “All right,” said Robin.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. But I don’t think they would be scared. I’m sure Sun Dance wouldn’t be, anyway. Just think of the Swim Man and Ningsy and Dead Cat and The Lady! And now he knows what’s under the stairs as well!”

  “What?” asked Mrs Brogan.

  “Dark,” said Robin. “He says you told him. He calls it ‘The Dark’. He talks to it through the door. ‘Dark!’ he says, ‘I know you’re in there!’ It sounds awful!”

  Chapter Eleven

  There was a cheerfulness spreading through Porridge Hall. It had begun with the letter from Charley that had set off Mrs Brogan’s memories of the summer when she and Harriet and Nick had all been eleven years old together. Remembering that time and telling Robin about it had brought Robin’s father back into the home again. First Mrs Brogan and then gradually Robin had begun to remember not just that Nick was dead, but also that he had been alive, born lucky, had sung down the chimney, built a raft and drifted out to sea, been rescued (very wet and cold but not noticeably subdued), and had continued in this reckless, cheerful, stubborn, kind-hearted way of life until the terrible day when he had suddenly left it.

  “For ever and ever,” Robin had supposed, until very recently. Lately he had begun to realize that in real life stories do not end so neatly. Nick’s story had become part of his own, and his own was part of all sorts of others, his mother’s and Sun Dance’s and Dan’s, whose father had been Robin’s father’s best friend.

  All linked together, thought Robin. His own links went back and back, back to Harriet who had helped his father build a raft …

  “Once is enough!” his mother had said, referring to Robin’s own raft and Robin thought that if Harriet and Nick hadn’t built theirs, then his might have been the first. He and Dan might have set sail. Then what? thought Robin.

  Dan had not cared what they built. A tree house was just as good as a raft to him. All he wanted was an excuse to trim planks and drill holes and bang in nails.

  “Don’t think Dad would ever have stood for a raft, anyway,” he remarked to Robin.

  “I told Mum,” said Robin. “She went mad!”

  Dan, who was unscrewing an over-tight drill bit with his teeth, could only give an enquiring grunt.

  “She said she’d watched one raft drift out to sea and once was enough,” Robin told him.

  “I know about that,” remarked Dan. “My dad told me. He remembered it happening. That’s how I knew he’d never stand knowing I was building a raft. This drill has got itself jammed. Pass me the hammer!”

  Robin passed him the hammer, Dan gave his father’s brace-and-bit a tremendous clout and the jammed part came loose and clattered to the ground in two pieces.

  “That’s bust it!” said Robin. “What’ll your dad say?”

  “He won’t mind,” said Dan. “It’s only a drill bit, I’ll get him another for Christmas. I was trying to think of something he needed. Did your mum really like that tree?”

  “She loved it,” replied Robin. “Sh
e’s keeping it outside until Charley comes and then we’re going to bring it in and decorate it.”

  “Bet that Charley wasn’t on the raft with Nick, was he?” asked Dan.

  “No,” said Robin.

  “Too wet!” commented Dan and was slightly surprised when Robin did not immediately agree.

  The day before Charley was due to arrive, the weather changed. For ages and ages it had been icy, either freezing and wet or freezing and dry, but always numbingly, achingly cold. Now, suddenly, the wind changed, the sun came out, and the air became as sweet and warm as spring. Mrs Brogan celebrated by abandoning the housework and taking Friday for a walk instead, and because it was such a brave, cheerful morning she set off in a direction that she had not taken for twenty-seven years.

  Which I’m sure Dan would call soft! she thought, pausing for a moment to admire his Christmas tree. Not that I’m certain he ever really believed in the cave anyway, or Robin either, for that matter. And she remembered again their puzzled faces as she had described it to them.

  But it can’t have disappeared, she told herself. I know Sun Dance thinks I’m ancient, but it wasn’t really all that long ago. I can’t believe it has gone completely.

  It had not gone at all. Mrs Brogan scrambled over the rocks that separated the sandy outer beach from the shelly inside one and immediately saw it, looking exactly as she had remembered it. It was still a special place, solid, secret, bright with morning sunlight and not at all frightening. Friday, who always explored every step of every walk as if it was the first in a new country, dashed recklessly inside and Mrs Brogan followed and there on the wall in front of her was the list of names they had carved.

  Nick was highest, enormous, confident letters sprawled across far more than their fair share of smooth rock and slightly squashing Mrs Brogan’s own name, which came underneath. It had a distinctly spiky look about it, being all straight lines and chopped out of the wall by Kathy in rather a temper. Beneath Kathy came Charley’s scratchy signature and then Harriet, cut carefully and deeply into the rock.