Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter One: The House That Leaned
Kitty Milburn was nine years old, and she was angry in the loud, thundering way of a person who has not been asked.
Nobody had asked her about the boxes. They had simply appeared one Tuesday, stacked in the hall like a wall built by somebody with no imagination. Nobody had asked her about the flat, either — the flat above the laundrette, in a town with no hills at all, where her father said the rent was sensible and her mother said they would make it lovely.
"There's a lift," said her brother Bobby, for the ninth time that morning. Bobby was six. "A real lift. With buttons."
"Buttons," said Kitty, in a voice like a slammed drawer.
"You press them and the floor moves."
"I know how lifts work."
The house they were leaving was tall and crooked. It leaned slightly to the left, as if it had been listening at a door for a hundred years and forgotten to straighten up. Every stair creaked in a different key. The bathroom window had a crack shaped like a running dog. On windy nights the whole place made a sound like an old man settling into a chair, and Kitty had never once been frightened by it, not even when she was small.
On Sunday, all of that would belong to somebody else.
"You can put your bed by the window," her mother said, wrapping cups in newspaper. "You'll be able to see the bus station."
"Wonderful," said Kitty.
The worst part — the truly unbearable part — was Grandma Hetty.
Grandma Hetty had lived in the attic for as long as Kitty had been alive. Her room smelled of pencil shavings and peppermints. She had a chair by the round window and a tin of buttons she let Kitty sort by colour, and she was, in Kitty's opinion, the only sensible person in the entire family.
And she was packing. Calmly. Neatly. Folding cardigans into a case as though leaving the crooked house were an ordinary thing that ordinary people did.
"Aren't you even a bit cross?" Kitty demanded, standing in the attic doorway with her arms folded so tightly her elbows hurt.
Grandma Hetty considered the question the way she considered all questions, which was properly.
"I am a bit cross," she said. "But cross is like a kettle, Kitty. It's very useful for about four minutes, and after that it just makes noise."
"I'm going to be cross for a hundred years."
"Then you'll want a bigger kettle," said Grandma Hetty. "Come and help me with the trunk."
