Second Fiddle (2 page)

I watched the silent violinist's back for maybe half a minute, and then suddenly her elbow started sawing again and she played a final violent burst, leaning dangerously far over on her left side so that it looked as if she might topple over the flimsy wooden railing that ran around the porch. At the last moment she straightened up, flung one arm out from her body, and made a low, sweeping bow to an imaginary audience.

I laughed, because all I could see of the bow was the girl's bottom sticking up, gleaming synthetically in tight-fitting Lycra leggings, and the top half of her body disappearing below the rail of the balcony. There she goes, bum in the air, big black shiny peach—if she could see herself from this point of view!

The girl spun around at the sound of laughter, but I stepped quickly backward into the greenery. I knew that there was nothing to be seen where I had stood, except perhaps the uncanny nodding of the long, protective arms of the brambly brushwood that hid me from view.

Gillian

I don't spook easily, but it was a bit eerie. I could have sworn that someone laughed, and when I turned round, the brushwood was nodding, as if someone had just stepped back into it.

I told myself it was probably a squirrel making the branches wobble, or a wood pigeon, great big clumsy things. They go plodding around on twigs that are too small to bear their weight. It's a wonder you don't find more of them with their necks broken on the forest floor.

That's all it was, probably, just the local wildlife getting a bit restless. Maybe they think I am some kind of extraordinary new bird. The fiddler-bird.

Note to the Reader

The bits called “Gillian” in this story are where Gillian butts in, but of course, even though she is talking, I have actually written those bits too, because I am the author of the whole story. The thing is, though, I am not Gillian, I am Mags, so I don't actually know what Gillian was thinking at any point. I do know her side of it, roughly, because she has told me so that I could write it down to make the story, but obviously, I have had to make up her actual thoughts, and don't for one moment imagine it is easy.

I have tried to make Gillian sound like herself, which is sort of bossy and remote, and not like me, which is friendly and amusing and clever, but I don't know if it is working all the time. Sometimes my own voice might slip out, like a ventriloquist having a bad day. But I promise to do my best not only to give her side of the story, to the best of my knowledge, but also to be fair to her. That is not always easy, since she is not as interesting a person as I am, though of course she is very talented in her own way, and most of the time she is perfectly pleasant to be around, though at other times she is insufferable. But I try to paint her in as kindly a light as I can.

Mags

“Foresters' hut,” my grandfather said when I called by his cottage on my way home that evening. He was pouring half a bottle of tonic water into a glass. He always drinks tonic at five o'clock, with a slice of lemon and two ice cubes clinking in it. He calls it his “sundowner.” He smirks when he uses that word, as if he has said something terribly witty. I gave a dutiful grin and said “Sláinte,” which is what you are supposed to say when Grandpa makes his sundowner joke.

“They keep their tools in it,” he went on. “Their jackets too, and their teapot and gas ring for the cuppa tea in the mornings. You can't beat a cuppa tea first thing.”

I was disappointed that Grandpa was so matter-of-fact about my story of the strange girl and the funny little hut that had just seemed to appear out of nowhere. I wasn't sure exactly what a forester was, beyond a vague idea that it was the modern word for “woodcutter.” In stories, woodcutters tend to be poor men whose wives long to have babies. This didn't seem right somehow.

“Could a girl be a forester?” I asked.

“You could do worse,” said my grandfather, misunderstanding me completely. Typical of adults. “Nowadays, anyone can be anything they like, can't they? Though I wouldn't tell your mother, if I were you. She has her heart set on you going to university.”

“What heart?” I asked bitterly, kicking the underside of my grandfather's chair with the toe of my sandal. Sometimes I'm a bit hard on my mother, I suppose, but it works both ways. (By the end of the book, as you will see if you make it that far, we are getting along together much better. I know that is a bit of a cliché, and that in most books people who are at loggerheads at the beginning end up being all pally at the end, but I can't do anything about that because it's true; that's how it turned out. Sometimes life is more like books than you expect it to be.)

“Ah, Mags! You know your mother loves you.”

“Only because she has no choice,” I said. “She'd stop if she knew how.”

“That's nonsense. She thinks the world of you.”

It wasn't nonsense in my view. I hate to have to admit it, but I am a disappointment to my mother. My mother would have preferred a daughter like the girl with the violin, one who'd wear a shirt like a surgical corset, a confident girl with talent and probably friends, who could stand up in front of an audience and who definitely doesn't spend her time mooching about the woods getting herself muddy. I don't get myself muddy on purpose to annoy my mother, if that's what you're thinking. It's just that if you muck about in the woods, mud happens. My mother doesn't seem to understand that.

“She'd love me more if I was a Miranda,” I said, polishing an apple I'd filched from the kitchen on the ribbing of my jumper.

“A Miranda?” said my grandfather. “Who's Miranda when she's at home?”

“Oh, nobody. Just a girl.”

“Miranda, she's called?”

“Naw, that bit's not true,” I said, biting into my apple with a satisfyingly loud crunch. “The name I made up.”

“But not the person?”

I swallowed my bite of apple too quickly and it made cornery progress down my gullet. “Only the name,” I said, swallowing extra saliva to wash the lump of apple down. “I had to make the name up because I don't know what she's called. I haven't met her. I only saw her back.”

“You only saw her back. But you know enough about her to think your mother would prefer her to you. Oh, Mags!”

He's always saying “Oh, Mags!” Come to think of it, a lot of people are always saying “Oh, Mags!” as if I were some sort of troublesome puppy. I'm not troublesome in the slightest. I don't see why people think they have to throw their eyes up about me all the time.

“Yemp. That's about the size of it, Gramps.”

I took a swig from my grandfather's glass, to chase the cornery bit of apple down. He rolled his eyes.

“Don't call me Gramps,” he grumbled. “I'm not some old American codger. And don't drink my gin.”

“Y'are so an old codger.” I bit into the apple again, hard. “Anyways, it's not gin. You can't fool me.”

“Of course it's gin,” he said with mock grumpiness. Sometimes he does mock grumpiness so well I wonder if it's not real grumpiness. “And I'm Irish.”

“Well then,” I said, crunching carelessly.

“You are a
difficult
child, do you know that, Mags Clarke?”

“Hmph. Yemp.”

“And you shouldn't eat with your mouth full.”

I laughed, revealing a mouthful of half-chewed apple. He doesn't mind that sort of thing, because he is an old codger. It drives my mother wild.

Gillian

There is definitely someone hanging about the woods. She looks a bit like something the cat brought in, with her scruffy clothes and her hair all rats' tails around her shoulders, like a Neanderthal. There's a new family over the other side, someone said. She must be part of it. New people are usually better, because they haven't known you all their life; they don't think you couldn't possibly amount to anything because they always knew your grandfather was a terrible farmer and as for that hopeless creature your father married, poor man.… Well, of course, she
is
hopeless, but that isn't the point.

Goodness knows, I didn't choose for this to be the one thing I'm any good at. If I had a special gift for making apple tarts or hairdressing, I'd make apple tarts or cut hair till the cows came home. I wish I could. I'd like to work in a bank when I grow up, or open a coffee shop or set up a Montessori school, and then people would say, “Hasn't she done well? Considering everything. You have to admire her spirit.” They like you to have spirit, but in manageable amounts, and you also have to use it in approved ways.

(I don't think Gillian would be capable of constructing this sentence, actually, but I have to give her adult-sounding things to say from time to time because she is a bit older than I am. You can't just introduce a person and say, “She is a year and a half older than me,” even if it's true, because that is too obvious. You have to have the satisfaction of picking up some things for yourself. Signed:
Mags
)

Mags

I saw Miranda again in the woods a few days later. She was just coming out onto the porch of the foresters' hut. I was watching from behind the brambles, and on a sudden impulse I stepped forward and called up to her. I don't know why I did it, because I definitely didn't like the idea of this hut, this girl, all this activity in my forest.

It isn't really a forest. It's only a scrap of woodland on the hillside, but I forested it with my dreams. (Sometimes I write down interesting ways of saying things, like this, in a notebook, but then I usually lose the notebook, so if, like me, you are planning to be a writer when you grow up, I don't really recommend it as a writing technique, unless of course you are more organized than I am. I didn't get this sentence in my notebook, because of course my notebook is lost. It just came to me as I was writing the story down. You can call it inspiration if you like. I call it just being good at writing.) I had a sort of a den in a clearing by the stream, and there I could Sherwood to my heart's content. There was a smooth slab of slaty stone that made a good table, and I kept my water bottle cooling in the running river.

“Hallo!” I called, stepping firmly out of the brambly undergrowth. “Hallo there! Hi!”

The girl looked around, startled, clutching her walnut-colored violin by the neck. She made a sunshade over her eyes with her hand and peered into the greenery, searching for the source of the voice—me, in other words.

“I'm Mags,” I shouted up. “I live over yonder.” I'd never used the word
yonder
before. It was part of my woodland vocabulary. I wondered if I was pronouncing it properly. “Who're you?”

“Gillian.” The girl's voice was high and precise. A soprano, no doubt. Altos and sopranos never get along; it's a well-known fact, like Scorpios and Geminis.

“Suits you,” I said. There weren't many names that were worse than “Miranda,” but “Gillian” definitely was.

Gillian tossed her cloud of hair. She'd located me by now on the woodland path below her hut.

“So does yours,” she shouted down to me. “Suit you. Mags. You're a Mags all right.”

I wasn't sure that this was friendly information, but Gillian followed it with an invitation. “Come on up. My brother's just making the tea. You can have a cup if you don't mind powdered milk. We've got Kit Kats too. Only the fun size, though.”

I nodded. Wasn't it just typical of someone like Gillian to invite me for
tea?
Only grown-ups ever offer people tea. She looked older than me, but not very much older. I hoped she wasn't going to be all big-sisterish.

“Stairs are over this side,” Gillian called, pointing around the side of the hut.

I followed the direction she pointed in and found that rough wooden steps, made out of cross sections of tree trunk, had been fitted at uneven intervals into the sloping bank. Clever, I thought, picking my way carefully from step to step. You'd hardly notice them, if you weren't looking for them.

“When I was small,” Gillian announced as I arrived on the porch, “my brother told me the woodland fairies had made the steps and disguised them so human beings wouldn't notice them. I believed him, because it's true the hut is very well hidden. I don't know why people wanted to disguise it.”

“Fairies, huh?” I said, careful to use my woodland voice.

I noticed that Gillian's face was too small for her neck and her eyes were not of an interesting color. That was something, anyway.

“Well, I was only small,” Gillian said.

“Well then,” I said in a slightly apologetic tone. Apparently I say this a lot. I haven't noticed it myself, but people keep imitating me doing it, so I suppose it must be true, and for this reason, I drop it into the dialogue from time to time to give an authentic flavor. That's a good tip, by the way, if you are interested in writing. Give your character a catchphrase.

“Come in,” said Miranda. Gillian, I mean. The way her little head bobs on her long neck, and those pale eyes—pure Gillian.

“This is my brother, Tim,” said Gillian. “Tim, this is Mags. She lives, er, over yonder.”

Tim wasn't what you'd expect of a brother. That is to say, he seemed almost grown up. More like an uncle. And tall, like a tree, with his brown-haired head a very long way from his elbows, which is about where I reached to.

“We're new,” I said helpfully. “We moved in last month. What's the story with the violin?” I sat down on a paint-stained chair that Gillian pointed out.

She handed me a mug of tea. It was strong and hot. The powdered milk formed curdy lumps in it and did nothing to cool it down. I stirred but the lumps wouldn't dissolve.

“It's for making music on,” said Gillian's brother. His voice boomed above my head.