9

The Helpful Spider

Tucking the knife inside her jacket, Gafferty and her father made their way back to the Sprout kitchen. The washed pots and dishes from the meal were piled up by the sink, except for a single plate covered with a tea towel to keep its contents warm. Her dinner had been saved for her like she knew it would. Mum sat alone at the table, wrapped in her red shawl with its black ladybird spots, waiting.

‘All sorted?’ she said, eyeing them sternly.

Gafferty nodded silently and joined her at the table, tucking into the chip slice and chopped greens. The potato had gone soft, but she was so hungry she didn’t care. Her mum stood and stooped to kiss her on the cheek: words weren’t always necessary. Both parents relaxed. The argument over, life could go back to normal with everyone safe at home. But Gafferty knew that wasn’t entirely true, and life wouldn’t be the same. She had a map and she was going to use it to find other Smidgens.

She didn’t look at the atlas again until the next morning. Mum let her have a lie-in, so she curled up in her bed, a cosy shelf cut into the stone wall of her room. With a mattress made from a washing sponge and covered with a quilt stuffed with feather barbs, moss and cotton wool, it was a snug spot for some reading. A money spider, about the size of her palm, had recently taken up residence in one corner of the bed nook, but it kept out of her way and she appreciated its mute company. Anyway, it was well known that spiders were good luck.

Gafferty flicked through the book, taking in all the detail.

‘No wonder it’s called the Tangle – it’s more like a knot! Or as if a spider has spun a wonky web of ink over the paper.’

She laughed, although the spider didn’t appear to be impressed by the idea and just stared at her with its many eyes. But it wasn’t only the maps that had intrigued Gafferty. She read the second part of the book’s title again:

Showing All the Secret Roads and Lost and Legendary Ways of the Three Clans.

Mum said she hadn’t heard of any clans of Smidgens before, but her parents didn’t seem to know much about the past, about this great big Disaster, so that didn’t mean an awful lot. The book was written by Smidgens for other Smidgens to use – that was clear from its size. And Smidgens lived in the Tangle so the Three Clans must be Smidgen clans, that was the only explanation! The Sprout family were probably one family amongst many that made up the clan.

‘And just because our clan was stupid enough to die out or disappear, doesn’t mean the other two did,’ she said to the spider.

Her heart beat faster at the thought. She would make friends with other Smidgen-lads and -lasses when she found them. Friends her own age! She would share things with them, jokes, thoughts, ideas – things only another Smidgen would understand. What would it feel like to belong to something bigger than her family? She sighed wistfully then shook her head. She was getting carried away. She had to find them first – perhaps there was a clue in the atlas as to where they might be.

‘Let’s think about his logically,’ Gafferty said.

First, she had to work out where the House, her home, was within the atlas’s pages. It didn’t take long to find. Whoever had created the book had drawn a little picture of it, with its many windows, and Gafferty recognised some of the paths leading away from it as those the Sprouts used in their scavenging trips. Next to the image of the House was a triangle.

‘It’s just like the triangle on the cover,’ said Gafferty. ‘I wonder if the three symbols are meant to stand for the three clans. Was the House the headquarters for one of them?’

She glanced up at the spider, but it wasn’t going to help. It hadn’t moved from its corner as it kept watch for reckless flies. Gafferty flipped through the pages, to see if she could find the other symbols.

‘If one clan did live in the House,’ she reasoned, ‘the other clans might have had their own places to live in. If I find their symbol, I find their home.’ She soon discovered one of the symbols, the upside-down triangle. It was drawn next to a picture of a tall, round tower, like that of a castle. There was nowhere like that nearby, as far as Gafferty knew. And there was more disappointment when she found the third symbol, the circle. It was beside a path that ran off the page with a question mark written by it. The path was labelled To Parts Unknown. That wasn’t very useful. If the Smidgen who made the atlas didn’t know where the third clan was, then she had no hope of finding it! She threw the open book on to the bed and sank back into her pillow.

‘I give up, spider,’ she said, but the creature had disappeared. Gafferty sat up and saw that while she had been reading, it had crawled down the wall and across the bedclothes and was slipping out of sight between the discarded atlas’s pages. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to trap you in the book accidentally.’

She gently lifted the page under which the spider was hiding. It scuttled out and sprang away, back up to its corner of the bed nook.

‘Make up your mind!’ said Gafferty, laughing. She looked down at the page in her hand. There were the three symbols, side by side, exactly as they were on the book’s cover. She’d missed this!

‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘Spiders are lucky, after all!’

The symbols were drawn next to a convergence of paths, which was labelled with the word Smidgenmoot. Gafferty didn’t know what that meant, but it looked important, as the word had been written larger than any other and underlined twice. And that wasn’t all. There were drawings of places near to it that she knew, old Big Folk places like the market square.

It wouldn’t be too difficult to work out where this Smidgenmoot was. And then … then perhaps she could visit it! The thought was so daring it gave her a shiver. It could be her first little adventure, a voyage outside of her parents’ world. She shook her head. No, she couldn’t do it. Mum and Dad would be furious if they found out, going off by herself without telling them. But … but they’d never know, would they? She’d never done anything so defiant before, but the more she thought about it the more certain she was it was something she had to do.

‘Thank you, spider!’ she said. ‘An expedition of discovery! And who knows what – or who – I’m going to find?’