Witch Is When the Penny Dropped (4 page)

Chapter 5

The next morning, I phoned Mrs V to tell her I wouldn’t be going into the office.

“Will you feed Winky, please?”

“If I must.”

“Don’t forget, it’s—”

“Full cream milk. I know.” I could hear her sigh. “Jill, I think I may have come up with a title for the book: ‘Scarves are from Mars, Socks are from Jupiter’. What do you think?”

“Someone beat you to it. Keep trying.”

It was my date with Luther tonight. The day ahead would have been perfect had it not been for my magic lesson with Grandma. I didn’t look forward to those at the best of times, but after the rotten trick she’d played on me at the poker table, I really didn’t want to see that woman.

I’d arranged to meet the twins at Aunt Lucy’s house. It had been a while since I’d seen her. I arrived early, and there was no answer when I knocked on the door. I turned the handle, and as usual it was unlocked.

As soon as I stepped inside, I heard footsteps on the landing. I glanced up just in time to catch a glimpse of Lester. He was hurrying towards the bathroom—wearing only shorts and a vest.

“Jill?” Aunt Lucy appeared at the kitchen door.

“Morning. I hope you don’t mind me calling by so early.”

“No—err—of course not. Come in.” Was it my imagination or was she a little more flustered than usual?

“Did I catch you in the middle of something?”

“Me? No. Come in. I was—err—Lester is coming around later. I was just tidying up.”

Huh? Lester was coming around later? Was that the same Lester I’d just seen dive into the bathroom, I wondered?

“Lester?” I said.

“Yes. He’s coming around in a little while. Most probably after you and the girls have gone to practise.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Aunt Lucy was blushing.

“Hi, Mum!”

“Hiya, Mum!”

The twins had arrived.

“Jill!” Pearl gave me a hug. “You’re keen this morning.”

“I’m not.” Amber pulled a face. “I don’t know why we have to have these stupid lessons. It’s not like we want to move up to the next level. One of our staff has called in sick. We should be at Cuppy C.”

That was the first time I’d heard either girl admit they weren’t interested in moving up levels, although I’d long suspected it. Even though I shared their dislike of Grandma’s lessons, I was keen to go as far as I could with my magic.

“I suppose we’d better get a move on.” Pearl sighed. “Grandma’s meeting us there.”

“We heard that Grandma won all of your money at poker,” Pearl said, as we made our way to the Range.

“Who told you?”

“Grandma. Who do you think? She was boasting about how good a card player she is.”

“She cheated. She blatantly cheated. I should have won.”

“You should tell her that,” Amber said.

“Are you trying to get Jill killed?” Pearl scolded her sister.

“It’s time we all stood up to her,” I said.

The twins stopped, looked at me earnestly for the longest moment, and then laughed.

“I’m serious. We shouldn’t let her walk all over us like this.”

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Amber said. “You’ve only had a few months of this to put up with. We’ve had her around all of our lives.”

“You both deserve a medal.”

They giggled.

“There’s something else, but I’m not sure if I should mention it,” I began.

“You have to now,” Pearl said.

“Yes, spill the beans. We love juicy gossip.”

“When I got to Aunt Lucy’s just before you two arrived, I saw—” I shook my head. “No, I really shouldn’t say. It’s none of my business.”

The twins exchanged a glance.

“You mean Lester?” Amber blurted out.

“You know?”

“Of course we know. He’s been more or less living there for almost a week now. Mum doesn’t think we know, but we’re not stupid.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t said anything to her.”

“This is way more fun.” Pearl giggled again. “When we’re around there, and we know he’s hiding upstairs, we ask Mum where he is, and watch her splutter as she tries to come up with some story or other.”

“The best one yet was when I said I wanted to go up to our old room to look for something. I thought Mum was going to have a seizure.” Amber laughed. “She said the room had been fumigated, and we weren’t allowed in.”

“You two are cruel!”

***

“What’s tickling you three?” Grandma met us at the gates to the Range.

“Nothing, Grandma,” we chorused.

“Do you usually laugh at nothing? They’ll be locking you away. Now if you were laughing at Jill’s poker exploits, I might understand the hilarity.”

I stopped laughing. Not satisfied with cheating, she now had the gall to rub my nose in it.

“You’re not having much luck with
Jacks
of any kind, are you?” she quipped, and then cackled at her own joke. If ever I made level six, she would so get hers.

“Well at least you managed to bring a smile to her face,” Pearl whispered as we made our way into the Range.

“She’s been a real misery guts all week,” Amber said.

“What’s new?”

“She’s been even worse than usual because of Ma Chivers.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Hasn’t Mum told you about Ma Chivers?” Amber glanced ahead at Grandma to make sure she wasn’t listening.

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“You’re probably going to hear a lot about her from now on. Ma Chivers and Grandma progressed through the levels together initially, but Ma Chivers reached level six before Grandma. She won the Levels competition when she was only on level four. Not long afterwards, she moved to the human world. She’s been gone for over a century, but now she’s back to stay apparently. Grandma is not impressed because she’s returned just in time for the ‘Elite’ competition.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an annual competition for level six witches only. The winner is awarded the Elite Cup.”

“I bet Grandma always wins doesn’t she?”

“She rarely takes part. She reckons she is above such things. Mum says Grandma used to win it every year, but she got tired of it because there was no meaningful opposition. Anyway, Ma Chivers has called her out—she said if Grandma doesn’t show up for the competition, everyone will know she’s afraid of her.”

My curiosity was sparked. Since discovering my ‘new’ family, I had yet to see anyone come close to getting the better of Grandma. I wanted to meet this Ma Chivers.

“You really don’t want to meet her,” Grandma said. I’d done it again—I’d allowed myself to become complacent when I should have realised she’d be crawling around inside my head. “I know you think I can be a little unpleasant at times,” Grandma said.

A little unpleasant? Just like the bubonic plague was a little unpleasant?

“But once you’ve met Ma Chivers, you’ll change your mind. You’ll think I’m the nicest person you’ve ever met.”

The twins and I all exchanged a look, but said nothing. Anything we did say would no doubt be held against us in the court of Grandma.

“Quiet!” Grandma raised a crooked finger. We were in the Spell-Range. “Today’s lesson will be on the ‘jump’ spell. “Which of you has memorised it?”

The twins shrugged in unison.

“I have,” I said.

The twins mouthed, ‘I have’. I ignored them.

“I might have known.” Grandma produced two spell books out of thin air, and threw them at the twins. “You have ten minutes.” She turned to me. “You, come with me.”

I hadn’t liked the look of the ‘jump’ spell when I’d read about it. Its innocent name hardly did it justice. When I first saw it, I’d assumed it would simply allow me to jump higher—big whoop. I’d been wrong. The spell effectively made your feet act as powerful springs—multi-directional springs. So, for example, if I was standing between two buildings, I could leap from one to the other, and back again in a kind of diagonal motion. Think parkour, but on steroids. On paper, that all sounded well and good, but in reality, I’d never been great at jumping. I always stepped over the line in the long jump, and crashed into the bar in the high jump. That did not bode well.

Grandma took me to the far side of the Range—to an area I hadn’t seen before. Sure enough, there were two high brick walls which stood parallel to one another.

“I don’t get this spell,” I said.

“You don’t get it? What’s to get?”

“I know what it does, but I don’t know why I would ever need to use it. Couldn’t I just as easily use the ‘levitate’ spell?”

Grandma sighed at my apparent stupidity. “You’ll never make a witch if you can’t master the art of spell selection. As you progress up the levels you’ll come across numerous spells which appear to overlap in terms of their functionality, but the key is recognising the right spell for the right situation. After ‘focus’, ‘spell selection’ is the most important thing for you to master. Take the ‘levitation’ and ‘jump’ spells for example. What is the main difference between them?”

I hated it when Grandma did a pop quiz. I invariably gave the wrong answer.

“Levitate lets you rise in a straight line. Jump lets you—err—bounce from side to side.”

“
Bounce?
”

She knew full well what I meant.

“Apart from being able to
bounce
what else is different about them?”

I wished the twins were with me—at least then, they could have shared in the humiliation.

Then suddenly out of the blue, the answer came to me.

“The speed!”

“Better late than never. That’s right—the speed. The ‘levitation’ spell has its uses, but if you’re in a hurry then the ‘jump’ spell is much better.

No, no. I mustn’t smile. Whatever I did—I mustn’t smile.

“Something funny?” Grandma’s wart was in my face.

“No.”

“Do you usually smile for no reason?”

“No, sorry. I had an itchy nose.”

If nothing else, I was getting better at scrambling my thoughts to stop Grandma reading them. Just as well too, or she’d have realised I was smiling at the idea of decrepit, old Grandma trying to use the ‘jump’ spell to bound up a wall.

I’d no sooner thought it than—

She leapt onto the first wall, and then bounced across to the second, and so on and so forth until she reached the top. Just as quickly, she made her way back to the ground in a similar fashion.

My flabber was well and truly gasted.

“You were saying, missy?”

The wart was back in my face. So much for my thought scrambling. I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t find the words.

“When you’ve done catching flies, it’s your turn.”

I stepped forward so I was standing between the two walls. If Grandma could do it at her age, how difficult could it be? I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, cast the spell, and then leapt. Even though I’d seen Grandma do it only moments before, I was taken aback by the sheer force with which I left the ground. The trick was to glance off one wall towards the opposite one.

Thud!

I totally mistimed it, and instead of bouncing off the wall, I came sliding back down to earth.

“Impressive,” Grandma cackled. “What do you call that?”

I had a sore knee, but the only thing really hurting was my pride. I pushed past Grandma and had another go—with the exact same result. Grandma made some comment, but I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t going to be defeated by some stupid level two spell.

The problem wasn’t in casting the spell—that was working fine. It was in my timing. I had to focus on the timing. I leapt up again—this time I caught the first wall just right, and the second. Now I had the hang of it. Moments later I was sitting on top of the wall. I heard applause coming from below, and for one insane moment, I thought it was Grandma.

Yeah, right.

The twins had joined us and were waving to me.

“Nice one, Jill!” Amber shouted before being reprimanded by Grandma.

Getting back down was a breeze. I couldn’t help the huge grin which was plastered across my face. Grandma looked as unimpressed as ever.

“Right,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.” She turned to the twins who looked as terrified as one another.

“Those walls are really high,” Amber said.

“And hard,” Pearl added.

“Stop your whining and get moving. Which one of you wants to go first?”

Neither of them volunteered.

“In that case, you can go in alphabetical order.”

Pearl sighed with relief.