Jem
I did a drawing of the biscuits at the bottom of the page, like instructions, in case the new people didn’t know what Jammie Dodgers were. I’m not good at drawing, though. It looked more like a pepperoni pizza. So I wrote BISCUITS underneath, with an arrow. And a row of kisses, because it never hurts to be friendly.
Then Dad clapped his hands together and yelled, ‘Five minutes to go, lads! Five minutes to go!’ and my heart went skip like it wanted to fly right out of me, all the way to the new house.
‘Yesyesyes,’ I said.
‘Noooooo!’ wailed Tilly, and lay down on her face on the kitchen floor.
‘Why is Doris Morris in the bin?’ shouted Noah, running in from outside. He was hugging a furry penguin.
‘She’s not in the bin, she’s in the charity recycling,’ I told him. ‘You had to choose just your favourite softies to take with us – remember? Not, like, a hundred thousand million families of penguins and otters and bears with hats on.’
‘I’ve written a poem,’ said Tilly, still lying on her face.
‘Doris Morris is my most favourite for ever,’ said Noah firmly, and he put the penguin in his backpack.
‘My poem is called The Tragedy of Tilly Magee,’ said Tilly. ‘It goes like this: Oh woe is Tilly, alas and alack and booooo to everything … She will never see her one true love’s face again … And it is such a nice face too … Life is plop.’
‘That doesn’t rhyme,’ said Noah, reappearing holding a bulgy plastic bag.
‘I’m too upset for rhyming,’ said Tilly.
‘He’s not your one true love, he’s the postman,’ I told her while peering into the bulgy bag. It was full of more softies: a pink bear, a mouse with one ear and a long, overstuffed snake.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Noah, grabbing the snake and the mouse, and squishing them into his backpack too.
‘I haven’t done the second verse yet,’ said Tilly. ‘Listen: Oh woe is me, my letter box may fill up, but my massively sadtimes heart will be for ever empty …’
I decided to ignore them both because we only had less than five minutes left, and being the oldest I had my important witchy things to do.
Some people think I’m not really a witch. I only do kind things, like a happiness spell which is actually more just a hug, and magicking away holes in socks by knowing how to sew them up, but I think very witchful thoughts while I’m doing them, so it totally counts. Good witches know that when you move house, you have to say goodbye to all the rooms and the memories, or it’s a bad omen. I do it every time we move.
Only this time it was extra exciting.
We used to be just the Magees.
Dad.
Mum.
Me, Jemima, though everyone calls me Jem because it’s quicker and because Mum says I’m sparkly like a precious gem (on my insides, with my imaginative brain and my interesting ideas, not my outsides, which are round: round glasses and a round face and a short haircut that some people say is unflattering but I don’t care).
Tilly – who is Matilda really – who is nine, with massive woolly black hair and, Mum says, ‘the personality of a pre-emptively teenage black cloud’.
Noah, who’s six and likes making all his toys be in families like the Sylvanians – only it doesn’t matter if a fox and a tiger have dinosaur babies, and who, Mum says, is called Noah because you spend all day saying ‘No!’ and ‘Argh!’ at him.
Plus Spooky the black cat.
And we were brilliant at being Magees for years and years – till I was eight, which is quite old. But then Mum kissed Mr Gregorio, and Dad and Mum decided they didn’t like telling jokes any more, or singing along in the car, or each other – so Mum went to live in a shiny flat in Croydon by herself, which she said she liked best.
She doesn’t really. No one would want to live in a flat in Croydon, even a shiny one, all by themselves. And obviously we were all massively sad, and maybe some of us cried in the playground at the end of school once. Maybe twice. But that’s divorces for you. There’s a lot of shouting, and then someone has to go to Croydon. And it couldn’t be Dad, because he’s the only one who knows how to make macaroni cheese.
Then our dad fell in love again – with my best friend’s mum, which is what everyone’s dad should do because it’s very convenient.
Obviously I could see it was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to us ever, because of being the oldest and knowing more things. And Dad knew too, because he is in love. Last night we stayed up really late together doing the last bits of packing, and he had two beers and made a picture of Mina’s face out of fridge magnets.
‘I love that woman,’ he told me, pointing at her nose, which was made out of Southend Pier.
‘I love new houses where you get to live with your best friend who is now your sister, nearly,’ I told him.
And we giggled a lot.
But the others were too busy writing poems to the postman and hugging penguins to get properly excited.
There was a honking noise from a taxi outside.
‘It’s time, lads, it’s time!’ yelled Dad, chasing Spooky the cat round and round the kitchen so he could be poured in through the hole in the top of the kitty carrier.
‘You’ll like it when we get there, I promise,’ I told him through the bars.
Spooky mewed crossly.
‘Je-e-e-em,’ said Noah.
Tilly put her hairy head on my foot. ‘Je-e-e-e-e-em,’ she said too.
I looked at Dad, a bit pleady.
It wasn’t about the postman really, or softies in the charity bag. We weren’t just moving to a new house. We were turning into a whole new family. And we’d done that once already when Mum left and it had been completely miserable.
(Maybe I cried in the playground more than twice. Maybe we all did.)
Dad rubbed his hands together. ‘Ah, come on now, lads – it’ll be grand when we’re in. There’s only the one pool full of piranha fish you have to cross on the driveway … Then just a wee wall of fire inside the front door … You’ll get used to the troll we’ve put in behind the toilet in no time …’
He looked back at me, a bit pleady too, because he is best at jokes, not feelings.
So I got on the floor and pulled Tilly’s socks down till she got cross enough to roll over and sit up and brush her hair out of her face. I blew on Noah’s long blond hair till he wriggled.
‘Superglue,’ I whispered.
Superglue is like secret Magee code. One year, for Dad’s birthday, all three of us bought him a present from the charity shop with our pocket money: a china giraffe with delicate spindly legs and gold paint on its hoofs. We carried it all the way home, ever so carefully – but when we wrapped it up in proper crackly paper, something went snap. One of the delicate spindly legs was in Noah’s fist, and the rest was on the table. We all felt flat, like a popped balloon. But Mum said, ‘Superglue!’ and we stuck that leg back on in no time, and Dad said it was his favourite present in the history of birthdays.
So that’s what superglue means for Magees. Don’t worry, and Let’s make it better. Because there’s not a broken thing that can’t be fixed, not anywhere.
Tilly and Noah both lifted up their heads, looking hopeful.
‘Is there really a troll?’ asked Noah.
‘And a pool of piranhas?’ asked Tilly.
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Dad, with his best twinkly smile.
‘Come on! Hurry up!’ I whispered, shooing them out as Dad gave my hand a squeeze.
I jumped into the car, and I shut my eyes and crossed my fingers and crossed my toes inside my shoes, which is a secret witchy way to make sure good things happen. (Don’t tell anyone.)
Georgie
‘Kitchen – second bedroom – top-floor bathroom,’ Mum reeled off, directing the Heavenly Removals people into the new house with a flick of her wrist.
‘Um. What’s that smell?’ I said, wrinkling up my nose as we stepped inside.
‘New paint,’ said Mum in a rapturous sort of voice, and sniffed deeply. ‘Isn’t it marvellous, Georgie?’
Then she sniffed all the walls. And the carpets, and inside the kitchen cupboards, and even the water coming out of the taps.
It was marvellous, probably. But I went around opening windows instead, even though it was December, because asphyxiating your new siblings didn’t seem like a good start to a family.
Then I stuck up all my hand-decorated colour-coordinated name cards, so everyone would know which bedroom was theirs.
‘Blu-Tack? On the new doors? I don’t think so, Georgie,’ said Mum, pulling them all down again.
‘Can we put the Christmas tree here?’ I asked, pointing at the bare, white-painted wood floorboards in a corner of the bare white living room.
All the other houses on Sorrel Street still had their decorations up: twinkling lights, and trees loaded with sparkly baubles in every window. We’d had to take all ours down for the move, but I knew where they were: in the big box marked CHRISTMAS in the very first removal van. It would be the perfect welcome: cosy and friendly and warm.
‘Next year,’ said Mum, frowning as she smiled. ‘All that mess for a few days? Don’t be silly, Georgie.’
I am mostly a positive person. But my shoulders went droopy at the thought of no more Christmassiness at all for a whole year.
Then Mum saw my face, and her frown went soft and crumply as she pulled me into a hug. ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I just—’
‘You want everything to be perfect,’ I whispered into her shoulder, hugging her back.
‘I do. New, and special, and perfect. Like … like we didn’t have before. You understand, don’t you?’
When she pulled back, her eyes were a little bit shiny.
I nodded.
I understood exactly. I wanted it too.
There was a scrunch of gravel on the drive outside, and a lot of yelling.
‘They’re here,’ breathed Mum, gripping my arms.
‘They’re here!’ I said, running outside as they all climbed out of the taxi Mum had booked.
‘You’re here!’ I yelled, and hugged Jem as hard as you can hug someone who is carrying an angry cat in a plastic cage.
She put down the cat so we could hug some more, and jump up and down on the scrunchy gravel.
‘Apparently we’re pleased to see you,’ said Mum, laughing as she gave Joel a kiss. She laughed again as she wiped away her purply lipstick from his lips.
I gave Tilly and Noah a hug too, feeling a bit shy. I was definitely excited about having a brother and sister as well as a Jem. I hoped they liked me. True, the one time I put my hand out to hold Noah’s while we crossed the road, he licked it, and whenever I tried to talk to Tilly she put her hair over her face – but Jem says she does that to most people. It would be different now that we were practically related.
Then I shook Joel’s hand – rather stiffly, because we have agreed not to hug.
I wasn’t completely sure about having a new dad. But we were only practically related, not actually related, so he wasn’t one really. He was just a strange man I didn’t know very well coming to live with us. It would all be fine.
Joel craned his head back, staring up at the house with his shiny face.
(He was in an accident when he was little. It makes him look a bit crinkly in places, and too smooth in others. He always says he was in a fight with a dragon, ‘and you should see the dragon’ – but it was a spilled kettle really.)
‘Did it get bigger?’ he said, laughing. ‘Did you go out shopping for a bigger house in the same place while I wasn’t looking?’
‘Are we rich now?’ whispered Noah.
‘Do we have to talk posh?’ asked Tilly.
Jem squeezed my hand and shook her head. ‘Don’t be daft. We’re still us. Just with more house. Let’s find the troll!’
Before I could promise there wasn’t one, she had grabbed the cat cage and sprinted inside and up the stairs, Tilly and Noah at her heels.
‘Shoes off indoors, with the new carpets, hmm?’ Mum called after them. ‘And remember – the cat will stay in the kitchen for the first week, yes? In case of any little accidents? Like we agreed?’
Upstairs, Jem was peering uncertainly at the bedroom between Tilly’s and Noah’s; at the double bed and the beigey carpet.
‘Not us.’ I tugged her past it and turned onto another flight of stairs. ‘We’ve got the whole top floor to ourselves – look. And this,’ I said grandly, ‘is your room.’
I’d picked it for her myself, because it has sunny yellow walls and a window seat, and I could just picture her sitting in it thinking up things for us to do. That’s what being friends with Jem is like: always exciting. All the things I’m good at, you have to practise and practise and practise, and have lessons. But Jem never even tries to do things perfectly. She just does them, and when she gets bored she stops and finds something else. That’s why we’re best friends.
Jem just stood there, blinking. Then she turned and walked across the little square of carpet to peer into my bedroom: lavender walls, with deep blue carpet and sloping ceilings.
‘I thought we’d be sharing,’ she said. ‘Not your room and my room. I thought we’d have bunk beds, and we could take turns on who had the top one, and tell each other stories all night instead of going to sleep, and it would be like having a sleepover all the time, always.’
‘Mum decided we’d like separate rooms more,’ I mumbled, feeling fluttery. Now she said it, I knew that her idea was better, and it wasn’t all turning out new and special and perfect after all.
‘Never mind,’ said Jem, striding back into her room and jumping on the bed. ‘This way you can do violin practice in the morning without it being right in my ear. And I can put my craft corner here, and all my crystals and witchy books here, and I can be messy, and you can be tidy, and actually it’s best. Oh! Did you make this?’
Her door sign was on the bed where I’d left it: bright yellow, with JEM in stencilled gold pen writing on the front, and a picture of a lion and a bright shiny sun.
I nodded.
‘I love it, it’s brilliant,’ she said.
And she stuck it on the door with Blu-Tack.
That night, just as I was starting to have a dream about cats who lived in Christmas trees, Jem woke me up with a flash of her phone torch in my face.
‘Argh!’ I said – quite reasonably, I felt, under the circumstances.
‘Shh!’ said Jem. ‘Get up. Now. It’s nearly midnight!’
I put on my dressing gown and followed her back into her bedroom.
Down below, Sorrel Street was coming back to life. Music trickled from brightly lit houses. People spilled outside, laughing and chatting: grown-ups with glasses of wine and party hats, children in pyjamas, two hairy greyish dogs from the two houses opposite ours barking loudly till they were bundled back indoors with a shout of ‘Stop waking everyone up, Wuffly!’ which was loud enough to wake even more people up.
‘Are we going down there?’ I whispered, feeling excited. Mum never bothered with New Year’s Eve parties; not when it was just the two of us. I knew living with Jem would be full of adventures.
But Jem was frantically moving the phone torch under her bed.
‘Have you lost something?’
‘Spooky,’ she whispered guiltily. ‘He was lonely in the kitchen, I could tell. So I let him out so we could have cuddles on my bed. But when I woke up he was gone, and now it’s nearly midnight. On New Year’s Eve!’
‘Is this a witchy thing?’ I asked gently. ‘Is he supposed to turn into a handsome prince at midnight? Or back into a pumpkin? Because … I think he’s actually just a cat, Jem. Even if you are completely really a real witch, obviously.’
(To be honest, I’m not sure she is. I don’t think witches exist at all. But it’s not very best-friendly to say so.)
‘New Year’s Eve!’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Midnight! Fireworks!’
And then I understood – because the last time there were fireworks, Spooky had run away to hide in someone else’s garden and they hadn’t been able to find him for three whole days. And if Spooky ran away this time – from the new house; the brand-new house he didn’t know was home – he might never come back.
Suddenly I felt terribly worried about all my open windows.
‘We’ll find him, I promise,’ I said. Then I went to wake up Mum.
Jem hopped up and down with even more worry – but what Jem doesn’t know is that Mum is really brilliant in a crisis. She didn’t say, ‘I told you he had to stay in the kitchen!’ or ‘Why aren’t you asleep, it’s the middle of the night!’ She put those in a pocket for later and gave Jem a hug.
‘Come on, sweetheart. There’s still seven minutes to go. Finding one cat usually takes six, tops.’
Joel fetched torches and hunted in all the cupboards, even though he was only wearing pants. With all Jem’s calls of ‘Spooky! Spooooookyyyyyy!’ Tilly and Noah woke up too – so we all joined in the search together. We switched on the lights. We looked under every bed and behind every sofa. We searched every room with an open door, waving torchlight around the piles of still-packed boxes as the last minutes of the old year ticked away – until at last mine caught a flash of black fur and glowing eyes in the downstairs bathroom as Spooky leaped into the sink.
‘Found him! Quick – help!’ I yelped.
‘Ten!’ echoed down the street outside.
‘Just hold onto him,’ yelled Joel, running down the hallway, still in his pants. ‘We need – we’ll get – um …’
‘Nine!’
I’d never picked Spooky up before. He felt like a very furry stream of water running through my fingers. Then he turned into something sharp with teeth and claws that didn’t like me much.
‘Jem!’
‘Just a minute!’
‘Eight!’
‘Where do you normally put him, Jem, sweetheart? What did you do last year?’
Spooky writhed and wriggled and gnawed on my wrist as I clamped my arms around him.
‘Seven!’
‘Um, well, we made him a nest in a box in the airing cupboard, with soft things around him to muffle the noise …’
‘Six!’
Outside I could hear lots of thumpy noises, and boxes being shifted around, and muttering.
‘Whoa, Mina, you don’t have to—’
‘Five!’
‘Hush, Joel, it’s fine. There – that one next!’
‘Hurry up, Daddy!’
‘Four!’
The bathroom door was wrenched open.
Outside, in the hallway, instead of a neat stack of cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked, there was now a sort of gigantic cardboard castle taking up the whole space. There were four walls, making a small square space inside, lined with soft and fluffy white towels. Lying discarded to one side was an empty packing box with NEW LINENS: BATHROOM 3 written on the label in Mum’s careful handwriting.
‘Oh, Mummy,’ I breathed, because I knew she’d spent three hours in John Lewis touching all the different towels to pick out her very favourite.
‘Three!’
‘Hurry!’ wailed Jem.
I stepped forward and hurled the wriggling Spooky at the nest of new towels.
‘Two!’
Mum jumped forward and thumped another box over the hole so he couldn’t leap out.
‘One!’
We all leaped onto the castle as little black paws appeared round the edges of the hole, scrabbling to escape.
Bong! Bong! Bong!
The echoey sound of Big Ben chiming twelve on TV filtered down the street, followed by fireworks up above. There was a lot of oohing from the street outside.
‘Well done, lads,’ said Joel, over the feeble sound of Spooky mewing in fear and scratching at the boxes.
‘Thanks,’ mumbled Jem in a sniffly voice.
‘It’s only towels,’ said Mum in a slightly strangly voice.
‘Can we go and watch the fireworks?’ asked Tilly as another chorus of oohs went up outside.
They hurried into the night, making Brr and Ouch noises in bare feet on the scrunchy gravel.
‘Put some clothes on, Joel – you can’t meet our new neighbours like that!’
‘Ah – start as you mean to go on, eh?’
Jem stayed clinging onto the castle of boxes, her face pressed against the gap where Spooky’s whiskery black nose peeped out.
So I stayed too.
‘Happy New Year, Georgie,’ she said.
‘Happy New Year, Jem,’ I said.
It was my happiest New Year ever.
and 
They were both very beautiful,
about being left all by herself 
and about her mum leaving home for ever and ever 
Luckily Georgie already knew all about being a Product of Divorce, which is what you are called if your parents split up.
