The Tide Knot. Helen Dunmore

follow Granny Carne in my mind as she goes down the path to the churchtown, and then as she takes the road round to the track which leads down to our cottage and Mary’s. Our cottage will have lights on in the windows by now. It gets darks early in November. Granny Carne knows her way in the dark. I’m glad that I don’t have to walk past there and see other people living in my home. I wonder if the curtains are the same? Those red checked curtains that Mum made when we were little. They always looked so welcoming with the light shining through them when we came home from school on winter afternoons.

      I wonder if the people who are living in our cottage ever go down to our cove? I wonder if they will ever catch sight of Faro or Elvira sitting on the rocks by the mouth of the cove, where Conor and I first met them? I hope they don’t. I’m not just being selfish in hoping that. If they see the Mer, their lives won’t ever be the same again.

      But Granny Carne’s cottage is at least two miles from the sea. I don’t know how far inland the power of Ingo can reach, but Granny Carne’s cottage definitely belongs to the Earth. Maybe that’s why Sadie is sleeping so peacefully by the stove. I don’t feel peaceful, though. I’m going to stay because of Sadie, but I wish I didn’t have to. I’m not at home here.

      It takes a long time to get ready for the night at Granny Carne’s. I help her to carry in more wood from the stack in her woodshed, and fill the scuttle full of coal. The stove’s got to be kept going through the night. Before Granny Carne goes to bed, she riddles it out with an iron poker with a hook on its end. By the time Granny Carne finishes, the hook glows red. I help to shovel out the hot ash into the ash pan. Granny Carne says ash is good for the earth, and she’ll spread it on her vegetable patch tomorrow, when the ash is cold. She stokes up the stove with logs and a thick layer of fine coal, and closes the damper on the front.

      Suddenly I remember something. “We had a stove like this when I was little, before Mum got storage heaters.”

      “That was the way everywhere, before the electric came.” Granny Carne talks as if electricity has only just been invented. “They’ll never bring the electric all the way up here, but I don’t miss it,” Granny Carne continues. She has lit the paraffin lamps. I like the light they give. It’s soft and yellow and it gives warm colour to the white walls. She uses paraffin lamps downstairs and candles upstairs. “You don’t need a lot of light to sleep by,” she says.

      The cottage smells of candles and wood smoke, paraffin and stone. There are big shadows in the corners of the room. It’s not a frightening place exactly, but it has too much power to be comfortable. I’m glad Sadie’s here. If I wake up in the night I’ll hear her breathing, and if I say her name she’ll wake up at once.

      Granny Carne gets slowly to her feet from where she’s been kneeling by the stove. She mutters something, too quietly for me to hear.

      “Now he’ll sleep through the night,” she says. “Praise fire and he’ll serve you well.”

      “Does your fire ever go out?”

      “He’s been alive as long as I have, my girl. Sometimes he’s burned low, but he’s never died.”

      “Granny Carne? I ask hesitantly. “How long have you – I mean – how many years—”

      She looks at me with her arms folded. Her fierce owl eyes are bright with amusement. She knows exactly what I want to know, because it’s what everybody in Senara has asked themselves, one time or another. How old is Granny Carne? How many years has she been living up there in her cottage, with people from the village coming up to see her privately when they have troubles to which they can’t find an answer? Years… decades… or even centuries?

      “I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth, Sapphire,” she says. “Does that answer your question?”

      “No,” I say boldly.

      “You want more?”

      “Yes.”

      “You ask a lot of me, Sapphire.” Her voice has grown harsher. Her tone changes. She is no longer an old woman, and I’m no longer a child. I stare into her eyes. People’s eyes don’t change.

      But everything else is changing. As I watch, the wrinkled brown skin around Granny Carne’s eyes grows smooth and soft. Colour steals into her grey hair, which breaks loose from its knot and ripples lustrously over her shoulders. Long, dark brown hair, the colour of the darkest earth, and with red lights in it like fire. Her lips are red and full. Her body grows straight and slender as a young birch tree.

      “Granny Carne,” I whisper. But there’s no Granny Carne in the room. The young woman’s lips part in a smile, and then she lays a finger on her lips to silence me. This is Earth magic, and it’s too potent for me. I shut my eyes. When I open them again, the woman like a birch tree has disappeared, and Granny Carne is standing there.

      “Where’s she gone?”

      “There’s been no one in this room but our two selves, Sapphire. All I’m showing you is that time isn’t what you think it is.”

      “But how can you be old and young at the same time?”

      Granny Carne smiles. “Ask anyone with grey hair. Ask Mrs Eagle if she feels any different inside from how she felt when she was eighteen. There’s little difference.”

      “Do you know Mrs Eagle?”

      “I’ve known Temperance Eagle from a girl. Temperance Pascoe as she was then. Wild, she was,” goes on Granny Carne thoughtfully. “Her father used to scour St Pirans for her on a Saturday night, shouting that he’d take his belt to her when he found her. He was a strong Bible Christian.”

      But I’m not going to be diverted by tales of Mrs Eagle’s youth. Mrs Eagle is most definitely one hundred per cent old now. Granny Carne’s old, too, yet she changed before my eyes into a woman like a young birch tree. I know that I didn’t imagine it. What Granny Carne did is something completely different from an old person feeling young inside.

      “Mrs Eagle can’t do what you did,” I say as firmly as I dare, “and no one else talks about time the way you do, as if they can go back hundreds of years and see what was happening then.”

      But suddenly I remember. Someone does. Faro talks about time in the same way as Granny Carne, as if history is still happening. As if he’d watched the Ballantine smash on to the rocks with his own eyes. And he made me watch it, too, when I saw into his mind.

      Granny Carne sighs. She looks very old now. “You ask a lot of questions, Sapphire. They’re hard questions, too, and I can’t give you all the answers you want. Let me tell you this much. What you saw just now, not many would see.”

      “Why did you let me see it?”

      “It wasn’t me letting you. It was you that had the power to see the old and young standing in the same place. You think all your power lies in Ingo, Sapphire, but that’s because you choose to make it so.”

      “But you said I had strong Mer blood, Granny Carne. You told me and Conor that last summer.”

      “Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Your Mer blood may be strong, but your Earth blood is powerful too. Not as strong as your brother’s, but strong enough.”

      “Is having Earth blood the same as living in the Air – being human, I mean?”

      “No. Most people live out their human lives without choosing either Earth or Ingo. They don’t need to. They’re happy as they are. They live in the present time, and in one place. As far as they’re concerned, the past is rolled up like a carpet and no one can touch it. And the future, too. Perhaps they are the fortunate ones,” adds Granny Carne.

      “I don’t see what’s fortunate about not being able to go to Ingo.”

      “Ask your brother.”

      Conor’s words echo in my head: I’ve got to try to belong where I am. Conor really wants to be part of