Back in the house, Mam lit the range, and they sat by the warm glow of it, Aunty in her big old rocker, Mam on the stool, Mup on the pouffe by Aunty’s feet.
“What’s the queen like?” asked Mam.
“I’ve told you before,” said Aunty. “Your mother is cold, broken, dangerous. She’ll destroy you.”
Mup nodded earnestly – this was something they all knew. Aunty had told them: Mam’s mam was bad. Mam’s mam was dangerous. She must never be spoken of. But Aunty had also told them that as long as everyone behaved, the queen would leave them alone. Hesitantly, Mup chanced a new question (after all, on so strange a night wasn’t it possible any question might be answered?): “Aunty, why … why did the queen send witches for Mam?”
Aunty sighed. She glanced at Mam. “To see what you are like, maybe? Now that I’m gone and you’re next in line to the throne. To see if you’re a threat?”
Mup looked at her mam’s tired face. A threat? Could Mam – vague, dreamy, distant and a little disorganized – ever be considered a threat?
“Perhaps she hopes I’d be an asset,” said Mam quietly.
There was a long silence. “Your mother would never consider you an asset, Stella. Don’t fool yourself of that. You made the right choice staying here. You and the babies are safe now.”
The phone rang sharply, and the two women glanced at it.
“Let it ring,” said Aunty. “It’s not like we don’t know who it is.”
The phone rang. It rang. It rang. Mup closed her eyes. This time it was easy to bridge the gap to the other end of the line – in her mind she saw a doctor in the big white corridor of the hospital in the city. He was the nice man who had been taking care of Aunty. His slim brown face was sad. On the tenth ring, he put the receiver down with a shake of his head.
In the quiet that followed, Mup looked up. Mam’s eyes were filled with tears.
“So,” she said to Aunty, “you’re gone.”
Aunty nodded. “I’m gone.”
“Will you not be coming back?” asked Mup. Was that possible? Life without Aunty? It didn’t feel real.
“I’m going to be so lonely, Aunty,” said Mam.
“Sure haven’t I made you this lovely home?”
“I’ve no friends. I’ve no sisters. I’m all on my own.”
“Not quite.” Aunty gently pushed Mup’s shoulder. “Go give your mam a hug, Pearl.”
Mup went and wrapped her arms around Mam and held tight. Mam loosely closed her arms about her.
“Well,” said Aunty, softly. “Guess I’d better go.”
She kissed the top of Mup’s head. She placed the palm of her hand on Mam’s cheek. Outside, the sun rose above the trees and painted the kitchen with the finest lemon light. It seemed to wash Aunty from the air.
Mup pressed her face in against Mam. The quietness of the house closed in. It was a strange, heavy kind of quiet. Uncomfortable. Was this what the world felt like without Aunty? Mup could feel Mam moving her head left and right, then left again, as if she was looking all around the room. Perhaps she was looking at the empty chair and the empty table, and Aunty’s empty slippers by the stove.
Aunty was gone. She was gone.
Mup clenched her arms tighter. “You still have us, Mam,” she whispered. “Me and Tipper and Dad.”
Mam did not reply, and at last Mup looked up.
“Oh,” she said, startled. “What’s happened to the light?”
Everything seemed brittle and over-bright. The cups, the table, the cooker, the fridge – all of it glittered, strangely flat. Even Badger, asleep in his spot by the fridge, seemed not to breathe.
Mam stood up from Mup’s arms. She went to peer down the hall.
Mup ran to her, and slowly they began to walk from room to silent room.
“Is he breathing?” asked Mup, peering between the bars into Tipper’s cot.
“Yes,” said Mam. “Don’t wake him.”
“Tipper will miss Aunty, won’t he, Mam?”
Mam didn’t answer. She frowned out into the garden as she cracked the curtains, causing a spear of sunshine to shaft across the room. It illuminated the circus mobile which Aunty had hung over Tipper’s cot. The paper figures were heavy as glass on their cobwebby strings – all the monkeys and elephants and tigers, motionless. Mup touched a finger to the ringmaster’s painted leg. He glittered and spun and came immediately to rest.
“Everything feels…” Mup searched for the word.
“Fragile,” said Mam. “Ready to break.”
The two of them jumped as a blast of static shattered the stillness.
“The witches!” cried Mup.
Mam shook her head. “It’s not them,” she said. “Don’t wake your brother.”
Tipper was peaceful as a pillow in his cot, his chubby hands thrown up either side of his round face, his eyelids lightly closed. The blaring noise didn’t seem to bother him at all.
“Watch him,” said Mam, moving out into the hall. Mup watched him for as long as it took to back to the door, then she followed her mother to the kitchen, where the noise seemed to originate.
It was the TV. It had somehow switched itself on. Mam was standing in the doorway, gazing at it, and as Mup came up behind her, the screen flicked all by itself from one empty channel to another, before settling on the news. It showed a helicopter leaning drunkenly in a field, dazed men in jumpsuits being helped from the door. Mam strode across and turned up the sound.
“… four hours after the helicopter from the North Sea oil rig went missing, search-and-rescue were amazed to discover it in this field in Cornwall. The crew and passengers are said to be disoriented but unharmed. Concern has been expressed, however, for crew member Daniel Taylor, who – despite having been named on the flight list – is nowhere to be found. Concerns that Mr Taylor may have fallen from the craft are being discounted as ‘unlikely’. However, the crew seems to have little knowledge of the circumstances of his disappearance, nor of how they managed to be blown so radically off course.”
“Daniel Taylor,” said Mup quietly. “That’s Dad.”
Mam pressed the TV to mute.
“Mam,” insisted Mup. “They’re talking about Dad!”
Instead of answering, Mam flung open the back door, where she stood in a flood of frosty sunshine, staring down to the shadow-drenched trees that hemmed the garden. Mup moved to her side. There was a cat in the shelter of the trees. It dipped its chin when it saw Mup’s mother, and tilted its head as if in greeting to her. Mup did not feel at all surprised when it spoke.
“Highness,” it said. “Will you cross?”
Mam’s fingers closed tight against the wood of the door frame. “Has the queen taken my husband?”
The cat wagged its head, maybe yes, maybe no. “There are any amount of folk interested in tempting the heir back over the border, now your aunt is not around to stop us. Who knows which of them might have taken your man, hoping to draw you across.”
“That’s my dad you’re talking about!” cried Mup. “Give him back!”
The cat huffed. It lifted its luminous eyes to Mam. “Will you rescue him? After all, who else will, if you do not? A spawn of earth lost in the Glittering Land – who else would bother to care? You do recall how to cross, don’t you, Highness? The duchess hasn’t so addled your instincts that you can’t recall your way home.”
“This is her home!” cried Mup.
The cat tutted and rose to its feet, turning away as if to go.
Mup ran forward. “Bring back my dad!”
“You needn’t have stolen him,” shouted Mam from the doorway. “Why didn’t you just ask me to come home? Why did you assume you had to take?”
The cat’s eyes slid to where Mup stood angrily between them. “Why indeed?” it said, and with a final sneer, it walked away into the shadows. In the unnatural stillness of the morning, the sound of the river beyond the trees was very loud. The cat seemed to disappear into it.
Mam stormed back into
the kitchen and began taking things from cupboards – baby bottles, nappies, wipes. “Get your boots,” she told Mup grimly. “Get your coat. Wrap up warm.”
“Are we going to cross the border?”
Mam paused, then recommenced throwing things into Tipper’s baby bag. “Yes,” she said.
“To rescue Dad?”
“Yes.”
Heart racing, Mup ran to tell Aunty what they were planning. It was only when she opened the door, and Aunty’s bedroom greeted her with all its quietness, that she remembered.
The sun glowed through the yellow curtains and lay on the neat bed, and it seemed unlikely that Aunty, all moonlight now and strangeness, would be there. Still Mup whispered, “Aunty? We’re crossing the border. We’re going to rescue Dad.”
The room seemed to have nothing to say about that, though Mup listened very hard, hoping.
After a moment she gently closed the door. “Well,” she said, borrowing Aunty’s favourite phrase, “we’ll just have to manage as we are.”
She decided it was probably best not to go on a rescue mission dressed only in her pyjamas and so she hurried to her room and flung open her wardrobe. She pulled on her warmest tights – the stripy ones that looked like rainbows. She pulled on her fluffy purple socks and she pulled on her favourite wellingtons – not the sensible, grown-up black ones, but the old lime-green ones, the ones with the faces like frogs.
There was something about the witches – their cold, dark eyes, maybe, their fluttering black clothes – that made Mup want colours. Not just colours but colours: COLOURS! She put on her scarlet wool dress and over the top of that her pink tutu with the skirt made of tulle. The tutu was a little tight over her scarlet dress, but it was covered in spangles and when Mup turned in front of the mirror, she sent rays of light shooting out into the sluggish air.
Good, she thought.
Mam was in Tipper’s room, changing Tipper’s bum and getting him ready. Mup could hear that he was not quite awake. She ran past his room, pulling on her red jacket. In the kitchen she rummaged out her favourite hat – the orange one with a rabbit’s face and ears on it. She jammed it over her unruly cloud of black hair, and took Badger’s lead down from its hook. She chose the new lead that Dad had bought Badger for Christmas. It was blue with little yellow bones on it. (Colours, she thought. Colours!)
It took a long while to wake Badger. He just didn’t seem to want to. But eventually she got him to his feet. By the time Mam had finished with Tipper and came into the kitchen, Mup was standing by the back door, with Badger on his lead, a school bag on her back (sandwiches, a flask of orange juice, a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps, and two green apples), ready to go.
Tipper was in his carrier on Mam’s back, and he looked at Mup sideways from around the bottle he was sleepily sucking down. There wasn’t much of him to see between the thick hat he wore, his bottle and the side of Mam’s head, but he waved a cheerfully mittened hand, and Mup solemnly waved back.
Mam was dressed in jeans and a sensible raincoat, hiking boots and a cream-coloured hat. She came to a halt in the kitchen doorway, apparently startled at the sight of her daughter’s clothes. Mup felt unsure suddenly. Aunty had never liked it when clothes stood out too much. Maybe this outfit was one of those she’d have frowned at?
Mup smoothed her tutu. “Am I too sparkly?” she asked Mam.
Mam seemed to swallow something down into her chest. She adjusted the heavy baby bag on her shoulder. “You can never be too sparkly, Mup.”
Mup nodded.
Mam opened the door and sunshine lit the room. “Let’s go rescue Dad.”
“Aren’t we taking the car?”
“No.”
“How will we get there?”
Mam just kept walking through the brittle sunshine, heading for the shadowy trees at the end of the back garden. She took Mup’s hand. This was a surprise. Mup tried not to “hang off” her or be “too hot” – things that usually made Mam let go – and they held hands all the way across the lawn and into the shade.
Aunty had never allowed Mup in under these trees. The air had a thick, syrupy feeling to it here, as if the world were asleep and she were walking through its dream. At first, spears of light hit off her dress and made the surrounding trunks sparkle. But soon the trees grew denser and the sparkles stopped. Badger, reluctant at the end of his lead, looked longingly back the way they’d come. There were only golden fragments of garden visible now through the crowding branches. The scent of pine was sharp, the sound of the river much louder than Mup had ever heard.
They broke suddenly into sunshine, and the air roared with the noise of the river.
Mup shaded her eyes against the water-dazzle; she could barely see the other side.
I never knew the stream was that wide, she thought.
“Is this the border?” she shouted.
“Yes,” Mam yelled back. “I remember it from when I was little.”
“I always thought the border was far away?”
Mup could hardly hear Mam when she muttered, “The border’s never far away. No matter where you run, it’s always just around the corner.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” cried a familiar voice, and they turned to see Aunty rippling like sun-dapple within the darkness of the trees. Mup cried out in delight, but Mam clamped down on her hand, stopping her from running forward.
“Aunty,” said Mam softly. “You should have passed over by now. You know it’s not good to hang around.”
The sparkly Aunty-shape flung out its arms in exasperation. “But what choice do I have? I’m only gone for one second and you’re already running back to your mother!”
“I’m crossing over to rescue Daniel!”
“You’re walking right into her arms! You’ll end up locked in a dungeon, dead in a gibbet or worse!”
“Well, what do you want me to do? Leave Daniel to the same fate?”
Aunty shrugged. “You could always find another husband,” she suggested weakly.
“Aunty,” gasped Mup. “Why would you say that? You like my dad!”
Mam growled. “You should be ashamed, old lady. I thought you crossed the border to get away from that kind of callous behaviour.”
“Well, you can’t take those babies with you.”
“I’m not a baby,” said Mup. Aunty gave her a sharp look, and Mup squared her shoulders. “I’m not,” she said, straightening her rabbit-eared hat.
“Me the baby!” yelled Tipper, bopping Mam on the head with his bottle. “Me the baby!”
Mam lifted her hand to deflect the bottle’s blows, her eyes fixed on Aunty. “I won’t abandon Daniel,” she said. She turned back to the river, but she looked a little uncertain now, all laden down with bags and baby, her face light-splashed and glittery, staring across to the unseen far bank. Mup grabbed her hand supportively. Mam looked down at her in surprise.
“I’m not what I used to be!” warned Aunty. “If you go over there, I won’t be able to help you!”
“Well,” said Mam softly, gazing into Mup’s eyes, “I’ll just have to make do with what I’ve got, then. Are you ready, Mup?”
Mup nodded.
Mam tugged the straps of Tipper’s carrier, tightened her grip on Mup’s hand and together they stepped onto the gurgling surface of the water.
Look how the water ripples around my toes! thought Mup as they took one step then another out into the dancing light. It’s a good job I wore my wellingtons.
“Fishy!” cried Tipper from somewhere high above. “Fishyfish! Fishy!”
Mam quickened her step. “Think floaty thoughts!” she called, raising her voice above the river’s roar. “Think purposeful! Think crossing thoughts!”
Crossing thoughts, thought Mup. Purposeful… What does “purposeful” mean?
Behind her, Badger was slipping and sliding about. He seemed not to know what was expected of him on the river’s tumbling surface. Mup tugged his lead. “Think floaty thoughts, Badger!” s
he yelled. “Think purposeful!”
Badger yowled and spun like a leaf on the end of his lead. Then his feet broke through the surface of the water, and – first knee-deep, then shoulder-deep – he began swimming, a horrified, chin-lifted doggy-paddle in the blinding chaos of light.
“Leave him behind!” yelled Mam.
As if in panic at the suggestion, Badger yowled again and tried to doggy-paddle over to Mup, but he was sinking fast. Soon only his eyes and his desperately upturned snout were visible above the surface.
“Leave him behind, Mup!” yelled Mam again. She was nothing now but a voice and a hand leading to an arm that was swallowed by water-dazzle. “He’ll drag us down!”
“I can’t leave Badger!”
Badger went under, sucked from sight as quick as a blink. Mup – still clinging to his lead – was pulled down with his weight. The water gave way with a plooping sound, and next she knew she had broken through its rushing surface and plunged after her dog.
How different it was under water. How green and still and cool when compared to the turmoil above. Badger was frantically paddling below her, his eyes upturned to hers. The bright blue lead with all its cheerful little bones stretched between them, preventing him from being whipped away by the current. He doggy-paddled in a wide circle and barked a bright stream of bubbles.
I have you, Badger! thought Mup. I have you. I won’t let you go!
Overhead, Mam’s hand fiercely held her by the wrist. Mup could see the thick crimped soles of Mam’s hiking boots puncturing the surface with every step. She could see Mam’s wavery outline where she was hunched over, trying to keep hold of Mup and stay above the water at the same time. Mup was certain that up there in the sunshine Mam was still yelling at her to let go of Badger.
Suddenly the water split and Mup plunged even lower as her mam dropped, waist-deep, into the gloom. Mup briefly saw Mam’s face, goggle-eyed and frantic, all surrounded in bubbles, then Mam managed to pull her head above the water, and all that could be seen were her bicycling legs, the bottom of Tipper’s little boots paddling the surface of the water, and Mam’s arm stretched down, clinging furiously to Mup’s wrist.
Begone the Raggedy Witches Page 3