Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe)

by Siobhán Parkinson

  Beverley was furious. Who did this local boy, this – this – this yobbo think he was, telling her how to behave? And on her expedition. She hadn’t even invited him.

  ‘Oh shut up you too, Kevin Mulrooney,’ she snapped at him. ‘You’re nothing but – but – but a shopkeeper’s son and a culchie to boot!’

  Elizabeth drew in her breath sharply. Gerard looked as if he would burst into tears.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with having a shop,’ Kevin snapped back, ‘or with being a culchie either. Better than a snotty-nosed townie any day, anyways.’ (He pronounced it anny-ways, to Beverley’s deep disgust.)

  ‘And if the culchies are so terrible,’ he went on, before Beverley could snap back again, ‘why do you come down here on your holidays, you stuck-up snob, you? Is it a thing that ye can’t get enough air up there in Dublin or what? All traffic and dirt and crime and people running around with their mobile phones, trying to look important, that’s all Dublin is. And then ye come down here for the summer and look down yeer pointy little noses at us and ask us have we no posta or gorr-lick and “whot taim does the Gawrdian come in?” and “is there nowhere around here we con get a deecent cup of express-oah?” Ah, ye make me sick, lettin’ on to be English or French or whatever it is, and afraid to be seen dead puttin’ red sauce on yeer chips.’

  Gerard started to giggle nervously.

  Beverley was bright red. She didn’t know how to respond to this attack, partly because, if she were quite honest, she recognised herself in what Kevin had said. She had asked him that very question about the Guardian the other day, and she’d heard her mother giving out about not being able to get a cup of espresso in the pub.

  ‘There’s no need to be so bloody rude,’ she mumbled, unconsciously feeling her nose to see if it was pointy. ‘And that goes for you too, Specky,’ she added viciously to Gerard.

  Gerard blushed deeply and pushed his glasses up his nose with an anxious little movement.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kevin gruffly. ‘But you were rude to me first, and there’s no need to take it out on the young lad either. And it’s a nice shop, so it is.’

  ‘It’s a grand shop,’ said Elizabeth brightly, eager to smooth over this little unpleasantness. ‘And it’s true, Beverley, you were rude to him first.’ She didn’t say anything about how rude Beverley’d been to Gerard. It seemed being rude to him was acceptable.

  ‘Well, I didn’t ask him to come,’ said Beverley sulkily. ‘Don’t you start taking his side.’

  ‘Look, would the pair of you give it over and act your ages?’ Elizabeth pleaded. ‘And can I just get on with this story?’

  Beverley simmered, but she didn’t argue any more. She knew she’d been horrible to Kevin, but she couldn’t bring herself to apologise as he had done. Better let Elizabeth’s intervention do instead. She sniffed, and shrugged her shoulders. And anyway her nose wasn’t pointy, she knew that.

  ‘One day,’ Elizabeth continued, with her eyes closed again, ‘they went for a walk in the woods. And as they went along, they ate the berries that they found there.’

  Beverley couldn’t help snorting at this, and she started to wash up the breakfast things noisily in protest, but she didn’t raise any more objections to Elizabeth’s story. She stopped for a moment to thrust a tea-towel at Kevin.He might as well make himself useful, now that they were stuck with him. He wiped away agreeably enough, but Beverley could see his mind wasn’t on the job. He was listening to Elizabeth and her precious story.

  ‘Not because they were hungry,’ said Elizabeth, raising her voice above the clattering of the dishes, ‘but because the berries were so delicious. They looked just like really ripe blackberries, except that they were as big as plums, and they tasted like really ripe blackberries too. At least, that’s what one of the children thought. Another of them thought they tasted like enormous cherries, and another thought they tasted like honey-sweet melons. In fact, the berries were enchanted berries, and they tasted of whatever it was you most enjoyed eating. For some people they even tasted like fish and chips. For this reason, the children called them wishberries.’

  ‘Wishberries!’ Gerard breathed. ‘Did you hear that, Fat? Wishberries.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Kevin appreciatively, but quietly, so as not to offend Beverley more than was really necessary.

  ‘Humph!’ said Beverley.

  ‘Now, what the children didn’t know was that the wishberries were enchanted in another way also. Pigberries they were called by the locals, because it was said that if you ate them you would turn into a pig.’

  Elizabeth paused for effect.

  ‘Go on, Elizabeth, did they turn into pigs?’ asked Gerard. Beverley was moving the dishes more quietly now.

  ‘Well, that was the funny thing, you see,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They did and they didn’t.’

  ‘Woo-oo!’ said Gerard, his eyes wide.

  ‘They did and they didn’t?’ repeated Beverley, who didn’t like ambiguity. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That is to say,’ said Elizabeth carefully, her audience silent now with anticipation, ‘one of them turned into a pig, one of the older ones, a girl, but the others didn’t.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Gerard.

  ‘Because,’ said Elizabeth, ‘because they were all turning into other things.’

  ‘Gosh!’ whispered Gerard.

  ‘You see, pigberries was not quite an accurate name. It is true that a local person had turned into a pig after eating the berries, but the way the berries worked was like this: you turned into whatever animal you most resembled. This particular person had happened to turn into a pig and so they were called pigberries.

  ‘The eldest, a boy, he turned into a very tall and beautiful black heron, with very long spindly legs and a long, black neck and wonderful glowing coal-black feathers. When he wanted to talk to his brothers and sisters, he had to duck down very carefully so that he didn’t catch his neck in the branches of the trees, as he was very tall.’

  ‘You never said they were brothers and sisters,’ interrupted Beverley. She seemed to have stopped washing up, though she’d only got halfway through.

  ‘Did I not?’ said Elizabeth with a frown. ‘Well, they were.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Gerard wistfully. ‘Three brothers and sisters must be nice.’

  ‘Then, as I said,’ Elizabeth went on, ‘the next, a girl, she turned into a pig, a small, dainty sort of a pig with an extremely curly tail and dumpy, stumpy little legs which she had to move very quickly in order to make any kind of progress over the ground at all.

  ‘And the other girl, she became a fawn, swift as the wind and lithe as a lath.’

  ‘Lithe as a lath?’ exclaimed Beverley. ‘You can’t say that! Laths aren’t lithe.’

  Elizabeth considered for a moment. ‘Poetic licence,’ she said at last. ‘Anyway, they made all their laths of willow in that country, you know, which is very springy.’

  ‘Very springy!’ repeated Beverley scornfully, far from satisfied with this explanation.

  ‘What about the last one, the other boy?’ Gerard asked.

  ‘Oh yes, well, he turned into a furry little hamster, a nice chocolate-brown one, a bit on the slim side for a hamster, but very warm and comforting to hold.

  ‘But the strange thing was, the children didn’t know that they had changed into these creatures at all. The heron went stepping on through the woods, carefully lowering his head from time to time to talk to the piglet and the piglet went trotting along as fast as her trotters would carry her and still not getting very far, and the fawn went leaping and sailing through the air, her pretty little hooves barely skimming the ground, and the poor little hamster went snuffling along at a great rate, wearing his little heart out with the effort of keeping up with the others. He would make a quick scuttling movement and fly away ahead, but then he would be worn out and have to stop for a rest, his bright eyes darting around in case there might be an owl on the prowl, though it was b
road daylight, and by the time he had got his breath back the others would have passed him out.

  ‘And so they went on through the woods, leaping and scuttling and trotting and stalking, still eating pigberries whenever they felt like it and talking to each other whenever they all managed to be in the same place at the same time.

  ‘They were all having a grand time, but after a while, whether it was all the trotting and scuttling and so on, or what, they all began to feel very tired, and just as they were looking around for somewhere nice and mossy where they could settle down for a rest, something awful happened. The merry little fawn was skimming along lithely as usual when suddenly she was caught in a horrible trap. It just grabbed her by the hoof and dug its horrible teeth into her.

  ‘Well, that was the end of the little fawn’s leaping and bounding. She was well and truly grounded now – in fact she could hardly move at all without inflicting dreadful pain on herself.

  ‘The heron was the first to reach her. He ducked his head gracefully down through the greenery and examined the raw, bleeding wound, with the nasty metal teeth of the trap still embedded in it.

  ‘Then up trotted the pig, anxiously snuffling the earth and gently nudging her sister with her soft, pink snout.

  ‘And finally the hamster came scooting along in a flurry of fallen leaves and with his tail lashing from side to side like a rudder. He curled up behind the fawn’s ear and whispered comforting whistles to cheer her up.

  ‘The animal-children were all wondering what to do when the heron raised his glorious neck to give it a rest from ducking down and spotted, away among the trees, the sweetest little gingerbread house you ever saw.’

  ‘Uh-oh!’ said Gerard softly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ‘precisely. Well, it had a liquorice-allsort chimney, you know, the black cylinder one with the white stuff in the middle.’

  ‘My favourite,’ breathed Gerard.

  ‘Yes, that one, and it had a little puff of candy floss coming out of it.’

  ‘Oh my, for smoke,’ said Gerard, enchanted.

  ‘Yes, for smoke. And the roof was thatched with boudoir biscuits. The walls were slabs of golden gingerbread, and the window-panes were made of slices of glacier mints.’

  ‘What about the door?’ asked Gerard.

  ‘A Jersey Cream biscuit.’

  ‘Edinburgh rock for the fence?’

  ‘Is that the chalky kind?’

  ‘Yes, sort of.’

  ‘Well that’s it then,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘What about the fawn?’ asked Beverley, who felt the story was getting diverted a bit by the building of this house.

  ‘Oh yes, the fawn. Well, the heron and the pig said they would go to the house for help.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ said Beverley.

  ‘Why?’ asked Kevin.

  ‘Well,’ said Beverley, hardly noticing that she was conversing with Kevin, ‘because of the witch.’

  ‘Oh, the witch,’ said Kevin. ‘Wait a minute, what witch?’

  ‘The one in the gingerbread house.’

  ‘But they weren’t – hey, hang on there now a minute! Whose story is this anyway? How do you know what’s going to happen in Elizabeth’s story?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. She’s wrong,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Will everyone please stop talking and let me get on with it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kevin and Beverley together.

  ‘Well, when they got to the house, there was the grandmother sitting up in bed.’

  ‘The witch,’ Beverley mouthed.

  Elizabeth saw what she was saying.

  ‘No, the wolf,’ she said triumphantly, ‘with a striped nightcap on to cover his long ears and a long nightshirt on to cover his hairy body.

  ‘As soon as the grandmother, I mean the wolf, saw the heron bobbing in at his front door, he started to dribble with excitement at the thought of stuffed heron roasted with rosemary sprigs and glazed potatoes.

  ‘And when he looked down at the heron’s ankles and saw a plump little piglet there, he drooled even more at the thought of crackling and sage stuffing and apple sauce.

  ‘But as soon as the heron, who was tall and had a better view of the world, saw the wolf in grandmother’s clothing sitting up in bed, he knew the danger they were all in. He knew that they would have to think of a way of getting the better of the wolf. So he stepped up to the edge of the bed and bent his long black neck down and whispered in the wolf-grandmother’s ear: “Woodcutter alert! You’d better clear out of here quick. Go out the back door and head for the hills. And whatever you do, don’t look back, or you’ll be turned into a pigberry tree.” That was why there were so many pigberry trees around – a lot of curious wolves they were really.

  ‘“Woodcutters!” yelped the wolf, leaping out of bed and tearing the night-clothes off. “How many?”

  ‘“Seven,” said the heron, “and their seven husbands too. Quick now!”

  ‘But the last sentence never reached the wolf’s ears, for he was off out the back door, leaving it hanging on its liquorice bootlace hinges, and over the hills and far away, and he never came back to the gingerbread cottage from that day to this, and he may be still running for all I know.

  ‘So then the heron and the piglet had a good snoop around the little house, helping themselves to candy door handles or clove rock bath taps as they pleased – which grew back again straight away – and before long they had found the wolf’s magic medicine chest under the bed.

  ‘It was full of unctions and oils and salves and unguents and balms and, and, and – liniments and poultices, and – lotions and potions, and tablets and pills, and draughts and powders and tisanes of all sorts, and there was also a Manual of Cures and Spells, conveniently printed with orange-fizz ink on rice paper.

  ‘It didn’t take them long to find what they needed – a spell for opening traps and an ointment for broken skin. So they tore the page with the spell out of the book, and the piglet took the phial of ointment carefully in her mouth, and off they went back to the hamster and the fawn.

  ‘Their brother and sister were delighted to see them. They had seen the wolf heading for the hills at the speed of light, and they were hoping furiously that the heron and the piglet weren’t already inside his inside.

  ‘In a twinkling, the heron had said the spell for opening traps, and as if by magic – oh, no, it was actually magic – the trap opened up and released the fawn’s injured leg. To celebrate this, the heron ate the spell. It tasted of nothing very much with orange.

  ‘Meanwhile, the piglet smeared the special ointment on the fawn’s wound and before their very eyes it completely healed up and left not so much as a scab or a scar.’

  ‘Deadly,’ breathed Gerard.

  ‘And with that, the fawn leapt into the air with a wild bound, and the piglet fell in behind at a respectable trot and the heron stepped along in their wake. The poor little hamster landed in a clump, having fallen right off his perch when the fawn jumped up, and with a sigh he gathered his strength and put all his energy into catching up with the others.’

  Elizabeth stopped.

  ‘Did they not turn back into children?’ asked Gerard, not wanting the story to end.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No handsome frogs to kiss them, I suppose,’ said Elizabeth complacently.

  ‘That was a cool story, even if they didn’t turn back into children,’ Gerard pronounced.

  ‘Yeh, it was grand, great,’ said Kevin good-naturedly.

  ‘Hamsters don’t have long tails,’ was the best Beverley could manage to say.

  ‘Oh lordy,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I suppose he might have been a gerbil then. How long is a gerbil’s tail, Miss Know-All?’

  ‘Long enough,’ said Beverley, grudgingly.

  ‘So he was gerbil then, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ said Beverley, ‘all right, all right.’ And she went back to sloshing the dishes around in the washing-
up bucket.

  Chapter 6

  INTREPIDLY INTO THE INTERIOR

  AFTER THE STORY, THE OTHERS HELPED BEVERLEY to clear away the rest of the breakfast things, and pack everything neatly in the rucksacks. Then they were ready to explore the island.

  ‘It’s not very big,’ said Beverley, wiping her hands. ‘I think we could cover the whole of it by lunch time. Now, my plan is to make a map. We can write down anything interesting we see and put it in on the map.’

  ‘Oh boring!’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘Let’s not bother with a map. Let’s just explore for the fun of it.’

  Beverley felt a wave of irritation wash over her, making her scalp prickle and her nose twitch. Whose expedition did Elizabeth think this was? But she decided not to make an issue of it. Generously, she ignored Elizabeth’s childishness and asked, by way of changing the subject: ‘Should we take a picnic lunch with us, or plan to be back here for lunch?’

  Lunch! thought Kevin. How long were they planning to spend on the island, then? He was hoping they’d all have got tired of this exploring game long before lunch. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have come after all. Still, he couldn’t have let them off on their own. Goodness knows what might have happened. He started to calculate times in his head. This was the woman’s grocery day. That meant she’d have to row to the mainland to pick up the box he’d left on the pier for her earlier that morning. Sometimes she took the opportunity to do a bit of business in the village, but she didn’t really like to be seen, so most days she just picked up the box and rowed straight back to the island. She liked to be gone before the village woke up properly. Assuming she stuck to that pattern today, she’d be bound to be back soon, within an hour at most. They should clear off before the tide was fully in.

  ‘Oh, a picnic, definitely,’ said Elizabeth, starting to open up plastic bags and polythene boxes again. ‘We have to be prepared for all contingencies.’

  What are contingencies? Gerard wanted to ask, but he thought the better of it.

  ‘You never know what might happen between now and lunch,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘There could be anything in the interior.’ It gave her a little frisson of delicious horror just to say that.