Lauren Child: Look into My Eyes

Ruby also kept a vivid pink notebook, dog-eared and smelling of bubble gum, and it was in this that she listed her Ruby rules – there were seventy-nine so far.

RULE 1: YOU CAN NEVER BE COMPLETELY SURE WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN NEXT.A truth no one could argue with.

Ruby was a petite girl, small for her years – at first glance a very ordinary looking kid. There was nothing particular to mark her out – that is, nothing until you looked a little longer. Then you would begin to see that her eyes were ever so slightly different shades of green. When they looked at you it was somehow hard to remember the point you were arguing. And when she smiled she revealed small doll-like teeth which somehow made it impossible to consider her anything other than a cute kid. But the most striking thing about Ruby Redfort was that when you met her you felt a strong need for her to like you. The bathroom phone rang; lazily, Ruby reached out and groped for the receiver.

‘Brandy’s wig salon, hair today, gone tomorrow.’

‘Hi Rube,’ came back the voice on the other end; it was Clancy Crew.

‘So Clance, what gives?’

‘Not a whole lot actually.’

‘So to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?’

‘Boredom,’ yawned Clancy.

‘So why don’t you get yourself over here, bozo?’

‘Well, I would you know Rube but my dad wants me home – he’s got some kinda embassy type function and he wants us all smiling, you know what I mean?’

Clancy Crew’s father was an ambassador and there was always some function or other in progress. Ambassador Crew liked to have his children scrubbed and serving canapés to prove what a great family guy he was – though truth to tell he was usually too busy to even remember their birthdays.

‘Some people have all the fun,’ drawled Ruby.

‘Yeah, my life stinks,’ said Clancy.

‘So cheer yourself up why don’tcha. Scoot yourself over, watch a few toons and you’ll still be home in time to smile for the camera.’

‘OK Rube, you’ve talked me into it, see you in ten.’

Ruby put down the phone. It lived on a shelf with two others: one was in the shape of a conch shell, the other disguised as a bar of soap. She had a whole lot more of them in her bedroom. She had been collecting telephones since she was about five years old, all in different shapes and colours. The donut phone was her first – the latest, a cartoon squirrel sporting a tuxedo. Just about all of them had come from yard sales.

She was about to continue her bathroom-based surveillance when the intercom buzzed – Ruby’s parents had sensibly fitted them on each floor to keep shouting to a minimum.

She pressed the ‘speak’ button.

‘Hello, how may I be of assistance?’

‘Howdy,’ came the voice from the other end of the intercom. ‘This is Mrs Digby, your housekeeper, may I please remind you that your parents will be home from Switzerland in two and a quarter hours.’

‘I know, Mrs Digby, you told me that a half hour ago.’

‘Glad you remembered. May I also point out that they may be a little grief stricken to see the state of your bedroom.’

‘It’s my style Mrs Digby – “layered”– it’s very in vogue.’

‘Well may I continue to remind you that some magazine folks are coming to photograph this very house tomorrow and if your mother sees it in its “layered” state, you will be in what’s commonly referred to as “the dog house”.’

‘OK, OK,’ sighed Ruby, ‘I’ll take care of it.’

The Redfort house, dubbed the Green-Wood house, on account of its environmental features, had been designed in 1961 by famous architect Arno Fredricksonn. Even now, a decade or so later it was still considered very state of the art and was regularly featured in architectural journals.

Ruby returned to the bathroom, sat back down on her stool and continued to stare out of the window; the truck was still there but now there was a raccoon sitting on its roof. The bathroom door pushed open and in ambled a large husky dog, which sniffed around before settling down to chew the bathmat.

‘Bored, huh?’ said Ruby, slipping off her stool. She padded into her bedroom and surveyed the wreckage. It was not a pretty sight. Ruby wasn’t so much untidy as she was a spreader – she had a lot of stuff and when she was busy working on something the stuff had a habit of creeping from one surface to another and this was what her mother did not like.

Darn it! muttered Ruby. If the magazine people were coming, her mom would just about freak if this was what they saw. She could almost hear her father saying, ‘for the sake of your mother’s sanity – do something Ruby.’ So she set about slipping records back into their sleeves and pushing books onto shelves. Ruby had a lot of books; they were arranged floor to ceiling across one end of her room.

A FICTION SECTION:

both English and foreign titles.

FACTUAL:

comprising anything.

GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS:

subject – largely crime and mystery.

Ruby and Mrs Digby had a shared enthusiasm for crime and thrillers: fact or fiction, whether in book form or on the screen. They would often settle down with a large bowl of blue corn chips and watch the quiz show What’s Your Poison? or when Ruby was several years younger, Mrs Digby would settle Ruby to sleep by reading one of her favourite Crime thrillers, The Claw at the Window .

PUZZLES:

Puzzles were Ruby’s passion.

Any kind of puzzle: crosswords, anagrams, riddles, even jigsaws – anything that needed to be solved by finding the ‘pattern’ the ‘trick’ or the ‘key’. This had led Ruby to…

CODES:

She had read many books and essays on the subject.

In fact she was a subscriber to Master Code Monthly , a little known Chinese subscription-only magazine. Subscribers had to prove their code-cracking talent before they were permitted to sign up. It was this journal that had led her to read the following:

* Garp Einholt’s, The Theory of Code, its Abstract Duality and Subtext (to be honest Ruby had found this very overstated and not a little tedious).

* Sherman Tree’s more vital Unlock My Brain.

* Anya Pamplemous’s thirty year study of codes, The Puzzles That Lie Within , which she also very much enjoyed.

But her personal handbooks were both written many centuries ago, one, by the Greek philosopher, Euclid with the simple title of X , the other, a tiny indigo book (origin unknown) which was filled with all manner of codes. It explained riddles and poems and equations – patterns, symbols and sounds. It was a code breaker’s bible.

Having dealt with the books, records and papers, Ruby began the more complex task of sorting through clothes; all of which seemed to be on the floor of her closet. It was here, underneath a pile of knee-high striped socks, that she unearthed her glasses.

Boy, am I glad to see you!

Although Ruby would on occasion wear contact lenses she didn’t much care for them; they had a habit of falling out at exactly the wrong moment. If Ruby Redfort had an Achilles heel, it was her eyes; without some sort of visual aid life was just a blur.

There was another buzz from the intercom. ‘Yuh huh?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Being tidy – why?’

‘Just checking.’

‘Mrs Digby, you are one suspicious woman.’

Having put away as many of her clothes as she could be bothered to put away, Ruby grabbed all the remaining garments and stuffed them down the laundry chute. She was in the habit of tipping all sorts of things down the laundry chute – even, on occasion, herself. It saved time.