Helen Dunmore - The Complete Ingo Chronicles - Ingo, The Tide Knot, The Deep, The Crossing of Ingo, Stormswept

“Don’t cry, Saph. They’re going to be all right. Look, Gray’s trying to open his eyes!”

“I know. I’m not crying because of that.”

“What is it then?”

“Do you think Ingo and Air will always hate each other?”

Conor sits back on his heels and frowns. “I don’t know. They’re so different. So separate. They can’t understand each other, because they never meet. Humans stay in the Air – on Earth – and the Mer stay in Ingo.”

“But we don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We do both. We live in the Air, and we can live in Ingo.”

“ You can.”

“You can too. And maybe we’re not the only ones. There might be other humans who can cross over, only we don’t know about them. There might be Mer who can cross over too.”

“Maybe,” says Conor slowly. “But don’t let’s talk about it now, Saph. I’ve had enough of Ingo for today. I’ve got to get the anchor up and get the engine working. Lucky I went out with Roger that time, I think I can remember how it works.”

“Look! Roger’s hand! It’s moving.”

I put my hand under the foil blankets and touch Roger’s cold fingers. They reach for mine. He clasps my hand feebly.

“It’s all right,” I say, bending over him. “You’re going to be OK. There was an accident. Me and Conor are looking after you.”

Roger struggles to lift his head, but it seems to hurt him. He groans and his head falls back. He must be bruised all over, like a boxer coming out of the ring.

“It’s OK,” I repeat. “You’re going to be fine. Don’t try to move. You’re safe.”

A splash of salt water comes over the side of the boat. Salt spray flicks in my face. I get up from where I’m crouching, and look over the side.

There they are. Faro, and Elvira. Elvira’s beautiful dark hair swirls in the water around her. Faro’s eyes fix on mine.

“Are they alive?” he asks.

“Yes, they’re alive.”

“Ah,” says Faro. It’s the faintest sigh of Air going out of him. I can’t tell if it’s a sigh of relief, or a sigh of regret. But even Faro – no, surely Faro couldn’t want them to die?

Suddenly Faro does something I’ve seen before, but only deep under the water. Now he does it on the surface. He curls his body tight and with all the muscled power of his tail he spins into a somersault, half in the water and half out of it. One turn – two – three—

The sea thrashes and sparkles. Faro is a whirling circle. As he comes round for the third time he straightens, lifts his tail and with all its power he smacks it down on the water so it sends a wave of spray into my face.

I wipe it off, laughing. There’s Faro, upright in the water again, tail sculling for balance. He’s laughing too.

“Goodbye, little sister,” he says casually, and slips beneath the sea. I wait, leaning over the bow. Surely he’ll come up again? Surely he’s not going to disappear just like that, without saying any more?

But the sea is flat. Nothing moves. Not even a bubble rises.

Elvira! Where’s Elvira?

I turn. Halfway down the boat, Conor is leaning towards the water. Elvira has drawn herself right up. They aren’t talking, just staring at each other, their faces so close they almost touch. As I watch, Elvira slowly drops in the water. Her shoulders slip beneath it, her neck, and then her face, hidden in the cloud of her hair.

She’s gone. Conor and I are left, staring at the surface of the sea. We wait for a long moment, then we turn and meet each other’s gaze.

Our boat rocks, very gently. High above, a gull drifts, watching us, crying out the news. Telling Ingo everything that has happened. I could understand what the gull is saying, if I tried. But I’m too tired to try.

Faro, I never even said thank you. You helped me to bring Conor to the surface. Without you and Elvira we’d never have got Roger and Gray on board. So you did save us, even if you didn’t want to.

There was no time to thank you or say goodbye, and now you’ve gone. The sea has swallowed you. There are so many things I want to say to you, but I can’t, because Roger and Gray are waking up. First, Conor and I have to find a convincing reason for them to be in the bottom of Roger’s boat, wrapped in foil blankets, covered in bruises and with their equipment damaged. We also have to explain how it happens that when they wake up the first people they’ll see will be Conor and me. They’re well able to remember that their boat was way out by the Bawns when they dived. They’re also well able to remember that we weren’t in their boat when they set off from St Pirans. And so where did we come from, and how?

While Roger and Gray are still semiconscious, we make our plans about what to say to them. How to convince them.

“We don’t really have to convince them, Saph,” whispered Conor. “It doesn’t matter how unlikely our story is, does it? If the alternative to believing something unlikely is believing something impossible, then they’ll have to believe us.”

“You mean, if it’s a choice between believing that we rescued them from Ingo with the help of two Mer People, after a battle with guardian seals, or believing that we swam out to help because we thought they were in trouble, they’ll believe that we’re Olympic swimmers.”

Conor nodded. “They’ll go with the Olympic swimming option. They’ll have to. Hush. Roger’s opening his eyes again.”

Gray and Roger recover more quickly than we’d dared believe they would. Half an hour after Roger was feebly clutching my hand, he’s standing up and giving Conor instructions about managing the boat.

Roger can’t work out what’s happened. What went wrong with the dive? Where did we spring from? Roger and Gray are bruised and bleeding and bewildered, but they’re recovering fast and they’re full of questions. They want answers.

“Conor and I were out on the rocks by the mouth of the cove, Roger. You know how you can see the Bawns from there, though you can’t see them from the beach? We spotted your boat out there – we had Dad’s binoculars with us. We watched you dive. They’re really good binoculars. Conor wanted to watch you come up from the dive, so we waited. You were gone for a long time. We got worried. People are always saying how dangerous it is around the Bawns. We thought maybe something had happened to you. So we decided – we decided to swim out.”

“ Swim out ?” asks Roger, frowning in disbelief.

“Yes,” says Conor. “We didn’t think there was time to fetch help.”

“You swam out from those rocks? All the way to the boat? But we were anchored way out by the Bawns. You swam ?”

“Yes.”

Roger looks from one of us to the other. He looks like a judge in his foil-blanket robes. Slowly he shakes his head. No judge would believe us. Roger doesn’t, can’t believe us.

“That’s – that’s unbelievable,” says Roger. But I stare back at him without blinking. After all, it is true. We did swim all the way out to the Bawns. It wasn’t exactly swimming as Roger understands it, but he doesn’t need to know that.

“My God, you were so lucky,” says Roger at last, shaking his head again. He believes us! He has to believe us. He has no choice. How else could we have reached the boat?

Now Roger’s foil-blanket robes crackle around him as he looks from one of us to the other. “My God, you two have no idea how lucky you were. What a crazy thing to do. All that way – and in that cold water. You weren’t even wearing wetsuits. The currents round this coast are lethal. You should never have tried to swim. What if you’d been swept away? You should have been swept away. Your guardian angels must have been working overtime.”