Toby Layton was at the theatre too. He was there with his mum, Mrs Layton, and Ada had to be polite and sit next to him.
‘Did you watch a movie at our house?’ Toby said. Toby still knew nothing; he didn’t carry a terrible secret like Ada did. Everything she could say would seem hard as a shield thrown up against the real truth. She wouldn’t bother telling Toby about Gregory Peck and the happy sads. Tilly said that some sadness gets buried so far away inside that it only gets unburied by something as accidental as happiness. What did she and Toby usually talk about? She couldn’t remember.
‘Our chickens got killed by the fox,’ she said. Ada kept going, swept up in her own satisfaction at having found the right thing to talk about. ‘And Mum had to ask your dad to come and bury them for us because our dad works too far away.’
She shouldn’t have mentioned Toby’s father. Ada quickly jammed a fingernail in her mouth and gnawed at it. Toby’s father would probably cry if he knew what Toby’s mother had done with her dad. And he was a tall, kind man. He had buried the chickens and they had talked about Elmer. He had shown her and Toby the blue-tongue lizard. Her heart sank. There was nothing that didn’t lead to it, no way of talking to Toby Layton without the secret bubbling up.
‘Are you getting more chickens?’ Toby’s feet swung back and forth beneath the seat.
Ada nodded. ‘I guess so. But there won’t be another chicken like Bolshie. She used to lay her eggs in our washing basket. She pecked on the window and we had to let her in and then she jumped in and laid an egg. Mum didn’t like it because sometimes we didn’t know it was there and so Mum broke an egg on the floor.’
‘Why did she lay her eggs there?’ Toby asked.
‘I don’t know. She just did. Ben used to say, here comes Basket Case.’
Toby didn’t get the joke. He unwrapped his ice cream. It was choc-coated. Ada was always envious of Toby’s lunchboxes at school and now he got an ice cream too. Toby got chocolate biscuits so often that he was offhand about them. He didn’t even eat them at playtime, whereas Ada would have been counting down the minutes looking forward to it. She eyed his ice cream with a furious longing. Ada’s Mum said Toby got certain things that Ada didn’t because Toby had been a child they had worked hard to get. And Ada was lucky because she had a sister and a brother. There were times when Ada would have willingly swapped her brother and sister for chocolate biscuits. Older brothers and sisters went before you all the time, in everything and there was never anything Ada could be first at. And Ben had told her the Easter bunny wasn’t true: she had found more Easter eggs than him in the hunt and he told her to get even. But she had worked out for herself about Father Christmas, because her mother used the same wrapping paper with gold candles as Father Christmas had. Ben said not to let on that she knew about that either because then their parents wouldn’t bother giving them Father Christmas presents. So then Ada had to pretend on behalf of them all and that was a terrible responsibility. She only did it for one Christmas before she let them all down. So sometimes she would just rather have chocolate biscuits in her lunch.
‘Did you know the Easter bunny isn’t true? It’s your parents who hide the eggs,’ she whispered.
Toby didn’t get the ice cream to his mouth. He stopped halfway, his mouth open like a trapdoor. For a moment he didn’t say a word and Ada watched his long face, as thoughts dashed in and out of his mind. Toby closed his mouth and dropped his hand to his lap and even let go of the ice cream.
‘How do you know? Are you sure?’ he asked. His voice was small and clip-clopping.
‘Yes. Ben told me. I’ve known for ages and ages,’ Ada boasted.
Toby’s face screwed up for a minute, as if he was trying to see the Easter bunny in the theatre. Ada instantly regretted having said it. But she couldn’t unsay it. She sucked in her breath. It hadn’t been fair that Ada had to know everything, and Toby knew nothing, but now that Ada had told him, she felt even worse. It wasn’t the right thing to have done. Ada knew it and now she would be in trouble. Toby was squirming, and the movie was about to begin. Ada didn’t know what to say. She leaned closer, panicking.
‘But don’t worry because Father Christmas really is true. And you don’t need to tell anyone you know about the Easter bunny. Don’t tell your mum and it won’t stop happening. Does it make you sad? It made me a bit sad.’
‘No, I don’t care.’ Toby tugged at his finger. He stared at Ada as if she was a frightening person.
Ada hung her head. It was all because of the choc-coated ice cream and the secret and how together they had built up a sort of pressure inside her, which exploded in that sudden, terrible way, and now there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t even say sorry because Toby was pretending it didn’t matter; yet Ada knew it did. In her mind she began to sing:
Miss Mary Mac, Mac, Mac,
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
All down her back, back, back.
Toby still didn’t eat his choc-coated ice cream.
She asked her mother for fifty more, more, more,
To watch the elephant, elephant, elephant,
Mop up the floor, floor, floor.
When the movie finished, they didn’t say anything else to each other, and Ada was so worried she forgot how to be normal. The harder she tried to think normal thoughts, the more and more her thoughts would turn into Easter bunnies and Mrs Layton in the nude. So she had to start singing again just to scare them away.
By the time they all said goodbye, the doom had crept in and Ada had the terrible pressing feeling again. And this time she had been the one to start it by breaking a bit of Toby’s heart. Now life would swing like a wrecking ball, make PJ die or roll a fireball over Tilly when she went to a party at night and it would all be her fault.