Let me tell you a story about this thing which happened when I was a little girl, and you can decide if I am lying or not.

I was just ten years old when my grandmother gave me a present for Christmas that would change my life for ever.

At the time, I had two grannies: Granny Bike and Granny Car.

Granny Car was my stepmother Christine’s mummy, and she was super rich, because she had invented Skinny Pop – the amazing fizzy drink, which made you thinner and thinner. I didn’t like Skinny Pop, because I didn’t think I needed to be any thinner, and also, it tasted of nail polish.

Christine always told me to be on my best behaviour when Granny Car came to visit.

Granny Car liked to arrive in her chauffeur-driven Bentley, and her driver Godfrey would take off his coat and put it down on the front path so her feet didn’t have to touch the ground we lived on.

‘Frightfully common!’ sniffed Granny Car, as she trampled his jacket into the mud.

Granny Car thought that about lots of things. Like my name, Ethel. ‘Frightfully common!’ she said. Or my dad, because he worked for the local council and hadn’t invented a global soft-drink sensation. ‘Frightfully common!’ My school, because we didn’t wear the same hats and skirts she used to wear when she was little. And my pet goldfish, Silver – because he wasn’t a poodle dog. ‘Frightfully, awfully, vulgarly, obscenely, hopelessly COMMON!’ she squawked.

The only person in our entire family Granny Car didn’t think was common was her daughter, Christine.

‘My princess,’ she used to purr. ‘My golden duchess, my peach, my prize,’ she cooed. ‘Why did you have to marry into such an embarrassingly common family?’

(That is another story, but it has quite a lot to do with my real mum dying when I was little, my dad being quite lonely and something called a holiday romance.)

And every Christmas, Granny Car always brought us lots of presents.

Lots and lots.

They were always wrapped in glittering gold paper, tied up with silk ribbon in frilly bows. There were always loads of boxes, which Godfrey struggled to carry from the car. The pile always made Silver’s eyes pop out of his head when he saw it stashed under the tree.

And the presents were always, always, never anything we wanted.

Like last year – Lycra jogging bottoms for Dad, who hated running or exercise of any kind other than walking in the park and whistling, which he did a lot. ‘Frightfully slimming!’ said Granny Car.

The latest mobile phone for Christine, covered in so many diamonds that she had to keep it in a safe. ‘Frightfully smart!’ said Granny Car.

And a designer dress for me. WHEN SHE KNEW I HATED DRESSES. ‘Frightfully pretty!’ said Granny Car.

Silver always hid in his toy plastic cave whenever Granny Car visited. But he reappeared as soon as he heard a certain noise coming up our path.

Squeak! Squeak!

That was the noise Granny Bike’s ancient bicycle made as she wheeled it along. It was an old-fashioned cycle with wonky handlebars and a basket tied on with string.

Dad told me that it had been his granny’s bike before it had been his mum’s and before that, it had been her mum’s bike, and before that . . . well, that didn’t matter, it was such a long time ago. But Granny Bike looked like she might have been around even longer than that.

She was tiny and wrinkled. Her pale skin looked like it was made of paper, or the material wasps built their nests out of. And she had a crooked nose, with whiskers on her crooked chin.

She also never spoke.

Granny Bike had got seriously ill once and the doctors had to take out her tongue. This was before I was born. I had never heard her speak.

I didn’t mind.

She always had a nice, big, lopsided smile for me, and a twinkle in her ancient eyes.

Granny Bike wasn’t super rich. She hadn’t invented Skinny Pop. I never was quite sure what Granny Bike did. She didn’t live in a big mansion like Granny Car. She lived in a little tumbledown cottage on the outskirts of town, and was either always cooking something that bubbled in a pot or growing strange-smelling herbs in her garden.

When I asked Dad what she did, he would mutter, ‘It doesn’t matter, and anyway, she’s retired now.’

Christine always shuddered when Granny Bike visited. She said she smelled of dishcloths and old cheese, which wasn’t true, she didn’t. If anything, she smelled of bonfires and autumn leaves, which were two of my favourite smells.

Now on this Christmas Day, Christine decided to be meaner to her than ever before.

‘I don’t want her dragging that filthy old bike in and stinking up the place,’ she said between gulps of a special seasonal Skinny Pop, which tasted of Christmas pudding and grown-up chocolates. ‘If you want to go and see her, why don’t you visit her on Boxing Day? Or the day after? You can take her my present.’

Christine held up the tiniest bottle of perfume you’d ever seen. ‘Mummy’s latest,’ she said admiringly. ‘Eau d’Skinny Pop. You spray it on anything – your skin, furniture, old ladies – and they smell like a sticky, fizzy drink for a whole week.’

‘That’s kind, dear,’ said my dad, from his favourite chair, where he was busy reading his favourite book, The Birds of Britain. ‘We’ll do that.’

I knew Dad loved Granny Bike as much as me. But I wished he would stand up for her once in a while.

The snow had been falling all morning, and I wanted to go outside and play in the park with the other children in our street. A few of my friends were pressing their faces against our window, wrapped up in woolly hats and gloves, making funny expressions, until Christine shooed them away.

‘You’ll catch your death, or worse, if you go out and play in that filthy park!’ she said. ‘Just imagine how much dog mess there is out there under the snow.’

I said there were plenty of other things I would prefer to imagine.

Then Christine went red and grabbed the golden necklace around her throat, which she always did when she was upset, and called for my dad. ‘Stewart!’ she yelled. ‘Your daughter seems to have forgotten what day it is.’

‘Don’t upset your mother,’ said Dad, still looking at pictures of lesser spotted tits.

I hated it when he said that as well. I mean, Christine wasn’t my mother. She was just pretending to be. Besides, how could I forget what day it was? There were endless Christmas songs burbling out of her state-of-the-art laptop in the kitchen. They all sounded cheesy to me. I was wearing the horrid Christmas jumper Granny Car had given me last year, which was decorated with a picture of a huge knitted bottle of Skinny Pop, covered in holly and snow. It made me feel stupid and I hated it.

Before either of us could say another word, there was a loud honking outside.

‘Mummy!’ said Christine, and she ran to the door, to let Godfrey in, who was struggling under a heap of golden gifts. I may have been imagining things, but I thought I heard Dad let out a long sigh as he stood up to help him. Silver blew some bubbles to the top of his bowl and dived back into his cave.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It was kind of Granny Car to get me the jumper the year before. And this time, as I opened the layers of thick, expensive paper, to discover a huge, professional make-up set, I did smile and say thank you.

I knew there were lots of other children who might have wanted the glossy box, with photos of glamourous models on the front, and all the different weird-smelling pots and creams inside. But I wasn’t one of those children, and I was sad that Granny Car never seemed to notice that.

I was sad that Granny Car, Christine and even Dad never seemed to notice lots of things. Perhaps sad isn’t even the right expression. Boiling mad might be better.

Granny Car ran her bejewelled fingers through my hair. ‘You’re turning into a young woman, my gel. Don’t keep it cut this short – frightfully common. Start with this kit to sort your face out, and then Mummy can make an appointment to see my hairdresser, Gustave de Florie – you’ll love him.’

If I stared through the snow piling up against the glass, I could see other kids making a snowman in the park across the road. I wished more than anything I could join them.

In fact, this Christmas, I wished I was anywhere but here in our overheated front room, with Granny Car not only beaming down from her gold-framed portrait above the TV, but sitting at the end of the table, talking loudly over us. I wished my real mum was here instead of Christine, and I wished Dad was like he used to be.

The Dad who used to laugh a lot and put me high on his shoulders, and run around the park till we could both hardly breathe for having so much fun.

I wished Dad would smile at things rather than sigh.

I wished many, many things.

I suddenly didn’t like my life, and I wished it not to be my life. I wished it so much that I nearly snapped the pencil I was holding. (I was a bit of a doodler, always getting told off at school for drawing pictures of our teachers in my exercise book. I always kept a pencil and pad to hand because sometimes losing myself in drawing and colouring in a picture was the only way I could stay calm.)

But before I could do any drawing, or go and join my friends outside, we had to have Christine’s special microwaved Christmas dinner. ‘Just pop it in and voilà!’ she said.

She popped it into the microwave, and it popped out moments later. I had just popped a forkful of the rubbery goo into my mouth – and can assure you there was nothing voilà about it – when I glanced out of the window to see how my friends were getting on with their snowman.

It was beginning to snow harder and harder, and I couldn’t see them clearly any more. I hoped that they hadn’t been turned into snowmen themselves.

But what I saw instead, dimly appearing through the white swirls, was a familiar bent figure wheeling something along.

Squeak! Squeak!

‘Granny Bike!’ I said.

‘Oh, how frightfully dreary,’ sighed Granny Car, trying to spear some rubbery peas with her fork.

‘I thought we agreed she wasn’t coming,’ said my stepmother, looking at Dad.

Dad shrugged. ‘You know how she is.’

Silver was at least pleased, swimming up from his cave and blowing bubbles along the surface of the water. I pushed my chair back and ran to the door.

‘I don’t remember saying anything about getting down,’ said Christine.

‘Frightfully rude,’ muttered Granny Car.

I didn’t care. It was Christmas Day after all.

I opened the door, and a gust of snow blew in, stinging my face. There was Granny Bike, wrapped in a raggedy bundle of scarves and shawls, her crooked nose poking out like a beak. With great care, she leaned her bike against the wall.

‘Happy Christmas, Granny Bike!’ I said. ‘We’ve just sat down to dinner. Do you want to come in?’

She shook her head, showering snow over the doormat.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to get out of the snow?’

Granny Bike gave me one of her biggest, warmest, most lopsided smiles, and a large snowflake fell off her nose onto her whiskery chin.

Suddenly, I wanted to tell her everything. How unhappy I was, how no one understood me, how horrid Christine was, how snobby Granny Car was. ‘Granny Bike,’ I started to say.

But she put a mittened finger to her lips to quieten me, and, turning around, began to rummage in the basket on top of her bike. It was full of yellowing newspaper scraps, a ball of wool and some twigs. Eventually, she found something at the bottom, which she handed to me, beaming.

It was a parcel, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

‘For me?’ I said.

Granny Bike nodded, her whiskery chin bobbing up and down, and then she enfolded me in a hug. She was cold and damp from the snow, and she was as skinny as a skeleton, but I can promise you, it was the warmest and cosiest hug I had that Christmas.

Then she patted me on the head, and slowly began to wheel her bike back into the swirling flakes.

‘Goodbye, Granny Bike,’ I called after her. ‘Happy Christmas!’

I dimly saw a frail hand waved in reply, then she was gone.

‘What did she want?’ called Christine, as I closed the door.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I told her we were eating.’

I hid the present under a pile of winter coats, because I knew that if Granny Car or my stepmother saw it, it would probably be deemed too common and put in the recycling.

‘Oh, good,’ said Christine. Then when she saw Dad’s crestfallen face, she added. ‘Come on, Stewart! You know she doesn’t even like Christmas anyway. We’ll see her on Boxing Day. Maybe.’

She patted his hand, and we carried on spooning special microwaved gloop into our mouths, listening to cheesy Christmas music from the computer, while the snow fell outside and the day darkened.

Later that night, when everyone had gone to bed, I crept downstairs and took my present out from its hiding place in the coat pile.

Back in my room, hiding under my duvet with a torch, I carefully untied the string and unwrapped the paper.

And there was . . . a book. It had a plain, rough black cover, maybe leather, I couldn’t quite tell, and about a hundred pages.

Every single one of them was blank.

I turned the book over. There weren’t any words. Only a long silver pencil, taped in place.

That was it. Nothing else.

Then, as I gathered up the wrapping paper, a tiny card fell out. I opened it and read:

To my darling granddaughter Ethel,

Happy Christmas!

This is no ordinary sketchbook. This is a wishing book. It has great power. Use it wisely and well, and may all your wishes come true. But always, always, be careful what you wish for.

Granny Bike

A wishing book? I picked up the sketchbook and examined it carefully. It was covered in a thick layer of dust, which I blew and rubbed off, but no genie appeared. There was no ancient spell written anywhere, no secret compartment and certainly no fairy dust. It seemed plain and ordinary to me. Apart from the fact that both the pencil and the book looked as old as Granny Bike herself, it couldn’t have been less magical.

The pencil wasn’t even that sharp.

I reread her message. The last line was a bit odd. Be careful what you wish for. Still, it gave me an idea.

As an experiment, I would draw something I had never wished for, ever.

The next morning, when I came down for breakfast, I knew straightaway that things were not right. Christine sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, sobbing, while Dad patted her on the back, and tried to offer her a mug of tea. Silver was swimming in circles quickly, which he always does when he’s stressed.

I knew it had to be bad.

‘What’s happened?’ I said.

‘We’ve been burgled,’ said Dad, and Christine started to scream.

I looked around. The front door was in one piece. No one had smashed any of the windows, and everything seemed to be still there. Anything a burglar might want to steal, that is – the TV, microwave, laptop, the expensive exercise machine Christine bought off the internet and never used, and Silver, of course. (Well, if I was a burglar, I would want to steal him.)

Except, not quite.

Because next to the Christmas tree and its twinkling lights, where there should have been the huge pile of presents from Granny Car, was an empty space. There was no make-up styling kit. No Wi-Fi slippers for Dad (that could be heated up remotely by a phone app). And no piles and piles of jewellery for Christine – all gone.

Not a single bow or ribbon remained. Just a flattened patch of carpet.

Christine wiped her eyes and stared at me. ‘Who would do a thing like that to us!’ she bawled. ‘I’m a good person! I signed fifty online petitions to save donkeys last year!’

‘There, there,’ said Dad. ‘We all know you’re a wonderful person, love; perhaps they got the wrong flat.’

‘How did they get in?’ she demanded. ‘Down the chimney! Like Father Thingummy?’

‘Er, no,’ said Dad. ‘No one could get down that chimney. You do know the fire’s not real, don’t you?’

And she started screaming again. As usual, neither of them was paying any attention to me or what I was doing. I flopped down onto the sofa and opened the wishing book. Making sure no one, not even Silver, was looking, I turned to the first page.

The drawing I did last night.

Of the presents under the tree.

They were no longer under the tree, but they were in my book. I was quite good at drawing, yet this sketch surprised even me. The boxes, surrounded by wrapping paper, looked so real, I could almost reach out and grab them.

Like they were in the book.

I wondered.

Sucking on the silver pencil for a moment, I looked around the flat for something else that I hadn’t wished for. There was quite a lot to choose from – and then I spotted it.

Sitting on the kitchen windowsill, a huge cactus.

Not only was it massively ugly, like a great big green monster’s thumb, but every time I brushed past, I got stung by its prickles.

I started to sketch, first drawing a rough outline of the plant in the pot, and then shading it in, and adding the spikes last.

And the strangest thing happened.

The plant began to disappear, into thin air.

The more I drew it onto the page, the less it was there.

A tall shadow fell over my drawing. I looked up. It was Christine.

‘Wot you doing?’ she shrieked. Her eyes were red and raw from crying, layers of her make-up streaming down her face.

I closed the sketchbook, just in case she saw the picture of the presents. ‘I’m drawing.’

‘Drawing!’ she bawled. ‘A fine way to help your mother at a time like this . . .’

‘You’re not my mother,’ I said quietly.

‘. . . when you could be on your hands and knees, looking for clues! Or calling the police, or doing something useful to earn your keep around here. Is drawing going to get me my presents back? Is drawing going to pay our mortgage or our fuel bills? Is drawing going to mend the gaping wound in Granny Car’s heart when we see her this afternoon and tell her this terrible news?’

I looked up at her. ‘I thought we were going to see Granny Bike today?’ I was looking forward to showing her my drawings and finding out more about this amazing present she had given me.

Christine dismissed the idea with a flick of her hand. ‘I’ve cancelled it. Who wants to go and see that stinking old bat anyway; she never has much to say for herself, does she, Stewart?’ And she elbowed Dad sharply in the ribs.

He looked wounded, but didn’t say anything.

‘No, we’re going to go to Granny Car and you’re going to get down on your knees and grovel as you tell her that your hundred-pound make-up kit has been stolen! How do you think that news will make her feel?’

‘I didn’t want it anyway.’

‘Tough! I could have sold it on eeeeeBay!’ she screeched, so loudly that Silver’s bowl nearly cracked in half.

I absolutely didn’t want to see Granny Car. I wanted to see Granny Bike. But there was no way out, unless . . . Studying the gold-framed portrait which hung proudly above the TV, I began to draw . . .

We didn’t go to see Granny Car after all. She mysteriously disappeared that Boxing Day, right in the middle of taking a luxurious bubble bath (Christmas Cake and Sherry fragrance), in her specially custom-made gold bathtub. Godfrey came in with the king-size bath towel of finest Egyptian cotton, which he had spent the last half-hour specially fluffing on his mistress’s orders – only to find that his mistress was no longer there.

He thought she might be hidden by the bubbles and the steam.

She wasn’t. She had quite gone.

Almost as if she had been sucked down the plughole, even though she would never have fitted. After he had got over the shock, Godfrey was delighted to discover that not only would he never have to put his jacket down in the mud for her to walk on again, but that he had inherited her BMW.

The police used my ‘incredibly lifelike’ sketch to issue a missing person’s report.

‘Uncanny, isn’t it?’ said the desk sergeant, beaming with admiration as he studied my drawing. ‘Almost like she was ’ere.’

Then Christine started demanding to see his superior officer and I quickly took my book away. I was beginning to get tired of Christine and all her yelling at everyone the whole time.

While she and the sergeant tore chunks out of each other, I sat back on my chair and, licking my pencil, began to sketch.

If I said so myself, I was getting pretty good at drawing now.

This time, the police came to our house to ask about my stepmother’s sudden disappearance. The sergeant wasn’t smiling any more.

Although it didn’t matter. I shut the door in his face, and while he shouted and hammered on the door, I got out my pad. It wasn’t the best sketch, a bit cartoony, but the hammering soon stopped.

That was the moment things started to go wrong.

I couldn’t stop drawing. Anyone who annoyed me, anyone who stepped out of line, anyone I didn’t like the look of, ended up wished away in the sketchbook. The kid on the bike who wasn’t looking where he was going and nearly ran me over. A fox who looked at me funny from the end of an alleyway. Even the snowman my friends had made in the park, because I didn’t like watching it melt from our window.

Then I wished our view could be improved. There were three tall blocks of flats right in the middle of it, and very ugly they were, too. Stained concrete, smashed windows, I didn’t even know whether people lived in them or not. I thought maybe learning to draw buildings instead of people would make a change.

Soon the horizon was improved, and the buildings lived only in the pages of my book. It was uncanny how real they looked, almost as if the sketchbook made them look better than I could actually draw. Sometimes, if I held the sketchbook to my ear, I could almost hear thousands of tiny voices all chattering and screaming.

After the tower blocks came the big factory in the town, that did nothing but belch out oily smoke and toxic chemicals into the sky. I think some people worked there, but surely they would be better off working somewhere nicer and less smelly?

Then the church, because I went to a service once and found it boring. And the school, so I wouldn’t have to go back next term. I drew the hospital, because it scared me, and thought at least all the ill people inside wouldn’t be in pain any more.

Soon, there wasn’t much left of our town, but just a kind of white space, like things had been rubbed out.

People began to go crazy.

There were riots, with people throwing things at policemen in riot gear, yelling that all the disappearances were a government conspiracy, while helicopters with searchlights buzzed overhead.

I had my nose pressed to the window, even though Dad wanted me to stay away.

I had never drawn an action scene before, now was my chance!

After the police disappeared, the government sent in tanks.

I wasn’t wildly keen on drawing those, but sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone, don’t you?

Then the countryside began to look a bit patchy. All the gaps made it seem messier than before. I started to draw and draw and draw. Soon the messy, ragged world outside was all safely contained within the pages of my book.

The only thing that remained was our house and garden, Dad, Silver and me.

Dad had gone mad, though. He didn’t understand what was going on. He looked wild-eyed and confused and started to babble, not making any sense. I gave him the biggest hug I could and asked if I could draw his portrait to cheer him up.

That was when Silver started to act funny around me. He wouldn’t come out of his underwater shipwreck to play. Only the occasional bubble appeared.

He needn’t have worried. I would never draw Silver.

Although, what was to stop me drawing his bowl?

The next morning, I woke up, stretched with a big yawn, got out of bed and went to open the curtains and see if the Christmas snow was still there.

Only I didn’t. Because my bed wasn’t there. Then I remembered. It had felt cold and uncomfortable, so I had drawn it and put it in my pad. There were no curtains to pull either, because they hadn’t closed properly.

There was nothing to see at all.

It was all in the dark book clutched in my hand, which, along with the silver pencil, was everything I now owned. They were the only two objects which seemed to exist in the world.

All around was whiteness, wherever I looked. But it wasn’t snow. Just blank space. Above, below and around me. I could have been in a film studio or on a screen, except I wasn’t, I wasn’t . . . anywhere.

I was utterly, completely alone. With Granny Bike’s present, I had made everything disappear. I hadn’t been careful what I wished for at all.

I sat down in the middle of the white space and opened my wishing book, turning right to the first page. There were all our other Christmas presents. My make-up kit. Christine’s piles of jewellery. And Dad’s Wi-Fi slippers. There on the page, almost as real as life. I never knew how good I was at drawing until I picked up that pencil.

If I held the book to my ear and shook it, it was almost possible to hear the jewellery rattling inside and the Wi-Fi self-heating slippers beeping as they searched for a connection.

What a stupid, dumb idea, I thought. Wi-Fi slippers that self-heated via a mobile phone app, so that they were warm, ready and waiting when you got home from work. Why would anyone give that to someone as a present? Or even buy it in a shop? It was so ridiculous and completely bonkers that I began to smile.

But I wasn’t meant to like the things in this book. I had wished them away. I turned the page.

The prickly cactus, looking as sharp and deadly as ever.

I remembered Dad once pricked himself on it while carrying a jug of hot custard, and he did a dance of pain and splashing custard, which gave rise to the family nickname, ‘Custard-Cactus Dance’, given to anyone either dancing badly or reacting to a stubbed toe.

No, that wasn’t funny, I decided. Definitely not.

Then there was Granny Car, frozen in time. She was only wearing a shower cap, surrounded by a cloud of extra foamy bubbles. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could hear – faintly, like a fly trapped between glass – her exclaiming, ‘A dirty old sketchbook! How frightfully common!’

Granny Car, I thought to myself, looking at the picture. She was bossy and a snob, and not always nice to everybody. And I had started hating her for that. Now here she was, preserved for all time, stark naked apart from a handful of soapy bubbles.

Once upon a time, such a thought would have made me laugh.

Now, though, I felt a tug inside. A tug of sadness.

She was my stepgranny after all. She did come to visit us all the time, even if she was overcritical. All those presents, over the page, she bought those for us all the time. They were about the worst, waste-of-money presents to be found on earth.

But they were presents. I tried to remember what I had got Granny Car for Christmas this year.

Then I remembered. I had bought her a little wind-up toy version of the Queen. If you wound it up, her jaw went up and down and her white-gloved arm waved. It was only a jokey thing from a toy shop, and I thought Granny Car would hate it, because she thought anyone who didn’t stand up when the Queen was mentioned was frightfully common.

Actually, she thought it was the funniest thing ever and kept playing with it over Christmas dinner, until even Christine – her own daughter, who never laughed at anything – started to laugh.

I felt a smile begin to tug at the corner of my mouth.

I turned the page. The policemen, who were trying to help look after us. Christine, my stepmum, who wanted to know what had happened to her mum.

My school and my friends.

The town where we lived, tower blocks, factory and all.

Dad. Silver.

I looked up. I didn’t know how long I had been absorbed in the drawings. As there was no sun (too hot, in the book) or clocks (too anxious-making, on the page), the sketchbook was absolutely bursting full of people, animals, places and things. It sounds strange, but it even felt heavier. And from every sheet of paper, in between the cracks and spine of the book, I could hear noise. Chatter, whispers, shouts, cars, rain, cats and dogs, all the noise of everyday life was seeping out, as if from the faintest radio signal in a distant galaxy.

Not everything in the book made me laugh. Some of it still made me furious. Like the cyclist who nearly ran me over at the zebra crossing. But all the same, I clutched the book tight to my chest.

There was a whole world in there. I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted it back.

Then, to my surprise, I heard a noise not coming from the book.

Squeak! Squeak!

I looked up.

Far away, on the horizon of the huge blankness I found myself in, I could spy a tiny, dark, bent figure, wheeling her bicycle towards me.

Granny Bike!

As she got closer and closer, the noise of her bike got louder and louder, and the noise of the world in my sketchbook got fainter and fainter. Until she was standing over me. The one person I hadn’t put in my sketchbook.

She didn’t say anything, of course.

But she looked at me. Her whiskery chin was firm and her eyes were not twinkling with mischief like they often were. I believe it was physically impossible for Granny Bike ever to be cross, but this was perhaps the nearest she would ever come to it.

I hugged the book to my chest. ‘Am I in trouble, Granny Bike?’ I said.

Granny Bike didn’t reply.

‘I shouldn’t have drawn all those people and things, should I?’ I said. ‘You told me to be careful what I wished for, and I ended up drawing everything. I thought it was because I didn’t want them, but actually . . . I do. Now I don’t have them, I can even love a pair of Wi-Fi-controlled self-heating slippers. Or a cactus. Even Granny Car.’

Granny Bike smiled a little at that.

‘How did it work, though, Granny Bike?’

She shrugged.

‘Are you a . . .’ Somehow, I couldn’t quite say the word. Even though she had a crooked nose and greasy hair and a wart on her whiskery chin, I couldn’t say that word about Granny Bike, or any granny, for that matter.

Granny Bike cocked her head at me, as if to say, Go on.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I just want to put things right now. Can you help me?’

Granny Bike nodded. She offered a wrinkly, papery hand, and pulled me up so I was facing her. I put the wishing book down on the floor of white nothing and gave her a hug.

She patted me on the back and took the pencil out of my hand. Then, creaking low on her ancient knees, she picked up the book, turned to the last blank page and began to draw.

‘Granny Bike,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’

And she started to draw, faster and faster, scribbling and shading in, till it seemed that sparks were flying off the page.

I began to feel a funny, tingling feeling in my feet. I looked down and they were beginning to disappear, vanishing into thin air.

‘Granny Bike!’ I screamed. ‘No! That’s not fair!’

I lunged, trying to grab the pencil out of her hands, but I couldn’t, because my arms had disappeared.

The last I saw of her was her pen scribbling and scribbling away, until she dwindled to a circle of a grinning, cackling mouth and then—

I was inside the wishing book.

I felt flatter and squashed, at first, but then I shook my hands and feet around a bit and the blood began to return. Gasping for air, I looked around and was surprised to find that the pages weren’t white-and-black, as I had imagined.

They were full of colour and life. The trees of the park across the street from us were there, still laden down with their winter snow. A snowman with a shiny top hat and a carrot for a nose. Tower blocks twinkling with light in the distance, clouds of smoke puffing into the sky from a factory chimney – a helicopter buzzing in between them.

A bell made me swerve sharply, as a cyclist sped past.

Then I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders, and I twisted around. ‘Where did you get to?’ said Dad. His face was flushed and he was out of breath. Then I looked down, and saw the snowball rolled up in his gloved palm. ‘You don’t think Christine’s going to let you get away with it that easily, do you?’

Christine? I thought. That doesn’t make any sense. Christine would never—

Then a snowball caught me square in the back, and I whipped round, to see Christine doubled up with laughter. She was in a fur coat – which meant it was definitely my stepmum and not an impostor – but she was covered in snow and leaves and having a laugh. As was the older woman next to her, bright red in the face, as she tried to roll the biggest snowball I’d ever seen . . .

‘Frightfully common!’ said Granny Car. ‘And frightfully funny! Come on, Ethel, chase me!’

And she tried to waddle off through the drifts.

It was like the world I knew, only changed a bit to the left. Only better.

There was just one thing. ‘Dad?’ I said, tugging at his sleeve, before he ran off to pull his mother-in-law out of the hedge she had fallen into. ‘Is Granny Bike here?’

He looked at me weirdly for a moment, then mussed my hair, and gave me the biggest Dad-hug I’d ever had from him. ‘Oh, love, I wish she was, I really do. But I know what you mean. And I like to think she still is, somehow, looking down on us all.’

Dad turned his head up to the night sky and I followed his gaze up above the snowy trees, over the tops of the tower blocks, through the cloud of factory smoke, and far, far away into the endless starry sky.

There, hanging in the middle of space, like a porthole shining down from another world, was a huge moon. And do you know the strangest thing? If you angled your head and looked at the moon in a certain way, it looked exactly like the white face of a crooked old lady, with her bent nose and warty chin.

With just perhaps the trace of a smile.

So, go on, then. Tell me if I’m lying or not.