Girls on the Up

by Linda Newbery

  On Wednesday, Maria, who was Mrs. Rutherford’s cleaner and came once a week, interrupted Andie and Prune in the kitchen. “Hey!” she said, bending to examine the drawings. “Ought to work for a fashion magazine, you two! I could see myself in that one-piece trouser suit, if I lost a pound or two. Very Space Age.”

  “There, you see,” Andie told Prune later. “Even if that stupid agency didn’t want you as a model, that’s not the only way of working in fashion. You could be a designer.”

  “Thanks, And. I owe you a favour.” Prune collected up the sheets, and put them into a special folder, which she referred to as her portfolio.

  Andie was quick to cash in this favour, before Prune forgot or changed her mind. Next day, she asked Prune to go with her to the National Gallery. Prune managed it with barely a complaint, though she got bored fairly soon and sat reading about “How to be a Switched-on Dolly Bird” in her magazine. “Dolly bird!” Andie scoffed. “Haven’t you had enough of that? Who wants to be a doll? Something to dress up in pretty clothes, and that’s all?” But it wasn’t worth starting a real argument, not when she was having her own way. They bought sandwiches in the café, then Prune left Andie for an hour and a half while she went to investigate the shops in the nearby Strand. “Nothing like the King’s Road,” was her verdict. “More like Mum’s sort of shops.” But Andie had seen Renoir and Pissarro and Monet, and was happy.

  That evening Prune went down to see Sushila. Andie was reading in bed when she came back, bringing with her a book called The New Astronomer. “Ravi said to give you this. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing!” With great curiosity, Andie took the book and opened it. “It’s…to help with my painting, that’s all.”

  Tucked inside the flyleaf was a small, handwritten note. “ROOF – TONIGHT – MIDNIGHT” it said, in sloping capitals.

  She could so easily have missed it! Or been asleep, and not even opened the book till tomorrow! Now, tingling with excitement, she prepared to stay awake for the next two-and-a-half hours. She turned the pages, looking at diagrams of the constellations. Maybe, if she swotted up now, she could impress Ravi by recognizing some obscure star-pattern, or by mentioning that Galileo Galilei, who’d lived near the Leaning Tower of Pisa, had made a telescope good enough to see the mountains of the moon. In 1610! And it was Galileo who thought the moon had seas, though it didn’t really, and had named the Sea of Tranquillity, where the astronauts would be landing. Of course Ravi would know all that – this was his book – but maybe she could work it casually into the conversation.

  Prune got ready for bed, but sat fiddling with her transistor radio; Mum and Dad were still up, watching Wojeck, Dad’s favourite crime drama. Andie kept an anxious eye on the time. Her parents were usually in bed by eleven, but what if they stayed up late? How would she escape then? At one point, in spite of her worry, she almost dozed off – but then snapped her eyelids open and pushed herself up from the pillow. She dreaded being fast asleep in bed, while Ravi waited for her on the roof. Not that he would be waiting, with the night sky for company – Cygnus the Swan, and Sagittarius the archer, and Ursa Major and Minor, which meant Great and Little Bear. It was hard to make herself believe that what looked like scatterings of bright dust was actually made up of distant suns, fixed in their sky-patterns. She flicked back to a coloured picture of the solar system. The diagram made it look as if some observer had stood right outside the Earth, noting distances and orbits and colours. But, she thought, it’s been worked out by people standing just like I did, staring up at the sky – looking and comparing and puzzling – and asking themselves questions about how it could possibly make sense. People used to think the sun went round the Earth, didn’t they? – she’d just read that Galileo had even gone to prison, for saying it was the other way round.

  How astonishing it was! How had she not been fascinated ever since she was old enough to gaze up at the sky?

  She heard footsteps in the hallway. Mum, in her dressing gown, looked round the door.

  “Put your light out now, Andie. It’s time you were asleep. Goodnight, love.”

  It was ten past eleven. Prune was already sleeping. Andie clicked off her bedside lamp and waited until her parents were in their room and the flat in darkness, allowed a little longer for them to fall asleep, then turned her light back on and continued reading.

  At last! Five to midnight, and all quiet. While she was putting on socks and sneakers, and pulling a warm sweater over her pyjama top, she heard the faint creak that meant Ravi was on his way up to the attic. She tiptoed out of the flat, remembering to put the door on the latch, this time, so that the cats couldn’t escape.

  He was there, setting up his tripod on the flat part of the roof. Andie gazed up. The night was beautifully clear, the sky spangled with stars – luring her closer, making her wish she could spread her arms and fly into them.

  “Hello! It’s lovely and clear tonight. I want to look at Lyra,” Ravi said, just as if he hadn’t virtually ignored her in the garden, last time they’d met. “It’s only small but it’s got one of the brightest stars in it, Vega.”

  “Does Kris know you come out here?” Andie asked, while he was adjusting the telescope.

  “Course! That’s why she was winding you up about the ghost. She knew it was me,” Ravi said, with his shy grin.

  “Wouldn’t she want to come, too? I mean, Patrick and Marilyn let her do whatever she wants – she wouldn’t have to sneak out, like I do.”

  “She did come up a couple of times. But she’s no good at staying awake, or waking up once she’s gone to sleep – and when she did, she had to stay in bed till ten in the morning, to get over it.”

  “It’s just – you know,” Andie tried, “I don’t want to leave her out.”

  Ravi looked at her in surprise. “Leave her out? Who’s leaving her out? She’s not bothered about this, and we are, that’s all. But I was telling you about Vega. You can’t miss it, even with just your eyes – it’s the fifth brightest star of all. Fifty times brighter than our sun. That’s a useful one for skyhopping. Here, look through the scope. See it, the really bright one?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And if you look really closely at Delta,” Ravi continued, “which is left and a little bit down, you’ll see that it’s really a double! Can you see the two separate stars, very close together?”

  “Yes!” Andie said, after searching for a few moments. “And they’re different colours – one’s sort of reddish, and the other one’s white.”

  “That’s right. Now look with just your eyes, and I’ll show you the Summer Triangle – a triangle made by Vega and two other bright stars, Deneb and Altair. That’s useful to know, as well…gives you a good, er, landmark…”

  “Skymark?”

  “Okay then, skymark.”

  Soon Andie had various skymarks she could pick out for herself – even if she’d never know as many stars by name as Ravi did.

  “But they’re moving!” she exclaimed, finding that she had to keep making slight turns of the telescope.

  “They’re not. We are. The Earth’s turning – the stars stay where they are.”

  “Well, course.” Andie tried to pretend she’d always known this. And of course she had known – but how odd to see it happening, almost to feel it!

  “Now let’s come a lot closer to home,” Ravi said, when Andie was quite dazzled. “To the moon, I mean.”

  He positioned the tripod and focused, muttering, sounding pleased, then motioned Andie towards the eyepiece. As before, the moon’s surface leaped towards her, startling in its detail. It wasn’t just a decoration in the sky, a flat silver disc like a floating sixpence, or smooth like a Christmas-tree bauble. It was real, huge, there – the telescope brought its surface features sharply into view, mountain ridges, craters, peaks, valleys, cracks. Some parts looked as dimpled as orange peel, some were craggy with cliffs or smooth as lakes. Andie had just seen in the book that all the mountains and crat
ers and plains had names; there were detailed maps. Some astronomers, it seemed, knew the moon better than Andie knew the back garden at home.

  “I feel dizzy.” She stepped back from the telescope at last. “Moon-dazzled.”

  “That’s the best kind of dazzled,” Ravi said, taking over. “Next to sky-dazed, or star-giddy.”

  Andie looked up. It was true – the stars did make her giddy, as her eyes reached farther into their depths, and more and more of them seemed to rain at her, pouring through the immensity. She stretched out her hands and saw stars shining between her spread fingers: worlds and worlds contained in a handspan. I’m starbathing, she thought. Better than sunbathing – that only makes you hot and red. Starbathing fills you with time and space and wonder.

  She tried to do it in paint – to show the blackness of space, pricked by points of light as far as the eye could see, and the mystery of for ever. But paint just wouldn’t do it. It was only a spotty mess. Every time she thought she was getting better at painting – every time she did something she felt proud of – her next attempt would show her how much she just couldn’t do. Her eyes saw, and her mind saw, but in between them and the paper were her clumsy hands.

  Sometimes she felt like giving up. But only sometimes.

  Prune’s birthday was coming soon. As Prune had such definite ideas about what she liked and didn’t like, Andie thought it would be safest to let her choose her own present. This meant a shopping trip, to look for something Andie could afford – a record, perhaps, or a rope of beads or some bangles. Andie braced herself for a morning of watching Prune drool over things she couldn’t have, and off they went to the King’s Road.

  The present was found and bought with surprising ease – a Simon and Garfunkel album, which cost more than Andie had had in mind, but was very definitely what Prune wanted. But, of course, Prune hadn’t finished yet.

  “I want to look in East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” She grabbed Andie’s arm; not waiting for an answer, she pulled and shoved her through stationary traffic to the shop entrance on the other side of the road.

  A lanky young man, with straggly hair and a beard that made Andie think of paintings of Jesus, stood by the open frontage, smoking and gazing out into the street. His thoughts seemed to be elsewhere; he gave the girls a vague nod as they passed. Prune marched straight in; Andie followed, feeling like someone entering a different, intriguing world, like Narnia. East of the Sun, West of the Moon wasn’t just one shop, but a sort of indoor market, made up of separate stalls, some with their own entrance doors or bead curtains. Inside was shadowy and enticing, smelling headily of joss sticks and patchouli and cotton, lit with tiny lamps strung around the ceiling and from the partitions. Andie saw rugs in earthy colours, kaftans, belts and beads, mirrored cushions, colourful bowls; sitar music lured her farther in. A few customers were browsing, but no sales staff were in evidence.

  “Marilyn’s jewellery’s in here,” Andie reminded Prune. “You know, Kris’s mum.”

  Jewellery of various kinds was mounted on a stand at the very back of the arcade. Andie and Prune gazed at rings, necklaces, beads, bangles, chokers and earrings, displayed against a backdrop of midnight-blue velvet. Marilyn’s pieces, pinned to a board headed Foleyworks, were of finely wrought silver in the shapes of fish, snakes, moons and twining patterns, some studded with tiny gemstones of turquoise or black. Also on the stand were heavier pieces by other designers – made from bronze, gold or wood, decorated with shells, feathers and many-coloured beads.

  “Oh! I love this – I just love it!” Prune lifted a carved ivory bracelet and slipped her hand through it, turning her wrist this way and that. “I saw one just like this in Honey, with a safari jacket and skirt. Doesn’t it look great?”

  “How much?”

  Prune flipped over the small handwritten price-tag. “Fifteen pounds! But it is real ivory.”

  “No one in their right mind would spend that much on a bracelet,” Andie said. “Anyway, it’s dead elephant. You wouldn’t wear dead elephant, would you?”

  “No-o.” Prune sounded doubtful, but took off the bracelet and replaced it on the stand.

  They wandered on, Prune to a rack of tie-dye T-shirts, Andie to a stall draped with silky Indian scarves. Prune took ages, dismissing half the clothes, examining others with minute detail, then finally choosing a tiger’s-eye ring from the jewellery stall.

  “Come on!” Andie was impatient. “I’m hungry. Let’s go home and get some lunch.” She looked around for someone to take Prune’s money. There seemed to be only the Jesus-man, who was still standing by the door smoking as if he had nothing else to do. She wasn’t even sure that he worked here; but as they approached, he moved to a cash till on the nearby counter.

  “Just this, please.” Prune took a ten-shilling note out of her purse to pay for the ring.

  The man gave her half-a-crown change, then looked at her searchingly and said, “Just by the way, what about the bangle?”

  Prune’s cheeks flushed red. “What bangle?”

  “The one in your bag. Are you thinking of paying for that as well?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Prune stammered.

  Andie looked at her, aghast. She knew Prune well enough to recognize guilt when she saw it. The young man really did look quite a lot like Jesus, or at least how Andie imagined Jesus to look. He had sad hazel eyes that rested reproachfully on Prune’s face, and thin cheeks as if he didn’t get enough to eat. He was even wearing a thin and slightly dirty white kaftan that looked a bit Biblical.

  “Hey,” he said. “I saw you slip that bangle into your bag when you thought no one was looking. I’m not going to get heavy about it. It’s no big deal to me. It’s only money when it comes down to it, and there’s more important things to worry about. It’s your conscience, not mine. Who’s to say a thing belongs to one person rather than another, just ’cos they’ve paid money for it? If you want it that badly, take it – go on. I’m just telling you that I know.”

  Andie was fascinated. Prune, turning ever-brighter scarlet, looked incapable of saying anything at all, so Andie put in, “Actually, if that bangle belongs to anyone, it’s the elephant whose tusks it’s made out of. I don’t see why people should cut off bits of animal to make jewellery, when there’s other things they could just as easily use.”

  The Jesus-man looked at her with interest. “Well, you’ve got a point there. I can dig that. See, I don’t eat animals, or wear animals, or use anything from animals. But hey, who said it was an ivory bangle? I didn’t.”

  “Well, I –” Now it was Andie’s turn to feel her face firing up. He must think she was involved in this. “Why are you selling ivory, then, if you don’t want to use animal stuff? That doesn’t make much sense!”

  “It’s not my shop,” he said pleasantly. “I’m just standing in for a friend who’s gone travelling.”

  Andie couldn’t quite see where the conversation had got to, or how it might end. This young man wasn’t actually asking Prune to turn out her bag, or threatening to call the police. And Prune wasn’t marching out of the shop in a temper, or trying to make a run for it – but she wasn’t denying having the bangle, either, which would surely be her response if she hadn’t got it.

  “Come on, Prune!” Andie said, impatient to be gone. “Have you got it, or haven’t you?”

  “Prune, was that?” The Jesus-man was leaning on the counter with both elbows. He had a very nice smile, Andie noticed.

  “Prudence. Prue. Anything but Prune,” Prune said, flustered. She reached into her crochet bag, and, shamefaced, drew out the carved bangle and handed it over. “I’m sorry – I must have—”

  “Zak? What’s going on?” called a female voice. There was a jangle of bead curtains behind the till, and a wild-haired woman with an Indian scarf tied as a headband came through to join the Jesus-man. Unlike him, she had a very businesslike manner, and piercing blue eyes that seemed to take in the situation at one glance.

 
“Oh, nothing. We were just chatting,” he said. He covered the bangle with his hand, and pushed it under a folded scarf near the till.

  Andie gave him a thank you look, said goodbye and chivvied Prune out to the pavement.

  “What’s got into you?” she hissed. A girl burdened with carrier bags tutted as she veered round them into the road. “Prune? Were you really going to steal that?”

  “I don’t know! I – I – no, of course not! I must have put it in my bag by mistake.”

  “Really?” Andie peered at her closely. “Well, you were lucky that Zak bloke was so un-heavy about it. You could have been arrested! Prune, you can’t go round helping yourself to stuff!”

  “I don’t!”

  “Not much, you don’t. It’s like that Biba dress in the wardrobe. You see something and you’ve just got to have it. Honestly, you shouldn’t be allowed out!”

  “It was a mistake!” Prune flared back. “Don’t you ever make a mistake?”

  “Not mistakes that make me steal from shops, no!”

  They’d started to walk in the direction of the Town Hall, but now Prune stopped, taking hold of Andie’s sleeve. “Andie – you won’t tell Mum, will you? Or Dad?”

  “No,” said Andie, “as long as you promise not to do it again. By mistake or on purpose. I don’t want a jailbird for a sister, thanks.”

  “He was nice, though, that Zak, wasn’t he? Weird, but nice.”

  “Yeah,” Andie retorted, “and I bet he thought you were really great. Trying to nick stuff, then standing there like a beetroot. A gibbering beetroot.”

  “I didn’t gibber!”

  “Yes, you did. It’s a good job I was there, or you’d have melted into a bright red gibbering jelly.”

  Very huffy with each other, they walked home in silence.

  By Sunday, the ban on going out with Kris had expired. Kris came up to see if Andie wanted to go to Hyde Park again – not for a rock concert this time, but to wander round the Serpentine and eat ice cream, and look at the outdoor art exhibition.