Lately, each time he’d tried, the memory had been getting blurrier and blurrier.
Now, as Keith pushed his fists into his eyelids, he couldn’t even see the kid’s face.
Perhaps it wasn’t even him.
Keith dusted the pieces of mango with flour and slid them through the bowl of creamy batter and dropped them into the bubbling fat.
Then he opened a tin and did the same with some pineapple rings.
When they’d all turned golden brown he scooped them out with the spatula and put them onto a plate.
He blew hard onto a piece of mango for a couple of minutes, then put it into his mouth.
Mmmm. Nice one. A bit fishy, but otherwise delicious.
He heard footsteps on the stairs and Mum came into the shop.
‘I thought I could smell frying,’ she said sleepily. ‘Keith, what are you doing? It’s Sunday.’
‘Making breakfast,’ said Keith. ‘A typical Australian breakfast.’
Mum’s shoulders sagged. Then she stared at Keith.
‘What have you done to your shirt?’
‘It’s tropical,’ said Keith.
Mum closed her eyes.
Alright, thought Keith, it’s not the most perfect tropical shirt in London but it’s not bad for a first effort.
Next time he’d have to use a tape measure when he cut the sleeves short so they ended up the same length. And he’d have to learn to paint tropical birds a bit better too.
Mum opened her eyes.
‘Why’s it got socks on it?’
‘They’re parrots.’
Mum took a deep breath.
‘Don’t let Dad see it, Keith. After last night he’s liable to do something drastic.’
‘I just want us all to be happy,’ said Keith. ‘We’d be happy in Australia, I know we would.’
Mum looked at him for a long time.
Finally she spoke. ‘I want us to be happy too love, and I’d go to Timbuktu if I thought it’d make any difference.’
She looked around the empty shop and out into the overcast street.
‘But this is our life and we’ve just got to make the best of it. Now get that shirt off before Dad gets up.’
‘What shirt?’ said Dad, coming into the shop in his dressing gown.
He stopped and stared at Keith’s shirt.
Keith saw his forehead clench into angry ripples. Even more than Mum could get on hers.
Dad opened his mouth to speak.
Keith opened his mouth to speak.
Mum beat them both to it.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘let’s have a day at the seaside. We haven’t been to the seaside for years. Let’s have a day at Worthing.’
Keith sat on a deck chair, freezing.
He looked at Mum, sitting on her deck chair, coat buttoned up and scarf wrapped round her throat, doing some knitting. He could tell she was purposely not looking at him.
He looked at Dad, sitting in his deck chair, coat buttoned up, reading the paper. Dad was purposely not looking at him too.
Keith shivered and wished he’d left the sleeves on his tropical shirt. He pulled his jacket tighter round him and wondered if the numbness in his arms was nervous tension or frostbite.
He looked at Mum again.
She smiled at him. He knew it wasn’t a real smile. It was the half-hearted lip-stretch people do on windy beaches on overcast days when they want to pretend they’re having fun.
Keith looked out across the pebbles. This is ridiculous, he thought. Two hours we’ve been here and neither of them have asked me why I’ve got a white nose.
He touched his nose to make sure the white coating was still on it.
Yep.
Ask me, thought Keith, ask me.
Because then he could tell them.
‘It’s the zinc cream people wear in Australia to protect their noses from the sun that shines all day, every day, 365 days of the year.’
And then they’d have to ask themselves why they were freezing to death on Worthing beach when they could be lying under palm trees in North Queensland.
Keith hoped they couldn’t tell it was really toothpaste.
He sent a double-strength telepathic message to Mum.
Ask me.
Mum closed her eyes and looked as though she was dropping off to sleep.
Keith sighed and decided to get the 50p back he’d paid Dennis Baldwin to teach him the secret of telepathy. Then Dad suddenly screwed up his newspaper and jumped to his feet.
Blimey, thought Keith, my aim must have been crooked.
But Dad didn’t mention white noses or white sandy beaches.
‘OK, that’s it,’ he shouted into the wind. ‘Enough. Finish. We’re going home.’
He started stuffing the thermos and blankets into the picnic bag. Mum opened her eyes, went to say something, then changed her mind.
‘We can’t go yet,’ said Keith. ‘I’ve only just put my zinc cream on.’
Dad came over to Keith and grabbed him by the arm. It hurt.
At least I haven’t got frostbite, thought Keith.
‘I’m only going to say this once more,’ said Dad, ‘so listen very carefully. We are not ever, under any circumstances, going to Australia.’
Nobody spoke on the drive back to London.
Keith sat in the back of the van and stared out into the dusk and tried not to feel sad about going to Australia by himself and leaving Mum and Dad behind and probably never seeing them again.
Why should I feel sad, he thought.
It’s their fault.
I tried.
He felt his eyes getting hot and prickly.
See, he thought, it’s happening already. I’m turning into a misery guts.
He took his mind off things by working out how many potatoes it would take for him to save up the plane fare.
Twenty-five thousand.
He’d better start tomorrow.
Then he closed his eyes and thought about warm white sand and warm turquoise lagoons and glorious pink tropical sunsets.
He opened his eyes just as the van was turning into his street and for a moment he thought he could see one.
A glorious pink tropical sunset.
Then he realised what it was.
A fire.
Blimey, he thought, one of the buildings in our street’s on fire.
Suddenly the van was surrounded by red flashing lights and screaming sirens and men running with hoses.
‘Whose place is it?’ said Mum.
‘Can’t see,’ said Dad.
The van moved slowly forward and Keith tried to see whose place it was.
Then he remembered.
The fryer.
The one he’d cooked breakfast in.
He’d forgotten to switch it off.
7
Keith stood in his street at dawn looking at the sooty wall with the black holes that used to be his life.
The black hole that used to be the kitchen.
The black hole that used to be his bedroom.
The black hole that used to be the shop.
He looked at the edges of the shop hole to see if there was a tiny bit of Tropical Mango that might cheer him up a bit.
Nothing.
Just charred wood and a yellow plastic strip that the fireman had tied across the shop to stop people going in and pinching stuff.
Not that there was anything left to pinch.
Keith realised Mitch Wilson was standing next to him with a bikeload of newspapers, staring at the black holes. After a bit Mitch pulled their paper from his bag, folded it up, handed it to Dad and hurried off, his bike wheels crunching over the glass that used to be the shop window.
Mum started sobbing and Dad put his arm round her.
Owen’s milk truck pulled up with a whine. Owen stared at the black holes.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
Nobody answered.
Keith realised he was the one who should speak.
&n
bsp; ‘I burnt it down,’ he said.
So this is what it feels like to be a misery guts, thought Keith.
He had a vision of spending the rest of his life doing what he’d been doing for most of the day. Lying on cousin Bradley’s bed in Aunty Joyce’s old bathrobe feeling like there was a black hole inside him bigger than any of the ones he’d seen that morning.
The intergalactic gladiators on the posters around Bradley’s bedroom wall glared down at him. Keith knew what they were thinking.
Misery guts.
He stood up.
OK, he thought. The only way I’m going to get out of turning into a misery guts is to think positive.
He picked up all his clothes and laid them out carefully on the bed.
Jacket, scarf, tropical shirt, vest, jeans, socks, underpants, shoes.
He emptied out the pockets of his jacket and jeans and laid those things out too.
Penknife, 84p, hanky, potato peeler, slide of tropical beach, school bus pass, half a stick of Worthing rock, tube of toothpaste.
Could be worse, he thought. Plenty of kids in the world haven’t even got this much. Plenty of kids in the world, if they lost everything in a fire it’d be a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and a plastic bowl, not a desk with two drawers and a cassette player with detachable speakers and a collection of Green Shield stamps that only needed another 8,940 books for the Ford Escort and a leather football and a book about mountain climbers and a life membership to the Mr Bean fan club and a . . .
Stop it.
Think positive.
Mum and Dad still had the clothes they were wearing and there was the van and the picnic basket and the thermos and the deck chairs.
What more did they need to drive to Australia?
He could hear Dad and Uncle Derek downstairs talking to the man from the insurance. Surely the insurance money would be enough to pay for the ferry rides over the sea bits.
I’ve got a choice, thought Keith.
I can go downstairs and tell Mum and Dad how sorry I am and we can all sit around being miserable.
Or I can go down and make it up to them by persuading them to come to Australia where they’ll be happy for ever and ever.
It wasn’t even a choice really.
‘Insurance,’ Uncle Derek was saying, shaking his head, ‘you pay through the nose, then when it’s their turn it’s a different story.’
The leather armchair Dad was sitting in groaned.
Keith was shocked by how droopy Dad’s mouth was. Have to go carefully in Australia, he thought. Too much grinning too quickly and Dad could strain something.
‘They’re being fair,’ Dad was saying, ‘none of the shop equipment was new, or our furniture and clothes and stuff, so you can’t expect them to pay the cost of buying new stuff.’
The room fell silent.
None of them had seen Keith standing in the doorway. He hitched up his bathrobe.
This was his chance.
He ran through in his head the speech he’d prepared about how it didn’t matter so much about being poor if you were happy.
He was about to start saying it when he noticed Mum’s eyes. The rims were bright red. She must have been crying for hours.
Suddenly the words Keith had planned to say were scrambled up in his head.
‘Will you have enough to open a new shop?’ asked Aunty Joyce as she sat down on the settee next to Mum.
The settee groaned.
‘Don’t know,’ said Dad.
Keith stopped trying to remember his first speech and rehearsed the second one, the one about how it was cheaper to open up fish and chip shops near tropical beaches because you didn’t have to spend anything on heating and you could get free salt off the rocks.
He was about to start saying it when Dad sighed.
It was the saddest sigh Keith had ever heard.
He had a vision of them all turning to him after he’d said his speech and just looking at him with long faces and Dad doing another one of those sighs.
He didn’t speak.
Uncle Derek sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. The chair groaned.
‘Come and work for me,’ he said to Dad. ‘Roof insulation’s a growth industry. Big opportunities. OK, you’ll have to hoof it round the country with a salesman’s bag at first, but after a few years, who knows? I’m thinking of expanding into remote control garage doors.’ His face fell. ‘That’s if I can find one that actually works.’
‘Thanks, Derek,’ said Dad in a flat voice. I’ll er . . . I’ll think about it.’
Keith frantically tried to remember his final speech, the one about the 937 varieties of tropical fish on the Great Barrier Reef.
‘You can stay with us as long as you like,’ said Aunty Joyce. ‘We’ve got the spare room and Bradley doesn’t mind sharing with Keith.’
Bradley, hunched in front of the TV, turned and glared at Keith.
Is it 937, thought Keith desperately, or 973?
‘Thanks, Joyce,’ said Mum, ‘but we couldn’t.’
‘Don’t worry about the financial side,’ said Aunty Joyce, ‘you can make it up to us in baby-sitting. You’d like that, wouldn’t you Diana?’
Diana, lying on the floor picking the plastic veneer off her walkman, looked up at Mum.
‘Our last babysitter,’ she said, ‘cut her head open on the microwave.’
Nearly a thousand, thought Keith, that’ll do.
He opened his mouth to speak.
But Mum and Dad, sitting there, looked so unhappy that Keith couldn’t get the words out.
When people were that unhappy it just seemed wrong to try and cheer them up.
Keith had never felt that before in his life but he did now.
And with an awful feeling of dread, he realised what it meant.
It’s happened, he thought. I’ve become a misery guts.
In bed that night he tried everything he could think of to cheer himself up.
Jokes, Mr Bean episodes he knew off by heart, a replay of the time the school team beat Kidbrooke six-nil, memories of when Eric Cox’s mum worked in a chocolate frog factory and she was allowed to bring home the ones without legs.
No good.
He was a misery guts.
As he finally drifted off to sleep, he was half aware of Mum and Dad coming into the room.
They must be sick of all the roof insulation stacked in the spare room, he thought sleepily and rolled over in bed to make space for them.
‘Keith,’ said Dad, ‘are you awake?’
Keith struggled awake.
Bradley was snoring on the blow-up bed on the floor.
Mum and Dad led Keith to the spare room. They sat him on the bed and stood over him. Keith could see piles of roof insulation looming up behind them.
‘Fourteen years we kept that shop going,’ said Dad, ‘and now it’s finished.’
Here it comes, thought Keith sadly. The accusations. The blame.
‘I’m sorry, Dad’ he said.
‘Half a million pieces of fish we sold,’ said Dad.
‘I’m sorry.
‘Twenty-five million chips. Two hundred thousand pickled onions. A hundred thousand bags of peas. And now I’m faced with spending the rest of my life selling roof insulation.’
‘Dad,’ said Keith miserably, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot about the fryer. It’s my fault.’
‘Keith,’ said Mum, ‘Dad and I have made a decision.’
Here it comes, thought Keith. The punishment.
What would it be? Making him leave school to get a job to pay them back? A juvenile correction centre?
‘We’ve decided,’ said Dad, ‘to go to Australia.’
8
On the plane to Istanbul, Keith wrote a postcard.
Dear Uncle Derek and Aunty Joyce,
Please thank your friend the travel agent for fixing up the cheap tickets. When Dad found out how much the full-price ones were I thought he was going to change his mind. I could tell from your
faces you thought he was too. Love to Bradley and Diana and Mum hopes Bradley’s rash from the blow-up bed has cleared up.
Love, Keith.
At Istanbul Airport he wrote another.
Dear Nan and Grandad,
Thanks for the tropical shirt. I’m saving it to wear when we land in Australia. I’ll also wear it when we’ve got rich and you come out for a visit. Nan, I’ve checked up and you can’t get cholera or typhoid in Australia, or Yangzte Fever, so don’t worry. Mum and Dad are well, but Dad is in a bit of a bad mood. He says seven and a half hours is too long to wait between planes. I think he just can’t wait to get to Australia.
Love, Keith.
He wrote two more on the plane to Karachi.
Dear Mr Naylor,
Mum asked me to drop you a line to say thanks for having us to tea last Tuesday and she’s very glad the fire didn’t damage your wallpaper. It’s a small world. Dad is sitting next to a German salesman who sells wallpaper. He’s been telling Dad all about it for over three hours.
Your ex-neighbour, Keith Shipley.
PS. Thankfully you were wrong about taking off in planes. We’ve done it twice now and none of our ear drums have exploded.
Dear Owen,
Please cancel all milk deliveries to our place, if you haven’t already.
Yours sincerely, Keith Shipley.
And another two at Karachi Airport.
Dear Mrs Lambert,
Guess what? We’re in Pakistan and we’ve got upset tummies too. I reckon it’s the sandwiches we bought when they said our next flight was delayed ten hours. Was the plane delayed on your trip to Africa? Please tell the class they’re very welcome to visit us in Australia at any time and that goes for you too but I’d stick to biscuits at the airports.
Yours faithfully, Keith Shipley, Indian subcontinent.
Dear Mr Crouch,
I’ve just been talking to a cleaner who used to live in Bristol till he was deported and he says they’re short of good science teachers here in Pakistan. Bear in mind that the language might be a problem. Dad spent ten minutes trying to tell the guard at the security gate he was only going to Australia cause Mum wanted to. The guard thought he was talking about radial tyres.
Your ex-student, K. Shipley.
PS. I’m sure Dad was only joking.