Wild Blue Yonder (The Ceruleans: Book 3) (4 page)

Jude left right after breakfast, after pulling Adam aside
and muttering to him in a low, warning tone. Adam suggested we start by helping
Nathaniel, and so we made our way to the kitchen, Adam pushing along the
hostess trolley, now laden with dirty plates, and me bringing up the rear with
an armful of condiments.

In the kitchen, Nathaniel greeted us warmly and gave me a
little tour of the space, pointing out a new stainless-steel oven of which he
was very proud. Then he ushered me into the pantry to show me his stock. Shelf
after shelf was neatly arranged with cans and jars and fruits, and on the floor
stood bags of flour and rice. He explained that they ate vegetarian on the
island, and they produced what food they could to minimise the need to shop –
eggs from the chickens, and cheese and butter and milk and yoghurt from the
goats and cows (which explained the very creamy milk).

‘All the food is healthy,’ he added. ‘As nature intended it.
We want to keep these bodies going as long as possible, don’t we?’

I thought longingly of Luke’s ‘cakeage’ back home, but
smiled and complimented him on his sugar-free vanilla biscuits.

His delight was evident, and he promised to restock my
supply upstairs.

‘And ours!’ said Adam.

Ours? I wondered who his roommate was. It seemed rude to
ask. Perhaps the guys doubled up in rooms.

From there we moved on to the office, where I met Caleb, the
grandly titled ‘operations manager’. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a
need for such a thing, but as the short, elderly man explained, there was money
to manage and goods orders to place and maintenance to arrange.

‘People come here, to do maintenance work?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We do what we can ourselves. Adam
here’ll tell you he’s been up a ladder with a paint brush often enough.’

‘And a drain clearing rod that time,’ Adam reminded Caleb
with a shudder.

‘Well, lad, those drains won’t clear themselves… But some
things are beyond us. Like when the generator packs up.’

‘Don’t the people who come over, those who aren’t Ceruleans,
wonder…’

‘It’s well known on the mainland that this is a privately
owned island,’ said Caleb. ‘People think we’re a sort of commune.’

As Adam led me away, across the central living room, I
asked, ‘But where does the money come from? For workmen. And televisions. And
clothes. And food. Do you… with that power to be invisible… do you just help
yourself?’

My guide stopped suddenly and said with horror, ‘No,
Scarlett. Of course not! We have various means of raising funds. We sell
vegetables and eggs and milk to the mainland. Some of us work over there –
medical staff, mainly, for obvious reasons. I believe there are investments of
some sort. And of course there are the sponsors.’

‘Who?’

‘People who know of us and support our work.’

‘People? You mean…’

‘Yes, there are some who know who we are and what we do.’

‘But I thought it was a big secret – that Ceruleans exist?’

‘It is, generally, but there are a few exceptions.’

‘Who are they, these sponsors?’

‘In the beginning, there was one family that supported us.
Now, there are several who donate and raise funds for us.’

I stood silently, tracing rivulets of rain water cascading
down a window pane. I was thinking that if a few humans out there knew of the
Ceruleans, supported them, why not my mother? She had the money. And surely if
she knew that would mean she could see me sometimes, and all her grief would be
gone.

‘Look, I know there’s a lot to take in, Scarlett. A lot of
questions and a lot of answers that seem bewildering at first. But you’ll get
there.’ His voice was kind and full of understanding.

‘Thank you. But I feel like there’s still so much I don’t
know.’

‘You need to speak with Evangeline. It’s torture for you,
waiting. But the timing…’

‘Can you tell me? What Jude won’t say – what he says needs
to come from her?’

‘Sorry, Scarlett. That would be disrespectful to Jude, and
to Evangeline.’

‘I understand,’ I said, though I didn’t.

‘So,’ said Adam in a brighter tone. ‘Are you ready to see a
man about a dog – and a chicken, and a cow, and a goat, and a donkey?’

*

An hour later we were at the front door to the hotel,
peeling off soggy coats and muddy wellies and changing back into our dry
trainers.

I’d met James, the livestock keeper, and his menagerie of
animals.

I’d met Paul, the gardener, who showed me the herb gardens
and vegetable patches and orchards.

I’d met Tobias, the ‘odd job man’, as he put it, who mended
a fence here, built a stone wall there.

‘That’s all the core team,’ said Adam.

‘How come they’re not out healing?’ I asked him as I shook
droplets of water from my hair.

‘They’re older,’ he explained. ‘They still go to the
mainland sometimes, but I suppose you could say they’re semi-retired. The
longer we heal, the more it drains us. Eventually, we’re entitled to spend more
time here.’

‘How come they’re all men?’

‘Why should women be stuck milking cows and chopping
carrots, huh? It’s every feminist’s fantasy – men doing the graft.’

It didn’t escape my attention that he hadn’t answered the
question. Nor that he’d entirely misunderstood the concept of feminism, which
wasn’t remotely about ‘men doing the graft’. What were the women doing, sitting
about painting their nails?

But as Adam led me down the corridor that led to the
playroom to ‘re-meet’ some more Ceruleans, I realised that was it: the women
must be with the children. The women’s libbers of the 1960s would have sobbed
at the setup.

Before we reached the playroom, Adam stopped outside the
library. The door was shut, but he gestured for me to peek through a glass
window to the side. I saw a row of tiny desks at which sat five little boys who
weren’t quite toddlers but weren’t quite school age either, listening intently
to an elderly man perched on a desk and reading from a book in a booming voice:

‘Build a house?’ exclaimed John.

‘For the Wendy,’ said Curly.

‘For Wendy?’ John said, aghast. ‘Why, she is only a
girl!’

‘That,’ explained Curly, ‘is why we are her servants.’

‘
Peter Pan
,’ whispered Adam. ‘One of my favourites
when I was their age. That’s Matthew. He’s one of the teachers.’

‘So the children are schooled here?’

‘Until the age of five. Then they go to the mainland.’

‘What’s there for them?’

‘Kikorangi. It means sky-blue in Maori. Don’t ask me who
chose that name; no idea. It’s our base there. A house on Dartmoor. Not on this
scale, but remote, far enough away from people that we can live there without
being drained. The boys continue their education there until they’re sixteen.
Learn how to use their powers. There are some dedicated teachers, and many of
us teach the odd class if we have a particular passion or talent in an area.
Like Michael. He’s the most amazing artist.’

‘What about the younger ones?’

He grinned. ‘Can’t you hear them?’

Now he mentioned it, there was a rather odd noise coming
from further along the corridor. I followed Adam to the playroom and stood
behind him as he swung open the door. Here, I thought, I would find the women,
but in fact the room was quite literally manned: three grey-haired men amid a
small gaggle of giggling toddlers, all of them having a whale of a time
crawling around the floor making odd noises and pretending to be…

‘Dinosaurs?’ I whispered to Adam.

He grinned. ‘Usually. Or dragons. Or sometimes mythical sea
monsters. Scarlett, meet Matthias and Aaron and Amos.’

One by one the mannies gave me a wave and a smile, before
reverting to roaring and crawling.

‘Imagination time,’ explained Adam. ‘Man, I used to
love
that.’

‘Me too,’ said a voice behind, and I turned to see Jude.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hey.’ I raised an eyebrow and he nodded just a fraction.

‘Are you done here?’

I nodded – I was desperate to speak to him, to ask about
Luke. But something was tugging at me, keeping me here. Literally.

I looked down.

A small curly-headed boy had crawled up to me and pulled
himself up to standing using my legs for support.

‘Gah!’ he told me seriously, and then he lost his grip on my
jeans and sat down smartly on his bottom. He blinked up at me, his mouth a tiny
O, and his lower lip began to tremble.

‘Hey,’ I said automatically, crouching down to his level,
‘it’s okay.’

He looked at me solemnly, then asked, ‘Mada?’

‘No,’ I said softly. ‘Scarlett.’

He pursed his lips while he thought about that, and then
pointed at the ceiling and exclaimed, ‘Ng ba!’ Then he launched himself onto
his knees and crawled away at lightning speed.

When I stood again I was smiling, but neither of my
companions were. Adam was staring into the mass of toddlers/mannies/dinosaurs.
Jude was staring at me with an expression on his face I’d never seen before.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and smiled. It was a tender sort of
smile.

We left Adam pitching in with imagination time, flapping
around the room being a quetzalcoatlus, which, he explained to the wide-eyed
tots at his feet, was a pterosaur –
not
a flying dinosaur, but of the
same era, and a giant of the sky.

‘Wow,’ I said as Jude and I walked back up the corridor. ‘Do
the little ones understand all that?’

‘Doubt it,’ said Jude. ‘But they lap it up anyway.’

‘They seem really happy here.’

‘This is a happy place,’ he said. But his smile looked
strained.

‘So…’

He looked around. We were near the living room, right
outside the snug and, seeing that it was deserted, he nudged me in and closed
the door behind us.

‘Sit,’ he said, gesturing to the large corner sofa.

I perched on the edge of it and he sat down beside me.

‘What is it?’ I breathed. ‘What happened?’

He looked at the door, as if at any moment someone may burst
in and shout,
‘Aha! Caught you!’
Then he turned to me.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘Luke was home. Not Cara,
though.’

‘How was he?’

‘O-kay.’

‘Define “o-kay”.’

‘Well, himself.’

‘His usual self?’

‘Er, no, not really. But coping. Functional.’

In some perverse way, it hurt to hear Luke was coping, and I
scolded myself silently – I’d told Luke to be strong, to move on. And anyway,
it would have hurt a lot more to hear he was broken, devastated.

‘And he was hostile to me, as usual,’ added Jude.

I smiled a little at that. Luke’s catchphrase, when it came
to Jude, had always been ‘I don’t like that guy’.

‘What did you do?’

‘I gave him the letter. He read it right there.’

‘And?’

‘And?’

‘And how did he react?’

‘He was sad. And relieved. And sad.’

I thought about that for a while, and then asked, ‘Did he
write a reply?’

Jude reached into his back pocket, pulled out an envelope
and handed it over to me. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘He’d already written it for you.
Had it waiting.’

I inspected the seal on the back of the envelope. It looked
to be intact.

‘Did you read it?’

He looked hurt. ‘Of course not!’

I slipped the envelope into the pocket of my cardigan for
reading later, when I was alone.

Jude was silent, staring down at his hands.

‘Is that it?’ I pressed. ‘You left then?’

‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I left.’ He looked up. ‘I’m sorry,
Scarlett. For the both of you. He’s in pain. You’re in pain. But I hope what I
did today can draw a line under it for you both. And you can move on.’

I sat back and looked out of the window. Outside, the rain
was thickening. I thought about what to say. I was angry with Jude. With this
whole situation. And reluctant to conceal that.

‘It’s not that simple,’ I said at last. ‘You don’t just fall
in love with someone and then move on the moment you’re separated.’

‘It’ll take time. I understand that. So long as you know
that you do need to let go.’

‘Why, exactly?’

‘Because you could never be with him, Scarlett. He’s there,
you’re here. He’s human, you’re Cerulean. You’re incompatible.’

I stared at Jude. Clearly, he was resolute that I would be
staying here. The task of convincing him to take me back to Luke seemed
Herculean. But before I could make any attempt, he had changed the subject.

‘Evangeline has asked for you,’ he said. ‘You’re to go and
meet her now.’

‘Now?’

‘Now. One of the women – Estelle, you remember her from
yesterday? – she’s waiting for you in the living room. She’ll take you to
Evangeline.’

The way he’d spoken of this Evangeline had built her into some
powerful mythical figure in my mind, and I found my stomach twisting nervously
at the thought of meeting her now. But she was the key to the answers I still
needed. And perhaps I could get her on side and persuade her this whole
bringing-me-to-Cerulea business had been a mistake.

‘And she’ll explain everything to me? All the stuff you’ve
held back on?’

He looked uncertain. ‘I don’t think today…’

‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Why not?’

‘You’ll see,’ he said enigmatically.

He reached over and his hand hovered awkwardly over my knee.
Before, back in Twycombe, we’d got to a point where we were close, where we
touched each other easily. But now, here, there was a distance. He was holding
back.

‘Scarlett, afterwards – if…’ He pulled his hand away and
rubbed it across his head in agitation. ‘Just come and find me. Please.’

‘You’re not coming?’