bonus of friends. The fact that they’d even thought of gifts came as a genuine shock.
“You got me presents? Actual presents?”
“Well, I wouldn’t get too excited. Arch got me batteries last year, wrapped up in old newspaper.”
“They still had a little juice left in them,” grinned Archie.
“Your dad got anything planned?”
Ned’s face darkened.
“My dad? Doubt it. He’s not great with stuff like that. Last year we stayed in watching cartoons. I mean, cartoons! We never go anywhere. It’s like I’m made of glass or something, like he thinks the world was made to break me.”
“Cheer up, Widdler, least he cares, right?” said George.
“I know, I know …” sighed Ned.
At Ned’s gate they said their goodbyes and agreed to meet up after lunch the following day.
Ned opened the door of Number 222 and headed for the kitchen, weighing up the choice between another one of his dad’s microwave meals, or a jam sandwich. The sandwich won.
“Hi, Dad,” he called as he passed the living room.
“And the answer is – Eidelweiss,” chimed the TV.
“Dad?”
“Ned, is that you?”
“No, Dad, it’s one of the millions of visitors you get every day.”
Terry Waddlesworth walked into the kitchen, wearing the kind of tank top you could only find in a charity shop and looking unusually dishevelled.
“Neddles, I was starting to get worried.”
“Oh come on Dad, you’ve got to stop. I sent you the obligatory ‘I’m alive’ text message fifteen minutes ago and I came straight home because of tonight …”
“Because of …?” Terry was now staring through the kitchen window, and out on to the street.
Ned’s heart sank. His dad was like a satellite link when it came to knowing where his son was, but remembering anything else was often problematic. He had a habit of getting … ‘distracted’.
“You didn’t forget … did you?”
“Forget what?” asked Terry, his focus now back in the room.
“The large pile of presents and the party you’ve planned, you know, the one OUTSIDE the house, FOR MY BIRTHDAY?” said Ned, now certain that there’d be neither.
Terry’s eyes started to go a little watery and he pulled Ned in for a large hug.
“You all right, Dad? You’re not thinking about her again, are you? You know it only makes you sad.”
“Not this time, Ned, I promise. She would have loved it though. Our little boy, thirteen years old. Who’d believe it?”
“We said we wouldn’t talk about her today, Dad … and I’m not a little boy, not any more!”
“So you keep telling me.”
“I wouldn’t have to if you just let me … be,” muttered Ned, through gritted teeth and a faceful of his dad’s shirt.
“I know.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“You can let go now.” And Ned didn’t just mean with his arms.
Ned’s dad released him at last. “I didn’t forget, son,” he said, producing an envelope and a badly wrapped present no bigger than the end of his thumb and handing them over.
Ned smiled, turning over the tiny package in his hands. “Please tell me this isn’t, like, really rare Lego. Because we’ve built just about everything you can with the stuff and I am seriously, like totally too old for it now.”
“No, Ned, it’s actually a bit rarer than that, but you’ll have to wait till tonight to open it. I do have a surprise for you though. We’re going to the circus. It’s on the green; the tickets are in the envelope.”
Ned would have loved the circus a few years ago, but he was thirteen now, and thirteen-year-olds had the internet, and cable TV and, more recently, friends. Still, any Waddlesworth outing outside the house was worth encouraging.
“Great … I love the circus,” he managed, with all the enthusiasm of a boy that still loves his father just a little bit more than the truth.
“Put them in your pocket, son. I’ve got a bit of a work crisis on. An old colleague of mine … she’s … she’s in a pickle, and I have to go and help her out, but I’ll be back later. We need to have ourselves a little talk before the show. Stay indoors till then, OK? You’ll love the circus, Ned. There’s nothing quite like it.”
Terry Waddlesworth didn’t usually mention “colleagues” and had never had a work crisis, at least not as far as Ned could remember. What worried him more were his dad’s shaking hands, as he went to pick up the keys.
“Dad, are you sure you’re OK? I hope this isn’t about moving again, because …”
But his father was already out the door, double-locking it behind him before marching off down the drive, and Ned was talking to himself.
Ned took his sandwich up to his room and looked around him. Everywhere a mess of abandoned projects lay scattered. Things he and his dad had started building, or were in the process of taking apart. The largest by far was a scale model of the solar system, every planet recreated from a mass of tiny metal parts and their corresponding screws. What made it different from more ordinary construction sets was that the planets actually orbited the sun, or at least they would, when Ned finally got round to finishing it. However, Ned’s new friends, all two of them, meant that he had less time for the compulsory Waddlesworth hobby, besides he was rarely challenged now by the things his dad wanted them to make. Plus he was starting to think that maybe building model sets with your dad was a little geeky anyway.
He didn’t have the heart to tell his dad though. It had always been their thing, but as Ned had got older he’d come to realise that Terry had a disproportionate obsession with it, as if any problem, any issue that life threw in their direction, might be answered by something found within the folds of some manual.
Ned was fed up with plans, with diagrams and instructions. “Don’t do this”, “don’t go there”, “make sure you call or text”. Much as he loved his dad, Ned wanted freedom, wanted to try life without a manual or his dad’s overprotective ways.
Ned sat down on his bed. Whiskers was lying on his pillow as usual and looked like he might be asleep, though Ned could never really tell. The old rodent had the uncanny habit of sleeping with at least one eye open.
Ned’s mouse never slept in a cage, barely moved unless you were looking at him and in all the years they’d had him, Ned couldn’t remember ever seeing him eat. According to Terry, he preferred dining alone.
“All right, Whiskers?”
The mouse didn’t move.
“Yeah, Happy Birthday to you too.”
He lay down beside him and thought about Terry. Something was making him particularly jumpy. And annoying as his dad could be, Ned did not like seeing him upset.
Ned was pretty sure his dad’s jumpiness had started on Ned’s very first birthday. Olivia Waddlesworth – Ned’s mum – had gone out to buy a candle for their son’s cake when she’d lost control of her car. In his grief, Ned’s dad had destroyed all the photos he’d had of her. Ned didn’t have any other relatives so everything he knew about his mother had come from his father’s memories. He’d described her