Almost as soon as they had moved in to the ivy house, Polly had offered to help Abi decorate her bedroom. Abi, alarmed, had asked, ‘Can I choose the colours?’ even before she remembered to say thank you.
‘Of course,’ Polly had replied, squashing out of her mind the memory of her own twelve-year-old bedroom, where she had insisted on chocolate brown and nothing else, to look like a hobbit hole. ‘Anything you like.’
Abi had chosen a silvery grey colour for the stained, flaking ceiling and a faded greenish blue for the walls. At the corners she outlined with chalk a series of small upright trees, bare-branched, and slender. When the outlines looked right she’d filled them in, with the same silver grey as the ceiling, and then she had looped their two-dimensional branches with fairy lights; amber, rose and yellow. In a charity shop she and Theo found some rusty orange denim curtains, and a matching furry mat. These strange colours fitted together so well that Polly sounded and felt remorseful when she said, ‘And I painted Louis’ old room for you pink!’
‘It was all right. Just a bit . . . a bit . . .’
‘It was bubblegum pink!’ said Polly. ‘Sorry, Abi! I love your greeny-blues and golds.’
‘One day I’ll do the furniture too,’ said Abi, ‘and then it will be perfect.’
With the lights switched on, and the curtains closed, the room already looked perfect to Louis. His bed was so close to Abi’s he could reach out and touch her hand.
‘Come and see!’ he called to Max when Abi was getting ready in the bathroom, and Max put his head round the door and asked, ‘Why are you even here?’
‘In case I get frightened of anything,’ said Louis, very pleased with himself now he didn’t have to face the night alone.
‘She’s got you for life, then,’ said Max. He had hated sharing a room with Louis, but now suddenly he felt so left out it hurt. It made him bad-tempered. ‘You’re always frightened of something,’ he continued. ‘Spiders. Beetles. Haircuts. Toads . . .’
‘I’m not!’
‘Messy bedroom floors. Mum never coming back . . .’
‘She is! She is!’ screeched Louis, sitting up and flinging first his pillow, and then Abi’s pillow, hard as he could at Max, ‘Go away!’
‘Crikey, calm down!’ said Max. ‘I never said she wasn’t!’ and he tossed back the pillows and retreated to his own room with its spare bike wheels and footballs and orange lava lamp. He’d recently added a poster of the Eiffel Tower and thought it all looked very French.
‘Shout if you need me,’ he’d told Abi when she came up to bed, but Louis and Abi didn’t shout; they whispered.
‘Tell me more about Iffen,’ said Abi. ‘When did you see him first?’
‘When Mum was here. I thought he was a nowl. He was much smaller then. But he wasn’t a nowl, he was a cat-thing. Then Mum went away and Max was always cross and you read books all the time and I kept seeing Mrs Puddock, and Iffen got bigger and bigger . . . Abi?’
‘What?’
‘What if Mrs Puddock grows bigger and bigger too?’
‘Of course she won’t. She’s just ordinary. Like . . . like . . . that white cat at the beach was ordinary. And the foxes in the summer. Like nearly everything is ordinary.’
‘Not the ivy,’ said Louis, and from outside they heard the ivy leaves rustle a little, as if in agreement.
Louis spoke again.
‘Iffen isn’t ordinary. But he’s real too. He does real things.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Abi, thinking of the marks on the door and the slashed patchwork rug in the room beneath.
‘Unordinary things are happening all the time now,’ said Louis.
‘I know.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Like it?’
‘This time. This unordinary time. I don’t know what it’s called,’ said Louis helplessly. Abi did. Granny Grace had named it long before: ‘What a time of green magic! ’
Louis’ eyes were on hers, waiting for an answer to his question.
Did she like it? Abi’s thoughts revisited these last few green magic weeks. She had been stunned, shocked, chilled to her bones. Astonished. Awed. Lost and found. But her dad had a word that he used about his work now and then: ‘privileged’. She had also been privileged.
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I do. But sometimes it’s scary.’
‘Like Iffen,’ said Louis.
‘Is Iffen scary?’ asked Abi, so gently that Louis could whisper, ‘Yes.’
After that he was quiet for such a long time that Abi thought he’d fallen asleep until he suddenly reached up a hand and said sleepily, ‘I did see the snow on your hair.’
‘I did see Iffen,’ said Abi, and she stretched down a hand to touch his, and added, ‘Night, Louis,’ and watched as he fell asleep.
Then for a long time Abi lay awake, listening. Theo creaked up the stairs, peered round the door, blew a silent kiss and creaked back down again. In the next room Max dropped his headphones, releasing a trickle of French conversation, and flopped down on his pillow. There was the sound of wind in the ivy outside, traffic further away, somewhere a dog barking. Did dogs see Iffen?
Where had Louis found Iffen?
The tired house slept, all except Abi. Abi’s mind was turning and turning as she remembered.
The strange music in the blizzard wind. The waiting-to-pounce tension of the attic rooms where Anne Frank wrote her diary. The lurch of the balanced bus. The blue horizon of the South Pacific.
The wild, wide encounters of the worlds she’d discovered in books.
And she’d found a chestnut leaf and a speckled shell. The memory of snow in her hair.
And Louis had found Iffen.
‘I think,’ said Abi to herself, slowly explaining as she began to understand, ‘I think, in the beginning, Iffen must have come out of a book.’