How to Look After Custard

Bea was nine, and brave in the ordinary way, which is the useful kind. She was not brave about lions, because she had never met one. She was brave about doing a thing carefully when it mattered. She also carried her own spoon in her coat pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, because you never know about other people’s spoons. Grandma said this was very sensible. Grandma was the only one who did.

Now, at the end of the lane there was a round stone tower with a kitchen at the bottom of it. And around the outside of the tower, wound like a cat around a table leg, there was a dragon.

His name was Custard. He was the size of a house, because he was a house-sized dragon, and there is no getting around it. He was apricot-colored all over. He had whiskers like a catfish, long and drooping and thoughtful, and when he was happy he hummed. Not a loud hum. A low one, down in the stones, the kind you feel in your feet. When Custard hummed, every spoon in the kitchen drawer rattled, and any spoon left out on the table went walking slowly toward the edge.

Grandma had to go away for one night. One night only.

“Can I mind him?” said Bea.

“You can,” said Grandma. “I have left you a letter. Do what it says. It says what it means.”

So that is how Bea came to be standing in the kitchen at the bottom of the tower, at dusk. She had a lamp lit, a letter in her hand, and her own spoon in her pocket. And what she wished for, more than anything, was to get through one whole night without doing one single thing wrong, so that Grandma would let her do it again.

The letter was long. She read it one line at a time, the way you eat something you want to last.

Dear Bea. Thank you for minding Custard. He is a good dragon and he will not eat you. Feed him at moonrise.

That seemed fair.

He likes the blue bowl.

There was only one blue bowl on the shelf, and it was chipped in one place. Bea took it down. It was as wide as a bathtub and lighter than it looked, the way magical crockery often is.

Round things only. Nothing with corners.

Bea laughed out loud at that one. Then she looked up.

There were three scorch marks on the kitchen ceiling, black as pans, and beside each one Grandma had drawn a little arrow in the margin of the letter and written: 1. Toast. 2. A cracker. 3. Do not ask.

Bea stopped laughing. She went to the pantry and got out apples and plums and peas and grapes and one round biscuit, and she cut nothing, because cutting makes corners.

The moon came up over the lane. Bea carried the blue bowl out with both arms, and Custard lifted his enormous apricot head off his own tail and looked at her with eyes like two warm plates.

“Hello,” said Bea. “I’m minding you.”

Custard breathed out. A small blue flame came with it, about the size of a candle, and floated up and went out. He was not angry. He hiccuped, is all. He always had.

She set the bowl down. And here is a thing you might not believe. Custard turned the bowl with one claw, carefully, all the way around, until the chipped part was in front of him. He drank from the chipped side. Only ever the chipped side.

Now, you might think a dragon the size of a house cannot be fussy about a bowl. You would be wrong.

Bea read on.

Do not knock suddenly on anything. Not the door, not the table, not the pot.

Well, thought Bea, that is a strange one. And an hour later, half asleep, she knocked the wooden spoon twice on the pot to shake off the peas, tap tap, the way anyone would.

Custard shot straight up on all four legs. The tower shook. Three plates jumped off the shelf, and a fourth thought about it. A blue flame the size of a bedsheet went whoomp against the ceiling, and there, when the smoke cleared, was a fourth scorch mark, brand new, right beside the other three.

Bea stood very still with her hand over her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Custard settled. His whiskers drooped. He put his chin back down on the doorstep and looked at her sideways, embarrassed, the way you look when you have made a fuss over nothing.

“It’s all right,” said Bea. “It was my fault. I did think that line was a joke.” She said it out loud, to be honest about it, because being honest out loud is easier when there is only a dragon listening.

Twice she had thought a line was a joke. Twice it had not been. Bea decided that would do her for one night.

She fed him plums. She fed him peas, which took a while, one at a time, and which Custard enjoyed enormously. She was reaching for the grapes when he hiccuped again, and the little blue flame went up sideways instead of straight, and it caught the corner of the letter.

The paper curled up brown in her hand, fast as anything, and was gone.

Bea sat down on the floor.

There was still half a night left. There were still instructions she had not read. She did not know what came after the grapes, or how you got a dragon the size of a house to go to sleep, or whether there was a trick to it, or a song.

So she did it from memory, and from kindness, which is all anybody has when the letter burns.

She gave him the grapes. She gave him the apples, whole, and he took them off her palm like a horse. She turned the blue bowl so the chipped side faced him, every time, without being told. She did not knock on anything. She talked to him about nothing at all, in a low steady voice, the way you do. She gave him the last thing in the pantry, which was one round biscuit. Custard ate it with enormous delicacy and closed his warm plate eyes.

Then he began to hum.

The spoons in the drawer rattled. The spoon on the table went walking toward the edge, and Bea caught it, because she was watching. Custard wound himself around the tower, once, twice, nose to tail, snug as a cat around a table leg, and put his chin on his own back and went to sleep.

Bea went in to blow out the lamp.

And under the lamp, dry and unburnt and waiting, was the last page of the letter.

She read it aloud, because it deserved to be said aloud.

P.S. I knew you could. Blow out the lamp. Love, Grandma.

So she blew out the lamp. And the tower hummed all night long, very gently, and Bea slept the whole night through, and so did Custard.

The end.