Ruth was the eldest of the Conroy girls. In a few weeks’ time she would be fifteen. ‘I used to think that fifteen would be nearly grown up,’ said her sister Naomi, ‘until you started being it.’ Ruth knew exactly what she meant; she felt the same way herself and she thought the strangest thing about being so old was the fact that it made no difference at all. She was no more self-confident, or organised, or magically in charge of her emotions than she had been in the past. Nothing had changed; she was the same muddle-headed person she had always been, forever swinging between happiness and despair, never doing the right thing at quite the right moment. Naomi, eighteen months younger and two years behind her at school, had far more common sense.
Naomi was brainy, and a much more private person than Ruth. While Ruth either dreamed of miracles or expected the worst, Naomi took a more detached view of life. She and Ruth were very good allies; they understood each other. They read the same books, liked the same friends, detested the same enemies and managed to share a bedroom and yet remain on speaking terms most of the time. They endured with courage their little sisters Rachel and Phoebe.
‘Although they really are insane,’ remarked Ruth gloomily.
‘Don’t be silly!’ said her mother, although secretly thinking that Ruth had a point. ‘Phoebe has been top of her class since the day she started school!’
‘That’s got nothing to do with whether she’s bonkers or not,’ observed Naomi.
‘And Rachel’s teacher says she is a “good average”,’ continued Mrs Conroy. ‘And should be encouraged.’
Rachel was ten. Her latest preoccupation was What They Ate in Books. She had dreams of munching her way through literature.
‘After all, it’s really quite an original approach to reading!’ said Mrs Jones, Rachel’s class teacher, at the annual parents’ evening. ‘And it can’t be easy for her. All those clever sisters, not to mention Phoebe coming up behind!’
Mrs Conroy sighed a little.
‘I wish I had more ordinary daughters,’ she remarked. ‘I should never have taught them to read so early.’
‘Early reading is an absolutely splendid achievement!’ Mrs Jones assured her. ‘Absolutely splendid! Dramatically broadens their horizons!’
Mrs Conroy went home and looked at her daughters. Their horizons seemed dramatically narrow. There was Ruth, dripping with tears over Little Women (which she must have read a hundred times before). There was Naomi, droning aloud snatches of the poems of Housman.
‘I’m sure they’re not suitable for a girl of thirteen,’ protested Mrs Conroy.
‘Thirteen and a half,’ said Naomi, ‘and school think they’re suitable. We did the “cherry hung with snow” one in English literature before the teacher ran away with the French assistant. Listen!’ And she read aloud with great enjoyment:
‘Before this fire of sense decay,
This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone,
The steadfast and enduring bone.’
‘Very morbid and exaggerated and I’m sure you can’t understand a word of it!’ said Mrs Conroy, and turned away, and there was Phoebe, who at the age of eight read nothing but stories where teenage girl sleuths drove beautiful cars and wore mysterious dark glasses and never had to go to school.
Last of all, there was Rachel.
‘Not bonkers!’ Mrs Conroy told herself firmly.
‘What’s fat salt pork?’ asked Rachel, looking up from her book. ‘They seem to eat a lot of it here.’
She held up Little House on the Prairie to show the book she meant.
‘They eat it with beans,’ she continued. ‘How was the parents’ evening? Did Mrs Jones say nice things about me?’
‘Why ever shouldn’t she?’ asked Mrs Conroy evasively.
Rachel and Phoebe both went to the same junior school. Ruth and Naomi attended the local comprehensive, travelling by school bus. It was just on the point of leaving for home one April afternoon when Ruth, tearstained, dishevelled and breathless, scrabbled aboard.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve had cookery again,’ remarked Naomi, as Ruth flopped down beside her, and she regarded her sister’s wicker cookery basket with suspicion and disgust. ‘We’ve only just got through the last lot.’
Ruth didn’t reply. She sat silently clutching her basket, hunched against the motion of the bus.
‘If it’s more fish pie,’ said Naomi, ‘I can’t bear it. I shall turn vegetarian like Phoebe.’
Waste not, want not was a very firm policy in the Conroy household. If it was food, it was eaten, and that was that. So far the results of Ruth’s cookery lessons had been counted as food.
‘It isn’t anything like that,’ said Ruth, holding her basket even more tightly and fumbling in her blazer pocket for something to wipe her nose on.
Naomi raised a corner of the basket’s plastic cover, peered inside, and then jumped back in alarm.
‘What on earth is it?’ she demanded. ‘It looks like a squashed hedgehog!’
‘Leave it alone!’ snapped Ruth.
‘It was Simple Cottage Rolls today,’ someone from Ruth’s class told Naomi helpfully.
The smell that had arisen from Ruth’s basket when Naomi lifted the cover was not that of simple cottage rolls. It was a sweetish, rankish, rancidish smell. A hedgehoggy smell.
‘Let me look again,’ said Naomi. ‘Let me look properly. It’s only fair if I’ve got to eat it.’
Ruth gave in. After all, Naomi would have to know sometime or other. Gently she uncovered the contents of her basket enough to allow her sister to look again.
It was a squashed hedgehog.
‘Don’t frighten it,’ said Ruth.
‘Isn’t it dead, then?’
‘Of course not. It’s just curled up. But a car’s hit it; there’s blood on some of its spines. I found it in the gutter by the school gates.’
‘When?’
‘Afternoon break.’
‘Where’s it been since then?’
‘In my cookery basket.’
‘What did you do with the rolls you made, then?’
‘Chucked them away.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ said Naomi with relief.
The whole bus had been quiet while people eavesdropped on this conversation, but now it erupted into a torrent of noise. Squashed hedgehog jokes were called from seat to seat and there were loud predictions about the agility and appetite of the invalid’s fleas. Ruth was assailed by shouts of advice, compliments on the sudden improvement of her cooking skills, squeals of disgust and wails of sympathy. Wendy, the girl who always knew everything, hung over the back of her seat to tell them the name of a vet to whom she had once taken a squashed hedgehog herself.
‘He did it for me free,’ she said.
‘Did what?’ demanded Naomi.
‘Put it to sleep.’
‘Should you have wrapped it in your jumper?’ asked Martin-the-good, leaning across the aisle to peer over Ruth’s shoulder.
‘Anyone started itching yet?’ enquired a voice from the back of the bus, and was answered by shrieks and hoots from all sides. Two people fell scratching and writhing into the aisle. The noise reached a crescendo.
Ruth, unable to bear it any longer, thrust the basket into Naomi’s arms, and was preparing to leap to her feet and do battle when everyone suddenly cannoned forward as the bus jerked to a halt.
‘ENOUGH!’ roared the driver, blasting his passengers into silence. ‘PACK IT IN!’
Limp with astonishment and relief, Ruth stared at him in admiration. He was new that term, and she’d never really noticed him before, but now she thought that no knight in shining armour ever made a more welcome rescue.
‘Crikey!’ said the bus driver in an ordinary voice, and drove on.
Once Ruth was off the bus and on home ground, the reactions to the contents of her cookery basket were slightly better.
‘Oh, you wrapped it in your jumper!’ said Mrs Collingwood, the Conroys’ next-door neighbour and mother of Martin-the-good, but she added, ‘Poor little thing!’
‘You ought not to have wrapped it in your jumper!’ said Ruth’s mother. ‘Still, I suppose it will wash. Put it in the shed and leave it in peace and we’ll see how it is after supper.’
‘Olden days people used to eat hedgehogs,’ remarked Rachel through a mouthful of macaroni cheese. ‘Covered in mud and baked in their jackets.’
‘Shut up!’ said Ruth.
‘I think that was cruel,’ continued Rachel. ‘Their poor little prickles cooking!’
‘Shut up!’ said Ruth.
‘No worse than eating sheep,’ Phoebe pointed out. ‘Or cows. Or pigs. Or horses.’
‘I don’t eat horses,’ protested Rachel.
‘They do in France,’ said Phoebe. ‘I expect you would if you were there.’
After supper there was a worried hedgehog inspection.
‘It will have to see a vet,’ said Ruth at last. ‘How much do you think it will cost?’
‘Wendy said it was free.’
‘That was just for putting down. I want this one making better.’
‘Ask when you telephone,’ suggested Naomi.
Unfortunately when Ruth telephoned she found that the nearest vet was closed for the day. So was the next nearest. So was the next nearest, which was twelve miles away and not near at all. Ruth left messages on all three answerphones, describing (with sobs) the extremeness of the emergency, but carefully not mentioning the species of animal involved. This was a precaution in case a hedgehog wouldn’t be considered important enough to deserve an after-hours visit.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit much,’ asked Naomi, ‘calling out three vets to one squashed hedgehog? What will Mum say if they all turn up together in the middle of the night?’
‘What else could I do?’ asked Ruth. ‘She’ll know I had to. She won’t mind.’
‘I bet she will.’
‘I’ll find out,’ said Rachel, and before she could be stopped had dashed into the kitchen. A moment later they could hear her breathlessly enquiring, ‘Do you mind that Ruth has telephoned three midnight vets to come and see her hedgehog?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She told them on their answerphones that it was life or death. She said you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Ruth! You couldn’t have been so silly!’ exclaimed Mrs Conroy, hurrying out of the kitchen.
‘Why is it silly?’ asked Ruth, still sniffing. ‘What else could I do?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Mrs Conroy crossly, ‘you behave more like four than fourteen! For goodness’ sake go back and look up their numbers and cancel them, Naomi. Rachel, I saw you! Come out of the fridge! You’ve had your supper! And where has Phoebe vanished to just at bedtime?’
‘She’s gone next door,’ said Rachel, through a handful of hastily grabbed cheese. ‘Practising her spying and sleuthing, I expect.’
‘You girls go from one silly phase to another!’ said Mrs Conroy. ‘Go and fetch her, someone, and apologise to Mrs Collingwood if she’s been rude . . . not you, Rachel!’
But Rachel had already gone, chewing as she went. She liked Mrs Collingwood, who always asked if she was hungry, and Martin-the-good (who she was planning to marry if the worst came to the worst), and Martin’s little brother Peter, who saved his biscuit ends for her, and Josh, the next-door dog, and most of all she liked apologising for her sisters, especially Phoebe, who was often difficult to keep squashed into her proper place as the youngest of the family.
‘Mum says she’s sorry if Phoebe’s been rude,’ she told Mrs Collingwood smugly.
‘Rude?’ asked Mrs Collingwood. ‘Phoebe?’
‘Spying,’ explained Rachel.
‘Spying!’ Mrs Collingwood laughed. ‘She’s been unloading the dishwasher, good as gold!’
‘Oh,’ said Rachel, very disappointed. ‘Well, anyway, it’s her bedtime.’
Phoebe said goodnight to the Collingwoods and went with Rachel very meekly, but on the street outside she remarked, ‘Do you know what happens to people who blow other people’s cover?’
‘What?’ asked Rachel.
‘I’ll lend you a book,’ said Phoebe.