Framed

  ‘If you’d thought it through you might have got away with it.’

  ‘I don’t want to get away with it. I don’t want to do a robbery. I told you. I’m happy.’

  ‘Come on, everyone has a dream.’

  A faraway look came into Tom’s eyes. ‘You know I’ve got these super-articulated models of the Turtles? Well, apparently they made one of Splinter too. Only you never see them in the shops. They’re only available as a Japanese import.’

  ‘Maybe you could steal one of them,’ said Minnie.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Tom. ‘I might look on eBay.’

  ‘Your trouble,’ said Minnie, ‘is that you give up too easily.’

  29 March

  Cars today:

  RED FORD KA – Ms Stannard (stopped for petrol, a Twix and firelighters)

  VAUXHALL ASTRA ESTATE 1.9 CDTi –

  Mr Davis (just reversing)

  BLUE LEXUS – Mr Choi (stopped for petrol)

  WHITE MONTEGO – Mr Evans (noisy gearbox and squeaky windscreen wiper)

  RED TOYOTA PRIUS T4 AUTOMATIC –

  Dr Ramanan and family – (fill up, oil check, air check, brake fluid and party pack of Hula Hoops)

  GREEN DAIHATSU COPEN – Mrs Egerton

  Weather – wet

  Note: NO BALL GAMES

  This one’s an easy one to remember. Ms Stannard came round to show us the new Ka (top speed 108 mph) that she got from the insurance people and I became the very last boy in Manod town.

  I remember Dr Ramanan coming in for that big pack of Hula Hoops because that was the last time I saw Mohan. Mohan was the only other boy in our school, and on 29 March he moved out.

  When I first started at Manod Elementary there were ten other boys – just enough for a game of five-a-side, with one man on the bench. Unfortunately, five of them were the Ellis brothers, so when Mr Ellis went off to London to work on the New Thames Barrier, that was half the boys in the school gone and no more five-a-side, just three-a-side. It was OK if you had rush goalies. Then Terry Tailor’s mam went off to learn to be a teacher, and Terry went with her. Then Wayne and Lewis Martin moved to Manchester because their new dad was in computers. He bought them a season ticket for City, and we were down to just kicking the ball around. Then Mr Ellis told Paddy Parry’s dad that he could get him work on the New Barrier too, so off went Paddy, leaving me and Mohan with nothing to play except penalties.

  The New Barrier, by the way, is this big floating wall thing that’s supposed to stop London flooding again. They started to build it when the Old Barrier broke that time. Amazing that a place the size of London has to ask a little place like Manod for help to build its barriers. But that’s how good Manod is, I suppose.

  When he came in to pay, Dr Ramanan said to Mam, ‘I won’t say goodbye, Mrs Hughes, because I’ll still be your doctor. We hope to see you very often.’ Which is not really what you want your doctor to say.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ said Dad.

  ‘I’m sad to leave the people, but really there’s nothing here for us now.’

  Nothing here? There’s everything here!

  There’s an off-licence (open from 6.30 p.m.), a Spar (only one unaccompanied child allowed in at any one time), unisex hairdressing at Curl Up N Dye, Mr Elsie’s chemist’s shop, and Mr Davis’s butcher’s shop, which has ‘Always meat to please you; always pleased to meet you’ written over the door. This isn’t strictly true, as he’s never pleased to meet you. When you go in, he says, ‘Well?’ You tell him what you want. He weighs it out and then he just points to the price on the till. Oh, and there’s a shop called Save-A-Packet (‘where you save money because we don’t have packets’). They have these big bins full of dry goods and you scoop out as much washing powder, or cornflakes, or whatever, as you like and then you pay at the till. We never go in there because Mam likes to know what she’s buying, and of course the stuff in the barrels has no brand name. Or ingredients. Or sell-by date.

  The best shop is the Mountain Rescue Charity Shop. They sell all kinds of things there. For instance, I got a skateboard there once for £3.50. When Jade Porty saw it, she said it used to be hers but she’d given it away ‘to the poor children. And now you’ve got it. So you must be poor’. Which is a bit mad, because the shop isn’t for poor children. It’s for lost and injured mountaineers. I love looking in the window, because it’s different every time. Sometimes a thing – say, a hat – will be in the window, and the next day it’s gone. And you can wonder about who bought it and then you’ll see it somewhere in Manod – for instance, on Mr Morgan’s head.

  And there’s Waterloo Park. That’s a fantastic park that used to have a boating lake, a water feature and an indoor pavilion in case it rains. The pavilion was like a wooden house that had two ping-pong tables in it and, of course, a snooker table. Manod used to be globally famous for snooker tables. The quarry at the top of Manod Mountain used to produce the smoothest slate in Wales. It’s closed now, but when it was open all the best snooker tables in the world were made of Manod slate. Minnie says there’s one in Buckingham Palace and one in the Crucible in Sheffield. And there is one in the pavilion in Waterloo Park. It’s still there, but you can’t see it because the pavilion is padlocked and the windows are boarded up. The lake and the pavilion were closed a few years back because of all these problems with insurance. But it’s still a great park. For instance, round the lake there’s a great big wooden fence with a mural on it showing Scenes from the Life of Elvis Presley. That was Mr Davis’s idea. He actually saw Elvis once, in Harlech Home and Bargain, when everyone else thought he was dead.

  When they quarried the slate, they more or less hollowed out the mountain. They threw the bits they couldn’t use all over the top of the mountain. All the other mountains around here have grass on the top. Ours is covered in broken slate. Basically they turned the mountain inside out. I mean, how many towns have got an inside-out mountain at the end of the High Street?

  Slate is legend, by the way, and not just for snooker tables. You can make roofing tiles, doorsteps, fireplaces, floor tiles. Anything. In Manod, we’ve got slate roofs, slate doorsteps, slate window sills. There’s even a slate pillar box and, by our school gates (slate), a statue of a man made of slate. And a slate bus shelter with a sign on the gable that says ‘No Ball Games’. And when you go indoors, slate tiles on the kitchen floor. And a slate clock, we’ve got. You can write on slate too. They used to use it for blackboards in school. On the slate bus shelter, someone has written, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!’ in great big letters. They’re only joking, of course. That’s the thing about Manod people. They’ve got a sense of humour. As Dad says, ‘They have to, or they wouldn’t stay here.’

  The whole of Manod – from the pub at the bottom to our garage at the top – is one colour. Slate colour. Grey, in fact. As Dad says, ‘It’s not the most interesting colour in the world, but it does go with the clouds.’

  The only thing in Manod that’s not grey – apart from the Elvis mural – is the cars. Dr Ramanan’s car, for instance, was that deep red you only get on a Toyota. It looked like a big lady’s fingernail.

  As he started up the engine, Dad said to him, ‘Manod has the lowest crime rate in Britain, Doc. You can’t sniff at that.’

  Dr Ramanan said, ‘It also has the highest rainfall, of course. And perhaps the two are related.’

  And then they went. I saw Mohan looking out of the heated rear window and I gave him a wave and thought, ‘There goes my last chance of a game of footy.’

  It’s not that Mohan was much good. He had a left foot you could open tins with but it was a bit random, which meant that you spent most of the afternoon climbing over the wall to get the ball back and not developing your skills at all. But it was better than nothing, which is what I have now.

  When the Ramanans’ Toyota pulled off the forecourt, I remember thinking that the steering looked a bit mushy. I said to Dad, ‘The steering looks a bit mushy.’

  ‘I’m sure they know ho
w to sort out steering in Blaenau.’

  And as the Toyota drove away, he just kept staring at the number plate. I do that sometimes – see how far away something goes before you can’t see it properly. I said to him, ‘Fancy a game of penalties after tea?’

  ‘No thank you,’ he said, and went off into the workshop and shut the door behind him, even though there was no car in there for him to work on.

  Tom’s mam came to collect him in her little Copen. Tom wanted to say goodnight to Dad, but Minnie told him not to bother as he was in a bad mood.

  ‘Why’s that then?’ said Tom.

  Minnie said, ‘You know you’re not supposed to count your chickens before they’ve hatched? Well, imagine if you waited till they hatched, and then you fed the chicks and made sure they had water and antifreeze and oil checks, and then they grew up and flew away.’

  Tom said, ‘I’m not sure you’re supposed to give chickens antifreeze anyway.’

  ‘No, but. . .’ said Minnie. ‘Nothing. Goodnight.’

  Dad didn’t come out even at closing time. Mam decided to try to cheer him up with a fish supper from Mr Chipz. She bought me a cheese pie without asking. Marie had rice instead of chips because she’s watching her figure. Minnie had bean sprouts with peas because she’s so unusual. And we got Dad a huge haddock.

  When we got back, Dad said he wasn’t hungry. Then I said, ‘We’ve got you a huge haddock.’ And he was persuaded.

  When we were all sitting down, Dad said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you and it’s this: the Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel is in trouble.’

  Everyone started asking what kind of trouble, but he held his fork up and we all went quiet again.

  ‘Today we’ve lost a valuable customer. Over the last year, we’ve lost nearly all our most valuable customers. And today we had a call from our petrol supplier. Normally they just put petrol in the tanks and collect the money once it’s all sold. The problem is, we take an unusually long time to sell their petrol. They don’t think it’s worth coming up here any more. They say the only way they’ll give us petrol is if we pay up front. Now, you can’t have a garage with no petrol, so what I want to know is, what is Team Hughes going to do about that?’

  Everyone in Team Hughes had a different idea.

  Marie’s idea was to sell up and move to London so she could get famous and we could all be part of her entourage.

  I said, ‘We can’t sell the garage. This is where we live! That’s the whole point.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Dad, ‘we wouldn’t get that much for it. Not enough to move to London.’

  Mam’s idea was that we turn the Snowdonia Oasis into something more than a garage. ‘If you look at our two competitors,’ she said, ‘they’re both more than garages. First, there’s the filling station on the A496 – and that’s more than a garage because it’s a Little Chef. And the other one is on the Blaenau bypass and that’s more than a garage too, because it’s an Asda.’

  ‘But you can’t just turn into an Asda,’ said Dad.

  ‘We could open a cafe. Or a bed and breakfast. We could call it the Mountain View’.

  Dad wasn’t convinced. ‘The mountain view in question is a bit grey, isn’t it? It’s not pretty.’

  I said, ‘It’s not pretty. It’s unique. Our mountain is inside out.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Dad, ‘but I’m not sure it’s an advantage.’

  Minnie’s idea was an insurance job. That’s when you burn the garage down, say it was an accident and then make a claim on the insurance. No one thought that was a good idea.

  ‘You can’t burn the garage down,’ said Mam.

  ‘It’s easier than you think,’ said Minnie, and she went into worrying detail about how to set fire to your own house. ‘We’re off to a head start with all this petrol lying about. All we’d need is some trained rats. You let them run under the floorboards with burning rags tied to their tails.’ Honestly, she did make it sound very easy. She even offered to go through the insurance policies and work out how much we’d get. But Dad put his foot down.

  ‘We are not going to burn the Oasis down,’ he said. ‘This is our home and Team Hughes is going to fight to keep that home. That’s the whole point. Am I right?’

  ‘Not just keep it,’ said Mam. ‘We’re going to make it better than ever. We’re going to make it grow.’

  ‘Grow into what, though?’ said Marie.

  ‘We are going to make the Snowdonia Oasis Auto,’ said Mam, and she was glowing when she said it, ‘into the premier indoor attraction in Manod.’

  And everyone clapped. And Dad gave me some of his haddock.

  6 April

  Cars today:

  CARBON BLACK BMW M5 – went up the mountain road!

  RED NISSAN X-TRAIL – went up the mountain road!

  TWO WHITE COMBI VANS – went up the mountain road!

  Weather – cloudy. And rainy

  Note: COWABUNGA!

  You can learn a lot about life by watching the Turtles.

  For instance, in ‘Enter the Shredder’ the Mouser Robots completely destroy the Turtles’ sewer-lair – where they’ve lived for fifteen years – and then kidnap their revered master, Splinter. Do the Turtles sit there wondering how to pay for petrol? No. They go and look for him. They burrow through collapsed sewers. They track the Mouser Robots by following the trail of destruction. They fight the Purple Dragon street gang and finally rescue Splinter so everything ends up back the way it was, the way it’s supposed to be.

  If the Turtles can cope with a completely wrecked home and a kidnapped master, then Team Hughes can raise the money for a tank of petrol.

  Dad bought an old Mini Cooper S (top speed 90 mph) at the police auction in Harlech. It needed loads of work doing to it. But it had all its original features. For instance, the knob of the gearstick was made of leather and the indicator arm had a little light on the end that flashed when you were signalling, like a tiny Lightsaber. Dad said it was just the kind of thing that went down well on eBay.

  Mam had the brilliant idea of keeping the computer in the shop, so that people can have Internet access for a pound for half an hour. Mr Morgan uses it to email his son, who is in Australia. This causes friction with Marie, who does her coursework on the computer. So, in a way, it’s good that only Mr Morgan’s used it so far.

  Also, Mam started shopping in Save-A-Packet instead of Asda. She bought the loose cornflakes. You could get a bag the size of a sleeping bag for the same price as one box of Easy Porridge. Bargain!

  It turns out that the reason they don’t put the ingredients on the cornflake tub in Save-A-Packet is because there are no ingredients in the cornflakes. When you put milk on them, they sort of disappear. Instead of a bowl of cornflakes, it looks like a bowl of lumpy yellow milk.

  No one complained. Team Hughes was working together.

  We didn’t even complain when Mam cancelled our TV subscription channels. It was a pity about Cartoon Network. But we still had the Welsh-language cartoon channel, which was free. It had all the Welsh cartoons – Super Ted, Will Cwac Cwac – and all your favourites translated into Welsh. It was a nice change hearing Michelangelo say, ‘Dwy’n hoffi partio!’ instead of, ‘I like to party!’

  While we were eating our lumpy yellow milk, Mam said, ‘The Bala Lake Sea Scouts are having a car-boot sale today at Bala Marina. Can we go there and raise the money for petrol? What do you say?’

  Marie said, ‘You mean, you want us to sell some of our stuff?’

  ‘Nothing too special. Just things you’ve got bored with or grown out of. How about it?’

  I said, ‘Would my Legotechnic do?’

  ‘Dylan,’ said Mam, ‘Legotechnic would be perfect. Good boy.’

  Minnie said, ‘What about all your football stuff . .. your shin pads, and all those replica tops? It’s not like you’re going to be able to play an actual game for years.’

  I said, ‘Well . . .’

  And then she said, ‘Or what about your Play
Station 2? You’ve got no one to play that with either.’

  ‘You can play that on your own. That’s the point.’

  Mam said, ‘Just the Lego, Dylan. Thank you.’

  So I got a bag of Lego. Marie got some old clothes and CDs. Minnie got her ‘Country Vet’ kit, the one with the real thermometer. Mam said, ‘That’s lovely, but I thought you needed that. I thought you were going to be a vet when you grow up.’

  Minnie said, ‘I’ve got other ideas now.’ And she winked at me.

  We haven’t got a car as such, but we have got a tow truck – a 1997 Wrangler (top speed 110 mph), 59,000 on the clock, a special edition with chrome bumpers. We were just getting into it when Mrs Egerton’s tiny Copen tootled on to the forecourt and Tom got out with this huge bag.

  ‘Show Mrs Hughes,’ said Nice Tom’s mam.

  He showed us what was in the bag. Turtles stuff. Tons of it: lunch boxes, the strap-on shell, the Sewer Scooter, you name it.

  His mam said, ‘He wants to sell it. To help you out.’

  Tom didn’t really look like he wanted to sell it. He looked like he wanted to cry. Our mam said, ‘That’s kind, but there’s no need. It’s our garage. We’ll sort it out.’

  ‘No, no. He loves his job here. Tell them, Tom.’

  Tom said, ‘I love my job here.’

  ‘He’d much rather have his job than a silly lunch box he should’ve grown out of years ago. Tell them, Tom.’

  Tom said, ‘I’d much rather have my job than an original Turtles lunch box from the very first series with the special pizza-slice holder inside.’

  ‘Go on, get in,’ said his mam. So he did, and off we went. Tom said he hadn’t brought the best Turtles stuff, not the super-poseable models or the Turtle Lair with extra sewage piping. It was just what he could spare. But the minute he put it all out on the trestle table behind the car, we were surrounded by people wanting to buy it. And Tom was surprisingly hard about the price. Someone wanted to buy the strap-on shell for five pounds. He made them pay twenty-five. ‘It’s highly collectable,’ he said. ‘And still in its box. They go for forty on eBay.’ He got thirty for the Sewer Scooter. It all went in the first half-hour, apart from the lunch box.