Framed

  We had a few problems with the Legotechnic, namely that Max kept trying to eat it. And then he kept trying to throw it at people. So it was a relief when Big Evans came and bought it all. He’s a friend of my dad’s. His daughter is in my class. Her name is Terrible Evans. It’s not just me who calls her that, by the way. Everyone does. She’s got two pigtails. That sounds nice and girly, but actually they make her look like a Viking.

  ‘Is that Legotechnic?’ said Big. ‘She’s into all that. Costs a packet in the shops. How much do you want then?’

  I said, ‘Twenty-five quid.’

  Terrible said, ‘It’s not worth it, Dad. He’s trying to rip you off.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s not. I’m sure he’s just trying to raise a little money, like the rest of us.’ He started talking to Mam about how he was thinking of going up to London to work on the New Barrier.

  ‘We’ll give you a tenner,’ said Terrible.

  ‘Fifteen,’ I said.

  Big gave us twenty. Which was nice of him.

  Terrible is the only girl in school who likes the Turtles. She’s got a Turtles pencil case and she sometimes wears socks with a pizza-slice pattern. And now she was looking at the Michelangelo lunch box. Tom opened it so she could see the special pizza-slice holder. You could see she wanted it. Girls and lunch boxes. With boys it’s football teams. With girls it’s lunch boxes. The girls with the Tracy Beaker lunch boxes all sit together, but they never sit with the girls with the Bratz lunch boxes. And neither of them will sit with that girl with the Will Cwac Cwac lunch box.

  Tom said, ‘It’s from when they were first out, look. So it’s collectable. I’ll take fifteen for it. The Michelangelo ones are the most popular.’

  She looked at it and said, ‘Michelangelo’s a pillock.’ That’s how terrible Terrible is. She can’t even cope with someone liking a different Turtle.

  In the end Tom got twelve for it. He’d made nearly a hundred quid altogether. He looked so happy, it made me wish I’d brought my PS2 and sold that.

  Marie sold all the clothes she’d brought. Minnie sold the country vet thing and Mam sold everything, including a set of patio furniture we got years ago when Dad was planning to build a patio. Altogether we made nearly £300. Mam was really proud of us. She gave us a pound each and told us to go and buy ourselves something from the stalls while she packed up. We had to take Max with us.

  The field was mostly full of boring estates and hatchbacks, a couple of people carriers and one funny electric car. Every car had a table next to it, most of them covered in old lamps and kettles and packs of old Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Except the one next to the electric car, which was covered in leaflets about solar power.

  Minnie said, ‘This’d be a great place to do a robbery. Just jump in one of the cars and drive off.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marie. ‘Brilliant if you’ve got the urge to steal two old desk lamps and a book about the Queen.’ She didn’t want anything from the car-boot sale, so she walked up to the High Street and got herself a tube of Tanfastic, which is fake sun tan that you rub on your legs. It’s very convincing if it’s done right.

  Minnie found this immense Dictionary of Crime and Criminals with a pull-out chart of ‘Master Criminals’ inside.

  Tom came back with something in a big shoebox. I asked him if it was Turtles stuff. He shook his head and a weird little scratchy noise came from inside the box. I thought it was best not to ask.

  I chose a little ball with a bell inside it for Max.

  When we got back to the Wrangler, Mam wasn’t there. We found her standing by this silver Montego Estate (I’m constantly impressed by the ample boot capacity of the Montego, by the way), staring at a huge metal box with taps and dials and knobs all over it. It looked like a fiendish machine from Shredder’s lair.

  ‘What the shell?!?’ said Tom.

  ‘A Gaggia,’ said Mam. ‘It’s for making coffee with.’ She was biting her lip.

  ‘What’s wrong with a kettle?’ said Marie.

  ‘You’re right. You’re right. Of course you’re right. Let’s go,’ said Mam.

  We were all getting back into the Wrangler when Mam suddenly strode off across the field towards the Montego. The next thing we knew, two massive blokes were putting the big metal box in the back of our truck. Mam said, ‘A hundred quid! ONE hundred! It’s exactly what we need.’ All the way back home, she talked about all the different kinds of coffee we’d be able to make and sell with the Gaggia. ‘The Oasis Auto Marvel is on its way,’ she said. ‘We’ll sell the best cup of coffee between Snowdon and the sea. Wait till your dad sees this!’

  When he saw it, Dad said, ‘A hundred quid!’ He sounded just as surprised about the price as Mam, but less happy. ‘A hundred quid!’ he kept saying.

  Mam said, ‘All it needs is filter papers. And coffee. Oh. And a plug.’

  ‘A plug,’ said Dad. ‘A hundred quid – and it hasn’t even got a plug! How do you know it even works?’

  ‘If it doesn’t work,’ said Mam, ‘you can fix it.’ Which is true, see. He can fix anything.

  Dad went off to his workshop and shut the door.

  ‘You’ve got no vision!’ shouted Mam. And she went into the house and she shut that door.

  We all stood on the forecourt for a while. There was another scratchy sound from inside Tom’s box. He looked at it like he’d forgotten about it and said, ‘I got a present for Mr Hughes. Shall I give it to him now, d’you think?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Minnie. ‘Might cheer him up.’

  Inside the workshop, Dad’s legs were sticking out from under the Mini.

  Tom said, ‘Mr Hughes?’

  Dad grunted.

  ‘Mr Hughes, Minnie said you were worried because your chickens had flown the nest and you hadn’t counted your eggs. So I got you this . . .’

  Dad slid out from under the car and stared at Tom.

  ‘It’s a present,’ said Tom, handing him the box.

  Dad lifted the lid of the box and looked inside. And looked and looked, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  ‘It is chickens,’ he said. ‘Two chickens.’

  ‘And a starter pack of chicken feed,’ said Tom, bringing the packet out from behind his back.

  Dad put the box down on the floor and gently tipped the chickens out. They ran straight back into the box and huddled together in the corner.

  ‘I thought you could have free-range hens. And sell free-range eggs,’ said Tom.

  ‘We could. We could,’ said Dad. ‘A few chickens round the place will give us a bit of atmosphere.’

  But the chickens weren’t really into ranging. Tom had bought them from this man who rescued chickens from factory farms, so they’d always lived in tiny little cages. And now they were too agoraphobic to come out.

  ‘Sorry about that, Mr Hughes,’ said Tom.

  ‘No problem. I’m sure they’ll come out when they’re ready. What shall we call them?’

  Everyone looked at Minnie – what with her being the genius.

  Minnie looked at the box. ‘How can we give them names before we’ve had a proper look at them?’ she said. ‘We’ll have to wait till they emerge.’

  We took the box outside and waited by the car vac for the chickens to emerge. They must have been even more agoraphobic than we first thought, because they never did emerge. Mam did, though. She emerged from the house at about two hundred miles per hour, plonked Max on my knee and disappeared into the workshop. We could hear her shouting but we couldn’t make out any words except every now and then Dad yelling, ‘A hundred quid!’

  This went on for a very long time. The sky got dark. We got hungry. I was thinking, Maybe if I’d sold the PS2, we’d’ve made more money and they wouldn’t be having this fight.

  I looked in my pocket in case I had any chocolate, and I found the little ball I had bought for Max. I sat him on the floor and rolled it at him. He laughed, but it was the jingly noise, not the beauty of a ball in motion, that interested him. A
ll the same, I carried on doing it. Once or twice he did sort of poke it with his foot, like a nearly kick.

  Minnie said, ‘Bit early to start working on his ball skills, isn’t it?’

  I said, ‘If I have to wait seven years for my next game of football, I’m going to make sure it’s a good one.’

  That’s when it happened. A set of headlights suddenly lit up the forecourt. Our shadows chased across the petrol pumps and the Alta Gaz. Max jumped up into my arms out of fright. A Nissan X-Trail (top speed 110 mph), a BMW M5 (top speed an amazing 161 mph!) and two Toyota HiAce vans swept on to the forecourt out of nowhere. Me and Minnie and Tom just stared as they rolled up to the mountain gate. The driver of the BMW wound down his window (he was a very clean man, by the way) and he said, ‘If you could open the gate for us, we’d be very grateful. Thank you.’

  We all ran over to open the gate. The man said, ‘Thank you,’ and the vehicles started to move through the gate and head off up the mountain.

  Tom said, ‘What the shell?!?’

  Max kept shouting, ‘Car! Car! Car!’ which is sort of what I was thinking too – except I was also thinking, Those tyres are no good for off-roading.

  The door of the workshop opened and Mam and Dad came out. They weren’t shouting at each other any more. They were staring, like the rest of us. Even Marie came out in the end. ‘Unexpected traffic on the mountain road,’ she said. ‘Probably the biggest thing that’s ever happened in the whole history of Manod.’

  We couldn’t stop looking. Even one of the chickens stuck its head out of the box after a while.

  ‘Where are they going?’ said Tom.

  Dad said, ‘Nowhere. I mean, that’s where the mountain road goes, isn’t it? Nowhere.’

  ‘Unless the Sellwood ladies have suddenly decided to have lots of friends over,’ said Mam.

  But the cars kept going well past the Sellwoods’ place. We could see the smudges of headlights every now and then as they worked their way up the twisty road. Then suddenly a streak of light punched into the clouds, right up near the top. Everyone went, ‘Wow!’ all together. The light stayed there, sticking and spreading out, like a frozen firework.

  Minnie said, ‘Like some strange alien searchlight scanning the skies for a long-lost mother ship!’

  I said, ‘That’s the Nissan. It’s got safari lights mounted on the roof rack. And a heated glove compartment so you can keep your takeaway warm.’

  And Tom said, ‘Cowabunga!’

  7 April

  Cars today:

  BLUE LEXUS – Mr Choi (didn’t stop)

  CARBON BLACK BMW M5 – the shiny man (would have bought coffee)

  Weather – rain

  Note: THE BEST BITS ARE BETWEEN THE LINES

  In other words, they still hadn’t come down the mountain!

  Nice Tom is supposed to come to work at eight o’clock. When I went out to get the milk at seven o’clock, he was already there on the doorstep, staring up at the mountain. He said, ‘They didn’t come down then?’

  I said, ‘No, they didn’t.’

  ‘I wonder what they’re doing up there.’

  Minnie, by the way, had lots of ideas about what they were doing. ‘They’re most likely a criminal organization setting up an impregnable mountain headquarters from where they can take over the world.’

  ‘Like Shredder?’ said Tom.

  ‘A bit like Shredder,’ she said, ‘but people, not giant intelligent mutated rats.’ By now she’d put the chart of famous criminals up on her wall. Bonnie and Clyde were on there and Al Capone and Vincenzo Perugia (the one who stole the Mona Lisa). She spent ages looking at their faces. ‘Some people say there’s a criminal type, you know. That all criminals have a certain look. What d’you think?’ She pointed to a picture of Toto Riina (the head of the Mafia) and said, ‘Don’t you think he looks a bit like Tom?’

  ‘Tom is not a criminal. He’s just frustrated.’

  ‘What about her? I think she looks a bit like me.’

  She pointed to Anne Bonny, the pirate queen. She looked absolutely nothing like Minnie.

  After breakfast (lumpy yellow milk again), me and Tom went and stood by the car vac and did some more staring up at the mountain. The big shoebox with the chickens in it was still there. Every now and then we’d hear a scratching from inside.

  I said, ‘Minnie says we can’t give them names until they come out, right. But what if they won’t come out until they’ve got names?’

  ‘How d’you mean, Dylan?’ said Tom.

  ‘Well, if they had names, we could call them. We can’t call them if they haven’t got names, can we?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to think up names though,’ said Tom. ‘I haven’t got the skills.’

  ‘Well, you bought them, Tom, so we should call them Donatello and Leonardo, like the Turtles.’

  Tom smiled, and it was the most immense smile I’d ever seen in my life. It totally rearranged his face and he looked like a completely different person. ‘Only one thing,’ he said. ‘It could be Michelangelo, not Leonardo. Michelangelo is the party dude.’

  So we called, ‘Michelangelo . . . Donatello . . .’ and the minute we said it, this tiny, feathery black head peeped out of the box.

  Tom went, ‘Yes! Look at that!’ The feathery head went back in again, obviously.

  I started calling them quietly again. In case you don’t know, by the way, Donatello is the clever Turtle. Raphael is the angry Turtle. Leonardo is the grownup Turtle and Michelangelo is the party dude. Everyone usually likes Michelangelo to start with. He’s the one who eats lots of pizza and says, ‘I like to party!’ (Dwy’n hoffi partio!) Most people think he says it too often. Like about ten times in each episode, which means that if you were watching it on Cartoon Network, he might say it like fifty times before breakfast. So they tend to move on from Michelangelo. But not Tom. Because he’s so loyal.

  All the way to school that morning, I just kept looking up at the mountain behind me, in case the cars came back down. They didn’t. And the longer they didn’t, the more amazing it was.

  ‘Told you,’ said Minnie. ‘International criminal organization. They’re probably setting up their satellite tracking station as we speak.’

  I said, ‘The police wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘Bought them off,’ said Minnie.

  Our policeman is Sergeant Hunter. We only really see him once a year, when he comes over from Blaenau to do cycling proficiency with Year Six. He didn’t seem the type that you could buy off. But then, as Minnie pointed out, ‘If an international criminal organization wanted to build a satellite tracking station, what could Sergeant Hunter do about it?’

  Our school is twinned with a school in Malawi called Gumbi. We saved up and bought their school a computer and a modem so we could all swap emails once a week. We’re supposed to pick one person and write them an email about life in Manod. We were each given a photograph of someone to write to. Mine was a boy called George. The photo showed him holding a football with a whole bunch of mates, under a sign that said ‘Welcome to Gumbi’. So that’s two differences between Gumbi and Manod. Gumbi’s got boys and Gumbi’s got a sign.

  This is Minnie’s email to Gumbi (it was to a girl named Nelly):

  Dear Nelly,

  We live in a small town at the bottom of a big mountain. In the old days, there was a famous quarry at the top of the mountain. The men who worked up there had to get up at five in the morning to walk to the quarry. They put little white stones all along the path so that they could see their way in the dark. A hundred years ago there were four thousand men working up there. Four thousand men walking up the mountain road past the Misses Sellwood’s place. It’s amazing to think of it. When they got there, they mostly made slate for roofs. They used to bring the slate out and cut it into tiles out in the open. There were different kinds of tiles such as Empress, Duchess, Countess and Wide Ladies. In the winter it was so cold they called it the North Pole and they had to cut the tiles in sp
ecial underground shelters called caban crwn. That’s why they got sick. Because when they cut the slate indoors, the dust went straight into their lungs. They were mostly dead before they were fifty. That doesn’t sound that young, but it means that hardly anyone in Manod has a grandad.

  Nowadays Manod has the lowest crime rate in the United Kingdom, but back then it was more interesting. An infamous and bloody murder was done in one of the caban in 1898. What happened was, Thomas Jones and Mary Bruton (aged 33) were walking back over the top when . . .

  And Ms Stannard had deleted all the rest. So it must have been horrible. The email ended with Minnie saying, ‘Let us know all about Gumbi. Especially any infamous and bloody murders.’

  So that’s what Minnie wrote. And this is what I wrote:

  We saw a BMW, a Nissan and two combi vans go up the mountain road.

  That’s all I could think about.

  Ms Stannard said, ‘It’s a bit thin, Dylan. Not very interesting.’

  ‘How can you say that? They went up and didn’t come down. That means they stayed up there all night. Where did they sleep? There’s no houses up there, except the old one by the mine. Did they go down the mine? What are they doing up there? They could have an underground lair . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you say all that?’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘I meant in your letter.’

  ‘Well, it’s sort of between the lines.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, smiling, ‘let’s sort of put it on top of the lines then, shall we?’

  So I wrote:

  We saw a BMW, a Nissan and two vans go up the mountain road and they haven’t come down again yet.

  Ms Stannard said it was still quite sparse and asked me to try and add to it for homework. ‘I know you’ve got new chickens. You could write about them.’

  Ms Stannard said perhaps I’d better take the email home with me and finish it there. ‘Maybe you’ll find something a bit more interesting to write about.’