to ask if the brother was a musician as well.
But here Martya dashed up in a panic and seized Hayley’s arm. “You don’t go, you don’t go! Your baba kills me! So sorry,” she gasped at the musician. “She bother you.”
He smiled his blue-eyed smile. “Not at all,” he said.
Martya gave him a flustered glare and dragged Hayley back to the shop, where she and Mr Ahmed had settled the argument by getting Grandma both oranges and orangeade. Grandma was not pleased when they got home. She had wanted orange juice.
Thereafter, whenever they went to the shops, Hayley always tried to tempt Martya to walk on the sunny side of the street, in hopes of meeting the musician’s brother. Martya nodded and smiled as if she quite understood, and then stayed on the usual side of the road. Nodding and smiling turned out to be a habit with Martya. She used it instead of understanding English. She used it particularly when Grandma told her to clean the silver or sweep the stairs. Grandma soon began saying Martya was a lazy slattern.
“Now let us see,” Grandma said, one afternoon a few days later, “if you can manage to do one simple thing, Martya. No, don’t nod, don’t smile. Just look at Hayley’s shoes.” She pointed. Martya and Hayley both looked down at Hayley’s neat black shiny shoes. “Now go to the shoe shop,” Grandma said, “with this note and this money, and get Hayley another pair just the same but half a size larger. Can you do that?”
“I can do that, Grandma,” Hayley said joyfully. The shoe shop was on the sunny side of the street.
“I’m talking to Martya,” Grandma said. “Martya is doing the buying. I want the same kind exactly, Martya. No other colour, no fancy bits. Have you understood?”
Martya nodded and smiled vigorously and the pair of them set off towards the shops. On the way, Martya said, rather helplessly, “I don’t know how is shoes. What is fancy bits?”
“I’ll show you,” Hayley said.
The shoe shop was quite a long way down the road from The Star, where the musician was playing as usual. Hayley waved to him across the street, but she was not sure he saw her. When they reached the shoe shop, Hayley led Martya in front of the window and pointed to the various different shoes inside it. “Look – those pink ones with cowboy fringes have the fancy bits, and so do those with a flower on front. Do you see?”
While Martya pulled her hair aside in order to bend down and stare at the shoes, and then did her usual nodding and smiling, Hayley suddenly began hearing sweet distant snatches of music. It was not violin music. She was not sure what instrument it was, but it flowed and stopped and flowed again, in some of the loveliest sounds she had ever heard. “It’s his brother,” she said to Martya. Martya just nodded and smiled and looked at shoes. Hayley said, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and walked sideways away along the fronts of the shops, tracking the music. “Like the Pied Piper or something,” she said aloud, as the sounds led her on, and on, and then round a corner into a small side street.
The musician was there, standing in blazing sunlight and, to Hayley’s delight, he was actually playing a pipe, the kind you held sideways out along one shoulder to play. Hayley dimly thought it might be a flute. She had never heard such lovely sounds as those that came pouring out of it, although she did wish that he would keep to one tune, instead of playing in snatches. One moment he would be playing something wild and jolly. Then he would break off and start another tune, this one melting and sad. Then it would be music you could march to. She stood and surveyed him and rejoiced.
He had hair like Martya’s, quite long, but not as long as Martya’s, that blew around his head in fine white strands, and he was as tall and thin as the violin-player, though nothing like so neat. His clothes were green and baggy, and a green, green scarf fluttered from his neck. A baggy green hat lay on the ground by his bare feet, waiting for money.
He was watching Hayley watching him while he played. His eyes were the same green as his scarf. Hayley had never seen eyes that colour before, nor had she ever looked into eyes that were so direct and interested and kind. It was as if he and Hayley knew one another already.
“I’m sorry I haven’t any money,” she said.
You couldn’t play a flute and talk. He took the flute away from his mouth to smile and say, “That doesn’t matter.”
“Are you the violin man’s brother?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Hayley Foss,” Hayley said. “What are you called?”
He grinned, the same sort of youthful grin as his brother’s, and asked, “What do you want to call me?”
All sorts of names flooded through Hayley’s mind, so many that she was surprised into taking a deep, gasping breath. “Flute,” she said, in the end.
He laughed. “That’ll do. And I suppose that makes my brother’s name Fiddle. One of us had better warn him. What can I do for you?”
“Are you a magician?” Hayley asked.
“In many ways, yes,” he said. “I don’t live by the usual rules.”
“I have to live by rules all the time,” Hayley said wistfully. “Can you show me some magic?”
Flute looked at her consideringly – and quite sympathetically, she thought. He seemed to be going to agree, but then he looked up over Hayley’s head and said, “Some other time, perhaps.”
Martya was rushing up the small street, waving a pair of large pink shoes with cowboy fringes, and a lady from the shoe shop was rushing after her. Martya was so agitated at losing Hayley that she forgot to speak English at all and shouted a torrent of her own language, while the shop lady kept saying, “I don’t care where you come from. You haven’t paid for those shoes.”
Flute twisted up one side of his face, so that half of it seemed to be smiling at Hayley and the other half looking seriously at the shop lady, and said, “I think I’d better sort this out for you.” He said to the lady, “It’s all right. She thought this little girl had gone missing, you see.” Then he spoke to Martya in what was clearly her own language.
Martya replied with a gush of Darkest Russian, clapping the pink shoes together in front of her bosom, as a substitute for wringing her hands. They were very big shoes, much more Martya’s size than Hayley’s. Flute spoke to her soothingly while he collected his hat and shut his flute into a long case. By the time they were all walking back to the shoe shop, he was wearing rather battered green boots that Hayley had certainly not seen him put on.
He did do some magic! Hayley thought. Quite a lot of it! she added to herself, as she watched Flute calming everyone in the shop down and making sure that Martya counted out enough of Grandma’s money to pay for the large pink shoes. Then he smiled at Hayley, said, “I’ll see you,” and left.
Martya and Hayley went home, where Grandma was far from pleased. Hayley said repeatedly, “It wasn’t her fault, or Flute’s, Grandma. They both thought you meant the shoes were for her.” While Martya nodded and smiled and hugged the shoes happily.
“Be quiet, Hayley,” Grandma snapped. “Martya, I have had enough of this nodding and smiling. It’s just an excuse for laziness and dishonesty. You’ll have to leave. Now.”
Martya’s ugly face contorted inside her beautiful hair. “Laziness I am?” she said to Grandma. “Then of you, what? You do nothing all day but give orders and make rules! I go and pack now – and take my shoes!” She went stumping up the stairs, scowling. “Your baba is a monster!” she said as she stamped past Hayley. “You I pity from the depths of my chest!”
It startled Hayley. She had not thought of Grandma as a monster – she had just thought life was like that: long and boring and full of rules and things you mustn’t do. Now here was Martya actually pitying her for it. She wondered if it made sense.
But