Indigo's Star

by Hilary McKay

  By this time every school in town was out for the holidays. The streets were teeming with students, silly with exuberance at the thought of summer. The townspeople glanced at the crowds discontentedly, and muttered the old familiar complaint that the holidays were far too long. Rose barged through them all as if they did not exist.

  The town bridge had been taken over by the gang from Indigo’s class. They were all there, red-haired leader, rabble and hangers-on, eating chips and pizza, throwing Coke cans into the river, exchanging loud and insolent comments on the passing public, and knocking each other about in a mild sort of way. People avoided them, but Rose did not. Across the bridge, on the opposite side of the road, was the turning that led to the music shop. Clutching her bundle and hugging the guitar close to her chest, Rose plunged right into the middle of the gang.

  There seemed a great many of them to Rose, big boys, smelling of dusty clothes, and pizza, bubble gum and sweat. Their voices were loud and alien. They blocked Rose’s way and she kicked them. She knocked into somebody and he dropped his Coke can and swore. Rose, with her eyes fixed on to the opposite side of the road, dodged and shoved and broke free and ran.

  All at once she was grabbed from behind.

  Two boys had hold of her arms and were pulling her backwards. She fell sprawling, and dropped the guitar. There was a horrible sound of cracking wood.

  Then Rose was hauled to her feet again, the guitar was snatched up by a third boy, and a van driver who had stopped on the bridge in the nick of time, restarted his engine, yelled at them one last time, and went on his way.

  The boy who had picked up Tom’s guitar looked at the dirt and splinters, the tangled gluey strings, and the spilt contents of Rose’s bundle, pegs and cogs and screws scattered all over the pavement and gutter. He said, ‘Wrecked!’

  Then Rose went crazy. She pulled herself free from her tormentors and kicked and lashed like a wild thing.

  ‘It’s that kid sister of Indigo Casson’s,’ the red-haired gang leader said. ‘I warned him! Get her!’

  Nobody got Rose. She got them instead, starting with the two who had pulled her back from under the wheels of the van. While they were still protesting, she attacked the one who had saved the guitar from being smashed entirely, and then, in her misery, she fought indiscriminately.

  Indigo, hurrying through town in search of Tom, turned a corner and took it all in. It was everything he had ever feared, Rose in the centre of the gang, her face streaming with tears, the smashed guitar, and the seething rabble. He heard the red-haired gang leader call, ‘Drop it in the river!’

  Then Indigo launched himself into battle. In the next few minutes he made up for all the fights he had not fought in the year that had passed, and Rose joined in.

  The rabble, bruised and bleeding, behaved like heroes. They held the guitar out of harm’s way when the battle raged closest. They fended Rose off from the edge of the kerb, over and over again. When Indigo got the red-haired gang leader down on the ground and knelt on him, deaf to his tears and pleas for mercy, and looked like he was never going to stop hitting him, they pulled him off and held his arms behind his back until he calmed down enough to hear what they were saying.

  ‘Crikey, Indigo! Slow down!’

  ‘Let Tony get up now, Indigo!’

  ‘Your sister’s not safe to be let out! She would have run straight in front of a delivery van!’

  ‘Look! She bit me!’

  ‘We pulled her down, but nobody meant to hurt her. We had to.’

  ‘Let me go!’ demanded Indigo, glaring at the red-haired boy, now sitting hunched against the wall of the bridge, and they tightened their grip and said, ‘Think Tony’s had enough just now, Indigo!’

  Then at last Indigo began to understand what had happened, and he looked across at the boy by the wall again.

  ‘Is he all right?’ he asked.

  A couple of people pulled Tony up, dusted him down a little, and said, ‘Fine! Look! Indigo says Are you all right, Tony? You’re fine, aren’t you?’

  Tony staggered on his feet. His face was white, with crimson blotches. He stared round at the rabble, and then at Indigo. He could not seem to grasp that his days were over. He glanced towards Rose and said, ‘I told you to get her.’

  The rabble, his loyal rabble, whom he had guided and encouraged, coaxed and pushed for so long, looked at him as if he was almost a stranger.

  Someone remarked casually, ‘Off his planet!’ and there was a ripple of laughter.

  Most people did not even bother to speak.

  There was a feeling of lightness in the air, as if a storm had gathered and broken and left clear sky behind it. The rabble examined their wounds with a sort of pleasure. They felt like they had been under a cloud, and now it had blown away. This time they had not been the bullies. This time they had been attacked unfairly, and they had responded like stars.

  Now the past was cancelled. Justice had been done.

  A small group, with Marcus as self-appointed expert, were examining the remains of the guitar. Others were collecting together the contents of Rose’s bundle. Josh was showing her the circle of tooth marks she had left on his wrist.

  The group was beginning to break up.

  One rabble member was caught by his mother, and was being forced to gather up all the chip wrappers they had dropped in the street. Three hangers-on, who had been left out of all the action, were draped over the bridge parapet, trying to spit into the river.

  The red-headed boy tried one last time. He looked at them all, and spoke. He said, ‘Who’s coming with me? I’m going.’

  He stood still and waited. Nobody took the slightest notice.

  He took a step backwards and then another.

  ‘I’m going, I said.’

  ‘See you, Tone,’ said David kindly.

  Meanwhile time was passing, and Indigo, back in his right mind and anxiously enquiring of everyone if he had hurt them, was torn between his promise to find Tom, and the need to get Rose safely home. The state of the guitar was another huge problem. General opinion was that if it was taken to the music shop in its present condition, by Indigo or Rose in their present condition (filthy, tear-stained, bloodied and penniless), they would be thrown out as soon as they got through the door.

  ‘They’d probably ring the police,’ said Marcus. ‘They’d definitely ring your mother! Better go home and get cleaned up and find some money.’

  ‘Rose ought to be home, anyway,’ said Indigo worriedly. ‘And I promised Tom’s grandmother I’d find Tom. She needs him; she’s really upset. And now I’ve got to tell him his guitar is smashed.’

  Rose hiccuped and Marcus said hastily, ‘They’ll be able to do something with it at the shop.’

  David said, ‘You go and find Tom, Indy. We’ll see Rose home. Come on, Rose. Let’s get you to your mother!’

  Indigo looked at him uncertainly, longing to be off looking for Tom. He asked, ‘That all right, Rose? You’ll go with David and Marcus and Josh?’

  Rose nodded.

  ‘I’ll carry the guitar,’ said Josh. ‘David has got all the bits that came off.’

  ‘You’ll see her right to the house?’ asked Indigo. ‘Right to the house, and inside? Look in the shed if it seems like there is no one about. My mother will be painting in there.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Don’t leave her on her own.’

  ‘’Course not.’

  When Rose said to her father. ‘I have done something terrible! Daddy come home!’ it frightened him. He had panicked. Grabbed his bag. Locked his flat. Raced to the station and caught the first train home.

  Marcus, Josh and David, escorting Rose like a guard of honour, got to the house and found no one there. Eve had gone hunting for Rose only minutes before. However, she had left the back door open, in case anyone should return before she did. David took the guitar inside and propped it in a corner of the kitchen. Marcus and Josh, following Indigo’s instructions, went with Rose to the shed. It
, too, was empty.

  ‘Indigo said not to leave her on her own,’ said Marcus. They were all hesitating by the back door, wondering what to do next, when a taxi pulled up in the street outside and Rose’s father jumped out.

  ‘Daddy!’ shrieked Rose, and flung herself upon him.

  Marcus, Josh and David took one look at him, immaculate suede jacket, black shirt, designer haircut and expression of absolute fury as he saw the state of Rose, and they disappeared like smoke blown in the wind.

  Rose and her father took no notice. They hugged each other and shook each other, and shouted their opinion of each other’s behaviour, and when the worst was over Rose started wailing again that she had done something terrible.

  ‘Rose,’ said her father. ‘You are eight years old! Nothing you could do can be that terrible!’

  Rose wailed even louder.

  ‘Rose!’ shouted her father (he had to shout because Rose’s wailing was now at the hee-hawing, donkey-sounding stage), ‘Come to the house and tell me what you think you have done. Whatever it is, I promise I will fix it!’

  By this time they had reached the door that led in to the kitchen.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Bill assured Rose very tenderly, as he led her inside.

  He meant it. It shocked him to see Rose, brave, aggravating, self-assured Rose, in such a state of unhappiness.

  ‘Whatever it is, whatever you have done, I will fix it,’ Bill promised, and Rose believed him, and stopped crying.

  Her father straightened up, and then for the first time ever, he saw Rose’s picture on the kitchen wall. Rose had forgotten until that moment how much she had longed to show it to him, but now she watched him, and her heart was beating very fast, and her tears were all dry.

  Bill Casson, usually so self-controlled, was staring with his mouth hanging open. The picture was so huge, so dominating, such a multitude of colours and complex images. He was shaken right through to think that such a thing could have been created in his absence.

  Rose waited for him to speak.

  Her father assumed he had discovered the source of her tears, the awful thing she had done, and he showed amazing restraint. He did not get angry. He swallowed back the words, ‘I told your mother not to take you to that damn silly graffiti class’. Instead, he said very gently, with his arm around Rose, ‘Don’t worry sweetheart, it will scrub off.’

  ‘Scrub off?’ said Rose.

  ‘Well, maybe not completely. But it will certainly paint over.’

  ‘Paint over?’

  Rose looked at him, at first in disbelief, and then with growing understanding. There he was at last, loving her, worried about her, having rushed all the way from London to comfort her. Promising he would make everything all right. She loved him, and she hated him, all at the same time.

  Still with his arm around her he tested a bit of the picture with his fingernail, one of the sharks conjured up by Rose to devour his uncaring carcass. He scratched right through the shark skin to the plaster underneath and said triumphantly, ‘There! Look darling! I told you it would scrub off! Was Mummy very cross?’

  Rose was speechless.

  Her father still did not get angry. He was not angry. His intention was what it had always been, to save the situation, rescue Rose, and sort out whatever terrible thing she had done, at whatever the cost to himself. So he sat down, pulled Rose on to his lap, and said bravely, ‘You and I could get that cleaned away in no time at all!’

  It was impossible to tell from his voice that he did not really believe this for a moment, and actually thought it would take several days of backbreaking, hand-ruining scraping.

  ‘That’s not the terrible thing I did,’ said Rose.

  ‘I’ll have to go into town and buy some jeans and a T-shirt or two to work in…’

  ‘I did something much worse than that!’

  ‘…There’s an appointment or two, several actually, I’ll need to cancel in London…’

  Rose slid off his knee, crossed the kitchen, picked up Tom’s guitar, shoved it under her father’s nose and said, ‘This is the terrible thing!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘It’s Tom’s guitar. I tried to mend it and I made it much worse. And I fell down on it and made a big crack. And some of the bits I unscrewed got lost and one of the pegs is all bent. A van ran over it.’

  ‘That’s the terrible thing?’ asked Bill, astonished.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What you were so miserable about?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But surely,’ said Bill, completely bemused, ‘it can be replaced, Rose sweetheart!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t one guitar as good as another? More or less? I would have thought so!’

  He was so immensely relieved to find Rose safe and well, and nothing worse to deal with than a broken guitar, that he stretched up his arms and laughed. Then he sat back, and sighed with relief and suddenly remembered something he had grabbed just before he left his London studio. A picture, to show to Rose.

  He leaned sideways, pulled his bag towards him and took it out.

  Rose’s heart sank.

  Inside was a portrait, not quite finished, done in ink and water-colour washes. It was painted from the photograph Caddy had seen in her father’s studio. Rose in her glasses. Truculent. Bewildered. Rose, lost among reflected Roses, at least a dozen of them, fading forwards and backwards like a dream.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Bill.

  Very unwillingly, Rose looked, and she was astonished. She said, ‘It’s me!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s good.’ She gulped back a sob, but said again, because it was true, ‘It’s really good.’ Then she looked at the broken guitar, and began to cry once more.

  ‘Can’t we just buy Tom a new one?’ asked her father, who at that moment of triumph would have bought anybody anything.

  ‘They cost a lot of money,’ said Rose.

  ‘You expect to have to pay if you want quality,’ said Bill calmly. ‘Isn’t there a music shop in town somewhere?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose, hardly able to believe her ears, ‘and there’s a guitar in it that Tom has been wanting for weeks and weeks and weeks. Can we go right now?’

  Bill said magnificently that of course they could go right now, and he allowed himself to be towed into town straight away. And if he regretted his magnificence a little when he saw the price of the black guitar, he did not allow Rose to know. After all, she had liked his picture. And he was used to spending money, far better at it than Eve would ever be. Also the shop assistant helped very much, recognising Rose at once, and congratulating her father on being such a discerning and generous purchaser.

  ‘Of course it’s for your friend?’ he asked Rose.

  ‘Tom,’ said Rose.

  ‘Tom. Of course. Give him my good wishes, won’t you.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ said Rose.

  Then she and her father walked home together, Bill striding along as if he owned the town, Rose hopping and skipping beside him, as temporarily happy as she had ever been in her life.

  ‘I loved your letters,’ said Bill.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Made me laugh out loud.’

  ‘They weren’t meant to make you laugh.’

  ‘Oh. What were they meant to do?’

  ‘Make you come home,’ said Rose.

  It had been hours since Indigo set out to look for Tom. There was nowhere he had not searched, backwards and forwards to Tom’s home and his own, all through town, to the music shop, the library, the church tower, even the multi-storey car park.

  Indigo had climbed them all.

  Evening arrived before he realised where Tom must be.

  Although he had been half expecting him all afternoon, it startled Tom considerably when, glancing towards the west where the sun was setting, a hand appeared clutching the rail at the top of the fire escape.

  Then the top of a head. Wind-blown, lanky brown hair.


  (‘Much too long,’ Saffron always said. ‘Let me and Sarah cut it!’

  ‘No!’)

  Then the other hand stretched up, and Tom was ready for that one and he reached out and pulled Indigo over the parapet and hugged him.

  ‘Go on then, say it,’ said Indigo.

  Tom grinned and asked, ‘Feeling blue, Indigo?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  The top of the school was covered in a sort of gravel, dark and mossy with age. Indigo stretched out flat on his back. The climb had taken less than ten minutes, but it felt like hours.

  He said, ‘Hey Tom, the sky’s going green.’

  ‘I’ve been worrying about that,’ said Tom, also flat on his back, and they looked at it together. There was not a cloud, nor a plane, nor a bird. Just the blue-green clearness of a summer evening.

  ‘I brought a bag of cherries,’ remarked Indigo, fishing in his pocket.

  ‘You think of everything,’ said Tom. ‘Do you know what I found up here? A little tree. It’s growing over there by the wall. There’s been a pigeon too.’

  ‘Spit out your cherry stones as far as you can,’ said Indigo. ‘We’ll have an orchard up here in no time.’

  ‘We need never go down, once the cherries are ripe.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sky’s getting greener all the time. There’ll be stars next if we’re not careful.’

  ‘Probably,’ agreed Indigo philosophically.

  ‘Indigo?’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘You wouldn’t nip down for my guitar?’

  ‘Couldn’t you just hum?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’ve got an awful lot of stuff to tell you.’

  ‘I’ve got to go home.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’d go home if Frances was Rose and you were me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What if she dies, and I’ve just been horrible to her all her life?’