by Gwyneth Rees
‘Why don’t you have a cliffhanger ending?’ Connie suggested. ‘They do that on television all the time. Then you can leave all your loose ends and everyone will want you to write a sequel.’
But Uncle Maurice’s brain had now been totally hijacked by dragons and all he could manage in reply was a distracted grunt.
Aunt Alice passed him on her way downstairs, but instead of joining Connie in the kitchen she went straight into the living room to phone back Connie’s mother. Connie heard her aunt confirm the plans for her parents’ visit as she waited for her toast to pop up. Then, just as she was going over to the fridge to get the butter, she heard Aunt Alice start to talk about her. ‘I think you’ll find quite a change – she’s quite the little bookworm now! . . . What? . . . Well, no, it’s not surprising, I suppose, after spending the summer with us, though I never thought I’d see her so interested in fairies. I always thought she was more of a tomboy, like you!’
Connie’s mouth had gone dry. How had her aunt found out about the fairies? Connie had never talked about Ruby and, so far as she knew, her aunt had never been there when Ruby appeared.
‘Yes . . . well . . . it’s a book I’ve never heard of,’ Aunt Alice continued. ‘Fairy Treasures or something . . . I dare say she’ll show it to you when you come next week.’
Connie sighed in relief. Aunt Alice was surprised that she was reading about fairies, that was all. She wasn’t talking about real ones.
At midnight that night, Connie was fast asleep, fully-dressed, on top of her bed when her alarm clock woke her. She was wearing her cropped stripy trousers and her favourite lilac blouse and she had also put on her sparkly necklace and a sparkly hair band, since she knew how much fairies approved of sparkly things.
As she got up and staggered sleepily across the landing towards the stairs, she didn’t hear her aunt and uncle’s bedroom door opening.
It was a cloudy night and the moon and the stars weren’t giving out much light to see by.
‘Ruby?’ she whispered, nervously, after she had climbed in through the library window.
Suddenly the room burst into light and a mass of fairy voices chorused, ‘SURPRISE!’
Connie gasped as she took in the bookshelves draped in twinkling fairy lights and the floor totally covered in a shimmering gold confetti. Numerous fairies, all dressed in fancy crêpe or tissue-paper dresses were smiling at her. There were even little men fairies dressed in leather trousers and brightly coloured tissue-paper shirts. Queen Amethyst was in the middle of the room and, as the music started up, she began to dance in the air most elegantly with a male fairy whose bright-green hair was standing on end. He proudly kicked up his legs and flapped his wings in time to the music.
Ruby waved and Connie went over to join her, taking care to pick her way round the edge of the room so as not to bump into – or stand on – any of the party guests.
All the fairies who weren’t dancing were sitting in little groups on the floor with miniature picnic rugs spread out in front of them. They were unpacking hampers of food and chattering excitedly as they passed round tiny paper plates. Connie saw fairy-sized biscuits shaped like different letters, little sugar-paper tarts with gold full stops on top, and what looked like tiny cheese-and-pineapple punctuation marks on sticks.
Ruby, Emerald and Sapphire were sitting with a boy fairy with black hair and leather bookmark trousers, who was popping open a tiny bottle of fizzy drink. As Connie sat down beside them, Ruby told her that the bottle contained bubbly dew made by flower fairies.
‘Do you think I might be able to see flower fairies from now on as well as book fairies?’ Connie asked.
‘I don’t see why not,’ Ruby replied. ‘If you’re in the right place in the right mind then you should be able to see any kind of fairy.’
Suddenly, one of the book fairies screamed, and pointed to the window. A human face was pressed up against the glass. Its nose was all squidged, but Connie still recognized those dark, piercing eyes and scary eyebrows.
‘Uncle Maurice!’ she gasped. ‘He must have followed me!’
‘Can he see us?’ Emerald leapt up and flapped about in the air, looking terrified.
‘Uncle Maurice isn’t like most other grown-ups,’ Connie said quickly. ‘He believes in fairies and he writes books about other things grown-ups don’t usually believe in – like dragons and aliens and stuff.’
‘Why does he write about dragons and aliens when he could be writing about us?’ Sapphire asked, looking genuinely puzzled.
‘Let’s ask him,’ Ruby said. And before anyone could stop her, she had flown to the window and was calling out, ‘Hi there, Connie’s Uncle Maurice! Why don’t you come inside and join the party instead of standing there staring at us like that?’
As Uncle Maurice was welcomed inside by the fairies, all those who had heard what Connie had said, rushed over to tell him that he must write about them in future, not about silly things like dragons.
‘Here,’ said Sapphire, handing Connie a thimble glass of bubbly dew.
All the fairies in the room had thimbles now and the fairy queen had stopped dancing and was holding up her glass to make a toast.
‘To Connie!’ Queen Amethyst announced. ‘A very brave girl who didn’t believe in fairies or books until now!’
‘TO CONNIE!’ everyone shouted, including Uncle Maurice who was now being handed paper and pens to make notes by at least a dozen fairies, all eager to appear in his next book.
‘I wonder why she said I didn’t believe in books before,’ Connie whispered to Ruby who had flown back over to join her. ‘Everyone believes in books – they’re all around us!’
‘Maybe what she means is that you didn’t believe before that books could be really special,’ Ruby said.
‘I never thought a book could take me away to a completely different place, that’s for sure,’ Connie agreed, looking across at the entry-book, which was still sparkling as it wound down after transporting all the fairies.
‘I wish I could take you back to fairyland to live there with me,’ Ruby said. ‘But I don’t suppose you’d want to come, would you?’
Connie smiled and shook her head. ‘No, but I’m going to miss you an awful lot.’
‘I hope you won’t forget about me. Children are always forgetting about fairies when they grow up.’
‘Of course I won’t forget about you!’ Connie promised. ‘And if my uncle does write a book about fairies next, I’ll ask him if the main character can be called Ruby.’ She suddenly frowned. ‘Mind you, Uncle Maurice’s characters tend to be a bit weird . . . Maybe that’s not such a good idea after all . . .’
‘Maybe you could write a story and put me in it,’ Ruby suggested.
Connie laughed. ‘No way. I hate writing stories.’
‘Really?’ Ruby waited until Connie was looking in the other direction before flying up and sprinkling a handful of fairy dust over her head. ‘We’ll see about that,’ she chuckled to herself, before whizzing off to enjoy the rest of the party.