Mr Skip

  Dedication

  For

  Léa, Eloise, Alice, Lucie

  and Clare, because you all love Barnaby so much

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One - In which I find Mister Skip

  Chapter Two - In which I put Mister Skip together again

  Chapter Three - In which Barnaby comes to stay

  Chapter Four - In which Barnaby goes to the Saturday races

  Chapter Five - In which Mr Skip has a cunning plan

  Chapter Six - In which Magnus Finnegan lends us a helping hand

  Chapter Seven - In which Mum has a cunning idea, and everything turns out just fine

  Also by Michael Morpurgo

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I was forever finding things in that rusty old yellow skip. It was on the corner of the estate by the phone box. Whenever they wanted to get rid of stuff, people from all around used to come and dump things in our skip. I’d go have a look and a good mooch around in there whenever I felt like it.

  At first Mum told me I shouldn’t do it because there might be something in the skip that could cut me or prick me or whatever. So I promised her I’d be careful, and after that she was always fine about it. What made her really happy though was when I brought things home. We didn’t have much in our flat – we couldn’t afford to buy much at all – so quite a lot of what we did have came out of that rusty old skip.

  I found the blue china horse for the mantelpiece, and Mum was thrilled to bits with it, even though it had a chipped nose and only three and a half legs. Her favourite armchair came off the skip too, as well as the electric radiator. All we had to get was a plug for that and it worked perfectly. But best of all was the twenty-six inch Sony Trinitron television set that I brought home in a wheelbarrow – my cousin Barry gave me a hand. It worked fine except that one of the knobs was missing and the colour was a bit fuzzy. Mum didn’t mind. She was over the moon about it.

  Mum often told me I was “a terrible little jackdaw”. And each time she said it she thought it was really funny, because my name is Jackie Dawson, which sounds a bit like jackdaw – if you see what I’m saying. It’s not exactly hilarious, is it? But Mum thinks it is. Mum loves a laugh, but there’s one thing she takes very seriously indeed. Mum likes to keep up appearances. She doesn’t like other people looking down on us or laughing at us – nor do I come to that – which is why she never liked the idea of the neighbours seeing a child of hers crawling about on the skip after other people’s cast-offs. That was why I only ever went rummaging around the skip at dusk or after dark.

  I don’t like to upset Mum, because there’s just the two of us, and as she says, we make a great team – her and me against the world. And our world is the estate. There’s things I like about it – I mean, all my friends live here – but there’s lots I don’t like about it. It’s a grey place, and you can’t see the sky because there’s tower blocks everywhere, and some people are sad all the time and don’t smile. We haven’t got much to do on our estate, except watch TV. So most evenings in summer we have races, horse races, and then there’s the big race on Saturday afternoons. I reckon we’ve got more horses around our place than on any other estate in the whole wide world. They’re tough little horses too. They’ve got to be. They live out all the year round, in all weathers, and they soon eat down all the grass, so they’ve never got much to eat. Some people don’t look after their horses as well as they should either and I don’t like that. I always thought that if I ever got rich, I would build a stable for every horse on the estate.

  Most of the boys on the estate have horses, and a few of the girls too; but the girls aren’t allowed to race. It’s a boys only thing. The boys call themselves the Crazy Cossacks, and they don’t allow the girls to join in even if they do have horses. If you haven’t got a horse on this estate, then you’re a no-one. If you’re a girl and you haven’t got a horse, like me, then you’re a no-one twice over. All I’ve got is that three and a half legged blue china one on the mantelpiece. The one thing I’ve always longed for all my life is a real live horse of my own that I could look after, that would go as fast as the wind, faster than any of the Crazy Cossacks’ horses.

  For just a few weeks last year I was allowed to ride on Dasher, Barry’s horse. Barry’s a little less horrible than most of the other boys on the estate. He’s certainly a lot less horrible than Marty Morgan, but then there’s no-one as horrible as Marty Morgan. Marty’s the chief of the Crazy Cossacks, and he’s a great big oaf, all loud and lumpy, and everyone’s frightened of him, except me. I’m terrified of him, so I keep well out of his way. Even Barry, who’s as big as he is, won’t stand up to him.

  Barry’s alright when he’s alone with me. When his friends aren’t watching he can be really quite nice. I’d been begging him for years to let me have a go on Dasher. All Barry would ever let me do was groom him, or feed him or pick out his hooves – and he wouldn’t let me do that very often. Then last year when he got glandular fever, he let me ride him out – not in the races mind – just to exercise him for when Barry got better – which he did, and a bit too soon for my liking. But meanwhile I rode Dasher every moment I could. I had the best time of my life. All I’d ever ridden before was Barnaby, Gran’s old donkey who’s about as old and slow as Gran is. So to ride Dasher for a while was a real treat, even if I couldn’t join in the races round the estate with the Crazy Cossacks.

  Anyway, late one evening last week, I was out watching the races, watching Marty Morgan and Barry and the rest of the other Crazy Cossacks as they thundered past me whooping and yelling like a bunch of idiots. I was feeling all miserable and angry. I so wanted to be out there with them, racing them, beating them. To be honest, I was secretly hoping that Barry would fall off, and break his collarbone or something, so that I could ride Dasher again instead of him. Then I noticed a car backing up to the skip. A man got out, opened up the boot of his car, lifted something out and chucked it into the skip. I remember wondering what it was and thinking I’d find out later. Then I forgot all about it for a while, because suddenly Barry did fall off. Sadly for me he didn’t break anything.

  After that I was busy for a while catching Dasher. It was always really dangerous for a horse if he was running loose on the estate. They were safe enough in their crowded little paddock behind the estate where most of them lived, or even when they were hobbled and grazing on the grass around the flats; but if they broke free and ran off, then they could be straight out onto the open road and in amongst the cars. We’d had a lot of horses knocked over like that, and I wasn’t going to let it happen to Dasher.

  He was in a bit of a panic, so it took me a while to sweeten him in, catch him and calm him down. Barry thanked me as he mounted up again, and said I could groom Dasher tomorrow if I liked. Big deal, I thought. But I didn’t dare say anything. If I upset Barry too much he wouldn’t even let me do that. One day Barry, I thought, one day I’m going to ride in the races myself and I’ll leave you standing, you and your stupid Crazy Cossacks. I’ll beat the lot of you, you see if I don’t.

  As I made my way home later in the gathering dusk I was still angry, still dreaming of having my very own horse, and talking to myself out loud as I often did. “There won’t be another like him,” I was saying. “He’ll be the fastest on the estate, the fastest in all Ireland, the fastest in the world. And I’ll be riding into the winner’s enclosure at the Irish Derby, and I’ll leap out of my stirrups like Frankie Dettori. I’ll be the greatest.”

  I was still talking to myself as I came past the skip. That was when I remembered about the car backing up, and that man chucking something in. I thought I might as well have a look. I made sure there was no-one about, then hoiste
d myself up and into the skip. I couldn’t see all that well, and at first there didn’t seem to be much that was new. In fact it was almost empty.

  Then I saw him. He was lying there on an old mattress at the bottom of the skip, and he was looking up at me. Well his head was, his face was, but the top part of him was separated from the rest. The other half of him, a very round pot belly and stubby little legs with pointed boots on the end of them, and the toadstool he was sitting on, lay inside a discarded pushchair. In my mind I put the two halves of him together, and recognised him for what he was – a gnome, a battered old garden gnome.

  I felt suddenly very sad, very sorry for him, lying there all broken and abandoned and unloved in the bottom of a dirty old skip. I couldn’t leave him there like that. I just couldn’t. And then I had this totally brilliant idea. I’d fix him up, I’d give him to Mum for her birthday in a fortnight’s time. She’d love him, she’d love him to bits.

  So, crouching over him and picking up his head I told him my plan. “I’m going to save you,” I said. The moonlight fell on his face, and I could see he was a happy smiling sort of gnome. I thought of his name just like that. “Mister Skip. I’m going to call you Mister Skip, and you’ll be coming home with me. I’ll put you together again. And Mum and me, we’ll look after you, alright?” As I was speaking, his eyes twinkled at me, I was certain of it. It was like he was trying to show me he was happy, as if he was saying thank you. It gave me the shivers to think that this plaster gnome could actually be listening to me, that he could really understand, that he had feelings. But they were nice shivers.

  I couldn’t be sure of it, but as I walked away with a half of him under each arm, I honestly thought I heard him chuckling – the top half of him and the bottom half at the same time. It was weird, but I liked it.

  I had to keep Mister Skip a secret. I didn’t want Mum knowing anything about him, not until I’d put him together, not until her birthday. So I used the lock-up garage. We didn’t have a car, but we did have a leaky lock-up where Mum never went, but I did. I went there whenever I wanted to be alone. It was my secret den, a bit smelly and dark and damp, but one end of it stayed dry, mostly. I’d made it as comfy as I could. I had a table in there under the window at the back and a chair and a bit of old carpet – all scrounged from the skip of course. So that’s where I hid Mister Skip. That’s where I planned to fix him up, and he needed an awful lot of fixing.

  For a start there were some bits of him missing completely – one of his little hands and the top of his red bobble hat. I found the missing hand in the skip, in amongst someone’s disgustingly slimy rubbish bags. I looked and looked, but I never did find the bit of his hat. It took me a couple of days, but in the end I managed to borrow some glue from the art cupboard at school, and some paints and some brushes. I told my teacher, Miss Munroe, that they were for a project I was working on at home. She seemed a little surprised at my sudden enthusiasm for art, and asked if she could see whatever it was I was working on when it was finished. “Maybe we could have it in the art exhibition for Parents’ Evening, Jackie,” she said. But she soon forgot all about it – thank goodness.

  So now I had all I needed to put Mister Skip back together again. But I had to work fast. It was now only twelve days till Mum’s birthday, and I wanted to make him perfect for her. I wanted him to look just how he must have done before he became all neglected and battered and broken in half.

  First of all I scrubbed him down with a nailbrush. Then, when he was dry, I glued him back together, top half to bottom half, and I gave him back his missing hand. I filled his holes and cracks with Polyfilla and sanded down all his chips and scratches. Then I began to paint him, trying as best as I could to match the colours that were already there. His chubby cheeks had to be bright pink and his beard had to be white as white. He looked a bit like a mini Father Christmas, I thought, on a toadstool. His hat I painted bright red, his little boots too; and all his buttons had to be sparkling silver. I pinched some of Mum’s special nail varnish for that – she didn’t miss it. As for his trousers they should have been blue, but I couldn’t find any blue paint in the art cupboard, so I made them green instead. And I made the toadstool look more like a toadstool again. Then I varnished him all over so that the paint would never come off.

  By the time I was finished he was without any doubt the smartest shiniest garden gnome in all the world. All that had to be fixed now was the missing bit of his bobble hat. In the end I decided the best thing to do was to cover it up with a real hat. I did a swap with Barry: my Harry Potter sweatshirt – the one Gran gave to me for Christmas that had a hole in it – for his Liverpool red woolly hat, also with a hole in it. It fitted Mister Skip perfectly, and he looked really pleased with it too.

  That was the strange thing about Mister Skip. Every day I worked on him he seemed to look happier and happier, so happy sometimes that I thought he really might burst out laughing. He never did. I mean he couldn’t, could he? After all he was only plaster, I knew that. But sometimes after we’d been alone together in the lock-up for a while, I came to think of him almost as a real, live person. I suppose that was why I began talking to him – it just seemed natural somehow.

  I told him all about Mum and me, our whole life story, about school, about Barry and Marty, about the Crazy Cossacks, about everything. He knew things about me I’d never even told Mum. He’d never say anything back of course. But once or twice I thought I heard a chuckling inside the lock-up when I left it to go home.

  There were a couple of days still before Mum’s birthday, and after school I’d spend all the time I could in the lock-up with Mister Skip. I’d just sit there admiring him, admiring my amazing handiwork, and looking forward to seeing the look on Mum’s face when I gave him to her on her birthday. But then I began to think about him, about what was going on inside his head. I couldn’t help wondering how lonely and miserable he must be left alone in the lock-up most of the day and all night without me. I realised I was beginning to think of him not as a painted garden gnome at all, but as a friend who I liked to be with and who seemed to like being with me. Silly, I know, but that’s how I felt.

  It was on the last evening before Mum’s birthday, and I was sitting there with Mister Skip in the lock-up just chatting away like I did, about how one day I would beat Barry and all the rest of the Crazy Cossacks out of sight, how I was going to wipe the floor with them. “I’ll show them,” I was saying. “I will too, honest. You watch me.”

  As usual Mister Skip just sat there smiling at me and never saying a word. But that was the thing. Suddenly I found myself almost expecting he would say something. He didn’t. So I just went on gabbling. “Mister Skip, d’you know what Mum and I want more than anything else? First we want to build stables for all the horses on the estate, so they don’t get all cold and miserable in the winter. Then we want to get off this lousy place. We’re always on about it, always dreaming. We’d like a little house of our own in the country where there’s green fields all around and hills and big wide skies, and no high buildings. And she’ll keep chickens and ducks, and I’ll have my own horse. I don’t care what he’s like really. Four legs and a tail, that’s all I want. I’m not fussy, so long as he goes fast. I want to gallop out over the hills, splash through the rivers, jump the hedges.

  I get all sad sometimes, Mister Skip, because I know it’ll never happen. But like Mum says, it costs nothing to dream. Dreams are good for us, she says, they keep our spirits up. And she’s right too. I can close my eyes whenever I like, and be out there in the country riding along, the wind in my face. Wouldn’t it just be great?”

  “Well, Jackie, d’you know what I’m thinking?” He spoke! I’m telling you, Mister Skip spoke! His lips never moved, but he spoke. Words came out. I heard them. He was speaking to me! He knew my name! For a few moments I was so stunned that I couldn’t think straight at all. Mister Skip went on. “Like I was saying, Jackie, I’ve been thinking that one good turn deserves another. Out of t
he kindness of your heart you picked me out of that skip, put me together again, and gave an old gnome a new lease of life. So I’ll see to it that all your dreams will come true, and mine too come to that – I’ve got dreams of my own, y’know. But it’s our secret, right? No-one else must know about it, just you and me. You never heard me. I never spoke a word, did I?”

  I couldn’t say anything. I just shook my head. “There’s my girl. And Jackie, don’t worry. It may not happen just as you think it’ll happen, not even as you want it to happen, but it’ll happen all the same. Promise.”

  His lips did not move as he spoke. None of him moved. But by the way Mister Skip looked at me, I knew for sure that he had spoken every single word, that I had imagined nothing.

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I kept expecting Mister Skip to come knocking at my window, or to find him sitting at the end of my bed. I was so tired at breakfast that I forgot to wish Mum a happy birthday. So, to remind me, she hummed “happy birthday” very loudly and very deliberately as she buttered my toast. I gave her a big birthday hug and she forgave me. I said I’d give her her present at teatime, and then off I went to school. On the way I checked the lock-up to be sure Mister Skip was still there. He was sitting just where I’d left him on the table under the window, not speaking, but smiling.

  “Mister Skip,” I whispered. “About yesterday. Did you really talk to me? Did you?” All I heard in reply was the drip drip of the water as it came through the roof in the corner, and my own tummy gurgling – I hadn’t eaten my breakfast.

  At school, I couldn’t think of anything else except Mister Skip and all he’d said to me. Miss Munroe gave me a ticking off for daydreaming, and then a detention for doodling in my English book. We were supposed to be writing a story about a giraffe, and all I’d written was “Mister Skip. Mister Skip. Mister Skip”. And I’d done a dozen or more drawings of garden gnomes.