by Hilary McKay
“What time are you leaving?” she asked Gareth, meeting him in the garden, early that Friday morning.
“Eight, he hopes. Eight thirty more like, she guesses.”
“I’m going to stay out of the way. I can’t bear all the fuss. I hate saying good-bye . . .”
“Me too . . .”
“So don’t let’s.”
“Binny . . .”
It was happening already. Tears. Binny scrubbed at her eyes with her fists while Gareth searched for cheering remarks.
“You’ll manage at the bank. You’ll be fine. I was thinking about it. You’re right. It is the thing to do.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re staying here. Not moving. You’ll still be next door when we come back in the summer.”
“Mmmm.”
“You and Clare are friends again.”
Binny nodded.
“I wish Max could teleport or something! I’ll make him Skype you.”
“It’s not just Max.”
“Oh.” Gareth took off his glasses and rubbed them the way he did when he felt awkward.
“I suppose I’d better stop telling people you’re my girlfriend, hadn’t I?”
“You don’t have to if it helps.”
“It does help,” said Gareth, and stopped fumbling with his glasses to glance at her face. Their eyes met, startled, as if they had just seen something new and astonishing.
“Bin,” said Gareth, and all at once he gathered her up, much as he had gathered up the pigeon: easily, as if it was the obvious thing to do.
“Burnt toast,” said Binny, sniffing, burrowed in his jacket.
“Seaweed,” he replied, and she could feel his laughter as he spoke.
“Why . . . ?”
But there was no time for why. Voices were calling from both their houses, “Binny? Binny? Gareth?”
Binny sighed and gave one last hug. Gareth untangled his face from her hair, pushed on his glasses, and was transformed into his bony, untouchable self.
“What about the pigeon? Are you coming? I’m letting it fly in a few minutes.”
“I’ll watch from my roof.”
They both spoke as if nothing had happened. As if their hearts were not beating slightly faster than before. As if they hadn’t noticed how the place where they were standing had suddenly tipped a little closer to the sun.
James appeared.
“Hello! Don’t . . .”
“We weren’t going to,” said Gareth. “Were we, Bin? Were you going to kiss James?”
“I . . . No! Of course I wasn’t!”
“Neither was I,” said Gareth, with such a sudden wicked gleam in his eyes that James became suspicious and demanded, “What’s funny? What are you laughing at? Tell me what’s funny?”
Binny left Gareth to deal with him and escaped to her attic.
* * *
Now she was perched on her father’s desk, head and shoulders out of the window, elbows resting on the new tiles of the roof, so high up that she could see clearly into Gareth’s garden as well as her own and Miss Piper’s. She was surrounded by birds. The local pigeons were fast learners when it came to finding food. There was a flurry of wings as Gareth opened his kitchen door and then they were down searching for seeds within seconds of them being scattered. Binny saw Gareth’s pigeon flutter from his hands to join them. It merged with the others so completely that if it had not been white it would have been lost amongst the flock. It flew with them when the food was finished and they rose to settle on the roofs once more. It was well again.
“Perfect!” called Binny, clapping, and Gareth saw her looking down at him and waved triumphantly back. Then he went inside, but Binny stayed on her rooftop, listening.
Sounds floated upward.
Out of sight, on the street below, the two cars belonging to Gareth’s family were being slowly loaded. Voices rose, so clear in the bright air, that she could tell every one. There was a great deal of conversation, mostly the organizing kind, about keys and distances and flower tubs to be watered, but also “Congratulations! Oh, how lovely!”
and
“Most dogs travel in the back and put up with it!”
and
“A warm day at last and we have to go!”
Also
“That is absolute rubbish! Absolutely not art! I thought you’d got rid of it! Take it out of the car at once!”
Gareth and Max, Clem and James, Gareth’s father and stepmother (Binny remembered with gratitude her hot chocolate and kindness). A welcoming shriek for James told her that Dill was there too, and so was Miss Piper, her witch voice lapping like water against stone.
In a few minutes, Binny thought, I will go down and smile at her to show I’m not witched, and I’ll then say good-bye to Gareth and Max. It will be all right, not terrible, because it’s nearly summer. Soon they’ll be back for weeks and weeks. And then when they’re gone I’ll walk into town and wait for the bank to open at nine. I’ll be the first one in.
Binny had dressed that morning much more carefully than usual. Pink striped shirt, comfy old jeans, seaweed hair tied up in a knot. She was ready and waiting, up on the roof. Bright sky, red tiles, and a racing wind that whipped the sea, “the glinting tinfoil sea,” murmured Binny, “into chains of foam right up to the horizon.”
She thought, I’m going to write that down.
She had brought Clare’s pen up to the roof with her, and her precious blue and silver notebook was on the desk below. She stooped to pick it up, and then looked for a long time at the picture on the cover.
The Little Prince with his birds to help him fly, his rose and his sheep and his active volcano.
L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.
What is most important is invisible to the eyes.
* * *
“Hello Dad,” said Binny softly, and felt in the sunlight on her shoulders the comradeship of storytellers.
What had Clare said? I thought you’d like a pen because you’re a writer.
Yes I am, agreed Binny, and unsnapped the silver elastic around the notebook.
The pages fell open as if they had been waiting for that moment and inside was the missing money.
Then the wind stopped blowing and the sea was stilled. Bang, bang, bang went Binny’s shocked and thankful heart, hammering into silence every sound in the town. For a while it was as if she had slipped through one of her gaps in the world into a new and empty place. In that place there was nothing but air and silence, and the feeling of dry leaves under her hands.
She found her eyes were closed.
When she opened them the money was still there.
This time she counted it, counted it twice, with shaky fingers.
Two hundred pounds.
Found.
Found! thought Binny, and was back in the world again, up on the roof, listening to the sounds of the cars being packed next door, waiting for the ache of saying good-bye to Max, feeling the warmth of the sun on the tiles, hearing a new voice, Clare, calling, “Hello! Where’s Binny?”
“Wuff!” barked Max in greeting.
Somebody was whistling, just out of sight.
Binny held tight to the money.
Max barked again, startling a flurry of pigeons to clatter upward into the sky.
Time was turning backward.
Slate blue, earth brown, and white, the pigeons rose from the eaves and roofs, rattling wings and a rush of air as they circled over the street.
A gasping shriek of dismay, worried cries, and then suddenly a door banged shut.
“Miss Piper!” cried voices: Clem, Binny’s mother, Gareth’s stepmother, and Clare.
“How can anyone be that frightened of pigeons?”
That was Gareth, and then James, high and clear.
“Here’s her bag that she dropped! It’s all bursted open!”
“Let me knock! Oh she’s heard me.”
“Miss Piper, you worried us!”
“Miss
Piper!”
“Miss Piper!”
* * *
Miss Piper.
At last Binny understood. How the money had come to be abandoned, and by whom, and the reason why . . .
“Here!” she shouted. “It’s here! It’s here!” and she leaped from the desk, flew the attic stairs, jumped the house stairs, and hurtled through the front door, rushed to Miss Piper, and pushed the notes into her hands.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! I lost it, it was awful! I truly didn’t mean to take it. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m truly sorrier than sorry. I promise . . .”
Miss Piper’s face showed not a trace of emotion as she took the notes and folded them. She gave no sign of having heard a word. Binny stammered to a halt and then stood twisting her empty hands more and more uncomfortably under the chill of the calm blue gaze.
“So you had it after all,” said Miss Piper, in her smooth, lapping water, lipstick pink voice. “Yes Binny. Just as I guessed.”
Chapter Twenty
Afterward
There were no secrets left. Nothing was hidden. So far as anyone could tell, there were no gaps in the world through which things might slip and be lost. Gareth was gone and Max was gone. Later that Friday morning Clare had had the idea of rushing Binny to the market for apologizing pink tulips to give to Miss Piper. Binny had chosen them and carried them with anxious carefulness. Miss Piper had received them without surprise.
(Was there somewhere, Binny had wondered when she was safely back home, a peg doll Binny, holding a bunch of pink flowers?)
(“Probably,” said Clare.)
* * *
Days passed, and the wind grew warm. There was often a white pigeon dozing in the roof corners. When Binny looked out of her skylight it would glance at her and blink. The blink said, “Yes. I believe we did meet before.”
In Binny’s attic they at last found a home for their father’s bag. It stood tucked between the wall and the desk, very much as it had done in the olden days, and it had become a place for small and precious things. James had begun this, searching for a hiding place for his two fallen out top teeth. “Dill is not having them for his collection!” he explained, winding them round and round with sticky tape, and Binny had promised that they would be safe. When Clem heard about this she handed over a small brown envelope, her first week’s earnings after the café reopened. “Don’t give it to me, however much I beg!” she told Binny. “It’s for end-of-the-world emergencies!”
Binny herself had put Max’s puppy collar in the bag, just because it seemed the perfect place to keep it, and then, very recently, her mother had come up the attic stairs with a tiny square box in a padded envelope. “You can look if you like,” she told Binny.
“It’s all right,” Binny reassured her, hugging her. “It really is. I don’t need to look.”
Elsewhere in the house, things were coming back into place. The spirit level had been returned to the living room mantelpiece. Pete was often in the kitchen or round about the house. He’d come whistling up the street and they’d rush to the door. Binny wrote and wrote and wrote. She wrote till she’d unburdened the story of the money, and her mind was all untangled and her thoughts ran clear again.
“It’s summer!” she said to Clare one day, and it was.
James and Dill were in the garden, although only James was visible. Dill was in the apple tree. He was looking rather thoughtful and holding very tight. James thought he must be stuck but Dill shook his head. He was not yet prepared to say he had no hope of getting down. Not to James, who scampered the branches like a sunny, energetic squirrel.
“Shall I tell you what to do?” inquired James.
“No thank you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re six,” said Dill, so witheringly James bounced in indignation, dislodged Dill from his branch, and landed him in the grass.
“Told you I wasn’t stuck,” said Dill, smiling his downward smile.
Clare said dreamily, “Yes, it’s definitely summer. Listen to Clem.”
Clem’s flute was climbing and climbing, echoing, glass clear into the high blue sky, startling the dozing pigeons, spiraling up amongst the seagulls, echoing over the red roofs and the marketplace, reaching toward the harbor and the lighthouse on the rocks far out to sea.
“I shouldn’t mind playing a flute,” said Clare, admiring but yawning. “Not all the practicing that Clem does, I don’t mean. Just now and then, to surprise people. Only the trouble is, I don’t like music. I’d always rather it was turned off. I wonder if anyone likes it really, or do they just pretend . . . What are you writing?”
Binny scribbled a minute longer, and then showed her.
“I shouldn’t mind playing a flute,” said Clare, yawning. “Not all the practicing that Clem does, I don’t mean. Just now and then, to surprise people. Only the trouble is, I don’t like music. I’d always rather it was turned off. I wonder if anyone likes it really, or do they just pretend . . . What are you writing?”
Clare read it out loud, as well as she could for laughing, and asked, “How did you do that?”
“It’s something I’ve discovered. Writing down exactly what people say. Then you really hear them, just as they are. It’s one of those half magics, like Miss Piper’s peg dolls.”
“Miss Piper,” said Clare, “is not a witch. The peg dolls, Pete’s van, the little dog she gave you to remind you that you were in her power, that broomstick, they are all ordinary things. You just want her to be a witch to be exciting.”
“Of course I do,” agreed Binny. Now that she was out of the direct line of Miss Piper’s witchy ways, her thoughts sparkled with interest. Who would not want to live next door to a witch, however complaining, however nosy, however pink and purple flowery . . .
* * *
No one was more disappointed than Binny when, as silently as Miss Piper had arrived, she was suddenly no longer there.
* * *
Binny discovered this one midsummer morning, on a day when the Cornwallis household was even busier than usual. They had gone to bed far too late, and got up far too early, and Clem’s list of things that had to be done was still far from complete. Yet Binny was in her attic, in her favorite position, half in and half out of the skylight window, untangling her thoughts.
She left behind, wrote Binny, who had peered through the letterbox, her butterfly doormat, her picture of the Queen aged seven, the honesty leaves in their little pot, and all the pretend flowers in her windows. But when you look past the windows, the rooms are bare. You can see all the spellbooks are gone from the shelves, and as well, last night when it was black black dark, I heard the strangest noise on the tiles overhead. . . .
A great whirling scraping right over my head . . .
“Binny!” yelled Clem from downstairs.
. . . and that huge black broomstick . . .
“Come on Binny!” shouted James. “Come on! Come on! Even Gertie and Pecker are ready!”
. . . that she never used to sweep with . . .
“Binny, Bin, Belinda, Bel!” called her mother.
. . . has . . .
“Do you want to be a bridesmaid,” demanded Clem, “or not?”
. . . vanished! scribbled Binny, and ran.
About the Author
Hilary McKay is the award-winning author of Binny for Short (which received four starred reviews), Binny in Secret (which received three starred reviews), and six novels about the Casson family: Caddy’s World (which received three starred reviews), Saffy’s Angel (winner of the Whitbread Award, an ALA Notable Book, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book, and a School Library Journal Best Book), Indigo’s Star (an ALA Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book), Permanent Rose, Caddy Ever After, and Forever Rose. She is also the author of Wishing for Tomorrow, a sequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess. Hilary lives with her family in Derbyshire, England. Visit her at HilaryMcKay.co.uk
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Simon & Schuster • New York
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Also by Hilary McKay
Saffy’s Angel
Indigo’s Star
Permanent Rose
Caddy Ever After
Forever Rose
Caddy’s World
Wishing for Tomorrow
Binny for Short
Binny in Secret
MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Hilary McKay
Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Tony Ross
Published by arrangement with Hodder Children’s Books, a division of Hachette Children’s Books
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder Children’s Books
First U.S. Edition, 2017
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