The Butterfly Club Read online

But Alistair spoiled it. He shook his head at the others. ‘There’s no such thing as magic,’ he said.

  ‘Yes there is, Brainbox. What about all them shows on the telly?’ said Mick.

  ‘They’re just clever tricks,’ said Alistair. ‘And Tina’s played a clever trick on you lot.’

  ‘So how’s she done it then, Sherlock Holmes?’ asked Selma.

  ‘Easy-peasy. She’s torn out the scribbled-on page and done her caterpillar over again. Simple.’

  I felt very annoyed with Alistair. I sooooo wanted everyone to think I had magic powers. Especially Selma.

  After life cycles we had to do writing. Only Miss Lovejoy mixed up writing with life cycles, because she wrote on the whiteboard A Day in the Life of a Caterpillar.

  ‘You what, miss?’ asked Mick.

  ‘Miss Lovejoy!’ said Miss Lovejoy. ‘And don’t use that uncouth expression. Surely the meaning of the title is obvious. I want you all to write about a day in the life of a caterpillar.’

  ‘Yes, but what caterpillar, miss— Miss Lovejoy?’ said Peter.

  ‘Any caterpillar. Make up a story about one.’

  ‘Can it be a monster caterpillar, Miss Lovejoy?’ said Mick.

  ‘Yes, it can. This is a story so you can make up anything you want.’

  ‘Can it be a story that is one hundred per cent true, Miss Lovejoy?’ asked Alistair.

  ‘Yes, it can. Now, get started, everyone. Copy down the title into your writing books. And pay strict attention to the spelling on the whiteboard!’ said Miss Lovejoy.

  I paid strict attention to the spelling – but not quite strict enough. I got my ‘a’s and ‘e’s a bit muddled. I looked at the board but didn’t manage to write it the same way on the page.

  Miss Lovejoy came and checked and sighed deeply. ‘Look, Tina, look! Dear me. I think you’d better write out caterpillar five times before you get started so that you can remember the correct spelling in future,’ she said.

  So I had to copy it out very slowly to make sure I got it right. While I was doing this, I started to make up my story in my head. I imagined being very, very, very small, a little black-and-white caterpillar with a red head (or bottom). I would have big problems hiding from birds. All the ordinary green caterpillars would just crawl into a bush or a tree and hide amongst the leaves, and the birds wouldn’t have a clue where they were. I’d have to find a black-and-white hidey-hole.

  Simple! I decided I’d make friends with a zebra. I was pretty sure zebras didn’t eat caterpillars. So I trekked all the way to the zoo – a tremendously long trek if you’re a very weeny caterpillar. I didn’t have to pay because caterpillars go free. I saw yellow lions and grey elephants. There was a stripy tiger, but he was too orange. I saw black and white penguins, but they didn’t have stripes. But then I saw a zebra. ‘Hello, Mr Zebra,’ I said in as loud a voice as I could manage. ‘Hello, little Miss Caterpillar,’ said the zebra. ‘Would you care to jump up into my mane? I will carry you wherever you want so long as you give my head a little scratch whenever it gets itchy.’ So I jumped up onto his mane and lived there very happily indeed, and every morning when the zebra woke up with an itchy head, I went scratch, scratch, scratch with my weeny feet and scratched all the itch away.

  If Phil or Maddie had been next to me to write it all down, then it would have been a very good story. But they weren’t there – I had to write it all myself, and my hand was already aching after copying the word caterpillar, and I didn’t have much time left for my story.

  It didn’t come out right. Miss Lovejoy wasn’t impressed.

  At break time Phil and Maddie told me what they’d written. Phil wrote a story about a man caterpillar making friends with a lady caterpillar in a cabbage patch and them having lots of babies.

  ‘Miss Lovejoy said it was nicely written and I got all my spellings right,’ said Phil, ‘but she pointed out that it wasn’t very accurate because caterpillars don’t mate. I thought that was mean – she said we could write anything because it was a story. And I made up lovely caterpillar babies called Christopher and Carol and Colin and Crystal.’

  ‘I made up a story about a race between all the insects in the garden,’ said Maddie. ‘The caterpillar was nearly always last because its legs are so little, but then it drank some fertilizer and grew great enormous legs so it could dash along and beat everyone else. Miss Lovejoy said it was very imaginative, but she didn’t like the fertilizer bit because she said it would be deadly poisonous. That was mean too, because fertilizer in stories doesn’t have to be poisonous. It’s not as if I’m going to drink fertilizer.’

  ‘I made up a story about a weeny black-and-white caterpillar and a zebra. Miss Lovejoy didn’t like the spelling and said that it wasn’t long enough and I hadn’t tried hard enough,’ I said mournfully. ‘I hate it in Miss Lovejoy’s class.’

  I thought I might like the next lesson because it was art and Miss Lovejoy had said that I was very good at art. But we didn’t do any proper art in this art lesson. We did cutting out with scissors.

  Miss Lovejoy told us about a man called Matisse who did cut-out pictures of snails and strange people and weird shapes. She hung copies of his cut-out pictures on the wall.

  Then she got Selma to hand out coloured paper to each table – red and yellow and blue and ordinary white – and a pot of paste, and a pair of scissors each. They weren’t proper scissors, they were silly baby ones without points. Still, perhaps this was just as well as I was sitting next to Selma.

  We had to do our own cut-out pictures, sticking coloured shapes onto the white paper.

  I wanted to draw my shapes first in case I went wrong.

  ‘No, no, put that pencil away, Tina. The whole point is to free yourself up and make big bold shapes,’ Miss Lovejoy told me.

  I didn’t like doing big bold things. I liked to draw everything, rubbing it out if it went wonky, and colouring it in very carefully, not going over the lines. I liked to choose my colours too. Red and yellow and blue were a bit limiting.

  I had a picture in my head. I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like.

  But when I tried cutting it out, it went all wrong.

  ‘That’s rubbish!’ said Selma.

  She was right – it was rubbish. Phil’s head was too small, and poor Maddie lost one of her legs when the scissors wobbled, and I was lopsided, as if I were falling over. The colours were wrong too. We looked as if we’d been using Gran’s hair-dye and had a bad case of sunburn.

  ‘My picture’s much better!’ said Selma.

  She was right again. She hadn’t tried to make anything up, she’d simply copied Matisse and stuck blobs of paper in a snail shape. But it worked.

  It was very, very annoying.

  ‘Well done, Selma! That’s exactly what I wanted,’ said Miss Lovejoy.

  Selma smirked all over her face.

  At the end of the lesson Phil and Maddie came to look at my cut-out. I could see that they were all prepared to admire it. They looked for a while without saying anything.

  ‘Well, it’s quite good,’ said Phil, meaning, It’s very, very bad.

  ‘Did that horrible Selma nudge you when you were cutting out?’ asked Maddie. ‘I bet she did. She jogged you so you chopped off my leg and a chunk of Phil’s head.’

  ‘Of course!’ said Phil. ‘And I bet she nudged you again when you were sticking and that’s why you’re all lopsided, Tina.’

  Now this hadn’t happened at all. I didn’t say it did.

  ‘I don’t want to tell tales,’ I said instead. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  Then I put my chin on my chest and looked sad. So of course Phil and Maddie thought that Selma really had nudged me and made me spoil my cut-out picture. It wasn’t really my fault – was it?

  They were positively fuming. They said all sorts of bad things about Selma. It was very enjoyable.

  Then they went storming up to her at lunch time. I tried to stop them – I didn’t want my sisters to get hurt because Selm