Indigo's Star

by Hilary McKay

  Only Rose was where she should not be.

  Saffron and Sarah searched the town’s two art shops. The smart one that Bill patronised when forced to buy stock out of London (‘You expect to have to pay if you want quality’) and the scruffy one, (which also sold birthday cards, fireworks and unbelievably cheap watches), where Eve always went because they gave fantastic discounts on squashed tubes of paint.

  Rose was in neither of these places.

  Rose was with Tom. They were standing on top of the concrete box that covered the ventilation shaft on the highest level of the multi-storey car park. No one was about. Nobody ever parked up there, except in the weeks before Christmas.

  Rose felt quite safe. If she fell it would only be the few feet to the car park below. She was telling Tom how frightened Indigo used to be of heights, and how he had almost, but not quite cured himself by abseiling out of his bedroom window.

  From so high up Rose and Tom could look right down into the market place. It looked beautifully organised. The people (little moving blurs of colour to Rose) seemed unhesitatingly to follow predestined routes among the stalls. Tom pointed out the skateboarders, who he said he was controlling with his Programmable Invisible Remote Control Skateboard Handset. Everyone had programmable skateboards in America, he explained to Rose, and they were very useful. Mothers and fathers put their little kids on them, programmed in the co-ordinates, and sent them round the park for hours on end, perfectly safe. Rose listened happily, laughing in the right places and not interrupting too often. Tom found himself liking her more and more. It was a long time since he had had such an uncritical audience.

  It was late in the afternoon before Rose got home. Even so she beat Saffron and Sarah, who in desperation had gone to the police station. By then they had managed to lose not only Rose, but also Sarah’s mobile phone. However a policewoman telephoned home for them, and Eve, who was out of her shed by then, answered at once and said, ‘But Rose is here. With me. She came in a few minutes ago. She found her way home all by herself. She’s drawing…what are you drawing, Rose darling?’

  ‘Tom on the roof,’ said Rose.

  ‘Drawing Tom on the roof,’ related Eve, being as helpful as possible because after all she was dealing with the police. ‘With pastels. Not oil based.’

  ‘I am using some oil based,’ said Rose. ‘For the highlights.’

  ‘Some oil based,’ said Eve contritely, and would have prattled on in this way for hours and hours if the policewoman hadn’t tactfully shut her up.

  Indigo, who had heard Rose’s account of her afternoon, came to look at her picture.

  ‘Did you like Tom then, Rose?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose.

  Chapter Seven

  Eve said, ‘I really need a few more power points in my shed,’ and she bought a very long extension lead with three sockets on the end. She plugged one end in at the wobbly switch that was shared by the washing machine, and then she led the cable out through the kitchen window, and all the way down the garden path to her shed, cleverly twisting it round the washing line posts to keep it off the ground.

  ‘Fancy me being good at DIY!’ she said happily to the watching guinea pigs in their hutch at the end of the garden.

  The other end of the cable went in at the shed window. There Eve triumphantly installed an electric heater, a kettle, and the fibre optic lamp that the Young Offenders, to whom she taught art, had bought for her at Christmas.

  ‘Luxury,’ said Eve, switching everything on.

  The kettle boiled over and flooded the heater, blue flames shot out of the wobbly plug by the washing machine and all the lights went out. Rose wrote another scary letter to her father.

   Darling Daddy,

   This is Rose.

   So flames went all up the kitchen wall. Saffron called the fire brigade and the police came too to see if it was a trick and the police woman said to Saffron Here You Are Again because of when I got lost having my glasses checked. But I was with Tom whose Grandmother is a witch on top of the highest place in town.

  Love Rose.

  It took Rose a long time, but she knew it would be worth the effort. It left her father with no alternative but to rush home and check out the state of the kitchen wall, the police records on missing children, Tom’s grandmother, and the safety of the highest place in town. She awaited her father’s next communication with great eagerness, pouncing on every telephone call, until the right one finally came.

  ‘Now then, Rose!’ said her father briskly. ‘I’ve got your letter! What is all this about needing to have your glasses checked?’

  Rose, who was a great basher-down of telephone receivers, bashed it down again.

  The second week of term began, and for Indigo and Tom it was as bad as the first. One morning four windows in the language corridor were found to be broken and a ball, very like the sort that Tom carried about, was discovered at the scene of the crime.

  Tom was called into the Head’s office, and asked a lot of questions, not all of them about the windows.

  Was Tom unhappy, the Head asked. Was there anything that he would like to talk about? Tom was visiting England, the Head understood, at his own request. Did he not want to make a success of the experience? Had he, for instance, made any particular friends?

  Tom, except for remarking in a couldn’t-care-less kind of way that he knew nothing about the smashed windows, took no notice of any of this. He gazed at the Head, bored and expressionless, looking like someone idly waiting for the rain to stop.

  In his pocket was a note from Rose, delivered by Indigo the day before.

  Dear Tom

  It is still there. My class were doing a traffic survey in the market place so I went round the corner and looked and it is still there.

  Love Rose.

  In all the time that Tom had been in England he had not sent a message to anyone. Not to his friends at home, nor his mother (toiling away among the bears in Yellowstone National Park), or even to the father he talked so much about.

  But he had replied to Rose:

  Thank you. I am going to have another look at it on Saturday. Tom.

  Indigo had delivered both messages without any fuss.

  It was beginning to dawn on Tom that Indigo was not quite the fool he had seemed at first. That was partly why he had bothered to take any notice of Rose, because she was Indigo’s younger sister. In Tom’s opinion, younger sisters were among the worst of family calamities. On Saturday, when he had realised who Rose was, he had slowed down to take a look at her in the same awful-but-fascinated way that people slow down to look at traffic accidents. Expecting the worst.

  His fingers touched her note in his pocket. He guessed that it might not have been easy for her to sneak away from the traffic survey to visit the music shop. It made him smile to think of her doing it. He had kept her note, like he would have kept a message from any friend.

  ‘Are you listening to me, Tom?’ demanded the Head sharply.

  Tom jerked his thoughts away from Rose and Indigo and the black guitar, and was beginning to treat the Head to one of his most insolent, slow-motion shrugs when there came a knock at the office door.

  ‘Wait outside please!’ called the Head, and then, ‘I said WAIT OUTSIDE!’ as the door opened.

  To Tom’s enormous surprise, Indigo appeared.

  Indigo said, without any apology or introduction, ‘Tom didn’t break those windows. Think about it! How’s Tom going to throw his ball through a window and then get it back again to throw through the next? Four times? How would he get it back each time? And why would he leave it there afterwards to get himself into trouble? It would have taken two people to smash those windows, one to throw the ball through, and the other to throw it back again. And they’d need people keeping guard while they did it.’

  The Head popped his eyes out at Indigo in the unpleasant way he had, and said, ‘Thank you, Indigo! My powers of reasoning had actually led me thus far!’

&nbs
p; ‘Why are you yelling at Tom, then?’ asked Indigo.

  ‘Out you go, Indigo!’ snapped the Head. ‘Out! Now! That’s right! And you, Tom! I see you seem to have made one friend at least. Off you go, both of you!’

  To Indigo’s surprise he was suddenly sounding quite human. Also, he had clearly had enough of them. He herded them out of his room so fast that they nearly fell over the large clump of rabble who were listening at the door.

  ‘Ah!’ said the Head, popping out his eyes again.

  Tom took a ball out of his pocket right under the Head’s nose.

  Nothing happened.

  Tom bounced it.

  The Head looked away.

  The rabble muttered indignantly.

  Tom raised his eyebrows maliciously at them, said, ‘Come on, Indigo!’ and set off down the corridor, bouncing his ball.

  The Head still seemed not to notice, so Marcus, a particularly slow-thinking rabble-member, unwisely pointed it out, saying, ‘Look, Sir! That’s how those windows got smashed!’

  ‘Is it really, Marcus?’ said the Head, menacingly. ‘I think in future you would be sensible to keep your opinions to yourself!’

  Marcus’s friends thought so too. They cornered him in gang headquarters during afternoon break and told him so.

  ‘You don’t do anything that I don’t tell you to do,’ ordered the red-haired leader. ‘And you keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak!’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Marcus, so they explained why.

  ‘Now do you understand?’ demanded the red-haired leader, panting a little. Marcus was heavy, and the explaining had required so much muscle he had been forced to lend a hand.

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Marcus, very flushed and damp and unhappy.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ prompted the leader gently.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Marcus, but obviously he did not really understand, because the next day at football training he tackled Tom so viciously and so publicly he was sent off the field.

  Later on he had to endure another explanation.

  Afterwards Marcus went home and feigned an illness so well that his worried mother let him stay away from school the next day. Josh, his best friend, who had been very frightened, and didn’t understand why Marcus had not drowned, fell victim to the same illness. He was allowed to stay at home too.

  After a day or two, however, they both had to go back, and although they were relieved to discover the incident appeared to have been forgotten, their happy rabble days were over. Their hearts were not in it any more. They could not forget that Marcus had only been released the second time because Tom himself had intervened.

  Tom had heard the grunts and splashes of the toilet-dunking explanations and set about kicking down the cubicle door with indiscreet yells of, ‘Stop it, or I’ll kill you!’

  Part of the rabble had to be redeployed to shut him up, and then Indigo Casson suddenly appeared and joined in the attack. They made so much noise between them that Marcus had been reluctantly hauled back to dry land.

  ‘You wait, Levin!’ snarled the red-haired gang leader, afterwards. ‘And you, Casson!’

  Despite their apparent victory, the skin on the back of Indigo’s neck prickled with fear. The red-haired gang leader saw it in his eyes and laughed.

  Tom looked from one to the other, heaved a big sigh, said, ‘Catch!’ and threw his ball to Indigo. Indigo missed and the ball went rolling away along the corridor.

  ‘Useless,’ said Tom, jogging off to retrieve it. ‘Try again! Gosh, how could you miss that? Didn’t your father ever teach you to catch a ball?’

  ‘No,’ said Indigo, grinning at the thought of Bill doing such a thing. ‘He’s not a baseball player! He paints things.’

  ‘Houses?’

  ‘Pictures. Art. He’s an artist in London. We don’t see him much.’

  Tom gave him one of his quick, considering glances and asked, ‘Doesn’t he live with you?’

  ‘No,’ said Indigo, finally saying out loud what he had known now for a long, long time. ‘Not really. Not any more.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It happened so slowly,’ said Indigo, ‘I suppose I got used to it without noticing too much. Rose minds. And she’s only eight. She worries about things. Don’t tell her what happened just now.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll see her again,’ said Tom.

  Indigo grinned. Since Saturday, Rose had put in a good deal of work on the picture on the kitchen wall. Sarah, who had previously occupied a prime spot on one side of the chimney, had been ruthlessly swept away. She had reappeared some time later, talking to Saffron, further along the roof. A shadowy outline now lounged in Sarah’s place, holding a guitar.

  ‘I think you probably will see Rose again,’ said Indigo to Tom.

  Caddy came home on Friday evening. Perfectly Harmless Patrick brought her, in his battered old car.

  ‘Patrick’s the one with the chinchilla,’ said Caddy, by way of introduction.

  Perfectly Harmless Patrick said, ‘Hi! Hi! Gorgeous!’ and fell asleep on the sofa holding a full mug of coffee.

  ‘Crikey, Caddy!’ said Indigo, and disappeared upstairs to tell Rose.

  Eve murmured, ‘Sweet,’ rather doubtfully.

  Sarah said, not doubtfully at all, ‘Horrendous! The worst yet. Rock Bottom.’

  ‘He had a very difficult childhood,’ said Caddy, as she removed the mug of coffee from his unresisting fingers.

  ‘Who didn’t?’ asked Saffron unsympathetically. ‘Gosh, he’s ancient, Caddy! Look, he’s going bald! All that long trailing stuff is just a disguise!’

  ‘If I was going bald,’ said Sarah, ‘I would face the fact and have it all shaved off.’

  ‘Well, I thought Mummy might like him,’ said Caddy defensively. ‘He’s sensitive, that’s what he told me. He says he needs mothering. Anyway, I can always take him back.’

  ‘I think you’re going to have to, Caddy darling,’ said Eve. ‘Even if he didn’t need mothering (which after all is only another way of saying he needs a slave), sensitive people are so terribly…’

  ‘Sensitive,’ said Saffron.

  ‘Well,’ said Eve, ‘they are generally quite useless at practical things. Like sorting out the wiring…Anyway, I must get on with some work. Cats to paint! Hello, Rose darling! Come in and see what Caddy has brought home to show us!’

  She escaped and Rose, who had already heard the news from Indigo, glanced at Patrick, and began laughing.

  ‘See?’ said Sarah. ‘Rose knows! Absolutely rock bottom! You cannot be serious, Caddy!’

  ‘Oh, stop looking at him!’ said Caddy, uncomfortably. ‘I’ll find something to cover him up with in a minute!’

  ‘How long are you leaving him there for?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Just until Sunday,’ said Caddy, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Till Sunday!’ repeated Saffron. ‘So is Michael dumped?’

  ‘Of course he isn’t!’ said Caddy, indignantly. ‘I’ve never dumped anyone!’

  ‘Start!’ said Saffron. ‘Otherwise they just pile up, taking up the sofas…Come on! Do this one right now!’

  ‘I’ll do him later,’ said Caddy, and slid out of the room, followed by Rose, who wanted to show her the latest developments on the kitchen wall. Saffron and Sarah were left alone with Patrick, who had begun to snore.

  ‘Sunday!’ groaned Saffron, looking at him. ‘Sunday! I can’t believe it!’

  Her voice must have penetrated Patrick’s sleeping mind because he woke up all at once and moaned blearily, ‘Sunday! Sunday! Wha…timisit?’

  ‘Nearly seven o’clock,’ Sarah told him.

  ‘At night?’

  ‘Yep!’

  ‘Nearl’ sevna’ clock!’ repeated Patrick clutching his head and rocking backwards and forwards. ‘And Sunday! Igottagetbackon Sunday! Howlongavabin asleep?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Howlong ava bin asleep?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Saffron, suddenly diaboli
cally inspired with a means of getting rid of him. ‘Gosh, ages! Fast asleep since Friday!’

  ‘We thought you’d never wake up,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Well…Igotta…begoin!’ said Patrick, and began a sort of slow-motion panic, hitting himself in a clumsy, sleepy kind of way, groaning, ‘Carkeys! Carkeys!’

  Sarah and Saffron looked at each, baffled for a moment, and then Sarah understood and said, ‘He wants his car keys! There they are! On the floor beside him!’

  ‘What! Oh right!

  Car keys! There you are Patrick!’

  ‘Carkeys,’ said Patrick, grabbing them. ‘Savedmilife!’ and heaving himself off the sofa he staggered into the kitchen, shaking his head as if to test how firmly it was still attached. ‘Caddy…Caddy! Gotta go! Bigrushon!’

  ‘What, right now?’ asked Caddy, very surprised. ‘I can’t possibly!’

  ‘Well I gotta…Where…dileave…acar?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Saffron, steering him firmly out of the door and hissing over her shoulder, ‘Shut up, Caddy! Say nothing!…Come on, Patrick, this way!’

  She closed the kitchen door securely behind herself as she followed him out and led him to his car.

  ‘Carkeys! Carkeys!’ moaned Patrick.

  ‘In your hand,’ said Saffron, taking them from him and unlocking the door.

  ‘Binalovely…break.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ agreed Saffron, pushing him gently in. ‘Car keys! That’s right! Put your lights on, I should. Soon be dark! Don’t worry about Caddy, we’ll look after her.’

  ‘Peacedarlin,’ said Patrick, gratefully.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Saffron. ‘Off you go then!’

  She spent a moment waving goodbye before rushing back indoors and calling urgently, ‘Turn the lights off! Turn all the house lights off so he won’t have anywhere to head back for if he suddenly wakes up!’

  ‘But I don’t understand!’ protested Caddy. ‘He was staying until Sunday!’

  ‘He did,’ said Saffron. ‘At least, he thinks he did. Now let’s everyone lie down on the floor so it looks like nobody’s in! Go on, Rose! And you, Sarah! How could you have thought he would do for Mum, Caddy?’