Watch & Listen

The beach at Olhos d’Água woke slowly. The first light turned the white walls pink, then touched the shutters. Up in Sea View Village Square, Gloria opened her café. The smell of her coffee drifted down to the sand before the sun had cleared the rooftops. Down by the wooden stairs, Veronica arranged buckets and spades, rubber dinghies, sun hats and armbands outside her beach shop.

High on the sea wall sat a white cat called Kookie Eyes, watching everything and missing nothing. The Governor, the locals called him. He ran the whole village from one warm stone.

Sergeant Rufus marched along the sand, chest out, ears up. He was a small dog with a very big job. Nobody had given it to him. That made it more important, not less.

Dotty was already on her lounger. Her flowery dress was smoothed flat, her pot arms were folded, and her sunglasses caught the morning light. Two holidaymakers stopped to admire them. Dotty thanked them. She thought it was only fair.

High over the water, a gull was watching.

A shadow slid across the towel, over the flowers on Dotty’s dress and up to her face.

Then her sunglasses were gone.

Stephanie the seagull swooped up and away with them. A single white feather drifted down onto the towel.

Rufus’s ears went up.

“Nobody touch anything,” he said. “This is a case.”

He was already running.

He raced the length of the beach, barking at a bird who was far above him and not listening. He tried Cardiac Hill, but gave up after a few paces. By the time he reached the beach shop, Veronica was hanging up the last of the sun hats. Her mum, Antonieta, was sweeping sand off the step.

“Chasing that seagull?” Veronica asked. “Go and get a net off the fisherman.”

So Rufus ran to the blue fishing huts at the far end of the beach. Fishing nets always lay in front of the huts, in long green heaps, drying in the sun. A fisherman sat among them, mending a net.

“A net,” said Rufus. “For a case.”

The fisherman looked at him for a moment, then lifted a net from the top of the pile and held it out.

“Bring it back,” he said.

Rufus took it in his teeth.

He tried the rocks. He tried the wooden stairs. Twice. He stood very still and tried to look innocent, which has never worked for anybody.

At last, he came back to the shop with sand in both ears, a stitch in his side, no seagull and a fishing net he had no use for.

Antonieta leaned on her broom and looked at him.

“Hold still, little sergeant,” she said, brushing the sand off his back. “Now go and ask the Governor. He knows things.”

Rufus dragged the net to the sea wall and climbed up, puffing.

Kookie Eyes had not moved all morning.

“You don’t chase a gull,” he said. “You wait where the food is.”

“That’s not a plan,” said Rufus. “That’s just sitting.”

“It’s both,” said Kookie Eyes. “You’ll see.”

“You wait where the food is,” Rufus muttered, trying out the words.

He did not agree with them.

Not yet.

Up in the square, Gloria spotted him and came to the café doorway with a plate of hot chips.

“For the sergeant,” she said. “On the house.”

Rufus carried the chips down to the rock pools and set the plate on a warm, flat rock above the water.

Carl the crab was already waiting under his ledge. Dotty came too. She settled on the rock as if she had invented waiting. She did not look up once, not even when a wasp landed on the plate.

The smell of hot chips drifted along the beach.

Up on a rooftop, somebody turned her head.

Stephanie came in low and fast.

The net came down from four sides at once. Rufus held down the front edge. Dotty’s pot arm swung in from the side. Kookie Eyes sprang down from the wall to catch another corner, and Carl clamped his claw around the last.

“Got her!” said Rufus.

For one second, it was the best morning of his life.

Then he looked down through the net.

Stephanie looked very small beneath it. Very still. The sunglasses had slipped sideways and hung from the tip of her beak.

“Wasn’t me,” she said, in a voice with no shout left in it.

Nobody moved.

“They wave their hats at me,” Stephanie said, staring at the rock. “Every morning. Off, off, get off. Nobody is ever glad to see me.”

The sunglasses slipped from her beak onto the rock. She reached towards them with the tip of one wing.

“She looked nice in them,” she said. “People smiled at her. Nobody smiles at a gull on a roof.”

Rufus looked at the net. Then he looked at Dotty.

She did not help him decide.

Even Kookie Eyes kept quiet.

So Rufus lifted the net himself.

Stephanie did not fly away. She stayed right where she was.

The net lay open on the warm rock. Below them, the tide crept a little higher, taking no notice at all.

Dotty picked up her sunglasses. She put them on with one pot hand and straightened them with two painted fingers. Then she looked at Stephanie over the top of the frames for a long, slow moment.

“Tomorrow,” said Dotty, “you may ask.”

Rufus dragged the fishing net back along the beach to the blue huts and laid it on the pile where he had found it.

The beach filled up again. Along the seafront promenade, the stalls set up for the day, and Antonieta swept the shop step for the second time that morning.

On the sea wall, Romeo, Lovely Lisa’s cat, settled beside Stephanie without a word. Together, they looked out over the village.

Rufus’s ears went up.

This time, before he moved, he waited.