Eva Ibbotson - Not Just a Witch

‘What I was wondering,’ said Daniel as they wheeled the carrot towards the zoo, ‘was why you need a familiar? I mean, they’re animals that help witches to do their magic, aren’t they — and you changed Basil all right without one?’

‘I don’t need one, but I want one. And nothing ordinary like black cats or toads. I bet Dora’s trailing round with a bontebok by now at the very least.’

Wellbridge Zoo was small, but pretty and well-kept, with flower-beds between the cages. Daniel went there often because his friend Joe, whose father was a keeper in the ape house, could get him in free.

‘Now to business,’ said Heckie when they had paid and gone through the turnstile. ‘You know what we’re looking for?’

‘An animal that’s fierce?’

‘Well, not so much fierce as powerful. Mean. Strange and perhaps a little throbbing; that kind of thing.’

But the sea lions, lying about like old sofas, did not look very mean or throbbing and nor did the giraffes with their knock knees and film-star eyes. They passed the aviary and though the cassowary looked interesting with its flabby black wattles and dirty feet, Heckie did not think she really wanted a bird.

‘All that flapping is not very good for magic, I have found.’

But when they got to the hyena, pacing up and down in its cage, Heckie’s face lit up. ‘Now that is something! The way its back end just trails away and those sinister spots, and the smell !’

She wrote something in her notebook and they crossed over to the big enclosure which housed the kangaroos and wallabies — great, rat-coloured beasts with huge feet and mad, twitchy ears which Heckie liked enormously. ‘Oh, I wish I was an Australian witch,’ she cried. ‘Everything over there is so queer and extinct-looking!’

The animal houses were closer together now and Heckie was running from cage to cage, as excited as a child in a toy shop. There were penguins jumping from rock to rock with their feet together like loopy waiters; there was a rusty numbat shovelling up ants — and there was a camel in front of which she stood for a long time. It was a bull camel, tall and sneery with lumpy knees and a lower lip full of froth. Bits of dirty straw stuck to its hump, and a low rumble like thunder came from its throat.

‘I want this camel,’ said Heckie. ‘I want it terribly. But I’m going to be sensible. I’m going to be practical. I’m going to be brave .’

Daniel could see how hard it was for her to tear herself away from the camel, but in the reptile house she cheered up again. It was a silent, sinister place and every one of the animals looked as though it would help one to do magic: the crocodile, smiling in its sleep, the Bearded Basilisk, the iguana like a shrunken dinosaur…

In the ape house, they saw what seemed to be a very small ape in blue jeans forking fresh straw on to the floor. This turned out to be Daniel’s school-friend Joe, helping his father clean out the cages.

Joe’s mother had died when he was born and his father had reared Joe like he reared one of his orphaned apes, carrying him round in a blanket, feeding him on bottles of milk and bananas. Joe’s hair was ginger like the orang-utans’ and fell over his face; there was no tree he couldn’t climb, and when anyone annoyed him, he stuck out his lower lip and glowered exactly like a gorilla.

Daniel introduced him to Heckie who was very interested to hear that his father was a keeper.

‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘are there any empty cages in this zoo? Spare cages? In case someone was to send in some animals in a hurry? Unexpectedly?’

Joe gave her a sharp look from under his hair and said, yes, there were. ‘They’re over by the West Gate, behind the tea place.’

He went on staring at Heckie as she talked to the monkeys and the apes. Joe understood animals almost as well as his father and he knew that the way they came up to Heckie and laid their faces against the bars and tried to take her hand was quite out of the ordinary.

‘Is she an animal trainer or something?’ he asked Daniel, and Daniel said that perhaps in a way she was.

‘We’ll just have our picnic now and have a think,’ said Heckie when they had been right round the zoo. ‘Perhaps your nice friend will lend us a saw to cut up this interesting carrot. Or shall we just go across the road to The Copper Kettle?’

Daniel thought this was a good idea and soon they were sitting at a corner table, eating cucumber sandwiches and looking at Heckie’s list.

‘Of course, the baboons are unbeatable. Those red and blue behinds!’ Her eyes glinted. ‘But I like the orang-utans too: the way their hair hangs down from their armpits…’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘You notice I’m being brave about the camel?’

Daniel nodded and suggested the Bearded Basilisk. ‘It might fit better into the flat?’

‘Yes, but reptiles are dreadfully snooty. Coldblooded, you know. Oh dear, this is so difficult .’

Heckie was very quiet as they wheeled the carrot back across the river and the tip of her nose had gone quite white from the strain of deciding. But in the street behind Daniel’s house, she stopped and stared at a shop window. It was a Do It Yourself shop full of tools and screws and bits of shelving.

Suddenly she hit her forehead with her hand. ‘What an idiot I am, Daniel. What a complete fool! Why choose a familiar? Why not make one?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Daniel, his eyes shining. ‘A Do It Yourself familiar! The first one in the world!’

And, terribly excited, they hurried back to Heckie’s shop. Once she had made up her mind, Heckie wasted no time.

‘Do you know what I’m going to make?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘A dragon. Yes, honestly. Why not go for the best? A pocket dragon. Well, a bit bigger than that. Sort of between a rolling pin and a turkey in size. About the weight of a Stilton cheese. Oh, I can see him. Slightly fiery round the nostrils, you know, with green scales and golden claws! Let’s get the pattern book and have a look.’

She went to the bookcase and got out a book called Ferocious Dragons and Loathly Worms and began to turn over the pages. There were pictures of silvery dragons like the ones that ate princesses and were killed by St George, and gloomy, evil-looking dragons with poisonous claws and fiery tongues. But the nicest dragons were the Chinese ones. They had shaggy heads like Tibetan terriers with their hair in topknots and big, bulging eyes and wide mouths chock-full of teeth which gave them a smiling look. Daniel had seen dragons like that painted on kites and liked them very much.

‘Can you make a dragon from nothing?’ he asked when they had decided that a Chinese dragon was what they wanted.

Heckie looked shocked. ‘No, no, dear boy. I’m only a witch, you know. I can change anything into anything else, but I can’t make things from nothing. What we’ll have to do is find an animal that isn’t happy any more. An animal that’s tired of life — and then I can change it. To mess about with an animal that was enjoying life would be quite wrong.’

They went downstairs to the shop to see if there was an animal there that was bored with living, but there wasn’t. So they went to the park because Heckie thought she remembered seeing a duck that was no longer glad to be alive and, sure enough, there it was, sitting in a clump of rushes by the pond. It was a white Aylesbury drake; its eyes were filmed, its feathers were limp. The other ducks were swimming and diving and gobbling up bread that the children threw, but not this duck. This duck had turned its face to the wall.

Heckie put out an arm. The duck did not have time even for one ‘quack’ before it found itself zipped into the tartan shopping basket on wheels and bundled off to the pet shop.