The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (11 page)

 

CHAPTER 14

LIZ

The house was still horrible, but it was too hot to do any more, and anyway we were too miserable and worried. Dad took a deck chair and put it down right beside the phone box. He sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers all clasped together in front of his mouth, looking at the middle of the road. Owen was on the lawn, hovering over Neetch, watching him anxiously. The hag ladies hid themselves away in their rooms. For a while nothing happened.

There were birds on all the wires and on the roof and in the trees. None of them flew, none of them sang or croaked. They were looking, too.

I made a chant, and I danced around the house singing it.

“Leafyman, leave here,

Birds fly in the air.

Leaves die, fall down

Hedgehog sleeps in the ground!”

My shoelaces were untied and they flew and flapped as I danced, and kitten Neetch jumped and pounced and chased them around my feet.

“Who's the leafy man?” Owen asked as he watched Neetch play with my laces.

“The Season,” I said. “The Summer. She's stuck here and she's angry.”

“Why is he leafy? Seasons are all air and water and stuff.”

“She's been the Summer for thousands and thousands of years, so she looks a bit like the Summer now—or how the Summer would look if it was a thing.”

“How do you know?”

“I sometimes see her in my dreams. Far off. The sun is so bright in my eyes, I can barely make her out. I hide, because I don't want her to see me seeing her. I don't think the Seasons like being seen.”

“What does he look like?”

“Leafyman,” I sang. “Leafyman, Leafyman.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘her' and ‘she' but when you sing you say ‘Leafyman'?”

“Because that's the word you use. When you are something you're a something-man. A policeman. A fireman. A Shieldsman. So everyone thinks you have to be a man to be these things, even though there are women policemen and women firemen and women Shieldsmen. But I think man isn't just man; it's short for
wo
man too, see? So I don't say policewoman or firewoman or Shieldswoman, because that makes you different from all the policemen and firemen and Shieldsmen and people might say you're not a proper one of them because of the woman bit at the end. So I'm a Shieldsman and the man at the end is just short for woman, and the Summer is Leafyman, but it's a she.”

“You should be the Weatherman,” Owen said. “Dad says it's going to be Neil, but I think it should be you. I don't think Neil will like being a Weatherman much.”

“I can't be the Weatherman. I'm a girl.”

I sang and danced some more.

“I'm sorry,” Owen said.

I pretended I didn't hear him. I hopped and kicked and Neetch jumped and swiped at my laces with his tiny paws.

Mum came and sat on the doorstep and watched me while she sipped tea from her favorite red mug that I had got her for Christmas one year. I stopped dancing and sat down beside her.

“What was it you said to Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mum, that made her go away?”

“I didn't make her go away, dear. She went because she was ready to go.”

“But it was because of what you said. Why is that?”

“I don't know. I just made it up. Like the little songs you make up. It's something my gran would have said.”

Mum had lived with her gran for a while after her parents had died in a car crash. Then she'd gone to live with her uncle Matt, who had been an important person in the Weatherman's Club. It was easy to forget that Mum had a whole life that happened before she became a Maloney.

“Sometimes I remember her voice, telling me stories, singing songs, chanting. Sometimes it's like she's still whispering in my ears, telling me things.”

I wished Mum's gran would come whisper in
my
ear. I was always saying the wrong thing.

“You said you knew her—Mrs. Fitzgerald.”

“No, Liz. I said I knew her
like
.”

“How, Mum? How do you know her like? Is it because of your gran?”

“That's part of it,” she said, and she sighed, put the mug down, and stretched her legs out in front of her. I crossed my legs and Neetch crept into my lap. Owen lay flat on his back and looked up at the sky. The clouds had yellow in them, like cloths that have been wiped across a dusty table.

“I remember,” she said, and sighed and shook her head, and started again. “I remember the day the magicians from the Weathermen's Club all climbed into their cars and their vans and drove as fast as they could out of the city. It was early in the morning when the phone call came into the club. Uncle Matt had no one to mind me, so he put me in the back seat and took me with him. I'd been living with him for a few years by then, but I'd never seen anything like this. Everyone was in such a panic, and so angry. You'd think the world was going to end.

“We drove to a farm in the middle of nowhere—the Fitzgeralds are living there now, of course—and there was an old man and his son standing together in the yard, waiting for us. The old man was thin and gray, defeated and ashamed, and his son—your dad—no older than me, the same age as Neil is now, furious with everyone. The men from the club piled out of their cars and started shouting, and the old man stood there and said nothing, just a quiet word here and there, while the son yelled back and told them to leave him alone and it wasn't his fault. Then the Fitzgeralds showed up, that nasty little rat of a man and that scary, beautiful woman. My God, she hasn't aged a day! She stayed in the car while John-Joe tried to chase everyone away, but the old man and the boy had nowhere to go, so he gave them twenty-four hours to find a new home and clear out.

“Uncle Matt took charge. He sent some men to the well and sent others to scout around and others to ring estate agents and others to help the old man and the boy to pack. Oh, your dad was so strong. He protected his father as fiercely as any Shieldsman ever would or could. I liked him for that. I helped him pack his things and his father's things.

“The magicians found this house and the phone box and decided to move the Doorway. It was dangerous, but they were desperate and scared. They said it would only be for a while. They said they'd get the farm and the lake back as soon as they could. The spell nearly killed them, but it worked.

“Your dad and your granddad moved in here, of course, and I went back to Dublin, but the club was cracked and it didn't take much to break it. They no longer trusted the Weatherman, and the Weatherman no longer trusted them. The spell that moved the Door to the phone box left the magicians weak, and they never fully recovered their powers. It was as if they were being punished for what they did. Years went by, and the club lost power and influence bit by bit. The members grew old and retired, and there was no one to replace them. Uncle Matt bent and broke the rules and brought me in to help—that's how I ended up learning about magic and magic people and Mrs. Fitzgerald's sort. I loved it, but it was also sad because it was dying.

“Your granddad passed away and so did Uncle Matt. Your dad became the Weatherman. The men in charge of the club let me know that with Uncle Matt gone my help was neither needed nor welcome. But your Dad and I had kept in touch over the years, with letters and phone calls, and we used to visit each other and go on holidays together.

“He proposed to me one morning when the Spring arrived. There's nothing quite like the Spring—all the life and energy and warmth coming back into the world. When he went down on one knee and asked me to marry him I felt as if I were flying high over the world, bursting with happiness.

“I started the bed and breakfast because all of Uncle Matt's money vanished when Tony Holland robbed the club. Dad told you all about that, didn't he? How they blamed your dad for everything? They said Dad rang them and persuaded them to give Holland a job looking after their finances, and over five or six years Holland robbed them blind, then vanished. But Dad never rang them, though it's true he and Tony had been at school together. But Tony Holland's dad and John-Joe Fitzgerald were cousins—which makes me think … How long has she been planning this? And why?”

“She doesn't want to go back,” I said. “She doesn't want to go back to the mountain—and they can't make her go back if she's the Weatherman, can they?”

“She came down from the mountain, married John-Joe, and persuaded him to steal the farm so she could be Weatherman,” Mum said thoughtfully. “And when that didn't work she waited and waited and now she's ready.”

“Because now she's got the Gray Thing!” I said. “They weren't able to do weather magic until they got the Gray Thing, and it must have taken them ages to work out how to get it free. But if she's all magical and powerful, why would she need weather magic?”

“Your dad won't go without a fight,” Mum said. “She must know that. He's one of the four most powerful men in the world. It's just that he's not allowed to use that power much. But he will—to stop her—and even she might not be strong enough to fight him. The problem is, even if he wins, he loses…”

The sun burned through the yellow sky like a torch shining through a dirty sheet. The heat was massive, like dust burned in an oven and poured over everything. Every now and then one of the birds would drop from the wires or the roof or the trees and lie dead on the ground.

Mum went to check on Dad, and I sat on the grass and thought about things. I'd already known some of the story Mum had told me. She rarely talked about her mum and her dad. In fact, she almost never talked about when she was a kid—except when she was talking about her uncle Matt. Maybe she wanted to but didn't think I was ready. Maybe when I was older she'd tell me more, more about her mum and dad and about herself. My grandparents and young Mum—they kind of hung there at the back of the story, waiting, like spells, to change the way I looked at things.

What I wanted to do was to show Mum that I could change things, too—that even if I could never
be
Weatherman I was
good enough
to be Weatherman.

Neetch, who had deserted me to go fall asleep on Owen's stomach, suddenly jumped awake, trembling, as if from a bad dream. Owen stroked his back to calm him down, but he darted onto the grass and started to grow larger, digging his claws into the turf and leaning and pulling and twisting, as if something was dragging at him. He started to run in a wide arc, away from something and toward something at the same time.

“Neetch!” Owen shouted.

We could hear the grass under his claws, ripping and tearing. He spat and hissed and jumped from spot to spot as if bouncing on a trampoline. Then he braced his legs against the pull again, all his fur standing up and leaning in the direction of the road. He grew suddenly huge, so fast it was hard to see—a huge red shadow that tore free and leaped over the hedge and away.

But he had been hurt last night and he still wasn't better. Before he'd even cleared the hedge he was shrinking, and we heard him wail as whatever it was got hold of him again.

Owen and I ran through the gap in the hedge and followed Neetch around the field to the cattle track that led down to the road. He dashed across and jumped the hedge. Between the hedge and the wood were the Ditches—a wee scrap of bog, wet and marshy, full of rushes and pools of oily black water, home to frogs and flies and a family of moorhens. There's a path through, but you have to jump from tussock to tussock and if you slip you can sink up to your knees in nasty gooey muck. The whole thing floods in really wet weather and we call it the swimming pool. The previous week's rain had drained down the hill or off the road, and the whole thing was now a cold wet mirror broken by grassy mounds and half-drowned willows.

I stopped when we reached the road. Neetch leaped from tussock to tussock, heading for the woods.

“We can't go there,” I said, surprising myself. I was being sensible for Owen's sake, to hide how scared I was of meeting
her
in the woods.

Owen didn't care. “Neetch!” he called, and ran across the road and through the hedge and jumped from tussock to tussock.

“Owen!” I called, and glanced down toward the house. I could just see Dad's knees poking out in front of the Weatherbox. I could waste time trying to get his attention or I could pelt after Owen and drag him kicking and screaming back to the house before he got into trouble.

I crossed the road and the ditch and leaped from tussock to tussock after Owen, calling for both him and Neetch to come right back here at once or I'd tie them both to a flippin' tree and leave them there for the fairies to take. But they vanished out of the Ditches and into the woods, slipping away as if they were fairy things already, water and wild. My heart sank into my stomach because I knew I should go get Mum and Dad, but I also knew I didn't have time. Sometimes it's no good trying to be sensible, because you can't just let your little brother and his monster kitten go running off into the trees on their own.

I thought I'd catch Owen quickly, then drag him back to the house. Neetch could look after himself. I was wrong, though. Turns out Owen could move faster than a chicken with its tail feathers on fire, and he was small, running under branches and through thickets where I had to duck or go round. If he kept this up I'd have to get him to fill out an application form to join my Shieldsmen Club. Meantime I cursed and swore at his bobbing head and his vanishing back and his darting legs.

We climbed the hill, going in zigzags and sideways as Neetch, somewhere ahead, kept fighting against whatever it was pulling him on. Owen stopped running at the edge of a clearing, and I ran up behind him and took him by the arm, ready to carry him back over my shoulders if I had to.