The Listmaker (2 page)

She jumped off the porch to inspect them, and I went back inside to check that the phone was connected. Its last owner had decorated it with blue-wren stickers. They couldn't be peeled off, as I found after I'd dialled and waited a long time for someone to answer at the other place. No one did, which meant Aunty Nat really
had
left. She just wasn't capable of ignoring a ringing telephone. She loved an opportunity to chat to anyone at all, even telephone sales people. (Dad claimed that he'd once overheard her earbashing someone who'd made an obscene phone call. Aunty Nat was kindly suggesting a whole lot of social clubs that creep could join, and also offering advice about where he could get counselling.) This time, though, the phone just rang and rang. If she'd already left, I thought anxiously, where was she
now
?

I hung up, debating whether to ring Piriel next. She'd given me one of her business cards, so I had her office, mobile phone and flat numbers. But I felt uncomfortable about bothering her. She might get the impression that her future stepdaughter wasn't capable of dealing with a small hiccup like a lost elderly relative and a missing truck full of furniture. Like Dad, Piriel had a low opinion of people who couldn't cope. The first time I met her was at a restaurant. Dad had arranged a special lunch to introduce us. When it was over, while he was paying the bill and Piriel and I were in the ladies' room, she'd smiled at me in the mirror and said, ‘I don't particularly like children, Sarah; I might as well be frank about it. But you seem so sensible I just
know
we're going to get along very well indeed.' It felt like the highest kind of compliment, and I didn't want to risk damaging it now by sooking out my worries to her over the phone.

Actually, I'd already had plenty of training at being sensible and self-reliant from four years of boarding school. Not that
everyone
who boarded there automatically developed those traits, of course; some of those girls were just as dizzy as the aunts! Because there was no one there I felt close to, I'd learned how to cope with day-to-day problems on my own. Just as I'd learned not to make a fuss about weekend treats being cancelled at the last minute because Dad had to work unexpectedly. He took it for granted I wouldn't complain about things. It was flattering, really, the way he treated me almost like another adult.

There certainly wouldn't be any hiccups when we moved into that city apartment – not with two capable people like Dad and Piriel in charge! There wouldn't be any snags at all during the actual move – or afterwards. Life would be as smooth as velvet in that apartment block with its high-tech security system, residents' pool and resident caretaker. That's what I felt like right now at Avian Cottage, a resident caretaker, though I wasn't making a good job of it. Clutching a germy telephone decorated with blue-wren stickers and worrying about a scatty old lady didn't seem very constructive. I took out the memo pad that went everywhere with me.

‘Aunt Dosh,' I called through the front door. ‘Let's make a list of everything in the house that needs repairs.'

It wasn't as though I thought she'd be much help with it, but I didn't want to risk leaving her outside by herself. She was capable of wandering off to look at the other gardens in the street without telling me first. One missing aunt was quite enough to deal with.

‘We'll start with this entrance hall,' I told her after I'd finished wiping up the soil she'd tracked back inside. ‘You call out the things, and I'll write them down.'

‘You and your lists! Well, all right, dear, but I'm not sure I can spot anything much. It all seems okay to me.'

‘How about those cracks in the wall? And the light fitting …'

‘Cobwebs can just be swept off.'

‘I didn't mean cobwebs, I meant all those dangly glass teardrop things. Half of them are missing. And the floor dips down in one corner, surely you can see
that
?'

The floor sloped in the main bedroom, too. The wardrobe door was also stuck, though Aunt Dorothy claimed it just needed a good shove. When she tried, it came right off its track and crashed into the flywire screen on the window.

‘Oops,' she said. ‘Oh well, never mind. I think that screen needed replacing, anyhow. It was already full of holes, not just the one I made.'

I went through into the ensuite bathroom and tried the taps, which made a noise like a couple of Rottweilers. So did the overhead fan and the toilet when we tried flushing it. Someone had got a bit carried away using swans as a motif in that ensuite. They floated about on the tiles, shower curtain and blind, not to mention a plastic ornament clipped to the bath, shaped like a swan with its wings arched to hold soap.

Aunt Dorothy trailed after me back to the living room, which was painted pink, like the icing on little kids' birthday cakes. It had a narrow wallpaper strip pasted all around the walls, just under the ceiling. At first we thought the pattern was just roses or something. Aunt Dorothy hoisted herself up on a window ledge for a closer look, and said they were pink dancing flamingos. (She also managed to knock a curtain-rod loose when she was getting down.)
Anyone
could see that an urgent redecorating job was needed for the living room, so I didn't make any notes on my memo pad. I didn't bother making notes about the kitchen, either. It was just one big disaster zone. At least it didn't seem to have any birdy items anywhere – though the dining room opening off it certainly made up for that! It was lined with parrot wallpaper.

‘Oh no, Sarah, we wouldn't want to rip down that nice wallpaper,' Aunt Dorothy objected, reading the list over my shoulder. ‘It was one of the things that really caught Nat's eye when we were thinking about buying. She's going to make a matching tapestry cover for the window seat.'

There were more parrots, real ones, flitting about outside the big window. I watched them for a while, thinking they looked like little red jesters tumbling about amongst all the greenery. Avian Cottage was two-storeyed, but because it was built halfway down a slope, the top floor was the entrance with the other level tucked away underneath. The garden seemed to go on forever. It was actually a double block, the rear one just bushland. Being so high up, I was looking down into the tops of shrubs and even some of the trees. There were so many shades of green I could have used up a whole page of my memo book listing them all, but we still had to get the repair details for downstairs. (Piriel Starr, I knew, would never leave a job half-finished.)

The staircase leading downstairs had a banister knob missing, four wobbly steps, a broken light, and a loose shelf on the landing. That shelf was carved like an eagle with its wings spread wide, and could probably give people a nasty fright looming out of the shadows if the landing light wasn't fixed. (Aunt Dorothy went one better. She just about knocked herself out crashing into it. )

The bottom floor was where I gave up and put my pen away. Listing all the things wrong down there would have filled the whole notebook! Because of the wild green garden smothering every window pane, it felt like swimming about in a pool that hadn't been de-sludged for a long time. And as though there wasn't quite enough green outside, someone had even stuck up a rainforest scene in the end room. It was one of those enormous blown-up photograph posters, covering a whole wall. You could just about smell leaf-mould if you stared at it long enough – though maybe I was only imagining that because of the musty atmosphere downstairs. Aunt Dorothy did stare at it, going off into one of her trances because she thought it was so beautiful.

I went back upstairs, washed my hands thoroughly, then sat on the front porch again, thinking glumly that with Dad overseas, school closed for the holidays and Aunty Nat vanished from the face of the earth, I was more or less in the position of being an orphan. (Aunt Dorothy didn't count; no sane person would have given someone my age into her custody.) It was quite a battle to stop myself phoning Piriel and bleating about it. I was quite sure that if
she'd
found herself in a similar predicament at my age, she wouldn't have whinged about it to anyone. Somehow she would have known
exactly
what to do. So instead I made an irritated list of all the most annoying old-fashioned words and phrases still used by the ancient aunts, such as frock, wireless, rouge, all that glitters is not gold, stockings, every cloud has a silver lining. And by the time I'd reached all's well that ends well, a van came trundling up the hill followed by Aunty Nat's little car squeaking along behind like something out of Beatrix Potter.

Aunty Nat

1. Getting slang expressions wrong and saying things like ‘a real woozie' instead of ‘a real doozie'.
   
2. Her real doozie of a cassette collection (played loudly in the car and when she's cooking):
   The Three Tenors in Concert, Twenty-Five Favourite Hymns, Camelot, Aled Jones Boy Soprano, The Mikado, Magic Moments from Favourite Ballets, Phantom of the Opera, The Immortal Glenn Miller, Songs of the Scottish Highlands
   etc.
   
3. Sending me down to video shops to get out nerdy videos:
   Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain, The Great Caruso, Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
   etc.
   
4. Buying embarrassing things like treatment lotion for corns when I'm right next to her in a chemist shop.
   

Aunt Dorothy

1. Wearing old tracksuits instead of winter pyjamas.
   
2. Wearing checked flannel shirts and Blundstone boots.
   
3. Promising she's going to quit smoking on a certain date. Then when it arrives, saying her horoscope in the paper warns it's not such a good day to begin new projects.
   
4. Making
   me
   answer the door if it's someone selling stuff, because
   she
   never knows how to get rid of them.
   

∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

‘All's well that ends well,' Aunty Nat said. ‘Fancy those young idiots forgetting the patio furniture and having to turn around and go back for it!'

‘If you'd taken Piriel's advice and hired a proper removalist firm …' I began sternly.

‘Oh, I couldn't do that, Sarah, not after promising the work to Scott and Cameron. And they did a pretty good job on the whole, even if there
was
a spot of bother fitting everything in snugly. That was only inexperience, though, just little things like not taking the legs off the beds first. Still, we managed, and nothing much got damaged. It wasn't the boys' fault, either, the van conking out on such a narrow corner with me stuck behind. There wasn't a skerrick of room to overtake. We all just had to sit it out while Scott tracked down the engine problem. I was going to try reversing all the way down that bendy road and taking another route, but it was just far too dangerous with all the blind corners. I'm sorry you had such a long wait, dear, without any means of knowing what was going on. But there was no alternative.'

I thought of several (though Piriel explained to me once that the use of ‘alternative' isn't strictly correct when there are more than two choices). It was a waste of time, however, pointing any of them out to Aunty Nat. She'd been having one dither after another ever since Scott and Cameron had unloaded all the stuff and taken themselves off. The present dither involved searching her handbag for the code list to find out which of the packed boxes held towels. I'd personally invented that code system of numbered stickers on all the boxes, and felt quite proud of it. Though it had clearly been a mistake to hand the important master list to Aunty Nat for safekeeping.

‘The jolly thing's in here somewhere,' she said, upending her handbag over the kitchen table. It produced only recipes torn from hairdressing salon magazines, brooches with missing pins that had probably been on their way for repairs months ago but hadn't quite made it yet, bankcard slips, and a change-of-address form which she'd forgotten to hand in at the post office.

‘Well, I guess I could dry myself on my shirt after I've had a shower,' I said, being resourceful. (Piriel Starr was resourceful at my age. She'd told me about arriving once at a birthday party where another girl was wearing an identical dress. So Piriel had ducked into the bathroom and snipped away the top layer of her own skirt with a pair of manicure scissors, leaving just the lining. That had transformed it into a very plain sheath dress, much more sophisticated than anyone else was wearing.)

‘But I bought some new towels to celebrate our first night in Avian Cottage,' Aunty Nat protested. ‘You deserve a nice one, love, after all your hard work showing Cam and Scotty where the furniture should go. Let's see, perhaps they're in this carton marked
T2
.'

‘I think that's your tapestries – or maybe tableware stuff. If we only had that master list …'

‘Quality towels they were, too; those ones that look like velour. Watermelon-pink for my ensuite, moss-green for you and Dorothy in the downstairs bathroom. Because of all those darling little ferns peeping in at the windows, you know.'

‘They aren't little or darling, Aunty Nat. They're huge great frondy things,' I said. ‘And talking about moss, I think it could be a bit damp downstairs. There's a funny smell.'

‘Old houses are always on the nose after they've been closed up for any length of time. I'm sure it's only due to that. The agent said Avian Cottage is in fair enough condition if you take its age into account.'

I thought about producing my list of repairs, but it somehow seemed picky when she was so delighted at finally being in her dream house with everything unloaded, the van gone, and weeks of contented pottering to look forward to. She kept flitting about now to admire things she'd only just noticed, like a row of brass owl hooks behind the kitchen door. And for all I knew, the house
was
in good condition for its age.

The same thing, I suppose, could be said about Aunty Nat herself. She and Dorothy had been my mother's aunts, really, but Great-aunt was too much of a mouthful to say. For someone over sixty, she was very vain about her appearance, going to the hairdresser once a week. The hairdresser had invented this particular colour rinse for her, like rose-hip syrup. She wore rose-pink lipstick to match, mist-blue eyeshadow and floaty scarves. You had to give her credit for trying, although Piriel had remarked to me on one occasion that Aunty Nat really should do something about getting her weight down. Piriel claimed that all weight problems could be controlled by strict diet and a fitness program. I couldn't imagine
her
ever losing her figure, but Aunty Nat was as plump and round as Horace.

I'd been trying all day not to think about poor old Horace! You get very attached to a cat you've had for years, even if you see them only at weekends and in term holidays. Although he was officially mine, he'd always lived with the aunts because of Dad being away so often. (In fact Dad didn't like cats, and it was the aunts who'd actually given me Horace in the first place.) It had been their suggestion that Horace should stay overnight at the nearest vet's for this move, so he wouldn't get agitated by all the furniture being taken out of the only house he'd ever known. But I suspected he'd be just as agitated by having to spend a night at the vet's! Horace liked routine. He'd get upset even if his food bowl was moved to a different spot, or if a favourite cushion was at the wrong end of the couch. He
hated
change – though soon there'd be another one in his life, when I took him with me to live in the city apartment. He'd have to be trained to use a litter tray before then, too, and I wasn't sure how he'd take to that idea.

‘It's certainly been a long day,' Aunty Nat said. ‘I know it's not even dark yet, but having an early night seems like a good idea. Dorothy's mooning around outside somewhere, so maybe you could fetch her back in.'

Aunt Dorothy was hard to find in that big garden. Threading a way along the paths was like playing hopscotch. They kept disappearing under weed clumps and didn't keep in straight lines, but rambled about between shrubs and through overgrown archways that looked more like railway tunnels. There didn't even appear to be any proper flowerbeds, either. Plants just sprouted up out of the long grass, each one competing with the next, like sports teams. Only in this case the teams had all surged out of control and seemed to be bashing each other up. Two climbing roses along the side fence, one yellow and the other pink, had gone even further and reached the stage of strangling each other. I stopped to look at the roses, trying to work out if they were both on our property, or if the yellow one actually belonged to the house next-door. You would have thought that the people who'd originally planted them could have got together and chosen colours that didn't clash quite so much.

A big white cockatoo suddenly came flapping over the fence at me. I jumped, then blushed and pretended I'd only leaped aside to dodge rose thorns. It wasn't a cockatoo at all, just that beamy, bouncy girl I'd seen earlier. She was handing me scones wrapped up in a white tea-towel.

‘Hi, I'm Corrie Ryder,' she trumpeted in the loudest, fastest voice I'd ever heard. ‘Your next-door neighbour – well, I guess that's obvious, isn't it, otherwise I wouldn't be up on this fence! Mum says to yell out if there's anything you guys need. She would have brought these scones over herself, only Dad told her not to be a pest on the very first day you moved in. Rubbish collection's early Wednesday morning, mail gets delivered about ten, and if you like grapefruit, just help yourself off our tree. It sticks over your fence, anyway. Oh, and if you want to get rid of all those blackberries down the back of your place, I'll just bring Meg over some time. She
loves
guzzling them up. I'm twelve, by the way. How old are you?'

‘The same,' I said guardedly. Having someone the same age as me next-door would almost certainly set Aunty Nat hinting that we should be friends. She was forever trying to push me into making friends with local kids, so I'd have someone to clack around with on weekends and holidays. (I think Aunty Nat meant ‘hack' but she'd got the expression wrong.) Well, she needn't think this boomy-voiced Corrie Ryder was the answer to her prayers! I couldn't see us having anything at all in common. Corrie looked as though dust mites wouldn't bother her one bit. Even trying to make temporary friends with her seemed to be a wasted effort, because I wouldn't be here long enough. It might save time to make the situation clear right from the start …

‘My name's Sarah Radcliffe,' I began. ‘I saw you this afternoon carrying a couch thing along the street. It was while I was helping my aunts shift in, but I don't really live with –'

‘Isn't it ace, that swing-couch? Some people round in the lane were chucking it out. Dad's already busted one of the chains swinging too hard, but he's going out to get another length. We're picking up our Christmas tree, too, at the same time … There he is now – gotta go, see ya!' Corrie babbled as a car horn tooted from around the front of their house.

She vanished down her side of the fence without giving me the chance to say anything at all. I was left staring up at the empty place where she'd been, thinking what patchy manners Parchment Hills people seemed to have. It wasn't polite to dart off like that in the middle of a conversation. It was even ruder to announce that you'd bring someone called Meg over to help herself to other people's blackberries without even waiting for an invitation! Perhaps, though, the Ryders didn't know any better. When he'd seen on the map how far Parchment Hills was from the city centre, Dad had made a joke about this area being full of wild hillbillies. He'd said that next time he caught up with them, the aunts would probably be wandering around barefoot with clay pipes wedged in their mouths.

Aunt Dorothy just about fitted in already with her nicotine addiction! Dad and Piriel didn't smoke, and neither did any of their friends; they wouldn't be seen doing anything so uncool. I could see a thread of smoke spiralling up from further down the garden. Aunt Dorothy, who didn't even seem to realise it was uncool, was sitting on a log just where the bush block began, lighting a cigarette from the stub of another. I hurtled down the rest of the path and made her put it out. There was never much point yelling messages at her from a distance. She always seemed to be enclosed in some kind of container, like those bottled sailing ships, and if you wanted to attract her attention, you had to get up close and sort of tap on the glass. It was hard to believe she was the sister of short, teapot-shaped Aunty Nat. Aunt Dorothy was tall and gawky and she hadn't been anywhere near a hairdressing salon for years. Her hair was just scraped back into a knot and shed hairpins like pine needles all day long.

‘Moving day was the date we all picked for you to give up that disgraceful habit once and for all,' I said. ‘What happened to the patch?'

‘It's okay, I ripped the darn thing off first.'

‘It's
not
okay. You're supposed to be a committed quitter now, with hours of clean air in your lungs.'

‘I promise I'll try again tomorrow.'

‘It's for your own good,' I said, nudging her back towards the house. It was like taking a brontosaurus for a walk. On the way there she managed to collide with a branch, a garden tap, an old wheelbarrow and the barbecue. A couple of bricks fell off the barbecue, but it didn't seem to matter very much. The whole thing was full of dead leaves from a huge tree that arched over the house like an extra green roof. The gutters were choked up with dead leaves, too, but instead of chopping that tree down, someone had stupidly built a seat all around its trunk. Aunty Nat, who'd come outside for one last gloat before going to bed, just said quaint little touches like that were what gave Avian Cottage its character.

‘Here's another quaint little touch,' I said, handing her the bundle of scones. ‘Someone from next-door slung them over the fence at me, but you and Aunt Dosh are welcome to the lot. I don't want any, thanks very much. There's no way of telling how
clean
that tea-towel actually is.'

‘Sarah, anyone would think germs have their own mafia with you as a personal target,' Aunty Nat said. ‘This cloth is
perfectly
clean. It was very neighbourly of those people, and I hope you thanked them nicely. What with Dorothy being such a hermit and you acting so superior lately, it's a wonder we have any mates at all.'