The Land of Neverendings Read online

  For a boy,

  a bear

  and a penguin.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One: The Book of Bluey

  Two: The Wrong Door

  Three: Choir Practice

  Four: Black Toad

  Five: Wonderland

  Six: Trouble in Pointed End

  Seven: Research

  Eight: Battle of the Bedroom

  Nine: Experiment

  Ten: Inside the Sycamores

  Eleven: Fire

  Twelve: An Old Friend in a Strange Place

  Thirteen: The New Lodgers

  Fourteen: It Begins

  Fifteen: The Serpent in the Garden

  Sixteen: Pippa’s Holiday

  Seventeen: The Spellbinders

  Eighteen: Fireworks

  Nineteen: Demands

  Twenty: Gold Boots

  Twenty-one: The Penguin Society Outing

  Twenty-two: A Meeting in Wonderland

  Twenty-three: The Message

  Twenty-four: Showdown

  Twenty-five: A Very Important Job

  Twenty-six: Invitation to a Posh Ball

  Twenty-seven: Everybody Wins

  Twenty-eight: All Shall Have Prizes

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Kate Saunders

  About The Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  One

  THE BOOK OF BLUEY

  WHEN HOLLY DIED, Bluey suddenly fell silent and all the lights went out in Smockeroon.

  Holly’s bedroom was an empty cave that Emily was scared to walk past at night.

  Men came to rip out the special lift for her chair, the huge hoist over the bath, and all the other things Holly didn’t need any more.

  Emily had grown up saying, ‘My sister is disabled’, and now she had to get used to saying, ‘My sister

  is dead.’

  It had happened nearly three months ago, at the beginning of the summer holidays. Holly had one of her seizures in the middle of the night, and this time, her heart stopped. Dad had used exactly those words when he told Emily – her heart stopped. When nobody was looking, Emily put her hand on her own chest to feel the reassuring thud-thud-thud of her heartbeat. How did her heart know to keep on beating? It scared her to think what a fragile thing it was. People didn’t realise how close they were to dropping dead. She overheard someone saying that her parents’ hearts were ‘broken’ and worried that this would make them more likely to stop.

  The counsellor at the hospital wanted Emily to talk about her feelings. She kept asking Emily about that morning, the terrible morning, when she woke to find Holly’s room empty, and her parents sitting at the kitchen table like a pair of white-faced zombies. Everyone nagged you to ‘talk’, as if that solved everything.

  ‘But I don’t know how to say I miss Bluey,’ she wrote in her secret book. ‘I can’t even say his name because it makes them cry.’

  Bluey had been Holly’s favourite toy – a bright blue teddy bear, always at Holly’s side, for all the fifteen years of her life. He had a special place on her wheelchair, and on the metal frame of her bed. Long ago, as a very little girl, Emily had started doing a voice for Bluey. And then she had started telling stories about him, and the silly adventures he and Holly had when nobody was looking, in a magical land called Smockeroon. Emily had no idea where this word had come from, or how it had popped into her head, but it made Holly smile until her whole face lit up – though she couldn’t talk and was nearly blind, she’d understood a lot more than people thought. Mum and Dad began to do Bluey’s voice and repeat his daft sayings, until he lived with them like an invisible member of the family.

  None of it had seemed real to Emily until Mum gave Bluey to the man from the undertakers, to put in Holly’s coffin.

  Emily couldn’t find the words to explain why this made her so dreadfully sad. Of course Bluey had to be with his owner – that was the rule with toys. She didn’t want her parents to think she cared more about a stuffed bear than she did about her sister. People who were in the first year of secondary school were supposed to be too old for soft toys, anyway. But Bluey had been so much more than a toy. Emily needed to remember as much about him as possible, because each memory of Bluey contained a bit of Holly.

  This was why Emily had started the secret book – to save Bluey. She had invented a fiendish code that nobody (not even her best friend, Maze, who was the queen of nosy parkers) would be able to read. One of her birthday presents, a few months ago, had been a small, chunky notebook with a bright pink cover. Emily carried it everywhere. Whenever she remembered something about Bluey or Smockeroon, she wrote it carefully in her book, in tiny writing like the tracks of an ant.

  On the first day of her mother’s new job, Emily

  wrote: ‘Toffee teapot.’

  She was reminding herself about a story from Smockeroon that had suddenly come back to her during break – when Bluey had invited Holly to tea and his new teapot had melted because it was made of toffee.

  Holly had liked the sound of words that began with ‘t’; she had smiled and made the huffing sound that meant she was laughing.

  Oh, Holly and Bluey, I miss you so much.

  *

  ‘It’s just not fair,’ said Maze. ‘I shouldn’t have to hang about at the surgery after school. It’s so BORING – you won’t let me use my phone and there’s nobody to talk to.’

  Maze (short for ‘Maisie’) Miller had been Emily’s best friend since forever. Their gardens backed onto each other, so that they had always been able to run between the two houses without crossing any roads. She was a tall, confident person, with a loud voice, a big mouth and long black hair that she could sit on, and she was planning to be famous for something when she grew up. Emily was shorter and quieter, with thin blonde hair, a pale face and embarrassing big feet that she kept tripping over.

  ‘Do stop moaning,’ said Maze’s mother. ‘For the last time, I’m not leaving you alone in the house.’ Maze’s mum, Jo, was one of the doctors at the very busy local health centre, and this was her day to drive Maze and Emily home from their new school. ‘You can always do your homework.’

  ‘No I can’t – I need some time to relax first. Don’t blame me if I fail all my exams. You should’ve let me go to Summer’s.’

  Summer Watson was the most glamorous person in their new class, and Maze was obsessed with her. She longed to be Summer’s best friend and trailed after her like an adoring dog.

  ‘What about Emily? According to the car rota, I’d still be picking her up – and then I’d have to drive across town again to fetch you, and I’m not your personal chauffeur.’

  ‘Oh.’ Maze glanced over her shoulder at Emily in the back seat.

  The fact was that Maze had been weird since Holly died – distant, and not listening properly. When the two of them were alone she didn’t want to talk, and even looked a little surprised when Emily spoke to her, as if she’d only just noticed she was there. This was painful, especially at school, where they were the only two girls from their primary school and didn’t know anyone else. Sometimes Emily was so lonely that it was like being invisible.

  ‘Let’s hear from Emily, for a change,’ Jo said, giving her a smile in the rear-view mirror. ‘Today’s your first time at Ruth’s, isn’t it? Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Emily. ‘Fine.’ This wasn’t true, but nobody wanted to listen to the truth, which was that she hated all the changes. They kept coming, one after the other, as if Holly’s death had pulled the plug out of the whole world and sent it rushing down the drain.

 
First there was the stress of starting secondary school, where Emily had to meet strangers who didn’t know about Holly and asked if she had brothers or sisters.

  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Mum had got herself a part-time job with a local charity. On Thursdays and Fridays she would be working until six o’clock. And since Dad never got back before seven, she had arranged for Emily to go to the antique shop next door, which was owned by her friend Ruth.

  ‘Your mum needs that job of hers,’ Dad had told Emily firmly. ‘She needs to get out of this house, where everything reminds her of—’ He was bad at saying Holly’s name, and gulped instead. ‘And anyway, you like Ruth. You know you can trust her not to say anything silly about—’ Gulp. ‘People say silly things because they don’t know what it’s like and can’t bear to imagine it. But she does know – she lost her son.’

  Ruth’s son had died when he was a teenager.

  Young people weren’t supposed to die. When you had a dead young person in your family, it was like joining a weird club that nobody on earth wanted to be a member of.

  Emily couldn’t explain why she hated the new arrangement so much. It had nothing to do with Ruth. She wanted to go home – to run up the path and find Mum and Holly in the kitchen, waiting for the latest news from Smockeroon – and without Holly her home felt all wrong.

  Jo stopped the car outside the shop, Barkstone Bygones. Emily got out, trying not to look at her empty house beside it.

  ‘Catch you later,’ Maze said. ‘She won’t let me text until I’ve done my homework.’

  Barkstone had once been a village, and was now at the edge of the small market town of Bottleton, which was famous for only two things – a writer and a pie factory. The writer was John Staples, author of a series of classic sci-fi novels; until he died in the 1960s, he had lived in the red-brick house next door to Maze, and part of his long garden had been turned into a wildlife meadow. The pie factory was Norton’s, a gigantic place beside the ring road, where Emily’s dad worked in the accounts office. Emily and her parents lived in the old part of Barkstone village, in a small grey brick house beside a short row of shops. The shops were on the ground floor of a crazy old half-timbered building with a sagging thatched roof.

  For a moment, Emily stood on the pavement, furiously blinking away a sudden rush of tears. The autumn day was grey, wet and gusty, and if Holly had been here, Bluey would have said something about the instant wellies he had invented (you sprinkled a sachet of magic powder on your legs and it turned into a pair of wellies, in a selection of tasteful colours). She had nearly forgotten. When she had a moment she would put it in the book.

  Welly powder.

  It only took a couple of words to pin a memory down.

  Feeling more cheerful, Emily picked up her backpack and went into the shop. It was a very cosy place. The light came from two lamps with mouldy shades. There was a wood-burning stove and a sagging armchair covered with a splatter of faded roses. Ruth sold small pieces of furniture, china figures, dim silver jugs and speckled Victorian pictures. On the shelf behind her till, squashed between two big clocks, sat the most ancient of teddy bears, once the property of Ruth’s mother. He was on the point of falling apart, but people had still wanted to buy him, so Ruth had hung a not-for-sale sign around his neck. On the wall above his head was a small photo of a handsome, laughing boy of ten or eleven – Ruth’s dead son, Daniel.

  ‘Hi, Emily,’ Ruth said. ‘Is it that time already? Don’t worry, I hadn’t forgotten you were coming and the kitchen’s as warm as toast.’ She was sitting beside the till, sorting through several boxes of the greetings cards she sold as a sideline. ‘Your mum said I didn’t have to feed you – but I couldn’t miss such a great excuse for buying chocolate biscuits.’

  Ruth was short and stout, with a springy puff of grey hair, and big round glasses with heavy frames. There was a china biscuit barrel at home in the shape of a smiling owl, and this had always reminded Emily of Ruth. Today she was particularly owlish, in a huge and shapeless brown cardigan; it really was amazing to see how neatly she dodged around the teetering heaps of stuff in her shop.

  ‘Funny to see that blazer again – I was at Hatty Catty myself, back in the day.’

  Emily’s new school was called the Harriet Cattermole School for Girls; everyone in Bottleton knew it as ‘Hatty Catty’. There was a uniform of dark purple blazer, white shirt, grey skirt and green-and-purple tie that still felt stiff and strange to Emily.

  ‘I won’t ask you if you’re enjoying it,’ Ruth said over her shoulder, waddling off towards the kitchen at the back of the shop. ‘I hated my first term there – hated and loathed it. I was short and fat, and they called me “Spacehopper”.’

  ‘Wow – poor you!’ Emily giggled, but only because it was so awful. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Oh, it didn’t last long; believe it or not, I ended up liking the place.’

  ‘I don’t exactly hate it,’ Emily said, ‘but I don’t exactly like it, either. I suppose I’ll just get used to it.’ Her old school had been the small village primary round the corner. Hatty Catty was miles away, and enormous; there were huge crowds of big girls, clanging bells between lessons, and strict teachers who expected you just to know things by magic without being told. She couldn’t imagine ever liking it.

  ‘Well, give it a chance,’ Ruth said. ‘You never know.’

  The kitchen was small and cluttered, dominated by a big old Rayburn that made it gorgeously stuffy and warm. Emily had often squeezed in here with her mother – and Holly, her wheelchair and her breathing machine – and found that she was feeling surprisingly relaxed and at home. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, and it was only for two afternoons a week.

  The table, just big enough for two people to sit at, was swamped by a very fat tabby cat, his striped belly hanging over a box of chocolate finger biscuits.

  ‘Hi, Podge,’ said Emily.

  Ruth firmly shoved Podge down to the floor. ‘You can do your homework here, and help yourself to the biscuits – I can’t eat them because I’ve joined Weight Watchers again.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ll be in the shop till five – yell if you need anything.’ Ruth waddled back to her chair beside the till and her boxes of cards.

  Left alone with the lazy cat in the warm kitchen, Emily made herself a mug of tea and opened the biscuits. She did her homework (geography worksheet – not too bad). After that she took out her Bluey book to write ‘Welly powder’. The warmth was making her yawn.

  And suddenly, before she even knew she had fallen

  asleep, she was dreaming.

  In her dream she was telling a story to Holly, but she was also inside the story. A muffled, woolly, socky voice was singing something – Bluey’s voice. The tune had been Dad’s favourite for making up silly songs, the ‘Toreador Song’ from a famous opera called Carmen.

  Bluey sang:

  Help I have lost my lovely blue moustache!

  I had it ON,

  But now it’s GONE!

  And then his voice was joined by lots of other waffly voices – Bluey’s choir. He had paid all Holly’s other soft toys a penny a year to follow him round as a permanent backing group.

  Oh WHERE is his lovely blue moustache?

  Where oh WHERE has it GONE?

  Emily opened her eyes to find that her head was resting on the table. She had been woken by a rumble of thunder; it was raining hard outside.

  When had she ever made up a Bluey song about a moustache?

  Two

  THE WRONG DOOR

  RUTH, CAN I ask you something?’

  ‘Hmm? Yes, of course.’

  It was five o’clock. Ruth had shut the shop and joined Emily in the kitchen.

  ‘After your son died, did you have dreams about him?’

  Ruth wasn’t embarrassed or distressed by this question. She looked thoughtful. ‘I wanted to dream about him. But I didn’t – not for a few years, anyway. Other people used t
o say they’d dreamt about him, and that made me jealous. Do you dream about Holly?’

  ‘No,’ Emily said. ‘I go to sleep every night wishing I could dream about her, but I never remember anything in the morning.’

  ‘That’s probably because it happened so recently.’ Forgetting her diet, Ruth helped herself to three chocolate biscuits. ‘Your mind is still in a state of shock. Danny only came back into my dreams when I stopped searching for him.’

  ‘And were they … nice dreams?’

  ‘Very nice,’ Ruth said, with her mouth full. ‘He was a happy little boy again, playing with his old friends in the enchanted forest.’

  ‘What’s the enchanted forest?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the land of stories and imagination, where your toys go when you’re not looking – funny and silly and kind, like Winnie-the-Pooh.’ A big tear rolled down Ruth’s cheek and splashed on the table. ‘Danny called it the Land of Neverendings.’

  ‘Sorry …’ Emily was dismayed. She hadn’t meant to make Ruth cry, and grown-up tears were horrifying.

  ‘No, you mustn’t say sorry.’ Ruth tore off a piece of kitchen towel and blew her nose with a honking sound that made Podge twitch in his sleep. ‘Look, I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll never get on if we’re pussyfooting around each other’s feelings. You let me cry about Danny and I won’t make a big thing of it if you cry about Holly.’

  ‘I cry every time I talk about her,’ Emily heard herself saying. ‘And people think it’s because I don’t want to talk about her, so they change the subject. But I do want to.’

  ‘Of course you do. And while you’re here, you can talk about Holly as much as you like without worrying about my feelings. I’m not your parents.’ Ruth scooped up the last chocolate biscuits. ‘Deal?’

  ‘OK,’ Emily said.

  It was a good idea. Talking to Ruth was not the same as talking to the counsellor, who had not known her sister and only thought of her as a disabled person. And Emily was interested in what Ruth had said about the enchanted forest, which sounded very like Smockeroon. Did everyone make up stories about the secret lives of their toys?