by Hilary McKay
For the smallest fraction of time, Clare’s eyes remained on Binny’s. Then she glanced away and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you go back to the old railway line?” persisted Binny, but it was no use. Ella was now erupting with volcanic force, pouring tears and gasping and staggering about.
“Air!” shouted Clare, and seized her friend’s elbow, pushed past Binny, and headed for the door. Just before they got there Ella ceased erupting, but Clare did not stop hurrying.
Binny didn’t see either of them again that morning, nor at lunchtime, because she had at last discovered a place where she could have a little peace. This was the school reference library. As soon as she could escape the crowds, Binny slid quietly inside, and tiptoed between bookcases to a secluded seat from which she could see both doors. Except for a teacher invisible behind a mountain of marking, and two much older students toiling over homework, the room was empty. Binny picked up a book, but only part of her read. Most of her listened to the homework sighs, the papers turning, a radiator humming as it warmed, footsteps in the corridor outside.
It was a watchful, jungle peace.
* * *
“Still, no one said ‘grockle,’ ” she told Clem on the bus home that afternoon.
“Well, they’re bound to get tired of the same stupid jokes.”
“Gareth said in the end they forget they hate you.”
“They don’t know you, Bin, so how can they hate you?”
“You can hate people you don’t know,” said Binny, who always had been a very good hater herself. “Gareth says if you think about it, hardly anybody likes hardly anybody.”
“Oh, Gareth!” said Clem scornfully. She’d never got on with Gareth. He was too arrogant, and too fascinated by natural history. “Why do you know this stuff?” she had demanded of him once, when he had gone too far over a paella and told her everything he knew about the ingredients. “Why not football, astrophysics, Xboxes, Facebook? Why not take up the saxophone? Why not start up a band?”
“Gareth,” said Binny, “only likes ten people in the whole world and guess what, I’m one of them!”
“Well, of course you are,” said Clem. “If I only liked ten people in the whole world you would be one of them.”
“Would I really?” asked Binny, shining.
“Top ten! ‘Course you would! Here’s our stop! Come on!”
It was one of the days when Clare was also on the bus. Binny had worked out strategies for these times. If Clare got off first, Binny lingered, dawdling, deliberately dropping things, driving Clem distracted but not setting off until Clare was far ahead. If things worked out the other way round and Binny was off first, she abandoned Clem and sprinted. Clem would follow afterward, secure in her almost-grown-up world, impatiently retrieving anything Binny scattered in her flight.
This time, Clare was behind them so Binny ran, airy with happiness at the thought of being in Clem’s top ten, plowing through drifts of orange beech leaves and startling Pecker as she whizzed round the corner of the house.
She arrived back to find her mother and Mrs. Tremayne hanging curtains; ancient heavy winter-smelling ones. They were busy in the bedrooms so Binny retreated to the living room, where she found James, upside down in a chair, eating cookies with his legs stretched higher than his head.
“Hello, don’t . . .,” he began, his eyes on the television. “Oh, it’s you! Look! Me and Mrs. Tremayne have mended the television! Could you pass me another cookie please?”
Binny handed him a cookie and sat down on the hearth rug in front of the electric fire. Cinderella was there, bathing in the heat. “Cinders, Cinders,” murmured Binny, reaching out to stroke her and Cinders purred and rolled. She was snow white all over, but her eyes were grass green and the pads of her paws were kitten pink. If they were twenty times bigger, thought Binny, what kind of paw prints would they leave? And if Cinders was twenty times bigger, what sort of cat would she be?
“A jagular,” said James, and Binny jumped and looked up from her dream to find that he too was watching Cinderella.
At that moment Mrs. Tremayne’s voice was heard outside the door.
“Thinking of your hen,” she said, her head appearing before her words, “you might use that little brick shed round the back and put her coop in at night. The door has a good latch, and she’d be out of the wind and whatever. Foxes.”
“Foxes?” repeated Binny.
“And I’ll have a word with Mark,” said Mrs. Tremayne’s head, and disappeared before Binny could ask, “Who’s Mark?”
James did not care about Mark or foxes. He tumbled down from his chair exclaiming, “A house for Pecker! Her own little house! Come on, Binny! Come on, Binny! Come on, Binny, please!”
So Binny got herself to her feet and followed him outside, and there was the shed, a window buried deep in ivy, a low black painted door, and a hundred years of dust on the wide window ledge and floor.
“I’ll get a brush and sweep,” said James, who loved sweeping, and went scurrying back to the house. A minute later he was raising great gray thunderclouds of dust, while Binny pulled long strands of ivy from the windowpane.
“Guess what somebody in my class said,” said James, as he swiped at a cobweb hanging in the doorway. “He said his brother sees jagulars all the time round here. Jagulars and panthers, when he’s out on his paper round!” James hit at a cobweb again, missing Binny’s head by nearly nothing at all, and continued cheerfully, “They escape out of zoos. They get out of the cages and the zookeepers don’t dare tell anyone in case they get into trouble. And then the zoos say, ‘Oh dear our poor jagular has died!’ No wonder Gertie got got!”
“Who told you all that rubbish?” asked Binny.
“I told you! Somebody in my class. Nobody you know.”
“Oh, them,” said Binny rudely. Somebody-in-my-class and Nobody-you-know had been two good friends of her little brother ever since he started preschool, aged three. They seemed to move around with him, changing school when he did. They both led, according to James, exciting and privileged lives. No one in the family had ever met them.
“It’s true,” insisted James. “I told you before that it was a jagular got Gertie. That’s why I didn’t want to go and look for her with you. Because of danger.”
The whole conversation was making Binny more and more uneasy. Ever since the shattering moment when she had fallen in love with her shadowy animal, she had understood completely why Gareth trampled his badger prints to hide them from curious eyes. Secret was safe, said Gareth, and he was right.
Binny changed the subject from paperboys and their early morning illusions.
“I’ve got this window clear. What’s it like inside now?”
“Come and see.”
“Not till you’ve put that brush down!”
James lowered his weapon, and Binny stepped cautiously through the door and looked around. Flaking whitewashed walls. A wide shelf under the window. So many cobwebs that they entirely veiled the ceiling.
“Imagine it in the dark!” she exclaimed. “Shut your eyes!”
James shut his eyes and invisible spiders trickled down his neck. He squirmed and wriggled. “Pecker won’t mind, though,” he said. “She likes spiders. She gobbles them up! Let’s go and get her and show her her new house.”
Pecker squawked with dismay when James and Binny lifted the hen coop, but once inside the shed she didn’t seem to mind. They arranged her so that she had a view from the window, and gave her an extra supper to make up for the disturbance. A family of sparrows were chattering in the ivy and Pecker crooned back to them as she picked up her corn.
“They can be friends,” said James, pleased.
Binny looked around one last time before they closed the door. In a corner of the windowsill something caught her eye. It was a rectangle of cardboard, yellow with age and gray with dust, tucked almost out of sight. As soon as she picked it up she recognized the handwriting.
She took
it in to show to Clem.
“It’s that Clarry again,” she said. “The one who did the butterflies.” Clem had seen the butterflies for herself now, and she hadn’t liked them any more than Binny had, although she had pointed out how carefully the little key was drawn. Now she read:
Web of Common House Spider
(Tegenaria domestica)
August 1912
“Goodness!” said Clem, shuddering.
“It was right beside a real cobweb,” said Binny. “Well, a lot of real cobwebs; there’s millions in that shed! It must have been there for a hundred years. Read the back!”
Clem turned it over and read,
The Museum of the Penrose Cousins
A World Famous Collection from All Over the World
Collected by
Rupert Penrose
Peter Penrose
Clarry Penrose
“It must have been a sort of game they played,” said Clem. “Now come and see what I found! It fell out of one of those old books.”
It was a cardboard photograph folder with writing inside.
Clarry, Rupert, Peter
August 1913
“There they are,” said Clem, holding it out to Binny. “Peter looks as sulky as Gareth, but Rupert looks nice. Grown up, compared to the others. I wonder what happened to him, nineteen thirteen . . .”
But Binny was looking at Clarry, gazing at her with great dislike.
“All those butterflies,” said Binny.
Three figures in a brown damp speckled photograph. A tall fair boy in the center, squinting cheerfully into the camera, a small dark girl with raggedy hair, and an equally dark and untidy boy. The girl was not looking at the camera. She was gazing worriedly across to the boy on the other side. He was glaring straight ahead, arms folded, enduring it. Smile! someone must have said, and the fair boy had grinned, the girl’s eyes had opened wide, and the breeze had lifted the dark boy’s hair into a lopsided ruffle.
Summer 1913, Part 5
Captain Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, was back from the Antarctic. The newspapers were full of pictures.
Peter said he didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
“Why is everyone so shocked that they died?” he asked. “I’m not surprised at all.”
“Peter!” said Clarry.
“It happens,” said Peter. “People die. You don’t have to go to the Antarctic to do it. If they” (that was his father and his grandfather, both very enthusiastic and ganged up against him) “make me go to that boarding school, I’ll die.”
“What of?” asked Clarry practically.
“Of nothingness,” said Peter.
“What?”
“Nothingness! Nothingness! Nothingness!” shouted Peter. “I’ll die because there will be nothing to keep me alive. Like an animal in a zoo.”
“Rupe goes there, and he hasn’t died!” said Clarry furiously. “Why should you when Rupe didn’t?”
“Because I am not Rupe,” said Peter, limped across the room and slammed out of the door.
As the summer went on, Peter grew more and more bad-tempered and isolated. Often he made long journeys alone on his bicycle across the fields and the moors. Now and then he came back with butterflies.
Not always, thought Clarry. And not lots. One at a time. But she sometimes looked doubtfully at her brother.
“Do you find them dead?” she asked once.
“For goodness’ sake!” said Peter.
So Clarry understood that of course he found them dead.
Chapter Eight
One Saturday morning James came running across from his bedroom to Binny’s calling, “Come and look! There is a man with a gun outside our house now!”
For a moment Binny’s heart seemed to freeze at the thought of her precious shadow creature. When she got to the window she saw James was right; there was a man with a gun crossing the end of the garden.
“Mum! Mum!” she shrieked, and her mother came hurrying. She was too late to see the man anymore, but she guessed who it was: Mrs. Tremayne’s son, Clare’s grown-up brother . . .
“Mark?” asked Binny, remembering Mrs. Tremayne the week before, and her mother said, “Yes. It must be. Mark.”
* * *
Later he knocked at the door.
The Cornwallises were a town family. Not one of them had ever seen a real-life gun before. They stared and forgot to speak. The gun’s owner had to begin. He said calmly, “Mum asked me to take a look around. That be all right?”
“Take a look around?” repeated the children’s astonished mother, and she glanced over her shoulder, as if wondering if the house was tidy enough for a visitor with a gun. “Oh no,” she exclaimed, suddenly very emphatic, as if she’d decided it wasn’t. “No thank you! No! There’s no need for that!”
“You’ve had trouble with your hens?” said their patient (but armed) visitor, and there was a gun-stunned pause. Binny found out afterward that she was not the only one who had assumed Mark was offering to dispatch their troublesome hens. Poor Pecker, surrendering, wings in the air . . .
It was James who first began to try to unravel things. “He means chickens,” he murmured. “Some people say hens. What they mean is chickens. Gertie and Pecker.”
“Didn’t you lose one?” asked Mark.
“Gertie,” said James. “All except some feathers. We found a lot of feathers. A mouthfu . . .”
He stopped in surprise at the sight of Binny’s blazing green eyes.
“Did you want to come in?” asked the children’s mother, suddenly seeming to wake up to the fact that she might be being rude. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to . . .”
Binny saw her glance at the gun, and knew she wanted to say, leave your weapon at the door, and couldn’t because of how completely ridiculous it would sound.
But Mark didn’t want to come in. He backed away gently, as if trying not to alarm them, saying he’d just stopped at the door in case they noticed him around.
“Mark!” said the children’s mother, when he’d gone. “Goodness me! What was he thinking of? Why on earth would he turn up here with a gun?”
“I didn’t know guns were as big as that,” said James.
“Neither did I!” agreed his mother. “I’m surprised it’s allowed! Does Mrs. Tremayne know . . . She must, I suppose.” She paused to look out of the kitchen window. “There he is, across the field, and his sister with him too.”
“Clare?” asked Binny, and looked herself and saw that her mother was right. Mark was no longer alone. Clare was running beside him, looking very cheerful, waving her arms as she spoke.
“I suppose it must be safe,” said Binny’s mother, but she sounded very doubtful.
* * *
A Man with a Gun, wrote James in his newsbook that night, Cam to awer Hose.
* * *
They saw Mark two or three times after that, walking the fields in the dusk or the early morning. Always with his gun. Always with Clare.
“I like him,” said James, coming in to breakfast one morning very wet around the ankles from the long, soaking grass. “Only he wouldn’t give me a go with his gun, not even to point in the air. Not even one bang.”
“I should hope not too!” exclaimed his horrified mother.
“He doesn’t really shoot things,” said James reassuringly, as he began to scoop up cornflakes. “I asked him, ‘Do you really shoot things, or do you just have a gun to bang?’ And he said, ‘However did you guess?’ and he winked to show it was true.”
Binny wanted so much to believe this that she found she almost could.
“What else did he say?” she asked.
“He said did I like mushrooms because he’d found some mushrooms,” said James, now gulping orange juice. “And I said no because they are like cooked slugs. And he said he wouldn’t bother shooting any for my breakfast, then. That was a joke. And I said what else did he shoot and he told me apples and oranges and carrots if they ever fly past. He’s nice
. He’s my friend.”
“James, I will not have you out with Mark and his gun,” said his mother very firmly. “However nice he is. Whatever he says.”
James stuck out a mutinous lip, but found it was no use. His mother was crashing together breakfast things in one of her rare bad tempers. “Guns!” she said. “Of all the unnecessary, destructive . . . What is it about boys and guns, for goodness’ sake?”
“Girls too,” said Binny, thinking of Clare, always tagging on.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people!” continued her mother. “And as for saying he just has it to bang! Although, perhaps . . . Do people do that, do you think, just have them to bang? I suppose that’s all you’d need, a bang . . . Oh hello, Mrs. Tremayne!”
For Mrs. Tremayne had appeared, as unnervingly as usual, and as usual she began in the middle of what she wanted to say.
“Appled out!” she announced. “Yes, hello, good morning. There’s apple trees forever at our place. We’re appled out this year. And last year hardly a handful and you can’t blame the frost because we hadn’t any. I brought a few,” she added, and nodded toward the doorstep.
Four bulging carrier bags had materialized there. A cake was balanced on the top of one of them.
“Apple cake,” said Mrs. Tremayne. “I like to leave a cake for guests. There you are. A pleasure.”
She was gone. Binny and her mother looked at each other and then at the four enormous bags of apples.
“There must be a tree full!” said Binny.
“She is a truly kind person,” said Binny’s mother. “This apple cake is still warm. She must have been baking at dawn. There are more apples there than I buy in a year!”
They ate apples on the way to school that day, there were apples in all the lunch boxes, and an extra bag for James to give out to his friends. There was apple cake waiting when they got home from school. It was heavy and scented, buttery sweet with a cinnamon crisp top. Binny ate a slice and it was wonderful. She took a second outside, and wandered through the thick grass to the end of the garden, thinking about Mrs. Tremayne. Definitely not a witchy old woman, she decided, feeling rather ashamed. Fierce when it came to protecting her cupboards and her beds, but certainly a wonderful cook. And there had been chocolate for James, and a house for Pecker, as well as hot water bottles and bus timetables.