by Hilary McKay
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Are the children all right?”
For a moment Bill (still dim with sleep) nearly said, “What children?” which would have been disastrous, but then instead he heard himself repeat, “All right?”
“Caddy? I worry about Caddy. I sit here and think, it’s all too much for Caddy . . .”
“Caddy’s fine,” said Bill as heartily as he could. “Off to school, bright and early . . . Do you think she’s academic?”
Eve didn’t. He could hear her shaking her head through the phone.
“Well, she must be something,” continued Bill. “It isn’t art and she’s not practical, far from it . . . Saffy and Indigo . . .” Bill looked around desperately. “. . . Saff and Indy . . .” (Where were they? The house was silent, and when he looked outside, the garden empty.) “Saffron and Indigo . . .”
Indigo’s note caught his eye and he pounced on it, like a starving man on a sandwich. For a moment the randomly scattered, enormous lettering baffled him completely. He read forward and then backward with increasing bewilderment. Blinking, he thumped his forehead with his fist to help him understand, deciphered a word, found another, understood, and announced brightly, “Saffy and Indigo are at school! So, nothing to worry about there. Now your turn! Any news?”
“Yes! They’re doing it today! Bill? Bill?”
Eve’s voice suddenly sounded far away and panicky, like she was falling slowly down a well. That was just emotion, Bill knew, and best ignored, like Saffron’s bad language. So he said, as coolly as possible, “Are we talking heart surgery?”
“They’ve explained everything very carefully,” said Eve (still in her well-shaft voice), “and they know it’s not ideal, but I trust them absolutely. They’re wonderful. It’s wonderful news, really. It’s what we’ve been waiting for, after all. There’s some forms to sign . . .”
“I’m on my way,” said Bill. “Give me an hour”—he glanced around the kitchen, at the mud and scattered food, at his own unwashed reflection, at Old Panda starfished urgently against the washing machine door—“or so . . .”
“Or so,” sighed Eve from the bottom of the well.
“Superb,” said Bill. “Excellent. Fantastic. Great news. Well done!”
Eve sang “Happy Birthday” to the fledgling, now one month old and more hideous than ever but clearly (noticed Eve) very pleased that the date had been remembered.
After “Happy Birthday” came The Reading of the Color Chart, a rainbow document from a firm of artists’ suppliers, usually kept on the kitchen wall. Eve had unpinned it during her last hurried visit home (hugs, shower, collapse on sofa, more hugs, sleep, grabbing of random items, tears, return).
The color chart was no random item, however; it was a vital part of the family’s world. Caddy’s and Indigo’s names had both been chosen from it. Cadmium Gold for her glowing brightness (for months after Caddy was born, Eve was certain she radiated light, like an angel in a picture), Indigo for his wondering, shadowy, indigo eyes. Saffron also had a color for a name, a spicy, warm yellow. Now it was the baby’s turn, and Eve read the names of the colors aloud, emeralds and violets, scarlet and olive, siennas and magenta, ultramarine from beyond the sea, cerulean blue of heavenly skies.
The baby in its nest of tubes and wires listened impassively, waiting for its day to begin.
Chapter Sixteen
AT TREACLE’S
“HOW DID WE MANAGE WITHOUT TREACLE’S?” ASKED CADDY.
“It was always here,” said Beth.
“Not like this,” said Caddy, looking around, and Beth had to agree with that. Now the hay bale prickles were softened with throws, crimson and sage green, lent by Beth’s kindhearted mother. The colors looked good with the green and gold of the hay. So did the fan of feathery autumn grasses that Caddy put in the window, and the rainbow makers she hung from the roof struts. They had music, too, a CD player discarded by Alison and mended by Ruby. “It just needed a new contact in the battery bit,” said Ruby. “And a spring to keep the cover shut—I used one from a pen. The radio’s working again too. It was only the antenna that needed fixing.”
“You are clever, Ruby,” said everyone, impressed.
Once the CD player was mended, anyone could tell who had arrived first by the music that was playing. “Friday I’m in Love” was Alison’s song. “They are very Alison words,” agreed Ruby, listening carefully. Her own favorite, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” brought Treacle cantering across from wherever he happened to be grazing. Robbie Williams, to everyone’s glee, sent him off in a huff to sulk.
At Treacle’s they laughed more than they did in other places.
“Meet you at Treacle’s!”
That was what they told each other every morning as they entered the school gates. Quite often they did not see each other much after that. Ruby would be hauled off to endure her extra classes. Alison spent a great deal of time in some sort of disgrace. Beth tightened her belt and drooped in quiet corners. Lately she had supplemented the Norman diet so heavily with Mars bars that Juliet (surreptitiously trying on her school jacket to see if it fitted her yet) wept with greed and indignation when she discovered the pockets full of wrappers.
“Beth!” said her mother reproachfully, when presented with the evidence (flung on the kitchen table with shrieks of “It’s not fair!”). “I noticed you weren’t eating properly yesterday! Is that what your pocket money goes on? I thought I could trust you better than that. I didn’t even know you liked Mars bars!”
Beth didn’t; they made her sick. Juliet did, though. “You’ll get spots!” she told her sister revengefully.
“I won’t. And anyway, Ruby says spots from chocolate is just a myth. She read it somewhere.”
“Ruby,” said Juliet, “is boring. You’re a greedy pig. Caddy is a mess. I don’t like any of her clothes. Alison hates me.”
“Alison hates everyone. It’s not just you.”
“It shouldn’t be me, because I don’t hate her. I think she’s cool. Cooler than the rest of you. Why didn’t she come yesterday?”
“She was probably in detention.”
“I’m going to be always in detention when I’m grown up,” said Juliet admiringly. “You won’t catch me hanging round in a shed! Gobbling Mars bars and sucking my thumb!”
Ruby was the thumb sucker. She did it without thinking, especially when she was worried. “Tell me when I’m doing it,” she begged, “and I’ll stop.” She didn’t do it often, because she was happy at Treacle’s.
Helping her friends race through their homework. Speculating on spiders and sunlight, the fragrance of hay, the movement of dust motes. Nothing was too small or too common not to interest Ruby. “There are stories about dust,” she said, gazing at the sparkling haze in a sunbeam. “I’m not surprised. Who do you think first thought of hay? Why does the smell of grass change when it dries? Spiders, if you think about it, must be able to hope. Or else they couldn’t make traps. Did you know that the colors you see aren’t the colors things are? They’re the color things reflect.”
“Really?” asked Alison, interested for once. “I never knew that! That might be useful! Are you sure it’s true?”
“Yes, it’s true. Well, it’s obvious when you think about it,” said Ruby, to whom many things were obvious that baffled normal people.
Alison opened her mouth as if she would like to ask more, but Ruby was deep in her book again. She devoured books in Treacle’s shed, making up for the hungry hours at school. She also pored over the prospectus of the academy, usually in private, hidden among the covers of more respectable literature, but once with Caddy, who was a good listener.
“Look, this is where I’m not going,” she said. “Imagine if I did! Imagine if, all on my own, I had to go up those steps and through That Door one day!”
“It’s only a door,” said Caddy, laughing, but Ruby didn’t laugh.
“You go through that door, and you’re into that corridor. It leads to the hall one wa
y and the cloakrooms the other. Look! There’s a floor plan! Up those stairs, that’s where the library is, but all the laboratories are round the back so you can’t see them from the road. Imagine me in that uniform, talking to girls like those! I wouldn’t know what to say! Look at the list of what they do in PE! Orienteering! I’ve never heard of anyone doing orienteering! And that’s their clubs. ‘Clubs and Societies,’ it says. They’ve got a geology club, even, but anyway, I wouldn’t know anyone in it.”
“Is geology fossils?”
“That’s part of it. I bet they go on field trips. Here’s photos of all the staff.”
“I know that one,” said Caddy, pointing, and added most surprisingly, “She lives down the road from me and Alison.”
“Down your road?” asked Ruby incredulously.
“Mmm. The posh end.”
“I knew she’d be posh. Posh and scary.”
“She’s got a little girl who has to have a wheelchair.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why does she have to have a wheelchair?”
“Because of her legs, I suppose,” said Caddy.
“Has she broken them? Did she have an accident? Is it something curable?”
“It can’t be,” said Caddy logically, “or else she’d get cured, wouldn’t she?”
“We can make new joints,” said Ruby. “We’re beginning to be able to grow new nerves back . . .”
“‘We’?” quoted Alison, eyebrows raised, but Ruby didn’t notice. She had gone quiet, thinking.
There was lots of quiet at Treacle’s, more than in any other place Caddy knew. Quietness and friendliness. You could catch up on your dozing, or marvel at Ruby’s brains, or watch as Alison sat at her hay dressing table, painting her eyelids in magical colors.
“Have a go?” offered Alison, and Caddy was soon peering from under rainbows of silver, yellow, and purple. Beth and Ruby looked at her dubiously and refused to try themselves. They did not have Caddy’s ability to enter so freely into other people’s worlds. Still, they were glad to share their own with her. Often Ruby pushed a book or magazine toward her, saying, “Read this!” Beth measured her thoughtfully with her eyes and said, “Perhaps I could teach you to ride. Yes. You’d be all right. Come and try.”
Caddy liked that idea, and followed Beth outside. They captured Treacle with carrots and flattery and hoisted Caddy into the saddle. No sooner had she got there, however, than an unlucky and rare thing happened. Two horses came trotting down the lane that ran across the end of the field. Treacle, who rarely met his own kind anymore and had long ago exhausted the charms of goats, gave a squeal of pleasure and hurtled toward them. Caddy, with equal speed, shot backward over his tail and landed on the base of her spine in the mud.
“I knew that would happen,” remarked Juliet, who happened to witness the accident.
“No, you didn’t!” snapped Beth. “Caddy, are you all right? You should really get on and try again.”
“OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!” groaned Caddy, rolling in agony. “I can’t! I couldn’t possibly! I’ve broken all my bones right up to my teeth!”
“See!” said Juliet. “I always said it wasn’t safe! Shall I telephone an ambulance?”
Caddy shook her head, rolled onto all fours, and then, with Beth’s help, managed to stand and then to stumble into the stable and drape herself face downward on a hay bale. After a while she recovered enough to stagger outside again, but it was a relief when Treacle refused to allow himself to be caught.
“He knows he’s been naughty,” said Beth. “He didn’t mean it, though, Caddy.”
“He was just excited to see those horses,” agreed Caddy. “He probably gets lonely, here on his own.”
Beth’s stricken face made her wish she could unsay those words as soon as she had spoken. “I didn’t mean that how it came out,” she said hastily. “He couldn’t really be lonely, not with all of us. I just meant . . . I don’t know what I meant. My back hurts, so I’m not thinking properly.”
“Do you think you should go home?” asked Beth worriedly.
Caddy shook her head and said that she’d rather be here, with her friends, than anywhere else in the world.
Sitting down was still painful, so she helped Beth to shake out Treacle’s straw in his half of the shed, arranged the throws on the hay bales in the other, swept the floor, tidied Ruby’s books, measured out sweet feed, and scrubbed Treacle’s water tub.
“Why has he only got a cold tap?” demanded Alison.
“He’s a horse,” said Caddy reasonably.
“Doesn’t he ever wash?”
“You don’t wash ponies, you brush them,” said Beth. “I wash his mane and tail sometimes, though.”
“How?”
“With pony shampoo.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Alison. “I meant how, with only cold water?”
“Oh,” said Beth, understanding. “I fetch warm from the house in a bucket.”
“A clean bucket?” asked Alison.
“Of course,” said Beth, and showed Alison the very clean bucket that she used for shampooing Treacle.
Alison scrutinized it inside and out.
“I suppose it would do,” she admitted, and on Friday she astonished them all by plonking a small cardboard box on the hay dressing table.
“Pink,” she said.
“What?” they asked.
“I can’t do it at home because Mum would go mad if I got pink splashed in the bathroom. She’s got that man who looked round our house coming back tomorrow for another snoop. So I thought you’d help me.”
“Do what? What are you talking about, Alison?”
Alison rolled her eyes skyward. “I daren’t dye my hair at home (dumbos), because if I did I would get splashes (ner!) all over the carpets (which are green) and it would show and Mum would go mad because this man (she says) really, really, really likes our house, and he’s the only one who’s shown any interest for years, and his car was brand-new, even if it was only a Ford, so he obviously has money, and Dad said, ‘It’s incredible that people can be so naive, but he didn’t ask a word about the neighbors,’ so I’m dyeing it here.”
“But that’s awful!” Caddy cried. “Does your mother think she’s actually found someone who wants to buy your house?”
“Why not?” demanded Alison, bristling. “Why shouldn’t he? There’s nothing wrong with our house.”
“But then would you move?”
“No,” said Alison sarcastically. “Obviously we’d live upstairs and he’d live downstairs! Dur! Of course we’d move. What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden? We’ve been talking about moving for years.”
That was true. Alison’s family’s mythical, unlikely move to the place she could never remember the name of had been common knowledge for years. Nobody believed in it—that was why they were surprised—any more than they believed any of the threats adults dangled over their lives. (“One day you’ll wish you’d read those instructions properly!” “Left your eyebrows alone!” “Said no!” “Said yes!” “Stayed out of it!” “Joined in!” “One day you’ll know what it’s like to be always trekking up to school, making excuses for your daughter!” “One day you’ll look at a photograph and say, ‘Why did you ever let me go out looking like that?’ ” “One day you’ll be paying the bills!” “One day, when this house sells, we’ll be out of here!”)
Even Alison had not really believed that a house (no matter how neat) that was entirely green, as hers was, inside and out, walls, furnishings, carpets, kitchen, and bathroom, would ever be wanted by anyone other than her green-loving parents. She herself did not like green. She preferred pink.
“But you can’t just let them sell your house!” protested Caddy. “You can’t move, Alison! Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
“What sort of thing?”
“Put him off somehow! This man who’s coming back again. Tell him something awful about it! Tell him . . . tell him
it’s haunted!”
“Mum and Dad always say nothing sells faster than a haunted house,” remarked Alison.
“Well, then, say the roof leaks! Could you make a damp patch? Get into the attic and pour water through the ceiling!”
“They’d kill me,” said Alison.
“Well, do something with the electricity! Fuse all the lights! Leave something about that makes an awful smell! Block the loo with loo roll like they do at school! Get it overflowing! Could you fake a rat hole? Don’t you care?”
“Whether I care or not, I can’t do anything about it,” said Alison, shrugging. “If he buys it, he buys it, but he probably won’t. Either way, I can’t change it.”
There was a sort of fatalism about Alison that words could not change. Arguing never worked with her. If anything, it made her more determined not to budge. Caddy gave up protesting and picked up the box on the hay dressing table. “‘No recreational colors!’ ” she remarked, quoting from the school prospectus.
“Or what?” asked Alison mockingly. “Like, what are they going to do? Cut my head off? I don’t think so.”
“They could suspend you,” said Ruby.
“Well, that would be fantastic!”
“But why,” asked Caddy, “do you want pink hair?”
Alison said that she needed pink hair because she could not stand one more day of the hideous combination of black-and-purple school uniform and pale brown hair.
“Black and purple and brown,” she said. “Think about it!”
They thought, and pointed out that half the school, at least, endured the same horrible fate. That Beth’s hair was browner than Alison’s and that even Caddy’s gold and Ruby’s red were really shades of brown.
“You squeeze this tube of stuff into this dispenser thing,” said Alison, utterly ignoring them as usual. “Rub it in and leave it for at least half an hour.”
“It says you need gloves,” said Ruby, reading the instructions.
“I know. I’ve got some in my bag. And a towel. Help me put it on, then! I don’t want to miss bits.”
