1
Seagulls
Go on, I dare you. The beady eye of the seagull twinkled at Connie from on top of the lifebuoy.
“But, Scark, I can’t!” Connie whispered back, scuffing her sneakers on a coil of blue rope on the quayside. “What if someone sees?”
Scark cocked his head and opened his yellow beak in silent mockery of her cowardice. Connie glanced furtively over her shoulder. She really wanted to do it. No one was watching her. She was just another young girl spending her holidays hanging out by the marina. There was no one close enough to see that she was set apart from others by her mismatched eyes, one green, one brown, and by the fact that she talked to seagulls. The fishermen were too busy washing down their decks to notice the eleven-year-old girl with ripped jeans and a mop of black hair. The parties of tourists by the bus parking lot had eyes only for the straw hats and seashell mementos in the gift shops. Nobody seemed to care that something extraordinary was about to happen a stone’s throw away.
“Okay, I’ll do it!” Connie said, giving in to her desire. “Bet I’ll beat you this time.”
Taking a crust from her pocket, she threw a few crumbs into the air as practice runs. Scark flapped from his perch and caught them easily. Play begun, other herring gulls circled out of the sky and landed on the harbor wall, a row of eager spectators. White heads bobbed impatiently, waiting for the real fun to begin.
“Here goes!” called Connie to them. “It’s me against you lot. If one crumb falls to the ground, I win.”
The seagulls screamed their approval and flapped into the sky. Connie threw a handful of crusts high. Birds mobbed them from all sides, effortlessly plucking them from the air. Scark gave an ear-splitting mew.
“So, I can’t get you out that easily?” Connie laughed. She threw the bread faster and faster, spinning on her heels in an attempt to confuse her opponents. Gulls darted nimbly left and right, splitting their flock, spinning on the wing, diving, anticipating every feint, every low trick she could devise to outwit them. The billowing cloud of birds swarmed around her, responding to the movements of her body as if she was a conductor and they her orchestra, becoming an extension of her mood and music. She swirled them around her like a vast cloak, wrapping herself in their delight in showing off their skill on the wing. A power flowed from her to the birds: it seemed to them almost as if she had shed her human skin and become flight itself, the heart of the flock. The seagulls shrieked with joy, urging her to fly with them out to sea and join them in their raucous colonies on the ledges of the cliffs and rock stacks. The mass of birds formed into the shape of two vast wings extending from her fingertips. She felt that if she just tried a little harder, she too would lift from the earth and fly, but her feet could not quite leave the ground. Taking the last piece of crust in her fist, Connie threw it high into the sky.
“Catch!” she cried.
The seagulls zoomed upwards like Spitfires in a dogfight, vying with one another for the prize. With a beat of his broad, gray wings, Scark snatched the morsel from under the beak of a small white female and returned to the lifebuoy, ach-aching triumphantly.
“Hey, that wasn’t very polite of you,” Connie scolded him affectionately, “stealing it from her like that! Whatever am I teaching you?”
Scark bobbed his head in indignation, telling her with a puff of his wings that a mere chick—for so he considered her—could teach him nothing.
“I s’pose not,” Connie conceded. Sitting down on the cobbles beside him, she suddenly felt deflated. The other gulls drifted away on the breeze to seek new sport by the garbage bins and fishing boats. “I know I’ve got a lot to learn. I just wish I didn’t have to go to school to do it. I hate school. I just know it’s going to be a disaster.”
Scark shook his head sceptically.
“I haven’t survived more than a term or two at my other schools. Something always happens: foxes start following me around, or mice invade the classroom, and it soon becomes pretty clear that it’s all my fault. Why should it be any different in Hescombe? I don’t stand a chance. At the other schools, it was only me that people found strange; here, there’s my aunt as well.”
Connie threw a stone listlessly into the harbor. It plopped out of sight, leaving worried wrinkles to disturb the seaweed and the litter collected by the seawall. When her parents had moved abroad recently, they had considered sending Connie to boarding school but in the end decided that, in view of her terrible record in the classroom, she would be safer with a relative, even if that meant Mr. Lionheart’s strange sister, Evelyn. Boarding school had sounded grim, but now that she had met her aunt she wondered if it would not have been a better choice. Who else had an aunt who wailed mournfully from her bedroom window at five in the morning and disappeared for hours running on the moors dressed in a long black ragged cloak? As Connie had swiftly realized, Evelyn was strange, not to mention scary, but unlike her niece, she did not wish to hide her oddness.