Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe) Read online

  Beverley had the food in her rucksack, as she was the cook as well as the leader, and cooks need to be in charge of the larder. They had tins of sardines, tuna and spaghetti – Gerard got to carry the tin-opener – and hard-boiled eggs still in their shells, teabags, a small carton of milk, cans of fizzy drinks, a large sliced pan, a quarter pound of sliced cooked ham and a quarter pound of something pink and also sliced called luncheon meat that Elizabeth had persuaded Beverley (who was a food snob, and hadn’t much liked the idea of tinned spaghetti either) to agree to, a packet of rashers and a packet of sausages, a ring of black pudding, a small jar of baby beetroots from Poland, a tube of Pringles crisps and a large foil bag of peanuts. They also had a plastic basket of pears, two bunches of bananas, like half-clenched yellow baseball mitts, assorted packets of biscuits, a tin of peaches, a tin of pineapple rings and several large bars of chocolate. Beverley had wanted to bring a tin of condensed milk, because in all the best stories with picnics in them, they have condensed milk, but they only had evaporated milk in the Spar shop, and she wasn’t sure if it was the same thing.

  Beverley had wisely divided the chocolate into survival rations, not to be eaten unless there was an emergency, and ordinary chocolate for standard consumption. The emergency chocolate got wrapped in tinfoil and each person had to carry some of it separately.

  ‘Flares,’ said Elizabeth, laying the contents of her rucksack on the brown candlewick bedspread – why, Beverley wondered, for the umpteenth time, was every single thing in this house brown? – for a final check before packing it all away neatly again. ‘We should have flares.’

  Elizabeth was carrying all the non-culinary items – spare clothes, rugs, notebooks, compass, matches, the first aid kit and so forth, and so flares seemed to be part of her area of responsibility.

  ‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Beverley, producing two very long spindly coloured paper parcels with sticks out of the bottom, something like a cross between fishing rods and elongated lollipops.

  ‘Is that what flares look like?’ asked Elizabeth doubtfully, fingering the thin waxed paper.

  Gerard looked at Beverley with wide eyes. He was rather in awe of this capable older girl. Only she could have thought of such an exotic-looking pair of items as part of the equipment for an adventure. He was sitting hunched on the floor with his knees under his chin, trying very hard to cough as quietly as possible, so as not to annoy the girls, and keeping well out of the way. Fat was snoring in the gap between his thighs and his chest.

  It had been a mistake to bring Fat on holiday. Gerard’s mother had been right about that. He had sulked all the way and peed through the wicker floor of the cat basket, all over the back seat of his uncle and aunt’s Volvo. The stench was awful at the time, and it got worse as the holiday wore on. Every time the car door opened, the sweetish smell of stale cat pee assaulted everyone’s nostrils, and they all turned to Gerard and said: ‘You and that blinking cat! You can’t take cats on holidays. Nobody does, in case you haven’t noticed.’

  Actually, they didn’t all say that about Fat. His uncle and aunt were far too kind to make such hurtful remarks. They were nice to him because he was the child of a single mother. There were two sorts of people in the world, he found – the ones who despised you because your mother wasn’t married, and the ones who bent over backwards to show you that they didn’t disapprove one little bit, in fact they hadn’t even noticed that you hadn’t got a father, though now you came to mention it, right enough, there didn’t seem to be an adult male in your household.

  But Elizabeth had no such scruples, and she said it (about the blinking cat) loudly enough and often enough for three. Gerard held Fat in his arms and buried his face in his rancid, dirty-cream fur and said nothing when Elizabeth poured scorn on him, but his toes squirmed inside his runners.

  Gerard had made a collar and lead for Fat out of wool. Cats are difficult on holiday at the best of times. They hate being away from home. But cats at the seaside are the end. They steal people’s fish, and they hate water. Fat didn’t like the collar. He probably thought he looked silly in it. He did. Very silly. So every time Gerard tried to put it on, Fat kicked up the most dreadful stink, hissing and snarling and scratching and doing a good imitation of a bridge with hair. Then he ran away and sulked under the knobbly brown furniture in the holiday bungalow.

  In the end, Gerard gave up on the lead and carried Fat everywhere. People looked at him in amazement, a small, pale, underweight, asthmatic eleven-year-old whose ears stuck out and who wore glasses that looked too big for him, carrying a large, pale, overweight, possibly also eleven-year-old cat along the beach. But what could Gerard do? If he didn’t carry him, Fat’d wander off and get lost. And he certainly wouldn’t walk on the beach. He didn’t like sand between his toes, and good gracious! there might be a damp bit.

  ‘No,’ Beverley was saying, from several feet above the crouching Gerard. ‘These are garden candles, also called flares, but they’re not really the distress kind. You see, you stick the pointy bit in the earth and you light this bit. You take the paper off first, of course.My parents bring them every year, in case we get barbecue weather. We never do.’

  ‘They won’t be much good in an emergency,’ said Elizabeth. Elizabeth had a hunch there might just be an emergency. She had a funny feeling about this island that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  ‘Oh, I think they’ll be visible from the land. Especially if we put them up on a hill or something.’

  ‘Only if it’s dark, you thick.’

  ‘Umm,’ said Beverley. She hadn’t thought of that. Or rather, she had only thought of an emergency as being the kind of thing that happened at night. ‘Oh well, we’d better take them anyway. They’ll be better than nothing. You can carry them.’

  ‘Gee thanks,’ said Elizabeth. She sighed as she took the ridiculous things from Beverley. Really, Beverley could be a bit much at times. But still, maybe they would be better than nothing. Elizabeth stood the garden flares against the wall, ready to take next morning.

  She caught sight of Gerard as she turned around. ‘You’re not bringing that cat, by the way,’ she said. Elizabeth hated Fat almost as much as she despised her small boy cousin, and she had a theory that people with asthma shouldn’t have cats anyway. Gerard lived in fear that his mother might get to hear about this theory, so he tried very hard to be nice to Elizabeth, just to make sure she didn’t mention it some time, to get her own back on him. Not that she ever noticed how nice he was to her.

  ‘But I have to,’ he wailed now. ‘If I leave him behind he’ll panic and pee in the house. Or worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ squeaked Elizabeth. ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Gerard miserably. ‘And if you think cat pee stinks, you should smell …’

  Actually, Gerard was quite fond of the smell of cat pee. It reminded him of flowering currant. But he knew from experience that other people didn’t exactly see it that way.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Elizabeth, adjusting the garden flares so they didn’t slither over. She was beginning to wonder why she’d agreed to this expedition. Between Beverley with her stupid barbecue candles and Gerard with his endless wheezing and his ridiculous cat, they were going to be a right lot of eejits going off to the island. ‘Don’t go on! Boys are so revolting.’

  Gerard thought this was a bit unfair. It was Fat’s bad habits that were in question, not his, after all. But he didn’t dare to irritate Elizabeth more than was strictly necessary.

  ‘You’ll have to carry your rucksack as well,’ Elizabeth warned him.

  ‘Sure. No problem.’ Gerard was eager to co-operate, to make up for the cat.

  Elizabeth started to pack her rucksack, calling out each item as she tucked it in. Beverley ticked everything off on the list for the second time, just to be sure they had everything. The list she’d begun with in the sum copy two days before had got much longer, and now included items like a magnifying glass and binocula
rs, and Elizabeth’s rucksack was bulging by the time she’d finished. But it was neither as knobbly nor as heavy as Gerard’s, so she didn’t complain. Plus, she didn’t have to carry a cat, so really she was doing pretty well.

  ‘OK, so we’re all set then, aren’t we?’ said Beverley. ‘Are you sure you checked the time of the tide, Gerard?’ She toed him in the behind to catch his attention.

  ‘Ouch! Yes, I’m sure. It goes out mad early, but at eight o’clock it will definitely be fully out. It starts to come in again at about nine.’

  The vibration in Gerard’s chest woke Fat up. He stretched and yawned, and then slithered out under Gerard’s elbow and disappeared under the bed.

  ‘Eight o’clock!’ Elizabeth was appalled. ‘Do you mean eight o’clock a.m.? Like, in the morning?’

  Gerard nodded.

  ‘Ye gods and little fishes!’ exclaimed Elizabeth, who was re-reading Little Women. ‘It’s supposed to be the holiers!’

  ‘Come on, Liz,’ said Beverley. ‘We are intrepid explorers, remember?’

  ‘What does “interpid” mean?’ asked Gerard innocently.

  But nobody bothered to answer him. People often didn’t bother to answer Gerard, he noticed. He crawled under Elizabeth’s bed, after Fat, and he lay there for a while, listening to the mattress-dulled hum of the girls’ voices and looking at their ankles moving restlessly under the straggly brown fringes of the bedspread. Then he sneezed – it was dusty under there – and rolled out on the other side, gathering Fat in his arms as he did so. His shirt crackled with static from contact with the brown nylon carpet, and Fat’s fur stood up on end like a yard brush.

  Elizabeth turned to look at her cousin, struggling up from his knees, his arms full of cat.

  ‘You’ve got fluff in your hair,’ she remarked. ‘And so has that filthy cat of yours. And you shouldn’t be crawling around under beds. I’m sure dust isn’t good for you.’

  Gerard said nothing. He found that was the best policy with these girls. That way, they didn’t notice you so much, and they left you alone. He’d see how sprightly Elizabeth would be feeling at eight o’clock the next morning. Ha!

  Chapter 3

  THAT KEVIN

  ELIZABETH WAS NONE TOO SPRIGHTLY at eight in the morning. She never was before breakfast.

  ‘I still think we should have said.’ Her voice had taken on its whiniest tone, partly because her feet were wet, and she hated having wet feet. It was a damp morning with no atmosphere, not the way dawn is supposed to be. Not that it was dawn any longer. That had happened while they were still deep asleep. But it felt like dawn. The beach was cold and deserted, the shop was firmly shuttered, all the holiday houses still had their hands over their eyes. Only the seagulls were awake.

  ‘You’re supposed to say,’ she whinged on, ‘you’re supposed to say when you’re going on a long walk. You’re supposed to make sure somebody knows you’ve gone, and what time you’re expected back, so they can send army helicopters after you if you’re not home in time for your tea.’ Elizabeth was not one for missing her tea, if it was at all avoidable.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Elizabeth,’ said Beverley. ‘I did say, I keep telling you. It’s just that adults don’t listen properly when you tell them stuff. I said you and I and Gerard were going on a picnic, and “That’s nice,” was all she said. So it’s her lookout if she doesn’t know where we are. Anyway, you said so too. I heard you telling your mother we were going on a hike today.’

  ‘Yes, but we never said we’d be gone before they all woke up. We didn’t say anything about sneaking out at the crack of dawn without our cornflakes.’

  ‘It’s not the crack of dawn,’ Beverley pointed out with her usual maddening pedantry. ‘In some countries, people would be in their offices by now.’

  ‘You’re supposed to ring the coastguard, or someone like that, and tell them how long you’ll be gone for.’

  ‘That’s only for seagoing vessels,’ said Beverley. ‘There’s no such protocol for picnics on islands.’

  Elizabeth didn’t know what a protocol was, but she knew Beverley was wrong, and she also knew Beverley deliberately used hard words like ‘protocol’ just to get the better of Elizabeth. But she wouldn’t ask her what it meant – that would only give her ammunition.

  Gerard toiled away silently, doggedly pulling each foot out of the wet sand with a gentle plop at every step. Fat had put his arms around Gerard’s neck, in a rare gesture of affection that meant he was doing his best to co-operate, but the result was that Gerard couldn’t really see where he was going. The cat’s lolling head got in the way. But he dared not hurt Fat’s feelings, not after all that had happened with the Volvo and the woollen lead and everything.

  They had just left the soft sand of the beach, with its tattered carpeting of dried-up, fly-infested seaweed above the tideline, had crossed the brief band of rippled firmer sand closer to the sea, and had ventured onto the wet and sloppy causeway to the island. The tide was well out and the air was acrid with salt and iodine. It would have been easier to walk if they could have taken their runners off, but it was too cold still for this, even though the sun had been up for hours, and the day was only a bit misty.

  Elizabeth’s runners leaked. She’d forgotten how badly. Her socks clung damply to her toes, and sand lodged between them uncomfortably. She wished she hadn’t agreed to come on this silly outing. It was ridiculous sneaking out of the house like a thief. Why did she agree to things old Bossy-Boots Beverley suggested? She’d only known her for three days.

  Elizabeth wished for the third or fourth time she’d left a reassuring note for her parents. Why hadn’t she said something more explicit to them yesterday? Just because Beverley didn’t get on with her parents was no reason for Elizabeth to behave badly to hers. Elizabeth’s parents were cool. She should have told them. She shouldn’t have let the idea of an adventure silence her.

  ‘I think I’ll go back and leave them a note,’ she said with sudden decisiveness, stopping in her tracks.

  ‘It’s too late now,’ said Beverley. ‘We have to get to the island before the tide changes.’

  ‘Oh lord! But I’ll only be ten minutes.’

  The house the Ryans were renting was almost right on the beach, closer than Beverley’s family’s cottage.

  Beverley sighed. ‘Well, don’t blame me if you get left behind,’ she warned Elizabeth, who had already turned back.

  Coming down the beach towards them was a figure dressed in black. Only Elizabeth could see him because the others were facing in the opposite direction. She stood still for a moment, settled the garden flares against one shoulder and screwed up her eyes to see if she could make out who it was.

  ‘It’s that Kevin from the shop!’ she called over her shoulder to the others. ‘He’s coming after us.’

  ‘Oh blast!’ said Beverley, turning around. ‘What does he want? Pretend we haven’t seen him. Come on, face the other way and ignore him.’

  ‘But I’m going back to the house.’

  ‘Oh please, Elizabeth. Let’s not get involved with him.’

  Elizabeth hesitated. Then: ‘It’s too late. He’s seen me looking at him. He’s waving.’

  Spontaneously she raised her free arm and waved it in a long arc.

  ‘Stoppit, Elizabeth!’ exclaimed Beverley.

  ‘I’m only being friendly. He’s nice.’

  Elizabeth waved again.

  Kevin was striding along. The dry sand didn’t seem to impede his progress as it had theirs. Perhaps local people had developed a method for beach-walking, Elizabeth thought. Maybe they were able to spread their toes in a certain way, so that they worked like snowshoes, allowing them to glide swiftly over the sand. Perhaps their toes were webbed, even. Kevin had reached the hard, compacted sand at the waterline now.

  ‘Hallo-o-o!’ he called, picking up into a trot now that he was on a firm surface.

  ‘Hiya!’ called Elizabeth, with a beam. She’d forgotten all about going home.

>   In no time, Kevin was on the waterlogged stretch of sand that led to the island. Elizabeth stood and waited for him to catch up.

  Even Kevin had some difficulty with this part of the sand. He stopped for a moment to hitch up his jeans at the knees and came plashing along more slowly to join Elizabeth, who still stood with her back to the island, watching him.

  When he reached her, Kevin stopped and lifted one foot gingerly into the air, and reached out to roll up the bottom of his jeans. Then he lowered that foot, and did the same with the other, jutting his elbows out to balance himself. He looked like some demented black heron.

  ‘Hi,’ said Elizabeth again. ‘We’re going out to Lady Island.We have a picnic.’

  She turned to point out her companions, but Beverley and Gerard were away ahead of them now, two bright rucksacks with legs, in the distance.

  ‘Lady Island?’ said Kevin, sounding a bit surprised. ‘Oh! A picnic! Well, well.’

  Elizabeth couldn’t for the life of her see what Beverley had against this lad. He was perfectly pleasant, though he seemed a bit startled at the idea of taking a picnic out to the island.

  ‘Yep.’ Elizabeth nodded in the direction of the island, green and hazy and large from this perspective.

  Kevin was silent. He thrust his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders and buried his chin in his neck.

  ‘It’s not haunted or anything, is it?’ asked Elizabeth, peering into Kevin’s face.

  ‘Well …’ said Kevin. He dug his heels into the sand and swivelled on them. ‘Arrah, no, no,’ he went on, as if he were trying to sound more decisive than he really felt. ‘No. I don’t think you could call it haunted,’ he said slowly.

  ‘And it wouldn’t be trespassing, would it?’

  ‘How do you mean, like, trespassing?’

  ‘I mean, does it belong to someone? Someone with a Doberman, for example?’