*
By the time she got home from school, her mental list was long and comprehensive. She began to work her way through it.
She searched the obvious places first, more to get them out of the way than from any real hope of finding the trophy there.
If she had been double-guessing Liam, he had also been double-guessing her. A note inside his wardrobe said HA HA. Under the bed, two pairs of ancient football boots were labelled WERE YOU LOOKING FOR THESE?
Behind the curtains was practically a letter. OH, COME ON. TRY HARDER! DID YOU REALLY THINK I’D HIDE IT HERE?
“Nope,” said Abby, and set off to tackle the bathroom.
“What are you doing in there?” called Mum through the locked door after a while.
“Cleaning,” Abby called back.
“You’re what? Let me in,” said Mum.
“In a minute,” said Abby. The side of the bath was almost unscrewed. Sure enough, it did come off, and there was quite a useful hiding space in there, although it did not currently hold a trophy or indeed anything other than an impressive amount of fluff.
She opened the door and gave the screwdriver to Mum.
“What the...”
“It won’t screw on again,” said Abby. “You’d better do it.” She ran downstairs to scour the living-room.
She looked in the cupboards, the dresser, behind the sofa and under the desk. The notes said HO HO, OH NO, NOT EVEN WARM and YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY, LITTLE STICKYBEAK. The trophy was not there.
Abby sat back on her heels, ticking off her mental list. Then she went into the kitchen. By the time Mum came downstairs, she had already checked the breadbin, the freezer, the vegetable rack and the pan shelf, and was burrowing in the corner cupboard.
“What are you doing?” demanded Mum. “And why is the fridge open? And what are all these notes in Liam’s hand-writing?”
“I’m just looking for something.”
Mum read a note. “GUESS WHAT ISN’T HERE. What isn’t here, Abby?”
“Nothing,” said Abby, throwing empty jam jars out of the corner cupboard in order to search behind them. They rolled around the floor.
“Put those back,” said Mum. “It’s that trophy, isn’t it? Liam’s hidden it. And I don’t blame him. Come out of there.”
Abby pulled her head out of the cupboard and glared at Mum. “It’s my trophy as much as his! He has no right to hide it from me! I should be allowed to look at it!”
“Next week.”
“Five days,” said Abby. “That’s still too late. Have you got it? I bet he’s given it to you to look after! Has he, Mum? Has he?”
“He has not. Stop digging in my kitchen. Put those things away. And I do not want to find any more cutlery in the laundry basket.”
Abby threw the jam jars back into the cupboard with a reckless clatter, and headed for the stairs.
“And you may not go in my bedroom!” shouted Mum after her.
“All right,” said Abby. Aha! I bet it’s there, she thought. Otherwise she wouldn’t forbid me.
So after five minutes of banging around in her own room, just to make it clear to Mum exactly where she was, she glided silently across the corridor into her mother’s bedroom. She checked under the bed and then began to riffle through Mum’s clothes.
It seemed like years since she had played in here. She remembered how Mum used to let her empty out her jewellery box and try her dresses on.
Abby paused in her ransacking as an unexpected warm waft of nostalgia wrapped itself around her like a hug. Life had been so much simpler back then, when she was five. Liam had been eight: younger than she was now. He had still been human.
“I said, you may not go in my bedroom!”
“Nearly finished,” Abby said.
“OUT! OUT! OUT!”
“I’m not a cat,” said Abby. “You don’t need to shoo me.”
“I am very annoyed!”
“Garage?” said Abby hopefully.
“No!”
“But I haven’t searched in there yet.”
“I said No! Go to your room.”
Abby shrugged, meaning, that’s not a proper punishment.
But it was. She scuffed her feet as she mooched into her bedroom.
Her room was boring. It was full of old toys that she never played with but wouldn’t let her mother throw away. Stuffed bunnies and teddies; and hundreds of craft kits that Mum had bought her in vain attempts to get her to sit still. It had never worked. Abby didn’t like embroidery. What she really wanted was an archery range, and that wouldn’t fit in a bedroom.
She wrote out her list again, on the bedroom wall. Mum refused to redecorate her room until she stopped writing on the wall. Abby pointed out that this would never give her any incentive to stop writing on the wall. So? said Mum.
So. Now she wrote the list underneath the windowsill and crossed out every hiding place she had already checked, which was most of them.
“Eighty per cent,” she muttered. “But Liam isn’t four times better than me at hiding stuff. He isn’t as ingenious. I must be able to work out where he’s put that trophy.”
She was so frustrated that she banged her head against the wall.
“Ow,” she said, and read the list again.
She hadn’t checked the garden or the garage. He could have buried it in the compost bin. Abby shuddered. The compost bin was full of thin red worms and fat yellow slugs, which Liam hated almost as much as she did. So that might rule it out.
And the garden only had space for a tiny flowerbed. She didn’t think Liam would risk Mum’s anger by digging it up.
The garage was a possibility, although Abby spent so much time in there hunting for ping-pong balls that she knew all the hiding places. All the same, she would search it as soon as she could get herself grounded in there again.
But if the trophy wasn’t there, then she was stuck.
“NO!” declared Abby. “I am not stuck yet. I can’t be stuck. I am the champion of ingenious solutions! And that trophy’s mine! Come on, mighty brain. Where is it? What would Liam do?”
She pulled all her bedclothes off the bed into a heap, fell on top of them and tried to throw her pillow up high enough to hit the lightshade while she thought herself inside her brother’s head.
She’d looked in all the obvious places.
She’d looked in all the unobvious places.
She was at a dead end. Where could that trophy be? A dreadful thought struck her. Maybe Liam had given it to Jack or Tom or one of his other friends to look after.
Abby hurled the pillow up again, furiously, and this time it hit the lightshade. The lightshade slithered off the bulb and plummeted into her old toybox with a sound of splintering plastic.
“Bother it,” said Abby. The lightshade was only a cheap one. But it was the third time in two months. That was why the lightshade was only a cheap one. Mum said she was like a cross between a moth and a cannonball, with her fatal attraction for lights. Fatal to the lights, she meant. Mum still hadn’t forgiven her for trying to hang the Christmas tree lights on next door’s dog. The dog had survived, but the lights had not.
So Abby decided it might be prudent to try and mend the lightshade. It was only in four pieces, after all. She had glue somewhere in her toybox, in the underused craft kits.
She rummaged, throwing out embroidery sets, scraper boards, modelling clay and tangles of beads and felt and string. Somewhere under here should be a model aeroplane kit, requiring too much concentration to put together and therefore with its tube of glue intact.
Now she was down to the stuffed toy layer. A battered bunny, a squashed snake, a crushed koala... and something wrapped in her old baby blanket.
She unwrapped the blanket, with its familiar muggy smell. Inside it was a new smell: Vaseline, shampoo and steel.
The trophy.