The Exiles at Home

by Hilary McKay

  Sometimes Ruth worried about Phoebe’s treatment of Emma.

  ‘You shouldn’t joggle her like that!

  It’s rude and she’s old!’ ‘It’s rude to go to sleep when people are talking to you,’ pointed out Phoebe. ‘I don’t joggle hard. Anyway, she wanted to be awake. She was choosing more people to put in my zoo.’

  Emma had taken immediately to the idea of Phoebe’s zoo, and had more or less enrolled as a sort of underkeeper. Phoebe had constructed a cage for her which she kept in the shed. Lately, Phoebe and Emma had spent a great deal of time together in the shed, looking at library books about Africa and discussing their captives.

  ‘What sort of people does she put in there?’ asked Ruth curiously.

  ‘Mostly dead ones,’ said Phoebe. ‘She doesn’t draw pictures, though. She just writes their names on bits of paper and pushes them through the bars.’

  Ruth knew better than to comment on this practice, and merely remarked, ‘Well, don’t wear her out, anyway. Come on, it’s time to go home; Toby’s paid Naomi.’

  They met Naomi at the garden gate, looking far from happy. It had been very hard to take Toby’s money that afternoon, especially as he had also given them chocolate bars and orangeade, a bag of apples and the parrot’s old cage, in case they ever got a parrot. In the end, Naomi had settled for half the amount offered.

  ‘What about yon lad in Africa?’ Toby had asked, as Naomi dug her hands in her pockets and shook her head.

  ‘We’ve plenty for him,’ said Rachel cheerfully, and patted her stomach so that Toby could hear the jam jar rattle.

  ‘Certain?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Naomi, although she was far from certain. ‘Anyway, we only came to look at the garden and to see you. We’ve done hardly any work.’

  ‘You’ve done more than you know,’ said Toby. ‘Ay well, we’ll settle up one day.’

  ‘What about Joseck, though?’ asked Ruth as they walked home. ‘We’ve only got six pounds and it ought to be posted by the weekend.’

  Rachel and Phoebe glanced smugly at each other, and later that evening produced ten pounds in silver and coppers.

  ‘We earned it,’ said Phoebe casually.

  ‘How?’ demanded Naomi, and when they would not say, she glared very hard at Rachel and asked, ‘Legally?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Rachel and Phoebe together, who honestly believed that it was legal to manufacture sandwiches out of stolen property in a dog kennel and then sell them to school children.

  Ruth took the money very doubtfully, and purchased a ten pound postal order with some concern, although she could hardly believe that Rachel would have found the courage to rob the Post Office twice. It appeared that she had not; nothing happened when she went in, except that Rachel’s cashier threw his hands up into the air and shouted that he surrendered, but then he did that every time a Conroy girl entered, so it was not unusual. Rachel’s sisters were beginning to be extremely tired of the joke, but felt in no position to complain.

  ‘We do need another way of getting money, though,’ Naomi remarked that night.

  ‘I know, I’m trying to think of one.’

  Ruth fell asleep still trying, and it was not until her class trip to London that inspiration finally arrived. She came home exhausted, dirty, and glowing.

  ‘Artists were drawing pictures, just in the streets,’ she told Naomi, ‘and people were giving them money! Paying!’

  ‘In the streets?’ asked Naomi, going cold with dread.

  ‘On the streets,’ said Ruth, ‘on the paving stones! Chalks and pastels mostly. People stopped to look and put money in their tins or hats or chalk boxes!’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Naomi in horror. ‘Anyway, it’s begging!’

  ‘’Course it isn’t!’

  ‘I bet it’s against the law.’

  ‘They were doing it in London,’ said Ruth fanatically, ‘policemen everywhere. It can’t be.’

  ‘Anyway, I can’t draw.’

  ‘I can. And you could colour in.’

  ‘I won’t. It’s a terrible idea. It’s worse than robbing the Post Office. Someone might see us! Anything!’

  ‘People are meant to see,’ said Ruth, and Naomi recognised a familiar note of madness in her voice. Ruth, usually the sanest of them all, occasionally flipped. At such times she was not to be reasoned with; the only thing to do was to wait until the phase was over and then deal as best as possible with the consequences.

  ‘I’m not colouring in,’ said Naomi. ‘I’m not doing anything to help. I’m not coming near you. I think you’re mad. And you can do it in disguise, so that no one knows you’re my sister!’

  ‘Will you help me with the disguise?’

  ‘All right,’ said Naomi begrudgingly.

  For the first time in her life, Naomi prayed for rain. She prayed that it would rain all summer, from the first day of the holidays to the last, excluding the two weeks they were to spend in Cumbria with Big Grandma. During the first week of the holidays, it seemed that her prayers would be answered. It poured and poured; the pavements streamed with water. It was the sort of weather to make any hopeful street artist search for an alternative career, but Naomi was disturbed to see that Ruth’s ambitions remained undampened.

  ‘It will wash the pavements clean,’ she remarked, and went out into the down-pour to locate a suitable site for her efforts. Naomi refused to go with her and told Ruth quite frankly that she hoped she caught pneumonia, but Ruth returned home triumphant.

  ‘There’s a beautiful patch of clean paving stones right outside the church,’ she announced. ‘Just right, and miles away from the market and you know that’s where all the policemen lurk about. We’ll be quite safe.’

  ‘What d’you mean, “we”?’ demanded Naomi. ‘You needn’t think I’ll be there, because I won’t.’

  ‘I think I’d better start practising pictures,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Guard the door!’ said Ruth, and began rolling back their bedroom carpet.

  ’You’re crazy,’ said Naomi, but guarded the door while Ruth drew the local church, Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ and Tigger from Winnie the Pooh on the bedroom floor-boards.

  ‘Look at all the chalk you’re using up!’

  ‘I bought stacks,’ replied Ruth. ‘I spent all my pocket and Peter money.’

  ‘What an awful waste!’

  Ruth didn’t bother to argue. The next day she rubbed out the sunflowers, church and Tigger, and drew a beautiful parrot and the Prime Minister’s head and shoulders in black and white.

  ‘Isn’t it cheating to copy out of newspapers?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘They were doing it in London,’ replied Ruth, not looking up and printing ‘COUNTRY CRASHES!’ very neatly under the picture of the Prime Minister.

  ‘What’ll you do if it rains all summer?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘The weather forecast says it’ll be dry by the end of the week.’

  Naomi looked very depressed and went on a mysterious trip to Toby and Emma’s. She returned with a bulging carrier bag of old clothes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Disguise,’ said Naomi briefly.

  A long letter from Joseck arrived. He wrote that he was well and very happy to have four friends in England. He told them that when he took their letter home, there was his mother, cooking beans and bread for supper, just like Ruth. He had read the letter to his family and his mother had laughed and said she did not burn the bread and his father said tell your friend Rachel that his friend saw two lions cross the road only a few evenings ago. He wrote that Mari was seven years old and made everybody laugh.

  Then he wrote that from the school window he could see the bus from Nairobi coming along the road and that it had stopped outside the school and four people climbed out and Joseck had a thought that it might be his friends from England, although he knew all the time that really it was not.

  Naomi sighed. Ten pounds a month were hard enough to find, never mind air
fares to Nairobi.

  ‘Have you and Phoebe got any more money?’ she asked Rachel. ‘We’ll need to send another ten pounds before we go to Big Grandma’s.’

  Rachel and Phoebe shook their heads. The Homemade Spare Packed Lunch business had been temporarily closed when term ended.

  ‘Ruth’s going to get some,’ said Phoebe. ‘She told me she’s found an easy way!’

  ‘Easy!’ snorted Naomi.

  ‘Easier than looking after Peter, I think she meant. She wouldn’t tell us what it was, though.’

  Rachel remarked that she hated secrets and that she wished she knew what Ruth was planning and Naomi thought privately that Rachel was lucky. She wished she didn’t know, and she wished it even more the next morning when Ruth’s bed was found empty and Ruth herself could not be discovered anywhere.

  ‘Well at least she had something to eat before she went out,’ Mrs Conroy said, and she looked crossly at the crumbs all over the breadboard, the jammy butter and the bottle of spilt milk.

  ‘Perhaps she got hungry in the night,’ suggested Rachel, but Mrs Conroy said no, that was the morning’s milk spilt all over the table. Certain clothes, an enormous straw hat and a greenish-greyish old mac of Emma’s had disappeared from Naomi’s supply of disguises. Naomi noted this fact with mingled horror and relief and told herself that it was none of her business.

  Outside the church, in the early morning sunshine, the Owl and the Pussy Cat, Hey Diddle Diddle, the Prime Minister, a stained-glass window and Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ already brightened the paving stones. A small shabby figure rested contentedly beside these glories, eating chalk, jam sandwiches and dirt in about equal quantities. Beside her, also eating a jam sandwich, stood the lanky figure of the vicar. He was admiring the design of the stained-glass window.

  ‘It’s the animals in the ark,’ explained Ruth. ‘I thought I’d do something religious because of the church.’

  ‘Please don’t get into trouble,’ said the vicar.

  ‘I’ve got old clothes on,’ said Ruth cheerfully.

  ‘I didn’t mean that . . . Well, I shall be in and out of the church. Come and find me if you need to. Really I shouldn’t encourage you, but good luck,’ and the vicar dropped fifty pence on to the tigers in the ark and disappeared into the church.

  For some time Ruth earned no more. People passing by the church on their way to the market square stopped to admire the pictures, but no one seemed to think they ought to pay for the privilege. After a while Ruth realized that they needed somewhere to put their money, and took off her hat. She started it off with the vicar’s fifty pence and a couple of pennies of her own. Soon a steady trickle of money began to fall in it.

  This worked until a small scruffy man in an old-fashioned hat and sunglasses walked very close to her, dropped a penny on to the picture of the cow jumping over the moon, and hissed, ‘Put your hat on!’

  He had such a familiar voice that Ruth looked up.

  ‘Put your hat on!’

  The little old man shuffled off, sat down on the churchyard wall and glared at Ruth. Despite the heat of the day, he wore a long overcoat and a scarf wound round his face, almost to his eyes. Wellington boots came up to the hem of his coat. Ruth was so sure that she knew who he was, that she left her pictures and sat down on the wall beside him. Immediately he leapt to his feet and hurried away.

  At that moment a woman walked straight across the Prime Minister’s face, said, ‘Sorry, duck!’ and dropped twenty pence into the straw hat. The vicar came out and asked, ‘Everything all right? No trouble from anyone?’ and by the time Ruth had retrieved her money and assured him that everything was fine, the little man from the church wall had gone away.

  It seemed he had not gone far, however; he reappeared half an hour later and dropped a bar of nut chocolate on the man in the moon. Stuck into the wrapper was a note. ‘Put your hat on. And your coat. Egg-Yolk Wendy and Gavin coming this way.’

  ‘Naomi!’ exclaimed Ruth and the little man nearly jumped out of his skin.

  ‘Don’t shout my name! And you’re supposed to be in disguise! And rub that out!’ Naomi pointed a wellington boot to where her sister had signed her name across the paving stones.

  ‘Do you think it’s too vain?’ asked Ruth earnestly, and found she was suddenly talking to empty space. Naomi had leapt nimbly over the churchyard wall and been replaced by a very familiar pushchair.

  ‘Good dog!’ said a loud and friendly voice.

  ‘Bad news!’ announced Mrs Collingwood cheerfully. ‘Awfully sorry but you’re breaking the law, Ruth! Policeman approaching from the right! Vicar approaching from the church, peculiar little man hovering in the background! Time to stop, I’m afraid.’

  Her voice was like sudden cold water on Ruth’s dreaming head. All at once she awoke from the week’s madness and saw the pavement of pictures, the policeman from the market threading his way towards her, the vicar hesitating on the path, and Mrs Collingwood’s face. It bore the expression of exasperated cheerfulness that she usually reserved for late-night telephone calls from her clients at the police station. Ruth also noticed that Mrs Collingwood had thoughtfully parked Peter on the greater part of her signature, and was busy scuffing out the end she was standing on.

  ‘Awfully silly to sign your name,’ she remarked.

  ‘That’s what I said!’ Naomi, hat even lower and scarf even higher, suddenly reappeared between them. ‘Give me your money! Stuff it in this bag!’

  ‘Good gracious!’ said Mrs Collingwood.

  ‘Quick, before that policeman gets here!’

  It was almost too late. Even as Ruth transferred the last handful of change to the little man’s bag, the policeman arrived beside her. Hastily the little man jumped the churchyard wall, dodged the vicar and sprinted across the gravestones. As he ran, he shed his hat and scarf, dropped his glasses and abandoned his coat. Before he was out of sight, he had transformed into Naomi, hurrying across the market place in wellington boots.

  ‘That someone you know?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ruth.

  Mrs Collingwood, to cheer Ruth up, informed her that she was the dirtiest person ever to enter her bath-tub.

  ‘Impressive, you’ve got to admit,’ she said, ‘when you think of my husband after rugby, or Martin after football, or Peter!’

  Ruth looked completely uncheered.

  ‘Well, we can’t go and talk to your mother with you looking like that! You know I had to promise I’d mention it to her. It all looked so odd; not just the pictures, but Naomi’s clothes, and her running off like she did and the silly old vicar, offering to witness you’d been robbed!’

  ‘S’pose he was only trying to help.’

  ‘Lucky the policeman recognised me, and that poor old Peter was sick when he was! I wish I’d noticed him with that chalk. It may have been non-toxic, but it was a very nasty shade of blue!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll play it down to your mother,’ said Mrs Collingwood reassuringly. ‘Don’t look so upset!’

  Play it down as she might, Mrs Collingwood could not hide the fact that Ruth had been discovered drawing pictures in the street for money and had been ordered to desist from this rash enterprise by . . .

  ‘A very pleasant man,’ said Mrs Collingwood. ‘I’ve dealt with him before. Very practical! A charming . . .’

  ‘Policeman,’ finished Mrs Conroy, who knew too well the pleasant practical men her neighbour usually dealt with. She was very angry with Ruth.

  ‘So did she do it?’ Rachel asked cheerfully that night.

  ‘Who do what?’

  ‘Ruth. Get that easy money for Joseck?’

  There was a long silence while Naomi considered the day and Rachel gazed at her expectantly.

  ‘Well, she got it,’ said Naomi eventually, ‘but it wasn’t easy.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  The week before they were due to leave for Cumbria, the weather turned damp and dismal and the Conroy hous
e seemed even smaller than usual. Smaller and full of suspicious glances. Mrs Conroy was keeping a close eye on her daughters, and no sooner did they disappear into their bedrooms in furtive twos and threes, than she routed them out again and found them jobs to do. Their reply to Joseck’s letter was written in Toby and Emma’s potting shed, the only private place they could find. Emma appeared in the doorway not long after they began. ‘Saw you was here,’ she remarked, sinking down on to the garden chair Ruth pushed towards her.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Why should I? What you doing?’

  ‘Writing to Joseck in Africa.’

  ‘Have you told him you’ll be there one day?’

  ‘We never could. It would cost hundreds of pounds.’

  ‘In an aeroplane,’ said Rachel. ‘How do they stay up? What if it didn’t? They don’t give you parachutes. I asked Martin, and he told me.’

  ‘Scared?’ asked Emma, sounding surprised and shoving a new piece of paper through the bars of her zoo. ‘I’ve never been scared of nothing. You put that in for me! My hands are shaking!’

  Ruth took the slip of paper, and threaded it through the bars.

  ‘Getting crowded,’ she commented.

  ‘Their problem,’ said Emma. ‘Anyway, I’m getting back. That was all I come for. You say hello to that boy for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Naomi inspected the envelope. ‘I would but I’ve just licked it up and it’s stuck. We will next time.’

  ‘Say it when you get there,’ said Emma, and she wandered back to the house.

  ‘Get there!’ said Naomi rather crossly. ‘It’s practically impossible even to get the ten pounds every month!’

  ‘Mum’s awfully mad with Ruth,’ remarked Rachel.

  ‘She’s mad with all of us,’ said Ruth. ‘She hasn’t got over you robbing the Post Office yet, or Phoebe smashing her train. It’s not just me. I think we ought to try and not show up very much for a while.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just be there,’ said Ruth, ‘but not do anything that anyone would notice.’