The Exiles at Home

by Hilary McKay

  ‘But we can’t do it for much longer,’ said Ruth, worriedly. ‘We ought to be earning money.’

  ‘How?’ asked Naomi bleakly. ‘Babysitting was the last way we had, and now Peter’s ruined it. I couldn’t sell the books. There’s no one to ask. We’ll have to give up.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  Ruth’s mind went round and round. ‘If . . . if . . . we sold things at school.’

  ‘Packed lunches?’ asked Naomi, bitterly. ‘That didn’t work.’

  ‘Homework answers! If we did people’s homework . . .’

  ‘Oh Ruth! We don’t do our own!’

  ‘If we asked for school dinners instead of packed lunches, and kept the money instead?’

  Naomi groaned.

  ‘If we could borrow it from Mum without telling her. Or Dad.’

  ‘No,’ said Naomi.

  ‘No. I know.’

  It was hopeless.

  They were not the only ones miserable. Rachel had started sleeping with her sledge again. Phoebe, after having totally ignored the subject for two days, marched up to Naomi one night and demanded, ‘Is Emma really dead?’

  ‘You know she is,’ Naomi told her, and she had not replied, but later on Mrs Conroy had noticed a change in Phoebe’s zoo. The inmates who had languished there for so many months had all been released. Instead, every cage was littered with slips of paper. Emma’s name was on all of them.

  ‘Why, Phoebe?’ Mrs Conroy had asked.

  ‘Because she’s dead,’ said Phoebe, furious, but unable to find the words to explain that as far as she was concerned Emma had deserted her, left her friend to cope alone, vanished in the middle of an argument, died without a word of explanation or farewell.

  Phoebe, with no intention of letting her escape so easily, put her in the zoo, and Mrs Conroy found her there and threw all the cages away and cried again. Phoebe did not cry. She went to her father, who asked, ‘What can I do to help you, Phoebe?’

  ‘Give me five pounds,’ said Phoebe, suddenly remembering something that really would help.

  It was not the answer her father had expected, but he tried to understand.

  ‘To buy something for Toby?’

  Phoebe shook her head.

  ‘What then?’ he asked, wondering if she’d heard talk of funerals at school. ‘Flowers for Emma?’

  ‘She’s had flowers,’ said Phoebe. ‘She’s had flowers all summer. She still went and died.’ Tears were running down Phoebe’s cheeks now. ‘The mean pig!’ said Phoebe.

  ‘Phoebe!’

  ‘You are all mean pigs,’ said Phoebe, and stamped upstairs, converted her slipper into a temporary cage and put her father in it.

  ‘I wish their grandmother was here,’ said Mr Conroy. ‘She might make more sense of them than we can.’

  Mrs Conroy said it was just plain naughtiness on Phoebe’s part, but when on Tuesday night, Rachel appeared in her parents’ bedroom, tear-stained and miserable, and asking not for comfort, as her mother had hoped, but for an advance on their pocket money with no questions asked, she realised it was something more. On Wednesday, when a phone call revealed that Ruth and Naomi had not been at school all week, she remembered Mr Conroy’s wise words about their grandmother and rang and asked for help.

  That was how, when Ruth, Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe came home on Friday night, an astonishing sight met their eyes. Hands on hips, gazing sternly down the road at them, stood a battered old lady.

  ‘Big Grandma!’ they shrieked, and broke into a run.

  ‘Big Grandma indeed!’ snapped Big Grandma, as they reached her. ‘I think you people have some explaining to do!’

  ‘Oh Big Grandma!’ Rachel hugged her round her iron waist.

  ‘Why did you come?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘To save your poor mother from madness,’ replied Big Grandma. ‘Go on, Phoebe! Ask me, I’m waiting. How much?’

  ‘Five pounds, please,’ replied Phoebe meekly, ‘we’ve got the other five already.’

  Silently Big Grandma handed her the money. Rachel plunged her hand down her front and extracted a jam jar of coins, Naomi dashed inside and returned with an envelope, and Ruth, seizing jam jar, envelope and five pound note, sprinted away round the corner to the Post Office. She returned a few minutes later, out of breath but smiling with relief.

  ‘Happy now?’ asked Big Grandma sarcastically, ‘or just happy until November? What do you plan to do then?’

  ‘Naomi’s birthday’s in November,’ said Rachel, ‘birthday money.’

  ‘Out of interest,’ said Big Grandma, ‘what would you have done had I’d not turned up this evening and bailed you out?’

  ‘Trick or Treat, or early carol singing,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘No we wouldn’t,’ said Naomi.

  ‘We could have done sledge rides, I thought,’ said Rachel, ‘only there isn’t any snow.’

  Ruth and Naomi said nothing.

  ‘I must say,’ remarked Big Grandma, ‘it’s obviously a very good job I came when I did! However, put it all behind you! There’s a reception committee waiting to cross-question you indoors.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your mother, as chief (and most indignant) sufferer; your father, home early from work on purpose; Mrs Collingwood in the dual capacity of Emma’s solicitor and unwilling victim of your ingenuity, one of many I might add; and myself as interested bystander!’

  ‘Now what have we done?’ demanded Naomi.

  ‘You may well ask,’ said Big Grandma.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong for ages,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No, neither have I,’ protested Phoebe, as she was propelled inside. ‘There’s nothing wrong with putting people in zoos when they act like they’re friends and then go and die.’

  ‘My poor sausage!’ said Mrs Collingwood, hearing this remark and catching sight of Phoebe’s unhappy face. ‘My poor sausage, come here!’

  Rachel, who had rushed upstairs for her sledge, came back into the room, holding it like a shield and remarked, ‘No one calls me a poor sausage, and I haven’t done anything wrong, except what other people made me do and I did it to be kind, and now I’m in trouble! I don’t think it’s fair!’ She positioned her sledge like a wall and got down behind it.

  ‘Nobody is in trouble,’ Mrs Conroy said. ‘Well, that’s not true. You’ve all been very silly. Why on earth didn’t you tell us about this boy in Africa?’

  ‘How do you know about him?’ Ruth and Naomi spoke together.

  ‘Your grandmother seems to have guessed a lot,’ replied their mother, ‘and anyway, Emma told Mrs Collingwood.’

  ‘Emma told?’ asked Phoebe furiously. ‘Good job she’s dead then, I say!’

  ‘Phoebe!’ exclaimed Mrs Conroy, and then, seeing the tears running down Phoebe’s face, put an arm round her.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Ruth bravely, ‘it was all my fault. We couldn’t tell you at first because I put that I was eighteen when I wasn’t. And then we did other things to get the money that we couldn’t tell you either . . .’

  ‘Only robbing the Post Office once,’ said Rachel sulkily.

  ‘And selling sandwiches made in a dog kennel,’ said Mrs Conroy, ‘and being street artists, for goodness sake! And you should never have tried to sell those books, Naomi, and you knew it. And poor Mrs Collingwood, Ruth. It’s very irresponsible to teach babies bad habits!’

  ‘I didn’t want him to grow up too quickly,’ said Ruth, ‘so that he wouldn’t need me to look after him any more, because I needed the money for Joseck.’

  ‘We couldn’t charge Toby and Emma, you see,’ said Naomi. ‘We thought at first we could, but soon we couldn’t. They were too kind.’

  ‘Kind!’ growled Phoebe. ‘Emma told!’

  ‘Emma had to tell me,’ explained Mrs Collingwood, ‘because I was her solicitor . . .’

  ‘And because she’s . . .’

  ‘Hang on, Phoebe,’ said Mrs Collingwood, ‘because I was her solicitor an
d she wanted to give some money to your friend in Kenya . . .’

  ‘Emma hadn’t got any money,’ said Ruth. ‘Neither has Toby. They’re as poor as poor; you should see where they live.’

  ‘Toby and Emma asked to see me,’ continued Mrs Collingwood patiently, ‘and because you’d been their friends and given them such a lovely summer, and they knew you needed money. Emma and Toby have, had I should say, although Toby still has of course, quite a lot of money. They sold a farm, you know. But they never had children and they were very lonely. It made a lot of difference you being there and making such friends with them. You stopped them feeling so old.’

  ‘Being old isn’t any excuse for anything,’ said Phoebe, ‘especially sneaking!’

  ‘Emma asked to see me not very long ago,’ Mrs Collingwood continued, ‘and I helped her make a new will, where she left enough money to see Joseck through his school years and to start him off a little afterwards. She said she owed you that much for the summer in the garden.’

  Great silence fell.

  It lasted for a long time; longer than any silence that had ever happened in that crowded house.

  ‘Enough for Joseck to stay at school?’ asked Naomi, at last, and she looked at Ruth, and Ruth looked at her, and suddenly they also had tears rolling down their cheeks.

  ‘Is it true?’ whispered Rachel.

  ‘Is that why she sneaked?’ asked Phoebe.

  ‘Yes, it’s true and that’s why she sneaked,’ Mrs Collingwood told them, ‘so don’t be sad, Phoebe; she didn’t stop being your friend. That was her way of helping you. And . . .’

  She paused, and then went on. ‘She left a little bit of money for you girls, too.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘For adventures,’ she said. ‘Emma liked adventures. She told me she was one of the first . . .’

  ‘Girl Guides,’ said Ruth, half smiling, half crying. ‘Does Toby know all this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can he come here at Christmas so he’s not on his own?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘What a good idea,’ said her father.

  ‘He might like Peter,’ said Ruth. ‘Peter might make him laugh.’ She looked hopefully at Mrs Collingwood, who said at once, ‘You can introduce them, Ruth, as soon as ever you like.’

  ‘Joseck wants to be a doctor,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Perhaps Emma’s help will make that easier for him now,’ said Mrs Conroy. ‘Emma, and you girls. You silly girls . . . not always silly . . . Tea!’ she said, suddenly, ‘I’ll make some tea,’ and she blew her nose in the kitchen.

  Ruth also jumped to her feet. ‘We’ve got his photograph,’ she said, and went to fetch it, and the letters too, and Naomi followed after her and came back with the atlas and all the books about Africa they kept borrowing from the library.

  ‘Tomorrow I must write to him,’ said Mrs Collingwood. ‘And to his parents as well.’

  ‘So will we,’ said Ruth, ‘and one day, perhaps . . .’

  ‘We can visit,’ said Phoebe, ‘and see Mari, and all the goats on the roof.’

  ‘I’ll take my sledge,’ said Rachel, nodding.

  ‘There’s a bus from Nairobi that goes right past the school,’ remembered Naomi. ‘But we’d have to get passports, and anyway we can’t go now, we’ve got to look after Toby.’

  ‘And Peter,’ said Mrs Collingwood, smiling at Ruth.

  ‘And go back to school,’ said Big Grandma. ‘And try and learn a little sense!’

  ‘Yes, but one day,’ said Ruth, ‘Martin won’t have to wait the bus for us, and the driver won’t have to grumble and Egg-Yolk Wendy will be struck dumb with shock because we’ll have gone to have adventures. Proper real adventures, like the sort they have in books.’

  My friends Ruth, Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe,

  I am so happy . . .

  Turn the page for an extract from

  The Exiles in Love

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ruth was the eldest of the Conroy girls. In a few weeks’ time she would be fifteen. ‘I used to think that fifteen would be nearly grown up,’ said her sister Naomi, ‘until you started being it.’ Ruth knew exactly what she meant; she felt the same way herself and she thought the strangest thing about being so old was the fact that it made no difference at all. She was no more self-confident, or organised, or magically in charge of her emotions than she had been in the past. Nothing had changed; she was the same muddle-headed person she had always been, forever swinging between happiness and despair, never doing the right thing at quite the right moment. Naomi, eighteen months younger and two years behind her at school, had far more common sense.

  Naomi was brainy, and a much more private person than Ruth. While Ruth either dreamed of miracles or expected the worst, Naomi took a more detached view of life. She and Ruth were very good allies; they understood each other. They read the same books, liked the same friends, detested the same enemies and managed to share a bedroom and yet remain on speaking terms most of the time. They endured with courage their little sisters Rachel and Phoebe.

  ‘Although they really are insane,’ remarked Ruth gloomily.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ said her mother, although secretly thinking that Ruth had a point. ‘Phoebe has been top of her class since the day she started school!’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with whether she’s bonkers or not,’ observed Naomi.

  ‘And Rachel’s teacher says she is a “good average”,’ continued Mrs Conroy. ‘And should be encouraged.’

  Rachel was ten. Her latest preoccupation was What They Ate in Books. She had dreams of munching her way through literature.

  ‘After all, it’s really quite an original approach to reading!’ said Mrs Jones, Rachel’s class teacher, at the annual parents’ evening. ‘And it can’t be easy for her. All those clever sisters, not to mention Phoebe coming up behind!’

  Mrs Conroy sighed a little.

  ‘I wish I had more ordinary daughters,’ she remarked. ‘I should never have taught them to read so early.’

  ‘Early reading is an absolutely splendid achievement!’ Mrs Jones assured her. ‘Absolutely splendid! Dramatically broadens their horizons!’

  Mrs Conroy went home and looked at her daughters. Their horizons seemed dramatically narrow. There was Ruth, dripping with tears over Little Women (which she must have read a hundred times before). There was Naomi, droning aloud snatches of the poems of Housman.

  ‘I’m sure they’re not suitable for a girl of thirteen,’ protested Mrs Conroy.

  ‘Thirteen and a half,’ said Naomi, ‘and school think they’re suitable. We did the “cherry hung with snow” one in English literature before the teacher ran away with the French assistant. Listen!’ And she read aloud with great enjoyment:

  ‘Before this fire of sense decay,

  This smoke of thought blow clean away,

  And leave with ancient night alone,

  The steadfast and enduring bone.’

  ‘Very morbid and exaggerated and I’m sure you can’t understand a word of it!’ said Mrs Conroy, and turned away, and there was Phoebe, who at the age of eight read nothing but stories where teenage girl sleuths drove beautiful cars and wore mysterious dark glasses and never had to go to school.

  Last of all, there was Rachel.

  ‘Not bonkers!’ Mrs Conroy told herself firmly.

  ‘What’s fat salt pork?’ asked Rachel, looking up from her book. ‘They seem to eat a lot of it here.’

  She held up Little House on the Prairie to show the book she meant.

  ‘They eat it with beans,’ she continued. ‘How was the parents’ evening? Did Mrs Jones say nice things about me?’

  ‘Why ever shouldn’t she?’ asked Mrs Conroy evasively.

  Rachel and Phoebe both went to the same junior school. Ruth and Naomi attended the local comprehensive, travelling by school bus. It was just on the point of leaving for home one April afternoon when Ruth, tearstained, dishevelled and breathless, scrabbled aboard.


  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had cookery again,’ remarked Naomi, as Ruth flopped down beside her, and she regarded her sister’s wicker cookery basket with suspicion and disgust. ‘We’ve only just got through the last lot.’

  Ruth didn’t reply. She sat silently clutching her basket, hunched against the motion of the bus.

  ‘If it’s more fish pie,’ said Naomi, ‘I can’t bear it. I shall turn vegetarian like Phoebe.’

  Waste not, want not was a very firm policy in the Conroy household. If it was food, it was eaten, and that was that. So far the results of Ruth’s cookery lessons had been counted as food.

  ‘It isn’t anything like that,’ said Ruth, holding her basket even more tightly and fumbling in her blazer pocket for something to wipe her nose on.

  Naomi raised a corner of the basket’s plastic cover, peered inside, and then jumped back in alarm.

  ‘What on earth is it?’ she demanded. ‘It looks like a squashed hedgehog!’

  ‘Leave it alone!’ snapped Ruth.

  ‘It was Simple Cottage Rolls today,’ someone from Ruth’s class told Naomi helpfully.

  The smell that had arisen from Ruth’s basket when Naomi lifted the cover was not that of simple cottage rolls. It was a sweetish, rankish, rancidish smell. A hedgehoggy smell.

  ‘Let me look again,’ said Naomi. ‘Let me look properly. It’s only fair if I’ve got to eat it.’

  Ruth gave in. After all, Naomi would have to know sometime or other. Gently she uncovered the contents of her basket enough to allow her sister to look again.

  It was a squashed hedgehog.

  ‘Don’t frighten it,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Isn’t it dead, then?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s just curled up. But a car’s hit it; there’s blood on some of its spines. I found it in the gutter by the school gates.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Afternoon break.’

  ‘Where’s it been since then?’

  ‘In my cookery basket.’

  ‘What did you do with the rolls you made, then?’

  ‘Chucked them away.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ said Naomi with relief.

  The whole bus had been quiet while people eavesdropped on this conversation, but now it erupted into a torrent of noise. Squashed hedgehog jokes were called from seat to seat and there were loud predictions about the agility and appetite of the invalid’s fleas. Ruth was assailed by shouts of advice, compliments on the sudden improvement of her cooking skills, squeals of disgust and wails of sympathy. Wendy, the girl who always knew everything, hung over the back of her seat to tell them the name of a vet to whom she had once taken a squashed hedgehog herself.