by Hilary McKay
WAS THAT FIRST PHOTO FOR REAL?
OR WERE YOU JUST MESSING ABOUT?
FAKING STUFF?
DID YOU JUST TAKE IT?
DID YOU JUST POINT THE CAMERA AT THE GROUND AND TAKE IT?
YES, wrote Binny. OF COURSE. FUSS FUSS FUSS YOU’RE STILL IN A MOOD. CRIKEY.
After this exchange the phone went quiet again.
* * *
A surprising thing happened that afternoon. Mrs. Tremayne knocked on the door. “That’s for your James,” she said to Binny, who happened to be the one to open it, and handed her a bar of chocolate. It was a very small bar, the smallest in fact, that it was possible to buy, but still, chocolate.
“Oh!” said Binny, astonished. “Thank . . .”
“We’re all out for the day today. Should you be wanting us we’ll be back around eight.”
“Mrs. Tremayne,” said Binny bravely, “I’m sorry if I was . . .”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Tremayne, and left.
* * *
“It’s because of my letter,” said James, when Binny took the chocolate up to his room. “I knew it was good.”
“What did it say?”
James held out a worn looking sheet of paper, one of his practice letters, and Binny read:
I am sory I mendd yor tele tel tv.
I AM SOry I unlokd the cbod you lokd.
You lef the keys in a drawr so I did.
Now I wont any mor.
And the stons of the wall for my chikn Peker to kepe her safe.
Lots of love from James Cornwallis age 6 xxxooo
o meens hug
“I am sorry I unlocked the cupboard you locked,” Binny read out loud.“You left the keys in a drawer . . . James? You’ve gone bright red!”
“No I haven’t.”
“You’re up to something! What did you do with the keys?”
“Gave them to Mummy.”
It was the word Mummy that gave him away, more than the suddenly dropped golden head, more than the quickened breathing.
Binny looked at her little brother, face hidden, ears flaming scarlet, left hand clutched tight in his pocket, and asked, “Did you give all the keys to Mum?”
“There was nothing in the cupboards, only those screwdrivers and lightbulbs and things like that. And that locked up room is just full of tables and plates and chairs all piled up.”
Binny nodded. She had discovered this herself by taking a kitchen chair outside, climbing onto it, and peering through the window.
“But the big key that I found under my wardrobe said ATTIC. A-t-t-i-K! On a label! I only want to look. There might easily be good stuff up there.”
What would be good stuff to six-year-old James, Binny wondered, and while she was wondering James said hopefully, “Presents. Ones that nobody’s unwrapped. An Xbox. A proper train set, all laid out. Or just money. Piles and piles and piles of money. And an owl,” said James, looking wide-eyed at Binny. “What if an owl lives there!”
“An owl!” All Binny’s family knew that ever since she first encountered Harry Potter she had wanted to meet an owl.
“Look!” James held out his left hand and slowly uncurled his fingers. There was the key with its tag, stained old steel, warm and slightly sticky from being clutched in James’s hot little fist.
“Come on, then,” said Binny.
* * *
“It’s horrible!” said James, five minutes later.
“Yes it is,” agreed Binny.
“I knew there wouldn’t really be presents.”
“I knew there couldn’t be an owl.”
They poked around in the dim light of a grimy electric bulb, grumbling to each other, but there seemed nothing to discover. Dirty cardboard boxes. Crumbling newspapers. A stale musty smell of undisturbed dust.
“The air is itchy,” complained James, rubbing ferociously at his eyes.
“Don’t! You’ll make them sore.”
“And it tastes,” said James. “It tastes of moldy bread.”
“You’ve never eaten moldy bread.”
“I have, in the park that I found on a bench. It looked good as new. But it wasn’t. It had blue dots on the back. Why are you looking at those books?”
“I just want to see what they are,” said Binny, peering at the faded spines. “Mathematical and Algebraic Functions . . . Gosh! Yuck! A Lecture in Mendelism . . . Modern Ideas on the Constitution of Matter . . .”
“I’m going back down! I don’t like it here.”
“. . . Dr. H. Drinkwater,” Binny read, while James’s footsteps rattled down the attic stairs. “Senior Lecturer at the University of Oxford. Probably dead ages ago . . . What’s this box? James?”
But James had gone so Binny opened the box by herself.
Butterflies, rows of them, bodies skewered by rusting pins. Fragile colors on brittle, fragmenting wings.
A hand drawn key slipped out from inside the lid. Their names, listed under ghostly outlines, and on the back:
This case of thirty British butterflies was donated to the collection by Miss Clarry Penrose
(Who also drew the magnificent key!)
July 1913
Binny looked at the butterflies and then turned to the card again.
Clarry Penrose.
Who also drew the magnificent key.
Magnificent, thought Binny, boiling inside a little. Is that what she thought it was?
A stale smell came from the box. There were gray spots of mildew and sickly yellow stains of damp. Binny thought of the warm gold and brown butterflies that flickered in the sunlight around the blackberry bushes. Those forlorn shapes must also have flickered, until Clarry Penrose . . .
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Binny, because she hadn’t been there to protect them, a hundred years ago.
“Binny!” called a voice from below.
Very gently Binny closed the lid of the box again.
Clem was standing at the open door at the foot of the attic stairs. It was difficult to know these days just how far Clem had progressed into the distant world of adults.
“I was just looking,” Binny said guiltily.
“It’s all right,” said Clem. “I’m not going to tell you were there.”
“It’s only books and boxes of junk. And a case with rows of poor dead butterflies all stabbed on pins.”
“It’s hard to believe people ever thought it was okay to do that,” said Clem. “Hurry down to the kitchen, Bin! Gareth’s on the phone.”
“What again? What about?”
“He didn’t say. Just that he needed to talk to you.”
“Needed to talk to me?” asked Binny, and tore down to the kitchen and grabbed the phone and said, “Max?”
“What?”
“Is it Max?”
“Max is fine. Listen. You’ve got to go to that place you were this morning, the exact same spot where you took that photo, and take another one.”
“What? Why? Are you sure Max is fine?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Hurry up.”
“Now? You don’t mean now!”
“Yes I do,” said Gareth impatiently. “Go on!”
“In the dark?”
That silenced Gareth for a moment and then he said, “Oh. Oh yes. I didn’t notice. No. You’d better not go in the dark. Tomorrow.”
“I might not have time. Why does it matter?”
“Look, Bin, just do it. Please.”
Summer 1913, Part 4
In the summer of 1913 the national hero was Captain Scott, who had sailed to the Antarctic in his ship the Terra Nova.
“And then,” said Clarry to Peter and Rupe, “he walked to the North Pole! It took ages. Months! He wrote it all down in a diary!”
Peter looked at her and the corners of his mouth twitched.
“Are you absolutely sure he did that, Clarry?” asked Rupe.
“Yes, of course I’m sure. There’s been lots about it in Father’s newspaper. How could you not know?”
“I didn’t know about the North Pole,” said Rupe. “He must have got lost.”
Then he and Peter snorted with laughter.
“I think you’re both horrible,” said Clarry crossly, swiping at Peter and shaking Rupe by his blazer buttons. She herself had cried when she heard how Captain Scott died on the way home, he and his friends in the tent together, with their food all gone and the blizzard outside. “It was an amazing thing to do!” said Clarry.
“Amazing,” said Peter, hiccuping.
“Of course it was,” said Rupe. “Whichever Pole!”
“What do you mean?”
“Come with me!” said Rupe, and led the way to the sitting room and the old yellowy globe in the corner. There he took Clarry’s finger and traced the long downward journey of the Terra Nova from England to Antarctica, and the long upward walk of Captain Scott (and his diary) as they headed for the North Pole.
“Oh,” said Clarry as she crossed the equator for the second time. “Well. South Pole, then! I knew that really. Stop laughing! It was sad.” She looked at Antarctica again, right at the bottom of the world where the spindle went into the globe. It made her feel giddy. She didn’t understand how it was possible to live there. Upside down. However, she knew better than to make that remark to the boys. She did say how strange it was that Antarctica was so very cold.
Instead of very hot.
Which was what she would have expected, since it was so far south, and quite close to Australia. Perhaps poor Captain Scott and his friends had also expected it to be very hot. What an awful surprise the snow would have been, said Clarry, if that was the case.
When Clarry mentioned all these thoughts the boys began laughing again.
“I’ll show you how it is,” said Peter, and gave her the globe to hold, and found a table lamp to be the sun. He was a good teacher. Very soon Clarry understood the coldness of the Antarctic, and could see that it would not have been the shock to Captain Scott that she had feared. She also grasped, as a sort of added bonus, that the universe did not have a top and a bottom and that therefore, whatever the problems of the inhabitants of planet earth, upside down-ness was not amongst them, wherever they might live. At the moment when these surprising facts became clear forever, Peter hugged her.
* * *
Afterward, when Clarry remembered it, it seemed to her that there was no end to the laughter of that day. For the time that it lasted, there was no growing up and no grown away from, no leaving and no left behind, no future and no past. It was perfect sunlit present.
Chapter Seven
“Just do it!” Gareth had ordered, demanding his photograph, but there were other things to do too. Binny’s family spent Sunday morning at their old house, still covered in blue tarpaulin but with new roof beams already being fitted into place. They had a picnic lunch there, and hot chocolate at the museum that overlooked the sea. Then they inspected the paintings and the models of ships and the things in the gift shop that they couldn’t afford, and ran round the harbor for a breath of fresh air and it wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that they left town to go back to the chilly new house.
“Now,” said their mother, “I have an extra shift at the old people’s home and James is coming with me. Binny, I wonder if you should come too? You could bring your homework.”
For a minute Binny was tempted. She liked the old people’s home where she and James were teased and admired, given advice and butterscotch, and told stories that only ended when the storyteller fell asleep. But there was Gareth, who as well as ordering, “Do it!” had also (amazingly) added, “Please.”
“I’ll stay here.”
“And behave? And let Clem get on? And get your homework out and do it properly? And sort out your uniform for tomorrow?”
“All those things,” agreed Binny, but the first thing she did was collect the mobile phone and go and look for Gareth’s footprint.
Which had vanished.
Gareth answered her text at once, with a call.
“What, nothing?” he asked.
“Just mud and leaves.”
“You’re in the wrong place.”
“I’m not. There’s a big stone you can tell by. I’ll show you. Wait!”
Gareth waited. A satellite above the planet received a picture of a big stone, empty mud, and fallen leaves and bounced it back to earth again.
Gareth said, “That can’t be right.”
“I suppose footprints do disappear,” said Binny. “There’s plenty of other giant chicken prints, though. Shall I photo them instead?”
“No.”
“They’re just the same.”
“Except they haven’t disappeared,” said Gareth. “Are you exactly where you were yesterday when that girl called you away?”
“Called me away?” For a moment, Binny was taken aback, but after all, that was what Clare had done: called her away.
“Yes. Why?”
“I get rid of badger prints when I find them.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I trample away badger prints to keep them private. I get rid of them.”
“But it wasn’t a badger! It was that giant chicken thing!”
“Heron.”
“Yes, heron. What are they like?”
“Herons? You must have seen them! Big. Gray and white. Long necks and beaks and lanky legs. Their feathers always look as if they might fall off. Are you going back to the house now?”
“I might explore a bit first.”
“Well, be—” Gareth suddenly stopped.
“Were you going to say, careful?”
“Yes.”
Bossy, thought Binny, but she was used to Gareth’s bossiness, and she soon forgot.
She wandered down the old track, treading gently, hoping for rabbits. There were pink birds about, bright as flying roses, grasshoppers too, like animated paper clips, springing up at her feet. Farther along, by a patch of dark rushes she saw the first heron of her life and recognized it at once from Gareth’s description. She curled up in the long grass to watch.
The heron dozed, half opened a yellow lidded eye, blinked, and dozed again. Binny lay so still that a mountaineer ladybug climbed her elbow.
I’m a giant, thought Binny.
Ants, like punctuation marks, wove through the thin grass stems. A beech leaf came sliding down invisible stairs of sky, level after level, slower and slower, and landed in her hair.
That’s a wish! thought Binny, not moving. This time I’ll wish the perfect wish . . .
She closed her eyes.
* * *
The heron woke her. It was the biggest thing she had ever seen flying and it was directly above her head. It was as huge as a hearth rug and it flew like a rocking horse and its legs trailed behind like leftover scaffolding.
It was like being buzzed by a dragon.
It doesn’t look true! thought Binny, half between sleep and waking, still rubbing her eyes, and what is that?
Not a dog, but dog-sized, not a deer, but deer-silent. A dark shape, dusty bronze, crossing the track, heading for the undergrowth on the far side. It moved very quickly, but for an instant in time it paused, turned its head, and glanced back.
Binny had the impression of great, uncertain, isolation in that glance. In that moment she fell in love.
Then there was a twitch of a dark plumed ear, a silken bound, and the world was empty. The heron was gone. The pink birds were gone. There was no ladybug. There was no leaf in her hair. The air was cold. There was nothing left but an ache of loss, and a memory of a creature more shadow than substance.
She thought, What did I see?
Did I see?
* * *
All her life, Binny had seen things where other people did not. A rainy window watched with silver shifting eyes. A blur of color swirled into a person. The light on a wave rolled into a dolphin, or a pattern of leaves took flight. She remembered Gareth’s scorn at the Swallowtail butterfly. What would he say abo
ut this?
I don’t have to tell everything to Gareth, thought Binny. He doesn’t tell everything to me. He’s making all that fuss about the photo I sent him but he won’t say why.
Binny looked at the photo on her mobile phone again. It was so small. So nothing-much. The heron print like a badly drawn star. The tracks of the small mousy creature, and . . .
She raced to call Gareth’s number.
“There was a paw print too!”
“At last,” said Gareth.
“Why didn’t you say before?”
“I didn’t want to tell you what to see. You’re too good at seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Of course it’s there! What is it?”
“A dog?” asked Gareth, but he did not say it as if he believed it for one moment, and he did not argue when Binny, who happened to be very good at dog footprints (Max having left them all over her heart), said, “I’m sure it’s not a dog. What else could it be?”
“I don’t know,” said Gareth.
* * *
At school on Monday, Binny remembered her promise to her mother. At break time she went across to where Clare was standing with Ella and said, “I told my mum I’d say sorry to you about what I said on Saturday. I’m sorry for what I said on Saturday.”
“Is that it?” asked Clare.
“Yes.”
“I bet you’re not really.”
“You were spying on me. You trapped me in that tunnel. And you said ‘actually’ to try and make me kill you in front of both our mothers.”
Ella looked from Binny to Clare in surprise. “Is she mad? Want a chip?”
“Yes, she is. No, thanks.”
Ella had an unusual way of eating potato chips. She squashed them to crumbs and then drank them from the packet like a long stream of dirty snow. Sometimes this did not go smoothly and she exploded into a blizzard of salty snowflakes. Already Binny had learned to move out of range when the chip packet was raised. This time she stepped back at exactly the moment that Clare did the same thing, in a movement as smooth as a reflection. They both noticed. Their eyes met in surprise and in that moment of honesty Binny thought of something.
“After you saw me yesterday,” she said, “after the tunnel, and after when you were in my bedroom, did you go back?”