The Book of the Banshee

by Anne Fine

  ‘Getting in all those stupid fights with Stormer Phillips on the way home from school, and setting fire to next-door’s shed like that, and saying, “Eh?” like a halfwit whenever anybody speaks to him—’

  ‘Steady on, old girl!’

  (Brigadier Flowers getting it together at last.)

  But it was too late. She’d almost finished with me anyway.

  ‘Will is enough of a pain. But Estelle!’ She leaned across the table. Her sleeve fell in the bacon pie, but she didn’t notice. ‘We do our best, and she just treats us like enemies. At least Will’s not like that. At least he’s always known who’s on his side.’

  She turned to me.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ she demanded, just the way Estelle speaks to Muffy.

  Like Muffy, I couldn’t help beaming and nodding. But I was not so sure. I don’t know who’s on whose side. This isn’t war. Mind you, sometimes I think it might be a whole lot simpler if we went round in different coloured uniforms to show where our sympathies lay in each particular battle. ‘Oh, look. She’s one of us today. She’s wearing khaki.’ ‘Watch out for him. He’s just gone up to change back into field grey.’

  But it probably wouldn’t work. Even William Scott Saffery had problems working out who was the enemy. As I helped Mum and Dad clear the table, I thought about the time he was scrambling back from a night raid and a shell fell so close it blasted him out of his senses. He crawled off, bleeding steadily, the wrong way through no man’s land, but the sweep of a machine gun over the field of mud and wire soon sent him hurtling into the safety of a shell hole. A flare shot up and fell in an arc of livid green. In its brief light, he watched bullets flying over the lip of the hole. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Then suddenly into his private swamp of mud and blood fell someone else in desperate need of shelter. Whoever it was landed heavy as a saddlebag. As William rolled to face this new danger, another flare shot up. The bilious light hung for its few long moments in the sky, and William and the other boy looked gravely at one another. Then, with no words, the two of them came to an understanding. Gently, so as not to startle someone no older than himself into a deadly mistake, the boy lifted his arm, and pointed out the true direction of William’s front line. In return, William drew back his bayonet.

  Will got back safely. That night, he says, he hoped aloud to God the other boy did too. ‘I felt no enmity,’ he wrote. ‘Why should I? Without the dying splutter of the flare, how would I even have known that, where mud and blood had failed to cover it, his uniform was not, like mine, khaki, but the dreaded field grey?’

  And that’s how I feel about Estelle. She doesn’t chew Mum’s plants, or burn down sheds. She even opens door quietly. (Makes up for that, of course, the way she slams them shut.) She doesn’t say ‘Eh?’ and no one would ever call her an idiot. (They wouldn’t dare.) She doesn’t get on their nerves in exactly the same ways as I do. She has her own style. But that doesn’t make her my enemy. And sometimes I even think Estelle has right on her side. You take the row at supper. Was what she said so terrible? Was it so wrong? We all watch television. We see the news. We know all about the children she’s describing to Muffy. We’ve seen them staring through the netting of their camps, or wasting away on their mats. Maybe Estelle is right, and we shouldn’t sit filling our faces with pie day after day, not even talking about them because it’s ‘rude’.

  But then sometimes I think she’s wrong. She’s got the wrong end of the stick. It’s not that Mum and Dad don’t care about horrible things. I know they do. I’ve heard Mum often enough, when Dad leans forward to change television channels. ‘Oh, no, George. Not the news. Not tonight, please. I couldn’t stand it.’

  That’s not indifference. That’s simply having had enough.

  And what’s the point of going on and on about terrible things, if you can’t stop them? Mum’s not the only person in the world who wants to blot them out. Last week, when Gran borrowed me and Estelle to shift some furniture around in her bedroom, we came across an old cardboard dress box full of photographs at the bottom of the wardrobe. Estelle picked out one of five fancy ladies sitting on a bench at the seaside, dressed up as if they were about to go to church. In front of them, stabbing the sand with a little wooden spade, was someone the same age as Muffy. We couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  Gran took a look.

  ‘That’s my grandmother.’

  ‘Yours?’

  Gran gave Estelle a warning look.

  ‘People my age didn’t come out of tins,’ she said tartly.

  ‘And who are all the ladies?’

  ‘My great-grandmother and her four sisters.’ She pointed one by one along the line. ‘Rose, Elsie, Greta, Matty and Daisy.’

  Estelle rooted in the box. A few layers down, she found what was almost the same photo over again. There was the same wide line of white hotels facing the sands, the same tall lampstands curving over the promenade. But, this time, the child on the beach was old enough to have built a sandcastle with a wide foaming moat and four magnificent turrets.

  And this time the sisters were all dressed in black.

  ‘Everyone was in mourning by then,’ explained Gran. ‘It was such a terrible war!’ She stroked the photo and a memory came back. ‘Do you know, my grandmother told me once that when she ran down to the beach on their first holiday after the war, she couldn’t understand why the sea sounded so different. She asked her mother, “Where’s that other noise?” and Rose glanced at her sisters. “What other noise, dear?” said Aunty Matty. “The waves sound just the same, surely.” But my grandmother persisted. “Yes, the waves sound the same. But where’s the noise you told me was the huge rocks on the sea bed, rolling and banging against one another?” One by one, the aunts looked away uneasily and wouldn’t answer her. And Grandmother realized for the very first time that, during all those endless summer days spent on the beach, what she’d been hearing was the guns in France.’

  I felt quite sick. Gran handed me the photograph to put back in the box, and I couldn’t even bear to glance at it again, knowing that, summer after long summer those sisters had sat in a row and listened to the guns that were killing their husbands and brothers and uncles, and said nothing in front of the children.

  ‘Didn’t they care?’ Estelle demanded.

  ‘Of course they cared,’ Gran replied. ‘People with self-control don’t have any fewer feelings. They felt the same as anyone else when they were handed their black-edged telegrams.’

  ‘But not to say!’

  Gran shrugged.

  ‘Stiff upper lip.’

  Estelle went mad.

  ‘Fools!’ she yelled. ‘Idiots! Couldn’t they see it was a waste? Didn’t they realize that it was self-control like theirs that let that horrible war go on for years?’

  Gran didn’t argue with her. Neither did I. Perhaps Estelle’s right, and people should speak up more. There is a bit in William Saffery’s book when he leans back in a ditch and lets himself daydream about what he would say if he had the chance to show the Big Brass round the battlefield. He’d tell them what he thought of their great ‘war to end all wars’. His words burn off the page, and I can hear behind his scorching sarcasms, his bitter wit, the scathing tones of Estelle. Though he probably died of old age before she was born, and she’s not read his book, the two of them have a lot in common. Neither would trade a child’s unruffled summers on the beach for nothing said about the war in France.

  In fact, sometimes, late at night, I get confused. I put down the book and lie in the dark, thinking about what I’ve read, and an image swims up in front of me. I see the slight young body in the uniform, the tousled hair. But it’s Estelle’s face I see, though it’s a boy’s face. And when his withering descriptions of all the horrors he sees around ring in my head, it’s Estelle’s voice I hear.

  And that’s not surprising. Some of the things they say sound so alike. But he stayed in the war month after month. Oh, he wr
ote his doubts down secretly when he could; but he kept shooting at those other boys, not very much older than himself. Estelle would never have done that. She would have flung her rifle in a ditch, rather than be a part of anything about which she had so many doubts.

  Who’s braver? Who cares more?

  I’m more like William, I know. I’d see it through. Whether you kick up a storm about something is really a matter of the way you are, or the way you’ve been brought up. It doesn’t prove what you feel. Surely it’s only chance – like the colour of the uniform you end up wearing if you’re about my age when war starts up, or the colour of ink you happen to have in your pen the day you start writing a book about your sister.

  So I’m not going to worry any more about The Curse of Miss Adulewebe. Teachers aren’t always right. If I don’t choose to litter this book with my feelings, that’s my affair. It could still be a good book. William Scott Saffery didn’t go on and on about what he felt all the time. He simply set down what he saw – simple as that. He turned himself into the eyes and ears of war, and grimly and determinedly wrote it down, every last horror, exactly as it happened.

  The Impeccable War Reporter. That’ll be me.

  Chapter 4

  FRIDAY 29TH SEPTEMBER. 07.52 hours. Dawn Attack!

  Dad was the first to sense danger. As usual I was up and dressed, and standing at the end of their bed, rooting through pockets in search of lunch money. Mum couldn’t be seen at all. She was under the downie. Dad’s head was on the pillow, his eyes closed. I thought he was clinging to the last shreds of sleep, but suddenly his eyes snapped open. I froze. I wondered for a moment if he was going to tell me off. Had I picked a leaf off the geranium without thinking? Had I barged through the door like something Dr Frankenstein knocked up at night? But no. He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring up at the ceiling. And when he spoke, it was in the clipped tones of the experienced military officer, Leader of Men:

  ‘It’s too quiet out there. I don’t like it.’

  Mum didn’t stir.

  Dad went on in hushed and urgent whispers in spite of the fact that, hidden underneath her downie mound, Mum obviously couldn’t hear a word.

  ‘It was like this once before, Flowers. Do you remember? Silent as armistice morning. We could hear nothing out there. Nothing. No bleating about lost school books. No squabbling over the last few coins for lunch money. No moaning about how long other people were hogging the bathroom. Then, suddenly – do you remember? All hell let loose! They hurled everything they had at us!’ He threw himself under the downie. ‘Dawn attack!’

  The door burst open. But it was only Muffy. She padded over in her little yellow gnome suit and stood beside the bed, looking at both lumps of downie. Then she poked the side that was Dad.

  ‘Stelly’s not going,’ she told it.

  Part of the downie flinched. A muffled voice came out from a fortified bulge.

  ‘Not going where?’

  ‘School.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  There was no further response, though Muffy waited a while, watching the bed, in case one or another of the lumps heaved into life. But when after a couple of minutes nothing had happened, she turned and padded back to the door.

  As soon as it clicked behind her, the bedclothes flew down, and Brigadier Flowers took up his War Memoirs.

  ‘We’d faced this sort of attack before, of course. We called it “The Banshee” because it seemed to come out of nowhere with no warning, an ominous portent of impending doom—’

  Mum pushed back her side of the downie.

  ‘Are you getting up, George? Or do I have to go down and sort everyone out before I get dressed for work?’

  Dad looked quite horrified.

  ‘No, no!’ he said. ‘You stay here. It’s far safer!’

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and reached for his dressing gown. Mum fell back in the bed. Dad turned to me.

  ‘Right, lad,’ he said, handing me last night’s tea tray. ‘Watch my back. I’m going down there to face your sister. I want steady covering fire.’

  ‘Could I have some lunch money?’

  He brushed me aside.

  ‘Later, lad. Later. Can’t you see there’s a war on?’

  ‘Mu-um?’

  She pulled the downie over her head, and groaned.

  I followed Dad out of the room.

  ‘I had a piccalilli sandwich yesterday,’ I told him. ‘The day before that, I had to have mint sauce on crackers. I need some lunch money, Dad. I want proper food.’

  ‘Ssshh, lad. Keep your voice down.’

  He was creeping along the landing. As he drew level with the bathroom door, he drew himself up and banged on its panels.

  ‘Hurry along in there!’ he shouted. ‘There are other people waiting!’

  Just at that moment Muffy padded up, looked at him as if he were mad, pushed the bathroom door open and went in. It had been empty.

  Dad crept on down the stairs, making the banisters take his weight so there were fewer warning creaks.

  ‘Da-ad—’

  He wasn’t listening. Outside the kitchen door he paused to brace himself. Then he threw open the door. Estelle was sprawled at the table, still wearing her dressing gown and slippers. Her hair was a rat’s nest. Beside her, a mug sat in a little pool of spilled coffee, some of which was soaking up her sleeve. She didn’t care. She was idly painting her nails green and reading a pop magazine that was propped up against a milk carton. On its cover was a photograph of the lead singer of the Black Plague Rats, leaping up out of a sewer and waving his guitar.

  ‘Morning, Estelle,’ said Dad.

  She lifted her head and scowled at him.

  ‘I’m not going,’ she announced. ‘I told Muffy to tell you. I’m not going to school.’

  Dad took the tray from me and put it down on the draining board. Deftly, he refilled the kettle, plugged it in, and slid the dirty cups off the tea tray.

  ‘You have to go to school, dear,’ he told her. ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘Then the law’s stupid,’ Estelle said.

  Dad reached up for the tea caddy.

  ‘And so will you be, dear, if you don’t go.’

  I grinned. (I couldn’t help it.) Estelle turned and caught me at it. She shot me such a poisonous look that when Dad glanced in her direction, he went pale. And he only caught the tail end of it.

  ‘More coffee?’ he asked her as brightly as he could.

  Her face went black.

  ‘No.’

  Dad’s bright tone took on a bit of a steely edge.

  ‘No, what, Estelle?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said with real venom.

  ‘That’s better, dear.’ He turned back to the kettle. ‘Now tell me what’s bothering you,’ he said, and it was only because I came up behind him to get the cornflake packet out of the corner cupboard that I heard him adding quietly, under his breath: ‘You miserable, bad-tempered old maggot.’

  Estelle must have caught something.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He didn’t dare repeat it.

  ‘I said tell Daddy why you don’t feel like going to school today.’

  Estelle tried to push her hair back impatiently, in one of those film-star gestures she picks up off Flora. But it was so long since she’d brushed it properly, her hand got caught in the tangles.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t feel like it. I’m just not going. It’s a waste of time. I’ve gone for years and years and years, and I’m not going any longer. I’ve had enough.’

  Dad heaped Mum’s crunchy granola into a bowl on the tea tray.

  ‘You have to go to school, Estelle,’ he said. ‘It’s education, you see. Education. It’s what distinguishes Man—’

  Proudly, he threw his chest out and pointed to himself. Then he snatched up her magazine, and pointed to the lead singer of the Black Plague Rats.

  ‘– from Animal.’

  Estelle snatched the magazine back.<
br />
  ‘Not in our school, it isn’t! We don’t do anything worth doing. We never get to learn anything. Nobody ever listens. We never do anything interesting. And, if we do, Mark Hanley and Rich Sheens muck about all the time, and ruin it. So I’m not going. It’s just a cosmic waste of time.’

  I thought she had a point. Dad didn’t, though.

  ‘It can’t all be a waste of time, Estelle. You must have learned something over the years. You can read, can’t you?’

  Estelle went back to her nails.

  ‘Mum says she taught me to read. It wasn’t school. She says if Miss Philomena had her way, I’d still be staring at non-sexist, non-racist, nonclassist work sheets, unable to decipher a single word. She says she had to go round to Gran and dig out all her old Janet and John books. Then I could read in a week.’

  Dad was trying very hard to pretend he wasn’t hearing this.

  ‘And you can write.’

  Estelle was outraged.

  ‘I like that! What a cheek! You’re always on at me about my writing!’

  Dad made the mistake of persisting.

  ‘And you know things! You know where France and Russia are – oh, no. You don’t know where they are, do you? That came up only yesterday . . .’

  Estelle moved in for the kill.

  ‘See? See? You know it’s useless! You and Mum have been going on about how useless it is for years and years.’ She made the bilious green fingernails of one hand chatter to the nails of the other, imitating Mum and Dad having one of their five million conversations a week about the sorry state of affairs at Wallace Secondary School. ‘“What does she do all day, that’s what I’d like to know.” “Well, she certainly doesn’t seem to learn anything.” “That’s true. Do you know, I found out today that she doesn’t even have the faintest idea where Russia is. Russia!” “That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I don’t think they teach them anything. I don’t think they even bother to look at their work.” “They most certainly don’t bother to correct it!”’

  It was a pretty good imitation. Dad looked embarrassed.

  Estelle put the boot in properly as she picked up her bottle of nail polish, and drifted towards the door.