‘How about a couplet or two?’ he said, tweaking one of Tuesday’s plaits lightly. ‘Hmm?’
His eyes twinkled as he said in a wonderfully theatrical voice:
‘The butter from Dorothy’s crumpet,
Dripped into the bell of her trumpet.’
Ordinarily, this would have Tuesday replying with a couplet of her own.
‘Sweet young Edgar, eating jello,
Dropped a spoonful onto his cello.’
But tonight her heart just wasn’t in it.
‘It’s no good, Dad,’ she said. ‘I can’t think about anything but Mum. Do you think she’s ever coming down?’
‘It is getting late,’ her father agreed. ‘Why don’t you tootle on upstairs and have a listen outside her door.’
So Tuesday kicked off her rollershoes and tiptoed quietly up the stairs to the landing outside her mother’s writing room, and Baxterr followed. Tuesday put her ear against the solid timber of the door. And Baxterr did the same.
There they stood, for quite some time, until they were certain that what they could hear inside was … absolutely nothing.
Then Tuesday did hear a sound. It was a creaking kind of sound. Nothing like the click clack click clack ding of her mother’s typewriter. She listened harder. Creak, creak. Perhaps her mother was pacing the floor. Perhaps she was trying to figure out the very, very last sentence of Vivienne Small and the Final Battle. Tuesday wondered if she should go in. Perhaps she could help? It couldn’t be much harder than figuring out the answer to 23 across. Suddenly the creaking got louder, and Tuesday realised it was the sound of her father climbing the stairs behind her.
‘Well?’ Denis asked.
‘Nothing. I can’t hear a thing,’ Tuesday told him dejectedly.
‘Odd,’ her father said, looking up through a skylight in the ceiling into an evening sky spotted with stars.
Denis put his own ear to the door. Hearing nothing, he knocked lightly.
‘Serendipity?’ he called.
There was no answer.
‘Serendipity?’ This time he called a little louder.
‘Mum?’ called Tuesday.
‘Woof ?’ barked Baxterr.
Nothing. No reply. No sound at all.
‘I think,’ Denis said to Tuesday, ‘that there is only one thing for it.’
He turned the handle of the door, and carefully pushed it open. In the room with the honey-coloured floorboards and shelves in which all the books were piled higgledy-piggledy, was … a desk, two chairs, a lamp, a typewriter and a window that stretched almost to the ceiling. The window was wide open and Serendipity Smith was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter Two
Tuesday was confused. Had her mother somehow left the house without them realising it? Was she in the bathroom, perhaps? Or in her bedroom? Tuesday looked at her father, who did not – she thought – seem as surprised as he ought to. Denis stood for a moment, thinking.
‘Dad, where’s Mum?’ Tuesday asked, cold shivers running down her legs and up into her hair.
Denis walked across the room, flung his head out the writing room window and peered into the darkness beyond. Tuesday wondered what on earth he was thinking. That her mother had flown away?
‘Dad,’ Tuesday said, ‘is Mum okay? She didn’t fall?’
‘Oh, good gracious no, Tuesday,’ said Denis, pulling her close against him and continuing to look far out into the night sky.
‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Where is she?’
‘Hmmmmm,’ he said, non-committally, gazing intently at a distant star.
‘Dad? You know, don’t you? You know where she’s gone.’
‘Yes, sweetheart, I think I do,’ said Denis, pulling himself back in from the window.
‘Well?’
An uncertain look passed over his face. He tapped the large stack of white pages beside the typewriter with his fingertips.
‘I can’t tell you,’ he said gently.
‘But …’ said Tuesday.
‘I’m sorry, Tuesday, I can’t tell you, but I am sure she’ll be back very soon.’
‘Back? But where’s she gone?’
‘Well, let’s just say she’s gone somewhere very important, and I think we’d best leave her to it.’
‘But aren’t you going to shut the window?’ Tuesday asked, looking back as her father ushered her out of the room.
‘Oh, no, we’ll leave it open, I think,’ said Denis, as he closed the door behind them.
This was too much for Tuesday.
‘But … why? I mean, why is the window wide open anyway? How do you know someone hasn’t kidnapped her? How do you know she didn’t fall out the window and is right now caught in the top of the tree outside waiting for us to come and rescue her?’
Her father chuckled.
‘I know that it’s immensely irritating that I cannot illuminate the issue, my impetuous imp, but your mother’s return, I assure you, is imminent, though probably not immediate. What is immediate at this moment, however, is your bedtime.’ ‘But …’ said Tuesday.
‘Butterfly,’ said Denis.
‘Buttonhole,’ said Tuesday, unable to stop herself.
‘Buttinski,’ said Denis.
‘Oh, so rude! Buttock,’ said Tuesday.
‘Butter dish!’ said Denis.
‘Button mushroom!’ said Tuesday, and before she knew it she was in bed in her cupcake pyjamas with her teeth cleaned, and her dad kissing her goodnight.
‘Are you sure Mum’s all right?’ Tuesday asked, looking into his brown eyes. ‘Can’t you tell me where she is?’
‘She’ll be back for breakfast,’ Denis said. ‘And we’ll have blueberry pancakes.’
As he left the room, Denis did not switch off the bedside light, nor did he close the door, which was just the way Tuesday liked it.
Curled up in her bed, with Baxterr snoring in his basket beside her, Tuesday watched the light from the moon make watery patterns on her ceiling and wondered where her mother was, and why her father had seemed to be looking for her out of the window, a window that was five storeys above the street. It was a mystery and she couldn’t solve it, no matter how hard she tried.
She rolled over and turned on her iPod. Her favourite audio book was I Know about Vivienne Small read by her very own mother, the author Serendipity Smith. It was the first of the Vivienne Small stories and Serendipity had written it just after Tuesday was born. At the start was the dedication: To TM, every day is magic. In fact at the beginning of every Vivienne Small book there was a dedication to TM – each time with a different message.
No one in the whole world, other than Serendipity, Tuesday, Denis, Baxterr, and of course Serendipity’s assistant, Miss Digby, knew who TM was, because when Serendipity Smith did her book talks and signings and television shows and bookshop appearances, she would never tell. And that wasn’t the only secret Serendipity Smith, the most famous writer in all the world, kept from the journalists and interviewers who wanted to know everything about her life.
Journalists and interviewers all believed that Serendipity Smith lived on the top floor of the most famous hotel in the city; she had no children and no husband and certainly no dog. The Serendipity Smith everyone saw at bookstores and on television was very tall with wild red hair. She wore velvet coats in every colour, long purple boots and fabulous glasses. It was rumoured that she wrote day and night, which was why she was so rarely seen in public. Room service trays piled up in the hallway outside her room, barely touched, and the hotel’s maids removed rubbish bins overflowing with pencil shavings.
When Serendipity Smith strode through the hotel foyer of the most famous hotel in the city, people gasped and pointed, cameras flashed and fans raced up asking her to sign copies of her books. But a little while later, when an ordinary-looking woman with a short brown bob, wearing jeans, black boots and a short black coat, emerged from the hotel and hailed a cab to take her to Brown Street, no one paid any attention. When Tuesday’s mother arrived
at school to do canteen duty, or to help with the school fair, no one called her Serendipity. They called her Sarah, or Mrs McGillycuddy. When children at school talked about the Vivienne Small books, Tuesday never said, ‘My mum wrote them,’ even though she sometimes felt she would burst with the effort of keeping it a secret.
For years Tuesday herself had no idea that her mother was anything other than, well, her mother, the writer who worked in her writing room at the top of the house. But when they thought she was old enough, Denis and Serendipity had given Tuesday her very first Vivienne Small book and told her the truth. They had told Tuesday how vitally important it was that she never whispered a word to anyone of her mother’s secret identity. And Tuesday never had.
Because just as it never occurred to anybody that Tuesday’s mum was more than she seemed, it never occurred to anybody that Serendipity Smith, the most famous author in all the world, was actually in disguise. And that’s why it was possible for Tuesday and her mother and her father to take holidays together and never be recognised. They could play frisbee in the park on Saturdays and have brunch at the local cafe on Sundays without anyone ever troubling them. So Tuesday always found a way to keep the secret and the mystery of all those books dedicated to TM remained unsolved.
Tuesday lay in bed and listened to the recording of I Know about Vivienne Small. Her mother’s voice sounded far away, not close and cosy as it usually did. A little while later, after quite a bit of thinking and quite a bit of frowning, Tuesday fell into one of those strange sleeps where you’re sure you’re still awake. When Tuesday did wake up from this peculiar half-sleep, it was very late at night and the house was absolutely still. Surely her mother had come home by now?
Very quietly, Tuesday crept out of bed past Baxterr and made her way down the stairs to her parents’ bedroom. From the doorway she could make out only one sleeping form – her father’s. Tuesday tiptoed back to her room, glancing up the stairs as she went, but there was no light coming from under the door of her mother’s writing room, and no click clack click clack of the typewriter as her mother wrote late into the night, as she sometimes did. There were no lights on downstairs in the kitchen, or in any of the other rooms in the house. Her mother was still not home.
Despondently Tuesday slipped back into bed. Pressing PLAY, she hoped the story would lull her back to sleep.
Mothwood took yet another length of twine … her mother’s voice read … and knotted it tightly about the neck of the foul-smelling sack containing Vivienne Small and two impossibly heavy ingots of lead. Within, Vivienne bided her time. Satisfied with his handiwork, Mothwood dragged the sack along the ship’s deck, towards a gap in the railing. The ingots bumped bruisingly against Vivienne’s arms and legs. ‘What a glorious day,’ said Mothwood in his rasping voice. ‘The day that Vivienne Small meets her utterly inglorious end, drowned like a cat in a squall.’ And then, using all his strength, he hauled the sack over the side of The Silverfish. Down, down, down went the sack and cold, cold, cold was the salt water that swamped Vivienne, rushing in over her mouth and nose and chilling her through as the sack plummeted into the ocean’s depths.
Tuesday pressed STOP, her heart beating fast, as it did every time she reached this part of the story. Tonight, with her mother missing, it seemed more frightening than ever, even though she knew perfectly well that Vivienne would escape by slipping her knife from where she had hidden it inside her boot, while holding her breath in the way she had learned from the sea-people of Xunchilla. Vivienne was always prepared and she knew useful things. She always found her way out of a fix.
Tuesday looked up at her ceiling and wondered what Vivienne would do if she were in her place. Tuesday knew that there was no way Vivienne Small would just lie there, listening to stories, while someone might be in terrible peril. Vivienne would scale mountains, ford snowdrifts, swim oceans. Vivienne would leap over yawning abysses with her small, blue wings outspread. She would battle carnivorous creatures, outsmart toothless oracles, render senseless the deadliest enemies with darts from her Lucretian blowpipe. But Vivienne would never, ever, just go to bed and wait to see what happened in the morning. Vivienne would work out what needed to be done and do it.
Tuesday swung herself out of bed, and this time as soon as her feet touched the floor, Baxterr’s eyes flew open. He got to his feet, shook himself and looked at Tuesday with pricked ears.
‘Come on, doggo,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how, but we’re going to find Mum.’
Tuesday and Baxterr quietly took the stairs to the top floor of the house. Tuesday opened her mother’s office door. Moonlight flooded across the floor. The deep red reading chair looked enormous in the darkness. So did her mother’s desk. And so did the window that was opened wide to the night sky.
Tuesday switched on the lamp with the fringe of red beads, making the room glow with a soft, ruby light. For the first time ever, Tuesday sat alone on the chair at her mother’s writing desk. On the right-hand side of the desk was a big, thick stack of pages. It was, Tuesday knew, the manuscript of Vivienne Small and the Final Battle. Serendipity had stacked the pages upside down, so that the page on the very top was the last page that she had written.
Tuesday was tempted. She reached out and lifted one corner of that very top page … and stopped. Reading the end of a book before you’ve read the beginning, Tuesday knew, was a sure way to spoil it. And she also felt that it would be wrong to read any pages of the book before her mother had said it was ready. She let the corner of the page fall back into place, put her hands on the edge of the desk, and stared out the open window into the night sky above the city.
‘Mum?’ she whispered.
And then Tuesday noticed that sitting in front of her mother’s typewriter was a tiny silver box. Tuesday had never seen this box before. It was smooth and shiny, without any markings or engravings. Tuesday lifted the lid. Inside the box was a silver thread. Very gently she reached out and touched it. It moved a little and then lifted up and floated in the air. Tuesday had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t a thread from a dress or a scarf. It wasn’t even a thread of moonlight, though it was soft and shimmery the way moonlight is. Once she had guided the thread very gently onto her fingertip, she could see it wasn’t a thread at all. It was two silver words joined by something invisible. And those words were … The End.
The End! Were these the last two words her mother had written? Tuesday wondered. The very last words of her mother’s new book? But why were they here, in a box? Why weren’t they on the page?
‘I have an idea,’ Tuesday said to Baxterr.
She picked up the last page her mother had written and turned it over. It only had a few sentences at the very top. She deliberately didn’t read them, looking instead at the big blank space on the rest of the page. Very carefully she lifted the silvery words and placed them on the page. They shimmered for a moment before they dissolved into thin air.
‘Oh, no,’ said Tuesday guiltily.
‘Ruff,’ said Baxterr, who was transfixed by the open window.
‘You’re no help at all,’ she said to him.
Tuesday picked up the little silver box to close the lid and saw that the words were somehow back inside. She tried again, lifting The End from the box onto the last page of her mother’s manuscript, but once again it disappeared and returned to the box as if by magic.
Next, Tuesday took from the top drawer of her mother’s desk a new sheet of blank paper. She threaded it into the typewriter just as she had seen her mother do, curling the paper around the big, smooth, black cylinder that looked like a rolling pin and placing the hinged silver bar on the paper to keep it snug while she typed.
Tuesday had longed for this moment, but she had never dared to ask her mother if she might write something – just a page, or perhaps just a paragraph, or only a sentence – on this lovely old typewriter. She sat up very straight in the chair and then, taking a deep breath, she reached out and pressed her fingers down onto the keys. The
End, she wrote.
Tuesday had thought that maybe something would happen if she typed those two words on the page. But nothing happened. The End, she wrote again. The End, The End, The End, she typed over and over, bitterly disappointed that this hadn’t somehow made her mother reappear.
‘It’s no good,’ Tuesday said in frustration. ‘It’s not working.’
‘Hrrrr,’ said Baxterr sympathetically.
Tuesday sat and thought.
‘Who wants to start at The End?’ she said to Baxterr. ‘Maybe what we need is a beginning.’
She unrolled the page from the typewriter and turned it over, so she had a completely blank page again. Then she began. The words appeared rather slowly because she wasn’t used to typing and had to keep looking for the right keys, but this is what she wrote – One dark starry night when all the city was sleeping, a girl and a dog waited by an open window.
As Tuesday typed, something strange happened. While the words appeared in nice black letters on the page, as words do if you are typing, a silvery thread appeared with every word, just as if it were made of the very same thread as the words in the little silver case. They grew a little bigger, the silver words, as they took to the air and wrapped themselves carefully around Tuesday’s left wrist. They felt cool and tingly against her skin.
‘Baxterr,’ whispered Tuesday, ‘this is most unusual.’
Baxterr cocked his head and gave a curious little growl. ‘Rrrrr.’
‘Shh, you might frighten them,’ said Tuesday.
The dog, Baxterr, Tuesday wrote, was a fierce and fearless dog with a bushy tail.
And this sentence too became floating silver letters that formed themselves into a strand. It joined up with Tuesday’s first sentence and twined around her forearm, reaching up as high as her elbow.
Baxterr loved strawberry ice-cream, teriyaki chicken and steak tartare, wrote Tuesday. And this time when the silvery letters floated off the page and linked up with the others, they coiled up to Tuesday’s shoulder, making her shiver as if tickled.
Finding Serendipity Page 2
