The water all around us by Lynn Michell

Author:Lynn Michell [Lynn Michell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linen Press
Published: 2023-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Fenn

At school, the clock on the wall ticks with spiteful slowness through the long hours. Fenn stares out of the window to watch the restless cloud formations, to check on gathering grey, to monitor the patches of blue that teasingly grow and shrink and grow again. Hey sky, stay blue! Bigger bits of blue, please. Bigger! The incessant staring out of the window inevitably invites Miss Murdoch’s wrath but Fenn no longer cares. This is important. Dividing by seven isn’t. She can do that. She plays the game, Fenn Against the Weather, as she wills and tugs it into the right shape. She knows how it can change from drenching rain to sun and back to rain in the space of an hour. She knows about gales that batter the place for days without respite until you wake up one morning to an eery silence where only hours before winds had howled round the house like banshees and rattled all the windows.

At last, at last, the bell rings and Fenn is racing away from the place that holds her with the thinnest of threads, then tapping her impatient feet on the floor of the school bus, and finally, finally she is allowed down and set free. A whoop of joy, and she’s at the gate and the birds are gathered at her feet. Still she greets them all with affection and kindness, strokes a head, picks up a wriggling weight of feathers, and doesn’t skimp on her task of getting them all to their bedtime places. This too is important. There’s her dad digging holes in the same spot, and on the stairs in the house she can hear brush-on-paper noises from her mum’s room. All is well. All is as it should be.

Fenn and Jess make no definite arrangements about days and times because each senses, rightly, that the other is happier with an agreement that is as fluid as the sea. Some days, Fenn finds herself alone on the white sand. No sign of Jess. The reason doesn’t matter. It’s not a problem because that’s how it used to be and she steps backwards easily into that other time. There are rock pools to search, terns to watch while she sits very still with her back to the dunes, maybe a buzzard or an eagle circling further away, a moving dot on a big blue canvass.

Today when Fenn reaches the dunes and peers over, there is Jess sitting on the sand, her spiky fair hair already wet. So she’s been in. My turn next.

‘Hi,’ Jess calls, fountains of sand preceding the stamp of a girl’s feet and the skitter of paws. Hero is at her side first, licking her hand and shaking more sand all over her. She closes her eyes. ‘Hey, stop! I can’t see. Go and dig somewhere further away.’

‘Hi,’ Fenn says. And before she has even sat down, ‘Can we go swimming?’

Jess laughs. ‘Hello, Fenn. How are you? How was school? Yes, I’m fine, thank you.

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