“That’s not true.” I felt giddy. “They can’t do that.”
“Apparently they can.” She nodded. “Jodie’s brother got sent there.” She stubbed out her cigarette in one of the plant pots and flicked it over the railing. “Jodie said it’s like a zoo. You know, bars on the windows, kids howling all the time.”
The glass door slid open and Mum stepped out onto the balcony holding one of her shoes in her hand.
“Hello, you two,” she said, wiping the sole of the shoe with a wet cloth. “Honestly, the mess on this estate. I just trod on a half-eaten sandwich, of all things.”
I turned round so that Mum couldn’t see my face, and as I did so I saw, in the distance, Dad’s helicopter clip the top of a tree, burst into flames, spiral downwards and land in the gravel of the dog toilet, scaring the living daylights out of a large Dalmatian.
Dad threw the control box to the ground and lay face down on the grass, hammering it with his fists.
2
Bad things
The atmosphere over supper was not good.
Becky told Mum it was my sandwich. Mum tore me off a strip for wasting good food. Becky said wasting food wasn’t the point. The point was dropping it on Craterface. So Mum said you could drop a piano on Craterface and it wouldn’t make much difference. At this point Becky swore and stomped off to her room.
To make matters worse, Dad had forgotten to take the chicken out of the freezer. He’d forgotten to buy more washing-up liquid. And he was sulking about his helicopter, which was now lying in the hall, burned, broken and covered with bits of gravel and dog-do.
“It’s only a toy,” insisted Mum, halfway through yesterday’s left-over lasagne.
“It. Is. Not. A. Toy!” shouted Dad.
It got very noisy at this point, so I slipped off to the kitchen and earned some Brownie points by doing the washing up. Unfortunately I had to use the lemon-flavoured soap from the bathroom, which made everything taste funny for the next few days.
When I’d finished I went out onto the balcony for some peace and quiet. Dad joined me five minutes later. He leaned on the railings beside me and gazed out into the darkness.
“Life’s a cowpat sandwich, Jimbo,” he sighed, “with very thin bread and a lot of filling.”
“You can mend the helicopter,” I reassured him.
“Yeah,” he said, “I know.” Then he went all sad and silent. I knew what was going to happen. We were going to have one of those conversations about how he didn’t feel like a real man any more. I wouldn’t know what to say. He’d tell me to work hard at school, because I needed good exam results so I could get a job because there was nothing worse than being unemployed.
I didn’t want one of those conversations. Not now. I particularly didn’t want to think about school and exam results and jobs.
“I don’t know how you lot put up with me,” he ploughed on mournfully. “I can’t cook. I can’t clean. I forget the shopping and I mope around the house all day.”
“You’ll get another job,” I said. “And anyway, I think lasagne’s much nicer than chicken.”
He laughed and we stared out into the dark. After a minute or two I found myself thinking about the school thing. Mr Kidd and Fenham and the bars on the windows and the howling. “Dad?” I asked.
“What?”
I wanted to tell him how worried I was. But it didn’t seem fair. He had enough on his plate. And the possibility that I was going to be expelled wasn’t going to cheer him up.
“Oh, nothing,” I said vaguely. “Look, I’ve got to go and do some stuff.”
“Sure.” He ruffled my hair. “Catch you later, pardner.”
I grabbed my jacket, slipped out of the front door and headed down the stairs.
Becky had to be lying. If she was telling the truth then she was being helpful. Warning me what was going on. Giving me a chance to pull my socks up. And Becky had never been helpful to me in her entire life.
Plus, she had a Nobel Prize in winding people up. Last year I went into hospital to have a squint in my eye put right. Before I went in, she kept telling me about all the things that could go wrong. The anaesthetic might not work. I’d be lying there, wide awake, unable to move, watching them cutting my eye open. They might give me too little oxygen and damage my brain. They might mix me up with someone else and amputate my leg.
I was so terrified that I was wheeled into the operating theatre holding a large piece of paper on which I’d written: PLEASE MAKE SURE I AM PROPERLY ASLEEP. The nurses thought it was hilarious.
On the other hand, I did muck about in class. I was in detention every other week. And I was not Albert Einstein.
In fact, getting chucked out of school would be pretty much par for the course. Everything seemed to have gone wrong over the past six months. It wasn’t just Dad losing his job. It was Mum getting a job that paid double what he’d ever earned at the car plant. She did a part-time business course at the College of Further Education, came top and ended up with a job at Perkins and Thingamy in town.
So, while Dad slouched around all day feeling sorry for himself, circling job adverts in the paper and gluing bits of balsa wood together, Mum zipped back and forth in her new red Volkswagen, dressed in natty suits and carrying a briefcase with a combination lock.
Some days it seemed as if the whole world had been turned upside down.
In ten minutes I was standing in front of Charlie’s house. It was a big posh job, four storeys, garage, an actual drive. Dr Brooks, Charlie’s dad, was a short, wiry man with monumental eyebrows, who spoke as little as possible. He worked as a police surgeon. He was the guy you see on the TV, standing over the dead body, saying, “He was killed by a blow to the head with a crowbar at approximately four a.m.”
Mrs Brooks, Charlie’s mum, was completely different. She was a professional cook who did wedding receptions and conference banquets. She had a kitchen the size of an aircraft hangar and a fridge the size of our flat. She had a temper like a flame-thrower and talked pretty much constantly.
I walked through the gate and up to the front door, wondering why someone had ripped up the flowerbed in front of the lounge window. I was about to ring the bell when I heard a fake owl-hoot from above my head. I looked up and saw Charlie leaning out of his bedroom window. He pressed his finger to his lips and pointed round the side of the house. I kept my trap shut and followed the direction of his finger.
As I stood in the dark passage next to the garage, Charlie’s other window creaked open and I saw a rope ladder falling towards me. “Come up,” whispered Charlie. I started to climb, trying very hard not to fall off or put my foot through a window.
“What’s all this about?” I asked, sitting on his bed and getting my breath back.
“I’m grounded,” he explained, rolling the rope ladder back up again. “Level Ten. No going out. No friends round. No TV. Nothing.”
“What for?”
“I decided it was time I learned to drive,” he said.
“Why?”
“Driving is a very useful skill to have, Jimbo,” he said, turning on the radio to cover the sound of our conversation. “It seemed like a good idea to start early. So I took the keys from the fruit bowl and got Mum’s car out of the garage while she was at the hairdresser’s. Did a bit of first gear and reverse up and down the drive. Then it all went a bit pear-shaped.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You drove into the flowerbed.”