The Deep. Helen Dunmore

beautiful. I’m back in Senara, back at our cove, back where I belong. Faro and I have been talking for ages. Not about anything special, just talking. That’s one of the best things about Faro. We start a conversation and it flows so easily, as if we’re picking up each other’s thoughts. Sometimes we are.

      Faro’s tail is curled over the edge of the rock, and every so often he pushes himself off with his hands, and plunges into the transparent water to refresh himself. The muscles in his arms and shoulders are very powerful, and he can pull himself up again out of the water and on to the rock again without much effort.

      Faro can’t stay out of the sea for too long. The skin of his tail, which is usually as glistening and supple as sealskin, grows dry and dull. Faro says that if the Mer get too much sun on their skin it cracks, and then they get sun-sores which are hard to heal.

      But I’m sure that Faro’s able to stay out of the sea longer these days. Maybe it’s something to do with Faro growing older, and more resilient…

      My thoughts drift away. Luckily, Faro’s one of those people you can be silent with, too. He hauls himself up on to our rock again, dripping and glistening.

      A new summer is about to begin. For my brother Conor and me, there’ll be days and days of swimming and sunbathing and long evening walks with Sadie. Sadie loves swimming, too, and with only her nose above the water she looks more like a seal than a Golden Labrador. In the evenings we’ll build driftwood bonfires on the sand, and have barbecues where we cook mackerel which we’ve just caught off the rocks.

      I don’t want to think about the past. I want to live now. But no matter how hard I try, the memory of the flood in St Pirans keeps coming back. Floods change people, even after the water’s gone down. You don’t feel safe in the same way, once you’ve seen fish swimming in and out of the car-park gates, and houses like caves full of salt water.

      Conor and I have never talked to anyone about what happened to us the night of the flood, when the Tide Knot broke. Nobody would believe us, anyway.

      The Tide Knot is sealed again. The sea can’t come raging in over the land.

      But I shiver. I know Ingo’s power.

      We moved back to our cottage here in Senara in January. That was one good thing that came out of the flood: our rented house was an uninhabitable wreck. And Mum didn’t want to live in St Pirans any more. She thought we’d be safer back in Senara, high up on the cliff.

      If you’ve never been in a flood, you can’t imagine what St Pirans looked like afterwards. The streets were full of mud, sand, rocks and every kind of rubbish. Wheelie bins, smashed cars, street signs, hundreds of plastic bags, soggy sofas, wrecked computers, TVs with shattered screens, filthy clothes and books turned to mush. There were waterlogged oranges everywhere. You wouldn’t believe there could be so many oranges in one town. There were lots of dead fish too, stranded when the water fell.

      The smell was the worst part. The whole town stank of rotting food, rotting seaweed, dead fish and sewage from broken pipes.

      There were muddy tide marks on the houses higher up the hill, but ours was completely underwater during the flood so it was dirty all over. There was even a branch of seaweed sticking out of the chimney. Our front door hung off its hinges. All our possessions had swilled around in the flood water. Some had disappeared, and most of the rest were ruined.

      Mum was really upset about losing our photo albums. Conor and I searched through piles of stuff, trying to find them, but in the end we had to give up. We did find just one framed picture of all the family, face-down in the fireplace under a tangle of seaweed. In the photo Mum and Dad were standing close together, with Dad’s arm around me, and Mum’s arm around Conor. It was taken a few years ago, and it was always Mum’s favourite.

      But after Dad disappeared, nearly two years ago now, she put the photo into a drawer.

      The photo frame was smashed, but the photo wasn’t damaged. Conor and I dried it carefully, then we gave it to Mum.

      That was the only time Mum cried. But she said she was being stupid, because she had us safe and who cares about photo albums if you’ve got the real thing?

      She hasn’t got Dad, though. She still believes Dad drowned nearly two years ago. When she talks about him, it sounds as if that part of her life is closed. I’m scared that her boyfriend Roger is slowly and surely taking Dad’s place.

      I sit bolt upright at the thought, clenching my fists. Faro gives me a quizzical smile.

      “Do you want to fight, little sister?”

      “Sorry, Faro, it’s not you, it’s just something I thought of…”

      “Watch me instead. I’m going to do underwater somersaults.”

      He dives in a pure, fluid line. I’ll never, ever be able to dive like that, no matter how much I practise. And those somersaults – his body is a blur, whipping the water into foam. Round and round, faster and faster until he breaks the surface, tosses back his long hair and calls triumphantly, “Did you see that, Sapphire?”

      “It was great, Faro.”

      He climbs out of the water again, and settles to watching sea anemones in a tiny pool on top of our rock. Faro can watch rock pools for hours. So can I usually, but not today – my thoughts keep pulling me back.

      So we came back to our cottage in Senara. The Fortunes, who were renting our cottage, moved out when they heard we were homeless. They’ve rented another cottage nearby. Gloria Fortune came round on the first day we were back, with an apple pie. She knocked politely on our kitchen door as if she’d never lived here at all.

      Everybody in Senara brought us furniture and food and clothes and blankets, as if we were refugees. It’s true that all our clothes were gone, and we didn’t have money to buy new ones, but I didn’t want to wear other people’s old stuff. Mum got an emergency payment from the insurance, so now at least we’ve all got new trainers and a set of new clothes each.

      The restaurant where Mum worked has closed, like all the other restaurants in St Pirans. Mum’s got a temporary job at the pub here in Senara, four evenings a week.

      We’re home again. We are really home.

      Sometimes I can hardly believe those words. I wake up and expect to find myself in the little bedroom with the porthole window in St Pirans. But here I am, in my own bedroom with the ladder leading up to Conor’s attic. I feel something I can hardly describe. It’s like when you panic because you’re late and it’s Monday morning, and then you remember that it’s half-term. It’s like the sun coming out. Home. All the sounds and smells of our cottage are just right. I know where all the scuffs on the furniture have come from. I know why the living-room door doesn’t shut properly (because Conor smashed into it when he was learning karate). I know which birds sing in the tree outside the kitchen door. Every object in our cottage is like part of the family.

      The Fortunes hadn’t changed much inside our cottage, but they did loads of work in the garden, getting it ready for spring planting, just as Dad used to do. I’m planting stuff every day now, all the things Dad used to plant: carrots and lettuces and tomato plants up against a sunny southern wall, and some strawberry runners that Granny Carne gave me. She gave me lots of seeds, too. Granny Carne doesn’t ever buy seed in packets, from shops. She saves it all from year to year, she says. She has seed you can’t get nowadays.

      Dating back to the sixteenth century, I expect, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. You have to show respect to Granny Carne. Besides, it makes me dizzy when I try to think of all the time Granny Carne must have seen. All those lives coming and going.

      Granny Carne went on carefully sorting seeds and putting them into brown wage envelopes marked in her strange, spiky handwriting. Finally she said, “If you can’t feed a family from a plot of land as good as you’ve got here, there’s something wrong with you.”

      She bent down and crumbled a clod of earth between her fingers. “Respect the earth and give it back what it needs,