by Hilary McKay
‘Cherries,’ diagnosed Saffron, coming up to see what was the matter with her, and Rose, who had forgotten about the cherries, immediately felt better. She was quite happy to give up eating brandy-soaked cherries (which had never come her way before and weren’t very likely to do so again), but she didn’t want her secret life of crime to make her sick. Not when it was going so well.
Only I mustn’t lose Caddy’s ring again, she thought. That’s twice already it’s got out of my pocket!
To prevent it happening a third time she took off her shorts and pushed the ring down to the very bottom of the pocket. Then, with a needle and thread, several drops of blood and some rather heavy breathing, she sewed the top of the pocket shut.
Indigo banged on her bedroom door (which she was leaning on as a security precaution), just as she was finishing.
‘Want to come with me to the music shop?’ he called.
‘To see if they’ve heard from Tom?’ asked Rose eagerly.
‘I suppose we could ask that. I bet they haven’t though. I need some new guitar strings, that’s why I’m going.’
‘I’ll come,’ said Rose, scrambling back into her shorts, and opening the door. ‘Then I won’t have to go swimming! Good! Is that smell Sarah’s cake?’
‘Yes,’ said Indigo, following her down the stairs. ‘And they are both on their knees in front of the oven door trying to see through the little glass window. They look like they are waiting for it to explode.’
‘That’s because we are waiting for it to explode,’ said Sarah, overhearing him. ‘It’s got a layer of popcorn on the top. We’re waiting for it to pop.’
‘Was that the surprise secret ingredient?’ asked Rose.
‘Yes, but nothing is happening. Perhaps it isn’t hot enough. I’ll turn the oven up higher again.’
‘I wish I could see it pop,’ remarked Rose.
‘You don’t have to come with me,’ Indigo told her.
‘I want to,’ said Rose.
Out in the street she hopped along beside Indigo very contentedly. She liked the music shop. During his stay in England Tom had haunted it, and Rose had haunted it with him. The owner liked musicians, however young and penniless. Week after week Tom had been allowed to come and try out the black guitar that he longed to buy, while Rose sat and listened, or prowled among the dusty instruments at the back, or fiddled with the perpetual supply of special offers on the counter. Rattles shaped like eggs for shaking out a rhythm. Bookmarks made from old sheet music. A jumbled box of guitar picks, all different colours. These things had become a part of Rose’s world, and she did not know how much she had missed them until she was on the way back to see them again.
‘Let’s hurry,’ she suggested, and for a few minutes they did, but they soon slowed down. Even for Rose it was too hot to run. Every morning, it seemed, the heat grew unbearable slightly earlier than the day before.
They were glad to turn out of the glare and in at the entrance of the music shop. It was good to hear the familiar jangle of the bell above the door; the smell was the same too, polish and wood and old dust. The box of guitar picks was in its place on the counter, the same posters decorated the walls. For a moment Rose expected Tom’s voice to call, ‘Hello, Permanent Rose!’ from the shadows at the back of the shop.
Then the magic faded. It was not the same. A red electric guitar hung where the black one had been. Tom’s stool was pushed against a wall, and was stacked with copies of dog-eared catalogues. A drum kit filled the corner where she used to sit and listen.
The owner recognised them both and he asked about Tom almost at once. Rose heard Indigo admitting that they did not know how he was, they had not heard if he got the black guitar safely back to America, they had not heard a word.
‘Have you?’ Indigo asked, more for Rose’s sake than because he thought it might possibly be true, and the owner said, ‘No. No. No I haven’t. No,’ and shook his head.
Rose, who had looked round to hear his answer, turned away again.
‘Well, never mind,’ said Indigo, and asked about guitar strings.
It seemed that there were very many different sorts of guitar strings, and since the music shop owner was the sort of person who liked things to be done as well as possible, he took down set after set and explained their differences. And all the time he was doing this, taking down packets of guitar strings, and showing Indigo exactly how to put them on (with the help of a terrible old wreck of a guitar from the back of the shop), he talked about Tom.
‘He was a proper player,’ he said, watching critically as Indigo threaded a string and knotted it carefully. ‘Not like some that come in here. Wanting the latest electric models and no more idea how to play them than my cat…That’s right…Now up to the tuning peg…You’ll be doing it with your eyes shut before you know where you are. It’s just a knack…No more idea than my cat, but money no object…Good…Try another…You want them to look tidy…He was a proper player, that boy…’
As Rose listened the shop seemed to become a little less empty. If there was no Tom about any more, at least there was a memory of him. A good memory too. She stirred the guitar picks in their battered box and felt the familiar enjoyment of their smooth, sliding shapes and colours. There were even a couple of hologram ones. Sometimes she had wished Tom would choose one of those, but he never had. He chose the translucent reds.
Rose sifted one out with her fingers. It fitted like a lucky charm into the palm of her hand.
Meanwhile, back at the Casson house, the heat in the kitchen had become tremendous and the popcorn was still refusing to pop.
‘Maybe if we go away and pretend we don’t care then it will start,’ Sarah said hopefully.
‘Perhaps,’ Saffron agreed, so they had turned up the heat a little higher still, and left the cake to explode in private. Now they were in Eve’s bedroom, ransacking the top of the wardrobe.
‘There are about twenty boxes up here!’ said Saffron, who had climbed up on a chair to hunt. ‘All covered with dust and thrown-away knickers!’
‘Oh, you Cassons are so artistic and disfunctional and cool it’s not fair,’ said Sarah. ‘Stop showing off and chuck them down!’
‘All of them?’
‘Why not?’
‘OK then,’ said Saffron, and began passing down boxes which Sarah pulled open with comments like, ‘Baby shoes again!’ or ‘Christmas tree lights and some odd socks,’ or ‘LPs. Look! Real vinyl!’
In the middle of all this there was a knock at the door.
‘Nobody who matters would knock,’ said Saffron. ‘Ignore it. They’ll go away.’
Whoever it was did not go away. Instead they knocked again, and then they started calling, ‘Hey! Hey!’ in a breathless and creaky voice until at last Sarah gave in and peered out of the window to see who it was.
‘It’s that boy,’ she said. ‘David or something. The fat one from the gang that got Indigo.’
‘Oh him,’ said Saffron. ‘We don’t want him. Close the window before he notices you.’
But it was no good. The knocking and the calling continued until at last Sarah was forced to stick her head out of the window again and remark, ‘It can’t be anything important.’
This startled David so much he fell over backwards on the doorstep.
Sarah withdrew her head and continued unpacking boxes.
‘Gone?’ asked Saffron.
‘Soon,’ said Sarah, but she was wrong.
‘Hey!’ called David. ‘Don’t go! There’s something burning really badly in your kitchen!’
‘What’s he say?’ asked Saffron.
‘Says something’s burning in the kitchen.’
Saffron tried but failed not to look alarmed by this information.
‘Stop worrying,’ said Sarah. ‘It can’t be the cake. The recipe said it would take an hour and a quarter to cook. And I doubled everything so that’s two-and-a-half hours. It hasn’t had anything like that long.’ She stuck her head out of the window a
gain and said, ‘You can just smell baking. Goodbye.’
However David seemed determined not to be ignored. He shouted, ‘Help! Help!’ and hammered so hard that Saffron climbed down from her chair, opened the bedroom door, and stood and sniffed at the top of the stairs. Something certainly was burning in the kitchen.
‘I can hear bangs,’ she said. ‘I’m going to look.’
‘Really!’ said Sarah crossly, bumping after her down the stairs. ‘That’s just pandering to him! It’s only a bit of popcorn popping. It pops at a hundred and seventy-five degrees centigrade (I looked it up on the internet). The cake is baking at a hundred and eighty. (Ish). (Maybe a little more!) Anyway, obviously it’s going to go off! It is a controlled experiment…’
The kitchen was full of smoke.
‘Chocolate vapours!’ said Sarah, coughing. ‘Delicious! I am a fantastic cook!’
By this time Saffron had the oven door open. She pulled out Sarah’s baking tin and Sarah shut her eyes and said, ‘I am going for a puffy popcorn chocolate soufflé effect which Mum will love…’ She unsquinted her eyes for a fraction of a second and took a quick look. The cake popped one final pop and then gave a sigh like a dying animal and sank.
‘It’s meant to do that,’ said Sarah, quickly shutting her eyes once more. ‘Don’t show it to David, Saffron, or I’ll never speak to you again!’
‘Puffy popcorn chocolate soufflé or carbonated exploding swamp?’ enquired Saffron, waving the cake tin under her nose. ‘Probably which?’
‘Swamp,’ admitted Sarah, so Saffron put it down, opened the door a tiny crack and said, ‘Thank you for your concern. Everything is under control. You will find Indigo at the music shop with Rose, if you run.’
David hung around for a few minutes after the door closed. He could hear shrieking. He recognised it as the shrieking of people who are laughing so much they are in pain, so he was not alarmed.
Chapter Seven
David felt good.
Even though he was on the wrong side of a closed door, he felt good. He realised that the wild laughter on the other side of the door was at least partly caused by the fact that he, David, had blundered unexpectedly on to the scene, but he still felt good.
I made them come and stop whatever it was burning, thought David as he hurried (he did not run, running would have killed him) along the road to town, and he smiled so hugely that passers-by noticed him. They saw a big lumpy boy in a baggy white T-shirt, enormous denim shorts, desperate trodden wrecks of trainers and a smile on his hot round face like the smile on the face of the moon.
A mirrored shop window caught his eye, and suddenly curious, he stopped to look.
It was a long time since David had last looked in a mirror, so long that he did not quite know what to expect. The red face that looked back at him could have been any stranger’s.
That is me, thought David, and the reflection looked a little interested, as if mildly surprised to be recognised.
What do I look like to people? wondered David. I look…I look like a big…I look like a big, hot…I look like a big, hot, ridiculous person!
That was such a good description that David smiled again, and his reflection smiled triumphantly back. They were briefly noticed by someone tall and good-looking, sauntering along the street behind. That person paused for a moment to advise in an amused voice, ‘You should get a hat, mate!’ and then passed on out of the morning.
David nodded. It was true that a hat would help. In it he would look like a big, hot, ridiculous person, wearing a hat.
He went on his way again, still smiling.
I did the right thing, he thought. Making the girls stop that burning. The right thing.
That was why he was so happy. It was because he had found the right thing to do at last.
All his life David had been confused about what was the right thing to do. For the first ten or eleven years it had been fairly simple, he had been a noisy nuisance. Nothing else. But then more had been demanded of him. The right thing to do (and it had seemed exactly right because he was so effortlessly good at it) was to be a thug. A tormentor of isolated people. The means to block a doorway. The weight behind a heavy knee. And often much worse. Even now David could not put into actual words some of the things he had done when the right thing to be was a thug. It still surprised him that no one had died.
It was in this period of his life that he had first met Indigo, and because of Indigo, Saffy and Sarah and Tom and Rose. He did not suppose that Rose would ever forgive him.
After it had dawned on David that being a thug was not the right thing, he had become very humble. A humble admirer of Tom and Indigo, particularly Indigo, whom he had tormented most of all. He tried to be like him. He bought a skateboard and terrified himself learning to balance on it. He listened to Indigo’s sort of music, although it filled him with a sort of baffled pain. For a very short time he took to self-consciously carrying a book around. Once he had even visited the music shop and pretended he was thinking of buying an electric guitar. This had been a terrible experience. He had been subjected to such a barrage of impenetrable and humiliating questions (for example, ‘What sort of music do you want to play?’) that he had escaped as soon as possible and promised himself he would never go back.
He did not quite understand why he was going back now, except that Indigo was there, and Rose. He wished he could make Rose take notice of him.
David reached the music shop just at the moment when Rose palmed the red guitar pick. He looked through the window and saw her do it, and she saw him see her. Her eyes met his in defiant hatred, and then she abruptly turned her back. She looked so fierce that for a moment or two he hesitated about going inside, but then he pushed open the door anyway.
‘Hi, David!’ said Indigo at once.
‘Hello,’ said David. ‘I went round to yours and the girls told me you were here.’
‘How’s their cake?’ asked Indigo.
‘Burning,’ said David, and although Rose refused to look at him, Indigo laughed, and so did the shop owner.
David laughed too, and gave a sigh of relief. The music shop suddenly felt a much less frightening place. For one thing, his status as a friend of Indigo’s changed the shop owner’s attitude completely. He offered to get down electric guitars for him to try, and when David said, ‘Oh no, it’s all right I don’t know nothing about them. I just wondered!’ he said, ‘No harm in wondering,’ quite civilly. For the first time in his life David felt like a real person. Someone like Indigo, who could visit a shop without being suspiciously watched by the owner all the time he was there. The sort of person who could be left in a room with someone else’s drum kit, and not give it a wallop.
It was a truly magnificent drum kit. It was the sort of drum kit no mother would ever allow her son to keep in his bedroom. David looked at it and looked at it and the more he looked the more he thought he was born to be a drummer.
He reached out one finger and touched the largest drum.
Indigo and the shop owner, who had been watching him all the while, burst out laughing, because it was such a very small touch for such a big person and such a big drum.
Rose did not laugh because she was not there.
The music shop door rang a bell when it opened, and it rang the same bell when it closed, but if you opened it very gently, not the full way, and if you slid cautiously out of the gap and left it balanced where it was, not open and not shut, it made no sound at all.
All the time David had been in the music shop Rose had been seething with anger. She hated David being there. Indigo was engrossed in learning how to string a guitar. The shop owner was busy teaching him. David appeared to be in a sort of dumb trance in front of a drum kit. Rose slipped out of the door.
‘She’s run off home!’ said Indigo, when at last they noticed she was gone, and forgetting his packet of guitar strings, he called his thanks to the shop keeper, and ran off after her.
‘You see her safe!’ called the musi
c shop owner, as he watched him go, and turning to David he said, ‘You’ll take his strings for him?’
‘Yes,’ said David. ‘I’ll try and catch them up.’
‘You do that,’ agreed the music shop owner, and as David set off into a lumbering jog, he thought, That may not be such a bad boy as he looks.
The first person that summer to look at David and think, That may not be such a bad boy as he looks, had been Indigo. The second was the stranger who had told him to get a hat. Now there was a third.
With Rose, a few perfect words from Morte D’Arthur went a long way because she hardly ever read anything. With David, it was the same. A little bit of respect, just the sound in a voice, raised him higher than he had ever been before. He felt suddenly light as air, and he gave a sort of elephantine hop, and turned and waved back at the music shop owner, smiling his newly acquired enormous smile.
‘Hmmm,’ said the music shop owner thoughtfully, as he watched him from the doorway, and he raised a hand back in salute. ‘Certainly got the build for a drummer,’ he said.
Saffron and Sarah put the exploded carbonated swamp in the garden to cool, opened all the doors to let the smell out of the house, and went back to looking for the box Eve had described. They found it at last, right at the back of the wardrobe.
‘Are you sure that’s the right one?’ Sarah asked when she saw it. ‘I thought it would be huge.’
But it was definitely the right one. It was labelled ‘Linda’ in Bill’s handwriting, and taped up very neatly all round, as only Bill would bother to tape a box. They took it out into the garden and sat down in the shade of Eve’s shed and looked at it.
‘You don’t have to open it,’ said Sarah. ‘We could just put it back.’
‘No we couldn’t,’ said Saffron. ‘Not now we know it’s there,’ and she peeled off the tape.
She was disappointed from the moment she opened it. The box was not even full. There were a few photographs, a bundle of letters, a tatty address book, and two blue notebooks which had been used as diaries.