by Hilary McKay
Only it was not friends; it was enemies.
Binny had known at once that she was looking at her enemy, and the boy had known it too. The understanding was like a swift brightness between them.
It was not at all how Binny had planned things to be. Only the night before, Binny had worked out what to say to their silent new neighbour.
I know your name, she would tell him, and then he would ask, Yes, but what’s yours?
Binny, Bin, Belinda, Bel. Mostly Binny. Call me Binny.
After that the first, hardest words would be safely over, and they would no longer be strangers. They would be Binny and Gareth. Easy, after that, to ask almost anything. Coming to the harbour? Do you think that ghosts are real? How far can you swim?
Anything.
After the first words.
That was Binny’s idea, but it did not work out because she met Gareth at the wrong time, in the wrong place. She leaned out of her bedroom window and there he was, almost close enough to touch, leaning out of his.
Binny jumped with shock.
Pale sunlight caught the boy’s glasses and flicked blank circles of scorn at her. His smile was not nice. He made a sneering, sniffing sound with his nose.
Binny swiftly abandoned all her earlier peaceful plans.
Battle, then. They would be enemies. They were enemies. No use to consider anything else. She had no problem with that. After all, she had not had a good, tough enemy for months. Not since the last one died.
All summer Binny and Gareth had been enemies. If things became dull they had a very good way of spicing them up again. Two words. Irresistible. Dare you!
Binny and Gareth had dared and argued and squabbled their way through all the bright days of summer, until at last they had come to the final day.
This day, that had begun with the long trek to the headland, four miles further down the coast.
Much later, when things had become desperate, Binny understood. There was a pattern in time. It was woven of days. And all the days, since the first day she could remember, led to this day, and this day, when it was over, would be the completion of the pattern.
BY THE TIME BINNY WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD she had lived in two worlds. A child’s world, and a time-to-start-growing-up-now world. An easy world, and a hard world.
Eight years in the first, and three in the second. Yet when Binny looked back at the first world from the second it was hard to believe it had lasted so long. The eight years diminished like a landscape seen from far out at sea. An outline. Sunlit highlights. Some gull shrieks of dismay. A coldness, just as if a fog had rolled in from the sea. Then it was almost gone. A shadow land that once had been solid, steady world.
That steady world had held Binny, her father and her mother, her brother James, and her sister Clem. It also held a large cheerful house, a friendly school, and her father’s bookshop. Very famous people had visited that bookshop, and some of them wrote about it afterwards. The sort of bookshop you will find in Heaven, wrote one optimistically. Books to die for! said another.
‘That’s an awful thing to say!’ said Binny when she heard, but her family laughed at her and her father had both quotations embossed on thick cream bookmarks, which he gave out free to customers. It was the sort of bookshop that gave away a lot of things free: bookmarks, sofas to sit on while you read, sweets in blue china bowls next to the sofas, iced water, stickers.
Even free stories.
The stories came from Binny’s father. He had a large supply of them which he shared with anyone who wanted to listen. Often that person was Binny. Binny seemed to have more need for stories than most people. Even when she was very young she was a restless, bothered person. Stories allowed Binny to escape for a while.
‘A long, long time ago,’ began her father one empty Sunday afternoon, when Binny was about six and in one of her fidgeting, no-one-to-play-with, climb-about moods, ‘in the days when there were heroes …’
‘Aren’t there still?’ demanded Binny.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Can girls be heroes?’
‘As a matter of fact, girls usually make the best heroes of all … Are you going to listen, then? I can’t tell stories to someone all tied up in a curtain.’
‘Why?’
‘They might miss something.’
‘What?’
‘Something that matters.’
‘I can’t hear you properly because I’m all swizzled up.’
‘Unswizzle then. It might be important.’
‘It’s only a story.’
‘Some stories are very important. Sometimes stories can save your life.’
‘Save your life?’ asked Binny, unswizzling.
‘I thought you’d hear that!’
‘Tell me a story that could save my life! Go on! Start again! A long, long time ago, in the days when there were heroes …’
‘What are you up to now?’
‘Building a camp.’ Binny collected an armload of cushions, rolled the hearthrug into a log and began digging a well with the TV remote. ‘Get on with the story!’
‘In the days when there were heroes, which there still are, and nearly all girls too, there was a little house, in a little town, right on the edge of a wild, rocky coast. Right on the edge of the land this town was built, houses spilling down to the rocks. Salt spray blowing up the streets. Rock and stone and salt and wind and a sort of lightness in the air …’
(Here Binny crawled behind the sofa and began collecting firewood for her campfire by gently peeling away strips of wallpaper from the bottom of the wall.)
‘And in that town,’ continued her father, in a rather louder voice, ‘there lived a girl whose name I forget.’
‘Call her Binny!’ said Binny, popping out very suddenly.
‘Lived a girl called Binny. In one of the little houses with hardly room to swing a cat, and the noise of her brother and sister, and the seagulls on the roof and chickens out the back, and the clatter of feet on the cobbles outside, and all the other sounds that there are in a place like that. So this girl, Binny, she used to go down to the sea to practise her singing …’
Soon, Binny-the-listener became Binny-from-the-story. The camp was transformed into a rocky shore. Seals sprawled like cushions on the shingle. The tide rose, and Binny climbed high amongst the rocks until she ended up perched upon a table, measuring the waves.
Binny was as good at listening to stories as her father was at telling them. His stories drifted around her head, and some stayed there and some vanished.
‘Nothing vanishes,’ said Binny’s mother, which turned out not to be true.
All this happened when Binny was very young indeed. In the first world, before it went forever. Before Max.
In that first world, for her eighth birthday, Binny had asked for a sheepdog puppy. ‘Black and white,’ she had ordered. ‘White socks, white stripe up his nose. White on the end of his tail. Look at the picture in my book!’
‘No, no, no!’ her mother had exclaimed, waving the picture away, but Binny’s father had taken the book and looked.
Max the puppy, exactly like the picture in the book, had come rollicking into Binny’s bedroom at dawn on the morning of her birthday. When Binny in the second world looked back to that far-off, lost world of her first eight years, it seemed incredible.
‘It was,’ said Clem. ‘Ordinary eight-year-olds don’t get sheepdog puppies for their birthdays.’
It was incredible, but it was about to end. By the time Binny was nine, Max had gone. He had raced into Binny’s life and out of it, all in a few months.
‘Where? Where?’ asked frantic Binny, but there seemed to be no answers. In the early days she was haunted by the fear that his unhappiness might be as bad as her own.
‘Everyone’s unhappy,’ said Clem, although not unkindly, and, ‘Try not to worry Mum.’
Binny tried, but it was not easy. Remembering Max hurt. ‘It hurts my heart,’ she told Clem, hugging the cold ache in her stomach.
‘That’s not where your heart is,’ said Clem, sympathetic but accurate. ‘You’ll get over it. You always get over things,’ added Clem, who didn’t. ‘You’ll get used to it and go on.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You have to.’
After Max, more than two years went by.
Binny was nine, then ten, then eleven.
By the time Binny reached eleven it seemed that Clem had been right. Half right at least. Max had gone and Binny, although she hadn’t got over it, had got used to it. Just. Although for ages she had hoarded a box of dog biscuits in case Max should somehow find his way home, and even two years later she couldn’t help gazing after any black and white dog she saw. She had survived, but she hadn’t forgotten, and now it was a long time since she had last called ‘Max’ and been flattened by his welcome. A long time since she had burrowed her face in his fur, or heard his terrifying roar at the sight of any stranger.
‘But Clem was right, you have to go on,’ admitted Binny.
Going on was how the Cornwallis family, Clem, Binny, James, and Polly their mother, survived.
BINNY WAS PLEASED WHEN SHE TURNED eleven.
‘Grown up,’ she said.
‘Not very grown up,’ said Clem, who was sixteen, cool, clever and very grown up indeed.
Binny was green-eyed, with reddish-brown hair that hung in crinkled straggles: a seaweedy look.
‘Oh well,’ she said, because six-year-old James’s hair was spotlight gold while Clem’s was silver gilt, smooth as pouring water.
‘I don’t care,’ she added, dragging her seaweed into two tatty bunches and tying them up by her ears. She really didn’t care, even though sometimes it was hard work being sandwiched between Clem and James.
Clem was in her last year at school. Next she would go to sixth form college.
‘If I pass my exams,’ she said cautiously.
‘You know you will. Then what?’ asked Binny.
‘University perhaps,’ said Clem, even more cautiously.
‘To do music? With your flute?’
‘If I can,’ murmured Clem. ‘If I can. If I can. If I can.’
Binny did not doubt it. Clem seemed to have been born with a lucky gift for music, in the same way that some people had a gift for seeing ghosts, or turning cartwheels.
‘Lucky!’ protested Clem, when she heard this. ‘I practise and practise!’
‘Yes, but even if you didn’t you would still be able to do it.’
‘How?’ demanded Clem scornfully.
‘It’s a sort of magic, I think,’ said Binny.
Binny herself had turned out to be very unmagical when it came to music. Her own plastic recorder (after a long time of Binny gnawing on the mouthpiece and hoping for a miracle) had become mildewed, loose at the joints, and warped into a curve from being cooked in the dishwasher. Finally, during the big clear-out, it had disappeared completely, along with many other items.
The big clear-out.
Bankruptcy.
The first flat, the first strange school.
‘Why?’ asked a nosy new neighbour.
‘Because of Dad,’ said Binny.
‘What did he do?’
‘Died.’
That was the calamity that had hit the Cornwallis family when Binny was eight. Their father had died.
Binny recovered the fastest, so quickly that a year or two later she could hardly remember being sad. I must have been, she thought guiltily. Very. Everyone was.
All the same, it seemed she got over the loss disgracefully quickly. Much faster than James, who for a time turned back to being a baby again. Faster than Clem too, who took ages to return to life. Even when the anniversaries came around, Father’s Day, birthdays, the first Christmas, Binny had to think sad thoughts to make herself get the necessary tears in her eyes. The sad thoughts were not about her father either; she had almost forgotten how it had felt to have a father.
Clem guessed.
‘How can you not remember him?’ she asked.
‘Of course I do,’ said Binny, and she hugged Clem and thought of how when her sister had played her flute, whatever her father was doing, however busy he was, he would listen, gently opening all the doors between the place where he was working, and wherever Clem was practising.
Poor Clem, thought Binny. Sometimes she also thought, poor James, remembering her father, infinitely patient, hour after hour, down on the floor with his creaking knees, laying out train tracks and miniature engines. There was no one now to play trains with James. The others tried, but they could not do it. James was too bossy and the boredom was too much for them. ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ James had howled, beating the floor in rage.
Binny had never raged, nor huddled in misery. It made her feel bad. Perhaps, she thought, if I’d had a special thing, played a flute, or liked boring trains, it would have been the same for me.
But maybe not, because I still had Max.
While Binny had still had Max it had been impossible to be wholly miserable.
Max did not understand that anyone had died. He was the only thing in the house that remained its identical, cheerful self. Max still emptied rubbish bins and gobbled up the contents. He still needed playing with. He still chewed the corners of rugs, dug holes in the garden, spun in circles of excitement at the sight of a ball, left puddles, yowled at strangers, and knocked over his friends. James had screeched to be rescued. Clem had pushed him away, but Max had made Binny laugh.
‘Max was an awful dog,’ said James, years later, scrutinizing a blurry photo of Max attacking a cushion.
‘You give me that and shut up!’ ordered Binny.
James handed it over cheerfully, and turned to another picture, this time of his father.
‘Very old,’ he said critically. ‘More like a grandad.’
‘He was twenty years older than Mum,’ said Binny, bending to look at the photograph. ‘She told me that when she married him all her friends and relations said “Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!”’
‘He didn’t pay the bills,’ remarked James. ‘Bills killed him.’
‘Clem says that’s not true,’ said Binny.
Perhaps it wasn’t, but all the same, after their father died the bills were discovered. Everything went. The bookshop. The big house. The cars. The schools. The holidays. Binny’s first world.
After the big house had come a very small flat. It was in every way a horrible place, and no good at all for a large bouncy dog. At a family meeting it was decided that Max would have to live with Granny who had a little house with a garden across the other side of town.
‘I’ll go as well then,’ said Binny desperately. ‘Every weekend I’ll go and live there! All the holidays too!’
‘That would be far too much for Granny,’ said her mother, seeing the look of horror on Granny’s face.
‘I’m afraid it would,’ said Granny faintly.
‘If you ask me,’ said Aunty Violet, in her cold, detached voice, ‘you are all being ridiculous. That dog should be properly rehomed.’
‘Properly rehomed!’ repeated Binny, turning on her in amazement. ‘What do you mean, properly rehomed? And anyway, nobody did ask you!’
‘And trained,’ said Aunty Violet, ignoring Binny completely. ‘Always presuming the creature is trainable, of course.’
‘Don’t you call Max a creature!’ exclaimed Binny. ‘Or I’ll call YOU a creature!’
‘Binny!’ said her mother.
Binny marched out of the room, slamming the door behind her with a panel-splitting crack.
‘Bang!’ said James, with satisfaction, and crawled under the table where he continued to repeat, ‘Bang!’ over and over, turning it into a one-thought song, and rocking himself to the rhythm. Aunty Violet watched him without curiosity, murmuring, ‘I expect there’s people he could see.’
‘What people? See about what?’ asked Clem, but Granny said, ‘Clem dear, I should like a cup of tea,’ and Clem’s moment of indignation passed. Ja
mes continued to sing, Binny wept, with her arms around Max, and Aunty Violet went back to Spain where she lived in a large rented apartment with no pets and no children. ‘Thank Heavens,’ said Aunty Violet.
Max lived with Granny for four or five months, so happy, rampageous and noisy that every single one of her friends stopped visiting.
Aunty Violet flew back from Spain and did something about it, disappeared, and left Granny to do the explaining.
‘He’ll be far, far happier in his new place than with an old woman like me,’ said Granny when furiously confronted. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t my decision, Binny darling. Aunty Violet thought it was best.’
‘I’d like to KILL Aunty Violet!’ roared Binny.
For the next year or two, nothing went right. Binny and her family lived in one awful flat after another, as their mother scurried from side to side across the country in search of the sort of job that fitted in with school hours, no car, three children, and no childcare.
No word was ever heard of Max.
Sometimes the children’s mother thought she should try to trace him before it was too late. If only she had time, if only they lived in a place where Max would be possible, and if only there were not so many other problems.
Problems came like slapping waves, one after another, leaving the children’s mother breathless. James was too young to notice, but Clem and Binny did, and they both got into the habit of protecting her as well as they could. For Binny this meant not making her feel worse by dragging the subject of Max into every possible conversation. For Clem it meant stubbornly organizing her own music lessons, which was much harder than it sounded.
‘How much do they cost?’ asked Binny. These bankrupt days she and Clem were very aware of how much things cost.
‘Twenty-eight pounds an hour.’
‘Twenty-eight pounds an hour!’
‘Dad used to pay.’
‘Couldn’t you teach yourself?’
Clem shook her head. ‘You have to pass exams if you want to get on. Colleges want grades. I’ve looked it up. I can take the lessons at school and Mum will never need to worry.’
‘How can you pay for them?’ asked Binny.
At first Clem managed.