The Exiles Read online

  CONTENTS

  A Note From the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  The Exiles was my first book – I wrote it nearly thirty years ago, remembering my own childhood as one of four sisters, and our much-beloved Big Grandma, in a small house, with red brick in every direction, and – lucky child that I was, but I didn’t know it – a fantastic town library on the doorstep.

  This is not a story of what we did, so much as how it felt to live in that world. It had all but vanished even when I began writing thirty years ago. It is history now.

  I typed the book on a tiny portable typewriter, and posted off the only copy to a likely looking publisher (I’d never heard of agents!) in the village letterbox. Miraculously, it found a friendly editor. I was very, very lucky. I’ve been writing books ever since.

  Something I’ve discovered is that no book is ever finished. Every time I read anything I’ve written I re-edit it in my head. Now, for the first time ever, I’ve been able to re-edit a book in real life. It needed doing for lots of reasons. Times have changed since I first wrote this story. It’s not so easy any more for children to go off on their own to build campfires on the beach, or explore the local countryside.

  I don’t think young people have changed much though. I think they are just as adventurous and stubborn and kind and rebellious and accident-prone and brave as they always were in the past. Probably more than ever, when I think of the admirable young leaders who are coming forward today.

  So it was a complete delight to been given the chance to polish up my 1980s Exiles for twenty-first century readers. Once again, I’ve been very, very lucky.

  Hilary McKay

  March 2019

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was red brick in every direction. The back of the house and the fronts of the sheds enclosed two sides of the garden, and a high wall surrounded the rest. It was the last weekend before the summer holidays.

  Naomi Conroy crouched uncomfortably at the end of the garden reading a book. As usual, she had spent her Saturday morning at the town library, searching the too-familiar shelves for something new. On her left was the stack of books she had read since she returned, and on her right the pile she hadn’t opened yet. She kept her elbow leaning on that pile to guard them from her permanently book-hungry sisters. Even now, she could feel herself being watched, and without looking up knew that Ruth was hovering close by, waiting for her to finish. By law of the family, the book would become then common property, free for anyone to read.

  Ruth watched the flickering of her sister’s eyes as they moved across the page. She watched Naomi’s grubby fingers curl and turn the pages over. She measured the thickness of book left to read and sighed. Ruth was banned from the library. The librarian was holding her library card to ransom in the hope of extracting at least part of the amount Ruth owed in library fines.

  ‘But I’m one of your best customers,’ Ruth had complained when this news was delivered.

  ‘Worst customers,’ corrected the librarian, and so Ruth (who had no money and wouldn’t have handed it over if she had) was reduced to surviving on the books her sisters chose and grudgingly handed over.

  Naomi finished the chapter, rubbed her eyes, and looked around the small, sunshiny garden. It was overcrowded, she thought. Too many plants, too many scattered belongings, too many book-starved sisters waiting to pounce.

  Naomi was eleven years old, and Ruth was thirteen. They were the Big Ones. Phoebe and Rachel, aged six and eight, were the Little Ones. Ruth and Naomi had been known as the Big Ones since Rachel’s arrival into the family. It gave them an uncomfortable feeling of being shoved on from behind.

  ‘One more week,’ Ruth remarked, ‘and then we’ll be finished with school. That’ll be one less torture anyway.’

  ‘I’d rather be at school than stuck at home all summer,’ Naomi answered. ‘I’d rather be anywhere.’ She rolled over onto her back, pillowing her head on the pile of books. ‘Anything for a change.’

  ‘We ought to run away,’ said Ruth while gently easing a book away from Naomi’s heap. ‘People do. Uncle Robert did, when Mum was little. Just disappeared!’

  ‘Didn’t,’ said Naomi. ‘He joined the Navy.’

  ‘Same as disappearing.’

  ‘Isn’t.’

  ‘I count it the same,’ said Ruth, and just then the book came away with a jerk and there was a short tussle.

  ‘The trouble with running away,’ said Naomi, when it was over, and she’d won, ‘is where to run to. If we went anywhere where we know someone we’d be sent back, and if we went anywhere where we didn’t, then we’d be lost. It’s knowing where to start.’

  ‘We’d start here,’ said Ruth, sucking her bleeding knuckle.

  ‘Well, then, it’s knowing where to end.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The garden was quiet as they pondered, not for the first time, the problems of running away.

  At the other end of the garden, Rachel and Phoebe were racing stolen maggots around the lid of a tin. The maggots belonged to Mr Conroy, and were bought for his fishing on Sundays. As well as the usual awful white ones there were others, dyed pink and green.

  ‘Posh maggots,’ said Rachel, scooping amongst them with a teaspoon from the kitchen drawer. She always took a pink one, and Phoebe a green. Maggot racing already showed signs of becoming the summer’s main occupation. The rules were very strict. You could prod your maggot in the right direction, but not push him forward. If they stopped you must allow them to start again of their own accord. Rachel always prodded hers with a blade of grass, but Phoebe usually favoured a matchstick. Maggots responded better to matchstick prodding, but it tended to wear them out faster. Phoebe’s green maggot was beginning to look very limp.

  ‘He’s too hot,’ said Phoebe. ‘I’m going to set him free.’

  The career of a racing maggot always ended in freedom.

  ‘It’s kindness,’ said Rachel. ‘Releasing them into the wild,’ and Ruth, overhearing, said she wished someone would release her into the wild.

  ‘I want something exciting to happen,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it won’t,’ said Naomi. ‘It never will. It never has.’

  It was true that so far, it never had. Mrs Conroy, perhaps as a result of a too exciting childhood of her own, had chosen to marry a man of such serene good nature that it was astonishing he survived at all. Mr and Mrs Conroy didn’t own a car, wouldn’t buy a television, disliked the thought of pets, and could never quite afford to go on holidays.

  ‘How awful to be you!’ a girl at school had once remarked to Naomi, on hearing for the first time of her family’s general differentness.

  ‘Awful?’ exclaimed Naomi, indignantly. ‘What would be awful for boring people like you, isn’t awful at all for someone like me!’

  Nobody was allowed to pity a Conroy girl, although sometimes, in a grumbling kind of way, they pitied themselves.

  The summer weekend drifted on. Sunday afternoon ended in Sunday Tea, varied and bountiful, and prepared, as always, by Mrs Conroy alone. The evening ran its usual course. Mr Conroy dead-headed his roses, school uniforms were found. Rachel and Phoebe were bathed and given clean pyjamas. Naomi toiled through the dregs of her homework. Ruth escaped with a stolen book. Mr and Mrs Conroy, after a weak tea and milk-chocolate biscuits, locked the
doors, climbed the stairs, and slept.

  Sunday-night darkness seeped through the house.

  All day long it had hung around waiting, hunched under the stairs, reeking in the shoe cupboard, shivering in the bottom of vases. Now it was loose.

  Rachel and Phoebe slept in bunk beds packed with teddy bears, colouring books and stray lumps of Lego. Phoebe in the bottom bunk dreamed of crocodiles; the ones that lived in the front room behind the sofa. There was nothing to be afraid of as long as you poked crisps into their mouths, and there were plenty of those, left over from tea. Phoebe fed the dream crocodiles happily in her sleep. Beneath the bedclothes her fingers moved, picking up crisps. Phoebe was safe in the dark; it never frightened her. Sometimes she woke herself up, singing loudly.

  Rachel, in the top bunk, slept with her back jammed against the wall, as far from the edge as possible. It was very uncomfortable. She had fallen asleep with her face resting on her hard brown plait, and it was printing a pattern of twists across her cheek. She didn’t dream, but all through her sleep hung a nervous distrust of the edge of the bed.

  The dark was thickest and blackest in Ruth and Naomi’s room, where huge old blue velvet curtains hung, smothering the windows. The curtains had faded round the hems to a browny-grey colour, and they held Ruth and Naomi in the dark like jailers.

  Ruth lay awake, staring at nothing and thinking.

  One day, she dreamed, she would spend summer in the countryside, somewhere hilly, not like the Lincolnshire flatness she was accustomed to. She would have two houses – one for herself, and one for her family to come and visit her in – and she would be a famous … a famous … a famous what? Well, famous anyway, and very rich of course …

  ‘Are you awake?’ hissed Naomi.

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘When I’m rich.’

  ‘Huh!’

  Silence for a while.

  ‘Is that all you’re thinking about?’ asked Naomi eventually.

  ‘One more week of school.’

  ‘Yucky-pucky,’ said Naomi, and fell asleep.

  Mrs Conroy was dreaming of being lost in a strange town. She dreamed the same dream every night, but tonight she was rescued and returned to her safe dark bedroom by Mr Conroy, who seemed (from his kicking) to be dreaming of football.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The last week of school began in the usual manner of last weeks of term.

  ‘Can we play games?’ begged all the children of all their teachers, first thing on Monday morning.

  ‘No you can’t,’ said the teachers, ‘you can play all summer. There’s another week left yet. We’re paid to teach, not to baby-sit.’

  Nobody was disappointed by this. It was the traditional reply. The class ringleaders went on to the next question.

  ‘Can we watch a film?’

  ‘Can we have a general knowledge quiz?’

  ‘Can we play hangman on the board?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said the teachers, handing out worksheets, ‘but later, if we have time, we might clean the chewing gum from under the desks.’

  There was silence then, while people worked out whether or not this was a treat.

  In the Year 9 maths classroom where Ruth sat staring at a list of questions, the windows were open, but no air circulated.

  It smells like a greenhouse full of corpses in here, wrote Ruth on her question paper, knowing that it would probably never be marked.

  Speak for yourself, wrote her neighbour Wendy, who had naturally egg-yolk coloured hair, tied into a proud and flouncing ponytail.

  I’ll work out the odd numbers and you do the evens and we’ll swap, proposed Ruth.

  No, scrawled her neighbour, writing without looking at the paper to avoid detection.

  There was a jug of sweet peas standing on the teacher’s table. It was too tall for the flowers and only their heads and a stump of stem showed, poking over the rim. A bee spotted them from outside and flew in to investigate. Nobody saw it at first. The teacher was taking down work from display boards, clearing shelves and sorting through lost property. She didn’t notice the bee until it hurled itself against the classroom window and tried to drill its way through the glass.

  ‘Somebody put that creature outside,’ she ordered, and people began a great flapping of papers, and exclaiming, and jumping up and down.

  The bee buzzed in horror against the invisible barrier.

  Then Ruth, who never helped, walked calmly across the classroom, picked up the bee loosely in her hand, and dropped it through the open window.

  The gasp of admiration was even louder than she had hoped.

  ‘End of event,’ said the teacher, refusing to be impressed. ‘Thank you, Ruth. Sit down, everyone. Close the windows, please.’

  Weren’t you scared? wrote Ruth’s neighbour on Ruth’s answer paper.

  Bees don’t sting me, wrote Ruth, grandly and untruthfully. At least they haven’t done yet, she thought, and wondered how soon they would.

  By lunchtime, a sticky, smothering feeling hung in the classrooms and the corridors, and there didn’t seem to be quite enough oxygen to go round.

  From the school kitchens an appalling smell of boiled meat rippled through the building. Even the sweet, sour, musty smell of the dining room was blotted out by it.

  Irish Stew / Veg Curry

  Steamed Lemon Sponge / Fruit / Custard

  chalked the Head Dinner Lady on the blackboard that stood at the entrance to the dining room.

  ‘Irish Stew?’ asked Naomi in horror. ‘In this heat!’

  ‘There’s curry. As you can see,’ replied the dinner lady as she stomped back to her cauldrons. Dinner ladies were entitled to a free school dinner, one of the privileges of the job, but they made no secret of the fact that they all brought packed lunches from home.

  Slowly the school lined up, collected its dinners, poked them around their plates and finally scraped the remains into the waste bins that stood by the exit, dinner and pudding all mixed up. The most squeamish children scraped their plates with their eyes shut, so as not to see the curry fall into the custard. There was always a special dinner lady on duty to supervise the scraping, known as the Bucket Lady. She had been appointed the day after a girl had been lifted in as a birthday joke.

  Naomi’s knife tipped off her plate and sank out of sight. She couldn’t bear the thought of diving for it so she dumped her dishes quickly and hurried outside.

  There were groups of people all over the playing field, some huddled in bunches around magazines or comics, some flat on their backs with their blouses rolled up and their skirts hitched high, trying to acquire bikini-shaped sun tans. Naomi, looking for an empty patch where she could read in peace, noticed a cluster of shrieking girls gathered around some protesting victim, and wasn’t very surprised to see that it was her sister Ruth.

  ‘Is it true,’ asked Egg-Yolk Wendy, ‘that bees don’t sting your sister?’

  Naomi didn’t commit herself to any reply. She stood with her hands in her pockets a little outside the circle, hoping that Ruth wouldn’t disgrace them both. Inside her pockets her fingers were crossed.

  Ruth was kneeling in front of a clump of clover. Her voice was a bit higher than usual and she was saying, ‘I don’t want to hurt them, lifting them about.’

  ‘You won’t,’ said Wendy, who as discoverer of the bee-immune Ruth, had assumed dictatorship of the affair. ‘Pick one more up to prove it.’

  ‘I’ve picked up three.’

  ‘Well, pick up another.’

  Ruth wondered if it was physically possible to be stung by a bee without showing it on your face. Very doubtful, she thought, and remembered that she had heard that dogs could smell fear, and it nearly always made them bite you.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Wendy, impatient for drama.

  Very carefully, Ruth eased a bee off a clover flower, closed her hand around it for a second, and dropped it lightly onto another blossom. Its legs clung stickily t
o her fingers for a moment before it fell.

  ‘Easy as anything,’ said Naomi with her nose in the air. ‘I mean for Ruth,’ she added as Wendy turned greedily to look at her.

  ‘Doesn’t it run in families then?’ asked Wendy, disappointed.

  ‘Not ours,’ said Naomi, and left rather hastily. That seemed to signal the end of the performance and the group wandered apart, all except for Egg-Yolk Wendy, who stuck to Ruth like chewing gum. She hadn’t finished yet.

  Ruth turned her back to Wendy and lay on her stomach, peering down into the grass, watching an ant. It struggled up and down the blades, heading away from her. She picked it up and moved it a little way along its journey. It staggered for a while, and then turned ungratefully back in the direction it had come from. Ruth heard, ‘Does it work with wasps?’

  Silence.

  ‘I said, “does it work with wasps?” ’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Well, does it? Do wasps,’ asked Wendy, ‘sting you? Or not?’

  ‘They haven’t yet.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t, same as bees.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Look,’ said Wendy, ‘let’s go and find some wasps. Perhaps they’ll not sting you, like bees don’t.’

  It occurred to Ruth that acquiring glory wasn’t all jam. It seemed you had to carry on with continual acts of heroism. What would she be required to do supposing she survived the wasps?

  ‘There’s always wasps around the bins,’ remarked Wendy temptingly. ‘Take your fingers out of your ears!’

  In one way or another, that lunch hour was an eventful time for every member of the Conroy family. While Naomi, with her fingers crossed in her pockets, supervised Ruth’s reluctant juggling of the bumblebees, Rachel and Phoebe (and every other child in their primary school) were indulging in an outbreak of midsummer madness. That morning the County Council grass cutter had visited the school and left behind an enormous heap of grass cuttings. The children discovered this treasure trove, buried in it, rolled in it, and smothered their friends with armloads of it. The teacher on playground duty (who suffered from hay fever and had kept well away) was startled when she blew the whistle for afternoon classes to see people who had gone out tidy, in red and white uniform, return to school tattered, and more or less green.