The Amber Cat

by Hilary McKay

  “We’ll show you when we’ve done it.”

  “If you’re planning on using my wood,” said Dan’s father, “you needn’t bother showing me. You can pack your bags and go!”

  “We won’t use your wood,” promised Dan.

  “That cart you cobbled together last summer nearly broke my heart,” said Dan’s father. “I’d had that bit of oak since before you were born! And you forced my saw and bent it!”

  “Robin’s got a saw,” said Dan.

  “He won’t have a saw much longer if you get at it,” said Dan’s father. “So be warned, Robin! It’s more than I was! Goodnight to you all!”

  “Goodnight!” they called back, and Dan shouted, “I’ll take care of the drill!”

  “Good lad,” said Dan’s father, “I’ll take care of you if you don’t!” and drove off.

  “Good old Dad!” said Dan, when he had gone. “I wonder if he’s got any long screws.”

  “Bed,” said Mrs Brogan firmly, drawing back the curtains for one last look at the night. “Oh listen! Poor little Sun Dance! And he went home so happy!”

  All the lights were on next door and the night was full of crying.

  Chapter Four

  Although Dan and Robin had been allowed to stay up and watch the football, the Robinson children were not. Their mother said it would be finished far too long after bedtime and added that she thought whoever organized late evening international matches on schooldays might show a little more sense.

  “Mum!” groaned Perry, at this ignorant and unsporting remark.

  “Don’t groan at me!” said his mother. “School tomorrow, so you’re going to bed.”

  “Dad!” appealed Perry.

  “Whatever your mother says,” said his father. “Set up that video you forced me to buy and you can get up early and watch it.”

  “I wish I had a television in my bedroom,” said Perry.

  “You can have one as soon as you leave home,” said his father. “Something to look forward to,” he added cryptically.

  Perry sighed, but recognized when he was beaten. He gave the subject up and went to find Sun Dance, who was the only member of the family who could be relied on to manage the video.

  Sun Dance had been very quiet that evening, much to his family’s surprise. Usually he was a passionate football fan (despite his disconcerting habit of identifying with the ball), yet he had not bothered to join in with the pleas to be allowed to watch the match. Nor had he prowled the darkest corners of the house in search of ghosts, or listened breathlessly to the telephone in the hope of hearing The Lady’s whisperings. Instead, he had hugged his knees and thought and thought. High tide and a new moon and the new moon pulls up whales. If whales, then why not Sun Dance? Because the whales were in the sea, surrounded by water, soaking wet. Lucky whales, thought Sun Dance. I should drown. Unless my head was sticking out.

  Then Sun Dance’s mind made a tremendous leap. It isn’t the whales that are pulled, he thought. It’s the water they live in. The moon pulls water …

  And for the rest of the evening (except when roused to programme the video) Sun Dance sat in a dream.

  By half-past ten the whole house was asleep, all except for Sun Dance, who had plans for the night.

  High tide and a new moon, he reminded himself, and climbed softly out of bed.

  No one was better at moving quietly than Sun Dance. He slipped down the stairs like a shadow and finding the doors locked and the keys taken away crawled out into the garden through the dog’s cat flap. There he made his way to Ningsy and Dead Cat’s shed, collected two plastic buckets, filled them from the outside tap, dunked his dressing gown in one of them, pulled it icy cold and dripping round his shoulders and stood, soaking, freezing and hopeful, a bucket in each hand, waiting.

  After the first numbing minute the cold became more bearable. There was no wind and the new moon, a brief silver curve of light, was hooked in a sky full of stars. The buckets were very heavy.

  How long, wondered Sun Dance, before I begin to float?

  It was not long. He lowered the buckets on to the frozen grass for a minute to rest his arms and immediately felt the delicious lightness beginning. Tightening his grip on the handles, he fixed his sights on the moon. His mind was whirling with stars and excitement and he could no longer feel his feet on the ground.

  He was well on his way when there was a crash and a shriek and something enormous grabbed him from behind.

  “Let me go!” screamed Sun Dance. “Let me go! Let me go!”

  The grabber took no notice, except to hold him even tighter. Sun Dance bellowed and kicked and sank his teeth into his captor’s arm.

  “Let me take him!” said Sun Dance’s father and Sun Dance came suddenly back to earth.

  He was in the kitchen. All the lights were on. The whole family was awake and clustered around him. His dressing gown and pyjamas were lying in soaking heaps on the floor. He was wrapped in a quilt and his back and feet were being rubbed by his parents. He could not stop shaking and he could not stop crying. The room was filled with noise, hundreds of questions from his brother and sisters, thousands of questions from his mother. Sun Dance’s sobs grew louder and louder and Old Blanket awoke in the middle of the uproar and began to bark. Old Blanket had twice slept through burglars and once through the collapse of a chimney. Things were bad when Old Blanket barked.

  “Clear this rabble!” bellowed Sun Dance’s father above the din. “Bed! Now! Out! Do something with that dog!”

  The kitchen miraculously emptied. Old Blanket saw the excitement was over and immediately fell asleep. “Silent night,” said Sun Dance’s father in the silent room. “Holy night. Whatever were you doing?”

  “I was just beginning to float,” sobbed Sun Dance.

  “To float?”

  “To the moon,” explained Sun Dance, sniffing.

  “To the moon?” asked Sun Dance’s father, considerably startled.

  “Not right to the moon,” said Sun Dance. “Just up a bit.”

  “How did you propose to get back?”

  “Empty the buckets,” said Sun Dance.

  Mr Robinson suddenly felt terribly tired. He did not ask any more questions, he just hugged Sun Dance and said, “You might have caught pneumonia.”

  “New what?” asked Sun Dance.

  His mother returned from putting his brother and sisters to bed. She brought hot milk and hot water bottles for Sun Dance and hot whisky for herself and her husband and she said, “Oh, Sun Dance. Oh, Sun Dance. Oh, Sun Dance.”

  “I would have come back,” said Sun Dance.

  “Oh, Sun Dance,” said his mother. “Oh, when I looked out of that window and saw you standing there!”

  “Steady on!” said Mr Robinson. “He’s all right now! It’s just lucky you woke up when you did! It might have been much worse!”

  “He’s not over his chickenpox yet,” said Sun Dance’s mother. “He might have caught pneumonia!”

  “What’s new moonier?” asked Sun Dance, beginning to feel alarmed.

  “Nothing, Sun Dance,” said Mr Robinson soothingly and mouthed “Don’t frighten him!” to his wife. Sun Dance saw the words and began to be really alarmed, especially when he caught sight of a ring of purple toothmarks on his mother’s wrist.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, seeing what he was looking at. “Nothing matters. We’ve got you safe and it’s all right! There’s nothing to be frightened of!”

  They carried him upstairs and tucked him into bed, with hugs and kisses, and for a long time he lay very still and listened to their voices rising and falling in the room next door and knew that he had escaped great danger. It wasn’t a safe way of getting to the moon. He’d wondered why nobody had tried it before and now he knew. If his mother had not arrived in time, he might never have got back; worse still, he might have caught new moonier and that, judging by the frightened faces of his mother and father, would have been the end of Sun Dance and his bright ideas. All nigh
t he drifted between sleep and wakefulness and every time he woke, he was crying, “New moonier! New moonier!” and his mother was saying, “You’re quite safe, Sun Dance! Quite safe! Quite safe!” and he would fall asleep again.

  The next morning, the chickenpox club was back down to two members. Perry, Ant and Beany, pausing in the road on their way to school, had attempted to explain by mime the cause of the night’s disturbance.

  “They must be practising that hobbit dance they’ve got to do,” said Dan eventually, after some minutes of watching Perry and Ant, with their arms pointed into rocket shapes above their heads, leap skywards to the moon.

  “Perhaps,” said Robin, without conviction, because he couldn’t imagine Perry and Ant voluntarily doing any such thing. “But what’s Beany doing?”

  Beany was doing the sound effects which mostly consisted of roaring. Both leaping and sound effects stopped abruptly when Mrs Robinson opened the front door and shouted some dreadful threat.

  “I know people say Sun Dance is crackers,” remarked Dan, “but I think they all are, more or less. That Beany is definitely a nutter. Does she wash your bed-and-breakfast sign every day?”

  “Every day,” Robin told him. “And polishes it at weekends.”

  Sun Dance did not appear that morning and Robin and Dan missed him very much. They were both feeling more alive than they had for days; their sore throats had gone and their spots had almost stopped itching. Their mothers had a telephone conference about school but decided against it.

  “There’s flu going round now,” said Mrs Brogan, “and there’s a lot of difference between feeling well at home and feeling well in a classroom.” Dan’s mother agreed and said she didn’t suppose they were missing much.

  “They seem to spend half their time watching school TV,” she said. “They could do that at home.”

  “So they could,” said Mrs Brogan, “and I could make the Christmas cake in peace.”

  “Why does she want to make the Christmas cake in peace?” wondered Robin.

  “Because that Charley’s coming?” suggested Dan.

  “S’pose so,” said Robin gloomily, but Mrs Brogan, when questioned, said, “When have I ever not made a Christmas cake?”

  “I’ve never seen you,” said Robin.

  “That’s because you’ve always been at school,” said Mrs Brogan. “Stop moaning!”

  It was a very long morning. Robin and Dan sat through half an hour of shopping in French and a documentary about matchstick production and were rewarded for their patience by a Canadian film about beavers.

  “This is terrible!” said Robin, after what seemed like hours of leafless trees and empty water. “At least at school the fuse keeps blowing!”

  “Beavers are educational,” said Mrs Brogan firmly, when she brought in the cake bowl to scrape.

  “This programme is a lot more dam than beaver,” said Dan and Mrs Brogan laughed.

  “I hope Sun Dance comes round this afternoon,” said Robin.

  “Don’t count on it,” said Mrs Brogan. “He sounded very upset last night. I’m afraid all those ghost stories weren’t a good idea.”

  “It was Sun Dance who was telling the ghost stories,” pointed out Robin. “You were telling us about Harriet. I dreamed about Harriet.”

  “Did you?”

  “What happened to her?” asked Robin. “Did you quarrel?”

  “Of course not,” said Mrs Brogan.

  “Do you still know her, then?”

  “What happened to her in your dream?” asked his mother.

  “She ran away.”

  “You’re getting as bad as Sun Dance,” said Dan. “You’ll be seeing ghosts next!”

  “Don’t give him ideas!” said Mrs Brogan. “If I pop next door to see how Sun Dance is, will you two be all right? You won’t set the house on fire or go into a sudden decline?”

  “Tell him to come and see us,” said Dan.

  “I will if he’s allowed out,” promised Mrs Brogan. “I’ll see what his mother thinks first.”

  Sun Dance’s mother was in her kitchen, looking very tired. She laughed when Mrs Brogan apologized for allowing Sun Dance’s ghost stories and said he was as at home with his ghosts as he was with his own relations and that anyway his tales were nothing to the ones that the twins regularly invented.

  Sun Dance himself came bouncing through the door before she could explain the cause of the night’s commotion, quite his usual self after a morning’s sleep.

  “Did the chickenpox club miss me?” he asked.

  “It won’t be a chickenpox club for much longer,” said Mrs Brogan. “It’s nearly better. How are your own chickenpox, Sun Dance?”

  “Fading,” said his mother.

  “Still there, though,” said Sun Dance, pulling out the neck of his jumper and peering down at his stomach to check. “Can I come chickenpoxing this afternoon, Mrs Brogan?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Mrs Brogan. “I’m not the boss!”

  “Can I, Mum?”

  “If Mrs Brogan doesn’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t,” said Mrs Brogan cheerfully. “Come after lunch and stay to supper and we’ll waylay the twins and Beany on their way home from school and invite them, too.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Mrs Robinson thankfully.

  “Quite sure,” said her friend, “and you can go to bed for the afternoon!”

  “No pestering Sun Dance with questions,” Mrs Brogan warned Robin and Dan, when she got back.

  “’Course not,” said Robin.

  “Was it the ghost stories?” asked Dan.

  “His mother says not. I don’t know what it was and I think it would be better not to ask.”

  But there was no need for anyone to ask anything. Even before the ritual exchange of symptoms with which the chickenpox club customarily greeted each other, Sun Dance was describing the perils of the night. He lost no time in explaining how he had nearly been sucked up to the moon and only rescued in the nick of time by the quick thinking of his mother.

  “I bit her,” he said regretfully. “You can still see the mark! I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know who was grabbing me. Lucky that she did, though. Emptying the buckets wouldn’t have been enough.”

  “What buckets?”

  “The moon water buckets.”

  Dan and Robin glanced at each other in silent confusion.

  “They should teach you about it at school,” said Sun Dance. “They teach you about not getting run over and not getting kidnapped but they never say anything about the moon. They should tell you about not getting moonnapped.”

  “Sun Dance,” said Dan, “you couldn’t get sucked up by the moon!”

  “You said yesterday I could. You said whales did.”

  “Whales are in the sea.”

  “That’s what the buckets were for,” said Sun Dance triumphantly. “Anyway, I did get sucked up! I’d tell my mum to show you the teethmarks, only she’s gone to bed.”

  Robin and Dan gave up. Sun Dance’s logic seemed even more complex than usual that afternoon. All they completely understood was that he was now terribly afraid of the moon. They grasped that the night had been somehow dangerous, but where the buckets and bites came into the story they couldn’t imagine. Mrs Brogan decided they had discussed the subject for long enough and distracted them by coming in with three aprons and summoning them to the kitchen to learn to cook.

  “Cook what?” asked Dan, warily.

  “Pancakes,” said Mrs Brogan. “And I like mine well tossed and the twins and Beany are coming to tea after school, so you’d better get practising!”

  Pancakes passed the afternoon quickly and happily. Mrs Brogan showed them the Porridge Hall method of pancake making, each pancake being no larger than a small saucer and piled in stacks, with orange juice and golden syrup in between.

  “We have them rolled up, with lemon and brown sugar,” said Sun Dance.

  “We have them folded in half, with apple and cream,” sa
id Dan.

  “Well, now you know the proper way,” said Mrs Brogan, “and there is no better, unless it is maple syrup and cream whipped with brandy and I don’t happen to have any cream or maple syrup or brandy to hand!”

  She also taught them to toss the pancakes, explaining that it was all a matter of courage and not taking your eyes off the ball.

  “Pancake,” interrupted Sun Dance.

  “Pancake,” agreed Mrs Brogan. “Oh, well caught, Dan! A double flip!”

  The twins and Beany, waylaid before they burst through their own front door and woke their mother, were impressed and envious.

  “We’ve had a terrible, awful day,” said Ant.

  “Hobbit rehearsals?” asked Dan, and Ant nodded mournfully.

  “They’ve cancelled the singing dwarf bit,” she told Dan, “because in the end there was only one dwarf left without chickenpox or excuses from their mother, but they’ve put in extra hobbits to make up for it …”

  “Don’t talk about it,” begged Perry.

  “Tell us what we’ve missed,” said Robin. “What did you do for the rest of the day?”

  “Nothing,” said Perry. “Just sat around. We didn’t learn anything.”

  “You must have,” said Mrs Brogan. “Think!”

  So Perry sat with his head in his hands and thought and thought. “Nothing,” he said at the end of this painful process.

  “It isn’t just pancakes we’ve learned,” said Dan, with a sideways glance at Mrs Brogan. “It was beavers this morning. Very strange animals. Nearly invisible!”

  “And impossible to film,” said Robin. “And we did French, too.”

  “French out of books?”

  “French off the telly,” said Dan. “It took them half an hour to buy six apples and a loaf of bread at this French market they were at and, all the time, you could see a supermarket just across the road. They could have been in and out in five minutes and not had to speak a word!”

  “We watched a load of rubbish about matches,” said Perry. “I can’t remember anything about it, though.”

  “We watched that,” said Dan. “We were hoping they’d tell us how to make the stuff they put on the ends, but they didn’t.”