by Hilary McKay
Binny looked at him doubtfully.
“Remember when he dropped that door key in the harbor on purpose!” said Gareth.
“That was a long time ago.”
“And when he put the chicken in the attic! When he grew poisonous salad and tried it out on me! What about the time he mended Clare’s mum’s TV!”
“I didn’t know you knew about that.”
“He told me himself.”
“You see! He told you! James is honest. He would never have taken the money.”
“He stole that chicken last summer, that wasn’t very honest!”
“He didn’t steal it! He swapped it for things he had.”
“I know! Stuff he got from the old ladies where your mum works! That ring! The watch and the ruby!”
“He thought they didn’t want them anymore. Anyway, he would never take money. He wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had it. He once had five pounds and it muddled him up so much he cried.”
“I bet he wouldn’t cry now,” said Gareth. “I bet he’d love a load of money. I bet he’d know what to do with it too. I’ll ask him!”
“Be careful!” said Binny alarmed. “Don’t let him guess why you’re asking, in case he tells Mum and Clem.”
Gareth said he would be careful, a lot more careful than Binny had been with Clare. He wasted no time getting on with his questioning. As soon as he and Binny got back he invited James to come and witness the pigeon’s morning bath.
Very soon afterward, by means of devious and skillful questioning, he discovered exactly how James would deal with a great deal of money.
“You couldn’t just spend it,” said James. “Because they’d all say, ‘Where did you get it from?’ You’d have to hide it and spend it in little bits. What are you doing?”
Gareth, who was suddenly adding exclamation marks after James’s name on the Suspects list, said, “Nothing, nothing. Go on.”
“But if I had a lot of money I didn’t have to hide or spend in little tiny bits,” James continued obediently, “I’d buy a suit of armor and kill Dill.”
“What?”
“I’d buy a suit of armor and kill Dill,” repeated James placidly.
“But Dill’s your friend!”
“Not anymore.”
“Anyway, you couldn’t. You couldn’t kill anyone with a suit of armor.”
“With a sword you could. Or a Star Wars lightsaber.”
“But why do you want to kill Dill?”
“I don’t want to, I just have to. To stop him killing me.”
The pigeon had finished its bath. Each time the water was less murky. Each time its wings were stronger. Now it attempted to preen its tattered feathers and Gareth looked at it with pride. Early that morning he had taken it to the vet, borrowed a cage, and been given some advice. Now he carried the pigeon in its cage out to the garden and scattered birdseed over the lawn.
“Other pigeons will come,” he explained to James, “so when I let it go it’ll have a flock to fly off with. That wing was only bruised. The vet said to give it a couple of days and then let it try and leave. Come on, then! Tell me about you and Dill.”
“He’s turned into my enemy. He’s waiting for a chance to get me.”
“Oh come on, James! Don’t be so daft!”
“He stares at me out of his grandma’s window. Every time I go and see if he’s still there, he is. Waiting.”
Gareth demanded proof of this, and straightaway was led into the street and along to Dill’s grandmother’s house. Sure enough, there at the window stood Dill, white faced, motionless, glaring at James with murderous burning eyes.
“He’s always there now,” said James.
“What, standing there, just like that?”
“Sometimes he blinks. Not often.”
All at once, Dill sprang into action and mimed terrible chopping and very high kicks.
“That was his kung fu fighting,” said James, when, as suddenly as he had begun, Dill became motionless again. “He does that too, as well as the staring.”
“When did this all start?” asked Gareth.
“After he saw Kung Fu Panda.”
“No, no, when did the staring out of the window thing start?”
“That day we went to the beach.”
“Ah!” said Gareth. “Burying treasure. Is that right?”
James nodded. “Come away now,” he urged, backing up as he spoke and tugging on Gareth’s arm to make him follow. “Don’t talk so loud; I think he can hear through glass. And don’t wave! It makes him madder.”
Gareth allowed himself to be towed backward until they reached James’s doorstep and then he asked, “Why did your treasure burying cause so much trouble?”
“It was meant to be a secret,” James explained. “A deafly secret . . .” (He paused to touch his ears. Still working. Good.) “Both of us were going to bury secret things. It was Dill’s idea and then he spoiled it.”
“How?”
“He guessed what I buried,” said James, round eyed and solemn. “That’s why he’s so mad.”
“So did you bury something of his, then?”
James sighed regretfully, and glanced over his shoulder.
“Well,” said Gareth cunningly, “I suppose he buried something of yours, didn’t he? So that’s fair. As long as neither of you buried something really stupid, like a whole lot of money.”
“It was a secret, what Dill buried.”
James’s voice was getting smaller and smaller as he spoke, while his ears glowed scarlet with guilt.
“You know what it was,” said Gareth sternly.
“It was in a tin,” said James. “A special red coffee tin with bare ladies on it.”
“Bare what?” asked Gareth, rather startled.
“Ladies. Gold bare ladies.”
There was a sudden movement at Dill’s grandmother’s window. The kung fu fighting had started again. James lost courage completely and bolted into the house. Gareth found him five minutes later, deep behind the sofa.
“Come out!” he commanded, peering round at him, but James only put his fingers in his ears and screwed his eyes tight shut.
Chapter Thirteen
Wednesday Morning, Part Two
While Gareth and James were watching the phenomenon of Dill in the window, Binny had gone into the house to find Pete, very much at home, making tea in the kitchen.
“One for your mum before she goes to work,” he said. “I’ll take it out to the garden for her in a minute. One for me. One for you if you want it. One for Clem, take it up to her, will you Bin, and tell her I’m going to have to turn the power off for half an hour or so.”
“Why are you?”
“So I don’t get frazzled in the attic setting up lighting for the family masterpiece.”
“We haven’t got a family masterpiece.”
“You’ve got everything but, though,” said Pete, looking meaningfully at the pile of junk Binny had dropped when she came in the door: jacket, dog leash, plastic bag of beach trash for Gareth’s art installation, chewed Frisbee, and sandy sneakers.
“It’s hard to know where to put it all,” said Binny.
“Coat peg, coat peg, trash can, dog basket, outside till they dry then bang them together to get the sand off and shoe box by the back door.
Binny gave him one of her looks.
“And don’t let that tea get cold!” said Pete, and strode outside.
Bossy, thought Binny, redistributing her heap nevertheless. She could see him through the kitchen window, being watched admiringly by her mother while he did something outrageous to Gertie.
“Nit powder!” mouthed her mother, seeing Binny looking, and gave her a double thumbs-up. Binny returned the thumbs-up rather limply, feeling that nit powder was not a thing to be celebrated with such joy.
“I’ve brought you a cup of tea from Pete,” she called to Clem as she climbed the stairs. “And he said to tell you he’s turning the power off. Where are you?”
“Bathroom. I know he’s turning the power off. I’m having a shower before he does. Put the tea in my bedroom!”
“Please!” said Binny reprovingly.
“Please!”
“Okay.”
Binny turned the handle of Clem’s bedroom door and went in and, as she always did when she found herself there, paused to gaze around.
It was quite unlike any other part of the house, or for that matter, any part of any other house that Binny had ever seen. Once, in the days when she still wrote things down to untangle them, she had searched for a whole evening to find the best way to express the mystery that her sister had created in that room. In the end, she had decided upon snow. Clem’s room had the same feeling as a landscape after snowfall. The clutter of the everyday world was gone, and the light was clear.
Clem achieved her snowscape bedroom by owning very little. Her clothes were so few that they hardly filled her narrow chest of drawers. There was nothing in her bookcase except a few books from the college library, her college notebooks, and a pile of music. A miniature table worked for a desk, just big enough for a friend’s discarded laptop and two pens and a pencil in a tub. There was a bed, a music stand, a small mirror, and a silvery shell on the windowsill and that was all.
Out of this place of calm came sound. An enormous quantity of sound, that raced and raged and cascaded and flowed through the white closed door, created by the only possession Clem owned that she really treasured: her silver flute.
Clem’s flute was the explanation for her room. The shattering cost of specialist flute lessons was the reason for the emptiness of the chest of drawers, the spaces in the bookshelf, and the ancient laptop. Binny could never have lived like that, but all the same she loved to stand and admire the result.
This time, however, Binny gazed around the room and she was puzzled. It had changed. The whole feeling was different, as different as the house had been when the roof blew off. Yet, there was the bed and the table and the chair. The books and music and the shell and the mirror were all in place. Binny turned, taking it all in, wondering.
The chest of drawers.
James and Binny and the children’s mother constantly left their possessions lying about, but Clem never did and her flute least of all. If it wasn’t in her hands, it was safely in its case on top of the chest of drawers.
Now it wasn’t there.
When had Clem last played her flute? Binny clutched her head to think. Not today, she knew, nor yesterday, she was sure.
Monday!
The day of the lost money and the frantic hunt. The day of the noises like lunatic owls and Clem’s oblivious passing through the chaos, leaving Binny the grown-up and James and Dill free to escape with their treasure to the beach. And she had run after them, leaving the door wide open behind.
Binny’s skittering thoughts were never far from the furthest reach of possibility that Gareth called unreal. Clem’s flute was absent; was it lost? Surely, surely, surely, it had not fallen through the same gap in the world that had taken the money?
Had Miss Piper’s first guess been correct, then? Had they been burgled after all?
No, thought Binny, coming to her senses. If either of those things, lost or stolen, had happened to the flute, Clem would have dismantled the universe to find it.
While Binny stood looking, there came the click of the bathroom door opening, and then Clem was in the doorway, her hair wrapped up in a towel, and her eyebrows a little raised to indicate that she was surprised to find Binny still in her room.
“Thank you,” she said, removing the mug of tea Binny still held. “I’m going to get dressed now, so off you pop.”
“Clem, where’s your flute?” said Binny.
Clem became very still.
“Is it stolen? Lost?”
“No.”
“Where, then? You haven’t . . . you can’t have sold it?”
“No NO! Of course not!” Clem closed the door behind her and leaned her back against it. “It’s gone to be mended, that’s all.”
“Oh!” All at once Binny understood the terrible owl noises. “It was broken? Why didn’t you say?”
Clem ignored that question and went on. “The music department at college helped. They know a place, so that’s where we’ve sent it. It’s out of alignment . . . it’s not an enormous problem.”
“Will it cost much to be fixed?”
“My flute teacher talked to them. That made it a bit less. It’ll be back in a few days. Don’t tell Mum.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no need for fuss.”
“But what about paying, Clem? How will you manage?”
“It’s paid for already,” said Clem, calmly, but she would not look at Binny as she spoke.
Binny left Clem’s room, stood on the landing, thought, and then bounded back.
“Clem, where did you get the money to pay for your flute?”
There was a pause while Binny waited and Clem’s eyes grew wide with outrage.
“That is absolutely none of your business,” she said, at last.
“It might be,” said Binny.
“How?”
“Like when you sell things?”
“How is that your business?”
Binny hesitated. There was a regret about Clem’s selling that she had felt for years and never mentioned. “When they are things I might have had, it is.”
“What absolute nerve!” exclaimed Clem.
“It’s true. Lots of my friends get things passed on from their big sisters. And if you are going to say, ‘What about the ones without big sisters like Clare,’ well, they get the things new themselves in the first place. Ella has a bike that she had from her big sister and Clare has a bike that her mum got her new. But you sold yours.”
“Why shouldn’t I have sold it?” demanded Clem. “It was mine. I had it for my birthday when I was eleven or twelve or something. It was a present!”
“I didn’t have a bike for a present when I was eleven or twelve or something.”
“That’s because things were different by then.”
“If I had,” continued Binny, “I could go and see Clare when I liked without waiting for buses. Gareth and I could go biking together.”
“I had to have the money, Binny.”
“You sold your ice skates and your Rollerblades. Loads of clothes and books. That little camera you had for your ski trip. All your camping things from when you used to go with Guides. I expect lots of other things I don’t know too. All the stuff you had when you were the eldest and we hadn’t gone bankrupt. So I think it is my business. And that’s why I asked about the money for your flute.”
“Do you think I like it?” snapped Clem in a furious whisper. “I hate it! I always have. Selling special things. Putting up notices at school when Dad had only just died. Lying in shops about my age. Asking my friends!”
“Okay. Shut up.”
“It was the only way I could carry on learning. Mum couldn’t earn enough. I couldn’t earn enough. I admit it, I’m selfish.”
Clem’s anger was all gone. She sat slumped at her desk with her head in her hands. She rubbed her eyes with the damp towel that was unwinding from her head and said, “I’m sorry, Binny.”
Binny, rubbing her hot cheek against Clem’s damp hair, became the comforter.
“I’m sorry too. The bike and everything, I shouldn’t have said. And it’s not always like that anyway. Remember the dolls’ house, ages ago? I made such a fuss and you didn’t sell it.”
“We’ve been falling over it ever since,” said Clem, sniffing a bit but hugging her back. “I wish I could have kept the bike for you. But I couldn’t. The only thing I can do properly, almost properly, is play the flute.”
“It’s not!” exclaimed Binny. “You can do millions of things! You’re clever! You’re pretty! If your worst thing wasn’t having your photo taken, you could be a model!”
“A model! No thank you!” said
Clem, laughing now. “You be a model, if you want a model in the family! Oh Binny, look at you. Why did you dye your seaweed hair?”
“Gareth says it still is seaweed. Bladderwrack, he says.”
“As soon as I’m rich I’ll buy you a bike.”
“I’d rather have a car, thank you, Clem. With a top that folds down like Gareth’s dad’s.”
“What color?”
“Probably green. I think Max would like green too.”
So they were friends again, and a little more equally than before. Clem, the dazzling big sister had said, “I’m selfish.”
And I looked after her, thought Binny, remembering Clem’s defeated shoulders as she sat at her desk. That’s fair, she admitted, and her mind went back to the hundreds of times that Clem had been there for her. When I had nightmares every night. When Mum wasn’t there when I got home from school. When I had chicken pox and Mum still had to go to work. When she made Max a birthday cake and it was cheese with ham icing.
Clem isn’t selfish, thought Binny, but where did the money come from to mend the flute?
I can’t ask her again.
The children’s mother called up the stairs that she was just on her way to work and there were sandwiches in the kitchen for anyone who wanted them, and lentil soup on the stove because it was such a cold day. Binny ran down to say good-bye, and then Max became so excited at the sight of shoes going on and coats being found that Binny put him on his leash.
“We’ll walk with you to keep you company,” she told her mother.
“Lovely.”
They set off together, in the opposite direction to Dill’s grandmother’s house, past Miss Piper’s flowery, lacy, waiting windows, past the baker’s on the corner, where the pasties were piled in the window like a harvest. Then along down the narrow street and into the marketplace. From there they had a view of the sea, wave shaken right to the horizon. A row of herring gulls stood along the library roof, their backs to the wind, their yellow eyes half closed, concentrating furiously on changing the weather by the power of herring gull thought.
“Dreaming of summer,” said Binny’s mother.
