by Hilary McKay
Much later a blackbird screamed and broke the spell and the sun went in – not behind a cloud, but behind the huge height of Big Grandma. She was standing behind Naomi holding a sack and a large, shiny-pronged fork.
Naomi jumped in alarm. What was the sack for, she wondered, and also the very dangerous-looking fork? Could she really, as seemed only too apparent, have eaten an entire bed of strawberries? And what did Big Grandma propose to do now?
‘I am going to dig some new potatoes for supper,’ announced Big Grandma, ‘and I would be grateful if you would come and pick them up for me.’
‘I’ve eaten all the strawberries.’
‘So I see,’ agreed Big Grandma with no apparent emotion. ‘Did you enjoy them?’
‘Yes, but they’re all gone,’ said Naomi, ‘and I don’t know what to do about it now.’
‘Help me with the potatoes,’ ordered Big Grandma, walking over to a patch of bushy plants. ‘Too late to worry about the strawberries now you’ve eaten them. Nothing you can possibly do about it. Not at this late stage.’ She stuck her fork into the ground and lifted up one of the plants, shook it and threw it aside. Naomi stared in surprise to see a number of pale-skinned potatoes scattered on the ground.
‘You pick them up,’ ordered Big Grandma, and obediently Naomi began to put them in the sack while Big Grandma stirred through the dusty earth where they had grown and uncovered more.
‘Rather a grovelling job,’ said Big Grandma, smiling as she paused to watch Naomi scrabbling through the earth at her feet.
‘Rather a dangerous-looking fork,’ said Naomi, and found herself smiling back.
Despite the fact that from the time they left the house, Ruth, Rachel and Phoebe could see the whole of the village, and even the particular white building that was the village shop, Ruth was determined to use her map. Every time the footpath crossed a stile or turned a corner she fished it out, located their position, and after much twisting and turning made the path marked on the map line up with the one they were following. Then she would point triumphantly in the direction in which they were to proceed. By this means they reached their destination without once getting lost.
The shop was peculiarly lacking in everything they wanted. It had no books, no comics, no toys, no crisps, and no ice cream, the owner said, until Thursday. He was a small, ginger-haired man, and he stood wringing his hands and blushing redder and redder as the list of what he didn’t sell was revealed to them. Eventually they bought chocolate, some dreadfully expensive butter, and three dubious postcards that Phoebe insisted she needed. All the while they were choosing these things two old ladies and an ancient man scrutinised them with great care and commented to each in noisy whispers that it was easy to overhear.
‘They don’t look like their mother.’
‘Or their grandmother.’
‘Pity.’
‘Aye, she were bonny in her time. Good of her to have the four of them. More than I’d want to do.’
‘They look a right handful.’
‘They look,’ said the old man, ‘like that miserable, useless, nowt of a lad of hers!’
‘Robert was a nice lad,’ said one old lady.
The old man examined the price of a packet of biscuits, snorted, and remarked, ‘Robbery! No wonder they all goes to the snooper markets!’
‘Forty-seven pence isn’t much,’ said Rachel, examining the label he was thumping with his thumb.
‘Not much!’ he exclaimed. ‘They used to be thru’pence a pound!’
‘They didn’t,’ said Phoebe belligerently. “What’s “thru’pence” anyway? Stop poking me with them!’
Ruth, realising that Phoebe was about to start a fight with an eighty-year-old man, shoved her out of the shop and prepared to open the map again.
‘Lost already?’ enquired a scruffy boy, sauntering up the street towards them. ‘Straight along the road. You can see the house from here.’
‘She’s practising maps,’ explained Rachel.
‘How do you know who we are?’ asked Phoebe.
‘Your gran said you were coming,’ he explained. ‘She said to keep an eye out for you.’ He was too polite to add the rest of what she had said.
‘We’re going to the sea,’ Rachel told him.
‘Straight down the road the other way then,’ the boy said. ‘You’ll see the Island today.’
‘The Isle of Man?’ Ruth asked. ‘You can see that from Big Grandma’s house. I saw it this morning.’
The boy looked up at the hot blue sky and pulled his sheepskin jacket closely round him. Ruth noticed that he was wearing a thick jumper underneath. ‘That means rain’s coming,’ he informed them. ‘When you can see the Island, that means it’s going to rain. And when you can’t see it, that means it’s raining.’
‘Joke,’ he explained as they stared blankly at him.
‘Oh well,’ he continued, giving up his hope of a laugh, ‘I’ll be off now. Don’t get lost,’ he added over his shoulder.
‘He sme—’ began Phoebe in a loud voice, and was stopped just in time by a shove from Ruth.
‘What if he heard you?’ Anxiously she looked after the boy, but he had not turned round. He was walking straight down the middle of the road, gazing at the world as if he owned it.
‘Well,’ commented Naomi from the doorstep some time later. ‘I see you found the sea. Who pushed you in, Phoebe?’
‘No one,’ answered Ruth. ‘She fell, running away from a wave and it went right over her. And then it happened again when she ran back to rescue her postcards. Oh, stop grizzling, Phoebe, and go and put some dry clothes on. D’you know what,’ she continued, turning back to Naomi, ‘everyone we saw knew who we were straight away!’
‘We met a boy –’ Rachel took up the story – ‘and he said Big Grandma told him to watch out for us. And it means it’s going to rain if you see the Island, and you can see it, quite clearly.’
‘You can’t any more,’ Naomi interrupted.
‘You could before. Then after that we met a man who said he’d heard we were coming and it was a queer day and it would rain or go dark before morning, and we said how did he know, and he said it always had so far …’
Naomi groaned.
‘And there was an old lady with a dog said she didn’t know how Big Grandma was coping!’
‘But,’ said Naomi, ‘what about the books you went for? Why didn’t you get any? I thought at least you’d bring back magazines or newspapers or something.’
‘The shop doesn’t sell books,’ Ruth told her, ‘and they’ll only get you magazines if you order them specially and you have to say you’ll have them for at least three months, same with the newspapers. I asked, and the man at the counter said he didn’t want them left on his hands like he’s had before.’
‘Well, couldn’t you have bought any of the ones he’d had left on his hands then?’
‘He said he hadn’t got them any more.’ Ruth explained. ‘I tried talking reasonably to him but it was hard with Phoebe arguing in the background. And Rachel.’
‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ put in Rachel. ‘Only talking quietly to myself.’
‘Oh well,’ Naomi rose stiffly from the doorstep, ‘it’s teatime. Big Grandma sent me to look for you. You’d better chuck those cards away, Phoebe; the pictures are awful even if they weren’t all soggy.’
‘No!’ said Phoebe indignantly. ‘You don’t know how much they cost! I’m going to show them to Big Grandma. The sheep have brilliant faces and the lady looks just like her.’
‘You show them to Big Grandma and I promise you she’ll go mad,’ said Naomi warningly, but Phoebe took no notice and showed them anyway.
They found that Big Grandma wasn’t so easily shocked as they had thought she might be. She not only admired the sheep but also ironed the cards flat so that they were almost as good as new. Phoebe explained her likeness to the lady in the picture, and Naomi and Ruth were surprised to find that she considered herself complimented.
‘We thought you’d be furious,’ remarked Naomi.
‘Not at my age,’ said Big Grandma.
It seemed that the village weather forecasters had been right with their predictions. By bedtime the sky had clouded over and the wind had dropped to the ominous trickle of breeze that comes before a gale. In the middle of the night, Ruth was woken by rain on her face, blown straight across the bedroom from the open window. The noise was terrific, not just the wind sounds, and the lash of the rain, but a deep dull roaring that rose and fell: waves grinding shingle during a midnight high tide.
The curtains were streaming into the room like flags. They flapped wetly down on Ruth as she dragged the window shut.
‘Thank goodness!’ came a voice from Naomi’s bed. ‘I’ve been getting soaked for ages but I couldn’t wake you up!’
‘Why didn’t you go and close it?’
‘My legs are still stiff.’
‘It’s a proper storm,’ said Ruth, shivering. ‘That boy in the village was right.’
With the window now closed, they became more aware of the sounds indoors. The sea wind thrummed across the chimney pots, tugged and smacked at the windowpanes, and whipped the walls with the trailing branches of the ash tree that grew by the front door.
‘It sounds as if this house is falling to bits,’ said Naomi uneasily.
‘Or as if it’s alive,’ added Ruth, and jumped as the kitchen door crashed open below them and the sudden draught caused the three-hundred-year-old treads and timbers of the stairs to creak in protest.
‘Those creaks sound like footsteps,’ whispered Naomi, and clutched at her knees in fear as the bathroom door slammed itself shut across the hallway. ‘I’m sure this house is haunted.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Or there’s someone out there.’
‘Who?’
‘Big Grandma?’
‘She wouldn’t crash around like that.’
‘Typical of Big Grandma,’ said Naomi bitterly, ‘to live in a haunted house!’
The worst of the storm was now locked out in the dark, but still it raged at the windows.
‘It hates us shutting it out,’ said Ruth, catching Naomi’s fear. ‘We’ve made it angry. It wants to come in. Perhaps we should …’
‘No!’
They dared not lie down, in case they might have to get up quickly to escape. Escape what? They didn’t know. Instead they dozed, sitting up and waking with startled jerks, listening. Towards morning they fell asleep and dreamed wistfully of home.
Something very hard landed on Naomi.
Terrified she struggled with her blankets, sat up, and saw the morning light. Phoebe was sitting on her.
‘Have you any clean socks I can borrow?’ she asked.
‘You nearly gave me a heart attack!’ Naomi shoved her onto the floor. ‘And no I haven’t. Anyway, mine would be too big for you.’
‘I often wear your socks,’ said Phoebe incautiously.
‘Well, you’re not going to this time.’ Naomi returned happily to the world of scrounging sisters and petty theft. ‘Go and pinch some of Ruth’s before she wakes up.’
Two slates had fallen off the roof in the night, wrenched away by the wind. One of them slithered to the ground and smashed on the front doorstep exactly where Naomi had been sitting the day before. It rained all day, not hard, but continuously. Big Grandma hardly took any notice of the weather. She spent the afternoon in a deck chair in the greenhouse, peacefully writing letters, and seemed surprised, on returning to the house, to find that nobody else had been out. The washing from the day before hung on the line so heavy with rain that it would have sagged to the ground if it hadn’t been sustained by the clothes prop in the middle. ‘You’d think one of us would have had the wits to bring it in,’ remarked Big Grandma, but she didn’t seem particularly distressed.
Nobody but Ruth and Naomi seemed to have been disturbed by the noises of the night. Not wishing to make fools of themselves, they didn’t mention their uneasy fears to anyone, but privately, in their bedroom, they discussed the matter.
‘You said this house was haunted.’
‘You didn’t say it wasn’t.’
Later on they both spent time slamming doors and running up and down the stairs, trying to recreate the sounds they had heard the night before. Eventually they were ordered to stop by Big Grandma, on pain of being given something productive to do. In the darkest parts of their minds they both believed, not unwillingly, that the house was probably haunted. They went to bed expecting the worst but were disturbed by nothing more alarming than a looting party, led by Phoebe, in the early hours of the morning.
‘How come they’ve got so many left?’ whispered Rachel from the doorway.
‘They never change them, that’s why,’ answered Phoebe, tiptoeing away with her arms full of socks.
The rain didn’t stop after one day as everyone had hoped it would. It went on and on and there was nothing to do. No secret passages were discovered, and they tapped in vain on the walls of the house, listening for a hollow sound where treasure might be hidden. Eventually Big Grandma realised what they were doing and explained that although the walls were two feet thick, they were solid stone right through. (‘Except for the garage,’ she added, ‘which is a twentieth century breeze block atrocity, but serves its purpose.’) So they abandoned the walls, and decided to hunt for trapdoors in the floors instead. Naomi had quite a nice time organising Rachel and Phoebe onto their knees in the attic, listening for suspicious squeaking boards until Ruth came up and spoilt it.
‘Trapdoors in the attic will go into the bedrooms and trapdoors in the bedrooms will go into the living rooms and trapdoors there will go to the coal cellar and the coal cellar floor is just the hillside, you know it is; you can see where the rock shows through!’
‘Oh, go away,’ said Naomi peevishly.
To Big Grandma the days of wet weather seemed like a time of constant searching, as the girls wandered through the house, questing for ghosts, books, relics of the mysterious disappearing Uncle Robert, secret passages, something to do, books, books, books, anything to read. A less determined woman would have broken down, but Big Grandma did not.
Towards the end of the week, as the supply of unread cookery books dwindled, as the rain continued to pour, and as people became less and less tolerant of their relations, the strain began to show. Rachel and Phoebe staged a spectacular fight which began at the top of the stairs and ended when they rolled in a heap at their grandmother’s feet in the hall below, still gripping handfuls of each other’s clothes, after having smashed a banister on the way down.
‘She blew at me,’ raged Phoebe as Big Grandma pulled them apart.
‘I can blow at whoever I like!’ screeched Rachel, lunging at her sister. Big Grandma sent them in the dining room to fight it out and for quite a long time there was no sound to be heard from them but that of loud blowing and running footsteps. When the room grew quiet and Big Grandma cautiously opened the door they were both fast asleep on the hearthrug, exhausted by the struggle.
Ruth wandered around the house, depressed not only by the general gloom, but also because to date her collection of Interesting Bones consisted of one skull. On top of this, she still had no proof that the house was haunted, although she lay awake and heard prowling ghosts for several hours every night. Naomi refused to discuss the matter, finding even the idea intolerable.
‘Go away,’ said Big Grandma to her grandchildren one morning, in her usual unfeeling way. ‘Go out. I cannot bear you any longer. I didn’t invite you here so that you might spend the whole summer breathing your quarrelsome little breaths down my neck.’ And she forced them to put on coats, equipped them with umbrellas, and pushed them out for a walk. They slopped sulkily down to the post office and bought stamps and sweets.
‘Ice cream here,’ said the shopman proudly. ‘Told you we’d be getting it in!’ He wrung his hands and grinned weakly at them and pointed to a coloured chart which displayed th
e different ice creams and lollipops he had now acquired.
‘They’d wash away if we took them outside,’ Ruth said.
The shopman straightened up and looked indignantly at her. ‘Better not grumble!’ he said. ‘Rain’s what makes the lakes, and the lakes are what the visitors come for.’
They stomped back up the hill feeling snubbed.
‘You’re back quickly,’ said Big Grandma as they came in. ‘Out you go again!’ and before they could protest she had handed Ruth a bundle of letters to post, and shut the front door on them.
‘What shall we do?’ asked Rachel, looking at the letters as if they might explode.
‘Post them,’ said Ruth, ‘or she’ll never let us in again. Here, you take them while I get this umbrella to work.’
Rachel wasn’t a good choice. Clumsy as always, she dropped them in the mud.
‘Ha!’ said Naomi. ‘Perfect! Now, pick them up and hurry!’
‘Why was it perfect?’ asked Phoebe, running after her sisters as they set off to the village.
‘She was watching from the window,’ explained Naomi.
‘Smirking!’ said Ruth.
‘Dry,’ said Naomi.
‘And warm,’ added Ruth, whose jacket was leaking chilly rain between her shoulder blades.
‘Well,’ said Phoebe, ‘she’s the boss, isn’t she?’
‘Phoebe!’ they all shouted, and ran away down the hill.
CHAPTER SIX
Once, much earlier in the history of the Conroy family, a coloured pamphlet had arrived at the house through the post. It had been found by Rachel, and Rachel had kept it a secret. As far as she could make out it was offering free books (there had been a picture of the books) to anyone who cared to tick the ones they wanted and post it back with their name and address filled in. Rachel had carried out these instructions, and for a long time, even when the twenty-four very heavy books had been returned, she had received letters addressed to ‘Dear Sir/Madam’. The books were almost forgotten now, and so was the cost of their return postage, and even the threats of what would happen to her if she ever did such a thing again. All that remained in Rachel’s memory of the incident was the knowledge that you could begin a letter ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, and it would do for anyone in the world.