Unexpected Magic (6 page)

What made Chunter bolt was a mystery. Sarah always said he had seen Mr. Platt and was afraid of being taken to the vet too. Anyway, there was Chunter hammering along the road, striking frantic sparks from it with his hooves, with Sarah clinging on for dear life, when Mr. Platt came jumping out of the hedge and swung on Chunter's bridle.

“Thanks,” said Sarah, when Chunter had stopped.

“You should never, never let a pony gallop on a tarmac road,” said Mr. Platt. “I don't think anyone has explained to you: it ruins their feet and jars their legs.”

“But I didn't—!” said Sarah. That was all she managed to say, because Mr. Platt proved to be just as good a talker as his wife, and he walked back to the house with her, holding Chunter's bridle and explaining gently how you should treat a pony. “I think I must come inside and explain to Glenda that you shouldn't ride without proper supervision,” he said when they got there. And he did. When he had done that, he went out to look at the barn where the ponies lived and came back to tell Mrs. Willis that it was not suitable for ponies.

Mrs. Willis was typing somebody's book about the history of Poland, full of names like Mrzchtochky, and she left out several
z
s. “I shall go mad,” she said.

“Don't worry,” said Sarah. “There's always Daniel Emanuel.”

No one had yet told the Platts about Daniel Emanuel. This was odd, because Daniel Emanuel was well known to be interested in animals too. Only the week before, he had fallen out of the oak tree in the football field trying to catch a squirrel. Last year he had cut himself on rusty iron wading into Weavers Pond after a duck and nearly died of tetanus, because he had heard you could eat ducks.

Mrs. Platt met Daniel Emanuel first. She was coming home after caring for the Moores' budgie. She had found it on her windowsill. By this time, she had noticed that people did not quite like it when she took their pets to the vet. So she took the budgie home. “Look, Lily,” she explained, “I've cut his wings for you, ever so neatly, so that he won't be able to fly away again.”

“How kind!” Mrs. Moore said bitterly, thinking she would have to keep the cat in the yard in case Mrs. Platt cared for the cat too. “You'll have to keep the budgie in your bedroom,” she said to her son Terry. “I hope Daniel Emanuel does something to the Platts soon!”

Mrs. Platt had got halfway home, to the bottom of the main road, when she saw, to her horror, a four-year-old boy walk out into the traffic. A bus bucked to a stop almost on top of him. Two cars missed him by two separate miracles. Mrs. Platt rushed into the road and seized the child's arm. “Who are you, little man? Does your mummy know you're out?”

He looked up at her. “I'm Daniel Emanuel of course,” he said. He had curly hair and long eyelashes and a band of freckles across his nose.

“Where do you live?” said Mrs. Platt.

Daniel Emanuel did not seem to be sure. He let Mrs. Platt lead him around Chipping Hanbury. She seemed to want to, and he felt like a walk anyway. After an hour or so though, she began to bother him. She kept asking things and calling him “little man.” The only little men Daniel Emanuel had ever heard of were the dwarves in “Snow White,” and he began to be afraid he would not grow any more. He took Mrs. Platt home so that he could ask Linda.

Mrs. Platt looked at the O'Flahertys' tall ramshackle house with pieces of car lying about the front garden under the washing line. Children were running and screaming, and Mrs. O'Flaherty was anxiously looking over the front gate. “This is a Problem Family,” Mrs. Platt said to herself, “and I must care for them.”

“Daniel Emanuel!” everyone in the garden screamed.

“He was walking in the traffic,” Mrs. Platt explained. She had meant to have a long talk with Mrs. O'Flaherty about her problems, but Mrs. O'Flaherty was so glad to see Daniel Emanuel safe that she took him straight indoors. “No manners either,” Mrs. Platt said sorrowfully.

Indoors, Mrs. O'Flaherty said, “You naughty boy!” and raised her fist. Daniel Emanuel's face screwed up miserably. “Oh, I can't hit him!” said Mrs. O'Flaherty and she took her fist down. Daniel Emanuel unscrewed his face and beamed. “Linda,” said Mrs. O'Flaherty, “why did you let him go in the road?”

Linda was five, and the only one who knew how to manage Daniel Emanuel. She shrugged. There were times when even she could not stop Daniel Emanuel. “He can think,” she explained, “and the cars just stop.”

“He may think they will, but they don't,” said Mrs. O'Flaherty and hurried away to get lunch. A mother who had seven children and a husband who spends his spare time stock-car racing has not quite time to understand everything.

“Am I a little man?” Daniel Emanuel asked Linda anxiously.

Linda knew what he meant. “Not you!” she said. “You'll grow bigger than Dad.”

Daniel Emanuel was much relieved. He was not sure he liked Mrs. Platt. She said things that were not true.

Mr. Platt's next news sheet had a lot in it about Problem Families.

“Oh good,” said Mrs. Willis to Sarah and James. “They've met Daniel Emanuel.”

Next time Daniel Emanuel gave Linda the slip he went to look at the Platts' cottage. He thought it was lovely. The stones around the flowers were painted white. There was a white wheelbarrow on the front lawn with flowers planted in it, which bothered Daniel Emanuel. Flowers should grow in the ground. Daniel Emanuel took the flowers out carefully and tipped the earth on the grass. He found Mr. Platt's golf clubs in the porch and dug a hole for the flowers with them in front of the porch. He put the flowers in the hole and carefully opened the tap in the rainwater butt to give the flowers a drink. Then he found a pot of white paint in the porch and thought he ought to give the hole a white rim like the other flowerbeds. When Mr. Platt came around the house from building his fourth greenhouse, he found Daniel Emanuel squatting in a river using a bent golf club as a paintbrush.

Mr. Platt took Daniel Emanuel in a stern kind hand and led him home, talking gently to him about how wicked he was. Daniel Emanuel seemed a little vague about what wicked meant. Mr. Platt explained by telling him stories, and one of the stories was “Daniel in the Lions' Den.”

“Oh Daniel Emanuel!” said Mrs. O'Flaherty when she opened the door. Daniel Emanuel was earth-colored with streaks of white. Mr. Platt was shocked to see that Mrs. O'Flaherty had been reading a book while she cooked lunch. She had two favorite books which she read turn and turn about to keep her sane: this one was
The Mill on the Floss;
the other was
The Count of Monte Cristo.
She knew both so well that she could do most things while she was reading.

Mr. Platt explained what Daniel Emanuel had done and gave Mrs. O'Flaherty long and patient advice on how to bring up children, until Mrs. O'Flaherty smelled the potatoes burning and snatched Daniel Emanuel up and ran. “What a feckless woman,” Mr. Platt said sadly.

Mrs. O'Flaherty was so annoyed about the potatoes that Daniel Emanuel barely got scolded. “Where's any lions?” he asked Linda as soon as he was free.

“Aren't any,” said Linda. “Only in cages in the zoo.”

The next day, Daniel Emanuel set out to find himself a cage of lions.

There are no lions in Chipping Hanbury. The only large beasts are Sarah Willis's Chunter and James Willis's Ben. Daniel Emanuel was seen by James standing in the doorway of the ponies' barn. “Is this a den?” Daniel Emanuel asked.

“No,” said James. “It's a stall.”

Daniel Emanuel nodded and went away. He was next heard of eight miles away in Abbots Hanbury. How he got there Daniel Emanuel never said, but there he was. He was in a pen in the cattle market with a hundred pigs, angrily shouting, “Bite me!” His father was home when the police telephoned. He drove his newest car to Abbots Hanbury and fetched Daniel Emanuel away. Since Mr. O'Flaherty was the only person in the world that Daniel Emanuel was afraid of, Daniel Emanuel arrived home very sore and sullen. “I don't like Platts,” he told Linda.

Both the Platts were very concerned about Daniel Emanuel. Mr. Platt went to see Mr. O'Flaherty to tell him Daniel Emanuel needed special care, and the Dougals saw him leave again rather quickly. Mrs. Platt went to speak to Mrs. Willis. “Glenda,” she said, “I think we two should get together and care for our Problem Family. The O'Flahertys, you know.”

This time, Mrs. Willis was typing someone's experimental novel. It went down the page in two columns which said the same thing, but not quite, and it had to catch the five o'clock post. “I don't think they're a problem,” she said. “Ask James and Sarah. Their main friends are Patrick and Thelma O'Flaherty. Do let me catch the post.” But Mrs. Platt stayed persuading Mrs. Willis till four o'clock. At four-thirty Mr. Platt arrived with some brochures, saying that he and Mrs. Platt thought Mrs. Willis ought to be using a word processor. When Sarah and James and Mr. Willis came home just after five, Mr. Platt was still there and Mrs. Willis was in tears.

“Do something!” said Mr. Willis.

James and Sarah saddled their ponies and went drumming away down the bridle path to the football field where Thelma and Patrick were riding their bicycles. “What is it?” said Patrick, propping himself on the hedge.

“Make Daniel Emanuel do something to the Platts,” said Sarah.

“You can borrow the ponies and we'll go on a bike-and-pony trek if you do,” said James.

Thelma and Patrick looked wistfully at each other. It was an offer they couldn't refuse. It cost Patrick a lot to say, “We can't make him do anything.” And it cost Thelma just as much to add, “Linda's his manager.”

“Ask her, and we'll do the trek anyway,” said Sarah.

During the last month, Linda had been rather pestered. Holly Smith, Terry Moore, and Alastair Dougal had also made offers that couldn't be refused to Brendan, Maureen, and Brian O'Flaherty. “He's not ready to do anything yet,” she told Thelma and Patrick. “But I'll try.”

Next Saturday, Sarah and James kept their promise and the trek set off to Beacon Hill. Linda kept hers by taking Daniel Emanuel for a walk in Weavers Close. But it was one of Daniel Emanuel's saintly days. Nothing happened, except that Mrs. Platt saw them and hurried out saying, “Little children like you oughtn't to be out alone!” She brought them inside the cottage, where it was neat and plain and brown, and made them sit down. Linda looked hopefully round for biscuits at least, but Mrs. Platt sat down too and told them the story of Jesus. Linda knew it. She had been sent home from school on her first day crying about Jesus. She turned paler and paler.

“Did it hurt much?” she whispered.

“What, dear?” asked Mrs. Platt.

“Being nailed up in a tree,” Linda whispered.

Mrs. Platt was rather taken aback. “Well—” Since she did not quite know what to tell Linda, she took them back home feeling she had given them both something to think about.

She had. While Mrs. O'Flaherty was trying to stop Linda crying, Daniel Emanuel collected four nails, a hammer and some string, and marched off to the oak tree in the football field to find out for himself if it hurt to be crucified.

Luckily for him, he got tangled in the string before he had banged in the first nail properly. Even more luckily, Sarah, James, Patrick, and Thelma happened to be coming home only an hour later after an almost perfect day. They heard the thin little wailing, which was all the noise Daniel Emanuel was able to make by then. “That's Daniel Emanuel!” said Thelma, and managed to make Chunter gallop. And it was lucky the ponies were there. Daniel Emanuel was quite high up, hanging mostly by one arm. They managed to reach him by putting the ponies under the branch, with James, standing on the ponies, one foot on Chunter and one on Ben, boosting Patrick to the branch to cut the string. Sarah held the ponies and Thelma caught Daniel Emanuel as he came down. He hurt a lot, and he was frozen, and he was very angry. “It's not
good
for people!” he kept saying as he rode home in front of Thelma. They put him to bed, and he brooded. He was very angry with both the Platts. They pretended to be kind and told you bad things.

Mr. and Mrs. Platt went from house to house with a petition to have the oak tree cut down. They said it was very dangerous.

“Wouldn't it be easier to take Daniel Emanuel to the vet?” Mrs. Willis asked sweetly.

Mr. Platt didn't follow her meaning at all; but he followed Mr. O'Flaherty's meaning when Mr. O'Flaherty told him what to do with his petition.

Daniel Emanuel was still brooding. “He's nearly ready,” Linda told the others. Nearly every day, Daniel Emanuel went round to Weavers Close and stood looking at the cottage thinking what to do. When Mr. and Mrs. Platt came out to take him home, he had vanished before they got to the road. But one day the Platts went out in their car. Daniel Emanuel wandered through the garden and around the back. He wandered thoughtfully through all the greenhouses. Mr. Platt had never stopped building greenhouses. There were six by now. Daniel Emanuel ate tomatoes in one and picked a bunch of flowers in two. He made pies in flowerpots in the other three, thinking, thinking. But none of it gave him any ideas and he went away.