by Jean Ure
“She’ll let us know if anything happens.”
“But I did what you wanted!” said Jem. “I spoke to him again. Saint Anthony! I got back to him.”
I think my mouth must have dropped open. I said, “Really?”
“Really! See, I thought about it, and I knew you couldn’t do it, cos I mean you wouldn’t know how, so I waited till I was in bed and then I had a word with him.”
She made it sound incredibly important, having a word with him. But I guess it is pretty important, talking to a saint.
“What did you say?”
“I said –” Jem clasped her hands and tilted her face heavenwards – “I said, Please, Saint Anthony, hear my prayer—” She broke off at this point to explain that that was what you had to do. “Like, you can’t just say ‘Hi,’ or ‘Anybody there?’ You have to use the right sort of language.”
I said, “Yes, I can see that, but what exactly did you say?”
Jem tilted her face back up. “Please, Saint Anthony, hear my prayer and help my friend Skye find her gran’s pencil. And if you could be very kind and make it a priority, cos she’s really, really miserable, I could probably manage to go to church every Sunday for at least a year.”
I said, “Probably? For a year?”
“I know,” said Jem, “it’s a terribly long time, but I thought it was the least I could do.”
She was positively oozing with the spirit of self-sacrifice. I could almost see this little halo of light hovering just above her.
“I could hardly offer him anything less,” said Jem. “Not if we want him to make it a priority.”
I had actually been going to suggest she might have offered him more. I mean, what good was a year? Being a saint is pretty serious stuff, I would have thought. Saints suffer. Horrible things happen to them, like being pierced with arrows and burned at the stake. I couldn’t see Saint Anthony was going to be satisfied with one measly year. Seemed to me it was a bit of an insult, really.
I said this to Jem, but she rather pompously informed me that I had no idea what I was talking about. She said Saint Anthony hadn’t been pierced with arrows or burned at the stake, and she reckoned a year was about right.
I said, “We shall see. I’m giving him till the weekend.”
“Then what?” said Jem.
“Then I shall take over,” I said.
Later that day, first period after lunch, we had PE. It was hockey with Miss Turnbull, and I just knew that everyone except me and Daisy Hooper were hoping it would rain. All the rest of my class are total wimps, like, “Yeeurgh, mud!” and “Ouch, my ankle!” and “Please, miss, can I be excused?” Skye says hockey is barbaric. Even Jem, who can run really fast when she wants, complains that it is pointless.
“Just churning up and down, whacking at things.”
I happen to enjoy churning up and down. And whacking at things. So does Daisy. We are great rivals when it comes to hockey. Miss Turnbull always puts us on different teams and tells us to pick. Neither of us ever wants to pick Skye. Not even loyalty to a friend would make me pick her unless I absolutely had to cos of no one else being left.
Today she looked so forlorn, trailing her hockey stick behind her as if it were some kind of poisonous snake that might sink its fangs in her leg at any moment, that I went into total meltdown and heard myself calling her name before I properly realised what I was doing. Daisy shot me a look of triumph, like, “Gotcha!” Having Skye on your team means you are almost doomed to lose, and I do hate losing! Especially to Daisy. But I think it must be really humiliating to be left till last all the time, and Skye can’t help being useless at sports. Jem simply can’t be bothered, but Skye has no ball sense whatsoever, and I think her legs must be too long for her body, cos when she runs it’s like she’s wobbling about on stilts.
That day she was even more useless than usual. Miss Turnbull kept encouraging her to “Move, Skye! Move!” But then when she did move she got in people’s way, and the game surged round her, with everyone yelling and sticks clashing, until in the end she just stopped dead, like she was confused by it all, and this huge great girl called Roseanne Stubbs charged into her and sent her flying. Miss Turnbull told her to go straight to the office and get herself checked out, and, oh yes, my team lost, which I’d known they would.
Skye didn’t appear for our last class, and when we went to the office afterwards Mrs Tully said that she’d sent her home. I immediately texted her: You OK? She texted back, Ha ha, got outa hockey! Jem craned over to see.
“Oh, clever,” she said. “She did it on purpose!”
But I didn’t really think that she had.
“Just one more day,” I said to Jem. “If nothing’s happened by this time tomorrow…”
Jem said, “What?”
“I shall have to take matters into my own hands!”
The truth was, I was still feeling guilty in case it was my fault. A treasured possession will be lost… Suppose that really was the horoscope Skye had picked? Suppose I really was psychic?
“We can’t afford to let things just dribble on.”
“But you can’t bully a saint,” pleaded Jem. “Saint Anthony is very popular. He’s one of the most popular saints there is. There’s people all over the world asking him to find things for them. Surely we could just give him till Monday?”
I said grudgingly that I would think about it. I knew we couldn’t expect an important saint like Saint Anthony to drop everything just for us. I could even see that some of the things people asked him to find might be considered more important than a mere pencil, even if it was a silver one and had belonged to Skye’s beloved gran. A child, for instance, or a dog or a cat. They would probably be at the top of the list. Unless, of course, it was all done strictly in order, like first come, first served?
I asked Jem what she thought, but she crinkled her nose and admitted that she wasn’t sure.
I said, “Well, I wish you’d find out. Couldn’t you ask a priest or something?”
Jem said she didn’t know any priests.
“You could always try going to church,” I suggested. “Like you promised you would!”
She wriggled, uncomfortably. “I said if he helped us.”
“Yes, but if you went before he helped us, that would show him you were serious.”
I could tell she didn’t want to. I had to remind her rather sternly that it was for Skye.
“It’s not much to ask, I shouldn’t have thought.”
Jem agreed that it wasn’t. She could hardly do much else. I mean, just going to church! How difficult was that?
“So will you do it?”
She sighed. “I s’pose so.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, all right!” she said. “I promise!”
So there I was, all prepared to give Saint Anthony another two days to get his act together, when this weird thing happened. Something very shocking. Mr Hargreaves handed back our maths homework and Skye had been given a B-. I could see it, in Mr Hargreaves’s big, bullying handwriting, bursting off the page: B-. Skye! She’d never had such a low mark in her life before.
My first thought was that I was glad I hadn’t done any copying off her. But then I caught sight of her face. All the colour had drained out of it so that she wasn’t just ordinarily pale but white like a mushroom, with beads of sweat.
For a minute I was scared she might be going to faint. She used to faint sometimes at primary school when we had assemblies. I always thought it was something to do with her being so tall and the blood finding it difficult to get round her body, but I’d never known her to faint sitting down.
I was all prepared to spring into action when she took a deep breath, hooked her hair back over her ears and sat up very stiff and straight with this glassy smile on her lips. I wasn’t sure whether Jem had noticed or not. I tried to catch her eye, but she was hunched over her maths book, drawing faces. She draws faces over everything. They all have these pouty lips and eyelashes sti
cking out like spokes. I poked at her, and nodded in Skye’s direction. Jem craned over. She obviously saw the B-, cos she turned back to me, this look of total incredulity on her face.
As we filed out at the end of class Mr Hargreaves called Skye over to his desk. I heard him ask her, “What happened?” I could have told him. “Her gran has just died and she’s very unhappy.” Knowing Skye, though, she wouldn’t say a word.
But that was it, as far as I was concerned. Saint Anthony had had his chance! I wasn’t waiting any longer. I told Jem, who immediately said, “Does that mean I don’t have to go to church on Sunday?”
“That is entirely up to you,” I said. “We all have to do whatever we can.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do what you suggested.”
“Me?” Jem sounded surprised and pleased. “Did I suggest something?”
“You told me to go and look in my crystal ball,” I said. “So that’s what I’m going to do!”
One of my teachers once wrote on my school report that I was slapdash. Well, that is the way Mum interpreted it. What she actually said was, “Frankie must take care not to let her natural enthusiasm lead her astray.”
Nothing whatsoever about being slapdash. It is true, however, I suppose, that I do sometimes get a bit carried away. It is difficult not to when you are eager to get on with things.
I was positively bursting to find Skye’s pencil for her, but I knew I couldn’t just go rushing ahead. For a start, I had to find out about crystal balls and where you got them from. Could you simply go into a shop and buy one? If so, how much did they cost? Or maybe you could make them yourself. And then, once you’d made one, or at any rate got one, how did you use it?
I told Mum after tea that I was going upstairs to do my homework – without being told! She was well impressed. Once up there, I sat on the bed with my laptop to do research. They are always telling you at school that research is important.
“Don’t just go straight to Wikipedia. Look around. Read as much as you can. Get a balanced view.”
Well! It is all right saying this, and maybe it would work OK if we were all like Skye and could read at the rate of about a thousand words per minute, but when you are just an ordinary sort of person like the rest of us, it is not what I would call practical. I could have been there all night learning about crystal balls! Everybody said something different, and lots of the things they said I didn’t properly understand, so that after a while I started to get a bit desperate. I’d boasted to Jem how I was going to use my powers, and I couldn’t even work out how to begin!
I asked myself, what would Skye do? She wouldn’t panic. She would… make a list! That was what she would do. Make a list of all the things you needed for a crystal ball, like:
1 A glass sphere
2 A crystal
3 Some incense
4 A silk scarf
I felt a bit better when I’d made my list. I could get all those things! No problem. A glass sphere was easy, I could use Mum’s mixing bowl. A goldfish bowl would be better, but the secret of success, it seems to me, is making use of what you’ve got.
Like, for instance, I didn’t have a crystal, but Angel has a crystal necklace, which I reckoned would do just as well.
Like, again, we didn’t have any incense, but we did have some stinky candles that someone gave Mum for Christmas. They were supposed to smell of sandalwood, but Dad said cow dung, more like, so Mum shut them away in a cupboard and forgot about them. She wouldn’t mind if I used one.
The only scarves I have are thick and woolly, but Angel has this very expensive shawl that one of our grans brought back from holiday for her. It is all bright colours, like red and green and blue, very soft and slinky. Angel croons over it occasionally, and had it draped over her dressing table for a while, but she never actually wears it, so I didn’t see she could object if I just borrowed it for a bit. It seemed to me it would be more suitable than one of my old woolly jobs. Apparently when you are doing a reading (that is, gazing into your crystal ball) it is very important to make an occasion of it. You can’t just slap a mixing bowl on the kitchen table and drape a towel over your head, or the spirits will be insulted. I think this is perfectly understandable.
I was longing to get started, but I decided it would probably be best if I waited till next day, when Angel would be out of the house. She does get so ratty if anyone touches any of her things, and I knew if I asked her she’d only yell at me to keep my hands off. Plus she might let on to Mum, just to be mean, like, “Frankie’s trying to tell fortunes with your mixing bowl!” Then Mum would get all fussed and bothered about me messing with the supernatural, and I couldn’t do it anyway without Angel’s shawl and her crystal necklace. I knew Mum would say I ought to ask first, but it wasn’t like I was going to muck anything up. I was just going to borrow stuff, and put it straight back. Angel wouldn’t ever need to find out. Even if she did, and went berserk, which she almost certainly would, it was a small price to pay for helping one of my best friends.
Next morning, Mum and Dad went off shopping. Mum asked me if I’d like to go with them. She seemed somewhat surprised when I said I had things to do. She knows I adore shopping!
“Not more homework?” she said.
I told her that it was. Cos I mean it was; sort of. It certainly wasn’t stuff that I could do at school. Dad said, “This is a turn-up for the books!” Meaning, I think, that it was somewhat unusual, not to say practically unheard of, for me to choose homework over shopping, but Mum told him not to tease.
“We should be encouraging her. Good for you, Frankie! Angel, do you want a lift into town?”
I held my breath. It would be just like Angel to have fallen out with all her friends and to stay sulking on her own indoors. I’m surprised she ever has any friends since she is so bad-tempered, though strangely enough there are some people who actually seem to like her. Maybe she doesn’t yell at them the way she does at me.
Anyway, to my relief, she came skittering downstairs screeching at the top of her voice that she was coming, she was coming. “Don’t go without me!” She was all dressed up in bright purple leggings and knee-length boots with heels about two metres high, which was why she was skittering. She looked like the leaning tower of Pisa in a high wind.
A few minutes later I heard the car doors slam and the engine start up. Hooray! I had the place to myself. Well, apart from Tom, but he doesn’t count. He was up in his room playing on the computer, and even if he came down he wouldn’t be interested in what I was doing. He might give one of his grunts, like “Hm?” to acknowledge my presence; but then again, if his head was filled with computer stuff, he mightn’t even do that. I don’t think he really notices other people.
Determined to be businesslike, I consulted my list: sphere – crystal – incense – scarf. First off, I cleaned the kitchen table. Then I took down Mum’s big glass mixing bowl and washed it and dried it and polished it till it sparkled. I didn’t want to give the spirits any excuse to feel I wasn’t treating them with proper respect.
Next I tiptoed up the stairs and into Angel’s room for her crystal necklace and her shawl. I was careful to make a note not only of which drawer she kept the shawl in, but whereabouts in the drawer she kept it, so that I could put it back in exactly the right place. Like the necklace. Under the bracelet with the red stones, on top of the butterfly hair slide. She’d know immediately if anything was even just a centimetre away from where it ought to be. She is totally obsessive.
Lastly, I rooted about in the kitchen cupboard in search of a stinky candle. Got it!
I put the necklace in the bowl, lit the candle, draped my head in the shawl and settled down to wait. Rags settled down with me, his front legs sprawled across a chair, his eyes firmly fixed on me and the mixing bowl.
We waited and waited, but nothing seemed to be happening. Surely something ought to happen? I’d thought a mist was meant to form. Then when you asked your quest
ion, shapes would appear and you had to interpret them. Like, maybe, what I was hoping, I’d see the shape of a piece of furniture, or Skye’s garden, and I’d know that was where the pencil was to be found. Only there wasn’t any mist, there weren’t any shapes, there wasn’t anything!
Rags gave an impatient yelp. He is always very interested in what is going on, but he does expect a bit of action. So do I!
I was just beginning to despair when I had this bright idea, thus showing that I do sometimes pay attention in science classes whatever Mrs Monteith might say to the contrary. If I put some boiling water in the mixing bowl and covered the bowl with the shawl, the water would condense and form a mist. Yay! There is always a solution to every problem if you just come at it the right way.
I boiled the kettle and very carefully poured the water up to the halfway mark. Then I put the candle in as well, standing it on an upturned dish. I reckoned the candle would keep the water heated up and help the mists to form, as well as creating a suitable atmosphere. I felt the spirits would appreciate a bit of sandalwood. I mean, it is quite an exotic sort of scent. I am not sure where it comes from. India, maybe. Somewhere mysterious, at any rate.
I slid back under the shawl and made a tent over the bowl. It was rather hot under there, what with the candle and the boiling water, and the smell was a bit overpowering, but sometimes, in a good cause, you have to be prepared to suffer. I wondered if there was some special spirit language you were supposed to use, or whether you could ask questions in ordinary English, except that ordinary English was all I knew so I didn’t really have much choice. I began to chant, very low:
“Where is the pencil, I’m looking for the pencil… spirits, speak! Where is the pencil?”
Rags woofed hopefully. At last! Something was happening!
I wasn’t actually sure that it was, but I kept on with my chanting.
“Where is the pencil… spirits, speak!”
Suddenly, from somewhere behind me, came a ghostly wail: “Whooooo aaaaaah! The spirits speak!”