Between Sea and Sky E-Book

Nicola Penfold

• Herausgeber: Little Tiger Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In a near future where a series of environmental disasters has left much of the country underwater, Pearl lives on a floating oyster farm with her father and younger sister, Clover. Following her mum's death several years earlier, Pearl refuses to set foot on land, believing her illness was caused by the poisons in the ground. Meanwhile, Clover dreams of school, friends and a normal life.Then Nat comes to spend the summer at the sea farm while his scientist mum conducts some experiments. Leaving behind the mainland, with its strict rules and regulations, he brings with him a secret. But when the sisters promise to keep his secret safe, little do they realize that they may be risking everything…A thrilling and thought-provoking ecological adventure from the author of the highly acclaimed WHERE THE WORLD TURNS WILD. Perfect for fans of THE EXPLORER, THE LAST WILD and WHERE THE RIVER RUNS GOLD.PRAISE FOR WHERE THE WORLD TURNS WILD:"A sense of the natural world's curative power runs through this adventurous story like a seam of gold." – Guardian"Some books are excellent story-telling, and some books broaden your knowledge and mind, and some just ought to be written and this book is all three. I loved it." – Hilary McKay, author of THE SKYLARKS' WAR"A brilliant adventure that pulls you headlong into Juniper and Bear's world, where survival depends upon finding the wild." – Gill Lewis, author of A STORY LIKE THE WIND"An absorbing, thought-provoking début tapping into pertinent ecological themes." – The Bookseller"Wondrous, warm-hearted, wildly exhilarating […] The world is familiar and frightening, the relationships between characters beautifully rendered – Nicola Penfold is an author to watch." – Nizrana Farook, author of THE GIRL WHO STOLE AN ELEPHANT

Leseprobe

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For Mum, Dad and Emma

Contents

Title PageDedicationReviewsChapter One: NatChapter Two: NatChapter Three: PearlChapter Four: PearlChapter Five: NatChapter Six: PearlChapter Seven: PearlChapter Eight: NatChapter Nine: PearlChapter Ten: NatChapter Eleven: PearlChapter Twelve: NatChapter Thirteen: PearlChapter Fourteen: PearlChapter Fifteen: PearlChapter Sixteen: NatChapter Seventeen: PearlChapter Eighteen: NatChapter Nineteen: PearlChapter Twenty: NatChapter Twenty-One: PearlChapter Twenty-Two: NatChapter Twenty-Three: PearlChapter Twenty-Four: NatChapter Twenty-Five: PearlChapter Twenty-Six: NatChapter Twenty-Seven: NatChapter Twenty-Eight: NatChapter Twenty-Nine: PearlChapter Thirty: NatChapter Thirty-One: NatChapter Thirty-Two: PearlChapter Thirty-Three: PearlChapter Thirty-Four: NatChapter Thirty-Five: PearlChapter Thirty-Six: NatChapter Thirty-Seven: PearlChapter Thirty-Eight: NatChapter Thirty-Nine: PearlChapter Forty: NatChapter Forty-One: PearlChapter Forty-Two: NatChapter Forty-Three: PearlChapter Forty-Four: PearlChapter Forty-Five: NatChapter Forty-Six: NatChapter Forty-Seven: PearlThanksExtractAbout the Author Copyright

Reviews

Praise forBetween Sea and Sky

“A message to us all in the most powerful, evocative and hopeful story spinning.” Hilary McKay, author of The Skylarks’ War

“A beautifully told adventure that will have readers, like its protagonists, diving deep to discover the fragility of our eco-system and emerging emboldened to protect its delicate balance.” Sita Brahmachari, author of Where the River Runs Gold

“Breathtaking, transporting and captivating. I was absolutely hooked.” Polly Ho-Yen, author of Boy in the Tower

“BOSS level MG dystopia, so vivid!” Louie Stowell, author of The Dragon in the Library

“A shimmering testament to the restorative power of nature and the limitless wonder unearthed by childhood curiosity.” Piers Torday, author of The Last Wild

“Nicola Penfold makes me want to love our planet harder, hold it closer.” Rashmi Sirdeshpande, author of How to Change the World

“I loved Penfold’s debut … and this confirms her as a rising star of children’s fiction, mixing a thrilling evocative adventure with pertinent themes of the environment and recovery.” Fiona Noble, The Bookseller

“This is compelling, high-stakes storytelling… This will be a favourite that I will return to over and over again.” Nizrana Farook, author of The Girl Who Stole an Elephant

“A powerful call to protect the world we’ve got.” Sinéad O’Hart, author of The Eye of the North

“A post-apocalyptic love song to the tenacity of nature, this is a story of the inbetween places, of change, loss and hope.” Lindsay Galvin, author of The Secret Deep

“An original and wonderful story of wild children and a world in trouble … so perfectly written that reading it is living it. And living it is an adventure.” Rachel Delahaye, author of Mort the Meek

“A compelling story with a richly imagined world woven with wonderful characters.” Lou Abercrombie, author of Fig Swims the World

“I loved Between Sea and Sky. I was totally immersed… I could almost smell the sea and feel salt in my hair. Powerful storytelling and a thought-provoking tale.” Gill Lewis, author of Sky Hawk

“An ecological adventure that’s though-provoking, poignant and an utterly immersive experience… Absolutely brilliant.” Juliette Forrest, author of Twister

“My book of the year. I adored Between Sea and Sky… This is a book that will leave a lasting impression.’ Marie Basting, author of Princess BMX

The dares have started early this year. Normally we wait till summer, but there are still two weeks of school to go and coloured flags are already appearing around the bay. Like everyone got bored at the same time.

It’s a trail. You put the flag someplace you shouldn’t go. The marshes or shoreline, or ground still saturated with poisons from way back. Mostly it’s the solar fields. The fields of silicon panels that have been our playground since we were five, even though they’re strictly no access.

The flags are calling cards. Proof you’ve been where you say you’ve been. Then you dare someone else to go and get them.

I call on Lucas at 8 a.m. sharp. He’s in the apartment next to me and Mum, on the top floor. The most stairs, Tally says when we leave her behind on the first floor. The best view, we retort. Yeah, of the solar fields, she’ll fling back at us.

“Flag day! Flag day!” I chant through Lucas’s letter box. The door swings open into my face.

“Watch it!” he says, stepping out in front of me. “You want my parents to hear?”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?” I say. “No grown-ups would be awake this time on a Sunday! Mum says her eyes need to be shut for twelve hours straight after a week in the growing tower!”

Lucas smiles good-naturedly. The growing tower is the heart of Edible Uplands, the crop-growing complex where most of the adults in the compound work their shifts. Vegetable and salad plants stacked up in rows in a pink incubating light. Mum says it’s like looking into a permanent sunset, especially since Central District upped their quotas again. Sometimes I wonder if they need the extra food at all. Maybe it’s stacked in warehouses somewhere, rotting, and all they really want is to show their power over us.

Lucas and I spring down the concrete stairwell. We always take it three steps at a time.

“Tally?” Lucas asks at the first floor.

“She’ll be at the bike sheds already,” I say, swinging past him and leaping down to the ground floor.

Tally whistles when she sees me. “Nat! Mate! You’ve not chickened out then?”

I shake my head, fast. Tally, Lucas and I have flagged together since nursery and today it’s my turn to place the flag. A red one. Everyone uses red for their hardest dares. It’s meant to be someplace dangerous, that’s the point, but we’ve always left Billy Crier’s windmill alone.

“We need to up the stakes. You said it,” I say.

“We’ve only got two years left, but we’re still playing baby games,” Tally had said at lunch yesterday. I’d known straight away where I’d have to go.

At some point kids stop with the daring. They get pulled into work at Edible Uplands or the desalination plant. Or inland – some assignment will come up at the polytunnels or one of the factories. We’ve got to make the most of our time together.

“Least there’s no wind,” Lucas says. I take a gulp of air. It’s hot, with the lingering taste of salt. It hasn’t rained in weeks.

Tally leads the way out of the compound. We live in four floors of concrete and steel, on stilted metal legs. Like some spacecraft landed years ago to refuel but never managed to lift off again. The legs have been surrounded by seawater so many times during floods that they’re starting to corrode.

Even the concrete’s cracking now, imploding from the inside. They built it cheap, Mum says. They didn’t reckon on the wind and the heat and the salt. They should have built it further back – it’s too close to the sea.

“It’s not too late to change the plan,” Lucas continues, looking back at me. “Your mum won’t want extra points.”

We’re standing under the board where all compound families are listed and where civil disobedience points go up against the names. For shirking shifts or missing quotas or going over the boundary, or a long list of other things Central deem impermissible.

Even when everyone’s been compliant, peacekeepers still come from Central every so often to take away the top offender for the prison ship. It’s a deterrent and reminder. Never forget the rules.

“Mischa better watch out,” Tal says, whistling. “His dad’s three off the top.”

I hate that list. Our friends and neighbours, their names blur together when I look.

“We won’t dare Mischa,” I say quickly. “Not this time.”

“Or Eli,” Lucas cuts in. “His family’s not far behind.”

Tal shakes her head. “Nah. Sara and Luna, that’s who we’ll pick. Their families barely have any points at all. Those girls know how not to get caught.”

“We could always do fifth field instead. We haven’t done that in ages,” Lucas says. He’s still trying to give me an escape, but there’s no way I’m backing out now. Not in front of Tal.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Tally’s already saying. “Fifth fieldis just like first field, and second and third.” She lets her voice drone on for emphasis.

“No,” I say, determined. “It’s Billy Crier’s windmill. Just like we said.”

“Cool,” Tally says breezily, and lifts her bike down the last few steps.

The mirrored fields dazzle you when you come out from the compound’s shadow. Fields of silicon stretching away either side of Drylands Road, until everything becomes sky. There’s shortages of most things round here, but sky we have in abundance.

Most people went inland during the floods. When the seawaters rose, they drowned whole villages and towns, sweeping people right off the edge of the earth, spreading disease and famine. But some people were brought back to the bay after, when the wind pumps were working again, draining seawater out of the land. Edible Uplands and the solar fields were built, and our compound, with its housing, service shops and school. Those are the things our district is known for. Them and the prison ship, brooding out on the horizon, representing everything bad about the sea.

“Race you!” Tally calls, jumping on her bike, and Lucas and I ride after her, our bike tyres cartwheeling over the maintenance tracks.

Even when there’s no wind, there’s something. Energy, from the ground maybe. It builds in the rotating wheels and passes up into you.

We leave our bikes stashed under one of the panels in third field. We make sure they’re hidden, so no one recognizes them as ours.

I used to love these fields. It was a novelty to be out of the compound at all and we’d spend whole days tramping through them. The fields felt alive – electrons bouncing round the silicon panels, taking sunlight, parcelling it up into electricity. It’s pretty miraculous. The shine just wears off after a bit.

“Looks like we’re clear,” Tally says, scanning the field either side. We have to be careful. If you’re caught in the fields, it’s one civil disobedience point. Points for minors go up against your parents. You only get your own chart when you start your shifts. No one wants to risk their parents being sent to that ship, to spend the rest of their days at sea.

We proceed on foot, single file between the panels. Tally first, then me, then Lucas.

We’ve flagged most places there are to flag already. All around the harbour, Customs and Immigration and Edible Uplands. Last year a flag was left at the top of the growing tower and all the kids in the compound were grounded for a month. Every single one, because no one would break ranks and say who it was that had climbed the rickety ladder. Flag rivalries aside, growing up in the compound makes you pretty tight.

Billy Crier’s windmill isn’t like the growing tower. The danger isn’t just in the climb.

It’s older than the other wind pumps. It predates not only the floods and the Hunger Years, but the Decline, and even the Greedy Years before that. It’s from when the land was still healthy enough to farm, before the poisons and the saltwater got in.

“It’s just a story. He was probably never even real,” Lucas says, as the windmill looms closer, black and broken.

“Yeah?” I say, looking back.

Lucas nods emphatically. “Dad says they only tell about Billy Crier to keep us out of the fields.”

“Liar,” Tally pronounces, staring back at him defiantly.

Lucas blushes. “Well, the ghost bit at least.”

“I guess Nat’s going to find out,” Tally says, crooking her neck ghoulishly and making an eerie kind of cry.

I laugh, to show I’m not bothered.

Billy was the same age as us. He was a runner for the smuggling gang that operated in the bay in the Hunger Years. People were so desperate for food they were dragging eels out of the marshes. If customs officers were coming, runners got the windmill operators to stop their sails at a diagonal cross, so the smugglers knew to sink their goods. It was a throwback to another time – some ancient signalling system.

The night Billy Crier was running, his dad was in the marshes, in one of the little wooden boats. There’d been a delivery from the next district and Billy’s dad was taking packages of food up to the old town.

Billy got word customs officers were coming, but when he got to the windmill, the operator refused to go up. A summer storm was coming and the brakes for the sails weren’t working properly. It was too dangerous. Only Billy thought it wasn’t as dangerous as it would be for his dad to be caught out on the marshes, with a full shipment of food, so he climbed up himself to stop those sails.

All the kids in the compound know the story. A freak gust of wind blowing in from the sea. Billy losing his footing. His necktie getting caught on the sail. They say he only wore that necktie to look older, like his dad.

The storm meant it was three whole days before they could get his body down. Or so the story goes.

Lucas glances across to me. “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

I don’t say anything. We’re standing at the bottom of the windmill. It’s like you slip through to a different time here. No one comes, not even maintenance. Green straggly vegetation has grown up, and though the gulls barely bother with the land, sometimes they come here and sit at the top of the sails, watching.

Lucas’s grandmother says the gulls are the souls of all the people that drowned in the floods.

“Nat, mate, did you hear?” Lucas says, determined to give me the chance to back out. It doesn’t matter to him that Tally’s listening.

The panels have started up with their whistling. It makes my heart skip a beat or two. There’s a film of sweat on the back of my neck. “Do you think Billy was scared?” I ask suddenly. “The night he climbed?”

Tally’s gone ahead into the doorway. Her face is dim in the shadows. “You know Crier wasn’t his real name?” she says in a lower tone than usual. “It was ’cause of all his crying that night.”

Lucas giggles nervously. “Well, he can’t have cried for long, can he? Not after a fall like that.” He does the same neck twist that Tally did earlier.

A gull screams at the top of the windmill and flutters up into the sky. “Something scared it,” Tally says, looking at me intently.

I push past her into the windmill. I want it done with. I want that flag up there and it to be someone else’s job to get it down.

I peer up through the space in the ceiling where the steps used to be. Someone took them out years ago to deter climbers, but they didn’t do a great job ’cause the next set of steps is still there. And the set after that. More like a ladder than actual steps, but still there. You can see them all the way to the top, like snakes and ladders.

The noise of the panels has got up outside. A pinging, like someone repeatedly twanging an elastic band.

“You got the flag?” Lucas checks.

“Course!” I show him a flash of red from my pocket.

“You don’t have to climb out properly,” Lucas says, scared now. “As long as you can see it from the outside. The flag doesn’t have to be right out on the sails, does it, Tal?”

Tally shakes her head. She looks scared too, just a tiny bit, and a shiver runs down my spine. Tally shrugs when she sees me looking. “It’s just a flag, isn’t it? We could even leave it down here. The others would still be too scared to come in.”

We all nod. This place is taboo. There are no names sprayed on the walls like you get round the compound – bored kids, proving their existence. Billy’s windmill is totally empty. Just the few odd stinging plants – nettles and thistles. Sometimes the plants grow round Edible Uplands too, before maintenance get paranoid about pests or disease and rip them up. Nothing can jeopardize the growing tower. It’s what keeps us all alive.

“Right, I’m going up. Catch me if I fall,” I say, stepping through the doorway.

Lucas tuts disapprovingly, but comes forward to give me a leg up to the first floor. I scrabble on to the dusty floorboards above.

It’s dark inside and there’s an odd creaking that sounds throughout the building. The sails don’t turn any more – they were permanently braked years ago – but it feels like they’re going round anyway.

“You all right, Nat? Are the steps sound?” Lucas’s voice trembles slightly. He hates flag days. If it were up to him, we’d leave all our flags in the compound.

I put my hand on the iron rungs to the next floor and give them a shake. They groan, but don’t wobble enough that I can back out.

“What’s it like?” Tally calls.

“Dark. Dusty,” I say.

“And? Is there anything there?” she says impatiently.

“Nothing,” I say. “Some old sacks. Names on the wall.”

“Names?” Tally shrieks. “Someone’s been up?”

I laugh quietly at her indignation. “Not for ages. They look old. Carved in the wood.” I run my fingers over the letters. I shiver – it’s like fingers walking down my spine. “Billy’s here,” I whisper.

“What?” Tally shouts.

“Billy,” I repeat, louder, uncomfortable now, like I’m trespassing somewhere sacred. “His name’s here.”

“Billy Crier?” Lucas asks.

“Just Billy. And his mates, I guess.” I read them out. Billy’s last on the list. Jones, Yusuf, Mara, Olive, Billy. The names are written together, but in different writing, like each of them scratched out their name themselves.

BILLY. The letters are jagged and deep. It could be any Billy, but I know it’s him. I feel it. Billy Crier, up here one summer’s day with his mates, or at night, after the windmill operator had gone home. Billy, carving out his name by torchlight. Never imagining what would happen.

“Nat, you going on up?” Tally says. “We don’t want to hang around longer than we need to.” She sounds nervous.

I’m almost on the third floor when there’s a scrambling noise below. “Nat! Nat!” Lucas shrieks. “Someone’s coming. Uplands people. Hide!”

Tally swears loudly. “How did we not see them coming?”

“Lucas? Lucas!” I hiss. But there’s silence below. Tally and Lucas have already scarpered.

I’m about to leg it back down when I hear footsteps outside. Voices.

I pull myself up the rest of the way on to the third floor, wincing when the ladder creaks. The voices outside carry on uninterrupted.

I crawl along the wooden floor to where there’s a little window at floor level. I lie horizontal and peer out to the ground below.

There are two people. A man and a woman. They’re both workers from the Uplands, I recognize them. They’re wearing white, wipe-clean, seamless suits, that are anti everything – bacteria, virus, fungus, general grime. The woman’s got a box and is looking down into the thistles like she lost something. She picks something up with gloved fingers and holds it out to the man. I can’t make out what she’s saying.

They seem to be transferring leaves to the box. The man keeps pulling a face and rubbing his hands on his legs, like he’s touching something unpleasant. The woman lifts up a leaf to her face and stares at whatever she’s seeing on it.

“That’s all of them, surely? Don’t know why Central are so bothered. Not if the things die anyway,” the man says, louder now. He sounds bored.

The woman gazes to the top of the windmill. “I swear I saw something. Some movement.”

I retreat back into the darkness, willing myself invisible.

The man’s looking now too. “They say this mill’s haunted. That boy who was strung up on the sails, back in the Hunger Years.” He laughs nervously.

“Billy Crier, poor lad,” the woman says sadly, before they both head off down the maintenance track with their boxful of whatever it was they were collecting.

I jump back down the ladders. Both flights to the first floor, then a final leap down and out into the sunshine. My eyes blink after the dark of the windmill.

“Tal? Lucas?” My voice sounds emptily across the fields. There’s nothing but the hum of the panels.

I crouch down next to the thistles. I’ve never noticed the leaves before. They’re pointy, with prickly hairs on them, like the nettles that grow round the compound, before maintenance come and rip them all out.

No one would come out here for thistles. What was it they were collecting?

I rifle through the plants. They’re just leaves. I’m about to spring up, to get away from this place, when I notice it. A creature – moving, living. A tiny black thing with miniscule hairs. It’s inside a sort of webbing. It looks a bit like a maggot, the kind you see when the vacuum packs of meat are left open too long. But from the way the woman was looking at the creatures, boxing them up, they can’t be maggots.

There’s a prickle on the back of my neck, as if someone’s watching, and I look round again for Tally and Lucas, but they’re nowhere in sight. There’s no one there, just me, and Billy’s ghost.

I go through the thistles again, quicker now. There are more creatures further on, huddled together on a fresh set of plants. The man and woman must have missed them.

I drop one of the creatures from the leaf on to my palm. Its little, segmented body soft against my skin. It tickles.

There are always scary stories about pests or fungus coming to the bay. About the Hunger Years coming back with a vengeance. Mum gets angry when I don’t take them seriously. “You don’t know what it’s like, Nat. To know hunger like that.” The adults have the Hunger Years etched deep in their heads and their bellies. That’s why they put up with all the rules.

“Are you dangerous?” I whisper to the tiny creature.

I take out the red flag from my pocket and spread it over the ground and then transfer the creatures into it. There must be two dozen or so. I add some leaves, because from the holes in them, I think that’s what the creatures eat.

I don’t know why I take them. Perhaps it’s because the Uplands people want them. Or maybe it’s something to show Tally, to make up for not hanging out the flag.

We’re painting the exterior of our cabin – yellow against the blue sky. It’s weather protection, but we might as well make it colourful. Clover picked up the paints from the hardware shop on the mainland. She chose a whole rainbow but her enthusiasm is less bright than yesterday, when she had clattered off the motorboat with a toppling stack of cans.

“It’s the hottest it’s been in ages, Pearl. I want to go swimming.” Clover’s looking over the water longingly. There are four sleek, grey bodies breaking the surface – turning like little wheels.

“We have to paint a bit every day, otherwise it will never get done. Like Dad says.”

“Does he?” Clover says, furrowing her eyebrows. “Does he really say that any more?”

There are snores from inside the cabin and I blush on Dad’s behalf. He’s flat out on the sofa.

Clover’s voice sings out. “I can’t remember the last time Dad helped with anything.”

“He took you ashore yesterday, didn’t he? He just needs more time, after that winter…”

I shudder, thinking about the winter. Ice formed all the way round our platform. We had to break it up with axes to get to the oysters. Even in April, we were still breaking up the ice.

“It’s been warm for ages now,” Clover says dismissively.

“I know, but the cold gets to Dad more because he’s older, and…” My voice trails away. I inhale a deep breath of sea air. It’s thick with salt. Tangy.

If you look towards land, the mudflats are already appearing, like a magical kingdom rising up from under the sea, all green and gold. It’ll be glorious out there today. A perfect day for mudlarking, where we find washed-up treasure in the sand that’s exposed when the tide goes out. The finds twinkle extra sparkly when it’s sunny.

“I’m going to do a wishing,” I say. “Later. When the tide’s full out.”

“You’ve got to leave off with the wishing, Pearl. You’re getting too old,” Clover preaches in someone else’s voice. Somebody from one of her books maybe. Clover’s always imagining a life other than our own. She wasn’t so annoying before she could read.

I pull a face. “Mum wished.”

“It was a game, Pearl. She was playing a game for us,” Clover says, kindly now. My ten-year-old little sister, telling me I should have grown up by now and found some other way of forecasting our future than using the things that turn up in the mud.

“Grey!” I say, looking past her. Clover runs to the edge of the platform and throws herself flat on her front, her fingers trailing down into the water. Grey nudges up to her, wanting fish.

You shouldn’t have favourites, but Clover and I love Grey best. The round, smiling bulk of him.

“The wishing brought Grey, didn’t it? And the others,” I say.

Clover rolls on to her back, her head hanging over the side of the platform, yellow hair streaming into the water like beams of sunshine. She’s laughing and Grey’s prodding her. “Maybe. Maybe it did,” she says playfully.

When Grey first came, Clover had wished for a friend. It was a couple of years ago now. She did it out of spite because we’d argued, but it was still a bona fide wish. She’d used her best treasures. Things we’d found on the flats, larking – the cracked face of an old porcelain doll, a broken comb, a swirly black marble. She’d laid them in a ring of periwinkles and left them for the tide to take, whispering out her wish to the sea. “A friend who’ll understand me,” she’d said, looking at me deliberately as she spoke.

And that was the day they came, gliding in from beyond the prison ship, like they’d always been here.

Clover noticed them first. She’s never forgotten that the first two mammals in my sea ledger were her spot.

“Mermaids!” she’d yelled certainly across the deck. Dad was inside, sleeping. Even back then he’d sleep a lot. I’d been shucking oysters, so intent on the knife in my hands that I hadn’t noticed the squat little bodies surround our sea platform, breaking the surface with their triangle fins.

“Mermaids!” Clover had screamed again, jumping up and down with delight.

Dad had guffawed when he made it out on to the platform. “They’re not mermaids! They’re a type of cetacean. Porpoises.”

I’d repeated the word softly. Porpoises. Harbour porpoises, Dad had said. All I really knew about were the bivalves we farm in the lantern nets under our platform, and down in the cages on the floor of the sea. I hadn’t set foot in the prison library back then.

We weren’t sure what else might exist. I don’t think we thought anything else could, so much had been lost in the Decline.

“Harbour porpoises?” Clover had said curiously.

“That’s right. Sorry to disappoint you, my little legume.” Dad had used her favourite pet name and flung her up into the air. He’d had more energy then. “You and Pearl are the closest this bay will ever get to mermaids.”

“Are they sisters, like Clover and me?” I’d asked excitedly, but Dad had shaken his head. It was a mother and a child, he’d told us, and Clover and I had gone all solemn.

“It’s a blessing to have them back,” Dad had said, as he tucked us into our hammocks that night. It was a happy thing, but Dad’s voice had been sad. “You should be recording this, big one.” Big one is me, and because Dad doesn’t issue many instructions, and because the porpoises seemed so happy, I had started my ledger the next morning, backdating it one day for accuracy.

Grey’s the little one, all grown up now. His mum swam on at some point, but Grey’s never gone away.

Once I found my way into the prison library during a delivery to the ship, I found out all sorts about our new friends. Olive, a prisoner who sorts the books, found the perfect book. Cetaceans of the UK – Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises. The books in the mainland library are all new – any old ones were washed away in the floods – but the good thing about a library on a ship is that it floats. Their books may be yellow and ancient, but they survived.

Sometimes Clover will bring back more up-to-date reading material when she goes ashore with Dad for supplies. Some pro-compound propaganda pamphlets about working your shifts, the greater good, not wasting food, loyalty to Central. Clover studies them like they’re engaging even though I can tell she’s bored. She’s much happier with the old novels I sneak back from the ship.

Cetaceans breathe air, like we do. They’re aquatic mammals and give birth to live young. The writer of Cetaceans of the UK says harbour porpoises are shy and retiring, but ours aren’t. There’s nothing shy about porpoises when they want food. They come for the schools of fish that gather under our farm. Dad says our farm’s a veritable coral reef.

The book says people used to call porpoises puffing pigs because of the noise they make when they breathe. I never heard a pig, but I can imagine them from hearing the porpoises.

I can hear Grey now. Choo, choo, choo, like he’s sneezing.

Clover strips off into her pink cotton swimsuit.

“You can’t!” I cry aghast. “We’ve got to finish this paint coat. Storms don’t stop because it’s summer!”

She beams. “They will if you command them to, Pearl. Can’t you wish for that? A summer of no storms?”

“Clover! You know it isn’t like that!”

“Can’t you wish anything you want if you leave the right offerings?” She puts her hands into a prayer sign.

“Clover!” I repeat, though I’m already loosening the ties on my shorts.

“Come in with me! The painting will wait. Look at that sky!”

Clover raises her arms up above her head. She flicks me a smile as she dives down into the water, where Grey’s waiting to greet her, snorting away.

I can’t help but smile too, looking up, looking all around us, because when you live at sea the sky’s everywhere. It’s a fifth element. And today there’s not a cloud in sight. Clover’s right, the painting can wait.

I press the lid tight on the yellow paint pot, then I’m diving in after her, unable to ignore the sea’s call any longer.

We swim round the platform. We swim in circles and figures of eight. Butterfly, backstroke, front crawl, breaststroke. All the ways Mum taught us to propel ourselves through the water.

Grey doesn’t stick around for long, and nor do the others. The fish must have moved on. “Farewell, Grey. Goodbye, Smile! See you later, Salt! So long, Snort!” Clover calls.

Dad laughed at us for not picking more eloquent names, but I think they suit the porpoises.

We lie on our backs like starfish before diving down, pulling ourselves deeper along the rope lines of the scallop nets and mussel socks, to the oyster cages and clams at the bottom. With a big enough breath of air, we can make it right down to the seabed where there’s barely any light left.

Some of the cages are full – crammed with big, fat shells, hardly any space between them. We need to bring them up; they’re ready for harvest.

I gesture to Clover at the cages. She was meant to have separated these oysters out last week. She told me she had.

I shake one of the cages pointedly and the water darkens around us. Clover pulls a funny forgive-me face and starts making her way back up to the light.

I wait for a moment, the pressure of the sea drumming against my ears. Clover and I used to have competitions to see which of us could stay down the longest. We’d count out the seconds, holding hands, gazing into each other eyes. I learned every fleck of green in her blue irises.

Clover’s lost interest lately. She’s always up first, wanting to surface.

I kick my way up, after her.

“Race you!” Clover cries, as I break the surface, and she shoots on by towards the flats. Butterfly stroke, fast, to make me laugh.

“We have to do those cages,” I say when I reach her, sprawled languidly out on the mud. “The algae’s bad again.”

Clover pulls a face. “Later, though? We’ll do it together, after larking.”

I nod and take her hand to pull her up. We can never resist the flats on a day like today.

Clover and I used to mudlark all the time with Mum. Even when she was sick, Mum would summon up the energy for larking. She said the finds gave her energy.

I think she was looking for the right thing. She didn’t know what it was, or at least she wasn’t able to put it into words, but maybe if it had washed up on the sand before her, that would have been the turning point. Then she’d have started to get better.

Only it didn’t turn up, whatever it was she was looking for, and the doctor from the compound hospital came and said there was nothing left for him to do. He told us Mum ought to go to the mainland so they could better manage her condition. Only they didn’t actually mean that, they meant better manage her dying. Even though it was the land that got her sick in the first place.

“Look, Pearl. A face.” Clover’s voice is clear as a bell.

I tremble a fraction. We get our fair share of faces, though now it’s almost always just the bones underneath. The floods washed so many people away they’ll be washing up forever. Eventually they’ll be fossils.

But Clover’s not found anything ghoulish. She’s sunk on her knees and is digging with her fingers.

It’s an old doll. Plastic. The eyes have long washed away, so there are just two hollow sockets and a little snub nose, which is surprisingly intact. The doll’s got two arms but only one leg, and even that’s missing a foot. She’s in need of a mermaid’s tail. I’ll carve one out of driftwood before I send her on her way again.

“You could paint it,” Clover says. “It would be good for your wishings.”

She’s smiling at me sweetly and I nod, trying not to notice how she always calls them my wishings now, when they used to belong to us both.

After years of larking you end up with too many of certain things. Mum started the wishings as a way of giving them back to the sea. We’d lay things out at low tide and wait for the water to take them, sending our wish as they went.

In the beginning, we laid the offerings in circles, but after Mum died we got more adventurous. We found an old book in her office. Rituals, Magic, Witchcraft. It’s about white magic, or Wicca, which is magic to do good. The book’s damaged – whole pages bleached out from seawater or sun – but somehow the gaps make the surviving sections more important.

We wish to get better when one of us is sick. For a winter without the sea freezing over. For the geese to come back in October.

We wish for things we want too. A new dress for Clover. A notebook or pencil for me. Those things don’t turn up very often, but sometimes they do. Not washed up by the sea, but once in a while Dad will bring something back from a supply run.

Pretty much all our spells and chants come from the Wicca book. The shapes too. Triangles and stars.

Pentangles, five-pointed stars, are my favourite. Five points for spirit, water, fire, earth and air.

Water is the sea all around us. Earth the poisoned land. Air’s the sky where the gulls fly.

Fire is the Decline. Here it was floods and the rising storm water, but elsewhere it was fire. The world got too hot. Fire burned forests and villages, whole cities too.

Spirit is everything that was lost. For us spirit is Mum, because she got lost too.

Clover’s digging efforts have paid off. She lifts the doll from the mud triumphantly. “Ta-da! She’s a pretty one, isn’t she, Pearl?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty,” I say nonchalantly.

“You can have her.” Clover holds the doll out to me, her arm stretched tight. “Take it. She’s more your thing than mine.”

I take the brittle figure but I don’t say anything. I run my finger over the smooth face. All the places the sea has touched. I place the doll down on the sand and start marking out a pentangle with my toes.

Clover turns cartwheels, her shadow turning alongside her so she looks like two people. She’s coming deliberately close to my star.

“Careful!” I say, irritated.

“I wish something exciting would wash up,” Clover says. “Something we’ve never seen before. I’m so bored. B. O. R. E. D.”

Clover writes the letters in the sand with her finger. One straight line of capitals. She does this a lot lately. She’ll write FED UP, or RESCUE ME! Like someone might see. Clover’s always wanted to be noticed.

Then she flops down and lies on her back, looking up at the sky.

“Watch your eyes,” I say automatically. In winter we worry about the wind, but in summer it’s the sun that can be the enemy. It glints off the sand particles and burns your skin. Burns your eyes too, if you aren’t careful.

Clover sighs and turns over, so her face is flat on the sand instead. Her voice comes out muffled. “I’m going to ask Dad to send me to school in September.”

I stare at her, open-mouthed. Clover stays still, face down, listening for my reaction. I can’t think of a single sound to make.

“I need to learn, Pearl,” she says, still speaking into the sand. “I’ll never achieve my dreams stuck out here. You know how much I want to see other places and meet new people. I’m going to ask Dad.”

“Clover, you can’t! You’re a secret!” I gasp.

“One of us is,” Clover says purposely. “One of us is a secret. There’s one school place, if we ask for it.”

“Don’t you dare!” I cry, outraged. “Look what the land did to Mum!”

Clover’s silent for a moment, but she turns reluctantly on to her side to look at me. She spits out a mouthful of mud. “It’s just going to school, Pearl. Like every other kid in this entire bay except us.”

“But we’re not in the bay, are we?” I exclaim. “We’re at sea. The compound school wouldn’t want a sea girl!”

Clover sits up, her eyes lit with fury. “Don’t call me that. We’re no different from them. I’m no different.”

“That’s not what they’ll think,” I say meanly. The first time Dad took Clover back to land, a kid called her a sea witch right to her face. She won’t let us talk about it, but she’s never forgotten. Only Clover’s not like me. The landlubber taunts don’t make her want to stay away – they just make her want to prove them wrong.

“I deserve to go to that school. Just because you…” Clover’s voice fades out.

A gull flies above. We watch its shadow on the sand, cutting between us.

“Just because you never wanted to go,” Clover finishes.

“You won’t fit in,” I say quietly.

Clover’s voice trembles. “I’ll make myself fit in.”

“Dad’s a better teacher than they’ve got, I bet.”