by Hilary McKay
“So it is,” agreed Beth’s mother, about the breakfast and the lunch, and smiled at Beth, who (unlike her little sister) could always be trusted to be sensible.
However, it was hard being a Norman, meal after hungry meal. Very soon Beth, who in the past had hardly thought about food at all until it arrived on her plate, found herself thinking of it all the time. Also her sense of smell developed so wonderfully that she could smell when Juliet took the lid off the biscuit tin, she knew if there were bananas in the fruit bowl before she looked, and actual cooking became such a torment that she had to go out and visit Treacle when it was happening.
Even visiting Treacle was not without its problems. Treacle’s sweet feed, Beth discovered, smelled deliciously sweet to those on a Norman diet. So did hay. Sometimes Beth chewed a little hay when things were bad. However, sticking a photograph of Treacle on the fridge door helped a lot. So did drinking lots of water. So did chewing gum; in fact, chewing anything. And Juliet. Juliet helped, just by being her usual self.
Juliet did not forget the boots.
“Why have you stopped wearing them?” she demanded.
“They got a bit hot.”
“Not on me, they didn’t. For me they were nice and cool.”
“Oh.”
“So can I borrow them?”
“No.”
It was suppertime. Their father was away, but their mother was there. She had made lovely vegetable soup and apple pancakes. Beth ate the soup but not the vegetables, and the apple but not the pancakes.
“Someone brought in chocolate brownies because it was their birthday,” she explained. “They were huge ones, with marshmallows on top.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Juliet enviously. “Were there any left over?”
“Yes, loads.”
“What happened to them?”
“She shared them out again until they were all gone. Dingbat had three.”
“Three!” squeaked Juliet, pouring golden syrup on her pancakes. “Three! Beth, you pig! If there were that many spare, why didn’t you bring some home for me?”
“Juliet, that’s enough syrup and don’t be a pest!” said their mother. “And Beth didn’t say she had three! At least I hope you didn’t, Beth!”
“Of course I didn’t,” said Beth, who, thanks to the useful Dingbat, had eaten none at all. “And how could I have brought them home for you, Juliet? They were someone else’s special birthday brownies.”
“You could have said, ‘Please could I have one for my little sister?’ ” said Juliet, grumpily stabbing her fourth pancake in its middle. “‘Please could I have one or two?’ you could’ve said. And then they could’ve said, ‘Of course, take all these if she’d like them,’ and you could’ve said, ‘Thanks, I’ll bring the box back when it’s empty . . .’ What’s the matter? Stop laughing, both of you! Anyway,” added Juliet (still not forgetting the boots), “what I was saying was, if I can’t have your boots just to borrow (how mean), can I have something else instead? Can I come to your room and do trying on to see what you’ve grown out of?”
“NO!” said Beth, but there were no locks on the bedroom doors and so Juliet came anyway.
“Go away!” ordered her sister.
“I’m just looking. Not touching,” said Juliet, opening the wardrobe door. “At your old denim jacket that you haven’t worn for ages. You must have grown out of that!”
“Well, I haven’t.”
“Put it on and show me.”
Beth shut the wardrobe door so quickly Juliet only just snatched her fingers away in time.
“Your Snoopy slippers, then! Look! They fit me perfectly.”
“Take them off!”
“Oh, Beth, you hated them when Gran bought them.”
“I’ve got used to them now, though,” said Beth. “I know what I’ve grown out of that you can have, though.”
“What? What?”
“All my Posy Pets,” said Beth, gathering up an armload of brightly colored, flower-spattered plastic puppies, kittens, and rabbits.
“Oh, brilliant!”
“And my disco light!”
“Goody!”
“And my Tracy Beaker story CDs.”
“And the books as well?” asked Juliet greedily.
“Oh, all right,” groaned Beth. “The books as well! But that’s all. And I won’t be growing out of anything else for ages and ages, so don’t ask!”
“I won’t.”
“And no secret trying on, either!”
“No, of course not, Beth,” said Juliet with such terrible sweetness that Beth took defensive action: emptied her schoolbag of books and began repacking it with other things. The boots, Snoopy slippers, and denim jacket went in first, but other things were added too. Things that if Juliet appeared wearing would cause her parents to say, “Goodness, Beth, have you already grown out of that?”
No one must notice her growing, Beth thought, and anyway, perhaps after a little while of eating like a Norman, those things would fit her again.
Juliet had not closed the bedroom door when she left. Beth could hear her in the kitchen, chattering as she displayed her loot to her mother.
“Oh, you are lucky,” she heard her mother say, “to have a sister like Beth!”
“She’s perfect,” agreed Juliet. “It must be awful. I’m glad I’m not.”
Beth did not feel perfect. She felt tired and slightly fragile, as if the easiest thing in the world to do would be to burst into tears, and the hardest thing afterward would be to stop them.
From the kitchen her mother called, “Like some hot choc, Beth? I’m making it for Jools.”
“Maybe later,” replied Beth, and heard her mother laugh and say, “Of course! All those brownies! I forgot!”
Then the smell of hot chocolate began to billow through the house: great clouds of warm, sweet, chocolate-scented fog. It was too much for Beth. She pushed shut her bedroom door, flopped down on her bed, flat on her back, and let tears of self-pity trickle coldly down her cheeks and into her ears.
Juliet eyed the bedroom door speculatively as she came upstairs.
“What are you doing, Beth?” she demanded.
“History,” said Beth. “Norman. Go away!”
Chapter Twelve
THE CASSON HOUSE
THE CASSON HOUSE HAD NEVER BEEN TIDY. THEY WERE NOT A tidy family. For one thing, no one (except Bill) ever threw anything away. The rest of them were hoarders, and as a result there were things everywhere. Canvases for Eve’s painting, piles of washed clothes, books, toys, half the contents of Grandfather’s house because he was in a nursing home, more than half the contents of Eve’s twin sister’s Italian flat, sent home when she died. Also everything the children had ever brought home from school, or grown out of, or been given. If Treacle had been Caddy’s pony there would have been no need to worry that one day he would be found a more suitable owner. He would have stayed forever, like everything else.
“It’s not exactly minimalist,” Dingbat had remarked on his first visit to Caddy’s home, which had made Eve laugh and laugh and like him very much.
It was surprising what one house could hold. When plays were put on at school, teachers always asked the Casson children, “Do you think your wonderful mother might be able to find us a long enough wig for Rapunzel? A Victorian birdcage? A camel? Cardboard would do, as long as it was big enough.”
Dingbat, who happened to be there when Indigo came home with the request for the camel, was very impressed that Eve (instead of shrieking with indignation as his own mother would have done) inquired, “One hump or two?”
“Like for the story,” explained Indigo.
“Which story?”
“How the camel got his hump.”
“Oh, that story,” said Eve. “There’s one in the attic.”
“You’ve got a cardboard one-hump camel in the attic?” asked Dingbat incredulously.
“Mmmm. Propped up behind the Christmas trees.”
“How man
y Christmas trees?”
“Just a few from when Caddy’s class did Narnia. They ended up here. I can’t remember why. Do you think you and Caddy could help Indigo if he goes to look for it now? You might have to lift the rocking horse out of the way. And mind Grandad’s cabinet. It’s full of glass.”
Dingbat said he thought it was amazing the way the family knew where everything was. That made everyone collapse into astonished laughter and Dingbat ask, “What did I say? What did I say?”
“Darling, it’s not that we know where everything is,” Eve explained at last. “It’s more like we think we know where a lot of things might be. Which is good enough for us,” added Eve. She, Caddy, Indigo, and Saffron lived among the clutter without hardly noticing it. It was just part of home to them, like the smell of drying paint and Eve’s haphazard baking. Somehow it worked. People got to school more or less on time. Eve rushed out of the house to give art classes, home to paint pictures, up and down stairs to collect laundry, round the supermarket grabbing apples and bread and flowers and socks (because socks always vanished), and home again in time for everyone back from school. However chaotic the days, at the end of them nobody ever went to bed hungry, or unhugged, and always there was the possibility that Bill might come home, like the family’s own private Father Christmas.
Bill coming home was always an event. He brought flowers, too: florist flowers with ribbons and baskets. Exotic sweets appeared from his briefcase, theater tickets from his pockets. For a day or two or three he whizzed them out of the house and away into the world, propelled by laughter and his own bright energy. For as long as Indigo and Saffron could remember, family life had been that way: their mother nearly always home, their father nearly always away.
Now everything was changed, and these changes were caused by the firework baby, who, as the days went by, still continued to waver between the temptation of either causing chaos in everyone’s lives by staying or of wrecking everyone’s lives by going.
The longer the firework baby stayed, the more excuses it seemed to find for leaving. It turned blue, and then yellow. It could not make up its mind to breathe unaided for any length of time. It showed no interest in opening its eyes. In the second week of its life it caught pneumonia and had to have antibiotics.
“That’s not uncommon with very small babies,” Bill told the frightened Caddy as calmly as he could. “A day or two, at the most, and everything will be fine.”
Saffron and Indigo looked at him skeptically. Those two would have made good spies. They had a sort of secret radar system that made them aware of things other people considered private. Their ability to absorb information from supposedly guarded sources was impressive and frightening. They lurked in the shadows of doorways, vanished among curtains, poked and pried, and became invisible behind the sofa during telephone calls.
Saffron and Indigo knew that, whatever their father said, at the hospital people would be very surprised if the baby was fine in a day or two. When they were allowed to visit again (they were all banned at the slightest sniffle or tummy ache) they peered into the baby’s plastic box and were amazed it was still there.
“Getbettergetbettergetbetter,” Indigo used to command, but the baby seemed so temporarily alive that he didn’t really believe it would. Once, in the middle of the night, it stopped breathing completely, and alarms went off, loud alarms, calling for help.
“Stopped breathing!” wailed Caddy, also in the middle of the night.
“How did you know that?” demanded her father.
“Saffy and Indigo.”
Saffron and Indigo, inscrutably asleep, did not deny it, and neither did their father, but later he said to Eve, “Caddy gets into such a state, I think it would be better if we did not mention . . .”
And Eve agreed.
Day after day, and then week after week, the baby endured, tied by tubes in its plastic box in the special ward in the hospital. And except for the most fleeting visits home, Eve—who knew it heard every word she said, and recognized the names of its siblings in the stories she told, and preferred its yellow and pink hats to its blue and white ones, and already had dark curls and blue eyes and a precocious sense of rhythm—stayed with it.
So Bill took charge.
He began by throwing things away, starting in the kitchen, having long deplored the nature of Eve’s catering.
“All my Coco Pops!” said Saffron indignantly. “All the chocolate pudding mix! All the milk shakes!”
All the curry-flavored instant noodles vanished as well. So did all the tinned spaghetti and microwave pancakes. Bill went shopping and returned with a great deal of salad, brown bread, and . . .
“Porridge!” said Saffron in disgust, unpacking the bags while her father took one of his endless phone calls from London.
“Orange juice with bits in,” said Indigo mournfully.
“Yogurt with bits in. Even the bread has bits in. I don’t eat bits.”
“I’ve found something worse than that,” said Caddy.
“What?”
“Dead fish.”
“What?”
Caddy handed her package to Saffron, who peered inside, screamed, and threw it across the floor because it really was dead fish: rainbow trout, all complete with heads and tails.
“They’ve got faces!” whispered Indigo, horrified, and so they had. Faces with shocked open eyes and tragic smiles. By the time their father reappeared there were four new fish-sized graves in the garden, and three reproachful gravediggers in the kitchen.
Their father managed to laugh that time, and cooked them omelettes instead.
“With runny middles,” said Saffron.
“That’s melted cheese.”
“Cheese and egg mixed up?” asked Indigo, and became very sick indeed.
“On purpose,” said Bill, unfair with crossness, and was attacked by Saffron and Caddy.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he said. (He was never mean with apologies; in fact, no one did them better.) “Poor sweethearts! Poor pets! Well done, Indigo! There’s a brave chap! I’ve got the cure for this. I’ll fetch it in a moment.”
The cure was wonderful cologne on a cool linen handkerchief. Bill folded it across Indigo’s hot little forehead and Indigo got better.
“You should give some to the firework baby,” said Indigo, and Bill promised he would. He saw the firework baby much more often than they did because he went while they were at school. Saffron and Indigo grumbled about that and said it was not fair. They grumbled on the days when they did go too, because their father demanded such high standards of cleanness and healthiness before he would agree to take them.
Caddy didn’t complain, however; the last thing she wanted to do was breathe germs onto the firework baby. At home she did her best to help, reading bedtime stories to Saffron and Indigo, unmuddling their school clothes, washing plates and dishes, and putting up with her father’s attempts to reform them into a model family.
That was not easy. Bill seemed to be always getting cross, and although he was sorry almost at once, it didn’t stop him snapping the next time someone made him annoyed. And no matter how much Saffron protested, his cooking remained relentlessly healthy, and his habit of throwing things away that he considered rubbish, relentlessly ruthless. He took to insisting on early bed, even when the early bedded people lay awake for hours, not sleeping, and after the first week or so of school, he enrolled Saffron and Indigo in an after-school club, so they didn’t get home for ages and ages. His phone calls to London got longer, too, and he shut the door when he made them so no one could hear what he said.
Caddy’s school did not have an after-school club, and home, with its irritable new ruler and its closed doors and tidiness, was not a place she wanted to be. More than ever she clung to her friends, Alison, Ruby, and Beth. Somehow, the genie did not seem to touch that world.
Caddy said, “Let’s make a promise to never, never change.”
“Let’s,” agreed Ruby, and �
��Perfect,” said Beth, but Alison laughed.
“Hmmm,” said Alison. “I don’t think so.”
Chapter Thirteen
SOMEWHERE TO GO THAT ISN’T HOME
ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON NEAR THE END OF SEPTEMBER THEY all walked home from school together: Dingbat, Caddy, Ruby, and Beth, and even Alison (miraculously not in detention for the first time for days). Beth was slightly ahead of the group with Ruby. Glancing sideways, she stealthily measured her height against her friend’s. She was almost sure that the difference was a little less. She knew that her school trousers were definitely looser.
That was good. But bad was the weary feeling in her legs and wrists, and the way that thoughts of food ambushed her from every direction. Even a glimpse of the spire of St. Matthew’s in the distance made her swallow with hunger and turn to Ruby to ask, “What did the Normans actually eat?”
Ruby was the perfect person for questions like that.
She didn’t demand, “Why do you want to know?” because to Ruby wanting to know came naturally. She brightened up, although she had been rather quiet most of the way home, and said, “Oh! The Normans. Let me think! Not potatoes, of course, because they hadn’t been discovered. Or tomatoes either. So no chips and sauce!” (Beth swallowed again.) “Nothing very sweet, I don’t suppose. No sugarcane, you see, probably only just honey for sweetness. No oranges or bananas or things like that. No chocolate, poor things! Or tea or coffee or pasta, or rice or curry . . .”
“You’re just telling me what they didn’t eat!” objected Beth. “Tell me what they did!”
“I think they grew wheat, so bread, I suppose. And things made with oats, like porridge. Vegetables of course. Cabbages and things. Cheese if they had cows. Eggs if they had chickens. I bet there’s books in the library that would tell you . . . We could go and look if you like . . . No, we couldn’t . . .” Ruby paused.
“Why not?”
“I’ve lost my library card. I forgot. And I don’t want to go to the school library. Somebody might see me.”
