Helen Dunmore - The Crossing of Ingo

As I bend closer I see something I am sure I’ve never seen before. In the blue-brown waters off the west coast of Cornwall there is a new word, written in tiny, exquisite writing. It looks exactly like the handwriting on the rest of the map, but the ink is new. Not faded brown, but sharp and black.

Ingo

Ingo. A shiver runs over my skin. I seem to hear the wash of the waves in the coils of my ears. No one else can have written that word except Dad, before he left us. I scan the map again. Yes, there is something else that wasn’t there before. How could I have missed it? In the corner of the map, where the known dissolves into the unknown, there is a small figure. Dad always drew well. This is one of his best drawings. It shows a Mer woman. Not a mermaid with long golden hair, a scaly fish tail and a comb in her hand, but a Mer woman like those I’ve seen in Ingo. She has long dark hair and a strong seal tail.

When Dad drew this he couldn’t have known that Conor or I would ever find our way to Ingo. It was a clue, maybe, left for anyone who was capable of understanding it. Just one word, Ingo, and one figure. If this map went to a museum they would say that the Mer woman was a mythological figure. Someone would pore over the word Ingo, and maybe decide that it was a local name for one of the reefs.

But this map is never going to a museum. It is private and it belongs to the Trewhellas, because we are the only ones who truly understand it.

I look around for the pot where Dad kept his best pen. No one has touched it since he went. Mum took all Dad’s clothes to the charity shop in St Pirans, and she sold his camera and the digital printer he used for his work. But she kept the personal things for me and for Conor.

I take out the pen and unscrew the cap. The pen has a fine nib which is good for drawing. I bring pen to paper, and hesitate. It feels like sacrilege. I am breaking a rule that has been drummed into me since I was first allowed to see the map. But as the first line flows it feels entirely right. I am meant to be doing this. I am a Trewhella and this map is for the Trewhellas, to show us what the world is like.

Close to the word Ingo I draw four tiny figures. They are as small as I can make them without losing definition. Two are Mer and two are human. The Mer figures have strong seal tails and flowing dark hair. The girl wears a bodice of woven sea grass. The human figures are dark-haired too. They could be cousins to the Mer figures, except that they have legs instead of tails.

I understand now what Dad was trying to tell me about the mapmaker who made it. This map is about a person’s experience of the world, not about what a camera sees as it blinks in space.

I finish my drawing. The piece of paper with Dad’s writing on it is still lying open. I glance at it again, casually, wondering if it’s worth putting it back into the map before I roll it up. My glance sweeps over the numbers, and suddenly I realise that they are not part of a calculation. It was the layout that confused me. If Dad had put in the dots, I would have seen their meaning immediately.

22.30 7.6

23.00 9.6

23.15 15.6

23.30 19.6

They are times and dates. Half past ten in the evening on the seventh of June. Eleven o’clock on the ninth of June. Quarter past eleven on the fifteenth of June. Half past eleven on the nineteenth of June. Dates and times which were so important to Dad that he must have noted them at the time. So important that he hid the paper inside the map. He didn’t think anyone else would ever guess what they meant, but I know. I know which June it was. It was the month that Dad disappeared.

These must be the times and the dates when he heard Mellina singing. It was Dad who wrote the word Ingo on the map because even then he knew – or suspected – what Ingo was. My heart beats faster. Maybe these weren’t just the times that he heard Mellina sing. They might have been times when he went down to the cove, and met her, and fell so deep in love with her that he knew he would abandon everything for her.

I am not sure why he left a record of these times. Perhaps it was a clue for whichever Trewhella might come to read it one day.

My eyes sting. I so wish I could go back in time. If only I could come in and find Dad while he was writing those figures. He must have felt completely alone. Ingo was pulling him, the way the Call is pulling us, and he couldn’t tell any of us about it. All he could do was leave a message almost in code, and hope that maybe one day somebody would understand.

I roll up the map very carefully with Dad’s piece of paper inside it, exactly as it was. I wrap the faded tape around the parchment, and tie it so that the bow won’t loosen even if it has to wait for years before it is undone. I slide the scroll to the back of the drawer at the left hand side, where it fits perfectly.

I’ve left my own message now for whoever comes after me. I wonder if one day in the future some girl who looks a little like me will unroll the map and look at those four little figures, and understand what they mean.

“Watch out, Conor, I’m going to throw it.” “You’re crazy,” grumbles Conor. “I told you, you should have given it to the cat.” I take a small plastic bag out of my pocket, and shake out the bed of weed which is wrapped around the fish egg. The little fish is still alive, swimming inside its rubbery membrane. I shudder, draw my arm back and throw egg and weed as far away from us as I can into the waves.

Sea water swirls around my legs, almost knocking me off balance. I grab Conor’s arm and we stand together, waiting, watching the horizon. The Call is alive in both of us. It’s like music rising at the start of a crescendo, but it hasn’t got there yet. We are waiting for Faro.

The sky is dark today. The wind chops off the white crests of the waves. Even inside our cove, where the water is protected by a curve of cliff and by the rocks that guard the entrance, the sea is wild.

A wave sucks back, tugging at us, wanting to pull us with it. We manage to stay upright, but we have to fight for balance.

“There he is!” shouts Conor.

Faro’s head shows through the wave crests and then vanishes again. Next time he rises he is only fifty metres from shore. He waves, and we plunge forward. I dive through the first wave and then the next, cutting through the water with Conor beside me. We are not in Ingo yet, but the water feels like home.

We reach Faro. His head is above the surface and he is breathing air. He is pale and his face, like the sea, is stormy. I wonder if the air is hurting him. I thought it was growing easier for Faro to make the transition.

“Are you all right, Faro?” I ask.

“I was pursued,” says Faro, and anger blazes in his eyes. “Look.” He flips over so that we can see his tail. There is a gash in it at the base. “I am losing blood,” says Faro. “I have called my sister but she is with a child who was thrown against the rocks by a rogue current. She will come when she can.”

“Faro! It looks deep,” I say.

“It is deep. It was intended to be deep. Mortarow pursued me. The sea bull has gored me.”

“He did this to you?” demands Conor, and a fury equal to Faro’s flares in his face.

“Ervys’s followers have taken up arms,” says Faro. There is deep anger in his voice as he shakes back his hair defiantly. “He has taught the Mer to arm themselves against their brothers and sisters. He has defied the law of the Mer. Saldowr shall hear of this.”

“Faro, can you climb up on to a rock?” I ask him. “We aren’t healers like Elvira but if we press hard on the wound that might stop it bleeding.”

“It will weaken me more to leave the water. I came to tell you that in two nights we will answer the Call. But Ervys’s followers are waiting for us. They will pack the Assembly chamber if they can. They will try to turn the Mer against us so that we are not chosen to make the Crossing. They fear what will happen if we succeed. They don’t want peace: they want war, and victory.”