The Tide Knot. Helen Dunmore
to listen? Does Sadie really believe that I’m her owner now? Yes! A few metres away from the terrier, Sadie slows and stops. You can see from her body how much she longs to rush right up to it. She glances back at me, asking why I’ve spoiled what could have been a wonderful adventure.
“Good girl. You are such a good girl, Sadie.”
I’m out of breath. I drop to my knees on the wet sand and clip on Sadie’s lead. The terrier girl picks up her dog, which is no bigger than a baby.
“I thought your dog was going to eat Sky,” says the girl. She has very short spiky blonde hair and her smile leaps across her face like sunshine.
“Sky. Weird name for a dog.”
“I know. She’s not mine. She belongs to my neighbour, but my neighbour’s got MS so I take her for walks. Not that she walks far. Sky, I mean, not my neighbour,” adds the girl quickly, as if she’s said something embarrassing. “Sorry,” she adds, “too much information.”
I don’t even know what MS is, so I just say, “Oh. I see.”
“Is this your dog?” asks the girl longingly.
“Yes.” It still feels like a lie when I say that. It’s such a cliché when people say that things are too good to be true, but each time I say that Sadie is my dog, that is exactly how it feels. Much too good to be true. I worried for weeks that Jack’s family would want her back, but they don’t. She’s yours, Jack’s mum said. Dogs know who they belong to, and Sadie’s chosen you for sure, Sapphire. Look at her wagging her tail there. I never get such a welcome.
“She’s beautiful.” The girl stretches out her hand confidently, as if she’s sure that Sadie will like her, and Sadie does. She sniffs the girl’s fingers approvingly. I give a very slight tug on Sadie’s lead.
“We’ve got to go,” I say.
“I must take Sky and River back, too. That’s River, over there at the bottom of the hole. He’s always digging holes. He’s my little brother.”
“River. Weird name for a boy,” I nearly say. I stop myself in time, but the girl smiles.
“Everyone thinks our names are a bit strange.” She looks at me expectantly. “Don’t you want to know what my name is? Or would you rather guess?”
I shake my head a bit stiffly. This girl is so friendly that it makes me feel awkward.
“Rainbow,” she says. “Rainbow Petersen. My mum called me Rainbow because she reckoned it had been raining in her life for a long time before I was born, and then the sun came out. My mum’s Danish, but she’s been living here since she was eighteen.”
There is a short silence. I try to imagine Mum saying anything remotely like that to me, and fail. The sun came out when you were born, Sapphire darling. No, I don’t think so.
The girl – Rainbow – looks as if she’s waiting for something. She picks up the terrier, and I say, “Well, bye then.”
But then she looks straight at me and says quite seriously, “You know my name and my little brother’s name and Sky’s name. Aren’t you going to tell me yours?”
I feel myself flush. “Um, it’s Sapphire.”
“That’s great,” says Rainbow warmly.
“Why?”
“I’m so glad you haven’t got a normal name like Millie or Jessica. Sapphire. Yes, I like it. What about your dog?”
“She’s called Sadie.”
The girl looks at me again in that expectant way, but whatever she’s expecting doesn’t happen. After a moment she says, “OK, see you around then, Sapphire. Bye, Sadie,” and she goes back to where River is digging his hole.
It’s only when she’s been gone for a while that I realise she wanted to know more about me. But there’s nothing I can do about that now, and besides, as old Alice Trewhidden always says, It’s not good to tell your business to strangers.
You’d have thought I was Rainbow’s friend already, the way she smiled at me.
Conor’s gone fishing off the rocks at Porthchapel with Mal. Mum was right: Conor has got to know loads of people in St Pirans already. I suppose it’s partly because he goes to school here, but it’s also just the way Conor is. I don’t know all his friends’ names, but they’re mostly surfers. Conor speaks surfer talk when he’s with them. He and Mum and Roger all keep telling me I should surf, but I don’t want to any more. If you’ve surfed the currents of Ingo, why would you want to surf on Polquidden Beach, or even up at Gwithian? It would be like being told that you’re only allowed one sip of water when you’re dying of thirst.
Conor doesn’t feel the same. I tried to talk to him about it once, not long after we came to St Pirans.
“Saph, you’re not giving St Pirans a chance,” he said. “There’s great surfing here. You used to like body-boarding at the cove.”
“That was before we went to Ingo,” I said. Conor looked at me uneasily.
He doesn’t talk much about Ingo now we’re in St Pirans. It’s as if he thinks we’ve left Ingo behind, along with the cottage and everything we’ve known since we were born. Or maybe there’s some other reason. I have the feeling that Conor is keeping something from me. Mum says he’s growing up, and that I can’t expect Conor to tell me everything now, the way he did when we were younger.
“Don’t you feel it’s pointless, this kind of surfing?” I asked. I wanted to probe what Conor was really thinking. “I mean, compared to surfing the currents, it’s nothing. Once you’ve been in Ingo, you can’t be satisfied with messing around on the surface of the water.”
Conor’s face was clouded. “I can’t live like that, Saph, neither properly belonging in one place or another,” he said. He sounded angry, but I don’t think he was angry with me. “I’ve got to try to belong where I am. It’s no good to keep on wanting things you can’t have—”
He broke off. I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“I know you miss Senara,” he went on.
“Home, you mean.”
“All right, home.”
“So, I miss home. That’s normal, Con!”
“But other people are living in our cottage now. We can’t go back there, so it’s no use hankering.”
“We could go back if we wanted. Mum could give the tenants notice.”
“But, Saph, Mum doesn’t want to. Can’t you see that? She was glad to get away from the cottage and the cove and everything that reminds her of Dad. Mum’s much happier here.”
I know that really. I’ve known it for weeks, but I haven’t wanted to put it into words.
“And there’s something else, too,” Conor goes on. “She wanted to get us away from Ingo.”
“Mum doesn’t know anything about Ingo! She doesn’t even know it exists.”
“We haven’t told her anything. But Mum’s not stupid. She picked up that something strange was going on down at the cove. She was frightened for us – especially for you. She even asked me if I knew why you were behaving so strangely.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
“Saph, why are you so suspicious all the time? Of course I didn’t. Mum doesn’t know about Ingo, but she senses something, and since Dad disappeared she’s not taking any chances. Maybe she’s right,” Conor adds, sounding thoughtful.
“Mum’s right? Right to take us away from everything? Adults know they can get away with doing what