Becca Fair and Foul Page 8

  Who-who-who-who-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! the voice cried out again.

  “‘Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,’” Jane whispered. “‘Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not …’”

  From deep in the island came an answering call.

  Who-who-who-who-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!

  It rippled like sea in wind.

  “Oh!” Jane cried. “Look! It’s there! It has a baby. Owls!”

  Grrrrrrp. Grrrrrrrp.

  There in the dark, Becca’s eyes began to see them. Paler than night, paler than twilight, the owls were ghosts in the shadows.

  “It’s a mum and a young one,” whispered Becca.

  “Or maybe a dad,” said Lucy.

  “They’re watching the play,” Jane said.

  Again the hoot of the distant, answering owl shivered the dark air, and then Becca could see neither mother nor baby anymore.

  * * *

  “Oh, my gosh.” Alicia’s voice sounded suddenly, intruding like daylight into darkness. “Frank was so freaked I had to really squeeze to hold onto him.”

  “Alicia! What are you doing here? With Frank!”

  “Fabulous sound effects,” said Merlin.

  “Truly,” said Aunt Fifi. They sounded as if they were one person waking up from a dream.

  “What are you doing here?” Becca asked Alicia. “Did you get attacked?”

  “Attacked!” Alicia exclaimed.

  “Yes!” Lucy said. “Something tried to eat my head. A bird!”

  “Oh!” said Aunt Fifi. “Barred owls!”

  “Your ponytail,” said Merlin.

  “Barred owls go for ponytails,” said Aunt Fifi. “Especially runners’ ponytails. For some reason to do with ponytails looking like squirrels and bouncing up and down when people run. Or so some people say.”

  “You were really attacked?” Alicia asked.

  Lucy clicked on her headlamp.

  “Look! Blood!” she said.

  “Is that part of your costume?” Alicia asked, peering at her. “Is it really blood? Oh! There’s a huge gouge on your forehead.”

  “Bard owls?” Becca asked. “A Shakespeare owl?”

  “Barred as in with bars or stripes on their feathers,” said Aunt Fifi.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Alicia said. “An owl didn’t really attack you.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Becca said. “You said you wouldn’t have anything to do with the play.”

  “Anyone can walk in the park,” said Alicia.

  * * *

  “What did you think?” Becca asked Alicia later, as they brushed their teeth and spit the foam into Gran’s herb planter, something they were strictly forbidden to do. “Did you like it?”

  “It’s more exciting than I thought,” said Alicia. “With the owl and everything. But it’s too much work. I don’t know why they call them plays.”

  11. Housework

  Gran had decided it was time to get ready for Auntie Clare and Uncle Clarence. Everybody had to help clean the house.

  “Never mind,” said Aunt Fifi, marching along beside Becca into the morning sea. “It might not take forever.”

  All around them waves splattered blue and silver and gold into the air, as if they’d been licked by sunlight.

  “Maybe it will take forever!” Becca said. “And it’s a perfect sunny day. A day for doing things! Not for housework.”

  * * *

  Inside, Gran was sitting by the teapot writing.

  “We’re going to have a day in remembrance of my mother,” she said. She was making a list. “We’re going to clean this place from top to bottom. My mum was a great housekeeper. She even washed her scrub brushes.”

  But why? Becca wondered. Why would anyone do that?

  “Grandma was a great adventurer,” Aunt Fifi said. “Remember that time she was kayaking and rescued the guy off the west coast? And piggybacked him all the way in through the rainforest because he was so weak?”

  “Yes, but she was also clean and tidy,” said Gran. “And Clare and Clarence are coming and I want the place perfect for them.”

  Becca knew why. Auntie Clare and Uncle Clarence would only be here for a little while, and then they went back to their work overseas in Swaziland. Mum and Dad had told Becca that many people in African countries were sick with AIDS — sick and dying. Girls and boys, women and men. Teenagers, even, and babies like Becca’s sister Pin. Auntie Clare and Uncle Clarence ran a clinic for people with AIDS and worked with different organizations to get medicine for them. And they helped people who were not sick, too — the grandmothers who took care of the children whose parents were sick.

  “A clean house will be more cheerful for Clare,” said Gran, writing away.

  “Auntie Clare doesn’t care about clean houses,” Becca said. “She cares about people, and her house is always scruffy. Once when I was there a mouse ran across my pillow. Mollie and Ardeth had to come chase it away. And her bread grew fur, right there in the bread box.”

  “It’s nice for people to walk into a clean house,” said Gran. “It’s welcoming.” It was like she hadn’t even heard Becca.

  “Mum!” said Aunt Fifi. “It’s a glorious day! I refuse to spend it mousing around under the beds. And anyway, your mother would hate to be remembered this way. Housework!”

  “Fifi,” said Gran.

  That was all.

  Aunt Fifi threw up her hands and stumped off to change out of her bathing suit.

  “You each get an area,” said Gran. “Meg, you do the kitchen and fridge, and Alicia can clean the windows, and Lucy can do the bathroom.”

  Auntie Meg was only partly awake, and Lucy and Alicia weren’t really awake at all. Maybe that was all for the best, Becca thought.

  “But Jane and I have to go to the free store,” she said. “To look for costumes. And after today it’s closed for three whole days! And we need to have the play all ready so Auntie Clare and Uncle Clarence can see it.”

  But she might as well have been talking to Frank.

  “Maybe in the afternoon,” said Gran.

  “But our boat!”

  Gran looked at her list.

  “Fifi, you take the downstairs bedroom and Becca, you do the front and back lofts — everything — bedding aired, floor vacuumed, boxes sorted, clothes tidied. And go through those boxes of books. We’ll take the ones you don’t want to the free store.”

  * * *

  Cleaning the lofts! On a sunny day! It was no joke, Becca thought, throwing Lucy’s filthy T-shirts back into her suitcase.

  “Just be glad you aren’t scrubbing out the fridge,” she heard Auntie Meg say from downstairs. “Is this old mustard or congealed foot ointment, do you think?”

  Becca could hear Gran outside.

  “Oh, Jane!” Gran called in a welcoming way. “How good to see you! Becca’s in the loft. You can go up and help her.”

  Jane was armed with her backpack and a pair of sturdy runners. “I thought we’d go on an expedition,” she said. “I thought I’d escape our stinky house for a day on the beach.”

  Becca looked at her sadly.

  “You can go if you want,” she said. “But I can’t.”

  “Why is your family so grumpy today? Except your gran. She’s practically jumping for joy.”

  “Labor is happening,” Becca said.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Jane.

  “I mean, I must remove some thousand of these things and pile them up,” Becca said, gesturing at the loft.

  The front of the loft was full of mattresses and bedding and looked out over the sea, and the back part looked out over the trees and was where Becca and Lucy and Alicia kept their suitcases.

  Gran kept lots of other things in the back loft, too. A bread-make
r, a trunk, shells, games, old clothes, photo albums, books, potted plants — some dead, some not yet so — wrapping paper, camping equipment, a microscope, glass specimen jars, a bag of old-fashioned bathing caps, and something that looked like a fossilized sock but was a piece of coral.

  And those were only the things Becca could see.

  “But …” Jane said, “the wind’s blowing, the sea’s rolling in, the tide’s rolling out, the sun’s shining!”

  Becca shook out her sleeping bag.

  “You just dumped out half the beach,” Jane said.

  “Now I’ll have to vacuum it up.”

  “Why’s your gran so good at thinking up chores?” Jane asked. Then she gathered up the sleeping bags and took them out to the back deck, where she held them up, one after another, and shook them.

  “Lucy must really shovel it in there,” she said, looking at the fortification of sand that had fallen from the sleeping bag.

  “That’s Alicia’s,” Becca said.

  “Does she ever wash her feet?” asked Jane. “Whoa — what’s this?”

  A small paperback had come flying out of the sleeping bag. Jane held it up.

  The Tempest.

  “She’s thinking about it,” she said.

  “I want you to vacuum that loft thoroughly.” Gran’s voice floated up from the front room.

  “How do you expect them to do that with a vacuum cleaner held together with duct tape?” came Aunt Fifi’s voice.

  Becca could hear her crashing around in the back room.

  “Why do you have a commercial fishing net in here?” Aunt Fifi demanded. “No, don’t bother answering.”

  Then there was a thump and the sound of something falling over.

  “To think I could be hiking on the beach or having a swim with my niece!” Aunt Fifi exclaimed.

  Becca heard the door slam.

  She and Jane brought the sleeping bags back in. Becca folded hers, shook out her pillow and tipped her mattress so the sand fell off. She crawled to the sides of the loft where the roof came right down to the floor and tidied up the things she found there. There was a good drawing she’d made last year, and a stuffy she’d got from the free store when she was five, and dried-up pens, and tissues — some used and some not — and a book on marine life of the Pacific Northwest, and dustballs the size of moon snails.

  “This is the most asinine vacuum cleaner in the world.” Aunt Fifi’s voice rumbled up from below. “And why do you keep the chainsaw at the foot of your bed?”

  Gran didn’t answer.

  “I know you don’t approve of my orneriness but I don’t think that means you should torture me with poor cleaning equipment,” Aunt Fifi went on. “Oh, a bottle of single malt! Why is that at the foot of your bed? Mum?”

  “Forty-one jars,” Auntie Meg announced. “Forty-one partly full jars of jams, jellies, nut butters, conserves, chutneys, pickles and relishes. And some with best-before dates from a decade ago.”

  But Gran must have been out by the shed, making plans for more tidying. She didn’t answer.

  Behind the mattresses, there were boxes of books.

  “My First Visit to the Dentist,” Becca read.

  “The Care and Feeding of the Offshore Crew,” read Jane. “It’s advice for cooks who work on freighters.”

  “Did Gran work on a freighter?” Becca wondered. “Did she feed them stir-fried sea asparagus?”

  “Maybe we could get some ideas from it,” Jane said, “for when we have our own boat.”

  “What’s this?” Becca asked. “Muriel’s Beautiful Girlhood.”

  The book fell open in her hand and she started to read from its thick furry pages.

  Muriel was a boring person. Becca read on, and Muriel and her friends hosted a tea party. Muriel then prepared to go out for dinner with a young man, and her mother gave her advice.

  Becca tried to think about a world in which someone considered this interesting.

  As she started to close the book, it fell open at the flyleaf.

  For my dear Isobel, she and Jane read in faded writing. May you grow into womanhood with strength, love and faith. This book meant everything to me when I was your age! From your loving mother on your thirteenth birthday.

  Gran was Isobel. It was Gran’s book, and that must be Gran’s mum’s writing. Becca’s great-grandmother.

  And Gran turning thirteen.

  “What’s growing into womanhood?” asked Jane.

  “Nobody says that,” Becca said. “Now they say It’s Perfectly Normal.”

  “But it doesn’t look like it’s about bodies,” said Jane.

  “Maybe it’s not,” said Becca. “Anyway, womanhood must have been awful if you had to read stories like this.”

  She opened the book again.

  Now Muriel prayed for guidance about which boy she should marry. Should it be the businessman who was a bit rakish and had been known to play billiards? Or should it be the teetotalling farmer who was so kind to his widowed mother, but whose farm was about to be possessed by the bank?

  Whoever it was, Muriel was sure to keep a clean house. She was a hard worker, that Muriel.

  Becca read a paragraph in which Muriel tidied up the linen closet. Every noble, sincere person loves truth, Muriel’s mother told her.

  “Imagine getting this for your birthday!” Jane exclaimed.

  No wonder it didn’t have the beat-up look books got when they’d been propped open in front of your lunch or stuffed under your covers.

  “Mother, why do you keep potato chips at the foot of your bed?” Aunt Fifi hollered. “Just curious … and why’s your wetsuit in your bedroom?”

  There was a pause, but no answer. Where was Gran?

  Had Gran’s mother been sorry that Gran turned out to be a person who had a wetsuit, but no linen closet?

  Why hadn’t she given Gran a book on intertidal marine life? Or birds of the Pacific Northwest?

  “Hey, I didn’t know we had a wood-burning set,” Aunt Fifi said, her voice muffled by the sound of the vacuum cleaner.

  From the loft, Becca could see Alicia sloshing the front windows with water and soap, and then using a long-handled squeegee to clean it all off. All the sea salt and grime was disappearing, but Alicia looked about ready to bite someone.

  Auntie Meg finished washing the kitchen floor and flung open the front door. The sea wind blew through the house, all the way up through the loft and out the sliding doors to the upper deck out the back.

  “I finished the bathroom,” Lucy said, coming into the front room. “Gran? Can I go now?”

  But Gran didn’t answer.

  Becca looked through Alicia’s sparkling windows and out over the beach. There was Gran in her bathing suit and a wet towel, standing in the wind down by Mermaid’s Rock, chatting away with Merlin and Kay-next-door. The sea jumped and sparkled in the noonday sun, and kids were making sandcastles down on the sand.

  “Let’s hurry up,” Becca said.

  “I want a swim,” said Jane.

  They bundled the rest of the books into a box for the free store, but Becca couldn’t make herself get rid of Muriel’s Beautiful Girlhood.

  Gran! She wasn’t acting at all like Muriel’s Beautiful Girlhood told her she should.

  Downstairs, sunlight bounced back from the floors. The blue sea flashing its reflections through the new-washed windows looked like part of the room. Even the pictures on the fridge had been arranged neatly, and when Becca opened the door to get the milk, she was met with orderly emptiness.

  It was nicer.

  But it was awful bringing about such a state of cleanliness.

  And there was something else, too. The cabin had become tidier and tidier, thanks to Auntie Meg, Aunt Fifi, Lucy, Alicia, Jane and Becca.

  And Gran giving orders. Making
lists. Saying it was in honor of her mother. And spending the morning on the beach. Swimming. Laughing with the neighbors.

  Gran was like Prospero. A magician, a director — not like Muriel with her linen closet and all.

  She came up from the beach at last.

  Becca and Jane showed her Muriel’s Beautiful Girlhood. She turned the pages.

  “It’s a book from my mum’s era,” she said. “It didn’t seem suitable for my own daughters —”

  A peculiar look came over her face and she snapped the book closed.

  “Oh, Alicia!” she said suddenly. “What a good job you’ve done of the windows! But they’re almost too clean. We’re going to have trouble with the robin fledglings crashing into them.”

  Alicia glared at her.

  “Work! Work! Work!” she grumbled as she and Becca waited for Gran to leave, then secretly poured the window washing water into the herb planter. “I might as well be in a play!”

  “Really?” asked Becca.

  “No!” she said.

  12. A Dangerous Wind

  Lucy wanted to fly.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said, wheeling her bike up the trail on her way to help Annie the veg lady. “Maybe I can get back at that nasty owl.”

  “We’ll rig up a zipline,” said Jane.

  “We’ve got pulleys and line,” Becca said. “But I don’t know anything about putting them together.”

  “Merlin might help,” said Aunt Fifi.

  “No! It’s Shakespeare,” said Gran. “He’s —”

  “I know, I know,” said Aunt Fifi.

  “We won’t let them argue,” said Becca. She thought Aunt Fifi and Merlin were getting along quite well.

  “Our plumbing might do Merlin in,” said Jane. “Not Shakespeare. At least Shakespeare doesn’t stink.”

  * * *

  Becca and Jane went to recycling and the free store. The free store was all stuff people didn’t need any more, organized like a proper store so you could find what you needed, and sometimes things you didn’t know you needed. There were lots of things for costumes — ancient swim fins for Caliban’s fishy feet, a robe for Prospero, a rainbow-dyed jumpsuit for one of the clowns and silky pantaloons for the king.