Eating Things on Sticks

by Anne Fine

  The wind was gale force, though. My words were blown away.

  TELL ME! GO ON! TELL ME! TELL ME!

  On the ride home, I asked them curiously, ‘How did you two meet?’

  Both of them looked embarrassed.

  ‘Go on,’ I pushed. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s just too silly,’ Uncle Tristram said. ‘I’d feel an idiot telling you the story.’

  ‘So would I,’ Morning Glory said.

  I thought she’d crack first, so I started on her. ‘Go on. Go on. Tell me. Go on. Please! Tell me! Tell me!’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Uncle Tristram said. ‘Just tell the boy before I push him out of the car.’

  So Morning Glory told me the story of how she’d begged a ride to London after an argument with someone on the island.

  ‘Your dad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Not telling,’ she answered petulantly.

  ‘Just give me one small clue. Did he have a beard?’

  She plain ignored me. I didn’t push my luck.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You went to London in a bit of a snit.’

  ‘I was not in a snit,’ she said. ‘I was bereft!’

  ‘That’s how I found her,’ Uncle Tristram said. ‘The poor girl was sitting on her suitcase, weeping. I offered her a place to stay.’

  ‘Only so long as I got rid of that spider.’

  ‘What spider?’ I asked Morning Glory.

  She grinned. ‘The one that was keeping him out of his bathroom.’

  ‘The thing was massive!’ Uncle Tristram said. He spread his arms to show me. ‘It had been squatting there for days!’

  ‘It was a money spider,’ Morning Glory said. ‘Tiny. I stayed a week.’

  ‘Was it a week?’ said Uncle Tristram. ‘It seemed to pass in a flash.’ He leaned back to say to me airily over his shoulder, ‘Then that morose bearded maggot we just made the mistake of visiting sent her a note.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Uncle Tristram said. ‘Perhaps a few tribal curses. Something about the stern path of duty. The road to London is the shortcut to Hell. That kind of thing.’

  ‘He told me to come back for Aunty Audrey’s funeral,’ Morning Glory said. ‘While I had gone, she’d died of a heart attack and left me the house.’

  ‘This one we’re staying in?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Scales tumbled from my eyes. ‘So all that lumpy brown furniture and stuff is your Aunt Audrey’s, not yours? All of those knitted pigs and china owls?’

  ‘Some of the pigs are crocheted,’ said Morning Glory. ‘And one or two of the owls are made from a rather fine terracotta.’

  ‘I’m going to make them have their Grand Battle soon,’ said Uncle Tristram. ‘My money’s on the pigs.’

  ‘The house is very gloomy,’ Morning Glory admitted. ‘But it is famous.’

  ‘Famous? Why is it famous?’ I couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Because it has the only tree on the island.’ She turned, astonished. ‘Haven’t you even noticed it? That apple tree in the garden? People come miles to see it.’

  ‘Really?’ said Uncle Tristram.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ he admitted. ‘Trees are a bit “two a penny” where I live, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’d go any distance at all to look at a plain old apple tree.’

  Morning Glory shrugged. ‘Well, I must confess that, much as I love the apple tree, up until recently even I was thinking of selling Aunty Audrey’s house and moving somewhere else.’

  ‘Where were you planning to go?’

  She turned all wistful. ‘There is a lovely cottage overlooking the fairground. Not very far away from the police station.’ Morning Glory sighed. I thought I heard her muttering, ‘Though that dream’s over now.’ But just at that moment we came round the last bend and there the house stood in front of us. Squat and dark and bleak.

  Ghastly, in fact.

  We all sat staring at it, swathed in the pall of gloom that seemed to have followed us all the way back across the island. In the end, Uncle Tristram broke the silence by asking, ‘But who would ever buy it? It may have the only tree, but who would want to buy a house on any island with no bank, a ferry only once a week, and not a single cinema?’

  I had an idea. ‘Someone who likes eating lots of things on sticks?’

  Thursday and Friday

  Thursday and Friday

  PING! PING! PING!

  When I woke up, the rain was beating on the windowpanes. The sky was grey. I could hear dripping and see little pools of water all over my uncarpeted bedroom floor.

  I hurried downstairs. Morning Glory was on her knees, rooting in the back of a cupboard.

  ‘Have we got any buckets?’ I asked her. ‘My room is springing leaks.’

  ‘We’re clean out of buckets,’ she told me. ‘Already this morning we’ve used up most of the saucepans. We’re down to mixing bowls now, and Tristram says if any more leaks start up we’ll be reduced to tea cups.’

  I ate a pork pie on a stick. (I had begun to practise.) And then I helped by wandering round the house like Tristram, emptying saucepans and buckets.

  Ping! Ping! Ping!

  ‘The upstairs of this house is like a colander,’ he kept on grumbling. ‘We’re going to have to stay home all day simply to keep an eye on it.’

  I peered along the landing. Ping! Ping! Ping! The floor was cluttered with mugs and jugs and cereal bowsl, all filling fast.

  ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  I went back downstairs to the cupboard in which I hadn’t found anything modern enough to use a battery. What did folk do all day before things with batteries were invented? Chopped logs and knitted? And sure enough, on the top shelf I found a basket overflowing with balls of leftover wool of every colour and shade.

  On the shelf below there was a packet of drawing pins.

  ‘All we need now is a ladder.’

  We found a pair of folding steps out in the coal shed. Then Uncle Tristram held them steady for me while I climbed up and down with lengths of coloured wool and drawing pins. It took an hour or so, but finally I’d managed to use the pins to stick one end of each of the lengths of wool into the ceiling plaster right beside every spot where drips kept bulging. The drips ran down the wool instead of dropping off. We gathered all the bottom ends and draped them all over the rim of one big bucket.

  ‘There you go!’ I said. ‘Down to one bucket in the middle of every room. And no more pinging!’

  Morning Glory clasped her hands together. ‘My heavens, that is so beautiful! It looks like an upside-down maypole.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Uncle Tristram. ‘I think your new system buys us just enough time to get our breakfast.’

  We had more pork pies on sticks. It was too wet to go out. I got so bored I started on my holiday homework: Imagine you are Frankenstein’s monster, suddenly endowed with feelings. Write your daily diary.

  ‘What does endowed mean?’ I asked Uncle Tristram.

  ‘Given,’ said Uncle Tristram. ‘Like Morning Glory got this house from her Aunt Audrey.’

  I knew I’d end up having to copy the whole thing out a second time in best, so I didn’t bother writing out the title. I just got stuck in.

  Sunday: The strangest day. I feel as if I have been given an e wlife. Everything seems brighter here. I stare down at the clumps of grass out side the door. They shine like scattered emeralds among the rocks. I gaze at the sky. It glows like the bluest sapphire. Is it me, or have I moved into a different world?

  Easy-peasy, once you let yourself go.

  Monday: This morning I woke fearing the magic might have vanished and I’d be back to my same old dull grey plodding self. But, no! Again today I seemed to walk on air. The mice scurried as I strode with heart aloft between the dark walls of this place. I think they sensed my growing confidence.

  I snuck out for one m
ore pork pie, and licked the stick as I carried on.

  Tuesday: I’ve seen an angel! Speak to me last week and I would have told you she was nothing more than a pretty young lady. But I see more clearly now. She is a shining angel! I want to shout to those around me, “Look at her! Don’t you see her radiance?” But I know better than to spill my secret. So I said nothing.

  Uncle Tristram came into the room. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, tucking my work away safely behind the sofa cushion.

  ‘Well, stop your slacking,’ he told me, ‘and come upstairs to take your turn emptying buckets.’

  I’M GOING TO NEED SOME MONEY

  We got ahead with the emptying, then took a bit of time off to get lunch and practise with things on sticks. First we had comfrey fritters. (Don’t even ask.) Then we had florets of broccoli. (They were hard to stab.) Then we had artichoke pancakes. (They were all floppy and you almost had to slide in underneath to get them eaten.)

  I could see Uncle Tristram working himself up to ask Morning Glory a question. Finally, out it popped. ‘Have you always eaten like this?’

  ‘What, off a stick?’ Distracted, she let her pancake slither down inside her velvet bodice. ‘Don’t you think, if I had, I’d be a little better at it?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Uncle Tristram said. ‘What I meant was, have you always eaten this sort of stuff?’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  He spread his hands. ‘You know. All these weird gleanings from’ – he tried to suppress a shudder – ‘the countryside. These comfrey fritters, for example. And those turnip croquettes that we had yesterday.’

  ‘The parsley muffins,’ I added bitterly. ‘And that nettle pudding.’

  Morning Glory turned huffy. ‘Oh, I know! Down in London you eat good stuff like pizzas and hamburgers and sushi and samosas and sweet-and-sour chicken and—’

  ‘Stop!’ I interrupted her. (I was practically drooling.)

  ‘Well, you have restaurants,’ said Morning Glory. ‘And money. You can afford to eat like that.’

  ‘Not much money,’ Uncle Tristram argued.

  ‘You have a whole lot more than me,’ said Morning Glory.

  I felt a little guilty. After all, we had been with her since Saturday night. She hadn’t had a single one of our pork pies, and we’d had lots of her stuff.

  ‘I am owed pocket money,’ I pitched in. ‘If I’m still getting it after burning down the kitchen. I could phone Mum and ask, and if I am, maybe we could lash out on steak and chips and I could pay you back later.’

  She didn’t argue, so I went in the living room and phoned home.

  Mum picked up instantly. I could tell she was in a state. ‘Harry! Thank God! Are you all right, my precious?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I told her.

  She didn’t believe me, you could tell. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘I can’t say it’s much fun. I’m really cold, and I am sick of emptying buckets.’

  I heard her whispering, ‘Poor lamb! They’ve got him in some sort of cell! He’s even emptying buckets.’

  I looked round Aunty Audrey’s living room. ‘It isn’t quite a cell,’ I said. ‘But it is damp and bleak.’

  ‘Oh, my poor darling!’

  I thought it might be time to strike. ‘I’ve had to ring you, I’m afraid, because I need some money.’ Realizing instantly how bad it sounded, only bothering to get in touch in order to beg for my allowance, I made a little joke of it. ‘That’s if you want me out of here alive!’

  Mum made a choking noise and said, ‘You just put one of them on the line!’ I wasn’t going to drag in Uncle Tristram or Morning Glory to do my wheedling for me. ‘I can’t do that,’ I told her, horrified.

  ‘Well, how much are we talking about?’

  I thought about it. ‘The whole lot, I think.’

  ‘The whole lot? What does that mean?’

  I couldn’t believe she had forgotten yet again how much I get each week. ‘It’s—’

  I heard a creaking noise behind. Distracted, I turned to see the precious only apple tree on the island outside the window gradually keel over sideways and crash to the ground, taking the phone wire with it.

  GONE DOWN SOME POTHOLE

  Poor Morning Glory was distraught. ‘The tree! The tree!’

  We all went out to look. Uncle Tristram thought to snatch up Morning Glory’s umbrella with the dancing frogs to save her velvet bodice and cowboy skirt from getting wet. But he and I just stood there getting drenched.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she wailed, mystified.

  ‘It is strange, I admit,’ said Uncle Tristram. ‘Because it isn’t even windy.’

  ‘The ground feels odd,’ I said.

  It did, too. Where I was standing, there was a sort of sodden wet roiling and boiling, as if the earth beneath my feet was churning into mush. ‘The hill looks different,’ Morning Glory said. We all looked up. I felt a stab of guilt. I had forgotten to sneak up to unblock my dam, and now the stream was tumbling down our side of the hill as firmly and as strongly as if that were its natural route.

  For all his earlier wavings of the camera at the glories of the view, Uncle Tristram didn’t seem to have noticed that the stream had switched sides.

  ‘If there were ever any sun to glint in,’ he observed, ‘that water might look quite pretty till it suddenly disappears like that, halfway down.’ He shrugged. ‘Gone down some pothole, I expect.’

  We stood there, shivering, till Uncle Tristram finally dared interrupt Morning Glory’s Farewell Lament to her fallen tree by saying, ‘Can we go back inside? I’m soaking. And we really ought to get back to the buckets.’

  OWLS v. PIGS

  At tea time it was still raining hard, so Uncle Tristram arranged a rota. I emptied for an hour, then Uncle Tristram took a turn. As it began to get dark, Morning Glory took over.

  ‘I know,’ said Uncle Tristram as soon as the two of us were alone. ‘Let’s have the battle of the pigs and owls. Cheer ourselves up. Bags I command the pigs.’

  ‘I wanted to be owls in any case,’ I told him.

  We had a great time. Pigs were flying everywhere. The owls were vicious. I had them crawling across the curtain rails and up and down chair legs. Now that we knew it wasn’t Morning Glory’s furniture, we felt a little freer to clamber over sofa arms and climb on the sideboard to fetch a piglet down from where he’d been spying from some light fitting, or shove a pack of owls into formation on top of the nest of stools.

  I had my advance force abseiling down the dresser when one of my knitted owls unravelled a little on its descent and fell in a drawer.

  ‘Man down!’ crowed Uncle Tristram.

  ‘Not so!’ I countered, and mounted a rescue. One of my china owlets went down inside the drawer to fetch out her companion in arms.

  The knitted owl had got all tangled with some envelope. I brought them up together.

  Just at that moment, Morning Glory came back at the end of her shift. ‘Your turn again,’ she said to me.

  ‘Can’t stop,’ I warned her. ‘Owls on the counterattack.’

  ‘You have to stop,’ she said, ‘because I am not carrying on emptying buckets just because you two are mucking about.’

  ‘We are not “mucking about”,’ said Uncle Tristram. ‘We are engaged in a ferocious and deadly duel of skill and cunning. If I am not at my most committed and focused as a commander, his evil owlets may take over the world.’

  ‘It’s still his turn to do the buckets,’ Morning Glory said.

  I know when to give up. I rose to my feet in front of the dresser. ‘Want this?’

  I handed her the envelope.

  ‘Is it for me?’ She snatched it so keenly I knew she must be desperately hoping for some particular letter. But then she saw it was already open, and her face fell. She pulled out the papers inside. ‘Oh, it’s just Aunty Audrey’s house insurance.’

  ‘Is it still valid?’ asked Uncle T
ristram.

  She took a closer look. ‘Only until the end of the month.’ She sighed. ‘So that’s another bill that’s winging its way towards me. And I must say, now that the tree’s fallen over, I just don’t feel I have the same commitment to the place.’

  ‘If you’d prefer to have the insurance money,’ joked Uncle Tristram, ‘just ask young Harry here to set the place on fire. He’s good at that.’

  I blushed.

  Morning Glory looked around. The damp was seeping halfway up the walls now. There was a sort of tidemark around the room.

  ‘I doubt if anyone could set fire to somewhere as damp as this.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyhow,’ I told her loftily, ‘because I’m afraid that I only do kitchens.’

  HEY! DRESS-UPS!

  At nine o’clock the rain stopped. To celebrate, I had a wild mint samosa on a stick. An hour later, the dripping upstairs had slowed its pace enough for us to go to bed. I had a troubled night, dreaming of helicopters circling overhead, the powerful beams of their searchlights sweeping across the panes of my bedroom window.

  When I came down in the morning, there was a giant heap of clothes piled on the sofa.

  I picked up an old-fashioned corset with so many laces it could have made a whale look trim. ‘So what’s all this lot?’

  Morning Glory sighed. ‘I’ve just been round to check on all the buckets, and there was water seeping out of one of the cupboards.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘Yes. I think the apple tree must have pulled down some of the guttering as well as the phone wire when it fell over.’

  I looked around. The tidemark of rising damp was far, far higher up the wall. I nearly said, ‘All the wet in this house is soon going to meet in the middle,’ but Morning Glory looked so defeated, standing there in her tutu and tartan wellingtons, clutching her beaded pashmina round her shoulders. So I tried to distract her by picking up the next thing on the pile – a long black sequinned gown for someone as big as a house – and saying, ‘You must have lost a huge amount of weight since you wore this.’