by Hilary McKay
To Rose that almost sounded as if Tom accepted this as a good enough reason.
‘You can’t be disgusting to people just because they annoy you!’ she exclaimed, very crossly. ‘Thousands of people annoy me! Millions of people annoy millions of people all the time!’
‘That’s true,’ agreed Tom, thinking bitter thoughts of home.
‘You have to put up with them,’ said Rose.
Tom did not say anything to that.
Chapter Nine
Bill Casson was not the least bit disturbed by Rose’s remarks concerning his probable replacement by one of Caddy’s rock bottom boyfriends. He laughed. He thought it was a joke. What did bother him was the thought that one of the boyfriends might attempt to rewire Eve’s shed. Rose’s letter seemed to suggest the two problems – the rewiring of the shed, and the rock bottom boyfriends – were somehow connected.
Just in case they were, Bill telephoned to forbid it.
Rose, as usual, answered the phone.
‘Darling Rose,’ said her father, his heart sinking to his artistic boots at the sound of Rose’s unhelpful voice, ‘I’m ringing about your letter…’
‘I knew you would!’ interrupted Rose smugly.
‘You were joking about Caddy’s ridiculous boyfriends?’
‘No.’
‘I’d better talk to Mummy then!’
Rose seemed to lose interest, and started humming, as if she was bored and about to walk away.
‘Don’t hum, Rose! Off you go and tell Mummy that I need to talk to her about the wiring to the shed…’
‘What!’ cried Rose. ‘Not about the rock bottom boyfriends coming here instead of you?’
‘Just the wiring, darling. Off you pop.’
‘Too late!’ said Rose, most put out. ‘Derek-from-the-camp who Mummy calls Darling Derek DARLING DEREK came and did it yesterday! He dug a trench right down the garden and put the wire in that. He threaded it through a hose pipe.’
Bill groaned.
‘It took all day and afterwards Mum cooked him a special supper to celebrate. And then he went to the garage and bought pink lilies because he remembered those were her favourite. He’s very fond of her. So.’
Rose waited hopefully for her father to say no one ought to be fond of Eve to the extent of pink lilies, but he did not seem to mind at all, so she went on.
‘And then DARLING DEREK fixed proper plugs on the wall in the shed so of course Mummy is very pleased.’
‘She won’t be pleased when the circuit overloads and the house goes up in smoke! I wish this…this…Derek, is it?’
‘Darling Derek.’
‘Whatever. I wish he’d consulted me first. I’d be much happier if he’d left things alone.’
‘So would I,’ agreed Rose. ‘I bet we hardly ever see Mum any more. She used to come out to make coffee and get warmed up but now she’s got a kettle and a proper electric heater she doesn’t need to. She rang up last night to say it was bedtime.’
‘From the shed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good grief! Can you fetch this Derek, Rose? I think I should speak to him.’
‘He’s gone back to his camp. He’s guarding a stone circle.’
‘Mummy then.’
‘She’s gone with him. She’s going to paint it.’
‘You should have told me Eve wasn’t home, Rose!’ exclaimed Bill. ‘Who is looking after you?’
‘Caddy.’
‘Go and find her then, darling,’ said Bill, a little impatiently. ‘Say Daddy wants to know something important about the fuse box.’
‘What can be important about a fuse box?’
‘Rose!’ thundered Bill.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Rose, and put down the receiver. Her father heard her voice calling, ‘Caddy, Caddy,’ and her footsteps running up the stairs.
A minute later she was back again. ‘Caddy’s still asleep,’ she announced. ‘She wasn’t in until very very late last night. She was out with Michael.’
‘Please,’ begged Bill. ‘Please Rose, let me speak to someone! Saffron or Indigo?’
‘They’re at Sarah’s.’
‘Rose,’ said her father pathetically, ‘do you happen to know whether that shed extension is wired properly to the fuse box?’
‘Of course it is,’ said Rose promptly. ‘Labelled and everything! Paradise!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Derek made a pink label and wrote PARADISE on it,’ explained Rose. ‘Let’s stop talking about boring wiring! Do you know what Caddy said?’
‘Tell me!’
‘She said she went to visit you and you were nice!’
‘Of course I was nice!’
‘Oh.’
‘How’s school, Rose?’
‘Same as always.’
‘What have you been learning?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What have you been doing then?’
‘My great big picture.’
Bill did not ask, as Rose longed for him to ask, ‘What great big picture?’
‘You’ll see it when you come home,’ she said.
‘Lovely!’
‘You’re not on it!’
‘Oh well. How would you like me to paint a picture of you, Rose?’
‘We were talking about my picture that I’m painting!’ shouted Rose.
‘Of course we were!’ agreed her father. ‘And it sounds marvel…’
‘You can’t say that without even seeing it!’
‘No, no I can’t! You are absolutely right! Only I must go now, Rosy Pose! Don’t bang the phone down this time! Love to everyone…’
For once he beat Rose to it, getting the phone down before she did, disappearing back into the silence of his unknown London world.
Rose stood in the middle of the kitchen and shouted, ‘I hate him! I hate him!’ until Caddy came staggering sleepily down the stairs and asked, ‘Who?’
‘Daddy!’
‘No, you don’t. Have you had breakfast?’
‘I don’t want breakfast!’ growled Rose.
‘Just let me have a shower and I’ll come down and make pancakes.’
‘Real pancakes?’
‘Of course, Rose darling,’ said Caddy. ‘I am not just a beautiful zoologist! Oh, and I brought you some silver for your picture. It’s a stick of graphite, really, but it makes a lovely silvery colour. It’s on the mantelpiece somewhere. Have a hunt.’
Caddy went upstairs again, leaving Rose feeling a little better. She hunted along the mantelpiece until she found the graphite, a stick of metallic silver, cool and smooth as water, perfect for her picture.
Earlier in the week, Eve had moved the fridge to give Rose extra space, and since then her picture had grown and grown. Now Tom’s father’s rocket whizzed across the sky, heading for a galaxy of stars. Beyond the stormy waters that Rose had drawn lapping the walls of the house, a small island had emerged, a distant view of America, with clearly visible bears.
The sketch of Tom was still unfinished.
‘I can’t get his hands right,’ explained Rose, as she watched Caddy mix up pancake batter. ‘I wish he’d come here and let me draw him properly, like Derek-from-the-camp did.’
‘Get Indigo to ask him,’ suggested Caddy, and when Indigo came in a few minutes later, he said that he would try. He and Saffron were both very bouncy, and extremely pleased to find Caddy and Rose cooking pancakes.
‘Exactly what I felt like eating,’ said Saffron, hunting out plates. ‘And good news, Rose! Sarah’s mother has invited us all for Sunday lunch. Roast chicken and lemon pie.’
‘Roast chicken and lemon pie!’ repeated Rose, and abandoned her job of sugaring and stacking pancakes to sketch into her picture a tiny outline of Sarah’s mother, sailing in a small boat towards the storm-washed house.
‘Delivering Sunday lunch,’ explained Rose.
On Monday morning Indigo went in search of Tom as soon as he arrived at school. After a very short while he
found him in one of the upstairs classrooms, doing what he liked to do best, entertaining an audience.
Tom was giving a display of his ball-throwing skills, with the help of a lump of blue chalk and a volunteer rabble member. He had cleared a semicircular space of chairs and tables, and placed his volunteer against the classroom wall. By the time Indigo arrived he was already halfway through, tracing the boy’s outline on the white paint of the wall behind him with a series of spectacular ball shots.
‘Don’t move!’ ordered Tom.
Wham!
The ball, just missing the spread-eagled figure, smacked into the wall with an explosion of blue dust. Tom caught it on the rebound and chalked it again.
‘Don’t move!’
Wham!
Each throw left a circle of dusty blue on the wall. There was one at the point of each hand and foot, and one at each side of the volunteer’s hips and shoulders.
Wham!
Wham!
That was a bounce beside each ear, done in two swift movements.
‘Don’t move!’ commanded Tom, and finished off the show with a last perfect shot that just skimmed the top of the boy’s head.
He caught the ball with a flourish, and there was a spontaneous outburst of applause.
‘Cool!’ said David, the volunteer, and there was a buzz of enthusiastic agreement that turned to groans when Tom, high on success, remarked, ‘My mother can do it from horseback!’
Here we go again, thought Indigo, and wished that Tom would learn to stop when he was winning.
‘She practise on the bears?’ asked someone facetiously.
For that he got the ball smack in the middle of his stomach.
This did not deter another person from demanding, ‘Can’t she do it blindfold, Tom?’
‘Blindfold from horseback?’ shouted another.
‘That would be too easy,’ drawled the red-haired gang leader. ‘Rides rodeo, doesn’t she, Levin?’
‘You keep your mouth shut!’ snapped Tom.
‘Come on, Tom!’ urged Indigo, trying to divert Tom’s attention before things got any worse. ‘Throw me that ball!’
But Tom was past the point when he could be diverted. A bell rang, and the class streamed out and along the upstairs corridor, still jibing at him.
‘Throw Indigo the ball, Tom, before his big sister comes and gets you!’
‘How many horses you got then, Tom? Just the one?’
The rabble were racing ahead now, enjoying themselves, galloping and neighing on pretend horses, heading for the first of the pair of staircases that led down to the main entrance hall of the school.
‘Are you the biggest liar in America, Tom?’asked the red-haired gang leader pleasantly. ‘Or are they all like you over there?’
He was foolish enough to ask this question at the top of the stairs, turning back to smile into Tom’s angry face.
Tom did the obvious thing. He gave the red-haired gang leader a huge and satisfying shove in the chest. Then, immediately cheerful again, he continued on to the second staircase without even pausing to see the outcome of his action.
The red-haired gang leader, caught off balance, rolled and tumbled all the way down the stairs, bringing down many of the bellowing rabble before him. He came to a halt when he crashed into the Head, who had come rushing out of his office to investigate the cause of the noise.
The Head stumbled and fell, whacked the bridge of his nose sickeningly hard on the edge of the hall table, and lost his temper.
‘What in the world are you IDIOTIC CHILDREN playing at?’ he roared, bowed in anguish with his nose cupped in his hands. ‘Fooling about on the stairs like that!’
The red-haired gang leader had jarred his shoulder very painfully, but he had not lost his uncanny instinct for making the maximum amount of trouble out of any situation. Also he had noticed the friendliness that seemed to be growing between Indigo and Tom and he did not like it. So he eyed the rabble menacingly and replied, ‘I wasn’t fooling about, Sir. Indigo Casson pushed me.’
‘I did not!’ shouted Indigo in surprise. ‘It was…’
Indigo stopped suddenly, and looked around. Tom was nowhere in sight. ‘I didn’t see who it was,’ he finished lamely.
That did not matter, because at least half the rabble, it seemed, had miraculously witnessed the whole thing: Indigo Casson pushing their leader down the stairs. In the past all the rabble would have seen, but times were changing. A few people, David (still blueish with chalk dust), Marcus and Josh, and one or two others, no longer followed their leader quite as blindly as they had in the past. They shuffled uncomfortably when questioned, and said they had not noticed anything.
In the middle of all the fuss Tom strolled up, his hands in his pockets and his eyebrows raised.
‘Tom,’ said the Head, his nose already swelling and his eyes still streaming. ‘Do you happen to know who pushed this boy down the stairs?’
Tom, who knew nothing of the red-haired gang leader’s inspired accusation, took his ball from his pocket and bounced it with elaborate unconcern right under the Head’s aching nose. Then he asked insolently, ‘What does it matter? So long as somebody did!’
Indigo stared at Tom in astonishment. Never for one moment had he imagined that Tom would not say at once, ‘It was me!’
Tom noticed Indigo staring at him and asked, ‘Feeling blue, Indigo?’
The red-haired gang leader laughed.
‘Tom Levin, put that ball away!’ thundered the Head, who until that moment had been outraged to the point of speechlessness. ‘Indigo Casson wait outside my office! The rest of you get off to your classes! Now, not when you feel like it!’
Darling Daddy, wrote Rose grumpily that night:
This is Rose.
Saffy says everyone says it is Indigo’s fault that their
Head has two black eyes and a swelled-up nose.
Love from Rose.
P.S. Sarah who is here says tell you love from wheelchair woman too.
Rose’s father telephoned especially to tell Rose not to call Sarah Wheelchair Woman.
‘That’s what she called herself,’ protested Rose. ‘She thought of it! Aren’t you worried about what I told you about Indigo and the Head?’
‘What?’ asked Bill. ‘Oh that! Two black eyes and a swollen nose! I don’t think I can believe that one, Rose darling! It doesn’t sound like Indigo to me!’
‘What are you doing this weekend?’
‘Paris probably. Poor old Dad! It will be horribly expensive. What about you?’
‘Not Paris,’ said Rose.
It was a very bad week. Indigo spent it waiting for Tom to explain his unreasonable behaviour. Tom spent it sulking. Almost as soon as he had spoken he had regretted mentioning his horseback-riding mother. He felt he had made a fool of himself, and he missed Indigo, who left him alone.
It was not until Friday that David told him exactly what the red-haired gang leader had said when he picked himself up at the bottom of the stairs.
Tom was no great believer in heroic self sacrifice, but nevertheless he went to the Head (whose black eyes were now at their multicoloured peak of perfection) and said, ‘If that red-haired moron told you Indigo Casson pushed him down the stairs on Monday he was lying. It was me.’
The Head was also no believer in heroics, but he was pleased with Tom for coming forward and so he said quite amiably (for him), ‘Well, well. Time is a great healer. This is a Governors’ meeting. Get out, and next time knock!’
Tom got out, hunted down Indigo, and bounced his ball off the back of his head before he even knew anyone was behind him.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ said Indigo.
‘Why didn’t you tell the Head it was me who shoved that prat down the stairs?’ Tom demanded indignantly, and Indigo replied, just as indignantly, ‘What do you think I am?’
Tom bounced his ball around for a bit, not answering, and then flashed one of his sudden, lightning smiles.
‘You see me
go round David with the blue chalk on Monday?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I told Rose.’
‘How is Old Rose?’ asked Tom politely.
‘She says I’ve got to get you to come round to our house. Why don’t you come tomorrow?’
Tom’s eyebrows went up very high.
‘Or are you doing something else? Going to the music shop?’
‘What’s the point?’ asked Tom, resignedly. ‘They know I haven’t any money. I was going to the library.’
‘Oh.’
‘I was going to find the way up on to the roof.’
‘What?’
‘There’s always a way on to a roof like that,’ said Tom. ‘There has to be. For maintenance.’
‘But what’s so special about the library roof?’
‘I like to get up high,’ said Tom, and Indigo remembered the fire escape, and the multi-storey car park, and the sound of music that had seemed to come from the sky when he and Rose visited Tom at home.
‘You come with me,’ said Tom, ‘and then I’ll come to your house afterwards.’
‘You want me to come with you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Will you bring your guitar when you come? And show Rose that thing with the chalked ball? She’d love it.’
Tom’s eyes narrowed a little. He said, ‘Only if you’ll climb up to the library roof with me first.’
‘I bet it isn’t possible.’
‘Well, maybe it isn’t,’ agreed Tom. ‘But I’m going to find out. Catch! How could you miss that? Try again! Tomorrow then, at ten. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Indigo.
Chapter Ten
Rose was not pleased when she heard that Tom’s plans for Saturday morning did not include a visit to the music shop. She said, ‘They’ll think he does not want it any more.’
‘They’ll have more sense than that,’ said Indigo.
Rose did not think so. Therefore early on Saturday morning she dragged Eve out of bed and persuaded her to fit in a visit to town before the beginning of her class at the college.
‘Rose darling!’ protested Eve sleepily, as Rose handed her toast, her shoes and the car keys and pushed her out of the door.
At the music shop Rose was recognised at once by the kind assistant. Eve propped herself up in the doorway for five more minutes of dozing, and Rose took the black guitar, sat down on Tom’s stool and solemnly tested the strings.
