Binny Bewitched

by Hilary McKay

  “With the map?” asked Dill.

  “Yeah, all right,” said Gareth.

  “Promise you won’t open it without me?”

  “Promise,” said Gareth.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Later on Wednesday Afternoon

  Binny and Gareth and Max set off for the beach. James and Dill were left behind. They didn’t care. They were as passionately friends as they had been enemies an hour before. Dill offered James a shared ownership of Spider-Man. James offered Dill the best cushion in his cave. Binny and Gareth abandoned them with thankfulness.

  “Map,” said Gareth when they reached the sands, and they bent to look at it.

  “It’s not a map at all!” said Binny after staring for a moment.

  On the paper that Dill had given Gareth was a picture of the top half of a large thin lady with no clothes on. As far as Binny could see, it gave no clue as to where any treasure hunt should begin.

  However, Gareth was more hopeful. “It must be near where I found that key ring,” he said, grinning at Dill’s illustration.

  “Could you find the place again?”

  “Think so. Come on.”

  They ran, and Max ran with them, until the town beach was left behind. “Slow down now,” ordered Gareth, pausing to look around. “It might have been somewhere about here.”

  Once more they got out Dill’s map. The bare lady seemed as enigmatic as ever to Binny’s eyes, but Gareth saw more. “Look!” he said, pointing. “That’s James!”

  James, rather squashed on the edge of the paper and identifiable only by his hat, leaned against a triangular rock, some distance from the bare lady. She, when Binny looked closer, seemed to be surrounded by a garland of sharks’ teeth. MUNNY spelled letters in one corner of the paper, and a wavy line pointed over sand and rocks to the bare lady’s stomach.

  Gareth proceeded to translate all this with a briskness that stunned Binny. The bare lady was clearly the coffee tin, placed in the center of a ring of rocks, slightly to the left of a large and solitary boulder, and while Binny was still marveling at this braininess, Gareth had located not only the rock ring and the boulder, but also marked a circle in the sand around the place where they should dig.

  “How stupid were we, though,” he exclaimed at this point, “not to bring a spade!”

  Not having a spade was made much better by the fact that they did have Max. When they realized what an efficient digger Max was they divided the circle into sections and got down to serious work.

  It was not easy, but sometime in between Gareth remarking that they should have brought a metal detector, and Binny giving up hope entirely, a corner of red paint emerged.

  “We’ve found it, we’ve found it, we’ve found it!” rejoiced Binny, and they had. There was Dill’s coffee tin, bright red and gold. There were his bare ladies with their thoughtfully arranged hair. And whatever was inside moved when the tin was shaken with a dull and papery thump, exactly as a roll of slightly dampened twenty-pound notes might be expected to move.

  “Promise you won’t open it without me,” Dill had said. Gareth had promised, but Binny hadn’t, so they fought about it all the way home.

  * * *

  “There you are!” exclaimed Gareth’s father, looming suddenly out of the shadows of Gareth’s front door. “At last! Oh, no you don’t! Don’t even think of dodging round next door to hide! We leave you alone for half an hour and come back to find the entire house waist deep in birdseed and (excuse my language Binny) PIGEON SHIT! I have been waiting here CURSING this past hour and I am absolutely damned if you get past me now! DON’T roll your eyes at me! IN! And clear up! As in, clear up to my admittedly OCD standards of immaculate hygiene, or else the ruddy pigeon goes! NOT you please, Binny.”

  It was amazing. It was awful. One minute the money was within moments of recovery. The next it was behind a closed door.

  “Please, please!” Binny called, hammering very hard on that door with both fists and it opened very suddenly to reveal Gareth’s six foot four inches, rugby scrumming, golf ball whacking, triathlon stampeding, iron willed, reckless tempered, unreasonable perfectionist relation filling every possible inch of the doorframe.

  “Not today, thank you, Binny!” he said. “Off you pop! Good-bye!” And then the door was closed again, very firmly indeed.

  “It’s not fair!” she howled through the letterbox, but it remained shut and a movement from behind Miss Piper’s lacy curtains sent Binny home again.

  Back in her own home, things had become equally tense. As soon as Binny opened the door she felt it, like thunder in the air. She stood still at the foot of the stairs, her senses twitching with alarm as they searched for the source of the trouble.

  Not James and Dill. She could hear their voices from behind the living room sofa, the comfortable drone of two people talking at once and not listening to each other.

  Not Clem. Her coat and bag were both gone from her peg by the kitchen door.

  Memory echoed in the electric air. What was it, what was it, what was it, wondered Binny, and then suddenly she knew. It was an argument between two adults.

  It was a strange, long forgotten feeling to Binny; the tension between rooms, the deadened weight of words unspoken. It startled her with its familiarity. For years and years she had remembered the time when her father was alive as one of steady perfection. Had there been arguments then? It seemed there must have been, because the echoes of memory suddenly found words:

  Isn’t that an awful lot to pay for a flute for a child?

  and

  You used to love adventures! When did that change?

  and

  A sheepdog puppy? Tell me you’re joking!

  At the time, these darknesses had hardly been noticed by Binny; they were grown-up clouds, and between them and behind them was always the steady summery brightness of the everyday world.

  But Binny had grown older and she noticed the darkness now.

  Suddenly voices came from the kitchen:

  I trusted you!

  It was nothing! Next to nothing!

  Not next to nothing to me! I’d never have agreed if I’d known.

  “Hello! Hello!” called Binny, appalled at finding herself eavesdropping. “Hello Mum, I’m here!”

  There was no reply; they had not heard. Binny knocked on the door and then pushed it open just as Pete came storming out. His voice was very loud, “ALL RIGHT I THINK I’VE GOT THE MESSAGE. I’M OFF. Hey! What are you doing here?”

  “I just . . . ,” began Binny, but Pete was already thundering up the stairs and he did not stop to hear her reply.

  “Binny!” called her mother from the kitchen.

  “Oh hello!” said Binny, pink with guilt. “I just came in. I thought you would still be at work.”

  “Yes, so did Pete,” said her mother grimly, ramming a saucepan into the cupboard as she spoke.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Binny’s mother banged shut the cupboard door, leaned back against the kitchen wall, closed her eyes, and did the special counting-breathing that she herself had taught Binny to use in times of nightmare, panic, outrage, or great temper tantrums.

  After at least a minute of this, she said, “Yes.”

  “Oh good. Is Pete . . .”

  Binny stopped speaking and waited while her mother breathed deeply in on a count of seven, and slowly out again, on a count of eleven. Clearly she did not want to talk about Pete.

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” Binny offered.

  “I DON’T WANT . . . ,” began Binny’s mother (from whom Binny had undoubtably inherited her own terrible temper) and then began counting again.

  Up to seven, down to eleven.

  “Thank you Binny. That would be nice.”

  “Open your eyes,” suggested Binny.

  Her mother did this and said peacefully, “Just a misunderstanding. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Everyone is screaming and swearing today,” said B
inny, knowing from experience how comforting it is to hear about other people’s temper failures when you are having to endure your own. “You should have heard Gareth’s dad just before I came in. Worse than you. Horrible. About nothing. Well, hardly anything. Here’s your tea.”

  “I wasn’t screaming and swearing.”

  “ ’Course you weren’t,” said Binny, patting her arm.

  A tremendous thudding now began on the stairs, Pete, weighed down by two enormous tool bags, one over each shoulder.

  “Would you like a cup of tea too?” Binny asked him, feeling very much the grown-up amongst all the bangs and flashes.

  “NO I SOMETHING-WELL WOULDN’T THANK YOU,” said Pete very forcefully. “I’m finished here.”

  Then to Binny’s astonishment he stumped through the living room, retrieved his spirit level from the mantelpiece, stuck it in his jacket pocket, and marched (slightly a staggering march because of the weight of the tool bags) out of the door.

  Behind the sofa, James rolled his eyes, a new trick which he was mastering rather well. “Grown-ups!” he said to Dill. “Always in moods.”

  Dill nodded very primly, looking rather like his gran.

  Binny did not understand what had happened, but she could not let Pete leave like that, not after all the time he had been with them.

  “Wait!” she called, and ran down the street after him.

  He didn’t hear her. He was unlocking the doors of his old white van.

  Thwack! that was the first tool bag dumped inside.

  Bang! that was the second.

  Pete straightened his shoulders, slammed shut the doors, and pulled the spirit level out of his pocket. With it came a fragment of bubble wrap that opened and sparkled as it fell.

  Clem’s bracelet, the silvery moon, the flute, the curling treble clef, spilled from the wrapping onto the road. Pete stooped to pick it up just as Binny arrived beside him.

  “Pete!” she exclaimed.

  Pete’s eyes looked coldly down at her.

  “Clem’s bracelet!”

  “Yes,” he said, and tipped it from his hand into her own.

  “You’d better give it back,” he told her. “Give it straight to Clem. And don’t tell Pol . . .” He paused, and started again. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not your business.”

  Binny clutched the bracelet tightly, her thoughts all whirling in her head and she had to swallow hard before she managed to ask, “Did Clem drop it?”

  “She left it somewhere. I picked it up to keep it safe.”

  “Where?”

  “Never you mind.”

  “You’ve packed up all your things.”

  “I have,” said Pete, and shouldered his way past her, pulled open the driver’s door, started the engine, and then leaned out of the window.

  “You’d better look in the attic,” he said.

  “Look in the attic?”

  “That’s what I said,” said Pete, and drove off leaving her still staring.

  “He’s gone!” said Binny to her mother. “How can he be gone? What happened? Why have I got to look in the attic?”

  “Go and see,” said her mother, as if relieved to have a reason to shoo Binny out of the kitchen. “Go on! It’s a surprise, although how you haven’t noticed yet is beyond me! I suppose you had Max and Gareth to keep you busy. Take Max! He can manage the stairs.”

  There were now stairs up to the attic. The old open staircase Pete had brought to the garden, painted blue, with a handrail, fixed neatly to the wall. Max managed them in two bounds with Binny close behind him.

  She looked into the place that Pete had made. For the family junk, he had said once, or perhaps the family treasure.

  There were blue wooden railings round the top of the stairs with a little gate in them that opened into a new white room, tent shaped, bright. It was hardly furnished, but Binny’s chest of drawers had been carried up, and her bed was there too, waiting to be made, with Max’s basket beside it. There were other things too, but Binny hardly saw them, because under the roof window that filled the room with light, was something so astonishing it stopped her breath.

  Her father’s desk.

  “How? How? How?” demanded Binny, turning round to find her mother had followed her up the stairs. “How is it there? Is it true? Is it staying? How?”

  “Well, he fetched it. Pete. Pete fetched it out of storage in his van. For a surprise. He took the top off to get it up, and then put it together again. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Binny knew she was being disappointing. She knew she should be jumping around in joy, or crying tears of memory, or asking a dozen questions. She should be hugging her mother (she did do that) and making her bed and admiring the skylight view and racing up and down the new staircase. But instead she simply stood.

  “I can’t think,” she said.

  Her brain needed untangling. Her father’s desk. Clem’s bracelet. Pete gone, and the tension in the air. The movement behind Miss Piper’s curtains. James and Dill and their buried treasure. Gareth, and his stubborn belief in one world only, containing many lovely animals, infinite faulty humans, and no gaps.

  “ ‘Thank you’ is a good word,” said Binny’s mother, opened the small blue gate, and stamped down the stairs.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” cried Binny, too late.

  * * *

  “Give it to us! Give it to us! Give me my tin!”

  There was banging on the front door and it was Gareth. He was bumping it with his head while he fended off James and Dill with his arms. When Binny pulled it open they all fell through together in a grabbing, squabbling heap.

  “Rugby scrums OUTSIDE!” ordered Binny’s mother, appearing before them in her worst temper in years, and rushed the whole lot through the kitchen and into the back garden.

  In the damp space behind the trash can they untangled themselves. Gareth produced the coffee tin then, and held it high above his head.

  “Give it!” demanded Dill. “You’d better not have opened it! Let me see!”

  “Don’t let him run off with it,” said Binny urgently to Gareth. “Make him open it here.”

  “I mightn’t want to!” growled Dill.

  “You’ve got to,” said Binny. “We know what’s inside!”

  “You don’t!” Dill grabbed again as Gareth held it out of reach. “How do you know?”

  “Worked it out,” said Gareth. “We know it’s money and we know it’s not yours.”

  All the fight went out of Dill and he sagged against the trash can. James reached out a kind arm to his friend and even Binny spared him a glance, although her eyes were on Gareth, unpeeling the tape that Dill had wound round and round the lid.

  “My treasure,” moaned Dill.

  “Let’s face it, you stole it,” said Gareth. “This needs scissors or something.”

  “Give it to me,” begged Binny.

  Now that the hunt was finished a calmness had come over her. It was going to be all right. Miss Piper would stop her witching. Soon it would be possible to walk through the town without fear. The final piece of tape came loose.

  “Got it!” said Gareth.

  Binny pried off the lid and tipped out a bundle of damp brown paper, also taped. “At last,” she sighed. “My money.”

  “S’not your money,” said Dill sulkily.

  “Sort of, it is. We’ve been looking for it all week.”

  “S’James’s.”

  “What?”

  “S’James’s money.”

  “Mine!” cried James. “Mine! I haven’t GOT any money! Show me!”

  “Well, you needn’t get mad,” said Dill. “You buried my Spider-Man. I buried your money. Fair. Give it to me now.”

  He grabbed the bundle from Binny, gnawed through the tape with his teeth, and scuffled through the wrappings. Then, before Binny’s horrified eyes,
he shook out two brown pennies.

  “My PLAYGROUND pennies!” shrieked James in delight.

  * * *

  Gareth stood like a person stunned. James and Dill leaped in celebratory kung fu poses all around the trash can. Binny seized the red coffee tin with its glassily smiling bare ladies, emptied it out, and checked every scrap of tape-tangled wrapping paper, before staring wildly round the garden as if a fist full of twenty-pound notes might have blown away unnoticed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wednesday Night and Thursday Morning

  James was happy that night. He lay in bed, his small brown wooden boat of a bed, and gloated. He was back on the exciting, choppy seas of friendship with Dill. True, he had nearly capsized once or twice. He shouldn’t have drawn black clothes on the coffee tin ladies. He shouldn’t have confided to Dill that he had thought of killing him dead with a Star Wars lightsaber. Those had been difficult moments. But he had steered into safer water when he had given Dill one of his playground brown pennies. Dill had been so overwhelmed that he had promised to ask if James could visit him, next time his gran calmed down.

  “Does she calm down much?” James had asked, because secretly he would have preferred to visit on an uncalm day.

  “No,” Dill had replied, “not much. Not for very long either.” Then he had looked thoughtfully at the red coffee tin. James had dressed the gold ladies with black felt pen and it hadn’t cleaned off very well. They would never be as bare again, thought Dill regretfully, and he decided Dead Granddad’s calendar would have to remain unshared until his friend was much older.

  Still, Dill had hoped that James could visit soon. James had good ideas. “At your house,” he had said, “we can do kung fu fighting shows in the window. It’ll be better with two of us. And on the street outside we’ll put a box with a notice. PAY HERE NOW. What’ll we buy with the money?”

  A tent and an Xbox, some chickens for Dill, two surfboards, and a drum kit.

  “In the morning,” said James, and sailed happily to sleep.

  * * *