Free Cry of a Seagull by Monica Dickens

blotted out, and then – bingo! The land was bright again, and if you said, ‘Sorry,’ he said ‘What for?’ and genuinely seemed not to remember.
    While Rose had been away, Smasher had broken five tea plates and the spout off one teapot and the handle off another. The Mumford twins had threatened to leave again because there was no lavender soap in the bathroom, and Professor Henry Watson actually
had
left, because he had indigestion and because he thought the photographer Bernard had cheated at backgammon. In the kitchen, Hilda was threatening a nervous breakdown.
    For the first time since Mollie had bought Wood Briar Hotel, Rose wished she were an ordinary girl of the Hazel variety who lived in a home where nothing happened. She wanted desperately to go away by herself and think about the journey. The sense of threat and danger in the marina car park was still with her very strongly. Bits of the scene kept coming back to grab at her attention: the feel of the boat’s deck under Vicky’s bare feet, the naval father’s red, blustery face, the tiger girl, the odd flat eyes of the gang leader, bleak and bitter; the donkey’s ear-splitting bray that seemed somehow to connect this with Newcome beach and the donkey man’s noisy foal.
    Instead of being able to concentrate on all this, she had to go and find her father and tell him that Crasher had clogged up one of the sinks by pouring into it hot fat that had now set. Hilda was in tears.
    â€˜What can
I
do?’ Philip was in the garage, riding a stationary bicycle that was bolted to the floor, testing it for durability.
    â€˜Go and calm her down. She likes you. Tell her one of your feeble jokes to buck her up.’
    â€˜Can’t go now. Very important job.’ He pumped his legs round and round, going nowhere, like the hamster. ‘Got to complete this test by tomorrow. We’re almost up to a hundred miles.’
    He had not been on the stationary bike for days. Rose thought he was only pumping it so furiously to ride away from having to deal with Hilda and the clogged sink.
    Jim Fisher dealt with both, although he was off duty, and somehow dinner got cooked and served. Upstairs in the family flat, Rose turned on the television to the ballet
The Sleeping Beauty
. She didn’t like dancing herself, because she was clumsier at it than Moonlight trying to do a collected canter, but she loved to watch other people. Her father kept interrupting, because it embarrassed him to see men in tights dancing, so Rose turned the beautiful music down low and sat very close to the set, so that he could not walk between her and the screen.
    The Lilac Fairy was leading the love-sick prince through the thorny forest that shut the sleeping princess away from the world and away from the progress of time. Through the sweet, melodious Lilac Fairy theme, Rose imagined that she heard, very faintly, the rusty bray of a donkey. She turned up the sound a little. There it was again, the screech of indrawn breath, the hoarse bellow that came out with the air.
    The moonlit wood on the stage changed to the moving sea, not at night time, but under a dawning pearly light. The dark object of the other visions was fighting to move through the small troughs and hillocks of the waves. And now at last, she saw what it was. A donkey’s head. Dark wet fur, great earslaid back, the white nose stretched out, barely keeping above the water. From time to time, a choppy wave washed over its head, and he coughed and gasped and struggled on, pitifully small in the wide ocean.
    â€˜Oh, my God.’ She whispered it, but her father heard.
    â€˜Oh, my God is right. A simpering young man with a velvet T-shirt and a wooden sword pretending he can’t get through a few cardboard bushes …’
    For Rose, the donkey was still swimming on the screen, the donkey with the white nose from the paddock by the marina.
    â€˜Don’t stare so, Rose. Don’t