Authors: Fleur Hitchcock
Saving Sophia (6 page)
We struggle on until it gets dark and decide to camp under an upturned rowing boat. Things crawl all around us, poppy things that crunch if you walk on the sand. They’re probably edible if you could catch them, and if you had a cooking pot.
And a fire.
And some salt and pepper.
And water.
We huddle together in our wetsuits, listening for footsteps and feeling hungry. We’ve eaten sea-cabbage flowers, sorrel leaves and the end of a piece of bread that some picnickers left on the beach.
Apart from a tap for washing sand from wetsuits, we haven’t found any water, and I’m not sure we should have drunk from it but bad water seems preferable to no water.
My stomach rumbles for the millionth time. I’m thinking about chocolate bars. I can’t help it; they keep coming into my head. I’ve had a particularly strong sense of Swiss chocolate bunnies, the ones wrapped in gold paper. Ned can’t bear them, he says it’s like eating happiness, so I always save him from that by eating his too. “What would you really like to eat just now?” I blurt out.
“Spaghetti con vongole,” Sophia says. “With loads of parmesan.”
“Oh,” I say, not wanting to show my ignorance by asking what it is. “I’d settle for chocolate.”
We sit in silence, listening to the crunching things on the beach. I imagine they’re probably eating each other. I pull my legs in closer. I daren’t lie down, I don’t want the sea things to move into my hair.
There’s a bit in
Sand for Sandy,
where Sandy has to battle with an enormous crab. She kills it with an umbrella. It’s quite dramatic and heroic.
But just at the moment, I’m not feeling very
heroic, and I don’t have an umbrella.
“I wonder if my parents know yet?” I ask.
“They’ll have rung them straight away. They always ring Pinhead the moment I take off.”
“Ours are off camping in Cornwall – they probably didn’t take a mobile phone.”
“Really?” asks Sophia. “I didn’t think anyone went anywhere without a phone.”
I shrug. “My parents are different.”
“They are,” says Sophia. “I liked them.”
“Oh!” I say, feeling a confusing sense of pride and embarrassment. “That’s—”
“I’ve lived all over the world, I can speak three languages, I’ve had nannies, and minders, and stayed in hotels on my own, but I’ve never met anyone like your parents – or you, for that matter.”
“Really?”
“You go swimming in that crummy old bathing suit, and you don’t mind; you wear turquoise eyeshadow; you bring an enormous ancient rucksack on a school trip; you’ve got sensible socks, sensible shoes, sensible trousers. You actually read books! It’s great that you’re so unbothered.”
The blush starts somewhere near the bottom of my spine though I make a mental note
never
to wear
makeup again. Sophia might be completely wrong about how unbothered I am but I still want to hug her, though I don’t think I know her quite well enough yet.
Somewhere not very far away, a dog barks.
“How did Pinhead and your mum meet?” I ask, whispering this time, like I might set the dog off.
“When she started singing, he was her manager.”
I imagine Sophia’s mum as a slender blonde, crooning into a microphone.
“So they fell in love?”
Sophia goes silent for a long time, so long that I think she might have fallen asleep, and I finally slip down so that my hair lies on the sand.
“I don’t think she fell in love with him.”
“Did he fall in love with her?”
There’s a long pause while the things outside eat each other.
“I think he realised he could control her – and she liked having someone to organise everything for her. I think I was the problem from the start, but it was all different then, because Mum and I lived on our own in a little flat in Maida Vale, over the tube station, where the trains shook the bookcases and the rats ran around at night.”
“Nice,” I say, changing my vision to one where Sophia’s mum, still slender and blonde, is standing at the top of the stairs batting away the rats with a frying pan.
“We had cockroaches, too, but I used to keep them as friends under the bed in a box; my cockroaches never ran away with all the others, they stayed.”
“Really?”
“I loved it there,” she says. “Just me and Mum, and I went to a local school and had lots of friends, and wore a red-and-white checked dress. And then he turned up, and the two of us started to live separate lives – me at boarding school and her performing around the world. She’s sung at the Paris Opera House, you know, and in Sydney.” Sophia sighs loudly.
“I thought he wanted her money?”
“Mum never had any money then but she’s earned squillions since. He’s in charge of it, and he must have spent loads on my education.”
Something crunches really close by, and I sit absolutely still for a moment. It’s probably a giant lobster eating a giant crab. Unless it’s a giant cockroach.
“So what does he say when you tell him you want
to see your mum?”
“That she’s ill or in Australia or something. Or taking a health cure.”
“Aren’t there any friends you could ask about her –
her
friends, I mean?”
“She doesn’t have any anymore – all her old friends have fallen away. I’ve tried but they don’t know anything. Not the ones I can find, anyway.”
“What about the internet – can’t you find anything out about her?”
“Oh – I’ve tried looking for her on the web. I can’t find her, but he says she’s changed her name.”
“Oh,” I say. I thought you could find anything out on the internet, even people with changed names, but then, I don’t really know anything about it – I’ve only ever used it at school, to look stuff up for history projects. Sophia’s bound to be right.
“He
made
her change her name. He’s like that.”
Something’s bugging me. “Actually – I thought you said he kept you away from the internet, so that you couldn’t contact her?”
“Oh, he does, but I’ve found out about her through other people, people who have been able to use computers. You know, teachers and people…”
We sit in the relative silence of sea things crackling outside.
“What was her name? Before he made her change it?”
“Isadora.”
“Isadora what?”
“Oh. Fonseca.”
“Fonseca?” I say. “But yours is Formosa.”
“Yes – they’re different. I’m named after my father – he was a Spanish sea captain. Died in a tsunami. Unless he’s still alive on a desert island somewhere— What’s that noise? Outside?”
Something else crunches outside the boat – either that or the same lobster’s found another crab – or do crabs eat lobsters? Or do cockroaches eat both?
We sit stock still. I listen intently until it feels like my ears are going to burst.
It sounds like two lobsters now. Really big ones.
“Heloooooooo! Girls!”
And someone pulls the boat off from over our heads.
It’s Ned. And I can’t work out if I’m glad or furious. While I’m still thinking about it, he snuggles down under the side of the boat and starts talking.
“Need to hide from the helicopters – have they been this far along the coast?” He shines his torch in my eyes.
“Ned! Torch!” I squeal.
“Oh – sorry. But did you see the crash? I sank the Wesson woman with one blow – she’s totally rubbish at steering – but the noise was spectacular, and I did think I might possibly have drowned
her, but the course leader dived in to get her out, although she was already out, so they were both wet by then – and,” Ned coughs, “really cross. Anyway, the motorboat rescued her, Miss Sackbutt told me off which was like being told off by a bathmat, and it took them all that time to work out that you two had gone, and only I had seen which direction you went in.”
“But how did you know we wanted to escape?” asks Sophia. “Sorry,
I
wanted to escape.”
“I didn’t. It was a complete accident. I was watching a cormorant landing on a buoy, and I hit Wesson. She’s not very lovely. She is here because of you, Sophia, isn’t she?”
“Of course she is!” I snap, now feeling that my heroic stance is being eroded by the chivalrous actions of my unchivalrous brother. “So why are you here?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to be on your own for ever. I mean, it’s not possible to be out here with only a wetsuit for very long. You can’t exactly buy anything, or ask for anything, or even hide, and at some point, your skin’ll fall off.”
“What?” asks Sophia.
“He’s probably right,” I say, reluctantly. “A
wetsuit is like wearing a wet rubber glove. After a while, things get fetid.”
“Eeeew,” says Sophia.
“I knew it,” cheers Ned. “I knew she’d be an ‘Eeeew’ girl. Just like you.”
“She’s not,” I say. “She lived in a flat full of rats.”
“Oh, I heard that bit. Do you believe it?” Ned asks me as though Sophia’s not there, and starts pulling something out of his bag.
“I do,” I say, reaching out my hand to grasp Sophia’s wrist in a gesture of solidarity.
“Hmmm,” says Ned, chucking something at me.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Clothes,” says Ned. “Out of the lost property box. And what about the bit about her mum being a singer?”
“But she is,” says Sophia.
I wriggle to reach the zip of the wetsuit. “What you don’t know is that Sophia thinks that Pinhead – Pinehead – wants to keep her away from her mum, so that he can steal her mum’s fortune.” I say it firmly, unpeeling the warm rubber suit and reaching for what appears to be a T-shirt.
“Really?” says Ned. “Sounds like something out of one of your books, Lottie.”
I thump him, and drag on some tracksuit bottoms.
“But we don’t know she hasn’t made it all up, all the sea captain bit, the gun running, and the names,” says Ned.
“What about Miss Wesson, then?” I say.
“She might be exactly what Miss Sackbutt said, just someone hired by the school for extra security.”
“But it’s all true…” mutters Sophia in the dark, her voice quiet but with a hint of a sob. She’s rustling. Pulling clothes on over her head.
“Oh, I’m not saying it isn’t but we like proof in our family, don’t we, Lottie?”
“You do,” I say. “I…” I don’t know what to say. I’m just glad it’s dark and no one can see the colour of my face.
We sit in silence. I know Ned’s got a point but I don’t want him to be right. I want Sophia to be my friend, not his, and although he’s right about the wetsuits, and the proof, and the running away on our own, I could happily feed his unromantic and boringly practical brain to the giant lobster.
“Anyway,” says Ned breezily, “it doesn’t matter either way – it’s fun being here, on the run, under an upturned boat and now you’re both properly
dressed, we should sleep so that we can set off really early.”
“But we haven’t eaten anything,” I say.
“Ah – food – thought you might want some. Here…” There’s rustling as Ned pulls something else from his backpack. “Sophia, take the torch.”
Our boat tent fills with light and the warm smell of sausages as Ned spreads a bundle of tinfoil on his knees. There are two long hot dog sausages. Normally, I’d say they were disgusting. I really do think they look like poo, but just at the moment, my instinct is to grab both and cram them into my mouth, but then I remember Sophia and say: “You first.” I watch, my tongue hanging out, as she takes the first sausage and nibbles it.
“Lottie?” says Ned.
“Oh – I’m not really hungry—”
“In that case…” Ned lifts the tinfoil up towards his mouth.
“No!” I scream, grabbing the sausage just before his nose touches it.
“Ha!” he says. “I knew it!”
“Ned!” I say, tearing at the soft salty flesh of the sausage. “You really are…”
“…very kind to come and find us with a warm
dinner?” he says, folding the tinfoil and putting it carefully back into his rucksack. “Water anyone?”
This time, I grab the bottle first but as it turns out, Ned’s brought two.
“So anyway – I followed your tracks.”
“Our tracks? But we went along the coast, on purpose, so that we couldn’t leave any tracks.”
“Yes, but you buried a boat – I found it; no one else knows – then you clambered over the rocks with sandy feet; a little further on I found two wetsuit bum prints in the sand and a load of sea-cabbage stalks. Then there was the tap, which had obviously been used and was after all the only water, and then, this boat had to be the only place that you could possibly hide. After all, where else could you go in a swimsuit?” Even though I can’t see it, I can imagine his horrid grin – he’s so SMUG!
“Well done, Ned. You’re either very good at tracking, or we’re lousy at hiding our tracks,” says Sophia, licking her lips. “What about everyone else?”
“They think you’ve gone the other way – I don’t know why, but it might be because I told them you were looking for Mum and Dad in Cornwall, and
for some reason I don’t understand Sarah-Jane said she’d seen you go that way too.”
I imagine Sarah-Jane pointing in the wrong direction with certainty. It would be just like her to do that because it would make her important. For a moment I feel sorry for Sarah-Jane, but then I remember just how unpleasant she is and stop.
Overhead we hear the thump of a helicopter. We switch off the torch and sit motionless under the boat, waiting for it to pass. In fact, the helicopter stays in the area for so long that I think it must have seen us but in the end it turns and goes back along the coast.
“Flip!” says Ned, after it’s gone. “That was close.”
