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  PRAISE FOR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR HILARY McKAY:

  “A sheer delight.”

  –Booklist, starred review for Saffy’s Angel

  “As riotous and refreshing as ever.”

  –Publishers Weekly, starred review for Indigo’s Star

  “This disarming family could charm snakes.”

  –Kirkus Reviews, starred review for Permanent Rose

  “McKay has set the standard of brilliance.”

  –Horn Book on Caddy Ever After

  “Simply lovely.”

  –Kirkus Reviews, starred review for Forever Rose

  Get to know the rest of the Casson Family in these other books by Hilary McKay:

  In Caddy’s world, things are always changing.

  People vanish for days, come to live in your bedroom, hide under tables for hours and hours, count pennies in jam jars until they have enough to buy bread, and then the next day gild halos for the school play with real gold leaf. Caddy’s home is a turmoil of piled possessions, lost belongings, and unexpected adventures. Her one constant is her three best friends, a charmed circle that she never wants to leave.

  But the summer that Caddy is twelve, everything turns upside down. Her mother spends most of her time in the hospital with the fragile new baby. Her father comes home from London to “organize” his family, causing plenty of chaotic confusion. Her boyfriend, not content with dating three girls, is looking to conquer a fourth. But worst of all for Caddy, her best friends are growing up and growing apart.

  Luckily, Caddy is the bravest of the brave, and luckily for Caddy, endings are not always the end, and a world that is entirely unpredictable is also a world full of surprises.

  HILARY McKAY is the award-winning author of the Casson family series: Saffy’s Angel, winner of the Whitbread Award, an ALA Notable Book, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book, and a School Library Journal Best Book; Indigo’s Star, an ALA Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book; Permanent Rose; Caddy Ever After; and Forever Rose. She also wrote Wishing for Tomorrow, a sequel to A Little Princess. Hilary McKay lives with her family in Derbyshire, England. Visit her online at HilaryMcKay.co.uk.

  Jacket design by Michael McCartney

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2012 by Julia Denos

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Meet the author,

  watch videos, and get extras at

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  caddy’s world

  ALSO BY HILARY McKAY

  Saffy’s Angel

  Indigo’s Star

  Permanent Rose

  Caddy Ever After

  Forever Rose

  Wishing for Tomorrow

  MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

  MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Hilary McKay

  Published by arrangement with Hodder Children’s Books, a division of Hachette Children’s Books

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder Children’s Books

  First U.S. edition, 2012

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Margaret K. McElderry Books is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  The text for this book is set in Melior.

  0212 FFG

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKay, Hilary.

  Caddy’s world / Hilary McKay.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Caddy’s world turns upside down when her father, Bill, temporarily becomes a stay at home “mom” and her best friends since kindergarten, Ali, Beth, and Ruby, begin to move in different directions.

  ISBN 978-1-4424-4105-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-4107-1 (eBook)

  [1. Family life—England—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Babies—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 6. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M4786574Cak 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011016381

  ISBN13: 978-1-4424-4105-7 (print)

  ISBN13: 978-1-4424-4107-1 (eBook)

  For Sophia and Victoria Steinsberg,

  with lots of love from Hilary McKay

  Contents

  Chapter One: Charmed Circle

  Chapter Two: Lost Property

  Chapter Three: The Spinning World

  Chapter Four: Absolutely Nothing to Worry About

  Chapter Five: Treacle and Beth

  Chapter Six: The Road to School

  Chapter Seven: Dingbat

  Chapter Eight: Awful Day

  Chapter Nine: The Firework Baby

  Chapter Ten: The News

  Chapter Eleven: What the Normans Ate

  Chapter Twelve: The Casson House

  Chapter Thirteen: Somewhere to Go That Isn’t Home

  Chapter Fourteen: Managing

  Chapter Fifteen: Important Tuesday

  Chapter Sixteen: At Treacle’s

  Chapter Seventeen: Bill on the Doorstep

  Chapter Eighteen: Starry Eggs and Moon Tomatoes

  Chapter Nineteen: Caddy on the Doorstep

  Chapter Twenty: Bravest of the Brave

  Chapter Twenty-One: Beth and Mars Bars

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Pink Hair at School

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Saffron and Indigo on the Doorstep

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Tomorrow, All Things Being Well

  Chapter Twenty-Five: A Beginning

  Six Years Later: Caddy and Rose

  Chapter One

  CHARMED CIRCLE

  THESE WERE THE FOUR GIRLS WHO WERE BEST FRIENDS:

  Alison . . . hates everyone.

  Ruby is clever.

  Beth. Perfect.

  Caddy, the bravest of the brave.

  (“Mostly because of spiders,” said Caddy.)

  Alison, Ruby, Beth, and Caddy had started school together aged four and five, plonked down at the four corners of a blue-topped table in primary one.

  “You four will be friends,” the teacher had told them, pronouncing the words like a charm. She was an elderly person, tall, with silver-streaked hair twirled and looped about her head, black beads, and, remembered Caddy, years afterward, a sort of purple haze about her that may or may not have been a cardigan.

  She was probably a witch.

  “You four will be friends,” she said again, and her glance included all of them: Alison, who was sulking; Ruby with her thumb perilously close to her mouth and her hair cut short like a boy’s; and Beth, who was not only perfect but also dressed utterly and completely in brand-new clothes, snow white underneath, school uniform on top. Last of all Caddy, who had arrived very late because her mother had forgotten the date.

  The teacher smiled down from her looped and beaded heights at the table of little girls. Charmed, they smiled back up into the ancient purple haze. Alison, Ruby, Beth, and Caddy: bewitched.

  They stayed that way. All through first school and into secondary school. At twelve years old they were
still good friends.

  “Best friends,” said Caddy.

  Alison lived next door to Caddy, in an immaculate house. No visiting went on between the families. Alison’s mother used to look out the window at Caddy’s mother and shake her head and say, “I’m not getting involved.”

  “Absolutely not,” Alison’s father would agree.

  They were both estate agents. Sometimes Alison’s father would gaze at the state of the Cassons’ roof and murmur, “I hope we never have that property on our books. You’d have to be honest.”

  Their daughter was honest naturally. Alison’s was a lovely but insulting honesty that conceded to no one. Her bedroom window faced Caddy’s, but usually she kept the curtains closed. “I like my private life,” she told Caddy. All the same she was a helpful friend. When Caddy showed signs of oversleeping on school days, she had several times flung slippers and hard-nosed teddy bears at her window and screeched, “Get up!”

  “You could work out a much better system than that,” said Ruby. “You’d only need two pulleys if you could fix a pendulum to the lamppost in between. It’s out of line, but it wouldn’t matter if you hung weights or something to take up the slack . . .”

  Ruby, now twelve years old and still sucking her thumb, was even brainier than ever. Ruby, small, redheaded, and quiet, owned a hammer and a Swiss Army knife and loved books and maps and numbers and patterns and words from other languages. She was good at mending things too. Ruby knew how to fix charms on bracelets, chains on bicycles, and frozen computer screens with petrified mice. She was an only child—both her parents were dead, killed in an accident when she was a very small baby. Then an amazing and unusual thing had happened. Her four grandparents (all retired, all elderly, all astonishingly intelligent) had pooled their not-very-large savings and bought a house. And into it they had moved with Ruby. All four of them. So Ruby was brought up with not much money but with lots of books, nursery rhymes in five different languages, kitchen chemistry, seaside expeditions to observe the effect of the moon on the tides, and a large, floppy cat, bought in order to stop her feeling too much of an only child. Really, though, it was her friends who did that. They shared with her and teased her, and at school they stopped her ever having to do a thing by herself. That was very useful to Ruby, because as well as being brainier than ever, she was also shyer than ever.

  Perfectly happy, though, until the day of her last school report.

  Just like all her friends, Ruby had ripped open the brown envelope and unfolded her report the moment she left the school gates.

  The first time she read it (eyes round with disbelief), she thought, how amazing!

  The second time, with Caddy reading over her shoulder, she thought, but awful!

  She became aware that her heart was beating very fast.

  “Ruby!” Caddy had exclaimed, when she finally understood the report’s staggering conclusion. “Do you think you’ll do it?”

  Ruby did not answer at once. The pounding in her heart was now so loud it seemed strange that Caddy did not hear it too. Her astonished mind was still tottering between AMAZING and AWFUL.

  “It would change things a lot if you did,” said Caddy, and then noticed the frightened look on Ruby’s face.

  “Don’t worry!” she exclaimed. “We’d still be friends! Just as much . . . in a way.”

  Ruby stared at her, eyes wide and shocked.

  “You’d be posh!” said Caddy, and laughed a little, to encourage Ruby to laugh too.

  “Posh!” repeated Ruby.

  “I was only joking. Anyway, you already are, a bit. Well, you’ve got a posh cat! So, will you do it? Would you like it?”

  By now Ruby’s heart was bumping less fiercely. Her mind had stopped its tottering between AMAZING and AWFUL. It came down firmly on the side of AWFUL.

  “No, I wouldn’t like it!” she said. “And I won’t do it!”

  “Don’t you even . . .”

  “And I don’t want to talk about it, either! So there!”

  “I don’t see why . . .”

  “Please, Caddy,” begged Ruby.

  “All right,” said Caddy.

  Beth. Is perfect.

  “I’m not,” protested Beth, neat-haired, brown-skinned, modest as well as perfect. “I’m not . . . If I told you some of the things I think . . .” Her voice trailed away. She never would tell. She was ungrudgingly nice, even to her little sister, Juliet (who preferred the name Jools and was far from perfect).

  Beth’s parents were also perfect. Her mother was good at homework and cakes for school fairs, and her father always won the fathers’ race on sports day. To complete this perfection, and best of all, there was a pony named Treacle, a perfect birthday surprise that had appeared when Beth was eight.

  “Of course, he’s to share,” Beth was told at the time.

  “When Juliet’s old enough.”

  Juliet was nine now, and Beth would have shared, but, “No thanks very much!” said Juliet.

  Last of the friends came Caddy. Cadmium Gold Casson. Caddy had no special label. She wasn’t perfect or clever and she didn’t hate anyone. For a long time she was just Caddy, which bothered her friends.

  “Just Caddy is fine,” protested Caddy. “It’s what I am.”

  All the same, they found her a label, mostly because of her fearlessness with spiders. Caddy was sorry for spiders, so universally unloved, and she did not allow them to be squashed.

  “Leave them to me,” she would command, and no matter how grey-legged, scrabbling, or hairy, she would gently pick the monsters up and carry them to a place of safety.

  Caddy, the bravest of the brave, said Alison, Ruby, and Beth.

  “I’m just Caddy really,” said Caddy, but she liked having a label all the same. She felt it gave her a proper place in the circle of friends.

  “Alison, Ruby, Beth, and me,” she would say to her little sister and brother, Saffron and Indigo, and told them stories about Treacle the pony; Wizard, Ruby’s enormous cat; and the tank of miniature fish they could sometimes glimpse through Alison’s bedroom window: tiny rose and blue flickering things, like swift-trailing flames.

  “I call them The Undead,” said Alison.

  “Oh, Alison!”

  “Well, they do die.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “Scoop ’em out and put some more in,” said Alison. “Don’t look like that! It’s life.”

  Alison was a fatalist. She could live with the possibility of almost anything. For nearly four years, ever since she was eight, she had lived with a For Sale board outside her house and never shown the slightest interest in its existence. So completely did she manage to ignore it that after the first shock of its arrival, her friends ignored it too.

  Years passed. The board faded, acquired a greenish tinge, and became part of the landscape. Then in its fourth year it blew down. A bright new replacement appeared in its place and Alison’s friends woke up like a startled flock of birds.

  “You’re not really moving, Alison? Alison! Why?”

  Alison shrugged.

  “You wouldn’t go far away?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Haven’t you asked?”

  “Asked who?”

  “Your parents, of course! They must have said something! Haven’t they told you anything, Alison?”

  “They go on and on,” said Alison, yawning.

  “On and on about where?”

  “South.”

  “South?”

  “Where my uncle lives. It’s got a weird name.”

  “Oh, Alison, please find something out,” begged Caddy, and she seemed so upset that Alison actually made an enormous effort, communicated with her parents, and listened to the answer.

  “Tasmania,” she reported.

  “Tasmania!” repeated Ruby, stunned, while Caddy and Beth stared at each other in astonishment. “Tasmania! Are you sure?”

  “Think so,” said Alison. “Think that’s right. Tasma
nia’s south, isn’t it?”

  The girls happened to be at Ruby’s house at the time of this conversation, draped around on sofas, watching TV with the sound turned off. Alison, having done her Tasmanian duty, picked up the remote and began flicking through channels as if there was nothing more to be said, but Caddy and Beth continued to stare at each other and Ruby ran out of the room.

  She returned very quickly, carrying a small globe, and sat down beside Alison.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to a reddish-colored island, chewed-looking at the edges and surprisingly close to the North Pole. “This is here, where we are now.”

  “Yeah?” asked Alison politely.

  “And”—Ruby turned the globe upside down and pointed again—“that’s Tasmania!”

  Alison blinked a bit at that, took the globe in her own hands, found the chewed red island for herself, turned the globe over, and peered. Sure enough, there was Tasmania.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Well, that’s definitely going to be south, isn’t it? Are we watching The Simpsons or what?”

  “Don’t you mind?” shouted Caddy, grabbing the remote and turning everything off. “Don’t you care? It’s the other side of the planet! What about Ruby and Beth and me?”

  “Caddy?” asked Alison, shocked at last. “What on earth is the matter?”

  “I thought we’d be friends forever,” snuffled Caddy. “Like we are now. You and Ruby and Beth and me. With nothing changing.”

  Then at last even Alison understood. Because in Caddy’s world, things were always changing.

  And Caddy did not like it.

  Caddy’s home was like a world that, from time to time, a genie from a bedtime story picked up in his hand and spun upon his finger. People set off on journeys and returned unrecognizable, vanished for days, came to live in your bedroom, hid under tables for hours and hours, wandered the house fast asleep demanding to go home, counted pennies in jam jars until they had enough to buy bread and then the next day gilded halos for the school Nativity play with real gold leaf. Caddy’s home was a turmoil of piled possessions, lost belongings, and unexpected siblings.