The sun’s shining as Kim and me pedal up the road, seagulls whining overhead in the clear air. A helicopter buzzes over the Solent and there’s the roar of a motorboat setting out from the boatyard at the end of our road. I’ve given Kim my mountain bike and I’m on Mum’s old shopping bike so I get out of breath quickly, what with trying to keep in a straight line and filling Kim in on Mohammed’s story.
“What do you think would happen if the police found out?” says Kim.
“Dunno.”
We have to go into single file as some cars come past. When we’re back side by side I say, “If you read the papers it looks like everyone hates asylum seekers.”
“We don’t.”
“No, but the trouble is we don’t know who else thinks like us.”
And that’s the problem, I think. If me and Kim don’t know who to trust then how on earth can Mohammed and Samir hope to feel safe?
We cycle along the front and then Kim calls out, “I’m starving, it’s ages since we had that sandwich. Jaxie’s working at the pub today, shall we go up there and get some chips?”
I hesitate. It’s almost two o’clock and then I think, Mohammed won’t die if we’re another hour and it’s so great being in the open air, hanging out with Kim after all the insane stuff of the last few days.
So I say, “Cool, let’s go.”
We pump our pedals north through the Island and onto the bridge across Langstone Harbor to the mainland. The sea stretching out either side of the bridge is a choppy gray color whipping into little white flurries, and I can see the water lapping right up to the seawall. The tide is still high and won’t turn for another couple of hours. When we get to the pub people are already sitting in the sunshine on wooden benches, throwing crisps and pork scratchings to the ducks and a single swan bunching up on the water.
Jaxie comes out to collect glasses and seeing us calls out, “Hiya, how about some chips?”
She disappears and comes back carrying a tray with two enormous portions of chips, ketchup, salt and vinegar and two glasses of cola, with ice and a slice of lemon.
“Hope you remembered the vodka,” says Kim cheekily, and Jaxie messes up her hair, which Kim hates.
“Thanks, Jaxie. We’ll clear some glasses for you when we’ve finished,” I say.
She gives me a big grin and says, “You’re all right, Alix. How’s your mum doing?”
“Okay,” I mumble through a mouthful of chips, and Kim and I settle down to watch the yachts bobbing about on the swell.
A boy rows up and takes a packet of crisps and a couple of cans from a man on the quayside and I think how great it would be to sail around Britain, stopping in pubs for chips and never getting off your boat. I’d just started to learn how to sail with Grandpa when he had his first stroke, and after that he couldn’t take the boat out anymore.
The sun on the benches gets warmer and Kim stretches out, pulling her jacket around her, and dozes off. I collect up a great stack of plates and glasses and wander around the back of the pub to the kitchen door. Trevor, the cook, is taking a cigarette break in the little garden and no one else is around. Must all be busy serving, I decide.
The sink’s piled with dirty stuff so I clear it, and squeezing loads of frothy dish soap, fill the sink and start to scrub the greasy plates. The pub’s very old, with low ceilings and thick oak beams, and I imagine I’m a cabin boy in the galley of one of the old sailing ships, slaving away all day, adjusting my legs to the roll of the ship. Maybe I’d be part of the Langstone Gang.
“That’s what your grandfather would have liked!” Mum used to joke.
Grandpa told terrific smuggler stories when I was little. “The Langstone Gang were notorious,” he said once when we were having breakfast before school. “They brought in all the things the government wanted taxes for, such as spirits . . .”
“Why did the government want to tax ghosts?” I’d asked.
Grandpa laughed and finished buttering my toast. He often took me to school back then. We’d go in his old Nissan Sunny.
“Not those sort of spirits,” he said. “Drink, you know, like whisky and brandy.”
“Oh, that,” I said, nodding casually. The adults drank brandy on birthdays sometimes.
“They smuggled in tobacco . . .”
“For your pipe?”
Grandpa nodded, “And lace, fine silks and wine.”
“Didn’t the police catch them?” It all seemed very exciting, sailing around Hayling Island with smuggled stuff in your boat. Did smuggled mean stolen?
“They didn’t have police hundreds of years ago. Customs officers chased smugglers. But the Gang was too clever. They didn’t keep their contraband on the boat; they towed it behind them, beneath the surface of the water. Then if the customs boat appeared they’d cut the towline and the cargo would sink to the bottom.”
“So they lost it?! What’s the point?” I giggled.
“Aha!” Grandpa would twinkle. “They knew exactly where they’d dropped their contraband and they would go back at low tide and find it. The customs fellas hadn’t a clue.”
“You’d know where to find the countryland again, wouldn’t you, Grandpa?” I’d say. I always got the long words wrong when I was little.
“Wouldn’t he just!” Mum laughed, and Grandpa would sit back in his chair, a knowing look on his face, sucking his empty pipe.
What would Grandpa think of people smugglers? I wondered, watching froth drip slowly down the side of the beer glasses. What would Grandpa say about those scumbags who pretend they are bringing terrified asylum seekers to a new and better life?
“Mohammed just wanted to die when he fell in the sea,” Samir had told me. “He’d never been so cold in all his life. Iraq is really, really hot. I remember when I first came here; it felt like I was living in a giant air-conditioning unit, twenty-four seven.”
“Wow, Alix, you’re a real star!” Jaxie’s shrill voice breaks into my dreams and I turn, towel in hand, drying the last of the glasses.
I shrug. “It’s nothing.”
“Clearing the lunchtime crockery, I wouldn’t call that nothing, where’s that lazy sister of mine?” Jaxie digs into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out a five-pound note. “Here, slave wages.”
“Thanks, Jaxie!” I grin and go back outside.
Kim’s sitting up, throwing the last of her chips to the swans. We jump back on our bikes and pedal furiously to the big pharmacist in the village.
The pharmacist is very helpful on infected wounds.
“But it sounds like you really need to get your uncle to a doctor. I’m sure he needs antibiotics,” she says anxiously.
She’s very thin and quite young-looking really, and even though she’s wearing a white coat I think she could be just a student. I can see she bites her nails right to the edge.
“My uncle hates doctors,” I say, and Kim nods. “So we’ll just have to manage by ourselves.”
We come away with a huge bag of antiseptic wipes, creams, dressings and miles of surgical tape.
“Do you know what to do with all this stuff?” I ask Kim. She shrugs. “Trial and error, I suppose.”
We cycle back to my house, dump the bikes and collect Trudy, who’s desperate for a walk. Then we go off to the beach. As we arrive outside the hut I get this strange feeling, as though something has changed.
I climb through the window, calling out warily, “We’re back.”
But Samir and Mohammed are both jammed up against the wall, their faces creased into worried frowns, and standing in the middle of the hut is Lindy!
Oh my God! Now we’ve had it!