The Time Of Green Magic

by Hilary McKay

  While he was speaking, he had gently opened the door and now his voice was soft with relief. ‘It’s all right!’ he murmured. ‘Look!’

  At first Abi could see nothing, just the room as she had left it after she’d closed the window earlier, nothing changed at all except the slightly rumpled bed.

  Although perhaps a little more than slightly rumpled, she realized, peering into the gloom.

  Perhaps, you might say, heaped.

  Louis’ bed appeared to be occupied by a great, billowy shadow. A dim softness of translucent golden grey. Almost as if a smoky evening cloud had drifted in through the window and settled there to rest. Abi looked, and looked again, and then jumped back in alarm and gasped, ‘Louis!’

  The cloud was breathing, and it wasn’t a cloud. It was a very big, heart-stoppingly big cat-thing.

  At the zoo there was a terrace on which lions dozed in the sun, right beside a window where visitors could gaze. Abi had paused there once, one step and one thickness of glass away from the rounded bellies, the huge relaxed pads, the slow breathing nostrils.

  Now the glass was gone.

  It wasn’t a tiger – it wasn’t striped – nor a lion, not with that blotched coat; not a lynx, much too large for a lynx. A leopard? A cheetah? What was it, what was it?

  If it wasn’t a dream.

  From its tail tip to its extended front paws it was the length of Louis’ bed. It stretched, blinked, raised its head, glanced at Louis, saw Abi.

  Its gaze stayed on Abi, unwelcoming.

  ‘Iffen,’ said Louis, once again kneeling on his bedside rug, his small face perilously close to those paws, ‘Iffen, I brought Abi.’

  In a dream, it’s hard to move. It’s hard to think. It’s hard to speak. Abi shook off the dream-feeling and gathered her wits.

  ‘Louis, get back!’ she whispered. ‘Come back, right back, slowly to me. The door’s still open. Duck under my arm. I’ll come out straight after. We can telephone the zoo . . .’

  ‘The zoo?’ asked Louis, laughing at the ridiculousness of such an idea.

  ‘Or the police . . .’

  ‘But I love him,’ said Louis, as if that changed everything.

  Perhaps it did, thought Abi, and stepped a little closer.

  ‘He used to be quite small . . .’

  Iffen’s length covered the bed; he smelt of smoke, caramel, charcoal, crushed green ivy and winter air; and yet Abi asked, ‘Is he real, Louis? What would happen if I touched him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Louis. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘All right.’

  In the summer, fox-cub watching, Abi had learned something useful. It was that animals do not like a direct gaze. She remembered that lesson now, and carefully looked away from Iffen, absorbing him in glimpses, assembling a patchwork picture in her mind.

  There was something familiar about him. Something she’d seen before. This cat. This great cat. This grey and gold and charcoal-shaded cat . . .

  All at once, Iffen rose and turned and was gone, out of the window and leaping through the ivy.

  ‘That’s what he does,’ said Louis, and sighed.

  The smell of crushed ivy was still all about them, and Abi couldn’t yet grasp what she’d seen, except somehow, once again, there had been magic in the house.

  ‘Does he come every night?’ she asked.

  ‘Not every.’

  ‘And no one else has seen him?’

  Louis shook his head. ‘Only you. He jumped right past Max once, when he came in, but Max didn’t notice him. And one night I woke up and Theo was just closing the door, and Iffen was right beside me on top of my quilt. But Theo didn’t see him either.’

  That was something Abi could almost understand. ‘When I was little, I had an invisible dog,’ she told Louis. ‘No one could ever see him. But I could. I always knew where he was and I used to make space for him to sleep on my bed. I called him Roly. I used to paint pictures of him. He had brown ears and a brown patch on his back and his tail was pointy and he had fat knees.’

  Abi paused. Why had she painted him like that? Because she saw him that way? Or had she seen him like that because she’d painted him that way?

  ‘Couldn’t even Granny Grace see him?’

  ‘No. But once she fell over him. She was just about to step on him when I shouted out to warn her and she tripped and fell right over him.’

  ‘Did she see him then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Abi knew the answer to that. She had worked it out years before. ‘Because she didn’t believe he was possible.’

  ‘Was he sort of magic?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose he was,’ admitted Abi. ‘Perhaps you could have seen him.’

  ‘Like you can see Iffen?’

  Abi nodded.

  ‘What happened to Roly?’

  ‘I don’t know. He stopped coming. I couldn’t always make him come when I wanted. Can you always make Iffen come?’

  Louis shook his head.

  ‘Louis, I couldn’t touch Roly. I wanted to, but I never could. Can you touch Iffen? Is he real enough to touch?’

  Louis paused, thinking. Was he? He was real enough to whack the window till it shook. To sag the bed until it creaked. To slice a rug, to block a door. But had he, Louis, actually ever touched him?

  ‘He yawned,’ he told Abi at last, ‘and I tried to touch his tooth.’

  ‘His tooth?’

  ‘It looked so long and shiny. But I couldn’t.’

  ‘Good,’ said Abi thankfully.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It would be scary if you could touch him,’ said Abi, ‘but, if you can’t, he’s just an . . . an –’ she stretched back her mind to remember what Granny Grace used to call Roly – ‘an illusion!’

  Abi sounded so relieved that some worried part of Louis also relaxed. He didn’t know what an illusion was, but he had great faith in Abi.

  Already the shock of Iffen was leaving her. He was gone and, just as when the books were closed, the memory was fading, like a very vivid dream fades.

  ‘Tell me next time you see him?’ she asked, and Louis nodded, but a day passed, and then another, and it was almost a week before Louis arrived in the kitchen late one evening after he was supposed to be in bed. Abi was alone, finishing her homework, and at first she couldn’t think what he was talking about when he appeared before her and said crossly, ‘I wish I hadn’t let you look at him now! What if he never comes back?’

  ‘What if who never comes back?’

  ‘Iffen, of course!’

  ‘Oh! I’d almost forgotten him.’

  ‘Forgotten him?’

  ‘I’ve had loads of homework, and I’ve been helping Dad . . .’

  ‘You don’t love him,’ said Louis, and applied his pyjama sleeve to his nose.

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’ complained Abi, so Louis went into the rocking-horse room where Theo was busy. The latest thing to happen there was that Theo had found a friend at work who claimed to like sweeping chimneys and would sort theirs when Theo said the word.

  ‘The sooner the better,’ said Theo, thinking of Polly’s latest phone call, which had included, amongst the many messages and instructions, the cheerful words ‘beginning to wind up’.

  ‘How long?’ he had asked, and Polly had said not long, not long, but not a word to Louis because it would only set him off.

  ‘Not a word to any of them,’ Theo had promised, and gone into work very jauntily.

  ‘About time she came back,’ said his friend when he heard the news, and, in preparation, he lent Theo his huge supply of ancient discarded hospital sheets. Now Theo was hanging them from the light fittings to protect his precious ceiling from soot, and covering the sofa, and draping the walls, right down to the floor. The rocking-horse room was losing its shape and becoming a white shadowed cave.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Louis, hovering barefoot in the doorway.

  ‘Won’t be forever,’ said Theo cheerf
ully.

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘Better take yourself off to your nice warm bed, then,’ said Theo, but Louis took himself off to Max’s room instead. The door was not properly closed. Louis slid in and saw that Max had his back to him, and his laptop open. Music was playing and Max was singing ‘Esmé, Esmé, Esmé, Esmé’ in his own invented French accent while drawing neon pink hearts on his laptop screen.

  Sniff, went Louis in a moment when Max (and the Kaiser Chiefs) paused to draw breath, and was yelled at for spying and chased away and down the stairs and into his own room, where he comforted himself by sniffing as much as he liked. Also he opened his window and called out recklessly into the dark, ‘Iffen! You can come and get Max if you like!’ and was almost instantly overtaken by a great surge of greenness and wildness and magic and muscle that bounded up the ivy and over the sill and stood glaring over him like a wild cat genie let out of a much-too-small bottle.

  ‘Tcha!’ said Iffen, a harsh, angry, questioning sound from the back of his throat.

  ‘I was joking,’ said Louis.

  Iffen gave him a very unamused look, turned his back and settled down, taking up three-quarters of Louis’ bed. Louis, having nothing better to do, got into the remaining quarter, pushed his legs down too far and accidentally shoved Iffen hard.

  Wallop! went Iffen’s paw down on Louis’ shin, and then Iffen jumped out of the window and Louis put his head right under his quilt and did a great deal more sniffing until at last he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Everyone had helped with the practical magic of transforming the rocking-horse room. Theo had painted the ceiling. Abi had caught and relocated every spider, a very long job. The cleaning and polishing of the wood-panelled walls had been shared between all of them, with Louis responsible for the lowest panels. He had taken this very seriously, becoming absolutely filthy as he worked his way around on hands and knees. Recently, since Theo had hung the walls with dust sheets, his task had become much harder.

  ‘I have to squeeze behind them,’ he complained.

  ‘Wait until the chimney’s swept and we’ll all give you a hand,’ Theo told him.

  ‘You said I could do it all by myself,’ Louis replied ungratefully.

  ‘Not if it’s going to take forever,’ said Max.

  ‘You ALL said . . .’ protested Louis.

  ‘You get so dirty it’s not worth it,’ said Abi. ‘The time it takes to wash you is longer than the time it would take to polish.’

  Louis took such a huge, deep, ominous breath at this that Abi stepped backwards and Max said, ‘Crikey, let him do it!’ while Theo squatted down, took Louis by the shoulders and said, ‘Louis, you can do it. All by yourself.’

  ‘I’m going to,’ said Louis, and that evening after supper he collected his polish and dusters and crawled behind a dangling sheet.

  He soon backed out again. It was the day after he’d summoned Iffen to get Max, and there was still too much magic about. It wasn’t nice to be alone in a shrouded room, stuck between a sheet and a dark wooden wall, with the evening black outside the windows. Abi found him hovering in the doorway, clutching a bunch of ivy leaves. He brightened at the sight of her.

  ‘Will you stay in here with me and not go away without saying?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So’s I can polish. Just till Theo comes home.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ agreed Abi, and curled up on the sofa with a book from her bedroom, one that she’d been plodding through for days. Louis became busy out of sight: a little ghost-shaped bulge behind the sheets. Every few minutes he called, ‘Are you still there, Abi?’ and waited till he heard her say, ‘Mmmm.’

  Max was also occupied. Abi could hear him in the kitchen, torturing Esmé with his home-made French. I should go and rescue her, she thought as she turned a page, but after a while she forgot. The sounds faded. She couldn’t hear Max any more. Louis was quiet now too; there was just the rustle of the wind in the ivy outside.

  It was a wild wind, and grew wilder. It was fierce and dark and snow-laden, impossible to stand against. It numbed Abi’s hands and feet and face, outlined her bones in aching ice, and filled her mind with an astonished joy that there should be a world with such a wind unleashed, and that she should be there to feel it.

  It froze her to a standstill.

  It was Louis who brought her back from that place, screeching her name and pulling her arms. He had wiggled out from behind his sheet when she stopped answering ‘Mmmm’ to his questions. He found her bent double, and icy.

  ‘She’s dead and she won’t talk to me,’ he’d wailed, running to Esmé and Max in panic, but Abi wasn’t dead, only lost in deep cold. They’d taken her into the warm kitchen, wrapped her in the quilt that Esmé had run up to fetch from her bed and hurried to make her hot tea.

  At first she shook too much to drink.

  ‘I think you have fever,’ said Esmé.

  ‘F-fever!’ chattered Abi, her lips and nails still blue.

  ‘What happened, then?’ demanded Max.

  ‘It was the book I was reading. It was like I was there.’

  ‘She had snow on her hair!’ said Louis. ‘I touched it and it melted!’

  ‘Don’t be weird!’ Max told him impatiently, and Louis said he wasn’t weird – Max was weird. Max was weirder than weird, and Max said, ‘Snow! Making things up!’

  ‘Tu es sot!’ snapped Louis, which made Esmé splutter with laughter, and Max became bright red, and there might have been an argument if Theo hadn’t arrived just at that moment.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ asked Theo.

  ‘I thought Abi was dead, but she’s come alive,’ said Louis, ‘and tell Max to stop saying I’m weird!’

  Theo rolled his eyes, took Abi’s temperature, checked her pulse, listened to four different explanations, demanded to see the book and sent Max and Louis to find it.

  ‘Now tell me what happened again,’ he said, when both arguing boys were out of the way. ‘I’m guessing you fell asleep?’

  ‘I didn’t. I was awake. I was reading in the rocking-horse room and then I wasn’t there any more.’ Abi paused, trying to remember. ‘I was lost and I needed to find my way to somewhere very important.’

  ‘What sort of somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t know. I got colder and colder and it was harder and harder to move. Then I heard Louis call.’

  Louis had called, and she had turned towards his voice and found his small hot hands clutching hers, and then they had tugged her back home. The storm had vanished and already the memory was fading.

  ‘Found the book!’ said Max, reappearing at that moment with Louis in tow. ‘The Worst Journey in the World, it’s called. It looks dead boring.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Theo, but it was just an ordinary book, with lots of black-and-white photos of penguins. No snow fell from the pages when they turned them, much to Louis’ disappointment.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Theo worriedly, looking across Abi. ‘I don’t know what Pol would say!’

  ‘I’m all right now,’ said Abi, untangling herself from the quilt. ‘Why do you have to tell her? She would only get worried about nothing.’

  Perhaps it had been nothing. It was easy to agree when Max said, ‘That room is always freezing. If anyone fell asleep in there, they might easily get frostbite nightmares.’

  It was true, they might.

  ‘Sooner we get that chimney swept and a fire in there, the better,’ said Theo, cheering up a little. ‘And the whole house feels odd tonight, between polish and damp and I don’t know what! I noticed it as soon as I opened the front door. Speaking of the door, Max, you and I need to be a bit more careful bringing our bikes in. It’s getting pretty badly scratched.’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Max, and went to look. Abi followed after him, for no particular reason except to be back in the normal world again, and Louis tagged along because he always tagged along, and there, by the light of the N
arnia lamp, they saw the scratches on the door.

  They were long, deep grooves.

  Max said at once, ‘That wasn’t me!’

  Louis said nothing.

  Abi’s thoughts swirled and gathered and scattered away again like autumn leaves in a gusty wind. The white seaside cat raking its paws against the tree. Long-ago Roly. Iffen. Louis. Abi looked at Louis and he looked back at her, blank-eyed and innocent.

  ‘No way I did that,’ said Max, very crossly and Theo said from behind, ‘No, probably it was me. Just thought I’d mention it. Esmé, it’s a dark night out there – I’m going to get you a cab. Is Mrs P. still hanging about?’

  Louis swung round to look at him.

  ‘I met her earlier on the path,’ explained Theo. ‘Just be careful when you go out. Can we shut the door now before the house gets any colder? How are you feeling, Abi?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Abi.

  ‘That’s good. Max, if you can just see Esmé off, I’ll make a call and see how soon we can get that chimney sorted. Louis, bath and bed?’

  Louis glanced at the darkness at the top of the stairs.

  ‘I’ll go up with you,’ offered Abi.

  ‘Great,’ said Theo. ‘Esmé, I’ll say goodnight, then, and thank you very much.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Esmé,’ said Abi, raising a goodbye hand.

  Louis suddenly rushed upstairs, rushed down again, flung himself on Esmé and hugged her. Esmé detached herself with the remote look of someone whose thoughts were already halfway home.

  ‘Au revoir and mercy!’ said Max, on the doorstep, because if Louis could speak French whenever he felt like it, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t too. ‘Et bonne chance pour le weekend. What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘Rien de tout,’ said Esmé, vanishing so smoothly into the dark that when Theo asked afterwards if she’d got the cab all right Max had to think before he could answer, ‘Oui.’

  ‘Don’t know what we’ll do without her,’ said Theo absent-mindedly.

  Max didn’t want to talk about doing without Esmé, so he went off and sprayed his bike chain with special bike-chain lubricant, and there was something about the smell that took him straight back to summer and the bike-repair and car-cleaning business. He missed Danny terribly, Esmé was leaving, his own dad was long gone, five years and more. Suddenly Max had to lean his head against the wall for quite a while, just thinking.