by Lissa Evans
‘See you tomorrow then, Stuey,’ shouted one of Stuart’s friends as he turned the corner into Beech Road.
‘See you.’
It was a crisply cold day in November, the sky a brilliant blue, and Stuart was just arriving home from school. Everyone in his new class called him ‘Stuey’ and he quite liked it. It was certainly no worse than anyone else’s nickname, and a lot, lot better than Shorty Shorten. No one ever called him that any more.
‘Hail,’ said his father. ‘Another satisfactory day at your pedagogic institution?’
‘Yeah, it was pretty good,’ replied Stuart.
‘And how was the inaugural meeting of the after-school Explorer’s Club?’
‘All right. In fact I’ve, er … I’ve been voted president of it. Unanimously.’ He tried to sound casual, but it was hard not to show how pleased he was.
His father smiled. ‘Splendid.’
‘Dad, can I go round to April’s after supper? She’s writing an article on dog-training for the school magazine and we want to try and teach Charlie to balance a biscuit on his nose.’
Although what Stuart really wished he could teach the dog was to come when he was called. He opened the back door and tried out another couple of names he’d thought of on the way home.
‘Chuckle! Chopper!’ The dog carried on sniffing round the garden.
‘A duo of postal missives arrived for you,’ said his father.
‘Two letters? For me?’
The first was a large envelope with a cluster of Canadian stamps. Stuart opened it and drew out a rectangle of cream card, edged in gold.
Grinning, Stuart turned the card over and saw a few lines of handwriting.
The other envelope contained a small object wrapped in tissue paper, a newspaper cutting and a postcard of a theatre, with a cheerfully scrawled pencil message on the back.
Stuart picked up the small object wrapped in tissue paper. He could feel through the wrapping that it was small and circular. It’s a coin, he thought, and then drew a quick breath.
A coin.
A coin that had been found in the Well of Wishes.
He gripped the object, not knowing quite how he felt – anxious? Scared? Excited? Could this, he wondered, be the start of a whole new quest? He hesitated for a long moment before putting it down again, still wrapped, and unfolding the cutting from the Beech Road Guardian.
‘Stuart!’
April was standing at the back fence, pointing at her watch and then holding up a dog biscuit.
‘TEN MINUTES!’ shouted Stuart through the window. ‘I WANT SOMETHING TO EAT FIRST.’
‘OK.’
Stuart glanced at Clifford’s postcard again, and then, for the second time, picked up the tissue-wrapped coin. Quickly, before he could lose his nerve, he unwrapped it.
A small metal disc fell out, bounced on the table top and then rolled to a stop.
Relief and disappointment mingled inside him, and he found himself laughing.
It wasn’t a coin.
It had a hole punched through it and a name etched in capitals across both sides. A short name. A short name for a short dog.
Stuart ran to the back door and wrenched it open.
‘Chips!’ he shouted.
And Chips came running.
THE END
Read on for an extract from Small Change for Stuart
Chapter 1
Stuart Horten was small for his age – the smallest boy in his year at school – and both his parents were very tall, which meant that when he stood next to them he looked about the size of an ant.
As well as being tall, and quite old (especially his father), his parents were extremely clever people. But clever people aren’t always sensible. A sensible person would never give a child a name that could be written down as S. Horten. A sensible person would realize that anyone called S. Horten would instantly be nicknamed ‘Shorten’, even by their friends. And Stuart had quite a lot of friends. He also had a bike with eight gears, a garden with a tree house and a large and muddy pond. Life was pretty good.
* * *
Anyway, this whole story – this unexpected, strange, dangerous story of Great-Uncle Tony’s lost legacy – began when Stuart’s mother was offered a new job. She was a doctor (not the sort who stitches up bleeding wounds, but the sort who peers down a microscope) and the new job was in a hospital a hundred miles from home, which was too far for her to travel to every day.
‘I suppose I could live away during the week,’ she said, ‘but I’d hate it. I’d miss you both too much.’
So that was that, thought Stuart.
Life went on as normal for a day or two, and then Stuart’s father, who was a writer (not of films or of best-selling books, but of difficult crosswords), came up with an awful suggestion. ‘We could rent this house out for a year,’ he said quite casually to Stuart’s mother, as if leaving the village in which Stuart had lived for his whole life was something quite minor. ‘We could move closer to your new hospital, and see if we like it.’
‘I won’t like it,’ said Stuart.
His father took out a road map of England and began to trace his finger northward. ‘Well I never,’ he said, his finger halting at a black smudge. He shook his head wonderingly. ‘I hadn’t realized that the hospital was so close to Beeton. That’s the town where I was born – I haven’t been back in well over forty years. We could go and live there. It’s quite pleasant.’
‘Oh, now that would be interesting for Stuart,’ said his mother.
‘No it wouldn’t,’ said Stuart.
They didn’t listen to him. At the end of the school year, they packed up and moved to Beeton, taking Stuart with them, and though they were clever people, being clever isn’t the same as being sensible. A sensible person would know that if you had to move house, then the worst possible time to move would be at the start of the summer holidays. Because when you arrived at the new house you wouldn’t know any other children, and you’d have no chance to meet any until school started again in the autumn.
And – to make it worse – the new house (20 Beech Road) was small and boring and looked just like all the other houses in the road, and in the next road, and in the road after that. It was nowhere near an adventure playground or a swimming pool. There was no front garden, and the back garden consisted of a square of grass surrounded by a fence that was slightly too high for Stuart to see over.
On the first day after the move, Stuart shoved his clothes and games into cupboards, and flattened out the giant cardboard boxes into which they’d been packed.
On the second day, there was nothing to do. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Which is why, when his father said, ‘Ah, there you are. I was just thinking of going for a brief perambulation. Would you like to come too?’ Stuart answered, ‘Oh all right, then.’
By ‘brief perambulation’, his father meant a short walk. That was the way he talked all the time, and he always spoke in a loud, clear voice, so that people in the street turned and stared at him.
Normally Stuart would rather have poured cold gravy over himself than go for a walk with his father. Instead, on this dullest of days he accompanied him out of the front door and went left along Beech Road, right along Oak Avenue and left into Chestnut Close.
‘When I was a youngster,’ his father told him as they walked, ‘there weren’t any houses in this part of Beeton at all. This whole area was sylvan.’
‘What’s sylvan mean?’ asked Stuart.
‘Wooded. And there was a stream running through the middle of it.’
‘Did you light fires?’
‘Beg pardon?’ said his father, who was so much taller than Stuart that he sometimes had to bend almost in half in order to hear him.
Stuart raised his voice. ‘Did you light fires? Did you dam the stream? Did you make a swing?’
His father shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was never very keen on that sort of thing. I was too busy inventing crosswords.’
They walked in silence along Hawthorn Avenue.
‘Aha!’ said his father as they passed an ancient red telephone box and turned the corner into a street of shops. ‘Now this is the older bit of the town. I seem to remember that the entrance to the family business used to be just along here.’ He halted at a narrow side turning, but there was nothing to see apart from a pair of high-tech metal gates, firmly shut. ‘It’s long gone, of course,’ said his father. ‘Though the name’s still discernible.’ He pointed to a cast-iron arch that curved above the gates. A scattering of painted letters was just about visible.
H RT ’S M RAC L US ECH N SMS
‘Horten’s Miraculous Mechanisms,’ said Stuart after a lot of thought. He turned to his father. ‘What sort of mechanisms?’
‘Locks and safes, originally, and then the business diversified into coin-operated machinery. Though by the time the factory was conflagrated by an incendiary I believe it was making armaments.’
‘By the time it was what by a what?’
‘Burned down by a firebomb. In nineteen forty, during the Second World War, one fell on the factory when my father was away one night. My uncle Tony had been left in charge, but the fire took hold and the building was destroyed.’
‘Fifty years ago,’ said Stuart. ‘Almost exactly …’ Beside the steel gates were an intercom and a labelled buzzer that he had to stand on tiptoe to read: Tricks of the Trade. Goods entrance.
‘So what happened after the fire?’ he asked.
His father, whose normal expression was one of mild happiness, looked suddenly serious, and he started walking again. It was a while before he spoke. ‘It was all rather sad,’ he said. ‘I suppose it marked the end of the family. My father tried to start the business again, without success, and after a few years he moved away from Beeton. He blamed my uncle Tony for the fire, you see, because Tony had never really been interested in the factory at all, he was an ent—’ Stuart’s father stopped dead. ‘Good lord!’ he said, staring ahead.
Stuart followed the direction of his gaze and saw a tall, shabby house, its garden overgrown, its windows boarded up, and its roof a patchwork of cracked and missing slates.
‘That’s Uncle Tony’s house!’ said his father. ‘The probate dispute must never have been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties concerned.’
Stuart simply ignored this last sentence. ‘What’s an “Ent”?’ he asked. ‘You said he was an “Ent”.’
‘An entertainer,’ answered his father. ‘A prestidigitator.’
‘A what?’
‘A magician. He used to do conjuring tricks on stage.’
‘A magician?’ Stuart repeated. ‘You had an uncle who was a magician? But you never told me that.’
‘Oh, didn’t I?’ said his dad vaguely. ‘Well, I know very little about him. And I suppose it didn’t occur to me that you’d be interested.’
Stuart rolled his eyes in exasperation and walked up to the gate. It was encased in ivy, held tightly shut by the curling stems. ‘Number six,’ he said, running his finger over the brass number that was half hidden by the leaves. ‘So what sort of tricks did he do?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘And what was he like?’
‘I don’t remember him at all, I’m afraid. I was very young when he disappeared.’
‘He disappeared? What do you mean he disappeared?’
‘I mean that he went away and never came back to Beeton.’
‘Oh.’ Stuart felt disappointed. For a second or two he’d imagined a puff of smoke and an empty stage and an audience gasping. ‘So why’s the house all wrecked, then?’ he asked.
‘Because there was a probate dispute.’
‘You said that, but what’s probate?’
‘The legal enforcement of the will. Uncle Tony left the house to his fiancée, but apparently they had an argument. She ran off after the fire and nobody could ever trace her. My goodness, it does look a mess.’
Stuart stared at the front door. Several pieces of wood had been nailed right across it, but between them he could just glimpse an oval of stained glass, the multicoloured pieces forming some sort of picture. A hat, was it? And a stick? And a word that he couldn’t quite read?
‘But I was in bed …’ came his father’s voice from the distance.
Stuart looked round. His father was walking away up the road, having failed to notice that Stuart hadn’t moved. ‘So he left a present for me,’ explained Stuart’s father to the empty patch of pavement next to him.
‘Who did?’ shouted Stuart, running to catch up.
‘Your great-uncle Tony. He came to visit my house one Christmas Eve when I was a small child, but I was already asleep.’
‘And what was the present?’
‘A box.’
‘What sort of box? A magic box?’
‘No, a money box. I still have it, as a matter of fact – it’s the one that I keep paperclips in.’
About the Author
This is Lissa’s second fiction book for Random House Children’s Books, following Small Change for Stuart, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Costa Children’s Book Award and long-listed for the Guardian Children’s Book Award. Lissa has also written books for adults and younger children. After a brief career in medicine, and then in stand-up comedy, Lissa became a comedy producer, first for radio and then in television. She lives with her family in north London.
Also by Lissa Evans
Small Change for Stuart
‘A book full of warmth, sharp humour and clever puzzles’ Patrick Ness, Time Out
‘Perfect reading for children aged 7–10 … This is [Lissa Evans’s] first children’s novel. It ought not to be the last’ Achuka
For younger readers:
Smudger the Dog Saves Christmas
For adult readers:
Their Finest Hour and a Half
Spencer’s List
Odd One Out
BIG CHANGE FOR STUART
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 409 02696 9
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Lissa Evans, 2012
Illustrations copyright © Temujin Doran, 2012
First Published in Great Britain
Doubleday Childrens 9780385618281 2012
The right of Lissa Evans to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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