Binny in Secret Read online

  This broke his leg.

  Peter’s broken leg was the start of the museum.

  Chapter Two

  The last of the shopping was done. The last summer break supper eaten and cleared away. Clem, who dealt with stress by organization, had run out of things to tidy.

  “I think we’re really truly ready at last!” said the children’s mother, and James, shorn like a lamb and fueled by sausages, turned an exuberant somersault over the end of the sofa. He landed on Clem, who tipped him onto the floor beside Cinderella the cat.

  “You should be in bed,” she told him, and although James pleaded, “Not yet! Not yet!” the words had been said, and the last day of the summer was over.

  Binny went upstairs feeling chilly with dread. In the morning she would have to face the new school. They had only moved to the town at the beginning of the summer break. She wouldn’t know a single person.

  Clem was good at making friends and James bounced up to people as if he had known them all his life. But Binny could not do those things; she didn’t shine like Clem or glow like James. She was clumsy and defensive and she said things that sounded terrible.

  However, she was brave. In the morning she got up and put on the new gray and purple uniform without any fuss.

  “I know how I look, so don’t say anything,” she announced when she came downstairs. “Worse than I’ve ever looked in my life and don’t try and cheer me up.”

  “I’ve seen you looking much worsener than that,” said James at once. “Often!”

  “You’ve forgotten the year all your front teeth fell out at the same time,” added Clem.

  “That uniform isn’t really much worse than the chopped off old jeans you’ve been running around in all summer,” said her mother. “Anyway, you’ll all look the same when you get there.”

  “You should come to my school.” James dug deep holes in a jar of chocolate spread as he spoke. “Then you could look like me!” He loved his cheerful red sweatshirt and red baseball cap. His new vertical hair stuck out around the cap like dandelion petals.

  “Wow!” he said when he looked in the mirror before he set off to school. “Just wow! Come on, Binny!”

  But Binny would not come. She went off to school alone.

  “Won’t you walk with me and James?” asked her mother. “Just for the first day? Your schools are almost next door to each other.”

  “No, because then everyone would say, ‘That’s the girl who gets taken to school with her mum and her little brother!’ ” answered Binny. She left them without looking back and all the way to school her legs felt strange and heavy, as if she was walking in a dream.

  * * *

  But at the end of the day, on the way home again, Binny ran.

  * * *

  She couldn’t help it. She began by walking very fast, but soon the need to get away was so great that she gave in and sprinted. Through the town she ran, across the star shaped marketplace where tree-loads of wishes were tumbling in the wind, and onto the narrow street that led uphill to their house.

  Home came in glimpses to meet her. Cinderella disappearing behind a dustbin. The flower tub full of white geraniums. Two granite steps and the small blue painted door with a dolphin shaped knocker.

  Binny drew a deep breath and pushed the door open.

  The radio in the kitchen competed with the cuckoo clock on the stairs. Clem’s flute repeated a phrase, over and over. Binny stepped over James’s new school shoes, dropped her bag on the doormat, and was safe.

  In the kitchen her mother was peeling apples.

  “Binny!” she exclaimed, putting down an apple to hug her. “How are you? Come and tell me! What was it like?”

  Like? thought Binny. She could find no words. How to describe the day of bewilderment, buffeting, trouble, and scorn? She stared speechlessly up at her mother.

  “Binny?”

  An idea came to Binny, bright as a switched-on light. A wonderful solution, if only her mother would see it.

  “Actually Mum, I’m really sorry but I didn’t seem to learn anything. It’s not a very good school, everyone says.”

  “Binny, what went wrong?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing! I just thought, what about if I get books from the library and teach myself at home?”

  “It’s only been one day, Bin.”

  “I know,” said Binny earnestly. “I only said it because if we want to sell my uniform it would be better to do it now, before I’ve worn it very much. I was only being sensible, like you always say! I could look after Cinderella while you’re at work. And I could teach James as well! Easily! Then he needn’t go to school either.”

  “But . . .”

  “Please don’t say ‘but’!” begged Binny.

  “Oh Binny!”

  “Think how much I’d know if I just read all the books in the library! I could do that. You always like me going to the library!”

  “That’s true. I do. I love you going to the library.”

  Binny’s mother picked up another apple and began peeling very carefully. Binny waited. Was she going to say, “All right Binny. Take off your uniform and put it in a bag to sell! Of course you can stay at home and teach yourself with library books.”

  No, she wasn’t. There was a two-apple-long pause, and then she said, very quietly and carefully, “Binny, remember how you didn’t like your old school at first?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like this new school,” said Binny. “I just said it wasn’t very good.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  Binny reached for a piece of apple peel and ate it, wincing at the sourness.

  “Did you have a nice lunch?”

  “Not really. Lettuce.”

  “Just lettuce?”

  “Well, bits of tomato and cucumber and stuff.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “Cheese.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, fries,” admitted Binny. “But no pudding. Only a milk shake.”

  “I made flapjacks,” said her mother, kindly not saying that cheese salad and fries and a milk shake would have pleased Binny at any other time. “Would you like some? And you could take some to James as well.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He went off to do his homework.”

  “Homework? James?”

  * * *

  It was true. Binny found him lying on his bedroom floor coloring a picture of a pirate. Beside him lay his loot from his first day at school: a reading book, a party invitation, and somebody else’s hat.

  “Hi James!”

  “Hello, don’t kiss me,” said James, the precaution he had taken with his family ever since he learned to speak.

  “Fancy giving you homework on your first day!” said Binny. “What an awful school. Poor you. Would you like to leave and stay home with me instead?”

  “No I wouldn’t!” said James ungratefully. “We’re doing pirates in history and there’s a climbing frame and two slides in the playground and I’m a monitor. Your shadow is going all over my homework.”

  Binny moved her shadow.

  “Do you know what a monitor is?” continued James, busily giving his pirate a dripping red sword. “They’re the most important ones, after the teacher. They do messages to the office, walking not running. Because what would it be like if everyone ran? I walk,” he said virtuously, “even when no one’s looking. Guess what everyone calls me? 007! That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” admitted Binny. “So do you like your school, then?”

  “I love it!” said James.

  “Aren’t you going to ask if I like mine?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  James colored for a minute longer and then murmured, “Binny.”

  “What?”

  “Your shadow.”

  * * *

  Clem was more comforting. She groaned when Binny showed her that the gray and purple blazer had someone else’s name tag
inside.

  “I didn’t mind that it was from the nearly new shop,” said Binny. “But I didn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “Give it to me! Let me look!” said Clem, holding out her hand. “We should have checked. I never thought of it. Nobody will have noticed, though, Bin.”

  “The whole class noticed,” said Binny. “Because I left it behind by accident and somebody took it to the office and they gave it back to the wrong person. A fat girl in the year above. And I don’t talk posh, do I Clem?”

  “You?”

  “I knew I didn’t. They say I do. They said that’s how they knew I was a grockle.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s someone who shouldn’t be here,” said Binny. “Someone from away. They notice when people are from away. They say, ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’ ”

  Clem didn’t argue. She had been asked that question herself that day, at least a dozen times.

  “There was every sort of person at my old school,” Binny went on. “Scruffy and posh. From loads of different places. Nobody said grockle. But the worst thing was much worse than that! You know that girl who dropped her things in the street when I saw the butterfly? She was there!”

  “Binny! I hope you said sorry to her properly this time! Straightaway! Did you? And asked how you could make up? Binny? Bin?”

  “Not straightaway.”

  Clem groaned.

  “I hoped she wouldn’t recognize me!” said Binny. “I don’t look like me in this uniform, do I? I just look like anyone from anywhere! Like Mum said, we all look the same! But she knew it was me straightaway.”

  Clem looked at Binny’s unique seaweed bunchy hair, stubborn chin, wide green eyes, and church wall bruise in the middle of her forehead and said, “Of course she knew it was you!”

  “Clem, don’t you think it was awful bad luck her being there?”

  “Where else would she be?” asked Clem. “This is a really small town. One school, one college. You meet the same people over and over. You’d better tell me what happened.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. As soon as I saw her I ducked out of the way . . .”

  “Ducked out of the way?”

  “So I could think what to do. I thought it would be better to make friends with her when a few days had gone . . .”

  “This is appalling!” said Clem.

  “I was going to be really kind to make up, and then when she got used to me of course I was going to say sorry! But she knew it was me straightaway. She said, ‘It was you!’ and I said, ‘What was me?’ . . .”

  “Binny!”

  “And then she told everyone that I smashed up her mum’s birthday flowers and squashed her mum’s birthday cake and trampled on her mum’s birthday card. I said sorry. I said it about a million times. A million million.”

  “A bit too late!” said Clem.

  “It wasn’t! It didn’t make any difference. She wouldn’t listen and she made it sound as if I’d done it on purpose. She’s called Clare and she’s got a friend called Ella. She’s horrible too. She said, ‘Why do you call yourself Binny? Binny’s not a name!’ So I said, ‘It’s actually Belinda,’ and then they both started saying, ‘Is it, actually?’ and ‘Actually, it is!’ They thought they were so funny. I’m going to leave that rubbish school. I told them so, and they said ‘Good!’ ”

  “School will soon get used to you, Binny, and you’ll get used to them.”

  “I won’t. I hate them all.”

  “You don’t really,” said Clem, who was used to Binny, with her loves and her hates, her fears and her courage, her dark and her light. “I’ve taken that name out of the blazer and put in yours instead. If I were you I’d get a card for Clare and write inside how sorry you are and how you were too embarrassed to say so when you met her . . .”

  “She didn’t say sorry to me! She didn’t say one word about pushing me into the wall!”

  “Binny, do you want this to be over, or not?”

  “It would be much easier just to leave school,” said Binny, but Clem said not to be daft and that one day soon all the fuss would be forgotten.

  “Promise!” said Clem, but Binny could not believe this. She could only see a future of being the enemy, labeled a grockle, of being told she talked posh, of lonely pretended interest in alien notice boards.

  Unbearable.

  That night, when Binny went up to her tiny cupboard of a bedroom, she caught sight of something small and bright on the windowsill. A birch leaf. Clem’s wishing leaf.

  “I wish,” said Binny aloud, “that something would happen to stop it being school in the morning.”

  * * *

  “Wake up! Wake up! Come on, Binny, sit up!”

  “Go away!” moaned Binny.

  “Quick! Hurry! Clem’s already downstairs with James.”

  A flashlight beam bounced around the room showing a black liquid window. Binny’s scrapbook-pictured walls seemed to rustle and flutter. There was a watery sound.

  “It’s not morning and it’s not funny,” groaned Binny, and burrowed back under her quilt.

  It was snatched from her. The watery sound increased to a pouring rush. The flashlight beam ricocheted from the mirror as her mother pulled her out of bed. They both just made it to the doorway before a huge chunk of ceiling fell.

  “Why? Why? Why?” demanded Binny as she stumbled and shivered down the narrow cottage stairs. “What did it? Was it James? Why can’t we have the lights on?”

  “The power’s off,” explained her mother. “It’s a storm. We must have a hole in the roof. No, James, you are not going outside!”

  “But my chickens!” wailed James.

  They had been his wonderful surprise present from the old people at the home where his mother worked. Pecker and Gertie, two brown hens.

  “Pecker! Gertie!” roared James.

  “They’ll be all right. They’ve got a nice strong roof. It’s not safe to go out just yet. Listen!”

  Louder than the wind, harder than the rattle of the rain that flung itself against the windows, was the sound of roof tiles crashing to the ground.

  “I’ve got Cinderella,” said Clem. “I’ve put her in her traveling basket in case we need to leave.”

  Clem was calm in this emergency, collecting coats and bags ready to be grabbed, fielding Binny from the windows and James from the doors.

  “What if the walls blow down?” asked Binny, fearfully. “What’ll we do? We’ve only just moved here!”

  “This house has been here more than three hundred years,” said her mother. “The walls won’t blow down. Wrap your quilt around you and curl up on the sofa until it gets light. You too, Clem. And James can have the big chair. Try and get some sleep.”

  “What about you?” asked Binny.

  “I’ll take care of Cinderella. Come on James, I’ve made a little tent for you.”

  James crawled into his little tent, stayed still for one moment, and then exploded through the blanket walls, crying in anguish. “MY HOMEWORK! It’s in my bedroom and I need it for school tomorrow!”

  It was then that a great sunny warmth seemed to pour over Binny.

  “You needn’t worry about that, James,” she said. “There’s definitely not going to be any school in the morning!”

  Summer 1912, Part 2

  The museum was Peter’s idea to begin with, although he was soon joined by Rupert. It was stocked, arranged, and owned by the boys. At first Clarry was not involved at all.

  “She can visit, though, I suppose,” said Peter. The boys often talked about Clarry as if she wasn’t there.

  “I’m in the room!” said Clarry.

  “She should visit,” agreed Rupe. “She might learn something.”

  “I’m in the room!”

  “Did you hear anything just then, Pete?”

  “No.”

  “Thought something squeaked.”

  Clarry marched out of the room, found some nails and a hammer, and started
an art gallery on the landing. It failed within hours when the grandparents noticed the clean pale oblongs on the walls downstairs, and came up and reclaimed their property. The grandparents didn’t like the nail holes either; Clarry had used large nails, and plenty of them. The grandparents’ complaints were so bitter that the proprietor of the gallery ran away to the end of the garden, where she climbed onto the wall and chopped off all her hair.

  “Why?” asked Rupert when he finally managed to track her down.

  “I just did,” said Clarry, holding her raggy dark head very high in the air.

  “First Pete jumps out of a train. Then you cut your hair off. My turn next. I’ll have to look for another adder. Now come on down, Clarry, I’ve got you a job.”

  Clarry looked at Rupe doubtfully, suspecting more teasing.

  “What job?” she asked.

  “This museum of Pete’s. He’s taking it very seriously. He wants everything organized and labeled, he says. You’ve always liked fiddling about with stuff like that, haven’t you?”

  “Like what?” Clarry still showed no signs of climbing down from the wall.

  “Indian ink and fancy writing, like in a real museum. Pete said you’d be perfect.”

  “Peter said that?”

  “Said you’d do it properly,” said Rupe, not mentioning the difficulty with which he had dragged these words from Peter.

  Clarry, who was not used to praise, especially from her brother, was still cautious. “Why didn’t he ask me himself?”

  “He’s stuck upstairs with a busted leg, isn’t he? Poor old Pete, it’s not his fault that he’s wrecked for the summer.”

  “He jumped off a train onto rocks!”

  “I like your hair.”

  “Do I look like a boy?”

  “No. Come on.”

  * * *

  Clarry’s writing was her best thing, clear and fine, like the marks on a shell, or the lines on the wings of certain butterflies. Very carefully she wrote:

  Cast Skin of Grass Snake

  (Natrix natrix)

  July 1912

  Found by Rupert Penrose

  amongst the reeds beside the river

  “Not that bit about Rupe,” objected Peter.