Ingo (11 page)

“But I want to go,” I say.

“I know you do. Believe me, Sapphire, I know how much you want to go. I can feel it in you.” Granny Carne reaches forward and grasps my wrist. Her hand is strong and warm. “I can feel it running in you. But we lost the first Mathew…and then your father…and now who knows what’s going to happen? The story’s not ended yet. There’s a pattern, and it’s got to work itself out. Ingo’s growing strong. We’ll have fish from the sea swimming up the stream to my cottage next. But that’s not right. If Ingo breaks its bounds, then Earth will break its bounds. Ingo should stay in its place, and then I can stay in mine.”

She stands tall and stern. Her voice is a voice I have never heard from her before. Deep and powerful and not caring about anything but saying what it wants to say.

If Ingo breaks its bounds.
I don’t understand what she means. The sea comes in to the high-tide mark, but no farther. The cove fills with water, and then it empties again. That’s what has always happened, so how can it change?

Granny Carne is standing between me and the sea. She’s stopping me from getting to it. She’s planted in my way like a tree or a rock. Suddenly I’m sure that if I can only get to the other side of Granny Carne, I’ll hear the sea singing again. Her body is blocking out the music of
Ingo. I know it, and she knows it too. She’s standing there on purpose.

“You’ll have heard about the other Mathew Trewhella,” Granny Carne goes on. “The first one. He was a fine man. Handsome as a prince, and he sang in the church choir. People used to say that he had a voice like an angel. You know the nonsense people talk. One person says it, and then they’re all repeating it. But it’s true that he had a fine voice. Your father’s voice is the only one I’ve known that ever matched the first Mathew Trewhella’s.”

I feel as if an electric current’s flowing through Granny Carne’s hand and into my wrist. It’s the same story, the story Dad told me when we were in the church years ago. The mermaid, the wooden mermaid they slashed with a knife. Here she is again.

Granny Carne won’t let go of me. Her voice rises louder. “But of course the story got told wrong over the years,” she goes on. “Stories get mixed up as they’re passed from mouth to mouth, down the years. It wasn’t just one mermaid that enchanted Mathew Trewhella. He fell in love with Ingo. It was Ingo that captured him. Mer…Mare…Meor…Ingo…That’s what took Mathew from his friends and family. And he’s never returned in all this time.”

Why are you telling me all this?
I think fiercely, trying to resist the current of Granny Carne’s story.
You’re trying to stop me from going to Ingo. You’re trying to frighten me.

“You mean—are you talking about the Mathew Trewhella in the old story?” asks Conor in a strange, doubting voice.

“Yes, the first Mathew Trewhella. I’m going back a way now.” Granny Carne’s face is stern. She looks as if the things she’s remembering aren’t easy or peaceful.

Conor asks no more questions. He takes hold of my other hand, which is something he never does, and keeps it in a firm grip. And then he touches Granny Carne’s arm, so that the three of us are joined together in a circle. Earthed. The lane smells of dust and blackberries. I don’t want to get to the other side of Granny Carne anymore. I only want to stay here, safe with her and Conor, with the sun warm on us.

Granny Carne’s brown face creases into a smile. She likes Conor, I know that. And Conor likes her. Like,
like
—do I really mean that? No, it’s not that Conor
likes
Granny Carne. It’s that Conor is
like
Granny Carne.

But how can that be? Granny Carne’s as old as the hills. Conor’s my brother. She’s tall and wrinkled and strange, and when Dad said she was full of Earth magic, it wasn’t hard to believe him. Conor’s just a normal boy. But all the same, they are two of a kind.

The circle holds. It seems like a long, long time that we stand there, the three of us, but probably it’s only a few seconds. And then a dog barks. I glance up quickly, because it sounds like Sadie. What’s Sadie doing down here?

Yes, it
is
Sadie! She races down the track toward me and skids to a halt on her front paws, looking pleased with herself. I run to her, kneel down, put my arms round her neck, and rub my cheek against her face. She’s quivering all over with excitement, and her coat is hot from the sun.

“Sadie, what are you
doing
down here? Did you come all on your own? You bad girl, stravaiging over the countryside, you’ll get hit by a car.”

But Sadie doesn’t care. She’s panting from her long run and wriggling with the pleasure of finding us. She’s done it on her own, clever Sadie, finding our scent in the middle of all the other smells of cows and foxes and chickens and cars. The world of smells is like a library with a million books in it, for Sadie.

“Good girl, clever girl, now take it easy; you’ve been racing much too fast in this hot sun.” I give her one last hug and then stand up, slipping my hand through her collar in case she runs off again. She presses against my legs, looking up with her intelligent brown eyes and giving short, sharp little barks.

“We must take her home,” says Conor.

Suddenly I realize that Conor and I are alone with Sadie. Granny Carne’s gone. When did she go? Conor shrugs. “You know what she’s like.”

“Sadie, come on, Sadie girl, let’s go on up to the cottage, and I’ll find something for a lead, and then we’re going for a long walk, all the way back home. They’ll be
worrying about you. They’ll be wondering where you are.”

Sadie bows her head consideringly. She loves the word “walk,” but it’s still the end of her freedom, and she knows it.

“And we’ll get you a bowl of water. It’s uphill all the way back; you’re going to need a drink.”

We walk on up to our cottage, Sadie close at my side and Conor behind.

I’m so hungry. Why ever didn’t I eat those sausages? If Conor calls Jack to tell him we’ve got Sadie, we can eat before we walk her up to the farm. What food have we got? I bring up a mental picture of the fridge’s contents. There’s spaghetti sauce, and half a tub of chocolate and pecan ice cream, a bag of peaches Mum brought back—

Suddenly Sadie stops dead. Her rear legs are stiff; her body quivers. Her head goes up, pointing toward the sea. She whines, deep in her throat, then lets out a volley of barks.

“What is it, Sadie? What can you hear?”

“Whatever it is, she doesn’t like it,” says Conor. “Hold on to her.”

I grasp her collar with both hands. She’s rigid, trembling. She’s not trying to escape; she’s flattening herself against me. She’s scared.

“It’s all right, Sadie, come on, girl. Come on in the house.”

Sadie shivers and backs away, pulling me with her. She whines and stares at me as if asking why I’m not hearing what she hears.

I can’t hear anything. I’m not going to hear anything. I put my hands over my ears. Stop it, stop it. I’m not listening. I can’t hear anything.
Chocolate and pecan ice cream, spaghetti, chocolate and pecan ice cream, spaghetti, CHOCOLATE AND PEC—

“Saph, why’ve you got your hands over your ears?”

“Quick, Con, Sadie’s going crazy. Open the door; let’s get her in the house.”

We’re in. Sadie races around the kitchen, her claws skittering on the tiles. Suddenly she’s just a dog going wild, and I’m just a girl trying to stop her. Calm down, Sapphire, and stop imagining things. You’re home.

I
HATE SAYING GOOD-BYE TO
Sadie. I kneel down beside her, and she pushes her head against me. Her funny folding-down right ear has grown straighter as she’s grown older, but if you look closely, you can see it’s not the same as her left ear. I stroke her ears gently, the way she likes it.

“It’s a blessing you two found her,” says Jack’s mum. “Jack won’t be back till late, and I’ve got people arriving for bed and breakfast, so I couldn’t have gone looking for her.”

Sadie whines and presses against me again. She doesn’t want me to leave. Jack’s mum bends down to pat her, but Sadie takes no notice.

“You’d think she was yours, the way she carries on. Or else you were hers. Sometimes I think dogs know who
they ought to belong to,” says Jack’s mum.

“We should get back,” Conor says quickly. “Come on, Saph.”

“Why did you drag me away like that?” I complain as we set off for home. “Jack’s mum was being really nice. She’s made loads of scones for the bed and breakfast people too. I saw them on the table. If we’d stayed, she might have given us a cream tea.”

“We need to get home. You shouldn’t be outside. It’s not safe.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s calling you, isn’t it?”

“What’s calling me?” I know the answer, but I’m going to make Conor say it.

“You know.” He looks around and lowers his voice. “
Ingo.
Saph, were you listening to what Granny Carne said?”

“Of course I was.”

“All that stuff about the first Mathew Trewhella. Granny Carne was talking as if she’d known him.”

“Well, maybe she did,” I answer vaguely. I’m still thinking about Sadie. Maybe she
is
meant to be my dog. Maybe it’s really going to happen one day. Mum’s going to change her mind—

“Wake up, Saph! How can Granny Carne have known someone who lived hundreds of years ago? It’s crazy.”

“Then why are you so bothered about it?”

“I can’t believe you’re so thick sometimes, Saph. What I want to know is
why
Granny Carne was talking about the first Mathew Trewhella. And why Ingo’s growing strong. If it’s all got something to do with Dad, then we’ve got to find out more.”

I hear the echo of Dad’s voice in the dark church long ago. I remember my own fingers tracing the outline of the wooden mermaid’s tail. I feel the gashes cut into the carving.

“The mermaid enchanted him,” says Conor. “She pulled him out of the church choir, down the lane, and down the stream that runs to Pendour Cove. He never came back. People said that years later you could stand on Zennor Head and hear him sing his Mer children to sleep.”

“It’s only a story,” I say. “It can’t have really happened like that. And Granny Carne can’t possibly have known the first Mathew Trewhella.”

“But you heard what she said,” says Conor. “About his singing and everything. Just as if she’d heard him herself. Do you remember how Dad always used to say Granny Carne had never been any younger than she is now? Never any younger and never any different. Maybe she
does
remember.”

“You mean you think she’s hundreds of years old?”

“I don’t know. It sounds impossible when you say it
like that. But when you’re with her, don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“Her power,” says Conor slowly. “That’s why I want to know why she’s talking to us. I think she wants us to do something.”

“Or not do something,” I mutter, remembering how Granny Carne’s force barred the way to the sea.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I say.

It’s dark inside our cottage, after the brightness of the day. Conor goes around shutting the windows, locking the back door, which we never normally lock. I watch him without saying anything. I’m trying to remember everything I can about the story Dad told me, long ago, about the man who vanished with a mermaid and who had the same name as him.

“Conor,” I say at last, “time doesn’t work like that. One person can’t live for hundreds of years.”

“I don’t know…. Time in Ingo isn’t like time here, is it? Maybe there are all kinds of time, living alongside each other, but usually we only experience one of them. Granny Carne might be living in her own time, and it might be quite different from ours. Think of the way oak trees live for a thousand years.”

“Earth time,” I say, not really knowing why I say it.

“Yes. If she’s got Earth magic, then she could be living in Earth time. And Faro and Elvira are living in Ingo
time. So what are we living in?”

“I don’t know. Real time? Human time?”

“They’re all real. But human time? Yeah, could be. So let’s say there’s Earth time and Ingo time and human time, that’s three kinds of time already, and there could be more.”

“Ant time, butterfly time, planet time, cream tea time—”

“I’m not messing around, Saph. Wait a minute. Look at Ingo time. I don’t think Ingo time is fixed against ours. It’s not like one year of Ingo time equals five years of human time or whatever. It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes Ingo time seems to run at nearly the same pace as ours, but sometimes it’s quite different…almost like water flowing faster or more slowly, depending on whether it’s running downhill or along a flat surface—yes, maybe that’s it, something to do with the angle of Ingo time to human time—”

I switch off. Conor will go on like this for hours once he gets going. That’s why he’s so good at mathematics.

Josie Sancreed’s jeering face comes into my mind. “I wonder what they
really
said when that first Mathew Trewhella disappeared,” I say. Were there people like Josie living then? Probably.

“I bet they said he’d gone off with another woman,” says Conor. His face is hard. “Just like they say about Dad.”

So Conor knows.

“Did you hear about what Josie said to me, Conor?”

“It’s what everyone says behind our backs. Josie said it to your face; that’s the only difference.”

“But Dad hasn’t gone off with another woman! He hasn’t gone off with anyone. He would never do that to us.”

“Maybe not.”

“You
know
he hasn’t, Conor,” I say angrily. Conor has got to believe in Dad. We’re a
family
. Me and Conor and Dad and Mum.

Me and Conor and Mum.

“I don’t know anything anymore,” says Conor. He shrugs. “Sorry, Saph. Everything’s upside down and inside out today.”

It’s so rare for Conor to have doubts about anything that I don’t know what to say. Conor’s my big brother, the one who knows things. If
he
doesn’t know where he is, then where am I?

“It’ll be okay,” I say doubtfully. “Maybe Granny Carne just likes telling old stories because she’s old.”

“She told us about that first Mathew Trewhella for a reason,” says Conor, in the same way as he’s always explained things to me, like who is in which gang at school, and why. I knew how the playground worked before I even went to school, because of Conor. “Don’t get scared, Saph, but I think Granny Carne believes we’re in danger.”

“How could we be in danger?”

“He never came back, did he? The Mathew Trewhella in the story, I mean. Maybe Dad won’t ever come back either.”

“Conor,
don’t
.”

Conor turns and grips my wrists hard. “They got Mathew Trewhella, didn’t they? I know what it’s like, Saph. You’re out there in Ingo, and they make you feel that everything back here on land is nothing. Even the people you love don’t count. You can’t even remember them clearly.”

“I didn’t forget you and Mum!”

“Didn’t you?”

“You just got a bit cloudy and far away.”

“I know. And so you go on, deeper and deeper into Ingo, until you don’t care about anything else—”

“Did you feel like that?”

“Of course I did! I would’ve stayed. I’d probably still be there now. It was the first time I’d got so close to the seals. Elvira said she was going to take me to the Lost Islands. But I heard you calling. I didn’t even
want
to hear it. I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard you. Can you believe it, Saph, me trying to pretend I couldn’t hear my own sister when she might’ve needed me? But you kept on calling, and I was afraid something bad was happening to you and you were calling to me for help. And so I had to come back.

“But when I got up onto the shore, there was no one there. You’d totally disappeared. I waited for you for hours and hours, thinking you weren’t ever going to come back. I went up to the cottage. I searched everywhere. I came back down here—I even went back into the sea again to look for you. But I couldn’t get into Ingo again. Not without Elvira. I dived and dived, but nothing happened. The water wouldn’t let me in. It pushed me up like a rubber ball every time I dived. The water was laughing at me.”

“But—but it wasn’t more than a few minutes after I called you that I came back. It can’t have been longer.”

“Believe me, it was. You were so deep in Ingo that it felt like minutes. But it was
hours
, Saph.”

I’m almost scared of Conor now. He looks like he did after Shadow had to be put down, the summer before last. Shadow was fifteen, which is old for a cat. We all loved Shadow, but Conor
really
loved him. I think of Conor searching along the shore, searching the cottage, trying to find me, running back to the cove, frantic, afraid that something terrible had happened to me.

“I’m sorry, Conor. I really didn’t know. I didn’t think I’d been away so long.”

“It’s all happening again; that’s what scares me,” says Conor in a low voice. “First, the olden-days Mathew Trewhella disappears. Okay, it’s only a story that’s supposed to have happened a long time ago. But then Dad disappears. And then I can’t find you. I really thought I
was never going to be able to find you again.

“I’ll tell you something, Saph, I won’t go there again.
Whatever
Elvira says, I’m not going to Ingo again. It’s too dangerous.

“Granny Carne doesn’t want us to go. She’s stopping us. I can feel it. You know when you try to push two magnets together and they won’t? It’s like that.

“But Elvira wants me to go. And she didn’t want me to come back either. Do you know what she said?
That can’t have been your sister’s voice. These currents make strange echoes. I didn’t hear anything.
But I knew I’d heard you. How could I be wrong about my own sister’s voice?”

I hate the pain and confusion in my brother’s voice. I hate the idea that Elvira wanted to keep him away from me.

“Conor, listen. You won’t go up to Jack’s again today, will you? You won’t leave me alone here?”

“No,” says Conor. His face lightens. “Hey, Saph. Listen.”

“What?”

“Maybe you should cut off your hair.”

“Cut off my hair?”

“Because when it’s so long and you’re in the water, your hair spreads out all around you. It makes you look like a—you know, like one of them.”

“You mean like a
mermaid
,” I say icily. How can Conor possibly suggest that I cut off my hair? He knows I’ve
been growing it since I was six. I’ve got the longest hair in our whole school. I wouldn’t be me without it.

“Yes,” says Conor, quite seriously. “They might see your hair floating in the water when you go swimming and get the idea that you’re one of them. That you ought to stay with them.”

“So let me know when I start to grow a tail.”

But Conor shrugs my comment away, as if I’m just the little sis trying to be smart. I’m about to snap back when a strange feeling seizes me, and I forget him.

How dark it is inside the cottage, with the doors and windows closed. You know that feeling when you come home after a holiday, and everything feels so familiar and comfortable, because it belongs to you and you belong to it? That’s the feeling I usually have when I come home to our cottage.

But not now. The walls seem to be pressing in around me. I’ve never realized before that the cottage is so small. There’s so little space that I can hardly move. I want to stretch. I want to get out. I want to leap and plunge and dive and be free, and I want the cool of the water rushing past my skin instead of this dry, scratchy air. Our cottage isn’t a home at all. It’s a prison.

Conor is watching me. “Saph, no!” he says warningly, as if he can read my thoughts.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I won’t let you, Saph. You’re not swimming off down
any streams without me. I told Granny Carne I’d look after you.”

I hold on to the strength of Conor’s voice.

“Conor, listen. What else did Elvira say to you?”

“Everything I wanted to hear,” says Conor. “But I can’t describe it. You have to hear her voice.”

I think of Faro and all the power of Ingo.

“I know,” I say.

“But I’m not going to Ingo again. If Elvira calls to me, I’ll put my headphones on and turn my music up loud so I can’t hear her. It’s the only way.”

Suddenly a thought cuts through me like a knife. “Conor! What about Mum?”

“What about her?”

“Mum might hear it too. You know. The singing. It might start to pull her. And then what’ll we do?”

“She won’t,” says Conor confidently. “Mum hates the sea. Can you imagine her in Ingo?”

“No…maybe not—”

“Mum wouldn’t even believe Ingo exists. And that’ll make her safe.”

In the cottage, with Conor there and Conor’s music playing loud, doors and windows shut, curtains drawn, lights on and spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove, Ingo seems far away.

But even the loudest music has pauses in it, and into
those pauses the noise of the sea can break through, drop by drop, then faster, a trickle, a stream, and now a flood tide—

No. I won’t let it happen this time.

I make a huge effort. I close my eyes, my ears, my mind. Our cottage is warm and safe and friendly. It’s our home, where we belong. In a minute it’ll be time to drop the spaghetti into boiling water.

Ingo does not exist. Ingo is just a story, far away.

Yes
, says a small, mocking voice inside my head.
Ingo doesn’t exist. How true is a lie, how dry is the ocean, how cold is the sun?
And I think the voice sounds like Faro’s.