by Hilary McKay
Saffron turned over the photographs. Bill and Eve, Linda herself waving from the stony walls of Siena, several of a baby. ‘Caddy,’ guessed Saffron, and sure enough there was Eve’s writing on the back, ‘Caddy fourteen weeks’, ‘Caddy, second birthday’, perhaps a dozen all together.
‘She must have had photographs of you,’ said Sarah.
‘Oh yes she did,’ agreed Saffron. ‘I have an album full in my bedroom. Eve made it for me years ago. It’s full of pictures of me, and my mother too.’
‘No men?’
‘No.’
‘What about the notebooks then?’
Saffron picked them up and looked at them. She said, ‘If I kept a diary and someone read it when I was dead I would hate it.’
‘We won’t read it then,’ said Sarah.
‘No. We’re reading it. It’s got to be read.’
‘Which would be worse? Family reading it, or a complete stranger?’
‘Family,’ said Saffron at once.
‘Better let me look at it then, if it’s really got to be read. You do the letters.’
The letters were all from Eve, and Eve had not changed.
Darling Linda,
I am writing this in my shed…
Darling Linda,
You are so lucky, no fireflies here! I have been making charcoal in the oven ON PURPOSE this time! With willow sticks. Caddy loved it. There are little black handprints all over the house . .
Darling Linda,
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Don’t tell Bill…
‘There is nothing in these diaries, Saffy,’ said Sarah soberly. ‘Not a word. They are too early. The last one ends months before you were born.’
‘How many months?’
‘Nearly a year. And anyway, they are not chatty diaries…Well, the first one starts off chatty, but they get less and less like that, just appointments and birthday reminders, stuff like that. No names. Doodles…There are more of those than anything. Look!’
The doodles were tiny sketches. A leaf. A star. A glimpse of a building, a face.
‘She was good at faces,’ said Sarah. ‘Look, there’s Eve and Bill!’
‘Perhaps she was homesick,’ said Saffron, and from the address book this seemed to be more than likely. Nearly all the addresses that Saffron’s mother had bothered to write out properly were English ones. It was a mess, like Caddy’s address book, full of crossed-out names and telephone numbers.
‘Yesterday Rose asked Caddy if Michael was in her address book,’ Saffron told Sarah, as she turned the pages, ‘and Caddy said of course he wasn’t. She only wrote in the people she thought she might possibly forget…Do you think my mother thought she might possibly forget my father?’
‘No.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Saffron, and all at once she scooped everything up, letters and notebooks together, and pushed them back in the box.
‘Whoever my rotten father was,’ she said angrily, ‘he didn’t care about me.’
Sarah let her do it, scoop them in all crumpled, wedge on the lid with a smack, push the box petulantly away and sit with her face buried in her knees.
‘Come on, Saffy!’ she said at last. ‘Hearts of stone!’
‘Oh shut up!’ snapped Saffron.
‘Who wants a rich Venetian papa, anyway? How pretentious!’
‘I didn’t want a rich Venetian anyone! I just wanted to know who my father was.’
‘I know,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s tough. Tough, but not unbearable.’
‘What do you know about unbearable?’
‘Ho,’ said Sarah, pleased. ‘What do I know about unbearable? Guess what? I would swap having a father for fully functional legs!’
‘You wouldn’t!’
‘Some days I would.’
‘Your father is lovely!’
‘Yes he is. So are your legs. It’s a pity we can’t share. Some days one of us could have the legs, and other days the father…Only we’d probably fight.’
‘You do talk some rubbish,’ said Saffron, smiling a bit.
‘I know. And speaking of rubbish, we have to make another birthday cake. Can I count on your support?’
‘What, today?’
‘Yes. Birthday tomorrow.’
‘Oh please not, Sarah! It’s much too hot to begin cooking again!’
‘I know. It’s just a bad day. If your mother ever knew who your father was she either tried to forget, or ate the evidence. My cake exploded in front of that horrible David. Caddy is falling apart at the thought of marrying Michael. Indigo’s best friend has dumped him. Rose waits for letters every day and never gets them…You’re all right, though, Saffy! You have me! And all the rest of them! And don’t forget, you still have Bill! Fully functioning legs and lovely wicked old Bill!’
For some reason this made them laugh and laugh.
After Rose had sneaked out of the music shop she had not gone home. Instead she had trudged the familiar way to Tom’s grandmother’s house. Despite everything Indigo had said the night before she had not been able to get out of her head the idea that someone had been there.
Who? wondered Rose. A friend of Tom’s grandmother, passing by? Someone lost? A burglar? That was a scary thought.
But I can run, Rose told herself. Very fast! Faster than grown-ups. Anyway, a burglar would have finished burgling by now. And what if it was Tom? What if Indigo was wrong? What if, somehow, Tom had come back?
‘Tom,’ said Rose, and saw a picture of his face in her mind.
Of course when she arrived there was no one. The house was shut up and silent and the garden was just empty. Emptier than it had been before, somehow, and not even scary this time. Very hot.
Hotter than home, thought Rose, under the smothering darkness of the yew trees. The yews seemed to have sucked every drop of moisture out of the ground around them so that the lawn was split with gaping cracks as if the world was falling apart. There was a smell, too.
Suddenly Rose remembered the cat, and looked across to where it had been, stretched out under the hedge.
It was still there.
I hope it is not dead, thought Rose, but it did not look dead. There was a little breathing movement about it. Asleep, decided Rose. Maybe that is its favourite place in the sun. She began to go across to look at it, but as she got closer she stopped.
The smell was the cat. Sweet and rank and dreadful, and the movement she had noticed…
‘I’m going home!’ cried Rose aloud, and turned in panic, and as she turned a flash of silver fell at her feet, rolled into one of the open cracks of the lawn and disappeared.
Caddy’s ring! Rose’s hand flew to her pocket. It was still sewn up. Sewn up tight all the way across, but the hard little lump where the ring had been was gone.
‘How can it have gone?’ asked Rose, bewildered, not knowing how easily a large brightly-cut diamond can rub a hole in a soft cotton pocket. ‘And where?’
‘Down the crack beside the cat,’ said Rose to Rose, and she said, ‘I can’t go near that cat again. I can’t.’ But bravely she took a step nearer.
The smell was appalling.
‘Don’t look at the cat!’ Rose told herself as she stooped down to peer into the crack.
Caddy’s diamond had never looked more like a star. A star wedged in a gap in the earth, just out of reach.
I need a stick, thought Rose. A little stick.
Then she froze.
There was a sound in the garden. And the star went suddenly dim. Also there was a new smell, sweat and chocolate.
‘I knew you’d be here,’ said David, smiling, blotting out the light with his shadow.
When Indigo was around, or Saffron and Sarah, reducing David to his constituent parts (oil and pulp, said Sarah), when there was anyone at all within reach, Rose did not know she was afraid of David. She knew she was bored, repelled, resentful, disgusted, but she did not know she was afraid.
David did not know either. Not until Rose, trapped between himself
and the terrible thing that the cat had become, chose the cat.
‘You go away!’ said Rose, backing towards the cat.
‘Rose!’
‘I’m not scared of you!’ Rose shivered, as if it was cold instead of boiling hot.
‘Rose!’
‘You do anything to me, and see what happens to you! Indigo will kill you. Saffy and Sarah will. Caddy. Tom. Tom will come back and kill you!’
David took a step closer.
‘What are you going to do?’ cried Rose.
Chapter Eight
Caddy had been losing her ring all summer, but never before had it vanished so completely. She had searched for it for hours and hours. It was beginning to feel like a nightmare.
‘It is in my room, I know it is,’ she told herself. ‘It was in its box. I remember thinking I would keep it there for a while. I know I did not put it on!’
Caddy searched every inch of her room. She stripped the bed. She emptied every drawer and box and pocket. As she searched she chanted to herself, a sort of moaning, regretful lament.
‘If only Michael didn’t want to actually marry me. I don’t mind doing practically anything so long as I know when it’s going to end! But you don’t know when marrying is going to end…’
She began shaking a pile of magazines by their middles, in case the ring should have accidentally been folded between two pages.
‘It carries on and on until you wear out. Or one of you gives in and runs away…’
She found her old school bag, unopened for three years, and tipped everything on to the floor.
Perhaps I swallowed it in my sleep, she thought. I should go to hospital and get an x-ray. But they would think I was a fool.
‘I am a fool.’ said Caddy. ‘I don’t know what to do. If I had the ring, I think I would know what to do. I am tired of dodging poor Michael.’
Just as she said that the telephone rang, and it was Michael.
‘Why did you want to know if it was insured?’ he asked.
‘I only wondered. No special reason.’
‘I’m coming round.’
‘No, don’t!’ said Caddy, panicking. ‘I am going out to work in ten minutes.’
Michael said he would be there in five minutes and would stop for four-and-a-half. Unless Caddy didn’t want to see him.
‘Of course I want to see you, Michael darling!’ cried Caddy. ‘What about tomorrow?’
‘What about it?’
‘By then I might…’ Caddy paused. ‘I mean it might…’
‘Go on?’
‘Not be so hot…’ said Caddy desperately.
‘Caddy,’ said Michael. ‘Since when did our relationship depend on the weather forecast? I’ll be there in three minutes.’
Caddy spent the three minutes putting on every ring she could find in the house in the hope of being able to wave a vaguely sparkling hand at Michael without him noticing exactly what was causing the sparkle. There were several silver ones belonging to Saffron, a piratical-looking thumb ring shaped like a skull, and a worn gold signet ring that they had decided at the last minute not to bury with Caddy’s grandfather. It was a fairly hopeless plan and it did not work for even thirty seconds because the first thing Michael did when he arrived was grab both of Caddy’s hands and demand, ‘Where is it? Lost? Or chucked away?’
‘Of course not!’
‘If you don’t like it come into town and choose one that you do.’
‘The one you chose was perfect! It looked like a star.’
‘Then why are you crying?’ asked Michael.
In the parched garden, with Rose and the cat and the cracks in the lawn, David was crying too.
At least, thought the astonished Rose, he looked like he was crying. Tears were pouring down his cheeks, faster than he could rub them away.
They had begun when Rose screamed.
I didn’t mean to scream, thought Rose, watching in fascination the silent flood that was flowing over David’s face.
But the words had come out like a scream, ‘What are you going to do?’
Then David had known what he looked like to Rose. Not the big, hot, ridiculous person he had seen in the shop window. Much, much worse than that.
‘I’m not going to do anything, Rose!’ he said at last. ‘I came here to look after you! I guessed you’d come here. You did before. Come away from that cat!’
‘What?’
‘Come away from that cat. It needs burying.’
That was so true and so sensible it brought Rose back to the real world again, and there was nothing scary any more. Only a dry garden, and a poor dead cat and David wiping the last of the flood away.
She remembered something he had said a minute ago. ‘How do you know I came here before?’
‘I saw you. Yesterday. I saw you on your own in the street. I followed after you to see if you were all right. In case you were going into town to pinch stuff again!’
Rose, who was still holding the guitar pick, felt herself go bright red.
‘But you came here instead.’
‘Did you watch me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew someone was here. That’s why I came back today. In case it was Tom.’
‘Tom!’
‘He might have come back,’ said Rose unsteadily.
David had a sudden longing to find Tom for Rose. To produce him with a flourish and announce, ‘Rose, I got you Tom! ’
Like a hero.
I would, if I could, he thought, and then his brain went scattering on to imagine it all. David the hero, and Rose’s astonished admiration. ‘David!’ she would exclaim…
If I really did it, thought David. If somehow I could do some brave, amazing magic and get him right here, Rose would not give one thought to me.
He sighed, and looked down at her. She was poking in a crack in the lawn with a stick, ungratefully unaware of David’s heroic dreams.
‘Come on,’ he told her. ‘I’ll take you home.’
‘I can’t go home,’ said Rose, not looking up, and jabbing away with her stick. ‘I’ve lost something down this crack. It’s going deeper and deeper.’
Her stick broke, and she threw it crossly away and it hit the cat, causing a humming cloud of flies to rise and then resettle like a shadow.
‘You’ve got to come away from that cat,’ said David, suddenly taking control. ‘You’ll get germs! What is it you’ve lost? Let me look!’
To his surprise Rose did as she was told, moving away so he could get down and see. ‘It’s something I dropped,’ she told him. ‘A ring.’
Not for a moment did it occur to David that it might not be Rose’s ring. He knew little girls had things like that. They got them out of Lucky Bags, or free from the front of comics, or in princess sets from toy shops. Beads and bracelets, rings and hair clips, he had seen them dozens of times in his shoplifting days. He assumed this was just another, worth nothing to anyone except Rose.
‘Have you got to have it?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Rose.
‘It’s gone too deep to reach with bits of stick. Leave it for now.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’ll have to. They’ll be worrying about you at home. I’ll come back and get it for you, if you like.’
‘How?’
‘With a spade or something. Something to dig with.’
‘What if anyone sees you?’
‘I’ll come when it’s dark. With a torch.’
‘What about the cat?’
‘I’ll bury it.’
‘In the dark? On your own? Will you really?’
‘Yes.’
‘And not tell anyone?’
‘No.’
‘And give it straight to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise,’ said David.
When Michael had gone away, Caddy did not go to work. She went into the kitchen and looked at Bill’s little Post-it on the fridge.
ANYTIME DARLINGS, ALWAYS
WITH LOVE DADDY
‘Anytime?’ reflected Caddy. ‘I wonder if he really meant it? Perhaps I could visit him. I think I need to get away for a while.’
Michael telephoned and said, ‘You sold it?’
‘NO!’ shouted Caddy, and slammed down the phone.
Then Saffron and Sarah appeared and started constructing another cake, and the mess from the new one was even worse than the mess from the old.
‘Why can’t you buy a cake?’ demanded Caddy, and they said, ‘What’s the matter with you? We are not hurting you! Pass the eggs! Don’t put your elbow there! Why does Rose have to leave heaps of crayons on every surface in the house?’
‘Where is Rose?’ demanded Indigo, coming in at that moment.
‘You had her!’ said everyone, ‘Have you lost her again?’
Before Indigo could reply the telephone rang.
‘You gave it away!’ said Michael.
‘You are being totally unreasonable!’ snapped Caddy, banging the phone down. ‘Saffron! There is disgusting chocolate goo all over this table!’
‘Moan, moan, moan,’ said Saffron. ‘No wonder Michael dumped you! Mind that box!’
‘Michael hasn’t dumped me!’ shouted Caddy, not minding the box which fell to the floor just as Eve came through the door carrying the carbonated swamp (now cool).
‘Everybody fine?’ she enquired affectionately, seeming not to notice that Caddy and Saffron were angrily collecting letters and photographs from all over the room, and that the kitchen was in a state of chaos remarkable even by Casson standards. ‘I found this lovely cake outside, Sarah. You are so clever!’
‘Eve,’ said Sarah, ‘it is hideous beyond belief.’
‘I always think that about mine too,’ agreed Eve cheerfully, ‘but then I ice them and they are somehow transformed!…Oh.’
All at once Eve realised what the papers were that lay strewn all about. She stooped and picked up a photograph. ‘Darling Linda,’ she said.
She was still looking at it when Rose came in, followed by David, who immediately trod first in a puddle of raw chocolate cake and next on a letter that had strayed across the room.