Phosphorescence (15 page)

‘Thank you, everyone. Pansy's list is the longest, so shall we all check where we coincide with her?'

Taking silence as acquiescence, he begins to read:

Make-up
Make-up remover
Minor
Shampoo
Whole wash bag actually
Electric toothbrush charger
Nail kit including nail clippers
Electric toothbrush
Two skirts
Three sundresses
Two pairs of jeans
One pair cut-off shorts
Six bikinis
Ski clothes for emergency weather
Four towels
Hairdryer
. . .

Mr Lascalles stops and screws up his face, taking off his glasses before addressing her despairingly.

‘Forgive me, Pansy. Is this your list for camping?'

Pansy looks affronted.

‘Yes, but I haven't even got to the tent and all the sleeping bags and stuff yet, although I have got one.'
She points to the pink and purple flowery roll tied to the bottom of her rucksack. ‘Dad got it for me in Woodstock and had it sent back to be here in time. It's the best, isn't it?'

Freda is no better, although her preoccupation is keeping her clothes clean. To this end she has packed three different washing powders, a washing-up bowl and rubber gloves.

By the time the bell releases us, Mr Lascalles, looking grimly determined, and somewhat worried, has halved the size of both Pansy's and Freda's piles of belongings and removed several items from everyone else's bags.

‘This is more acceptable,' he mutters, then, voicing my own thoughts, ‘I wonder what the warden is going to make of you lot.' He laughs drily and gets out a map of the North Norfolk coast. ‘I think it's worth looking carefully at where we are going. This may be Britain, but we are staying on an island.'

He points to Salt Head on his map. Carl and Dave look up from their rucksacks, but no one else is paying any attention.

‘Hey, there's a lighthouse,' says Carl, looking at the northern end of Salt Head.

‘Yes, and beyond it is Seal Point, where the currents are phenomenally dangerous.' I interrupt because I know Dad would want me to tell them this. ‘We don't swim there, we go round to the beach above the burial ground.'

‘How far is that from the hut?' Mr Lascalles is making notes in a small pad.

‘Oh, not far. Nothing is far on Salt Head. It only
takes about twenty minutes to walk from one side to the other, but there are dunes in the middle, so you can't see everything at once. There used to be a house on it years ago, but now there's nothing left except the burial ground.'

Pansy looks up from lacing up her rucksack.

‘That sounds scary,' she says with satisfaction. ‘How do we escape if we want to?'

‘With a boat when there is enough tide, or by waiting until it is at its lowest and wading. The currents are too strong to swim.'

I could tell them all this in my sleep, it is so familiar. Mr Lascalles slaps shut his notebook as the bell goes.

‘Right, we will all have to act sensibly and carefully,' he says, staring around at the eight of us. ‘I expect exemplary behaviour at all times.'

He doesn't actually click his heels together but he may as well have done.

‘I'll distribute notes later in the week,' he says and walks off down the corridor, his own small bag bobbing by his side.

‘He is going to be a nightmare,' predicts Harry, retrieving his mini-disc player and separate speakers and stuffing them back into his rucksack. Dave folds his pyjamas back into the side pocket of his bag, wrapping them around a bottle of what I thought was water but according to Freda's excited whisper is actually vodka.

‘He won't look at the stuff again. Anyway, I'm just going to say this pocket is full of my asthma medicine.'

Sitting on my own bag to keep it invisible so no one notices that I have
not
been searched, I am determined not to imagine my Dad's face when we arrive in Staitheley and start trying to stash all this ridiculous stuff on the boat to get over to Salt Head Island.

Dad is so easygoing it's absurd, but not when it comes to nature conservation. Then he turns into a tinpot dictator. That was Mum's joke, anyway, and probably what made her so keen to get back to the pavements and pollution of London. In Dad's world you must treat nature with respect. No short cuts, no flip attitudes. Ideally, he would like everyone who sets foot on Salt Head to be wearing a uniform of his choosing and carrying a prescribed (by him) list of essentials. Everything else, including my Elvis T-shirt, is subject to snorts of derision and worse. I've seen him chuck whole bags full of bedding into the mud when he feels people have brought more than they need. And if he is picking the group up, and they have too many rubbish bags, he makes them carry them back on foot, wading across to Salt, the nearest village, a good hour away, because he won't take it on the boat.

‘Fascist,' is actually what Mum used to say. ‘Bloody fascist.' That was years ago when he tried to stop us taking streamers over there for my seventh birthday party, a beach picnic with the seals. But I know now, from that and a hundred other experiences on Salt Head Island, that everything you take must be useful and it must be working properly. I have never been over there without a life jacket and an emergency flare, but Dad is so careful I've never needed
either. I don't know what he'll say about the Flower Power tent, but I can guess. I wish I hadn't seen that vodka, and I pray that Dad doesn't. I can't stop glooming out now. I know this trip is not going to work.

Despite my purchase of a special Romanian spell doll from the charity shop and willing the camping trip to be abandoned, the day of reckoning dawns. Mum and Marcus both take me to school, which would be embarrassing normally, but I have too much else to worry about to be concerned that I look like a juvenile delinquent being marched into care by undercover police officers.

Mum hugs me.

‘Have fun, and be careful, remember these are London children. They won't have a clue about tides,' she says, pressing a tide table into my hand.

I roll my eyes.

‘Honestly, Mum, are you expecting me to get them to learn this on the way up?'

But I grin and kiss her. Marcus gives me twenty quid and a BT phonecard.

‘This weekend is going to be like one of those challenging TV programmes where you've got to see how far you can go with these two items,' he says, winking at me. ‘I hope you will be able to get home from Staitheley.'

He kisses my cheek, which is the first time we
have touched each other, but it is not a watershed moment because I have just caught sight of Pansy's outfit for travelling and it is making me hyperventilate with anxiety about what Dad will say.

Unbelievably, we arrive in Staitheley much earlier than expected. This means that the tide is out. Pansy, chucking her phone to one side because it has had no signal for the past five minutes, leans over the seat of the minibus and shouts, ‘I can see the sea. Oh. No, I can't. I can see a trickle of water and miles of mud. There isn't any sea. Where is it?'

Freda stops applying mascara to look out of the window. She wrinkles her nose.

‘God, this place is filthy,' she says, and returns to the more attractive prospect of herself in the rear-view mirror.

The minibus judders to a halt. Pansy moves seats to get a better view.

‘We're not stopping here, are we?' she growls, her voice at its most husky. ‘We can't get out with all that mud. Where are we actually going?'

‘See that hut?' I ask, pointing my finger to the tiny, Lego-sized building on the horizon, separated from us now by the thick mud of the creek at low tide. ‘We're going to take a boat out there and that's where we're staying.'

‘Well,' is all Pansy can say, she is so deeply shocked by the basic nature of Staitheley. She bats accusing eyelashes at me and crosses her legs, revealed to full effect beneath her white hot pants and a silver lamé halter-neck top.

‘Are you auditioning for
Baywatch?
' Harry asks when she adds lipgloss and a slap of foundation before lowering her dark glasses. Pansy ignores him, and continues to gaze out of the window.

‘The sun's gone,' she adds balefully.

‘I think it might be your glasses,' says Jessie, not unkindly. Pansy removes them, but she was right.

In Staitheley, locals say, there is a microclimate, and we can have weather here that no one else is experiencing. It's usually quite extreme. Now the sun has rushed behind a purple cloud, and a huge shadow sweeps in across the marshes, drawing all light with it, so for a few moments the summer seems to have departed.

Along the grey quay, Dad approaches, pulling on a big yellow mac over his shorts and wellies.

‘Hey, check that dude,' shouts Pete, one of the back-seat boys.

‘Rock on, man. Rock right on over.'

There is a low whistle from his friend Carl.

‘Clock the ear muffs.' He grins.

The last time I saw them was when Carl played an intensely cool gig for a school concert and his house won. They signed up for the trip because they thought Aiden from the basketball team was coming, and now that he's not they don't even pretend to be interested. They're just here for the ride.

My cheeks burn when I step off the coach, and, in full view of my schoolmates, am folded into Dad's arms. There is now no way I can dissociate myself from the shorts and the ear hair.

Mr Lascalles groups us around Dad on the quay and makes a little speech.

‘We're all very grateful to you, Mr Jordan, for this opportunity to experience something quite unusual.'

He doesn't hear Pete whisper to Carl, ‘Just how unusual is our call? D'you want a bet on Pansy?'

‘Nah. Too easy. I'll go for Freda. She's more of a challenge.'

Freda bridles, obviously listening to them, not to Mr Lascalles. A huge pink ball of bubblegum swells from her mouth and she pops it with a splat over her cheek.

‘Eugh, gross,' she squeals, cutting through Mr Lascalles's thanks.

Dad coughs, delivers a flinty glare at our assembled group and begins his spiel.

‘Right, you lot. I'd like you to listen carefully for a few moments and then I'd like you to go away and digest what I am about to tell you. This is not chitchat. Your lives might depend on your listening to me.'

I have heard it loads of times before, so I really can't be expected to listen. But he has caught the others' attention, at least for the time being. I glance around surreptitiously, horribly aware of the spectacle we are creating on the quay.

Caroline Christie drives past, and I see her raise her eyebrows as Pansy, clearly wanting to change the tempo, reaches her arms above her head in a stretch which reveals yet more of her perfect midriff. Dad has lost everyone's attention already, and he has only got to the bit about not disturbing the terns. I switch off
for a while, coming to with a start when he puts his arm around me again (why is he doing all this friendly stuff? It's not normal) and says, ‘Anyway, I know I can trust my daughter to show you all how to behave on the nature reserve. Look to Lola's example and you won't go far wrong.'

How could he? What have I done, apart from not listening, to deserve this sort of humiliation? Crimson, I mutter something inarticulate and step casually out of his embrace. All the time we have been talking, the tide has been creeping up. We hang around waiting for it to be high enough to set off.

An old rowing boat with an outboard engine slides alongside us and I cannot believe the way things can go on getting worse. It is Josh and his dad, and they are taking us out to Salt Head. It could have been any one of the fishermen around here, but no, it has to be Josh. Why didn't he tell me he was taking us? I am not prepared for mixing my two lives. Panicking, I scramble to the opposite end of the boat from where I know he will be sitting.

‘I am due at an emergency meeting this afternoon, so I can't come over with you,' Dad is explaining to Mr Lascalles. ‘The only people I could get were Ian Christie and his son, Josh. So they will take care of you all.'

‘Blimey, don't spare us, will you?' mutters Josh's dad under his breath, winking a greeting to me.

I can hardly look at him. I still don't understand why Dad can't relax with them. I want to talk to Josh about it right now, to clear it up once and for all, so we can all accept that James died and Ian lived and
that it's sad but it was all so long ago. I feel like the grown-up with Dad right now, even in the middle of my embarrassment. Annoyingly, Josh makes sure he doesn't catch my eye as he heaves all our belongings into a dinghy attached to the motorboat. Dad, having looked Pansy up and down very slowly, has not attempted to edit our luggage at all, and soon the boat is sinking dose to its Plimsoll line.

‘All right, get in. Girls at the front, please.'

Freda, pausing to apply some fudge-scented hair mascara in vivid pink, joins me at the front.

‘He's fit.' She glances at Josh, who's helping Pansy into the boat. ‘Do you know him?'

‘Of course I do, I know everyone in this village. There are more people in our school than live here, you know.'

Freda is surprised I am so short with her,

‘All right, keep your hair on. Oh look, Pansy's playing her tricks on him.'

At the other end of the boat, Pansy is perching next to the outboard, tying a shawl over her hair and shooting sideways glances at Josh as he unties the mooring line, making sure the small dinghy he is pulling behind doesn't get caught in any ropes.

‘How did she manage to get to sit next to him?' hisses Freda.

‘She won't be able to when we set off.'

And indeed, Josh places a hand under Pansy's elbow and propels her to the bench in front of us.

‘God, he's right up my street, girls,' Pansy announces gladly and, getting out her phone, waves it in the air in search of a signal. ‘I've got to tell
everyone about this guy. He's so gorgeous. What's his name, Lola? How old?'