The Book of the Banshee

by Anne Fine

  And then Estelle turned round. It was incredible. She’d put such lashings of Mum’s precious black stuff round her eyes, she looked like a raccoon.

  Mum went demented. Dad could hardly keep her pinned to the bed while Estelle sailed off towards the door.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ she said. (The Martyr Queen.) ‘I needn’t go. All I have to do is tell Miss Sullivan that you won’t pay for it . . .’

  That one got straight through to Dad. Instantly he was out of bed and on his feet. Released, Mum started howling at Estelle’s departing back: ‘Don’t you dare tell Miss Sullivan any such thing!’ Dad grabbed his jacket and upended it. Everything in his pockets spilled out, and a handful of coins rolled away on the carpet. He snatched them up and, rushing past Muffy, who had just appeared in her pyjamas at the doorway, he flung them as hard as he could down the stairs after Estelle.

  ‘Go on your bloody field trip!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t let us stop you! Go out in the country and have a nice time kicking blackbirds and spitting at the rabbits!’

  Muffy looked horrified. The front door banged. The house shook. Then there was silence. William Scott Saffery says there is no silence like the silence after an attack. It has a quality, he says, so real you can reach out and touch it. It’s like that sometimes after Estelle goes. We wait quietly together. Muffy climbs into the bed, but nobody speaks. And then, at last, Mum and Dad eye one another as they hear the click of the front gate. Cease-fire! Mum sinks back against the pillows, her face white. Sometimes her hands are shaking so badly she can’t even hold the teacup Dad offers her. She has to put it down and have a good cry.

  Sighing (Four? Five? In the heat of the battle I’d entirely lost count), Dad rooted through his pockets and then through Mum’s handbag, and held out the results of his search: one twenty-pound note and twenty-seven pence.

  We’re not allowed to take large banknotes to school.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll make myself a sandwich.’

  ‘You’re a good lad, Will.’

  Mum couldn’t speak. She just gave me a little nod as I leaned over and kissed her goodbye. It takes her hours to get over Estelle.

  There wasn’t anything in the fridge, of course. All I could find was a heel of stale bread and two rather shrivelled carrots. I made a stale carrot sandwich. It wasn’t very nice. Even Chopper raised his eyebrows when he saw it, and he hasn’t won any prizes recently for bringing nutritious and appetizing sandwich combinations into the school lunch hall. We sat together at the paupers’ table, and watched my sister sail past carrying a plate piled high with chips and salad and pizza.

  I did my imitation of the last reel of Exorcist IV. Tipping my chair back, I flattened myself against the wall in mock terror, and held up my fingers in the shape of a cross.

  I croaked out in hoarse, broken whispers:

  ‘See that thing there, Chopper? It looks right, doesn’t it? And it sounds right. It even walks right. But beware, Chopper! Beware! That thing there is not my sister!’

  At my side, Chopper slid down in his chair so far he was practically under the table. All you could see were the whites of his eyes.

  ‘’Tis the Banshee of Beechcroft Avenue!’ His voice grated over the words like feet over gravel in a graveyard. ‘Those who do hear her wail by day lay cold as stones by nightfall!’

  ‘Cover your ears!’

  ‘And watch her floating by, pale wraith of Death, pulling her cloak around her bony shoulders like a shroud.’

  We’d learned it all from one of the books I’d picked up for Muffy at a branch library sale: Tales of the Unnatural. Mum wouldn’t let me read it to Muffy, so I read it to Chopper instead. He’d liked the bit about the Banshee best. But since he couldn’t remember any more, now he just took one last forlorn look across the room at Estelle, and finished up sadly:

  ‘She always used to be all right. She was good fun, in fact. She let me run the bank in Monopoly, even though I get muddled.’

  ‘She used to lend me her skateboard even when she wanted it herself. Now she hasn’t touched it for a year, but if I so much as lay a foot on it, she flies out of her cage.’

  ‘She spat tintacks at me yesterday when I called her Stelly.’

  I was horrified. ‘You never dared call her Stelly!’

  He turned a wistful look on me. ‘We used to be able to call her Stelly.’

  I poked my horrible sandwich. ‘She used to be all right.’

  Now Chopper’s wistful look seemed to have redirected itself towards my plate. ‘Are you eating that thing?’ he asked me. ‘Because, if you’re not, I’ll swap it for the rest of this yoghurt. I think it’s gone off.’

  I nodded after Estelle.

  ‘I expect that’s because she walked past it.’

  His eyes followed mine. Estelle was sitting with a pack of her mates. (Miss Adulewebe used to call them The Coven.) When they saw Chopper and me watching, they stuck out their tongues. Flora’s was covered with cottage cheese.

  Chopper picked up what was left of my carrot sandwich. I dipped a finger in his yoghurt pot. It tasted perfectly all right to me.

  ‘I’m writing a book about what’s going on at our house,’ I confessed suddenly. ‘What I intend to do is set down the whole grim and appalling story exactly as it happens.’

  Chopper turned and stared. I realized that, without thinking, I had used William Scott Saffery’s stiff and old-fashioned turn of phrase.

  And then, by the strangest coincidence, Chopper responded with the very same words as Chalky, when William finally explained to him exactly what it was he was so determinedly scribbling in all the quiet times between attacks.

  ‘Why waste your time, Will? After all, you’ll never get to finish it.’

  Chapter 3

  I WILL, THOUGH. I know I will. In our very first lesson with Miss Adulewebe, she told us the secret of writing anything. ‘Get your bum on your seat.’ Everyone argued, but she was adamant. ‘Honestly. That is the hardest part. Sit down and pick up your pen, and after that it’s downhill all the way.’ She said it with perfect confidence that morning, though I admit she never said it again. I don’t think Marisa’s silly giggling put her off so much as the fact that, once she’d read some of Chopper’s written work, she didn’t believe it any longer. She’d bitten dust.

  Poor Chopper just can’t write. He has no problem speaking. Words tend to come out of his mouth in a sensible order. But ask him to write them down, and what you get is some thick claggy mess that goes round and round, but never reaches a full stop. None of it makes any sense.

  ‘I can’t read this,’ Miss Adulewebe said, when he handed in his first effort.

  Chopper just sighed. He tried to comfort her the same way he comforts other teachers. ‘Never mind, miss. Perhaps it will be better when Will’s helped me turn it into English.’

  She turned and scowled. I think she thought he was joking. She didn’t know that that’s how we’ve been going on ever since Mr Astley took a major fit after struggling through Chopper’s desperate account of five main climate types. (‘You’ve crucified my subject, Chopperly! Crucified it!’) Chopper was terribly hurt. He sulked till the end of the lesson, when Mr Astley ambled over to apologize and offer him one of his peppermints. Then he cheered up. But after that, Chopper almost always asked me to go through his homework for him. I didn’t mind. He’s a good friend. And I don’t get in any trouble. Everyone who teaches Chopper knows that he and the untangled paragraph are all but perfect strangers. At least with me scorching through his written work first, they get a clearer run. It isn’t cheating, since they mark him down.

  But till Miss Adulewebe came along, no one had been insensitive enough to make remarks about the way we operate. She tipped the applecart over. She made us do a timed exercise under her nose: ten study questions on To Kill A Mockingbird. I chummed Chopper through the first seven, but then I had to leave early for the dentist just as Miss Adulewebe said, ‘Ten minutes more
!’

  Like a fool, Chopper finished it.

  It came back a few days later, dropped from a great height onto our double desk. Unnerved, Chopper made the mistake of asking,

  ‘How was it?’

  Miss Adulewebe looked us up and down and said with withering scorn:

  ‘To the extent that it was written by Will here, it was all right, I suppose. To the extent that it was written by you, Chopper, it was irredeemably frightful.’

  No, she didn’t mince words, Miss Adulewebe. Still, I liked her lessons. Never again was she rash enough to claim that all there was to writing was getting your bum on a seat and picking up your pencil, but she did deal out reams of other advice. She warned Stormer Phillips as early as the third week of term that if he was ill-advised enough to give her one more piece of written work stuffed with his brainless comic-speak (‘Pow!’ ‘Bang!’ ‘Yipes!’ ‘Aaaargh!’) she’d personally rip his ears off. She told Marisa that if she ever again ended an essay with the words ‘And then I woke up and found it was all a dream’, she’d find herself on the floor. And she was mighty rude to me, always flapping my essays around my ears before she gave them back.

  ‘You shouldn’t be sitting next to Chopper. It makes you smug and lazy.’

  No, Miss Adulewebe didn’t have much patience. I think that’s why she left. Scotbags made me lug some of her stuff out to her car on the last day. (‘You’re a hulking great lad, Flowers! Carry Miss Adulewebe’s boxes for her. Jump to it!’)

  She turned from stowing everything away neatly on the back seat. ‘Oh, it’s you. Good. I have something to say to you.’

  It sounded a bit threatening.

  ‘What have I done?’

  She drew herself up, leaned against the car door, and gave me a good long look.

  ‘I’ll tell you your problem, Will Flowers. You write things down all right, but then you always take very great care to leave out what you feel. Keep on like that, and everything you ever write will be entirely bloodless.’

  Charming. I carry her boxes for her. She puts a curse on me.

  Chopper sidled up just as the car shot off, spurting out clouds of black oil fumes.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  But it stuck in my mind. And, naturally, now I’ve decided to write a whole book, I worry she might be right, and I’m not saying enough about how I feel when 27 Beechcroft Avenue gets turned upside down by my ferocious sister rattling her cage bars. But it’s not easy. Often I don’t know. I am a bit like poor Muffy when she ends up in the no man’s land of the middle of the carpet just as Estelle decides it’s a good time to fire a shot or two at Mum and Dad.

  ‘Alison’s having a party on Friday night and I’ve said I’m going. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  Muffy’s eyes widen. Since she adores Estelle, part of her wants to climb in her lap just as she always has when anything makes her unhappy or nervous. But the rest of her wants to run for cover. And so she’s torn. The poor thing ends up standing there paralysed in her yellow bedtime gnome suit with the built-in feet, sucking her thumb harder and harder as things hot up.

  ‘Which Alison is this, Estelle?’

  ‘Will her parents be there?’

  ‘What time will it finish?’

  Sometimes there is an unexpected break in fire. ‘I think I remember Alison! Wasn’t she that nice girl we met once at the swimming pool? She looked rather sensible.’ And Muffy’s eyes light up. Maybe she even feels brave enough to shuffle over and lean against Estelle’s end of the sofa. But before long the argument is raging again.

  ‘It’s not fair! I’m not a baby like Muffy! Why can’t I go?’

  Muffy’s face falls. The most she’ll manage now is to uncork her thumb just long enough to plead: ‘Not a game, Stelly! Not a game!’

  And who thinks it’s a game? Certainly not Estelle. You’d think, to hear her, that one of her ambitions all life long had been to go to Alison’s party. And certainly I don’t. I realize straight away it’s curtains for my chances of getting any help from anyone with my French before tomorrow’s test. And Mum and Dad get furious with Estelle for setting off these grinding barrage attacks, day after day, about what she can wear and where she can go, and what time she has to be back again.

  Mum takes Estelle aside time and again.

  ‘You listen to me, young lady. You had a peaceable enough time when you were Muffy’s age. Why should your sister have to grow up forever listening to you fighting your battles? What sort of childhood is that? Why can’t you show a bit of self-control?’

  And she might even try. But it won’t last. Hardly an hour goes by, and she is off again.

  ‘I don’t see why I can’t go to this party. Everyone else is going. And one o’clock isn’t all that late.’

  This time it’s Dad’s turn to try and spike her guns.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Estelle! Can’t we get peacefully through one single meal? Remember what your mother said. This isn’t fair on Muffy.’

  ‘Muffy!’ Her voice brims with scorn. ‘Muffy’s all right.’ She turns to her. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Beaming, Muffy nods.

  ‘See!’ triumphs Estelle. ‘She’s all right. She doesn’t mind.’

  Mum didn’t say anything, but I saw her glancing anxiously at Dad, and I knew what she was thinking. Dr Rombauer at the clinic insists that it’s just a stage Muffy’s going through, hardly ever speaking. She’ll soon grow out of it and ‘make with the words’, as he puts it. But Mum sometimes worries that, with all the endless wrangling in the house, Muffy might stay silent for ever.

  Unlike Estelle. She was off on another tack.

  ‘And I don’t see why I have to go round never saying what I think, and not standing up for myself, just so Muffy can grow up in some fairy tale!’

  Dad sighs. ‘There’s nothing fairy-tale about wanting a little bit of peace and quiet during a meal . . .’

  ‘There is if you live in—’

  I block my ears, so I don’t have to listen. Muffy might not mind, but I do. I’ve heard Estelle too often before, reeling off the names of one war-torn country after another. Now I’ve read The Longest Summer, I hate to be reminded that there are boys the same age as William Saffery and myself toting their guns in all the places on her dreadful list. I didn’t stop pressing my fingers in my ears until I thought I was safe because I saw Dad was speaking.

  It was a pity that the first remark he made was that she should drop the whole subject till after we’d finished our meal.

  Mistake! Mistake! That simply set Estelle off about how lucky we all were to be eating at all. Muffy looked down at her bacon pie, mystified. And before anybody could step in, Estelle set about explaining to Muffy how there were others our age all over the world, starving in famines and slums and refugee camps because people like Mum and Dad were so busy stuffing bacon pie down the throats of their own families, they had no time to think about other people’s children.

  Mum lost her temper.

  ‘That’s enough, Estelle!’

  (Mum hates to cook, so if there’s one thing she can’t stand at meals, it’s base ingratitude.)

  Estelle went quiet, and started to shunt her food moodily around her plate, making a point of not taking any mouthfuls. The poison of her mood rolled over the table like a cloud of gas, but unlike William Saffery in his trench, we hadn’t been issued with masks so we had no protection. First Muffy’s spoon drifted to a halt. She couldn’t eat for worrying about Estelle not finishing her supper. Dad raised his eyes to heaven and laid down his fork. Without thinking, I stopped too, waiting to see what happened.

  Determinedly, Mum kept on swallowing. But you could tell from the look on her face that each mouthful tasted more like cardboard than the last.

  In the end even she gave up, and pushed her food away.

  ‘Well done, Estelle,’ she said. ‘Another meal ruined.’

  Estelle was furious.

  ‘That’s right!
Blame me! Of course, it has to be my fault.’

  Slamming her knife and fork down, she flounced out, banging the door hard behind her. In the silence that followed, Dad swivelled round to face Muffy. Stretching a finger out, he caught one of her fat shiny tears just as it brimmed over to roll down her cheek.

  ‘Pudding,’ he said, inspecting it closely and smacking his lips. ‘Yum, yum!’

  Muffy brightened. The tear on the other cheek rolled down and away, but no more welled up in her eyes to replace them. Dad turned the other way, to Mum, patting her hand on the table. Putting on a fruity old-fashioned army brigadier’s voice, he said to her:

  ‘That’s War for you, my darling.’ Thrusting his jaw out, he stared across the room. ‘And War is Hell . . .’

  Mum wasn’t in the mood. She nodded angrily towards the door.

  ‘I’ll tell you that young lady’s problem. She doesn’t know who her friends are. Will is enough of a pain—’

  I glanced up in surprise. Oh, yes? How come it’s Estelle who flounces out, but suddenly we’re talking about me?

  ‘—blaring that frightful music out of his room night and day, and sticking those horrible posters all over his nice honeysuckle wallpaper. Disappearing into his bedroom at the first sign of having to pitch in with the housework—’

  ‘Excuse me!’ I broke in. ‘I am still sitting here. Alive. With two ears that work.’

  More than hers did, I can tell you. She just kept on.

  ‘Will’s bad enough, forever shambling about like something Frankenstein knocked up at night. Bursting through doors without bothering to stop and turn the handle. Picking the leaves off every houseplant he walks past. Chewing his bus tickets so half the time he ends up paying twice—’

  I’d given up. I simply sat staring as she poured out this catalogue of failings I hadn’t even known I had.