The Crossing of Ingo

Rainbow and Patrick will be here in half an hour. Rainbow is bringing some pasties from St Pirans, because we told her what had happened to Sadie and that we hadn’t had a chance to cook.

Conor reaches forward to put another log on the fire. “So are you still going to release that fish back into the sea?” he asks. His voice is harsh.

“Yes,” I say.

“You’re crazy, Saph. Mary Thomas’s cat should have it.”

“No,” I struggle to explain. “If we act like them – like Ervys – it will never end. There’ll be one revenge, and then another, and then another…”

“I get the point. There’s another solution, though, Saph. We could walk away.”

“What do you mean?”

“We get out of it. Turn our backs on Ingo completely. If you don’t feed your Mer blood by thinking of Ingo and going to Ingo, it’ll grow weaker. In a few years’ time you might not even remember that it’s there. You’ll look back and believe that Ingo was one of those things you used to be interested in before you grew up.”

“How can you say that, Conor? Ingo is real.”

“Of course it’s real. But it doesn’t have to be real for us. Look at Sadie. That happened because of us going to Ingo. Do you really want to live like this, Saph?”

“Conor, I can’t believe you—”

And at that moment it comes. A low, thrumming sound that is sweet and piercing at the same time. It seems to begin deep in the shell of my ear, as if it’s growing from inside me. But it’s not just inside me, it’s outside me too. It beats the air like a bell, but it’s not an Air sound at all. It’s salty, full of tides and currents and vast undersea distances. It sounds like the sea beating on the shores of my understanding. It’s a summons, an invitation, a command.

Conor hears it too. The log rests in his hand, forgotten. The sound grows until there is nothing else in the room, nothing else in the whole world. Every cell in our body vibrates to it, and now, suddenly, I grasp its meaning. I am hearing the Call. I am being invited to come to the Assembly chamber as a candidate for the Crossing of Ingo. It’s what Faro told me about, but I never thought it would feel like this. I glance down at the bracelet of woven hair that is always on my wrist. My hair, twined so close into Faro’s that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. My deublek bracelet. Faro’s voice comes back to me. And then, little sister, we will present ourselves to the Assembly, and say that we are ready to make the Crossing of Ingo.

The Call thunders through us. Faro will hear it too in Ingo. And Elvira. The log falls to the floor as Conor reaches out and grabs my hand. I’ve never seen Conor look like this. Lit up, like a face with a torch shining on it, except that the light is coming from inside him.

“Saph,” he says, “you hear it too, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I was wrong. Everything I said was wrong, Saph. We’ve got to answer the Call.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_65813243-b37e-5569-8a89-9943662b3e8a)

All yesterday evening Conor remained lit up with excitement. I was sure that Rainbow and Patrick would sense the Call thrumming through him, even though they don’t know about Ingo. Maybe Rainbow did, in a way. She was very quiet, and she kept glancing at Conor when he wasn’t looking, and then away. Rainbow likes Conor; really likes him. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if Conor had never seen Elvira. Conor almost never talks to me about Elvira, but I know he thinks of her. He keeps her talisman around his neck. But whenever we’re with a group of friends it seems that Rainbow and Conor will end up sitting together talking. Conor’s face is full of warmth and life when he’s with Rainbow. They laugh a lot, but it’s not as if the rest of the world has vanished into nothing, as it is when Conor’s with Elvira. Rainbow isn’t dreamy like Elvira. She’s always aware of other people.

It was a good evening, but because of the Call it felt as if Conor and I were on one side of a sheet of glass, and Patrick and Rainbow on the other. I think they felt it too. We chatted about music for a while, and then everyone lapsed into silence. Patrick had brought his guitar, but he didn’t play. We built up the fire because it gets cold when evening comes down, and sat around it watching the flames. You know how it is with watching a fire: you don’t have to talk. The flames twist and pucker round the logs, never making the same shape twice. It made me think of the fire I saw once, when Granny Carne showed me the passage that runs to the centre of the Earth, from the standing stones. A log hissed and crackled. I suddenly thought, There’s never any fire in Ingo. It sounds so obvious, but I’d never realised it before. Faro had never sat by a fire and watched the flames and dreamed, and he never would. Faro watches baby fish flicker in rock crevices and dark red sea anemones quivering. He would scorn the idea of fire. Humans are very strange. Why should anyone want to change the temperature of their world? Why not live in it as it is? It would be impossible to explain to Faro about shivering with cold on a winter’s night. He’s never felt anything like that. He’s in his element, slipping through it, part of it. Faro would hate this fire.

Conor’s eyes were shining with dreams. I saw that Rainbow was watching Conor, not the fire. I couldn’t work out her expression. Rainbow is someone who understands much more about you than you ever tell them. Conor felt Rainbow’s eyes on his face and he looked up and smiled. Rainbow smiled back. They are so similar, even though Conor is dark and Rainbow has hair the colour of sunlight. They have the same warm-coloured skins. They are responsible in the same way.

“Conor,” said Rainbow, “Patrick thinks he can get you a Saturday job at The Green Room, don’t you, Pat?”

The Green Room is the surf shop where Patrick works. Everybody wants to work there because they pay over the minimum wage and you have an amazing reduction off all the stuff. Conor leaned forward eagerly. “D’you think you really can, Patrick?”

Patrick nodded. He is a person of few words. Then I saw Conor remember, and the eagerness faded from his face. The sound of the conch thrummed in my head and I knew that Conor heard it too. It drowned out everything.

“I’ll call in one day,” said Conor awkwardly, and I saw the surprise and disappointment on Rainbow’s face. She’d expected him to seize the chance of the job. But I couldn’t think about Rainbow too much, because my mind was full of Ingo. The flames of the fire made shapes like waves. I listened and I could hear the swell beating against the base of the cliffs. The tide was high, almost at the turn. Ingo was coming close. I saw Rainbow shiver.

“The sea’s loud tonight,” she said.

“You always hear it like that up here,” said Conor quickly. “It must be the way the wind blows.”

“It never sounds as loud as this in our cottage,” said Rainbow.

“And we’re closer to the water than you are,” said Patrick. “The tide comes almost to the door. Or through the door sometimes.” He was thinking of the flood and the way their cottage filled with sea.

“It won’t come like that again,” said Conor. He threw another log on the fire and the sparks shot upward. Rainbow leaned forward, holding out her hands to the flames.

“I love fires,” she said.

I know, I thought. You love fires and horses and dogs, and everything that belongs to Earth. You’ve never heard Ingo calling and you never will. You’re not half one thing and half another. You’re all Earth, like Granny Carne. You don’t have to choose because the choice has already been made in you.

The sea boomed against the cliff. I felt it ebb, then surge forward and smash on the rocks. Rainbow was right. Ingo was very close tonight. Faro was there somewhere in that deep wild water, and my father, and my baby half-brother, little Mordowrgi, and all the others. Soon I would be there too, and Conor. Excitement raced through me like an incoming tide.

But this morning everything is flat and gloomy. The rain is coming down in a thin, steady drizzle. The hilltops are hidden in mist. The only thing that is sharp and clear is the impossibility of our dreams.

How can I leave Sadie? She trusts me and believes that I’ll always be here to take care of her. I think of Sadie padding up and down, whining, sniffing the air, scratching at the door, waiting for me. I can’t abandon Sadie. Besides, there’s Mum. She’ll call us, as she does every day, and we won’t be here. She’ll call again and again, and still we won’t answer. How much human time does it take to make the Crossing of Ingo? Mum will panic and get on the next plane back from Australia.

We have to think about school as well. They’ll notice our absence, and Mum has given them contact details for everyone who is supposed to be responsible for us while she’s away. In practice that means they will contact Mary Thomas, because Granny Carne has no phone. Mary will come over and find an empty house. In less than an hour the entire village will be searching for us. They’ll remember Dad’s disappearance. They’ll whisper, “God forbid it’s another Trewhella lost to the sea.” They’ll scour the cliffs and coves and all the deserted places where we might have fallen or become trapped. In my mind I see the searchers moving steadily forward, beating at the furze on the cliff tops. I see divers with waterproof torches scanning the backs of caves. They’ll risk their lives to find us. We can’t let them do that.

Even if we managed to fix school, it’s impossible to fix the whole neighbourhood. If you cough at one end of the churchtown, someone the other end will ask if you have a cold.

But we must go. We have no choice. I can’t hear the Call any more but the memory of it is twined into every fibre of me. It won’t let me alone. You only hear that Call once in your life; if you ignore it, it won’t come again. Faro will turn his back on me. He’ll rip off the bracelet he made from our hair, and he’ll never call me “little sister” again. Dad will be at the Assembly. It’s our chance to see him again.

Ingo needs us to make the Crossing. We are mixed in our blood, Mer and human. Ervys hates us for it: he wants nothing human in Ingo. I used to hate it too because I wanted to be one thing only, instead of being torn two ways. But now I’m beginning to understand that to be double adds things to you as well as taking them away. I’ve been to Ingo so many times and there’s still so much I don’t know. I will never know Ingo truly unless I make the Crossing. Saldowr believes that the Mer world and the human world can come together, and stop fearing each other and trying to destroy each other. If human blood can make the Crossing of Ingo then maybe there is hope for a different future, where we’re not all battling for what we want and trying to destroy what is different from us.

Ervys will do anything to stop us. He wants Mer and human to remain apart. Fear and distrust is what drives his followers, and gives him his power.

I’ve got to go, but I can’t…I must go, but how can I…?

By ten o’clock this morning my head felt like a hive of swarming bees, full of thoughts that couldn’t live together. I was so desperate for distraction that I even dug one of my school set books out of my bag. Now I’m sitting at the kitchen table, trying to read Pride and Prejudice. The words dance and dive. If only Jane and Lizzie realised how lucky they were. All they had to worry about were their embarrassing parents and the embarrassing men who kept trying to marry them. They were never going to go to Ingo in their shawls and long dresses and elaborately curled hair…

Sadie is under the table, asleep. She’s been trying to hide under things ever since she got back from the vet’s. I keep telling her, “You’re safe now, Sadie girl. No gull will ever come into our cottage.” I wrap my arms around her neck and kiss her cold black nose, but she looks at me with scared eyes and I see she doesn’t really believe it. Even in her sleep, Sadie twitches and whimpers. She’s dreaming of gulls with cold yellow eyes and beaks that stab at her flesh. I’ll never let it happen again. I’ll throw myself on top of her so that they can’t get to her.

Conor has gone back to bed. In his view sleep is the best thing to do with a rainy day like this. I tried to talk to him about the Call but he was grumpy and monosyllabic – “Yeah, all right, Saph, we’ll work it out” – and then he dived back under the duvet. I’ve got to wake him up at one o’clock because we’re due at Jack’s house for Sunday dinner at one thirty.

When the knock comes at the door, I shout, “Come in, it’s open,” and quickly shove a heap of ironing off the table into the laundry basket. Some of our neighbours are all too curious about “How those two younguns are coping with their mum off in Australia”. They come round with a pie or a bunch of onions and their eyes dart round the kitchen, checking every heap of unwashed mugs.

It’s Granny Carne. Her old brown coat is dark with rain. She takes off her boots at the door and steps inside. Fortunately she has no interest in dirty crockery or unswept floors.

“Those gulls are thicker’n ever on your roof, my girl.”

“I know. Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Cup of tea would be good.” Her eyes burn on my back as I fill the kettle. “You want to do something about them,” she says.

“Yes,” I reply.