Monster Mission Read Free Page A

Then both of them would be angry.’
    Aunt Etta shrugged and dropped the scissors back into her bag. ‘Actually long hair can be useful.’
    ‘How can it?’
    ‘Oh for polishing things … oyster shells and suchlike. And if you fell into the water it would be something to get hold of.’
    They had come to the second of Minette’s dream houses, a low white house on the bend of a river with a willow tree and a garden sloping down to the water. But this time Minette did not see her mother and father taking tea together on the lawn. She heard her father saying, ‘That willow must come down, it cuts off all the light,’ – and her mother saying, ‘If you cut that tree down I’ll have you put in a mental home.’
    And suddenly, for no reason, she told this strange woman about her endless journeys from her mother’s tiny flat with its smell of face powder and curry from the takeaway downstairs, and the tights dripping in the bathroom, to her father’s cold, tidy, solemn house with its ticking grandfather clock. And about the silly dreams she’d had of bringing them together and the hopelessness of it all.
    ‘Do you think there might be a third place? Not my father’s house or my mother’s flat but somewhere else – by the sea perhaps? And that one day I might find it?’
    She drew back, suddenly frightened, because the fierce aunt was looking at her far too intently.
    But Aunt Etta was nodding. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course there is a third place. There is one for everybody. But it’s no good filling it up with people from your old life. If you want to find the third place you must find it alone.’
    ‘But I’m a child. I can’t go and live alone.’
    ‘Perhaps not. Not exactly, but you might be able to make a new start just the same if you had the courage.’
    ‘I don’t have courage,’ said Minette firmly. ‘I’m a coward.’ It was one of the few things on which her parents agreed. ‘I’m frightened of the dark and of diving off the top board and of being bullied.’
    The train stopped at York and the aunt bought sandwiches off a trolley. ‘Now I suggest you go and wash your hands and freshen up,’ she said, ‘because it’s time we had our lunch. Which of these sandwiches would you like – egg and cress or cheese and tomato?’
    ‘Cheese and tomato, please.’
    If Minette had known what was going to happen as soon as she had gone she would have been very scared indeed. For out of the pocket of her long navy-blue knickers the aunt took a little box with a brownish powder which she sprinkled carefully into the centre of the cheese and tomato sandwich. Then she unzipped the holdall and sat back in her seat with a very contented smile.
    ‘My first one,’ she murmured to herself. ‘My very first one. Oh really, this is most exciting!’ And then: ‘I wonder how Coral is getting on?’
    It had been much harder to get Coral to look like an Agency Aunt. She was the plump one who had been to art school when she was young, and she liked to stand out from the crowd, but she had done her best to look sensible. She only wore two necklaces and one pair of dangly earrings and the hand-painted squiggles on her robe and matching turban were peaceful squiggles, so that when she rang the bell of the big house in Mayfair she felt that she looked as aunt-like as she ever would.
    The idea of fetching Hubert-Henry Mountjoy from his grandparents’ London house and taking him back to his boarding school in Berkshire made Aunt Coral feel extremely glum.
    Her first batch of children had been as bad as Etta’s: a poisonous, podgy child who had tried to kick her shins, and a little boy who jumped on a beetle in the park. She was sure that Hubert-Henry Mountjoy would not be her cup of tea – a cold-eyed, snotty little aristo too big for his boots – and she had decided that if she caught him jumping on beetles she would wallop him hard and give up being an aunt and go home.
    As she was shown into the