Witch Baby and Me

by Debi Gliori

  RULE NUMBER TWO: Witch Babies can only do one spell at a time, so if you need to break a spell, try to distract your baby. Offer it something else to play with. Babies like objects that are bright, shiny and noisy, especially if they belong to other people and are accompanied by the words,

  The rules work very well. Almost too well.

  ‘No, Daisy,’ I said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch Mum’s very precious, sparkly glass bowl.’ I may even have added an ‘Oooo’ for effect. Anyway, that was how Witch Baby grew bored with playing with the fridge, put it back down, made the precious, sparkly bowl fly and learned how loudly Mum can shriek.

  ‘NOOOOOO!’ shrieked Mum. ‘PUT MY ANTIQUE CRYSTAL PUNCH BOWL DOWN RIGHT NOW!’

  Three:

  A little bit of slug

  I DON’T KNOW if Daisy really meant to turn me into a slug, but it doesn’t matter. The fact is, I am a mollusc and I will remain a mollusc unless I find a way to break the spell and turn back into me. How? I have no idea. I’m only a slug. I have slithered and slipped up the wheel, crawled along the shopping tray and hauled myself onto the handle of Daisy’s pushchair, but it’s no good. I can’t distract Daisy because I have no voice, no legs, no hands and no way of grabbing hold of my little sister and yelling, ‘OK – ENOUGH ALREADY. HA HA HA. SO FUNNY. NOT. NOW STOP.’

  Not that she’d listen. She’s too busy going, ‘LILY LILY LIIIILY,’ and rocking from side to side in her pushcha—

  Uh-oh.

  We’re moving. The pushchair’s wheels are turning. We’re rolling downhill. The garden behind the Old Station House slopes down to a pond. This is bad news because we’re hurtling towards the pond and I can’t make us stop. Slugs can’t work brakes. Now Daisy has gone quiet. This may be because we’re going so fast her face is pinned back against her pushchair and she can’t prise her lips apart to scream any more. If I wasn’t a slug, I’d be screaming,

  And finally,

  Fortunately, the water in the pond only comes up to my knees, and if Daisy can wail, then obviously she isn’t drowning either. We’re alive. WE’RE ALIVE!

  Hang on a minute.

  I look at Witch Baby.

  She looks back at me and stops going

  ‘Oh, Lilil,’ she says, then she gives a little cackle and claps her chubby hands with delight. she says, obviously feeling very pleased with herself. ‘Whee, whee, way is WayWoof?’

  Ah. WayWoof. I wondered when we’d get round to him.

  Four:

  Enter WayWoof

  LISTEN. THE CHIN and the Toad are having an argument. Inside their house, glasses shatter and raised voices shriek, crackle and croak. Sparks fly up their chimney into the darkness.

  ‘That blasted dog. It’s all your fault!’ the Chin bawls.

  ‘I wasn’t the one who opened the front door,’ whines the Toad.

  ‘No, but you should have stopped it.’

  ‘But . . . but I couldn’t,’ bleats the Toad. ‘It was the day after we’d found our Witch Baby. I was tired. I wasn’t thinking straight. The dog ran straight past me. By the time I reached it—’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. We’ve all heard it a thousand times. By the time you managed to drag your warty old lazybones out of your chair and hobbled after the dog, it had leaped into the fireplace—’

  ‘What could I have done to stop it?’ The Toad is nearly in tears. ‘How was I to know that the ashes were still full of magic from the night before? I mean, come on. The dog just seemed to vanish up the chimney—’

  ‘And the damage was done,’ interrupted the Nose. ‘And no amount of argument can undo it.’

  A deep silence falls. The Sisters shiver at the memory.

  ‘Throw another human on the fire, dear,’ begs the Chin. ‘There’s a chill in the air tonight.’ WayWoof is Daisy’s invisible dog. Imagine a cross between a dog, a wolf and a dustbin, and that’s WayWoof. Daisy and I can see WayWoof, but Mum, Dad and Jack can’t. He looks like a dog, howls like a wolf and smells far worse than a dustbin. I have no idea why he smells so bad, but he does. Sorry, WayWoof.

  On the day we brought Mum and Baby Daisy home from the hospital, WayWoof moved in. At first nobody noticed him, because we were busy playing with our new baby. But WayWoof was busy too. He was busy making smells all over our house. As we ooh-ed and ahh-ed over Baby Daisy, WayWoof was making pongs in the kitchen, silent-but-deadlies in the bathroom and stenches in the hall.

  I didn’t know it was WayWoof making all the smells. I couldn’t see him properly at first. Then, he looked like a patch of shadow moving across the floor. I think Daisy was too small to magic him properly. Brand-new Witch Babies probably have to learn how to do spells, just like they have to learn how to do everything else.

  So, for a little while, I had no idea where the awful whiffs were coming from. Secretly, I blamed Daisy’s nappy. But to be honest, I hardly thought about the smell because shortly after Daisy was born, Mum and Dad decided it was time for us to move house. To my horror, they said we were all going to move to a house a long, long way from Edinburgh. Two hundred miles away. I couldn’t believe it at first. I was going to move two hundred miles away from my best friends, Ally, Jen and Frieda? I’d never see them again?

  Did this mean I was going to miss Ally’s birthday party?

  Yes.

  Who would Jen tell all her deepest secrets to after I left?

  Someone else.

  And Frieda? I’d never find a friend who made me laugh like she did.

  Never.

  This was the worst thing that had ever happened. I was furious with Mum and Dad for doing this to me. I cried myself to sleep for a month.

  My eyes went all puffy and my nose was so bunged up with all the crying that I couldn’t smell anything at all, not even WayWoof. Not that I knew he even existed, back then. However, one night, a few weeks before the Big Move, I heard Daisy in her cot, laughing as if she was being tickled.

  ‘Hahahahaha,’ she giggled. ‘Wayoo, Wayoo, Wayoo.’

  I stuck my head into her room and saw WayWoof.

  I screamed. ‘There’s a huge DOG in Daisy’s room!’

  Problem was, nobody but me and Witch Baby could see him. Mum said I was probably having nightmares about our Big Move because she couldn’t see any dogs in Daisy’s bedroom, and besides, it was past midnight and could we all please go back to sleep? When she’d stomped back to bed, Dad came to tuck me in and said maybe the reason I could see WayWoof and he couldn’t was because I was born under a blue moon. Jack said something very rude, but he couldn’t see WayWoof either. Mind you, WayWoof could have been a thirteen-metre fire-snorting dragon with diarrhoea and Jack still wouldn’t have noticed him. But guess what? Even though they couldn’t see WayWoof, they could smell him just fine. And guess who they thought was making the terrible smells?

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Mum said, fanning the air in front of her face. ‘Bit of an upset tummy, Lily darling?’

  Dad went for the straight-to-the-point, no-nonsense, direct approach. ‘LILY. For heaven’s sake. Was that you?’

  So embarrassing. So unfair. Sometimes I feel as if I’m an alien that’s landed in the middle of a nice, ordinary Earth family.1

  Nobody else in my family (apart from Daisy, obviously) can tell that Daisy is a Witch Baby.

  Nobody else in my family was born under a blue moon.2

  Nobody else in my family (apart from Daisy) can see WayWoof.

  WayWoof has his good points, though. For one thing, Witch Baby loves him to bits. When she sees him, she wraps her arms round WayWoof’s hairy neck, closes her eyes and makes little cooing sounds. In return, WayWoof closes his eyes and pants. It’s hard to tell if this means WayWoof is enjoying himself because he closes his eyes and pants a lot of the time.

  Another good thing about WayWoof is that when he’s around, Daisy can’t cast any spells. WayWoof needs Daisy to concentrate on him or he just fades away to nothing. When WayWoof is absent, I start to worry that Daisy’s Up To No Good. WayWoof is like an early-
warning incoming-spell alarm. As long as WayWoof is around, I can relax and breathe easy.

  No. I didn’t mean that.

  Breathe easy is the last thing I can do when WayWoof appears. I need a gas mask to breathe when he’s around. But at least, if I can see him, that means I’m safe from Daisy turning me into a slug, or worse. And here comes WayWoof now, galloping towards us, tongue lolling and a tell-tale cloud of gas trailing from his tail end. If he wasn’t so stinky, he’d really be very sweet. Daisy and I are soaking wet from falling in the pond, but WayWoof doesn’t mind. He’s delighted to see us, no matter what state we’re in. Which is more than can be said for Mum. Just as I realize how much mud is clinging to Daisy and me, Mum appears.

  ‘There you are, my poppets,’ she says. Then she notices the mess. Slimy pond-weed drips from the pushchair, Daisy looks like she’s been dipped in poo up to her middle, and my best pink T-shirt looks like a giant blew his nose on it. To make things even worse, WayWoof immediately sits down and lets rip.

  Mum blinks rapidly, then coughs, but I’m not sure if that’s because she smells WayWoof or because we’re so dirty. In a tiny little voice, she says, ‘Oh, why are you both so filthy?’

  This is one of those grown-up questions that doesn’t have a right answer. In nine years, two months and three days on Planet Earth, I have learned that when Mum asks one of those kinds of questions, the best things to do are:

  a) avoid eye contact

  b) hang head (to try and look as if I’m really, really sorry)

  c) shuffle feet (I have no idea what this is for, but I’ve seen Jack do it and it seems to work).

  Mum goes, ‘Why on earth clothes muddy

  I go hang head,

  Witch Baby goes, Mumma, Lilil, WayWoof.’

  And Way Woof goes . . .

  Cough. Pass the gas masks.

  * * *

  1 Nice and ordinary, except for the youngest family member who happens to be a Witch baby, but let’s not quibble.

  2 Whatever that is.

  Five:

  A bit of glitter

  MUM HAULS US indoors to change out of our mud-and slime-caked clothes. We wash the bits that need washing and wipe the rest off on towels. Mum wants to tell us about her Plan. We’ve only just moved into the Old Station House and already she’s Planning Things. I wish she’d Plan to move out of the Old Station House and back to Edinburgh, but that isn’t going to happen. My heart sinks. When am I ever going to stop missing my old house? Mum doesn’t seem to miss it at all.

  ‘Now, darlings . . .’

  Any Plan that begins like this spells trouble. When Mum starts a sentence with ‘Now, darlings,’ I always think, Uh-oh.

  ‘Now, darlings,’ she repeats, smiling hugely, ‘wouldn’t it be a brilliant idea if we threw a party to help us get to know our neighbours. Not a huge party. Just a teeny, weeny little get-together. Some drinks, nibbles, maybe a barbecue . . .’

  All Mum’s awful Plans start off like this. Small. Teeny, weeny. Nothing huge. Then they start to grow and G R O W. Mum gets a glint in her eye and starts making lists. Long lists of food to buy and things to cook. This is because Mum loves cooking. The more people she has to feed, the happier she is. She likes nothing better than making pizzas as big as duvets. She loves baking chocolate meringue cakes that are so tall you could sledge down them. All my friends used to love coming to my house for tea when we lived in Edinburgh. I had loads of friends there. Will I ever make any friends here? I don’t even know if there’s anybody my age living nearby. If there isn’t, I’ll have to wait till school starts to meet anyone. Maybe Mum’s Plan to meet the neighbours isn’t such a bad idea. Just so long as she doesn’t overdo it.

  ‘Mind you, Lily, I’ve always fancied trying that recipe for suckling pig and that’s supposed to feed forty, so . . .’

  See? She’s overdoing it. We haven’t even unpacked our stuff from Edinburgh yet. I don’t know where all my books are, Jack’s lost his CDs and Dad can’t find his stinky old trainers. We are all hoping Dad never finds his stinky old trainers. Secretly, we are all hoping that the removal men ate them. But the point is, we can’t even find our important stuff, yet there’s Mum going on about unimportant stuff like candles, flowers, napkins, tablecloths, a big white tent in the back garden . . .

  I have to make her stop.

  She stops and blinks at me as if she’s never really seen me before. The glint in her eyes fades away and she looks like Mum again.

  ‘Heavens, Lily. Whatever was I thinking of? We want to meet the neighbours, not marry them. Let’s just have a cheese-wine-bread-crisps-and-dips kind of party. A quiet little get-to-know-our-neighbours party. What d’you think, Lil?’

  Sounds good to me. I love parties. I love dressing up and staying up late. Then I remember that because we’ve moved house, I won’t know anyone at this party. Maybe there won’t even be anyone there that’s my age (nine). A grown-ups only party? That would be awful. Grown-up parties are no fun at all. What I want is a proper party. Proper paties have cake, balloons and conjurers. At proper parties, someone is always sick. Sometimes, after a proper party, my friends are allowed to stay for a sleepover.

  Then I remember all over again. We have moved house. We don’t live in Edinburgh any more. This time, there’s no way Ally, Jen and Frieda are going to stay for a sleepover after the party. Not when they live more than two hundred miles away. I miss my friends so much it makes my throat hurt and my eyes prickle. Suddenly the party doesn’t feel like such a great idea after all. I don’t want to get to know lots of new people. I was perfectly happy with the people I used to know. But Mum knows this. She doesn’t need to hear me say it all over again. Just like I don’t need to hear Dad’s list of reasons why we had to move here all over again.

  Money.

  Jobs.

  Houses.

  Schools.

  Somewhere for me to practise playing my embarrassingly loud musical instrument1 without the neighbours complaining.

  I look up. Mum is staring at me. Did she just ask me a question?

  ‘Um, right,’ I guess. ‘The party? Mmmm. Sounds . . . great.’

  ‘And?’ Mum rolls her eyes. ‘I knew you weren’t really listening. What I said was, I need your help, darling. First of all, I thought you and Daisy could help me make some party invitations.’

  Daisy’s the first to tell Mum what she thinks of that for an idea.

  she mutters, toddling off into the kitchen.2 WayWoof heaves a huge sigh and follows behind. Time for a quick pit-stop. Lucky Mum.

  A little later, we get down to the business of making party invitations. Pretty soon, there’s a damp and gluey pile of invitations drying on the kitchen table and an unspeakable nappy in the dustbin.

  Daisy now looks as if she’s been dipped in glue and rolled in glitter. Every bit of her shines and sparkles. She looks exactly like a small and grubby Christmas tree decoration. She looks really sweet. You could almost forget she is the same Daisy who turned me into a slug. I suspect that even Daisy forgets that she’s a Witch Baby sometimes. While she was concentrating on making the invitations and covering herself in glitter, she must have forgotten to think about WayWoof. Daisy can only manage to concentrate on one thing at a time, so when she was sprinkling glitter, Way Woof just f . . . a . . . d . . . e . . . d away.

  For now, that is. He’ll be back, but hopefully not for a while. Because the next stage in Mum’s Plan is for Daisy and me to deliver the invitations round all the houses. We will have to ring doorbells and knock on doors and actually hand the invitations over because most of the houses round here don’t have letter boxes. No, I don’t know why either. The last thing I need when we’re handing out our gluey, sparkly home-made invitations is for WayWoof to suddenly appear by my side. What an introduction.

  Hi, I’m Lily. I’m your new neighbour with no friends, and here’s my little sister Daisy the Witch Baby, and here’s our dog who is actually a wolf crossed with a major gas leak.

  Yeah. Gre
at. Welcome to the neighbourhood.

  * * *

  1 Don’t ask.

  2 This doesn’t mean Daisy thinks Mum’s idea is full of poo; it means that Daisy has filled her nappy.

  Six:

  A barking rug

  LUNCH IS PEANUT butter and Marmite on toast for everyone except Daisy. She has mashed avocado on crackers. Daisy likes eating things that look like they’ve been dredged out of the bottom of a swamp.

  ‘Mmmm numm,’ she says, holding out a half-sucked cracker for me to try.

  ‘Yum,’ I lie, adding politely, ‘Thank you, Daisy.’

  Daisy frowns. Evidently she was hoping for more. Mum has her head in the fridge so she doesn’t see Daisy turn into the Swamp Maiden. I do, and it’s not pretty. The Swamp Maiden grins disgustingly as she pokes two stumpy fingers into her wide green nostrils. She rummages around in there for ages, as if she’s lost something. For some reason I can’t turn away, can’t close my eyes, can’t do anything except watch helplessly as Daisy the Swamp Maiden gets stuck in. Now she’s got her hands up her nose, now her arms, now she’s up to her shoulders . . . It’s horrible, it’s gruesome, but I have to admit, it’s also utterly fascinating. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over.