Not Just a Witch

Chapter Five

When Daniel called at the shop the following morning, he found Heckie feeding her hat.

After the quarrel with Dora Mayberry, Heckie had crept back and gathered up her Ribbon Snakes and King Snakes and the Black Mamba, and they now lived in a tank in a room behind the shop, eating boiled eggs and hissing and not being a trouble to anyone. It would have been easy for her to weave them together again and wear them on her head, but she hadn’t the heart, and because she knew that Daniel was a boy who could be trusted with people’s sorrows, she told him what had happened and how dreadfully she missed her friend.

‘We had such plans, Dora and I. She was going to have a little business making garden gnomes and nice things like that, and gradually fill the park with interesting statues. Only statues of wicked people, of course. Dora was Good, like me. Come and see her picture.’

She took Daniel up to the sitting-room and showed him the photo of Dora which she had turned with its face to the wall. The stone witch, with her square jaw and piggy eyes, was not beautiful, but Daniel said she looked interesting, like a prize fighter.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Heckie, and sighed. ‘And you should have seen her on the netball field! But it’s all over between us.’ And she turned the photo back to face the wall.

When they had fed the other animals in the shop, Heckie went to the larder to fetch a carrot. The carrot was about half a metre long and as thick as a thigh and scarcely fitted into the shopping basket, which was a tartan one on wheels, but Heckie said it would do for their lunch.

‘My friend grows them for me. She’s a garden witch — there’s nothing she can’t do with vegetables, but they do come out rather big.’

‘What I was wondering,’ said Daniel as they wheeled the carrot towards the zoo, ‘was why you need a familiar? I mean, they’re animals that help witches to do their magic, aren’t they — and you changed Basil all right without one?’

‘I don’t need one, but I want one. And nothing ordinary like black cats or toads. I bet Dora’s trailing round with a bontebok by now at the very least.’

Wellbridge Zoo was small, but pretty and well-kept, with flower-beds between the cages. Daniel went there often because his friend Joe, whose father was a keeper in the ape house, could get him in free.

‘Now to business,’ said Heckie when they had paid and gone through the turnstile. ‘You know what we’re looking for?’

‘An animal that’s fierce?’

‘Well, not so much fierce as powerful. Mean. Strange and perhaps a little throbbing; that kind of thing.’

But the sea lions, lying about like old sofas, did not look very mean or throbbing and nor did the giraffes with their knock knees and film-star eyes. They passed the aviary and though the cassowary looked interesting with its flabby black wattles and dirty feet, Heckie did not think she really wanted a bird.

‘All that flapping is not very good for magic, I have found.’

But when they got to the hyena, pacing up and down in its cage, Heckie’s face lit up. ‘Now that is something! The way its back end just trails away and those sinister spots, and the smell!’

She wrote something in her notebook and they crossed over to the big enclosure which housed the kangaroos and wallabies — great, rat-coloured beasts with huge feet and mad, twitchy ears which Heckie liked enormously. ‘Oh, I wish I was an Australian witch,’ she cried. ‘Everything over there is so queer and extinct-looking!’

The animal houses were closer together now and Heckie was running from cage to cage, as excited as a child in a toy shop. There were penguins jumping from rock to rock with their feet together like loopy waiters; there was a rusty numbat shovelling up ants — and there was a camel in front of which she stood for a long time. It was a bull camel, tall and sneery with lumpy knees and a lower lip full of froth. Bits of dirty straw stuck to its hump, and a low rumble like thunder came from its throat.

‘I want this camel,’ said Heckie. ‘I want it terribly. But I’m going to be sensible. I’m going to be practical. I’m going to be brave.’

Daniel could see how hard it was for her to tear herself away from the camel, but in the reptile house she cheered up again. It was a silent, sinister place and every one of the animals looked as though it would help one to do magic: the crocodile, smiling in its sleep, the Bearded Basilisk, the iguana like a shrunken dinosaur…

In the ape house, they saw what seemed to be a very small ape in blue jeans forking fresh straw on to the floor. This turned out to be Daniel’s school-friend Joe, helping his father clean out the cages.

Joe’s mother had died when he was born and his father had reared Joe like he reared one of his orphaned apes, carrying him round in a blanket, feeding him on bottles of milk and bananas. Joe’s hair was ginger like the orang-utans’ and fell over his face; there was no tree he couldn’t climb, and when anyone annoyed him, he stuck out his lower lip and glowered exactly like a gorilla.

Daniel introduced him to Heckie who was very interested to hear that his father was a keeper.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘are there any empty cages in this zoo? Spare cages? In case someone was to send in some animals in a hurry? Unexpectedly?’

Joe gave her a sharp look from under his hair and said, yes, there were. ‘They’re over by the West Gate, behind the tea place.’

He went on staring at Heckie as she talked to the monkeys and the apes. Joe understood animals almost as well as his father and he knew that the way they came up to Heckie and laid their faces against the bars and tried to take her hand was quite out of the ordinary.

‘Is she an animal trainer or something?’ he asked Daniel, and Daniel said that perhaps in a way she was.

‘We’ll just have our picnic now and have a think,’ said Heckie when they had been right round the zoo. ‘Perhaps your nice friend will lend us a saw to cut up this interesting carrot. Or shall we just go across the road to The Copper Kettle?’

Daniel thought this was a good idea and soon they were sitting at a corner table, eating cucumber sandwiches and looking at Heckie’s list.

‘Of course, the baboons are unbeatable. Those red and blue behinds!’ Her eyes glinted. ‘But I like the orang-utans too: the way their hair hangs down from their armpits…’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘You notice I’m being brave about the camel?’

Daniel nodded and suggested the Bearded Basilisk. ‘It might fit better into the flat?’

‘Yes, but reptiles are dreadfully snooty. Coldblooded, you know. Oh dear, this is so difficult.’

Heckie was very quiet as they wheeled the carrot back across the river and the tip of her nose had gone quite white from the strain of deciding. But in the street behind Daniel’s house, she stopped and stared at a shop window. It was a Do It Yourself shop full of tools and screws and bits of shelving.

Suddenly she hit her forehead with her hand. ‘What an idiot I am, Daniel. What a complete fool! Why choose a familiar? Why not make one?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Daniel, his eyes shining. ‘A Do It Yourself familiar! The first one in the world!’

And, terribly excited, they hurried back to Heckie’s shop. Once she had made up her mind, Heckie wasted no time.

‘Do you know what I’m going to make?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘A dragon. Yes, honestly. Why not go for the best? A pocket dragon. Well, a bit bigger than that. Sort of between a rolling pin and a turkey in size. About the weight of a Stilton cheese. Oh, I can see him. Slightly fiery round the nostrils, you know, with green scales and golden claws! Let’s get the pattern book and have a look.’

She went to the bookcase and got out a book called Ferocious Dragons and Loathly Worms and began to turn over the pages. There were pictures of silvery dragons like the ones that ate princesses and were killed by St George, and gloomy, evil-looking dragons with poisonous claws and fiery tongues. But the nicest dragons were the Chinese ones. They had shaggy heads like Tibetan terriers with their hair in topknots and big, bulging eyes and wide mouths chock-full of teeth which gave them a smiling look. Daniel had seen dragons like that painted on kites and liked them very much.

‘Can you make a dragon from nothing?’ he asked when they had decided that a Chinese dragon was what they wanted.

Heckie looked shocked. ‘No, no, dear boy. I’m only a witch, you know. I can change anything into anything else, but I can’t make things from nothing. What we’ll have to do is find an animal that isn’t happy any more. An animal that’s tired of life — and then I can change it. To mess about with an animal that was enjoying life would be quite wrong.’

They went downstairs to the shop to see if there was an animal there that was bored with living, but there wasn’t. So they went to the park because Heckie thought she remembered seeing a duck that was no longer glad to be alive and, sure enough, there it was, sitting in a clump of rushes by the pond. It was a white Aylesbury drake; its eyes were filmed, its feathers were limp. The other ducks were swimming and diving and gobbling up bread that the children threw, but not this duck. This duck had turned its face to the wall.

Heckie put out an arm. The duck did not have time even for one ‘quack’ before it found itself zipped into the tartan shopping basket on wheels and bundled off to the pet shop.

‘Can I watch you?’ begged Daniel when they had unpacked the animal and set it down on the kitchen floor. ‘Can I watch you make a dragon, please?’

‘No, dear boy, I’m afraid not. And you wouldn’t like it, you know. It’s not just my knuckle — a lot of power comes from my feet. Things happen down there that are not suitable for anybody young.’ She looked down at her toes and sighed. ‘If you come tomorrow after school, the dragon should be ready,’ said Heckie, and Daniel had to be content with that.

In the staffroom at Wellbridge Junior School, the deputy head was in a temper. ‘I’ve had another letter from those professors complaining about Daniel’s work. They say they’ll take him away and send him to a private school if he doesn’t do better.’

Miss Jones, who was Daniel’s class teacher, put down her cup with a clatter. ‘I wish they’d leave him alone. There’s nothing wrong with Daniel; he’s a thoroughly nice boy and his work’s perfectly all right. If they spent a bit more time at home with him instead of nagging about his marks, there’d be some point.’

The deputy head nodded. ‘I’ve gone past that house again and again and there’s no one in. He’s got a lost look in his eyes sometimes, that child. It’s a pretty turn of affairs when the most deprived child in the class is the son of two rich professors.’

But when Miss Jones went to take her class for English, she thought that Daniel looked more cheerful than he had done of late — and indeed Daniel wasn’t worrying about how he was going to do in the spelling test or whether he had passed his music exam. He was thinking that in a few hours he would see a dragon made out of an Aylesbury duck, and nobody who thinks that can look unhappy.

Of course, it would happen that on the one day on which Daniel was longing to get away, his parents were both in for tea.

‘Well, how did you get on with your spelling test?’ asked the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s father. He was tall, with greying hair and a big nose.

‘I hope you got ten out of ten,’ said the Professor Trent who was Daniel’s mother. She too was tall, with thick spectacles and a strong chin. When they were both standing looking down at him, Daniel felt a bit like a puppy who has made a puddle on the carpet.

‘I got eight out of ten,’ said Daniel, hoping that this would be all right, but it wasn’t.

‘Really?’ said Daniel’s father. ‘And what words did you get wrong?’

Daniel sighed. ‘Separate,’ he said. ‘And mystify.’

Daniel’s parents thought this was odd. Daniel’s father had been able to spell mystify when he was four years old, and Daniel’s mother said that surely when one understood that separate came from the Latin word separare there could be no difficulty. ‘How many did Sumi get right?’ she wanted to know.

‘She got them all right. She always does.’

Both professors shook their heads. ‘It seems extraordinary, Daniel, that a girl who does not even speak English at home should do so much better than you.’

Daniel said nothing. One day he meant to do something that would surprise his parents and make them proud of him — only what? If the house burnt down he could drag them from the flames (though they were rather large) and if there was a flood he could commandeer a boat and row them to safety. But so far there had been no fire, nor had the streets of Wellbridge turned into rivers, and sometimes Daniel thought that he would never be the kind of boy they wanted.

But when tea was over at last and he slipped out of the house, his face soon lost its pinched, dejected look. He took a deep breath of air and then he began to run.

Heckie seemed pleased to see him, but there was something a little odd in her manner.

‘Is he finished? Have you done it?’ asked Daniel eagerly.

‘Of course,’ said Heckie stiffly. ‘What I do, I do. It’s just…’

She led him upstairs and pointed to a dog basket she had brought up from the shop. The new familiar was sitting in it: a Chinese dragon about the size of a dachshund, with a black topknot of hair, big red eyes, fiery-looking nostrils and a pair of wings set close behind his ears.

‘Oh!’ said Daniel. ‘He’s beautiful! He’s the most beautiful dragon in the world!’

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he,’ said Heckie. ‘Most of him, anyway…’

Daniel moved closer. The dragon’s neck and shoulders were covered in green and golden scales, his pearl-tipped talons gripped the rim of the basket and his teeth were pointed and razor-sharp.

So far so good. It was the back of the dragon that was… unexpected.

Heckie cleared her throat. ‘You see, I was just in the middle of changing him when the bell rang and it was the postman. You know how exciting it is when the postman rings. It might mean anything.’ And Heckie blushed, for she had thought it might mean a letter from her friend Dora to say that she was sorry. ‘I left the window open and the pages blew over in the book and… well, you see.’

‘Yes,’ said Daniel.

The front end of Heckie’s new familiar was a dragon, but the back end was a worm. It was not an earthworm, it was a Loathly Worm like in the book — but it was a worm. There were twelve segments, each bulgy and carrying a pair of blobby legs, and though the dragon part was green and gold and scaly, the worm part was smooth and pale with faint pink spots.

‘What shall I do?’ asked Heckie, and Daniel was very touched that she, a witch of such power, should turn to him.

Daniel was usually a shy, uncertain boy, but he knew exactly what she should do. ‘Nothing! Please don’t do anything. He’s absolutely splendid as he is. I mean, any old witch could have a dragon for a familiar, but there can’t be a single witch in the whole wide world who has a dragworm!’

Heckie smiled. ‘I’m glad you feel like that, dear boy. Because, to tell the truth, it would hurt me now to change him. We’ll soon get him trained up. He doesn’t talk yet, but he understands quite a lot already.’ She patted the dragworm’s head and he shot out his forked tongue and licked her hand. ‘We’re in business, Daniel. You’ll see. This time next year there won’t be a single wicked person left in the length and breadth of Wellbridge!’