The Time of Green Magic by Hilary McKay

Author:Hilary McKay [McKay, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Childrens
ISBN: 9781529019230
Google: 0ywNyAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1529019230
Goodreads: 44887740
Publisher: S&S/McElderry
Published: 2019-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Abi, feeling guiltier than ever, put the letter down again and looked around for a possible way to help, right then, at that moment. There were breakfast crumbs on the kitchen floor. She thought she might vacuum them up, and then remembered the noise of the vacuum cleaner, and instead swept them up silently with a dustpan and brush. The kitchen bin rattled when she opened the lid to drop them in, and she jumped.

‘Eerie,’ she had overheard Polly say to Theo.

Yes.

It was a little better up in her own room. No one could glance through that high window, and notice she was home. Not if she didn’t switch the lights on, anyway. She supposed even her fairy lights would show from outside. She thought she’d better not play music either.

The house creaked its daytime creaks. They sounded like people leaning on walls.

Thankfully, Abi remembered that she had her school bag with her, full of damp paper, cereal bar wrappers, odd PE socks, and hurriedly done homework: Maths and Spanish and English. She got it all out, sorted the litter, paired the socks, and did the homework over again, this time to Granny Grace standards, rewriting the maths and checking the answers, whispering the new Spanish words until they stuck in her head, opening the book they were reading in English: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

Abi’s class had been working on it all term, reading excerpts, drawing plans of the house and writing their own diary entries. They had even role-played an afternoon in the annexe. Abi had been Margot, Anne’s big sister. ‘Anne, half the time, you drive us ALL CRAZY!’ she had shouted. Her friends had clapped, but then the teacher had made her do it again, quietly, which ruined the moment.

All these things Abi had done in school, in warm, light classrooms, with cheerful groups of friends. What she hadn’t done was curl up in a quiet place, and read, starting at the beginning, with Anne’s birthday presents, and her cookies shared at school with friends, and progress, slowly at first, but then faster and faster, by way of clumsy sewn-on yellow stars, vanishing classmates and trembling secrets, to the narrow wooden staircase that led to the secret attic rooms where no one must know she was hiding.

Oh, Anne, thought Abi, huddled on her bed, wrapped in her quilt, and now she knew that her English teacher was right. There would have been no raised voices in those cramped, hidden rooms. However angry, scared or hurt, they would have whispered.

The morning passed. Abi tiptoed down to the kitchen for a handful of biscuits, dithered in the bathroom about flushing the loo, and hesitated on the landing, listening to a sound like slow breathing that came from Louis’ room. It was, she realized gradually, the wind in the open window, sucking the curtains in and out.

Louis’ door had been hard to open, and then swung suddenly with a crash so loud it stopped her heart. Ivy leaves scattered the floor and bed.

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