The Book of the Banshee

by Anne Fine

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Fine

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It’s war . . .

  Will has two sisters.

  Muffy – a little angel who loves bedtime stories.

  And Estelle.

  A screaming, screeching banshee whose moods explode through the household.

  Mum and Dad have surrendered.

  And Will feels as if he’s living on the front line . . .

  A hilarious tale from multi-award-winning author Anne Fine.

  Anne

  Fine

  The Book of the

  Banshee

  For Brigadier Richard Warren,

  with love and gratitude

  I am indebted to Thomas Suthren Hope

  for his magnificent account of his time in

  the trenches, The Winding Road Unfolds,

  Putnam, London, 1937.

  Chapter 1

  TODAY A WRITER came to school and gave a talk to our class and 3B. No one was expecting her, that was quite obvious. Chopper and I noticed her standing about in the entrance hall, waiting for Mrs MacKay to think of someone who might be able to take her off her hands. Chopper thought she was a new teacher, so he took an interest. I pointed out that she couldn’t have come for an interview, the bag on the floor beside her was far too full. And she couldn’t have come to start teaching, either. No one turns up at lunchtime on their first day.

  Then we heard Mrs MacKay rap smartly on her glass screen as Scotbags strolled through the swing doors.

  ‘Mr Scotbeg. Mr Scotbeg! Here’s—’

  She stopped. She wasn’t sure what to call her.

  The woman put on a bit of a patient look.

  ‘Alicia Whitley,’ she said. ‘I’m Alicia Whitley.’

  She didn’t say if she was Miss or Ms or Mrs, and so she didn’t really help poor Mrs MacKay at all. I got the feeling that was deliberate. Alicia Whitley just stood there, watching, with her skirts swaying and her hands stuck deep in her jacket pockets, and all of a sudden I wanted to stay near enough to find out what happened. So nudging Chopper in case he sailed off to registration without me, I dropped on one knee and fiddled with a shoelace. Chopper caught on, and started to inspect the photo of last year’s girls’ hockey eleven. Give Chopper his due, he’s not very bright, but he always knows when I want to hang about and eavesdrop.

  ‘Mrs Whitley,’ said Mrs MacKay. (If she can’t work out if someone’s married or not, she always pretends they are. She thinks it’s much nicer.)

  Scotbags looked blank. He kept his blank look on just long enough to let Alicia Whitley know he hadn’t the faintest idea who she was, and needed enlightening. Then he switched channels to his ‘affable headmaster’ act, all smiles and outstretched paw.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Whitley. Or should I say . . . (nod at the clock, pause, throaty chuckle) . . . afternoon?’

  It was exactly one fifty. Afternoon bell.

  You could see Ms Whitley decide to crack, before Scotbags’ lengthy brainsearch for some clue as to why she was standing there was extended through some tortuous chat about the weather.

  ‘I’m Alicia Whitley the writer,’ she told him. She said the word ‘writer’ quite clearly, so he couldn’t miss or ignore it. ‘I’ve come as arranged four months ago. By Miss Adulewebe.’

  ‘Miss Adulewebe?’

  ‘That’s right.’ In case he started arguing, she pulled an envelope with the school crest out of her jacket pocket, slid out a letter, unfolded it and took a look. ‘Miss Lorna Adulewebe.’

  Was she teasing Old Scotbags? No school would have two Miss Adulewebes, after all.

  ‘Miss Adulewebe,’ groaned Scotbags. He tried not to groan it too badly, but it showed. Miss Adulewebe taught here at Wallace School for only two terms, but she certainly did leave her mark on poor Scotbags. He can’t stand teachers who go around arranging things. It makes work for him, and the man hates work. He thinks he’s paid to walk about smiling and sticking out his paw.

  But Alicia Whitley was getting fed up now.

  ‘Here I am, then,’ she announced. ‘As arranged. In writing. Several months ago. So I suggest you simply show me to your school library, clear me a table, bring in no more than sixty pupils to whom I’ll speak about the business of writing books, and then you can come back and fetch them an hour and a half later.’

  It must have sounded simple enough, even to Scotbags. But he hates arrangements so much he’d obviously have preferred to send her packing with a regretful shrug, and one last affable smile. Perhaps she sensed that, because she suddenly reached down for her enormous bag.

  ‘After all,’ she added lightly. ‘You’ll have to pay me. There’s no question about that. So some of your pupils may as well benefit from my going to the trouble of driving all this distance.’

  Beside me, Chopper whistled gently through clenched teeth. He’s not bright, but he’s not stupid. He recognizes a good Scotbagging when he hears it.

  And Mr Scotbeg, too, knows when he’s beaten.

  ‘Flowers!’ he yelled.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ By now I’d absentmindedly tied one of my shoelaces into a massive and unsightly knot.

  ‘Pick up this lady’s bag and show her to the library. Put out sixty chairs, and clear a table.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Chopper!’

  He’s odd that way, Scotbags. He yells at me by my surname for all the world as if he were the whiskery headmaster in some strict old boarding school, and then bellows ‘Chopper!’, which is only a nickname.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You’re a 3P, aren’t you? Nip along and tell Miss Shaw to send your lot to the library as soon as second bell rings. Then go and ask Mr Astley if he wants to send 3B as well.’

  Get that? Alicia Whitley isn’t expecting anyone in particular. She probably couldn’t care. It makes sense to send 3B. Mr Astley loves knocking off. Any excuse. They once stopped for twenty minutes to look at a rainbow. But ‘tell Miss Shaw to send your lot’! Does Scotbags bother to stroll along and check that Miss Shaw hasn’t spent her entire lunch break setting out complicated apparatus for an experiment, or arranging her slides in order and fixing up the screen and the projector? No, he doesn’t. He picks on Miss Shaw because she’s the most timid member of staff, and wrecks any plans she might have made without so much as an apology.

  Why should I mind? I hate chemistry. So I just bent down and picked up the bag. It weighed so much I thought she must keep bricks in it.

  ‘This way,’ I said.

  ‘Are you a threepy or a threeby?’ she asked. (That’s how she pronounced them. I got the feeling that was how she thought of us: threepies and threebies.)

  I tried to say ‘I’m a 3P.’ But it came out a bit threepy, and that is how I’ve thought of it ever since.

  ‘And how old are you?’

  This wasn’t interest in me. I understood that. It was a quick check over the battleground. Clearly this lady had been in secondary schools before. When I told her, she filed the information away, nodding.

  ‘And what was the last book you read?’

  I wasn’t going to tell her that. The last book I read was the one I read every night now. I bought it seven months ago in a book sale at our branch library. Mum wouldn’t go. She says it’s too depressing to watch our nat
ional heritage being sold off like jumble by the new District Barbarian, but she did give me fifty pence to see if I could pick up a nice Stephen King horror to take her mind off Estelle. (Estelle is my sister.) On the big trestle tables I found a book by William Scott Saffery, The Longest Summer. I just picked it up and opened it.

  In front of me there’s nothing but darkness, then flashes of the guns to right and left. Above my head, one howling banshee shell after another spins past, and the crump of their bursting makes the ground shudder. I know I face the unknown – danger, hardship, wounds, maybe even my own death. But the thought of this fails to touch me. I can think only of heroics, of battles won, of this great war I’ve read so much about, and for so long, in every newspaper that came to hand. What if I had missed it? What if I had been born too late? No need to worry now, for I am here – proud and glad – and that is all that matters. This will be my greatest adventure.

  I didn’t read any further. I simply tucked The Longest Summer firmly under my arm. And though I spent at least an hour longer at the sale, picking up all sorts of books and carrying them about a bit before exchanging them for others (no Stephen Kings, of course. As Mum said sarcastically when I got home, the District Barbarian would never sell them off), that was the only book I never put down again, not even once.

  It’s been under my bed ever since. I hardly read anything else now. I read a chunk of it each night before I put out the light and go to sleep. I can’t work out what it is exactly, but the book haunts me. William Saffery was no older than I am when he lied to the army about his age. He claimed he was eighteen. (This was the middle of the First World War, when men were dying in their thousands, so the army wasn’t checking.) He starts off merrily enough. He’s sitting on the back of a lorry watching the long and winding road unfold behind him – like a grey ribbon, he says – and he’s excited and keen. Of course, within a couple of days I was a lot further into the book, and he was a lot further into the war . . .

  But I don’t want to talk about any of that to someone I’ve never even met before, who only wants to know what I’m reading so she can work out what sort of school she’s in, and what she’s going to talk about for a whole double period.

  So I skipped back a month or so.

  ‘One of the last books I read was Right Ho, Jeeves,’ I told her. ‘Before that, I read Bagthorpes Haunted, and before that, The Viz Annual. I always have to read to my little sister, Muffy, when I put her to bed. She’s into Rumpelstiltskin. I read half of Flowers in the Attic, but I only got that far through because my name’s Will Flowers, so it was a bit of a joke to carry it around for a day or two. We’re reading Far From the Madding Crowd in class, but I went and finished that at home one night, so while they’re all ploughing through it I read Escape from Colditz under the desk.’

  She looked delighted. I don’t think I’ve ever pleased anyone so easily in my whole life.

  ‘But that’s just me,’ I said. ‘Chopper hasn’t read a book the whole time I’ve known him, and some of the others can’t even read, let alone won’t.’

  We’d reached the library by now. I swung her bag of rocks up on a table.

  ‘You’d better not judge by me,’ I warned.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  She meant thanks for warning her, I could tell. She didn’t mean thanks for carrying the rock bag. She could have done that perfectly well by herself. She was only being polite back there, letting Old Scotbags pretend that she couldn’t.

  She looked around. It’s not a bad library. It’s got a few bookshelves with a few books on them. You can’t say fairer than that.

  I started on the chairs. She touched my arm.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’ll do the chairs. You be a poppet and find me a cup of coffee.’

  Be a poppet! I couldn’t believe it. My mother calls Muffy ‘poppet’. Muffy is four!

  I went, though. I didn’t really have much choice. But I made the mistake of calling in at my classroom first for registration, and got caught up in one of The Animal Astley’s endless time-wasting inquisitions.

  ‘You’re going to fetch coffee?’

  ‘It’s not for me. It’s for Alicia Whitley, the writer.’

  ‘Is that this woman Chopper claims is sitting in the library, waiting for you lot and 3B? What is she planning to do with you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Talk to us, I suppose. About her books.’

  ‘But you haven’t been reading any books by Alexa Whitchurch. You lot have been reading Far From the Maddening Crowd.’

  ‘Madding,’ I corrected him. ‘Far From the Madding Crowd.’

  ‘Maddening,’ he insisted. ‘I work in this bear garden. I ought to know.’ He turned to the rest of the class and started bothering them instead of me.

  ‘Hands up anyone who’s ever read a book by someone called Alice Whitford.’

  Marisa began to put up her hand in a soppy kind of way; but as soon as she realized we were all looking at her, she pulled it down again, sharpish.

  Mr Astley grunted.

  ‘Good luck to Alison Whitfield,’ he said. ‘The poor woman probably doesn’t know what she’s in for. I suppose I’d better come along and watch her back for her.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Go along, then! Fetch her coffee!’

  On the way back to the library I ran into the stragglers from 3B and, what with their stupid fooling, spilled nearly all the coffee. But I got what was left to Alicia Whitley just as the rest of them were trailing in. She took it gratefully.

  ‘Thanks, Will.’

  I was relieved she didn’t call me ‘poppet’ again, in front of all the others. But I was also pleased that she’d remembered my name. (It took Mr Astley a whole term.) Chopper had saved a seat for me at the back. When I sat down on it, he was already slumped well down in his own place, staring gloomily at his huge feet.

  ‘A whole double period,’ he groaned. ‘About books!’

  It must be hard if you can barely read.

  She’d put her coffee cup down. Mr Astley stood up to sort us out, but she took one look at him and brushed him aside. It’s not as if he could do much of a job of introducing her to us anyhow. He didn’t know who she was. So she just stood up and dispensed with his services with a polite little wave. He wasn’t a bit put out. He’s not a sulker, and he knows when he’s well off. Gratefully, he subsided onto his chair, and surreptitiously opened one of the files that he’d brought along with him so, if he got bored, he could get on with whatever it was he was doing.

  Swirling her skirts, she started up.

  ‘My name’s Alicia Whitley.’

  That, in itself, caught most people’s attention. We spend whole periods pestering the staff to tell us their first names. When you hear someone her age just stand up and announce theirs, you take a bit of interest.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ she went on. ‘That’s how I earn my living and I’m going to talk to you about writing books.’

  Chopper let out a groan. It was only a little one, a tiny one really. But she still heard it at the front.

  She stopped dead.

  ‘Chopper!’ she ordered. ‘Come down and sit here.’

  She pointed to the row of empty seats at the front.

  Chopper was astonished. So was everyone else (including Mr Astley). I knew already just how quick she was with names, and she’d heard Chopper’s, of course, when Scotbags bellowed at him. But as I’ve already mentioned, Chopper’s not bright, and in the shock of the moment he forgot that.

  He stood up, beet-red and nervous.

  ‘Chum me!’ he whispered, desperate.

  So I stood up, too, and together we threaded our way to the front between the chairs she’d just shoved out in careless wavy rows. Mr Astley stirred in his seat. I thought for a moment he was about to speak up and send me back. You know the sort of thing. ‘Excuse me! I don’t believe I heard anybody mentioning your name . . .’ But it was as if Alicia Whitley saw it coming, and once again she seemed quite amiably
to wave him aside.

  ‘I’ll let Will come with you, Chopper, just so long as you both listen.’

  There was an unmistakable notch-up of tension. You could tell what they were all thinking: ‘Does this woman know everyone’s name?’ And then they all settled down. You can sense it. It is a sort of ‘not worth bothering to make trouble’ mood. I don’t know how it works. Maybe the bright ones relax because they know that someone’s in control and, just for once, everything isn’t going to get spoiled and we might even get some real work done. The piggies in the middle are always happy to be entertained. They’re easy settlers. The thicks go off into daydreams, and, most miraculous of all, the trouble-makers set about fiddling fairly quietly with something that can safely be ignored.

  Chopper sprawled on his new chair, sunk in the deepest despair. And I – I stared at Alicia Whitley.

  I was all ears.

  I don’t know what it was that interested me so much. Part of it might have been that she talked so fast. She talked a blue streak, at about a hundred miles an hour, and that made it feel as if it wasn’t just another boring lesson. Most of the teachers I’ve had talk horribly slowly. Some of them actually come out with the words at half speed, and others sound as if they’re talking normally at first, but when you pay attention you realize that they’re repeating themselves over and over again, first for the thicks in the back row, and then for all the people who’ve only just come in because they’ve been mucking about in the changing rooms, and then, one last time, for all those who’ve been there the whole time but simply weren’t bothering to listen.

  She talked fast, but she never said the same thing twice, so if you weren’t paying attention – bad luck, poof! you missed it. She talked so fast you practically had to sit up straight to hear. She pulled one thing after another out of the bag to show us. Mucky scribbled sheets of paper with huge crossings-out that she said were the first go at the first pages, written at top speed, just to get into it.

  She showed us pages written a bit more neatly, later, with grubby patches where she’d rubbed out over and over again to try things around different ways. On some of the sheets she’d rubbed things out so often she had giant holes in the paper.