The Exiles at Home

by Hilary McKay

  ‘They might be telling anyone anything, at least Rachel might.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling you’ll be glad to go home,’ said Big Grandma surprisingly on their last day.

  ‘Not glad,’ said Ruth, ‘but we’ve got things we ought to do.’

  ‘We love it here,’ said Naomi, ‘you know we do, but . . .’

  ‘But . . .’ said Big Grandma. ‘Quite. Your faces are very revealing! Perhaps you’ll tell me about it one day!’

  ‘About what?’ asked Ruth, but Big Grandma merely grinned at her and remarked that she was not so green as she was cabbage-looking.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Ruth on the train home, ‘what Big Grandma knows.’

  ‘About Joseck?’ asked Naomi. ‘How can she know anything? The trouble with Big Grandma is that she doesn’t forget things. She notices everything and it goes into her head and makes patterns. Or something. So the more she notices, the more she knows.’

  ‘Good job, then, that she lives so far away,’ said Ruth heartlessly.

  ‘Yes, lucky Mum’s not like her!’

  ‘Or Dad.’

  ‘Phoebe’s bad enough!’

  ‘Phoebe!’

  ‘Well, she thinks just like Big Grandma,’ Naomi pointed out, and Ruth was silent, appalled at the thought of two Big Grandmas, or even worse, two Phoebes in the same family.

  Mr Conroy was waiting for them as they drew into the home station; he nodded and smiled as the train pulled in, but couldn’t wave because his hands were full of Rachel and Phoebe. He held them by the scruffs of their necks to prevent them from hurling themselves across the platform.

  ‘Rachel’s looking ready to burst,’ commented Ruth.

  Rachel was exploding with questions and secrets. Joseck and robbery conflicted with the excitement of Ruth and Naomi’s return, and the desire to know what they had brought her, and how many people in Cumbria regretted her being left behind.

  ‘Did anyone say they wished I was there?’ she asked, peering hopefully into a carrier bag of spring cabbages and rhubarb from Big Grandma’s garden. ‘Has anyone given you anything to give to me? Did you get my letter?’

  Phoebe asked no questions, watching detached and unruffled as Mr Conroy hugged the travellers and Rachel riffled through their luggage. However, as they left the platform, she remarked,

  ‘Everything’s all right in Africa.’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Ruth, immensely relieved. ‘Everything?’

  ‘Only in Africa,’ said Phoebe, not wishing to raise her sister’s hopes too much. ‘I told Big Grandma to tell you, when she telephoned this morning, but she said you’d already gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘On to the train home, to here. She was ringing to say you caught it all right. I answered the phone. She said you were worried about something so I said to tell you everything was all right in Africa, but then she said you’d gone.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Phoebe, ‘only, “Good old Phoebe”.’

  “We came home just in time!’

  A letter from Joseck arrived the next morning, the letter that he had written describing the goats and the deer and the small cats in the hills.

  ‘What sort of cats?’ wondered Rachel. ‘Lions? Lions are cats.’

  ‘They’re not small, though,’ pointed out Ruth, but Rachel said perhaps Joseck was so used to living in Africa that lions seemed ordinary, like the squirrels in the park did to them. ‘And small,’ she concluded. ‘I’ll write and ask him. He’s my friend too, now. It was my ten pounds.’

  ‘What about me?’ asked Phoebe. ‘What about my train? I was going to send him my train money. I didn’t know that Rachel had gone to rob the Post Office!’

  ‘No one possibly could,’ said Naomi. ‘Only Rachel could think of anything so stupid. Or do something so stupid.’

  ‘It was very brave of me,’ said Rachel. ‘You and Ruth couldn’t think of anything except being sick.’

  ‘There are books in the library on Africa,’ Ruth changed the subject. ‘We could go after school and look up African animals. And he’s our shared friend now, so we’ll all write to him. He’ll be glad to have four, I expect.’

  The library was well stocked with books on Africa, and the girls had four tickets each, so they chose sixteen between them, which left a very large gap in the section.

  That evening, in the gap when Mrs Conroy had gone to work and Mr Conroy had not yet come home, they composed a joint letter to Joseck.

  ‘Let Naomi write it,’ suggested Ruth who was cooking tea for everyone. ‘She’s the neatest.’

  Dear Joseck,

  Now there are four of us. Me and Ruth and Rachel and Phoebe who are our sisters. They are seven and . . .

  ‘Nearly ten,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Nine and two months isn’t nearly ten,’ said Naomi, ‘I’ll put nine.’

  ‘Ask how old Mari is,’ said Ruth.

  Seven and nine, wrote Naomi.

  How old is Mari? Ruth wants to know. She cannot write because she is cooking . . .

  ‘Beans on toast,’ said Rachel happily, ‘tell him that.’

  She is cooking beans on toast. We have got sixteen books about Africa with pictures of deer and cats like you said. Kenya looks so beautiful. Rachel says do you ever see lions? In England it is spring, we have planted seeds and there are lambs where our Big Grandma lives. But no goats.

  ‘Tell him Ruth is burning the bread,’ suggested Phoebe, and Ruth dashed across the room and seized the blackened toast from under the grill.

  Ruth is burning the bread, wrote Naomi obligingly, Rachel is scraping the burnt bits off. It is strange to think this piece of paper is going all the way to Africa and you will read it.

  ‘Why did you put that?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Because it is strange,’ replied Naomi. ‘I can hardly believe it.’

  Love from Ruth and Naomi and Rachel and Phoebe.

  A little baked bean juice got on to the paper as they all signed their names.

  ‘Fancy our baked bean juice going to Africa!’ said Rachel.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Rachel, having watched (from a safe distance) the ceremonial posting of Joseck’s letter.

  ‘Now get thinking,’ said Naomi, ‘because we’ve got to get more money.’

  ‘There’s still Phoebe’s ten pounds. Where are you keeping it, Phoebe?

  ‘In Mrs Collingwood’s cage,’ replied Phoebe, ‘because she’s the richest person I know. I thought she’d be the best at looking after it. You can still get Peter money, can’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps, but he might not last much longer,’ said Ruth gloomily, remembering the scene she had witnessed only the day before. Mrs Collingwood had called her proudly into the kitchen as she returned from borrowing Josh.

  ‘You’ll appreciate this,’ Mrs Collingwood had said, and Ruth had watched in horror as Peter, perfectly clean and civilized, had rammed toast soldiers into a boiled egg, consumed them with only minimal damage to his surroundings, and washed them down with gulps of milk.

  ‘Fascinating, you’ve got to admit,’ said Mrs Collingwood. ‘Well worth going to Italy for. A kind waiter in the hotel trained him!’ She disappeared to answer the phone, and Ruth, with great presence of mind, picked up the empty egg shell and showed Peter how to smash it flat on his tray.

  ‘Good Peter!’ she said, watching as with happy fists, he pounded it to fragments. She felt very guilty as Mrs Collingwood returned to the devastation, especially when Peter beamed at his mother because he had been good. She could see that nothing but the power of speech prevented him from explaining his new accomplishment. Still, she had Joseck and his school to think of; Peter could not be allowed to grow up too quickly.

  ‘What else could I do?’ she asked her sisters. ‘Goodness knows what else that waiter taught him!’

  ‘Peter likes smashing things up,’ said Naomi. ‘It’s kindness really, to show him how. He’ll never have such good chances when he’s grown up.
When are you going back?’

  ‘Thursday after school. Mrs Collingwood said could I amuse him for a couple of hours while she cooks, because they’re having a dinner party.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Naomi, ‘it would be a good idea if every time you went, you taught him something really aggravating to do.’

  ‘No, I can’t do that,’ said Ruth. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. Anyway, he’s learning to talk more every day, he might tell. I’ll just not teach him anything useful, especially not English. Lucky that waiter only spoke Italian to him, so that’s all he’s learned!’

  ‘Italian!’

  ‘Oh yes, he says “hello” and “goodbye” and “thank you” in Italian now!’

  ‘Teach him French,’ said Naomi, inspired. ‘That’ll slow him down a bit, and it would be kind, too. I wish someone had taught me French before I knew any better!’

  It proved to be a very good idea. Ruth, equipped with her French dictionary, spent an energetic and educational evening teaching Peter to count ‘un, deux, trois’, while jumping off the sofa until he was completely breathless, after which they sat down and played Banging Books, a simple game, invented by Peter, during which Ruth opened all his picture books around him and he banged them shut again as loudly and quickly as he could. Ruth could open the books much faster than Peter could shut them, so she always won, but Peter did not seem to mind, and Mrs Collingwood was very grateful, announcing, with apparent satisfaction, that Ruth had obviously worn him out.

  ‘How much did you get?’ asked Rachel when she returned home.

  ‘Two pounds.’

  Rachel held a hand out for the coins and Ruth passed them over as meekly as if her little sister had a right to them.

  ‘Naomi said I could look after the money,’ explained Rachel, reaching down the front of her jumper and producing a small jam jar. ‘I’ve already put our pocket money in. Much safer than the beastly Post Office!’

  ‘What happens if you lose it?’

  ‘Then Naomi will kill me,’ said Rachel matter-of factly, having agreed that part of the arrangement earlier in the day. ‘Is Peter civilized yet?’

  ‘He’s learnt to spit,’ said Ruth happily.

  ‘Good for you!’ said Naomi.

  ‘No, it wasn’t me. It’s another thing he learnt in Italy. They had to teach him because he kept eating the flowers off the tables.’

  ‘You can eat pansies and nasturtiums,’ said Rachel eagerly. ‘Big Grandma told me one day last summer. Pansies are boring but nasturtiums are spicy. You could grow them in those old people’s garden and sell them in bunches to vegetarians like Phoebe.’

  ‘Don’t be daft!’

  ‘I could eat free sample bunches to prove it was possible.’

  ‘It would just prove that you would eat anything; everyone knows that anyway.’

  ‘And we could give Peter bunches of the wrong sorts, not pansies and nasturtiums and he could spit them out.’

  ‘Rachel,’ said Ruth, ‘I’m not being horrible and I do think it was brave of you to rob the Post Office, but I think you’re crackers. Completely. Nuts. Right round the bend.’

  ‘Food is food,’ replied Rachel cheerfully, not at all distressed to hear these familiar opinions repeated, ‘and we need money. Everyone knows you starve to death if you don’t eat things, that’s why they buy food. People pay money for much horribler things than pansies and nasturtiums!’

  ‘School dinners,’ remarked Phoebe.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Naomi, tired of the pointlessness of the discussion, ‘we haven’t got any pansies or nasturtiums. Or school dinners.’

  Late in the night Phoebe awoke. A foot had trodden on her legs. A moment later another foot trod on her stomach, there was a thump, scurrying sounds and then a prolonged shaking of the bed as Rachel heaved her sledge up on to the top bunk and settled herself down around it. Phoebe knew the symptoms. Rachel was going to try to think and Phoebe closed her eyes and stuffed her head under her pillow in order to go to sleep as quickly as possible before she was called upon to help.

  Carefully, Rachel tucked her sledge up with rather more than its fair share of the quilt, and then, comforted by its solid presence, began to order her thoughts. Scuffling through her mind she counted them out.

  ‘Money. Food. Jam jar!’ Yes, there it was, stuffed in a sock, wedged over beside eight of the sixteen books on Africa.

  I really need a double bed, thought Rachel peevishly and wondered how much they cost. Pounds and pounds probably. Suddenly a whole sentence of a thought came into Rachel’s head all at once.

  If I have any money, I spend it on food!

  That was the clue she had been searching for, because not only did she, Rachel, spend her money on food, but so did all her friends. Money burnt holes in their pockets until they had converted it into nourishment and eaten it. All that was necessary in order to become rich, therefore, was to obtain food and sell it to her friends. But Naomi had said they hadn’t any, not even pansies or nasturtiums. Rachel sighed heavily, curled up into the only shape possible between the books and the sledge, and fell asleep.

  ‘Rachel!’

  It was morning and Phoebe was kicking the underside of her mattress to awaken her.

  ‘Rachel! I’ve thought of something!’

  ‘Stop kicking.’

  ‘Wake up! We’ve got to get up and make spare packed lunches!’

  Rachel sat up, furious that Phoebe had produced so casually the idea she had struggled to grasp all night.

  ‘Spare packed lunches!’

  ‘To sell to people at school,’ explained Phoebe proudly, ‘you know, the ones who eat all theirs at break time and then have to beg for bits of other people’s. Like you,’ she added tactlessly.

  There was a long, hurt silence from the top bunk while Rachel considered the advantages and disadvantages of accidentally-on-purpose dropping her sledge on to Phoebe’s head and thus silencing her forever.

  ‘Friday is a brilliant day to start,’ continued Phoebe, unaware of the danger, ‘because of Mum and Dad both having to be at work for eight o’clock. They never have time to think.’

  That was true. That term, Friday had become the day that Mrs Conroy worked a morning shift at the hospital and the day that she was least likely to notice any unusual details of her daughters’ behaviour. She would certainly never notice how many lunches they packed themselves in the morning.

  ‘Have you gone back to sleep?’ asked Phoebe, craning sideways out of bed to look up at Rachel. ‘It’s a brilliant idea, isn’t it? It came to me all in a flash the second I woke up! But it won’t be any good without you,’ continued Phoebe. ‘You always make the best packed lunches.’

  Rachel, who had just balanced her weapon ready for the kill, granted Phoebe a reprieve and pulled it back again. After all, she did make the best packed lunches. It really would be no good at all without her.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, and slithered out of bed.

  Luck was with them that Friday morning.

  ‘Fourteen peanut butter and banana sandwiches, twenty pence each, two pounds eighty,’ Phoebe counted the takings at the end of the day.

  ‘Three hard-boiled eggs, those ones I found in the back of the fridge,’ said Rachel, ‘that’s another thirty pence.’

  ‘Three pounds ten, then. What about the raisins?’

  ‘Eighty pence. Eight handfuls, ten pence each, then the packet was empty.’

  ‘We ought to charge more for raisins next time. Everybody wanted them. Anyway, that’s three pounds ninety. Anything else?’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Rachel, ‘we ate everything else ourselves. Three pounds ninety is brilliant, though. Ruth and Naomi slave for hours for that much!’

  ‘But we won’t tell them yet,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘No,’ said Rachel.

  The difficulties began on Monday. Many were the complaints when lunch-time came round and Rachel and Phoebe’s hungry class-mates, having confidently consumed their own lunches earlier in
the day, arrived for further supplies and discovered that they did not exist.

  ‘We didn’t say we’d be doing it every day,’ argued Rachel, chewing up her own packed lunch so fast she nearly choked.

  ‘Just some days,’ agreed Phoebe.

  ‘Which ones, then?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. Fridays probably.’

  ‘Not any other day?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘Well, what are we supposed to do now?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Rachel, beginning her apple.

  One particularly round and earnest child tried to reason with them.

  ‘But I ate all my lunch on the way to school. Straight after breakfast, before nine o’clock. It isn’t actually possible for me to survive until tea-time. I’ll faint.’

  ‘You won’t,’ said Phoebe unmoved. ‘Rachel often eats her lunch on the way to school and she never faints.’

  ‘But she’s used to it,’ persisted the Earnest One, and went away, unconsoled, even by the free gift of two mints and Rachel’s apple core.

  ‘We’ll have to try and bring something tomorrow,’ remarked Phoebe as they walked home that night. ‘It’s a waste of good customers, not having anything to sell them.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ said the Earnest One, who was dogging their footsteps, presumably in the hope that they would drop a crust of bread. ‘I didn’t faint but I feel very, very ill and weak!’

  ‘Well, we’ll bring something tomorrow,’ promised Phoebe, thinking that he really did look ill and weak, and trying to remember what he had looked like in the past, before she had starved him.

  ‘Definitely?’

  ‘Definitely,’ agreed Phoebe, despite her sister’s dubious expression.

  ‘We can’t really promise,’ said Rachel as the Earnest One left them and staggered feebly through his front gate.

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ said Phoebe cheerfully, and the next morning produced from under her bed a sticky bag of marmalade sandwiches, constructed secretly in the middle of the night.

  ‘They’re all squidged up,’ said Rachel, inspecting them critically.

  ‘No one will care,’ replied Phoebe airily. ‘Look how hungry they all were yesterday!’ The Earnest One reinforced her confidence by coming up to her with an anxious expression and informing her that he had eaten his lunch again and she’d better have brought something good.