by Hilary McKay
Binny had looked enviously at her golden little brother. His lowered lashes cast an enchanting shadow on his smooth, irrepressible cheek and he looked extremely pleased with himself.
“That was lucky,” she said.
“Yes,” agreed James.
“Or else what would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” James had admitted. “I’ve been looking for money for ages. I did find two pennies on the playground, but Dill said they were his.”
So money haunted James as well. Two pennies on the playground. The bourbon creams. Still, he had managed a birthday present for Sunday with very little trouble. Two presents, in fact. Once again, Binny had worried about her own gift of homemade tokens for cups of tea, vacuuming, and putting things away. (This token when given to Belinda Cornwallis will make her put away a minimum of twenty items! Usable anywhere in the house.) Her other present, poppy seeds, was all right, but it didn’t wrap up into a proper parcel shape, and didn’t compare with Clem’s present of pearly dangling earrings with little silver shells.
“They only came from the market,” Clem had told Binny consolingly, when she found her worrying. “Poppy seeds are perfect, her favorite flower.”
Binny had not been much comforted, but it had been the best she could do.
Until now.
Binny walked home in a spending dream. Roses in pots and books of poetry. Dazzling silk scarves and bracelets and perfume. Giant chocolate bars for James and peppermint cremes for Clem. A new hat for Pete whose present one had a hole in the middle. He needed a hat and he had been icy with her ever since she had climbed up the scaffolding. A new hat might warm him up a bit. Also Cinderella, currently living on the cheapest cat food possible, needed sardines, and Max could have a Frisbee for when he came for his vacations, and the chickens, Pecker and Gertie, loved cabbages and . . .
Crash! All four library books fell as Binny walked into a lamppost very hard.
“Sorry, sorry,” she murmured to the books and the lamppost, hardly noticing the pain, her mind on her shopping list, her hand guarding the treasure in her pocket. Oh, money! Oh lovely, needed, unlooked-for money! Suddenly she couldn’t wait to get home, rush upstairs, spread it out on her bed, and gloat over it, each note, one by one.
Here was the last steep road. Terraced houses rising in steps, flower tubs and cats and trash cans dragged through the front doors from the little gardens at the back because tomorrow was trash day. Binny skirted the last of them and there was her own door with its dolphin shaped knocker, and then she was home.
The rest of the family were also home. James and his friend Dill were upstairs laying out train tracks, a newly revived passion since the discovery of the whistle and the hat. Her mother was in the kitchen with the table covered in newspaper, and a half painted wooden chair on the top. The kitchen chairs were all different shapes, but soon at least, they would be all the same color, apple green with white legs. Binny’s mother was painting one a day and this was the last. Tomorrow, when it was dry, nobody would have to sit on the stairs to eat their supper. At present the stairs were occupied by Cinderella, curled into a snow white swirl of cat. The air was filled with the smell of paint from the kitchen, the squawks and squabbles of the boys upstairs, and the sound of Clem’s flute in the living room, cascades of notes patterning and repatterning as she worked.
Into this kaleidoscope of family went Binny. Clem nodded to her when she opened the door but did not pause, and Binny retreated back from the room. She wasn’t musical like Clem, and she thought flutes might be beautiful to look at, but they sounded like loud mad owls. She headed for the kitchen instead, until her mother called, “Hello Binny! Shoo, till I finish with this paint!”
The problem was where to shoo that was private enough to spread out a pocketful of money. The moment she started up to her bedroom, there was James.
“Hello don’t k—” began James, and then, at a splutter from behind, ordered, “Shut up Dill!”
“ ‘Kiss,’ ” you were going to say!” murmured Dill.
“I wasn’t! Don’t come upstairs, I was going to say.”
“Why not?” Binny asked.
“Because you’ll tread on the train lines. Dill’n me have made the Channel Tunnel under your bed.”
Binny groaned. One of the many troubles of no bedroom door was no way of keeping out James.
“And,” continued James, “you can’t go into the bathroom because Dill says it’s Paris.”
Dill, husky voiced, severe, and seven, said, “Unless you’ve got a passport.”
“What if I want the loo?” demanded Binny.
The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.
“It would still be Paris,” explained James, and Dill added, “There aren’t any loos in Paris. I went there and there weren’t. You have to go up the Eiffel Tower.”
“What, everyone?” cried James, delighted. “Everyone in Paris? Even the girls?”
Dill smiled a mouth-turned-down smile, blushing a little and looked sideways at Binny. The family were still getting used to Dill, who had been presented to them without warning as James’s new best friend. It seemed to James’s family that one moment they had hardly known Dill existed, and the next he had moved in to live with them. Dill went to the same school as James. In class he sat at James’s table. After school, and in the vacations, he spent his time at his grandmother’s house, a few doors down the street. “So,” said James, “he has to be my friend.”
“Hmm,” said Clem, who had already chased Dill out of her bedroom (“Just lookin’,” said Dill), rescued Cinderella the cat from his schoolbag as he was leaving the door (“Just givin’ her a ride,” Dill explained), and interrupted his exploration of the back of the fridge (“Just wonderin’ what to cook”).
“I think it’s good Dill’n me are friends,” said James, and Dill’s grandmother agreed. It solved a problem for her that had lasted for years. Seven years, ever since the fateful afternoon when she and Dill had first met and he had looked so quiet and harmless, bundled in a white shawl in a plastic hospital cot. A rare and reckless excitement had swept her senses away that day. “I can help look after him,” she had told his grateful parents. “I’ll do that.”
What she should have added was “sometimes.” “I’ll do that sometimes.”
Instead of nearly every day, before and after school and all through the school vacations.
Dill’s grandmother was exceedingly relieved when James came along, with his home down the road, and his trains, and his useful supply of child-minding big sisters. “Off you go to your friend,” she told Dill, the minute he arrived, and off he went, and here he was now.
Binny, with the money burning to be counted in her pocket, the Channel Tunnel under her bed, and Paris in the bathroom, couldn’t help sighing. However, there was one closed door in the house, that of Clem’s bedroom, and so she called downstairs. “Clem, Clem, can I borrow your room just for one minute?”
Clem, who had not long before moved into the tiniest room in the house on the understanding that no one ever visited her there, yelled back, “No!”
“I need somewhere private,” explained Binny, coming halfway down the stairs, and a new voice said, “Ah!”
It was their neighbor, Miss Piper, who had recently moved into the vacation cottage she owned next door. Binny could never see this person in their house without wanting to turn her around, put both her hands in the small of her back, and push her out of the door. That was how Binny felt about Miss Piper and it was all because of the time she had overheard her say to her mother, “If you ever think of selling I would be so grateful if you would give me first refusal.”
“Oh!” Binny’s mother had said.
“Unless, of course, somebody has already asked you the same thing.”
“No. No one has. No.”
“Thank you, then. Thank you, Polly. I appreciate it. I must go now but that is such a relief.”
Binny had glared at Miss Piper�
��s retreating back and demanded, “What’s first refusal?”
“Nothing. Well. Nothing that matters. It means that if we ever wanted to sell the house we would ask Miss Piper if she would like to buy it before we asked anyone else.”
“I knew it was something awful.”
“Well, to tell the truth Binny, it wouldn’t be awful. It would be convenient and helpful and save us quite a lot of money. But of course we’re not selling the house to anyone, so you can stop worrying.”
Binny hadn’t stopped worrying. It was the start of her strange wariness of Miss Piper. Soon after, she had a word to describe that distrust, and although she had never once said it aloud, she knew Miss Piper was aware of it. Aware of it, and slightly amused by it. Sometimes Binny would feel Miss Piper’s eyes upon her. Their expression was that of a person doing private sums in her head. It was impossible to tell what she concluded from these calculations. Her voice was always exactly the same. It had a lap, lapping sound, thought Binny, a going-nowhere sound, like the water in the harbor at high tide on a windless day.
However, now Miss Piper was smiling. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and her smile floated up to Binny as she said, “I popped in to see how you were!”
“Me?” asked Binny.
“I was behind you coming up the hill when you walked into that lamppost. Quite a bump. You dropped all your books. I called.”
“Did you?”
“You didn’t hear. In a dream. In a daze. Dazzled. Bewitched and bedazzled! Were you?”
“No,” said Binny, uncomfortable, and untruthful.
Miss Piper raised her eyebrows. Binny fidgeted and was thankful when Clem appeared, still holding her flute.
“Clem!” said Miss Piper. “There you are! Playing your flute again. Do you know, I could hear you away down the street, almost as soon as I came out of the marketplace! Hello, Polly!”
The children’s mother looked at Binny and Clem’s bothered faces and said tactfully, “Come and see my chairs, Annabelle!” and led Miss Piper away.
“Ignore our growly Binny!” Binny heard her say as the door closed after them, and Miss Piper’s reply, “I do see that privacy must be a great problem for her and Clem!”
Binny pulled a face at the kitchen door.
“Don’t!” said Clem. “Why do you need my room? Is it about Sunday?”
Sunday was their mother’s birthday and Binny nodded because it was about that, in a way.
“Oh all right, then. But don’t let the boys in. Can people really hear my flute right down the street?”
“No,” said Binny. “Take no notice!” She glared again in the direction of the kitchen, but a minute later, safe in Clem’s bedroom with her back against the door, she forgot Miss Piper and took out her money.
It was a thick roll of notes. A transforming amount of money. Enough to make nothing impossible anymore. Binny sighed with thankfulness. Her mother’s birthday triumphant. Maybe even the next school trip. But birthday presents first! thought Binny. How much were diamonds? Her mother’s diamond earrings had not survived the bankruptcy. Imagine producing new ones! Happy Birthday! You’ll never guess what!
Binny had a money box, lighthouse shaped, usually empty. That night she stuffed it so full that the few small coins already inside hardly had room to rattle. Then she lay in bed and planned her route round the shops the next day. Following this, in bliss, she pictured the birthday morning with an armload of presents. The astonished unwrapping, the exclamations and delight. Binny, how perfect! My favorites!
This wonderful feeling lasted all night and was not shattered until morning when Clem asked quite casually, as they washed the breakfast things together, “Do you want to look at the earrings I bought Mum one more time before I wrap them up?”
It was as if Binny had stood on the edge of the sea, thinking, It’s warm! It’s gorgeous! and then been flattened by a wave of absolutely freezing salt water.
Binny floundered and gasped and dropped the mug she was drying to smash on the kitchen floor.
“Binny!” groaned Clem.
“Sorry,” Binny said, and after the broken pieces were collected, managed to follow Clem to her room, and agree (rubbing metaphorical salt water from her eyes) that Clem’s silver earrings, bought with the hoarded remains of her café earnings (after she had paid for flute lessons, college supplies, birthday cake ingredients, Binny’s new hair bobbles, and a comic book for James) didn’t look at all like earrings from a market stall, especially now that Clem had found them a proper little box, instead of market bubble wrap.
“They definitely said they were real solid silver,” said Clem, inspecting them so anxiously that Binny dismissed completely and forever the thought of diamonds as a birthday surprise.
It was a cold drenching of real life, the very beginning of the problem of being very rich when those around you are very poor. Before Binny had begun to recover from it there came another wave, just as bad.
James said, “You know Dill?”
“Yes.”
“Dill said that it was fair for me to give Mum the picture, because it was a picture of me. But it was cheating to give her the Kit Kat because I didn’t buy it. Or did he just say that because he wanted us to eat it?”
“Because he wanted you to eat it,” said Binny indignantly. “He’s a greedy pig and it was brilliant of you to save it for Mum!”
“If I give it to her it makes two presents,” explained James earnestly. “Two presents from me. Same as you and Clem.”
“Clem?”
“Two earrings.”
“Oh yes, I see.”
“Fair,” said James.
Chapter Four
Saturday, All Day, Till Night
Binny didn’t go shopping that Saturday morning. She couldn’t wreck the fairness of James’s anxious two presents each. Nor could she upstage those earrings and that worried-over Kit Kat. It would be cheating. Outrageous cheating. Anyway, there was no time to go anywhere because there was the birthday cake to be made.
“Chocolate cake,” said Clem, frowning over a recipe book. “We’ll start it soon as Mum goes off to work. I hope I’ve got enough stuff. I’m making a one and a half times the recipe size. Look!”
Binny looked, doing the math aloud as she read. “Three hundred and seventy-five grams of chocolate. Four and a half eggs . . .”
“Oh!” said Clem.
“Make it twice as big,” suggested Binny. “It’ll be much easier to work out, and we haven’t had a proper cake for ages and ages.”
Clem, hovering uncertainly between the kitchen and the stairs, said, “I don’t think I have enough chocolate. Unless I rush out and get one more bar.”
“Good idea!”
“Only, I’ve just about run out of money, that’s the problem. Have you any change, Bin? Would you mind if I raided your money box?”
“NO!”
“Thanks,” said Clem, heading up the stairs. “I’ll put it back as soon as . . .”
“I meant, No, don’t look in my money box!” said Binny, running to push past Clem on the narrow stairs. “Not, No I don’t mind! I’ll look! You wait down here!”
“All right! All right! How was I to know it was secretly stuffed full of twenty-pound notes! What’s the matter now?”
Binny, pale with shock, was staring down the stairs at her.
“Nothing,” she croaked.
“Hurry, then,” commanded Clem, and to Binny’s infinite thankfulness, left her alone to extract the very small amount of cash from her money box that could be reasonably handed over to buy chocolate.
“We’ll just manage,” said Clem, adding it to her own collection of change. “If I promise not to rob you while you are out, would you scoot to the shop to buy it, Binny?”
“Couldn’t you?”
Clem rolled her eyes and dashed out of the door and as soon as she had gone Binny ran for her money box again.
It was the start of a very difficult time.
During t
he morning, between taking turns to mix the cake, Binny hid the money. First in her school bag, and then, when James wanted to borrow pencils to make a birthday card, in her sock drawer, with the flower seeds and gift tokens. That was all right until Clem said, “Let’s get all the presents and see what they look like together in a heap. I know where they are, I’ll fetch them!” Binny had to race her upstairs again, rescue her treasure, and push it hastily into her slippers. This lasted until Dill appeared, all eager to construct more railway lines. Binny grabbed the slippers from under her bed and stuffed them up her sweater.
“Are they special slippers?” asked Dill, noticing at once.
“Yes. No. Yes they are.”
“No they’re not,” said James. “They’re just your smelly old ordinary slippers.”
“Why are you hiding them?” asked Dill.
“I’m not.”
“You are,” said James, “and you’ve gone all red!”
Dill murmured something to him.
“What was that?” asked Binny suspiciously.
“He said, ‘Let’s turn into spies!’ That’s all.”
“Spies!”
“No!” said Clem, overhearing this. “Binny and I are much too busy to put up with spies around here! Railway engineers are bad enough! Spies,” she added, looking at Dill, “can go home!”
Dill, who never went home if he could possibly help it, smiled his downward smile, and went back to helping James with the terribly difficult task of building a railway that went upstairs. Binny slipped off and hid the contents of her slippers in her jacket pocket. They stayed there until Clem suddenly groaned, “Icing sugar! I forgot to buy icing sugar! Have you any more change?”
“No,” said Binny certainly.