Indigo's Star

by Hilary McKay

  Indigo nodded.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Tom reassuringly.

  Tom was beginning to feel fine himself; he was beginning to feel really good. He felt like the leader of an expedition, taking care of his team. It had been hard the week before to accept the responsibility of Rose, to get her from the music shop to the library without being squashed on the road, but that was because he had never done such a thing before. Now he was experienced. It was no longer the first time. He said to Indigo, ‘You just relax. You’ll be all right with me.’

  Indigo raised his sick face and managed a bit of a smile. Tom was pleased.

  ‘You keep your head down till you feel better. There’s no rush. I’ll be right here.’

  He settled against the skylight opposite Indigo’s and took out his guitar.

  Time went by. It was hard to play, all hunched up against a sloping surface. Cautiously Tom stood up. He strummed gently, picking out chords and humming a little. It was a pity there was nothing to sit on, up on the roof, but he managed to get comfortable, hitching himself up against the glass. Watching Indigo all the while, he searched around for a tune, remembered the poster on the library wall, grinned, and began to sing properly.

  ‘Don’t look down yet, Indigo, if people passing by…’

  ‘Listen, Indy!’ he paused to say. ‘This is a Bob Dylan tune!’

  ‘…See you plastered on the sky…’

  The comfortable place he had found happened to be the top of the highest skylight. He had climbed it backwards, without even noticing.

  ‘They will know that you can’t fly, and start complaining!

  And I think we would find it hard to quickly disappear

  No place to hide up here…

  On this jingle-jangle morning…now it’s raining…’

  Indigo, who was already smiling, looked up in surprise and then began to laugh as the rain, that had begun falling without him even noticing, suddenly became twice as heavy.

  ‘We should go up that church tower one day,’ remarked Tom, seeing Indigo had come back to life again. ‘That would cure you of being scared of heights! I can see miles from here! Right across to school. I’m definitely going to climb school before I have to go…What’s the matter now?’

  ‘What do you think you look like from underneath?’ demanded Indigo.

  ‘What d’you mean, from underneath?’ asked Tom, and then he looked down and saw exactly what Indigo meant. The skylight glass was blurry, and reinforced with a net of steel, but he could still see movement through it. Dozens of little coloured blobs, dozens of people moving up and down the library stairs, any of whom might look up at any time and notice that there was someone on the library roof.

  ‘Whoops!’ said Tom, sliding down the glass in a flash. ‘Time to go! OK now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s run then!’

  One minute they had been under the sky, and the next they were sauntering down the corridor past the room where the music exams were still taking place, the roof door relocked, the keys replaced, the staff door passed unchallenged.

  Then they were on the floor below, (‘Say, “Bye bye to Bob!”’ said Tom. ‘Bye, Bob,’ said Indigo obligingly).

  On the next floor down the librarian who had advised Tom to practise his scales smiled at them and asked, ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Fine,’ Tom told him, and he nodded and said, ‘I knew it would!’

  In no time at all they were back in the street again. Tom looked up at the highest skylight and said, ‘There’s a pigeon sitting where I was sitting!’

  Indigo looked down and found Tom’s ball, rolled into the gutter.

  ‘Must be our lucky day!’ said Tom.

  ‘Catch!’ said Indigo.

  He threw the ball and Tom caught it. Then Tom threw it back, and Indigo missed, and Tom said, ‘How could anyone miss a catch like that!’

  ‘Let’s go and find Rose,’ said Indigo.

  Chapter Eleven

  While Tom and Indigo were on the library roof, Rose was in her mother’s Saturday morning art class, which this week was designing T-shirts with Attitude.

  There was an undercurrent of discontent in the air. Even Eve, who defended her students no matter what, was forced to admit they were not at their best on Saturday mornings.

  ‘It’s the Friday nights, poor darlings,’ she said, in explanation of their uncreative grumpiness, understanding that the consequences of Friday nights were beyond anyone’s control.

  Will I have Friday nights, wondered Rose, as she gazed idly around the college art room.

  Yes.

  The atmosphere in the room was catching, and Rose began another disgruntled letter to her father.

   Darling Daddy,

   This is Rose.

   Mummy has made me a T-shirt that says Permanent

  Rose with iron-on letters to show everyone how to do it.

  Rose paused, and looked around. On the board at the front was a list of words and phrases which her mother considered not suitable for use in college T-shirt design. She had been asked about some of them so often that in the end she had started a black list of banned words to which everyone could refer. Every time someone thought of a new one she unflinchingly wrote it down.

  ‘Have you learned any you didn’t know before?’ one student asked her.

  ‘No, darling,’ said Eve, a little wistfully. ‘Not for years and years and years.’

  Rose read through the list, and turned back to her letter.

  These are the words I learned to spell in Mummy’s art class today, she wrote, and sighed a little as she began the tedious job of copying from the board. She wished she had some new crisis to report. Sometimes she was afraid she would never find anything bad enough to bring her father home again. She had less and less hope that he would ever read one of her letters, exclaim in horror, and come storming to the rescue.

  Beside her, a boy with expensive-looking hair extensions and dark sunglasses was finishing embossing the words CRIME PAYS in fluorescent pink on a black T-shirt. Rose watched as he chopped off the sleeves, (‘You don’t want sleeves,’ he explained kindly when he saw her looking), stripped off his old shirt, and pulled on the new one instead.

  ‘Are you a burglar?’ she asked him hopefully, thinking of the black guitar.

  ‘Do I look like a burglar?’ he demanded indignantly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘People always jump to conclusions,’ he said crossly and yanked his T-shirt off again and screwed it into a ball.

  ‘Can I have it if you don’t want it?’ asked Rose.

  ‘If you like.’

  The class came to an end at last. Students either wore their work, or tossed it into the bin. They fled the room, groaning with relief, and suddenly Eve and Rose were alone.

  Eve swept up scraps of cloth and transfer paper from the floor. Rose said, ‘You don’t want sleeves,’ hacked through the ones on her Permanent Rose T-shirt, hauled it on and cheered up because Indigo was bringing Tom home that day.

  Then they carried the box of spare shirts out to the car, lost the car keys and found them again (on a thong round Eve’s neck), and were just driving out of the car park when Eve exclaimed, ‘The iron!’ skidded to a halt, and ran back inside to switch it off.

  Three minutes later they reached the same point again and screeched into a hand brake turn. ‘That awful list!’ cried Eve, and rushed back inside once more to clean the board. She came back out, started the engine, and asked, ‘Did I close the windows?’

  Rose nodded her head, and to prevent any more delays, stuffed her fingers into her ears, and screwed her eyes tight shut.

  When she opened them again they were home and Indigo and Tom were waving to her through the car window.

  ‘Hello, Permanent Rose,’ said Tom.

  Indigo made everyone a late lunch. It was an afternoon of revelations for Tom, and the first of them was Indigo making lunch. He made bacon rolls and maple syrup pancakes, flipping
the pancakes ceiling-high, as Caddy had taught him to do the week before, and catching them perfectly in the frying pan each time.

  ‘How come you can catch pancakes and you can’t catch a ball?’ demanded Tom.

  ‘Practice,’ said Indigo.

  A pile of pancakes was carried to the shed for Eve. Tom volunteered to take them because as soon as Eve had climbed out of the car she had murmured, ‘Must see if my cats are still sticky,’ and sloped off down the garden path.

  She did not return and Tom became curious. He wondered how sticky the cats must be to keep her away for so long. He assumed he would find her diligently rubbing them clean. Therefore he was very startled when he arrived with the pancakes to find Eve comfortably asleep on a faded pink sofa, and not a sticky cat in sight. He shook her awake and said, ‘I’ve brought you some pancakes and I think your cats have escaped.’

  ‘Darling,’ moaned Eve, pulling an ancient striped dressing gown over her head, ‘not another surreal conversation, please!’ and fell asleep again.

  Tom marched out of the shed feeling indignant on Indigo’s behalf. At home in America he was accustomed to any contributions of his own to family life (not that he had made many for the last year or two) being given terrific applause. An offering as spectacular as pancakes would probably end up in a glass case. He returned to the kitchen and there was Sarah, who had shared the bacon rolls and pancakes, propped up against the kitchen sink, scrubbing greasy plates.

  It was the first time Tom had seen Sarah out of her wheelchair, and he found the sight rather disconcerting.

  ‘Should she be doing that?’ he whispered to Indigo.

  ‘It’s her turn,’ said Indigo, quite callously, Tom thought. He was not a bit surprised when a moment later Sarah suddenly started wailing, ‘Oh my legs! My legs! Take the dishcloth quick, Tom! Everything’s going dim and blurry!’

  Tom took the dishcloth at once, and was washing up for ages before he realised Saffron and Sarah and Rose were drying the plates and passing them back to him over and over again.

  ‘Rose!’ said Tom reproachfully.

  ‘You haven’t even looked at my picture,’ said Rose.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Not carefully.’

  Tom put down the dishcloth and came across the kitchen and looked at Rose’s picture properly. He looked at it and looked at it, and said at last, ‘You did all this yourself?’

  Rose nodded.

  ‘Whew,’ said Tom.

  Rose began to introduce him to the people that mattered in her life.

  ‘That’s Caddy, who is at University in London. She’ll be coming home soon, for the summer. That’s Derek-from-the-camp, who used to be her boyfriend. This is Michael, who says he’s going to marry her. There’s Sarah’s mother bringing Sunday lunch in a boat, and that’s Sarah next to Saffron. And that’s our mother asleep beside the chimney, and me next to Indigo. He can’t fall off…That’s your father’s rocket.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘And over there is your mother. Taking care of the bears. That island is America. From a distance.’

  ‘Looks just like it,’ said Tom.

  ‘And over there is where I started to try and draw you. It’s the best place because you can lean back against the chimney…’

  ‘It used to be mine,’ interrupted Sarah. ‘I was cleaned off! I am treated very badly in this house!’

  ‘…But I can’t get the guitar right,’ continued Rose, ignoring Sarah. ‘I can’t make your hands look like they are holding it properly.’

  Tom looked around for his guitar case, but Indigo was already passing it to him. He took his guitar out, and sat with his hands holding it properly. Rose looked at him carefully and began to draw.

  Rose frowned with concentration, and drew and drew, and Tom sat patiently all the time, playing now and then, and talking in between. Once he looked up, and saw Indigo grinning at him. He raised his eyebrows and began finger-picking an intricate cascade of notes on his guitar.

  ‘Play that again,’ said Sarah. ‘It sounded gorgeous.’

  Tom played it again, and was happy. Not wild, up-in-the-sky happy, but ordinarily, peacefully, content. It was such an unusual feeling that he noticed it was there.

  After a while Sarah and Saffron left for Sarah’s house, and Rose grew tired of drawing. Tom began to teach Indigo how to hold a guitar and Rose, remembering her clumsiness in the music shop that morning, came to look too. The humming darkness in the opening behind the strings intrigued her, and she asked, ‘What’s inside the hole?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Tom answered. ‘Well, just an old label…See.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Admira,’ Tom told her, not needing to look. ‘That’s the make of the guitar.’

  ‘And the little letters underneath?’

  ‘Fabricado en España,’ said Tom, ‘I think.’ He bent over his guitar to peer at the faded writing, and caught a breath of the smell of the inside, pungent with wood and dust and varnish, faintly musty. ‘Fabricado en España…’

  His voice faded as he spoke. He took a deeper breath. The inside of his guitar smelled of home so piercingly that all at once he was three thousand miles away. He would not have been surprised to hear the hum of the traffic, or the sound of familiar doors opening and closing. He could have sworn he heard a baby wail.

  He could not have been more startled if he had seen a ghost.

  When Tom came out of his daze it was to find Rose and Indigo staring at him in astonishment.

  ‘Your hands are shaking,’ said Rose.

  ‘I was spooked,’ he said apologetically. ‘I was…It was really weird…Smell inside my guitar!’

  They sniffed obligingly, but shook their heads. The smell meant nothing to them.

  ‘It gave me an awful feeling,’ said Tom. ‘Shivery…’

  It had smelled of resentment. And the helpless anger that comes from being towed into a life where you do not want to be. And months and months and months of sulking in his bedroom. It smelled of closed doors behind which were whispered strategies to make him, Tom, the family problem, give in. And be happy.

  Back at home in America they had tried very hard indeed to make Tom give in and be happy.

  ‘You have tried much too hard!’ his English grandmother had remarked severely, when Tom’s father told her about Tom’s wish to be a million miles away. ‘But I don’t mind taking him off your hands for a while. It will give you a break, and it won’t kill Tom! He will have to go to school of course, I’m not having him hanging around underfoot all day, and he can help with the cats when he gets home. And if he likes to spend the rest of his time indulging in childish tantrums, that is quite all right with me. I am immune to tantrums!’ she had said complacently. ‘Send him over by all means!’

  So Tom, at his own request, had come to England, that being as far as could be managed to a million miles away. There he was no happier than he was in America, and considerably less comfortable. Also at his grandmother’s house he was quite spectacularly not the centre of attention, although he managed to make up for that at school. And he was terribly lonely. He didn’t like England, and he didn’t like home. Until the Saturday afternoon when he visited the Casson house for the first time, there was no place in the world that he wanted to be.

  Tom stayed all afternoon, and so late into the evening that Eve, emerging from her shed at last, kindly offered him a patch of Indigo’s floor for the night.

  ‘I’d better go,’ said Tom reluctantly.

  ‘Come back tomorrow,’ said Indigo. ‘Nobody else is coming.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’ asked Rose, looking hopefully at Eve.

  Eve shook her head and said, ‘I don’t think so, darling. Not Daddy, anyway!’

  ‘Bloody Daddy,’ said Rose.

  ‘Rose!’

  ‘I’ve told Tom about him never coming home any more,’ said Rose unrepentantly, ‘and Tom says…’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then!’ interrupted Tom loudly,
and at the same time Indigo ordered, ‘Shut up, Rose!’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Rose, but when Tom was gone she finished off the letter that she had started in the art class that morning. It was, she thought smugly, as she drew the kisses across the bottom, the scariest yet.

   Tom says one day soon you will come back and say Surprise, Surprise This Is My New Wife and This Is My New Baby.

   And expect us to be pleased.

   Love Rose.

  It was after dark when Tom got back to his grandmother’s house, so late that she had been worrying.

  ‘I know communication is not your strong point, but you could have telephoned,’ she complained. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘At Indigo’s. I met him in town.’

  ‘The tall thin boy with the baby sister?’

  ‘She’s not a baby.’

  ‘I expect she was once. What is she called?’

  ‘Rose,’ said Tom. ‘They’re all called after different colours. Their mother got them off a paint chart, they told me. Cadmium, Saffron, Indigo and Rose.’

  ‘What very nice names!’

  ‘Their parents are artists,’ Tom told her, pleased to have someone to talk to about his new friends. ‘Their mother paints pictures in a shed at the end of the garden but their father is in London. He doesn’t come home much any more. And Saffron is really their cousin. She’s adopted.’

  ‘There are all sorts of families,’ commented his grandmother, ‘and most of them seem to get on together, one way or another.’

  Tom was silent.

  ‘Bring Rose to see my cats one day. The Burmese. I’m sure she’d enjoy that. Although you will have to explain that I am not a witch. I expect she will be disappointed!’

  Tom looked up at her in astonishment. She had never seemed so friendly before.

  ‘All sorts of families,’ she repeated, her eyes on the clearing sky. ‘You’ll learn. And now come in and have your supper.’

  When Rose’s letter arrived in London it worried her father so much that he telephoned Eve that same day.