The Time Of Green Magic

by Hilary McKay

  He didn’t know how long he stood there, but when he went back into the kitchen Theo was making a giant omelette, stuffing it with grilled cheese and sliced tomatoes, and rolling it into a long baguette.

  ‘I know you had supper, but keep me company,’ he said, cutting it into halves, arranging each carefully on a plate, adding crisps and pickled gherkins, and handing one to Max.

  It seemed to Max impossible that a sandwich could help when your best friend was your enemy and the only girl in the world was going back to France, but it made him feel much better, anyway.

  Upstairs, Abi became efficient, ran Louis a bubble bath, hunted out clean pyjamas, and caught her foot in his bedside mat. That was when she discovered the two sets of long slashes there, straight and clean as if sliced by two handfuls of very sharp knives. Abi picked up the mat, and looked more closely. Under it, carved on the wooden floor, were eight long lines.

  Iffen.

  Iffen, who until she had seen the scratches on the door that evening, had retreated into shadow land.

  It didn’t make sense. Never, in all the time she had known Roly, had he left the slightest mark of his presence. No brown-and-white hairs had ever appeared where he slept. No paw print had ever shown where he walked. He had been real enough to trip up Granny Grace and to have his picture painted, but not real enough for that.

  For a long time Abi was very still. Then she collected an armload of pillows and quilts and went to the bathroom door. ‘Louis,’ she called. ‘I’m making you a camp in my room tonight. I’ve got that chair that unfolds into a mattress. Is that OK?’

  Absolute silence greeted this, but when she looked round the bathroom door she saw that his eyes were wide open and there were tears rolling down his cheeks. (Never, not even on the darkest nights when she had woken to feel Roly’s weight against her legs, never, for one moment, had Roly been frightening.)

  ‘OK?’ Abi asked again, and Louis nodded and kept on nodding until she went away.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Almost as soon as they had moved in to the ivy house, Polly had offered to help Abi decorate her bedroom. Abi, alarmed, had asked, ‘Can I choose the colours?’ even before she remembered to say thank you.

  ‘Of course,’ Polly had replied, squashing out of her mind the memory of her own twelve-year-old bedroom, where she had insisted on chocolate brown and nothing else, to look like a hobbit hole. ‘Anything you like.’

  Abi had chosen a silvery grey colour for the stained, flaking ceiling and a faded greenish blue for the walls. At the corners she outlined with chalk a series of small upright trees, bare-branched, and slender. When the outlines looked right she’d filled them in, with the same silver grey as the ceiling, and then she had looped their two-dimensional branches with fairy lights; amber, rose and yellow. In a charity shop she and Theo found some rusty orange denim curtains, and a matching furry mat. These strange colours fitted together so well that Polly sounded and felt remorseful when she said, ‘And I painted Louis’ old room for you pink!’

  ‘It was all right. Just a bit . . . a bit . . .’

  ‘It was bubblegum pink!’ said Polly. ‘Sorry, Abi! I love your greeny-blues and golds.’

  ‘One day I’ll do the furniture too,’ said Abi, ‘and then it will be perfect.’

  With the lights switched on, and the curtains closed, the room already looked perfect to Louis. His bed was so close to Abi’s he could reach out and touch her hand.

  ‘Come and see!’ he called to Max when Abi was getting ready in the bathroom, and Max put his head round the door and asked, ‘Why are you even here?’

  ‘In case I get frightened of anything,’ said Louis, very pleased with himself now he didn’t have to face the night alone.

  ‘She’s got you for life, then,’ said Max. He had hated sharing a room with Louis, but now suddenly he felt so left out it hurt. It made him bad-tempered. ‘You’re always frightened of something,’ he continued. ‘Spiders. Beetles. Haircuts. Toads . . .’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Messy bedroom floors. Mum never coming back . . .’

  ‘She is! She is!’ screeched Louis, sitting up and flinging first his pillow, and then Abi’s pillow, hard as he could at Max, ‘Go away!’

  ‘Crikey, calm down!’ said Max. ‘I never said she wasn’t!’ and he tossed back the pillows and retreated to his own room with its spare bike wheels and footballs and orange lava lamp. He’d recently added a poster of the Eiffel Tower and thought it all looked very French.

  ‘Shout if you need me,’ he’d told Abi when she came up to bed, but Louis and Abi didn’t shout; they whispered.

  ‘Tell me more about Iffen,’ said Abi. ‘When did you see him first?’

  ‘When Mum was here. I thought he was a nowl. He was much smaller then. But he wasn’t a nowl, he was a cat-thing. Then Mum went away and Max was always cross and you read books all the time and I kept seeing Mrs Puddock, and Iffen got bigger and bigger . . . Abi?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What if Mrs Puddock grows bigger and bigger too?’

  ‘Of course she won’t. She’s just ordinary. Like . . . like . . . that white cat at the beach was ordinary. And the foxes in the summer. Like nearly everything is ordinary.’

  ‘Not the ivy,’ said Louis, and from outside they heard the ivy leaves rustle a little, as if in agreement.

  Louis spoke again.

  ‘Iffen isn’t ordinary. But he’s real too. He does real things.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Abi, thinking of the marks on the door and the slashed patchwork rug in the room beneath.

  ‘Unordinary things are happening all the time now,’ said Louis.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘This time. This unordinary time. I don’t know what it’s called,’ said Louis helplessly. Abi did. Granny Grace had named it long before: ‘What a time of green magic! ’

  Louis’ eyes were on hers, waiting for an answer to his question.

  Did she like it? Abi’s thoughts revisited these last few green magic weeks. She had been stunned, shocked, chilled to her bones. Astonished. Awed. Lost and found. But her dad had a word that he used about his work now and then: ‘privileged’. She had also been privileged.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I do. But sometimes it’s scary.’

  ‘Like Iffen,’ said Louis.

  ‘Is Iffen scary?’ asked Abi, so gently that Louis could whisper, ‘Yes.’

  After that he was quiet for such a long time that Abi thought he’d fallen asleep until he suddenly reached up a hand and said sleepily, ‘I did see the snow on your hair.’

  ‘I did see Iffen,’ said Abi, and she stretched down a hand to touch his, and added, ‘Night, Louis,’ and watched as he fell asleep.

  Then for a long time Abi lay awake, listening. Theo creaked up the stairs, peered round the door, blew a silent kiss and creaked back down again. In the next room Max dropped his headphones, releasing a trickle of French conversation, and flopped down on his pillow. There was the sound of wind in the ivy outside, traffic further away, somewhere a dog barking. Did dogs see Iffen?

  Where had Louis found Iffen?

  The tired house slept, all except Abi. Abi’s mind was turning and turning as she remembered.

  The strange music in the blizzard wind. The waiting-to-pounce tension of the attic rooms where Anne Frank wrote her diary. The lurch of the balanced bus. The blue horizon of the South Pacific.

  The wild, wide encounters of the worlds she’d discovered in books.

  And she’d found a chestnut leaf and a speckled shell. The memory of snow in her hair.

  And Louis had found Iffen.

  ‘I think,’ said Abi to herself, slowly explaining as she began to understand, ‘I think, in the beginning, Iffen must have come out of a book.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Saturday morning began with Mrs Puddock. Louis, stationed on the doorstep to watch out for Theo’s chimney-swee
ping friend, caught sight of her unexpectedly and let out such an awful shriek that his whole family came running.

  ‘She’s horrible, she eats beetles, I know she does,’ said Louis in a loud fearful voice, and Mrs Puddock heard and froze into stillness, her mouth a tremulous smile, her little hands splayed over something that wriggled.

  ‘It’s about time you stopped this stupid Mrs Puddock fuss,’ said Max, turning back in disgust when he saw what all the noise was about.

  ‘Yes it is,’ agreed Abi, remembering Louis’ list of fears from the night before.

  Mum went away and Max was always cross and you read books all the time and I kept seeing Mrs Puddock, and Iffen got bigger and bigger . . .

  Here was one problem she could deal with, at least.

  ‘Wait!’ she ordered, dashed back inside and returned holding the shoebox that had once been used to pack air.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Theo approvingly as she began to line it with ivy leaves.

  Louis and Mrs Puddock watched from opposite sides of the path, their expressions wary and full of suspicion.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Take her somewhere safe,’ said Abi. ‘Hold this box for me!’

  ‘NO.’

  ‘Hold it!’ said Abi, and swiped his bum with the lid in such a no-more-nonsense Granny Grace fashion that Louis screwed his eyes tight shut, but did as he was told.

  ‘Careful,’ warned Theo anxiously, and Abi was very careful as, with cupped gentle hands she picked up the small creature that was Mrs Puddock and lifted her into the box.

  ‘Look!’ she said to Louis.

  Louis unscrewed his eyes a little. Then more. Then wide and astonished.

  ‘Put the lid on and don’t joggle her.’

  He nodded speechlessly.

  ‘I’ll be here,’ Theo told Abi. ‘Shout if you need me.’

  ‘OK. Come on, Louis.’ Abi took the box from him and led the way to the yew tree passage. Two minutes later they emerged into the wilderness of the old churchyard, with its fallen trees and dampness, and MARIAN HEPPLE, 1802, AGED 9. A LOVING HEART FOR ALL GOD’S CREATURES.

  ‘She’ll be all right here,’ said Abi. ‘There’s ivy, and grass, and she won’t get trodden on, and it’s away from the road. It’s much better than under our hedge. She’ll need to hibernate soon, anyway.’

  ‘Need to what?’

  ‘Go to sleep all winter, like they do.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘Toads,’ said Abi, taking the lid off the box and tipping it gently on to the ground. ‘She’s only a little toad, Louis. She was never anything else. Polly just gave her a name for a joke. You know that.’

  Louis nodded. He did now. Had he always? No, he hadn’t.

  Mrs Puddock glanced up at them with her gold-spark eyes, took a hesitant step, then another.

  ‘Wait!’ begged Louis all at once. ‘I want to see! Abi, make her wait! I’ve haven’t looked at her properly yet.’

  For a second, maybe two, Mrs Puddock did seem to pause, then, with a rustle of movement, a dry leaf pushed aside, she folded so perfectly into a miniature landscape of stone and tussock that she became invisible as they watched.

  ‘Gone,’ said Abi, and Louis cried, ‘What’ll we do now, Abi?’ suddenly forlorn.

  They arrived back home to find that the chimney sweeping had already begun. The air was filled with the smell of soot: sour, tar-tasting and dusty.

  ‘Out!’ ordered Theo, but the black velvet softness pouring like water into the fireplace was too fascinating to leave. They all three hovered, longing to help, while Theo and his friend shovelled darkness into bin bags. The first bag split with the weight and then soot billowed unconfined, and made them cough and rub their eyes. Louis’ nose ran worse than ever, and this cheered him up tremendously because, to his entranced delight, it ran black. One after another they were ordered into the shower, while the bags of soot were loaded into Theo’s friend’s very dirty van. It was his first visit to the house and the ivy astonished him. ‘Magic, or what?’ he exclaimed. ‘No wonder you got it cheap! You’ve not been trying to take it down, have you?’

  ‘Nope!’ said Theo. ‘For one thing, it’s not my ivy. For another, life’s too short. And, anyway, it’s probably holding up the walls! Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Noticed it was dropping a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘Wind,’ said Theo wisely.

  ‘Ah!’ said his friend, but Abi went out to look. It was true that there was a lot of scattered ivy, especially under Louis’ window. Iffen’s journeys up and down the wall had left their mark. In patches you could see right through to the dark red brick. Louis, very damp from his shower, came and looked too.

  ‘We’re all going out for pizza in a minute,’ he told Abi. ‘Theo says the house is too sooty to cook.’

  ‘I know. Why are you putting ivy leaves in your sock?’

  ‘They feel nice.’

  Abi looked at him. The leaves were only in his right sock, she noticed, and he was avoiding her eyes.

  ‘You’re walking funny,’ she told him. ‘I noticed earlier.’

  ‘Only in case the leaves fall out.’

  Abi frowned, but it was hard to be very worried in broad sunny daylight, with her dad and his friend so pleased with themselves, and Max appearing in a baseball cap he’d got off eBay saying ‘I ♥ Paris’ on the front and ‘Made in China’ on the back and Louis so charmed with his nose.

  ‘Now I HAVE to sniff!’ he said triumphantly. ‘So’s not to waste it.’

  They had ice cream after the pizza, with strawberry sauce, M&M’s, marshmallows and butterscotch chips. Theo’s friend said how good he felt to be getting his five a day.

  ‘Five what?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Sugar rushes,’ he explained. ‘I aim for five a day, but I don’t always make it. What are you people doing after this, then?’

  ‘Going home to light the fire,’ said Abi hopefully, but Theo’s friend said, ‘I’d stay out of that room for a day or two at least, and leave those sheets hung where they are. That soot’s going to be settling for quite a while yet.’

  ‘We should make a list of what we need to do next,’ said Theo. ‘And we’ll have to start thinking about a Christmas tree. First year ever that I’ve lived in a house with a proper old-fashioned chimney for Santa!’

  ‘A chimney’s what you need,’ agreed his friend. ‘I’ve never liked leaving the front door unlocked. I mean, I do it. Of course. Cos I want presents . . .’

  ‘I used to try and wait to see him,’ said Max.

  ‘I once made a trap out of string across the door,’ said Abi. ‘And then, when Granny Grace and Dad had gone to sleep, I thought I’d better test it so I got out of bed and just at that moment Dad came in and fell right over and he yelled, “What the heck? What’s going on? What were you thinking of, Abi?” and made me take it down.’

  ‘Theo, Theo, Theo,’ said his friend, shaking his head. ‘Was that reasonable?’

  ‘Yes it was,’ said Theo. ‘The last thing I needed on my only night off from the annual bloodbath that is A-and-E at Christmas was to be patching up ruddy Santa at two o’clock in the morning!’

  ‘Do you all really truly believe in Santa?’ exploded Louis, who had been staring from face to face in increasing astonishment.

  ‘Don’t you?’ asked Abi.

  ‘NO I DON’T!’

  ‘What do you believe in, then?’ asked Theo’s friend, laughing, and Louis replied at once, ‘What you said!’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Magic, or what?’ said Louis, and under the table he kicked Abi in conspiracy, while his face shone with such delight that she knew he was thinking of Iffen.

  Even so, he camped in Abi’s room for a second night, not waiting to be invited, but coming in very clean and a little anxious, and slipping quickly into bed in his socks.

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Abi, who had been waiting for him and pounced the moment he arrived.

&nbs
p; ‘I loved Mrs Puddock.’

  ‘Not about Mrs Puddock.’

  ‘Why are you cross?’

  ‘I’ve seen your leg.’

  ‘When?’ squeaked Louis, sounding suddenly alarmed.

  ‘Just before you went into the bathroom, five minutes ago. And when you got into bed. I’ve been watching. I knew there was something wrong.’

  ‘It’s nearly better.’

  ‘Let me look properly.’

  Reluctantly, Louis wiggled out of bed and pulled up a pyjama leg to show a deep grey bruise, as big as Abi’s hand, with four black holes in it, as if four large nails had caught him there, which they had.

  ‘It wasn’t his fault. He whacked the quilt and my leg was underneath.’

  ‘That was through your quilt ?’

  ‘Ages ago. I put ivy on it to make it better.’

  ‘If it’s infected, I’m telling Dad,’ said Abi, but it was plain to see that it wasn’t. It was a perfect whack by a not-quite-real big cat. Heavy, heart-shaped and clean.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t miss me while I’m sleeping in here,’ said Louis worriedly. ‘I left my window open so he didn’t scratch the door again, and I put down a bowl of milk.’

  ‘He’s not a kitten!’

  ‘I didn’t want him to be sad without me.’

  ‘He won’t be sad without you.’ Abi looked down at Louis’ troubled, loving face. ‘He’ll be off somewhere having adventures. I hope he doesn’t meet my foxes.’

  ‘I think he only gets squirrels that are already dead,’ said Louis. ‘I think he finds them lying under trees.’

  ‘Louis,’ said Abi patiently, not arguing with this hopeful opinion, ‘what books have you been reading?’

  ‘None,’ said Louis, sounding so surprised at this question that Abi knew he was telling the truth. ‘None, I promise.’

  ‘You haven’t brought home a reading book for days. You’d better not have been dropping them down drains again.’