The Complete Ingo Chronicles: Ingo, The Tide Knot, The Deep, The Crossing of Ingo, Stormswept. Helen Dunmore

to pretend I couldn’t hear my own sister when she might’ve needed me? But you kept on calling and I was afraid something bad was happening to you, and you were calling to me for help. And so I had to come back.

      But when I got up on to the shore, there was no one there. You’d totally disappeared. I waited for you for hours and hours, thinking you weren’t ever going to come back. I went up to the cottage, I searched everywhere, I came back down here – I even went back into the sea again to look for you. But I couldn’t get into Ingo again. Not without Elvira. I dived and dived but nothing happened. The water wouldn’t let me in. It pushed me up like a rubber ball every time I dived. The water was laughing at me.”

      “But – but it wasn’t more than a few minutes after I called you that I came back. It can’t have been longer.”

      “Believe me, it was. You were so deep in Ingo that it felt like minutes. But it was hours, Saph.”

      I’m almost scared of Conor now. He looks like he did after Shadow had to be put down, the summer before last. Shadow was fifteen, which is old for a cat. We all loved Shadow, but Conor really loved him. I think of Conor searching along the shore, searching the cottage, trying to find me, running back to the cove, frantic, afraid that something terrible had happened to me.

      “I’m sorry, Conor. I really didn’t know. I didn’t think I’d been away so long.”

      “It’s all happening again, that’s what scares me,” says Conor in a low voice. “First, the olden-days Mathew Trewhella disappears. OK, it’s only a story that’s supposed to have happened a long time ago. But then Dad disappears. And then I can’t find you. I really thought I was never going to be able to find you again.

      “I’ll tell you something, Saph, I won’t go there again. Whatever Elvira says, I’m not going to Ingo again. It’s too dangerous.

      “Granny Carne doesn’t want us to go. She’s stopping us. I can feel it. You know when you try to push two magnets together, and they won’t? It’s like that.

      “But Elvira wants me to go. And she didn’t want me to come back either. Do you know what she said? That can’t have been your sister’s voice. These currents make strange echoes. I didn’t hear anything. But I knew I’d heard you. How could I be wrong about my own sister’s voice?”

      I hate the pain and confusion in my brother’s voice. I hate the idea that Elvira wanted to keep him away from me.

      “Conor, listen. You won’t go up to Jack’s again today, will you? You won’t leave me alone here?”

      “No,” says Conor. His face lightens. “Hey, Saph. Listen.”

      “What?”

      “Maybe you should cut off your hair.”

      “Cut off my hair?”

      “Because when it’s so long and you’re in the water, your hair spreads out all around you. It makes you look like a – you know, like one of them.”

      “You mean, like a mermaid,” I say icily. How can Conor possibly suggest that I cut off my hair? He knows I’ve been growing it since I was six. I’ve got the longest hair in our whole school. I wouldn’t be me without it.

      “Yes,” says Conor, quite seriously. “They might see your hair floating in the water when you go swimming, and get the idea that you’re one of them. That you ought to stay with them.”

      “So let me know when I start to grow a tail.”

      But Conor shrugs my comment away, as if I’m just the little sis trying to be smart. I’m about to snap back, when a strange feeling seizes me and I forget him.

      How dark it is inside the cottage, with the doors and windows closed. You know that feeling when you come home after a holiday, and everything feels so familiar and comfortable, because it belongs to you and you belong to it? That’s the feeling I usually have when I come home to our cottage.

      But not now. The walls seem to be pressing in around me. I’ve never realised before that the cottage is so small. There’s so little space that I can hardly move. I want to stretch. I want to get out. I want to leap and plunge and dive and be free, and I want the cool of the water rushing past my skin instead of this dry, scratchy air. Our cottage isn’t a home at all. It’s a prison.

      Conor is watching me. “Saph, no!” he says warningly, as if he can read my thoughts.

      “I’m not doing anything.”

      “I won’t let you, Saph. You’re not swimming off down any streams without me. I told Granny Carne I’d look after you.”

      I hold on to the strength of Conor’s voice.

      “Conor, listen. What else did Elvira say to you?”

      “Everything I wanted to hear,” says Conor. “But I can’t describe it. You have to hear her voice.”

      I think of Faro, and all the power of Ingo.

      “I know,” I say.

      “But I’m not going to Ingo again. If Elvira calls to me, I’ll put my headphones on and turn my music up loud so I can’t hear her. It’s the only way.”

      Suddenly a thought cuts through me like a knife. “Conor! What about Mum?”

      “What about her?”

      “Mum might hear it too. You know. The singing. It might start to pull her. And then what’ll we do?”

      “She won’t,” says Conor confidently. “Mum hates the sea. Can you imagine her in Ingo?”

      “No – maybe not—”

      “Mum wouldn’t even believe Ingo exists. And that’ll make her safe.”

      In the cottage, with Conor there and Conor’s music playing loud, doors and windows shut, curtains drawn, lights on and a bolognese sauce bubbling on the stove, Ingo seems far away.

      But even the loudest music has pauses in it, and into those pauses the noise of the sea can break through, drop by drop, then faster, a trickle, a stream, and now a flood-tide—

      No. I won’t let it happen this time.

      I make a huge effort. I close my eyes, my ears, my mind. Our cottage is warm and safe and friendly. It’s our home, where we belong. In a minute it’ll be time to drop the spaghetti into boiling water.

      Ingo does not exist. Ingo is just a story, far away.

      Yes, says a small, mocking voice inside my head. Ingo doesn’t exist. How true is a lie, how dry is the ocean, how cold is the sun? And I think the voice sounds like Faro’s.

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      Mum straightens up and turns from the oven to the kitchen table where we’re all sitting. She places a pan of roast potatoes carefully on the heat-proof mat, next to the roast chicken which has been resting for ten minutes.

      “The chicken’s having a good rest before we eat it,” Dad used to explain to us when we were little. “It’s hard work to be eaten.”

      “Don’t fill the children’s heads with rubbish, Mathew. It rests so as to make the meat easier to carve, Sapphire,” Mum would say.

      Dad’s not here, but we’re still eating roast chicken. Isn’t it strange that a meal can last longer in your life than a person? Sunday dinner, the same as ever. I stare at the golden skin of the chicken and the crunchy golden-brown roast potatoes. Mum always sprinkles salt on the potatoes before she puts them in hot oil to roast.

      “I’ll just have potatoes and broccoli, Mum,” I say, when it comes to my turn. Mum has already heaped Roger’s plate