by Hilary McKay
It was still invisible.
Binny searched under beds and inside cupboards, but there was no money there. The dolls’ house did not have an attic but she remembered the space under the roof. It held nothing but dust and the batteries for the fairy lights that long ago, in a different world, her father had strung through the house to surprise them all.
Binny remembered his voice, “Push that switch!”
She pushed it again, and jumped in surprise as silvery light sprang through the shadowy rooms. James tumbled out of bed and Clem’s flute suddenly sparkled, Binny-on-the-stairs turned a somersault and her hand fell out of her empty pocket, and Binny herself, Binny the traveler at the end of the journey, was unbewitched at last.
* * *
It was a strange, strange feeling, like waking after an endless, muddled dream. It took a long while to feel real.
An hour passed, and then another. Gareth returned with Max and went off again to donate his art installation to the gallery in town. Clem tracked down Pete. He was easy to find; he was outside the jeweler’s shop, sandpapering the window frames.
“Oh Pete!”
“Didn’t cost me a penny,” said Pete.
“Thank you, thank you!”
“What’s the fuss? You get your bracelet. They get a coat of paint. Everyone’s happy.”
“Are you?”
“Never been better,” said Pete, and tried to whistle a bit to prove it.
James came home with his mother and then spent a very short time kung fu fighting in the window with Dill. Dill’s grandmother was not at all calm about this, so James helped Dill pack to run away. “You can come to our house,” he offered, but Dill had already decided on China and would not change his mind.
Binny’s mother spent the afternoon throwing things away, which she liked to do in times of stress.
Gareth returned from the gallery a local celebrity, having been photographed three times, interviewed twice, and given his autograph to a seven-year-old girl.
“You found it!” he exclaimed, the moment he saw Binny. “Where was it? That dolls’ house?”
“No it wasn’t. I haven’t. But Gareth, I know what to do!”
She was a different Binny, the struggle of bewitchment gone from her face, her eyes bright with plans.
“Listen Bin, I’ve been thinking,” said Gareth. “You’re the only person who ever actually saw that money. And you know what you’re like! Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Of course I’m sure. I took it. I lost it. And tomorrow, as soon as the bank is open, I’m going to tell them everything.”
“You’re mad,” said Gareth flatly.
“I’m not. I should have done that ages ago instead of blaming everyone else.”
“It wasn’t blaming them. It was checking them out. We’re still not certain it wasn’t Clem or Pete.”
“I am. You will be when I tell you. Anyway, I know who it was. It was me.”
“You took it, but then what? It didn’t fall through a hole in the world! You can’t tell that to the bank!”
Binny, who was now absolutely convinced that this was exactly what had happened, decided not to argue. Instead she said, “I’m going to tell them that I’ll pay it back myself.”
“Binny, think before you do anything daft,” said Gareth. “Don’t go hoping that the bank will let you off, because I bet they won’t.”
“I don’t want to be let off.”
“Nobody knows but me. Even if that old witch next door guesses something, she can’t prove it or she would have done it by now. Why don’t you just keep quiet and forget it?”
“Because I want to pay it all back.”
“Oh come on, Bin!” exploded Gareth. “You don’t even know how much it was.”
“Perhaps the bank will know.”
“And how will you pay it back?”
“I’ll earn it,” said Binny stubbornly.
“Earn it!” said Gareth.
“The café will reopen soon. I earned money last summer.”
“Cleaning tables for tips!”
“Yes. And I can do other things too. I could babysit . . .”
“You!”
“ . . . and find a paper route. Clem had a paper route when she was the same age as me. I can work all summer.”
“Are you going to tell anyone besides the bank about all this?”
“I might. I might even tell Miss Piper. I’m not scared of her anymore.”
“She’s not a witch, then, after all?” asked Gareth sarcastically, and was dragged up to Binny’s attic to see the witching in the dolls’ house, the bed-trapped James, the broken flute, and the unhappy model of herself.
“They’re just dolls shoved in any old way like any nutter might do,” said Gareth, but his voice was uncertain as he looked, and looked again.
“I think she can witch people,” said Binny. “But the witching only lasts if they let her. James didn’t let her. He bounced out of bed the next morning. Clem didn’t either. She got her flute fixed. And I’m not going to let her anymore. That’s why I’m going to tell before she does, as soon as the bank opens in morning.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Gareth slowly.
“Of course I am.”
“Tomorrow is Friday, don’t forget, that’s when we have to go.”
“You’ll be back for summer,” said Binny bravely, with her arms around Max.
“I wish I could come to the bank with you, but we always set off so early.”
“I’d rather go by myself. I can’t wait to begin making everything back to how it was before. I wish there was something I could do to start it now. Oh! I’ve just thought! There is!”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to see Clare. She’s back from that school trip today! I’m going there right now!”
Chapter Eighteen
Thursday Evening
It was a long walk out to Clare’s house, across the marketplace and then along the only road out of town, an always-breezy highway that started off between stone houses and shops, passed through a dreary stage of gas stations and tattoo parlors, skirted the permanently half built sports center, and then suddenly acquired grassy verges and became a country road, complete with dandelions, car flung litter, squashed squirrels, and airy blue views of the moors on the horizon.
Somewhere far out on those moors a big cat roamed, a dusty bronze lynx with feather tufted ears. Binny knew it existed because she and Clare had put it there, one frightening and beautiful autumn dawn.
A long walk, Binny thought, remembering. “A journey,” she told Max. “Longer than this. Colder too.”
Max pushed his nose into her hand to show that he was listening. All along the road his tail had kept up a steady swing of pleasure; no walk was ever too long for Max, but at the turn into the narrow side road that led to Clare’s house the swing became an exuberant wave, because coming toward them was Clare.
Will she be friends, Binny had wondered, all through the journey. One glance at Clare showed that she already was.
“Binny! Binny! Max!” she cried, and Max hurtled toward her with Binny towing behind him, so that they met breathless and laughing in the middle of the road.
“I was just thinking about you!” said Clare, untangling herself from Max’s leash, “and there you were! We’re not still enemies, are we? I don’t think we should be; it gets boring so fast. Do you still think Mum and me stole your money?”
“I never did,” said Binny. “I promise I never did. It was me.”
“You stole your own money?”
“Not my own. Clare, I’ve had an awful week.”
“You’d better tell me,” said Clare.
“That’s what I came to do. Listen!”
Then Binny paused for a long time, while Clare looked at her expectantly.
“I am listening,” she said at last.
“I know. Wait.”
There was another very long pause.
“
I am waiting,” said Clare.
“It’s hard to think of the words to begin,” said Binny apologetically.
Clare nodded.
“I’m thinking of them now.”
“Okay.”
“I may get things a bit wrong.”
“Look, you don’t have to tell me,” said Clare. “Tell me something else instead. What happened to your hair?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Oh.”
“Not the main part, though.”
“Did you mean it to be that color?”
“It’s fence color.”
“Yes. Did you mean . . .”
“No. Forget my hair.”
Clare, who had been leading the way back along the lane to her house, now took charge. “Sit here!” she ordered, steering Binny toward a battered wooden bench beside the front door. “Give me Max. Shut your eyes. It’s easier to talk with your eyes shut.”
Binny handed over Max’s leash, shut her eyes, and found Clare was right. Words came at once.
“It started when I was walking home from school last Friday and I hadn’t hardly any money for Mum’s birthday.”
“And you weren’t going on the trip with us,” suggested Clare.
“There were loads of things I wanted money for,” admitted Binny. “The more I thought of them, the more I wanted.” She paused, remembering her shopping list of presents. Clare stroked Max and waited until she went on again, and reached the marketplace where the pigeons were flying, and then arrived at the unattended ATM. “And I picked it up,” finished Binny. “It felt like leaves. Dry leaves, in my pocket and I took it home.”
She stopped.
Clare said, “I’d have done just the same.”
Binny’s eyes flew open in astonishment.
“Would you? Would you?”
“All that money? Of course I would! Think what you could do with it!”
“You can’t do anything,” said Binny. “I found that out almost straightaway. And you have to keep hiding it. I hid it so many times I lost it. All I wanted to do was give it back, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So that’s why I asked you. I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter. But what are you going to do now?”
“Pay it back,” said Binny at once. “I’m going to go to the bank tomorrow and tell them everything that happened and then I’m going to save up and get summer vacation jobs until I can pay it all back.”
“I’ll help you!” said Clare, immediately. “We’ll get it in no time! How much was it anyway?”
“Too much to count.”
“Wow!” said Clare. “Too much to count, just waiting to be collected! I’d definitely have taken it! Now, forget it for a bit and come into the house. I’ll tell you about the trip and we’ll get something to eat. There’s chocolate brownies and leftover sausages. I can’t stop being hungry. They starved us all week.”
“Did you like it, though? Did you do all that stuff about finding who you really are?”
“Mmm,” said Clare, making large sausage sandwiches. “Oh yes, we did all that. I’ve got amazing people skills and extraordinary tact but I’m still going to be an explorer.”
“I suppose they’ll come in useful,” said Binny. “I wonder if I’ve got them too.”
“No,” said Clare very certainly. “You’ve got awful people skills. I’ve never known anyone worse at people than you!”
“What was that other thing you’ve got?”
“Tact.”
Binny grinned, and thought how much she liked Clare, despite her people skills and tact, and also Clare’s mother, who came in and hugged her as if she hadn’t seen her for weeks, and even Clare’s grown-up brother Mark, despite the fact that he had once nearly accidentally shot her, and ever since had treated her like an edge-of-extinction species, saying such things as “Stand away from the microwave, Bin,” and handing her cushions and vitamin tablets. They all sat around the kitchen table watching Clare eat and listening to her complain.
“It was salad every meal and no proper puddings,” she said, eating dry bread and sauce because the sausages had run out. “I’m never leaving home again without emergency supplies. Can I open a can of beans?”
Mark reached in a cupboard and found her a can. She ate them cold with a fork without bothering with a plate.
Binny asked, “What did you do, besides starve?”
“Oh,” said Clare, not pausing in her scooping of beans. “Everything they told us we would. Caving, the caves smelled horrible, like dead sheep, there was a dead sheep . . .”
“In the cave?”
“Nearby. And rappelling (it was more waiting than rappelling I only got one turn) and we had to write a play about glue sniffing to put us off doing it if we were thinking of trying, but I don’t think anyone was. It would have been better if it had been about getting drunk because three people smuggled in vodka in shower gel bottles and drank it on the first night. They were really sick. I don’t think they’d rinsed all the shower gel out. Their parents got telephoned to fetch them home.”
“You’re making everything sound rubbish so I don’t feel bad about missing it,” said Binny.
“I’m not! Well, I am, but only partly.”
“But did everyone find out what they were going to be?”
“Sort of. Not the alcoholics. But there was a computer program with trick questions and an obstacle course where you got points for cheating and they put the results together. That’s how I found out about my people skills and tact. Binny, you can’t go back to school with your hair looking like that!”
“Clare!” said her mother. “Don’t be rude!”
“It’s all right. I hate it too,” said Binny. “But it washes out in twenty-four washes.”
“Twenty-four?” asked Clare, and when she and Binny were alone in her bedroom, asked, “How many have you done?”
“Three.”
“Come on, then,” said Clare, and led her into the bathroom where she ordered her to hang her head over the edge of the bath. Twenty-one scrubs and rinses later, Binny half swam to her feet at last, and after a short hot session with Clare’s hair dryer found she was almost back to her familiar seaweed color again.
“That’s better,” said Clare. “Mum said she’d drive you home and I’ve brought you back a present. There wasn’t much to choose from, but I thought you’d like a pen.”
“A pen?”
“Because you’re a writer.”
A writer.
* * *
There was no time for writing when Binny got home. Clare’s mother dropped her off, just in time to see Pete leaving. He had arrived with one of his familiar suggestions: “Just a thought . . .” And at those words Clem had seized James, pushed him into his coat and shoes, and hurried him out of the house.
“Where to?” James had asked.
“An adventure,” Clem had told him firmly, and she had kept him out adventuring until the sea became shadowy and the sky turned dusky purple. She brought him back, stuffed full of hot doughnuts from the stall by the harbor, just as the first stars began to come out, a minute or two after Binny arrived with Max.
“You needn’t have all disappeared,” said the children’s mother reproachfully, when she finally returned to the kitchen and found them all there.
“Oh yes we need,” said Clem.
“But since you’re here, all together, I wonder . . . I’d like to . . . I think it would help . . .”
“Get on with it, Mum,” said Clem kindly.
“To have a quick chat!”
“About Miss Piper?” asked Binny, suddenly uneasy.
“No, no, no! About Pete.”
“Pete?”
“Remember Pete?” asked her mother.
“Yes,” said Clem. “We remember Pete. If you mean the Pete who has lived here on and off since last October. The one who whistles and digs the garden and makes you laugh and builds attics into bedrooms and stuffs money into people’s bags when he thinks they
won’t notice.”
“Does he?” asked Binny, very surprised, and then answered herself, “Yes he does! I’ve seen him!”
“And behind the clock,” said James.
“Is that where it came from?” asked Clem.
James nodded. “Yes, I saw him. And he gets nits off chickens too. And did you know he can juggle?”
“Can he?” said Binny.
“Yes he can,” the children’s mother admitted. “He was juggling on the roof the first time I saw him.”
“The roof is fixed on very tightly,” said Binny. “Remember how I checked? And he had a huff afterward?”
“He has huffs,” said James.
“Huffs, and he doesn’t like being paid,” said Clem.
“Short huffs, though,” said Binny. “He huffs off, then he comes back with a new idea. I like it when he says, ‘Just a thought . . .’ ”
“Then you know it will be something good,” agreed James.
“Do you?” said his mother.
“Good, or really good, or even fantastic,” said Binny, as bravely, and lovingly, and reassuringly as she could, and Clem and James nodded.
“Are you quite sure?” asked the children’s mother.
“Yes,” said Binny.
“Yes,” said James.
“Of course,” said Clem.
* * *
The whole of the rest of the evening, every single minute of it, was taken up with discussing Pete’s latest idea. By the time Binny and Max went up to bed in the attic, the skylight was quite dark. Binny looked around the dim triangular room. The dolls’ house stood in a corner. Clare’s pen was on the desk. Max was curled in his basket.
Tomorrow he would be leaving with Gareth.
Oh! thought Binny, I wish I hadn’t remembered that!
It took all her daylight bravery away, so that the night clouds in the skylight became mottled and fearful.
Tomorrow she would have to go to the bank.
Down and down and down fell Binny’s courage, until an idea reached out like a friendly hand to save her.
Tomorrow, when it’s all over, I will write it down.
Chapter Nineteen
Friday Morning
Everyone understood that Binny was useless at good-byes, especially when it came to Max and Gareth. Once they were gone, back to Oxford where Max lived during term time with Gareth and his mother, then she was quite all right again. No one could take care of Max better than Gareth; Binny knew that. Also, he was just as much Gareth’s dog as hers; if she had had him first, then Gareth had had him longest. It was all quite fair, and yet even so the partings were dreadful. Binny’s unhappiness would chew like an ache, and she would find herself weeping for no good reason. It was very embarrassing and damp and it went on and on, all through the long, exhausting process of sorting and packing.