Page 23 of The Dark of the Moon
I stumbled behind him, following the furrows towards the edge of the field where a wooded copse offered some cover. With every step, the ghostly grey stems beneath my boots released another cloud of perfume, which would have been beautiful and calming under different circumstances, I suppose. My heart was hammering in my chest, though, as we reached the trees. One of the men put his finger to his lips and we stood there for a few moments, waiting until the distant sound of the plane’s engine had faded away entirely. The pounding in my ears subsided as, at last, I felt I could breathe again, and the silence slowly filled with the sounds of the night, the chirping of crickets and the soft hoot of an owl.
‘OK, it’s good.Allons-y,’ said a man dressed in the black robes of a Jesuit priest, who appeared to be the leader. He beckoned us to follow him, and we set off along a small country lane, keeping closeto the cover of the hedgerow. We must have walked a good mile or so, joining a larger road, until a small town came into view on the hilltop ahead. The moon hung directly above the pale finger of a steeple, and I could just about make out a cluster of stone turrets surrounding it in the dim light. At the point where the road began to climb, we turned off, heading away from the town down a dusty track. At its end, it opened out into a courtyard overlooked by a huddle of buildings with shuttered windows.
‘Bienvenue au Château Cadix,’ said the priest, using the code name for the base where the French intelligence service hid its Polish comrades.
He led me to an inconspicuous door off one side of the courtyard, knocking softly twice, then three times more. Then the door swung open, and I was ushered inside, into darkness. The door clicked shut behind us and someone flicked a switch, the sudden blaze of electric light dazzling me. I blinked, feeling disorientated, utterly wrung out after the journey. We appeared to be in a kitchen, its dark-beamed ceiling hung with gleaming copper pans. A woman standing beside a blackened cooking range smiled across at me before turning her attention to the kettle that steamed on the stove, pouring boiling water into a coffee pot. And then a man who’d been sitting at a scrubbed pine table with a bottle and glasses before him got to his feet and extended his hand. ‘Czesc, towarzyszko,’ he said in Polish. ‘Witamy we Francji.’ Hello, comrade. Welcome to France.
Finn
Last night we went for our walk on the beach to see the high tide. My supper was churning around in my stomach, making me feel sick, because I’d been thinking about the people arriving for the sailing camp the next day. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep well. The moon looked huge as it began to rise but, as we know, that’s just the Moon Illusion. It’s all in our heads. The moon appears bigger when it’s near the horizon. It’s nothing to do with the atmosphere or refraction of the light rays, it’s just a quirk of the way our minds work. No one really knows why. It’s an unsolved mystery, which I don’t like, but sometimes we have to accept that we don’t really understand everything that goes on in our minds. The Brain can be even more complicated than Outer Space.
As we walked along the beach, the sea was calm and still because it was the Stand of the Tide. That meant the sea had reached its highest point on the sand and for just a little while it was slack water, before the tide started to ebb again. We stood still too, looking out towards the horizon. The moon was rising fast and shrinking back to its more usual size in the night sky.
‘It’s like the ocean is holding its breath,’ Mum whispered. Even though that’s not a real thing, I knew what she meant. It was lovely and quiet.
And then, in the middle of the path of light cast by the moon on to the water, a black head popped up. It seemed to be looking at us.
‘Look, a Selkie,’ said Philly. ‘Do you know the legend about the Seal-People, Finn? They are said to come ashore and shed their skins, walking around like people. They can only return to the sea if they can get their skin back though – if someone steals it away, the Selkie is trapped in human form, feeling as if they don’t belong.’
‘I know that story. It isn’t true though,’ I said quickly. Dad once read it to me from a book. I’d thought it explained a lot – maybe I was really a Selkie and that’s why I wasn’t a normal human being, because I definitely wasn’t feeling comfortable in my skin at school at the time. So the next day I looked in the big wardrobe in Mum and Dad’s room, in case my real skin was hidden there. I didn’t find it, although I did find my Christmas present, which was the laminating machine, so it wasn’t a Surprise and I wasn’t anxious when it was time to open it that year. I was quite upset about not finding the sealskin, though. That’s when Mum told me the thing about Selkies wasn’t really true.
The seal ducked back under the water and disappeared, leaving only a whorl of expanding ripples in its wake. Philly nodded. ‘I know, it’s just a fable. But like all fables, it’s a story we can relate to. I suppose that’s the point – there’s too much beautiful truth in the world to waste your life living a lie. It’s said that all creatures on land have their counterparts in the ocean and that seals are the counterparts of humans. I think that’s just us flattering ourselves, though. Sometimes people can be about as evolved as Sea Squirts. Maybe it’s worth remembering that we’re all just animals, really, although some of us are doing a better job of pretending to be human than others.’
I thought about this for a while. As we stood watching the water settle and become calm again, it felt like my stomach had settled a bit as well. I decided that Philly is a very wise Old Lady.
Then we turned and walked back along the beach, alongside the line of shells and seaweed that had been left behind by the high tide.
This afternoon we had to go to the apartment complex to meet the other kids who are here for the sailing course. There are 4 of them plus me, and we each have our own Responsible Adult who’s in charge of us. Plus there’s a sailing instructor from Autism Afloat. His name is Iain and he’s actually pretty cool. He once sailed around the world single-handed, so he knows what he’s doing. Even if no one else really does.
When we went to the holiday apartments, I thought about what Dad said about being a Cat Herder. No one was where they were supposed to be at the right time, so we had to hang around for ages. Dad was talking to the instructor, and I began counting the coloured mosaic tiles that make a picture of the island on the wall beside the door of the apartment block. I got up to 504 by the time a boy and his Mum arrived. Dad did the introductions. The boy was 2 years older than me but about twice as big in all directions. His Mum talked a lot, but he said nothing. He just sat down on the ground and started to rock backwards and forwards. The others arrived at last (there were 1,345 tiles in the mosaic in total, so it was an odd number, which wasn’t good), and we all walked down to the harbour to look at the boats.
Dad had prepared a speech. ‘Welcome everyone, to our first ever Autism Afloat sailing camp,’ he said. ‘As some of you who have already had a chance to go sailing will know, boating is a fun and social activity.’ He went on to talk about how good it was for our well-being, being out on the water, even if it can be a challenge, too.
‘I hope you will get a lot out of the week, and go home feeling more confident, having used the particular individual strengths you have, and having mastered new skills,’ he went on. ‘Because you all have a lot of strengths. We know you are good at problem-solving as well as having excellent levels of concentration. And we know each one of you has the potential to become a committed and knowledgeable sailor, developing the specialised skills required. To help us with this, we are so lucky to have Iain, our excellentinstructor, who has gained a lot of experience with the Autism Afloat team back in the UK.
‘Before I hand over to him, I just want to say I know it must all feel a bit daunting right now, being in a new place and with new challenges ahead of us, but please be assured, we will be taking it one step at a time. I know some of you will be feeling anxious. But to minimise that, it’s all the more important we stick to the routine we’ve set out for the coming week, and we keep to the rules. You have my assurance, and Iain’s too, that we are committed to following the timetable we’ve put in place, which you’ve already had a chance to see, so you know how the camp will be structured. It will help us all if everyone can try to be on time and keep to the instructions. So I’ll hand you over to Iain to get our sailing camp started, with a bit of an introduction and a very important talk about safety.’
While the sailing instructor started talking about what we’d be doing each day in the week ahead, the larger boy was sitting on the ground again, doing his rocking and watching a snail that was creeping across the path. At the beginning of the Very Important Talk about Safety, he stood up and stamped on the snail, which made one of the girls start to scream. I pulled my ear defenders out of my rucksack and put them on, even though Dad had told me not to bring them because we had to be Sociable. The talk ended pretty quickly after that, and Dad said everyone should go back to their apartments and settle in and we’d meet back here at the boats at 10 a.m. the next day, which would be Acclimatisation Day, and we’d have the Important Safety Talk then instead.
I was glad to get home. I think Dad was too. He went straight into the kitchen and took a beer out of the fridge and drank it down in about 3 gulps. When Mum asked him how the briefing had gone, he said it was a bloody shambles and he must be completely crazy to have ever thought he could organise this damn sailing course. ‘It’s only the acclimatisation day tomorrow and we’realready behind schedule, now we have to add on the safety briefing then too. It doesn’t bode well, does it?’
He said some other words as well, but they are the Words We Do Not Say. At least, not usually.
Mum hugged him and said, ‘It will do the kids so much good, though. And it will be good for Finn. How did he get on, meeting the others?’
I was sitting on the porch with Philly. I’d taken off my ear defenders, because we were just doing our puzzles on our own devices as usual, but I reached down to get them and put them on again because sometimes it’s just easier not to hear what people are saying when they’re talking about you. When I looked up, she was watching me with her bright, birdlike eyes. She didn’t say anything, she just raised her eyebrows and pressed her red-lipsticked lips together tightly, then went back to doing her crossword again.
I was waiting for her to finish because I wanted to ask her about the secret mission to France and staying at the château with the Polish cryptographers. But it was time for supper, so I waited until afterwards and then I asked Mum if I could read the latest bit of Philly’s life that she’d written up today. Mum said she was very pleased that I wanted to read it. She handed me the printed pages and then she did our sign, which is when we hold up our right hands and spread the fingers out wide, like a starfish. Most starfish have 5 arms, but some have 6 or 7, sometimes more. There’s even one kind called the Antarctic wolftrap starfish that can have over 50. Anyway, Mum and I do the sign instead of her hugging me, because I don’t like being touched. I took the pages up to my room and read them when I was in bed. It was good to think about Philly’s secret mission and the team of Polish agents decoding the Germans’ messages, instead of thinking about the sailing camp tomorrow.
Even so, I did not sleep very well.
Philly
It must have been the strong black coffee I’d drunk so late at night, sitting around the table with my new-found Polish comrades, or it may have been the excitement and adrenaline of finally being in France, because I scarcely slept a wink on my first night at the château. I got up early and made my way down the curve of the stone staircase, attempting to retrace the dimly remembered route from the night before and find my way back to the kitchen. But on my way the sound of voices from a half-open door leading off the hallway drew me in. I tapped, a little uncertainly, and a voice called ‘Prosze wejsc!Come in!’
Tall wooden shutters screened the bay windows of the high-ceilinged room, but the early-morning sunshine slanted in through the slats, casting fingers of light across the curlicues of an Aubusson rug covering the floor. Marian Rejewski, the man Dilly Knox had told me was one of the chief cryptanalysts, got up from behind one of three desks positioned in the centre of the room. ‘Eveline, please, have a seat.’ We were already on first-name terms, Dilly’s present of the pouch of tobacco having proven a good ice-breaker on my arrival, although I’d still had to remind myself to use my cover name when I was being introduced to some of the team. ‘We are just looking at the gifts you’ve so kindly brought us.’
The Baby had been taken out of its crate and sat on the desk between us. At a second desk, another man, whom I’d not yet met, was unwrapping a packet of squared paper with evident delight. He reached out a hand to shake mine. ‘Henryk Zygalski, pleased to meet you,’ he said.
