Lauren Child - Take Your Last Breath

One Thursday she resurfaced just as Sergeant Cooper walked by. This chance encounter was not a good one.

COOPER: ‘Well, well, well, look who it is, Agent Redfort coming up for air.’

REDFORT: ‘Jeepers, I should have stayed down a few minutes longer.’

COOPER: ‘I doubt that you are capable of that Redfort. I hear you can only make one minute, hardly a record.’

REDFORT: ‘If I’d known I was going to be coming face to face with a giant sea cucumber when I next took a lungful, I might have put some effort in.’

COOPER: ‘You don’t know what effort is Redfort. Now, Bradley Baker, he really could hold his breath. Seven minutes I heard. Years and years of hard work and training.’

REDFORT: ‘No kidding. Were you standing there holding the towel?’

COOPER: ‘It would have been a privilege to hand that young man his towel. You should take note: Baker also started his Spectrum duty as a kid – younger’n you an’ smarter’n you too.’

REDFORT: ‘What? That’s meant to bug me?’

But of course, it did bug her. This Bradley Baker guy bugged the life out of her. Of course, he had long since grown up, become the most versatile agent Spectrum ever trained, loved and admired by all – the youngest, smartest agent Spectrum had ever hired, and no one was going to let her forget it. To make matters worse Bradley Baker had tragically met his end, dying in a plane crash in the line of duty, and so had died a hero’s death. If Bradley Baker’s ghost didn’t haunt Ruby, then his legendary status certainly did.

Of course, no one got away with speaking to Sergeant Cooper this way and Ruby found herself scrubbing all the latrines in the camp for the following three days. Kip Holbrook, who despite all the constant metaphorical hair-pulling was actually a nice guy, was kind enough to wade in and help her out. He didn’t exactly know why but he found himself liking this kid from Twinford.

‘Can I give you some advice Redfort?’ he asked in the middle of day three’s latrine scrubbing. ‘You might wanna learn to keep that mouth of yours shut, it gets you in some unsanitary situations.’

‘I can’t help saying what’s on my mind,’ replied Ruby, ‘it’s the way I am.’

‘Then buy yourself a pair of good rubber gloves because it looks like you’re going to be scrubbing latrines for many years to come,’ said Holbrook.

Having endured two weeks of what she saw as Drill Sergeant Cooper’s poor attitude, Ruby wasn’t exactly grief-stricken when one day she swam up through the clear ocean water to see a sign.

Well, to Ruby Redfort it was a sign: to the mere mortal it was just a donut on a plate sprinkled with candy numbers. The numbers she recognised without rearranging them: they were all digits that together and in the right order made up one long familiar number. Without any hesitation she crammed the donut into her mouth and made her way hurriedly to the bank of telephones outside the canteen.

One of the phone booths had a half-drunk milkshake balanced on top of the phone and next to it a stack of coins. Ruby picked up the receiver and dialled the number. The phone was answered on the third ring.

‘Double Donut, Marla speaking.’

‘Hey Marla, it’s Ruby.’

‘Hang on, I’ll get him, he’s right here.’

One minute twenty seconds later a man’s voice came on the line.

‘Hello.’

‘What took you?’ Ruby said.

‘Kid, can’t a person eat a donut in his favourite diner without getting harassed?’

‘I believe you wanted me to contact you,’ said Ruby.

‘Glad you can still read the signs,’ he said. ‘So how are the plankton?’

‘Oh, the plankton are OK, it’s the sea cucumbers I’m having trouble with.’

‘Sergeant Cooper?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘I gather he isn’t your biggest fan.’

‘I’m not too fond of him either.’

‘Well, this is your lucky day Redfort. Dive school is done with you and Twinford Junior High would like you back Monday at 8am pronto. So slip out of your flippers, you’re on a plane back to Twinford in… oh, seventeen minutes.’

Ruby Redfort smiled, but before she hung up, she asked, ‘So Hitch, why didn’t you just leave a message with the camp co-ordinator, like a normal person? It’s not like you’ve gotta be covert about it; everyone knows you’re my sidekick.’

‘Kid, you can fool yourself that you have a sidekick, but you’ve got a long way to go before you’re going to fool me, LB or anyone else in Spectrum.’

‘OK man, I’m just kidding with you, I haven’t forgotten that you are Spectrum’s number one numero uno action agent – I was only asking. Why all the secrecy?’

‘Just keeping you sharp kid. Don’t want you getting sloppy.’

Ruby smiled. Yep, that was Hitch all right, one royal pain in the behind.

THE DREAM HAD BEGUN IN THE USUAL WAY: Ruby alone, treading water in a bottomless ocean, an ethereal voice whispering to her, almost singing. She would turn this way and that, but she could never see ‘the thing’ until it was too late.

Suddenly she would feel something grab her leg and she would spin down, down, down into the indigo depths. And the miniature man who appeared in the water just couldn’t save her. And all the while the calling, like someone whispering a song to the ocean.

The vision was so real that whenever she awoke, she felt sure it had happened, the whispering so familiar that she could believe that she must have heard it once before, a long, long time ago, perhaps in a past life.

Ruby sat up in bed. She was covered in perspiration, freezing cold, and her head was thudding. She put out her hand and blindly felt around for her flashlight. But somehow the beam it shone just made things worse, more dramatic. She fumbled for the switch on the lamp beside her bed.

Click.

The room was bathed in light and Ruby could breathe again. Through the blur of her less than perfect vision she was reassured: there was the comic she was working on, spread out on her desk; there were the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, hundreds of them – fact, fiction, graphic novels, codebooks, puzzle books. Her record player, her records, her telephone collection – eccentric designs, from a squirrel in a tuxedo to a conch shell – all perched haphazardly on shelves and furniture. There was the jumble of clothes on the floor. She was definitely in her room and not miles beneath the heavy ocean, sinking through indigo.

Ruby lay back on her pillow, sighed a deep sigh and drifted back into sleep, this time dreamless, her glasses still perched on the end of her nose. She was only wrenched from her slumber when her subconscious tuned into the sound of screaming, coming from the backyard.

Ruby scrambled to get out of bed, tripped over the tangle of discarded clothes and limped to the window. There she saw clouds of seagulls swooping and diving around the house, filling the air with their wings, legs trailing ready to land. Seagulls are sizeable birds and as they dodged and swooped, their grey and white feathers almost made contact with the glass and Ruby found herself instinctively backing away.

The noise they made was enough to drown out most other noises, but not the screaming – this was coming from a small elderly woman who was darting around the yard waving a broom.

It was Mrs Digby.

Mrs Digby was the Redforts’ housekeeper and she had been with the family ‘forever’, which is to say longer than Ruby had existed and longer than Sabina had existed. No one could do without her and no one wanted to do without her: she was the family treasure.