A Tangle of Magic Read online

  A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE

  Isn’t hair an amazing thing? Or at least, it’s amazing for Penelope. Imagine waking up one day to find your boring old hair has turned a bright and surprising new colour? Penelope’s new hair is twisty, curly, soft and incredibly comforting . . . but it’s also a lot more magic than it first appears! I think Valija Zinck may be on to something pretty cool. And what’s more, there’s something in this story about roads which I have always suspected . . . Take off your hats and brush out your luscious locks: you’re about to embark on the most marvellous and tangly of magical tales.

  BARRY CUNNINGHAM

  Publisher

  Chicken House

  Contents

  1. Penelope Gardener

  2. Rainy Weather

  3. In the Swamp Forest

  4. New Hair

  5. Post

  6. A Grey Homecoming

  7. Love at First Sight

  8. Street Acquaintances

  9. Making Friends with the Road

  10. Upwards and Forwards

  11. News from Pete

  12. A Full Head

  13. Practice, Practice, Practice

  14. Floating with Tom and Pete

  15. Granny Elizabeth’s Secret

  16. Alpha Regius

  17. Seeing

  18. Finally Flying!

  19. Two Letters

  20. Movie Marathon

  21. Gina

  22. Bad Fortune

  23. Battling with Vegetables

  24. Preparations

  25. Salon Penelope

  26. The Journey Begins

  27. The Anti-Eye

  28. Blackslough

  29. Waiting

  30. The Man with the Fish Eyes

  31. Pursuit

  32. Behind the Wall

  33. The Cellar Spider’s Transport

  34. Freedom

  35. In Flight

  36. Leo Tells All

  37. Together

  38. Sunk

  39. Lucia and Leo

  40. Read All About It!

  Copyright

  1

  Penelope Gardener

  Penelope Gardener was an odd sort of girl. She had grey hair, although she was only ten years old, and a smell of fire followed her wherever she went. But stranger still, Penelope could sometimes hear her mother telling her to do something before Mrs Gardener had even opened her mouth.

  ‘Yes, Mum, I did wash my hair this morning,’ Penelope would say. Or: ‘OK, OK, I’m taking Granny her coffee right now.’ Mum would look at her with a very strange expression, but never asked Penelope how she’d known exactly what she was about to say.

  Penelope was used to her grey hair – she’d never known anything else. She hardly noticed the fire smell any more, and she barely gave the ‘hearing-before-hearing’ a second thought. But there was one thing that struck her as odd: it always rained on her birthday, even though it was on the thirteenth of August. Hardly anyone except Penelope seemed to notice it. And because most people put an umbrella up or wore a raincoat when it rained, hardly anyone except Penelope seemed to notice that the rain on her birthday wasn’t really wet.

  On her seventh birthday, when Penelope had asked about the strange rain, her mother’s face had turned pale. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about peculiar stuff like that!’ she’d snapped. ‘I’ve had enough of it to last me a lifetime!’ Penelope had asked her what she meant, but Mrs Gardener had stayed quiet, and Penelope thought she saw the glint of a tear in her eye. And because she loved her mother very much, she never mentioned the strange birthday rain again. Not when it fell again on her eighth birthday, nor at any time after that.

  Penelope lived with her mother, her granny Elizabeth and their grey cat Coco in a small house on the outskirts of a little village, right next to a swamp forest. The house was narrow and a bit draughty, but Penelope loved it. The wooden walls were once bright red, but Penelope’s mother had painted them dark green. Every year after the summer rains, a little of the green paint would flake away, and a little more red would show through. Now, the house was speckled all over with red and green, like dragon scales.

  Penelope’s father didn’t live in the dragon house. He didn’t live anywhere any more, as he’d died when Penelope was very young. She missed her father, even though she didn’t remember him. The only things she had of his was Coco, and a tattered old black-and-white photo that showed a long-haired man with his arms around Penelope’s mother, laughing. There were no wrinkles on her mother’s brow in the photo, and she had a round, expectant Penelope-belly.

  Apart from the photo, there was nothing in the house to remind her of her father. Mrs Gardener had given away all of his belongings because it made her too sad to have them around. Penelope thought that was a pity. She’d have liked to have known more about her father, and his things could have told her a little bit about him. Sometimes, when Penelope asked about him, Granny would say, ‘It’s a real shame the chap’s not around any more, isn’t it?’ But Penelope’s mother never replied.

  2

  Rainy Weather

  One gloomy Friday morning in April, Penelope was woken by something crawling across her nose.

  ‘Stop it, Coco!’ she murmured, still half asleep. But then it occurred to her that the cat was lying on her feet like a hot water bottle. Also, whatever was crawling over her face seemed to have an awful lot of legs.

  She sat up with a start, the creature clinging to her cheek. ‘Holy swamp cow!’ she shouted, reaching up and brushing the large grey-and-yellow cellar spider off her face, shuddering in disgust. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’

  The cellar spider didn’t reply, of course – it scuttled under the bed as fast as its spindly legs would carry it.

  ‘I don’t think much of your manners!’ she called after it. Penelope didn’t really mind leggy spider, hairy spiders, or any creepy-crawlies, but she wasn’t too keen on them strolling across her face at six in the morning. Her eye fell on Coco, who was still sound asleep.

  ‘Call yourself a guard cat? I get attacked by an eight-legged monster at the crack of dawn, and you just lie there snoring!’

  Her father’s cat didn’t even open an eye. No one wants to talk to me today, thought Penelope. But that was about to change, as the next moment a piercing shriek echoed through the house.

  ‘Penelopeeeee! Heeeeeeeeeelp!’

  Aha! At least her mother wasn’t ignoring her, too. No doubt the milk had boiled over, or maybe she’d spilt the coffee. But as Penelope hurried down the worn wooden staircase, she could smell neither burnt milk nor delicious coffee, and her mother was curled up on the sofa bed, sound asleep. Penelope listened for Granny, but all she could hear was the old woman’s snores drifting from her bedroom.

  She sighed, realizing what had happened. That dratted hearing-before-hearing! Sometimes it could be a real pain. The ‘before’ could be minutes or hours or even several days before – it was really confusing.

  Quietly, so as not to wake her mother, she started getting breakfast ready. She set the kettle to boil for her verbena tea and buttered a bread roll. Mrs Gardener was a clarinettist at the theatre in the nearest town. When she had a show in the evening, she often didn’t get home until after midnight and tended to sleep late the next morning, so Penelope would eat her breakfast alone. She tucked her grey hair behind her ears, took a bite of her roll and watched the raindrops running down the window pane in crinkly streams. What a pity it couldn’t have been birthday rain, so she could have stayed nice and dry! I’m going to be drenched before I even get to the bus stop, thought Penelope as she took another sip of tea.

  An icy wind gusted around the red-and-green-speckled house, blowing the rain into her fac
e as Penelope stepped outside. She ducked her head between her shoulders and went to fetch her bike from the shed. The path between the house and the road leading into the village was a bumpy sand track with herbs growing along the edges. Penelope had to push her bike along the track until she reached the old beech tree, where the road started. Here, she climbed on to her bike and pedalled up the steep hill that led into the village, where the school bus stopped.

  She was halfway up when she saw a tractor cresting the top of the hill and trundling down. The tractor was a bright, mud-splattered green, and puffed noxious black fumes from its exhaust pipe. The man driving it was wearing a hood shadowing his face, but underneath Penelope spotted a glint of gold-rimmed sunglasses – in spite of the rain. Penelope knew lots of the local farmers, and she’d never seen this man or his horrible tractor – besides, he was driving way too fast. She wheeled to the side of the road. The vehicle rumbled swiftly towards the huge puddle in front of her and ploughed straight through the middle of it at speed, sending up a torrent of water and sand. Penelope spluttered in disbelief. She felt like she’d just been pulled out of a dirty pond.

  ‘You stupid boil-face!’ she yelled after the tractor. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, believe you me – and more besides!’ She wiped her face. Some day this was turning out to be. First a cellar spider on her face, and now a mud shower from a tractor!

  ‘And you’re a fat lot of help!’ she said to the road. ‘Couldn’t you have taken him round some other bend instead?’

  The road didn’t reply, of course. Penelope sighed and pedalled on up the hill until she reached the bus stop.

  ‘Been for a dip in the swamp forest, have we?’ asked the bus driver, grinning, as she got on. Penelope couldn’t even summon up the energy to answer.

  At school, Penelope tore off her wet clothes, hung them over a cupboard door and put on the smelly T-shirt and shorts from her sports bag instead. She’d be cold, but it was better than sitting in her wet, muddy clothes – or wearing nothing at all! She’d manage somehow – she wasn’t some delicate little snowflake, after all.

  But when the sound of her teeth chattering disturbed Mr Potts’s lesson so much that he drew a jagged line on the whiteboard instead of a straight one, the teacher finally exclaimed: ‘Enough of this clattering! Boys and girls of 5B, you must lend your support. Not only to help me, your poor maths teacher, but also for the sake of our dear Miss Gardener. Who will lend her a protective layer to help spare her from catching pneumonia?’

  He’d have been better off asking who wouldn’t, as everyone was only too happy to help Penelope. Soon she was resplendent in a silky vest, a mint-green polo neck, a hoodie, a knitted tank top, a red-and-black striped scarf, a slightly scratchy pair of tights, a violet hair bow, a headband, a rose-patterned silver ring and beige leggings.

  ‘All we need now is some shoes,’ said Mr Potts. He wasn’t serious, but immediately two spindly boys with straw-coloured hair leapt up from the table at the back. Tom and Pete were Penelope’s best friends, and they were so alike they could have been identical twins: they had the same gap in their teeth, the same smile and the same shocking blue trainers, which they now held out to Penelope: a size 6 for her left foot and a size 7 for the right.

  ‘We can hop till tomorrow!’ shouted Pete, dropping his shoe on Penelope’s desk and hopping back to his seat, arm in arm with Tom. The whole class laughed.

  As Penelope slipped on the shoes, she found she was totally speechless. OK, so she was sweating in all the clothes, and the shoes were much too big for her, but what did that matter? She felt so grateful!

  By the time school finished, she could have changed back into her own clothes – they were still muddy, but at least they were almost dry. But she kept her classmates’ things on anyway. She wanted to hold on to the comforting feeling of being wrapped up in their friendship for as long as she could.

  3

  In the SwampForest

  Outside, the heavy rain had given way to a fine drizzle and Penelope decided it was dry enough to cycle the twelve-minute shortcut through the swamp forest.

  If you have ever travelled through a swamp forest, you will know that the few paths are extremely narrow, and that you mustn’t stray from them under any circumstances. Wander off and you might find yourself sinking into the cold swamp. And then, if you manage to pull yourself out again, the boggy ground will suck the shoes from your feet and they’ll be swallowed whole, never to be seen again. You’ll have to walk the rest of your journey in socks!

  The path was so slippery today that as Penelope carefully steered her bike over a gnarled tree root, the tyres almost skidded out from under her. She wondered if she ought to have taken the road, after all. Gripping the handle-bars more tightly, she clenched her toes to keep the large trainers on her feet – the blue shoelaces were loosening, and one of them was flapping in the wind. She steered with extreme caution around the next tree, and then stopped, startled.

  There was something lying across the path in front of her, something that didn’t belong in the swamp forest. A piece of dark-green fabric with pink roses on it, which Penelope recognized immediately: it was one of her mother’s scarves.

  What the heck is that doing here? she wondered. Penelope dismounted, leaning her bike against a tree, and picked up the scarf. She scanned the forest. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Trees and swamp grass swayed in the wind, which tugged gently at her grey hair.

  ‘Mum?’ she called softly. ‘Are you there?’

  No reply. Penelope stuffed the scarf in the pocket of the tank top. She looked all around her again, mounted her bike and continued on her way as fast as the wet path allowed.

  Penelope reached the dragon house and knocked on the green-and-red-speckled front door with numb fingers, but no sounds came from inside.

  ‘Mum!’ Penelope shouted. ‘Granny! Can you let me in, please?’

  No reply.

  Penelope walked around the house and looked through the window, feeling more worried. No pans simmered on the stove, no Mrs Gardener practising the clarinet, no Granny Elizabeth poring over her coin collection. Just Coco the grey cat, lying curled up on an armchair.

  What’s going on? thought Penelope. She sat down on the small wooden steps outside the front door and her tongue began to click against the roof of her mouth of its own accord. Penelope clicked whenever she was thinking hard. It was pretty annoying, but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘Oh, thank heavens, child, there you are!’

  Suddenly Granny Elizabeth was standing in front of her. Penelope could tell it was Granny Elizabeth by her threadbare olive-green raincoat and her plump belly, but her grandmother’s face was completely different. Her skin was grey, her brown-dyed hair was in disarray, her eyes were swollen and her nose was red. Whatever could have happened?

  ‘Your mother’s had an accident.’ Granny Elizabeth sank down on to the steps next to Penelope. ‘I’ve just come back from the hospital.’

  ‘What?!’ Penelope jumped to her feet.

  ‘Calm down, calm down. She’s going to be fine. We can go and visit her now.’

  On the long bus journey to the hospital, Granny Elizabeth explained that Penelope’s mum had been knocked down by a tractor in the village. Penelope’s tongue clicked. Was this the same vehicle that had soaked her on her way to school? She wasn’t surprised it had hit someone – the driver was a lunatic.

  ‘She’s broken a rib and hit her head quite badly,’ said Granny, sighing, ‘and although the doctors expect her to recover fully, she’s only able to stay awake for a few minutes at a time before losing consciousness again. She’ll be in hospital for a good few weeks, my dear.’

  ‘Was Mum’ – click – ‘in the forest today too?’

  ‘No,’ said Granny Elizabeth. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because . . . Oh, nothing. I just wondered,’ said Penelope, feeling the scarf in the top pocket of the woollen tank top. She gazed out of the window over the meadows, towards
the forest.

  4

  New Hair

  Over the next few weeks, Penelope missed her mother terribly. She visited at the weekends, but it wasn’t easy. The bus journey to the hospital took over two hours and her mother slept a lot, at first, even when Penelope was at her bedside. When she was awake she would smile bravely at Penelope and say, ‘Don’t worry, my love. I’m already feeling much stronger, and I’ll be home soon.’

  Penelope hoped that was true – not only because she missed her mum but also because Granny Elizabeth’s idea of cooking was, well, quite hard to stomach. ‘Cooking’ wasn’t the right word to describe Granny’s liver dumplings (dried out from being kept in the cupboard too long), fried eggs (charred until they were almost black), or any of the other delicacies she cobbled together.

  Recipe: Fried eggs à la Elizabeth Burke

  Ingredients:

  two eggs

  a frying pan

  a selection of old coins

  Break the eggs into a cold frying pan without adding oil or butter. Place the pan on the stove (heat setting: highest) and start sorting the coins. Wait until the kitchen is completely filled with smoke, then turn off the cooker and open the window with a loud screech. Wait until the charred eggs are stone cold, then serve.

  Enjoy!

  Another thing Penelope had learnt recently was that it was really hard to get hold of bright-blue shoelaces. The one from the trainer Pete had lent her had disappeared – Penelope reckoned it had probably ripped out when she was in the swamp forest. Pete said she didn’t need to replace it, as he had an orange shoelace he could use instead, but for Penelope that wasn’t the point. If she borrowed something, she gave it back, even if it took her a while.

  At last, one Friday afternoon, the doctor at the hospital said Mrs Gardener could go home the next day. Penelope was lying in bed that evening, tired but too excited to sleep, when she suddenly became aware that there was something missing. Something that’s always been here has gone, she thought. But she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She switched on the little lamp that stood on her bedside table and looked around. The table with the curved legs stood under the window as usual, the rust-brown armchair was in its usual place, the wardrobe obviously hadn’t gone missing, and it couldn’t be the bed, either, as she was in it.