“She plays the violin,” I said. “She’s good.”
“Hmm?” said my mother, pulling the slipped one over the knit one, always a tricky bit. “That’s nice.” Trying to sound casual again.
“But her face is too small,” I said.
My mother raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, because she was counting under her breath. Her needles clicked comfortably.
“She’s got a brother,” I added. “He’s a forester. He’s very tall.”
My mother turned her knitting and began again from the other end.
“I always thought you should take music lessons,” she said. “It was your father who said you didn’t have to if you didn’t want to. You can blame him.”
I knew she didn’t really mean that, about blaming my father, but it seems to me that being dead puts him at an unfair disadvantage, and my mother shouldn’t say things like that. He died just over a year ago. My mother and I had rattled about in our house afterward. At least, that’s what my mother always said: We’re rattling around in that house. People told her not to make any rash decisions, do nothing for the first year, but as soon as the year was up, she sold the rattly old house that I had loved and we’d packed up and come to live near my grandfather, and that’s how we got to be here. To make it more like a family. I think that was the plan. Only Grandpa is being contrary, wanting to go on living in his dingy little cottage. He doesn’t like the airy bungalow my mother chose, all large windows and views. He says it makes him feel as if he is on TV all the time. I can see his point. I don’t much like it either. So we live in our house and he lives in his, and it isn’t any more like a family than it was before, except that Grandpa lives nearby.
I sometimes wonder if dead people have special powers, like angels, and can read your mind. That is a spooky idea. Don’t have this idea in the middle of the night if you can help it. Especially not if you are thinking angry thoughts about the person who might have the special powers. Sometimes I am very angry with my dad for not being there. It’s all right to be angry. The bereavement counselor told me that, apparently, it’s all part of what they call the “grieving process.” But it doesn’t make that nice pat kind of sense in the dark for some reason. In the daytime, when things always seem less terrifying than at night, I try to compensate by thinking only nice thoughts about him. I hope he does the mind-reading thing in the daytime as well.
“Maybe you should have made me,” I said now, meaning about the music lessons. “I wish I loved something the way Gillian loves her violin.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do,” my mother said, in that vaguely reassuring way mothers do that especially irritates their daughters.
“Like what?” I asked, curling my lip. You read that in books, about people curling their lip, and it sounds a bit unlikely, but I have practiced it and I can do it pretty well now, though it is more a wave than a curl, I have to say. Still, you can’t say “waving my lip,” as that sounds ridiculous.
“Hmm?” said my mother again. She stopped knitting for a moment and put her knitting needle in her ear.
If I did that, she’d murder me. She’d tell me I was going to skewer my brain or something. But grown-ups can do what they like, can’t they? Up to a point, I mean. Don’t try this at home, by the way. I will not be liable if you skewer your brain. You have been warned.
“Sausages,” she said, after a moment’s thought.
She took the knitting needle out of her ear, gave the point a little wipe with her fingertips, and went on knitting, thinking that she had answered my question satisfactorily.
I sighed. Maybe she was right. Maybe there are just two kinds of people in the world: people who love the violin and lead beautiful lives and can make blackbirds swoop over woodland huts, and stodgy sausage-eaters who can only stare in wonder at the blackbirds and go back to chewing the gristly bits.
“I’m going to the woods,” I announced, standing up. “If you have no objection,” I added sarcastically, though my mother never gets sarcasm, ever.
“Well,” she said, “as long as you’re careful. You know I worry when you wander around by yourself. I wish you’d join the Girl Guides or something.”
“Mother! Read my lips: I—don’t—want—to—be—a—Girl—Guide. I’m not a joiner. I’m a lone wolf.”
“OK.” My mother sighed. I could practically hear her thinking, Little Red Riding Hood, more like. “Make sure your mobile’s charged, won’t you?”
“Yes, Mother,” I said, and I sighed too.
* * *
No violin girl today, I noted, as I passed under the stand of trees among which the foresters’ hut perched. Saturday. So, I had the forest to myself, the way I liked it, full of nothing except itself. I put my arms over my head and contorted my body into a delicious stretch. I had my lunch with me. I could spend all day here if I wanted to. It was a delightful, luxurious thought, though I hadn’t decided yet exactly what I was going to do with the day. I stretched again and flung my arms out and gave a little skip. That probably sounds a bit soupy, but if you are on your own in the forest, you can do that sort of thing. The thing is not to let anyone see you at it.
Still, I did sort of, just … wonder, when I saw the padlock at a stiff angle against the door. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t lonely or anything, or wishing to see them, but I just wondered, in an idle-curiosity sort of way, where Gillian was today, where her brother was, whether there were any other foresters to open up the hut and make the tea, and whether being Saturday was what made the difference.
Oh well, I thought, the Kit Kats are all eaten now anyway, so what’s to care about?
The fronds of silverweed gleamed underfoot on the woodland path under the hut, here and there spattered with the yellow glimmer of flowers. As I mooched along, fists in my pockets, I heard a movement among the tree roots: a rat maybe, or a squirrel. I stopped to watch. The scrabbling sound continued. I held my breath, waiting for the creature to emerge from the shifting undergrowth. The longer I stood, the closer I listened, the louder the sounds seemed to get. I thought I would surely hear breathing if only I listened closely enough. I peered toward the rustling, expecting a small mammal to scoot out of a pile of last autumn’s leaves at any moment.
A tiny sycamore sapling rose half a foot out of the browny moving ground and waved young leaves that were barely green. I peered harder. Then I saw it, partly hidden by the baby sycamore. It wasn’t a squirrel or a rat, but a bird, a black one, sleek, with an orange beak, heaving and hauling at something from beneath a stone. The bird pulled again and a worm came pink and wriggling out of the earth. The bird swallowed, the worm wriggled, the bird swallowed again, the worm disappeared. Then the bird looked right at me, its eyes beady and intelligent, as if it knew me. I scarcely dared to breathe, but I gave a shadow of a nod, as if in greeting. The bird hopped on both feet, stretched its wings, flapped them, and suddenly it was gone from me with a flurry and a whop, gone to a perch high out of my vision. I thought I got a warm whiff of birdwing, beneath the tang of pine and sap and the fresh woodland air, but I probably imagined it.
I turned away, and then I saw that there was a figure ahead of me on the woodland path, tall and spiky, like a tree in oilskins. Tim. He was waiting for me. I waved.
“Gillian couldn’t come today,” he said as I drew up alongside him, though I hadn’t asked. “She’s had news.”
“Ye-ers?” I said, in my woodland voice, anxious not to appear too interested, though of course I was. You can’t help it, can you? If someone mentions “news,” it is always curiosity-making. This is a good tip, by the way, if you are writing a story. You mention “news” and then you string it out interminably before you reveal to your reader what the news is.
“Good news. She said, if I saw you, to tell you to come over to the house, if you’re free.”
I wasn’t sure yet if I was free.
“I mean, ask you,” Tim corrected himself. “If you’d like to. It’s sausages for lunch.”
I fingered the sandwich in my raincoat pocket. I love tuna, but it felt suddenly flabby and slithery and unattractive in its clingfilm skin.
“Well then,” I said.
“Do you like sausages?” Tim asked.
“They’re all right,” I said. “Do you?”
“They’re all right,” he said, careful to give nothing away.
“What kind of good news?” I asked.
“She’d rather tell you herself. She said to say the blackbird is on the wing.” He gave a little wink.
My heart gave a funny thump when he said that.
“I know,” I said. “I saw him.”
“Oh, I don’t think she means an actual blackbird,” said Tim. “It’s like ‘The eagle has landed.’”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t, not really. “Where’s your house?”
“I’ll show you,” said Tim.
He walked on ahead of me for a bit, following the gradient of the woodland path as it skirted the mountainside on which the forest grew. The path got narrower as I fell in behind, keeping Tim’s yellow jacket always in view. After a few hundred meters of a climb, he turned off the path, in among the trees. I followed. He stopped under an old oak and turned to me.
“Climb to that bough there,” he said, pointing up into the tree.
“Do you live in a tree house?” I asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Well then,” I said, and climbed up to the place he had pointed out.
“Now,” called Tim—I was higher up than him now—“look out that way.” He pointed again.
I was still half expecting a tree house, or even a cottage deep in the woods, but he was pointing out of the forest, toward a sprawling housing estate, all white and red in the sunshine, like a Lego town.
“There?” I asked, peering down at him. It was strange to be able to see the top of his head. “In that sort of townie place?”
“Yes,” said Tim. “If you go straight downward from here, you’ll come to a stile at the edge of the woods; go over the stile, across that field, then two more fields—no stiles, you have to get through some barbed wire in the first, just find a gap in the hedge in the second, it’s easy enough—and you come out just below our house. It’s number twenty-seven, Oak Glade.”
“Oak Glade?” I said, coming down from my perch in the tree. “I see what you mean, that it’s not exactly a tree house—sounds like a tree house but isn’t.” I laughed. Or an air-freshener, but I didn’t say that part. I am not entirely tactless, you know.
Tim laughed too.
“Are you sure you don’t love sausages?” I asked.
“I do,” Tim admitted. “I love them.”
“I thought you might,” I said. I just knew he was one of us.
“But I can’t come with you,” he said. “I have to work. Are you going to go?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, just then realizing I’d had every intention all along of going. It wasn’t just because of the sausages. “Here,” I added, and I thrust a cold, smooth little parcel at him. “It’s tuna.”
“Next best to sausages,” he said with a grin. “Thanks.”
He shrugged a good-bye and I waved.
After I’d watched him trudge off down the hillside, I turned to go in the direction he’d pointed me in. The gradient of the hill was quite sharp here. I had to keep digging my heels into the rooty forest floor to keep myself from sliding headlong. I found the stile all right and crossed the fields to the outskirts of Legoville. Oak Glade was the first cul-de-sac. There were houses on one side only, facing a brambly ditch. Number 27 was on the corner.
I peered at my reflection in the shiny brass letterbox flap. It was like looking at a creature underwater, not much use to tell if my hair was mussed (more mussed than usual, that is) or my face streaked. I took out a tissue and rubbed my nose and cheeks with it, just in case. The reflection in the letterbox flap looked just the same, goldy and watery. I felt my hair-parting with the fingers of both hands and smoothed the hair down around it. Then I knocked.
Gillian
Honestly, she’s only half-civilized. She was kicking the doorstep when I opened the door to her.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “’Sjust a bitta mud. Won’t hurt.”
She kicked even harder at the doorstep.
“Take them off,” I said. I couldn’t have her clodhopping all over my mother’s carpet in her muddy shoes. “You can leave them on the porch. Do you want to borrow a pair of slippers?”
“No,” she said, crouching down to unknot her shoelaces. “Yes,” she added, when she saw the state of her socks.
I went and got her my slippers. They’re very pretty, pointy-toed mules, in rose pink, flower-embroidered satin. My mother gave them to me for Christmas. She goes in for theatrical presents.
Mags
They were like something out of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and they were too big, but at least they hid my shamefully poking toes.
“Who’s there, Gillian?” came a voice in dulcet tones from somewhere inside the house. You often hear people using that expression, but this really was like the voice the word dulcet was invented to describe.
“It’s Mags,” Gillian called over her shoulder. “I told you. I invited her to lunch.”
“Lunch!” came the disembodied voice again. “But we haven’t got any food in.”
“We have sausages,” Gillian called, “and French bread and that seedy mustard.”
“That’s not lunch,” complained the dulcet voice, “that’s picnic food.”
I giggled.
“Tell her you love sausages,” Gillian hissed to me.
“Who?” I asked. I felt a bit silly about addressing a voice belonging to someone I couldn’t see.
“My mother. She gets fussed when people call. She thinks we have to have epergnes and things in aspic and fish mould when we have guests, and dessert forks.”
I hadn’t a clue what she was on about, but I stuck my head in and shouted, “I love sausages, Mrs.… Mrs., er?”
The house smelled of roses, sweet and warm and pink. It was like putting your head into a pomander.
“Call her Zelda,” Gillian muttered.
“Zelda! Is that her name?” I thought maybe she’d made it up, the way I made up Miranda.
“Of course it’s her name.”
“OK,” I said with a shrug, and I called out again: “I love sausages for lunch, Zelda, that’d be lovely, thank you for asking me.”
There was no reply.
“She’s probably wandered off someplace,” Gillian explained. “She has the concentration span of a very small tadpole.”
I giggled again. I am not a giggly type, as you can probably gather, but this place was making me nervous.
“Come in,” she said, holding the door open wider, and I shuffled past her, curling my toes to keep the Ali Baba slippers on.
“You’ve got a pink carpet,” I said, though I didn’t really think this detail had escaped Gillian’s attention. It’s just that I couldn’t not remark on it.
“I don’t choose the color schemes,” she said stiffly, in a voice that suggested she thought I probably lived under a tree root, like a Hobbit, with an earthen floor and cave paintings on the walls.
The kitchen wasn’t pink. I don’t suppose you can buy pink stuff for kitchens. Let’s be thankful for small mercies.
“Tim said you had some good news,” I said as I watched her turning the sausages under the grill.
“Yes!” she said, doing a little twirl. She had put a tea towel around her waist as an apron and she whipped it off now and flung it into the air.
“Yesssss!” she yelped again, catching the tea towel and laughing. “Wait till you hear!”
The sausages spat suddenly under the grill and a blue flame shot out with a hiss.
“The sausages are burning,” I said. I wasn’t trying to stop her from telling me her wonderful news, just so I
could spin out the story a bit, but I didn’t want the house burning down all the same.
“Blast!”
She folded the tea towel quickly to use as an oven glove and pulled the flaming grillpan out from under the grill. She set it down on the cooker top and waited for the flame to burn itself out.
“I like them charred,” I said, looking at the blackened mess of sausages. It’s true, I do, but I said it to be helpful.
Gillian didn’t look impressed with my helpfulness. She glared at me.
“Zelda will be furious,” she said. “She makes such a fuss about everything.”
“Never mind,” I said. “You can tell her your good news and that will take her mind off it.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I can’t do that. I can’t tell her until she’s in a good mood. You never know how she might take it.”
“Well,” I said, “why don’t we eat these and you can cook another batch for her, and she need never know.”
Gillian shook her head. “She won’t eat them anyway. She only eats sushi, because it’s so pretty.”
I gulped. I couldn’t tell you whether sushi is pretty. I’ve never seen any. And by the way, this is not one of those books where people get anorexia. She just doesn’t eat much, OK?
“Well, let’s make hot dogs of them,” I said, “and hide them in the bread,” and I started to stuff that lovely squidgy-in-the-middle bread they had with the blackened sausages.
“Eating in the kitchen?” came Zelda’s voice from behind me. I jumped. I hadn’t heard her coming in.
I turned round and gaped at her. She looked just like her name: slim, poised, impossibly beautiful, with perfect pink-and-white skin, a tiny rosy mouth, and a pert little nose. Her auburn hair flicked itself into baby ringlets as it fell around her shoulders. She looked as if she couldn’t possibly be anyone’s mother. She looked about seventeen, except for her severely creased gray trousers (I bet she calls them “slacks” like my granny used to) and silver-gray polo neck and the grown-up way she wore her sleeves pushed up almost to the elbows. I couldn’t imagine how this doll could be related to the—er, shall we say—less-than-elegant Gillian, with her long neck and dull little face.
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