Millions

  3

  Moving House

  by

  Anthony Cunningham, Year Six

  We have just moved house to 7 Cromarty Close – a three-bedroomed property, not overlooked to the front. It cost £180, 000 but will retain its value well or most likely go up! It has solar panels on the roof and a cost-efficient central-heating system throughout. It has two bathrooms, inc. en suite to the master b’room. Substantial gardens front and rear complete the picture in an exclusive new development in a semi-rural setting. I’ve got my own bedroom at last. It’s got footballer wallpaper, which I chose myself.

  To be architectural about it, I found the new house disappointing.

  I remember Cromarty Close when it was made of string. Dad took us to a big field near the railway, all overgrown with brambles and nettles. A man with a checked shirt and a clipboard led us to a place where the brambles had been cleared and the grass cut short. It was criss-crossed with avenues of string. He pointed down one and said, ‘Dogger.’ Then he walked to the corner of the next one and said, ‘Finisterre.’ Then he pointed off to the left and said, ‘Cromarty’.

  ‘What d’you think?’ Dad said. ‘Want to move here?’

  I said, ‘Yes, please!’ very enthusiastically.

  So we did.

  Actually, my enthusiasm was because of a misunderstanding. I thought he was suggesting we live in the field, with the string. A lot of saints have lived in unusual houses. St Ursula ( 4th century) lived on a ship with 11,000 holy companions. St Simeon (390–459) tried to avoid the temptations of the world by living on top of a three-metre column. When sightseers started coming to stare at him, he moved to a ten-metre column so he wouldn’t hear them. And when they just started shouting (in 449), he moved to a twenty-metre column, where he ended his days in peaceful contemplation.

  Compared to that, living in a field full of brambles and string seemed sensible and pleasant. I was looking forward to it. When we came back, all the brambles had gone and there was a sign saying ‘Portland Meadows – exclusive, discreet, innovative’, and four rows of houses with very pointy roofs and funny-shaped windows. Number 7 Cromarty Close is a three-bedroom detached with substantial gardens and solar panels. Anthony said, ‘Detached houses hold their value better and three-bedroom is the configuration most sought after by most buyers. The solar panels are added value.’

  Compared to a boat with 11,000 companions, or a twenty-metre marble column, our house seemed a bit unsaintly, so I built myself a hermitage.

  Dad decided to get rid of the cardboard boxes. We ripped them open and found all sorts of stuff that we’d forgotten we had. One was full of vases. One was full of bedding. One had the Christmas decorations and a Micro Machines racing circuit inside (we set it up in the boxroom). I found the one with Mum’s dresses in and her make-up.

  When they were all empty, I took the boxes down to the railway, slotted them inside each other and there you go, a hermitage. It was tunnel-shaped, with little flaps for looking out. When the trains went by, the whole place shook. If it was dark, the trains lit up the inside for a second. There was a line of holly bushes between the gardens and the track, so the hermitage was nearly invisible from the houses. I took a few things down there – such as my St Francis bookmark and a tube of tinted moisturizer I found – but not much, the whole point being to live a simpler life. Not full-time, obviously, because of school. But whenever I could. I got a bit scratched going through the holly, but that was OK because suffering is good (it’s called mortification).

  I got the idea for the hermitage from Rose of Lima (1586–1617), who lived in one at the bottom of her parents’ garden from when she was a little girl. She had multiple and marvellous visions, including those of the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Ghost, and visitations from many saints. Personally, I didn’t get any, even though I stayed there until it was really cold.

  I went on Google to try and find out why my hermitage wasn’t working and the answer was obvious. Not enough mortification. People like Rose of Lima didn’t just live in hermitages. They fasted for weeks. They went everywhere barefoot. They wore uncomfortable clothes. They scourged themselves.

  Some forms of mortification are just not practical. Fasting for seven years, for instance, is not going to happen when your dad is obsessed with everyone eating five pieces of fruit a day. And as for scourging, well, there were no facilities in Portland Meadow. But I did sleep on the floor that night. I waited until I heard Dad’s light go off, then I got out of bed and lay down just under the window. It was uncomfortable, but that’s the point. Then on the way to school the next morning, I let Anthony get ahead of me and slipped my shoes off. It was fine when we were walking across the field – though my socks did get wet. But the path up to the road is made of little bits of gravel. I think one of the builders must have employed someone to sharpen each bit of it before they put it on the ground. It was really, really mortifying. I was greatly tempted to walk on the grass verge, but I resisted. The pavement was easy after that.

  I met Mr Quinn at the school gates. He noticed my feet and said, ‘Something wrong with your shoes, Damian?’

  I said, ‘Mortifying my flesh, sir.’

  I think he was impressed.

  During Numeracy Hour Jake came and tapped me on the shoulder and then went, ‘Ow!’

  ‘Jake, what are you playing at and is it maths?’ asked Mr Quinn.

  ‘I was going to ask him for a borrow of his ruler, sir, and he’s spiky.’

  ‘What?’

  Now everyone was looking at me.

  Jake said, ‘I just touched Damian’s shoulder, sir, and it hurt.’

  Mr Quinn came over and touched my shoulder. Then he leaned down and whispered to me to come with him. ‘Just get on with it, the rest of you.’

  Out in the corridor, he made me undo my shirt and show me what was inside. On totallysaints.com it tells you about Matt Talbot, who wore chains all the time. Obviously, I couldn’t get any chains as such, so I’d stuffed my shirt with holly from the hermitage.

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Did it myself, sir.’

  ‘You’re cut. Take the holly out and I’ll get some plasters.’ When he was putting the plasters on, he said, ‘I want you to come and see me at Home Time. I’m going to give you a letter to take to your dad. You’re not in trouble, but it is important. OK?’

  The letter was in a brown envelope. It was quite thick. Dad opened it as soon as I gave it to him. He read it and then put it in his pocket.

  Anthony said, ‘What’s it about? Are they going on a trip?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘Or. Yeah. Maybe. In a way. Eventually. Go and wash your hands.’

  It was my turn to wash up and Anthony’s to put away. Dad was supposed to be doing the floor, but when I came back into the dining room to make sure we hadn’t missed any dishes, he was reading the letter again. He put it away as I came in, but I saw that one of the pages was yellow and it said ‘Special Assessment’. I thought, ‘Special’, that’s pretty good.

  I think Dad must’ve stayed up late that night, because I fell asleep in my bed before he came upstairs to brush his teeth. In the middle of the night, I woke from a dream (which I don’t want to talk about), got up and stretched out on the floor under the window again. It was really cold after the warm bed. I couldn’t get to sleep. Suddenly I realized there was someone standing in the doorway. I thought, finally, a vision. But when it came closer, I could see it was just Dad. He bent down and picked me up, whispering, ‘Shhhh, Damian. You’ve fallen out of bed. I’m just going to pop you back in. Don’t wake up.’

  I didn’t like to tell him I was still awake. I just lay on my side so he wouldn’t be able to see my face. I thought he’d go away then, but he didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed for a while. Then he tugged the collar of my pyjamas down at the shoulder. He was looking at the scratches. When he finally got up to go, I whispered, ‘Dad, are you OK?’

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes.’ r />
  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Damian . . .’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What happened to your back?’

  ‘Just some holly, you know.’

  ‘Damian. Be good, won’t you? Be really good.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to be. That’s what I’m trying to be all the time.’

  ‘I know it is, son. I know that.’

  Then he went. After a while I heard the toilet flush. Then I got back on to the floor.

  4

  It’s not as easy to be good as you might think. For instance, on the Monday the doorbell rang just after Dad had gone to work. Now, we’re not supposed to answer the door when Dad isn’t there. On the other hand, it was time to go to school. So it was a moral dilemma – answer the door (disobedient) and be on time for school (good), or don’t answer the door (good) and be late for school (bad). Anthony doesn’t think about these things. He just headed for the door, pulling his blazer on. I stopped him.

  ‘Dad said not to answer the door.’

  ‘It’s twenty to,’ he said. ‘ We’re going to be late.’

  Then whoever it was rang the doorbell again.

  ‘But Dad said not to!’ I was shouting now. It was making me panicky. ‘Dad said not to do it and we’re supposed to be being good!’

  Anthony took a deep breath and said, ‘OK. This is what we do. Get your bag. We’ll leave for school. If there’s someone outside, then they’re just a coincidence. We’re not answering the door. We’re going to school. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ Anthony is very good at sorting out moral dilemmas when he tries.

  The coincidence was a man in a white shirt with a South Park tie and a plastic name badge saying, ‘Terry – IT’. ‘I’m from that one there,’ he said, and pointed at the house on the bend.

  Anthony looked at the house. ‘The corner position gives you extra garden, which is an asset, but you’ve no off-road parking, which is a definite disadvantage in this market.’

  ‘Is your dad in?’

  ‘Gone to work.’

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Oh.’

  Terry put his hands in his pockets, as though he was looking for something to give us. Anthony watched the pockets expectantly, but Terry didn’t seem to be able to find anything.

  ‘Can you give your dad a message?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We haven’t met. I leave for work before most people get up, but tell him if he wants to come over tonight, about seven o’clock, then cool. Most people will be there.’

  ‘Can we come too?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Hey, look at this.’ He fiddled with his tie and it played the South Park theme tune, which was quite surprising.

  ‘Who the hell is Terry?’ Dad was getting agitated.

  ‘Terry – IT over the road. He said to come at seven.’

  ‘Come what for? A party? Supper? A game of Monopoly? Help him move a wardrobe?’

  ‘He’s got a tie that plays tunes and he said, “Cool.” We think it’s a party.’

  ‘Meet-the-neighbours type of thing.’

  ‘What time is it now? I’ll have to go and get a bottle.’

  ‘No need. We’re baking a cake. Is that OK?’

  ‘I’m surprised.’

  ‘Surprised and pleased? Or surprised and disappointed?’

  ‘Surprised and pleased that you’ve taken this opportunity to be excellent.’

  It was my idea to bake the cake. When we got in from school, I’d said to Anthony, ‘This is an opportunity to be excellent. Let’s bake a cake.’

  He was against it on the grounds that we didn’t know how. But I remembered baking cakes loads of times in the past. It was one of the things I remembered a lot. Sometimes I even dreamed about it. I said, ‘Put the oven on to 200º,’ and we got cracking. We’d taken 110 grams of flour with 50 grams of margarine, two spoonfuls of water and a pinch of salt, mixed them and put them in the fridge to rest for twenty minutes, and that’s as far as we’d got. The patron saint of bakers, by the way, is St Agatha of Catania (c 250).

  Dad took the bag out of the fridge and said, ‘This is brilliant, but it isn’t cake. It’s pastry.’

  I realized then that my memory wasn’t about cakes, it was about quiche. It’s sad and worrying to think that you can forget bits of your favourite memory.

  On the brighter side, pastry is more versatile than cake, because you can make it into a tart. We made one using the apples we were supposed to eat after supper. We sliced and sugared them, fanned them out on the pastry base, put them in the oven and went to wash our hair. The smell of baking apples filled the house. We sat at the top of the stairs, just smelling it, while Dad sorted out our smart clothes. Luckily we’d worn them yesterday and they hadn’t gone into the wash yet. Dad spruced them up with an iron and a sponge. He combed my hair, then stood back, looked at the two of us and went, ‘Excellent. Truly excellent. Let’s party!’

  ‘Can we have a bit of the tart first? Or some toast? Anything? We’re starving.’

  ‘Hunger is the best sauce. There’ll be food there.’

  I carried the still-warm tart across the Close. Terry waved us in and took the pie off me.

  Dad said, ‘I’ve been hearing all about your tie.’

  Terry made it play the tune again. We laughed, but the tune went on longer than the laugh and we all had to stand for a while listening to the tie.

  ‘Well, that’s all, folks,’ said Terry when it finally finished. ‘The others are in the living room.’

  The others were four very clean men in white shirts and one bald tatty man in an old suit. They were all sitting in a circle, holding bits of paper. The tart was not in there and neither was any other food.

  The man in the suit shook Dad’s hand and said, ‘Welcome to the Portland Meadows Homewatch. I’m your community police officer – Eddie. Obviously there is no community here yet, but you know what I mean. I’m here when you need me – whether it’s for advice or help or just a cup of tea.’

  Dad sat down and we sat on each side of him.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you – we’ve got Christmas coming up; these are new houses. Statistically, you are going to get done. When you do, you give me a call. I give you a crime number and you claim on your insurance.’ And he handed round some little cards with his phone number on.

  Anthony nudged me, pointed to his stomach, then his head, and made little scissory movements with his fingers. He was miming, ‘My stomach thinks my throat is cut.’ I knew, because my stomach was feeling the same way. To make matters worse, we could still smell the tart sitting out in the kitchen, all on its own.

  Terry leaned forward. We leaned forward too. Maybe this was it. But instead of offering us food, he started on about his stereo. ‘You see, this baby cost me close to three grand.’ He pointed to a spaghetti of wires and cables sprawling around the room. ‘I put it together myself. I spent ages deciding what to get, scoping out the best deals. That is part of me. If someone nicked that, I don’t know what I’d do. It’d be like losing part of me. It’d be like a forced amputation. And the same with the computer, obviously. I mean, my memories are in there and my soul. If I lost that, it’d be like a bereavement. They’re part of me, my belongings.’

  He didn’t mention any edible belongings.

  ‘You can get an alarm or a dog,’ said the community police officer. ‘If you make it hard for them, they’ll move on to the next house. In this case, your neighbour’s house. Some of you might feel that that’s a bit antisocial. I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah, but I worked for this house, you know. This is me, this house. If I could—’

  One of the very clean young men leaned forward and said, ‘Isn’t the problem here that our houses are built on sand?’

  Dad sat up suddenly. ‘Sand? They’re not, are they? No, no. I was here when the footings were dug.’

  The policeman said, ‘
I think we’re talking metaphorically here, aren’t we? It’s in the Bible, isn’t it – not building your house on sand, not putting your light under a bushel, all that.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the cleanest young man. ‘Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 26.’

  ‘D’you mind me asking,’ said the policeman, ‘is the kettle actually on?’

  Terry went out to the kitchen. While he was gone, the policeman said to the clean young men, ‘So, at a guess, Mormons.’

  ‘Latter-day Saints,’ said one of the men. ‘People call us Mormons, but we prefer Latter-day Saints. I’m Eli. This is Amos and that’s John.’

  This was exciting. ‘You’re saints!’ I said.

  ‘Latter-day Saints.’

  ‘But saints, though.’

  The community police officer starting shuffling his papers and asked if there were any questions.

  I put my hand up and asked, ‘What exactly is a virgin martyr?’

  Dad coughed and said, ‘It’s something they’ve been doing in school. Damian, why don’t you go and help Terry in the kitchen. Anthony, you too.’

  In the kitchen, Terry was spooning instant coffee into a mug. That’s just one mug. The apple tart was on the side. We’d put cinammon on it and some raisins. It smelt like a mixture of Christmas and summer. It was sitting on the side with no one bothering it. It was not going anywhere.

  ‘Dad said we had to come and help you.’

  ‘It’s just a mug of coffee. There’s nothing to do.’

  It really was just one mug of coffee. My tummy made a noise almost as if it heard him. ‘You could go and ask that copper if he takes sugar.’

  Anthony didn’t move. ‘Our mum’s dead. Did we tell you?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, you did,’ said Terry. This time he went for his cupboard. It was stuffed with big party packs of crisps. From somewhere underneath them, he pulled out two Penguins. He offered them to us, saying, ‘Here, take these. Save them for home. I don’t want crumbs on my carpet.’