The Sand Dog
Sarah Lean
Grandfather had been gone for two years but I never thought it would be an ordinary day he’d come back, like a Monday or a Tuesday… I always knew he’d return across the water, triumphing over a few monsters on the way, I just didn’t know when…When Azi’s grandfather leaves their small Mediterranean island, Azi waits every day for him to return. The arrival of a nesting turtle and a tall sandy dog convinces Azi that it must mean that Grandfather is on his way. As Azi digs deeper into the past, he begins to unravel hidden secrets and starts to find out just how alike he and his grandfather really are. And without him, Azi knows he will never feel complete…
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018
Published in this ebook edition in 2018
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Text copyright © Sarah Lean 2018
Cover design copyright © HarperCollins Children’s Books 2018
Cover design by Katie Everson
Cover illustrations copyright © Jessica Courtney-Tickle
Sarah Lean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008165819
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008165826
Version: 2018-05-04
For my nephew Seb (lead guitar – Chapman’s Farm, vintage, Pops) Granville
Contents
Cover (#ua67efaf4-9e78-5223-adbe-3e40383dc65a)
Title Page (#uf15c5a6d-d162-5658-8892-09b542615af1)
Copyright (#ucefcba17-3094-5f41-9c81-48bfb6a3b402)
Dedication (#uf9da923d-aeb2-5e76-ab75-b17c031d9aa1)
Chapter 1 (#u1fc6a236-b04a-505e-9aae-6117157d72e4)
Chapter 2 (#u4b33bb5f-536b-50b5-b24d-03e175f2ff89)
Chapter 3 (#u1e84aa29-a95e-5e07-9316-18d249b83d62)
Chapter 4 (#u4ebd77b8-4d88-5a69-b3da-535697869c67)
Chapter 5 (#u755d7fa4-8f26-57bd-97df-92fbdafbaf6e)
Chapter 6 (#u0a74f74e-223a-5006-a346-f6205ba6a44e)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Sarah Lean (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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I NEVER THOUGHT GRANDFATHER would come back on an ordinary day like a Monday or a Tuesday. He’d come on the kind of day when the rising sun is pouring its colours on the sea because there’s not enough room for all its glory in the sky. Grandfather was like that kind of special day to me too. He was a fisherman, and from watching the drift of deep-water seaweed he could land a net of fish full to bursting. He knew the journey of a past storm by what swept up on the beach, and could tell a thousand stories of extraordinary creatures from the deep. He said that the ocean had a long story to tell about all of us, full of signs of things that have happened and signs of things that are to come. I always knew he’d come back across the sea, triumphing over a few monsters on the way, but I was still waiting after two years for that special day to arrive.
I live on a small island in the Mediterranean. My home used to be with Grandfather in a little fisherman’s cottage but now I’m in a flat with Uncle above his restaurant at the back of the beach. My open bedroom window is like an ear to the sounds of the water, and it was one Friday night that I heard the rhythm of the tide change.
In my underpants, I went downstairs and walked across the beach to look out over the waves. The sea was black as simmering tar, and the moon reflected like broken glass on the restless waves. At the far end of the beach on the shallow rocks that divided the beach from the cove further along, a turtle was struggling hard to climb out of the water. Her shell was patterned like the crazy paving of our narrow streets, and I wondered what it felt like to carry her home on her back.
The turtle was clumsy on the rocks without the support of the water, and tumbled on her back to the sandy cove. I ran over. Turtles aren’t good on land anyway, but her front flipper was caught in some fishing line round her neck like a sling, making it hard for her to move at all. I recognised the chip in her shell from when she’d been to our island two years ago. I wondered if she remembered me, because she didn’t seem afraid when I rolled her over. She was heavy, and as big as a shield, but I was strong and cut her free from the line. She lumbered off, digging grooves in the sand with her flippers, leaving a rippled pattern beside my footprints. Slowly she made her way to the back of the cove where she dug a cool hole, laid her eggs and buried them deep in the dark, just as she had before. I stayed with her until she was ready to go back to the sea, as the sun rose pink and gold behind a thin bank of cloud at dawn.
Grandfather had taught me that the sea could tell me a story. I needed three signs to let me know that he was coming home. The turtle had been the same one I’d seen the day before he left. Could that be the first sign?
I swam and dived with the turtle in the growing day, in the place where she was at ease, where I felt at home too, until I heard Uncle shouting from the rocks, ‘Azi! Get out of the sea! It’s almost eight o’clock!’
I surfed in with a wave and followed Uncle up to the restaurant where he was already laying tables ready for the early tourists.
‘Hurry up, or you’ll be late,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget your jobs after school!’ he yelled, as I leaped up the stairs to the flat, two at a time, to get dressed.
I pulled on a T-shirt and flip-flops and I ran, feet flapping, all the way to school, my wet underpants seeping through my shorts. It was already hot and I hoped they’d dry out before I got there. I’d got used to people calling me names like sea boy and water boy, saying the sea had weed on me, but I didn’t care today. It was the last day of term, a special and good day to feel that Grandfather was coming home at last. Three whole months of holiday lay ahead of us – enough time for Grandfather to see the turtle eggs hatch with me.
After school finished, Dimi, Chris and three other children asked me to play basketball with them.
‘Come on, just this once, Azi,’ Chris said. ‘We need enough players for two teams.’
I shrugged. ‘I’m going to the beach. I want to swim.’
‘You’re always going to the beach,’ Dimi moaned. ‘You can go anytime.’
We’d been stuck like this for a while now – them asking me to play basketball, me asking them to come swimming – none of us wanting to do what the other wanted. The last couple of years as we’d been growing up, we had grown apart.
‘You’re a weird creature from the sea, Azi!’ Chris shouted. ‘And you don’t even belong here!’ He slammed down the ball as I ran, trying not to listen to what he had said and to what people always told me, my flip-flops slapping on the tarmac that had gone sticky in the heat.
I swam, looking for the turtle, but she had gone, so I went to Uncle’s restaurant to talk to him about it. The restaurant was busy, the tables on the deck almost full of customers, white tablecloths swaying under the shade of the vines overhead.
In the kitchen, Uncle’s face was red and sweaty from the ovens and the scorching day.
‘The turtle came back,’ I said. ‘Do you remember the one that came the day before Grandfather left?’
Uncle frowned but didn’t answer. He was trying to take an order ticket from Maria the waitress, but she held on to it, her other hand on her hip, nodding her head towards me, waiting for Uncle to answer me first.
‘It must be a sign that he’s coming home. Have you heard from him?’ I said.
‘Two calamari!’ Uncle yelled to the other staff bustling and sweating around him as he tried to read the ticket between Maria’s fingers.
‘Azi is trying to speak to you,’ Maria said.
‘Two Greek salads!’ Uncle yelled, snapping the ticket from Maria. She clicked her tongue on her teeth because he was yelling, even though he didn’t need to, but she wasn’t ever bothered by his loud presence and the fact that he was the boss. ‘I don’t know anything about turtles,’ Uncle said more quietly and turned away from me to toss fish in a frying pan.
‘What’s the turtle got to do with Grandfather, Azi?’ Maria said, filling in for Uncle.
‘Grandfather taught me to read the signs from the sea,’ I explained. ‘Things that wash up on the sand can tell you a kind of story.’
Maria raised her eyebrows. ‘Is the turtle the same kind of sign as those big seashells you found on the beach? Or those waves breaking out like seahorses, and all the other signs you keep telling me about?’
I’d said the same kind of thing before, but this time it was different. This time I was sure it meant Grandfather was coming back. ‘Grandfather told me turtles are messengers,’ I said, hoping she’d understand.
At that moment, Uncle yelled across the kitchen. ‘How many times have I told you all of Grandfather’s talk was nonsense? And unless you’re bringing me a turtle to make soup, Azi, out of my kitchen and go get me some more customers!’
Although I was used to Uncle yelling a lot of the time over pots and pans (and I knew he didn’t really mean that he’d cook the turtle), you could hear the uncomfortable silence among the rest of the staff behind all the clanking and sizzling and chopping. Maria shook her head at Uncle, pursing her lips.
It wasn’t the right time to talk to Uncle. The restaurant was quite full, but not as full as Uncle would have liked it, and that made him crabby. He relied on having lots of customers in the summer to keep the bills paid throughout the quiet winter. I collected the flyers that I usually handed out to people who came off the ferries at the quay and was about to leave when Maria called after me, her foot holding the swinging door open.
‘Uncle yells at everyone, you know that, don’t you?’ she said. ‘It’s just a lot of hot air.’
‘Grandfather used to say that if all of Uncle’s yelling didn’t come out, it would boil and boil up inside him and then one day he’d go kaboom!’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t be good for business if Uncle went kaboom, hey, Azi?’ Maria laughed. ‘Grandfather made sense to you, didn’t he?’
I nodded. ‘We’re two of a kind, me and him. Two creatures from the sea.’
‘And what’s the message the turtle has brought you?’ she said.
‘People send messages to say they’re coming, don’t they?’
Maria smiled. ‘Yes, they usually do.’ She reached out and tugged at the end of my hair lying on my shoulders. ‘When are you going to let me cut your hair?’
‘When Grandfather comes back,’ I said, running off.
At the quay, I called out to the tourists as they stepped off the ferries that brought them from the other islands.
‘Come to Uncle’s restaurant on the beach! Fresh fish. Hot chips and ketchup. Cold beer,’ I told them, and handed out flyers, sticking some in the side pockets of suitcases as they were wheeled past. But most of the time I was checking to see if an old man in a blue cap would appear. When the ferries were finally emptied Grandfather hadn’t come, so I headed off, not really sure when to expect him.
I went back to the cove and staked a fence made of driftwood sticks and chicken wire round the area where the turtle eggs were hidden. I stripped down to my shorts and swam, and from out in the water looked back to the land to see what the turtle must have seen when she’d found her way to the same nesting place. Except for that one time two years ago, we’d not had any other turtles nesting on our island before. Surely it couldn’t just be a coincidence that the turtle had come back now.
Uncle’s restaurant was only thirty running steps from the edge of the sea, but neither he nor Maria knew the sea like Grandfather and I did. I might have got it wrong before, but this time I was sure Grandfather was coming. The sea knew this story and it was telling me so.
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THE SEA TAKES ITS own time to tell its story, Grandfather once told me. It was here long before we were and moved at its own pace and rhythm, not ours. Uncle was too busy in the restaurant over the weekend for me to talk to him again about Grandfather but it didn’t stop me thinking about what had happened. Grandfather had left suddenly to go to London, Uncle had said, to sort out an old family problem. Grandfather hadn’t been born here but neither had he been born in England, so I was sure he couldn’t have family there. Why then had he never come back?
Uncle gave me lots of jobs to do over the weekend so it wasn’t until Monday that I could go down to the beach again. I was out swimming at the cove when I saw a strange shape and shadow in the water and before long a blue door came floating in on the tide. Was this another sign? It wasn’t the kind of thing you would normally find in the sea, but after the turtle had turned up I wasn’t sure what to expect. I swam out to meet the door and climbed onboard. Although the paint on it was crackled and flaked away, it was the same colour blue as the one on Grandfather’s cottage.
Grandfather had lost his fishing boat a while before he left, so it was nice to feel what it was like to have something solid to float on again. There was a hole in the door where the letter box used to be and I looked down through it at the shadow it made on the seabed. Then I dived under and looked up through the opening, blowing bubbles through the hole before climbing back up and lying on it, face down, like a wide surfboard. I paddled around for a while and then took it to shore. It was already so hot in June that you had to hop across the sand. I dug away to get to the cooler, damp sand underneath and then propped the door up with some rocks and sheltered in its shade, looking out across the water for the afternoon ferries. When I saw the first big white-and-yellow ferry in the distance I knew it was time to go down to the quay and hand out more flyers, and while I was waiting I noticed something on the rocks out of the corner of my eye.
I squinted in the light until I could just make out that it was a dog. How long must he have been sitting there? He was looking out to sea, his narrow nose up in the air in a kind of proud way. He sometimes glanced over at me but when I looked at him he would look away. Then when I looked away he would shuffle a bit closer. I guessed he must want some shade because the sand was oven-hot, so I moved over and soon he came and sat next to me under the shadow of the door. He was almost as tall as I was sitting down, long and lean, with wispy fur the colour of sand. He didn’t do anything else but watch with his nose up while his ears drooped down. I wondered for a minute if he could be the third sign, but I decided he couldn’t be because he hadn’t actually come from the sea.
‘What are you waiting for?’ I said to him.
The dog’s eyes twitched towards me for a moment, but looking out over the waves was all he seemed to want to do, and we sat there for a long time, just like that, until the yellow-and-white ferry turned into the quay.
‘Gotta go,’ I said to the dog. ‘You can sit here, if you want, and keep watch for me.’ The dog looked up. ‘I’m waiting for another sign.’
At the quay, crowds of passengers disembarked.
‘Come to Uncle’s. Best restaurant on the beach,’ I said. ‘Calamari and chips. Ice-cold beer.’
I didn’t think Grandfather would really come on a Monday but you never knew, so I was still keeping an eye out for a short white-haired old man with muscular shoulders and arms, because that door was definitely telling me something. Maybe it meant that a letter from Grandfather had come! I headed into the village.
At the post office hardly anyone was queuing. I looked through the doorway to see who was inside and nearly stopped myself from going in to speak to Mrs Halimeda because she was an impatient kind of person. But when everyone else had gone I took my chance, and stepped up to the counter.
Mrs Halimeda sighed. ‘What is it this time, Azi?’
I folded one of the spare flyers, pushing it under the glass partition. ‘I couldn’t remember whether you’d seen Uncle’s new menu,’ I said.
She took it, unfolded it, and sighed again. ‘It’s exactly the same as the one you gave me last time you came in,’ she said, pushing it back through the window.
I rolled and unrolled the paper in my fingers before finally saying what I was really there for. ‘I wondered if there was a letter for me today?’
Mrs Halimeda narrowed her eyes. ‘As I’ve told you every week now for a very long time, if we did it would be delivered to your uncle’s address like everything else is. And before you ask again, yes, we know where you live.’
I felt uncomfortable that I always seemed to annoy her but I wanted to be sure she hadn’t missed anything.
‘I found a door and I think it’s a sign that something’s been sent to me, you see,’ I said.
Mrs Halimeda shook her head and looked over my shoulder as the queue began to grow behind me.
‘What about a postcard?’ I asked.
‘No postcards,’ she said, stern and as unmoved as a stone wall. ‘Next!’
When I moved away I heard her saying ‘Hopeless boy!’ and the lady from the Turkish Baths replying, ‘Well, you only have to look at who raised him.’
It burned inside and made me angry that they’d say something like that about me and Grandfather. But when people had called me names, or when they had looked at me as if I didn’t belong here, Grandfather would say, ‘They don’t know you at all, not like I do.’
And they didn’t know Grandfather like I did either.
When I went outside I found the dog from the cove was sitting beside the door. He put his nose in the air, looking away at first then looking back at me. Maybe his owner was in the post office.
Having no luck, I went back to the cove to check the turtle nest was safe from anybody disturbing it. As I was sitting there, digging away at my own hole in the sand with a stick to see how much work the mother turtle had to do to make her nest, a cool shadow fell across me, blocking the sun. It was the dog again, up on the rocks making shade for me. He climbed down and sat next to me again, looking out to sea.
‘Do you like it here too?’ I said.
He turned his head to look at me. His eyes were warm earth brown.
‘Nobody can bother you here. There’s just the whole wide sea … and us.’
The dog looked away when I didn’t say any more.
I wrapped my arms round my shins, rubbing at the scar on my knee, and rested my chin there as I thought about Grandfather. Would he be coming on a ferry? Or would he have bought himself a new boat?
I remembered once when Grandfather and I had found broken wooden boxes scattered along the tideline of the cove. Then, a few days later, whole crates were washed up, and he said I had to wait and see what else came floating in. After about two weeks and loads of my guesses about what it might be (none of which were right), hundreds of pineapples had been washed up on the beach. The pineapples had come out of the boxes and must have fallen off a ship, but, because the boxes and pineapples were different shapes and weights and sizes, it had taken them different lengths of time to arrive. I’m not saying that Grandfather was a pineapple, and I definitely couldn’t read the sea as well as he could, but it did mean that different things came at different times.
The dog sighed.
‘Be patient, you’ve only been sitting here for one day,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting for two years for Grandfather to come home.’
We stayed like that again for a long, longing time.
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THE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE Uncle was up, I stuffed some cold chicken and salad in pitta bread for breakfast and went down to the cove. The dog was already there, lying under the propped-up old door. His eyes and eyebrows twitched as he looked up at me but he didn’t lift his head. I sat beside him and picked out the cucumber and tomatoes to eat them first. The dog sat up and was trying really hard not to look at me eating the rest.
‘You must have got up early too so you’re probably hungry,’ I said, giving him a bit of chicken that he swallowed without chewing. It was nice having him beside me, even though he didn’t say or do much; in fact, that was what I liked about him first of all. I liked that he’d sit there quietly with me looking out to sea. It was what Grandfather used to do.
‘Stay there,’ I told the dog. ‘I’m going to get you something else.’
I ran back to Uncle’s restaurant and found the old tin bucket out the back. Then I went to the kitchens and checked on the shelves in the fridge for plates covered in foil with leftovers from the restaurant. I piled food into the bucket, shut the fridge door and then found Uncle standing there.
‘Who’s all that food for?’ he asked.
I wasn’t sure what Uncle would say if he knew I was taking food for a dog. Sometimes there were strays around the restaurant – dogs that people brought on the ferries and left behind, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by mistake. Uncle said the strays put customers off, and the staff knew better than to feed them and chased them away. He probably wouldn’t take kindly to the fact that I was encouraging one of them to hang about.
‘It’s all for me,’ I said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Good,’ he said, opening the fridge door to start preparing food. ‘You need feeding up.’
It was a quiet moment without hot voices and burning ovens and the first time I’d had a chance to be with Uncle without him yelling for people to get a move on and take orders, clear tables or hurry up with those chips. This was my opportunity.
‘Has Grandfather written to you to say which day he’s coming back?’ I asked.
Uncle had the same irritated look as Mrs Halimeda did when I kept asking the same question.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ he said.
‘Only I thought that if he’s coming home soon, maybe I should go over to his cottage and put some food in the fridge, ready for when he comes back.’
Uncle put a plate down harder on the counter than he needed to and his voice grew like popcorn. I blinked as he told me, ‘How many times have I said that you’re not to go over there? You live here with me now, and that’s that!’
I’d got used to Uncle’s yelling and Mrs Halimeda’s impatience and Chris and Dimi’s mickey-taking but it was getting harder and harder to accept that this was how things had to be. Even though they all repeated the same things to me again and again, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I belonged with Grandfather at his cottage, and while he wasn’t here I felt like a bucketful of water that had been taken from the sea and left behind on the beach when the sun went down and everyone else had gone home. When you can’t be with the person you need to be with all that you are left with is the longing to go back.
‘I’ve taken care of you, and taught you good things, haven’t I?’ Uncle steadied himself and lowered his voice. ‘You have everything you need here.’
‘Yes, Uncle,’ I said, which was what he wanted to hear.
He wrapped a chicken leg in a piece of foil and added it to my bucket. ‘Eat it all – you’re too skinny.’
I wasn’t hungry after everything that Uncle had said, so when I went back to the cove I fed the dog with the food. ‘You’re the one that’s too skinny,’ I told him as he ate everything I gave him. He burped and then lay down on his side, exhausted from wolfing it all down in such a hurry, and he reminded me of Grandfather all over again.
Grandfather had a thousand tales to tell from his days on his fishing boat. Sometimes the stories would overlap or merge, one tale leading to another, while other times the stories would be familiar because he’d told a part of them before. Sometimes it was just because it included me and I’d already stored it in my memory. But the stories were never the same, never fully told, only narrow doorways into one whole story of our lives. The dog wasn’t going to be able to tell me stories that made me feel like I belonged. He wouldn’t know how to ride the storms that made waves as tall and hard as massive walls of stone, or have heard of giant squid that could wrap their tentacles round sailing boats and drag them to the depths, or about huge sea creatures with heads like hammers. I could sit and listen to Grandfather’s stories for hours, my mouth wide open, daring it all to be true.
Without Grandfather, it was as if my history and the story I belonged in was missing the last chapter, the part when you finally get to hear how the monster is slayed.
Missing someone hurts all over. It’s much worse than a jellyfish sting.
I looked at the dog. Maybe he’d like to hear about Grandfather instead.
‘Once Grandfather saw the seabed split open and spit out fire from the centre of the Earth,’ I told the dog.
He raised his head, his ears twitching when I threw my arms up and wide as if they were the Earth breaking open, shooting out fire with my hands, exploding, bubbling, up and up. The dog blinked.
‘You ever seen such a thing?’
The dog’s eyebrows twitched, and I nodded. ‘The water boiled and the fish in Grandfather’s nets were cooked before he hauled them in or even had a chance to get them to Uncle’s kitchen, and he ate them, steaming, straight from the sea.’
The dog burped again and it made me laugh.
‘It’s true, dog. The boiling water cooked some seaweed too.’
I told him how the sea was full of things he couldn’t imagine, that the sea was a story all by itself, the greatest story I had ever heard. ‘Come on, dog, I’m going to show you something.’
I got up and went to the edge of the water with the bucket. It wasn’t really the edge because the sea didn’t have an edge as such because the sand was sometimes under the water and sometimes not. But, once upon a time, somebody had drawn a line on a map and said ‘This is the edge of our country’.
A dark red piece of seaweed rolled to my feet, strands like an octopus’s legs, waving with the rise and fall of the waves. I filled the tin bucket with seawater, poured in handfuls of sand, placed some small shells and waited for it all to settle. The dog looked in the bucket, sniffing at the wet, shiny weed I was holding, and then looked up at me, as if he was waiting for me to tell him something that might make sense of what we were looking at.
‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ I said. ‘Grandfather says we have roots, like plants do, kind of like an invisible bit of us that is attached to where we belong, and part of us will always be joined there even when we leave.’
But there were plants in the sea that didn’t have roots and drifted on the tides with nothing to hang on to. Grandfather had said that plants in the sea could only take root in the seabed where the water was shallow enough that the sunlight could still reach them.
The water in the bucket cleared and I pushed the end of the weed into the sand, finding a rock to hold it down on the bottom.
‘The seaweed has to live here for a bit,’ I said.
The strands unfurled, reaching towards the surface, and the dog and I stared into the mini aquarium I’d made. I used to find things to show Grandfather in the tin bucket. Back then, while I was diving in the water and he watched, he was the only one who really understood what it meant.
For the first time I touched the dog, stroking his head and neck, resting my hand on his shoulders. He seemed to like it, his eyes blinking slowly, as if he was feeling sleepy, or maybe remembering someone else’s hand that made him feel nice.
‘Even if we aren’t in the place we think of as our home, we still all know where we belong,’ I told him.
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IN THE EARLY DAYS of being on the fishing boat with Grandfather he’d taught me to read the sea – if there was a flock of seabirds, a warm current and a kind of bubbling in the water, it meant a huge shoal of fish was feeding near the surface. Then Grandfather could throw out his nets and haul in a good catch. The lie of the rock, the deep shadows underneath and the way the fish emptied the space before gradually coming back (they have short memories and would forget quickly why they weren’t feeding there), meant something else – it meant that in the dark, a moray eel with poisonous teeth would be waiting. From a distance you could poke under the rock with a long stick until the eel showed itself. Then you would know exactly what area to avoid to protect yourself.
I watched the sea to find the story I needed to hear. I wanted there to be a third sign that would tell me more about Grandfather coming home. But deep inside me I also had a feeling there was something else lurking – something lying, waiting in the dark, just like the moray eel under a rock. I needed to know what it was.
It was hot and sticky that night, the sky moody and heavy. I went to the restaurant kitchen while Uncle was very busy to ask him again if he knew anything about Grandfather’s return.
‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Uncle yelled, but this time I stood my ground and didn’t leave.
Maria stepped in again. ‘Hold that,’ she said, handing me the ladle from the mussel soup she’d been dishing into bowls. She pulled at Uncle’s arm to get him to turn round. ‘Azi needs an answer.’
The fired oven roared; plates ricocheted on tiled surfaces; glasses jangled on trays. Uncle told Maria that the people at table number five were waiting for their order, although we all knew he couldn’t see from there. Hot plates whizzed past my ears, waiters and waitresses twirled around me and each other to get the orders out quickly, and to bring back dirty plates, as Uncle yelled at them to get a move on. I waited for an answer.
‘Uncle, you know and I know that Grandfather is coming back,’ I said. In the dizzy tempest of the sizzling kitchen Uncle’s arm touched a boiling-hot pan and he jumped away but I carried on. ‘I only want to know when.’
‘He’s a drunk old fool and he’s not coming back!’ Uncle yelled. ‘Not ever.’
Stunned, I dropped the metal ladle and it hit the floor, clang-clanging as it bounced. All of the movement and noise of the kitchen stopped, except for the fiery breath of the oven.
‘Now get back to work,’ Uncle said uncomfortably, and the bustle erupted again.
Maria swooped over, picked up the ladle and led me out to the stairs to the flat. ‘Take no notice of Uncle. It’s one of the busiest days ever and we’re a bit pushed, that’s all,’ she said. ‘He thinks the world of you, Azi.’
I wasn’t going to ask Uncle about Grandfather again. Now that Uncle had exploded and told me what he thought, it reminded me that I’d also been hiding my deepest secret in the dark. It was my fault that Grandfather had left.
The next day, when I went to the quay, I saw that the dog was following a little way behind me, head down, trotting slowly with stiff old legs. He lay in the shadow under a bench with his head on his paws but didn’t close his eyes while all the passengers got off the ferries.
When everyone had gone to find B&Bs, shops, beaches and restaurants, all that was left was me, the dog and a small dark-red booklet that had been dropped on the quayside. I went over and picked it up. It was a British passport, and inside was a photograph of a girl called Beth Saunders who had been born in London.
Could this be the third sign from the sea? The girl that the passport belonged to was from exactly the same place that Uncle had said that Grandfather had gone – London. What could it mean? And then I knew what I had to do. I had to go and get him. I had to go to where he was staying and bring him back.
(#ulink_3ca1e387-3cad-52af-be97-460302964b51)
‘THAT’S TWICE THIS WEEK you’ve been in here, Azi,’ Mrs Halimeda said, irritated again on Thursday, looking at me like she always did, as if I smelled of rotting fish. ‘Yes, I’ve seen Uncle’s menu, and, no, I’ve still nothing for you.’ She looked over my shoulder to see who was next.
‘Can I have a passport?’ I said.
She squinted and took ages to reply. ‘What do you need a passport for?’
I knew not to tell Mrs Halimeda anything she could gossip about, so I mumbled something about a possible school trip in the future.
She frowned. ‘You need a form.’ She swivelled her chair to look in the shallow shelves behind her, selected a piece of paper, swivelled back and stared at me hard, narrowing her eyes. ‘You’ll have to give it to Uncle to fill out and sign.’
I assured her I would do that. ‘Also, I found a passport.’ I held up the one I’d found at the quay and she told me to take it to the lost-property office instead.
‘Let that boy bother someone else for a change,’ I heard her mutter to the next customer. It stung but I just kept thinking of Grandfather, of belonging with him again.
The dog was sitting outside the post office and watched with interest as I tucked the passport form inside my shorts and under my T-shirt.
‘I’ve got to be with Grandfather, nobody else knows me like he does,’ I said to him.
I didn’t go to the lost-property office, though. I thought I might hang on to the passport in case it helped me to answer any questions on the form.
As I was going along the road I heard someone shout, ‘Oi! Aqua boy!’
I turned to see Chris coming up the street with Dimi.
They came and stood by me. Chris was carrying his basketball. I was expecting them to ask me to play again, but they didn’t this time.
‘What are you doing?’ Chris asked, bouncing his ball.
Dimi rolled his eyes, obviously knowing what my answer would be.
Grandfather and I had both liked it when nobody was there at the cove with us, and there was nothing but the sand and the sea. It had been a long time since anybody had been there with me.
‘Do you want to see a turtle nest?’ I said.
Chris said no first of all, but Dimi nudged him and said, ‘Yeah, we might.’
‘Show us,’ Chris said.
We roamed along the shoreline where tourists speckled the sand with sunhats and towels, sunbeds and umbrellas, some paddling in the sea, their voices babbling in the distance. I told Chris and Dimi they wouldn’t be able to see any turtles yet but I could show them the nest and we could keep watch over the summer. But all they wanted to do was push and shove, kicking at the sand, slamming the ball at each other’s back. I saw the dog nearby, walking along stiffly, his head down.
‘The nest is in the cove over the other side of the rocks,’ I said, pointing in the direction of where the turtle had been. ‘I’ve put a fence round it so nobody touches it. By the end of August the eggs will hatch.’
Chris and Dimi looked over to where I pointed but they were not interested any more and just ran off in the opposite direction when they saw some of the other boys over by the jet-ski school, laughing and shouting back at me, ‘Forget it, turtle boy.’
I sighed. Who needed them anyway? The dog came over and sat down beside me at the cove. I didn’t know why he kept following me around.
‘You still lost your owner?’ I said. ‘Or maybe you want to come swimming with me instead.’
Grandfather was never fearful about me in the water so I had never felt like I should be afraid, not even of the deep-sea monsters that he’d told tall tales about. All the stories of the battles between sea monsters and men were won in the end.
‘What’s out there?’ I’d said, looking out to where the sea seemed endless.
‘Nothing you need to be afraid of,’ he’d say. ‘There are no monsters that we can’t overcome.’
As I thought about his words I waded out until the soft, cool water became my skin. It felt as if I disappeared when I dived under the surface; everything became a silent world of blue, including me. When I came up again the dog had waded into the sea after me. I showed the dog how not to be afraid of the water, staying near him, watching him, putting a hand under his belly when his feet left the ground. He was a natural. He made long doggy-paddle strokes, his nose up high, his body level in the water, graceful and calm, his stiffness all eased out. He seemed to like it too. As the dog circled me, I floated on my back with my arms out, held up by the water like driftwood, going wherever the sea took me. Before long, it pushed me back to the same shore.
The girl’s passport wasn’t much help in filling out the form. I wrote my name, address at Uncle’s (I started to write Grandfather’s but Mrs Halimeda would have something to say about that), and date of birth. I wrote in pencil first, trying to make my letters a bit slanted but neat, like an adult, before going over it slowly with a pen. Some of the questions were long and needed boxes ticking. At the end, there was a list of things I needed to send with it once it was signed, including a birth certificate and two photos.
People had told me for as long as I could remember that I didn’t belong on the island but when I had asked Grandfather why he had just teased me that it was because I had come from the sea. You were born in the breaking waves, Azi, like a mermaid child. He’d put his hand round the back of my head, pull me towards him and push the hair away to look behind my ears for gills. He’d beckon me to put my leg up on his knee, slipping off my flip-flop and rubbing the dust away.
‘What are you looking for, Grandfather?’ I’d say.
‘Roots!’ he would chuckle, and then laugh and laugh, feeling between my toes, then holding all my toes in his hand and peering at the bottom of my foot.
‘Have I got roots, Grandfather?’
‘Yes, Azi, yes!’ he’d say, and I would crook up my knee and look at the dirt on the bottom, saying I couldn’t see any.
‘Roots are not on the sole, they’re in your soul,’ he’d tell me. He took the harsh words said by other people and made them vanish like salt dissolved in the sea because of what he thought of me.
That night, I was up in the flat while the restaurant was full, bubbling over with tourists, and Uncle seared and sizzled in the kitchen. I practised Uncle’s signature over and over in pencil, rubbing it out if it didn’t look right, trying again and again. All the rubbing made a rough place on the passport form, but eventually I thought it looked good enough.
I went through all the drawers and cupboards, and found the folder with all of our important documents, but there wasn’t a birth certificate for me. Did Grandfather have it?
(#ulink_22ddf82f-4116-50b6-818f-91edcdea8f14)
EARLY IN THE MORNING, before the sun had come up and while all the cool shadows were still merged into one, I left the restaurant with my pocket money and the girl’s passport. The photo booth was outside the post office. I adjusted the stool, spinning round and round until it was the right height, straightened my T-shirt and pushed the hair away from my eyes, ready to take a picture. I went to put a coin in but it dropped out of the slot and rolled out of the booth. When I bent down and reached under the curtain for it I felt the dog’s wet nose on my hand.
‘You! What are you doing here?’ I said, but I felt pleased to see him again. His tail wagged and swished the curtain.
I picked up the coin and pushed it into the slot. The first of the four photographs flashed and the time on the screen counted down until it was ready for the next. The dog had come into the booth, as if he was wondering what was going on. He stood up on his hind legs as it flashed a second time. I think it scared him a bit because he jumped up on to my lap. I tried to push him out of the way but the camera flashed again and again.
‘No, dog, no!’ I said as he licked my face. ‘You don’t need a passport!’
The pictures developed and dropped out of the slot. The first one was okay, but the second had the top of the dog’s head at the bottom corner. They would have to do, though. The other two photos were a jumble of my hair and the dog’s hair, and me making funny faces because of the dog’s wet tongue. They were nice; I liked them and they made me smile. I’d keep those two for myself.
‘Lost-property office next,’ I said. ‘You coming, dog?’
The office was closed when we got there so the dog and I watched the fishing boats coming in instead, inspecting the smells and sights of the baskets and trays that the fishermen unloaded. Spider crabs and lobsters reached out to pinch at the dog’s nose and long fur; scales of fish flashed with light in the sun. I asked the dog which fish he might like for his dinner because that was what Grandfather used to ask me.
Eventually the lost-property office opened and I went in.
‘I found a passport,’ I said, sliding it across the counter. ‘It’s from a girl called Beth Saunders, aged twelve.’
‘That belongs to me!’ a voice called out from behind me.
Beth Saunders was about my height, with short brown hair, and she threw herself at the desk, clasping the passport in both hands. ‘I didn’t want to tell my parents I’d lost it. I’ve been coming in every five minutes hoping somebody would hand it in.’
I knew how the girl felt. It was just how I was when I went to the post office again and again. The lost-property man rolled his eyes at her, muttering that now, at last, she might stop bothering him.
Beth asked my name and thanked me for finding her passport but as I went to leave she said, ‘There’s a dog outside, does it belong to you, Azi?’
‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t really interested in talking to tourists who took snapshots of their holiday and collected short-lived souvenirs.
But as I walked away the dog came to my side, following me as usual. Beth ran and caught up with me.
‘Are you sure he’s not yours, because he looks as if he belongs to you.’
I smiled at that and bent down to ruffle the dog’s hair. ‘He’s been following me around for a few days,’ I said. ‘But he isn’t actually mine.’
‘Then he’s lost and needs to go home,’ Beth said.
I looked at the dog. There were lots of strays on the island and I hadn’t really thought about the dog like that. Beth’s words reminded me of Grandfather and how much I missed him and our home. It hurt me inside and I wasn’t expecting it. I needed to feel close to the place I belonged.
‘I have to go,’ I said, running off towards Grandfather’s cottage.
Since yesterday I’d been wondering about a lot of new things. For the last two years the only question I’d had was when was Grandfather coming back. Now Uncle had said he wasn’t, I wanted to see what was going on at the cottage.
Grandfather’s cottage was at the end of a narrow road over the other side of the village from Uncle’s restaurant. It was where I had grown up. I knew that I hadn’t been born in the cottage but that Grandfather had raised me there because my parents had died.
The bench was still outside the cottage by the window where Grandfather used to sit in his cap with his walking stick, indigo tattoo on his bare hairy arm: an anchor coiled with the tentacles of a sea monster. When I was little I used to brush at the hairs of his arm, smoothing them down to see the picture clearly; he’d say, ‘It’s the two sides of being a man of the sea, Azi. The anchor for feeling steady while the battle with the monster rages.’
Two cottages had been pulled down next to Grandfather’s, not long ago, and two were deserted, decaying on the other side. His cottage had walls thick with white paint, which I had always helped him redo every other year. His blue front door was the same bright colour as the scales of paint left on the one I’d found on the sea. After I’d found the passport, I’d started to think about that door. The second sign must be to do with the cottage. Maybe this was where I’d find my birth certificate. That was the last thing that I needed to get a passport, find Grandfather and make him come home.
A small patch of concrete with crazy-shaped cemented stones, painted white round the edges, lay under the sandy dust at the front of the cottage. A pot with dried weeds was by the door and a key still underneath. I hadn’t been in there since Grandfather had left because Uncle had said I wasn’t allowed to, but now I let myself in and the dog came too.
I remembered the days when I’d find Grandfather asleep in his chair in the gloom at the back of the room, head rolled forward over his chest, several days’ growth of silver stubble speckling his slack mouth, his shawl slipped to the floor and an empty glass held loosely in his hands. I looked around at the thinness of the life we’d left behind in the cottage. The walls grim with a crust of paint, the swirls of dust on the tiled floor, the gas bottle and rubber tube to the cooker, the space underneath the wooden staircase where I used to sleep. A bright corner of light poured down the stairs from the window in the bedroom and had been my morning alarm clock.
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