Then, by the time we actually started at Secondary, Dad had gone, and it seemed like that whole concern was in the past. Kit had grown into a happy (if challenged) five-year-old, flawed only by how incessantly she would beg for a baby brother or sister.
Somewhere selfish deep inside, I was dying for Mum to turn around and extinguish my fear of sleepless nights with another baby during my GCSEs. She’d admitted that there was a secret, and if that secret was (as I was absolutely certain beyond a shadow of a trout) the fishy business of the man she’d been seeing, it could mean anything. Forty-two was said to be the meaning of life, not the magical age where mothers of four stop being able to conceive!
“Are we moving?” asked Zak, ever so innocently for someone in the know. We all flashed forward in my head to a future where my youngest brother was a super-savvy secret agent, drove a fast car and remembered to put his socks in the laundry.
“Oh, are we?!” gushed Kitty, impressionably. It was as if the power of suggestion via anyone at all but her saying something made it certain fact.
Mum looked awkward at that. A shot of panic rippled through me as I hadn’t thought of it. What if Mum’s new man already had a lovely house, and wasn’t prepared to swap it for our scrutty but sweet pile of bricks?
The words escaped my lips against best efforts: “You’ve got a boyfriend and we’re supposed to pretend we haven’t guessed!”
I tried to calm my voice into a deadpan tone, but it still blurted out like an accusation, because I wanted so badly for her to actually speak rather than all this guilty smiling.
“Actually…” She gleamed at that, and leant out of the back door. Summoning him.
In strode a fair-haired man, thin and bookish-looking with neat, rectangular spectacles perched comfortably on his nose. Dressed like he’d come straight from an office in a dark grey suit, he advanced towards us and politely bent to shake Charlie’s hand and then Zak’s. (And then Kitty’s, at her grabby insistence.)
As if to force an awkward glace cherry on top of this unfortunate hospital cupcake of a situation, Mum, when she could finally control the girlish giggling this stranger seemed to bring about, added: “It’s all three!”
Strewth.
* * *
“It’s not that simple,” Mum insisted once again. (Even though it was exactly that simple.) “Harry’s a very successful car salesman, and I went to see him about a secretary job back in July, and, well, alright, it is that simple. Top marks for nosiness, Harley.”
“So you… are… pregnant?” I managed. The word caught in my throat. “And… we are moving? Those are the three things that are true?”
You could say I was in denial. I’d been checking the facts over and over for the past ten minutes, and every time, she’d claimed that it wasn’t simple, when all I wanted was for it to be simple. “Not that simple” sent torrents of doubts through the darkest alleys of my brain, when those same three “straightforward” things would be somewhat easier to take. (For me, a shoddily armoured worrier, anyway.)
Mum sighed. “The baby’s due in May, love. Try to take it all onboard.”
Harry added, “So we’ve decided to get married next month, right ahead of time. It’s the best way…”
“The best way?” I muttered under my breath, overwhelmed by the nonsensical notion.
“So I can still look nice in all our photies,” Mum explained.
“And my daughter needs to be getting on with her exams later in the year,” Harry embellished. “I expect you twins will have some, too.”
“Is she going to fly?” asked Kitty.
“I’m sorry?” said Harry, smart-casually.
“From America, is she going to fly to your wedding or go by boat?”
“Oh!” tittered Mum. “No, sweetheart – Harry’s daughter isn’t in America. She’s called America. It’s her name.”
Kitty flexed an eyebrow, comically. Despite her own real name being the unconventional Kitra, she was as perplexed as anyone else at the thought of someone having the same name as a whole country. “Why isn’t she called England then?”
“She just isn’t,” said Harry. For a man with such a smart-casual hairstyle / outfit / demeanour, he must’ve been in some maniacal mood we hadn’t met yet, to name his only child that. On that note of information, I instantly trusted him less. It wasn’t normal to rush into marriage like that at their age, with children and property to take into account. We weren’t going to be cheaper by the dozen. People already guessed that me and Charlie shared school jumpers out of sheer laziness about checking the labels!
It would’ve been wise of Mum, I couldn’t help but think, not to have irresponsible sex with a car salesman and try to take responsibility by rushing marriage and tearing us away from the only home we’ve ever known!
They’d had SEX. It hurt my head. It was just so wrong. I knew adults did that, and sometimes with people they didn’t know very well – but adults in their forties with kids and mortgages to worry about? Did all of them go around sleeping together all the time? Had Mum had sex with anyone else behind my back? Did my teachers organise a rota in the staff room for who got to go with the wonderful Mr Wordsworth and who got stuck with the lollipop man? If my own mum had gone and done it with someone within three months of meeting him, where did it stop, really?
I raged on and on inside – outside maintaining a thin veneer that matched that of everybody else involved in this uncomfortable silence. We must’ve reminded him of his daughter’s christening ceremony. Not that I thought me and my siblings looked that much like a bunch of grownups in suits and ties and shocked expressions; we looked like a cluster of children with the cumulative age of forty-three, wearing jeans, T-shirts and the look of some tidal jelly wave / hamster funeral / life-altering shock victims.
“There’s a lovely house up for sale just up the road, and big enough for all of us,” Harry told us. “One of those big white ones with the iron railings. Charlie, Zak, you could have your own bedrooms,” he suggested, unsure which boy to look at as he spoke each name.
Ah, the white houses at the end of our street. Andy lived in one – he’d lived in it all the time we’d known him, and he had a big bedroom and two sitting rooms and a beautiful garden, and generally way too much space for a family of father and two sons. It would have been perfect for us if we’d lived there all along – but we hadn’t! The thought of leaving our crummy old home with the paper-thin attic wall arguments and cracks in every ceiling and off-white carpets in every hallway… that was even wronger than the thought of Mum and her boyfriend doing it. Our house in the middle of our street – our house with the quaint story of hardship and good nature behind it, which was good enough for a child’s bedtime if you blotted out the Dad bits… I couldn’t leave it.
“And Harley, you’ll have someone more your own age to talk to,” Mum pointed out. “I know you’ve been missing that since Shelley went.”
My throat felt dry and lumpy at the same time when she brought that up in front of a total stranger. How dare she try to level with me by comparing some older girl I’d never met with the perfect, personal cousinly bond we’d had together? On top of all that she’d done…
“What if we don’t want to move?” asked Charlie. He looked as wobbly as I felt, which, as horrible as it is, went some way towards lightening the anger I felt about my great loss being aired out in front of Harry. Charlie was probably going to cry. I watched his eyes trail over all the knickknacks and family junk in the kitchen and through the arch doorway in the living room. I had to blink something back as well, when I realised for the first time the uniqueness of that arch and all else that we’d be leaving behind. In the space of half an hour, everything in this house had become so extra-special – special beyond all logic.
Those guest-friendly framed pictures downstairs disguised damp and mould and felt-tip scrawls. The carpets upstairs were matted with pet hair, because I only hoovered where strangers would see. The drywalls of our bedrooms could
be kicked holes in, easy as anything – Zak had once done that in my room, and the bookcase now covered it.
Harry was startled by Charlie’s outburst. What sane teenagers wanted to live amongst empty video cases, Lego blocks and pet fur in a house that looked set to collapse next time a butterfly flapped its wing too close by? “If you don’t want to move…” he sighed, looking as gutted as I felt. (Ha!) “Then I suppose we’ll have to move in here…”
“Fine! …” I began, cheerfully, before trailing off as power drained from my voice.
“But Harley,” Mum pointed out. “If we don’t move, you’ll have to share your room with Kitty and America.”
Why…?
She spotted my look of incredulity and explained. “The baby would be having Kit’s room, so you’ll have to make some space.”
Uggggg…
My eyes panned around, taking in a grungily pleading face, a coolly pleading face, and a currently cat-stroking kid’s one – and once again all the same stuff Charlie’d been lip-wibbling at – and I realised that I was doomed one way or another: invasion by the TS’s (a Titchy Sis and a Total Stranger), or the years ’til I was old enough to move out spent siblingly loathed from a distance, caged between the more substantial walls of my maybe-a-little-bigger bedroom.
Well, I knew which one I was going to pick. Social confinement or second-by-second bugging by a seven-year-old? Kitty over my own devices anyday. (Even if those own devices were maybe going to be a TV to myself and a proper stereo.)
“That’s perfectly OK,” I dimbled.
Uuuuuuuum, NO! FAR from “perfectly” OK!! squealed that cartoony conscience of mine – but I blocked out all my doubts for long enough to seem sure. Because, let me get this straight: I was expected to give up my privacy for my little sister and some girl I’d never heard of an hour ago…
#4 Born Cheese: The Musical
It’s quite sweet, really.
My sister, I mean. The way she feels the need to sing when she’s happy. This Tuesday afternoon, it had kicked in, and I couldn’t help wishing I was seven and simple enough to get excited over the baby and stepfamily developments.
“Booorn cheese, as chee-sy as naaa-chos,” she warbled, skipping along the pavement. “The cheese comes from my toes! The moon’s made of cheeeeese!”
People were giving us looks as we weaved our way to the pet shop after school. Kitty had inadvertently landed us with their guinea pig collection as of tomorrow, and I was pre-emptively starting to feel the burden of living in a home without so much as a free square inch in the garden.
She stopped singing and questioned me. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“No,” I reassured her. “As long as it’s only until the builders leave. Miss Atherfold told me they were disturbing them.”
I got this mental picture of some super-noisy guinea pigs squeaking over the sound of their jackhammers until these burly grown men were forced to lodge a complaint.
“They won’t be done until next year,” said Kitty, as if that was inconsequential. “The piggies are for keeps.”
“That’s not fair – your teacher never told me that.” I grimaced, making a mental list of all the people I knew who might want some surplus guinea pigs.
“She asked me if Mum said yes, and I said she did because she will when we get home!”
“Why didn’t you ask Mum anyway?” I sighed, trying to contain my irritation. Kitty’s about as good at thinking things through as Charlie, so I should probably have been prepared for a completely random adoption sooner or later.
“In case she said no.”
We went in through the sharp yellow automatic doors of the pet shop. It appeared that the builders, after two whole weeks, had still never bothered finishing the job. The equally bright storefront lettering was still cheerfully announcing that Fern’s dad was a bit woolly round the edges.
Fern was perched awkwardly on the swivel chair behind the counter, looking concentrational as if she strongly desired to defy the nature of the chair itself by keeping stock still.
“What’re you doing?” I asked, pointlessly. I mean, it made more sense than to actually try striking up a conversation about what I was pretty sure she was doing.
“The till boy’s off sick, and Dad’s been sat here all day while I was at school. I had to take a turn, really.”
“How much do you get paid?” asked Kitty, precociously.
As assumptive as it was, that was still better than anything I could’ve thought of to avoid a silence. I still wasn’t 100% on what to talk to Fern about.
“Nothing,” said Fern, cheerfully, as if it had never crossed her mind in a negative light. “What’re you doing?”
Oh, the awkwardness. Maybe we were quite alike after all. I started to feel intensely that I would much rather have to share my room with Fern for a stepsister – Fern who us three older ones had considered properly in our confusion – than the great unknown that Harry lived with across town.
I paused to gather a sentence that wouldn’t make Kit feel silly. “Kitty’s school have donated five guinea pigs to us, and-”
Fern looked suddenly anxious. “I’d love to say we can take them, but there’s really no space, and you’d have to be a registered seller, and-”
“We just came for supplies,” I reassured her. “How much for a hutch?”
“I’ll go and see,” said Fern. “Could you watch the counter? Please?”
As if they were going to get sudden throngs of customers as soon as she turned her back!
On that thought, three separate parties of people squashed in through the doors. A toddler dropped his dummy in the dog bowl by the entrance.
Fern reappeared.
“Sixty pounds for a small one, a hundred for a medium, or a hundred and fifty for a big one…”
I’d had no idea they were that much more than Zak’s rat cage.
“How small is small?” I enquired.
“Er, this big,” Fern explained, holding her hands out about sixty centimetres apart.
“Can we, uh, see them?” I wavered, attempting to buy time before admitting that I had only fifteen pounds to my name, half of which was saved up lunch money. I’d been planning to get a mobile when I could afford it.
“School’s giving us the hutches,” Kitty piped up.
“Then why didn’t you say so?” I groaned.
“Why didn’t you ask?” she replied, with pompous intonation.
#5 Time To Come & Cringe With The Twinnies!
“Hey! Hey! Are you ready to play?” trilled the “sound”-labelled television. If I could hear it all the way from my bedroom, something had to be up.
Course, Kitty still has her moments when she likes to revert to something a little young, like old vids of Winnie The Pooh, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggywinkle, or Spot’s Christmas. (In silent form, as we can only plug the battered VCR into one TV at a time.) That was an easy explanation, but the serious volume level made me suspicious that she was in distress.
I raced downstairs to find out what was going on, and was surprised to see Charlie in front of the televisions, fiddling with the buttons on a remote control. The sound stopped, and was replaced with an afternoon drama, but the picture remained – Bella, Milo, Fizz and Jake were still bobbing about on the screen labelled “picture”.
Harry had been round to service our electronics earlier, and the four boogying characters seemed to have been picked up both loud and clear. How had it taken him so long to change the channel?
I sighed and wandered back upstairs unfazed, planning to listen to my ancient Busted CD collection, eat crisps and generally chill out after a grim day’s school.
’Cause of the noise radiating from my CD player, I didn’t hear that The Tweenies continued as I slogged through my Maths (OK, feasted on my latest Fern-freebie copy of Bliss).
As another burst of toddler theme tune buzzed over the sounds of what Charlie Simpson went to school for, I decided it was too muc
h. Just because we didn’t have neighbours at the moment, that was no excuse to just abandon the telly with the sound turned up! I headed downstairs to have a (mild) go at whoever was in charge of the very loud TV which probably no one was watching.
At the bottom of the stairs, I started to believe otherwise. Quiet singing could be heard from the living room, along to the tune of some nursery rhyme on the still-blaring telly. In the living room was Charlie, still hovering on the rug as if he planned for an emergency escape.
I exaggerated a cough in the kitchen.
“Ugh!” he murmured. “I was just trying to turn the sound off on this, ’cause I can’t get it to work, and y’know we don’t need stuff like this on, it’s really too loud I know…”
Mm-hm. For like ten minutes?
“Picture’s silver like the TV – black’s sound, and the grey one’s the VCR, so don’t get confused,” Harry provided from behind me in the hall, making me jump.
I turned right around at the sound of his voice, and he shot me a wink before disappearing upstairs, probably to mess with the leaky bathroom taps or malfunctioning clock radio in Mum’s room. Had he started taking afternoons off work to hang out at our house? No wonder my siblings were regressing around me, when it appeared that the adults had turned to teens.
Zak clattered into the kitchen via the back door. “Aight, Charlotte?” he snorted in Charlie’s direction upon noticing the joyous racket. “Need some help with your ABCs?”
“Shut up, Zak, you can’t read!” exploded Charlie, horridly. I just knew he’d hurt Zak’s feelings, even if our younger bro would never admit it. It would be a lot harder to keep his dyslexia a secret than any embarrassing televisual taste, and Charlie was just mad that he hadn’t even managed to do that.
I knew to keep the whole Tweenies experience safely locked in my memory banks for near-future situations meriting a dash of wit (or a sprinkling of blackmail). My own twin still enjoying The Tweenies would be about as hard to forget as zesty-lemon deodorant…
#6 The Sky Rains Tam-Packs
I’d let Kitty have the trolley.
Bad mistake.
It had been piled high with the weekly shop, and had a wonky wheel (or two, or three, or four for all I could tell) that made it a tad hard for her to steer. When I spotted Jordy over the family’s worth of freezer foods and my own PMT stash for whenever food cravings chose to grace me again, I just wanted to hide. I did not want him seeing my 26-pack of Walker’s, or jumbo bag of Doritos, or giant Galaxy bar. Not that you Aussies would think it to look at us (I hope), Charlie and I are the giantest pigs – with only our high metabolism to save us. When I have money, I spend it on snacking. (And hence no mobile…)