3 Things come right
School was dreadful. Veronica's mother had let her ride her brand
new bike there. It had been bad enough when she'd just been boasting about it
but now all the kids gathered round to inspect it, some whispering behind their
hands to each other, but most rather impressed or frankly awestruck. Except
Elisha, who felt a bit put out that she'd nearly had one just as good, only the
well hadn't worked.
'It cost ever
such a lot of money,' boasted Veronica. At least £20, my dad said.'
Elisha rolled her
eyes but curiosity got the better of her so she walked over to the edge of the
admiring circle of children. The bike was splendid - a metallic blue with
metallic cherry-red wheel arches, gleaming and brilliant in the morning sun. It
was way better than the Choppers and Tomahawks the boys had all got. Her mouth
fell open in wonder and a tiny reflection of her gormless face in the bike
frame stared back at her.
Veronica locked
it carefully inside the bike shed, putting the key into the pocket of her
dark-green pinafore. She was wearing this over a short-sleeved check blouse. It
wasn't regulation summer uniform but Veronica always seemed to get away with
wearing some kind of variation that looked better. 'I'll let you have a ride on
the way home, if you want, Josie,' she said to her special friend but with a
sideways glance at Elisha to indicate that she’d never be allowed on it.
Linking arms, the
two friends went into school. Elisha stopped to drink in the bike's glories for
a minute. But then she had to run as the bell was ringing.
The children
crowded against each other as they sat cross-legged on the parquet floor of the
assembly hall, most of the girls in dark-green cardigans while the boys wore
sweaters. Elisha noticed Jasmine’s cardigan was buttoned up wrong and pointed
this out with nudges. It wasn’t long before they got told off for giggling.
In the classroom, she slipped
into the seat behind her desk, next to Alison Yates. She liked her place in
class because it was next to the window so she could see outside, although the
view was only of the playground and school fence. The only time it was a pain
was when the boys opened the window and it got draughty.
Her best friends
Jasmine and Stephanie waved to her from across the aisle so she waved back,
raising a hand and scrunching the fingers up and down a couple of times in the
way they always waved.
The three girls had been going
around together since their first year at real school. Elisha hadn't known them
at nursery as she'd gone to a different one, at the end of her road. Jas and
Steph had gone to a place called St Dunstan's together. Elisha had seen the
building, a big, redbrick affair near the Chinese roundabout, and thought it
looked rather forbidding and grand, like a posh boarding school or a country
house, except it was in the town. Jas and Steph said they only used a couple of
rooms inside. The rest was for school and church groups.
The teacher
started calling the register and the soothing rhythm of name and response made
her feel relaxed and sleepy.
If she'd been one
of them, Elisha thinks she would have wandered around to explore the rest of
the house. She was always curious about other people's houses. But she'd been
smaller then and maybe the place would have been too scary and intimidating.
She remembers envying the big garden, that you could see from the top deck of
the bus as it went past - stumps of trees to sit on, whole trees to hide
behind, lots of sloping lawn. Her nursery had been tiny, with just a small,
square yard to play in, although it had had lots of apparatus to climb on.
'Elisha Goodman.
Elisha?' the teacher's voice broke into her reverie and she called out, 'Yes,
miss' a bit too late and too loudly.
When she got home that afternoon she was still a bit grumpy. She
took one of the smoky brown glasses, that they'd got free from a filling
station, a little too full of milk, to her bedroom with some broken bits of
Caramac bar on a white saucer with a gold rim and a little chip in its edge.
As they only had the one, she liked to imagine it was a very valuable saucer
from someone else’s exquisite set of crockery and that she was a princess who'd
lost her memory.
She turned her little white
transistor radio on and fiddled with the tuning knob to try to get Radio
Caroline, her dad’s favourite station, though she actually liked Radio One
better, except that the DJs were morons. Once a song crackled through the
interference, ‘Caroline Goodbye’, quite a good one, she was confronted by the
well and thought, 'Why not? It can’t hurt to try again.'
Digging in her pocket, she
unearthed a tuppenny bit with a bit of green fluff stuck to it. She closed her
eyes and repeated her wish for a bike. 'Please.' She dropped the coin into the
well but didn't hear it land. Surprised, she peered after it - it was still
falling. The well was huge inside and so deep you couldn't see the bottom like it
had been in her dream. The coin made a whooshing sound that reverberated around
her head, making her feel dizzy. Elisha's eyes widened and her mouth fell open.
It must be magic. Then she heard the distinct sound of the coin hitting water.
‘How ever am I
going to reach it?’, she thought. Rolling her sleeve up, she started to stick
her hand right down the deep well - but immediately reached the bottom and
bruised her knuckles. 'Ow!' She looked inside again and saw that the well had
changed back to normal so that she could touch the bottom easily. Rubbing her
right hand with her left for a minute, she could see that now there was no
water and the coin was just resting against the side, in the shadow. For a
second she thought she’d imagined it all but when she pulled out the tuppence,
it had turned into gold!
She sat back on
her bed in amazement. So Auntie Jessie had been telling the truth! But where
was her bike? It wasn't in the room anywhere. She looked out the window in case
it had appeared on the pavement outside. No sign. It must be here somewhere.
She began a frantic search of the house, even looking in the cupboard under the
stairs, braving the spiders knocking down a light-blue, rope-handled BOAC
flight bag full of old white tennis balls, in case it was a fold-up one. No
bike to be found anywhere. Though she did have a bit of luck in finding a green
and white striped Pacer sweet that she’d hidden there some time before, now a
bit squashed but still in its wrapper and eminently edible.
Her mother told her
off for dashing about and crashing into the furniture. This time she felt even
more let down. With the tuppenny bit turning into gold she'd felt sure she'd
get her wish. It wasn't fair. She only hoped Veronica Atkins wouldn't be
allowed to ride her bike in the next day.
Tuesday morning was dull and miserable. Elisha really didn't feel
like getting out of bed. But in came her mother, excited for some reason,
cheerfully urging her to 'Rise and shine!'
'Oh, Mummy, do I
have to go to school?' Elisha whined. 'I don't feel very well.' She put on a
sad and she hoped sickly face.
'Yes you do,
madam,' said Mrs Goodman, opening the curtains to reveal the garden’s oak tree
outlined against clear blue sky. 'And I've got a surprise for you too.' She
turned back to her daughter, putting her hands on her hips.
'What?' Elisha
tried not to get too worked up. It was probably only something special in her
snack box. A Mr Kipling’s French Fancy or a Dairy Lea cheese triangle.
'Well, you know
the raffle at the social club.' Elisha didn't really understand raffles. It
seemed that you bought tickets but never got to use them for anything. So she
just nodded while she dragged herself out of bed. 'I've won a prize. It's a new
bike for you! Isn't that wonderful? We can pick it up this afternoon.'
'A new bike?'
echoed Elisha, pinching herself to check she wasn't dreaming, gawping at her
mother like an imbecile, until Mrs Goodman waved her hand in front of her face
to snap her out of it.
‘Yes, darling, we
won it.’
Her wish had come
true after all. She yippeed and jumped in the air, then hugged her mother
tightly round the legs, feeling the softness of the long woollen cardigan
against her face.
When she was
alone in the room, she picked up the well carefully and hugged it. Now she
could have anything she wanted. The well could grant her wishes and she was
already planning her next one.
Luke Collins
watched her from his garden. They used to play together all the time before
Luke got sick. Since he'd got out of hospital he hardly ever came out. Elisha
didn't mind as she was nervous of ill people. She was afraid she'd catch
something.
'Nice bike,' said
Luke. `Is it new?'
Elisha nodded but
didn't stop. She was concentrating too much to talk and there was no way she'd
let a germy person near her prized possession. She forgot that he was the one
who’d first taught her to ride a bike, letting her borrow his. The little boy,
pale and weak, watched her progress to the end of the road. He kicked his
garden gate feebly and went back inside to watch TV, even though it was only
that stupid How programme where boring experts explained how things
worked.
When she was
putting the bike away, her mother came out. 'You never play with Luke any
more,' she said. Elisha didn't reply, parking the bike carefully in the shed
and draping an old, faded, russet curtain over it to keep off the cobwebs.
'Elisha, why
don't you play with him? He's getting better now. They cut all the cancer out.
And he needs his friends.' Her mother's face was troubled; two little lines
appeared on her forehead between her eyebrows.
'What's for tea, Mum?' she asked,
not wanting to listen. Luke still looked ill. She didn't believe he was better,
even though he'd come back to school. His
hair had got thin, like an old man's or a baby's; and his eyes looked too big
for his narrow face. He reminded her of an alien from a TV show.
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