by Hilary McKay
“No money at all?” asked Clem, hunting through her purse. “Check your pockets! Or can I?”
“No!” Binny grabbed her jacket just in time, and very luckily a moment later Clem found a surprise pound coin in the corner of her bag. She hurried out to the shops for a second time while Binny hid the money again. And again, and again, as the morning progressed, and the cake went into the oven, birthday cards arrived in the post, Pecker laid an egg, and the railway engineers, ignoring Clem, became spies in winter hats and dark 3-D movie glasses, skulking at the base of Miss Piper’s back fence.
Binny took them the cake bowl out to scrape.
“Evidence!” they hissed to each other, and licked their spoons furtively, with their hats pulled down over their noses. “Could you tell who we were if you didn’t know?” asked James, between licks.
“Never,” said Binny kindly.
Pete the builder arrived unexpectedly while they were still outside. He brought with him a set of open wooden stairs that he said he’d come by from a friend and was leaving in the garden.
“Why?” asked Binny ungratefully.
“Just a thought,” he said, and disappeared indoors with his tape measure.
“Follow!” whispered James to Dill, so they did.
Binny waited until she was quite alone and then climbed swiftly up the apple tree. The summer before she had made a tree house there, consisting of half a surfboard, tied on with washing line. It was so wobbly that no one but Binny ever dared visit it, which made it a perfect hiding place for the money, wrapped in a bread bag and pushed under the board. Binny stayed in the apple tree until a woolly hatted spy popped up at her feet.
“It’s only me,” said Dill, and Binny groaned, rescued her money before he got any higher and took it back into the house. There she looked around her bedroom.
There was too much stuff. Not just James’s train track and the terrible clutter of everyday belongings, but half unpacked boxes, a never-played-with dolls’ house, and Max’s basket, kept on the floor to remind herself that he would soon be coming back.
The family were always sorting and stacking and organizing their belongings. It was difficult because the house was small, and the never-quite-finished building work made it even smaller. Only Clem achieved complete tidiness. That was because she owned so little. Clem’s things had a way of vanishing to pay for music lessons, unless Binny managed to rescue them first. The dolls’ house was a rescue that she sometimes regretted. It had very painful chimneys and the pointyness of the roof made it impossible to sit on with any sort of comfort. Binny looked at it crossly, and then had a good idea.
“James!” she called. “Guess what! I’ll give you the dolls’ house! You can use it for a station or a farmhouse or anything you like!”
“No thank you,” said James, arriving at once with Dill behind him.
“Why not?”
James rolled his eyes at Dill, who murmured as if to help Binny understand, “He’s a boy.”
“Makes no difference,” said Binny. “Boys need houses as much as girls. I’ll share it with you, then, James. You have it sometimes and I’ll have it sometimes. I’ve had it already for ages, so it’s your turn now.”
“If you give it to me I’ll give it to Dill,” said James ungratefully.
“All right,” said Binny, beginning to tug the dolls’ house out of her room. “Here you go Dill! Isn’t it lovely?”
Dill shook his head furiously and glared at James.
“He won’t be given it,” related James.
“Lent, then. I’ll lend it to you, Dill!”
Dill breathed hard through his nose.
“He won’t be lent it, either!” said James, and shoved the dolls’ house out of the way so hard it slid down the first two stairs and jammed, just as the front door opened and a voice called, “Hello!”
“It’s Mum! Keep her out of the kitchen!” screeched Binny, and James jumped the dolls’ house and clattered down the stairs to spread-eagle himself across the closed kitchen door.
“You can’t go in!” he explained. “Clem’s made something secret and I’m taking you for a walk while she ices it with Binny. It’s all arranged. We’re going to the harbor where you might buy me an ice cream. Dill’s coming too.”
Dill said something very quiet and intense.
“And then coming back after to scrape the icing bowls,” translated James.
“Yes I see,” said his mother, and went to the harbor very willingly, leaving Clem and Binny to experiment with chocolate and caramel and cream. The wonderful smell of the caramel brought Pete’s head poking round the door, where he was so admiring and dropped such large hints that Clem invited him to come and have a slice tomorrow.
“Bring a present, though,” Binny ordered.
“Binny!” said Clem, shocked at the idea of demanding a present from the never-paid Pete.
“I will,” said Pete. “I know just what she needs. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. I’ll look forward to that.”
* * *
Almost as soon as Pete had gone Miss Piper came round.
“Just popping!” she said. “To have a tiny word about James and his friend. Should they be playing with knives, do you think?”
“No they shouldn’t!” exclaimed Clem. “What sort of knives?”
“Table knives, I believe. So not a good idea! They were using them to enlarge the gaps in the fence.”
“Oh, they were spying!” said Binny without thinking. “Pretend spying, for a game,” she added, seeing Miss Piper’s smile tighten on her face.
“They won’t anymore,” said Clem. “I promise. I should have noticed them, but I was so busy with Mum’s cake.”
“Ah!” said Miss Piper. “Yes I knew there was a birthday coming. And how are you going to keep it hidden until tomorrow?”
“James is having it in his bedroom,” said Binny. “It’s his reward for taking Mum out while we ice it.”
Again she saw the expression on Miss Piper’s face, and she remembered her little brother’s bedroom, with its potions brewing in jars and its piled up socks, and she hurried to add, “In a cake tin of course. A tin, with a lid. Not bare in his bedroom, getting all hairy!”
Miss Piper said very quickly, although she had not yet been asked, “I never eat cake,” and retreated back to her own doorstep. “Don’t forget the candles!” she called from her butterfly shaped doormat, and then vanished into her house.
“Candles!” wailed Binny, but Clem had remembered. A pale green one for the middle of the cake. Thirty-nine pink and pale green tea lights, another find from the market, to go round the edge. “Whatever would we do without the market?” asked Clem. “Just think, if we had to buy everything in shops!”
Binny, now infinitely richer than her hardworking sister, felt guilty all over again.
All through that day the money continued to make itself as visible as possible. By evening it had been hidden in Binny’s pillowcase, very briefly in the tea light box, her bathrobe pocket, and in an empty cookie tin which was nearly thrown away. That night she took it to bed with her, made the quilt into a tent, and prepared to gloat over it again. She had not yet counted it. Somehow she could not quite bear to do that, it looked such a frightening large amount.
“Night, Binny,” said Clem, tiptoeing past her doorway, and Binny’s head shot out of the tent in a terrible panic and whacked hard into her headboard. “Ouch!” she moaned. “Oh no! Go away!”
“What have you got there?” asked Clem, not going away at all.
“Nothing, nothing,” said Binny, scuffling a lot under her quilt.
“I think you’re up to no good!” said Clem. “As usual. Do you want to get up really early and help with a surprise birthday breakfast?”
“Oh yes!”
“Okay. If you wake up first come and get me, and if I wake up first I’ll come and get you. I thought we’d do hot choc and pancakes, enough for everyone.”
“Gorgeous!”
�
��Night night, then. Shall I put your light out?”
“I might write for a bit.”
“Okay, if you must.”
Binny’s need to write baffled Clem as much as her own flute music did Binny. Clem did not see the charm of smooth paper, or the magic of the ripples and splashes of words as they poured onto the page. Nor did she understand that Binny wrote to untangle her thoughts, as other people doodled, or ran, or listened to music. She just knew that her sister did it. Often. Nearly every day. Understandable things, like the Biography of Max the Dog, and inexplicable things such as Everything Yellow I Saw Today, as well as entries in her father’s notebook, in very small writing so as to make it last forever.
That night Binny wrote:
I wish Miss Piper hadn’t followed me all the way back from the marketplace.
Think about something else! Think about something else! Think about something else!
Okay, Miss Piper and Pete.
Miss Piper doesn’t like Pete. Especially his white van with its rusty red patches. She says it spoils the look of the street. But it’s the best van Pete can manage because he never gets paid. Mum tries and he says, “PLEASE. WHEN I’M FINISHED.”
He was nearly finished until the day that none of the lights would switch on. Pete looked at our fuse box (which was full of damp gray crystals that looked like salt) and he yelled, “POLLY YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN EARTHED!”
“How do you know?” asked Mum. “I have been earthed a lot as a matter of fact. I find having three children very earthing.”
But Pete said he meant the sort of earthing that stops the house catching fire when the live wires touch each other. He didn’t like our wires, he said they were nothing better than chewing gum. Before he managed to get rid of them he got two electric shocks.
“Are you sure he knows what he is doing?” asked Miss Piper when she heard this news.
“Oh yes,” said Mum. “Oh yes, I’m sure he does. He’s put in all-new wiring and a new fuse box and plugs. We didn’t even know we had a problem!”
We haven’t paid Pete yet for all the wires and things, or for sorting out the windows so they open and shut. Or for painting the henhouse or for the little fence he made around the trash cans so the garden looks like a garden not a trash patch. He helped me dig over a place for the poppy seeds as well, but that was just to be friendly. We are friendly to him back. When we have baked potatoes and he is here we put in an extra one for him. And we make him cups of tea but he brings his own teabags because he says ours are wishy-washy. And he likes toast better than bourbon creams.
Miss Piper has a face she makes when Pete is around. She smiles and at the same time she sucks in the corners of her mouth.
I wish I hadn’t remembered Miss Piper’s face.
I’ve got all this money.
Pounds and pounds and pounds.
Binny fell asleep with her thoughts all heavy with money. Deep in the night she woke up to realize that her hands were full of twenty-pound notes, recognized the danger of Clem arriving early in the morning and discovering her secret, and staggered out of bed to hide them yet again.
Chapter Five
Sunday
Binny was woken by Clem shaking her shoulder and then a wonderful day began that started with pancakes and ended with candles and in between included many hugs, as well as exclamations of pleasure, including: “Binny, how perfect! My favorites!”
It was all just as Binny had imagined, only with much less glamorous presents. Straight after breakfast the silver earrings were put on and the poppy seeds were planted and then the first voucher was cashed in for a birthday cup of tea while the Kit Kat was shared with James.
In the afternoon more presents came, the first from Pete.
“Were you on the lookout?” he asked when Binny rushed to the door to meet him. “I hadn’t even rung.”
“I heard you whistling.”
“I wasn’t whistling! I was particularly not whistling!”
“Knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s door!” said Binny.
“Well, whatever,” agreed Pete. “How’s your mum?”
“She’s having a brilliant time. We gave her loads of presents and she’s got two she hasn’t unwrapped yet from the old people’s home. They gave her a great big card too, with everyone’s names on and Clem and me made posh lunch.”
“How posh?”
“Soufflé. That’s posh! You have to beat up egg whites. Where’s your van, Pete?”
“I walked,” said Pete, “not wanting . . .” He paused, and glanced over his shoulder in the direction of Miss Piper’s windows. Silk flowers filled their sills, and snowy lace curtains draped the panes of glass. Often, it seemed to Binny, there were soft movements behind those curtains, such as Cinderella made when she sat watching from the window at the sparrows in the street.
“She wants to buy our house, did you know?” Binny told Pete. “To make hers bigger for vacation people.”
“Half the old cottages are going that way,” said Pete. “It’s you lot who need more space. It’s like trying to work in a monkey cage in there sometimes. Mind you, you’d have more room if you got rid of the books.”
“You can’t get rid of books!”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t. We used to have a bookshop.”
“Isn’t the whole idea of a bookshop to get rid of books?”
“No!”
“ ’Course it is! Common sense!”
“Our bookshop didn’t get rid of books. It had thousands! And it had big sofas and little tables with blue bowls of free sweets.”
“Very nice,” said Pete. “Am I going to be coming in, then, or not?”
“Oh yes, come in!” said Binny, suddenly anxious for Pete not to ask what had happened to the happy place she remembered. The bookshop that had done everything a bookshop should do except get rid of books. “Come in! Did you bring a present?”
Pete had brought a present, and it was a spirit level, secondhand and not wrapped up, and the children’s mother could not speak for laughing when she saw it.
“I don’t know what’s funny,” said Pete. “Do you know not a picture in this house is hung straight?”
“Have you ever given anyone a spirit level for their birthday before?” Binny asked.
“I haven’t needed to,” said Pete, looking down his nose at her. “Everyone I know has got one already. What’s the matter with you?” he added, observing that both Binny and Clem were now dying with laughter too. “If I hadn’t got a spirit level and someone gave me one I’d be . . . I’d be . . . thankful!”
The children’s mother said she was very thankful indeed and she tried it on several pictures so that they could all watch as the little bubble floated slowly to the point which proved Pete to be right.
“It’s all relative,” said Clem. “Relative to the spirit level, the pictures are crooked. Relative to the floors and walls and ceilings, they’re straight.”
Dill, who had arrived uninvited and been very interested in the spirit level, stunned them all by saying huskily, “Nothing can be really straight because the world is round.”
“Rubbish!” said Pete.
“It’s true!” said James, nodding, while Dill smiled his downward smile, eyes on the ground. “Didn’t you know? I thought everyone knew!”
Pete said of course he knew the world was round, and James whispered loudly to Dill, “Pretend you believe him!” and they both curled with silent laughter, hitting each other with pleasure.
“Stop it!” Binny said crossly. “Stop it! It’s Mum’s birthday! Be good!”
Pete picked up a boy in each hand, opened the kitchen door with his foot, strode into the garden, and deposited them side by side on the henhouse roof.
“You’re a natural bouncer!” said the children’s mother approvingly.
Pete grinned, began whistling, stopped himself, found his hat, looked at it, put it back in his pocket, and ordered that the spirit level be put somewhere safe.
They put it on the mantelpiece, with birthday cards around it, and then James came in to say, as he had been saying at very short intervals all day, “What about birthday cake?” and everyone agreed that it was time.
It was a gorgeous cake, the children’s mother said when she saw it, but Pete looked dubious and said the whole thing looked very shaky.
“Shaky?” asked Clem.
“Like it might drop apart,” explained Pete, waggling the candle. “See that? Loose! Never pass the fire regs. Whole thing needs reinforcing if you ask me!”
Then he frowned down at Binny in a way that showed he had not forgotten that she had climbed up the scaffolding to check his tiling.
“You don’t have to have any,” said Binny, rather offended, but he did, and joined in with singing “Happy Birthday” as well.
“It’s not quite my daftest present ever,” the children’s mother said, when he left, not long afterward. “My father once gave me a haggis.”
“A haggis! What did you do with it?”
“I didn’t do anything. I think they are terrible things. My father loved haggis, though, so he ate it. There’s Miss Piper at the door! Open it, James!”
Miss Piper had a birthday present too, properly wrapped in pink tissue paper.
“But,” said James, staring as it was finally unwrapped, “even crazier than Pete’s!”
It was a doll made out of a clothes peg, the old-fashioned sort of peg with a round knob at the top. That made the head of the doll which was dressed to look, and it did look, exactly like Binny. There she was, gray green eyes, seaweed hair, freckles, jeans, and Clem’s old pink and white striped shirt. Under one pipe cleaner arm she carried a miniature notebook. Her other hand was in her pocket.
“Goodness it’s wonderful!” exclaimed Binny’s mother. “It really is! How clever you are! Binny, look! It’s even a real little notebook! It opens!”
Binny was already looking, not at the notebook, but at the hand in the left pocket. Bang, bang, bang went her heart.
“It’s perfect,” said her mother, and Miss Piper smiled and admitted to making very many of these dolls. “For a hobby,” she said modestly. “I’d never think of selling them. Oh, I’ve made them for a long time, ever since I was a girl.”
