Ingo (9 page)

T
IDES ARE POWERFUL.
Tides know where they want to be, and they take the whole sea world with them, dragging it to and fro. Faro says tides are the moon talking to Ingo. When the moon talks, Ingo has to listen.

We come in on the tide together, me and Faro and the seals. Faro finds a current first, and then we feel the tide folding us into its strong journey. It’s strange that the same tide is still rising, even though I seem to have been with Faro for hours.

“Conor and Elvira have already come in on the tide,” says Faro. “Conor’s left Ingo now.”

I feel calm and easy about Conor again. All my fears have drifted away. I can’t remember why I cried out for him or why I felt so desperate. I’m holding Faro’s wrist, and I am safe in Ingo.

Faro takes me as far as the mouth of our cove. I don’t want him to come any farther, because I know how much his lungs would burn and how terror would seize him as he went through the skin of the sea, into Air. He says he’ll come with me all the way if I want, but I say no. I’m not worried about leaving Faro, because I know I’ll be back. The pull of Ingo has got into me, strong as the tide.

“It’s all right, Faro. I know where I am now. You don’t need to come any farther with me.” I can see that he’s relieved, although he tries to hide it.

The seals are still with us. It’s easy for them to slip from Ingo into Air, because they can live in both. So they’ll come all the way with me, swimming in on the tide. I’m still holding Faro’s wrist when I see the place where the deep, deep water meets the shelf of sand. He mustn’t come any farther. I’m safe to swim in from here.

“It won’t hurt you to go through the skin,” Faro reminds me. “You’re going home this time.”

“Don’t come any farther in, Faro,” I tell him again. I feel protective of him now. He’s been looking after me deep in Ingo, and I’m going to look after him here, where we’re coming close to my own country. The surface of the sea wobbles not far above our heads. The light is sharp and dazzling, and the air will hurt Faro like knives, the way the sea hurt me when I first went down.

There are flickery broken-up shadows of sunlight all over the seafloor and all over Faro. He looks like a boy and a seal and a shadow all at once as he does a last backflip
and his tail swirls around his head. And suddenly there’s only a shadow, and Faro’s gone. I haven’t said good-bye to him. I haven’t asked when I’m going to see him again.

I don’t need to. I’m sure that I’ll see him soon.

The two seals are close to me, one on each side. They want to push me onward into the shallower water. The tide’s pushing me too, and there’s sand not far below me, almost underfoot now.

“Tell Faro that I’ll be back,” I say to the seals. They roll and circle round me, and I don’t know if they understand or not.
Mer,
I think.
Speak Mer to them, not Air.
I open my mouth, and the cool, sweet underwater rushes into it.
Speak Mer, not Air.
I let the sea flow out of my mouth and make its own words.

“We will,” says the seal closest to me in a gravelly voice like the tide sucking over a pebble beach. I feel his breath on my ear, and then he’s gone with his partner, and I’m diving up through the skin of the water, into Air.

It doesn’t hurt. It’s like stepping off a boat after hours out at sea with Dad. The land feels wobbly when you do that, as if it’s still going up and down, up and down. You can’t get your balance. Dad says it’s because you’ve still got your sea legs, and you have to get your land legs back. In a while you get used to it and the land stops behaving like the sea, and you’re back at home.

I’m back in the Air. I wade through the shallow water,
up the beach, toward the rocks at the back of the cove, where I have to climb. It’s a perfect day now, hot and still, without a trace of mist. The sand is warm underfoot.

I climb the rocks very slowly. My legs are tired. The rough, dry rock feels so strange under my hands. I’ve got used to the textures of Ingo. My arms and legs feel much too light, now that there’s no water pressing against them.

I clamber up the rocks, through the gap between the boulders, and haul myself up over the grassy lip of the cliff.

Conor.

Conor’s sitting there, waiting. He’s pale, and there are dark shadows under his eyes. He jumps up when he sees me. He looks shocked, as if he can’t believe it’s really me. He grabs hold of my arm and drags me onto the grass. He holds me so tight it hurts. For a moment I’m scared. Conor looks furious. I even think for a second that he’s going to hit me. But of course he doesn’t. He just stares and stares at me, as if he hasn’t seen me for years. Our faces are very close. Conor scans mine, searching for something.

“Saph,” he says very quietly, as if he can hardly believe it’s me. He shakes me gently, the way he does when he’s trying to wake me on a school morning.

“Saph, where’ve you
been
? I’ve been waiting and waiting for hours. I thought you were never going to come back.”

“Back from where?”

“Where do you think!” he explodes. “Don’t try and
fake it, Saph! I know where you’ve been. You’ve been away nearly twenty-four hours. Mum would’ve gone crazy if she’d known. But the car wouldn’t start, so she stayed overnight in St. Pirans after work. She got Mary to come up last night and check if we were okay. I lied for you. I said you were in the bath. And then I came out here to look for you. I’ve been waiting all night.”

I look around. There’s Conor’s sleeping bag, and his flashlight, a KitKat wrapper, and a bottle of water. Maybe—maybe it’s true….

“Twenty-four hours,” I repeat slowly. I remember the other day, when I saw Conor on the rock with the girl, Elvira. Conor thought he’d only just cleaned out the shed, but it was already evening.
He didn’t know how much time had passed because he was away in Ingo. Like me. So time in Ingo is different from time here.

“If I’ve really been gone twenty-four hours, then time must move more slowly in Ingo,” I say, thinking aloud.

“Ssh! Don’t talk about it here!” hisses Conor.

“Why not? There’s no one but us.”

Conor glances around, as if the grass might be listening. A herring gull swoops low, screaming over our heads. Everything sounds hollow and noisy, now that I’m back in the Air.

“You don’t know who might be listening,” he whispers.

“But Faro said that
you
were in Ingo too, at the same time as me. He said you and Elvira were talking to the sunfish.”

“I wasn’t talking to them. I don’t know how. Elvira was.”

“But that was only a little while ago. How could you have been there in Ingo and up here waiting for me on the cliff at the same time?”

Conor pulls a grass stem out of its sheath and nibbles the sweet end of it, thinking too.

“What Faro tells you,” he says at last, “I mean, the things that Faro says, they’re true in his mind. But they may not be true in yours.”

“Do you mean he’s lying?”

“It’s not like that in Ingo. Elvira’s just the same. There isn’t only one thing that’s true and everything else is a lie. And I think maybe time’s like that in Ingo too. It stretches out, then it presses itself together, like this—” and Conor squeezes his hands together, as if he’s crushing time.

“Who told you that? Elvira?” I ask jealously. “
Were
you there with Elvira, like Faro says, or not?”

“Yes, I was there…but I don’t know how long for. I think time in Ingo isn’t just different in how fast it goes but in the whole way it works. You said it was only a little while since I was in Ingo, but I’ve been back here for ages. Since yesterday. So maybe time there moves quite differently.”

“But did you see me? Did you and Elvira see me, and hear me calling, and then hide from me?”

It feels like the most important question I’ve ever asked Conor. I want him to kill the picture in my mind that shows him and Elvira slipping away together, maybe laughing, not wanting me to see them—

“You came to me,” says Conor slowly. “You came into
my mind, Saph, but I didn’t see you. I was with the seals, and suddenly you were there in my mind. I thought something bad had happened to you. I told Elvira I had to go back and find you.”

“What do you mean, I was ‘in your mind’?”

“You know how it is in Ingo,” says Conor reluctantly. “Everything you usually think about—everything that’s up in the Air—it floats away and fades. It doesn’t seem real. Even people fade. Even you and Mum started to feel like dreams when I was in Ingo. But suddenly all that changed. You were really there, in my mind, solid. I stopped feeling easy and dreamy. I was scared. I thought you were in trouble, Saph, and I might not get to you in time.”

“But I was there, in Ingo, all the time. Close to you.”

“Yes.” Conor’s face closes in a frown. “But it didn’t feel like that. It felt as if you were far away—calling to me—and I was losing you. Like when a mobile phone breaks up and you keep losing someone’s voice. Elvira said—” He breaks off and frowns even more deeply.

“What did she say?”

“She told me not to call you. She said it could be dangerous. She wanted us to go on surfing the currents. There’s a group of islands she’s going to take me to, but I said I couldn’t go with her. I had to come back and find you. She wasn’t very—”

He shakes his head, as if trying to shake away the troubled feeling.

“Wasn’t very what?”

“She wasn’t very happy about it.”

Your precious Elvira didn’t care what happened to me, did she?
I think, but I don’t say it.

“I don’t understand how it works,” says Conor.

“Me neither.”

Conor was there, in Ingo, and so was I, but we never met. Faro and Elvira kept us separate.

But they didn’t stop us when we said we wanted to come back.

No, I’m sure Faro doesn’t want to hurt me. He looked after me and made sure I was safe in Ingo.

“You look terrible,” says Conor. “Lucky Mum’s not back. She’d know straightaway something had happened.”

The KitKat wrapper glints in the sun. My mouth waters.

“Is there any of that KitKat left?”

“No, I ate it. It was a long night.”

“I’m sorry.” I’m so hungry. Starving. Hungry for food and hungry for sleep. “Can I sleep in your sleeping bag, Con?”

My legs feel like jelly. I can’t walk another step. All I want is to dive into Conor’s sleeping bag and sleep until tomorrow, or even the next day—

“No, Saph,” says Conor urgently as my legs begin to fold. “We’ve got to get home. You can sleep in your own bed once we’re there.”

“Can’t I even rest for a bit?”

“No, Saph, not here. It’s not—” Conor breaks off what he’s saying and glances around again. A black-headed gull sits quietly on a rock nearby, his head cocked. If he wasn’t a gull, you’d think he was listening to us. Conor whispers, “It’s too close here.”

“Close to what?”

“To Ingo. The tide will be high again soon.”

I remember what happens at high tide. The waves come right in, under the cliffs. There are gullies that the sea has been carving for centuries and blowholes where the water spouts up with a hiss of foam. When it’s rough, you can hear the sea roaring like a lion beneath you and feel the thump of the waves through the granite.

Conor’s right. Air and Ingo are close here. This shore is where they touch. Conor and I are standing on the border, between the two countries. I look out to the shining water and think of Ingo. All the color and creatures and life of Ingo are there, so close I could still touch them, if I just reached out—

Before I know it, I’ve moved forward, closer to the edge of the cliff.

“Saph!”

The gull opens his beak in a hideous squawk as Conor grabs my arm again and pulls me back.

“Come
on
, Saph! We’ve got to go home!”

I
WAKE UP SLOWLY
. I
’M IN MY
own room, lying in bed. Sleep doesn’t want to let go of me, and my head is fuzzy with dreams. Strange dreams that seem more real than the daylight. I dreamed of a huge cavern deep, deep under the cliffs, where I slept on a bed of silky sea moss while a warm current fanned my face. The dream was so real that I can still feel the touch of moss, like feathers against my skin.

But I’m lying under my old blue duvet cover. From the look of the light, it’s late morning. I can hear Mum downstairs, talking. I prop myself up on my elbow to listen, but I can’t hear another voice answering her. She must be on the phone. I can’t hear what she’s saying either, but suddenly I guess who she’s talking to. It’s that diver, Roger.
The man who’s coming here on Sunday. Mum’s voice murmurs on and on, as if she’s already known Roger for years and has a million things to tell him. Sometimes she laughs.

Roger the diver. Mum likes him; you can tell that from her voice. But Faro hates divers. What did he say about them?
Air People with air on their backs, bringing Air into Ingo, spying on Ingo.
That’s what he thinks they are: spies.

I’m glad Faro hates them. Now that Mum’s told me about Roger, the diver coming on Sunday, I don’t like divers either. I think they should keep out of the way and not come where they aren’t wanted.

Mum thinks I should stop waiting and hoping for Dad to return. She says I’ve got my life to live. I know she’s only trying to help me, but it isn’t helping. I’m afraid it means that
she’s
stopped waiting for Dad. She doesn’t think he’s coming back, and she’s trying to make a life without him.

She can’t do that. I won’t let her. I’ve got to make Mum believe that Dad’s not dead or disappeared off to somewhere like Australia. I know that’s what some people think. They whisper things about Dad, and when Conor or I come close enough to hear, they stop whispering and give us sly little glances that say,
We know something you don’t know.

I roll over in bed and thump my pillow angrily. Josie
Sancreed didn’t even bother to whisper. She turned round to me in the playground and said out loud, “Everyone thinks your dad drowned, and they feel really sorry for you, but my mum says most likely he’s gone off with another woman.”

Gone off with another woman.
I couldn’t believe Josie had said that. The words scraped me like gravel when you fall off your bike.
Gone off. He’s gone off because he’s found someone better. That’s what’s happened to Mathew Trewhella. Everybody knows; it’s only his family that doesn’t believe it.

I wanted to run away, right out of the playground and all the way home, but I didn’t. No one was going to make me run away. Josie stared at me with a stupid little smile, but I could tell she was also a bit scared at what she’d done. Loads of people had heard, so she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t said it. Katie said, “Shut up, Josie,” but the rest of the girls just stared at me too. I think maybe they were embarrassed, or they didn’t know what to do, but at the time I thought they were on Josie’s side.

I couldn’t bear it. I grabbed Josie by the shoulders and shoved her as hard as I could against the playground wall. She fell and started crying really loudly so all the girls gathered round her and helped her up. “It’s my hand; she’s hurt my hand,” Josie wailed, and suddenly everything was my fault, not Josie’s.

What was worse was that Mrs. Tehidy saw me push
Josie into the wall. She started clucking round Josie, and she put her arm around her and took her into the office to have her hand seen to.

“I’ll talk to
you
later, Sapphire,” she said over her shoulder.

Mrs. Tehidy hadn’t heard what Josie said about Dad. I didn’t ever, ever want to hear those words again, so I didn’t tell. Katie was going to, but I wouldn’t let her. So I was sent to Mr. Carthew, and he said, “I’m disappointed in you, Sapphire. Violence doesn’t solve anything.”

Oh, doesn’t it?
I thought. As soon as I got out of Mr. Carthew’s office, I went to find Josie. Mrs. Tehidy had finished washing Josie’s hand, and she’d put a big bandage on it. Josie was in the girls’ toilets telling everyone what I’d done to her. I walked in, and they all stopped talking.

“If you open your mouth about my dad again,” I said, “I’ll push you into the ditch that’s full of nettles, behind the hall.”

Josie knew I meant it, and so did everyone else. Some people were on my side because they’d heard what Josie said to me, but Esther put her arm round Josie and said, “Stop bullying Josie, Sapphire.”

“
She’s
the bully,” said Katie angrily.

I never get into fights normally, but it’s funny—once you start, it seems easier. And when Josie looked at me in that scared way, I felt good. Maybe violence doesn’t solve anything, but Josie never said another word about Dad. I
didn’t tell Conor. He’d only get into a fight with Josie’s brother Michael. And besides, I didn’t feel so good later on, once the hot, angry feeling inside me had died down. I went and sat on a tree stump by the school gate. I kept thinking about what Dad would have thought if he’d seen me grabbing hold of Josie like that. And maybe Josie really did hurt her hand. It was quite a big bandage.

Don’t think about that now. Think about something else. But the only thoughts that crowd into my head are thoughts I don’t want.

Roger.
I turn around and thump the pillow again. I don’t want Roger, the diver, at our table, eating our food. Maybe even sitting where Dad used to sit.

Suddenly another thought curls over in my mind like a fresh new wave, washing all the tangle of worries away.
It’s all right. I don’t even have to be there when Roger comes.

It’s true. I can go off somewhere else, somewhere far away. It won’t matter how much Mum calls me, I won’t be able to hear her. And she’ll never be able to find me. The thought of it makes me smile. I’ve got somewhere to go now, a place of my own where no one can find me.
Ingo.

I can hear the sea. Even though I’m lying in bed, the sound of the waves is as close as if I were lying on the beach. I can hear each one break on the beach, then the long
hushhhh
as it goes out again. My window’s shut, but the sea sounds as if it’s inside my room—

“Sapphire!” Conor’s voice makes me jump. He’s climbed down the ladder from his loft room without me noticing. And the strange thing is that suddenly I realize I’m not lying on my bed anymore. I’m standing beside my window, which isn’t shut at all; it’s wide open. But I don’t know how I got there or who opened the window. Was it me? My hand is on the windowsill, and the noise of the sea is louder than ever. A huge wave topples over and crashes onto the sand in a rush and swirl of foam—

“What are you
doing
?” asks Conor sharply.

“What?”

“Saph, shut that window.
Now.
I’ve got to talk to you.”

Slowly, reluctantly, I push the window shut. But the air pushes back, hard. The window wants to be open, wide open, so the noise of the sea can come in—

“Shut it, can’t you?”

The snap in Conor’s voice makes me push hard enough to close the window and fasten the catch.

“Mum’s cooking sausages,” says Conor. “She’s making a late breakfast for you, Saph. Listen, this is what I told Mum about what happened, so you’d better say the same thing. I said you woke up in the night. You had a nightmare, and you couldn’t get back to sleep for ages, so that’s why you’re still in bed now. Mum’s really worried about you, Saph. She thinks you’re ill. She kept creeping up to look at you while you were asleep, and she says you don’t look right.”

“I feel fine.”

“You don’t
look
fine. Look in the mirror.”

I go over to the dressing table Mum bought for me at an auction in Penzance. On top of the dressing table there’s a mirror on a wooden stand. Mum bought it for me after Dad left. She bought some stencils, and we painted the stand white and then stenciled shells over it and painted them sea blue. I painted tiny shells around the frame of the mirror too.

You have to bend down to peer into the mirror because of the way the ceiling slopes at the side of my room.

I bend down and stare into the mirror. The glass is old, and when you look into it, it’s like looking into another world. The mirror is spotted and tarnished, and its light is green, like underwater. My face in the mirror is pale, and my hair hangs over my shoulders like seaweed. The color of my eyes is swallowed up in huge black pupils. Do I really look like that?

“Mum says you look washed out,” says Conor.

But I don’t take any notice. His voice sounds distant, as if he’s not really in the room with me. I’m watching watery ripples of light pass over my reflection, like waves rippling over sand. They move across the glass in their dreamlike rhythm, and I count them as they go. One, two, three, four, five…and now there’s the sound of the sea again, soft and sweet this time, like a breath in my ear…closer and closer.

But who’s singing? Why are their voices so clear and strong? I’ve got to see them. I lean closer, closer—

“Sapphire, stop it! Don’t look in the mirror!”

But I can’t look away. The singing of the sea is so sweet that I want to go on listening to it forever. It’s pulling me into the mirror, farther in, farther in, into the green underwater depths—

There’s a crash. I jump back, and the singing stops. The enchantment shatters. My mirror is just an old secondhand mirror again, lying on the floor, smashed, facedown. What happened? And why’s my duvet on the floor?

It was Conor. He threw my duvet over the mirror to stop me from looking at it. But the weight of the duvet knocked the mirror to the floor. The glass has broken.

“What’s going on up there?” shouts Mum from downstairs.

“Nothing!”

“Nothing!”

“What was that crash?”

“Saph fell off the bed.”

“Stop messing about, the pair of you. These
sausages’ll be done in five minutes.”

I kneel down, gently lift my mirror, and turn it over. The glass has cracked all over into the shape of a starfish.

“Why did you do that?” I whisper furiously at Conor. “You’ve broken my mirror, and you’ve broken the—”

“Broken the what?”

“The—the song. They were singing to me.”

“Saph, how many times do I have to tell you? It’s dangerous. It’s too powerful. It’s stronger than we are.”

“
You
were in Ingo too, Con! You’re such a hypocrite. You just don’t want me to share it. You want to keep it all for yourself, so you’ll be the only one who knows about Ingo. You and
Elvira
.”

But to my surprise, Conor refuses to get angry. He kneels down beside me and starts carefully picking up the shards of glass. He’s bending over, and his face is hidden as he says, “It’s not like that, Saph.”

“Well, what
is
it like then? What am I going to tell Mum about my mirror? She’ll kill me.”

“I’ll tell her I was mucking about and I broke it. Listen, Saph. I’m scared.”

He lifts his face, and I stare at him. Conor, scared? But Conor is never frightened.
I’m
the one who gets spooked on wild nights when the wind howls around our cottage walls.
I’m
the one who lies straining her ears for the sound of Mum’s car coming home, because I’m convinced she’s had an accident on her way back from work. Conor is the
sensible one, who knows what can happen in real life and what can’t.

He’s only pretending to be scared. But when I look at him, I know that’s not true. His face is pale and tense.

“You were gone too long,” says Conor, fumbling for the right words. “The first time I was there—in Ingo—their time was almost the same as our time. Maybe, when I got home, it was a little bit later than I thought it would be. You wouldn’t really notice it. But each time I go there, time in Ingo eats up more of our time. It’s like—it’s like Ingo time is more powerful than our human time.

“When you came down to the cove to find me the other day, and you said that I’d been away for seven hours, and it was already evening, I didn’t believe you at first. I thought you were making it up to scare me. But then I saw the sun going down in the west.

“And then the very first time you went into Ingo, you were gone for nearly a day and a night. That’s how strong Ingo time was for you. But how long did you think you were away, Saph? I mean, while you were down there? What did it feel like?”

I try to remember, but it’s not easy. What did I do in Ingo? Faro and I talked. We dived and swam. We surfed some currents; we saw a shark and jellyfish and spider crabs.

But we didn’t eat, or drink, or sleep. And I’ve never in my life got through more than two or three waking hours without eating or drinking.

“I don’t know. When I was there, time seemed to slip away.”

“That’s what’s so scary,” says Conor. “If you go to Ingo again, how long do you think you’ll be there? How much of our human time will it eat up? It could be days. Weeks. Or even longer.”

“That’s stupid, Conor. It can’t be like that. You’re making it sound like that story about Rip Van Winkle. You know, when Rip Van Winkle comes back and a hundred years have passed or something, and his family and friends are dead. That’s not going to happen. I won’t ever stay away that long. I’ll come back when I want to.”

“
But you won’t know how long it is!
That’s the point. You’ll forget about our human time again once you’re in Ingo. You’ll
want
to forget. Look how strongly Ingo’s calling you now. You think I don’t know? You should have seen your face when you were looking into the mirror. But I couldn’t hear anything. You’re already much deeper into Ingo than I am, Saph. After only one visit. You’re changing. You don’t understand what Ingo’s doing to you—”