‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I told her we were eating.’
I hid the present under a pile of winter coats, because I knew that if Granny Car or my stepmother saw it, it would probably be deemed too common and put in the recycling.
‘Oh, good,’ said Christine. Then when she saw Dad’s crestfallen face, she added. ‘Come on, Stewart! You know she doesn’t even like Christmas anyway. We’ll see her on Boxing Day. Maybe.’
She patted his hand, and we carried on spooning special microwaved gloop into our mouths, listening to cheesy Christmas music from the computer, while the snow fell outside and the day darkened.
Later that night, when everyone had gone to bed, I crept downstairs and took my present out from its hiding place in the coat pile.
Back in my room, hiding under my duvet with a torch, I carefully untied the string and unwrapped the paper.
And there was . . . a book. It had a plain, rough black cover, maybe leather, I couldn’t quite tell, and about a hundred pages.
Every single one of them was blank.
I turned the book over. There weren’t any words. Only a long silver pencil, taped in place.
That was it. Nothing else.
Then, as I gathered up the wrapping paper, a tiny card fell out. I opened it and read:
To my darling granddaughter Ethel,
Happy Christmas!
This is no ordinary sketchbook. This is a wishing book. It has great power. Use it wisely and well, and may all your wishes come true. But always, always, be careful what you wish for.
Granny Bike
A wishing book? I picked up the sketchbook and examined it carefully. It was covered in a thick layer of dust, which I blew and rubbed off, but no genie appeared. There was no ancient spell written anywhere, no secret compartment and certainly no fairy dust. It seemed plain and ordinary to me. Apart from the fact that both the pencil and the book looked as old as Granny Bike herself, it couldn’t have been less magical.
The pencil wasn’t even that sharp.
I reread her message. The last line was a bit odd. Be careful what you wish for. Still, it gave me an idea.
As an experiment, I would draw something I had never wished for, ever.
The next morning, when I came down for breakfast, I knew straightaway that things were not right. Christine sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, sobbing, while Dad patted her on the back, and tried to offer her a mug of tea. Silver was swimming in circles quickly, which he always does when he’s stressed.
I knew it had to be bad.
‘What’s happened?’ I said.
‘We’ve been burgled,’ said Dad, and Christine started to scream.
I looked around. The front door was in one piece. No one had smashed any of the windows, and everything seemed to be still there. Anything a burglar might want to steal, that is – the TV, microwave, laptop, the expensive exercise machine Christine bought off the internet and never used, and Silver, of course. (Well, if I was a burglar, I would want to steal him.)
Except, not quite.
Because next to the Christmas tree and its twinkling lights, where there should have been the huge pile of presents from Granny Car, was an empty space. There was no make-up styling kit. No Wi-Fi slippers for Dad (that could be heated up remotely by a phone app). And no piles and piles of jewellery for Christine – all gone.
Not a single bow or ribbon remained. Just a flattened patch of carpet.
Christine wiped her eyes and stared at me. ‘Who would do a thing like that to us!’ she bawled. ‘I’m a good person! I signed fifty online petitions to save donkeys last year!’
‘There, there,’ said Dad. ‘We all know you’re a wonderful person, love; perhaps they got the wrong flat.’
‘How did they get in?’ she demanded. ‘Down the chimney! Like Father Thingummy?’
‘Er, no,’ said Dad. ‘No one could get down that chimney. You do know the fire’s not real, don’t you?’
And she started screaming again. As usual, neither of them was paying any attention to me or what I was doing. I flopped down onto the sofa and opened the wishing book. Making sure no one, not even Silver, was looking, I turned to the first page.
The drawing I did last night.
Of the presents under the tree.
They were no longer under the tree, but they were in my book. I was quite good at drawing, yet this sketch surprised even me. The boxes, surrounded by wrapping paper, looked so real, I could almost reach out and grab them.
Like they were in the book.
I wondered.
Sucking on the silver pencil for a moment, I looked around the flat for something else that I hadn’t wished for. There was quite a lot to choose from – and then I spotted it.
Sitting on the kitchen windowsill, a huge cactus.
Not only was it massively ugly, like a great big green monster’s thumb, but every time I brushed past, I got stung by its prickles.
I started to sketch, first drawing a rough outline of the plant in the pot, and then shading it in, and adding the spikes last.
And the strangest thing happened.
The plant began to disappear, into thin air.
The more I drew it onto the page, the less it was there.
A tall shadow fell over my drawing. I looked up. It was Christine.
‘Wot you doing?’ she shrieked. Her eyes were red and raw from crying, layers of her make-up streaming down her face.
I closed the sketchbook, just in case she saw the picture of the presents. ‘I’m drawing.’
‘Drawing!’ she bawled. ‘A fine way to help your mother at a time like this . . .’
‘You’re not my mother,’ I said quietly.
‘. . . when you could be on your hands and knees, looking for clues! Or calling the police, or doing something useful to earn your keep around here. Is drawing going to get me my presents back? Is drawing going to pay our mortgage or our fuel bills? Is drawing going to mend the gaping wound in Granny Car’s heart when we see her this afternoon and tell her this terrible news?’
I looked up at her. ‘I thought we were going to see Granny Bike today?’ I was looking forward to showing her my drawings and finding out more about this amazing present she had given me.
Christine dismissed the idea with a flick of her hand. ‘I’ve cancelled it. Who wants to go and see that stinking old bat anyway; she never has much to say for herself, does she, Stewart?’ And she elbowed Dad sharply in the ribs.
He looked wounded, but didn’t say anything.
‘No, we’re going to go to Granny Car and you’re going to get down on your knees and grovel as you tell her that your hundred-pound make-up kit has been stolen! How do you think that news will make her feel?’
‘I didn’t want it anyway.’
‘Tough! I could have sold it on eeeeeBay!’ she screeched, so loudly that Silver’s bowl nearly cracked in half.
I absolutely didn’t want to see Granny Car. I wanted to see Granny Bike. But there was no way out, unless . . . Studying the gold-framed portrait which hung proudly above the TV, I began to draw . . .
We didn’t go to see Granny Car after all. She mysteriously disappeared that Boxing Day, right in the middle of taking a luxurious bubble bath (Christmas Cake and Sherry fragrance), in her specially custom-made gold bathtub. Godfrey came in with the king-size bath towel of finest Egyptian cotton, which he had spent the last half-hour specially fluffing on his mistress’s orders – only to find that his mistress was no longer there.
He thought she might be hidden by the bubbles and the steam.
She wasn’t. She had quite gone.
Almost as if she had been sucked down the plughole, even though she would never have fitted. After he had got over the shock, Godfrey was delighted to discover that not only would he never have to put his jacket down in the mud for her to walk on again, but that he had inherited her BMW.
The police used my ‘incredibly lifelike’ sketch to issue a missing person’s report
.
‘Uncanny, isn’t it?’ said the desk sergeant, beaming with admiration as he studied my drawing. ‘Almost like she was ’ere.’
Then Christine started demanding to see his superior officer and I quickly took my book away. I was beginning to get tired of Christine and all her yelling at everyone the whole time.
While she and the sergeant tore chunks out of each other, I sat back on my chair and, licking my pencil, began to sketch.
If I said so myself, I was getting pretty good at drawing now.
This time, the police came to our house to ask about my stepmother’s sudden disappearance. The sergeant wasn’t smiling any more.
Although it didn’t matter. I shut the door in his face, and while he shouted and hammered on the door, I got out my pad. It wasn’t the best sketch, a bit cartoony, but the hammering soon stopped.
That was the moment things started to go wrong.
I couldn’t stop drawing. Anyone who annoyed me, anyone who stepped out of line, anyone I didn’t like the look of, ended up wished away in the sketchbook. The kid on the bike who wasn’t looking where he was going and nearly ran me over. A fox who looked at me funny from the end of an alleyway. Even the snowman my friends had made in the park, because I didn’t like watching it melt from our window.
Then I wished our view could be improved. There were three tall blocks of flats right in the middle of it, and very ugly they were, too. Stained concrete, smashed windows, I didn’t even know whether people lived in them or not. I thought maybe learning to draw buildings instead of people would make a change.
Soon the horizon was improved, and the buildings lived only in the pages of my book. It was uncanny how real they looked, almost as if the sketchbook made them look better than I could actually draw. Sometimes, if I held the sketchbook to my ear, I could almost hear thousands of tiny voices all chattering and screaming.
After the tower blocks came the big factory in the town, that did nothing but belch out oily smoke and toxic chemicals into the sky. I think some people worked there, but surely they would be better off working somewhere nicer and less smelly?
Then the church, because I went to a service once and found it boring. And the school, so I wouldn’t have to go back next term. I drew the hospital, because it scared me, and thought at least all the ill people inside wouldn’t be in pain any more.
Soon, there wasn’t much left of our town, but just a kind of white space, like things had been rubbed out.
People began to go crazy.
There were riots, with people throwing things at policemen in riot gear, yelling that all the disappearances were a government conspiracy, while helicopters with searchlights buzzed overhead.
I had my nose pressed to the window, even though Dad wanted me to stay away.
I had never drawn an action scene before, now was my chance!
After the police disappeared, the government sent in tanks.
I wasn’t wildly keen on drawing those, but sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone, don’t you?
Then the countryside began to look a bit patchy. All the gaps made it seem messier than before. I started to draw and draw and draw. Soon the messy, ragged world outside was all safely contained within the pages of my book.
The only thing that remained was our house and garden, Dad, Silver and me.
Dad had gone mad, though. He didn’t understand what was going on. He looked wild-eyed and confused and started to babble, not making any sense. I gave him the biggest hug I could and asked if I could draw his portrait to cheer him up.
That was when Silver started to act funny around me. He wouldn’t come out of his underwater shipwreck to play. Only the occasional bubble appeared.
He needn’t have worried. I would never draw Silver.
Although, what was to stop me drawing his bowl?
The next morning, I woke up, stretched with a big yawn, got out of bed and went to open the curtains and see if the Christmas snow was still there.
Only I didn’t. Because my bed wasn’t there. Then I remembered. It had felt cold and uncomfortable, so I had drawn it and put it in my pad. There were no curtains to pull either, because they hadn’t closed properly.
There was nothing to see at all.
It was all in the dark book clutched in my hand, which, along with the silver pencil, was everything I now owned. They were the only two objects which seemed to exist in the world.
All around was whiteness, wherever I looked. But it wasn’t snow. Just blank space. Above, below and around me. I could have been in a film studio or on a screen, except I wasn’t, I wasn’t . . . anywhere.
I was utterly, completely alone. With Granny Bike’s present, I had made everything disappear. I hadn’t been careful what I wished for at all.
I sat down in the middle of the white space and opened my wishing book, turning right to the first page. There were all our other Christmas presents. My make-up kit. Christine’s piles of jewellery. And Dad’s Wi-Fi slippers. There on the page, almost as real as life. I never knew how good I was at drawing until I picked up that pencil.
If I held the book to my ear and shook it, it was almost possible to hear the jewellery rattling inside and the Wi-Fi self-heating slippers beeping as they searched for a connection.
What a stupid, dumb idea, I thought. Wi-Fi slippers that self-heated via a mobile phone app, so that they were warm, ready and waiting when you got home from work. Why would anyone give that to someone as a present? Or even buy it in a shop? It was so ridiculous and completely bonkers that I began to smile.
But I wasn’t meant to like the things in this book. I had wished them away. I turned the page.
The prickly cactus, looking as sharp and deadly as ever.
I remembered Dad once pricked himself on it while carrying a jug of hot custard, and he did a dance of pain and splashing custard, which gave rise to the family nickname, ‘Custard-Cactus Dance’, given to anyone either dancing badly or reacting to a stubbed toe.
No, that wasn’t funny, I decided. Definitely not.
Then there was Granny Car, frozen in time. She was only wearing a shower cap, surrounded by a cloud of extra foamy bubbles. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could hear – faintly, like a fly trapped between glass – her exclaiming, ‘A dirty old sketchbook! How frightfully common!’
Granny Car, I thought to myself, looking at the picture. She was bossy and a snob, and not always nice to everybody. And I had started hating her for that. Now here she was, preserved for all time, stark naked apart from a handful of soapy bubbles.
Once upon a time, such a thought would have made me laugh.
Now, though, I felt a tug inside. A tug of sadness.
She was my stepgranny after all. She did come to visit us all the time, even if she was overcritical. All those presents, over the page, she bought those for us all the time. They were about the worst, waste-of-money presents to be found on earth.
But they were presents. I tried to remember what I had got Granny Car for Christmas this year.
Then I remembered. I had bought her a little wind-up toy version of the Queen. If you wound it up, her jaw went up and down and her white-gloved arm waved. It was only a jokey thing from a toy shop, and I thought Granny Car would hate it, because she thought anyone who didn’t stand up when the Queen was mentioned was frightfully common.
Actually, she thought it was the funniest thing ever and kept playing with it over Christmas dinner, until even Christine – her own daughter, who never laughed at anything – started to laugh.
I felt a smile begin to tug at the corner of my mouth.
I turned the page. The policemen, who were trying to help look after us. Christine, my stepmum, who wanted to know what had happened to her mum.
My school and my friends.
The town where we lived, tower blocks, factory and all.
Dad. Silver.
I looked up. I didn’t know how long I had been absorbed in the drawings. As t
here was no sun (too hot, in the book) or clocks (too anxious-making, on the page), the sketchbook was absolutely bursting full of people, animals, places and things. It sounds strange, but it even felt heavier. And from every sheet of paper, in between the cracks and spine of the book, I could hear noise. Chatter, whispers, shouts, cars, rain, cats and dogs, all the noise of everyday life was seeping out, as if from the faintest radio signal in a distant galaxy.
Not everything in the book made me laugh. Some of it still made me furious. Like the cyclist who nearly ran me over at the zebra crossing. But all the same, I clutched the book tight to my chest.
There was a whole world in there. I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted it back.
Then, to my surprise, I heard a noise not coming from the book.
Squeak! Squeak!
I looked up.
Far away, on the horizon of the huge blankness I found myself in, I could spy a tiny, dark, bent figure, wheeling her bicycle towards me.
Granny Bike!
As she got closer and closer, the noise of her bike got louder and louder, and the noise of the world in my sketchbook got fainter and fainter. Until she was standing over me. The one person I hadn’t put in my sketchbook.
She didn’t say anything, of course.
But she looked at me. Her whiskery chin was firm and her eyes were not twinkling with mischief like they often were. I believe it was physically impossible for Granny Bike ever to be cross, but this was perhaps the nearest she would ever come to it.
I hugged the book to my chest. ‘Am I in trouble, Granny Bike?’ I said.
Granny Bike didn’t reply.
‘I shouldn’t have drawn all those people and things, should I?’ I said. ‘You told me to be careful what I wished for, and I ended up drawing everything. I thought it was because I didn’t want them, but actually . . . I do. Now I don’t have them, I can even love a pair of Wi-Fi-controlled self-heating slippers. Or a cactus. Even Granny Car.’
Granny Bike smiled a little at that.
‘How did it work, though, Granny Bike?’
She shrugged.
‘Are you a . . .’ Somehow, I couldn’t quite say the word. Even though she had a crooked nose and greasy hair and a wart on her whiskery chin, I couldn’t say that word about Granny Bike, or any granny, for that matter.
Winter Magic Page 23