by Gail Banning
“This is my best bruise,” Tilley said, pointing to a horrific expanse of purplish flesh above her knee.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s great. It looks totally real. You could probably get a job drawing bruises on actors.”
“Really?” Tilley seemed thrilled. “I can teach you how to do them. You have to smudge in the green and the yellow in my secret way.”
“Okay. Show me after breakfast.”
We’d brought along breakfast cookies to go with the blackberries. They were chocolate chip oatmeal, from a package. We felt lucky to have packaged cookies. For awhile, Mom had been making homemade ones in her experimental campfire oven and Tilley and I were afraid that those charred pucks were the only cookies we’d ever get. Fortunately, though, Mom is a good enough scientist to know when an experiment has failed.
A crumb of my store-bought cookie fell to the meadow. Tilley and I watched an ant make off with it. “I bet the ant really likes it,” Tilley said.
“I bet,” I said, taking another bite. “He’ll probably spend the rest of his life searching the meadow for more.”
Tilley crumbled some of her cookie over the meadow. “There,” she said. “Now he won’t be sad.”
After breakfast, Tilley lay in the meadow making daisy chains while I tried again to decode Great-great-aunt Lydia’s letter. I tried the alphabet backward. I tried writing the first thirteen letters of the alphabet, with the remaining letters underneath, and switching each letter with the one above or below. Then I tried writing the top thirteen letters backward. Then I tried writing the bottom thirteen backward. Then my brain began to hurt. I folded the coded letter back in my wallet.
“Time for bike practice,” I said. As I mentioned, we’d sold our car. A car is not very useful when you can’t drive it to your home. Bikes were now our main transportation, so it was important that Tilley progress beyond training wheels. I got the bikes from our prefab garden shed and wheeled them to the meadow. Again and again I ran beside Tilley, providing moral and physical support until she wobbled off on her brief solos. Afterwards, we cooled off in our dammed pool, and lay in the meadow to dry.
“Let’s visit Oscar,” Tilley said. Oscar was Tilley’s name for the crayfish who lived in the shadow of a big rock upstream. Tilley considered Oscar a pet, and was very affectionate with him. She would scoop him up from the stream bed and baby talk to him and stroke his armored back. Oscar never showed any affection in return. I was not actually convinced that Oscar was only one crayfish. He seemed to be slightly different sizes and colours on different days.
Once we’d returned Oscar to his natural habitat, Tilley and I raced leaves down the stream. This is not as childish as it sounds. We didn’t throw our leaves in just any old place. We studied the currents carefully. We learned about undertows that could suck leaves beneath the surface, and about backwaters that could strand leaves into making slow circles forever and ever. We learned about rapids that could shipwreck leaves on rock islands. We became experts in hydro-kinetic theory.
When we got tired of racing leaves, we took the path into Great-great-aunt Lydia’s woods and gathered kindling for the nightly campfire. We were heading, arms full, back toward the treehouse when Tilley stopped on the plank bridge. “Rosie,” she said, turning toward me. “A lady.”
Looking across the meadow to Grand Oak Manor, I saw two men by the hedge. One man wore overalls and looked like a workman. The other man wore a cardigan and a tie, and he looked like, maybe, a supervisor. He was standing with his arms crossed, watching the workman work. It took me a second to see the lady. She was off by herself, on a second storey balcony. She had pale blue hair that must have been hairsprayed, because it was as stiff as a new pad of steel wool. She was standing very still. Beside her was a basset hound, also very still.
“It’s Great-great-aunt Lydia!” Tilley said. “Let’s get invited for tea!” She dropped her kindling and ran, stopping at the hedge underneath the balcony. “Great-great-aunt Lydia!” Tilley waved the way you’d wave at a plane if you were stranded on a desert island. “Hi! Hi, Great-great-aunt Lydia! Hi! Hi!”
Tilley stopped waving to think of a more formal introduction. “How do you do,” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “I’m your great-great-niece? Matilda? Her too! She’s Rosamund! Pleased to meet you!” Slowly Great-great-aunt Lydia looked down at Tilley. Her face was expressionless. Tilley looked very little and bruised, standing there by the hedge.
Great-great-aunt Lydia didn’t say anything to Tilley. She flipped open a cell phone. She called the supervisor man. I heard his phone ringing in his corner of the hedge. His ring tone was In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. I know because we studied it in Grade Six Music (the whole song, not the ring tone).The supervisor man flipped his phone to his ear. He talked and put it back in his pocket. Then he bent down and picked up something flat and square from the lawn of the Manor garden.
I was just starting to figure out what the workman was making. At the corners of the hedge were new, tall posts and I guessed they were for a fence. The supervisor man handed the flat, square thing to the workman, and the workman hammered it on the post. It was a sign.
“SSSS,” Tilley said. Being just out of kindergarten, she didn’t know how to read yet, but she did know her letters. She struggled to sound out the words.
“SSSSSTTTTT” Tilley ventured.
What the sign said was Stay Off—Private Property.
I walked up to Tilley and tugged her hand. “Come on,
Tilley,” I said. I didn’t think we’d be going for tea at Grand Oak Manor any time soon.
NOTEBOOK: #8
NAME: Rosamund McGrady
SUBJECT: Trespassers will be Prosecuted
The workman was at Grand Oak Manor again the next morning. Through the treehouse walls we heard him sawing, and from the treehouse porch, we glimpsed him through the oak leaves.
“I wonder what he’s doing now,” I said.
“Let’s spy on him,” said Tilley. Her six-year-old ambition was to be a spy when she grew up. “Let’s do secret spy stuff.”
We decided that the snowball bush on the island would be a good spy station. With a backpack of spy supplies, we climbed down from the treehouse and sauntered toward it, glancing sideways at the workman. While he was bent over his saw, we waded to the island and ducked inside the bush. If he noticed, when he straightened up, that we had suddenly disappeared from the landscape, he didn’t show it. We made ourselves comfortable in the spattered green shade. I opened my backpack and got out the high-powered binoculars that Dad used to observe insect life. Parting the snowball blossoms, I aimed the binoculars at the workman and set the power to maximum.
“Wow, are these ever strong,” I said. “I can see all his pores!”
“What’s he doing?” Tilley asked.
“Can’t tell. I can only see his nose and upper lip. Hang on, I’m switching to low power. Okay, that’s better. Here,” I said, handing the binoculars to Tilley. “You can have the first turn.” This made her happy, because she was all thrilled with the idea of spying, but I had guessed that there were going to be a lot of slow times. As one of our spying supplies, I’d brought along a library book on cryptography to keep myself busy.
“He’s doing the boards now,” Tilley said, when I was halfway through the chapter on transposition ciphers. “He’s putting them up and down.”
“Oh.Y eah?” I said without looking up. The book was making me think Great-great-aunt Lydia might have replaced the normal alphabet with a keyword code. A keyword code is an alphabet that starts with a secret word, followed by the remaining letters of the alphabet. I wrote out the real alphabet, and under it I wrote LYDIABCE-FGHJKMNOPQRSTUVWXZ.
“He just nailed another board,” Tilley reported a minute later. “He’s putting them so we can’t climb them. Look.” She shoved the binoculars at me.
I took them and poked the lenses through the blossoms. “Wow! Pretty high! She’s not fooling around, is she?”
“Why is she doing that?” Tilley asked. “Is it because she’s really, really, really shy? Like you said before?”
“Nope,” I said. “Shy would be if she wanted to be friends but was too scared. A big fence means she doesn’t want to be friends at all.” It hurt my heart to say it. From the moment I saw the Stay Off—Private Property sign the day before, I’d been missing the Great-great-aunt Lydia I’d first imagined. It was weird of me, I knew, to miss someone I had basically made up. Get over your imaginary friend, I told myself. But I couldn’t help being disappointed by the real Great-great-aunt Lydia, out of sight somewhere on the other side of her unfinished fence.
“Why doesn’t she want to be friends?” Tilley asked.
“I don’t know. She’s hard to figure out.” I began translating Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter from the ‘Lydia’ keyword code. DC DC OP UH WHSUKDO, was what I got for the first five words. Wrong again.
“Here comes that guy in the cardigan,” Tilley said. “He’s got another sign. Now he’s handing it to the carpenter guy. Now the carpenter guy’s nailing it to the fence. It’s got a ‘B’ in it, and then it’s got an ‘E’ in it, and then it’s got a ‘W’....”
I snatched the binoculars. “Beware,” I read out loud. “Guard Dog On Duty.”
“Does she mean that dog with the dragging stomach? That dog didn’t bark or growl or anything.”
“No, he wasn’t too excitable,” I said.
“Maybe she has a meaner dog in the mansion.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she’s pretending about the guard dog to keep us out,” I said, passing the binoculars back to Tilley. I was determined to crack Great-great-aunt Lydia’s code. I tried McGrady as a keyword, but that didn’t work either. ‘Florence’ couldn’t be the keyword, because there was more than one ‘E’, and ‘Augustine’ couldn’t either, for the same reason, two ‘U’s.
“Okay, so now the guy in the cardigan’s holding another sign,” Tilley said. I held out my hand for the binoculars. Keep Out, the sign said. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
“You know how our great-great-grandfather, Magnus, gave everything to Great-great-aunt Lydia?” Tilley said as the day wore on. “And nothing to Great-grampa? How come he did that? Wasn’t Great-grampa nice?”
I wasn’t sure I really remembered Great-grampa. I had an image of his crooked smile, but was that a memory or just a photo from our album? “Yeah, he was nice,” I guessed.
“So why was that Magnus person so mad at him?” “Maybe Great-great-aunt Lydia poisoned his mind against Great-grampa.”
“Like, tattled on him?”
“Yeah, tattled big time,” I said. “Probably for something he didn’t even do.”
“So Great-great-aunt Lydia is mean, right?”
“Right.”
“Not weird in a good way.”
“Nope.”
“Why did she bring us flowers then?”
“Well, she smashed them up. As a symbol. To mean the total opposite of welcome.”
“That’s so mean.”
“Yup.”
“Well, why did she write that letter and then rip it up?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“’Cause doesn’t she say forgive and welcome and stuff? And an invitation someday soon?”
I opened my wallet and got out the torn blue strip.
“Maybe she’s saying she’ll never forgive, and we’re not welcome. Who knows? And it doesn’t say ‘invitation’. Just ‘ation’. It could be, I don’t know, an explanation someday soon. Information someday soon. Communication someday soon.”
“Maybe she means that letter you’re uncoding.” “Maybe.”
“What do you think that code letter says?” Tilley asked. “Like, what do you think it’s about?”
“Probably about the big split in the family. And probably about whatever is her big problem with us.”
“When’s it going to be all uncoded?”
“Well I’m trying, but you keep interrupting me.” “Cause I’m tired of watching that man nail boards.” “Spy on the ducks then,” I suggested.
“I am. They never do anything secret though.”
Tilley and I gave up spying for the day. We rustled out of the snowball bush, and waded upstream to visit Oscar.
Progress on the fence continued for the next couple of days. I tried not to let it bug me, but it did. The fence gave the Manor a new look of fairy-tale evil. Every time I glanced at it, my mind was taken over by the memory of Great-great-aunt Lydia’s expressionless, dried-apple face. The fence made me feel different about myself. I did not feel lovable-at-first-sight anymore. When I was crossing the stream or riding across the meadow or sitting up in one of the cherry trees, I could feel Great-great-aunt Lydia’s dislike touching every surface of my skin. Great-great-aunt Lydia hated us, without even knowing us.
It bothered me to think that someone could hate me without even knowing me. It was a scary idea, especially when I was going to be starting a new school in less than two weeks. It was already the second half of August, and the reddening maples brought waves of back-to-school dread. So did the early darkness at our campfires. But what really got me in the pit of my stomach was the dayold newspaper I used to wrap up our garbage. BACK TO SCHOOL, threatened a full-page ad. GET READY NOW!
I tried to slow down the summer. If I paid five times as much attention to every moment, I reasoned, the rest of August might seem five times as long. All attention, I’d sit by the edge of the stream, studying the electric-blue dragonflies hovering like helicopters, and the spidery striders walking on water. I might have managed to slow time a bit, but I couldn’t stop it.
One midnight August turned into September. A few nights later Dad doused our campfire early. “After all,” he said, as the logs hissed out steam, “it’s a school night.”
Summer was over, long before I was ready.
NOTEBOOK: #9
NAME: Rosamund McGrady
SUBJECT: Enemy Territory
I woke up to a pink sunrise in the open porthole by my pillow. The backlit oak leaves were jewel green. The birds, who would slack off later in the day, were still singing their sunrise songs. I had a moment of perfect peace. Then I remembered. It was my first day at Windward Middle School.
I pulled back my curtain. “Your Mom and I are off,” Dad said, drinking his coffee dregs.
“Already?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’ve got to be at the university early to straighten out our timetables,” Dad said.
“Okay, then.”
“Okay. So good luck on your first day,” said Mom, turning in the arched doorway to blow a kiss to the top bunk. “Yup,” I said.
Something in my voice made Mom step back inside the treehouse. “You’re nervous,” she said.
I shrugged where I lay. Upbeat mothers don’t understand nerves.
“Oh, Rosie, it will be fine. Just be yourself. And be friendly. And just join in. That’s all there is to it. Really.” Mom climbed a few rungs of the bunk ladder to plant an actual kiss on top of my head. “Really.”
I nodded, and Mom and Dad descended through the trap door. I sat up in my bunk to get dressed for school. I had few choices for a back-to-school outfit. It was shorts weather and I had two pairs. The cargos were my favourite, and because they were my favourite I’d worn them every day. They were, when I stopped to examine them, a little grubby. My plaid shorts, on the other hand, were perfectly clean, but only because they were too ugly to wear. I wriggled into my cargos. I removed a clean T-shirt from my overstuffed drawer. It was crumpled and there was no way to press it. Since we had no electricity, we had no iron, and we had no room for an ironing board anyway.
I stood combing my hair before the locker mirror on the wall. When I combed out a twig and several pieces of bark, I started wishing I’d gone for a back-to-school hairwashing at the community centre. Too late now, I thought, peering at myself. The locker mirror was too small for me to behold my entire he
ad at once, so I took it from its hook and moved it around to check out different portions. No individual portion looked too bad.
There was no water in our porcelain washing-up pitcher or wash basin, so I pumped some. The stream had cooled off a lot in the last weeks of August, and the water was cold on my face. I washed quickly, focussing on visible dirt. I brushed my teeth and spat over the porch banister.
Inside the treehouse, I made the lunches: a banana and jam sandwich for Tilley, and a smoked-oyster sandwich for me. I woke Tilley up for breakfast. Time proceeded. At quarter to eight, Tilley and I got our bikes from the shed and bumped across the meadow. Tilley was now riding without training wheels, and she could even ride the plank bridge across the stream. The only thing she needed me to do was push her bike up the plywood ramp to the top of Great-great-aunt Lydia’s stone wall. Tilley coasted down, and together we rode the long path to the world of sidewalks and streets.
Tilley was starting Grade One at Sir Combover Elementary. I brought her to her classroom and left when she showed no signs of freaking out. Back on my bike, I continued past all the big fancy houses toward Windward Middle School. In my head I renewed the wish I’d made when my birthday candles had disappeared around the bend of the stream. The wish had been that the people at Windward would be nice.
I reached the big brick schoolhouse and locked my bike to the stand. Watching the Windward kids arrive, I couldn’t tell if they were nice. All I could tell is that they definitely did not live in treehouses. I watched them getting out of Mercedes and BMWs and Range Rovers. They were well-groomed in the way of those who have hot and cold running water and full-sized mirrors. Over the summer, I had somehow forgotten that this kind of grooming was not only possible but normal. Expected even. These kids were well dressed too. Amazingly so. Every single article of clothing I saw looked like it had been bought at full price within the previous twenty-four hours by a personal shopper carrying out a wardrobe plan. In a flash of contrast, I realized that I was a mess.