Binny in Secret

by Hilary McKay

  “Named after a wonderful lady and born on her birthday,” said Mrs. Tremayne. “And what I would have done without her, I don’t know. Him gone and a new baby. ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ That’s what she said, aged one hundred and Clare on her knee. And she was right, in the end. Mark’s the farmer his father never was. We rented the land out while he was at college but since then he’s took it on. Determined.”

  Mark! thought Binny, as she listened to the two mothers, now in full duet in praise of Mark. Mark the worker. Mark the thinker. Mark the brave.

  Mark and his gun, thought Binny. Even the birds in the sky were not safe, and as for foxes and other leavers of paw prints . . . Binny thought of her shadow creature. If Mark knew.

  If Mark knew what?

  For the hundredth time Binny tried to replay in her mind the moment on the old rail line when the shadow creature had crossed and turned. It was getting hard to do. Each time the image faded a little more in her memory. By now, if it wasn’t for the paw print she would have believed it to be a dream.

  However, there had been a paw print. A paw print of a cat. A cat much bigger than Cinders.

  A big cat.

  * * *

  The next day at school Binny made a terrible mistake. She was in the library at lunchtime as usual. There were the usual hardworking sixth formers, the usual paper-swamped teacher. Binny sat in her corner behind a barricade of books. Encyclopedias, wildlife guides, a book of animal tracks and signs. On the library table beside her was the family mobile phone. Binny was being a research student. She had already dismissed every big cat she had ever heard of, including the jagulars and panthers that the paperboy met so often. They were all too dark, or too spotty, or too brightly colored.

  And too big, thought Binny, although it was a big animal. Easily as big as Max, and its coat, although not spotty, had been definitely marked. Leopards were spotty, and so were cheetahs and jaguars. What would a baby one of those look like? A grubby baby cheetah? A small muddy leopard? Binny was in the middle of these thoughts when something happened.

  A swift hand reached over her shoulder and lifted the phone.

  Binny jumped and grabbed. The teacher stood up. The sixth formers stared.

  Then the phone was replaced again, as neatly and lightly as it had been picked up.

  Clare and Ella closed the library door and vanished.

  The heron print photograph, with the paw print underneath, had been on the screen a minute before. Now it was gone.

  “Gone!” wailed Binny, abandoned her table, and tore out of the room.

  Clare and Ella were gossiping amongst the crowds in the foyer. Binny hurled herself into the middle of them.

  “You deleted it! There was a picture on my mobile and you deleted it!” she stormed.

  “Oh Clare, did you actually?” asked Ella, and doubled over laughing.

  “Stop it!” said Clare. “I mean, actually stop it, Ella! Take Belinda seriously. (It’s Binny, actually.) Tell us about this picture, Binny. It must be, I mean, must have been, very, very special.”

  At once the surrounding crowd began to speculate. What was it? they asked. Binny’s boyfriend? Binny’s mummy? Binny’s teddy bear? Binny’s name and address and a picture of her house in case she got lost . . .

  “SHUT UP!” raged Binny. “Ask Clare! She knows what it was!”

  “I do?” asked Clare casually, but her eyes on Binny’s were anything but casual. They were warning Binny to say no more.

  Binny ignored the warning.

  “My paw print! You deleted my paw print! You know you did!”

  Clare’s eyes now were horrified, and for a moment Binny was horrified herself. Despite all Gareth’s warnings, she had told.

  Ella saved her.

  “Oh!” she said, like she had suddenly understood something. “That’s what you were doing with all those animal books! Looking for paw prints! Jagulars!”

  “What?”

  “Your little brother was talking to Clare’s mum. About the jagulars he believes in. They eat chickens, don’t they, and paperboys? And you were looking them up!”

  “But what’s a jagular?” demanded someone. “I mean, what actually is a jagular?”

  “Ask Big Cat Binny,” said Clare.

  * * *

  Mark had a black eye. Binny met him in town, quite by accident. To spare her feelings he turned his face sideways and shielded it with one hand, like a person staring into bright light.

  Clare made no effort to spare Binny. Exactly the opposite. With no more than one small lost picture on a mobile phone, and James’s rash discussions of jagulars, she thought up a new and terrible torment.

  Big cat footprints tracked Binny down.

  Huge ones, small ones, clumsy ones, careful ones, scribbled in invisible moments on her school books, slapped heavily and muddily across the shoulders of her jacket. They appeared on her desk and they followed her home and sat waiting on her doorstep. They were ink and paint and mud and white dust. Nowhere seemed safe. One evening she found a crimson line of them printed along her bedroom windowsill and on the ground underneath was the stamp that had been used to make them, a coffee jar lid with sponge shapes glued on the top. The paint was still wet. Binny tried an experimental paw print on her arm and saw how easily it was done.

  “Very neat!” said Clem. “But why?”

  “It’s Clare,” growled Binny. “Because of James talking about jaguars . . .”

  “Jagulars,” said James, who in one unsupervised minute with the coffee jar lid had begun a trail of paw prints right over the car. “Lars! That’s what they say at my school . . .”

  “James Cornwallis get off that car now!” ordered Clem.

  James added three more prints to complete the chain and slid off looking very pleased with himself. “Jagular!” he said.

  “There’s no such thing!” said Clem.

  “Oh yes, there is!” contradicted James. “Ask anybody in my class! Ask the boy with the brother with the paper round!”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  Binny washed away the latest prints as she had washed away many others. Washed or rubbed or brushed or scribbled over, but there were always more to find. Sometimes at school they sprang up in rashes around her. Other times, a whole day could pass with nothing at all. She would relax for a while and then see a dusty shadow on her bus seat or a tiny sketch on the corner of her notebook and they would start all over again.

  Clem watched this latest torment in silence. Binny’s mother said, “Think of the things you did to Gareth last summer!”

  “They were only jokes.”

  “Well, I think Clare’s paw prints are only jokes.”

  “Is it to do with when you fought Mark?” asked James, catching her in private. “When he shot that big bird and you threw his gun into the bushes! I think that made Clare mad!”

  “It’s nothing to do with that!” said Binny, although when she thought about it afterward she knew that was not quite true. Clare, Mark’s gun, the paw prints, the mythical animal that had silently crossed her world. They were all entwined, and with them came another world: Rupe, Peter, and Clarry.

  Clare and Clarry.

  It was the same name.

  Of course it was the same name!

  Binny’s mind whirled, and Binny whirled too, up to the bathroom where her mother and James were torturing each other.

  “Clare and Clarry!” she said. “No wonder! It’s the same name! The same name and the same birthday! The same people, that’s what they are!”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” said her mother. “James, stand still for one moment! I have to do this. There was a message from school!”

  “Not about me!” moaned James. “They didn’t mean me!” His head was green with hospital smelling shampoo. When his mother tightened her grip on the comb she was holding he went deliberately boneless and collapsed to th
e floor.

  “Itchy heads in Class One,” said his mother, heaving him up again. “You are Class One! Binny, what were you saying? Something about Clare? Not another quarrel!”

  Binny saw the this-is-the-limit-of-my-patience look on her mother’s thin face and came to her senses. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. Let James keep his nits! He’ll just have to stop being a monitor, that’s all.”

  This inspired remark froze James mid-battle. A great calmness filled the cold little bathroom. The children’s mother laid down her comb, said, “Wonderful, Binny, thank you,” and prepared to leave.

  “Stop being a monitor?” repeated James.

  “They’ll understand,” said Binny. “Mum’ll write you a note.”

  “No!” protested James, and grabbed the comb and began raking through his hair much harder than his mother had done.

  Poor nits! thought Binny as she watched. Poor nits, poor foxes, poor rooks.

  “Why is it all right to kill nits and it’s not all right to kill rooks?” she asked, and her mother said, “Not now! Binny!” and steered her out of the bathroom.

  Clem was more helpful. With her usual clear-sightedness she said at once, “There’s killing things because you have to. And there’s killing things because you want to. Mum thinks she has to get rid of James’s nits. I suppose Mark thinks he has to go round with that gun.”

  “Clare doesn’t have to go with him, though,” said Binny. “She can’t be a help. She’s probably a nuisance. She must just go because she likes it. And that girl Clarry didn’t have to kill all those butterflies either.”

  “In that picture I found she doesn’t look like the sort of girl who would,” said Clem.

  “I know, but she did. I found even more of them. Round boxes with writing on the lids, round and round in a spiral. Their names and things. I didn’t read it all.”

  “You should leave them alone.”

  “I only looked for a second. I hate seeing the pins. Have you still got that photograph, Clem?”

  Clem unfolded it from a shabby book and handed it to Binny, who bent over it, wondering.

  “Do you think they look the same, Clare and Clarry?”

  “Not really.”

  “I do.”

  “Binny, you can’t quarrel with Clare because a hundred years ago Clarry collected butterflies.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why is she teasing you with footprints?”

  “Paw prints.”

  “Paw prints, then.”

  Clem waited, while Binny wished. She wished that she could lean against Clem’s friendly shoulder and tell how it was, right from the first actually to the last paw print. She couldn’t, because at the heart of it was a secret that was not hers to tell. The paw print under the heron print. The creature she had seen.

  Binny imagined the conversation. Clem would say, “You were dreaming!”

  “Yes but I took a photograph.”

  “Of a big cat?”

  “Of a paw print. Only Clare deleted it.”

  “It would be a joke, Binny, like all the others.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But if you really believe you saw something we’d better tell someone. The Tremaynes for a start . . .”

  It was no use wishing she could tell. The only person she could imagine consulting was Gareth, but he slid away from the subject when later that evening she tried to talk to him.

  “Not again!” he said. “Can’t you talk about something else for once? You haven’t even asked how Max is. He had to go to the vet!”

  “WHAT!” shouted Binny, completely distracted. “When? What for? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “He’s been limping. I’m telling you now. It was one of his front paws. He didn’t like putting it down.”

  “How did he do it? What did the vet say? Has he got tablets?”

  “I knew you’d fuss. I nearly didn’t tell you.”

  “HE’S MY DOG TOO!”

  “I know. Listen. There was a thorn. He had an antibiotic shot. He’s fine.”

  But Binny wasn’t fine and having started her up, Gareth found he couldn’t turn her off so quickly.

  “If you’re not going to look after him properly I’m having him back! It’s not fair anyway, that I only have him during vacations. It’s not proper sharing. Proper sharing would be if we had him for equal times. You’ve had him for more than two years. Now I should have him for more than two years . . .”

  “Binny, he’s all right!” yelled Gareth. “He’s bouncing all over. Mum said I was fussing about nothing. Listen to him now!”

  Binny listened to a cheerful clatter of happy jumping and barking, and then the less cheerful news of what the vet had charged.

  “It worked out at four hundred and twenty pounds an hour!” said Gareth.

  “Do you want me to pay half?” Binny offered, frantically calculating dinner money, pocket money, and possible birthday money and trying not to think of her mother’s pleasure at supper for four for less than a pound.

  “Don’t be daft!” said Gareth in the rare kind voice he usually kept for animals, and peace was restored.

  They talked of Max, who had shaken hands with the vet. They planned Christmas, when Gareth and Max would be coming to stay.

  Only at the very end of the conversation did Gareth ask, very casually, “Does your cat go down to that railway place?”

  “Cinderella? She hardly goes outside at all.”

  “What about James? I mean on his own.”

  “Of course not! James? He’s only six! Even I’m not allowed to go there anymore.”

  That had been the latest order from her mother. “It’s getting dark so early, Binny, and I don’t like to think of you wandering about on your own. It would be much less worry for me if you just stuck to the house and garden.”

  Binny had hardly argued. James’s chicken had vanished, and Mark had a gun. Somewhere in the airy autumn darkness there prowled a quiet creature with a dappled bronze coat, sharp black tipped ears, and a profile carved like a small lion’s. The best way to keep a secret, Binny knew, was to leave it alone.

  Now Binny crossed her fingers, which she believed prevented a lie from being a lie, and told Gareth, “There’s nothing much down at that old railway anyhow. Just weeds and bushes and sometimes rabbits. There used to be butterflies but they’ve all gone. It’s quite boring.”

  Gareth said, quite calmly and politely, “Yes. I suppose it is. Boring.”

  He was saying good-bye. He had put down the phone. He was gone, and Binny was suddenly hit by such a gale of loneliness that she could not bear it.

  “Gareth! Gareth!” she cried, when her fingers had untangled enough to press the buttons to redial. “Gareth!”

  “What on earth . . .”

  “It’s so hard to know what to do!”

  About what? Gareth should have asked. Do about what?

  But he didn’t. Instead he said, “I don’t see why you have to do anything.”

  “Don’t you? Gareth, do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “You were talking,” said Gareth with infinite caution, “about that boring empty railway line.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Nothing,” said Gareth. “I’d do nothing. Bye.”

  He really did go. When Binny rang again he didn’t reply.

  October 1913

  Dear Dr. O. F. Gregory,

  I have heard that your school is a very good school. For instance I have heard that if anyone ever seems unhappy or not well then you arrange that their older cousins or brothers look after them. I think that is a very good idea of yours.

  I look forward to hearing more good things about your school.

  It is very good about the cousins and the boys who seem unhappy.

  Yours faithfully,

  Mr. S. Smith (Sir Lord)

  Clarry wished she could add an address for Mr. S. Smith (Sir Lord) but that was impossible. Would Dr. Old Fish Gregory act upon the
idea she had so subtly given to him, or not? She hoped for the best and posted it and began another letter to Peter.

  Peter I miss you so much. I wake up in the night and I don’t know if you are all right. You have stamps and envelopes, why don’t you write. Father says no news is good news and that we would hear if there was something wrong but I have written to you three times now . . .

  Even as she wrote Clarry knew that she could not possibly send such an unhappy letter to Peter. She started again.

  I am sorry about all the trouble at the station before your train left. I couldn’t think of any way of stopping the train arriving. That is why I grabbed your ticket. I thought Father would have to pay for a new one and he might be so angry he wouldn’t and then you would miss the train and wouldn’t have to go. That’s why I pushed it down the drain. The ticket. I didn’t know how else to get rid of it very quickly. I didn’t know drain covers just lifted off. I wish those other boys who were going to your school hadn’t seen. When you said you would never speak to me again I didn’t believe you but . . .

  This letter also was torn to scraps and thrown away.

  * * *

  Clarry spent the quiet October evening worrying. She worried her way through her solitary toast-and-milk supper, and then through a twilight wander from room to room that ended with a long pause on the threshold of Peter’s door. She gazed at the empty, tidy bed and thought, it’s as if he was never coming back.

  Later, in her room at the top of the house, she grew more and more fearful. In her mind she heard Peter’s voice, saying flatly and certainly, “If they make me go to school I will die.”

  They had made him go to school, and since then there had not been a single word.

  Don’t be silly! Clarry told herself. If anything was wrong, Father would have told me.

  Wouldn’t he?

  The later the night got, the more Clarry wondered. Would he have told her? When did he ever tell her anything?

  Never.

  That was why, just before midnight, Clarry slid out of bed and made her way down the stairs to the dismal sitting room with the red paper on the walls and the dust smelling piano and the yellowy lamp in the corner where her father sat reading.