by Hilary McKay
There was a sound downstairs. The sort a burglar bringing in more rubbish might make. Bill leaped down to tackle him, and it was Eve.
Eve flung herself into his arms and wailed that she was so worried about darling Caddy.
‘Caddy?’ asked Bill, bewildered. ‘What has Caddy done? Don’t snuffle on my jacket, Eve darling!’
Caddy, explained Eve, snuffling on her sleeve instead, had passed her driving test only the day before, and set off for Wales today…
‘To Wales!’ repeated Bill.
‘With Indigo and Rose…’ continued Eve.
‘With Indigo and Rose! ’
‘…To look for Saffy’s angel…’
‘Saffy’s angel? None of this makes sense! Where is Saffy? Is she with the others? Is she here?’
Saffy was quite all right, Eve told Bill. She had run away to Siena with the wheelchair girl whose name was Sarah, and whose parents had been very kind.
‘But…’said Bill, ‘Saffy’s all right, you say?’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘And the other three are gone off, heaven knows where?’
‘They’ve been gone all day!’ moaned Eve.
‘And meanwhile we’ve had this burglary?’
Eve said what burglary, and when shown the state of the house said Oh, she thought that was just the children looking for something. Which brought them back to Caddy and Indigo and Rose again, and would have been very traumatic if they had not suddenly heard a tremendous hooting outside.
Eve and Bill hurried to the door in time to see Caddy and Indigo and Rose climb stiffly out of the car. Instead of rushing to the Banana House however, they turned and ran back up the road, where two people, one in a wheelchair, were hurrying to meet them.
‘Saffy! Saffy!’ cried Indigo.
‘We’ve got it! We’ve got it!’ shrieked Rose.
‘Saffy darling!’ exclaimed Caddy. ‘Sarah darling! You’re home!’
Sarah’s father had been right and it had been Saturday night instead of Sunday morning when they got back, and Saffy and Sarah had dashed straight up the road to the Banana House.
‘To surprise you,’ said Sarah.
Bill said that he didn’t understand anything that had happened.
‘Since when?’ asked Sarah politely.
Bill held his head in his hands and said he couldn’t say since when. It probably went back years.
‘Come indoors and we will tell you everything at once,’ said Sarah kindly.
This turned out to be not possible. The talk went on all evening, and far into the night, and it was very nearly Sunday morning before the explanations were all over, and the lid of the box that Caddy and Indigo and Rose had brought back from Wales was finally lifted away.
Inside was Saffy’s angel.
For Saffron, it said, in shaky old writing on the damaged base, and on the other side, Saffy’s angel.
Saffron, picking up the broken fragments one by one said it didn’t matter. She hugged Rose and Indigo and Caddy and Sarah, and said again and again that it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter at all.
Sarah’s parents came to collect their daughter at midnight, and Sarah’s mother said, ‘Good night, Saffy, dear. I am so pleased you came with us! But I can see you are glad to be back!’
‘How?’ asked Sarah, and her mother said,
‘Look how her eyes are shining!’
‘No place like home, is there, Saffy?’ asked Sarah’s father, smiling down at her.
‘No,’ said Saffy, smiling back. ‘No, there’s no place like home.’
Epilogue in the Garden
Sometimes Saffron thought of her angel, and she could not help being a little sad, because after all the trouble everyone had taken to find it for her, it was broken. Still, there was too much going on at the Banana House for anyone to be sad very often. There was Permanent Rose, and her perpetual demands for more paint and bigger brushes. There was Indigo, now enrolled into the climbing club at the gym and being taught to abseil properly out of his bedroom window by Michael. Also there was Michael himself, who haunted the house on his weekends off, aggravating Bill very much.
‘Hired him to teach m’daughter to drive,’ said Bill to Eve, looking with disfavour at Michael’s earring and the red elastic band that held up his ponytail. ‘Didn’t ask him to take over the family. He’s got a nerve!’
Eve, who liked Michael, made soothing noises and took Bill to her shed to see her latest picture. It was an abstract painting, and it was called Cadmium, Saffron, Indigo, Rose and it was so good that Bill did not know what to say.
Sarah was also becoming one of the family. In fact she was so much a part of it that Eve had begun including her in her paintings. Bill did approve of Sarah and was always pleased to see her when she turned up on Sunday afternoons to help send him off to his other life in London.
A lovely man, thought Peter the taxi driver, watching in admiration the film star wave, and all the family enthusiastically waving back.
Soon, thought Saffron, on one of those Sundays, we shall be waving goodbye to Caddy as well.
Caddy had passed her exams at last and was going to university. She was leaving in the autumn, and already there had been a few frosty nights, and the first bright leaves were beginning to fall.
‘They are Caddy’s colours,’ said Rose, gathering them up, and so they were, Cadmium lemon, Cadmium deep yellow, Cadmium scarlet and Cadmium gold.
The nights were cold now, but the sunshine in the daytime was lovely. On the day before Caddy was to go away, Rose and Indigo, Sarah, Saffron and Michael were all outside, sprawled on the lumpy lawn of the Banana House, waiting for her to join them.
‘What is she doing?’ asked Michael impatiently.
‘She’s fetching something,’ said Indigo. ‘A surprise.’ He looked carefully away from Saffron as he spoke, because he had been in on the secret, and knew what the surprise was to be.
‘Can’t wait for ever,’ grumbled Michael.
‘Why not?’ asked Rose, sternly. ‘Why can’t you wait for ever? You might have to when Caddy gets to university. I bet she has thousands of boyfriends.’
‘Queuing up,’ agreed Saffron. ‘All round London.’
‘Better get used to waiting,’ advised Sarah.
Michael groaned and buried his face in the fur of a passing guinea pig.
‘It’s all your fault,’ saffron told him. ‘Yours, and that Droopy Di’s. You started Caddy off passing all those exams. So it serves you right.’
‘Let’s just blame Droopy Di,’ said Michael, ‘because of my broken heart.’
‘Anyway,’ said Rose. ‘You’ve still got her.’
‘Who?’
‘Droopy Di, of course.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Michael. ‘She will be a great comfort.’
‘You made her up, didn’t you?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Didn’t you? Who was it who collected you and took you off to Spain. It wasn’t Droopy Di was it?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Tell me,’ said Rose, attacking him.
‘All right. It was just a friend. There never was a Droopy Di. Don’t tell Caddy!’
‘I wonder what will happen to Michael when Caddy goes to London,’ remarked Sarah to no one in particular.
‘He will be blotted out of existence,’ said Michael sadly. ‘Along with the hamsters and the guinea pigs.’
‘Indigo’s looking after them,’ said Rose. ‘He hates furry animals. They are his next big challenge.’
‘And who is looking after you and Indigo?’ enquired Michael. ‘Sorting out your party dresses and faking your paintings and talking you down from windowsills?’
‘Me and Saffy, of course,’ said Sarah. ‘And do cheer up a bit, Michael! In only three and a half years’ time I will be old enough to learn to drive. Think of that!’
‘She likes to go fast,’ said Indigo, glancing fondly across at Sarah, the latest member of his pack. ‘Very fast, on the wrong side of th
e road, Saffy says.’
‘Oh great,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’
‘Caddy’s coming now,’ said Indigo, who was watching the house.
Caddy came out of the door as he spoke. She was carrying a box. It was the one that had held the fragments of the stone angel. Caddy had spent weeks over it. She had found the right kind of resin and one by one she had set the fragments together again, strapping each piece until it was solid, before adding the next. Then she had rubbed down each careful join with the finest grade of sandpaper. Last of all she had blown on to it a very little thin gold dust, Siena coloured. She had been able to find exactly the right shade from the ever-useful paint chart on the kitchen wall.
Caddy put the box down on the grass and took off the lid. Inside was the little stone figure that had come so far. Caddy lifted it out, and stood it carefully in the sunshine.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look at Saffy’s angel!’
Caddy’s Top Ten Driving Tips
(Oh please no! Just don’t go there. And if you must, don’t quote me. I’m having nothing to do with this. I’m out of here.–Michael )
Darling Michael, he doesn’t mean it.
These are sensible driving tips.
1. Learn left from right.
2. Or if you can’t, write it on your hands. I didn’t think of this until it was much too late.
3. Before you get into the car sort your buttons and hair and lipstick. It’s really hard to do driving. The mirror is not big enough. There’s other reasons too.
4. Check the back seat for small children. If you find any, boot them out.
5. If your driving instructor is gorgeous tell him so now, before you start the engine. Otherwise he just won’t take it in.
6. Try not to be the one who pays for the lessons. It could get very expensive. Or if you have to be the one who pays, choose your instructor very, very carefully. Choose someone you would like to marry and then theoretically you get the money back.
7. Take a hamster if you can. It is nice to have someone with you who is on your side.
8. Indicate as much as possible. Even if you are indicating the wrong way it makes people notice you. The more people notice you, the further away they are liable to keep. Bad at parties, good on the road.
9. Make your instructor teach you Emergency Stops first. You will need them.
10. Try not to cry. It’s not real life. It’s only driving.
11. Most useful tip of all: everything, absolutely everything, is closer than you think!
Good luck and lots of love from Caddy
(Whoops! That was eleven.)
The Day I Met the Cassons
by Sarah Warbeck
Of course, I had seen them about. I in my wheelchair. They on their legs or their tatty old scooter, or leaning out of their windows. Once chasing an escaped guinea pig down the street.
‘They look a lively lot,’ I remember my father saying, and I remember being sorry for him because he sounded like he would have enjoyed a lively lot and although I was lively enough, in an unsteady kind of way, I was never remotely a lot. I was a very only child indeed.
I met Saffron first, and by brute force. I deliberately ran her over. That surprised her. Serve her right, I thought, for all those years of polite smiles. Very polite from Saffy; she was the least smiley of them all.
So anyway, we made friends, but at first she wouldn’t let me visit.
‘You’ll say it’s a mess,’ said Saffy. ‘You’ll say Mum is bonkers and Caddy’s hamster smells. Rose will never leave us alone and Indigo will hide. Anyway …’
‘What?’
‘Anyway …’
‘What?’
‘Anyway …’
‘Well, go on, speak!’
Silence.
‘I’ll like them,’ I told her, ‘I know I will. I bet they’re really nice.’
‘You’ll probably like them better than me,’ said Saffron.
I will never like anyone better than Saffron. Having Saffron for a friend is like having a fierce sleek golden jungle cat on your side. After she came along my life changed, and for the first time I was Sarah. Not a girl with rubbish joints, asthma and an unreliable heart. Not the headteacher’s daughter at the posh school. Not rich – the Cassons never seemed to take money seriously; they kept it in a jam jar and that was that. Just ordinary. Shove that wheelchair where no one will fall over it. Sit down with Rose and drag her through two pages of her reading book. Make cups of tea. Find lost car keys, hamsters, shoes and the origins of funny smells.
That was the first thing they said to me, the first day I visited. ‘Can you smell a funny smell?’
Oh yes! No. Maybe. Definitely. Is it by the door? It’s near the stairs. Coming from upstairs? No.
It was me who tracked it down to the place where four coat pegs held a hundred coats and bags. One of them being Indigo’s PE kit, containing two liquid bananas and what were once tuna fish sandwiches wrapped in a PE shirt.
‘Oh, I remember,’ said Indigo, very pale. ‘That was ages and ages ago.’
His paleness became a greeny grey but Caddy saved him by saying, ‘Let’s have a proper funeral and bury them in the garden’ and in the fresh air he revived.
I wrote the funeral poem that was written on the cardboard gravestone.
Here lies some fish
And bread and butter
Lost amongst Indigo’s
PE clutter.
And Saffy grinned and Indigo looked pleased to have his name in a poem and Caddy got tears in her eyes because once there had been a real bright lively fish and its life had been wasted. But Rose said happily, ‘We’ve got LOADS of graves in our garden, Sarah!’ and gave me a guided tour. And then Eve came home and said, ‘Darlings, what died?’
And suddenly nobody could stop laughing.
In books they travelled to magic worlds through the back of an ancient wardrobe.
On TV they climbed into a tardis.
After that first day, all I had to do was bump on the Casson house door, and there was a world, with a place for me in it.
Fantastic.
The World of the Casson Family
by Rose Casson
The first thing to say about the world of the Casson family is that I do not know who is in it.
Our family has extended. However, it began with Mum and Dad, Caddy and Indigo and Saffy and me in a house that the Victorians built, thinking it would be comfortable (how wrong they were) half way down a long road, in a largish town in the middle of England.
It looks like the most unmagical place in the world.
It isn’t.
Caddy
Caddy’s real name is Cadmium Gold, but nobody calls her that. My friends say Caddy is pretty. I suppose she is. She moves very quickly and she has a sort of shine about her when she’s happy. She is often happy – it doesn’t take much.
Caddy says that she likes animals better than people. I don’t really believe this is true, but she thinks it is. Animals do not have to be cute and furry for Caddy to like them. Spiders, worms … Once, right in the middle of a perfectly peaceful day she rushed downstairs and started talking about worms. Apparently they visit … (I nearly started telling you myself.) But if you want to know I’ll put it on Twitter. Say, and I’ll do it.
The thing about Caddy is that she is kind. I used to think Caddy was kind because it was easier than fighting. Then for an experiment I tried being kind myself. I lasted about half a day. It’s not easy.
Saffron
is complicated …
She’s my cousin as well as my sister because my parents adopted her before I was born, when her own mother (my mum’s sister) died. She didn’t discover this until she was eight and found her name was not on the colour chart with mine and Indigo’s and Caddy’s. She wasn’t too thrilled about that, according to Caddy. She turned intelligent (but maybe she would have done anyway) and waspish and independent and sleek and cool and gold.
; Saffron has a friend who is like her other half. She is called Sarah. I cannot imagine what Saffron would be like without Sarah, nor what Sarah would be like without Saffy.
Sometimes, when I am painting, I put two colours together that apart you would hardly notice, but together they glow.
Like the colours of a kingfisher, that blue and that orange.
Indigo
Indigo has smoke dark eyes and brown hair and a very slow smile. He is tall and too thin and stubborn and brave and I think he is the only one of us who really thinks about what will happen next and if it does, whether it will be possible to survive.
Indigo creates meals by saying, ‘That and that and that!’ Then in everything goes, with chillies. Grilled cheese appears on the top of everything except curry but including the birthday apple cake he made for his friend David.
What else? He plays guitar but cannot sing. ‘Ooh dear,’ he says, listening to himself. It doesn’t stop him. He likes ice and rock and stones and fossils.
Sometimes he detaches himself from us all. You see it in his eyes first. Then the way he suddenly lifts his head. And the next thing you know, he is off.
Gone.
Mummy
(that’s Eve to the world)
It’s not true that Mummy calls everyone darling to save her bothering to remember names.
And if she seems scatty, she’s not; she’s juggling. She keeps multiple worries spinning in the air. They are:
Saffy and Caddy and Indigo and me.
Daddy.
The needy people who besiege her constantly. What do they need? Sometimes no more than a bit of noticing. To be called darling, or asked a favour. Sometimes they need rescuing. Or forgiving (naming no names but giving hard stares at my father).
