Chapter Fourteen
“What is that?” I ask on Saturday, staring down at the car that’s parked up on the pavement outside Beryl’s.
“It’s a Mini Cooper,” he says. It’s a vintage Mini, it’s blue and rusted, and the longer I look at it, the smaller and less reliable it looks.
“No,” I say, stepping back and shaking my head. I’d expected that Bastian would be borrowing his dad’s car, something sleek and silver with a new-car smell.
“No what?”
“No, I’m not getting in that death trap!” I exclaim, bending down to look in the tattered interior. “Couldn’t your dad buy you a car that won’t crumple like a soup can on impact?”
I see from the taut look on his face that I’ve said completely the wrong thing.
“It’s Mum’s,” he says.
“Ah.” Once again, my verbal diarrhea has got the better of me. Out of respect to his totally understandable sentimentality, I gingerly open the door. “Well. It’s cute. In a kind of deadly way.”
Bastian smiles gratefully.
“I’m a very safe driver. Only one minor correction on my test.” Bastian raises an eyebrow at me and then folds himself into the driver’s seat. It’s quite comical, really, because he’s so tall.
“You look like a clown getting into a clown car,” I say.
“I’m not sure you’re in the position to be calling someone a clown.” Bastian looks significantly at my rainbow jumper and the ridiculous jeans I embroidered myself. I feel so much better about my form now I’m wearing a binder again.
“Hey, this is the queer joy on display.” I spread my arms wide and do a spin. When I look at him again, he’s smiling and it’s almost fond. I try, very hard, to feel nothing.
“Queer sarcasm, more like,” Bastian says with a laugh, leaning over and throwing open the passenger door. “Come on.”
I reluctantly climb in beside him, putting my backpack down in the footwell.
I buckle myself in and instantly wish for one of those massive harnesses that descends down over your shoulders on the Smiler roller coaster at Alton Towers.
I brace myself as Bastian puts it in gear with a crunch and we shudder toward the motorway, following the signs for Blackpool.
The rain that has been pouring in Manchester since Thursday, alternating between horrendous downpour and bone-chilling drizzle, has stopped for a rare moment.
As we bomb up the M60, everything is damp and shiny, a glittering Saturday, the light reflecting off puddles in the road.
High above the Trafford Centre and the M60 bridge and spinning out over the far hills of north Manchester, the sun is low and the clouds scattered and misty, as ragged as an old pair of trousers.
It’s all so fresh and beautiful and I’m going on an adventure, so suddenly I’m filled with an unusual inexplicable delight at the world.
“So are we driving straight to the town?” I ask.
“Yep, we need to head to the beach at Lytham St. Annes.” My stomach contracts and I try to nod in an inconspicuous way. “It’s one of the beaches there where they reckon Kilgrimol sunk.”
I nod. I remember the legend that was told to me, growing up staring at the wide Irish Sea every morning.
I remember the tolling bell that would drift, forgotten, off the sea on moonless nights, the sunken church steeple still making its haunted music.
Bastian keeps talking, explaining, because of course he has no way to know that we’re driving toward my hometown.
Why should I tell him? I think to myself. It’s not any of his business.
“Apparently it was swallowed up by the sea but still makes its presence known. People hear bells and singing and find bones, all the classic haunted underwater town stuff.”
I nod like this is fascinating and pull out my phone, surreptitiously beginning to check my emails, searching for any from SouthernsConsulting@. I see one, sent two weeks ago, with the subject heading: Paris in October. I breathe a sigh of relief. They won’t be there.
“And we need to find a bone?” I say, tucking my phone away. “What, do we just pick up one of those sandcastle-making kits and start shoveling?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, I have a plan in mind,” Bastian says, ignoring the person who is honking their horn violently behind him as he drives at sixty in the middle lane.
“What?”
“I’ve got it under control, don’t worry,” he says with a grin.
I smile back tightly and try to relax my shoulders.
My parents are in Paris, I tell myself. They won’t be there.
No one needs to know. It doesn’t quite work, so I take out The Witchlore of Bodies and pick up again on the part I reached the night before. Bastian looks at me in horror.
“You brought it with you?”
“Yeah, I’m reading the diary, it’s interesting.”
“It’s an ancient magical grimoire and you’ve just been carrying it around?” Bastian swears as he swerves the car, tearing his eyes away from the grimoire and fixing them back on the road.
“It’s fine, I keep it wrapped in a plastic bag.”
“You’re meant to be keeping it safe!”
“It is safe with me!” I can’t explain to Bastian why I feel itchy whenever I consider leaving the grimoire under my bed, but I know that if I had left it behind today, I would have been worrying about it at the back of my mind.
“I live in a house full of witches, Bastian. This way I make sure no one nicks it.”
His jaw is ticking and his lips are pursed in anger. I can tell I’m not getting him on board so I decide to change tactic.
“Look, what if we need it for something to do with the spell? Doesn’t it feel right that we have the grimoire with us when we’re finding the essential components? I mean, isn’t that what everyone says you should do with complicated gramarye? You wouldn’t go shopping without the recipe, would you?”
“I suppose.”
This is what we’re all taught in class and I can see Bastian is swayed by it. I don’t tell him the truth: that to me, doing this without the grimoire feels wrong, as if I’m leaving someone important out of a conversation.
“And look, it’s really interesting reading, too. This is from the First World War, listen—” I shuffle the book on my lap and read aloud:
Father wants me to shift into a female form now that war has broken out, but I don’t know how I could stand to lie to the lads here who are joining up.
Lots of them are my friends, I saw them grow up, some of them marched with us and supported Mrs. Pankhurst’s cause.
I can’t let them go alone. There are terrible things happening in the world and it is my job to do my part, to speak up, to help where I can help. If I do not, what is there?
“So they weren’t into traditional gender stuff?” Bastian muses. “That seems unusual for the time period and for everything you’ve told me about shapeshifting culture.”
“Yeah, it is.” The thought of it makes me happy. “I get the impression they liked to shun shifter expectations.”
“Kind of like you.” Bastian grins. It’s not a sarcastic smile or a wry smirk. It’s genuine. I want to bat it off, to say something funny, but the words stick in my throat. I flush, even though I don’t want to, and fix my gaze out the window so I don’t have to look at that smile anymore.
“Thanks,” I say quietly. I open my phone and find my photos of Elizabeth. I stare into her face and think about how good it will be when I have her back and how this tiny, fluttery feeling I have when Bastian compliments me will fade, it’ll become nothing, when she’s back in my arms.
As soon as we get out of the car and smell the salty air, I realize this was a bad idea. The sound of wheeling gulls immediately takes me back to my childhood: tuning into the sound of their mournful voices to ignore whatever recriminations my parents were shouting at me, shame curdling inside.
Stop it, I tell myself. They’re in Paris.
If Bastian notices me withdrawing into myself, he doesn’t say anything as he pays for parking and I follow him mutely into my childhood town.
“So this is Lytham St. Annes,” Bastian says, as we walk down the high street and past NatWest, the small pretty houses with their pointed roofs and the traditional shop fronts—the greengrocer, the fishmonger—with their green Victorian awnings on either side. “Seems like every other seaside town.”
“Seems like it.” I keep my voice light, attempting to hide the truth that I am holding my breath, hoping we don’t run into anyone who could recognize me.
Then, with a jolt, I realize that no one ever recognizes me.
A sharp, bitter wind is blowing off the sea and down the high street, pressing against us.
In the offseason, it has that sleepy, neglected feeling, as if the closed-up pastel-colored beach huts are props for a show that hasn’t started yet.
All the seaside accoutrements that usually hang from awnings, the aqua-blue and hot-pink inflatables and bodyboards in primary colors, are gone, and the residents and shoppers are dressed in heavy coats with umbrellas hanging on their arms. Some of them glance at us a little suspiciously, all eyes fixing on Bastian’s face and then darting over my eccentric clothes that scream “gay as hell” at the top of their lungs.
We’re attracting a lot of “you’re not from around here” kind of looks and it makes me want to run back to Manchester.
Bastian’s shoulders are so tense they’re practically up by his ears.
He catches my nervous gaze, his gait deliberately slowing down.
“You okay?” I ask quietly.
“I grew up in rural Cornwall,” he says with a tight smile. “This is nothing.”
“Okay.” I nod, trying to ignore a couple who have walked past us and turned their heads back to stare. Bastian’s back is rigid but he doesn’t acknowledge them, glancing curiously down the road.
“I wonder if anything interesting happened here,” Bastian muses, his casual tone hiding any discomfort he feels.
“You mean apart from the drowned town?”