Caddy's World

by Hilary McKay

  “I’ve heard from half the English-speaking world,” said Caddy’s father. “So now let’s hear from you.”

  “I’ve had,” said Caddy, staggering to the sofa, “I’ve had . . . I’ve had . . . I’ve had an awful day!”

  Without being asked, her father took off her grubby shoes, tucked her feet up on the sofa, fetched her a glass of milk, and handed her Old Panda.

  “Beth hates me,” said Caddy. “And Ruby’s going to the academy. Dingbat’s dumped me so he can have Alison instead, but you already know about that. I expect I’ll get in trouble about bunking off school but I didn’t mean to. Beth was sick and I couldn’t leave her. Her mum said she’d ring our class teacher to explain. Soon there won’t be any stable den, or anyone to go there with. And I haven’t had any lunch.”

  Caddy did not get this whole statement out uninterrupted. Twice the phone rang and had to be answered. During one of the calls her father spoke very charmingly to someone, repeating, several times, “I’ve never missed a deadline yet.” The next time he was more his usual self, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I haven’t time now. Perhaps you could tell me later. I may not be able to do that this evening. It’ll be over very shortly, and then we’ll all be able to move forward again . . . Don’t set your hopes too high, darling.” It was only right at the end, when he came to the “darling,” that Caddy realized he had been talking to Eve.

  At last he turned back to Caddy again, and Caddy began to tell him more things. About Mars bars and hay and how Ruby, when reading, never really heard a word that anybody said. However, long before Bill had understood anything at all, Saffron and Indigo came bursting in from school, absolutely jubilant because after-school club had been canceled.

  “Canceled, canceled!” sang Saffron, flinging around cushions. “Why’ve you got Old Panda, Caddy?”

  “I haven’t had any lunch,” said Caddy pathetically, and fell asleep at that moment, still holding her glass of milk.

  “Look at Caddy!” marveled Indigo, and Bill said, “Don’t wake her. Let her sleep a little while. She’s had an awful day!”

  Caddy slept through more phone calls. Through supper of eggs and toast and apple pie from a box. (“At last Daddy’s learning to cook,” remarked Saffron.) She slept through her father beckoning, “Come and look at this, you two.” She slept through Saffron and Indigo’s squeals of astonishment and promises of silence. She slept while they dug in the garden and her father (with the phone switched off because Caddy was safe home at last) worked upstairs, undisturbable except in the direst of emergencies because this was a day when he’d had a hundred things to do, and not one of them was done.

  It wasn’t entirely peaceful sleep, however. Every now and then a truck bore down on her. Someone screamed: “I hate you!” Every now and then the baby at the hospital went cold and still.

  Sometimes she surfaced enough to catch words:

  “Did you hear Mummy’s message? Do you think she was crying?”

  “Is it something to do with the baby?”

  “Saffy, look what I found! LOOK!”

  “Don’t tell Caddy. She’s had enough today.”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “It is till tomorrow.”

  “It’s the best hole we’ve ever dug.”

  “It has to be!”

  In between Caddy slept, a restless, worried sleep. She dozed until the early evening and then woke to hear more voices.

  Saffron and Indigo on the doorstep.

  A reporter from the local paper had arrived.

  Saffron and Indigo were hardly surprised. They had met reporters before. Both of their parents had been interviewed and photographed. “Local Artists Painting Duo Eve and Bill Casson” the headline (much to Bill’s horror) had read.

  The actual reporter on the doorstep that evening was a familiar face to Saffy and Indigo. She often visited school in search of something to cover the acres of white paper she was expected to fill. Saffron had shot to fame at the opening of the new school wildlife pond, when she had volunteered to have her photograph taken. “Naturalist Saffy Walks on Water” it had been titled—and there was Saffy, ankle deep and smiling, simultaneously demonstrating the efficiency of the submerged safety grill and pointing to a ripple where a frog might once have been. That was Saffron’s moment of glory, and Indigo’s had come not long afterward, when a local writer had visited the newly decorated school library. She had asked for ideas for stories, and Indigo (all by himself, aged five) had stood up in front of everyone and delivered the plot for an entire new book. It was about dogs (Dalmatians, a hundred and one of them). “There was one like it before,” Indigo had explained. “And it was really good. You could do it again, with different dogs.”

  The applause had been huge, and Indigo’s smiling face had appeared under the confusing but attention-grabbing headline “Possibly the Next Walt Disney.”

  Not surprisingly, after these happy experiences, Indigo and Saffron had taken a liking to public acclaim. They took to spending many happy hours “playing newspapers,” which meant interviewing each other on such pleasant subjects as biscuit preferences and clouds. So they were very pleased indeed to find a reporter smiling down at them when they opened the door, especially as she happened to be the same person who had written so admiringly of them in the past.

  But it was a pity she asked to speak to their father. “He’s upstairs,” Saffron told her. “And he absolutely must not be disturbed for any other reason except if the house is on fire.”

  The reporter seemed rather disappointed about that.

  “I wouldn’t take long,” she said. “Just a few words about your sister. I’ve heard the main story, several times. I would just like a little background.”

  Saffron and Indigo looked at her unhelpfully. As far as they knew, Caddy had done nothing to deserve any sort of fame. They didn’t know anything about main stories or backgrounds. They wanted to start playing newspapers.

  “I telephoned,” the reporter told them, “several times.”

  “Lots of people do,” said Indigo, nodding.

  “It’s about your sister Caddy. I hear she has been very brave.”

  Caddy, listening through the crack in the door, felt herself going cold with horror. The last thing she wanted, the absolutely last, was to talk to some stranger about the awfulness of her day. She retreated back to the sofa and the comfort of Old Panda. “Manage by yourselves!” she silently commanded Saffron and Indigo.

  Saffron and Indigo did. Life without their mother had taught them a great deal of independence. Managing by themselves was something they had learned how to do over the last few weeks.

  Recently school photographs had been taken. All three of them were lined up on the windowsill at that moment. They were clearly visible from the doorstep.

  Saffron noticed the reporter looking at them.

  “I’ve a much nicer picture of Caddy than that,” she said, and ran upstairs. She came back a minute later, carrying the photograph taken on Ruby’s birthday trip.

  “There she is with all her friends,” she told the reporter proudly. “That’s Alison. That’s Ruby. That’s Beth. And that’s Caddy. Do you know what they call Caddy? The bravest of the brave!”

  The reporter looked for a long time at the photograph. She seemed to like it very much. She asked, “Might I possibly be able to borrow this, please?”

  “You’d have to give it back.”

  The reporter said that would be no problem. “Bravest of the brave,” she repeated as she folded it carefully into her notebook. “But where is she now? Is she here? Would she be able to talk to me?”

  Saffron and Indigo looked at each other. Was Caddy able to talk? Yes. But in her sleep? No. Nor did they want to wake her to talk. They liked talking, and they preferred to keep reporters to themselves. They didn’t want to share them.

  Saffron and Indigo shook their heads and said no, Caddy wouldn’t be able to talk. However, they themselves had nothing much to do and
could tell her anything she liked.

  “We should need your father’s permission first,” said the reporter.

  That was easy. From the bottom of the stairs Saffron screeched, “Can we play newspapers with a newspaper lady?” and from his lair at the top Bill bellowed in reply, “Do as you like but don’t set the house on fire.”

  “Can we make cups of tea?”

  “No.”

  “Biscuits?”

  “You’ve just had supper! Oh, all right. One each. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  “Won’t all that shouting have woken up your sister?” asked the reporter, still on the doorstep.

  They said they didn’t think so, and since she prudently refused to come in, they hospitably took a ginger biscuit out to her and pressed it into her hand.

  “Tell me a little bit about your sister, then,” she said. “I hear she’s very brave.”

  That started them off at once, and they launched into descriptions of Caddy’s bravery. They concentrated on spiders, the fat sort that looked squashy, and enormous sticky ones with loose legs.

  “There’s one lives in the cupboard under the sink,” said Saffron. “It’s horrible. As big as a hairbrush! But Caddy never lets anyone make it go away. She says under the sink is its home and it would be cruel to make it move. And if anyone wants anything out from there, Caddy puts in her hand and gets it.”

  “That’s brave,” Indigo told the newspaper lady, and she shuddered and nodded.

  “She was braver than that even with the frog,” continued Indigo excitedly. “The frog that Daddy ran over with the lawn mower and cut off its legs and it didn’t die and Daddy said it probably wouldn’t feel a thing because it was a frog . . .”

  “Bloody Daddy,” remarked Saffron.

  “. . . Be quiet, Saffy, it’s my turn talking! Because it was a frog, like I said. But Mummy couldn’t look and Daddy said, ‘Leave it, it’s nature’ . . .”

  “Caddy said lawn mowers aren’t nature,” interrupted Saffron.

  “Shut up, Saffron! And Caddy said lawn mowers aren’t nature and she picked it up and put it in a cereal bowl with cool water and killed it . . .”

  “Killed it?” asked the reporter, sounding rather surprised.

  “Yes, with one of Mummy’s tablets melted in the water and the frog stopped twitching and went asleep and we buried it in the graveyard.”

  “With a gravestone,” said Saffron. “With writing on it. Come on. We’ll show you.”

  All the time this conversation was going on, Caddy had been on the sofa. She could hear the talking but hardly any of the words that were said. She didn’t want to. However, when she realized that the reporter was being taken to the garden, she became suddenly curious.

  She crept across the little hall to peer out the kitchen window. There were Saffron and Indigo, displaying the family graveyard.

  “That’s the frog,” she heard Indigo say, pointing to a gravestone made from a green plastic plate, “and that’s his name, written on it.”

  “‘Valium,’ ” read the reporter, spelling out the wobbly felt-pen letters.

  “After Mummy’s tablet,” said Saffron.

  The reporter gave her a very odd look, and then turned to another gravestone.

  “‘Lost Property.’ ”

  “He had a good hole,” said Indigo. “Square corners. It took ages. We’ve only just started doing square corner ones. Before that we just did round.”

  “You dig the graves?”

  “Me and Saffy,” said Indigo modestly.

  “Then can I ask . . . ?”

  What was she staring at? wondered Caddy. Which of the many Casson graves had brought that shocked note to her voice? She wasn’t looking in the direction of the established graveyard now. Her face was turned toward the very end of the garden, which was so far uninhabited.

  Faintly on the evening breeze came a snatch of words from Indigo: “. . . that’s for when the firework baby . . .”

  Bill came downstairs.

  Caddy heard his footsteps just in time to get back into the living room, regain the sofa, and close her eyes. She heard the gentle opening of the door as he peeped in to check on her. Then his exclamation of surprise a moment later, when he found no Saffron and Indigo playing in the kitchen. Almost immediately after that, she nearly jumped out of her skin at his roar of indignation when he discovered an unknown reporter picking her way among the family gravestones, with never a word of permission. And then the reporter was escorted to her car and hurried off the premises, and Saffron and Indigo were sent upstairs for baths.

  Caddy gave up pretending to sleep. She was sitting up with Old Panda when Bill came in again.

  “Caddy, this girl you looked after today, I know her family were very grateful. Her grandparents telephoned and told me so. And something about a new school for her too, that seems to have pleased them a lot. And the police said you’d witnessed a speeding truck, and I know your friend Beth was sick, and I quite understand about not leaving her . . .”

  “Good.”

  “But can you please explain why I just found Saffy and Indigo showing some woman from the local rag every hole they ever dug in the garden?”

  “What did Saffy and Indigo say?”

  “Some rubbish about you and spiders and her coming to their school.”

  “Nothing about me picking up Ruby?”

  “Nope, not a word.”

  “I don’t know, then,” said Caddy wearily. “I can’t think. I feel all floppy and rubbishy.”

  “You’ve had nothing to eat since you came in,” said her father. “That’s what’s the matter with you.”

  He cooked a special little omelette, brought it in on a tray, and stayed to keep her company while she ate it.

  “Tell me about Mum and the baby,” said Caddy. “You haven’t been to see them today.”

  “I have. I went this morning, after you lot had left. They were waiting for the doctor to come round when I came away.”

  “Why did they need a doctor?”

  “It’s just routine, Caddy! Don’t start panicking! It’s a hospital! There’s doctors!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The baby is fine,” her father told her. “Eve’s chosen a name at last, she says, but I’m not to tell you because she wants to do it herself.”

  “It’s been ages since we went to the hospital,” said Caddy a bit dismally.

  “I know, but while you had colds and the good Lord in Heaven knows what it wasn’t worth the risk. Not after that chest infection. And then surgery. Heart surgery’s no joke.”

  “I know,” said Caddy in a very small voice.

  “We’ll have them home before you know it!”

  Promise, Caddy wanted to ask, but she didn’t, and anyway, she knew he wouldn’t. Not after the last home-before-you-know-it when the baby had been so ill.

  “Bed for you, Caddy,” said Bill. “You’ll see them very soon.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, all things being well.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  TOMORROW, ALL THINGS BEING WELL

  CADDY WENT TO BED, BUT SHE COULD NOT SLEEP. THIS TIME the genie had spun her world too hard, too fast, too recklessly. She had nearly lost track of how much she had lost. Deep in the night, the only one awake in the whole exhausted house, she counted.

  No more Dingbat.

  No more charmed circle. AlisonRubyanBethanme. No more. And what else, worst of all?

  The baby.

  “Tomorrow,” her father had said, “all things being well,” but in the darkest part of the night, tomorrow seemed a world away to Caddy, and she had even less hope of all things being well.

  Her father had told her, “Don’t worry.” “Fine.” “Coming home soon.” That sounded all right, except he had also said, “Heart surgery’s no joke.” Most telling of all, not knowing he was overheard, “It’ll be over very shortly and then we can all move forward.” He had said to Eve, and Caddy had heard, �
��Don’t set your hopes too high, darling.”

  Also, thought Caddy, hugging her knees in the dark, there was something that Saffron knew and Indigo knew, and she did not. That was not surprising, and had happened before. Saffron and Indigo had known about the baby’s heart surgery before Caddy had. They had told half their school about the night the baby stopped breathing and the alarms went off before Caddy heard a thing. She might never have known if it had not been for Juliet. “The insight of the illiterate,” Caddy’s father called their telepathic understanding of what the grown-ups tried hardest to hide. Saffron and Indigo knew when Bill was angry and Eve was miserable. They had private conversations with their father when they thought Caddy was asleep. “Is it a secret?” Caddy had overheard, and “Do you think she was crying?”

  Caddy slipped out of bed and crossed the room to the sleeping Saffron.

  “Saffy!”

  Saffron burrowed deeper into her pillow.

  “Saffy, wake up!”

  “Whywhywhywhy?” moaned Saffron.

  “I want to know about the baby. Have you heard anything new?”

  Saffron rolled over in bed among her bears. With her soft, tangled hair and her round, sleepy eyes she looked like a baby angel tumbled into a zoo. She said reproachfully, “I was bloody asleep, Caddy.”

  “There’s a secret about the baby and I want to know it,” said Caddy.

  Saffron’s mouth went very prim and tight and pouty. She let her eyelids droop. She slumped. “We’re not to tell you,” she said, and went deliberately and unshakably back to sleep.

  Indigo was always so difficult to rouse that it was almost an act of cruelty to attempt it. However, Caddy was desperate. She joggled him, rolled him, and froze him with no covers.

  Indigo remained asleep. Caddy considered pouring water over him, but the last time anyone had tried that trick he had dreamily wet the bed. Instead, she tickled his feet, removed his pillow, and when that did no good, tipped him right out altogether. Indigo slept on among the toys and shoes on the floor, looking pathetic. Conscience-stricken, she heaved him back onto his mattress again, moving him in sections: head and shoulders, an arm and a leg. The bits left over.