by Hilary McKay
But Caddy’s eyes were on Indigo, the only person in the house who seemed to know any answers.
“The firework baby got born in the night,” said Indigo.
That was the latest whim of the genie for the Casson family. The reason for Bill’s aren’t-we-a-nice-little-family and for Eve’s dark hints. That was the coming catastrophe, which Caddy, after one outraged protestation, had successfully managed to forget all summer.
“No, no, no!” wailed Caddy. “I don’t believe it.”
“Caddy darling, you’ve known since June,” said Bill.
That was true. Eve had broken the news of the new baby to all three of them together. “I think it is very lovely and exciting,” she had said bravely.
Indigo and Saffron had stared at her, astonished into silence. Caddy, absolutely horrified, had protested, “Not another baby!” as if there had been dozens.
“Not another?” Caddy had begged again (repeating, although she did not know it, her father’s exact first words on hearing the news).
“Yes,” said Eve. “Another baby. We are so, so lucky.”
“When? When? When?” demanded Saffron, and Caddy asked flatly, “Does Daddy know?”
“Of course he does,” said Eve, noticing how Caddy backed away from her hug. “And not for a long time, Saffy. Not till November.”
“When is November?” Indigo asked.
“When we have our fireworks party,” Eve told him.
The Casson November fireworks party was an event as regular as Christmas, and she could not have said a better thing.
“Fireworks!” exclaimed Saffron, and pranced at the thought.
“I love fireworks!” declared Indigo passionately. “Will there be fireworks when the baby is born?”
“Dozens!” said Eve.
“Rockets?”
“Yes,” said Eve firmly.
“And sparklers we can hold?”
“Yes,” said Eve. “For this baby, yes! Rockets and sparklers!”
“Is it nearly time for November?” pleaded Saffron and Indigo. “Is it? Is it?”
Eve looked at Caddy, now backed against the wall. “November is wintertime, and this is only just summer. So not for ages and ages and ages and ages,” she said consolingly.
Caddy had been consoled. In June, November was hard to believe in, another world away. She made up her mind not to think about it, and she managed this, mostly very successfully, all summer. Her father did the same, as often as he could. Even Indigo and Saffron, after a few days of waking up and hoping for instant winter, put away the dream of fireworks and the baby with the one of snow and Father Christmas.
But now this.
“It’s much too soon!” protested Caddy, there in the kitchen with the broken spotty china and everyone watching her to see what she would say. “It isn’t winter! It isn’t November yet! It’s too bad. It’s not fair!”
Indigo, spooning up dry cereal, with his milk in a separate bowl because that was the only way he liked it, almost understood.
“It isn’t fireworks night,” he agreed.
“We could still have fireworks,” suggested Saffron hopefully. “Couldn’t we have fireworks?”
“Of course,” said Bill.
“Today?” demanded Saffron. “Now?”
“When Mummy comes home,” promised Bill.
“Tonight, then?”
“Well,” said Bill, “well, Saffy darling, you have to understand, Mummy will be staying in the hospital with the new baby . . . So probably no fireworks this actual night . . .”
“I want Mummy,” said Saffron in an ominous and explosive voice.
The last fragment of china that Bill picked up stabbed him so that he winced. Nevertheless, he kept his patience.
“Of course you want Mummy,” he agreed. “You want Mummy and me, and Caddy and Indigo, and the new baby . . . Let’s make plans! What shall I do with you today?”
“Aren’t we going to school?” asked Indigo.
“School!” cried Bill, like a man falling into sunlight. “It’s school today! Good Lord in Heaven, I forgot! School! Wonderful! Let’s make that the priority! What do you need for school?”
“Coffee,” said Saffron, holding out her mug.
Bill made coffee for Saffron without complaint. He discovered schoolbags and sweatshirts and clean socks and pencils. He polished their shoes, checked their hands and faces, forgot their teeth, and stuffed their pockets with lunch money. He answered, with cheerful calm, a hundred firework-related questions. He swept up crumbs, watched the clock, found the car keys, and gave a great sigh.
“I told you there was nothing to worry about!” he said triumphantly to Caddy as he bundled her out the door.
Chapter Five
TREACLE AND BETH
BETH WAS ALSO GETTING READY FOR SCHOOL, IN COMPANY with nine-year-old Juliet. Unlike with her sister, nobody had ever suggested Juliet was perfect. She was a bit of a show-off, a bit of a grabber, and more than a bit dim when it came to understanding other people’s feelings. She came down to breakfast on the first day of term in Beth’s beloved cowboy boots, the fringed, embroidered ones that had been her last birthday present.
“Who said you could wear those?” demanded Beth.
“Can’t I?”
“Of course not. You’d ruin them. They stain really easily. Take them off!”
“You’ve grown out of them,” said Juliet, not taking them off, and she plonked herself down at the kitchen table and began constructing a very large Swiss cheese sandwich.
“Juliet!”
“You said ages ago how much they hurt your feet.”
“I didn’t. I don’t remember that at all. They’re much too big for you, anyway. And actually, I was wanting to wear them today.”
“Oh yes?” asked Juliet skeptically, her voice slightly muffled by bread and cheese. “I bet you’ve only just thought of that. And I know they’re too small for you because there’s bloody marks inside where they rubbed your heels!”
“That was because I had the wrong socks on! That was the only reason. Give them back!”
“Oh, all right,” agreed Juliet. She kicked them off in two loose, easy kicks, stood up, stretched, and curved slowly backward until she achieved a crab position (still chewing) with her hair puddled in a heap on the kitchen floor.
“Sugar Puffs,” she remarked, upside down, unlooped, and came back to the table.
Beth ignored her and pulled on the cowboy boots.
She was pleased to find they were rather less painful than she remembered. She paced exploringly about the kitchen.
“Absolutely perfect,” she said.
“I was only recycling them,” remarked Juliet, now pouring Sugar Puffs into a bowl. “You have to recycle things to save the planet. Which yogurt do you want, strawberry or cherry?”
“I don’t care.”
“I’ll have cherry, then,” said Juliet, and ate her Sugar Puffs with one thin, brown hand curved around the cherry yogurt tub, in case Beth should change her mind. By the time their mother came down from the shower, hurrying to be off to work, she was scraping the bottom.
“Packed lunches,” said their mother, pulling boxes of sandwiches and apples from the fridge. “Don’t forget to clean your teeth! Have you both had proper breakfasts?”
“Mmm,” replied Beth, cautiously sampling her second spoonful of yogurt and keeping her boots out of sight under the table.
Juliet said, “I haven’t had a banana yet.”
“Hurry up, then!”
“Or any toast.”
“Beth, do you think you could be an angel and pop in some toast for Jools? And you will remember to lock up?”
Beth nodded. Their mother always had to leave before the girls. It was Beth’s job to lock the house each morning and take care of the key all day. She had done this for years, since before she was smaller than Juliet. Beth was responsible, everyone agreed on that. It was part of being perfect.
“Good girl,” said
her mother, kissed them both, and was gone.
Beth looked at her little sister, already unzipping a banana. How could anyone eat so much, she wondered, and yet remain so very small? Juliet seemed to have been the same size forever. It wasn’t fair.
“Do you really want toast?” she asked.
“Yes please,” said Juliet, so Beth in her boots walked cautiously across the kitchen and put two slices of bread in the toaster. The boots felt wonderful. The slight tightness around the toes was pleasant, not painful. She decided she would wear them every day.
“Peanut butter or jam on your toast?” she asked Juliet.
“Both. Please.” Juliet was now in the middle of a handstand against the kitchen door.
“Both? Are you sure?”
Juliet came down from her handstand, swallowed half a pint of milk in four gulps, and nodded speechlessly.
“Okay, both, then,” agreed Beth. “I don’t know why you don’t burst. I’m sorry about the boots, though. Maybe you should ask for some yourself on your next birthday. No good waiting for mine; you’d probably have to hang on for years . . .”
Beth paused to reassess the feeling in her feet again and found it was still fine. Wonderful, in fact, she decided, then was suddenly struck by a very happy idea. Which was that if her boots were still all right, then maybe other things were too. Perhaps it was just some diabolical trick of photography that had made her friends’ heads seem only to come up to the height of her ears. Maybe all her worrying had been for nothing. Maybe Treacle—after all, he had been properly clipped for summer for the first time in ages—maybe Treacle just looked smaller. In comparison to how he had looked unclipped.
Once Beth had thought of it, she had to know.
“I’m just going out for a few minutes,” she told Juliet hurriedly. “Just to see Treacle . . .”
“Be-ee-ee-th!” moaned Juliet.
“There’s time if I run . . .”
“You’ll make us late!”
“I won’t. You’ve still got all that toast to eat. I’ll be back before you’re finished.”
Beth grabbed an apple and some bread (nobody ever went to visit Treacle empty-handed) and fled before Juliet could protest any more. She did not have far to go; just along the lane that ran beside their house, past the allotments, and there was the little field they rented, with the corrugated-iron stable-shed, and Treacle himself, standing by the hawthorn hedge and curling his lip to make terrible faces at the goats who lived next door.
“Treacle! Treacle!” called Beth as she climbed the gate.
He heard at once and came running, nearly knocking her over in his anxiety to see what she had brought him.
“Oh, you are greedy!” exclaimed Beth, hanging on to the gatepost so that she did not get tumbled onto the wet grass by the gate. “Let me look at you! Stand still, I can only stay a moment!”
She gave him his apple and he nudged her lovingly, dribbling apple crumbs down her front. Beth pressed her face into his neck to sniff his sweet pony smell. Although he was supposed to belong as much to Juliet as he did to herself, it was Beth who rode him and brushed him, scrubbed out his water tub and cleaned out his shed. Juliet would never do anything like that. Nor would she ride him.
“Sitting on animals,” said Juliet, “is just not me!”
Sometimes Juliet would keep Beth company in the stable while she forked and shoveled and brushed out corners, but she would never offer to help.
“I don’t like poo,” said Juliet.
Treacle finished his apple and began gobbling brown bread. He ate with his forehead rubbing against Beth’s hand, chewing and scratching at the same time. Beth looked at him with love. She had had him since she was eight years old and had needed to climb on top of the gate to get onto his back. Now, admitted Beth, as he plundered her pockets, it was much easier.
It took just the smallest of hops . . .
All summer long, uncomfortable facts had been growing more and more clear to Beth. The fact that owning Treacle was expensive: “The plutocrat,” her father called the farrier, and “I paid for that,” her mother had recently remarked, stuck in traffic in her ten-year-old car behind the vet’s purring Porsche. That was one fact.
Another was that Treacle had been bought for the girls to share, and Juliet was not sharing.
“It’s not good for him to be ridden by just one person,” said Beth, visiting her sister at bedtime one night in the hope of making her understand. “He’ll get lazy.”
“Take him to the riding school, then,” said Juliet. “Lots of people would ride him there. They need more ponies. They’ve got a waiting list because they haven’t enough.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know a girl who goes there,” said Juliet, picking up a foot and putting it behind an ear without seeming to notice she’d done it. “She told me. She said they’re buying more soon. I bet they’d buy Treacle if you wanted. Shall I ask her to ask them?”
“NO!” cried Beth. “All I said was, he needs more riding. That’s all!”
“Ride him yourself, then,” said Juliet, and she picked up her other foot, wedged it behind her other ear, and added, “Easy.”
Easy, thought Beth unhappily.
It wasn’t easy. That smallest of hops was followed by the hardest facts of all. The immense height from which she seemed to look down on Treacle’s neck. The way her feet when out of the stirrups could brush the seed heads of the long autumn grasses. The memory of Juliet’s hilarity the last time she had watched Treacle and Beth canter across the field.
“What’s so funny?” Beth had demanded.
“Only that you look just like you’re riding a bike,” said awful Juliet. “It’s your knees! It’s because you’ve grown so much!”
“I won’t grow any more,” vowed Beth, desperate in her boots. “I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.”
Chapter Six
THE ROAD TO SCHOOL
ALISON, RUBY, CADDY, AND BETH USUALLY MET UP AT THE crossroads and walked to school together, unless Alison was feeling particularly antisocial and decided to stalk off on her own. This morning things were different, though. This morning it was Ruby who set off alone.
“I need time to think,” she told herself.
Ever since she had begun school, Ruby had been happy. First at her primary school, and then even more at secondary school. She had been there for a year now, and she loved it, which none of her friends could completely understand. Alison could not see why anyone would like school at all, but Caddy could feel the charm of the welcoming, battered, chewing gum–speckled buildings, although she didn’t like school work, lesson after relentless lesson, with hardly a pause in between.
Beth liked the fact that at school she was not expected to be perfect or even particularly sensible, but she minded the vast amount of time it took out of her life, whole weeks vanishing while Treacle was alone in his field.
But Ruby loved it, especially in the company of Caddy and Alison and Beth. Away from those three she was a timid person, but with them around her she was as brave as a lion. No subject could frighten her, no homework was too long or any lesson too difficult. In fact, thought Ruby, they were not difficult enough. She could never quite see why her friends toiled and groaned and needed so many explanations to get through the day. Math for Ruby was a series of puzzles, each more ingenious and revealing than the last. Languages she absorbed as familiarly and easily as if she had heard them spoken in her dreams. Science and history and geography sent her racing to the library in order to discover more. Technology was bliss to her three-dimensional mind.
Ruby had been perfectly content at school until the day at the end of the last summer term, when she had torn open the brown envelope containing her report and read what they had to say about her, with Caddy reading over her shoulder.
Now, walking to school, she recalled that afternoon. Here was the drain down which she had poked the fragments of that fatal document. How foolish she had been not to guess
that they kept copies! How unresourceful not to have supplied a fake!
Ruby had a problem, and she had a solution to the problem that was so awful she could hardly believe there was no alternative. She wondered if it was actually possible.
“You can do anything you set your mind to,” her grandparents were always telling her.
I’m setting my mind, thought Ruby grimly, as she marched along the road to school.
Alison was the only one waiting at the crossroads that first morning.
“Ruby’s sneaked off without us,” she informed Caddy, as Caddy came racing up to meet her. “Beth rang me a minute ago to say we’re to explain that she’s going to be very, very late. And what’s the matter with you?”
“Me?” Caddy asked. “What is the matter with me?”
“You look awful,” said Alison. “Awful! That’s what!”
Alison herself looked wonderful. She had put on purple lip gloss, eyeliner, and mascara; rolled the top of her skirt so that what was left was hardly visible beneath her untucked blouse; and tied her tie (fortunately also purple) round her forehead like Pocahontas. Her nails were so newly varnished they were still slightly tacky and her long, fair hair had been straightened and trimmed with nail scissors to make a ragged fringe that covered one eye. Even her schoolbag was gorgeous: shiny black with a design of tear drops in silver. It was a spectacular effort, especially considering that the first moment any staff member spotted her she would be handed a baby wipe for her face, a black elastic band for her hair, and a copy of the school’s standard leaflet entitled “Preparing for Your Working Day.” (It included step-by-step diagram instructions on “How to Tie Your Tie,” as well as “Six New Ways to Learn and Have Fun.”) Within ten minutes Alison would look exactly like everyone else (but grumpier). It would all be wasted.
She was doomed.
But for the moment, she was perfect. It cheered Caddy up just to see her. She said admiringly, “You look completely fantastic, Alison!”
