Page 2 of The Dark of the Moon
Too many ghosts have followed me here. Too many memories. Faces in the moonlight, their eyes dark with fear. They knew they were risking everything. We all were. But we did it all the same. Because what other choice did we have?
Finn
The Old Lady smells of lavender, flowery but not too sweet – I like it because it’s like the drops Mum puts on my pillow to help me sleep and it doesn’t make me want to vomit like some ladies’ perfumes do. She wears bright-red lipstick that bleeds into the lines around her mouth. Her false leg is pretty cool, and her eyes are bright and wise like a bird’s. She told me to call her Philly. ‘But your name is Mrs Ophelia Delaney,’ I said.
‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘But my friends call me Philly.’
I don’t think we are friends really. She’s at least 80 years older than me. But it was nice of her to say that. Good Manners. Which we’re all trying to have at the moment.
At supper, my Mum and Dad made Polite Conversation, talking about the sailing camp. It was Dad’s idea. He’s been teaching me to sail a dinghy, which I quite like because when I sail it single-handed it feels like a place where I’m in charge and I can be on my own. Then he read something online about an organisation called Autism Afloat, which tries to get people like me who have an Autistic Spectrum Disorder interested in sailing bigger boats. Before I could point out all the reasons why it was a really bad idea, he’d got in touch with them and suggested they run a summer camp here on the island. He’s found some dinghies and a bigger boat, and helped organise accommodation and theyare bringing some kids to have this Amazing Experience. And I’ll be on that boat too, having the Amazing Experience with all the others. Only I know it’s going to be awful. I’ve been stressing out about it for months.
‘It’s going to be an amazing experience, isn’t it, Finn?’ said Mum, continuing the conversation. I knew her question wasn’t a real one. She was just saying it for the benefit of the Old Lady, in that tone of voice of hers that goes too high and too bright. She uses it to try and convince me – and herself too, along with anyone else who’s listening – when she knows something is probably going to be the opposite. Like going to a new school. Or eating cauliflower, which looks like bits of white brain.
I couldn’t really be bothered making Polite Conversation, so I kept on counting the peas on my plate, making sure there was an even number of them before I could start to eat, and hoping yet again that some cataclysmic event would occur to stop the camp from going ahead. The boats being no longer available, perhaps, due to being hijacked by pirates or swamped by a rogue tsunami. Or the planet being struck by a meteorite and all living things being wiped out. It’s not impossible. The Canary Island of La Palma is a basaltic shield volcano and it’s been shown that these structures have a tendency to experience catastrophic landslides about every 100,000 years. The last one happened about 89,000 years ago, plus or minus 8,000 years. If we assume it’s actually plus 8,000 years, then we’re about due the next one any day now. There’s a hypothesis that if the side of the island does collapse catastrophically, it will cause a mega-tsunami. So I don’t really want to be out in a boat when that hits.
There were 42 peas on my plate.
When I looked up from spearing my peas 2 at a time to eat them so the number on my plate would always be even, the Old Lady was watching me, and her eyes were sharp and bright, whichmade me think once again that she looked like a bird. Maybe one of the white-headed kittiwakes that swoop around the mast when I take the sailing dinghy out. I don’t mind sailing on my own or just with Dad. It’s the thought of having to do it with lots of other people that freaks me out. I think maybe she could see what I really thought about the Amazing Experience my parents have in store for me. She didn’t say anything though, just cut up a tiny piece of chicken and put it in her mouth.
‘There’s quite a bit for us to do in the week ahead, isn’t there, Finn? Putting the final arrangements in place,’ said Dad. This was really for the benefit of the Old Lady as well, because he went on, ‘So we’ll be keeping out of your hair, Philly, while Kendra gets your life story down.’
People say things like that a lot. As if we would be in their hair in the first place. It would be impossible. The Old Lady’s hair is straight and white and it’s cut short so it fits the shape of her head, just like a kittiwake’s feathers.
‘The timing’s worked out so well,’ said Mum. ‘And it’s good that I can fly back with you, too, on my way to the creative writing course.’
The Old Lady smiled and nodded, but I could see the brightness had gone out of her eyes a little. Maybe she can’t be bothered with making Polite Conversation either. I think she was tired, and she kept shifting her weight on her chair, so perhaps her leg was hurting her. After supper, I went straight upstairs to my room and I heard her coming up too, just a few minutes afterwards. Her false leg makes her steps a bit uneven.
Next morning, she looked a bit brighter again when she came downstairs to sit at the breakfast table. She didn’t eat much, but she seemed glad to accept the cup of coffee Mum made for her. Then Dad went off to do some of the final arrangements for the sailingcamp. He asked me to join him. ‘We could get the bikes out of the shed,’ he said. ‘Cycle over to the harbour?’
I said no thank you, I’d prefer to stay at home and read the book he gave me about sailing. I find making Polite Conversation can sometimes be a good way to get out of doing things you don’t want to do. It’s a lot less tiring than having a meltdown, anyway. I don’t really need to read the book. I know how to sail from using the dinghy, which is just for one or two people. Exactly the same principles apply to sailing the bigger boat, only you need more people. You have to Work As A Team and each member of the crew has to Play Their Part. Exactly the characteristics that autistic people aren’t exactly known for, in case Dad hadn’t noticed.
I sat on the sofa in the sitting room with the book on my knees while Mum and the Old Lady went into the study so Mum could start listening to her story. ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ I heard Mum say. And I was actually quite interested to hear the story too, so I left off my ear defenders.
Philly
My family was pretty unconventional for the time, I suppose, although I never realised it when I was young. Even the most eccentric childhoods seem normal when it’s all you’ve ever known.
My mother was Polish, and my father came from a wealthy Scots family who owned a jute mill in Dundee. So money was never a worry, even when he ran off to Argentina with a woman who’d been giving him and my mother tango lessons, and disappeared from our lives. It was the 1930s and the divorce was a terrible scandal. Mother’s (Catholic) family had already disowned her when she married my (Protestant) father, and the divorce was absolutely the final straw, so we never saw that side of the family. But Mother didn’t let it hold her back. I suppose she’d decided her reputation was already in tatters so she might as well do as she liked. And what she liked was lounging around the house in a silk negligée all day, then going out in the evenings to party, drink vodka martinis and play card games.
Most of the time her Polish roots were subsumed by a wish to appear thoroughly British, although her cut-glass accent would slip and she’d even lapse into speaking her native language when she’d had a few drinks. The one exception to following British customs was at Christmastime, when she’d insist on observing her childhood traditions. We’d fast all day on Christmas Eve while the house filled with the wonderful smells of the twelve dishes she’dprepare for our Wigilia feast, to be eaten that night while we held our Christmas vigil. I loved the vividly colouredbarszczwith littleuszkadumplings, the wild mushroompierogifried in butter, and the poppy seed rolls she made for dessert. Ella and Beatrice, my Scottish friends, would beg their parents to be allowed to come and spend the evening at my house, thrilled by our exotic traditions as well as the opportunity to extend Christmas by a day.
I was sent to boarding school and left largely to my own devices during the holidays, spending my days devouring books in the local library or staying over at Ella’s. My two brothers were older. Frank, who was ten years my senior and had a somewhat pompous and superior attitude to match, took over the running of the factory once Father left. I was closer to Teddy, who was nearer to me in age. And when he joined the RAF, based at Turnhouse, just outside Edinburgh, he was the one who got me interested in flying.
Thanks to him, I used to devour the newspaper reports of female aviators like Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia and who set many another record in the 1930s. My brothers had been at school in Edinburgh with her husband, Jim Mollison, and although they hadn’t been close friends – Jim being a couple of years ahead of my elder brother, Frank – I still considered it counted as a direct link to my idol. Teddy gave me a Schiaparelli bag named after ‘Johnnie’, as she was nicknamed, and it was by far my most treasured possession. I longed to be like her and become a pilot.
I think I was about fifteen when I first pulled on a pair of jodhpurs and a sheepskin jacket and climbed into a plane with Teddy for him to take me for a spin. I was immediately hooked. It gave me a freedom I’d never known before. He pulled back on the throttle and we soared away out over the sea, flirting with the clouds, leaving behind all the petty mundanities that existed back on solid ground. I loved the logic of it, the laws of physics that made us airborne and kept us aloft, and from that moment on I was determined I’d learn to fly. Mothergave me a pretty generous allowance and I spent every penny of it on lessons. By the time I finished school, I had my pilot’s licence along with an offer to study Maths at Cambridge.
But then the war changed everything, turning our lives upside down. It closed some doors but opened others, and so I shelved my plans to go to university and wrote a letter to a woman I’d heard about from Teddy, who was recruiting female pilots into the Air Transport Auxiliary. I desperately wanted to do something useful, especially when I read about Germany invading Poland. Even though my mother had turned her back on her homeland and her family there, my Polish roots ran deep within me, and I realised my pilot’s licence would probably be of more practical use than a university degree. Teddy was doing his bit, and I wanted to help where I could as well.
Now that Britain was at war, things moved fast. Almost straight away, I was invited to attend an interview at White Waltham Airfield in Berkshire. And so I did the logical thing and flew down for it in the Tiger Moth I’d borrowed from my flying instructor. I pulled up on the edge of the runway alongside a parked-up Spitfire and climbed out of my plane, clutching my handbag and attempting to smooth down my hair, which was in a sorry state having been squashed into my flying helmet for the journey. An RAF mechanic marched up to me pretty smartly and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, arriving unannounced and unauthorised like that. I pointed out that it was hardly unannounced, and neither was it unauthorised: I’d radioed the tower and been given permission to land, and I had an appointment to see Miss Pauline Gower.
He scowled at me. ‘Oh, you’re one ofthem, are you? Bloody women, thinking they can fly planes.’
‘I don’tthinkI can fly a plane. I can,’ I retorted. ‘As, in fact, I have just proven. Q.E.D.’
‘Queuey . . . what now?’
‘Q.E.D.Quod erat demonstrandum. It means “that which was to be demonstrated”. And now, if you would be so kind as to point me in the direction of Miss Gower’s office, I shall leave you to get on with your work, which I’m sure is of far greater importance than wasting time attempting to put a woman in what you mistakenly believe to be her place.’
