by Hilary McKay
‘Shrimps,’ corrected Gareth. ‘Hurry up!’
‘There really is a fish,’ said Binny. ‘Look! Sitting on the bottom! Do you think he’s ill?’
Gareth looked, admitted to the fish, identified it as a goby, not ill, just a natural bottom sitter, and relaxed into rock pool watching.
‘What I like are hermit crabs,’ he said. ‘If you keep still you can sometimes see a shell, like that pointy white one, reach out legs …’
‘Gareth, have you got your phone?’ interrupted Binny.
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Just that no one knows we’re here.’
‘Well that’s good. They’d be after us if they did. Moaning. They like whelk shells, hermit crabs … anyway, come on!’
They had to cross a great bed of slippery black seaweed to reach the actual headland. Here enormous rocks, house-sized, car-sized, ankle-turning football-sized, were tumbled together with patches of shingle and pyramids of granite. There were very few rock pools now, just one or two, deep and cool, with shoals of tiny fish amongst their weeds. Gareth plunged an arm shoulder deep into the largest of them and pulled out a handful of spiky jellied unpleasantness.
‘What’s that?’ demanded Binny in disgust.
‘Sea hare. Sea slugs, some people call them.’
‘Put it back! It’s horrible.’
‘It’s amazing,’ said Gareth, fishing out his phone to take a photograph. ‘It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen. Where can I put it that’s flat? Pull some seaweed, Bin, to make a background, and hold out your hands …’
‘Me?’ asked Binny, skipping hurriedly out of reach. ‘No thanks! Anyway, aren’t you coming to look for the net?’
The net was the whole reason for them being there. A swathe of fishing net; a tangle of tough blue nylon. From land it was not visible, but earlier in the summer Binny and Gareth had spotted it from the little tourist boat that took holidaymakers out to see the seals. Gareth had seen the rubbish it had caught, plastic litter, stained trainers, feathers, rags and someone’s nappy. Worst of all, a white gull, twisted and broken.
‘How did it catch a bird?’ Binny had wondered.
‘Easy,’ Gareth had told her. ‘The gull would see something moving just below the water, think it was fish, go in for a dive … I suppose it drowned in the end.’
Binny had shivered.
‘Gareth!’ Binny reminded him impatiently. ‘When are you going to help? What about that net? Have you forgotten what we came here for?’
‘You just hardly ever see them,’ said Gareth defensively. ‘Sea slugs, I mean. You can’t just walk past!’ All the same, he returned his sea slug to its pool, resisted the temptation of a large green crab, watching him from under a fan of seaweed with a look of insane curiosity in its stalky eyes, and followed after the scornful Binny, who could have walked past an ocean full of sea slugs without a moment of regret. They slipped and scrambled until they were far out on the headland, a place of rock and barnacle, neither sea nor land.
‘There!’ exclaimed Binny suddenly. ‘I can see it!’
She ran, as well as anyone could run over a seaweedy, bouldery seabed, and Gareth hurried after her, dropped his glasses, moaned, fumbled, trod on something that disintegrated with an ominous crunch, and found them again. One lens left. The other a fractured star, and where was Binny?
‘Gareth! Gareth!’ shouted Binny.
AUNTY VIOLET WAS DEAD, ALTHOUGH NOT IN Binny’s nightmares. Nor did death decrease her powers to meddle in other people’s affairs. Especially Binny’s.
From beyond life Aunty Violet reached out and found her again.
A letter arrived.
‘No. Please no,’ begged Binny.
(As if Aunty Violet ever listened to nos.)
Spain had been Aunty Violet’s home for a very long time, but still, in England, she had owned a little house.
When she died, she left it to Binny and her family. That was what the letter from the lawyers said.
To Binny in particular. To Belinda Cornwallis. Also her mother, Polly Cornwallis, her sister Clemency, and her brother, James.
They could sell it, and each have an equal share of the money it raised, or they could live in it as a family, whichever they chose.
I have been asked to state, remarked the lawyer who wrote the letter, that this change to the Will of Miss Violet Cornwallis was made after her recent conversation with her niece Belinda, to whom she sends her particular regards.
‘Her particular WHAT?’ screeched Binny.
‘Regards,’ said Clem. ‘It’s like love … well, no, not love …’
Her voice trailed away as she spoke. The whole family was dazed.
‘What did you say to her, Binny?’ asked her mother. She had known the contents of the lawyer’s letter before she read it aloud to the rest of the family, but still she was in shock. ‘Whatever did you say? Do you remember?’
Binny, who remembered too well every burning word, stared speechlessly at her mother.
‘She must have liked you very much,’ said James, but his voice was full of disbelief.
‘She couldn’t have liked me very much,’ said Binny flatly.
Clem and her mother glanced at each other. Binny, even in the worst of her nightmares, had always refused to talk about the time she had spent with Aunty Violet whilst they were at the hospital.
‘She’s just done it to be nasty,’ said Binny.
‘Binny, that’s a silly thing to say.’
‘It isn’t. If she wanted to be nice she’d have told me what she did with Max. That’s what I wanted. That’s all I wanted. Not her horrible house! Or her rotten regards!’
‘Did you talk about Max to Aunty Violet?’ asked Clem curiously.
‘I asked her where he was.’
‘Did she mind?’
‘It was me who minded,’ said Binny. ‘He was my dog! She didn’t care about anything!’
‘She must have cared about something,’ said Clem. ‘She changed her Will because of you. The rest of us are just tagged on. Even Mum.’
‘Even me,’ agreed James. ‘Me! And I’m the boy!’
Binny picked up James, turned him upside down, and lowered him gently into the rubbish bin.
‘Perhaps it was a good thing that you spent that afternoon together,’ suggested their mother, rescuing him. ‘It gave you a chance to get to know each other. I think she wanted to make friends with you. Maybe it would have happened, given time. Poor Aunty Violet. She couldn’t have known she would die so soon.’
Binny remembered the disgusting description she had given Aunty Violet of the probable black and oozing state of her smoker’s lungs.
She could have known she would die, she said silently to herself, I told her.
‘Her particular regards,’ said Clem, and she looked at Binny with thoughtful grey eyes.
‘Oh, shut up!’ snapped Binny.
‘Regards,’ murmured James, nodding.
Binny flounced out of the room slamming the door, and flounced back in again a minute later with a large book. She read it with her back turned to everyone and her fingers in her ears, but it did not help much. The Aunty Violet discussion still went on. The opinion of Clem and her mother seemed to be that Aunty Violet’s well-concealed heart of gold had been touched by her afternoon with Binny. Evidently Binny, as requested, had been polite. Lovable. Possibly even charming.
And so the house.
‘I bet it stinks. I bet it’s vile. She probably haunts it!’ said Binny.
The solicitors sent photographs. It was a tiny house with an overgrown garden in a seaside town in the West Country. It was difficult to know what to do with it. Sell it? Rent it?
‘Live in it,’ said James, not once, but a hundred times. It was a house at the seaside. It was theirs. They should go and live in it immediately.
‘We couldn’t really,’ said Clem, but one evening when Binny was out of the way in the bathroom, she picked up the solicitors’ photographs again. ‘It’s m
iles away. And tiny. It would be like living in the dolls’ house.’
‘I’d love to live in the dolls’ house,’ said James, passionately.
‘It’s got a nice front door,’ said her mother, also dreaming over the photographs. ‘Those two steps up from the street … Actually, any front door that we didn’t have to share with other people would be nice.’
‘We would have our own front door,’ said James, grabbing all the pictures for himself. ‘Our own two steps. Our own dolphin knocker. Our own basket thing with dead flowers in it. Our own … what’s that supposed to be?’
‘I think it’s supposed to be a kitchen.’
‘Our own broken kitchen … our own … that’s not a toilet, is it?’
‘A very old-fashioned one.’
‘Our own … They’ve got that terrible telly programme on in the flat upstairs again!’ James, who had been lying on his stomach, rolled on to his back, made his hands into a megaphone, and, before anyone could stop him, bellowed, ‘TURN IT OFF! IT’S HORRIBLE!’
‘James!’ exclaimed his mother, and at the same time the sound of soupy dance music became much louder.
‘If we lived in the seaside house,’ said James, ‘we’d have our own noise. And nobody else’s.’
The Cornwallises had got used to a lot of things since their first world vanished, but they had never quite got used to the tormenting noise of other people’s lives. Footsteps on the stairs, the whine of local radio stations, and the thumping bass of forgotten music. Raised voices, slamming doors, midnight washing machines that sounded like jet planes and an unseen baby that cried and cried. Worse still, their own noise tormented other people. James’s roars, Binny’s nightmares and, most of all, Clem’s flute caused a constant stream of complaints from the midnight washers, door slammers, invisible baby owners and enjoyers of very loud radio and daytime TV.
‘It would be lovely to have no one upstairs and no one downstairs,’ said Clem. ‘Our own house and nobody else’s.’
In all the years of worry and poverty and cramped homework in shared bedrooms, that was the closest she had ever come to complaining.
‘We don’t have to decide anything in a rush,’ said her mother. ‘Perhaps when the school year is over, we could go down. Maybe camp there for the summer while we think what to do … Hello, Binny! Nice bath?’
‘You’ve got those pictures out again,’ said Binny. ‘You wouldn’t really want to go and live in Aunty Violet’s house?’
‘Our house,’ corrected James.
‘Yes, but not to live in.’
‘We have to do something with it,’ said Clem.
‘Well then,’ burst out Binny, ‘it’s easy! Sell it … wait, James, you haven’t heard! Sell it, and buy back our old house!’
James began such a bellowing that Binny had to cover him with cushions and lie on top of him before she could continue.
‘Think what we could do with all the money we would get! We could buy back our old house and the bookshop (you could work there, Mum!). Clem could have as many flute lessons as she liked. James could have another Jungle Gym. And we could pay for … (Keep still, James!) … pay for … (I’m not hurting you, so don’t pretend I am) … pay for police detectives to track down Max!’
Clem groaned and her mother sighed. James’s feet began a frantic drumming. Binny ignored them all and finished in triumph. ‘And everything would be exactly like it was before!’
The look that Clem gave her was freezing. Ice.
‘Nearly exactly like it was before,’ admitted Binny. ‘Except for Dad. That’s …’
Clem walked out of the room. Her mother followed.
‘… all,’ said Binny. ‘What’s the matter with everyone? OUCH!’ she added, as James escaped from his cushions so suddenly that her chin hit the floor.
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ said James. ‘Everyone is happy because we’re going to live at the seaside.’
‘We’re not!’
‘We are!’
James retrieved the scattered cushions, arranged them into a nest shape and flopped down on his back in the middle. He reached out a toe and switched on the television. Two worried-looking men were discussing the economy. James gazed at them with pleasure, sucking two fingers, wriggling deep into his cushions. He gave Binny a sideways glance to see if she was noticing how comfortable he was.
‘The seaside,’ he murmured. ‘In our new house.’
‘It’s not new, it’s very, very old,’ said Binny. ‘It’s old. It’s broken. It’s probably haunted. And it’s mine more than anyone’s and I’m not going to live in it. So there!’ added Binny, and slammed out of the room.
Rose’s Blog © 2008-2011 Hilary McKay
Binny for Short © 2013 Hilary McKay
This ebook sampler first published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder Children’s Books
The right of Hilary McKay to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means with prior permission in writing from the publishers or in the case of reprographic production in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency and may not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978 1 444 92939 3
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