Now it’s night. No stars. Mist is hanging in the street. Frost is glittering. “IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE SPRING!” I want to yell. “SO GET LOST, FROST!”
An owl hoots, from the direction of Mr. Myers’s house. It hoots again, and something hoots in answer.
Owls. I feel so close to them. I share a home with them.
“Good night, owls,” I whisper. “I’ll write your story tomorrow.”
Hoot. Hoot hoot hoot.
Mina’s mother’s father was a seaman. Ever since he was a young man, he had sailed the world. He had been everywhere, to so many exotic-sounding places with such exotic-sounding names: Santiago, San Francisco, Cairo, Casablanca, Java, Buenos Aires, Fiji, Honduras, Tokyo, Reykjavik, Manila, Singapore, Bangkok, Abu Dhabi, Hanoi … The list could go on forever – or for as long as a list of exotic places could last.
Mina remembered getting postcards from those places when she was a tiny girl. Her grandpa traveled so much that Mina only met him a few times. She remembered a busy and funny man with a big laugh and skin the color of hazelnuts. She remembered his stories about the lions and tigers and crocodiles he’s fought in distant jungles, the whales he’d swum with, the whirlpools he’d escaped from, the treasure he’d discovered in sunken galleons. He said he’d bring back a treasure chest for her one day. He said he’d bring her a monkey. Even then, she knew the tales and promises were made up. She knew, for instance, that lions don’t live in jungles. But she did kind of hope that the tale about the monkey might come true!
He always said he’d stop traveling, that he’d retire and return to the house he had on Crow Road, but Mina’s mum knew that he never would. He went on sailing long beyond the time he could have stopped. He ended up doing trips in little sailing boats for tourists in the Indian Ocean. In his last postcard, he said he would be back very soon. He also said that he was looking for the right kind of monkey. He also said that he was in Paradise.
When he died he was buried at sea, in the Indian Ocean at dusk.
In his will, he left everything to Mina’s mum, but said the house on Crow Road should go to Mina when she became twenty-one. He said she was “the little girl that I have carried in my heart across the seven seas.” Mina liked that thought, that while she was at home in Falconer Road, she was also traveling around the exotic places of the world.
Inside the will, there was a folded note with her name written on it. It said:
P.S. Remember: It’s just a house. Don’t get stuck in it. Be free. Travel the world.
P.P.S. Sorry about the monkey!
P.P.P.S. Sorry we didn’t get to see each other much.
P.P.P.P.S. Live your life.
P.P.P.P.P.S. The World is Paradise.
P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Sorry I died (which I must have done as you’re reading this!).
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Bye-bye. Lots of love, Grandpa.
Mina had hardly been in the house until then. It was a big three-story place on Crow Road near the park. Mum had been born in it, but had no memories of living in it. When she was three, her dad started his traveling, and she moved with her mum to a smaller house, and grew up there.
The big house was never sold. Mum said it was always there as a reminder that her dad might come back again and settle down, even though she and her mum knew in their hearts that he never would.
“Did Grandma keep on loving him?” Mina asked one day.
Mum shrugged and sighed. “She said she did. But it’s hard to go on loving somebody that’s always on the seven seas.” She smiled. “Grandma was quite a force herself, of course.” She winked. “She was liked by lots of men.”
For a few years while Mina was growing up, the house was rented out to students. Mina remembered seeing them sometimes, going in and out of the house, rolling bicycles into the hallway, sitting in the front garden eating sandwiches, throwing Frisbees, playing guitars. She remembered wondering what it would be like, to live in a big house like that with lots of friends, and to throw Frisbees in the garden, though she found it hard to think of herself with lots of friends. Then she thought, Maybe I’ll find friends who are rather like me, and we’ll be able to put up with each other.
The students didn’t last forever. The house was getting run-down. It needed decorating, some of the window frames were starting to rot, the electrics needed to be fixed up. Mina’s mum wrote to Grandpa about it. He said he’d sort it out soon. They knew, of course, that he never would. So Mina’s mum locked the house, put boards across the windows and put a sign on the door that simply said:
And for a long time, the house was almost forgotten about.
One afternoon, just after the reading of the will, Mum got the key to the house out of a drawer. She found a torch. She and Mina put on old clothes, and they walked to Crow Road, to the dark green gate that led to the house. Mum unlocked the gate and they walked through the garden to the DANGER door. Mum unlocked that too. She pushed it open, stepped aside and bowed.
“Welcome to your inheritance, Mistress McKee,” she said in a spooky-sounding voice, and she ushered Mina into the inside darkness.
The house had big rooms, bare floorboards, bare walls. Mum shone the torch up into the corners to show the heavy plasterwork, the wallpaper curling away from the walls, the dangling light fixtures. There were cobwebs everywhere. Little creatures kept scuttling across the floors. Chinks of light shone through the cracks in the boards on the windows. Dust (skin!) danced through the torch beam. They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house.
“What on earth will you be doing with something so large?” said Mum.
“I shall live in it with my servants, of course,” said Mina. “Or I shall establish a school.”
“A school, my lady?”
“Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.”
They climbed three stairways. On the final landing there was a final narrow flight of stairs.
Mum paused.
“This leads to the attic,” she said. She shuddered. “I remember hardly anything of being in this house, but I do remember looking up these stairs and feeling very weird.”
“Weird?” said Mina.
“Yes, scared, and … weird.”
“Let’s go up,” said Mina.
Mum held back.
“Do I dare?”
Mina led the way. The stairs were narrow. She reached towards the attic door and opened it.
They were in a wide room. Light came in from an arched window that had not been boarded. Beyond the window was the park, then the roofs and spires and towers of the city, and the wide wide sky. The window was broken. Glass lay on the floor beneath. There were large bird droppings upon the glass.
“Look!” said Mina.
In one of the walls there was a hole where plaster and bricks had fallen away. Below the hole there were more droppings, a few brown and black feathers and some furry balls. Mum held Mina back.
“A nest!” hissed Mina.
Slowly, slowly, she approached it.
“Mina, take care!” whispered her mother.
But Mina wasn’t scared. The hole in the wall was as high as her head. She stood on tiptoes and peered into the shadowed space. She saw the feathered bodies lying there together. She saw the bodies moving as the birds breathed.
“Oh, Mum! Oh, come and look!”
Her mum came close. She stood on tiptoes, too, and peered in.
“Owls!” whispered Mina. “Sleeping in the day, they must be owls.”
They stared in wonder for a moment, then they backed away. Mum bent down and picked up two of the furry balls.
“Owl pellets,” said Mum.
They crouched against the wall beside the door.
Mum tugged at one of the pellets and broke it apart. She showed fur and skin and tiny bones in her hand.
“They eat their victims whole,” she said. “Whatever can’t be digested is brought up and discarded.”
She put th
e second pellet into Mina’s hand. Mina held it. Once this furry lump had been a vole or a mouse. Mina watched the nest. She had a vision of the owls rising from their sleep, emerging from the wall, flying out into the city sky. She imagined them hunting in the park.
Outside it was still bright day.
“Mum,” she said. “Let’s stay till night. Let’s see them fly.”
Mum’s eyes were glazed with the reflection of the sky as she looked back at her. She glanced at her watch. Dusk was an hour or more away. But Mina knew that her mum was as enchanted by the vision of the owls as she was herself.
“What if they attack us?” said Mum.
“We’ll get prepared. We’ll open the door. We’ll lie on the stairs and get ready to close it again if they come for us.”
And that’s what they did. They lay on the stairs and they waited. The sky outside the window slowly darkened. They lay together and could feel each other’s beating hearts.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Mum. “We should get the window fixed. It’s letting in the damp.”
“But the owls,” said Mina.
“I know,” said Mum. She shook her head. “What are they doing nesting in the house? They should be in the park, in a tree.”
Mina smiled. It seemed so mysterious and so right. There were owls, creatures of dreams and the night, living in her house!
“I’m uncomfortable,” said Mum. “My knees are getting sore. What kind of silly woman does a thing like this when there’s so much that’s sensible to be done?”
“A silly woman like you,” said Mina. “It won’t be long.”
The shadows in the attic deepened. The sky outside turned orange, red, then inky blue, and then the silveriness of moonlight was in the sky. They lay dead still. They breathed more gently.
“They’re birds of wisdom,” whispered Mum. “They’re the symbol of seeing hidden, secret things.”
“So we should be pleased to have them in the house.”
“Yes, we should be pleased.”
They watched and watched, and then their hearts began to thunder. There was movement in the nest, a rustling of feathers, a sudden low sharp screech.
And Mina and her mother gasped. A bird stood in the hole in the wall: dark feathers, shining eyes. They saw the head turning. Then another bird appeared. Mum held the edge of the door, ready to slam it shut. There was another low screech and then the birds leapt into the air, and seemed massive as they flew a circle around the room. They perched together on the sill for a moment in the moonlight, then they leapt again, and flew out into the night.
They rose to their feet. They gasped and giggled at the thrill of what they’d seen.
“Extraordinary,” whispered Mina, and somewhere far away a hooting started.
Hoot. Hoot hoot hoot.
“We’ll leave the window as it is,” said Mum.
“No we won’t,” said Mina, and she lifted a piece of broken brick from the floor, went to the window and knocked away more of the glass above the sill, making the opening wider and safer for the birds. She gazed out. She imagined leaping, like the birds did, like Icarus did in the story from long ago. She imagined her wings spreading as she swooped over the city.
Then they left the attic. As they entered the stairwell, Mina felt a creature winding itself around her feet.
“Oh,” she gasped, and then she smiled.
“Who’s this?” said Mum.
“My familiar little friend,” said Mina. “I’ve called him Whisper.”
Later, in the house, at the kitchen table, Mina made models of the owls from heavy clay and laid them on the table. She opened up the owl pellet in a bowl of warm water. She loosened the scraps of skin and fur and bone. She laid the fragments of what had been a mouse or a vole on her table. It was still gorgeous, so mysterious. It had been alive, it had been killed by an owl, it had been inside the owl and now it was out again. It was in her fingers, on the palm of her hand, on her table beside a clay model of an owl. Later, in her dreams, she made owls as light as spirits, and she flew with them in the night.
YOU FLY IN THE VELVET NIGHT.
YOU SEE WHAT CAN’T BE SEEN,
YOU HEAR WHAT CAN’T BE HEARD.
LEND ME YOUR FEATHERS
AND BONES AND WINGS.
LEND ME YOUR EYES
AND EARS AND CLAWS.
LEND ME THE HEART
TO LEAP LIKE YOU
INTO THE ASTONISHING NIGHT.
It was always writing that got me into trouble with Mrs. Scullery. She said I just EXASPERATED her.
“You could be one of my very best pupils, Mina McKee – one of the very best I have ever had, in fact. But you are a constant disappointment! You let the school down, you let your poor mother down, and most of all you let YOURSELF down, time and time and time again. You are a silly and wayward and undisciplined child. Instead of concentrating on the task in hand, you spend your time playing about and drawing attention to yourself and your silly foibles!”
Draw attention to myself? That was just about the last thing I wanted. I wanted to disappear. I didn’t want to be there at all!
The day that brought it to a head was SATS day. SATS Day, the day she started out so calm and sweet, the day she ended screaming out loud in front of the whole class, the day she snarled that I was full of nothing but stupid crackpot notions, the day she put her hands on her hips, glared straight into my face and growled,
“Mina bloody McKee. You are full of sheer bloody daftness and you are an utter bloody disgrace!”
Bloody. She said it in front of the whole class. It was unheard-of! A teacher said bloody in front of the whole class! That showed how bad things had become!
It was nonsense that did it. And it was SATS day! SATS day! Aaagh! Everybody just had to stay calm! It was nothing special! But everybody was so stressed out! Everybody was so scared! Everybody was so focused on making sure that the school was up to standard. Everybody was so concerned that everybody would all turn out to be better than the average of children of our age throughout the country! Everybody was so concerned that we would get Level 4 and Level 5 and Level 99! We shouldn’t get worked up about it, though! We should just treat SATS day as another ordinary school day! It wasn’t really a test at all! It was just a way of checking that things were going OK at St. Bede’s! It wasn’t really a test of the kids! It was a test of the school! So nothing to do with the kids at all! So just stay calm! So just don’t worry! Just relax! JUST RELAX! SATS Day was just another ordinary day! But SATS Day was SATS Day! IT WAS SATS DAY!
It started quietly enough. There we were sitting in class, some of the kids white-knuckled as they gripped the edge of their tables, some of them, such as Sophie, chewing their lips, some of them slouched and not caring at all. Some were poised and well prepared and smiling in anticipation, like Samantha, with new pens and pencils laid out neatly on the tables in front of them.
Mrs. Scullery looked like she’d spent the night seeing ghosts. Her hair was sticking out. Her lipstick was slashed across her chops. Her dress was buttoned up all wrong. Her hands were trembling. She goggled red-eyed from her desk at us.
“Remember,” she said to us in a high-pitched wobbly voice. “You must simply do your best, children.” She gave especially appealing glances to the ones she thought were cleverest, like me. “Just do your best. Please do your best. Please …”
I felt sorry for her. I really did. I felt that somebody should get up and go to her and give her a big hug and say,
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Scullery. It will all be all right.”
But nobody did.
Then she gave the papers out. We had to keep them facedown until she gave the word. Then she said it.
“Turn your papers over and you may begin.”
Oh my God I couldn’t stand it. Why should I write what they told me to write just because they told me to write it? What was the point of that? Why should I write because the school and everybody in it was so stupendously and stupi
dly stressed out? Why should I write something so somebody could say I was well below average, below average, average, above average or well above average? What’s average? And what about the ones that find out they’re well below average? What’s the point of that and how’s that going to make them feel for the rest of their lives? And did William Blake do writing tasks just because somebody else told him to? And what Level would he have got anyway?
What Level is that? And what about Shakespeare? “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble!” What Level’s that? Would Shakespeare have been well above average? And Dickens and Chaucer and Keats and Shirley Hughes and Maurice Sendak and Michael Rosen? Did any of them do stupid silly SATS! I SUSPECT NOT!
I stared out the window for a while. There were no flies dancing in the air that day, though the sunlight was particularly beautiful where it shone on the drops of water left on the glass after a little rain shower. Maybe I’d be able to write about that, or about the birds that kept flitting back and forward. And there was a lovely pattern where the paint had flaked away at the edge of the window frame. Or maybe I could write a story about Mrs. Scullery’s night with the ghosts. I heard my name whispered. Mina McKee. I looked up. Mrs. Scullery was glaring at me. Everybody was heads down getting their writing done. Mrs. Scullery whispered my name again. I looked at her. I nodded at her and sighed. Poor Mrs. Scullery. I read the first instruction on the paper. “Write a description of a busy place.” Oh my God. I looked up again. THE HEAD TEACHER was looking in through the glass bit of the classroom door. He looked like he’d been with the ghosts as well. He looked like he was about to burst into tears. He caught my eye. He mouthed the words: WRITE. DON’T WORRY! PLEASE WRITE. The poor poor man. So I smiled at him, and nodded, and shrugged, and started to write, and this is what I wrote.