Indigo's Star

by Hilary McKay

  ‘It wasn’t meant to sound fun! Sarah said it would bankrupt you!’ snapped Rose.

  Caddy, Saffron and Sarah, also found themselves under attack at the smallest excuse. Tom and Indigo received the worst treatment of all; they could hardly speak to Rose without being snarled at. She suspected them (rightly) of being sorry for her.

  Another week passed, and the final days of the term came closer. School was to finish on Wednesday. On Thursday Tom’s father would be flying to England, and on Saturday he would take Tom home again. That was it. There was nothing to argue about, nothing to hope for, nothing that could change. Tom no longer spoke of his father, not the astronaut, nor the baseball player, nor the really old, hippy old, rock and roller. Not even the person that had looked after him so well that he hardly missed his mother when she drifted away to take care of the bears in Yellowstone National Park.

  He and Indigo talked about other things. The gang and its red-haired leader.

  ‘Try not to let them slaughter you,’ advised Tom.

  ‘I have been trying,’ replied Indigo.

  ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Well,’ said Indigo. ‘Notice now! Am I slaughtered?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Tom.

  They discussed the black guitar. Tom had visited the music shop again, and had been allowed to spend a long time undisturbed, playing in the dimly lit stockroom, among the dusty boxes and abandoned instruments waiting for repair.

  ‘I know that as soon as I stop going in they’ll put it in the window again,’ he said to Indigo.

  ‘I’ll keep visiting for you.’

  ‘I suppose you can try.’

  ‘I’ll take Rose,’ said Indigo, as one might say, ‘I’ll take the Marines’, and Tom was forced to grin.

  Another thing that Tom often mentioned in those last few days was his old idea of climbing the school. One afternoon he led Indigo around the building, pointing out the route.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Indigo.

  ‘Come on, Indigo! We’ll light a bonfire on the top!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right. No bonfire. What’s the matter, Indigo? Feeling blue?’

  Indigo laughed.

  ‘It would be a good place to think,’ said Tom.

  ‘I’ll remember,’ said Indigo. ‘If I ever need to think.’

  Tom bounced a ball to him, one of the bagful returned to him that morning. The Head had made a small ceremony of it.

  ‘I hope you will come and see us again,’ he had said, looking at Tom down his nose. ‘Your visit has been an enlightening experience for us all…violent sometimes…’ he glanced at Jason, ‘…but interesting. Your property…I am delighted to have the opportunity to return it in person.’

  Here he handed Tom a grubby carrier bag of confiscated balls as solemnly as if he was handing over an ancient and valuable heirloom of the school.

  ‘You have broadened our outlook…’ he told Tom. (The red-haired gang leader sniggered and then yelped as he received a confiscated ball, hard and accurate, smack on his right ear.)

  ‘…Broadened our outlook,’ repeated the Head, watching benignly as Tom retrieved and pocketed the ball, ‘which is the fundamental aim of all good education…Shall you keep in touch?’

  ‘No Sir,’ said Tom.

  ‘Mmm,’ said the Head disconsolately, and wandered out of the room completely disregarding the indignation of the red-haired gang leader. None of the rabble seemed to want to tackle Tom either, armed as he was with a bag full of rubber missiles and immunity from retribution. For the same reason they also left Indigo alone. Nearly alone. The red-haired gang leader had caught up with him in the scrum at the door.

  ‘We know where you live, Casson,’ he hissed, and his eyes gleamed with malice. ‘Don’t you forget! When he’s gone home, we know where you live!’ And he added, when he was a long way away, almost out of earshot, ‘You and your dirty little sister.’

  On the final Wednesday of term Rose’s school was to close at the end of the morning. This always happened. The idea was that the younger children should all be safely home before the older ones, rowdy with end-of-term wildness, were let out on to the streets from their school nearby.

  The morning followed its usual timetable: the end of year assembly, a final distribution of lost property, the photographs and signing of T-shirts for the people who were leaving that year. Rose was one of the last to go home, her signature was always in demand with both boys and girls. She was popular, although she did not know it. She drew a rose.

  The end of the morning came, the last photographs were taken, and the last T-shirts signed. There were even a few last tears to be wiped away. And then the school was suddenly empty, and by lunchtime Rose was home.

  She found her mother in her shed, painting with the help of a handful of green feathers and some blurry photographs, as lifelike a picture as she could manage of a long-dead parrot.

  ‘What do you think, darling?’ she asked, when Rose appeared at the door.

  ‘It’s only got one leg,’ said Rose, peering at a photograph.

  ‘I know. That’s why I put him in profile.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Years ago.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said Rose, and looked critically at the picture for a little while longer before asking, ‘What about lunch?’

  Eve left the parrot and came at once, and in the house she made hot chocolate and peanut butter sandwiches, recognising that Rose needed a lot of comforting these days. They ate together in friendly silence, admiring for the hundredth time Rose’s magnificent work of art on the kitchen wall.

  ‘Rose,’ began Eve, after a while, ‘I wanted to say to you…about Tom…’

  ‘Was the parrot born with one leg?’ interrupted Rose, very quickly, through a mouthful of sandwich.

  ‘No, no. He had an accident…’

  ‘Well then, you should paint him with two. Like he was before the accident. I’m not talking about Tom. You should paint the parrot young. With two legs. I wish I had four hundred and fifty pounds.’

  ‘I wish I had too.’

  ‘Why, what would you do with it?’

  ‘Give it to you,’ said Eve, sounding surprised that Rose needed to ask. ‘I suppose I could try the parrot with two legs. And if it doesn’t work paint one of them out again.’

  Rose nodded.

  ‘Coming to help me?’

  ‘I’ll come and look when you have finished.’

  ‘Perhaps you would keep me company, just to talk. I get bored, out in that shed.’

  ‘You don’t really.’

  ‘Let’s abandon the parrot, Rose darling, and go and do something completely different! We could…we could…Go to the supermarket and buy a feast for when everyone comes home!’

  Rose was so touched by the heroism of this suggestion that she got up and put her arms round her mother’s neck.

  ‘Brilliant idea?’ asked Eve, rocking her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, Rose.’

  ‘I wish I could see the parrot with two legs.’

  ‘I’ll do it right away,’ said Eve, and tried not to mind when Rose wriggled out of her arms.

  When Eve had gone back to her shed, Rose went up to Indigo’s bedroom. Tom’s guitar lay on the bed in its case. Rose took it out, but she did not try to play it. She rested her cheek gently on its scratched wooden surface and stayed like that for a long time.

  Then she sat up.

  She turned the guitar over and looked at the crack in the back. To hear Tom talk about it you would think the whole guitar was about to fall into two halves, but to Rose’s eyes the crack was very small, long, but hardly the width of a fingernail.

  He should fill it up with glue, thought Rose.

  In the kitchen drawer downstairs there was a treasure trove of mending stuff, all sorts of glue and tape and screwdrivers and things like that.

  Rose went downstairs and began to rummage through it.

  There was one sort of
glue described on its label as stronger than nails. When Rose went back up to Indigo’s room she took it with her, along with a tin of furniture polish, a duster and the roll of tape Derek had once used to bind round the joint of a leaky tap. Rose had watched him do it, and she had many times been shown the too-loose tuning pegs on Tom’s guitar.

  The furniture polish worked wonderfully, removing fingerprints and covering scratches. Rose cheered up immensely as she rubbed. She thought, Tom could paint it black. I won’t paint it black, decided Rose virtuously, but Tom could.

  Polishing the strings and fingerboard turned the duster dark grey.

  All that dirt off, thought Rose with satisfaction, and very much encouraged by her success she tackled the slipping tuning pegs. She intended to wind them round with tape, as Derek had wound the tap joint. If it worked as she hoped, they would be tighter and stronger, and if it did not work the tape could come off again with no harm done.

  Each peg was shaped like a little screw which turned a cog that tightened or loosened the strings. Rose unscrewed and unscrewed and unscrewed. The strings got so loose they slipped off easily and flew free, twining round her arms and catching in her hair. She bundled them all together into the sound hole to be out of the way. Still the pegs did not come off. Rose inspected their fixings again, and went for a screwdriver.

  Very soon all six were free, and so were a lot of other things. Pegs and cogs and tiny screws, as well as the metal plates that held everything in place. Rose piled them all up in the middle of the bed and thought bravely, I know where they all go back.

  ‘I know where they all go back,’ Rose said out loud, although she could hardly bear to look at them. ‘I’ll just do the glueing and then I’ll sort them out.’

  A cold feeling of fear was beginning to stir inside her, somewhere near her stomach.

  ‘Nothing is broken,’ said Rose staunchly, ignoring it.

  The back took an awful lot of glue and only after a while did Rose realise why. Instead of setting stronger than nails, and filling the crack, it was trickling straight through. It was dripping into the inside of the guitar. Already it was all over the strings. It glued them to each other, and to everything else they touched. It stuck fluff and hairs on to the polished woodwork, and somehow it got on Indigo’s quilt. Then it was on the heap of things that Rose dared not look at. It was everywhere.

  Rose became terribly frightened and she began to cry.

  Downstairs the telephone rang. Automatically Rose jumped up, because she was the one who always grabbed the phone. She ran down the stairs and picked it up and it was her father.

  ‘Just checking in!’ he began breezily.

  Rose could not speak. She sobbed and sobbed into the telephone receiver. Far away in London she heard her father calling desperately, ‘Rose, what is it? What is the matter? Rose? TALK to me, Rose!’

  ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ wailed Rose.

  ‘Rose! Are you hurt? Is someone hurt?’

  ‘Something awful! I have done something awful!’

  ‘Rose! Rose, are you on your own?’

  ‘I have done something awful,’ sobbed Rose. ‘Awful, awful! Daddy, come home. Daddy, come home quick! I have done something awful!’

  Indigo and Tom’s school also finished earlier than usual that final Wednesday. They walked home together to Tom’s grandmother’s house without talking much. The sky was very blue and clear, so that the trails left by the jet planes lasted for ages, and the planes themselves were visible, like translucent blue arrows.

  ‘It always seems so weird to think there are people inside,’ remarked Tom, looking up at one as it crossed the sky, ‘reading the newspapers and watching videos and having drinks…’ His voice trailed away, and Indigo did not answer.

  There was trouble waiting for them at Tom’s house. The first thing they saw when they went in was his grandmother, staring at the telephone as if it had just attacked her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’asked Tom, alarmed, and she said, with no attempt to break the news gently, ‘You can’t go home.’

  ‘I can’t?’ Tom looked at her in amazement. Then, as the news sank it, he repeated, with growing delight, ‘I can’t go home?’

  ‘No. Your father just telephoned. He’s not coming.’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  ‘Frannie is in hospital. She’s very ill. She’s in intensive care…Frances…Poor little Frances…’

  ‘So how long can I stay?’ interrupted Tom eagerly. ‘Tell me what he said!’

  ‘She’s very, very ill. She has meningitis, Tom. She’s only a baby.’ Tom’s grandmother turned abruptly away.

  Tom looked across at Indigo in dismay and mouthed, ‘Crying?’

  Indigo nodded.

  Tom’s usual method of dealing with stressful situations was to get as far away as he could and think about something else. If that was not possible he bounced a ball and thought about something else. This time however, neither seemed appropriate. Awkwardly he patted his grandmother on the back and said, ‘Try not to worry, Gran!’ He glanced at Indigo, raised his eyebrows and jerked his head towards the door, heroically offering his friend the chance to escape.

  Indigo shook his head.

  Tom looked relieved and put a little more effort into his banging on his grandmother’s back. It became more like drumming, quite fast and hard.

  Indigo whispered, ‘Who is Frances?’

  ‘Just some kid,’ muttered Tom, looking extremely shifty.

  ‘What kid?’

  Tom looked everywhere but at Indigo and muttered, ‘She’s like, my father’s kid…’ and the drumming turned into quite hard thumping. It seemed to bring his grandmother back to normal all at once, because she said, ‘Stop it, Tom!’ quite sharply, and moved away.

  Indigo, who was staring at Tom in complete astonishment, asked, ‘Your father’s kid? Your sister?’

  ‘Not really. Only half sister.’

  ‘Has Tom never told you about Frances?’ demanded Tom’s grandmother, looking at Indigo. ‘Has he never mentioned his sister at all?’

  ‘Gran,’ asked Tom, returning to what seemed to him to be the most important aspect of the situation. ‘Did Dad say anything about how long I could stay?’

  ‘Tom!’ almost shouted his grandmother. ‘Frances is in hospital! She is dreadfully ill! I despair of you! I despair of you!’

  There was a shocked silence while she and Tom stared at each other, mutually outraged.

  Indigo took charge. There were a dozen things he did not understand, but he pushed them to one side.

  ‘We’ll make you some tea,’ he said to Tom’s grandmother. ‘That will make you feel better. I think Tom just hasn’t got it yet. About Frances. He’s not meaning to be horrible…’

  ‘Me? Being horrible?’ demanded Tom indignantly.

  ‘…He’s just not thinking straight. Put the kettle on, Tom!’

  ‘Put it on yourself!’ said Tom angrily.

  ‘He’s in shock. ’Indigo filled the kettle. ‘Like I would be if it was Rose…’

  At that moment, out of nowhere, the memory returned to Indigo of the red-haired gang leader taunting him the day before. He remembered the half-caught words he had heard:‘You and your dirty little sister!’

  ‘Like I would be if it was Rose,’ repeated Indigo.

  All at once, he was worried about Rose. He had a sudden, uncanny feeling, that she was in trouble somewhere.

  ‘Rose?’ asked Tom.

  Indigo glanced up and found that Tom was looking at him very oddly, as if he was trying to see right through his head.

  ‘Indigo,’ said Tom, ‘Frances isn’t like…it’s not the same…You care about…’

  Tom stopped himself just in time, muttered, ‘I only said I thought you should try not to worry,’ to his grandmother, and disappeared out of the door.

  She sat down and held her head in her hands.

  ‘I think he is right,’ said Indigo, pulling himself together and beginning to make tea. ‘You should try n
ot to worry. Babies are tough. Rose was in hospital for weeks and weeks when she was a baby. I told Tom.’

  ‘You heard him,’ said Tom’s grandmother bitterly. ‘He doesn’t care.’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘I went to visit them a year ago, just after Frances was born. He wouldn’t look at her.’

  ‘He’s always really nice to Rose,’ said Indigo staunchly.

  ‘He hated it when his father remarried.’

  ‘I suppose it was hard to get used to.’

  ‘He didn’t try. He got worse, not better. That’s why I had him over here. To give them all a breathing space. I thought he would come to his senses and be glad to go back, but he’s been pleading to stay…Well, he’s got what he wanted now! I wish I knew where he had gone to.’

  ‘I’ll go and look for him if you like.’

  ‘The trouble with Tom is he has been an only child for too long. He seems to need to be centre stage. He loves an audience.’

  ‘Well, we like him like that,’ said Indigo, more than a little defensively. ‘I expect Frances will too, when she gets better. He’ll make her laugh, like he does Rose. And tell daft stories and play his guitar…’

  Again, the strange feeling came that Rose was in trouble, but just then the telephone rang, and Tom’s grandmother jumped, spilling her tea.

  ‘Will you go and find Tom?’ she called to Indigo as she hurried to answer it. ‘You know where he goes to…Please, Indigo?’

  Indigo hesitated.

  ‘Please.’ Her voice was quavery and tight. ‘He should be here. I need him to be here.’

  ‘I’ll go right now,’ said Indigo.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After Rose’s telephone conversation with her father she went back upstairs to Indigo’s room. For a long time her mind was blank with dismay and she sat completely numb, staring at the broken guitar.

  Then, suddenly, like a light switched on, she thought of the music shop.

  The music shop would be able to help.

  Rose jumped to her feet and began feverishly gathering up the dismantled heap of pegs and cogs and screws. She bundled them up in her school sweatshirt, seized the guitar, ran down the stairs, out of the house and along the road to town.