Saffy's Angel

by Hilary McKay

  Everyone had heard.

  ‘Is Grandad still my grandad?’saffron asked Eve, when it seemed that the whole pattern of her family was slipping and changing, like colours in water, into something she hardly recognised.

  Eve said that of course he was. Just as he had always been. Exactly the same.

  ‘But was he my grandad right from the beginning?’ persisted Saffron, determined to have the truth this time. ‘Like he was Caddy’s and Indigo’s and Rose’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eve at once, and Caddy added,

  ‘He is just as much your grandad as ours, Saffy. More.’

  ‘More?’ asked Saffron suspiciously.

  ‘Much more,’ said Caddy, ‘because he remembers you. He knows your name. Everybody heard. He said “Saffron”.’

  ‘Yes he did,’ agreed Saffron, and allowed herself to feel a tiny bit comforted.

  Caddy was the only one of the Casson children who could recall the days when their grandfather could drive and walk and talk and do things like anybody else. She told Saffron about the evening when he had arrived at the house, bringing Saffron home.

  ‘He had a green car. A big green car and it was full of toys. He’d brought all your toys, he told us. Every crayon. Every scrap of paper. You used to pick up stones, he said. Little bits of stone. He brought them all. In a tin.’

  Nothing was ever thrown away in the Casson family. Saffron went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Caddy and Rose and raked around until she found the scratched blue coffee tin. The stones were still there, bits of gold sandstone, marble chips and a fragment of a red roof tile.

  ‘Grandad said, “She’s cried all the way. Not for her mother. For something else. I should have managed to bring it somehow. I promised I would. I shall have to go back”.’

  ‘What was he talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know. He went away, that same night. We didn’t see him again for ages and ages and when we did he was different.’

  ‘What sort of different?’

  ‘Like he is now,’ said Caddy.

  Chapter Two

  The Casson house had been chosen by the children’s parents before Caddy was born. They had liked it because it was unspoilt. Unspoilt meant no central heating, coal fires in every room (even the bedrooms and kitchen), and its own particular smell which was a mixture of dampness and soot and a sort of green smell that came in from the garden. The garden always seemed to be trying to sneak its way into the house. Ivy crept in through the cracks around the window panes. Woodlice and beetles and ants and snails had their own private entrances. In autumn dead leaves swirled in every time a door was opened, and in spring live birds fell down the chimneys.

  The house had a name. The Banana House. It was carved on to a piece of sandstone above the front door. It made no sense to anyone.

  It stood in the middle of a long road. At one end of the road were smart houses with gravelled drives, but the Banana House was not one of those. At the other end were little cottages with bright new paint and tidy gardens. The Banana House was not one of those either. It was quite alone in the middle.

  ‘A disgrace to both ends!’ Bill Casson thought once, on one of his brief visits from London, and he wondered why it never occurred to Eve that she might paint the windows and tidy the overgrown grass and grow flowers in the garden. The only things that grew in the garden were guinea pigs. Caddy owned at least half a dozen of them, scattered around in ramshackle runs and hutches. Occasionally they escaped and flocked and multiplied over the lawn like wildebeest on the African plains. Like the hamsters in the house, the guinea pigs on the lawn were Caddy’s responsibility. Only she was really interested in them. Caddy, and a child in a wheelchair from one of the smart houses up the road.

  Time passed, but the Banana House stayed the same. Generations of guinea pigs came and went. Years went by so quickly that Bill and Eve constantly lost track of the children’s ages. Caddy and Saffron grew long legs and long gold hair. Indigo took to dressing entirely in black. Rose started school.

  ‘At last,’ said the health visitor, disapprovingly. ‘She ought to have gone a year ago!’

  ‘She was so delicate,’ pleaded Eve.

  ‘Not any more,’ said the health visitor. ‘She is quite robust now! Very robust, in fact!’

  Eve looked so shocked at this opinion that Rose asked Saffron privately, ‘What does robust mean?’

  ‘Tough,’ said Saffron.

  Rose looked pleased.

  Rose drew a picture of the Banana House on her first day at school that made it look exactly like a banana with windows.

  In Rose’s picture the garden streamed from the roof of the house like a banner in the wind, bright green and covered in giant guinea pigs. At the end of the garden was a rainbow-coloured box.

  ‘Mummy’s shed,’ explained Rose, and drew her mother on the roof.

  ‘What is she doing?’ asked the teacher.

  ‘Waving,’ said Rose.

  There were people waving out of the windows too. Rose coloured them in as well as she could with horrible school wax crayons.

  ‘Caddy, Saffron, Indigo and me,’ she said. ‘Waving goodbye.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Daddy,’ said Rose.

  Waving goodbye to Daddy was as much a part of Casson life as the colour chart on the kitchen wall, and the guinea pigs on the grass, and the girl in the wheelchair.

  Once Rose had pointed to her.

  ‘Don’t point!’ her father had snapped furiously. ‘Don’t point and don’t stare!’

  None of the Cassons pointed or stared, but the wheelchair girl still kept going past the house now and then. She remained a stranger. Rose did not put her into the picture of the banana-shaped house.

  Rose’s work of art took her all day, including two play times, story time and most of lunch.

  At the end of school it was stolen from her by the wicked teacher who had pretended to be so interested.

  ‘Beautiful-what-is-it?’ she asked, as she pinned it high on the wall, where Rose could not reach.

  ‘They take your pictures,’ said Indigo, who was waiting for Rose at the school gate, when he finally made out what all the roaring and stamping was about. ‘They do take them. You have to not care.’

  Indigo was now eleven, in the top class of the Primary School, the opposite end to Rose. He was still small and thin, but less anxious now. He had learned to write his problems down in lists and this made him feel more in control. He still thought of his sisters as his pack.

  ‘Why do you want that picture so much?’ he asked Rose.

  ‘It was my best ever,’ said Rose, furiously. ‘I hate school. I hate everyone in it. I will kill them all when I’m big enough.’

  ‘You can’t just go round killing people,’ Indigo told her, but he looked at her hunched-up shoulders and her drooping head, and thought it was sad to see Rose, Permanent Rose, usually such a cheerful and obstinate member of his pack, completely changed after one day at school.

  ‘Sometimes they give them back at the end of term,’ he told her comfortingly. ‘Anyway, you can always do another. Let’s go home!’

  ‘It was my best ever,’ repeated Rose, not moving.

  ‘We can’t stay here all night!’

  Rose still did not budge.

  ‘Oh, all right!’ said Indigo in exasperation. ‘I’ll go and pinch it off the wall for you! Just this once! Never again!’

  ‘No, never again,’ agreed Rose, cheering up with amazing speed and following as he led the way back into school and along the empty corridors to the scene of the crime.

  ‘This is only because it’s your first day!’ he told her. ‘You needn’t think I’m doing it every time they stick a picture of yours up on the wall…’

  ‘I shan’t do any more pictures,’ said Rose, pushing open the door of the Class 1 classroom (luckily empty). ‘I shan’t do anything else, ever. Not at school.’

  ‘That’s what you think! Where’s this picture then? Is
that it?’

  ‘Yes. Do you like it?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Indigo, levering out the drawing pins. ‘Not bad. Bit like a banana. There you are. Roll it up! Oy! Wait for me!’

  Rose did not wait, but sprinted out of school as fast as she could and was well on her way down the road home before Indigo caught up with her.

  ‘What about in the morning?’ he asked as they half jogged and half walked along together. ‘What’ll you tell them if they notice?’

  ‘I could not go back in the morning,’ said Rose hopefully, but Indigo squashed that idea at once. For a while he walked along frowning, with his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I know,’ he said suddenly, looking up. ‘We’ll make a copy! They can have that! Easy, especially if Saffron and Caddy help!’

  ‘Saffron won’t,’ said Rose, and Saffron wouldn’t.

  ‘You’ll never get away with it!’ she said, after one look at the banana. ‘No one could copy that! They’ll see it’s the wrong one straight away!’

  ‘ ’Course they won’t,’ said Caddy, now eighteen and at college, supposed to be passing a few exams. ‘Give it here, Rose! I’ll do it for you.’

  Caddy’s copy was perfect, down to four drawing pin holes in the corners.

  ‘Just in case anyone catches you with it before you get it up on the classroom wall,’ she explained. ‘If I didn’t put them in it would be obvious at once that you were planting a fake. Mind you use the same holes when you pin it up!’

  Indigo and Rose looked at her with respect. Caddy could be surprisingly intelligent, considering how many exams she had failed.

  Everything went exactly to plan. Indigo and Rose left for school extra early the next morning and pinned the copy of the Banana House in place, and nobody ever spotted the difference.

  ‘You think you are all so clever,’ said Saffron.

  ‘You could have helped,’ Rose pointed out. ‘You didn’t want to help.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ snapped Saffron, crossly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ said Rose tranquilly, admiring her picture for the hundreth time through half-closed eyes. ‘Because I’ve got it safe now. It just needs framing…a big gold frame…’

  ‘What needs a big gold frame?’ asked Eve, coming through the door in time to catch Rose’s last words. ‘Your picture, Rose? Why don’t you ask Daddy when he comes home next. He’s good at frames. Saffy darling, I came in to ask you to hurry back from school tomorrow. Grandad’s coming for the evening.’

  ‘Grandad doesn’t only like Saffron!’ said Rose.

  ‘Of course he doesn’t,’ said Eve.

  ‘I need a big gold frame now, not when Daddy comes home!’

  ‘I might have one in the shed you could use.’

  ‘Grandad likes all of us, just the same.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ agreed Eve, soothingly, and she smiled at Saffron over Rose’s head.

  Saffron’s black mood slipped away and she found herself smiling back, and she said to Rose,

  ‘Of course he likes us all just the same.’

  Their grandfather was in the kitchen when the children arrived home the next day. This pleased everyone. They all of them loved him, lately with a sort of fierce defiance, very like the way they had loved Rose years earlier, when she had been so frighteningly impermanent. They hurried to include him in their lives. Rose brought him the Banana House picture to look at, and he sat holding it in his thin hands for a long time before laying it on the table. Caddy told him about her driving lessons. Her father had arrived from London, inspected her exam results (appalling) and announced that it was about time Caddy learned to work. He had enrolled her at college to resit everything she had failed, and booked her a course of driving lessons.

  Caddy told her grandfather how good she was at emergency stops and how bad she was at everything else, especially reversing, which she called going backwards.

  Her grandfather looked as if he was listening.

  ‘Feel that!’ said Indigo, pulling up his sweatshirt sleeve and putting his grandfather’s hand on his almost visible biceps, and his grandfather appeared to feel it. Indigo was very pleased and went to find the picture of the ice axe he was saving up to buy.

  ‘I want one too,’ said Rose.

  ‘When you are older,’ said Indigo kindly.

  Saffron did not bring anything to show her grandfather, or talk to him, or explain pictures of ice axes in catalogues. She just sat beside him. Saffron, who had grown up to be so fierce and alone, was always gentle with her grandfather.

  Eventually Caddy kissed him goodbye and left for her driving lesson, with a hamster in her pocket for comfort. Eve came in from her shed at the bottom of the garden and tried to send Rose to bed.

  ‘Without any supper?’ asked Rose, and Eve said, ‘Food, food, I forgot about food!’

  Indigo (who by necessity was growing into a very brave cook) said, ‘I am making fried corned beef sandwiches for everyone,’ and then the evening became very noisy and smoky. Indigo cut his finger on the corned beef tin, and Rose had to bandage it because Caddy was out and Saffron wouldn’t and Eve could not bear the sight of blood. After that there was a quarrel about who would eat bled-on sandwiches (Rose and Indigo) and who would rather starve (Saffron).

  During the quarrel Eve suddenly said, ‘Grandad’s tired!’

  Saffron looked at him then and saw how terribly faded he had become. He looked narrow and lost. All at once she began to cry. She put her arms round her grandfather and cried and cried and Eve said, ‘Come on, Saffy. Let’s take him home.’

  Caddy’s driving instructor was called Michael. He had been a wonderful surprise to Caddy the first time she met him. She had been expecting someone grey-haired and short-tempered and not at all nice. All her friends’driving instructors were like that.

  Michael said to Caddy, ‘Now Cadmium, we are coming up to a crossroads. I should like you to take the turn on the right.’

  ‘Right,’ said Caddy, happily, very pleased to be out with Michael again. ‘I’ll remember!’

  ‘You should be slowing down. Look in your mirror.’

  Caddy looked and said, ‘I don’t like this lipstick.’

  ‘You don’t need lipstick,’ said Michael, who always found it very difficult to keep up a professional detachment where Caddy was concerned. ‘You…Indicate! Indicate!’

  ‘Too pink,’ said Caddy.

  ‘TURN RIGHT, CADMIUM PLEASE!’

  ‘But it was free. It came through the door. A little tiny one. So I thought I’d try it…’

  ‘I said RIGHT! Crikey! Pull up and park immediately, please Caddy. Please Caddy!’

  ‘…on you,’ said Caddy, parking very neatly in an entrance marked KEEP CLEAR AT ALL TIMES. ‘What’s the matter? Are you all right?’

  Caddy had driving lessons twice a week. She had had dozens. After every lesson Michael had to drive off and find somewhere quiet where he could rest his head on the steering wheel and try to relax. He didn’t know why he put up with it, and yet every week he found himself coming back for more.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Caddy. ‘No, you’re not! You’re cross! Again!’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Michael. ‘Please change places, Cadmium dear.’

  Caddy jumped out of her seat with relief, and back in at the passenger door. Michael turned the car very quickly and headed back the way they had come.

  ‘What do you notice about this street?’ he asked conversationally.

  ‘Lovely gardens,’ said Caddy, getting out her hamster.

  ‘It’s one way! Turn right, I said and instead you turned left up a one way street! Then you parked in the fire station exit. And that mirror is for looking behind you, not admiring your lipstick in!’

  ‘I wasn’t! I said it was too pink!’

  ‘And I told you not to bring that hamster again!’

  ‘Why are you stopping?’

  ‘So you can drive. Your dad pays me to teach you to drive.’

 
‘That reminds me,’ said Caddy. ‘Don’t laugh. I promised him I’d ask you, but don’t laugh. My driving test. He said to ask you when. That’s all. You’re laughing. I knew you would.’

  ‘You could learn if you tried,’ said Michael, when Caddy was back in the driving seat and he, much against his better judgment, was holding the hamster. ‘You just need to stop mucking about and concentrate a bit.’

  ‘That’s what they used to tell me at school,’ said Caddy. ‘I remember them saying it before my GCSEs. And it wasn’t true. It didn’t work. I got awful grades in nearly everything. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Maths, English Lang., English Lit., French and Business Studies. Awful. And last summer I failed all three ‘A’ levels. All three. I’m just no good at exams. Is it time to go home?’

  ‘No. Twenty minutes. We’ll do some reversing.’

  ‘Oh, Michael darling!’

  ‘Don’t call me darling, I’m a driving instructor!’

  ‘Sorry. It was because I hate going backwards.’

  ‘My girlfriend,’ said Michael suddenly, as Caddy reversed up a kerb, ‘passed her test when she was seventeen!’

  ‘Your girlfriend?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.’

  ‘Yep. Very bright. Passed all her exams too. Top grades.’

  ‘What’s she called?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s she called?’

  ‘Oh, right. Er…Diane. Diane.’

  ‘I’ll try the corner again,’ said Caddy, gritting her teeth.

  ‘She leaves her hamsters at home too,’ said Michael.

  The first thing Caddy and Michael saw when they arrived back from the driving lesson was Indigo.

  ‘Just look at that stupid kid!’ exclaimed Michael, absolutely horrified. ‘No, don’t jump out, Caddy! Don’t startle him!’

  Indigo was sitting on his bedroom windowsill. On the outside of his bedroom windowsill, the open window behind him, his legs dangling into space and his eyes looking like two black holes in his white face.