by Hilary McKay
“Were you a girl?” asked James, round eyed, and Dill puffed out his cheeks with unexploded laughter but Miss Piper said calmly, “I was once, a long time ago, a very young, very pretty girl.”
There was still something very young about the arrangement of shadows and wrinkles on Miss Piper’s face. Her blue eyes and silver curls were almost pretty still. But old-pretty, thought Binny, like a pressed flower instead of a growing one.
Unbidden, Binny’s word for Miss Piper came to her just then.
Witch.
Miss Piper’s eyes were watching hers.
And she knows I know, thought Binny.
Meanwhile, Binny’s mother and Clem were smiling and introducing new friends, Clare from Binny’s class at school and Clare’s mother Molly. They were comfortably natural, handing over pink wine, a posh magazine, and a box of homemade cherry meringues.
“Rude cakes!” cried James in delight when he saw them, causing Dill’s face to turn dark purple, but the mothers placidly arranged them on plates and opened the wine. Even Miss Piper ate one, nibbling primly around the cherry and smiling as her doll was shown and admired.
Witch, witch, witch, thought Binny again, and was glad when she went home.
Later there was a thin slice of moon and an icy spring green evening sky. There was a planet too: Venus, rising as the sun set.
“Now?” asked Clare, looking at her mother, and her mother nodded and produced from behind the sofa a large box of giant sparklers. They lit them in the darkening garden and twirled circles and messages in vanishing bright lines.
“I like rockets best,” said Dill, and wonder of wonders, Clare’s mother had brought rockets too.
* * *
“Thank you for my brilliant day,” said the children’s mother at bedtime. “I ache from laughing! And the birthday cake, and the presents and the fireworks and the treats. It was perfect.”
* * *
“Light off?” asked Clem, standing in Binny’s bedroom doorway.
“Yes please.”
“Finished writing, then?”
“I don’t feel like writing tonight.”
“Binny?” Clem paused, one hand on the light switch, her silvery charms shining on her arm. “Something wrong?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Are you going to wear your bracelet always?”
Clem shook her head. “Just sometimes. It would be awful to lose it. Today was lovely, wasn’t it? Everybody helped, even Pete.”
“Miss Piper didn’t.”
“I liked her little doll. She said she’d make one of James and me as well.”
“Don’t let her!”
“Bin! How could I stop her? Why would I want to, anyway?”
“She’s a witch,” said Binny. “That’s why. I’ve been thinking for quite a long time that she’s a witch. I just haven’t liked to say it before now.”
Clem groaned.
“She’s even got a broomstick! I’ve seen it in her garden. Don’t say it’s for sweeping leaves because she hasn’t got any leaves.”
“Binny, do you always have to have an enemy? Aunty Violet? Gareth? Clare? And now Miss Piper! Why?”
“It’s the way she’s started looking at me.”
“Actually,” said Clem, unexpectedly, “I did notice her looking at you when she was here this afternoon. Thoughtfully.”
“Witchily!”
“Don’t be daft!” said Clem, and switched off the light.
* * *
Binny lay in the cluttered darkness of her room and thought dreadful, cluttered thoughts.
She looked at me like that because she knows about the money.
The money that I found.
Did she see me?
Nobody saw me.
If I hadn’t picked it up, someone else would have.
Or else it would have blown away.
Anyway it wasn’t anybody’s.
Well, perhaps the bank’s.
But
Banks don’t have feelings. Banks are just places. Like schools or hospitals or swimming pools.
I didn’t steal it.
I definitely didn’t.
Did I?
Did I?
Yes.
Chapter Six
Monday Morning
The money was the first thing Binny thought of when she woke the next morning, even before she remembered that it was the first day of the midterm break.
In a few hours her bundle of notes had gone from being a happiness to being a burden. She wished she had never seen it. Hadn’t her mother’s birthday been perfect as it was? Wouldn’t it have been ruined if she’d produced the least glimmer of a diamond? Her Saturday madness and joy was all gone now. She thought, I’m going to give it back, and the thought was absolute bliss.
Although giving it back, Binny realized very quickly, was not going to be half as easy as taking it in the first place. A handful of notes could not just be left at an ATM, unguarded, free to the cold spring wind, or the next grabbing hands. They belonged, Binny supposed, to the bank and that was where they would have to be returned.
Oh.
What would the bank staff say, she wondered, when she arrived at the counter? Might they be so pleased to see their lost property that they would forget to ask where it had spent the weekend? Would they understand that she had never meant to steal it?
I didn’t! thought Binny. Me! Steal! I’d never do that! Never!
Then she thought of Miss Piper’s murmuring voice. That peg doll Binny with its hand in its pocket, and suddenly she didn’t care how they would behave at the bank. It wasn’t important. It would be quite fair if they were angry with her. She would agree with them, nodding, Yes, you are right! All that mattered anymore was to get it back, quickly, as fast as possible.
Wherever the horrible stuff was.
Where had she last hidden it, the night before her mother’s birthday? Bathrobe pocket, thought Binny, and rolled out of bed to reach for it and it wasn’t there.
A thin rivulet of coldness, a tiny trickle of alarm, made its way down Binny’s spine. She turned her bathrobe inside out and shook out the sleeves.
No money.
Of course! Of course! She had taken it out of the pocket again when she had noticed the bulge it made. It was in the empty cookie tin on the bookshelf.
No it wasn’t, no it wasn’t, no it wasn’t.
Nor was it in her musical box. Had it ever been in the money box? It had been in the apple tree, her slippers, a bread bag, and her socks. Where else had it been? Binny was swept by a wash of horrible panic.
Somewhere in this room was a bundle of twenty-pound notes.
Definitely in this room; she remembered taking them to bed.
But they were not in her bed, nor in the pillowcase. They were not in her jeans pocket, or any of the drawers in the chest of drawers. Not in Max’s basket nor in her pencil case. Not transformed into very expensive bookmarkers to mark a place in The Railway Children, A Little Princess, or any of the other books from the half unpacked box. Binny knew this for certain because she took the books out one by one and shook them. It was not beneath her socks in her shoe box of socks, or amongst the washing in the washing basket on the landing, or under her mattress.
It was not under her bed, not in her wardrobe, or on top of it.
Not amongst the trash in her trash can, or the kitchen trash, the bathroom trash, or the big trash can in the garden. Probably not in the apple tree either, definitely not, it was madness to look, but, still in her pajamas, Binny climbed up and looked.
Since she was passing, she looked in the henhouse too, but it wasn’t there.
Binny returned inside, rather muddy.
The money was not in the bag of dog biscuits that she kept on her bedroom windowsill. It was not in James’s school bag, nor flattened under the train track. Not in the living room. Not folded into the sofa bed where her mother slept so that lucky Clem and James and Binny could have a bedroom each. Not down the sides of either the
pink chair or the rocking chair. Not in, or under, the birthday cake tin.
Not amongst the books on her bedroom bookshelf, or lurking with her old teddy bears in the box where they had been hibernating for the last three years or so. Not, she concluded after a swift ransacking, keeping nice and warm in the cupboard, amongst the folded towels.
Not in any other place that she could think to search.
The money was lost.
* * *
None of the family noticed Binny’s panic. Her mother, beset by builders’ bills, had hurried to work before six that morning, long before anyone else was awake, leaving Clem in charge. James was in the living room, dreamily eating cereal. He was half watching TV, half waiting at the window for Dill to appear. Clem was invisible, shut in her bedroom, playing her flute. Something was wrong in there too: the owl notes were not as clear as usual, they repeated over and over, windy and distorted and tormenting. After Binny had started to notice them she couldn’t stop hearing them. They made it impossible to think and she paused her frantic searching to beat her fists on Clem’s door and cry, “It’s awful, Clem! Stop it!”
“I know, I know,” she heard Clem call. “I can’t stop it.”
Binny returned to her room and began grabbing and shaking things. She did this for a long time, whimpering a bit. Then James erupted in her doorway, with Dill behind him, and demanded indignantly, “What have you done to our railway?”
Binny’s room looked burgled. Its doors and drawers gaped open. Books lay in heaps. Clothes were piled in landslides. The railway system was engulfed. There was no longer a route to Paris, or anywhere else. There was nowhere that a foot could safely tread. All but the highest landmarks had disappeared.
“Go away,” said Binny, but James and Dill only crowded closer.
“I lost something,” said Binny.
The devastation overflowed like a wave across the landing, lapped into James’s room, mingled with the contents of the cupboard, and poured down the stairs.
Dill, thoughtfully studying the toes of his red socks, spoke a few hushed words to James.
“He said, ‘What did she lose?’ ” said James. “What did you lose, Binny? Me and Dill will help you look.”
Binny shook her head.
“We want to,” said James, and Dill, who liked nothing more than ransacking through other people’s stuff, nodded in agreement. After that, for what seemed like hours and hours to Binny, the two of them hounded her with discoveries. “Is it this? Is it this? Is it this?” they demanded, holding up random items, papers, socks, spare dog collars, books, small trodden-on treasures, and a hundred other things until Binny fled the house to sit hunched on the kitchen doorstep. She remained there until the sky began splattering a thin rain and she realized that she was still in her pajamas. Very slowly she returned to the house and set off up the stairs. James spotted her at once and said brightly, “We’re still looking! Is it this?”
He waved a broken pen that had once written with gold ink.
“That’s not treasure,” criticized Dill. He was holding Binny’s jacket. “Yuk, crumbs,” he said critically, feeling in a pocket, and Binny leaped to grab.
But the jacket pockets were empty of skulking twenty-pound notes.
The dreadful mad owl noises from Clem’s flute had stopped, and while Binny had been searching her jacket pockets, her sister’s door had opened. Binny looked up to see Clem gazing down the stairs. Clem was a tidy person and Binny, mud covered and ankle deep in a sea of clutter, waited for her cries of horror. They did not come. Clem stepped through the turmoil as if she didn’t see it, her flute case in one hand, her bag in the other.
“Binny, I’m going out,” she said as she passed. “I’ve got to. I won’t be long. Look after the boys.”
“Me?” asked Binny, but Clem was already gone.
Dill looked questioningly at James.
“Clem was the grown-up,” James explained. “Now Binny’s the grown-up.”
Binny slumped down onto the stairs and dropped her head into her arms. She didn’t want to be the grown-up. She wanted someone to come and look after her, put everything away, and then wind back time so that she could walk safely past the ATM without a glance in its direction.
“Clem’s supposed to be the grown-up,” James continued to Dill. “The boss. When Mum isn’t here, it’s Clem.”
Dill nodded, looked at Binny, hopeless as a grown-up, nothing like a boss, and said, “It’s rubbish looking for her treasure. Let’s go and bury our own!”
“Where?” asked James. “Outside? In the garden?”
Dill shook his head.
“In your grandma’s garden?” asked James, hopefully. He had never yet been invited to Dill’s grandma’s house.
Dill shook his head again. “On the beach,” he said.
“Now? On the beach?”
James, aged six, was allowed to go to the baker’s on the corner by himself. He was allowed to walk to school with Dill and Dill’s grandma. He was allowed to go to Gareth’s house on one side, when Gareth’s family were visiting, and once, when his elastic band powered airplane had flown over the garden fence, he had been allowed to go to Miss Piper’s and ask for it back. Sometimes he was planted in the library when storytelling was going on. Binny had once abandoned him on the pier.
But he had never been to the beach alone. Never. Had Dill?
“I’m seven,” Dill reminded him.
It was the way he said it. Like a person might say, “I have superpowers.” James had been quite happy being six until he met Dill. And anyway, who said six couldn’t go to the beach?
Dill looked at James, hands in pockets, as if waiting for him to admit the uselessness of six.
James pondered.
“The beach, but not swimming,” he said at last, because although he had a wetsuit, pink and lime green, a lucky find from a trash can, these days it was only used in the warmth of the bath.
“Digging,” said Dill.
“Digging up treasure?”
“Bury it first,” said Dill. “Bury it. Make a map. Dig it up later.”
“Wow!” said James, overcome at the magnificence of this plan. “Yes! Have you got any treasure?”
“Mmm.” Dill smiled his downward smile. “At Gran’s.”
“We’ve got a spade,” said James excitedly. “Spade. Paper. Pencil. We’ve got everything! Bin! Did you hear? You’re the grown-up!” He prodded her hunched shoulders to make sure she was still awake. “Dill and me are going treasure burying. Okay?”
* * *
Binny heard all this, about the treasure and the map, and how she was now the grown-up. It made no sense to her. All she could think of was the vanished money. It could not be more than a dozen steps away, because the house was so small nowhere was farther away than that. She closed her eyes and tried to detect it by the power of divination. When this didn’t work she tried wishing she was dead, as she often did when life became inconvenient.
Meanwhile, the house became very quiet.
Chapter Seven
Monday Afternoon, Part One
Clem was the first of the family to return home. She was still slightly dazed from the worry that had sent her out, but, temporarily at least, she was back in the everyday world again. As soon as she closed the front door behind her she noticed the silence. Crossing the hall and the kitchen she peered into the garden.
No James and no Dill. Clem began to feel uneasy. Dill spent school vacations with his grandmother who lived a few doors down the street. Dill’s grandmother was a woman who believed in early independence. This meant encouraging Dill to visit his friends as often as possible for as long as possible, consuming as many meals as necessary along the way. Nor did Dill’s grandmother encourage him to bring friends back. It was very unlikely that the boys had gone to her house, thought Clem, remembering how often James’s “Let’s go to yours now” had been answered with a husky “Let’s not.”
Then Clem came to the foot of the stairs and sa
w the wreckage that had cascaded down from Binny’s room, and started panicking.
“James! Dill! Binny!” she shouted, and after a moment heard a startled, “What?”
Binny’s face peered down at her through the banisters.
“What’s happened?” demanded Clem. “Why is there stuff all over the stairs? Where are the boys?”
Binny looked around, blinking. After a moment or two she said rather blankly, “They must have gone.”
“Gone where? Binny, wake up! Where are they? You must know!”
Binny, coming slowly back to the world, found she did know. Maps, and digging and burying treasure. A spade and paper and a pencil.
The beach.
“The beach!” exploded Clem. “Those two! On their own! Do you mean on their own?”
Binny nodded unhappily.
Then Clem, the serene, the unselfish one, exploded.
“I was hardly gone any time! Half an hour! Couldn’t you have taken care of them for half an hour!”
“I . . . ,” began Binny.
“Aren’t you old enough! Nearly thirteen!”
“I . . .”
“It isn’t fair! Ever since Dad died, all these years, I’ve had to be grown-up! Mum and me looking after you and James!”
“I . . .”
“How can I do anything? How can I go to university? How can I go anywhere while you are so . . . so . . . helpless!”
“Me?”
“Look at you! Just sitting there! Doing nothing.”
Clem was not doing nothing. All the time she had been shouting she had also been dragging on her old coat, checking the battery of her mobile phone, and rushing for the door.
“Clem! Where are you going!” shouted Binny. “Clem, wait!” And then she began hurrying herself, an old sweater over her pajama top, jeans over the bottoms, bare feet in her school shoes, racing after Clem, calling, “Wait! Wait! Wait!” slipping and stumbling on the wet cobbles as she ran.
* * *
She left the door of the house wide open behind her, and that was the way Miss Piper found it.