The First Chapter of the First Book

"Seagulls"


'GO on, I dare you.’ The beady eye of the
seagull twinkled at Connie from on top
of the lifebuoy.
‘But, Scark, I can’t!’ Connie whispered back,
scuffing her trainers on a coil of blue rope on the
quayside. ‘What if someone sees?’
Scark cocked his head and opened his yellow
beak in silent mockery of her cowardice. Connie
glanced furtively over her shoulder. She really
wanted to do it. No one was watching her. She was
just another young girl spending her holidays
hanging out by the marina. There was no one close
enough to see that she was set apart from others
by her mismatched eyes, one green, one brown,
and by the fact that she talked to seagulls. The
fishermen were too busy washing down their
decks to notice the girl with ripped jeans and a
mop of black hair. The parties of tourists by the
coach park had eyes only for the straw hats and
seashell mementoes in the gift shops. Nobody
seemed to care that something extraordinary was
about to happen a stone’s throw away.
‘OK, I’ll do it!’ Connie said, giving in to her
desire. ‘Bet I’ll beat you this time.’
Taking a crust from her pocket, she threw a few
crumbs into the air as practice runs. Scark flapped
from his perch and caught them easily. Play begun,
other herring gulls circled out of the sky and
landed on the harbour wall, a row of eager
spectators. White heads bobbed impatiently,
waiting for the real fun to begin.
‘Here goes!’ called Connie to them. ‘It’s me
against you lot. If one crumb falls to the ground, I
win.’
The seagulls screamed their approval and
flapped into the sky. Connie threw a handful of
crusts high. Birds mobbed them from all sides,
effortlessly plucking them from the air. Scark gave
an ear-splitting mew.
‘So, I can’t catch you out that easily?’ laughed
Connie. She threw the bread faster and faster,
spinning on her heels in an attempt to confuse her
opponents. Gulls darted nimbly left and right,
splitting their flock, spinning on the wing, diving,
anticipating every feint, every low trick she could
devise to outwit them. The billowing cloud of
birds swarmed around her, responding to the
movements of her body as if she was a conductor
and they her orchestra, becoming an extension of
her mood and music. She swirled them around her
like a vast cloak, wrapping herself in their delight
in showing off their skill on the wing. A power
flowed from her to the birds: it seemed to them
almost as if she had shed her human skin and
become flight itself, the heart of the flock. The
seagulls shrieked with joy, urging her to fly with
them out to sea and join them in their raucous
colonies on the ledges of the cliffs and rock stacks.
The mass of birds formed into the shape of two
vast wings extending from her fingertips. She felt
that if she just tried a little harder, she too would
lift from the earth and fly, but her feet could not
quite leave the ground. Taking the last piece of
crust in her fist, Connie threw it high into the sky.
‘Catch!’ she cried.
The seagulls zoomed upwards like Spitfires in a
dogfight, vying with each other for the prize. With
a beat of his broad, grey wings, Scark snatched the
morsel from under the beak of a small white
female and returned to the lifebuoy, ach-aching
triumphantly.
‘Hey, that wasn’t very polite of you,’ Connie
scolded him affectionately, ‘stealing it from her
like that! Whatever am I teaching you?’
Scark bobbed his head in indignation, telling
her with a puff of his wings that a mere chick—
for so he considered her—could teach him
nothing.
‘I s’pose not,’ Connie conceded. Sitting down
on the cobbles beside him, she suddenly felt
deflated. The other gulls drifted away on the
breeze to seek new sport by the rubbish bins and
fishing boats. ‘I know I’ve got a lot to learn. I just
wish I didn’t have to go to school to do it. I hate
school. I just know it’s going to be a disaster.’
Scark shook his head sceptically.
‘I haven’t survived more than a term or two at
my other schools. Something always happens:
foxes start following me around, or mice invade
the classroom, and it soon becomes pretty clear
that it’s all my fault.Why should it be any different
in Hescombe? I don’t stand a chance. At the other
schools, it was only me that people found strange;
here, there’s my aunt as well.’
Connie threw a stone listlessly into the harbour.
It plopped out of sight, leaving worried wrinkles
to disturb the seaweed and the litter collected by
the seawall. When her parents had moved abroad
recently, they had considered sending Connie to
boarding school but in the end decided that, in
view of her terrible record in the classroom, she
would be safer with a relative, even if that meant
Mr Lionheart’s strange sister, Evelyn. Boarding
school had sounded grim, but now that she had
met her aunt she wondered if it would not have
been a better choice. Who else had an aunt who
wailed mournfully from her bedroom window at
five in the morning and disappeared for hours
running on the moors dressed in a long black
ragged cloak? As Connie had swiftly realized,
Evelyn was strange, not to mention scary, but,
unlike her niece, she did not wish to hide her
oddness.
The tide was at its height. The multicoloured
boats bobbed eagerly on their moorings, ropes
ringing against masts, summoning their owners
to set sail. Connie stood up and brushed down
the seat of her jeans, which were damp from the
fish-slick cobbles.
‘OK, Scark, it’s time to go. See you tomorrow.’
The seagull fluttered his wings once and
shook his beak at her in farewell. She watched
with admiration as he launched himself gracefully
off the lifebuoy, heading out to the wave-flecked
sea.
‘Good fishing!’ she called, her voice whipped
away like an autumn leaf scuttling before the wind.
She wished she could go home with him far away
from the humans who found her so odd.
Only when she turned from the sea did she
notice the old man, long white hair streaked with
ginger at the temples, half-hidden in a shelter ten
metres away, equipped with a motorbike helmet, a
thermos flask, binoculars, and a folded newspaper.
By his side lay a pair of scarlet ear protectors, the
sort worn by construction workers who use
pneumatic drills, but there was not a piece of
heavy machinery in sight and nor did he look
anything like a builder. Had he been watching her
all this time? Embarrassment flooded Connie in a
hot wave: she hated to think that anyone had seen
her playing with her friends. It always spelt trouble.
People in Hescombe would soon be whispering
that she was weird as they had in London.
Mortified, Connie did not wait to return the warm
smile he gave her when she met his gaze. She ran
off, threading through a party of tourists boarding
their coach, and pelted as fast as she could down the
High Street in the direction of her aunt’s house.
Dashing past the gaudy shops spilling plastic
buckets, spades, and carousels of postcards onto
the pavement, Connie collided with a group of
people gathered outside the Anchor Tavern.
‘Sorry!’ she said, jumping back from an elderly
lady, only to ricochet into a sturdily-built man in
wellington boots. He caught Connie before she
could fall and set her on her feet.
‘Careful,’ the man said. ‘You’ll do yourself an
injury if you carry on like that.’
Connie’s murmured apologies died on her lips
as she stood pinned to the spot in the circle of
people. They stopped talking and looked at her
with polite concern. Connie hesitated, unable and
unwilling to leave the group. She had caught an
echo from them of what she had felt when playing
with the seagulls. This was where she should be.
The place was rightfully hers.
‘Something the matter?’ asked the man with a
frown.
‘No, no, sorry,’ Connie said, shaking herself out
of her paralysis. She was being stupid. Of course
she shouldn’t stand there all day. She didn’t know
any of these people—she had no business
interrupting them like this. Their expressions told
her they had not felt anything special as she stood
there, other than entertaining vague doubts about
her sanity. She backed off hurriedly. Yet, after
running a few paces down the street, she could not
help glancing behind her, feeling called back to the
gathering of people. She was wrong: no one was
looking at her, let alone calling her. They had all
gathered around the elderly lady who was handing
out scarlet ear protectors from her shopping bag.
Connie turned and ran all the way to her new
home, Number Five Shaker Row, eager to be alone
with her thoughts about what had just happened.
Her aunt’s house was the last of a terrace of
fishermen’s cottages that clung to the bottom of
the cliff, seeking protection from the ocean that
beat hungrily at their front-steps. Number Five
shrank back from the waves, drawing itself taller
and thinner than its neighbours, like the last person
to enter a cupboard in a game of sardines. The
house seemed to anticipate that the waves would
at any moment rip the cupboard door open and
that Number Five would be the first to tumble out.
Madame Cresson, her aunt’s rather superior
marmalade cat, was stalking down the path, tail
purposefully erect. She miaowed when she
saw Connie, who paused briefly to greet her
before clattering into the kitchen to hang up her
jacket. She stopped dead. There on the spindly
umbrella-stand by the back door lay a pair of
scarlet ear protectors. What was going on? Her
first thought was that she should run straight back
out again and keep on running until she had left all
these strange people behind, especially her aunt.
Then she changed her mind. Surely, as she had no
real choice but to stay here, it would do no harm to
find out more about Evelyn Lionheart and her
odd goings-on? Perhaps the ear protectors
themselves might give her a clue? She glanced over
her shoulder to check she was alone and then
picked up the headset to study it at close quarters.
A small silver bird was stamped on both earpieces.
She put them over her ears experimentally, and
shut out all sounds so effectively that she did not
hear the footsteps until somebody tapped her on
the shoulder. Startled, she ripped them off.
‘You know what they say about curiosity and
the cat, don’t you?’ a voice asked smoothly—but
with the smoothness of thin ice. Tall but lightfooted,
and dressed as usual in black, Evelyn
Lionheart stood over her, her face ghostly white
against her long brown hair. Madame Cresson
padded in through the cat flap and wound round
Evelyn’s ankles, greeting her mistress.
‘Er . . . no—what do they say?’ Connie asked
awkwardly, her heart pounding.
‘That curiosity killed the cat,’ said Evelyn lightly,
taking the ear protectors from her to hang them
back on the stand.
Madame Cresson yowled in protest, offended
by this talk of death, and defected to Connie. She
arched her back as she rubbed herself against
Connie’s jeans, seeking comfort from her special
friend.
Connie stroked the cat’s head. ‘I’m sorry. I was
just . . . It’s just that I saw some other people in
town with them today. I thought it a bit strange,’
she ended lamely, thinking she must say something
to excuse herself.
‘Did you?’ Her aunt’s green eyes flicked to
Connie’s face with a shrewd expression, her silverhoop
earrings twinkling in the light from a small
window in the back door.
‘What are they for?’ Connie ventured, blinking
hard to shake off the mesmerizing effect of the
glinting rings.
‘That is none of your business,’ said Evelyn,
keeping her gimlet-gaze fixed on her niece.
Connie felt anger bubble up inside her, but it
was almost immediately burst by a prick of fear
when her aunt added, ‘Forget you ever saw them.’
Evelyn was so mercurial: at one moment full of
wild laughter and enthusiasm, the next showing
some alarming sparks of menace and temper.
Connie did not know what Evelyn really thought
about having her niece dumped on her. From the
reception she had received so far she suspected
that her aunt felt resentful and annoyed, and that
only a sense of duty to the family had persuaded
her to undertake the charge. Yet there seemed to
be something else too—something Connie could
not quite put her finger on. It did not help that,
though they shared the same house, Evelyn shut
herself away from Connie, keeping conversations
to a minimum and inviting no confidences.
Refusing to explain the ear protectors was all part
of this behaviour and Connie was beginning to
resent it. She wished that her parents had found a
more sympathetic guardian for her, someone who
at the very least would welcome her into their
home. But she dared push the question of the ear
protectors no further. The matter was dropped
and the next time Connie passed the umbrellastand,
the headset had gone.