The Shop at Hoopers Bend

By Emily Rodda

'Rodda is a master storyteller . . . This is a beautiful, compelling story'
-- Books+Publishing, four stars

When Quil Medway gets on the train, she thinks she knows where and howher journey will end. At camp. With another school holiday spent surrounded bypeople, but feeling alone.

Quil doesn't know how wrong she is. She doesn't know anything about theshop at Hoopers Bend. Or a bitter, prickly woman called Bailey Or a littleblack and white dog who at this very moment is chewing through a rope so he'll be free to answer a call that only he can hear.

She doesn't know about the magic.

But it won't be long now ...

From one of Australia's most renowned children's authors, this is a story about coming home when you didn't even know that was where you belonged.

MORE PRAISE

'The Shop at Hoopers Bend is a satisfying read for both young and old, with its timeless tale about new life, new hope and new beginnings. Recommended for 9 years and up.' - Reading Time

AWARDS

Shortlisted - WA Young Readers Book Awards

Shortlisted - 2017 Aurealis Awards

Shortlisted - 2018 CBCA Book of the Year Awards

Shortlisted - 2018 Speech Pathology Book of the Year Awards

Shortlisted - 2018 Queensland Literary Awards

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781460708163

Emily Rodda

Emily Rodda's first book, Something Special, was published with Angus & Robertson in 1984. It marked the beginning of a career that has seen her become one of the most successful, prolific and versatile writers in Australia. Since then, Emily has written or co-authored over ninety books for children. Her children's books range from picture books to YA novels, and include the award-winning Rowan of Rin series as well as the outstandingly successful Deltora Quest fantasy series. A full-time writer since 1994, Emily has won the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year award a record five times and seems to instinctively know what children want to read.

Book preview

Contents

  1. The Call

  2. The Journey

  3. The Meeting

  4. Millions to One?

  5. Memories

  6. Stardust

  7. Success Story

  8. Xero

  9. One More Day

10. The Offer

11. Treasures

12. The Collectibles

13. The Idea

14. Gazza

15. Real Life

16. Cleaning Up, Clearing Out

17. Night Terrors

18. Getting a Few Things Straight

19. The White House

20. Discoveries

21. On Condition . . .

22. A Moment in Time

23. Serendipity?

About the Author

Also by Emily Rodda

Copyright

1. The Call

The shop was waking from its long dream. It gave no sign, so only the cicadas droning in the huge old gum tree that shaded its rust-spotted roof felt the change.

To human eyes, the shop looked just the same as always, drowsing on its grassy corner across the highway from the Hoopers Bend railway station. Blinds covered its two front windows like wrinkled brown eyelids. Its door, painted bright blue by the last in a long line of hopeful tenants, was dusty and filmed with spider webs. At the roots of the gum tree, a ‘For Lease’ sign tilted sideways, showing its age.

Hands in pockets, the two men whose voices had broken through the dream kicked at the drifts of dead leaves piled against the shop’s front steps. They talked freely, ignoring the highway behind them surging with morning traffic and the few people still hurrying past the corner to the pedestrian bridge that led over to the station.

They had no fear of being overheard. No one was listening.

Or so they thought.

Meanwhile, a world away from Hoopers Bend, Jonquil Medway was plodding listlessly along the row of market stalls that had been set up outside Strathfield railway station. It was already hot, and she could feel sweat prickling under her hat. The pancakes that Maggie Koch had insisted on making her for breakfast (‘Oh, it’s no trouble, Quil — and I want to give you a treat!’) lay like lumps of clay in her stomach. Her bulging backpack dragged on her shoulders, making her hunch forward.

Maggie (‘Please call me Maggie, darling! Ms Koch makes me feel a hundred!’) was hovering in front of a trestle table heaped with crocheted toilet roll covers, embroidered hand towels and striped caps for babies. She was picking up one thing after another with her long, mauve-painted fingernails, at the same time juggling her handbag, her sunglasses and the phone she was using to keep an eye on the time. Now and then she’d look round and flash a cheesy grin at Quil. (Isn’t this fun?)

Poor Maggie. She’d been Quil’s aunt’s personal assistant (‘PA!’) for years. She was used to coping with Pam Medway’s frequent emergency dashes overseas to solve one business crisis or another. But never before had the timing been so awkward that she’d had to keep Pam’s eleven-year-old niece overnight, and bundle her onto a train to Lithgow the next morning like an awkward parcel.

The ever-efficient Maggie had done her best, but all Quil wanted was to be away from her. It was such a strain, fielding the woman’s well-meaning questions, her false, bright smiles and pitying eyes.

So my parents died, Maggie! Quil wanted to say to her. So I go to boarding school and get farmed out in the holidays because Auntie Pam spends half her life flying around the world on business. So what? I’m used to it. I don’t need your sympathy. I don’t want it!

But of course she didn’t say anything like that. She just said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ at the right moments and politely agreed with whatever Maggie suggested she might like to do.

Including looking at scrappy market stalls in aid of a local hospital because Maggie had been so keen to get her charge safely onto the train (and off her hands) that they’d arrived at the station forty minutes early.

Quil knew it was pointless to feel irritated. Long ago, when she’d first invented the private, people-sorting game she called Stardust, and started making up names for all the different groups she noticed, she’d decided that Maggie Koch was definitely an Aginoth person. Auntie Pam was mainly Aginoth, too, which was why she and Maggie got on so well. But positive, confident Aginoths always felt edgy around self-contained Palaris types like Quil, and vice-versa. The two groups were like oil and water. However hard they tried, however long they spent together, their minds just couldn’t mix. It was just one of those things.

Quil drifted to the next stall. Jams, pickles and chutneys. She stared at the rows of neatly labelled jars and willed time to pass.

Not that she was looking forward to the holiday camp across the Mountains where she was to spend the next four weeks till school began again. Her aunt, dropping her off at Maggie’s townhouse the night before on her way to the airport, said that Maggie had done wonders to find a place that could take Quil at such short notice. Quil was sure that any holiday camp with vacancies at this time of the year would be terrible.

Still, at least on the train she’d be sitting down, and alone.

Quil checked the time and sighed when she saw that it was still only five to nine. Her train wasn’t due for half an hour. Hitching up her backpack, she wandered to the next stall in line.

At the same moment, in a tidy, silent apartment on the other side of the Harbour, Prudence Bail finished watering the peace lily that had sat in the exact centre of her highly polished coffee table for three long months. On her desk in the corner, behind the sleeping laptop computer, an elegant four hundred–day clock worked tirelessly beneath its glass dome, counting the empty minutes.

The plant and the clock had been presented to Bailey on her last day of work with the company she’d served for almost thirty years. Before the takeover. Before the New Zealand office she’d managed had been closed down. Before the sleek new boss at head office, his plump hands with their perfectly clean nails folded on his perfectly clean desk, had so smoothly told her that the new role created for her on her return to Sydney ‘hadn’t worked out’, and he was going to have to let her go.

He’d pretended to regret it, but Bailey was fairly sure he’d planned it all along. Old-timers like her didn’t fit the company’s new, ‘dynamic’ image.

The peace lily had been nodding with white blooms when Bailey brought it home, but there were no flowers now, just a bunch of glossy green leaves that looked as if they were made of plastic.

Bailey pushed away the thought that this was some sort of symbol of her life. She tore her eyes from the plant, only to find herself staring at the laptop and remembering that its darkened screen masked an irritating email she didn’t want to answer . . .

Hi Bailey

Just wondering how you’re getting on. Len heard Poole’s had hired someone else for that job you went for. Bad luck! I suppose they took on some bright young thing with more looks than sense.

Well, you knew it was going to be hard to get another job at your age. As Len says, maybe you should set your sights a bit lower – something part-time, maybe? It’s not as if you need a big income after the payout you got.

You did mention, though, that that funny old Mountains shop your uncle left you is still vacant. It must be a bit of a drain on your funds. Maybe it’s time to get rid of it? As Len says, you’d do much better investing the money . . .

Bailey jumped as the doorbell rang. She realised that she had been staring blankly at the computer, her miniature watering can drooping in her hand, for quite a long time. Water had dripped from the can’s narrow spout, making a little puddle on the gleaming surface of the coffee table.

She put the can down, but otherwise didn’t move. She knew who the caller would be at this hour. It would be Elspeth from downstairs, bursting with some new complaint about Those Awful People in Number Twelve or kids skateboarding on the path under her balcony.

Perhaps, even worse, Elspeth had one of her ‘little favours’ to ask. Now that Bailey no longer had a job to go to, Elspeth saw her as fair game. (‘Oh, I’d be so grateful if you could manage it, pet! I’m rushed off my feet, and I know you’re not busy on Thursdays . . .’)

Not busy any day, thought Bailey.

The doorbell rang again, and this time there was a flurry of knocks as well.

‘Yoo hoo!’ Elspeth’s muffled voice cried. ‘It’s only me!’

Bailey pulled herself together. She moved to the door, opened it . . .

Elspeth stood there, her wispy grey hair falling out of its bun as usual, her plump cheeks flushed, her pale eyes filled with purpose. Before she was through the doorway she was gabbling breathlessly about cakes that she had promised to make for the Neighbourhood Watch meeting that night, without remembering that she wouldn’t have time to make them because . . .

Behind Bailey’s back, under the dome that sealed it off from the world, the gift clock’s elegant gold hands edged silently towards nine o’clock.

Up in the Mountains, at Hoopers Bend, a train oozed in at the station, glinting silver through the patchy screen of bushes that edged the highway. The two men in front of the vacant shop automatically checked their watches.

‘Nearly nine,’ the taller one said. ‘I’d better get going, mate. Now, relax, will you? The old girl sounded fed up when I spoke to her last. She’s ready to sell, I can smell it. Just leave it to me.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ the other muttered. ‘I’ve waited a long time to get this land.’

The warm air seemed to thicken and the cicadas abruptly stopped singing, but the men were too interested in their conversation to notice.

‘Tell you what, I’ll give her a call later, say the roof’s getting dodgy,’ the tall one offered, feeling for his car keys. ‘That’ll give her a nudge. She won’t be keen on paying for a new roof, with no rent coming in.’

His companion snorted. ‘She’d have rocks in her head to spend another cent on this dump! What a waste of space! Should have been bulldozed years ago!’

He winced and swore as one of the shop’s windows flashed blindingly in the sun, making his eyes water.

‘Look out, it heard you!’ the tall man said.

He thought he was joking. But while his friend was still wiping his eyes and growling, ‘Very funny!’, four things happened.

A few houses away, a woman with green hair yelled as a kitchen tap came apart in her hand and water gushed into the sink.

Four kilometres away, a small black and white dog began chewing through the rope that tied him to a garden fence.

A hundred kilometres away, Bailey found herself saying firmly, ‘Sorry, Elspeth, but I can’t help. I’m going to the Mountains today. I’ve got to decide once and for all what to do about a shop I own up there.’

And outside Strathfield railway station, Quil stopped at a table of second-hand goods and blinked in amazement at a china mug painted with her name.

2. The Journey

Two hours later, Quil was staring out of the train window at a blur of grey-green bush. She was seething with frustration. Her legs were wedged in by her backpack, which was squeezed into the floor space at her feet. Beside her, a billowing, red-faced woman chatted loudly to a pair of friends sitting together across the aisle.

Gamely waving goodbye despite arms weighed down by bags of tomato relish, lemon butter, three crocheted teddy bears, a large flamingo made of pink wire (‘Gorgeous in my courtyard!’) and a cling-wrapped chocolate cake (‘For the girls at the office!’), Maggie Koch had looked relieved when she saw a respectable female plump herself down next to Quil. She thought Quil was very young to be making such a long trip alone, and probably hoped the woman would stay on the train all the way to Lithgow.

Quil felt quite the opposite. All she wanted was privacy, so she could pore over the ‘Jonquil’ mug. But privacy, it seemed, was the very thing she wasn’t going to have. It was infuriating!

For years Quil had been seeing, in gift shops that went in for that sort of thing, racks of pens, bookmarks and bedroom door plates marked ‘Amy’, ‘Bethany’, ‘Caitlin’ . . . and all the rest down to ‘Zoe’. She’d always automatically scanned the ‘J’s (Jane, Jessica, Joanne . . .) but her name was never there.

Well, of course it wasn’t! Companies that produced things like that only used popular names. And there might be other girls called Jonquil in the world, but Quil had never heard of one.

Yet somehow the mug had been there, behind a clutter of ugly vases. And now it was in a pocket of Quil’s backpack, where she’d quickly stowed it before Maggie noticed what she was doing.

It had been unfair, in a way, because Maggie would have been so pleased to know that Quil had found something to buy. But instinctively Quil had known that Maggie’s exclamations about unusual names and amazing coincidences would somehow rub the magic off her find. She didn’t want Auntie Pam to hear about the Jonquil mug, either. She didn’t want to share it with anyone, even a stranger on a train.

So she sat, staring out of the window while the kilometres slipped by and the stations were called in a strangled, amplified voice one by one.

For the first hour, as the train stopped and started, she’d tried to distract herself with the Stardust game, silently fitting all the passengers who entered or left her carriage into their likely star groups. For once, however, the game hadn’t claimed her whole attention, and at last she’d given up.

The stardust idea had come to her after she’d watched a science programme on TV. At the time, she’d been young enough to try to explain her theory first (and vainly) to Grael, who looked after her while her aunt was at work, and then to Auntie Pam herself.

‘Stars die sometimes,’ Quil had said eagerly, the minute Pam walked through the front door. ‘They explode, and their dust spins away into space. And after millions of years the dust floats down to earth and becomes part of us — part of everything!’

Auntie Pam, tired after her long day at work but as patient as always, had raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that, sweetie,’ she’d answered, exchanging amused glances with Grael, who had joined them with her coat on, ready to leave. ‘Bye, Grael. Sorry I’m late.’

‘The man on TV said,’ Quil had argued, following her aunt into the kitchen. ‘He said we’re all made of old stars.’

Already she had the frustrating feeling that Auntie Pam wasn’t going to understand. But she was used to that, and she felt obscurely that this idea was too important to keep to herself. It explained so much!

‘So I was thinking,’ she persisted, as Pam kicked off her shoes and padded to the fridge, ‘that the dust probably comes down in clumps. So some people get made mostly of the dust from one star, and other people get made mostly of the dust from other ones.’

‘Maybe,’ Pam said vaguely. (Really, the child gets such odd ideas!) ‘Quil, it’s eight-thirty. You should be —’

‘And that’s why some people are your friends straight away and some aren’t,’ Quil finished in a rush. ‘If you meet someone from the same star as you, you sort of know her already. But if she’s from another star —’

‘Quil, is someone being mean to you at school?’ Pam asked, turning round and suddenly looking alert and worried.

Quil blinked. She didn’t see what that had to do with her idea. Just because people were made from different stars, it didn’t follow that they were mean to one another. It just meant they weren’t soulmates.

‘No,’ she answered cautiously. ‘Except Hannah Marr. She says brown