Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [58]
‘He used it as a pen to write the Mahabharata.’
‘Oh yes – that’s this huge big poem about all the gods and heroes and so on.’
‘And the mouse shows that he’s humble because he’s the destroyer of pride and selfishness,’ added Mrs Dalal.
For the next quarter of an hour they concentrated on eating. Mr Dalal didn’t rejoin them. Maybe he had gone to the recording studio, Zaki thought. He obviously knew they had been down there last night. Did he mind? Was he checking to see what they had been up to? Anusha didn’t seem at all concerned. Well, different families had different rules, he supposed.
‘The remover of obstacles’ – the words kept repeating in Zaki’s head. He could really do with one of those right now! Michael used to be his remover of obstacles. The one who went first: the first to climb a cliff, the first at the secondary school. He went ahead and came back and told Zaki what it was like, that it was safe. But now the obstacles had grown bigger and not even Michael could remove them.
He looked up from his plate and found Mrs Dalal smiling at him.
‘Mum,’ Anusha asked, as they tidied away the breakfast things, ‘can Zaki borrow the mask from the living room?’
‘There seems to be a lot of interest in that mask all of a sudden,’ her mother remarked.
‘We’re doing myths and stuff with Mrs Palmer and Zaki’s got to do a project.’
‘Well, yes, take it, by all means. But you might need to give it a bit of a dust.’
Anusha wrapped the mask carefully in an old tea towel and it joined the logbook and the borrowed CD in Zaki’s rucksack. Then they made themselves a picnic lunch to take with them to the boat.
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Chapter 17
It was the sort of September day that seems to have borrowed its weather from mid-July; there was no wind to speak of and the sun shone out of a clear blue sky. Sitting beside Anusha, while the bus wound its way through the lanes to Salcombe, Zaki felt rather self-conscious in his school clothes on a Saturday, and, despite the sunshine streaming in through the bus window, he kept his jacket zipped up over his pale blue school sweatshirt. He could feel the slight weight of the bracelet in his jacket pocket.
‘What if Curlew is still anchored near your boat?’ asked Anusha as they walked from the bus to the boat shed. Zaki had been wondering the same thing, but they needn’t have worried.
‘She’s long gone,’ Grandad told them.
‘Up the estuary, or out to sea?’ asked Zaki.
‘Out to sea. Only one person aboard, far as I could tell.’
Zaki fetched Morveren’s cabin key from the nail by the door, lifejackets for himself and Anusha and the oars for the dinghy. Grandad offered to tow the dinghy out with the launch, but Zaki replied that Anusha could do with the rowing practice.
‘That shoulder of yours all right for rowin’?’
‘Seems to be fine,’ Zaki replied nonchalantly.
Grandad raised a quizzical eyebrow but let it go at that.
‘If you intend leavin’ the dinghy on Morveren, fly the mermaid when you want fetchin’.’ ‘The mermaid’ was a large square flag with a mermaid on it. ‘Flying the mermaid’ was the family’s way of letting those ashore know that they were wanted onboard. During holidays, when the mermaid was run up the mast, it was the signal that lunch was ready and that Zaki and Michael should stop whatever they were doing and get back to the boat. Zaki’s mum had made the flag. This summer it hadn’t been flown.
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They had the tide with them until they were level with the harbour office, but as soon as they headed out across the estuary the ebb swept them sideways and they had to pull hard at their oars to make the moorings by the opposite shore. However, Zaki’s newly healed shoulder allowed him to use both arms to row and he and Anusha were a well-balanced pair, matching stroke