by Hilary McKay
“Because,” said Ella, opening a plastic lunch box as she spoke and fishing out a large floppy sandwich, “we have to put up with you, don’t we? Live in the same place. Breathe the same air . . .” She took an enormous bite, scattering grated cheese as she chewed.
“Ella!” protested Clare.
“What? I’m hungry!” Ella wedged the rest of her sandwich in her mouth all in one go, and added, grinning, “Actually!”
“Oh shut up!” growled Binny.
Ella snorted with laughter, spraying more cheese. “I bet you were bunking off yesterday, actually, weren’t you, actually?”
“No I wasn’t!” snapped Binny. “The roof of my house blew off actually and we had to move house actually. And we’ve ended up in a freezing cold hole in the middle of nowhere that belongs to some bossy old witchy woman actually. And she obviously hates us and the only good part was actually that I thought I’d never have to come to this rotten stinking school again! But I had to anyway. So there! Actually!”
This speech had a very surprising effect on Clare. She stopped paying attention to Ella and turned to Binny, staring.
“What?” demanded Binny.
Clare ignored her. “Do you remember?” she said to Ella. “I told you, last night?”
“About Them?” asked Ella, raising her eyebrows.
Clare nodded.
“She’s Them?” asked Ella, sounding very shocked indeed. “Did you hear what she just said? Bossy old witchy woman! Freezing cold hole!”
“I know!”
“What’s the matter with her?”
Binny did not hear Clare’s reply, because she and Ella had turned away, their heads together, their backs so stiff and alien that she dared not go after them. Ella’s voice carried back to her, though, as they marched out of the door.
“Mad. I love her! Everyone does!”
* * *
Following this, a hideous day began.
Everything Binny looked away from for a moment, books, sweater, timetable, vanished to reappear, kicked and grubby, in some distant corner of the floor. Doors swung shut as she was about to walk through them. Shoulders and elbows shoved from behind. Something touched her head and she reached up and found a clot of still warm chewing gum pushed into her hair. Also, anyone who innocently turned her way to speak or smile was stopped immediately with either a flurry of whispers from Ella or an icy glance from Clare.
Binny was shocked by the silent force so suddenly against her. It buffeted and bewildered her until she began to rage.
“You’re all vile!” she cried, on discovering that someone had wedged a half chewed candy in the keyhole of her locker.
Impassive faces looked away.
“It’s not fair!” Binny attempted to wipe her sticky hands on a crumple of tissue. It shredded into rags that fell to the floor. As she scrambled to retrieve them she heard a crunch and there was her pencil case with a dusty footprint on it.
“Everything in that was new!” she shouted. “Everything!”
“New?” asked a silky contemptuous voice.
“What a pity,” said another.
“I hate you!” shouted Binny, gathering the remains of her possessions and starting toward the door. “I hate you ALL!” She slammed it open, and there was a teacher on the opposite side.
“It’s Binny, isn’t it?” asked the slammed-into teacher. “Binny Cornwallis?”
“Belinda, actually,” said Clare from behind. Her voice was perfectly normal; friendly even, but at the sound of it Binny swung round.
“You shut up! You just shut up!”
“I’m sorry,” said Clare.
“You are not sorry!”
“I am, actually.”
Right in front of the teacher, Binny hurled her pencil case of broken pencils at Clare’s sleek, dark head. A moment later she found herself being very firmly led down the corridor.
The strangest feeling began to wash over Binny. Once at home they had had a door stopper, a fabric cat, stiff and weighted with sand. Now Binny felt like that cat. Immobile. Impossibly heavy. Vaguely she realized that she was actually leaning against a wall.
“Don’t you feel well?”
It was the teacher, kind, with her hand on Binny’s shoulder.
“Would you like to sit down?”
With a great effort Binny raised her head and moved again.
They took her to a chilly white place called Resources. They asked if she had eaten breakfast and she remembered Clem’s coffee and the pancakes. It was like remembering a scene from a book.
“I’m fine,” she told them at last.
Eventually they gave her a pink laminated card, which meant if she showed it to any member of staff she would be allowed to leave the room. Then she was released.
The day became a dreary nightmare with Binny trapped endlessly in its darkness. Students avoided her. Teachers asked how she was. “I’m fine,” repeated Binny.
A bell rang; bells had been ringing all day, but this time the people around Binny did not simply swirl and resettle again as if hardly disturbed. This time a new energy lifted and and swept them to the doors. Binny was blown along with them, and all at once, like a sudden awakening, she found herself blinking in clear September sunlight.
Dozens of people from school were streaming toward the bus station. Binny moved with them and then astonishingly, there was Clem. “Brilliant! You’re here!”
“Oh, Clem!”
“I thought I’d come and look for you! That’s our bus! Come on! Okay?”
Binny nodded. The relief of finding Clem! Of a seat beside the window with her sister between herself and the world! She leaned her face against the cool glass, and felt the rumble of the engine change as the bus moved off. The numbness of the day began to fade. They were passing the place where the airy bubble of a butterfly’s world had blown across her own, and she craned to look out of the window. Perhaps, miraculously, it would be there again. It seemed to Binny that if it was, then everything would be all right. The sensible part of her mind knew this could not be true, but another (hopeful, stubborn, ridiculous) part believed in many things that could not possibly be real.
There was no butterfly, and to Binny’s horror she found two tears of disappointment trickling down her nose. Hastily she blotted them with her sleeve. Clem was kindly silent.
The bus dropped them at the end of the road to the house.
“I hate school,” said Binny as they walked. “That’s all.”
“Well,” said Clem, and then after a minute or two, “if that’s all.”
Clem, Binny thought, kept all her loves and hates tucked carefully out of the weather.
They found that their mother and James were home before them. James was outside, heaving rocks from the tumbled garden wall and piling them around the hen coop.
“It looks like a Stone Age henhouse,” observed Clem.
“I know,” agreed James smugly. “I’ve rocked it all around with just a little gap for the door. Whatever got Gertie’ll never climb over that!”
“She might just be lost, not got,” said Binny.
“Got,” said James cheerfully. “Got and eaten! Don’t forget you said you’d look for her, Bin! Legs and things . . .” (Clem moaned and went inside.) “Then we can have a funeral. We haven’t had a funeral for ages!”
How nice to be James, thought Binny. What an easy life he lived. No complications. No battering despair. Even a night of loss and tragedy could be redeemed by the happy thought of a funeral. With relief she abandoned her own complicated world and slipped into his.
“Wait till I get these school clothes off and I’ll come and help,” she said, but by the time she was in her jeans James had stopped building and was suddenly very busy on his bedroom floor with coloring pencils and paper.
“Not homework again!” Binny complained.
“I got another star sticker for my pirate picture,” said James. “Get ten stickers and you get a certificate!”
“Then
what?”
“What d’you mean, ‘then what’? A certificate! With your name on! Wouldn’t you want a certificate with your name on?”
“No,” said Binny. “I thought we were building Pecker’s wall and hunting for Gertie. Come on!”
“I’m doing this now.” James rolled aside so that Binny could see, and she bent to peer at the small yellowed rectangle of cardboard he was coloring.
“You didn’t draw that!” she said, after one glance.
“I found it,” said James. “Can you see what it is?”
“It’s a skull. With a beak.”
“Yes. Gertie.”
“Oh James! That’s awful! And we don’t know yet that she’s dead. Let’s go and look for her now, while it’s still sunny.”
“Couldn’t you go without me?”
“No.”
“My teacher said probably a fox,” said James, sighing but heaving himself to his feet, “but I still think jagular and Dill, you know Dill who sits at my table?”
“How’m I supposed to know Dill who sits at your table?”
“Because . . . !
He sits . . . !
At my table!”
“Oh, all right.”
“Dill said, ‘Whew!’ Just like that! ‘Whew!’ About jagulars. They get you by the throat, Dill said. Do you think it hurts?”
“Not a bit,” said Binny untruthfully. They were outside now, and she looked around, considering the landscape of this new home. The garden was just a bit of field enclosed by walls. It sloped away from the house; a slope that got steeper and steeper as it headed downward. There the line of an old railway ran out toward the moors and then on to the old haunted tin mines of the coast.
“I think it would hurt if a jagular got you by the throat,” said James. “I don’t see how it couldn’t. I think it would hurt if anything got you by the throat!”
“Nothing is going to get you by the throat,” said Binny. “Come on! Down to the old rail line.”
“What if there’s a train?”
“There hasn’t been a train for a hundred years. They don’t come farther than the town anymore.”
The wild was reclaiming the old line. Its tunnels had become caves from which bats poured at sunset. Wild creatures watched from beneath the blackthorn bushes. Owls waited in the ash trees. In summer lizards basked on the small deserted platforms, in winter deer from the moors came down to its shelter. It was a great place for birds and blackberries and butterflies. Also midges, nettles, and the deep earthy smells of secrets.
“We might be the first people here for years,” Binny told James as they followed the zigzag track down the steep bank.
“What made this path, then?” asked James.
“Animals of course.”
James went more slowly.
“Don’t you like it here?”
“Do you?” asked James.
“I love it! Oh!”
They both saw it at the same time. A feather, tattered rusty orange, caught in the grasses.
“James?” asked Binny. “Gertie? Is it?”
James nodded. “Yes.”
He stooped to pick it up and Binny watched in silence as he stood with his head bent, smoothing the ragged edges back into a feather shape. Briefly he held its curve against his cheek. “Gertie,” he murmured, and suddenly turned and began scrambling very quickly back up the way they had come.
“James!” protested Binny.
“I’ve got to do my homework.”
“But it’s just getting exciting!”
“I don’t want it to be exciting,” said James, not pausing in his hurry.
“Wait just one minute. I can see more orange.” Binny hurried on a few steps farther, and this time there was a whole bunch of feathers, still in the fan shape in which they had been dropped. “Lots more,” she called up to James. “A whole handful!”
“A mouthful,” said James. “I’m going back to the house.”
“Oh James, don’t be silly! This is the best place we’ve found for ages and ages!”
But James would not listen. He disappeared up the last of the slope and vanished completely.
Binny did not follow. She could not understand James. The overgrown valley seemed a friendly place to her. In the world above, autumn had arrived, but this place was so sheltered that here summer still remained. Brown and orange butterflies lifted from blackberry bushes as she passed. A patch of late harebells made a puddle of fallen sky.
At the bottom of the zigzag track the ground was more open. A line of wooden sleepers from the old railway made a path that was comfortable to follow. Binny wandered along it until she found a patch of sun-dried grass and small yellow flowers. There she flopped down, and soon, in ones and twos, small movements began all around her.
Rabbits.
Binny knew nothing of the countryside. Except for the last few weeks, she had lived all her life on city streets. The rabbits were an astonishment to her. Their numbers. Their rocking-horse hops and sudden quivering pauses. The cheerful bounce of their white flag tails. She forgot about Gertie, and the horrible day at school, and watched, enchanted. How lucky that just when she needed it, she had found a private world.
* * *
An hour passed. The sun disappeared. The shadows became blue, and then gray. A voice called from high above, Binny, Binny, Binny! Binny stood, scattering rabbits, and began to hurry back, along the track and up the slope, across the tumbled wall and the shabby garden, until she stood blinking in the brightness of the large bare kitchen.
“Oh!” exclaimed Clem, seeing the handful of feathers. “Poor Gertie!”
“And poor Pecker,” said James, taking the feathers. “Now she’s got to lay eggs all on her own!”
“As soon as we are home again we’ll get a new friend for Pecker,” promised the children’s mother, busy as usual, stirring pasta sauce, pairing socks, and filling in a new address form for James’s school, “unless . . .”
“Unless Pecker gets grabbed as well,” said James, reaching for the cookie tin, “but she won’t because of my stones.”
“James! You’re dropping crumbs all over the floor,” said his mother. “Find a plate!”
James fetched a plate and began arranging Gertie’s orange feathers on it. He made a feather Gertie with a cookie head.
“For dinner,” he said, presenting this very suddenly under Binny’s nose, “it is chicken!”
“I thought you were sad about Gertie,” exclaimed Binny.
“I am. That’s why I’m being so careful about her poor dead feathers.”
“Wash your hands James, if you want any supper,” his mother told him. “And don’t eat that cookie you’ve been playing with.”
“Why not?”
“It will be all germy.”
“Why will it?”
“Because feathers are all germy.”
“But if Gertie is dead, won’t her germs be dead?”
“No they won’t.”
“Well that’s not fair.”
“James! Hands!”
James washed his hands but he still did not get any supper because just at that moment there was a loud thumping on the door and it was the woman from the night before, the owner of the house.
“I came with the bus timetable, which I thought might be useful, and I have to say I’m not pleased,” she began, the moment the door was opened. “I see you’ve been taking stone from the wall and I’m going to have to ask you to stop. And don’t try putting it back again yourself because that’s a specialist job. I don’t know,” she added, although she did not say what she did not know.
“I am so, so sorry,” said the children’s mother earnestly. “I’m afraid James . . .” She looked around for James, but he had vanished. “. . . really wouldn’t have realized. But I should have. And thank you very much for thinking of us with the timetable.”
“We try to look after our guests,” said the woman indignantl
y, “and we hope that in return . . . Well, I’ll say no more. Good night.”
“Good night, I am sorry, you must think . . .”
But the woman had turned away.
“It’s my fault,” said the children’s always-brave mother. “I should have thought. I should have watched James. I should have had that roof checked at the beginning of summer . . .” And then, to Binny’s utter astonishment, she turned her face toward the kitchen door and leaned there, her head on her arm.
It was only for a moment; by the time Binny’s alarmed eyes had found Clem’s, it was over as if it had never been.
“Supper!” she said, smiling at Binny. “Pasta. Ice cream. Shout James, someone. How useful to have a bus timetable. Binny, could you put some knives and forks and things out? Aren’t we going to miss this lovely big kitchen when we get home, Binny, Bin, Belinda, Bel?”
Binny nodded, the evening resumed, but because of that small moment by the kitchen door she made up her mind not to worry her mother with one word about school. Not then, or ever, no matter how bad it became.
Summer 1913, Part 2
That summer the museum was different. Rupe helped as much as ever, but in a slightly amused, grown-out-of-it kind of way. Peter worked passionately, traveling miles on his bike to scour new locations. Once again, the museum moved house, back to its starting place in the large bare room where Peter slept. It became very organized. In the quest for perfection several less perfect items, including the mole, were evicted. Soon Peter’s camp bed followed.
“You can’t sleep on the landing!” Clarry objected. “Everyone falls over you!”
“Who cares?” asked Peter, although after a few days of being fallen over he grew tired of it himself, and installed his bed in the bathroom that he shared with Clarry and Rupe.
In this inconvenient place he stayed. Clarry and Rupe put up with it, because it was the summer when everyone was putting up with Peter. Nobody wanted another drastic, school-avoiding accident. Peter would not discuss school, except to say what he had been saying ever since he was seven and first heard of the hideous place: “If you make me go there I will die.” It was no good anyone pointing out that Rupe went there, and far from dying, had become excellent at a dozen sports, made a hundred friends, learned a thousand jokes, and lived in fear of nothing, not even falling off the chapel roof, which he regularly climbed.