Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe)

by Siobhán Parkinson

Then the rain started, quite abruptly. It fell in sheets with a loud metallic clang. Before long, the little house was awash with hissing and singing and gushing and flushing and gurgling and splashing and drumming sounds as the rain assaulted the roof, the eaves, the guttering, the windows, the door, the rain barrel out in the garden, the garden wall, the narrow path that ran all around the house. It tried its best to get in any place it could, and soon the bandage on the kitchen window was sopping, and little trickles of water had penetrated the Sellotape seal.

  The cats were wandering restlessly around the room, stalking from chair to sofa to range, their tails waving slowly in the air like drunken question marks.

  Time and again the invisible photographer snapped the little group in the darkened kitchen, lighting them all for an instant with a bright, unflattering light, and then the photographer’s accomplice upstairs in the attic started shoving the teachests about again. And still the house rang with the sounds of the rain.

  In one of the flashes, Beverley saw that Gerard was sitting hunched over one end of the table, and Kevin was hunched at the other end, his eyes shut tight and his arms hugging his body. His teeth were still chattering, and his whole body was shivering. When the next flash came, Kevin’s head was down almost on the table and he had his arms clasped defensively over it, his black elbows sticking out awkwardly like great broken wings. His stylish haircut brushed the table like a slanting curtain. He wasn’t cold, it dawned on Beverley, he was scared, and it couldn’t be Dymphna he was scared of, because he’d been fine until just a moment ago. It was the thunder. Kevin was afraid of thunder!

  If it were Gerard, Beverley would have put her arms around his shoulders, laid her cheek against his and whispered something comforting. But Gerard was a little boy, and it was OK to mother little boys. Kevin was older. She couldn’t possibly do that to him. She sat and stared miserably at his misery. If she’d been a different sort of girl, she’d have bitten her fingernails. As it was, she contented herself with twisting her hands in her lap.

  One of the cats started to wail, as if that last almighty thunderclap had been too much for it. It was a weird and chilling sound, like a baby being tortured. The sound ate into Beverley, it was so like Dymphna’s wailing and yet it was a thinner, in a strange way almost more human sound.

  ‘O-o-oh!’ wailed Gerard then in desperation, and his wailing was worse even than the sound of the demented cat. Oh no! thought Beverley. Please don’t all start wailing. I can’t cope with any more!

  Gerard wailed a second time, and then he collapsed in a fit of coughing and gasping, his bony body shaking with grief and fighting to breathe. Kevin looked up, twisting his head around without unwinding his arms. Gerard scrabbled for his inhaler and took huge, noisy lungfuls of it before his breathing settled into a normal pattern again. Gerard’s face was contorted with misery. Beverley had moved over to him and was patting him repeatedly between the shoulder blades and talking softly to him, but Gerard seemed hardly to be aware of her. He was crying softly now and mumbling ‘Fat, Fat,’ to himself.

  Kevin slowly unwrapped his arms from about his head and laid his hands firmly, palms downward, on the kitchen table, and pressed hard. Then he levered himself awkwardly into a standing position.

  ‘Don’t worry, Gerard,’ he said, not looking at anyone, fixing his eyes on the backs of his hands. ‘I’ll find him for you.’

  Gerard turned a peaky face streaked with tears to him and gave him a look of pure gratitude.

  ‘You can’t go out in that!’ said Beverley. ‘You’ll be drowned. You’ll catch your death. And anyway, Kevin ...’ She didn’t know how to finish. She didn’t want to mention out loud that Kevin was terrified of thunder.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Kevin. ‘Look at the state the young lad’s in. I have to find his cat for him.’

  Look at the state you’re in yourself, Beverley thought, but didn’t say.

  ‘No, you can’t, you mustn’t.’ Beverley surprised herself by the forcefulness of her tone. And it wasn’t just that she didn’t want Kevin going out in the storm. She didn’t want to be left in charge either.

  ‘I must,’ said Kevin grimly.

  ‘Take your jacket off, then,’ said Beverley, with sudden inspiration, starting to pull gently at Kevin’s jacket. ‘Leave it here. You’ll get soaked anyway, and if you leave it here, you’ll have something dry to change into when you get back.’ Even in a crisis, Beverley thought about the practicalities.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Kevin, but he wasn’t thinking about getting wet and having dry clothes to change into. He was clearly focused on going out into that storm.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Beverley, going with Kevin to the door.

  ‘Thanks, Kev!’ Gerard called in a hiccuppy voice from the table.

  ‘Good on you, young Mulrooney,’ said Dymphna out of the gloom and gave a low cackle of laughter.

  Beverley laced her fingers quickly with Kevin’s and swung his hand. He squeezed her fingers, and then he was gone.

  As Beverley closed the door behind Kevin, she saw Dymphna in another lightning flash bending over Elizabeth’s foot, gently applying the pink lotion. Elizabeth appeared to be asleep or at least dozing, probably the effect of the pain, Beverley thought, though how she could snooze through this racket, Beverley couldn’t imagine.

  Beverley sniffed as a sweet and faintly familiar smell rose into the air. It was a pleasant, happy sort of smell. What did it remind her of? Something soft and warm and gurgling. Yes – she had it now – babies. It reminded her of babies. Why, yes – Johnsons’s Baby Lotion, she could swear to it! Well, that wasn’t going to do much good to a twisted ankle! She smiled at the idea that Dymphna thought it might.

  Beverley turned to look out of the window. A flash of lightning captured Kevin in sharp outline as he struggled to the gate, pushing against the rain and wind, his hair blown back in wet streaks from his head, and already, she could see, he was soaked to the skin. He had to fight to open the gate, but she couldn’t hear its distinctive protesting squall above the roar of the storm. It was like watching a silent movie and being able to hear only the crashing of the cinema piano, not the proper sound effects of what was going on on screen. It seemed unnatural to be able to see Kevin so clearly and not be able to hear a thing to do with him. She strained to hear, as if hearing him would make the whole thing more real, more controllable, and less frightening, but the only sound she could make out above the wind and thunder was a plaintive moo from across the hall. She turned away from the window, crossing her fingers as she did so, in a helpless gesture of supplication.

  Thunderclap followed upon lightning flash with monotonous regularity, and still the rain beat relentlessly against the roof and walls. It was as if they were at sea in the little house and were being lashed about on high waves, and if it felt like that in the safety of the house, how must it feel to be out in the storm? Beverley tried to remember whether there were any trees on the island. Hedges, yes, there’d been hedges. That was much the same as trees. But were trees a good thing or a bad thing in a thunderstorm? She wasn’t sure. Bad if you stood under them, because they attracted lightning, but good, perhaps, if you kept away from them, for the same reason. They were more likely to get struck than you were, because they were taller. Was Kevin taller than a hawthorn hedge? she wondered. She hoped not.

  Chapter 18

  THE MIRACLE

  IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN ALL THAT LONG, but Beverley was counting time in thunderbolts, and there had been plenty of them, before the garden gate squealed open (she heard it this time, in a moment of lull in the storm) and Kevin’s voice came shouting, ‘Open up! Open up!’

  ‘It’s Kevin,’ cried Elizabeth, who had a view of the garden from her sofa. ‘Oh, let him in, Beverley. He’s soaked.’

  Beverley ran to the kitchen door and flipped the old-fashioned rusty latch as quickly as she could. In the hall, she wrenched at the front door, but it had rained so much in the meantime that the door had swollen in
its frame and she couldn’t budge it. Suddenly the letter box flapped open, and she could see a slim rectangular section of Kevin’s streaming face with one eye peering at her. ‘You pull and I’ll push,’ he shouted. ‘On three. Are you right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘One – two – three!’

  At the count of three she yanked at the door and Kevin flung himself against it, and the door, which couldn’t have been all that badly stuck, gave with a rush. Kevin fell inwards on top of Beverley and knocked her to the floor.

  ‘Ouch! Get up! You’re heavy!’ she yelled. ‘And wet!’

  Beverley pushed him off and struggled to her feet. ‘Did you find him?’ she asked, pulling Kevin into the kitchen.

  Dymphna looked up in surprise at the dripping boy. She stood up then and walked right past him, out into the hall and up the stairs.

  Kevin cocked his head in a pointing gesture towards the open door of the kitchen, where Fat stood warily on the threshold, his back arched under his damp fur, looking surprisingly thin now that he was so wet, with his tail high in the air, eyeing up the resident cats, who stalked around him curiously, disdainfully, warily, but not with any overt aggression.

  Gerard gave a whoop of joy, leapt to his feet, whipped Fat up into his arms out of the way of the other cats, just in case, and buried his face lovingly in his fur.

  ‘Well done, Kevin,’ said Beverley. ‘Where was he?’

  ‘Asleep under a rock, out of the rain,’ said Kevin. ‘Well able to look after himself, that fellow is. Gerard hadn’t a right to be worrying about him at all, at all, had you, Ger?’

  Gerard gave Kevin a friendly punch on the upper arm, and Kevin replied with a flap of his hand across the back of Gerard’s head.

  ‘Stoppit, you two,’ said Beverley happily, hooking a hand into the crook of Kevin’s elbow and giving a little swing of delight.

  ‘Come on and get dry,’ she commanded, thrilled to be giving orders now that Kevin was back and she didn’t need to be in charge any more. ‘I’ll see if I can find you a towel or something, and take off that shirt. Slip on your jacket now before you get pneumonia.’

  Dymphna reappeared, with an armful of dry towels. She handed two to Kevin, very matter-of-fact, and said: ‘One to dry yourself with, one to wear. Take those pants off you before you get pneumonia.’

  This sounded so like what Beverley had just said that everyone burst out laughing. Maybe Dymphna wasn’t as daft as she let on. Kevin took her advice. He tied a towel about his waist like a sarong and wriggled out of his soaking jeans.

  Dymphna sat down, laid a towel across her lap, and then she bent down and scooped Fat onto it and started to scrub at him with one of the remaining towels. He stretched and yawned, but made no move to discourage her.

  ‘What’s his name?’ she asked.

  ‘Fat.’ It was Gerard who answered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fat – he’s Fat.’ Gerard was pointing at Fat.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He just has a lot of hair.’

  Dymphna had scrubbed so hard that all Fat’s cream fur had started to gleam and puff itself out in a fluffy halo around his body.

  ‘No, he’s fat all right, but what I mean is, that’s his name. Fat. Short for Fat Cat.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said the woman thoughtfully, ‘in both senses of the expression?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gerard.

  ‘Spoilt?’

  ‘Ruined.’

  Gerard and Dymphna smiled at one another in the soupy way that cat-lovers do when they discuss the objects of their passion.

  The gaps between thunderclaps seemed to have got longer. Beverley moved to look out the window, to see whether the storm really was abating. She counted the timelag between the lightning and the thunder each time. Two seconds, two, still two, oh, three, three, four, five, five, six, seven, nine – it sounded more removed now, a rumble only, and the flashes were softer, less garish, less alarming. But the rain was still spilling off the roof and onto the windowsill in sheets. The clouds still hung in the sky and poured water onto the garden and the path and all the landscape around for as far as she could see. There was no point in their trying to leave the cottage just yet, though it was now late into the afternoon, maybe evening. Absently, Beverley flicked her wrist to check the time, but her watch had stopped at ten to one, presumably when she had waded through the sea with Kevin.

  Beverley shrugged and turned back towards the others. Another roll of thunder bellowed in the distance, like a cow in a transport truck that was already nearly at the horizon. ‘The storm’s moving away,’ she announced. ‘It’ll be over any minute now.’

  She was right. There were no more lightning flashes after that. The storm had passed on, leaving the house on the little island streaming but safe. It was still raining, but the rain was less frantic now. Rain fizzed along the gutters and down the drainpipe, it raced persistently down the windowpanes, but it no longer assaulted the house, as if desperate to be let in, no longer rammed itself out of the skies onto the earth with such force that it bounced back up halfway to meet itself. It hum-drummed convincingly on the slates still, but in an absentminded sort of way, as if it had given up on winning this war and had decided to be content with merely prolonging it.

  The kitchen was still dark, but it was quieter now that the storm’s noises had receded, and the wind that had got up as if to warn them all of the storm had died down. Beverley looked around for something to do, something to take her mind off it all. She started to gather cups to wash them up. Gerard stood up eagerly, looking for some way to help her. He found a dishcloth, and sloshed the table enthusiastically with it.

  ‘That’s nice. Thank you all,’ said Dymphna, smiling benignly on the children, and appreciating the sight of her odd assortment of cups and jars ranged neatly again on the dresser.

  ‘What about a cup of tea?’ she said after a few moments. ‘To celebrate.’

  A cup of tea? But they’d only just washed up after the last one! This was like an even madder variation on the Mad Hatter’s tea-party. Still, it was easy to make more tea, and if it kept Dymphna happy, it was worth it.

  ‘To celebrate what, exactly?’ asked Beverley cautiously.

  ‘The storm.’

  ‘Ah, the storm. Being over?’

  ‘No. Being here at all.’

  ‘What’s there to celebrate about a storm?’

  ‘Well, it’s so magnificent,’ explained Dymphna, flinging her arms out. For a moment, Beverley thought she was going to stand up and start her wind-dance again. ‘And such a release,’ Dymphna went on. ‘I find it’s a release. Also, it’s a happening.’

  ‘A happening?’

  ‘Yes. Otherwise the days are so alike,’ said Dymphna almost wistfully. ‘Especially in the summer. You could go from one end of the week to another on this island, and not a blessed thing to differentiate one day from another.’

  The children looked at each other in silence. She made life on the island sound very dull, which indeed it must be, with only cows and cats for company.

  ‘Well, how come you live here then, all by yourself?’ asked Beverley.

  Kevin drew in his breath, as if to sound a warning.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Dymphna, ‘ah well.’ That was all. ‘But what about that tea, Beverley?’ she went on in a different, falsely cheerful tone. ‘Didn’t somebody offer to make me tea? I like a cup of tea, to celebrate.’

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ said Beverley. ‘I’ll make some more tea if that’s what you’d like. Would you like some shortbread with it?’

  ‘My favourite,’ said Dymphna, with glee. ‘How did you guess? With honey, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Beverley. ‘But I’m afraid there’s no milk.’

  ‘No milk?’ said Dymphna. ‘That’s bad housekeeping, isn’t it? Oh well, never mind. I’m just as happy to drink it black. In fact, I actually prefer it black.’

  And she beamed a forgiving beam on them all.

  Wh
ile Dymphna munched more honey-smeared shortbread and sipped tea, Beverley took the black cotton sleeves that Kevin had ripped from his shirt and went to bandage up Elizabeth’s ankle.

  ‘The swelling’s gone right down, Elizabeth,’ she exclaimed, lifting Elizabeth’s foot onto her lap.

  Gingerly she placed a finger on the flesh and pressed. Elizabeth didn’t flinch.

  ‘Wiggle your toes,’ Beverley commanded.

  Obediently Elizabeth wiggled her toes.

  ‘Turn your foot. I mean, draw a circle in the air with it.’

  Elizabeth raised her foot from Beverley’s lap, and, pointing her toes, described a circle in the air, swivelling her ankle as she did so.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ asked Beverley.

  ‘No,’ said Elizabeth, astonished.

  ‘Well, the bathing would have brought the swelling down a bit,’ observed Beverley, ‘but I wouldn’t have expected it to cure the sprain completely. Are you sure it really was sprained?’ Not that it mattered. The point was that it was fine now, and that meant one thing – escape was now within their grasp.

  ‘Sprained, strained, twisted – what do I know?’ said Elizabeth, waving her foot gleefully. ‘All I know is it hurt like anything. And it was all puffed up like a pigeon’s chest. But suddenly it’s fine. Maybe the holy well works after all. The pump’s attached to it, you know.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Beverley.

  ‘It’s the lotion,’ said Dymphna, through a mouthful of shortbread. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Beverley again, but under her breath this time.

  Elizabeth swung into a sitting position and carefully placed her foot flat on the floor. She tested it by leaning on it. Not a twinge. Then she stood up slowly, half-expecting the ankle to give way. Nothing happened.

  ‘It’s a miracle!’ she exclaimed, standing firmly planted on her two feet, only at an angle, because one of them was shod and the other bare.

  ‘No, it’s a cure,’ corrected Dymphna. ‘My lotion always cures people.’

  Beverley scratched her head. ‘It’s an unexplained phenomenon,’ she pronounced scientifically.