by Hilary McKay
“Well,” said Ruby, who sometimes found it to be a bit of a burden being the only one under seventy in a house of five people, “you should try being an only child like me.”
“I was,” said Caddy. “For ages and ages.”
Caddy could still remember very clearly the world before Indigo and Saffron arrived. In those days her father was home nearly all the time. Whole weeks would pass in which no tears were shed, no heads were clutched, no vases were stuffed with apologizing roses, and no hard sums were done to prove the cheapness of renting a place to work in London compared to the enormous cost of building a soundproof, childproof studio at home.
In those days nobody ever wore dark glasses and explained that they had hay fever.
And then Indigo and Saffron arrived a year apart, and if Indigo was an astonishingly swift Sunday-morning surprise, Saffron, aged three, was an unlooked-for and cataclysmic shock. And it seemed to Caddy that no sooner had they found Saffron a place to sleep (in Caddy’s bedroom) than the head clutching and hard sums that had begun with Indigo’s appearance suddenly stopped. (Although the roses and dark glasses did not.)
The matter was decided. Caddy’s father would work in London, renting a studio, and come home to his family on Friday nights. When possible.
All at once there was one parent at home, instead of two, and three children, instead of one.
Caddy got used to Indigo and Saffron, and then very fond of them, but her father stayed away for longer and longer periods, and her mother scrambled through the days and nights, juggling people and painting and children and cooking and always a bit behind with everything, and it wasn’t like other people’s houses.
“Darling Mummy is not the world’s best at multitasking,” said her father on one of his heroic trips home to unscramble the household.
“Darling Bill,” Eve would say, and collapse on the sofa to read fairy tales to the children while Bill restocked the fridge, wrote lists, threw out junk, constructed star charts for good behavior, stared at the bills, and gave everyone lots of very sensible advice.
“Darling kids,” Bill said once, pausing from filling trash bags to gaze at them, good as gold, curled up on sofa cushions, listening to stories. “Aren’t we a nice little family?”
“Little?” asked Caddy. It was June and warm but her skin prickled, cold with alarm. She did not know her father thought they were a little family.
“Little?” she asked again. “I thought you said we were a very big family. Too big to fit in a single hamster. That’s what you said.”
“Cadmium darling,” said Bill teasingly. “You’re not going to start taking life seriously, are you?”
The genie in the bedtime story frightened Caddy sometimes. She pictured his smile as he lifted their world to play. Tonight the smile was on Bill’s face, sweet and teasing and ruthless.
“When are you going back to London?” asked Caddy rudely.
That wiped away her father’s smile, but it didn’t touch the genie’s.
“One day,” said Caddy’s mother, soon afterward, “not now, not soon, not for ages, wouldn’t it be lovely and exciting if we had another . . .”
Once more Caddy’s skin ran with ice-cold fear, but this time she ignored it.
Chapter Two
LOST PROPERTY
THE SUMMER THAT CADDY WAS TWELVE—THE SUMMER THAT followed the days when Eve had said, “Wouldn’t it be lovely and exciting . . . ?” and Bill, with his genie’s smile, had asked, “Aren’t we a nice little family?”—that summer there came a storm that rocked the trees and flooded the drains in the streets.
When the deluge stopped at last, the girls gathered at their outdoor meeting place, a low wall in front of a house at the crossroads on the way to school. A great consultation began, with Beth saying, “Who will come swimming with me this afternoon? I’ve got to look after Juliet and that’s what she wants to do. I can’t bear to take her on my own. Not after last time! Do you think that lifeguard would recognize me if I wore a different swimming costume?”
“No, of course he wouldn’t,” said Ruby. “He probably hardly looked at you. Too busy clearing the pool! I can’t come, though. I’m going to the library.”
“Haven’t you enough books in your house already?”
Ruby laughed, assuming it was a joke to suppose that any single house could hold enough books to outlast such a deluge as they had just survived.
“Do Beth a favor!” suggested Alison, inspecting her newly varnished deep-purple fingertips. “Take Juliet with you. Do you like my nails?”
“Lovely,” said everyone.
“Three coats. It took ages. Caddy, I’m sure you had those jeans on before it started raining!”
“I did. I’ve been wearing them all summer. I’ll come swimming with you, Beth! I’m not scared of that lifeguard! And he needn’t have gone on like he did about Juliet. She couldn’t help throwing up and it was only Coke!”
“Three cans, little pig!” said Alison.
“Anyway, it wasn’t Beth’s fault! Let’s all go swimming, and then nail-varnish shopping and to the library on the way home.”
They were in the middle of trying to persuade Ruby and Alison to agree to this plan when something caught their attention. A movement in the rain-washed litter at the base of the wall.
“Oh, yuck!” said Alison. “Oh, revolting! Oh no, Caddy!”
For Caddy (bravest of the brave) had already picked it up. A featherless, new-hatched bird, washed from its nest in the yew trees high overhead.
“It’s twitching,” said Beth. “It’s still alive.”
“You can see its veins,” remarked Ruby, but she too flinched away from its frog-fleshed coldness.
“I don’t know how you can hold it,” said Alison to Caddy, almost crossly, because the thing was so awful, and yet so helpless.
It twitched again, jerking its pulpy, purple mound of a body, its naked wings flailing, and it stretched out a reptilian neck and opened its beak in a long, soundless shriek. On a nearby lamppost two pink-and-grey doves looked resolutely in the opposite direction, disowning responsibility.
“You would hardly guess it was supposed to be a bird,” said Beth. “I don’t think you should have picked it up, Caddy. I’m sure you’re not meant to do. If you leave them alone, their parents come and take care of them.”
“That’s when they’re older,” said Caddy. “When they have feathers and can hop about and keep themselves warm.”
“What are you going to do with it, then?”
“It ought to go back in its nest. It must be up there somewhere.”
They stood back to gaze into the dim, green depths of the yew trees.
“You couldn’t even prop up a ladder,” said Ruby. “Not in all those skinny branches.”
“Can’t we take it to a vet’s?” asked Beth.
“I did that once before,” said Caddy. “And they took it into a room and came out about one second later and said, ‘Very sorry, it just died,’ and they wouldn’t tell me what of, or if they’d tried any medicine, or anything. I always thought afterward that they murdered it. What we need (I know you’ll all moan) is one of those long, stretchy ladders like they have in the fire brigade . . .”
The howls of her friends drowned out the rest of her sentence.
“You can’t call the fire brigade again!” said Ruby.
“They’d be furious! Think how they were about that frog in the drain last Easter! You got that awful letter!”
“They were nice the first time, though, when we found the squirrel we thought was an escaped monkey . . .”
“You thought was an escaped monkey!” corrected Ruby.
“You can’t do it again, Caddy,” agreed Beth.
“What are we going to do with it, then?” asked Caddy, and Alison peered at the wheezing, gaping blob in Caddy’s hands and said, “It’d be better off dead.”
Ruby and Beth nodded in agreement.
“Yes, but it’s not,” said Caddy helpless
ly. “So we’ll have to look after it somehow . . .”
“We?” asked Alison, while Ruby shook her head and stepped backward in alarm.
“It’s you who’s good at looking after things, Caddy,” said Beth.
“I’m not!” protested Caddy. “Any of you could do it just as well . . .”
“My mother would go mad if I took it within a mile of the house,” said Alison.
“I’ve got a cat,” Ruby reminded Caddy.
“I don’t think I could,” said Beth. “I haven’t time. Not with Treacle to look after. It looks cold, Caddy.”
“It is cold,” said Caddy, “and I’ve nothing to wrap it in. I’d better take it home . . . if it is me taking it home?”
Her friends looked guiltily away.
“All right,” said Caddy.
“Do you really not mind?” Ruby asked her a little worriedly.
Caddy was never entirely sure what she believed animals could understand of human communication. More than people guessed, she suspected. Perhaps even this poor fledgling could grasp something of the debate that had gone on around it. For this reason she said bravely, “Of course I don’t mind! I love it! I just didn’t want to grab. I’ll take it home, then. Thank you! Any of you can visit it, any time you like!”
Even Alison blushed a little at that.
After Caddy left, the afternoon seemed empty. Her friends drifted off in different directions, feeling a little lost. All courage to face the swimming pool deserted Beth without them.
“I’m not taking you there,” she told Juliet. “And you needn’t sulk! Anyone who throws up three cans of Coke in the deep end of the swimming pool and has to have the whole place cleared shouldn’t want to go!”
Alison wandered round the shopping streets until boredom gnawed her like a pain. She found herself calculating the days left until term began. It seemed a terrible thing to her, to be looking forward to school. She went home and painted her nails again, this time a dark and savage red.
Ruby also thought of school, remembering her last school report. The memory made her change her mind about going to the library.
“I can’t ever go there again,” she said and, to save herself from temptation, dropped her library card in a trash bin. It vanished immediately among the cans and takeaway wrappers. For a little while afterward Ruby could not see very well.
It was not the first baby bird that Caddy had rescued, although it was easily the most forlorn. Her mother groaned when she saw it. Too well she knew what the next few days would hold. There would be name choosing, food making, sleepless nights, panic, bargains with God, rage, tears, a funeral, and struggles with the difficulty of gravestone construction.
“The swallows lived,” said Caddy, who could never forget the pair of fledgling swallows from the fallen nest she had found two years before. She had fed them flies and grubs and they had gobbled and stretched, fluttered, preened, and flown from her hands to join the spiral of birds circling the street. It had been the proudest day of her life. It was the reason why she tried so hard with each new patient, and cried so hard with each new failure.
The baby pigeon was installed in a shoe box on Caddy’s bedside table. The box was lined with cotton wool for softness and dried grass for an authentic smell of the wild. Saffron and Indigo looked on with interest and offered to help.
Caddy left them in charge while she went in search of baby pigeon food. Indigo worried about the mother pigeon left behind.
“Do you think it’s very sad?” he asked.
Saffron thought about that. “No,” she said at last. “She probably saw Caddy taking it away and thought, ‘Oh well, I shan’t have to bother,’ and was quite pleased and went off and did something good.”
“What sort of good?”
“Like went to the park.”
“Oh,” said Indigo, comforted.
Saffy peered critically at the occupant of the shoe box. “I hope it gets its feathers soon,” she remarked. “It makes me feel funny looking at it. I don’t like being able to see its insides from its outside. Or that yellow, baggy bit.”
“It smells, too,” said Indigo, lowering his voice in case the bird should happen to hear and understand.
It did. Sweetish and slightly rancid.
“Like lost property,” said Saffron.
“What?”
“It smells like lost property at school. That big box full of old clothes and lunch boxes and shoes and things. I hate it when I have to look in there. I wouldn’t like to smell like that.”
“Poor Lost Property!” said Indigo. “Let’s call it Lost Property, Saffy! And let’s give it a bath before Caddy comes, to surprise her.”
Caddy arrived back only just in time. The bathroom hand basin was full of warm water. Strawberry-scented bubbles had been fluffed up by Indigo into a strawberry-scented cloud. Lost Property was just about to be lowered to his fate when Caddy grabbed him from Saffron’s hands.
“You stupid kids!” she exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing? You might have killed him! Murderers!”
“Indy and me are not murderers!” said Saffron indignantly.
“We wasn’t hurting him, Caddy,” said Indigo earnestly. “We’ve been looking after him all this time!”
“Looking after!” repeated Caddy scornfully, as she tucked Lost Property tenderly back into his box. “Poor little thing! He might have drowned!”
“He wouldn’t! Of course he wouldn’t, would he, Saffy?”
“Do you think we didn’t know he had to breathe?” Saffron asked Caddy witheringly. “Do you think we wouldn’t have held his beak up?”
“Hmm,” said Caddy, crouching over the shoe box.
“What are you doing with that paintbrush?”
“Feeding him.”
“What?”
“Oatmeal and water and scrambled egg. I was scrambling the egg. That’s why I took so long.”
Already Caddy’s flash of anger had passed. She had a temper like a firework, a bright fizz of flame, a few bangs, a little smoke, and a shower of sparks, and it was over. Now she was using a tiny pointed paintbrush to drip oaty, eggy mush into the baby bird’s beak. She looked up proudly at Saffron and Indigo when a drip actually went down.
“He’s swallowing! Did you see?”
They nodded, impressed.
“We’ll have to think of a name for him.”
“We already have. Lost Property.”
“Lost Property?” repeated Caddy.
“Indigo thought of it.”
“Well,” agreed Caddy, “I suppose it’s true. He is.”
For a day and a night Lost Property occupied all their time. They hung over him, willing him to live. Indigo shaded his shoe box with branches to make him feel at home. Saffron told him comforting stories about pigeon picnics in the park. Caddy detected an infinitesimal growth of feathers. They were all sure that he knew his name.
And then he died.
Eve promised Heaven as the logical conclusion.
Saffron and Indigo, old hands at the job, surveyed the garden for an unused burial plot and dug a large hole.
Caddy wailed, “I tried and I tried.”
“It was just too young,” said Eve, sniffing herself as she hugged Caddy. “I didn’t think it could live from the first.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, then?”
“What would you have done if I had?”
“I wouldn’t have bothered,” said Caddy. “I wouldn’t have made it a nest. I wouldn’t have fed it. I wouldn’t have let it have a name. I wouldn’t have loved it.”
She cried and cried. She cried so much she spoiled the funeral. Saffy and Indigo, who had expected a good deal of praise for the excellence of their digging, were completely ignored.
“That hole had corners,” said Indigo, “and she didn’t even notice!”
“She can dig her own hole next time,” said Saffron.
Chapter Three
THE SPINNING WORLD
CADDY WENT
TO BED EXHAUSTED BY EMOTION AND FUNERAL arrangements and was woken at dawn by Alison pelting tennis balls at her bedroom window.
“Hurry up!” ordered Alison when Caddy emerged from under the covers to complain. “I knew you’d forget!”
“Forget what?”
“Ruby’s birthday thing. It’s today!”
Ruby’s actual birthday had been in the last days of the school term. Presents and birthday cake were over long ago. However, her birthday thing was still to come. It had been arranged by her four grandparents: a trip to the seaside, traveling by train. All four girls, and all four grandparents. They would go exploring and find somewhere interesting to have lunch. It was a treat, although it didn’t feel like it to either Alison or Caddy at not-much-after-six in the morning.
“Today! Oh no! Oh, say you’ve made a mistake, Alison!”
“Meeting at the station at half past seven,” said Alison grimly.
“Half past seven!”
“Other people have discos,” said Alison bitterly. “Cinema trips. Sleepovers. I’ve tried and tried but I can’t think of a good excuse not to go. Neither can Beth. I suppose you could say you’ve got to stay and look after that pigeon creature.”
“It’s dead,” Caddy told her sadly.
“You’re stuck too, then,” Alison said, and slammed shut her window.
It was a strange day, full of alien activities. Fossil hunting, rock pooling (“Just explain again what I’m looking for in this hole,” demanded Alison), ordering Italian food in an Italian restaurant in proper Italian with no pointing at the menu, and a visit to the fairground, where they were encouraged to work hard at the rifle range—accurate shooting, according to Ruby’s grandparents, being wholly a matter of the use of correct breathing techniques.
Now and then photographs were taken, very fast, with minimal posing. A single click, and there they were, squinting into the sun, arms looped around each other’s shoulders, hair tangled and blown in the salt-flavored wind. Behind them, as one grandparent aptly remarked, the thousand sparkling smiles of the sunlit ocean.