Our second winner is Samson Two Toure from Waterloo in Sierra Leone. Samson Two is the cleverest boy in the country. Recently his class was given a geography project about irrigation. Some of the other boys got A grades. Samson Two’s project was so good that the government bought it. His father says, “It is important to push your children hard to fulfill their ambitions. Samson Two and I have fun setting achievement targets. For instance, on his tenth birthday he set himself the target of becoming president of our country. I set him the target of winning this competition to ride the Rocket and he did it by writing a computer program that bypassed the ‘on hold’ part of the phone call and put him straight through to the operator. Although he is not interested in fairground rides, he is looking forward to this opportunity to study one of the Wonders of the World.”
I’m sorry, but if you already live in the Waterloo in Sierra Leone, instead of the Waterloo near Bootle, then you really don’t need to go and see the Wonders of the World. Because you already are one of the Wonders of the World—you’ve got jungles and rivers instead of gaso-meters and bypasses. It’s like the Grand Canyon wanting to come and look at the crack in my bedroom ceiling.
Still two lucky winners left to go. During the kerfuffle between lessons the next one was announced:
Our third winner is Max Martinet of Lille in France. Max’s father believes in discipline. “So many children today are allowed to run wild,” he says. “Not Max. I insist that he does exactly what he is told to do. If children are bad, you must punish them. If they are good, you must reward them. Max does as he is told. I told him to win this competition and he did.”
See? All these other kids are getting help from their parents. What’s my dad doing? Valeting the taxi.
The next lesson was media studies with Mr. Middleton, who blatantly hates me. We watched a DVD about the history of washing-powder adverts. No one noticed my phone playing in the background. I wondered how my credit was holding up. I’d now been on hold for three hours. Did it make me want to give up? No. What made me want to give up was the next text message. There were only going to be four winners in the competition, and this was the fourth:
We have a new winner: Hasan Xanadu from Bosnia. Hasan’s father, Edhem, says, “Childhood is a happy time, and how can we be happy if we don’t have the things we want? So I give Hasan everything he wants. After all, it’s only money. And I can always get more money. For instance, he really loves thrill rides and he wanted to be the first ever to ride the Rocket. So I found the number of the girl who won it for charity. I phoned her and I offered to give the charity twice as much money as she could raise with sponsors. Simple! Everyone has their price!”
If the competition was over, then the music should stop and the lines should be closed. But the music was still playing. Then I realized that if he’d bought the German girl’s place, then he wasn’t the fourth winner.
He was a replacement first winner.
There was still one chance left.
And now the music had stopped and there was a ringing sound. I was being put through! I pulled the phone out of my pocket and got ready to speak.
A hand snatched the phone out of my hand. It was Mr. Middleton.
I pleaded with him not to hang up. “I’m in a queue, sir. I have been since eight o’clock this morning.”
“No mobiles in class—an invariable rule and basic good manners. You should know that.”
“Please don’t hang up.”
I could hear a friendly woman’s voice talking on the phone. I was through!
He snapped the phone shut and smiled. “Tell me,” he said, “what was important about the new ideas that Omo used to promote their washing powder in the 1960s?”
“What was important about them?”
“I’ll give you a clue. Suds. Longer-lasting suds. Now then. Anything? No. You weren’t listening to me, were you? What were you listening to? Little voices in your head? Or on your mobile? Maybe you’d like to tell the rest of us what they were saying.”
It was a Level Seventy Monster Question, the kind you’re supposed to walk away from. But I Engaged instead. I said, “Recent studies have shown that the chances of an asteroid hitting Earth any time in the next hundred years are five thousand to one. Blatantly the odds get stronger with every day that passes. A big enough asteroid could cause total global extinction. And therefore, it doesn’t matter how long your suds last. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been specially selected or not.”
Sometimes you don’t need to take the Elixir of the Mages first. Sometimes if you simply step up to the monster, the elixir just comes.
He sent me out of the class.
Fathers Have Children
That was the night I finally took down my “It’s Your Solar System” glow-in-the-dark mobile. It wasn’t even astronomically accurate. It still had Pluto on it. Everyone knows that Pluto’s not a planet anymore. It’s something a bit too big for an asteroid, but too small for a planet. It’s nothing.
Like someone who’s too big to be a kid and too young to be an adult.
Then the phone rang.
A friendly voice said, “Hi. Drax Communications. Still want to be the World’s Best Dad?” This time I waited for the options to come up. But they didn’t. There was a pause and the friendly voice said, “Hello? Mr. Digby?”
“Oh. What? Yeah. Yeah, that’s me. Who’s that?”
“Dr. Dinah Drax here. I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“You’ve been waiting for my call?!”
“Yes.”
“But I tried to call this morning and I was on hold for about a year. I thought there must’ve been a million people in the queue.”
“But I told you that you were specially selected. Didn’t you believe me?”
“Yeah. But…the on-hold thing went on so long.”
“I really wanted to share that piece of music with you.”
“Well…thanks. I enjoyed it.”
“And to find out how patient you were. Patience will be an essential quality on this trip.”
“Oh, I can be patient. Really. I can sit for hours.”
“Good. Well, Mr. Digby, you’re through.”
“That is completely cosmic.”
“A car will collect you from your registered address at oh-eight hundred on Tuesday morning—”
“Dr. Drax…the Rocket…What kind of ride is it? Is it a reverse bungee? Or a roller coaster? Or—”
“Wait and see. That’s one of the ways in which you can exercise your patience. Now tell me a little bit about the child you’ll be bringing….”
I’d completely forgotten that dads have children.
“…I do hope it’s a girl. We’re very short on girls.”
“Oh. She’s a girl then. Definitely. Anything you say.”
“And what’s her name?”
“Who?”
“Your daughter, Mr. Digby.”
“My daughter?” Time to Engage. I said the name of the only daughter I’d ever had. I said, “It’s Florida. Her name is Florida.”
If Liverpool city center was Level Two, a secret location in China must be Level Fifty at least. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as last time. This time I was going to skill up before leveling up. In World of Warcraft you can have weapon skills, gathering skills or trade skills. You can have mining skills too, but they’re a bit rubbish and you have to buy a pickax.
If I was going on a quest disguised as Florida’s dad, I would need dad skills.
I went through all the books on my dad’s bedside table. They were mostly color charts of quick-drying low-odor bathroom paints with mad names like Antarctic Glow, but there was one called Talk to Your Teen, which was all about how to trick your teenage son or daughter into talking to you.
Un.
Be.
Liev.
Able.
It was like finding the cheat sheet for Orbiter IV. Except it wasn’t Orbiter IV; it was My Life. Look at this:
 
; Does your teen sometimes seem sulky and uncommunicative? Meals are the most natural place for conversation to flow. To create the best possible conditions for this, you should turn off the television before eating and try to serve fiddly food. Fiddly food keeps everyone at the table longer. Whereas a pizza can be dispensed with in a matter of minutes, a plate of spaghetti can keep a hungry teen at the table for fully half an hour.
In other words, meals are traps. Except what sane person would bait a trap with pasta?
It also said:
It’s very important to show an interest in their world. Ask them about their friends, their music, their books and their computer games.
So he was never interested in the history of Azeroth or the Wanderlust Warriors’ weapons at all! He was just keeping me talking.
I should’ve realized this before, because when I carefully monitored my dad’s conversations for several days, I discovered that they can all be broken down into five headings, namely:
How we got there.
What the parking was like.
What it was like in the old days.
Something thoughtful which it made you think.
Something to do with last night’s soccer.
For instance, on the Saturday morning we went to the New Strand to look for new handles to put on the new kitchen cupboards. We didn’t find any (though we did get an amusing cactus holder, shaped like a donkey). This is what Dad said:
The main road was so choked, we’d’ve been better off walking.
Two pounds to park for two hours! And it takes you half an hour to find a space.
In the old days, if the shop didn’t have the right door handles for your cupboards you came home empty-handed. Nowadays, with shopping malls and what have you, if they haven’t got door handles, you buy a cactus holder. It makes you think…
…are we really any happier now than we were then? Are we happier because we’ve got a cactus holder? It’s not like we’ve got a cactus.
It’s no good scoring lots of goals if you also concede lots of goals. We need a terrifying central defender.
These five headings apply to anything. For instance, if my dad ever did go to Azeroth, he’d probably say:
We took the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind (Dwarven District).
The tram is free. It’s very reliable and you don’t have to worry about parking. On the other hand, it was raided by the undead Scourge and a lot of us were killed. Luckily my guild companions have healing powers.
There was no such place as Azeroth when we were little. If we wanted to play a fantasy game we had to use sticks for swords and run round on pretend horses. The sticks really hurt.
We looked stupid, but we did get lots of fresh air.
Money has spoiled soccer. Players now spend more time advertising hair products than they do training.
I felt I’d mastered Level One of Being a Dad. Now I had to get myself a daughter.
You’ll Like It When You Get There
The first person I thought of to be my daughter was obviously Florida. After all, she already had extensive pretending-to-be-Liam’s-daughter experience and had gained lots of pretending-to-be-Liam’s-daughter skills.
On the other hand, her main pretending-to-be-Liam’s-daughter experience was me nearly putting her in incredible danger during that whole Porsche incident. So I knew I’d probably need to coax her slightly.
When I tried talking to her in school she either totally blanked me (but then she always did blank me in school) or hissed at me like an angry cobra. When I tried phoning her—calls from my number were barred. When I tried emailing and MSNing her, messages bounced back. I tried sitting by the Strand water fountain. She never came by. I think I saw her once, but she saw me first and ducked inside the Leaning Tower of Pizza.
That’s okay. If you need new equipment for a quest, you have to work for it. You have to dig for gold or grind away, fighting trolls and looting their possessions. You have to keep going until you’ve got what you need.
The one place where Florida had to talk to me was Little Stars. That Saturday Lisa made us get into pairs—a boy and a girl—and asked us to be father and daughter. Florida tried to avoid me but I came up behind her and said, “You could be Bryce Dallas Howard, star of Spider-Man 3. And I’ll be your father, Ron Howard, director of Apollo 13 and The Da Vinci Code.”
“Which one was she in Spider-Man 3?”
“She’s the girl in Dr. Connor’s quantum-mechanics class who falls in love with him and later on he saves her from a falling crane. That’s in the film. Originally, she went to the same school as him and she was his first love and she dies when Green Goblin throws her off the bridge. But that was just in the comics.”
“I remember. She was blond. And her dad is famous too?”
She didn’t know many celebrity father-daughter combinations and she didn’t want to let this one go.
Lisa was saying, “And Daddy’s got his daughter a treat. It’s up to you what the treat is. But the daughter really likes it. I want to see happy acting, and surprised acting, and also two people who really know each other type of acting. And for the boys, some older-person acting—but don’t overdo it. No old-man acting. You don’t have to be old old to be a dad.”
As soon as we started working on it Florida said, “Okay. So you’re my famous film-director dad and the surprise is a part in your new film.”
“I’m the dad. It’s up to me what the surprise is.”
Straightaway she was suspicious. “What is it then?”
“You’ll see.”
When it was our turn, it went like this:
Florida: Hi, Dad, how were things at the film set today?
Me: Pretty neat, I guess, Bryce. I have a present for you.
Florida: Oh Dad, you shouldn’t have. Wait, I know what it is—a part in your new film.
Me: No.
Florida: But you said—
Me: Well, it’s not that. It’s nicer than that.
Florida: Remember I earned loads of money by being in Spider-Man 3, so I have got practically everything a girl could want.
Me: It’s a little holiday—to a theme park—just the two of us.
Florida looks puzzled.
Me: It’s a brand-new theme park. One of the rides is going to be the Best Ride in the World and we’ve got an invitation. [Adding in a whisper] This is real. Honest. I won a competition.
An extremely long pause. After a while Lisa said, “Is that it?”
Florida [stops looking puzzled and looks annoyed]:
Dad, I can’t go.
Me: Yes, you can. It’ll be great. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Pack your bags and come with me. Don’t miss out.
Florida: I’ve got so much acting to do. So many commitments. I can’t go. You must know that.
Me: But this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
It’s the very first day the theme park is open. You’re going to be the first person on the rides! REALLY.
Florida: No.
Me: You’ll like it when you get there.
Florida: No, I won’t.
Me: Yes, you will. Just you and me together, father and daughter, like old times.
Florida: Together?
Me: Yeah. Me and you, father and daughter. What d’you think? We never spend any time together now because you’re always acting and I’m always directing films.
Florida: Well, you should have said so earlier. I can’t go now.
Me: Why not?
Another long pause. Lisa said, “Go on, Florida, tell us why not.”
Florida: Because I don’t want to. I already said that. Can’t you get it into your thick head?
Me: I was only trying to give you something nice. I thought you’d like to go on a holiday with your dad.
Florida: Well, I wouldn’t. Because I’m too busy doing other things.
Lisa said the drama was very real and also very moving. “I felt very sorry for the dad, who obviously wanted to spend more time with h
is daughter but she was too busy to make time for him. And Liam, you were so…dadlike. You really were like a real dad. Like my own dad, in fact. He was always saying I’d like it when I got there and…I’m sorry.” She had to stop talking because she was crying. In the end she did this huge sniff, looked at Florida and said, “And, Florida, you were very good too. You were…oh!” And then she ran out of the room.
While she was out, I tried quickly to tempt Florida with the trip. “First in. First go of all the rides. Exclusive entry. No queues. Free food.”
“Why? Why did they invite you?”
“It was a prize. I was specially selected.”
“And why would you want me to come?”
“Well, the prize was for a father and child.”
“So?” For a second she didn’t seem to get it. Then it hit her. “Oh! Oh. No, no, no, no, no…”
“Why not? We used to do it all the time.”
“Exactly. We used to do it all the time; then we nearly had a car crash.”