by Hilary McKay
“Friends.”
“Are we? I’ve never met anyone from Belgium.”
“Neither have I. Makes no difference. Britain has to go to Belgium’s defense . . .”
“Couldn’t we just not?”
“No. So that’s why we are at war with Germany. Do you see?” Peter waited, as once he had waited for Clarry to understand the coldness of Antarctica, but this time she wasn’t so accepting.
“Why doesn’t someone tell the Germans they can’t have Paris? And someone tell the French not to join in with Russia? And anyway, why is Russia fighting Germany? Can’t they all just stop and talk?”
Peter said they probably could, but they wouldn’t. And he added, surprisingly, that in his opinion Clarry had more sense than half of Western Europe. But, he said regretfully, nothing could change the fact that now Britain was at war with Germany, which explained why Miss Vane had stopped playing the piano in Sunday School (it was a German piano), why all the newspapers had vanished from the house (Father said you’d ask questions), and why the grown-ups were so worried about Rupe.
“But Rupe isn’t in the war,” said Clarry, baffled but not despairing. “He’s camping and having a wonderful time. I had another postcard. He’s got lots of friends and that one he visited in Ireland is teaching him how to play the banjo!”
* * *
The grandparents and Father are coming to see you, she wrote to Rupe. They think there might still be a way of getting you back.
However, before this could happen Rupe’s escape from university became complete, because he and all of his bright young friends were ordered to France as British soldiers.
Nothing could be better! he wrote to Clarry. Bonjour, la belle France and good-bye, dusty Oxford! Clarry, I rely on you and Peter to pass on all the gossip!
“I bet he doesn’t even know what he’s fighting for,” said Peter.
“He wants some fun,” said Clarry.
“There’s wanting fun,” said Peter, “and there’s shooting people!”
“Rupe would never shoot anyone!”
Peter looked at the photograph that had arrived in the morning post. It showed Rupe in uniform, holding a gun. He had signed it, very flourishingly:
Au revoir, mes amies! À bientot! Rupe!
“He thinks he’s in France already,” said Peter. “I suppose he won’t have to shoot anyone if he can get close enough. That’s a bayonet fitting on his gun.”
“What’s a bayonet fitting?” asked Clarry.
“It’s a long, thin . . .” Peter suddenly stopped. “Well,” he went on, after a pause, “Rupe had better watch out for German boys, that’s all. They might want to have fun too.”
“Peter, why are you saying such horrible things?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter, despairingly. “Because they are horrible. Because they’re true. Because nothing makes sense. Because everything has changed so fast. It was only last summer that Rupe climbed that tree and got the kestrel.”
“He wanted that to be wonderful,” said Clarry.
“He wants this to be wonderful,” said Peter. “And it won’t be. Clarry, write to him if you can. Perhaps it will help.”
“It helped you, didn’t it?”
“Yes, and your butterflies,” said Peter, and he did something he had never done before. He reached out for her hand and held it tight. Clarry held tight back, and then they went to look at the butterflies and it was all right until halfway through, when suddenly neither of them could look anymore, and Peter began to cry.
Chapter Twelve
“Home,” said Clare, and Binny agreed, so they turned away from the moor and began to hurry.
The way back was terribly hard. They did it at a sort of jog. Binny had not known feet could weigh so much. The backs of her knees were sore and tight and her shoulders sagged and ached. The tunnel was dreadful, but when they finally emerged it was to a different world. They blinked at the morning light.
“I hope nobody knows I’m gone,” said Binny. “I’m not supposed to be here. I promised.”
“We did it, though, didn’t we?”
“Yes. So, ha ha to Mark and his horrible gun!”
“Mark’s gun is horrible, but Mark is very nice. If he’d stop shooting things he’d be extremely nice.”
“Can’t you stop him?”
“Do you think I haven’t tried?”
“Well he won’t very nicely shoot our lynx!”
“Or James’s jagular!”
A silliness came over them, half tiredness, half relief.
“Will Mark be out now, do you think?” asked Binny.
“Perhaps. Yes probably. Let’s sneak up on him!”
“And leap out at the last moment!”
“Howling and growling!”
“If he’s there,” said Binny, but there he was, zigzagging cautiously down the sloping path to the rail line.
“Let’s creep like foxes and see how close we can get,” suggested Clare.
They slunk between bushes like two wary animals, except they weren’t animals.
They were Binny and Clare.
Binny’s brown freckles and seaweed red hair were perfect fox coloring, but Clare’s fair skin was as pale as the moon.
“Your face shows too much!” hissed Binny.
Clare streaked it with a handful of blackberries and Binny spluttered at the sight, and then they both got painful silent giggles.
They began to tease Mark. Clare snapped a twig and he jerked to attention. Binny remembered Max, and how he panted with excitement. She crouched low to the ground and hung out her tongue and puffed and tried not to explode with laughter as Mark’s head went from side to side, listening.
Then Clare started a rock rolling downhill to the railway track. Mark turned again, and Binny seized the moment to start climbing. She crept up the slope until she was well above Mark’s head, made a sign to Clare to shush, and picked two rusty pointy bramble leaves and stuck them in her tangled hair. Suddenly she had ears. The rising sun shone low and lemon yellow right behind her, and she lifted her head and yowled.
“NOOOO!” shrieked Clare, but she had seen the danger too late. Mark fired as she shrieked and suddenly Binny was rolling and tumbling down the slope.
My frend Mark, wrote James in his homework book. Shot my sistr Binny.
I mist it, he wrote regretfully.
From the moment that Binny started to roll down the slope, everything changed. It was as if a great, circling wind blew around her, sweeping in voices and people and urgent demands. Binny was buffeted until she could hardly think, and in the middle of it all came Gareth.
“I’ve been calling and calling,” he said very crossly. “And texting. Ever since it got light. You called me all panicky in the middle of the night and then you didn’t tell me one thing more! What happened? Where are you now?”
“In the car, coming back from the hospital. You have to turn phones off in the hospital. I got shot.”
“Got what?”
“Shot. With a gun.”
“Ha ha, rubbish excuse.”
“I did! It’s true! Ask Clem!”
“Clem shot you?” asked Gareth, sounding very surprised. “I never thought she’d do that! I thought she was just bossy.”
“You’ve got mixed up,” said Binny impatiently. “I said, ‘Ask Clem,’ because she’s in the car. Here with Mum and me. Not because she shot me.”
“What are you telling Gareth?” demanded Clem, turning round very suddenly to look at Binny.
“Just about being shot.”
“Oh yes?”
“Not that you did it!”
“Belinda Cornwallis don’t you dare start telling people that I shot you!”
“I won’t, I won’t, I’ll tell them it was Mark!”
“Binny!” said Gareth in a hushed, urgent voice. “Don’t wind her up! Keep calm and talk her down. I’ll call the police for you now!”
“NO!” shouted Binny, but Gareth was gone, and the day grew even mor
e complicated very quickly with the arrival of three police cars, one in front, one behind, and one boxing them in until they stopped.
After this interlude Binny’s mobile phone was taken from her, and so it was by old fashioned e-mail that Gareth at last heard the story of everything that had happened, between the finding of the half painted butterfly, and the dawn arriving on the moor. Binny’s messages were long, and so were Gareth’s questions in between, except for the last one.
So what is it like to be shot?
To be shot, wrote Binny, at the end of that infinite day, it is like a great pull that jerks you down. Like as if the ground was yanked from under your feet. It is so frightening that you don’t feel the hurt until afterward. First you feel the shot and then the hurt rushes all through you like ripples when you throw a stone in water, and you hurt all over, equally. Then the ripples run backward and the hurt is at the center. But my arm was not even broken. There is a big bruise and a long sore place and that is all. And that’s because at the moment Mark fired he knew it was me. And so he nearly missed me altogether instead of shooting me between my blackberry leaf ears, which was what he meant to do.
When I was a fox.
I got very bumped and scratched as I rolled down the slope. Mark was shouting, “No! Oh no!” over and over and galumphing down toward me. Clare grabbed my jacket and stopped me going farther. I sat up and told them I wasn’t dead but they wouldn’t believe me. Mark kept saying, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” and Clare said, “You are, you are, you know you are! Poor Mark, poor Mark!”
But I wasn’t.
Everybody has been very sorry for Mark.
Nobody has been sorry for me.
I can see why this is.
Anyway Mark is all right now. First he was furious and then he was sad and now he is quite calm and not shaking anymore.
Nobody cried when it happened. Not me when I was shot, or Mark when he had shot me, or Clem and Mum when they drove me to the hospital, or James when he found out what he’d missed, or Mrs. Tremayne (although she looked terrible until Clem made her a cup of tea). But much later when we got back Clare started pouring tears without making a single sound and everyone said, “Shock.”
“I hate guns,” said Clare. “I have always hated hated hated them.”
“But you were off with Mark every chance you got,” said Mrs. Tremayne. “Chattering and rushing about, getting in his way . . . Ahhh!” said Mrs. Tremayne.
“I’ve finished with all that anyway,” said Mark.
“HAVE YOU?” asked Clare. “HAVE YOU? HAVE YOU? HAVE YOU?”
“Leave the poor boy alone, Clare!” said her mother. “Of course he has.”
Poor Mark, he is very sorry he shot me. Mrs. Tremayne says he’ll never get over it.
“Good,” said Clare secretly to me. “If he does get over it I’ll arrange for him to shoot somebody else!”
It wasn’t until much later that they asked what we had been doing out so early. We told them about exploring the old railway tunnel and they went absolutely mad. Mark said he would get it closed off as soon as he could manage and James said, “Oh, not till I’ve had one little look” and that was brilliant because Mark got up straightaway and said, “I’ll make a start right now.” James wanted to help but Mark wouldn’t let him. He said he’d get a mate and do it properly with stakes and barbed wire and if James wanted to be useful he could look after his motorbike keys for him while they were both busy. James has got them Sellotaped to his arm while he makes a reinforced cardboard safe for them.
I have written this down like a story, but I cannot find the end yet because it is all tangled up with other stories. It helps to write it, though. It always helps to write things.
Love Binny.
Binny pressed “send” and the message whooshed away.
* * *
Later there was a tap on her bedroom door and in came her mother. She sat down on the end of Binny’s bed and said, “I asked you not to go down to that old railway line. I thought I could trust you, Binny.”
“You can, you can!” said Binny. “There was a very good reason. You would have done it too, I promise.”
“Are you going to tell me this very good reason?”
“One day I will. When I’m old I will. When I’m . . . when I’m . . .” Binny hesitated. How long did a lynx live? How long had it lived already? How long could her mother be expected to wait? Ten years? Perhaps. “When I’m twenty-two!” said Binny. “Then I’ll tell it all, right from the beginning.”
“What was the beginning?”
“When I saw the butterfly,” said Binny.
* * *
The railway tunnel was fenced off. Nobody at school said grockle anymore. There were no more scratch marks on Pecker’s door and she began to lay speckled eggs as well as white ones and brown ones and ones with lions on. James kept one particularly large white one to hatch. At his school the jagular was discarded in favor of werewolves, which arrived in the locality just in time for Halloween.
“Who told you about werewolves?” demanded James’s mother rather sternly.
“Nobody you know,” said James. “And don’t say they are not true because everyone in my class knows they are.”
A week later even the werewolves were forgotten in the excitement of Pecker’s snow white egg. To the astonishment of everyone, it hatched. One evening there was an egg. The next morning a full-sized brown speckled chicken.
Clem and Binny and their mother looked at each other and then rather worriedly at James.
“I don’t believe it!” said Mrs. Tremayne, who happened to be there at the discovery.
“You have to believe it!” said James, and held up in triumph the two halves of broken eggshell that the miracle had left behind.
Everyone sighed with relief, and James named this new chicken Gertie, after Gertie-who-was-lost and in time they merged together in his mind, until it was hard for him to tell when one Gertie ended and the next began.
* * *
Still, in Binny’s mind this was not the end of the story.
* * *
Back at the little house in town, the roof was repaired, the ceilings replastered and the walls repainted. They moved back home in time for Christmas and the children’s mother became immediately submerged in recipe books, having not only invited Gareth and Max, but also the Tremaynes for Christmas day, breakfast and dinner and supper.
“But we’ve only got four chairs,” said Binny, “and Gareth is used to big houses.”
“What matters is that we have eight plates,” said her mother, “and three new friends and a waterproof roof. Gareth will squash in somehow or other and Max can fit under the table.”
* * *
This turned out to be true, but it was still not the end of the story.
When Gareth came to visit he didn’t just bring Max; he also brought his mobile phone. This meant that on Christmas day there was a Christmas miracle, and the deleted paw print reappeared. Binny and Clare hung over it, marveling, and the lynx, which had begun to fade into a mythical beast, came suddenly back to life. It was described again to Gareth, its tufted ears, its dappled bronze, its lion head and the silent ripple of its outline as it moved.
“An animal out of magic,” said Binny.
Even on Christmas day Gareth could not put up with this sort of talk. “Either it was real or it wasn’t,” he growled. “Make your minds up!”
“Real.”
“Draw it, then.”
“What?”
“Draw it, before you forget.”
This was easy to say, but hard to do. Before long the floor of Binny’s room was littered with sketches. James came in while they were busy and stopped in surprise.
“That’s my jagular!” he said. “The one that I saw running away with Gertie.” He picked up a pencil and a discarded picture and added a bundle of feathers, held in triangular teeth.
“I told everyone in my class about it and they all said, ‘Yes that’s a
jagular!’ And everyone at home said, ‘No such thing!’ Binny, you said that, and now you’re drawing it!”
“I didn’t know what you meant,” said Binny. “I didn’t know jagulars looked like that. We were trying to draw something else.”
“What?”
“A . . . well, a lynx.”
“Links?”
“Yes.”
“The proper name,” said James, “is jagular. Come on! They told me to fetch you. We’re all going down to the harbor. Then Christmas cake. Jelly and ice cream. Crackers. And last presents.”
Last presents were a Cornwallis tradition, one saved for each person to open at the end of the day. “Save mine,” Gareth had ordered Binny that morning, and she had. It was an enormous badly wrapped bundle wedged in the shadows behind the Christmas tree. Now everyone watched as she pulled it out and undid the paper, and it was an enormous bag of dog food.
“Dog food?” said Binny, staring in surprise. “Dog food?”
It was more dog food than Max could eat in a month. Or two months. Perhaps in three. It was enough dog food to last for ages and ages.
“It didn’t seem fair for me to take Max away at the end of the week,” said Gareth. “So I thought we could swap back at Easter.”
So that was Christmas, with the best Christmas present ever.
* * *
Before Gareth went home he had to visit the railway line, and see for himself the scratches on the shed door and the butterflies, the real ones and the painted.
“A girl called Clarry made them, a hundred years ago,” explained Binny.
“It’s a funny name.”
“She was Clare really, like me,” Clare told him. “She painted them for her brother when he was at boarding school, all except the Swallowtail.”
“Who did she paint that for?”
“Her cousin, Rupe.”
“Why didn’t she finish it?”
Binny thought that when she knew the answer to that question she would know the end of the story.
The Years Between 1914 and 1917
Every Sunday afternoon Clarry gathered up the brightest scraps of her week and sent them to Rupe in France.
Rupe wrote back about the friends he had made and their endless jokes, the Frenchness of French towns, the comfort of hot tea on cold mornings, a little cat he had befriended, the cakes his grandmother posted to him, currant cakes and gingerbread and cherry loaves, just like she had sent to him at school.