The Amber Cat Page 3

  “Mum says Nick was born lucky,” he remarked to Kathy, who had stayed to help him. “I wish I had been!”

  “It’s not luck that Nick’s got, it’s cheek,” said Kathy comfortingly, as she knotted the sodden laces of Charley’s plimsolls together and draped them round his neck. “There!”

  “Thank you,” said Charley, pulling them round to inspect the knot and wondering if he would ever manage to undo it again. “Hey, look, Kathy! Someone else is playing our game!”

  Kathy gazed along the beach to where Charley was pointing and saw for the first time that another person was racing with the sea. It was a girl, and she must have watched what they were doing and joined their game from a distance. Kathy and Charley noticed that she kept glancing across at Nick and each time deliberately went out a little further and waited a little longer than he did before sprinting back up the beach in front of the surf.

  “She’s faster than any of us,” said Charley. “Even Nick.”

  But although the girl was quicker, she obviously hadn’t the advantage of being born lucky. As Kathy and Charley watched, she caught her foot on a protruding rock and fell flat on her face.

  Kathy reached her first, with Nick close behind and Charley, who had started running before the others, arriving last of all. By the time they reached the girl, she was on her feet again. She stood stock-still and stared and stared at Nick and Charley and Kathy as if she had never seen children before.

  “Oh,” she said.

  For a moment, Kathy and Nick and Charley were too busy staring back to reply. She looked like no one they had ever met before. Her faded green dress was so shabby that it might have been something washed up on the tide, her feet were bare and her hair hung in a chestnut tangle of curls down past her shoulders. She was so alarmingly pretty that Kathy felt slightly annoyed and glanced across at Nick to see if he had noticed.

  Nick was reassuringly unmoved; it would never have occurred to him to admire anyone who had not first expressed their appreciation of his glorious self, but Charley smiled at the girl in absolute delight, so hard that she could not help smiling back.

  “Your poor knee!” exclaimed Kathy, suddenly catching sight of a trickle of blood running down her leg.

  The girl looked at Kathy in astonishment, glanced down at her knee, went perfectly white and collapsed at their feet.

  “Fainted!” said Nick dispassionately. “Lay her down flat and pour cold water on her. Scoop up some sea in one of Charley’s plimsolls. They’re soaked anyway.”

  “I haven’t fainted,” said the girl, with her eyes tight shut.

  “Well, you’ve gone a jolly funny colour,” Nick told her.

  “It’s the blood,” said Kathy, who was busy struggling out of her jersey. “Mum’s just the same. Bother! I forgot this jumper had buttons! Find something to cover it up so she can’t see it and she’ll be all right.”

  Nick and Charley obediently turned out their pockets, but found nothing more suitable for hiding the blood than one of Charley’s wet socks.

  “Well, they were clean this morning,” said Charley and tied it carefully in place, while Kathy pulled her jersey over the girl’s head.

  “You’ll be cold,” protested the girl.

  “Kathy’s never cold,” said Nick. “Her temper keeps her warm! You might as well put it on, because it’s no use trying to argue with her …”

  “Shut up, Nick,” interrupted Kathy.

  “Kathy’s the bossy one,” continued Nick cheerfully. “Charley’s the quiet one …”

  “Who are you, then?” asked the girl.

  “He’s Nick and he talks a lot of rubbish,” said Kathy. “Who are you?”

  “Harriet,” said Harriet.

  “Do you live here?” asked Nick. “Or are you on holiday?”

  “Sort of,” said Harriet. “I’m not at school, anyway.”

  Kathy grinned understandingly, because she felt much the same way about school herself.

  “We’re stopping at Porridge Hall for the summer,” said Charley. “Me and Nick are, I mean. Kathy lives in Eastcliffe all the time.”

  “So shall we, when we get the new house,” said Nick.

  “Bad news for Eastcliffe!” remarked Kathy.

  “What is bad news?” asked Harriet, not seeming to understand the joke.

  “Nick living here,” explained Kathy.

  “Oh,” Harriet nodded and, after a moment’s thought, added, “but they’ll have Charley too,” as if that, at least, should be some consolation to Eastcliffe.

  Charley stared at her in astonishment. Never before had he been considered as compensation for the trials of those who were forced to live with Nick. Kathy collapsed into laughter and after a moment’s thunderstruck silence, Nick joined in.

  “I bet that’s the rudest anyone’s ever been to Nick,” Kathy told Harriet.

  “’Course it isn’t,” said Nick. “You should hear what they say at school! How old are you, Harriet? Six?”

  “I’m eleven this summer,” said Harriet with dignity.

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “September,” said Harriet.

  “Well,” said Nick, “you’re not eleven this summer. You’re ten.”

  “I’m eleven,” said Harriet.

  “Are you twelve in September, then?”

  “No,” said Harriet.

  “You’re ten, then.”

  “I’m eleven,” said Harriet, “and I’m not arguing. This is a lovely jumper.”

  The jumper that had fitted Kathy comfortably reached nearly to Harriet’s knees and certainly did not go well with her shabby dress, but she obviously did not care at all about such details.

  “Keep it if you like,” offered Kathy, and added her mother’s usual remark. “I expect you’ll grow into it.”

  Harriet pushed up about six spare inches of sleeve and looked very doubtful. Kathy mistook her expression and said, “Borrow it, then. Borrow it for as long as you like.”

  “All right,” said Harriet, smiling.

  “Borrow my sock, too,” offered Charley eagerly. “Borrow both if you want!”

  “Harriet doesn’t want your mucky socks!” said Nick.

  “They were clean,” said Charley.

  “They don’t even match. One’s blue and one’s grey.”

  “I can’t understand my socks,” complained Charley. “Mum packed me seven pairs to start with, one for each day of the week, I remember her telling me.”

  “So what?” asked Nick.

  “Now I’ve only got eleven odd ones. I counted this morning.”

  “What a nut!” said Nick.

  “No, he isn’t!” exclaimed Kathy and Harriet simultaneously and Harriet grabbed Charley’s hand and said, “Come on, I’ll show you my special place! Run!”

  Charley forgot about his socks and ran.

  Harriet’s special place was quite a long way down the coast, a small triangle of shore enclosed by two low rocky barriers, splayed out like fingers from the cliffs above. The sand in that place had a different feel, coarse and crunchy, because it was made up, not of stone, but of millions of tiny fragments of shell. At the back of the little beach was a deep hollow under the cliffs. Years and years ago someone had started to enclose the hollow with a wall and part of it was still there.

  “Look!” said Harriet proudly, dropping Charley’s hand to point. “That’s my cave!”

  “A cave?” asked Charley. “A real cave? Nick’s always wanted a cave!”

  “This cave is mine,” said Harriet fiercely.

  “Can I go in,” asked Charley.

  “You can go in,” said Harriet, “and so can Kathy …” She paused.

  “What about me?” asked Nick, grinning down at her.

  “I suppose you’d go anyway,” said Harriet.

  “Oh no I shouldn’t,” said Nick. “I should sit at the doorway and howl like a dog.”

  “You wouldn’t!” said Harriet.

  “I would!”

  �
��Go on, then,” said Harriet, so Nick did and he howled so loudly and pathetically that in a matter of seconds he had been invited inside with the rest.

  “It’s a lovely place,” exclaimed Kathy. “I never knew it was here!”

  “You ought to have found it yourself,” said Nick reprovingly. “You’ve lived here for years! Why didn’t you?”

  “I never used to be allowed to go very far along the beach on my own, until you and Charley came,” explained Kathy.

  “What are me and Charley supposed to do?” demanded Nick. “Rescue you from dragons?”

  Harriet laughed aloud and Kathy replied coldly that she would like nothing better than to meet dragons and that all Nick and Charley were expected to do was to inform her parents if she were to be swept out to sea and drowned.

  “To save them wondering where I was,” explained Kathy.

  “What a lovely job,” remarked Nick. “I can just see me saying to your dad, ‘You needn’t bother wondering where Kathy is, because she’s been swept out to sea and drowned’!”

  “I do what I like and nobody minds,” said Harriet vainly.

  “If I could do what I liked, I would live here in this cave,” said Charley. “It’s dry as dry and plenty big enough. You could keep all sorts of things in here.”

  Harriet’s guests looked around, half expecting to see all sorts of things stored away already, but the cave was empty of everything but sand and sea shells and it occurred to Kathy that perhaps Harriet had nothing much to keep.

  “It would be a brilliant place for storing treasure,” she said kindly, and watched Harriet’s face begin to glow.

  “Treasure!” said Nick contemptuously.

  “I’ve got a book called Treasures of the Sea Shore,” remarked Charley. “It’s full of things you might find. Shells and sea urchins and fossils and stuff like that.”

  “Pretty soppy treasure!” said Nick. “What I call treasure is gold coins and nothing else and you won’t find them here. It’s not that sort of beach.”

  “It’s a perfect beach,” said Harriet defensively. “You might find anything here. Or I might. You wouldn’t.”

  “Gold coins?” asked Nick.

  “Of course,” said Harriet with dignity.

  “You could look forever but I bet you’d never find one.”

  “I would,” said Harriet.

  “Anyway, just one wouldn’t count. One wouldn’t be proper treasure.”

  “How many would be proper treasure?” asked Charley.

  Nick frowned thoughtfully and then announced that the minimum amount necessary to count as proper treasure would be ten gold coins, all at once, not one at a time.

  “All right,” said Harriet.

  “Would you spend them?” asked Kathy. “I’d buy a horse to ride along the edge of the sea. I once saw a girl doing that …” She stopped and looked at Harriet, puzzled. “Might it have been you?”

  “Me?” asked Harriet.

  And Kathy, remembering her apparent poverty, changed the subject and asked, “What would you do with treasure if you found it, Charley?”

  “I should keep it to look at,” said Charley.

  “I’d buy a boat,” said Nick, forgetting for a moment that he didn’t believe in treasure. “A rowing boat. I’ve always wanted a boat of my own and this bit of beach could be the harbour.”

  “I didn’t know you could row,” said Kathy.

  “He can row brilliantly,” said Charley, who had often admired Nick’s beautiful oarsmanship on the pond in the park. “Nick’s a fantastic rower. What are you going to do with your treasure when you find it, Harriet?”

  “Nothing,” said Harriet. “Well, show it to Nick, of course, to prove I was right. And look at it for a little while …”

  “Then what?” asked Kathy.

  “Put it back,” said Harriet.

  The room had been growing greyer and greyer as the early December dusk began to fall. Mrs Brogan, who had been remembering a summer forgotten for more than a quarter of a century, suddenly realized that it was nearly dark. When she had finished her story there was no sound except for the crackle of the fire and the muffled thunder of the sea outside. For a moment she wondered if she had talked the boys to sleep, but when she glanced over to them, she found they were gazing at her with bright, puzzled eyes.

  “I should like to see Harriet’s special place,” said Sun Dance. “Why haven’t I? Why didn’t you show it to me, Robin?”

  “I’ve never seen it,” said Robin. “I know where the shelly beach is, but I’m sure there isn’t a cave at the back.”

  “There isn’t,” agreed Dan. “The cliffs are too crumbly for caves round here.”

  “There was a cave,” said Mrs Brogan. “Well, not a cave exactly. A hollow sort of place.”

  “It’s not there now,” said Dan positively. “The sea must have got into it and brought it down.”

  “Harriet told us that the sea didn’t come up that high,” remembered Mrs Brogan. “Well, I suppose you must be right but I’m sorry it’s gone; we had some happy times there.”

  “It couldn’t have been very safe,” said Dan.

  “Well, probably not,” agreed Mrs Brogan. “We weren’t very safety conscious. You and Robin have far more sense, I’m glad to say!”

  “And me!” said Sun Dance. “Look how I saved Dan from falling off the cliff last summer!”

  “So you did!” said Mrs Brogan immediately. “And stop grinning, you two!” she added to Robin and Dan. “I seem to remember that you distinctly told me that Sun Dance pulled Dan up from halfway down the cliff face. It’s no good changing your story now!”

  “You never asked us how Sun Dance knew Dan was there though, did you?” asked Robin cheekily.

  “Or why he didn’t fetch help earlier,” added Dan. “Like, three or four hours earlier would have been nice.”

  “I dare say Sun Dance had his reasons,” said Mrs Brogan. “Isn’t that right, Sun Dance?”

  There was no reply. Sun Dance was gazing dreamily out of the window.

  “Sun Dance, wake up!” said Robin.

  “Where is Harriet now?” wondered Sun Dance out loud, but he did not seem to expect an answer.

  “Weren’t you listening to anything we said?” asked Dan.

  “I was listening to the sea,” said Sun Dance. “It does sound loud.”

  “High tide and a new moon,” said Dan.

  Robin and his mother, who had always lived by the sea, understood at once but Dan’s explanation meant nothing to Sun Dance, although the words immediately fascinated him.

  “High tide and a new moon?” he repeated. They sounded like part of an incantation.

  “The tides always rise higher and fall lower when we have a new moon,” said Mrs Brogan. “Or a full one.”

  “How does the sea know about the moon?” asked Sun Dance, amazed.

  “The moon pulls the sea,” explained Robin, “and it pulls harder at a new moon or a full moon, because the sun is helping.”

  “Helping the moon pull the sea?” asked Sun Dance.

  “Yes.”

  “Where to?” demanded Sun Dance reasonably.

  “It sucks it into a sort of bump,” said Dan.

  “The moon does?”

  “Yes.”

  Sun Dance thought about this amazing bit of information for a moment and then asked, “What about the fish?”

  “I’ve never thought about the fish,” admitted Dan. “I suppose they get pulled up a bit, too.”

  “Why don’t they get pulled out of the sea?”

  “They’re in the sea,” said Dan, getting confused.

  “What if they were on the beach?”

  “They’d die,” said Dan firmly.

  “What about whales?” asked Sun Dance, determined to understand this phenomenon.

  “S’pose whales get pulled as well,” agreed Dan reluctantly.

  “A new moon and a high tide sucks up WHALES?” said Sun Dance. “Why didn’t anyone tell
me before?”

  “You never asked,” said Robin, laughing.

  “Is it true?” Sun Dance asked Mrs Brogan, and Mrs Brogan told him that it really was more or less true.

  “At least,” she admitted, “it’s definitely true about the water. I shouldn’t like to make any promises about the whales!”

  “This is magic,” said Sun Dance firmly. “Did Harriet know?”

  But Mrs Brogan jumped suddenly to her feet, switched on the lights, closed the curtains and banished Harriet back to her own time. Sun Dance was hurried home for his tea and Robin and Dan, who were getting better by the hour, ate scrambled eggs and asked for more. Later, Dan’s father came round and they watched the football all evening with two commentaries, one from the BBC, and another, much more interesting, from Dan’s father. What he didn’t know about the England team wasn’t worth knowing and he explained that he came by his knowledge on account of a friend of his, who was the brother of a chap who knew the bloke who did the hair of half the team.

  “Perms and streaks and gels and whatever,” explained Dan’s father. “Highlights and spikes and sprays and I don’t know what! They spend more on their hair than they do on their feet. It’s no wonder we’ve never won anything since nineteen sixty-six!”

  “Good grief!” said Mrs Brogan.

  “I should hate to see our Dan into all that,” said Dan’s father, rubbing his son’s hair over his eyes. “His mum says he looks like the back-end of an old dog, but it’s better than being all done up like a girl!”

  “I suppose it is,” agreed Mrs Brogan.

  “And if he’s never captain of England,” added Dan’s father with a perfectly straight face, “it’s his hair I shall blame and in a way I shall be thankful!” He got up to go home. “He’s a deep one, our Dan is. He’s beyond me already! There’s not many lads who feel as rough as he did a day or two ago and still remember to pack their Dad’s best brace-and-bit when they go away!”

  Dan, who had been peacefully grinning at his father, suddenly jumped and looked very guilty.

  “I’ll look after it,” he promised. “It’s just for something me and Robin are going to make.”

  “What would that be, then?” asked Dan’s father.