Survivor (2 page)

While she did this, her baby brother sat in the
middle of the lawn trying to push grass and worms up his nose. In Betty’s eyes this seemed to show he had a more adventurous imagination than his sister. Betty must have climbed up the tree at least ten times that week and every time all she saw was the same, skip, skip, skip, worms up nose, except on Friday. On Friday, the girl tripped and fell on top of the baby, who, at exactly the same moment, had been trying to put yet another worm into his nose. The sudden crashing down of his sister jerked his arm and he swallowed the wriggling worm.

Betty nearly fell out of the tree laughing. Fortunately the baby was crying too loudly for the girl to hear her.

On Saturday afternoon Mordonna put on her least witchy clothes and Betty tied her hair in red ribbons that were not at all the sort of red colour that blood is, and mother and daughter went to visit the new family.

When she had watched them move in, Mordonna had guessed that the whole family was very shy, so she blew a little relaxing-with-witches powder into the air as she rang the doorbell.

‘Welcome to Acacia Avenue,’ she said, holding out the plate with the chocolate cake.

‘Oh, how nice,’ said the woman. ‘Do come in.’

As the relaxing-with-witches powder went up her nose, she broke out in a big smile. Even the baby, who spent half the day crawling round the floor whinging about biscuits, gazed up at Mordonna and Betty with big happy eyes and only wet himself a little bit.

The new family were called the Hulberts. The baby was a boy. He was fifteen months old and called Claude. The girl was the same age as Betty and was called Ffiona.

Mrs Hulbert explained that Ffiona was called Ffiona and not Fiona because Mr Hulbert wrote with a stutter and that’s what he put down when he went to register her birth. Claude nearly got called Cccclaude, but the registrar realised Mr Hulbert had made a mistake and changed it.
⁵

If I was called Bbetty
, thought Betty,
I’d be really embarrassed.

But the funny thing was that the name suited Ffiona. She looked just like you would imagine someone with that name would look. Ffiona always had neat polished shoes, tidy school clothes with no bling, no nail varnish and no jewellery. She didn’t even have her own mobile or say ‘whatever’. She looked like photos of your granny when she was a little girl, and she wore big glasses like your granny wore when she was too old to care about how uncool they looked. The one thing Ffiona did have lots and lots of was freckles. She had hundreds
of them. Even her freckles had freckles, and she probably had a jar in the bathroom full of spare freckles for when she got bigger and had more space for them.

‘Why don’t you take Betty up to your room and show her your toys?’ Mrs Hulbert said to Ffiona.

‘Umm, all right, Mother,’ said Ffiona nervously.

Ffiona was scared of other children her own age, because she had almost never met any who had been nice to her, apart from a few who looked even nerdier than she did and only ever wanted to talk about computer programming and the major exports of Belgium.

So while the two mothers drank their tea and Claude sat on the floor staring at Mordonna and sucking the hem of her dress, which actually contained a chemical that was very soothing for teething infants, Ffiona and Betty went upstairs.

To Betty’s surprise, they became instant best friends. This wasn’t actually at all surprising because Mordonna had designed a special spell to do exactly that, though of course neither girl ever found that out.

Ffiona told Betty all the sad little secrets she had never been able to tell anyone before.

As everyone knows, kids can be horrible to each other and much more narrow-minded than their parents ever are. They can’t stand anyone to be different. So because of her freckles and the lace-up shoes and the tidy hair ribbons, Ffiona’s life at school was always made absolute hell by all the other kids. It had been particularly bad at her last school, Thistlecrown Primary. Ffiona’s life had been a neverending misery. At least once a week her teacher had to fish her out of the drains after
the bullies had flushed her down the toilet, and it always took the entire summer holidays for her hair to grow back after it had been pulled out or had rude words cut in it on the back of her head.

‘And we moved once before that too,’ Ffiona explained. ‘We came here because Mum and Dad thought it looked like a nice peaceful area and so the school would probably be nice and peaceful too.’

‘What, Sunnyview?’ said Betty.

‘Yes. What’s it like?’ Ffiona asked. ‘Is it nice?’

‘Well,’ Betty explained, ‘all that stuff you said about your old school is pretty much what Sunnyview is like.’

‘Oh,’ said Ffiona. Her shoulders fell and she began to look miserable.

‘But,’ said Betty, ‘you don’t have to worry. I’ll look after you.’

‘But what about the big kids? Won’t they just push us both down the toilet?’

‘If you’re my friend, no one will lay a finger on you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s like this…’ Betty began.

Having just got her first best friend, Betty was a bit anxious about telling Ffiona she was a witch. But then, she thought Ffiona would find out soon enough anyway, so she went ahead and told her everything.

‘A witch? Wow,’ said Ffiona. ‘Are you sure? My mum says there’s no such thing as witches and wizards. She says it’s all made up.’

‘Lots of it is,’ said Betty. ‘All that Harry Potter stuff ’s not real, but there are proper witches and wizards and I’m one.’

‘You don’t look any different,’ said Ffiona. ‘I mean, umm, your mother, she kind of does look like, umm…’

‘She really looks like a witch, doesn’t she? All the black hair and eye make-up and deathly white skin?’ said Betty. ‘Mind you, she could be mistaken for a Goth looking like that.’

‘Goths don’t wear pointy hats, though, do they?’ said Ffiona.

‘That’s true.’

‘But you don’t look like your mum,’ said Ffiona. ‘You look ordinary.’

‘I know,’ said Betty. ‘It used to upset me, but it’s actually brilliant, because I can do all sorts of magic stuff and no one ever suspects me because I look like a sweet little girl.’

‘Can you really do magic?’

‘Yes, it’s great,’ said Betty.

She told Ffiona that all the kids at school knew she was a witch and left her alone.

‘A few of the really stupid kids tried to pick on me,’ she explained, ‘but after I turned this disgusting boy who used to live next door to us into a fridge, they pretty well leave me alone.
⁶
So if I let everyone know you’re my friend, you’ll be OK.’

Ffiona looked so relieved that Betty thought she was going to burst into tears.

‘Can you do some magic now?’ Ffiona said.

‘OK, though you mustn’t tell my mum, because she made me promise not to,’ said Betty.

She clicked her fingers and Ffiona’s Barbie doll leapt off the bed, ran three times round the room and vanished under the bed. Ffiona sat wide-eyed with a huge grin on her face. The Barbie doll crawled out from under the bed, shook herself and jumped up into Ffiona’s arms.

‘I love you,’ said the doll and then turned back into a normal doll.

‘WOW,’ said Ffiona, holding the doll up to her face and shaking it a bit.

‘Don’t do that, you’ll give me a headache,’ said the Barbie.

‘So you needn’t worry about anyone bothering you at school,’ said Betty. ‘And anyway, our school toilets are too small to flush children down.’

‘Oh, thank goodness!’ said Ffiona. ‘Shall we go and ask our mums if you can come and visit again tomorrow?’

‘Good idea. But you shouldn’t tell your mum about me being a witch,’ Betty added. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

The girls went back downstairs, where Mrs Hulbert was trying to get Mordonna to be enthusiastic about the joys of crochet. Mordonna was biting her tongue to stop herself clicking her fingers and doing some serious magic. What she wanted to do was make seven sheep appear in the Hulberts’ back garden, each one covered in a different very brightly coloured wool. She wanted them to stand in a mystical circle while all their
wool leapt off their backs, spun itself into knitting wool, shot up into the clouds at the speed of light before reappearing thirty seconds later as a massive crocheted blanket that covered the whole lawn.

Instead she drank her tea and ate a coconut biscuit, though she did do one tiny magic trick that made Mrs Hulbert decide to stop buying
Women’s Weekly
and buy
Cosmopolitan
instead.

‘See, I told you not to judge people by their looks,’ she said to Betty as they walked home.

‘Yes, Mother,’ Betty admitted reluctantly. ‘I really like Ffiona.’

‘There you go,’ said Mordonna, ‘and I expect I’ll really like Mrs Hulbert too. I must remember to find out what her first name is.’