Chapter One

Falling From Grace

Jane Godwin

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If you stand on Cheviot Hill at Point Nepean, you can see the ocean on one side and the bay on the other. The bay is protected by the headlands: it’s calm and blue like a photo in a holiday brochure. The ocean looks wild because . . . well, because it’s an ocean – it’s Bass Strait, it might be close to the bay but they’re so different it’s hard to believe that only a five minute walk separates them.

Still, on that day, that night, it felt as if they weren’t separate, as if the ocean didn’t stop where it was meant to, it came right on over and swept into the bay.

annie

When Grace got lost, I had to go with her. Grace would never have found her way out of the sand dunes, not when it was starting to get dark.

But, as it happened, neither of us found our way out. I couldn’t find it either.

Grace, she’s my sister. She’s exactly eleven months older than me. That means that for one month every year, we’re the same age. That month is June, and it was June when Grace got lost. June the twenty-fifth, when we were both twelve.

In my opinion, winter at the beach is almost as good as summer. I wouldn’t know what Grace prefers because Grace isn’t the sort of person who likes comparisons, or lists of your five favourite things to eat, or anything like that. You can’t pin Grace down on anything.

In winter, we play tracking. Two people wait and the rest go and hide in the dunes. You have to leave markers, like arrows made of sticks, to show where you’ve gone.

You’ve got half an hour to hide and then the others come to find you. You can leave tracks and markers that are straightforward, or you can try to trick the finders. You can leave tracks to the water and then walk along the water’s edge so that there are no footprints to follow. Sometimes I walk backwards really carefully in my own footprints.

Grace got lost because she saw a penguin. She loves animals and she wants to be a vet. I don’t mind animals. Basically, I can take them or leave them, but Grace would never leave an animal anywhere. That was what got us into trouble.

We were playing tracking at Point Nepean. It’s a thin strip of land that stretches out into the sea. It’s a peninsula. Mum had walked home with our little brother Simon, but I wanted to hide without him tagging along. So Dad, Grace and I were having one last game.

Point Nepean used to be called Fort Nepean, and the army still uses it for training. There are cyclone-wire fences everywhere and signs that say DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING – IT MAY EXPLODE AND KILL YOU. Those signs make me laugh. Nothing’s going to kill me, but Grace always gets this worried look on her face when we go past one.

‘Don’t be stupid, Grace,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s going to get you.’ I made an arrow with three sticks pointing in the wrong direction, to trick Dad, then we walked to the end of the beach.

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I remember the date – June the twenty-fifth – the first day of the school holidays, and just after my birthday. It was winter but the afternoon was warm, almost as if summer was about to begin. It was the sort of day when you look at the water and want to dive in, the sun’s sparkling on it, and it’s welcoming and you can’t imagine that it would be cold.

I was walking down to the beach. I had my headphones on so I saw the whole thing with no sound. I mean there was sound, just not natural sound. What I really mean is that I saw the whole thing to music. It was a bit like a video clip, the way I saw it: you know when you’ve got headphones on and you feel disconnected from the world – you’re putting one foot in front of the other but you can’t hear your footsteps.

Still, when I remember what happened, I don’t think there were any other sounds anyway. I went along the road, and there was this kid, and he jumped out of a car while it was moving. It wasn’t going that fast, it was slowing down outside the shops, but this little kid got out and he stumbled and then he ran. He ran right across the road with cars going by. He wasn’t looking at me, he wasn’t seeing anything, and he ran straight into me. His face was screwed up, angry. He looked at me for a second, probably less, and I had this feeling. Even though it was so quick, that look, it was as if he wanted to ask me something, wanted me to give him some kind of answer. Maybe he even spoke, but all I heard was music in my head. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even take off my headphones. It all happened so quickly. And then he ran off through the trees towards the foreshore.

I could see this lady in the car, and I thought it was probably his mum. But she didn’t get out or call to him. She kept driving, slowly at first then a bit faster, staring straight ahead at the road. She looked in a complete daze. She wasn’t doing anything at all about the kid. She was just letting him go.

I headed over to the foreshore and then down onto the beach. I couldn’t see that kid. Not anywhere. He’d disappeared.

annie

At one end of the beach there’s a rock shelf and then the Heads. The water there is only as wide as a river, and it looks shallow. You can see Point Lonsdale on the other side. It seems really close. If you were a good swimmer you could probably swim across.

Even though the water in the Heads is flat, there are currents and whirlpools under the surface. It’s because there’s so much water pouring through such a narrow space. Grace and I watched a ship go through the Heads. Then we left an arrow for Dad and walked back the way we’d come. I was walking fast, but Grace wasn’t keeping up. She’s always wandering along, not concentrating.

‘What’s that?’ She called out. ‘Annie! A penguin.’

I turned around. It was a penguin, a little fairy penguin in the water.

‘It’s all on its own. It’s lost,’ said Grace. ‘Look, it’s swimming in circles.’

We followed it along the water’s edge. It struggled in the current. Grace wouldn’t take her eyes off it. Water lapped at her runners but she didn’t care. We went with the penguin all the way down the beach, past the spot where you go up to the carpark. We walked over the rocks around a point and when we’d nearly reached another point, a wave washed the penguin towards the shore. It collapsed on the beach at Grace’s feet. Its little body was going in and out, in and out.

Grace knelt in the wet sand. ‘I bet it’s got oil on its wings,’ she said. ‘We have to help it.’

There was no point arguing because Grace was not going to leave this penguin. I’m used to Grace and her animal rescues. She talked to it gently. Then she tried to pick it up but it made a squawking noise and squirmed out of her hands.

‘Watch out, Grace,’ I said. ‘It’ll peck you.’

After about twenty minutes, she managed to get it into the backpack. She zipped it up nearly to the top.

‘We can take it home and wash the oil off,’ Grace said. She lifted the backpack as if it was a newborn baby. ‘We can look after it till it’s better.’

I stood up. The tide had come further in. The weather had changed quickly and I hadn’t noticed. Half the sky was covered with a long, dark cloud. We’d forgotten about the tracking, and we’d come a long way – right past the quarantine station. ‘Are we even allowed up this far?’ I asked Grace, but she was only interested in the penguin.

At the point cove, waves washed over the rocks that jutted into the bay. ‘We’ll have to get around here quickly,’ I said. Grace didn’t think we could.

‘No, Annie,’ she said, still nursing the backpack, ‘let’s go back the way we came. We’ve been so long, Dad might have gone back to the car.’

The air had become cold. I didn’t want to walk back the way we’d come when we could take a short cut. From here we would be near the carpark if we went up and over the hill. The cliff was too steep on this side, but if we got around the point we could climb up where the land looked lower. It would only take a few minutes.

I looked at my watch. ‘Grace,’ I told her, ‘it’s nearly four-thirty. It’d take us half an hour at least to walk back that way. And look, a storm’s coming.’

She frowned in the direction we’d come.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I helped you with the penguin. Dad won’t find us this far up because we stopped leaving tracks. If we get around these rocks we can go up over the hill to the carpark. We don’t need to go back to the track, we can climb up here.’

‘Look at the water – the tide’s come right in,’ Grace said.

‘Hurry up, then,’ I said. The low dark cloud had broken up and was moving over the sea. I took the backpack from her. She didn’t want to hand it over. I grabbed it. ‘Let me carry it.’

She let me have it because she knows she’s unco and I’m a good rock-hopper.

‘Put it on your back,’ she said. ‘Be careful, Annie.’

I slung the backpack over my shoulder and off I went, jumping from one rock to the other around the point. The penguin tapped my back. Further out to sea it had already started raining.

Waves washed up and covered the black rocks ahead, then they pulled back and the rocks appeared again. They glistened. Cold wind was coming from the water. I had to time my jumps for when the waves went back. I knew not to jump on the smooth, sloping rocks. But my runners were wet and I slipped. I grabbed on to a rock, but the backpack slid off my back. I almost fell in, too. One of my new runners was full of water.

‘Annie,’ Grace called out. ‘The penguin.’

I scrambled on the rock. I almost grabbed the backpack, I touched the strap with the end of my fingers but the sea was pulling it.

The keys, Simon’s jumper, my Roxy wallet, Dad’s mobile phone, and the penguin, they were all in the backpack.

I jumped onto another rock and reached for the backpack. A wave came over my feet. The wind was getting stronger, quickly.

I went further out. This rock was taller and steep. I grabbed the tip of it with my fingers and stood up with my arms out, balancing.

There were no more rocks left. I was standing on the only one not covered by water.

I could see the backpack moving away in the current.

‘I told you we shouldn’t have come this way,’ called Grace from behind me. ‘Why don’t you ever listen?’