Chapter 12 #3
And of course what they found wasn’t a father, it was a Russian with a dog we now called Digger, and he came across them by unhappy accident.
They found their new place to be, and it must have been away down on the coast far to the south of here, a place their mother called the lizard.
It was a long jut of land you could hike to the rocky spine of and see two different seas on either side of it.
It was a much bigger version of the way they could see two bays from their old home in the orange groves.
This was a rockier place with different trees, wind-stunted things that dotted the moorland and huddled together out of the weather where the land folded itself into the creases that channelled the streams that came gurgling down off the high ridgeline.
They were happy once again, cosy in a stone-built house with a high-walled garden that hid the evidence of their cultivation from any eyes that might pass by on the empty sea below, just as effectively as the rock-bound harbour folded into the tangled cliffs hid their boat.
The village that twisted its narrow streets down to the harbour had burned a long time ago.
The girls carried on growing up flitting through the roofless shells of the houses, picking the berries that grew there in the protection of the scorched walls, or sitting in the sun tucked out of the wind and listening to their mother reading them stories or giving them lessons among the ghosts and the ruins.
The ghosts were just the stuck memories of all the generations of fishermen that had once lived there, the mother told Storm, and were not anything to be scared of.
Storm told me she wasn’t scared because she couldn’t hear them even if Freya could, and Freya wasn’t scared because she said the ghosts weren’t at all interested in the girls or their mother and only talked to each other about the past, almost as if the ghosts didn’t believe in the future the girls were living in, any more than Storm believed in them.
It wasn’t whispering that Freya heard, she told me. It was just the wind rubbing its shoulders on the old walls as it pushed past. Just the gusts of air, and the words Freya’s imagination made out of them.
They weren’t lonely the three of them, though they did miss their aunt a lot.
But they were old enough now to realise the long walks their mother took along the cliff tops were as much about hoping to see the red sailed ship as they were for watching for the family she feared was still out there searching for her somewhere.
And they were old enough when it happened.
Old enough for their monthly blood to have come in and become a habit they had stopped noticing.
Old enough to go rambling away from their home, looking for things by themselves.
Old enough even to stay away for nights camped out beneath the stars, or under the roofs of the more trustworthy derelict buildings they found themselves near at close of day.
That seemed odd to me, that their mother would let them go off alone, given all the accidents and bad luck that might happen to them.
No, said Storm. Not odd. Clever. She was teaching us how to be alone in the world, because one day she knew she wouldn’t be there. Except she cheated, although she didn’t tell us till much later.
We were sitting on the roof of the Tower when Storm told me this.
I remember her smiling as she talked, and maybe I remember because –like Cat – she didn’t smile easily, and this was one of the times she did, smile with her eyes fixed on the horizon to the south as if she could see all the way across the hills and valleys and forests to the coast and the harbour still twisted into the fold in the cliffs where all this had happened.
She admitted that she let us go, thinking we were on our own, and then followed secretly, tracking us as we went in case we got into difficulties, Storm said.
She did that a few times. And she only made herself stop following us when she saw that we didn’t do stupid things or get into any trouble.
And we didn’t. We weren’t the ones who found trouble or anything we couldn’t escape. She was.
The way Storm told it, it went like this: She and Freya had been away for three days and were in a hurry to get home because the only rule was you never stayed away longer than you’d said you would, because then worrying would start and they didn’t want to upset their mother.
They were excited because they found a house built into the side of a hill with big windows looking out at the moorland, and inside there was a lot of useful stuff that no one had taken in the long-ago when there were still lots of old people but not enough new things being made for them any more.
There were waterproofs that seemed unworn in special packaging, clean and unrotted, there was a big room full of tools, including a huge telescope that they were carrying back to show her, so she could see the moon close up, as they had done the night before.
They’d stayed up late with it, looking at all the lines and craters that distance had always hidden from them.
They knew she wouldn’t see her sister looking back at them any more than they had, but they thought she would be as delighted as they had been to look through the telescope and see the depth of space and the infinite fields of stars stacked up behind the familiar lights of the normal night sky.
They tied the telescope to a pole and carried it between them, figuring that the effort of bringing it all those miles was more than worth it for the smile it would conjure from their mother’s face.
I think remembering that view of the moon and the unseen stars was what made her like coming up on top of the Tower and stargazing with me.
Or maybe she just liked getting out of the Bunker some nights, like I did when it all got too atmosphere-y.
Anyway, Freya was leading when we came over the ridge, Storm said. And at first I was angry when she dropped her end of the pole and started running for the house because she’d damaged it after we’d carried it so far.