Read Ingo for Free Online Page B

choose the watch, but he didn’t choose for me. The shop assistant had laid my three favorites out on the counter. A watch with a blue face and gold hands, a silver watch on a silver wristband, and this watch. My watch. Dad waited and didn’t say anything while I tried them all on again, for the third time. I held my wrist out to see how each one looked, and then I knew. This one was mine. I loved it. But it was the most expensive of the three. I took it off and put it down.
    “I think I like the blue one best,” I said. I’d looked at the price labels, and I knew that was the cheapest one. But guess what Dad did then? He picked up the one I liked best and said, “Don’t look at the prices, Sapphy. You only have one birthday a year. It wasn’t the blue one you liked; it was this one.”
    “How did you know, Dad?”
    “You can’t fool me. I know you too well, Sapphy.”
    He knew me too well, because we were alike. Me and Dad, Mum and Conor. It wasn’t that I loved Dad more than Mum, but—
    “Don’t cry, Saph.” Conor puts his arm round my shoulders. “You didn’t mean to break it. But listen. You mustn’t come down here and swim on your own. You know we promised Mum we wouldn’t.”
    Mustn’t come down here and swim —Indignation shocks my tears away. “What about you ? Look at you, your hair’s all wet. You’ve been swimming with that girl, haven’t you?”
    “What girl?”
    I stare at him. “What girl? The girl who was sitting on the rock talking to you, of course. The girl with long hair like mine.”
    Conor looks at me with the elder-brother look I hate. “How could you see her hair if we were over on the rocks?”
    “I could. I could see her quite clearly.”
    “The trouble with you, Saph, is that you see one thingand then you imagine something else.”
    “I don’t . I don’t make up stuff. I used to when I was little, but I don’t now.”
    “If you say so.”
    “I don’t , Conor. Not much anyway. You’re only saying that to stop me asking about her .”
    “All right then. I went swimming after I cleaned out the shed. Maybe I should have told you I was going, but I didn’t. Just for once I wanted…”
    I feel cold inside from fear of what he’s going to say. What did Conor want that I couldn’t give him?
    “I don’t know,” Conor goes on, as if he’s talking to himself. “I wanted some space, I suppose.”
    “Oh.”
    “And then, after I’d been swimming, I sat on the rocks to get dry. End of story.”
    “But, Conor—it was this morning that you cleaned out the shed. It’s way past seven o’clock in the evening now. Probably past eight. Mum went to work hours ago. You’re telling me you’ve been here swimming for seven hours ?”
    “What?” Conor seizes my wrist and stares at the face of my watch.
    “It stopped when I went into the water,” I say.
    “It can’t be that late. You must have been messing about with your watch.” He shakes my wrist as if the hands of the watch might suddenly run backward, to match the time he thinks it is.
    “Get off me, Conor. It’s evening, can’t you see that? Look at the sun. Look how low it is.”
    Conor stares around. He gazes at the mouth of the cave, where the sun is low and golden as it sinks toward the horizon. I watch him realize that I’m telling the truth.
    “Maybe I fell asleep,” he says slowly. He looks lost, confused, not like my brother, Conor, at all.
    “You were talking to someone. I saw her. She must have gone off across the rocks,” I say, but this time I say it quietly, not because I want to win an argument with Conor but to make the truth clear. And this time Conor doesn’t answer.
    “Who was she?” I ask, not even expecting him to tell me. And he doesn’t. Conor’s face is pale. Tired out, the way you’re tired out after a long day in the sea. He doesn’t want to talk. Side by side, we walk back up the sand, toward the rocks, the boulders, the way that leads home. I feel shaky all over. There