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‘Not unless you want to.’ Mr Carver beamed as though he’d won a debate with Albert Einstein. ‘Would you like a run around the playground while you’re here?’
‘Good idea,’ said Grandma X, surprising the twins. ‘Run along now while I talk to Mr Carver.’
The twins bolted through the classroom and out the school’s back door. For such a small school, it had a very large oval with some play equipment tacked onto one side, almost as an afterthought. Presumably the playing field was shared with the town for sporting events and fairs. Jack raced Jaide right around the oval, winning by a comfortable margin despite the sludginess of the grassy ground beneath their feet. The rain was holding off for the moment, although the clouds, if anything, had thickened.
‘Stop!’ called a woman’s voice as Jaide rushed up the ladder of a slippery dip and prepared to whoosh down the other side. ‘Hold it right there!’
Jaide froze, poised between standing and sliding with both feet out in front of her. The voice had come from inside a wooden fort. A tall woman in overalls crawled out of the fort’s child-size gate and pointed emphatically with a wrench.
‘It’s broken! Get down or you’ll hurt yourself!’
Jaide’s face flushed, partly from embarrassment at being yelled at by a stranger and partly out of annoyance. She could see nothing remotely wrong with the slippery dip.
‘How do you know?’ she asked.
‘Because I’m here to fix it,’ said the woman. She stood up and indicated the base of the slippery dip, where Jack was standing. ‘I was going to work on the slide next.’
‘She’s right, Jaide,’ said Jack, pointing. The slippery dip’s legs had rusted right through and would have collapsed under Jaide’s weight. From where he was standing he could see it clearly. ‘You’re lucky she saw you in time.’
Slightly mollified, Jaide retracted her legs and climbed back down the ladder. The woman came around to meet her, her expression less severe now that she saw Jaide was safe. She reminded Jaide of her mother whenever one of the twins had a close call, going from terror to telling-off to apologies in a matter of seconds.
‘Sorry I gave you a fright,’ the woman said, slipping the wrench into a pocket and wiping her greasy hands on her overalls. ‘You’re all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Jaide, coming around the slippery dip to find solidarity next to her brother. ‘Thanks.’
‘Oh, no bother.’ The woman waved cheerfully, although there was a sadness to her eyes that Jack couldn’t decipher. ‘I’ll have it shipshape by the time you come back tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to let the little ones down.’
She took a step closer, as though she wanted to keep talking, but the twins said thanks again and hurried back inside, made nervous by the presence of yet another stranger. There had been so many in the last twenty-four hours that they were beginning to feel overwhelmed.
Mr Carver and Grandma X were engaged in a lively discussion on the proper education of children.
‘The mind of a child is the most precious thing in the universe,’ Mr Carver was saying. ‘It’s our job to encourage them to grow!’
‘It’s a teacher’s job to make sure they grow in the right way. How does letting something run wild achieve that?’
They broke off on seeing the twins, Mr Carver with visible relief.
‘Ah, yes, here you are. Did you meet Rennie? She’s the town’s odd-job woman. If you ever need anything done up at your house, she’s the one to call.’
If Mr Carver was trying to make amends, he failed in the face of Grandma X’s determined disapproval.
‘My house looks after itself perfectly well,’ she said. ‘And rest assured that we will continue this conversation another time. For now, we’re going to take a walk through the park.’
‘Be at one with nature, yes, that’s a lovely idea, good. Well, it’s been nice meeting you both.’ Mr Carver shook the twins’ hands again, meeting their eyes meaningfully and sincerely. They both noticed the dampness of his palm. ‘I’ll look forward to getting to know you better tomorrow.’
‘Uh, sure,’ said Jack. Grandma X’s grip on his shoulder was tight as she led them out the front of the school’s sole building. From the direction of the sea came the smell of fish. They had passed the fishing co-op during the short trip from Watchward Lane, and a trawler was offloading a big catch of something.
‘I suppose the school is at least convenient,’ said Grandma X, screwing up her nose at yet another apparition of rainbow paint, this time along the fence, a mural of many children holding hands and smiling exaggerated smiles.
‘Where else could we go?’ asked Jaide.
‘Nowhere close,’ replied Grandma X. ‘I don’t believe a long train trip each morning and afternoon would improve your minds very much.’ She peered at the clouds. ‘There’ll be time for that tour I promised you, I think.’
Grandma X’s car was a canary yellow 1951 Hillman Minx, with bulging leather seats and a steering wheel as big as a truck’s. It was Jack’s turn to ride shotgun, and he paid more attention to the car’s wood panelling and ancient accessories than to the places he was taken in it. There was no CD player or MP3 plug. The radio had only one dial. When Grandma X changed gear, the whole car vibrated, as if the gear change required the effort of the entire vehicle.
The park was on the other side of the iron bridge that crossed the wide, lazy river and its attendant swamps, leading to the town’s main street. Jaide had expected the usual trees and shrubs in the park, but found instead a large, carefully mown lawn with a bizarre centrepiece: an oval-shaped garden of cactuses growing out of weirdly placed stones. One cactus in particular stood up like a long, skeletal hand, pointing straight up into the sky. Others puffed and prickled in the breeze, looking various degrees of dangerous. They seemed very out of place in the rain.
‘Why cactuses, here?’ asked Jaide. ‘I thought they only grew in the desert.’
‘They require careful tending,’ replied Grandma X. ‘But they have been here since the town was founded. In fact, your great-great-grandfather – my husband’s grandfather – planted them, I believe out of a hankering for a former life in more arid parts.’
When quizzed about which parts, exactly, Grandma X was vague. The twins trailed after her as she looked at each cactus carefully, even getting out a pair of brass opera glasses to peer at the flowers atop the largest and presumably oldest cactus, which was well over thirty feet high.
But when she had finished, she summoned the twins with a clap of her hands.
‘Not a moment to lose!’ she exclaimed, even though she’d been the one staring at the plants. ‘Not if we’re going to see everything. Time is of the essence!’
‘Why?’ asked Jaide. ‘We’re not in any hurry.’
‘The rain, dear, the rain,’ Grandma X said.
From the cactus park Grandma X took them past the hospital and police station, but not, unfortunately, to the beach they had visited the day before.
Grandma X parked on the edge of the coastal reserve and peered through the trees at the ocean. She fiddled in her bag and produced the opera glasses again, which she focused on Mermaid Point. She hummed and tutted for a moment, then passed the glasses to Jack.
‘Tell me what you see,’ she said.
‘Just rocks. Big black ones.’
‘Now you, Jaidith. Anything unusual?’
Jaide squinted down the unfamiliar instrument. ‘The rocks look like a giant, curled up into a ball.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Jack, taking the glasses back from her. ‘Where?’
‘Look for the shoulders. Once you see them, you can see the rest.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘I see him!’
‘Her,’ Grandma X corrected, without further explanation.
Jaide assumed they were going home – Portland was very small, after all, and they had already seen most of it – but instead of turning up Parkhill Street, Grandma X headed out onto the headland visible from the opposite side of the bay.
There they found an old church and cemetery, and a lighthouse, all under the shadow of Portland’s most striking geological feature: the Rock.
The Rock was a hill of grey stone that speared up out of the ground fully four hundred feet high, providing numerous rookeries for seabirds on its steepest side and some precarious perches for clumps of pandanus trees and other small plants on the other.
The view from the top would be fantastic, thought Jack, and it didn’t look too hard to climb. In fact, he could see the beginning of a path, and a sign that looked like it marked the start of a trail. But his hopes of climbing it were temporarily dashed when Grandma X parked the Hillman at the base of the lighthouse and peered up at the tapering white column through the opera glasses.
‘What are you looking for?’ Jaide asked her. She was getting bored of sightseeing, particularly when she didn’t get to look through the opera glasses.
‘Oh, nothing, dear.’
