by Hilary McKay
He said, “Sank you, Caddy,” with his eyes tight shut and held up his arms to be hugged. He said, “In the morning I’ll show you the hole. For.”
“For what?”
“For . . .” There was a long pause. “For the . . .” An immense pause. “For the fire . . . work . . .”
The last words were so silent a murmur, from so far away, that they were no more than a breath. But they were enough.
“Thank you, Indy.”
Caddy dropped his quilt on top of him and tiptoed back to her room. In the miserable cold grey before dawn she dressed and slipped downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the garden.
Babies were not buried in gardens, Caddy knew. No baby would ever be buried in theirs. But Saffron and Indigo did not know that. Saffron and Indigo had more than once indicated that should the need arise, they would be ready to help. Caddy remembered very well the grave prepared for Lost Property, before he was dead they had known it would be needed and set to work. Juliet’s remarks on the subject the night they dyed Alison’s hair also came back to her, and the startled note in the reporter’s voice only the evening before.
In the shadowy predawn greyness the new hole looked shocking. A rectangle of darkness. Still. Quiet.
But waiting.
Now there was a question to which Caddy had to know the answer. Was the baby dead?
Caddy pushed it to the back of her mind and ran.
It was a short drive to the hospital, only three or four miles. A long, long walk, though, early in the morning.
The town woke up as Caddy scurried along its roads. Early dog walkers. Delivery vans. A street sweeper spinning its brushes in the marketplace. A flock of pigeons, silver and gold and pink and grey, rising from the library window ledges to circle and dip and spread for the day’s gleaning on the streets below. Then the long road out of town with the wind suddenly much colder and a fierceness in the flow of the traffic. The hospital car park, three-quarters empty, an amazing sight to Caddy. Usually it was so overflowing that her father drove round and round in a state of increasing fury and ended up parking half on grass, half on yellow crosshatched lines.
The huge glass doors were open. Deliveries were being carried in for the hospital shop in the foyer opposite the reception desk. Boxes and flowers and newspapers.
“Oy!” said the porter on the reception desk, catching sight of Caddy the moment she stepped through the doors. “What are you doing here?”
Caddy looked at him nervously. She knew him fairly well by now. He always noticed them when they came in with Bill, and he always nodded. Two or three times he had actually emerged from behind his desk in time to catch Saffron before she bolted into the car park. Once he and Indigo had played a winking game, he with alternate eyes, Indigo, despite enormous efforts, with both at once, the porter very solemn, Indigo speechless with giggles.
One day, after Caddy had spent a long time dithering over the buckets of carnations in front of the hospital shop, he had even spoken. “They’re not allowed on the ward where she is, pet,” he had advised Caddy. “Anyway, those prices are daylight robbery. Take your mum a paper. She’ll like something to read.”
He had watched with approval when Caddy took his advice.
The porter always seemed to have a newspaper to hand. He was holding one now as he looked at Caddy, first off the pile for the shop, ink fragrant, and smooth as if it had been freshly ironed. A long headline and a color photograph and the porter’s eyebrows raised very high as he looked over it to Caddy.
“I’ve come to see my mum,” said Caddy, and when his eyebrows lifted even higher, “I’ve got to.”
“Thought you’d got tired of coming here. Haven’t seen any of you for more than a week.”
“We had colds and things. And everyone said better not risk it.”
“Ah! And you are Cadmium Casson, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You see, I know all about you!”
“Oh . . .”
“And as it happens, I know your mum is up and about because I just called through to where she is and sent the papers up to the ward.”
“Oh, did you . . . ?”
“Ten o’clock’s visiting. You’re more than three hours early.”
“I’m here now.”
“Yes you are. And you’ve got to see your mum. And since it’s you, I’ll forget the rules . . .”
“Oh, thank—”
“Ring through to the ward . . .”
“Oh no, you don’t have to . . .”
“Put forward the clocks . . .”
Caddy’s father often said that hospitals drove him crackers. He also often remarked that if he had to spend any length of time incarcerated behind a desk he would go crazy.
The hospital porter, as far as Caddy could tell, spent his days and nights incarcerated behind a desk in a hospital, and it seemed he had suffered the fate that her father had foretold for himself. His insanity took the form of speech:
“Since it’s you I will roll out the red carpet that we keep for heroes . . .”
Crackers, thought Caddy, jiggling from leg to leg with impatience.
“Stand still and wait a minute longer . . . Scatter rose petals . . .”
He really was insane. Bonkers, nuts, both crazy and crackers. And terribly slow. He talked between pauses, first addressing Caddy, and then murmuring inaudibly into the phone he had just picked up.
“. . . and order a band! Off you go, pet! Here’s someone coming to look after you.”
It was the nurse that Caddy had met on her very first visit; the one who was so careful about clean hands. She was just as careful now, in fact more so than ever: After one glance at Caddy’s feet she produced overshoes for her to wear as well. Still, she was smiling and friendly. She led Caddy not to the place for special-care babies but along to a perfectly ordinary glass-windowed corridor, with wards along one side and offices on the other.
Perhaps the hospital was not accustomed to early-morning changes of routine. From all the doorways along the corridor heads popped out to look at Caddy as she passed.
One of them was Eve, clutching a newspaper. She let it fall as she ran, calling, “Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!”
Never before had Caddy been hugged in front of such a large audience. She stared at them in amazement when her mother at last let her go. What was the matter with everyone? she wondered. Her mother was mopping her eyes and blowing her nose on blue hospital paper towel. Other eyes and noses were being dealt with too. The audience were all either smiling or mopping or waving folded newspapers. Everywhere tears. Everywhere smiles. Everywhere waves.
Is this what hospitals are like when there are no visitors? Caddy asked herself. What was the matter with these people? Were they all, like the porter, completely cracked?
The numbers were growing. Nurses. Men in white coats. A whole lot of ladies in dressing gowns and slippers who were passing round tissues like you might pass around chocolates, whispering, “Oh, thank you!”
“Oh, I shouldn’t.” Eve was plunging in and out of waves of wet blue paper towel like a bedraggled mermaid in a paper sea. Footsteps were pounding fast up the corridor. Caddy turned to meet them just in time to be charged full tilt by Indigo and Saffron, wielding Old Panda. Behind them came her father and, last of all, the lunatic porter, escaped from his desk.
It was the lunatic porter who explained everything.
“Autograph, please, young lady,” he demanded, handing her first a hospital shop newspaper, and next a hospital shop pen.
That was when Caddy saw for the first time:
Cadmium Casson, the Bravest of the Brave
[over]
Ruby’s Birthday Photograph
“I gave her that picture!” said Saffron proudly, pounding the paper with her fist. “That newspaper lady! I fetched her the photograph and me and Indy told her what to put!”
“It was about the spider under the sink,” shouted Indigo, “and about when you killed that fro
g. And we showed her the graves! Did she write it all down?”
But it seemed she had not written any of it down. She had written about speeding trucks and Ruby falling and Caddy leaping to the rescue. She had added extra photographs too, blurry ones that someone had taken with a disposable camera. Ruby sprawled facedown in the road. Caddy as she dragged her to safety. Shocking photographs that made Saffron and Indigo stare in horror and Eve say, “I can’t look! I can’t think about it.” Photographs that seemed to make people want to reach out and pat Caddy, as if to check she was real.
Caddy didn’t like that, and she shook her head when people offered her pens to sign their papers, copying the lunatic porter. He suddenly presented her with a pink-wrapped bunch of daylight-robbery hospital carnations like a magician producing flowers from a hat. Scattered applause followed the carnations, and the clamoring sound of people reading aloud to their neighbors, and the word “heroine,” and her father turning to her suddenly and saying with unheroic honesty, “Another time . . . another time, Caddy . . . Don’t,” and her mother protesting, “Bill! Oh, you can’t say that!” and her father replying, “Each man to his own.”
It made no sense to Caddy, and it aggravated Saffron—all this fuss for Caddy when she had had no attention for ages and ages. No breakfast either, just rushed out of bed and hurried to the hospital the moment the porter rang. “I’m Ruby!” cried Saffron, rolling on the floor. “Help! Help! Indy, make Old Panda be the bloody truck!”
“Good Lord in Heaven,” said Bill, and pulled her up very abruptly, causing her to roar.
“Breakfast time,” said Indigo, and stuck out a tongue covered in chewed carnation petals.
Suddenly Caddy, to her great relief, discovered that she was no longer the focus of attention. She could stand back from the confusion and look around. She turned to scan the corridor and the doorways and the long glass windows of the hospital wards.
As she looked she became aware that somebody was watching her.
Somebody quiet.
Caddy turned and turned, searching, and then through the window that had been behind her she found what she was looking for.
Smoky, dark, unblinking eyes.
A solemn, friendly gaze.
A mouth curved into the start of a smile.
It was a baby.
The baby and Caddy looked at one another. Deep, deep, deep, each into the other’s thoughts. And Caddy did not need to see Eve’s sketchbook on the stand close by, or the cards that Saffy and Indigo had made, or the photographs from home to know that this was the fledgling. The firework baby. The last and best touch of the genie’s finger on Caddy’s spinning world.
A name card was fixed to the side of her cot.
“‘Rose,’ ” read Caddy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A BEGINNING
THE BABY WAS COMING HOME TODAY, THAT DAY, AS SOON AS the surgeon who had performed his miracle had had one last look. The purple fledgling was gone. It had flown from its nest of wires and tubes. It took part of Caddy with it.
The part of Caddy that was afraid of the genie left, and it never came back. Somehow, while she had waited for the baby to live or die, she had learned that a genie was not the only spinner of worlds. Anyone could do it. She could do it herself. And so could doctors and truck drivers and sheepish ones on doorsteps. Friends and enemies. Sisters and brothers. Fallen birds and firework babies.
“We meant it for a surprise, about coming home today,” Eve told Caddy. “We were almost sure, I was hoping and hoping . . .” (“Don’t set your hopes too high,” Caddy remembered) “. . . but just in case it couldn’t happen we tried to keep it secret. Only somehow Saffron and Indigo knew.”
“They always know,” said Caddy.
“Fireworks today,” said Saffron, “but first I’ve got to take Daddy shopping. Before he goes back to London.”
Nobody looked even slightly surprised, except Bill, who gave Saffron a very startled glance, began to speak, and then stopped. He understood, as well as Caddy and Eve, that Saffron and Indigo always knew, and he thought that perhaps it was not sensible to ask how. He had never really managed to stop Saffron answering his phone calls from London.
“All right, Saffy,” he agreed meekly. “As soon as Eve and Rose are home we’ll go shopping.”
That took longer than anyone had expected. It was midafternoon before the baby was finally discharged and home. By that time Saffron’s father was so sick of hospitals that he was as eager as Saffy to be off.
“Come on, Saffron,” he said. “Let’s hit town!”
Saffron took charge. They bought sparklers first. “Because there weren’t any in your wardrobe,” Saffy explained. Then a great deal of proper food in tins and packets, and all the dozens of things that they thought a baby might need. Or that Saffron thought a baby might need. There was a particular sort of bracelet made of silver and glass beads owned by every single girl that Saffron knew, except herself and Caddy. Some girls had two or three.
“Me and Caddy and Rose could manage with just one, to share,” said Saffron. “Or should we get Caddy a hamster? She’s always wished she could have one. Did you know that Indigo has wanted a Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver Flashlight all his life?”
Indigo spent the afternoon guarding Rose and Eve. The baby was in a sort of basket thing, beside the sofa. When Eve went to sleep, Indigo took up position beside the basket.
“I’ll watch she doesn’t get out,” he promised Eve, but when his mother was safely asleep the baby did get out, extracted by Indigo himself. He lugged her around the house and garden, showing her the important places. She took a great interest in the square corners of his latest hole, gazing at them intently for a long time, while Indigo went pink with pleasure. She was safely back in her basket, though, long before Eve woke up.
“You don’t tell, and I won’t either,” said Indigo, and Rose’s eyes gleamed with the merriment of suppressed secrets.
“It would be best if you went to sleep,” advised Indigo, and she went instantly to sleep.
It was the start of a great friendship.
Caddy did not stay long at home. She could hardly wait to see her friends and tell them the news. Up and down the familiar streets she ran, banging on doors.
Ruby, who had not wanted to be saved.
“Ruby! Ruby! Ruby! Ruby!”
Ruby, and all four of Ruby’s grandparents, sprang on Caddy and dragged her inside. They weighted her down with the fat cat Wizard while they told her what they thought of her. It was all very flattering, but Caddy could not stay to hear it. She tipped Wizard onto the floor, told the grandparents, “It was easy. It only took a moment,” seized Ruby, and dragged her away. “Come with me to get the others. I’ve got something to show you!”
“Beth! Beth! Juliet!”
“I hate you forever,” Beth had screamed at her.
Beth had no talent for hating people. Her forever had lasted for about as long as it had taken Caddy to get out of earshot. Now when she saw her friend she flung her arms around her.
“Hurry!” urged Caddy. “You, too, Juliet! Rose is home! We just need Alison. Run!”
“We’ve something to tell you about Alison,” said Beth as they raced down the road. “You weren’t at school today, Caddy, so you don’t know.”
“I know about her and Dingbat!”
“You don’t know all of it, though, just the beginning.”
“None of it matters,” said Caddy, and she called under Alison’s window. “Alison, Alison! Are you still grounded till the end of time?”
A girl with very short, straw-blond, spiky hair glanced out the window, vanished, and a moment later came sauntering into the street.
“ALISON! It looks wonderful!”
“I know,” said Alison. “I had it done last night.”
“You should see Dingbat’s hair, though!” Ruby told Caddy. “Dingbat dyed his pink!”
“Pink?”
“To be like Alison,” said Beth.
<
br /> “So that he could say, ‘I love your hair! It’s just like mine!’ ” said Alison scornfully.
“But I thought you and Dingbat . . .”
“Oh, thank you,” said Alison. “Thank you very much, Cadmium Casson! As if I’d go out with anyone who’d just dumped my three best friends!”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Would you?”
“I might,” said Caddy. “I might have done, if it was Dingbat. Poor Dingbat, what will happen to him? With none of us, what will he do?”
It was not often that Alison considered anyone’s feelings, but she did now. There would be time enough tomorrow, she decided, to break the news to Caddy of Dingbat and the identical midget twins in year eight. How they had sympathized with his loneliness, admired his betrayed pink curls, smirked identical smirks into his wicked green eyes, and begun illuminating his name on their notebooks.
Later, thought Alison. Not now.
She changed the subject completely by saying, “I’ve seen your baby, by the way!”
“You have?”
“Your brother had it outside. He dropped it once or twice. . . . He couldn’t seem to get a grip.”
“WHAT?” shouted Caddy, and raced home in a panic, and there was Rose, fast asleep and only slightly muddy, with Indigo still on guard. Then Bill and Saffron arrived, with all their wonderful shopping, and by the time it had been exclaimed over Rose was awake and ready to be properly admired.
“I’ll show you the most amazing bit,” said Saffron, and unwrapped Rose like a parcel to point. “That’s where they cut her open, to fix her broken heart!”
“Oh, fantastic!” sighed Juliet enviously.
“Jools!” said Beth reproachfully.
“It was awful,” said Caddy, but Eve said, “It’s over now,” and gave Caddy a hug.
“Fireworks soon,” said Saffron, “as soon as it’s night.”
“It’s night now,” said Indigo, and it nearly was, darkish anyway.
