‘What’s for tea?’ I asked, my tummy rumbling as I sniffed deeply. The humming stopped and Alice turned to me with a smile.
‘It’s stew.’ She covered the pot and put plates in the oven to warm. ‘Stop sniffing it; you’ll steal all the flavour.’
I grinned. Alice was always saying silly things like that, mostly to amuse me – and herself – but also, I think, because she couldn’t help it. She saw magic in everything: a trail of drips from a teacup were elf footprints; garden statues were people and animals that had been enchanted and turned to stone. Storytelling was in her blood; blood that we shared, though Alice’s was a little different. She didn’t have the same father as me. Hers had left her and our mum when Alice was just three years old. She had seen him only a handful of times in the thirteen years that had passed since then.
I watched as she set the table, noticing a plaster on Alice’s finger. ‘What happened?’ I asked, nodding to it.
‘Hmm? Oh. My finger decided it wanted to be a carrot and got in the way of the knife.’
‘You’re so daft,’ I said, giggling. Then I stopped as I saw that she had only laid the table for two.
‘I thought Mum was here for tea tonight?’ My voice came out all whiney.
Alice laid cutlery on the table and began to slice some bread.
‘She was supposed to be, but she called to say she had to work late.’
‘Again?’
‘Someone’s off sick and Mum has that book fair coming up. She’s snowed under.’
‘She’s always snowed under,’ I said sulkily.
I sank into my usual seat. I’d been looking forward to this evening. Mum had been working much later recently. She was the manager of a rights team for a big publisher, which meant that she sold books to lots of different countries. It was over a week since we’d last eaten a meal with her. In fact, it had been more than a week since I’d had a chance to say much to her at all, during mornings of uniforms being ironed and bowls of cereal being gulped down in the rush to get ready for school. We hardly saw my dad, either. He worked away on an oil rig and sometimes he was gone for months. Since Alice had left school in May, she’d taken over a lot of the cooking and household chores. She wasn’t just my sister, she was like a second mother.
‘It won’t be for ever,’ Alice said. ‘Things will calm down after this book fair.’
She ladled stew and dumplings on to our plates and I wolfed mine down, but Alice only picked at hers. By the time the subject changed to the Summoning and the Likenesses I’d seen on the way home, Alice had put her spoon down and abandoned her stew. She listened, her eyes clouding at the mention of the old man and his little-boy doll, and I wondered if she’d ever write down the story of him using the Likeness to speak to himself as a child. She often based characters on people from real life, if there was something about them that interested her.
‘Are you making one this year?’ I asked.
‘A Likeness?’ said Alice. She gave a vague shake of her head. ‘I’ve got other things to be getting on with.’
I was half relieved, half disappointed. Relieved because if Alice wasn’t making one then I wouldn’t feel I had to to, either. And disappointed because Alice always chose interesting people, like her favourite authors – or even characters from their books. One year, her teacher had made a project of it, and Alice been told off in front of the whole class for making a Likeness of someone who wasn’t a real person. Alice had replied, ‘They’re real to me.’
I loved her for that.
Later, we ate rice pudding in front of the fire. Shortly before nine o’clock, Alice went outside to get more coal, and I shivered as fingers of icy air crawled in through the back door and found their way to my neck. Alice stirred up the embers with the poker and heaped on more coal, then settled in the armchair.
I put down my maths homework and yawned. Alice wasn’t as strict about bedtime as Mum, mainly because half the time she didn’t realise what hour it was herself.
I stretched out on the rug next to Twitch and watched my sister. She sat with a notebook open on her knees, legs curled underneath her and her long fingers wrapped round her favourite pen. Her hand was still and she was staring into the fire, though I guessed she wasn’t really seeing the flames. I knew better than to ask what she was thinking about. Being interrupted while daydreaming was one of the few things that made my normally mild-mannered sister lose her temper. Daydreaming, she said, was how she made up her stories – and interruptions meant lost ideas.
Judging by the way she was nibbling her top lip, this story wasn’t going well. Once or twice, she began to write, but then ripped out the pages and threw them into the fire. Then, suddenly, she lifted her pen and began to scribble quickly, lines and lines, without pause. As she did so, she began humming the strange little melody again, the one I’d heard when she was making dinner. Now and again, she crossed words out, but continued until she must have filled an entire page. Finally, she stopped, looking over her words with a slight smile. So I was surprised when she tore out the page and screwed it into a ball. Then, like the ones before it, she aimed it at the fire. It hit the back, just below the chimney opening, but somehow bounced out and landed somewhere on the hearth. Alice leaned forward to pick it up, but a sound distracted her.
She glanced up. The nine o’clock news had just started on the TV. She snapped her notebook shut. ‘I hadn’t realised it was that late. Go and have a bath. You should be in bed by now.’ She got up, propping the fireguard in place, and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Her mood had changed – she seemed worried again.
Instead of going upstairs, I followed Alice to the kitchen, hovering in the doorway. The coldness of the kitchen tiles seeped through my socks. Alice was barefoot, but it didn’t seem to bother her, or perhaps she just didn’t notice. She had a tea bag in her hand, but made no attempt to put it in a cup, seemingly lost in thought.
‘Everything OK?’ I asked. ‘You hardly ate any dinner.’
‘I wasn’t very hungry,’ said Alice. ‘Food never tastes as good when you’ve cooked it yourself.’
‘What were you writing about?’ I asked, shifting from one foot to the other to stop my toes from cramping.
‘Just this story,’ Alice said softly.
‘Can you read it to me?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not ready yet. It wouldn’t make much sense to anyone but me.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s a secret.’ Alice finally put the tea bag into a cup. ‘It’s been in my head for months. But now I’m . . . well, stuck. I can’t figure out where it goes next, or how it ends.’ She sighed, her next words a mutter. ‘Maybe it’s not even supposed to.’
‘Then you’ll have to give it one of your silly endings,’ I said. ‘Every story has to have an ending, right?’
‘Right.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But a silly one wouldn’t be right for this. This story’s different . . .’
I eyed the notebook poking out of her pocket. ‘What else are you working on? Any detective stories?’
‘Only this story,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else.’
‘Not even a little one?’
‘Not a bean.’
‘Beans aren’t to be sniffed at, you know,’ I said. ‘Just look at what happened with Jack and the beanstalk.’
‘True,’ Alice said. ‘But I’m all out of beans – magic ones, baked ones, or otherwise.’ She lifted her hand to her forehead and massaged it. ‘This story . . . it’s taking everything. All of me.’
Something about the look in her eyes then was different. She’d struggled with stories before, but tonight she really meant it. There was only one other time when I’d seen her like this.
Last summer. No one except her knew what that story had been about, and she swore no one ever would. She’d destroyed the entire thing without finishing it. But, before she had done that, she’d told me something that had scared me a great deal, because I’d seen that Alice her
self was terrified.
The kettle came to the boil. She poured the steaming water into her cup, staring into it.
‘If only it were as easy to brew a story.’
‘You’ll figure it out,’ I said. ‘You always do.’
‘Not always.’
Our eyes met in an uneasy silence. I guessed then that she, too, was thinking of last summer. Of the unfinished story . . . and of the things she had told me.
Alice went back into the living room. I followed and we sat side by side in front of the fire, saying nothing. She took a few sips of her tea before setting it on the hearth and gazing into the fire. I could tell she was thinking, brooding about storylines and characters. She didn’t pick up her cup again and I didn’t remind her. I’d known all along that it would go cold before she remembered to drink it.
The same way I also knew that, whatever this story was about, it was going to lead to trouble.
2
The Magpie’s Nest
I WOKE IN THE NIGHT, shivering. The bedcovers had slipped off and, as I pulled them back over me, the comic I’d been reading when I’d fallen asleep slid out and fell to the carpet. I turned over, noticing a soft glow through the bedroom door. The landing light was off, but yellow light filtered down from the attic room.
I listened. At first, I heard nothing, then came a faint rustle of paper. Alice was still up.
I got out of bed and crept on to the landing. In the ceiling, a square hatch lay open and a fold-out ladder hung down from the attic. I placed a hand on each side and began to climb, the ladder creaking lightly under my weight.
I poked my head up into Alice’s room. She was hunched over her desk with her notes in front of her, wearing her fluffy dressing gown, slippers and a pair of blue fingerless gloves. She was humming that same little tune again, over and over, hardly pausing for breath. I said her name softly, but she jumped anyway.
‘Midge.’ She turned and rubbed her eyes. ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’
‘I was. I’m not sure what woke me up.’ I pulled myself through the hatch and sat on my knees on the thick rug. ‘What’s that tune you keep humming? Did you make it up?’
‘No, well . . . yes. Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘One of my characters made it up. It’s his tune, not mine.’
I didn’t say anything. I was used to answers like this from Alice. Most of the time I loved them, but sometimes, like tonight, they worried me.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘Why are you still up?’
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘You look like you need to.’
‘It’s chilly up here.’ Alice blew into her hands. ‘Come on.’ She got up and went to her bed, still clutching her notebook. We both got in, her at the head and me at the foot, as usual.
‘You forgot,’ I said.
‘Forgot what?’
‘To ask a riddle.’
There was a game Alice and I played when we went into each other’s rooms. To be allowed in you had to answer a riddle. We spent hours making them up and solving them, so I’d got pretty good at them.
‘Well, you’re up here now so there’s not much point.’
‘Ask me one anyway.’
Alice sighed. ‘All right, here’s one: I’ve an endless vocabulary, I’m known for being sharp and disliked when blunt. Yet I’ll never speak a word. What am I?’
‘Ooh. That’s a tricky one. A dictionary? No, that can’t be it. Hmm . . . Let me think.’ I snuggled down under the blankets, even tucking my nose in.
Cold air swirled round the tips of my ears. It was a lot cooler up in the attic. There was no proper heating like in the rest of the house, only a couple of plug-in oil radiators that just about took the chill off. But Alice never complained; she loved her attic room. If it were possible, I loved it even more.
You can tell a lot about a person from their room.
Alice always said that writers are hoarders like magpies – hoarders of ideas. If Alice were a magpie, then her room was her nest. Stuffed with odds and ends that, to an ordinary person, might seem as worthless as a wooden bead. But Alice had the power to string a row of wooden beads together and transform them into jewels.
Above her desk was what she called her ‘inspiration wall’. Here she pinned all sorts of bits and bobs: newspaper stories, postcards, photographs. Things that someday might hatch into a story. Notebooks were arranged in neat piles or were spread across her desk – depending on how well her work was going, the messier, the better. She wrote her stories by hand before typing them on to a laptop that had pride of place on the desk. Next to it was an old Woodstock typewriter that Dad had found at a car boot sale for just a few pounds. It probably weighed more than the desk, and the ‘A’ key was missing, but Alice thought it was the best gift ever.
In the corner was a smaller table with a kettle, cups and an open carton of long-life milk. Used tea bags sat wetly on a saucer, but it looked homely, not messy. There was no tap up here, but Alice could fill the kettle in the bathroom on the landing below, rather than having to go all the way down to the kitchen.
Books lined the walls, the gaps inbetween them stuffed with unusual trinkets: an old key, a framed postcard of a stag, a jewelled frog with a hidden mechanism that opened its mouth to reveal a place for treasure, or secrets. Alice had always liked knick-knacks, and many of her stories had been inspired by some object or other. Even the quilt was a patchwork of fairy tales: a glass slipper, a spinning wheel, a clock striking midnight. Tales Alice had told me when I was small, the tales almost everyone knew.
The only clear space was the floor. Alice was under strict instructions from Mum that nothing, nothing, was to be left on it. Ever. Not a book or even a biscuit. The rule had been put in place just a few weeks after Alice had first moved into the attic room. She had tripped on a cold cup of tea next to the bed, sending it through the hatch and almost falling through it herself. Mum had threatened to lock the attic and make her share a room with me again if ever this rule were broken.
I heard Alice write something in her notebook, then sigh and scribble it out again.
‘You should go to sleep,’ I said, my voice muffled under the covers. I’d warmed up now and my eyelids felt heavy.
‘You should take your own advice,’ came her moody reply. ‘In your own bed.’
‘It’s cold down there.’
‘It’s colder up here.’
‘I’m comfortable now,’ I murmured. I knew she wouldn’t really make me go to my own room. I often sneaked up here when I couldn’t sleep, or if I’d woken after a bad dream.
I peered over the covers. Alice had flopped back on the pillow with her arm half across her face. Only her mouth was visible. In her hand, she still clutched the notebook.
‘Go to sleep,’ I repeated.
‘Not until I’ve figured this bit out.’
‘Maybe the answer will come in the morning.’
‘I’ve been telling myself that for a week now.’
I felt an odd little twist in my stomach. ‘Stop it,’ I whispered.
‘What?’
‘You know what. What happened before, when you thought that . . . What happened last time when you got like this.’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Don’t lie.’
‘All writers lie.’ Her voice was sing-song. ‘It’s what we do.’
‘That’s not what I mean and you know it.’
She laughed, but there was nothing funny about it.
‘You were ill!’ I said fiercely. I sat up, wide awake now. ‘And you’ll get that way again if you carry on like this.’
‘I won’t. And anyway it was just the flu.’
‘No, that’s what you told Mum and Dad,’ I argued. Alice’s arm was still over her face and her lips were set in a stubborn line. ‘But I knew different. And if you make yourself ill again I won’t cover for you this time. I’ll tell them the truth, and then Mum will make yo
u share with me again. You won’t be able to sit up here writing all day and night.’
Alice lifted her arm and glared at me. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘I would.’
She pursed her lips and threw her arm back over her face, but not before I saw her eyes glistening.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, my voice softer now. ‘Why do you keep writing? I mean, you’re brilliant at it. Your stories are the best ever.’ I hesitated. ‘But sometimes, when you get like this, it just makes you so sad.’
She swallowed noisily. ‘But when it goes well I feel like I’m on top of the world.’
I had no reply to that, because I knew it was true. So I said the only thing I could think of to try to distract her.
‘Tell me about your dad.’
She sniffed. ‘You’ve heard it a hundred times.’
‘Tell me again.’
She paused and took a few deep breaths. When she spoke again, her voice was steady and clear. I felt the usual thrill as she said the next words, so familiar that I knew them by heart.
‘He was a traveller, a water gypsy. A group of them stopped on the canal on the day of the summer fete, mooring their narrowboats near the bridge. Mum was there with some of her friends, looking around. Most of the stalls were selling cakes and pot plants, but the travellers were selling things, too. Little wooden carvings, paintings, caged birds with feathers that had been dyed in exotic colours.
‘She didn’t notice him exactly; it was more that she saw him noticing her. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t unpleasant to look at, either. She found that the longer she looked, the more she liked. His nose was a little too long, and his lips too thin, but it was his eyes that captured her. They were such a pale shade of grey they were almost silver, like moons under the thick black clouds that were his eyebrows.
‘He didn’t say anything at first. Just crooked his finger and beckoned her closer. “I’ve got something for you,” he said and opened a wooden box. Inside, it was packed with scrolls of paper, each one tied with ribbon.