by Valija Zinck
Granny Elizabeth popped her head out of the window. ‘Lucia! Penelope! This calls for a celebration! I’ll bake us a victory cake.’
Penelope and her mother exchanged a brief glance. ‘Oh, there’s no need to do that, Mother,’ Mrs Gardener called out hastily. ‘It’d be quicker for Penelope to go and get us something from the baker’s, don’t you think?’
Cycling to the bakery wasn’t exactly Penelope’s favourite activity, but the prospect of having to eat one of Granny Elizabeth’s cakes gave her an energy boost!
‘EVERYTHING IS IN MOTION AGAIN,’ rumbled the road, the minute Penelope’s bike touched the pavement.
‘What?’
‘EVERYTHING IS FLOWING ALONG, EVERYTHING IS RUNNING SMOOTHLY. THE ROADBLOCKS HAVE BEEN CLEARED. ONE OF MY OLDER MOTORWAYS HAS GAINED ANOTHER LANE, EVERYONE IS GETTING TO THEIR DESTINATION QUICKLY. THE WAIT IS OVER, EVERYTHING’S MOVING, AND I’M STILL HERE, AND WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO, MY DEAR CHILD?’
‘To the baker’s. Granny Elizabeth’s conquered the creeper corms, so we’re having cake to celebrate.’
‘UGH, CREEPER CORMS!’ the road yelped. ‘THOSE ARE REALLY BAD GUYS. I HAD THOSE THINGS GROWING UP THROUGH ONE OF MY SOUTHERN BRANCHES FOR YEARS. AN EXTREMELY RARE PLANT, BUT ALSO A VERY UNPLEASANT ONE. AND THOSE TUBERS! OH, I KNOW THEY’RE VERY PRETTY AT FIRST, BUT IF THEY GROW TOO FAST, THEN – OUCH! – MY POOR TARMAC! IT’S WORST DURING THE HAY SEASON. WHEN IT RAINS, AND THE HAY THAT FALLS ON ME MIXES WITH THE RAINWATER . . . IF ANY OF THAT GETS ON TO THE CREEPER CORMS, THEY LITERALLY EXPLODE! THEY SWELL UP AS BIG AS PUMPKINS SOMETIMES. OH YES, IT’S A HARD LIFE FOR ME. YOU HUMANS HAVE IT SO EASY WITH YOUR CAREFREE LIVES.’
‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Penelope. She still hadn’t really managed to figure out the road, but she’d already grasped that it was pointless to argue with it. Then she started to think about what the road had said about the hay and the rainwater . . . ‘Yes, yes,’ she said again, and this time she couldn’t help grinning. There was certainly more than enough hay around at this time of year. And she might be able to use some exploding creeper corms during her visit to her father . . .
‘Well, in that case, I hope there will be a lot of rain after my trip to Blackslough on the sixth of July!’ she giggled. She blew two red strands of hair out of her face and started to pedal uphill with renewed energy.
24
Preparations
Sometimes, luck – or chance, or whatever you want to call it – simply comes knocking at your door with no warning. Penelope couldn’t believe it when she found out while they were eating their cake that Granny Elizabeth’s rest cure was due to begin exactly one day before Penelope’s planned excursion to Blackslough. Her mother was going to take G. E. to the health spa on the fifth of July, stay there overnight and then travel back the next day, she said.
‘It’s a long way, so I won’t be home till the next evening. Would you like to ask Anna-Lea if you can go to her house for a sleepover, maybe? Or Tom, or Pete?’
‘Mmhmm,’ Penelope mumbled with her mouth full, and knew in the same moment that of course she wasn’t going to ask anyone. This couldn’t have worked out better if she’d planned it! If her mother was going to be away on the fifth of July, that gave Penelope the perfect opportunity to sneak the ash paste out of her cupboard. She could turn her hair grey again, and then colour it brown with her Icelandic Earth Brown dye, at leisure. Even better, she’d be able to leave the house at the crack of dawn on the sixth of July without anyone being any the wiser.
Yes – she would carry out the mission to visit her father. And when her mother arrived home in the evening, Penelope would be home again too, and sitting in the kitchen as if nothing had happened. But something would have happened, of course – that would be only too clear on the seventh of July, because the postman wouldn’t bring any sand-filled grey envelopes to the dragon house. Not on the seventh, and not on any other day – Penelope would have seen to that. She smiled contentedly.
The fifth of July was a week later. Mrs Gardener and Penelope heaved Granny Elizabeth’s suitcase down the steps and up the sand track. The taxi was already waiting by the beech tree to take her mother and grandmother to the station. Her mother gave Penelope a kiss on the cheek. ‘Say hello to Anna-Lea’s parents from me, and make sure you thank them.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘And if I’m late getting back tomorrow evening, just go to bed, please.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
Granny Elizabeth gave Penelope a kiss too. ‘Now, behave yourself while I’m away – I’m going to be gone for three weeks now, don’t forget.’
‘Yes, Granny.’
She lowered her voice theatrically while Penelope’s mother helped load the luggage into the taxi. ‘And do some more reading in that lovely book, so that we can have our ointment soon.’
‘Yes, Granny.’
‘And put this in your pocket,’ she continued, handing Penelope some money. ‘Get yourself an ice cream.’
‘Yes, Granny, and thanks.’
At last Granny Elizabeth got into the taxi, and Penelope waved the two of them off until the car disappeared among the hills. Then she turned towards the dragon house and took a deep breath. The name ‘dragon house’ didn’t actually fit it so well any more – so much of the green had flaked away from the splintered wood this summer that the house was barely speckled now – in fact, it was almost entirely red.
‘You’re red again, and soon I’ll be grey again!’ Penelope shouted to the house as she ran towards it, down the sand track, and up the steps.
She went into the kitchen, closed the door carefully and made a beeline for her mother’s wooden cabinet. Penelope enthusiastically opened the door, shoving aside some battered books and opening a large tin and two boxes in her search, and finally unwrapping a thick linen cloth from a tall, narrow jar. Bingo! The glass was slightly misted and quite heavy. The gloopy paste inside made a soft smacking sound as it lapped against the glass wall of the jar, fell back down and started to crawl up again, like a trapped animal struggling to escape. Penelope unscrewed the lid carefully, and a familiar, biting smell of smoke rose to her nostrils.
25
Salon Penelope
It had taken six hours for Penelope’s hair to absorb all the sticky paste. Now it was dry again, and every last strand was limp and as grey as dried cement.
‘Ugh!’ Penelope grimaced. ‘Horrible! How did I ever stand this? It feels disgusting.’
It wasn’t just the colour she had a problem with – it was the way she felt inside: heavy and clumsy and dull. The lightness and permeability she felt with her natural hair had completely disappeared. She felt like half the girl she had been since the day her hair had turned red. In fact, she didn’t feel like herself at all. But then she drew up in determination. ‘I’m Penelope Gardener, and I can handle this. At the end of the day, this is for my mum. She doesn’t deserve to get such nasty mail. I must get on and get ready.’
She opened the box of Icelandic Earth Brown dye; inside were a pair of plastic gloves, a small bottle of liquid, a tube of something, a sachet of shampoo and an instruction leaflet which proudly claimed:
Icelandic Earth Intense lends your hair maximum colour intensity together with professional grey coverage.
Well, that was good to know. Now, where did it say how to use this funny stuff?
Attention: An allergy test should always be performed before using this product.
I can’t do an allergy test now – I haven’t got time, besides, this stuff can hardly be worse than the ash paste.
If you have just lightened or permed your hair, you should wait at least two weeks before you colour it.
Hopefully that didn’t apply to lightening with ash paste, as Penelope was even less able to wait for two weeks than to carry out an allergy test. Finally she came to the instructions, which said that the contents of the tube should be squeezed into the bottle of liquid, shaken well, and then distributed through the hair. Well, that sounded s
imple enough. In no time at all she had made up the colour mixture and smeared it into her hair, and after half an hour she could wash it out again. A quick blow-dry, and she was done.
A brown-haired Penelope looked out of the mirror, grinning. Very nice – no, wonderful! She’d never looked so normal in her life!
26
TheJourney Begins
That night Penelope tossed and turned restlessly from one side of her bed to the other, tugging at her duvet and fluffing the pillow, but she couldn’t sleep. Eventually, she sat up and looked out of the window into the darkness, then switched on the light and took out the old black-and-white photo of her parents. Did her father still look the same? she wondered. Exactly the same, just slightly older?
She lay down again and put her arms under her head. At some point she fell into a light slumber which contained a confused dream: she was crawling through some sort of park with a gaunt red-haired man. The man pointed to a huge marble angel and asked: ‘What makes you so sure that the key is under the angel?’
‘I dreamt it,’ the dream-Penelope replied, then gave a start because Coco’s whiskers were tickling her face. Her temples throbbed, her body felt dull and fragile. It was already getting light outside. Oh no, had she overslept? She glanced at her clock. No, she had another five minutes until the alarm.
She turned off the alarm, swung her feet out of bed and dragged the rest of her body out after them. The floorboards creaked softly. Penelope stumbled to the bathroom, washed, dressed, and groped her way down the stairs sleepily.
She wasn’t hungry this early in the morning, but she packed three thick cheese rolls with lettuce for later and filled a thermos flask with apple tea. She already had a big bottle of water in her backpack, but she hadn’t packed that for drinking – it was to help her get high enough in the air when she left, and also to help the growth of the creeper corms along a little. The root was already in her backpack, of course, wound up into a bundle alongside a huge tube of superglue and Gina’s Anti-Eye, and everything was padded with a thick clump of hay. Now all she needed was her purse.
Penelope was glad that Granny Elizabeth had given her some money before she’d left. She wouldn’t have to pay for the bus to Senborough, as she could use her monthly bus pass, but she’d need money for her train fare to Little Pilling.
The first birds were beginning to sing as Penelope opened the door of the dragon house. The sky over the swamp forest was turning a faint greenish-yellow, and she could hear a cockerel crowing in the village. Coco pushed past her as she walked outside.
‘Go back to sleep, Coco,’ Penelope suggested. ‘I’ll be back this evening.’ But the cat wasn’t having it. She followed Penelope to the bike shed and all the way up the sand track. When Penelope got on the bike and started pedalling, the cat tried to run after her.
‘Coco, I can’t take you with me! Go and catch yourself a mouse, or visit one of the cats in the village. You’ll have a lot more fun doing that.’ Penelope waved to her and rode off.
The empty bus stop had a gloomy air despite the morning light and the dew shimmering on the buttercups. Normally other people waited here too, but at this time of day they were all still in bed, of course. Penelope leant her bike against a sturdy birch tree and sat down on the bench, her heart thumping from the exertion of cycling uphill.
‘Bus, come soon please, I need to get going quickly,’ she said under her breath, shuffling her feet restlessly. But the next arrival at the bus stop was not the bus, it was Coco, who had obviously followed her up the hill. The cat leapt on to Penelope’s lap and nudged her head against her stomach.
‘OK, OK.’ Penelope stroked Coco until she rolled herself into a grey circle, purring. The purring made Penelope feel good, giving her strength and driving the heavy feeling from her limbs.
When the bus arrived, Coco tried to get on, but Penelope blocked her way. She couldn’t spend the day keeping an eye on the cat. Anyone who has ever had to glue up all the postboxes in a strange village, give their unknown father a piece of their mind, and throw a lasso of creeper corms around his house, knows that a cat isn’t exactly helpful for any of those things. But as the bus wound its way between the hills, taking Penelope further and further away from home, she started to wish she’d let Coco accompany her. She suddenly began to feel like she’d made a mistake, and this feeling grew until she was on the train, when she realized she hadn’t thought everything through properly.
‘Tickets from the last station, tickets please.’ A round-faced conductor shuffled into the carriage, dragging his feet tiredly. The other two people who were sitting in the carriage pulled their tickets out.
‘Good morning. I need to buy a ticket, please.’ Penelope rummaged for her purse.
‘And where would the young lady like to go today?’
‘To Little Pilling.’
The conductor typed something into his ticket machine, then held a freshly printed ticket out to Penelope. ‘That’ll be eleven pounds and eleven pence. That’s lucky, that is.’
Eleven pounds? What was lucky about that? How could it be eleven pounds? The journey was only an hour and a half, so why was it so expensive? Penelope could feel herself beginning to sweat.
‘But, I, er, um, I . . . eleven pounds? I’ve only got five.’
‘Oh, couldn’t you have thought about that sooner, girl? Now I’ve got to cancel this and start again – have you any idea how complicated that is? Children, children, children. Of course you can’t get all the way to Little Pilling on five pounds.’
Penelope’s heart faltered. She couldn’t get to Little Pilling? What was the conductor talking about? She had to get to her father today, there were no two ways about it. She was already on the way now – if she had to get off earlier, how was she going to get the rest of the way to Black-slough? She could fly, but didn’t know the way and of course people would see her and besides, she would have to use her water and then how would she get home?
‘But, but, but, that . . . I, uh.’ Her tongue began to click, and the conductor gave her a funny look. ‘Could you hold on a moment, please? I might have some more money in my backpack.’ She opened it up and looked inside. Hay, creeper corms, cheese rolls, water, tea and the Anti-Eye.
She straightened up again. ‘How far can I get for five pounds?’
‘To Synham. Four pounds and seventy pence.’
‘I’ll take that, then.’
Penelope was relieved when she was finally holding a ticket in her hand and the conductor turned to a lady on the other side of the aisle who had lots of bags with her. At least now she could relax until the train got to Synham. After that – well, she’d just have to think of some other way of reaching Little Pilling.
27
The Anti-Eye
The lady with the bags got off at the next stop. Now the only other person in the carriage was a sullen-looking man sitting at the far end. I’m sure he won’t give me any trouble, thought Penelope. She looked out of the window. The dusty meadows were scattered with hay bales, wind turbines and colourless cows. Rusty railway parts lay in the brown grass beside the tracks, and there was a dead copse whose splintered remains of trees pointed like pale fingers into the sky. After a while, they passed a house with bricked-up windows and birch trees leaning on the collapsed roof. Penelope felt a little uneasy. She knew she wasn’t that far from home, but everything felt very strange and alien. She unwrapped one of the cheese rolls in her backpack, bit into it and chewed. The conductor walked through the carriage again, grunted his ‘Tickets, please,’ again, and the next stop slid into view: a brick station, the stones more black than brick. After a minute, the train trundled on. Houses, fields, a rubbish tip around which grey-black crows circled, another train station. Penelope closed her eyes.
She fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
‘Next stop: SYNHAM,’ the loudspeaker clattered.
Penelope jerked awake as the sullen-faced man brushed her elbow on his way to the door. She glanced outside,
dazed and disorientated – feeling as if she might easily fall asleep again. The man stepped out on to the platform. Nobody got in. Penelope read the station sign: SYNHAM. What? Oh no! Suddenly, she was wide awake. She had no intention of leaving the train, but from now on her ticket was no longer valid; she would need to be vigilant. In sudden inspiration, she fished the Anti-Eye out of her backpack. Snatches of an automatic announcement rang through the windows, then the journey continued.
Penelope stood up and glanced up and down the empty carriage. Whatever else she did, she had to make sure to avoid the conductor. She pressed the ‘Open’ button on the door of the next carriage and peered inside, then quickly jerked her head back: the conductor was shuffling up the aisle, wheezing. Quickly, Penelope! Back to your seat, backpack on your lap, ears open. Now she just had to make sure she didn’t get nervous and press the Anti-Eye too soon, otherwise she wouldn’t get enough time, and he’d catch her. And, of course, she mustn’t press it too late either.
The door of the carriage glided open. ‘Tickets from the last station, tickets please.’ Penelope pressed her index finger hard on the small rusty button of the Anti-Eye and vanished instantly. Only a slight indentation in the upholstery where she was sitting marked her presence – and only the most observant person would spot that. As the conductor wasn’t an observant person, he shuffled past Penelope’s seat without even looking, and had left the carriage by the time Penelope reappeared.
She would have giggled in jubilation if not for the fact that the Anti-Eye had temporarily stolen her voice.
Penelope stepped off the train with a sigh of relief. The station here was small, like the previous stations, but slightly shabbier. A puddle-yellow stationhouse stood in front of the platform, its plaster crumbling, and a smeared ticket machine stood beside the gate. Two pigeons pecked at the concrete. Penelope checked the times of the trains running home – just in case she wasn’t able to fly, for some reason – and then set off.
