Lazy Daisy

  Chapter 5.

  It is hard to be good all the time, as the rage seems to build up until you think you’re going to explode with the sheer force of it. One day I woke up and no matter what I did, little spurts of fury kept coming out. I hit Eddie twice and shouted at Dad. When I finally lost it and swore at Aunt Daisy, Dad sent me from the table. I stormed to the back yard and threw myself down on the wooden swinging seat in the herb garden. The garden had become a jungle. The plants had grown tall and spindly and the bigger ones had gobbled up all the low growing ones, except right at the edge. I sat there moodily swinging myself backwards and forwards and listened to the swing creaking. It was soothing in a horrible sort of way and I understood why Eddie had spent so much time there. Mind you, since Aunt Daisy had come, neither of us had any spare time any more.

  ‘I do not… creak.…like Aunt Daisy… creak.…I hate her’…creak.

  Eddie came slumping along the overgrown path and gave a sort of gasp when he saw me.

  ‘What do you want?’ I demanded rudely.

  ‘I thought you were Mum for a moment,’ he spluttered.

  I was going to say something really mean and cutting when I saw he was truly upset and all pale and shaky.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s only me and I’m in a foul temper,’ I confessed. ‘Come and join me.’

  I patted the seat beside me and Eddie sat down. We creaked back and forth companionably for a few minutes. ‘Eddie, what did happen to Mum?’ I asked idly.

  ‘I told you and you didn’t believe me. She was sitting on the seat like we are and she was swinging and holding some green stuff in her hands and then she simply vanished in a fold of the air.’

  Same old story! ‘What sort of green stuff?’ I asked without interest.

  ‘I don’t know. Small stuff like that.’

  Eddie pointed to a patch of thyme, which was struggling to grow onto the path. I reached down and plucked a handful. ‘Like this?’

  I held the thyme up to my nose and breathed in the herby smell of it. It made me sad and reminded me of roast dinners and warm kitchens.

  ‘Exactly like that,’ nodded Eddie.

  We swung together.

  creak.… creak.… creak.…went the swing.

  As it creaked for the third time there was a sort of shimmer in the air in front of us, like a heat haze on a really hot day. The air seemed to open a crack, no, truly it did. I can’t describe it properly. It’s the sort of thing you have to see for yourself. But in the crack we could see a sort of steamy window, then it cleared and there was Mum. She was wearing an apron and standing in some sort of kitchen stirring something in a pot. Her lips were moving but we couldn’t hear her.

  ‘Mum!’ we both shrieked as she looked up and looked straight at us.

  Eddie and I jumped up and stumbled to the crack. But as we reached out, the mist swirled back over the window and she was gone.

  ‘That was Mum,’ I breathed incredulously.

  ‘I told you she vanished into a crack,’ Eddie croaked.

  Both of us started crying then. Well, you can’t blame us because the worst thing of all was that though Mum had looked right at us, she hadn’t seemed to recognize us.

  One thing we both agreed on, when we stopped crying, was not to tell Dad. It had upset us so much I couldn’t inflict that on him. Especially as we had no idea where Mum was or how to get her back. We didn’t think Dad would know either.

  ‘And whatever you do, don’t tell Aunt Daisy,’ warned Eddie. ‘She’d be bound to think we were both loopy. I’d get sent to a mental home instead of a boarding school.’

  ‘Me too,’ I agreed shakily. ‘But where on earth is Mum? How can we get to her? We have to get her back.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not on earth,’ breathed Eddie. ‘Maybe aliens have taken her and she’s on another planet.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too much Space Monster on TV,’ I scoffed, although I had to admit he had a point. It certainly hadn’t looked like any place I’d ever seen but the possibility of aliens was way too scary to consider.

  About then we heard Dad calling and I had to go back and apologise to Aunt Daisy for being so rude. Part of me was singing inside, I was so happy. I was so pleased to have seen Mum that I said ‘sorry’ very nicely and part of me even meant it. I could tell that Aunt Daisy was miffed that she didn’t have any excuse to punish me – bed without tea was her favourite. Not that it mattered, as whichever one of us it was, the other would smuggle in biscuits or sandwiches at bedtime. If we were both sent to bed without tea, then we took turns to stand guard while the other sneaked into the kitchen. We had to wait to do this until the house was dark and then grab something from the pantry. We had some really peculiar meals that way but at least we didn’t starve.

  Eddie and I stayed awake talking about it half the night and decided we had to make finding Mum our top priority. We decided that Mum must have been in a different world (okay, I gave in to Eddie on that point) or even a different time from us somehow. Eddie is a whiz at computers as well as at Maths and he said he’d use the school computer to look up everything he could about different worlds while I took out all the books in the school library about magic.

  ‘Because it has to be some sort of magic,’ I insisted. I was hoping rather vaguely for fairies although the sort of fairy that would send a person’s mother away probably wasn’t in the fairy godmother category. More the ‘fatten you for supper’ type but I didn’t want to dwell on that thought.

  Eddie was sure there would be a scientific explanation for it and we argued about that for a while but we figured between the two of us we would come up with something. We both rejected the idea that maybe what we’d seen wasn’t real. At least I know I did. I guess if we’d told someone like the psychologist that Eddie went to, he’d have said it was an hallucination caused by emotional trauma and sent us off for more counseling.

  By the end of a month I was absolutely saturated with magic. I’d stayed up late reading every night until my eyes felt as if they were standing on stalks. I reckoned what I didn’t know about Narnia, Hogwarts or Hobbits wasn’t worth knowing. I’d read books about flying carpets and genies in bottles and lamps and every sort of wizard and witch that anyone could dream up. I read about dragons and swords with magic powers and precious objects disguised as everyday things that gave you wishes, even though they were invariably tricky and ended badly. I had even spent one weekend ploughing my way though a long and extremely boring science textbook which was cunningly titled ‘The Magic of Time and Space.’ I was disgruntled to find that it wasn’t about magic at all, but decided to read it anyway. It was better than having to sit and listen to Aunt Daisy complaining or even worse, finding me housework to do.

  Eddie and I had gone down every day to sit on the swing, except when it was so wet and rainy we wouldn’t have seen anything there anyway. We hadn’t seen so much as a glimmer, which depressed us rather.

  One Saturday afternoon we pooled our knowledge. That’s a fancy way of saying that I wrote down everything I could think of that might be relevant into an old exercise book while Eddie told me everything he’d found out. Then we studied it. We read and re-read it. We looked at everything up, down and sideways but by Saturday night we were no nearer finding out what had happened.

  ‘We didn’t see a dragon so at least we don’t need to find a magic sword,’ I said gloomily. ‘In fact, we didn’t see anything much at all.’

  ‘It did look like a kitchen, a bit,’ Eddie said doubtfully.

  ‘Maybe it was a laboratory where they do scientific research,’ I suggested, although what Mum would be doing in such a place was hard to fathom.

  Maybe it was because I was so swamped with information that I had a really weird dream about frogs that night. I was supposed to kiss all of them so they would turn into princes and I spent hours running away from them down never-ending passages. Despite this, I woke up late the next morning with the beginnings of an idea. Eddie was already up and I coul
d hardly wait until after I’d had breakfast to tell him about it. Aunt Daisy, naturally, decided that we should spend the day cleaning windows.

  ‘I don’t wish to complain, but the windows are so dirty I am ashamed,’ she said gently, while her beady little eyes darted at us, daring us to oppose her. ‘You two need some exercise after being shut up in your room all yesterday. And it is not good for you to sleep in, Poppy. You should get up early every morning and go for a brisk walk instead.’

  Eddie was going to leap to my defense, but I frowned at him and he muttered to himself instead.

  ‘Actually, Eddie and I are going to do some gardening today,’ I announced virtuously. ‘That will be heaps better exercise than cleaning windows.’

  Eddie looked surprised but had the good sense not to say anything.

  It took the wind right out of Aunt Daisy’s sails. She couldn’t stop us doing something that was even harder work than the windows and which needed doing even more urgently. Dad, when appealed to, wasn’t interested in any of this but grunted,

  ‘Good idea.’

  Aunt Daisy rather nastily said she would come down and inspect what we had done so Eddie and I had to lug the spades to the herb garden and dig a few token holes to show we were working.

  ‘Why did you say we’d dig the garden?’ complained Eddie.

  ‘We don’t have to. I wanted us to be here. I have an idea.’

  Eddie brightened at this and listened.

  ‘You know how I told you about that science book I read?’

  ‘You mean the one you complained about because you thought it was about magic and it wasn’t?’

  ‘That’s the one. Well there was one chapter about a scientist who had a theory that time was in folds and you ought to be able to jump from one fold to the other.’

  Eddie looked at me intently as I took a deep breath.

  ‘Well, I reckon he’s right. I reckon there are places where the folds are sort of thin or touching closer than others and you can slip through. What’s more, I reckon that’s what has happened to Mum. She’s gone to a different bit of time, which is why she has disappeared.’

  ‘She must have gone into the future. Like Rip Van Winkel who thought he’d been asleep for all those years when he came back,’ nodded Eddie.

  ‘Yes, only I think if we want to get to the same bit of time then we have to do something to make it happen.’

  ‘What, you mean like doing exactly what Mum was? We know she was on the swing but we’ve tried and tried and it has never worked again,’ Eddie pointed out.

  ‘I think it’s like Mum’s recipes,’ I explained. ‘You have to have all the right ingredients in the right amounts and in the right order to get the results. Now think. What did we do that time when we saw Mum?’

  Eddie frowned. ‘You were holding the thyme and we were on the swing.’

  ‘Yes and the swing was creaking. I’m sure it’s something to do with the sound. Sound can change stuff. You know, like Joshua destroying the walls of Jericho with trumpets in the Bible. If we get the right sound and have the right smell, that’s the thyme, then it might work for us.’

  Eddie was impressed. ‘Let’s try it,’ he grinned at me.

  ‘This time we’d better jump off quick when we see the crack,’ I told him.

  We each picked a bunch of thyme, although it was so tangled with other plants that we ended up with a few other things as well. We sat down and I pushed us off on the swing with my foot.

  creak.… went the swing. The herb garden waved lank and tall in the breeze.

  creak.… a bee buzzed as it shot past my face.

  creak.…

  There was a misty haze over the garden. Eddie and I crossed our fingers, hardly daring to breathe. The mist cleared and we could see a long crack in the air in front of us. Grasping Eddie’s hand I called ‘now,’ and together we jumped for the crack.