This was the one bit of Amber that Sally didn’t like, the bit that made bargains. She felt in her pockets while Amber watched very carefully, her glossy black head moving now this way, now that, like a bird.
On to the bank Sally put two sweets, a piece of blue string and a rubber shaped like a frog. Then she found a stub of pencil and laid it beside the rest. Amber inspected everything.
‘Is that all?’ she demanded.
‘That’s all. . . today,’ Sally said slowly, as if, on normal days, her pockets were stuffed with treasures.
Amber swept everything except the pencil into the brilliant patchwork bag she brought to school with her things in. Then she picked up the pencil stub and wrote down the number on Sally’s hand.
‘Ouch!’ squeaked Sally. Amber was pressing much too hard.
‘Pencil’s not much good on skin,’ said Amber. ‘I’ve got to press.’
When she had finished, Sally inspected her hand. ‘I can’t really see it,’ she told Amber nervously. ‘Could you write it on some paper?’
‘Haven’t got any paper,’ Amber said. She sounded grumpy now. She wrapped her long sunburnt arms round her knees and stared moodily into the slow brown water. Her little gold earrings glinted in the sun and her rainbow-coloured dress was like bright feathers. Sally, who had thick blonde plaits and short stubby legs, felt boring and plain next to Amber, plain as bread.
She said, ‘I’ll get some paper. Wait here.’ And she ran off up the path that went through the middle of the allotments. When she reached the place where they made bonfires she rummaged about among the rusty oil drums. Very soon she soon found a brown paper bag, the kind one of the old men might have brought, with his sandwiches in. A lot of quite old people came to grow things on the allotments, and stayed the whole day.
‘Will this do?’ asked Sally, holding it out to Amber.
Amber inspected the greasy bag, tore a piece off the corner and scribbled down the number. But she still seemed cross. It was as if giving Sally the important number was like telling somebody your name for the very first time, as if it gave that somebody a kind of power over you.
‘There you are, Sally Bell,’ she said, slapping the scrap of brown paper into Sally’s hand, and the next minute she was gone, running very fast along the path towards Tolly Reach where the kingfisher was and where, across the fields, in a lay-by on the main road, the gypsies had their caravans.
‘Sally Bell’. That didn’t feel very friendly. Sally called Amber ‘Amber’. If the gypsy girl had another name then nobody knew it; it was one of the magic things about her.
Sally walked home looking at the faint writing on the palm of her hand. From time to time she felt inside her pocket for the tiny scrap of brown paper. She must put it in a very safe place. It was a good thing she had that paper because she couldn’t memorise the number. In the place where other people had a memory, Sally had a ‘forgettery’, that’s what her mum said.
As she lay in bed that night she discovered that the bath water had washed the faint pencil marks quite off her hand. But hanging over a chair was her blue cotton frock with the deep pockets and in the left-hand pocket was Amber’s special number. The thought of it comforted her as she drifted off to sleep. It was like a warm hot water bottle held against her tummy. It promised help, help to sort out the terrible thing.
The terrible thing hadn’t happened in the house in which Sally had gone to bed. She was sleeping at ‘Next Door’s’, where Mrs Spinks lived. Mrs Spinks was looking after her because her mother was in hospital.
This was awful for Sally but it wasn’t the terrible thing. The doctor had told Mrs Spinks and Mrs Spinks had told her that Mum would get better soon. So Sally tried not to worry and it was all right until the day she went to the hospital and wasn’t allowed to see her mother because they had put her in a special room for very ill people.
After that, Sally worried very much indeed and she asked Mrs Spinks to write to her father straight away, or even to send him a telegram, to Abroad where he was working. But Mrs Spinks said no, not yet anyway. It was Abroad where Mum had caught the illness, when she last visited Dad.
Mrs Spinks said that she had her instructions from Mum. These were that Dad mustn’t be told about the illness because it would only worry him, and besides, she really was going to be all right. The doctor had said so. Sally tried and tried to believe Mrs Spinks but she didn’t succeed. Why had they put Mum into that special room if she was going to be ‘all right’? When she’d said this to Mrs Spinks, she’d just turned her thin old-lady lips into a single line. That meant ‘No more questions, Sally Bell’.
Her big brother, Alan, suddenly going away with the army, to do his National Service, wasn’t the terrible thing either, though if he hadn’t gone, they could have stayed together in their own house, till Mum came back. Alan was good at looking after Sally. But he’d said, ‘When a soldier gets his orders, Sally Bell, he has to obey. It’s like school.’ It was funny how Alan called her ‘Sally Bell’, like Amber and Mrs Spinks; but he didn’t do it in a grumpy way.
No, the terrible thing had happened the day before Sally had slept her first night Next Door at Mrs Spinks’s. It had happened when she was all alone in their own house. It had happened in the hall.
She’d borrowed the key from where Mrs Spinks kept it, under a red plant pot on her kitchen windowsill, and gone home to feed William her pet mouse. Mrs Spinks didn’t like mice, not even clean white ones who lived in clean cages. So William had to stay behind.
Sally had made him a promise. While she was at Mrs Spinks’s she would come and see him every day, and give him a run around. What nobody knew was that Sally often gave him quite big runs around, when no-one was looking. He knew Sally’s voice and he always came back to his cage. He was a brilliant mouse.
But that day, William seemed to be in a mood. He wouldn’t even come out when Sally opened his cage, he just sulked in a corner. When she put her finger inside and made wheedling noises he disappeared into a cocoon of straw. She knew what was wrong. William was sensitive. Sally was sad so he was being sad too.
She sat in the middle of the carpet and looked round the big square hall. Its walls were covered with the carved wooden masks of animal-people and bird-people which Dad had brought home from Abroad. The house itself felt sad, as if it knew they had all gone away and left it. Even the grandfather clock had stopped ticking.
Mum loved the old clock. It had belonged to her mum’s mum’s dad. Nobody touched it but Mum because she said she knew its little ways. ‘Look after Grandfather for me, Sally,’ Mum had said, when she went off to the hospital. But now even Grandfather had fallen silent. Something felt very bad indeed.
Sally decided to wind the clock up. She knew exactly how to do it and where Mum kept the key. She had a feeling that if Grandfather started ticking again, Mum might start getting better. Sally sometimes got these funny feelings but she didn’t tell anybody about them. She just did what they advised.
To Sally,
