by Hilary McKay
Her mother looked at her thoughtfully, but did not ask, “Why not?”
“Your dad had a lovely desk,” she said instead. “You used to make dens underneath it when you were very little. Do you remember?”
“Mum?”
“Yes?”
“Dad is dead isn’t he?”
“Binny! Yes. Yes he is.”
“I was just checking. In case it was like in old books and it turns out they were only in prison or had brain fever or their airplane crashed on a deserted island.”
“Yes, I understand, Binny.”
“What happened to Dad’s desk?”
“It’s in storage. I didn’t want to part with it, but it’s too big for anywhere we’ve lived since. Maybe one day we’ll have space for it.”
“You don’t want to move house again, do you?” Binny asked, alarmed, but even as she spoke she knew it was not a fair question to ask someone who slept on the sofa, kept her two dresses in Clem’s wardrobe, and all her other clothes and things in the narrow darkness of the cupboard under the stairs. Very recently Pete had said, “Just a thought,” and put a light in the cupboard. “Luxury!” Binny’s mother had exclaimed, and the cry of, “Who has borrowed my flashlight?” was no longer heard.
But it isn’t really luxury, thought Binny. It would be much better for her mother if they did move house.
“I could swap rooms with you if you like, Mum!” she offered now. “Would that be better?”
“I don’t think it would,” said her mother, hugging her and laughing. “I’ll think we’ll stay as we are for the moment.”
“If you change your mind I will.”
“Thank you, but meanwhile I can manage without a bedroom if you can manage without a desk. What are you writing now, Binny?”
“I’m not really writing anything.”
“You finished the Max biography, didn’t you? I thought you’d be filling up your Little Prince notebook.”
Binny shook her head. Writing frightening things down made them far too clear to bear. She had lost her writing escape as surely as she had lost the money.
“What’s the matter, Binny?”
“Nothing.”
“Not true. Dad?”
“I should never have asked you that about Dad.”
“You can always ask me anything about Dad, Binny,” said her mother, so Binny asked the question that she had wondered for years.
“Do you think he knew before he died that we would be bankrupt?”
“I think,” said her mother, after a very long pause, “he always believed that something magical would come along and save it all. I am sure he never guessed, for instance, that you would lose Max.”
Max beat his tail at the sound of his name, and they both looked at him with love.
“I found him again,” said Binny, comfortingly, seeing the sadness on her mother’s face.
“Yes,” her mother agreed, but her face was still sad, and since cheerfulness hadn’t helped, Binny tried a plain unreasonable grumble instead.
“I told Pete I didn’t mind not having a door. I even said I liked it better, but he’s fixed it all the same.”
It worked. Her mother stopped looking sad and became indignant.
“It’s not a problem to most people, Binny, having a bedroom door. If it really annoys you I suppose we could ask him to take it off again.”
“Then we’ll have to pay him even more!” said Binny. “He’s done millions of things now, not just mending the roof. How will we pay him for them all?”
“You’re worrying about money!” exclaimed her mother. “That’s what it has been all this week! Oh Binny! It hardly took Pete and me ten minutes to fix your door. It was fun! We leveled it with my birthday spirit level! Don’t think about it for one minute more!”
“But he still needs to be paid,” said Binny, stubbornly. “He still needs things,” she added, remembering Gareth’s words, “food and tools and diesel for his van.”
“You really have been thinking about it!” said her mother. “I knew there was something wrong. Money! I thought it was much worse than that! Come on, give me a hug and say, ‘Mum, I’m so not worried about money that if I find a dungeon full of gold ingots, I won’t bother to bring them home!’ ”
That was so close to the awful truth that Binny could hardly bear it.
“What would you do if I did?” she asked.
“Take them to the police station and say, “ ‘My very strong daughter has managed to carry these gold ingots home. Please would you find the owner.’ ” But you never would. You’d have more sense!”
Chapter 12
Wednesday Morning, Part One
What are you doing?” asked James, up before seven the next morning and peering at Binny in the bathroom. “What’s that smell?”
“Go away! You should knock, not just barge in!”
“I don’t knock,” said James, as if stating a truth beyond his control. “Your hair’s dripping brown drips.”
Binny mopped anxiously. Brown splodges appeared on her towel.
“Why are you washing your hair with dirty shampoo?” asked James.
“It’s not shampoo.”
“Why are you putting it on your head, then?”
“To change the color. I’m tired of looking like seaweed. What are you doing here anyway?”
“My toothpaste cooking.” James squirted a dollop of mint toothpaste onto the tip of a finger and looked at it consideringly. “Strawberry sauce?” he inquired of his reflection in the mirror. “Oh yes, thank you!” he replied, nodding politely, and added a swirl of Peppa Pig pink.
“Pudding!” he announced, between delicate cat licks.
“No wonder the toothpaste is used up all the time!” said Binny.
“I know. Especially the strawberry,” said James shamelessly. “Do you want to see my muscles?”
He pulled up his pajama top to display a set of bony ridges that Binny correctly identified as ribs. “Ribs are good too,” she told him consolingly, when he looked disappointed.
“Good as muscles?”
“Definitely. They stop you caving in.”
“What do muscles do?”
“Stop you falling apart.”
“Wow,” said James, and made another pudding to celebrate.
“What happened with Miss Piper last night?” asked Binny.
“It was very polite,” said James, after some thoughtful licking. “She said very polite things for me to do and then I very politely did them.”
“What sort of things?”
“ ‘Please pick those clothes up.’ So I did. And ‘Please go to bed.’ So I went.”
This was such an unusual description of her brother at bedtime that Binny looked at him carefully, checking for bewitchment. She would have asked more questions if James had not innocently remarked that it was taking ages for her hair to be done.
Binny had equipped herself with an alarm clock and then forgotten to use it. Now, after a horrified glance in the bathroom mirror, she shrieked, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” and hung her head over the side of the bath with the shower on full. Dreadful colored water streamed from her head.
“Have you changed your mind?” asked James.
“Shampoo!” ordered Binny, groping and blind.
James passed it, and the bubbles turned gray.
“It’s like when we studied about pollution at school,” he said, watching with interest as she drowned.
“Towel! Towel!” begged Binny, reaching out from the deluge. “There! It’s done! I’ve done it! I knew I could!”
“Have you?” asked James, and he looked first at the picture of the extremely dry and glamorous person on the hair dye box, and then at Binny, drenched to her waist, and so far from glamorousness as to have dyed her ears brown.
“Yes, definitely,” said Binny.
“What color is it going to be? Different to seaweed?”
“Urban Darkness,” said Binny, proudly
. “Much different to seaweed, you’ll see!”
* * *
It was Gareth who had first looked at Binny’s crinkly hair and described it as seaweed colored. “Not green seaweed,” he had explained, as if that made it any better. “The red stuff you get at very low tides. Or washed up,” he had added helpfully.
It was an unusual description, but Binny, after privately inspecting a piece of washed up red seaweed herself, had decided he was right. Months later, wandering round the Pound Shop, she had noticed and bought a box of dark hair dye, half price because it was squashed. She had kept this secret for ages; it might have stayed hidden forever if Miss Piper had not made a peg doll that looked so knowingly like her it made her shiver to remember. Not any longer, though. Clem’s old pink shirt was buried deep in the linen basket, and the notebook was abandoned. The peg doll’s jeans had puzzled her until she remembered that it was supposed to be spring. She had hacked her own jeans into shorts and endured the icy consequences. And now, to finish the transformation, her hair was no longer a seaweed knot. It was a great cloud of Urban Darkness.
Her mother saw it first.
“Show me the box!” she said, the moment Binny appeared, but after she had looked at it she relaxed and hugged her, and said she’d wondered what all the splashing was about.
“Did you hardly recognize me?” asked Binny so hopefully her mother laughed and said, “Do you know, I hardly did, you look so different.”
It was too different for Clem.
“You idiot! Your gorgeous hair!” she exclaimed.
Binny was so astonished that she stared.
“You always laughed at it!”
“Yes, but still, that amazing color!”
“Twenty-four washes and it will be amazing again,” her mother told her soothingly.
Binny began to feel a little indignant, like someone who had been cheated of something valuable that they never knew they owned.
“That new color reminds me of our fence,” remarked James. “The bit at the end of our garden where I used to—”
“Thank you very much James. That’s enough,” said his mother.
“It’s just the same color. Fence brown.”
“It’s Urban Darkness,” said Binny quite crossly. “So you shut up!”
* * *
Binny went out to meet Gareth with her Urban Darkness fence brown hair dangling loose around her shoulders like a brown tattered veil, and the moment she stepped out of the front door Miss Piper appeared.
“Ah,” she said, with her head very slightly on one side. “A new look?”
“Yes,” said Binny.
“Very different.”
“Good.”
“Shorts! My goodness!”
“It’s spring,” said Binny.
“No notebook either, and no pink shirt,” said Miss Piper, turning up her mouth in a lipstick smile. She was dressed in pink herself that morning; soft pink and silvery pink earrings. A disguise, thought Binny, edging toward Gareth’s door. A disguise which won’t work because I know she’s a witch.
“Before you go,” said Miss Piper, smiling a rose pink smile and at the same time holding Binny back by invisible witchstrings, “I have a little gift for you . . . oh, nothing of any value,” she added, seeing the look of horror on Binny’s face. “Just something that might amuse, or have amused, before you changed so quickly. Come over and wait for a moment while I find it!”
Because she couldn’t think of a way of avoiding it, Binny hovered uncomfortably on Miss Piper’s doorstep, while Miss Piper, from somewhere beyond her front door, made time wasting remarks about pigeons, builders, and the purple honesty plants which she had growing in her garden and which were not as strong as she would like.
“Oh,” said Binny.
“Tell me, how is your builder getting on?” called Miss Piper. “I can’t help wondering how much longer he is going to make that job last.”
“He’s not always here,” said Binny. “And he tries not to bother you with his van. He often parks right up the street and carries things down.”
“Yes, I have noticed,” said Miss Piper, her smile curving a little higher. “Why the change?”
“He says he’s had enough of parking tickets and flat tires and batteries gone dead . . .”
Binny stopped, midsentence. Miss Piper had moved so Binny had a sudden glimpse of her hall table. On it was a silver framed photograph of the Queen aged seven, a vase of silvery leaves, and a toy that might have belonged to James, a small white van. It was a miniature, rather cleaner, version of Pete’s.
All the magic that Binny half believed in, witches and openings between worlds, came rushing back to her as she stared.
Pete’s van.
“No wonder!” said Binny, when her breath came back, and Miss Piper, following her gaze, said, “Yes. It makes me smile.”
“Smile!”
“Quite a nice little model. It has a charm.”
“A charm!”
“There beneath the honesty! Those silvery leaves are named honesty, by the way Binny! Yes, a charm that is rather lacking in the original, I am sorry to say. And speaking of charms, this is what I meant for you. Hold out your hand!”
* * *
“And it was Max!” Binny told Gareth, when at last the two of them hurried out with Max together. “Max! And she said, ‘Keep him safe!’ ”
“Show me again,” ordered Gareth, slowing up. “I didn’t see properly before.”
It was a tiny model from an old toy farm, a black and white sheepdog, cast in metal, and although the paint was worn in places it was very like prick eared, banner tailed Max.
“She said she found it on a market stall,” said Binny. “She found Pete’s van there too, she told me. I’ve told you how she witches his van. She could have done anything to Max!”
Gareth rolled his eyes.
“You know why she gave it to me? And why she let me see the van? It was a warning! Showing me what she could do. What does she know about the money? What does she know? Are you scared of her, Gareth?”
“No I’m not!” said Gareth with a snort of disgust. “She’s just dotty, that’s all. What’s the matter with your hair?”
“I dyed it so as not to look like her horrible peg doll.”
“It was better like it was.”
“Not you as well! You always said it was seaweed colored!”
“Still is,” said Gareth, as they reached the beach. “Just a different sort of seaweed. You’re more bladderwrack now!”
He held up a strand to show her.
“Oh shut up!” said Binny. “Come on, let’s keep moving or we’ll freeze! There’s a Coke can in that rock pool, right in the deepest bit. Are you going to get it for your art?”
For a moment Gareth looked ungrateful for this suggestion. It wasn’t the weather for rock pool diving.
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” said Binny, and such an ignorant remark was the help her friend needed to strip off his jacket and his hoodie, push up his T-shirt sleeve, and plunge his arm in shoulder high.
“You might as well get the potato chip packet too, now you’re soaked,” said Binny, pointing.
Gareth dived again.
“Is it cold?”
“Bone aching. Pass me the trash bag! What do you want to do when we get back?”
“Find that money,” said Binny. “Find it, get rid of it, and never have to think about it again.”
“Okay,” said Gareth. “We’ll carry on eliminating people. Not Clare or her mother, you say.”
“No.”
“Your mum?”
“No,” said Binny. “We talked about money last night. She’d have said. I know she would. She told everyone when she found ten pounds behind the clock.”
“All right. That leaves old Piper, James and Dill, you, Pete. Clem. It won’t be Clem, obviously.”
Binny looked at him in surprise. Clem hadn’t been let off so easily the first time that he had made his list.
“Obviously?” asked Binny.
“Clem’s not the sort to go grabbing at money.”
“I thought you didn’t like her much. I thought she . . .” Binny broke off suddenly.
“What?”
“Scared you!”
“Scared me?” asked Gareth.
“Being so grown-up.”
“No she’s not.”
“And pretty.”
“Can’t say I noticed.”
“And clever.”
“I don’t find intelligent people frightening,” said Gareth in a very annoyed voice. “Stupid ones, definitely. Anyway, of course I like her. She was really nice about my pigeon.”
Despite her worries, Binny grinned, although at the same time she felt a flicker of uncertainty. Gareth was wrong. Of all of them, Clem was by far the most likely to grab at money. Over and over again, Binny had witnessed her sister’s ruthlessness when it came to finding the way to pay for the music that mattered so much. And Clem was not herself these last few days.
“What about Pete?” asked Gareth, interrupting these thoughts. “A lot of people would guess Pete.”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t want it to be him.”
“Who’d you want it to be, then?”
“Miss Piper, but it isn’t, or else why is she dropping such horrible hints all the time?” Binny paused to throw Max’s ball for him. “Anyway, she’s a witch, not a burglar. She’s got a broomstick, did I tell you? An actual broomstick! I’ve seen it in her garden!”
Gareth grinned.
“I’m not joking!”
“I know. That’s what’s funny.”
“Anyway, Miss Piper doesn’t need to be a burglar. She’s rich enough already.”
“Rich!” scoffed Gareth. “Who says?”
“Pete says. I heard Pete telling Mum how she owns loads of the vacation cottages around here. And Clem says she’s rich too, because she has so many cashmere cardigans.”
“So what?”
“They are very, very expensive.”
“Oh. Well anyway,” said Gareth, sensibly dismissing cashmere cardigan fashion, which was not his strongest subject, “you’ve forgotten James and Dill. What if the treasure they buried was your twenty-pound notes?”
“They couldn’t be so stupid.”
“Of course they could! James could be that stupid on his own, never mind with Dill to help.”
