Midnight Dolphin (19 page)

Bethany felt a
tight knot of joy at the sight of such a wonderful animal. It must
be Megan’s dolphin Jet! She glanced around at where Mum and Dad
were lying. They were both dozing and were quite oblivious to the
wonderful creature that had suddenly appeared in front of her.
Bethany went right up to the edge of the rocks.

‘
Hello
dolphin’ she whispered excitedly. ‘You’re beautiful!’ she exclaimed
as she admired the sleek dolphin’s head and dorsal fin protruding
above the surface of the sea.

‘
Are you
Megan’s friend, then?’ she asked. The dolphin clicked in reply. On
television on Saturdays there was a drama about a dolphin that
lived off the coast of California. The dolphin was friends with a
boy whose dad was a coastguard and invariably saved people from
drowning in each episode. Dad said that it was like a sort of
aquatic Lassie. This dolphin seemed completely different though.
Bethany had never been so close to a real live dolphin before and
she wished she could jump into the water and swim with it, but she
didn’t dare to.

The dolphin
put its head on one side and clicked at her some more. Somehow,
Bethany decided that the dolphin looked sad.

‘
Did you want
to see Megan?’ she asked sympathetically. She couldn’t help but be
struck by the intelligence in the dolphins eyes. He seemed to be
looking intently at her. ‘I wish that Megan was here too’ she went
on, ‘but she’s gone off for the day.’ Bethany knew that the dolphin
couldn’t understand what she was saying, any more than she could
understand its clicks, but it helped her to speak to it.

‘
I wish I
could help you Mister Dolphin’ she said. Bethany stretched out her
hand as far as she dared, just on the surface of the water. The
dolphin touched her hand briefly with its beak. Then, with one last
sad look at her, the dolphin turned and disappeared again under the
gentle lapping waves. It was gone.

‘
Goodbye
Mister Dolphin’ she whispered.

After forty
minutes or so of searching, Megan and Rachel were both exhausted.
Dust seemed to have boiled up into clouds every time they moved
something and now there was a fine grey coating all over their
hair, hands, face and clothes. They looked like a pair of
ashen-faced ghosts. They sat down wearily on an upturned tea chest
and gulped greedily from a bottle of water that Rachel had in her
bag.

So far they
hadn’t made much progress. The loft was so full of boxes and
discarded junk that it was difficult to move through it at all.
They had to shift boxes just to get to something that looked
interesting. It was back-breaking work. There were any number of
cardboard boxes full of papers, but most of them seemed to be
accounts, old letters and manuscripts from the nineteen fifties and
sixties. Megan had imagined that they would find the odd rocking
horse, stuffed lions head or the occasional wooden chest, but it
wasn’t like that at all. It was more like someone’s office had been
boxed up and deposited up there.

‘
Look over
there’ said Rachel peering into one corner where the roof sloped
down to the wooden floorboards. Megan looked over keenly, but was
immediately disappointed. ‘You see there’s a bird’s nest in that
corner. It must be a great place to bring up chicks’ Rachel
laughed.

They got up
and started looking again.

‘
Let’s look
over there’ said Megan, pointing towards a corner furthest from the
door they had come up. ‘If you’re right, the further from the door
you go the older the stuff will be.’

‘
It’s going to
be impossible shifting all of those boxes to get over there though’
observed Rachel.

‘
Well, why
don’t we just climb over the top of them then?’ asked Megan with a
mischievous smile. ‘No one will ever know.’

‘
That’s
brilliant Megan’ said Rachel with a laugh. ‘Up you go then! Lead
the way. I’ll be right behind you.’ Megan climbed up and started
picking her way cautiously over the tops of the boxes. Some of them
were completely full with papers and were fairly safe to stand on.
Others were only half full or had strangely shaped objects inside,
and there was a risk of the top collapsing under her weight. She
soon learned to distinguish which boxes were okay to stand on
though as they made their way towards the shadows of the furthest
corner.

‘
Look!’ Megan
exclaimed, pointing. There was a space at the back which they
hadn’t been able to see before as it was hidden behind a wall of
packing cases. In the gloom they could make out an ancient
gramophone player with a an enormous brass horn to magnify the
sound that came from the heavy needle. Next to it was a glass dome
under which Megan could just make out stuffed humming birds that
had been arranged on a branch. Next to that there was an enormous
travelling trunk with brass fittings.

‘
That must
weigh a tonne’ murmured Rachel as the finally stood next to it.
‘Let’s look inside.’

Fortunately
the trunk was not locked and after some prising, the lid lifted up
and Rachel swung it back on its hinges. The trunk was packed to the
brim with hand-written letters tied up with ribbons, books and
‘journals!’ exclaimed Megan excitedly. She pulled out a volume. It
looked exactly like the one journal of the Reverend Smith’s that
Rachel’s mum had in the bookshop. In the dim light it was really
quite hard to make out the copperplate handwriting. Even the date
on the inside front cover was hard to decipher.

‘
Tell you
what’ said Rachel. ‘Let’s fish out all of the volumes of the
Reverend’s journal that we can find, clamber back over the boxes
and sit down somewhere with some decent light to read them.’ Megan
nodded in agreement. They found a total of eleven journals which
Rachel held in a great pile under her chin while they precariously
picked their way back over the mounds of cardboard
boxes.

‘
I don’t like
it up here’ said Megan, as they reached the top of the tight stairs
that led up to the loft. ‘Let’s go back down.’ They descended the
creaking stairs with their precious load and padded back along the
servants passage to the top of the main staircase. It was flooded
with afternoon light from the big picture window which overlooked
the garden. Below them Megan could see Rachel’s Mum and Toby Smith
wandering around the walled-garden, inspecting the flowerbeds and
laughing.

‘
They’re just
like a pair of giddy teenagers’ observed Rachel with a smile.
‘Let’s not disturb them. Why don’t we sit down here at the top of
the stairs and start browsing.’

Megan felt a
mixture of excitement and fear now that she had the Reverend’s
journals in her hands. Excitement, because what the Reverend had
discovered could bring her back to Jet again. Fear, because she
knew she might learn nothing useful at all.

Rachel and
Megan organised the journals in chronological order. There was only
one missing ‘which must be the one that Mum’s got’ observed Rachel.
There were another four journals that followed the one they’d read
from in Owl Books. Megan took the next volume after the one in the
book shop, and Rachel took the one that followed that.

They sat
there, engrossed. First of all Megan read each entry with close
attention, struggling occasionally to make out the words written in
the Reverends elegant hand. After a while though she resorted to
skimming the pages, looking for any reference to dolphins
whatsoever. There were long passages on folk songs in the area
which were of no interest to Megan at all.

Megan lost
track of how long they sat there studying their respective volumes,
but eventually they heard the tread of feet on the stairs and then
the faces of Toby Smith and Rachel’s mum appeared round the
corner.

‘
Oh there you
are!’ exclaimed Rachel’s mum. ‘We’d begun to think you’d got locked
in up there’. The two of them looked up from their respective
journals. Megan could see that shadows were lengthening in the
garden and the sun was getting low in the sky. Neither Rachel nor
Megan had exchanged more than a few words since they started
reading but Megan knew that Rachel hadn’t been able to find
anything interesting either. Then just when she was beginning to
despair Rachel made a little gasp and Megan had glanced over
curiously. Just then the two adults appeared.

‘
Mum, Toby?’
Rachel asked with a note of excitement in her voice. ‘Have you ever
heard of somewhere called the Trinity Caves?’

Chapter
Twelve
:

Lucy drifted
in and out of sleep after she returned to her physical self. Her
body and mind were exhausted. Doctors and nurses seemed to swirl
about her in the moments that she was conscious but she could
barely keep her eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time.
Her eyelids felt so heavy that she could hardly lift them at
all.

‘
Don’t worry
Lucy’ Dad whispered when she stirred and opened her eyes drowsily
to look at him, ‘it’s just the meds.’ He gave her hand a squeeze.
‘You’ll be right as rain before you know it.’ She smiled weakly at
him briefly before her eyes fluttered and closed again.

Dolphins
inhabited her restless dreams. Elusively, she would glimpse them
for a moment or two in the distance before they got lost again in
the swirls and eddies of her sleep. Other times she would half
glimpse the Victorian girl in a bonnet again, who she felt meant
her well, but whose features she could never quite see
properly.

Later on Lucy
forced her eyes open to see Bethany standing at the foot of the
hospital bed, a styrofoam cup in her hands, her hair an untidy mess
of blond curls about her face.

‘
Hey Kiddo.’
Bethany smiled lovingly at her. Lucy was so drowsy that for a
moment she thought it was Mum looking back at her.

‘
You look…’
Lucy began to say, but was unable to complete her sentence. She
drifted back to sleep again.

Every time her
mind crawled towards consciousness she felt Dad’s hand, cupping
hers in his. When she moved a little in her sleep, he would give
her hand a squeeze, as if to remind her that she must not slip away
from them again. She welcomed sleep though. Whether it was the
exertion of her mind while she was with Spirit, or the medication
that the doctors had given her, she needed sleep now more than
anything.

Lucy had no
perception of time passing, but when she finally came to, the early
morning sunlight was filtering through the windows of the ward. She
looked around her. Dad was asleep in the chair next to the bed. He
had two days stubble on his chin and his skin looked grey. He
suddenly looked much older than before. The lines of his face
seemed deeper and she wondered when she had last really looked at
him.

Now it felt as
though she was seeing the whole world with fresh eyes. The hospital
ward and everything around her seemed bright and new. Her body was
replenished and her mind was alert. She felt like jumping out of
bed and going outside. Dad’s head lolled back in his sleep and he
started to make a low noise from the back of his throat.

‘
Dad, Dad.
You’re snoring’ she whispered to him. He opened his eyes and
smiled, stretching himself as he did so.

‘
You look
bright eyed and bushy tailed’ he said, smiling.

‘
How long have
I been asleep?’ Lucy asked.

‘
Well’ he
replied slowly, ‘let me see. Yes it’s been two full days since you
came back to us. You’ve had a lot of catching up to do I think. The
doctors said that even though you were unconscious before that,
your brain was very active. They couldn’t really explain that to me
either.’ Lucy smiled. She knew very well why. ‘But do you remember
what happened to you?’ he asked.

‘
I, I know
that we were doing diving practice at the pool’ she replied. ‘I
cracked my head and then, then I opened my eyes and I was
surrounded by doctors.’ She thought it was better not to go into
any more detail with him.

‘
We were very
worried about you Luce’ Dad replied. ‘You were unconscious for a
very long time and the doctors couldn’t bring you around. Your
heart rate and blood pressure suddenly became very weak and
irregular and they even thought your heart might stop beating
altogether’ he went on. ‘I’m hoping to keep you out of hospital
from now on. After all it’s the second time this year.’ Lucy smiled
again.

‘
Do they
reckon I’ll be okay now then?’ she asked.

‘
I reckon so’
he replied. ‘You know what doctors are like. They’ll want to prod
and poke you and run all sorts of tests on you, but you don’t look
too bad to me.’

‘
Where’s
Bethany?’ Lucy asked. ‘She’s been here hasn’t she?’

‘
Oh yes’ Dad
replied. ‘She came up as soon as she heard about your accident and
she’s pretty much camped at the hospital ever since. Now you’re
over the worst of it I sent her back to the house to get a shower
and freshen up.’ Just then a nurse came up to the bed.

‘
And how’s our
patient this morning’ she asked brightly.

‘
I feel much
better thank you’ replied Lucy.

‘
You were our
Sleeping Beauty’ the nurse went on as she bustled round the bed.
‘Luckily it didn’t take a hundred years before you woke up again.’
The nurse smiled again broadly. ‘Looks like you’re on the mend now.
We’ll get you off home before you know it.’