Forever Rose Page 17

  ‘It wouldn’t be quick,’ said Molly.

  ‘Or ice?’

  ‘Yes, that’s a very good idea. I’ll try ice,’ said Molly. ‘And my other things are to learn French because we are going camping in France this summer and to pass Grade 4 Recorder and Grade 5 Ballet.’

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Kiran sarcastically.

  ‘Yes but I’ve got one left from last January to cut off my plaits,’ said Molly, cutting off her plaits.

  ‘MOLLY!’ shouted Kiran. ‘I thought you were supposed to be boring!’

  Kiran is going to be busy too. Her New Year Resolution is to humanise Mr Spencer.

  ‘Because whether you see him blurry, or whether you see him plain as plain, he will probably come back and we will be stuck with him,’ she said. ‘Stress does not last for ever and I should think Caribbean holidays are a pretty good cure. We must not count on hurricanes, or very rich film stars falling in love with him and whisking him away to Hollywood. In fact it is quite unlikely. I intend to humanise him by kindness starting with a Get Well Card from us all. I bought one and I’ve started it already and I met Kai in the street so he has signed it too. Everyone’s got to either write something nice or a joke.’

  ‘Something nice?’ asked Molly in a rather frightened voice.

  ‘Or a joke,’ said Kiran firmly. ‘Do you like the picture? It’s to remind him of the Zoo.’

  It was a picture of a poorly parrot in bed.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Molly looking at it admiringly, and then she opened the card up and wrote inside (very carefully, in her best writing and with tiny smiley faces instead of dots on the ‘i’s).

  It was the best school trip ever thank you very much I hope you get well soon I think it is the right time of year to see loggerhead turtles and I hope you do from Molly.

  ‘That’s very nice,’ said Kiran approvingly. She herself had written:

  My brother says that since December 21st daylight is returning to the United Kingdom at a rate of approx 2 minutes a day.

  ‘Your turn, Rose,’ said Kiran.

  I took the card and looked at it. Kai (under an unguessable amount of pressure) had written in very big letters:

  Come back soon Mr Spencer, and save us from Class 1.

  So I wrote underneath, in even bigger letters:

  Come back soon Mr Spencer, and save us from Kiran.

  ‘Not very nice and not very funny,’ said Kiran, but I said it was the best I could do and it was nearly midnight and weren’t we going to get up and watch the fireworks.

  So we did, and had pretend champagne afterwards with Molly’s parents, and texted our parents and Caddy and Michael and Indigo and Sarah and Saffron and Tom and Kai and everyone else we knew with mobile phones saying Happy New Year and suddenly it was nearly two o’clock and we were exhausted.

  ‘I forgot,’ said Molly sleepily, as we crawled into bed. ‘My last resolution. I’m going to write to David Attenborough and tell him about the tiger. Stop laughing, Rose, you ought to write to him too!’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for David Attenborough we wouldn’t have gone to the Zoo,’ said Molly. ‘And you wouldn’t have found Caddy for Michael and Mr Spencer wouldn’t have gone off with stress and we wouldn’t have had to help Class 1 with their play, and Kai wouldn’t have painted Annabel and so Buttercup couldn’t have been Baby Jesus. You know you loved it when Buttercup was Baby Jesus. You said it was just right!’

  So I did, and it was. It was perfect. It was a happy ending. Just like in a book.

  I have read quite a lot of books lately, and I intend to read many more. And in books I have discovered that there are sometimes lonely patches

  And scary times

  Disasters

  Catastrophes

  And long paragraphs of no use at all except possibly (says Saffron) to build up your stamina.

  But also there are jokes

  Friends

  Adventures

  And homes.

  And these things

  Will help you through the long paragraphs

  Lonely patches

  Perils

  And even problems with as many heads as dragons.

  To live Happily Ever After.

  Which is exactly

  What I

  Intend

  To Do

  Forever

  Rose.

  Thoughts from Rose’s Blog

  When the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen.

  That’s an ancient proverb, so ancient Shakespeare probably knew it. According to Saffy, he certainly knew about cold.

  And so do we.

  I am the only person I know who does not live in a centrally heated house.

  ‘Can’t we get central heating?’ I moan at Daddy.

  ‘Certainly,’ says Daddy, ‘if you can find a plumber who will do it for free.’

  ‘The frost patterns on the windows in the mornings are so lovely,’ remarks Mummy, when pursued with the same question. ‘Besides, it is nearly spring.’

  I don’t know if I would call January 14th nearly spring, but it is true, the frost patterns are lovely. I showed off about them so much at school that Molly and Kiran begged to come here for a sleepover so that they could see them for themselves. They prepared for this subzero experience with fleeces over their pyjamas, space blankets on top of their sleeping bags, socks and hats and fingerless mittens, hot blackcurrant and hot water bottles.

  None of these precautions worked. I knew they wouldn’t. By midnight the air was icy. Kiran said it was especially icy for herself and Molly because of physics and temperature gradients.

  ‘I wouldn’t have let you borrow my floor if I’d known you were going to lie on it complaining and making intelligent remarks,’ I told her.

  ‘Hot air rises,’ said Molly. ‘That’s what she means.’

  ‘Perhaps it does,’ I said. ‘When there is any. There’s no hot air round here.’

  I kept quiet about the fact that there was a warmish patch around my feet and later, when Kiran and Molly begged to come in bed with me I would not let them because it definitely wasn’t big enough to share. I explained that it was just as chilly for me in bed as it was for them camped out on the ice carpet.

  ‘Prove it!’ said Kiran crossly. ‘Come down here and sleep on the floor with us.’

  So I had to, and it was awful but I pretended I was too hot. And I waited as Molly and Kiran huffed and moaned until hypothermia set in and they went quiet at last. And then I went back to bed and it wasn’t any better, just slightly softer, like snow compared to ice.

  But in the morning it was worth it. The frost patterns were spectacular. Our huffings and moanings and shivering breaths had crystallized on the thin glass of the windowpane into a frozen forest of wild spinning fern patterns. And then the sun rose yellow and hit them from behind, and it looked like the window had been blasted by the breath of an arctic dragon, all swirling flames of fire and ice.

  But we forgot it when Saffy came in looking for survivors with hot chocolate and a blow heater and when we looked again the magic was all gone. The window was just wet grey glass, with puddles on the windowsill.

  ‘It will be here again tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘But we won’t,’ complained Kiran and Molly. ‘Oh, it’s not fair! Oh, you are so lucky! Oh, why can’t we live in houses with no central heating?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You could always turn it off.’

  Then Kiran and Molly went a bit quiet and thoughtful for a while, until Kiran said, very loudly and firmly,

  ‘That would be BONKERS, Rose!’

  And I have to admit, she was right.

  The World of the Casson Family

  by Rose Casson

  The first thing to say about the world of the Casson family is that I do not know who is in it.

  Our family has extended. However, it began with Mum and Dad, Caddy and Indigo and Saffy and me in a house that the Victorian
s built, thinking it would be comfortable (how wrong they were) half way down a long road, in a largish town in the middle of England.

  It looks like the most unmagical place in the world.

  It isn’t.

  Caddy

  Caddy’s real name is Cadmium Gold, but nobody calls her that. My friends say Caddy is pretty. I suppose she is. She moves very quickly and she has a sort of shine about her when she’s happy. She is often happy – it doesn’t take much.

  Caddy says that she likes animals better than people. I don’t really believe this is true, but she thinks it is. Animals do not have to be cute and furry for Caddy to like them. Spiders, worms … Once, right in the middle of a perfectly peaceful day she rushed downstairs and started talking about worms. Apparently they visit … (I nearly started telling you myself.) But if you want to know I’ll put it on Twitter. Say, and I’ll do it.

  The thing about Caddy is that she is kind. I used to think Caddy was kind because it was easier than fighting. Then for an experiment I tried being kind myself. I lasted about half a day. It’s not easy.

  Saffron

  is complicated …

  She’s my cousin as well as my sister because my parents adopted her before I was born, when her own mother (my mum’s sister) died. She didn’t discover this until she was eight and found her name was not on the colour chart with mine and Indigo’s and Caddy’s. She wasn’t too thrilled about that, according to Caddy. She turned intelligent (but maybe she would have done anyway) and waspish and independent and sleek and cool and gold.

  Saffron has a friend who is like her other half. She is called Sarah. I cannot imagine what Saffron would be like without Sarah, nor what Sarah would be like without Saffy.

  Sometimes, when I am painting, I put two colours together that apart you would hardly notice, but together they glow.

  Like the colours of a kingfisher, that blue and that orange.

  Indigo

  Indigo has smoke dark eyes and brown hair and a very slow smile. He is tall and too thin and stubborn and brave and I think he is the only one of us who really thinks about what will happen next and if it does, whether it will be possible to survive.

  Indigo creates meals by saying, ‘That and that and that!’ Then in everything goes, with chillies. Grilled cheese appears on the top of everything except curry but including the birthday apple cake he made for his friend David.

  What else? He plays guitar but cannot sing. ‘Ooh dear,’ he says, listening to himself. It doesn’t stop him. He likes ice and rock and stones and fossils.

  Sometimes he detaches himself from us all. You see it in his eyes first. Then the way he suddenly lifts his head. And the next thing you know, he is off.

  Gone.

  Mummy

  (that’s Eve to the world)

  It’s not true that Mummy calls everyone darling to save her bothering to remember names.

  And if she seems scatty, she’s not; she’s juggling. She keeps multiple worries spinning in the air. They are:

  Saffy and Caddy and Indigo and me.

  Daddy.

  The needy people who besiege her constantly. What do they need? Sometimes no more than a bit of noticing. To be called darling, or asked a favour. Sometimes they need rescuing. Or forgiving (naming no names but giving hard stares at my father).

  Her other worries are:

  Paint that takes forever to dry (she is a garden shed artist, the sort that paints anything that pays: dead pets, local views, visions, hospital walls). (‘Not exactly art,’ says Daddy.)

  Food. How hard it is to remember to buy. How quickly it vanishes.

  Her car. Petrol. Oil. Water. Air in the tyres. Strange grating noises. Terrible smells. ‘It’s like keeping some exotic pet!’ cries Mummy.

  Her secrets.

  To make up for all these problems she has …

  A shed!

  Which contains …

  The pink sofa!

  Mummy’s pink sofa is her greatest treat. It is escape and summer holidays, peace and luxury. It has worn out arms and feather cushions, paint splodges, a burnt hole in the back, a knitted patchwork blanket, an awful mangy sheepskin and an endless treasure trove of pencils, small coins, paint brushes, hair clips and teaspoons lost down the back.

  ‘Once it had little tassels,’ says Mummy. ‘Here and here,’ she touches the arms. ‘Never mind.’

  Daddy

  If you didn’t know him, if, for example, you read about him in a book, you’d think he was awful. ‘Samantha?’ you would ask. ‘And Saffy? Did … ? Was … ? Are you? THAT’S TERRIBLE!’

  If you’d never seen him smile. If you’d never had him rush home to save you from yourself. If you’d never wiped your teary, runny face on his jacket, watched him hang up his shirts (wooden hangers, 4 cm apart, colour coded, not touching), seen him search through the fridge …

  We drive him mad. He drives us mad. He has two lives, one much more glamorous than the other. We are the unglamorous life. The amazing thing is that he keeps coming back. He needn’t, but he does.

  Rose

  by everyone else

  Rose has inherited a great deal of artistic talent, which she uses with reckless destruction on all that she encounters.

  Bill Casson, father

  I called her Permanent Rose. I knew she would stay. I can’t imagine the world without her. She is perfect (like all the children). That time she went to New York without telling me, and the shop lifting (if you could call it that), the differences she has with darling Bill and those reports from school, those things do not count.

  Eve Casson, mother

  Rosy Pose. Thank goodness she did what she did at my wedding. She was quite right. And absolutely wonderful with Buttercup (don’t call him that).

  Caddy

  Rose. Don’t get me started.

  Saffron

  I don’t know. Rose. I don’t know where you’d begin. Anyway, it’s private, what I think of Rose. She does OK.

  Indigo

  Rose’s Last Resort Recipes

  (Warning from Indigo: If you can cook, or if anyone in your house can cook and can be induced to do it, skip this section. You won’t learn anything.)

  We are not a fussy family about food. We eat almost anything. Almost. Not those trout (no thank you Daddy; they had faces. No amount of watercress garnish was going to help with that). Nor spaghetti and cheese with a raw egg in the middle which a long ago Italian boyfriend of someone’s once produced. (His name is forgotten but his Passion Killing Cheesy Spag is not. It was an all time low in family dinners, and that is saying quite a lot in this house.)

  Equally inedible was the birthday cake Sarah once baked in our oven which fused to the baking tin and proved (said Saffy) that even carbon based life forms cannot enjoy the element in its natural state. And there were the American chocolate brownies that Caddy and I once tried to make for Tom. But never again. Because if you add hot melted chocolate to beaten egg the egg cooks, and you get chocolate flavoured scrambled egg which no amount of sugar or stirring or tears will ever turn into anything else.

  Luckily, as well as the things we are bad at making, there are others at which we are quite good. Such as:

  Apple Sandwiches!

  Invented by me, Rose Casson, but now given to the world.

  For apple sandwiches you need bread and butter and apples. Butter the bread. Slice the apples. Put the apple slices between the bread and butter. What can possibly go wrong?

  (Take the pips out if you are making them for ultra fussy people like Saffy and Sarah. And the stalk. Ignore suggestions that you might add honey, or cinnamon or sugar. They’re perfectly edible without the need to open extra cupboard doors.

  Mysterious Birthday Pudding

  Sarah’s mother made this for me on my last birthday. It was pretty and delicious. As far as I can tell all she did was mix up smashed meringues, pink rose petals, raspberries and cream. And then she put it in little glasses.

  Her rose petals did not g
o brown, her raspberries did not sink and her meringue stayed crispy. None of these miracles happened when I made it. I don’t know why, and neither does Sarah’s mother.

  A safer (yet strangely unpopular) pudding is:

  Apple Slices with Marmite

  Nb. only TWO ingredients!

  Slice the apple.

  Spread it with marmite.

  Fantastic and delicious.

  There is a version for wimps – which is not as good – called Apple Slices with Peanut Butter. I just can’t see the point myself, unless you have run out of marmite.

  I could add more recipes, but these are the best.

  Rose Casson

  The Banana House

  By the same author

  CASSON FAMILY

  (suggested reading order)

  Saffy’s Angel

  (Winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award )

  Indigo’s Star

  Permanent Rose

  Caddy Ever After

  Forever Rose

  Caddy’s World

  The Exiles

  (Winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize)

  The Exiles at Home

  (Winner of the Nestlé Smarties Prize)

  The Exiles in Love

  Wishing for Tomorrow

  Dog Friday

  The Amber Cat

  Dolphin Luck

  For young readers

  Happy and Glorious

  Practically Perfect

  PARADISE HOUSE

  The Treasure in the Garden

  The Echo in the Chimney

  The Zoo in the Attic

  The Magic in the Mirror