‘How long did your journey take?’
Her grandmother was asking her a question already, looking at her pointedly as if she were her teacher at school, and Ellie felt her insides curl up in fear as she didn’t yet know how to tell the time. She didn’t know anything much, not like Abby. She couldn’t even read properly and was well aware she was on the bottom table in school for maths, English and spelling, even though the teacher gave them different names like ‘Badger’ table for spelling and ‘Triangle’ table for maths.
Grandma was waiting for an answer. She was always dressed nicely, with lots of scarves, even indoors, whereas Ellie and Abby had hardly anything new. Their mum had new things too but she said that was because she worked in a boutique and she had to look nice, so the owners sold the clothes to her cheaply. If Grandma was rich, and they were poor, then Ellie wondered why she didn’t give them some of her money.
‘Thirty-three minutes,’ said Abby, as she walked past and Ellie felt herself go weak with relief.
‘I was asking Eleanor, not you,’ said Grandma.
Days consisted of hanging around the house or the garden – their grandmother seldom took them anywhere and their grandfather worked until late at night. He had a business importing wine and they only really saw him at the weekend. He would call them into his study and ask them to read aloud to him, something else that Ellie failed dismally at, and so he’d taken to only asking Abby.
As today was a wet day, there was no going outside. They were expected to entertain themselves with board games; TV was strictly off limits. Abby decided to take herself up to her room and Ellie followed, but Abby closed her door firmly. Ellie sighed, knowing this was an emphatic ‘do not disturb’ message. She wandered back downstairs, listening out in the large silent house that she still sometimes got lost in. She could hear a far-off hoover, which was the cleaner doing her daily rounds. At the foot of the stairs Ellie could see into the drawing room where her grandmother was sitting in a small armchair, her heels up on a footstool as she read her newspaper. A cup and saucer lay on the side table. Ellie knew from experience not to disturb her grandmother during her mid-morning ‘downtime’ and so she slunk away. She found herself outside the library and peered inside. It was a room she avoided as it intimidated her – all those books she couldn’t read – but this time something caught her eye. A butterfly was trapped inside, fluttering futilely against the windowpane. Ellie watched as it withdrew a distance, took a small circle and then headed back to the window, desperate to get out to the air it must have sensed outside.
She ran in and pushed a chair against the wall in front of the window, then climbed up so she could reach the catch. She opened the window and watched as the butterfly made its bid for freedom, her heart leaping as it escaped, and then she tried to keep sight of it until eventually it disappeared from view.
Ellie turned away from the window and sat in the chair, swinging her legs. The time went so slowly here, painfully eked out minutes and hours. She suddenly missed her mum so much it hurt. Her feet abruptly stopped swinging and she felt tears form, something she tried to stop as Grandma said tears were for babies and people who couldn’t articulate themselves well, except she didn’t know what that meant. She looked around and on her right was a small case with a glass front, inside which were yet more books. On the spine of one of them a word caught her eye. A word that she could actually read very well.
Chocolate.
She slid to the floor and opened the case. Pulled out the book, which was old. The front cover was nearly filled with a picture of a large bar of chocolate with the corner bitten out, an image that made her salivate. A ghost-like boy’s head was beaming underneath it and sitting on the boy’s arm was a man in a top hat. The book was called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, written by someone whose name she couldn’t read.
Ellie opened it up. For no other reason than that she had nothing else to do, she started to read the first page, and before she knew it she’d got to the bottom and was turning it over. She finished that one too, and the next, and the next, until she sat up and felt the thickness of the pages she’d turned and was shocked and delighted to be able to squish a significant amount of paper between her thumb and forefinger. It was a most unusual feeling but she didn’t stop to think about it too long as she wanted to know if this boy Charlie was going to find a Golden Ticket. She read on, stumbling in places, but something about this story kept her turning the pages, until she heard the gong in the hall that meant it was lunchtime. She was astonished. How could it be lunchtime already? Time never went this fast. And she didn’t want to go and sit in the large dining room with the loud ticking clock and answer questions from her grandmother, she wanted to find out what was going to happen to Augustus Gloop now he’d put his face in the river of chocolate.
Ellie knew better than to disobey the gong and she struggled through lunch and the questions and being told she was using the wrong cutlery, but for the first time she didn’t feel like crying into her plate. All she could think about was going back to the library and reading the book.
Which, the minute lunch was over, was exactly what she did. Once she’d completed the story, breathless with wonder, desperate to go to Willy Wonka’s factory herself, she was wistful for grandparents just like Charlie’s who all shared a bed together and were kind and funny, instead of what she’d been given: one strict, one absent. She pulled out another book from the cabinet. This one was called The Magic Finger.
She was just about to start it when something struck her so wondrous, so impossible, that for a moment she forgot to breathe.
She’d just read her first ever book. The whole thing. With no help from anyone.
FIVE
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Abby stopped in the doorway when she saw Ellie leafing through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At that moment, Ellie looked up and Abby was struck by the hurt and anger in her sister’s eyes.
‘Why do you have this?’ asked Ellie, raising the book aloft.
Oh God, why did I forget to move them?
‘This was Grandad’s, wasn’t it?’ Ellie indicated the bookcase. ‘They all were.’
‘Yes.’
‘So why are they on your shelf?’
‘He . . . left them to me.’
‘In his will?’ asked Ellie, incredulous.
‘Yes,’ repeated Abby.
‘But . . . why you? I mean, he didn’t leave me anything.’
Abby felt a flicker of irritation. Ellie sounded so pitiful – the victim. Again. It wasn’t her fault their grandfather had singled her out.
‘He gave them to me because . . . he thought they would be safer.’
‘They’re here on a bookshelf, hardly kept at a controlled temperature under glass.’
Ellie was staring at her and Abby wilted under her gaze. ‘Not like that . . .’
‘How do you mean, then?’
‘He wanted them kept in the family.’ Abby bit her lip as her sister’s face contorted in growing disbelief. She was unsure if the message had sunk in. ‘Forever,’ she added for emphasis.
Ellie was crushed. ‘He thought I’d sell them?’
‘Well, wouldn’t you?’