The First Book of Calamity Leek

by Paula Lichtarowicz

  Only one thing moved, which was a dribble from Truly’s left eye.

  ‘No?’ Aunty said. ‘Dear oh dear, how very disappointing. So, my flap-eared friend, there’s nothing at all to report?’

  I didn’t need to look up to know Aunty’s eye had fixed itself on me.

  ‘Nothing you’ll regret later? Because a lady should never have regrets.’ And Aunty bent low and whispered into my ear, ‘Well, not to worry, ma chérie. Tête-à-tête, à deux, peut-être?’

  Then Aunty thunked me on the head with the Digest and said, ‘Oh do quit snivelling, child. If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s a sniveller.’ And then she shooed us all out of her sight, and told us to get back to work or target practice or something, because we were clearly useless at even the most elementary of role plays, and Truly needed her spoonful of sugar to help her medicine go down in the most delightful way.

  Out in the yard, I turned off the standpipe.

  ‘Why didn’t you, Annie? Why didn’t you say the truth to Aunty?’

  Annie stopped kicking at concrete. ‘It’s only words, isn’t it? How can telling those words to Aunty make Truly better? How can words be medicine?’

  ‘But what about the danger? We should tell Aunty in case them injuns are off planning a surprise attack by sneaking up someplace else.’

  Annie said nothing. She watched me dry off my face with my headscarf and cover up safe again. Appendix words came into my head then. This is what they warned in S –

  Did you know, a niece with a secret is like a dog with a chicken bone – seems tasty, but BEWARE! Gobbled down in private instead of shared with Aunty, it’ll snag in her throat and choke her to death.

  I began to say this wisdom to Annie, when she burst out laughing at me.

  ‘Annie?’ I stepped back from her. ‘Annie, this really ain’t a time for laughter. We really need to think about the dog with the chicken bone.’

  But she just shook her head, laughing.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What is it? Because getting your throat choked ain’t funny, Annie, it really ain’t.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ She tried to shut up her smile. Then she shrugged, ‘Sorry, Clam. Only, I’ve just been thinking, and it’s plum simple, it really is. Truly’s getting better. You felt her hand, it was moving. And when Truly is strong enough to talk, well, then she’ll tell us exactly what she saw Outside. In fact, Truly being Truly, we’ll never shut her up, will we? And then we’ll know what to think about injuns and everything, and how to tell it all to Aunty. Fact is—’ and every one of the speckles on Annie’s face jumped up happy like I hadn’t seen since Truly fell down, ‘—fact is, Truly can tell Aunty herself, soon enough, all we actually have to do is wait!’

  I blew my nose on my smock and I thought about the sense of this.

  Annie grinned. She turned and squeezed me up in one of her bone-squeak hugs that she really does better than anyone. ‘Come on then, race you back to the Boules.’

  And we ran through the gate, and up the barrow path holding hands, which is nice to do, even if it is a bit tricky on the bends. And I looked at Annie, with her curls bouncing out under her scarf, and her nose turfed up high, which is how Annie always runs through roses, since she and Truly and me were little and they ran along laughing and shouting out behind, ‘Come on, Calamity Slow-Feet, catch us if you can!’ And I squeezed Annie’s hand and I said to her, ‘Catch me if you can, Annie!’ And her eyes fizzed with laughter. And my own heart flipped happy. And I thought again about her words, and I thought, yes, happen we will just have to wait for Truly to explain what she’s seen. Aunty will make her all better soon enough. Aunty will sort it. So we will all just have to wait and see.

  NO WORMS

  MY SISTERS’ VOICES are echoing something busy in my ears tonight. Not just Truly. Annie, Dorothy, even the second-wind toddlers are going on at me. But I’ll put them away for a little while, because here I am, ready and waiting for you, Jane Jones.

  Course, I expect you won’t come till it’s safe black outside. I understand that. But it’s gone dark beneath the blinds, and this room’s grey as mould now Mrs Waverley’s scraped her bottom off the chair, and the lights went off after her. Is it nearly time?

  Do you know there ain’t a single pipistrelle in this room, or one harvest spider sewing up the ceiling, or even a woodlouse poking nosy out of the floor. You wouldn’t think one woodlouse would be a problem, wriggling about next to a bed-stuck body, or even hid under the bed out of the way. You wouldn’t think that.

  Happen I could open that window and call up a tawny. Eliza had a tawny once, she said, flew in and sat under the eaves to watch over her them nights she felt most sickly. But I ain’t heard one owl here. I shut my eyes and the only sound is a far-off rushing moan, an unhappy one that never dies off. Might be it is females being dragged down to Bowels. Might be, I don’t know. Do you know, there ain’t the breath of a crow, a cockerel, or even one old itch of a dog’s bottom to be heard anywhere here.

  Do you know, I sure would like to hear a word. Not even a word. Just a truly scrumptious giggle from Mary Bootle would do it. Or I would like to see a flash of Annie’s green eyes. Or I would even take a thump from Nancy without even seeing her, I really would take that.

  I could press on the button to fetch someone in, course. That’s what they say. But it won’t be Mary Bootle or Millie Gatwick, will it? Won’t even be a worm popping up for a rest from turning the soil.

  But I’m not going to think Garden thoughts now. You won’t come in and find me blubbing in the dark, Jane Jones. No, you won’t do that.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY

  AS IT HAPPENED, Truly never did get to explain anything to us. Because, I am very sorry to say it, the next day, she was dead.

  Now, I also have to say, Truly didn’t die straight off. No, it took a while, because it was a very busy day. It started in the night with Millie losing Gretel, and it went on in the morning with tea with Aunty. It finished off with Emily’s birthday party. And it was only after all this that Truly’s death was what Aunty called ‘certified’. And in case I didn’t say it, it was a complete and utter accident. Yes it was.

  You don’t need to know much about Millie losing Gretel, only that it happened. Morning came rainy, and though Gretel weren’t ever one for getting her tail damp, she still hadn’t shown up by porridge time. Evita called us to breakfast, and Millie’s face grew as wet as the Goddess Daughter’s tears that were battering the yard, and she had to be stopped from running off to the Sacred Lawn to ask Emily for a rat-finding miracle.

  But even frog-faced Millie wasn’t wet as Annie that morning. Annie who hadn’t come to sit on her bale for breakfast under the eaves. Never mind that I was reading out M for Mother and M for Miracles, which are some of the best pages there are. No, never mind that, because Annie wasn’t no place other than the mending room door, squatting in the rain, waiting for Truly to call out that she was better and fancied a chat.

  ‘What do you think Truly’s first words will be?’ Annie shouted over to us.

  ‘Hello, fat rat, what you doing in here?’ Nancy said, and we all had to laugh at that. Except Millie didn’t.

  We were still laughing when the Communicator in the eaves bing-bonged, and said due to inclement weather conditions, after breakfast all nieces would proceed to the schoolroom, to copy handwriting from a Digest of choice – and then nieces might as well get out the pigskins and revise belly-bayoneting, seeing as their Mother kept going on about it. All nieces – apart from Calamity Leek, who was required upstairs immediately on a private matter. Over and out.

  Well.

  Well, I hadn’t moved an inch from my bale when the Communicator bing-bonged again and said, ‘Terribly sorry, but your absent-minded old Aunty has actually forgotten to communicate the most exciting news of all.’ She was just terrible with dates and it couldn’t be helped. But as soon as nieces were done jib-jabbing their swords, they might like to think of a gift idea.
An apple would do, or one of those straw dolls everyone was so crazy about these days. After all, it wasn’t every day of the year that a certain someone celebrated a B-I-R-T-H day. And who knows, it might be the last B-I-R-T-H day some nieces would witness. Which reminded her, shoes did not grow on trees, and if Sandra Saffron Walden wasn’t fully shod for the occasion, there’d be trouble. Come along, Calamity Leek, oh and bring up the Appendix, would you, sweetie? Over and out.

  Now, I’ll start it by telling you this. I ain’t ever had the clearest remembrance of my visit to Aunty that day. No. There’s them of my leftover sisters that would say otherwise, because of all the sadness that happened after, but I’ll tell you once, and not again, they weren’t asked there for tea, were they? They don’t know nothing.

  It was eight metal steps up, then a turn, then eight more steps to get to the High Hut, which, like I say, was handily built right on top of our dorm. A viewing balcony ran all along the front. When a body stood there, well, you could see it was no bother at all for a single eye to keep an eye on the yard, the roses, the Sacred Lawn and the yew path north to Mother’s Glorious Abode. And from the balcony you got the best view of all, course – of our grey stone, yellow-brick, red-topped Wall, jewel-toothed and twinkling, and belting us into perfect safety.

  When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high,

  ‘– shake a leg, Calamity –’

  And don’t be afraid of the dark.

  ‘– in the bedroom, Calamity, chop-chop –’

  Walk on! Walk on! With hope in your heart –

  Holding tight on the Appendix, I hurried up, the wet steps clanging under my feet, my sisters chattering busy about birthday presents down in the yard, and Annie’s face frowning up at me through the rain. Beyond the end door I could see Aunty sitting bareskulled at her mirror with the light bulbs round it, humming and painting purple over her leftover lips.

  When my sisters asked me what Aunty’s room was like, I always said it smelled sweeter than a jam pan and looked busier than if the Showreel’s Twelve Trapped Princesses had just woke in a hurry and were throwing their clothes about trying to get out and dance. Hair for every occasion hung off nails on the wall. Pants and stockings were spilled out of drawers. Medicine bottles and toffee wrappers lay about on the carpet, and one bluebottle or another was usually sniffing about. Toto was back-flipped on the pink bed, snoring. And like the Appendix says it – E for Education, Education, Education, so Aunty always had the Showreel playing on the television in the corner.

  And I don’t mind telling you here, the Showreel is the cleverest lesson there is, which is Aunty when she was still Ophelia Swindon, Operatic Opal of the Black Country! Aka Divinest of Divas, Apotheosis of Athena and Isis Incarnate! Aka the People’s Pearl, born with the Visage of Venus, the moulding of Marilyn, and blessed with the direct genetic inheritance of Queen Cleopatra’s most wonderful, witherproof skin!

  Which words always made Aunty have a little sigh and stroke of her fingers when they came up all quiet on the beginning of the Showreel. They stayed there long enough for us to read them all out, and for Aunty to have another sigh when we did, before the Showreel got on with Aunty showing us all the real terrible ways females suffer Outside, ‘So you’ll know exactly what you’re up against, nieces, when you pop off to War!’

  Right now on the television, Aunty’s Operatic Opal self was showing us a lunatic female called Sister Maria, who ran away from Walled safety.

  Aunty popped in a row of top teeth. In the mirror her eye winked at me. ‘Welcome, dear heart, so good to see you in private. Rather elemental out there this morning. Do be an angel and keep the rain out.’

  I shut the door, and sugary air flew up my nose and sprayed out in a sneeze.

  ‘Heavens, child! Snot is easily prevented by those who care to care about these things. Blow your nose and get over here. And do try not to drip on the Appendix.’

  Aunty’s eye swivelled off to the television screen, where her Opal self was running crazy at the Sun and singing about following rainbows till she found her dream. Aunty hummed along to the end of the song. And never mind there weren’t nothing left most wonderful, witherproof but her hands, Aunty’s voice couldn’t ever be melted away from her, could it?

  All about her dressing table were pots of cream and sticks of colour. A tub of pink jellies sat next to a bottle of orange medicine. Aunty had a jelly all ready and waiting in her hand, but her eye was fixed on the television. ‘You know I never got the habit of that habit, Calamity. Ten times in one performance at Wolverhampton Apollo, I came a cropper over that blinking hem.’ Aunty sighed and popped the jelly in her mouth, ‘And that was back in the days when I had twenty-twenty vision.’

  It is a tale as tragic as any in the Showreel, how Aunty lost her left eye. It really is. But you don’t need me, you need Ophelia Swindon Volume IV: In the Eye of the Storm to tell you that. And even if the Volumes were unlocked from their case, well, I’m sorry but they’d all be burned to nothing now.

  Aunty sucked jelly off her fingers. ‘My eye, but that’s delicious.’ She held the tub at me and winked. ‘Go on, sweetie, I insist. Calorie-counted, cellulite-lightened delights. Just one, mind.’

  It tasted like rose perfume and bone jelly and honey, all melting up together.

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d gobble that down without needing to be asked twice. You are looking a tad off-colour though, sweetie. Tell me, everything all right with you? Still pinning back those flappers at night?’

  I tried not to look in the mirror. Aunty had herself some medicine from the bottle on the table. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Calamity, sometimes I wonder whether your Mother actually bothered to stop and check over any of you, or whether she just panicked and snatched the closest thing to hand. Of course she denies it. She would. But there’s you, there’s boz-eyed Evita, there’s Tombstone Mary. Heavens, I shudder to think about Dorothy, I really do.’ Aunty went for a jar and threw rose water at her chins. ‘Still, a deal’s a deal, we work with what we’ve got, niece. Let that be a lesson to you, we all do it. We all manage.’

  I shifted the Appendix about and tried not to look at my ears in the mirror. ‘Utterly outstanding ears,’ Aunty once said I had. ‘Jumbo specimens.’

  ‘I’ll let you into a secret, niece. Whenever I get to feeling a little low, thinking about everything I used to be, you know who I like to think of, to snap me out of it?’

  Aunty went for a long drink of medicine, and I kept my eyes down.

  ‘Dumbo!’ Aunty shouted out, laughing like it hurt her, so some jelly bits flew out and hit the mirror. ‘I think about Dumbo, niece! No one can tell me that elephant didn’t make the best of what he had! Who wants to look like Marilyn all their lives? Not me! And if an elephant can fly – well, niece, let’s just say, where there’s hide there’s hope!’

  Aunty stopped laughing and finished off all the medicine bottle.

  ‘I will get to go Fight the Good Fight, won’t I, Aunty?’

  ‘Have another Turkish delight, Calamity, no need to start snivelling. I’m sure we can unleash you somewhere undiscerning. Luxembourg, perhaps.’

  Aunty grabbed a stick of brown grease and set to thumping it on her melted cheek. ‘Not every girl is fortunate enough to be born a Sandra Saffron Walden perfect ten, you know.’ Aunty went on thumping her eye socket, and her living eye jumped back to the television where, with the Visage of Venus, she was busy getting trapped in marriage. ‘But don’t you worry about Sandra, because it doesn’t last, Calamity—’

  And all sudden, the grease stick fell down on the table, and Aunty’s hands went rushing to push up her melted cheek, and smooth out the lumps of her leftover lips, and press down the spread of her fallen nostril. And she turned her head sideways so the mirror couldn’t see her shrivelled eye socket, and then she spun away from the mirror, so she couldn’t see her face at all. But in the television screen, her bald head was mirrored bright. Aunty jumped up and ran to the door.

&nbs
p; But then she didn’t go outside, she just stared at her hands a while. And I reckon that made her happy, it really did, because she stroked her fingers up and down. ‘Nothing lasts,’ Aunty said, ‘nothing at all.’

  After a bit Aunty came back to the table for a pot, and started to coat up her fingers in cream. ‘Dream your dreams while you’re young, Calamity. Because that’s where happiness lives. It’s the only place happiness lives in this world.’ And she held up her creamy fingers, and they waved at her and she blew a little kiss at them. ‘C’est la vie. One did what one had to. Je ne regrette rien. No, I don’t.’

  It sure was hot in the room, so I sneezed again. So Aunty looked up at me. ‘I’ll tell you what lasts, Calamity Leek,’ Aunty said, and her finger and thumb reached out and grabbed my wrist in a creamy pinch. ‘Love, Calamity Leek. Flap-eared-one-eyed love. The love that passes all understanding.’ And Aunty’s one blue eye twitched at me like it had one drop left in it. It fell back to staring at her fingers. ‘That’s the only thing that lasts in the end.’

  Aunty opened a door into the sitting room.

  Now I probably don’t need to tell you this was a room made for sitting and watching and drinking tea. But most of all it was a room made for reading, because standing against the back wall was a fat bookcase with glass doors, where the Archive was locked safe inside in five square brown Volumes. A group of chairs huddled round a table in front of it. On top of the table there was a new brown Volume lying open. A purple ink pen was waiting on a half-written page, and I gasped out loud to see it. So Aunty smiled and said, ‘Yes, indeed, my dear, Escape to Freedom! we’re calling this one. However, now’s really not the time for our little book group.’ And she shut up the Volume all quick. More medicine bottles and jelly boxes were thrown about the carpet here, also a Reader’s Digest on something called Spanish for Starters!