right!’
Or you might ignore him – you know: don’t provoke the nutter, and all that.
You could, I suppose, come back with a zinger, like, ‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba.’
OK, so I’m not big on zingers, but you get the idea.
So when Alfie said to me, ‘Aidan, I am more than one thousand years old,’ obviously I didn’t believe him.
And then I had to because, although it was unbelievable, it was the truth.
But, for it to make sense, I’m going to have to rewind a bit.
We moved in – me, Mum, Dad, Libby – at the start of the Easter holidays, and everything was unpacked in three days. My Xbox was smashed in the move. I asked Mum if I could get another one, and she just gave this sad-sounding little laugh, which I suppose means no. She said we had ‘other priorities’ and that made me feel bad for asking.
I had the rest of the holidays stretching out before me.
‘Call up your friends, go down on the beach,’ said Mum every five minutes.
Problem with that was Spatch was away in Naples with his Italian grandparents, where he goes every Easter; worse – he’d invited Mo to go with him. And not me.
I pretended I wasn’t hurt when they told me, but I was. When I talked to Mum about it, she was all like, ‘Oh well – we couldn’t have afforded the air fare, anyway, so no harm done,’ but that’s not the point, is it? Spatch was a bit embarrassed, I think. He said it was because there wasn’t room at his grandparents’ farmhouse, but I’ve seen pictures and it’s huge, and besides I’d have been happy to sleep on the floor. I nearly said that, but I’m glad I didn’t.
To ‘put the tin hat on it’ as Dad says, Aunty Alice and Uncle Jasper came to visit. Aunty Alice is OK, but Jasper? Sheesh.
I know Dad wasn’t happy because I heard him moaning to Mum: ‘Can’t they stay in a hotel, for heaven’s sake? It’s not like we’ve got loads of space.’
‘She’s my sister, Ben.’
Dad just tutted and rolled his eyes.
So, day four of the holidays. Aunty Alice and Jasper had arrived that morning, and I had moved into Libby’s room, on an airbed. She was at Brownie camp for the next couple of days so at least I wasn’t actually sharing with her yet, but still …
We all sat in the kitchen among the boxes left by the removal firm. Dad’s not working at the moment, so he was at home and he made tea and asked about Jasper’s boat (it’s a ‘safe topic’, apparently). Mum fussed over Aunty Alice’s blouse. Aunty Alice is much older than Mum and Jasper is much younger than Aunty Alice, although – thanks to his beard – he looks older than both of them, if that makes sense.
After Aunty Alice had said how much I’d grown, just about the only thing directed at me was Jasper saying:
‘And what about you, son? Are you getting enough of the old fresh stuff? You look like a flamin’ ghost!’ and then he grinned, showing his long white teeth, as if he didn’t really mean it, but I could tell that he did.
Aunty Alice said, ‘Aw, Jasper, he looks lovely!’, and Mum said to him with the faintest edge to her voice:
‘He’s fine, Jasper. Aren’t you, Aidan?’
I nodded vigorously, as if by nodding I could show my uncle that I was – to borrow one of his phrases – ‘as fit as a lopp’.
He went hmphh, and added, ‘Sea air. A bit of the old ventum maris. That’s what you need, son,’ then took a noisy slurp of his tea (black, no sugar).
He talks like that a lot, does Jasper. So far as I can tell, he has no regional accent, and no foreign accent, either. At times, he sounds slightly American, and at others more Australian, when his voice goes up at the end of a sentence as if he’s asking a question? It’s hard to work out. He was born in Romania and has narrow dark eyes – almost black – behind tinted glasses, and he’s lived in lots of countries.
I asked him once where he was from. ‘Just call me a nomad,’ he said, baring his teeth. Between you and me, I’m terrified of him.
With my milk finished and having heard the words ‘prime minister’ come from under Jasper’s beard, I figured it was time to make myself scarce. Once anyone mentions the government, the conversation – so far as I’m involved in it – is not going to improve.
‘I’m going outside,’ I said, and I got a grunt of what might have been approval from Jasper.
It was good to get out of the house. I did that big breathe-in-through-your-nose thing and exhaled with a loud ‘Haaah!’
Our house is on the very edge of the old bit of the estate. There are about ten tiny houses in a row, and then the new houses start next door. Over our back fence is just woodland. The woods don’t even have a name, so far as I know. They’re just ‘the woods’ or ‘that bit of woodland beyond the golf course’.
It would be really cool if there was a gate in the back fence that I could just open and be in the woods, but there isn’t, so it’s just this wooden wall, basically, at the end of the empty, rectangular yard.
On one side is an alleyway piled up with junk and smelling of cats’ wee. There’s an old mattress, and a rusty washing machine, and a bin liner spilling old clothes. Dad says it’s the council’s job to clear it up, but they’re obviously not interested. On the other side of Junk Alley live two ladies with short grey hair, Sue and Pru, who Mum has already met and declared ‘very nice’, adding, ‘One of them is a doctor.’ (I always thought doctors were quite well paid, so I don’t know why they’re living round here.)
Their yard has been turned into a neat, paved garden, and they have about five rescue cats. (Dad snorted when Mum told us. ‘Never trust anyone with more than two cats,’ he said, which I thought was a bit mean. I kind of like cats.)
On the other side of us is another garden, a proper one with grass, separated from our yard by a rickety fence.
So on the morning it all started I was standing there with my back to the fence, staring at the old houses made of dirty bricks. Half of the houses look as though they’re not even occupied and a couple have got broken windows. No wonder our house is cheap to rent. Mum and Dad say it’s only temporary.
‘Hello, Aidan!’
I looked about, startled, but I couldn’t see anyone. Then the voice laughed: a short bark of high-pitched glee. A girl. I did a full 360, trying to work out where it was coming from.
‘Over here!’
‘Where?’ I said. And then, ‘Ow!’ as something hard hit me on the cheek. A few seconds later, something whizzed past my nose.
‘Hey! Stop that,’ I said, and the terrier-bark laugh started again. Then I saw it: the yellow tube of a ballpoint pen withdrawing through a large hole in the back fence. Someone was using it as a pea-shooter to fire paper pellets at me, and she was a good shot.
I went over to the knothole and stooped to peer through it, and almost immediately felt a hard kick on my backside. Spinning round, I saw the tiniest girl grinning wickedly and cackling. I recognised her from school, although I didn’t know her name. We didn’t share any classes.
‘W-where