Magnus Finnegan chuckled somewhere behind the fog of his cigar smoke, and said, “Whichever way it ended, Jackie, it’s still a great story. Believe me, in Hollywood, that’s all that counts.” I hadn’t a clue what either of them were going on about.
No crowds were waiting for us when we got back home to the estate, no reporters, no television cameras. I led Barnaby into his lock-up where he began chomping happily on his hay. I was too angry with him even to speak to him, let alone brush him down. I just filled up his water bucket and left him there.
When I got up to the flat, Magnus Finnegan had gone, but I could still smell his filthy cigar smoke. Mum was making the tea. “I’ve done you toast and strawberry jam,” she said, “your favourite.” That was the moment I burst into tears. I sobbed my heart out and Mum just held me and stroked my hair. “A million euros, Mum,” I wailed, and poured out all my miseries. “Barnaby just sat there. He wouldn’t move. We could have had everything we always wanted, the house in the countryside, your chickens and ducks, a horse of my own. And we could have built stables for all the horses on the estate to keep them warm in the winter. It’s all so unfair, Mum.” I caught sight of Mister Skip looking at me. “And I wish,” I went on, “I wish that stupid garden gnome would stop smiling at me.”
“Don’t go blaming him, Jackie,” said Mum. “Mister Skip can’t help it, he’s always smiling. And besides, maybe he’s smiling because he’s happy. Like me. I’m happy. I’m smiling.” And I could see she was too, from ear to ear. It was crazy. We’d just lost a million euros and she was happy.
“Close your eyes, Jackie,” Mum said. I heard her go out of the kitchen, and so I opened them again. Mister Skip was sitting there smiling at me. I stuck my tongue out at him. I heard Mum coming back and closed my eyes again. I heard her moving the cups and plates aside, and putting something that sounded very heavy down on the table. “Alright, Jackie,” she said. “You can open them now.”
It was her battered old leather suitcase – one I’d rescued from the skip some time before. “Take a deep breath, Jackie,” she said, and then she opened it. It was stuffed full of money, twenty euro notes, fifty euro notes. “But how come you’ve got all that money?” I cried. “We lost!”
“So what?” said Mum. She was being deliberately mysterious and I still didn’t understand. “All those reporter fellows, all those telly people. Did you really think I’d let them have something for nothing? Magnus. Magnus Finnegan, him with the big cigar and the car as long as the Titanic, I did a deal with Magnus right at the start, Jackie. He wanted to buy our story, your story, Barnaby’s story, to make a film out of it. So I said fine, you pay us a great whack of money and look after us, and you can have our story, that’ll be just fine. And now he’s paid up. None of your cheques or your plastic card rubbish. Cash, ready money, the real stuff.”
“How much?” I breathed.
“Only 500,000 smackeroos,” said Mum. “It’s not a million maybe, but who’s counting? It’ll be quite enough to buy us our own place in the country, and for a horse for yourself, and for a nice stable for all the horses on the estate. Enough is as good as a feast, that’s what I say.”
I didn’t understand that either – not until Mister Skip explained it later. But after a moment or two of hard thinking I did begin to understand about the money and how she’d got it. 500,000 euros for a story, for our story! Maybe Barnaby would be in the movies! Maybe I’d be in the movies! I cried all over again, and so did Mum then, and we danced round the table laughing and crying both at the same time.
Later, when Mum had gone off to bed, I went back into the kitchen to have a quiet word with Mister Skip. “I thought you’d let me down, Mister Skip,” I whispered.
“Would I do that to you, Jackie?” he replied. “There’s ways and ways of doing things, and I thought this way would be more fun. And besides, when I thought about it, I thought maybe a million was too much money. So I changed my mind, and you lost the race. Winning isn’t always good, Jackie, not all the time. And too much money, like too little, is not a good thing.” I understood now, I understood perfectly.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I told him.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Mister Skip said. “Didn’t you put me all back together again? Didn’t you give me a new life? This is me thanking you, Jackie. Like I said, one good turn deserves another.”
I reached out and I hugged him tight, before I left him chuckling away in the dark of the kitchen.
So first of all we had twenty brand new stables put up on the edge of the estate for the horses. But we made Marty and Barry promise that from now on girls could join the Crazy Cossacks and ride in the Saturday race just the same as the boys. And a few months later we found our dream house with green fields all around it, on a beautiful hillside out in County Wicklow. There was enough room for Gran and Aunty Mary to have a room each when they came to stay and Mum could keep all the chickens and ducks she wanted. And when I looked out of my bedroom window now there were no concrete tower blocks, no roads, no cars, just a great big wide sky and grass and trees, and a winding stream and shifting sheep and Barnaby grazing in a field with a horse – my horse. I called him Skippy, of course. And he goes like the wind, of course.
Mister Skip himself lived outside by the front door – he told me that garden gnomes prefer to live outside. “It’s where we belong,” he said. So I often went and sat there on the front doorstep to talk to him. He’d always listen, I knew that, and he’d speak to me sometimes, but not as often as I’d like. I began to get the feeling he was a bit sad all on his own out there.
Then one day Mum said she had a cunning idea. “I was thinking,” she began, “I was thinking that Mister Skip looks a little lonely and sad out there all on his own.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” I told her.
“Great minds think alike,” she said. “I was thinking that we could set up a sort of business, a little business that’ll maybe bring in a bit of money, and one that’ll keep Mister Skip happy at the same time. I reckon that, one way or another, that old gnome has done us a power of good. He’s given you and me the best times we’ve ever had. And I’m thinking… one good turn… how does that saying go, Jackie?”
“One good turn deserves another?” I said.
“Right,” said Mum.
And so it was that the very next day Mum put a big advertisement in the Irish Times. “Wanted. Any old gnomes. If you’ve got an old garden gnome that needs a retirement home, a nice place in the country, we’ll take him free of charge. Fishing. Lovely views.”
Within days we had fifty old gnomes. Within weeks we had a hundred. One by one we repaired them and painted them. We put them out in the fields, under the trees, all over the place, and the ones with the fishing rods we put down by the stream. When we were ready we put up the sign outside: “Mister Skip’s Pixie Park”. We charged one euro to get in and they came in their thousands. We gave all of them a pixie hat to put on, big and red and floppy, to make them feel at home, and then they went on a tour of “Mister Skip’s Pixie Park.”
As for Mister Skip, he stays by the front door looking out over his park, and he isn’t lonely any more. He talks to me all the time now, you can hardly stop him. He’s so happy.
Yesterday evening I was sitting out there with him after all the visitors had gone, just watching the sun go down over the hill.
“Aren’t we the lucky ones, Mister Skip?” I said.
“Luck?” replied Mister Skip. “What’s luck got to do with it?” And when he began to chuckle, it echoed from hill to hill and down the valley, so that it seemed as if every gnome and pixie in the park was chuckling with him. Perhaps they were.
Also by Michael Morpurgo
Little Manfred
Shadow
An Elephant in the Garden
Born to Run
Farm Boy
The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
The Dancing Bear
The
Butterfly Lion
Dear Olly
Toro! Toro!
Farm Boy
Billy the Kid
Cool!
Copyright
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2002
This edition published in 2012
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2002
Illustrations by Nellie Ryan 2012
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
ISBN 9780007476787
EPub Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007479917
EPub Version 1
Michael Morpurgo asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of the work.
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Michael Morpurgo, Mr Skip
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