Edie and the Box of Flits

by Kate Wilkinson

  Edie opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. She felt as if someone had pushed her hard and she was falling backwards off a wall that she had sat on for years. She fiddled with the end of one of her plaits. ‘I can still run the fastest,’ she said.

  Naz and Linny looked at her as if she was their annoying younger sister.

  ‘Not in those shoes you can’t!’ Linny said, and then they had ignored her. They didn’t even ask her what she was going to do over half-term.

  Edie had decided early on to stop talking to either of them or their horrible new friends and her days at school were largely spent in silence.

  The corridor narrowed and Edie stopped in front of the last storeroom. She unhooked the latch and pushed open the heavy metal door, breathing in the familiar smell of old biscuits. The fluorescent strip lights buzzed into life. There were no windows in the storeroom, as the walls were covered with shelves that reached from floor to ceiling, and there was an old Persian rug on the floor that had been found rolled up at Waterloo Station almost three years before. No one had ever claimed it, but Dad had kept it as he said it gave the storeroom an air of homeliness.

  Edie walked along the first shelf, pulling out any items that were marked with the red Unclaimed labels. The pile grew – first a child’s Pokémon rucksack, then a Mickey Mouse money box, an Arsenal football flag and an egg whisk. She quickly scanned the other shelves, hoping to catch a glimpse of the box, but couldn’t see it.

  She became distracted by the new arrivals, pressing the alarm button on the rabbit-shaped clock to make its ears wiggle before she found a place for it on the shelf, and plucking at the strings of the purple electric guitar. She was just about to pick up a strange medieval-looking sword, when she heard a tapping sound – sharp and insistent. It was an annoying tap, like a twig against a windowpane on a windy night.

  Edie stopped to listen.

  There it was again – tap, tap, tap.

  It was coming from somewhere high up.

  She dragged a chair across the floor and levered herself up until her head was level with the top shelf. She ran her hands along the surface, feeling her way. Her right hand rested on the soft brown felt of a cowboy hat. She pulled it towards her and spun it to the floor like a Frisbee.

  Moving further along, her fingers caught in the feathers of a large stuffed bird. She snatched her hand away, thinking for a moment of the bird with the crocodile smile, but its feet were firmly glued to a wooden plinth.

  She stopped again to listen. The tapping was over to her left.

  Climbing down, she moved the chair along and tried again. Just next to the stuffed bird, her fingers rested on the sharp corners of a wooden box.

  She felt certain it was the box. Her box. The one she had found on the Bakerloo Line.

  Edie scrabbled for it and dragged it towards her. She felt sweat prickling on her forehead as she slid it off the shelf and into her arms. Yes, it felt the same, and she could see Benedict’s wobbly handwriting on the brown label stuck to its side, but she could now also see that there were two small panes of glass at each side and the tapping noise was coming from one of the panes.

  Edie felt scared and excited. She hadn’t been mistaken about that fluttering when she’d handed over the box to Benedict; there was something alive in there. Perhaps it was a hamster with a little wheel for exercise? If it was something alive, it would be very hungry.

  Edie weighed up what she was feeling. She knew she could be timid at school and hang back, but all her life curiosity had burnt like the flare of a match inside her. Gripping the box to keep it steady, she stepped back down from the chair.

  The tapping became louder and more frantic. Edie held the box up until the pane of glass was level with her face. At first all she could see was a faint yellow glow, but it was blurry, as if someone had smeared the glass with grease.

  Her eyes slowly adjusted. A tiny creature was beating its fists against the glass.

  It was about the size of Edie’s thumb. It had wings that were whirring furiously and a puff of hair that was like the fur on the tip of a cat’s tail.

  The creature stopped banging and started to wave wildly at Edie. Then, clear as a tiny bell, words began to form.

  ‘I want to come out RIGHT THIS MINUTE.’

  Chapter Five

  Baker Street

  E

  die stared at the small glass window and her mouth gaped open. She had to fight the urge to drop the box and run back down the corridor to the safety of the office.

  The creature waved again, both arms this time, as if it was flagging down a plane.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ it said.

  Eventually Edie replied in a croaky whisper. ‘Yes. Yes . . . I can.’ She felt her heart beating fast against her ribcage.

  ‘At last,’ said the creature.

  ‘Are you some kind of insect?’ Edie asked slowly and quietly. ‘Like a moth?’

  ‘A MOTH!’ said the tiny voice inside the box. ‘Moths have giant flappy wings. No, no. I’m a flit. F-L-I-T.’

  ‘O . . . K,’ said Edie. She tried to sound as if she met flits all the time.

  ‘My name’s Impy,’ said the flit. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Edie,’ she almost whispered. The weeks of silence in the playground seemed to have shrunk her voice.

  ‘Speak up!’

  ‘EDIE. Edie Winter.’

  Impy gave Edie a hard stare. ‘Will you help us, Edie Winter?’

  ‘I-I don’t know yet,’ said Edie.

  ‘We were hiding in a garden shed and Charlie was helping us,’ Impy went on.

  ‘Charlie?’ Edie said. ‘Do you mean the boy with the red hair who forgot you?’

  Impy was getting impatient. ‘No-oo . . . That’s Ivan. His stupid big brother. Charlie’s mother decided to have a clear-out of the shed and Ivan was supposed to take the box to a charity shop.’

  Impy pressed a tiny hand to her forehead. ‘He forgot about us and left us on the train, and now we’ve been stuck in this room for two whole days. Two whole days! Stuck on that shelf between a cowboy hat and a stupid stuffed owl.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Edie. It was quite a speech. How could Ivan . . . have forgotten about them? Meeting a flit was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.

  ‘It was me and my dad who rescued you,’ said Edie. ‘This is a lost property office.’

  ‘Funny sort of “rescue”!’ said Impy. ‘Leaving us stuck in the dark in here without anything to eat.’

  ‘We don’t normally keep living things here,’ said Edie. ‘They usually go to the RSPCA – or the zoo. I-I don’t really know what to do with you.’

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Impy urgently through the glass.

  ‘Eleven,’ said Edie. ‘I’m twelve on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine then,’ said Impy. ‘You can take us home and we can live with you.’

  The idea was mad. Edie knew it was. She should leave the box where it was in the back storeroom and hope that the strange flits would disappear. Yet she also knew that, more than anything else, she wanted to keep Impy all to herself.

  She sat down on the chair to steady herself and rested the box on her knees. Swinging her plaits out of the way, she bent her head so that she could look inside more easily.

  Impy was still pressed against the square of glass. ‘You must help us!’ she pleaded. ‘We need food and water.’

  ‘How do I let you out?’ said Edie.

  ‘There’s a button hidden at the back. Press it.’

  Edie felt along the back of the box, her fingers sliding across the smooth wood.

  ‘Can you find it?’ said Impy through the glass.

  Edie scowled and ran her hands over the whole surface, until right in the far corner she felt a small raised button. She pressed it and with a soft click she felt the lid release under her hand.

  Edie suddenly felt anxious. Had someone meant to keep the box locked? She rested her arms across the top of the
lid and pressed down. What if they were evil creatures? What if she opened the lid and a swarm of strange talking insects poured out of it as hungry as locusts? What if she could never get them back inside again? The idea was terrifying, but it also sent a tiny thrill through her.

  The tapping started again – insistent like a miniature woodpecker. Impy was pummelling at the glass with her fists. ‘Come ON,’ she yelled.

  Edie weighed up the situation. Impy was quite loud, but she didn’t look evil. Slowly she raised the lid.

  A sharp gust of air whipped past her cheek and Impy landed on Edie’s hand. She was a little bigger than a pencil sharpener and was dressed in a coat crafted from squares of brightly coloured sweet wrappers tied with a piece of parcel string. Her shoes were made from scraps of stitched leather. She folded her wings against her back.

  Edie had to grit her teeth to resist the urge to swipe her away. If she had wings, she might also have a sting! But she managed to hold her hand still, and Impy sat down cross-legged. They gazed at each other and, after a moment, Impy lay back against Edie’s fingers and threw her arms behind her. It tickled.

  ‘Fresh air!’ she said in a voice that sounded less impatient and more like the ting of a small bell. ‘It was horrible being shut in.’

  She sat up and swung her legs round so that they dangled over the ball of Edie’s thumb. ‘Good to meet you.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Edie. Although she didn’t quite know what she was meeting.

  ‘The first thing is supplies, and then we have to go back to the end of the line to meet Jot,’ Impy continued.

  ‘Jot?’ said Edie.

  ‘He’s my brother. Speckle is really missing him.’

  Edie felt she was being pulled along a slippery path and couldn’t get her footing.

  ‘Who’s Speckle?’

  ‘He’s Jot’s twin. He’s in the box.’

  Edie looked into the box. It was as if she had lifted the lid on a doll’s house and was looking down through the roof. A series of compartments were linked by a maze of small corridors and the whole box was furnished with items that must have been foraged by its thumb-sized inhabitants. The walls were lined with old seed packets. There were beds with jewel-coloured duvets made from scraps of cotton and a bath made out of an old anchovy tin. A couple of Lego bricks provided a table and round it stood a set of stools crafted from bottle corks.

  ‘Charlie gave us those,’ said Impy, pointing at the Lego bricks and a miniature skateboard that acted as a sofa on wheels. A bootlace doubled up as a washing line and several small bottle tops, filled with rice, grains, seeds and raisins, sat on the shelf above. Edie was relieved to see a jam jar half filled with water slotted into the corner with a tiny pulley system and a bucket on a string.

  Right in the centre of the box, in the largest compartment, two small creatures like Impy were seated on a matchbox. They looked like little bendy figures made of plasticine wearing clothes.

  ‘That’s Speckle,’ said Impy. ‘And that’s Nid, my annoying younger brother.’

  ‘Hello!’ said Nid. He pulled three tiny silver beads out of his pocket and juggled with them, expertly catching and throwing until they were nothing but a shiny blur. Nid’s hair stood up like a pastry brush and his clothes were made from the pocket of a pair of jeans.

  ‘Show off!’ said Impy.

  Edie laughed and her eyes flicked back to Speckle, who was hiding in the shadows of the box. He wore an acorn cup pressed tightly on his head like a miniature helmet, and he gazed up at her with an urgency that she didn’t understand.

  ‘What happened to Jot?’ she asked.

  ‘He decided to go back and look for Flum and the nut.’

  ‘Flum?’ asked Edie. There seemed to be a cast of thousands in the flit world.

  ‘Yes, Flum!’ said Impy. ‘Our flum. Like mum to you. We lost her in the tunnel when we were escaping the magpins. They came and attacked the Hillside Camp, which is our home. And now she is missing.’

  Nid dropped his juggling beads and they scattered in all directions, pinging off the walls of the box. Impy ignored him and carried on.

  ‘One minute she was behind us and then she was gone. We think the magpins must have caught her and stolen our nut.’ She almost spat out the word ‘magpin’.

  Edie realised that Impy had a lot on her mind. ‘Do you eat nuts?’ she asked.

  ‘No!’ said Impy, looking horrified. ‘Inside the nut is our new baby sister or brother. It’s not long until it hatches, and Flum was carrying it. Now the magpins have got that too.’

  Edie marvelled for a moment that a baby flit could be hatched out of a nut.

  ‘The magpins have been stealing all the flit nuts,’ Impy went on. ‘When they attacked the Hillside Camp we flew into the Underground to escape.’

  ‘So this box is not your real home?’

  ‘No!’ said Impy. ‘We found a safe place in a garden shed by the station at the end of the line, which turned out to be Charlie’s garden. Jot told us he would come back to find us at the station, and in the meantime Charlie gave us this box to live in and helped us furnish it and he promised to keep us secret. So we stayed there safe for almost five days until –’ her voice became a little indignant – ‘until Charlie’s mum put us out with the jumble.’

  One of Nid’s beads catapulted out of the box and hit Edie on the head. She longed to ask more questions. Above all, who were the magpins? But she could see that Impy was getting agitated, so she stayed quiet and stared at what remained of Impy’s family. They were so extraordinary and yet there were things about them that she recognised. They were not insects, but tiny people with wings who lived in a house, slept in beds and wore clothes. Though they had babies that hatched out of nuts.

  Her eyes roamed around the magical scene below her. ‘What’s in there?’ she asked.

  She was pointing to a compartment that was full of glittery things – a five-pence coin, a bent hair grip decorated with glass crystals and a broken silver charm in the shape of a lizard.

  ‘That’s Nid’s room,’ said Impy. ‘He likes finding forgotten shiny things. That’s how we live, by foraging for things no one wants any more.’

  Nid stood up on the matchbox and did a forward somersault off the side, landing perfectly.

  ‘He can fly but he chooses not to. He prefers to jump and run.’

  Edie was transfixed. She wanted to sit in the storeroom staring at the inside of this magical box for a whole week.

  The sound of the four o’clock tea bell jangled in the distance. Dad would be expecting her back in the office, but she couldn’t leave the box here, not now she knew what was inside.

  Chapter Six

  Baker Street to Green Park

  Found: one gold ring

  ‘I

  mpy, I want you to meet my family. Well, my dad. He works here.’

  ‘Can we go to your house after?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Edie. ‘But we’ll have to be careful. Someone else might see you.’

  ‘Adults can’t see us,’ said Impy simply, and she flew up and lodged herself behind Edie’s ear in the twist of one her auburn plaits. ‘Ivan couldn’t see us. That was the whole problem.’

  ‘Now I can’t see you!’ said Edie.

  ‘You can hear me, though!’ Impy blew into Edie’s ear. A tiny gust of air tickled her earlobe as if it was a pixie feather.

  ‘Agh!’ said Edie, laughing. ‘Why couldn’t Ivan see you?’

  ‘Too old. No one over thirteen can see us.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ said Edie. ‘You can’t just disappear when someone turns thirteen.’

  ‘We do,’ said Impy.

  ‘But . . .’

  It didn’t seem fair at all. Edie’s twelfth birthday was only a few weeks away, and then she would be in her thirteenth year. She wanted to spend the rest of her life watching flits.

  ‘I like your hair,’ said Impy. Edie could feel her clambering up and down the twists of her plait. ‘Can I have a swing?’ />
  ‘OK,’ said Edie slowly, and she leant forward and tipped her head to one side so that her plait swung free of her head. She could see Impy clutch it as if it were a giant rope swing.

  As she moved her head Impy shrieked. ‘Faster, Edie!’

  Edie swung her plait to and fro until her neck ached, but she felt something inside that she hadn’t felt for a while.

  Impy sat upright, breathless with excitement. ‘We’re going to get along very well. Do you know what your hair reminds me of?’

  Edie had been told by her dad that her hair was special and glowed like copper. But she had also been called ‘carrot head’ by a boy at school.

  ‘Marmalade,’ said Impy. ‘That lovely dark orange marmalade that Charlie liked to put on his toast.’

  ‘Marmalade?’ said Edie. She felt quite pleased with this comparison. ‘No one’s ever said that before.’

  Impy gave the plait a sharp tug. ‘Let’s get going.’

  ‘Ow!’ said Edie, although she was beginning to like having a flit in her plait. ‘OK. You can come if you hide in my hair. But the others will have to stay in the box just for now.’ She couldn’t risk treading on them or losing them between the floorboards.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ she said to their upturned faces as she closed the lid.

  Holding the box in front of her, she set off back down the corridor and up the stairs towards the front desk. A customer was talking to Dad and becoming quite agitated, so Edie edged round the back of his desk, placing the box on one corner.

  ‘Stay out of sight,’ she whispered to her plait, not yet convinced that Impy really was invisible to adults.

  The woman on the other side of the desk was wearing an expensive suit and flapping a newspaper to fan herself. Dad was on his hands and knees crawling slowly across the floor towards Vera, who was in the corner of the room wearing her stout black shoes and regulation trousers. Dad said this was a hangover from the long years she had worked in a ticket office on the London Underground. Round her neck dangled her eyeglass.

  The woman spoke in an increasingly high-pitched babble. ‘Mr Winter, first of all you’ve taken six weeks to report back to me that you’ve found my ring . . .’