This Wonderful Thing

by Adam Baron

  ‘What for?’ I demanded, and Ellen hissed again. Stephan was still in the van, which left Mabel looking up at me, her round, freckly face splitting into a grin.

  ‘Our stuff!’

  ‘Your …?’

  ‘Stuff! Isn’t it WONDERFUL?!’

  ‘Isn’t WHAT wonderful?’

  ‘We’re moving in!’

  ‘You’re …?’

  ‘Moving in!’ Mabel yelled, releasing her grip on my leg to make little hops up and down. ‘We’re coming to live in YOUR house with YOU, Thimbeline!’

  #worstoftimes

  ‘Can we go in now?’

  We just stared.

  Mum spun round, strode into the hall and grabbed her denim jacket from the end of the banister. Then she pulled the front door open.

  I thought back to the wheelie bin. But this was even worse. It was bad as BAD – because we’d now seen what the teddy really looked like!

  ‘We’ve got to stop her!’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But—’

  ‘Dad!’ Milly shouted.

  And she was right. YES! Dad would save us! Again! He would! He was in the back garden with Benji. I’d heard them go out there. We had to get to him quickly, though, and I spun round, staring through the French windows. Benji was in his sandpit, digging for the little dinosaurs that we all bury when he’s not looking. But where was Dad? He normally sits on the side with his trowel, digging in the wrong places on purpose – but I couldn’t see him. Mum was out of the front door now so I ran across the room and pulled the French windows open. I ran out and yes! Dad was at the bottom end of the garden, near the rabbit hutch, Boffo with his black nose pressed against the wire. Dad wasn’t feeding him, though. And he wasn’t clearing him out. He wasn’t mowing the lawn either, even though he’d got the Flymo out of the shed.

  Dad was lying on the ground.

  Not moving.

  He was just lying there, with his arms spread out, face down in the too-long grass.

  The police got there three minutes later.

  Two cars jammed to a stop outside our house. Mum crossed the road to point through the door and three officers bustled in. Mum shouted for them to be careful – the burglars might still be in there. But they weren’t.

  ‘Just the wind,’ a woman officer said, as she came back out. ‘Your bathroom window’s open. The door was banging and a vase got blown down. They’re long gone,’ she added.

  We all crossed over after that, Stephan putting his arm round Mum’s shoulders when he realised what had happened. I just stood there, numb, my head like our fruit bowl after Mum’s been to Lewisham market: overloaded. I glanced back at Stephan’s van, taking in the huge, unmistakable weight of it.

  Was it true?

  Really?

  They were moving in?

  ALL of them?!

  I wanted to deny it, to make the van vanish. I couldn’t, and not just because you can’t think away large motor vehicles. Or even small ones. Mum had told me. Or tried to. I’d turned my back on the subject, refusing to let the words in. I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t happy about it, though.

  ‘Dad?’ Ellen said, her voice sharp with hope. ‘Because of this, can we go back to live in OUR house?!’

  Stephan didn’t like her asking that. He walked her up the street to talk to her, a little cross at first before giving her a hug. And it was my turn to glare. What did SHE need sympathy for? It wasn’t HER house that was being invaded, was it? Or that had just been smashed up? I wanted to go and make that point, but Mum turned round and winced at me.

  ‘Cym …’ she started.

  ‘What?’

  Mum sighed. ‘You agreed that it would have to happen some day.’

  ‘SOME day, yes! In the FUTURE. But …’

  ‘You’d never agree when that day was. You kept saying “not this weekend because Lance is coming over” or “not this weekend because I’ve got league matches”. So I just thought we’d get it over with. I thought it would be easier for you.’

  ‘EASIER?!’

  ‘We were going to bake you a cake for when you got home. Mabel’s been dreaming of it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care. It’s not going to happen!’ I added, before doing something I knew I really shouldn’t. I pushed Mum aside and ran in through our door.

  I crunched over the broken glass and leapt up the stairs – to MY bedroom. I wanted to shut myself in there, maybe barricade MY door. I stopped, though, and stared, hardly able to believe my eyes.

  Because what had been done in the living room wasn’t half as bad as this.

  My bed had been yanked out. All my books had been swept off the shelves and the cardboard castle I’d made with Mum when I’d had flu had been ripped in half. My clothes drawers had been tipped out, as had the boxes and baskets from under my bed, Scoop from Bob the Builder getting his first outing in years. Captain Barnacles was there too, a present from Uncle Bill, and a squishy dinosaur I’d won at the fair on Blackheath (yes, that can actually happen). I turned from it to the wall – and the empty space where my Charlton shirt should have been.

  This was the one thing I’d been terrified of losing. My most prized possession. You see, it’s not a normal shirt. It lives in a frame because it’s been signed by the whole team, including Jacky Chapman who is Charlton’s best-ever captain (until I’m playing). When I saw it was gone, my heart nearly stopped – but then I realised. It was on the floor, the glass all smashed and the frame broken. The shirt itself seemed okay, and that spread a bit of relief through me, though not enough to stem the horror at what had happened in there. I was about to pick it up when Mum appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Cym,’ she said, after gasping with shock. ‘Can you come back out, please?’

  I didn’t move. ‘Why? So you can move Mabel and Ellen in here?’

  Mum sighed, as a policewoman appeared beside her. ‘So the officers can look for evidence, love. Footmarks, fingerprints …’

  ‘But why bother?’

  ‘So they can find the culprits of course.’

  ‘There’s no point,’ I said.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because these burglars just wrecked the place and they stole stuff. YOU’RE the real burglars.’

  ‘Cymbeline?’

  ‘You and Stephan. And Mabel and Ellen. Because you’re going to steal my life.’

  And then I did something else I REALLY knew I shouldn’t. This massive pressure built up in my chest and I slammed the door in Mum’s face.

  Now slamming doors in our house is a MASSIVE no-no. Mum and I had a family conference last month and it was one of the things I’d promised NEVER to do. Hers were never to:

  1. Show people pictures of me when I was little (with no clothes on).

  2. Run out of Nutella.

  3. Say the word ‘Millwall’.

  I thought Mum would go FRUIT SALAD (that’s BANANAS and some). Instead, I listened from the other side of the door, just about able to hear as Mum apologised to the officer, explaining the reasons for my ‘behaviour’. She talked about ‘bad timing’ and ‘reorganising the family circumstances’ – but I knew what she was REALLY doing. Her being all UNDERSTANDING was just a ploy to win me round! Well, it wasn’t going to work. I folded my arms, preparing to resist when Mum opened the door again, my dressing gown still wobbling on the back of it. Underneath were my height marks: every line that Mum has ever drawn on every one of my birthdays, each with a date underneath – in Mum’s handwriting. No one else’s. Always hers because it’s always been HER and me. JUST her and me.

  I sighed, remembering waking up last birthday, getting up and running through to Mum. Now I pictured the same thing, but with Mabel and Ellen there. And Stephan. I bit my lip, and set my face again, stepping back from the door and waiting for Mum to open it. I’d show her the marks. The history of US, all the way back to when I was one.

  Would they convince her?

  I’d never know because Mum didn’t open the door. Inste
ad, I could hear Stephan telling her something.

  ‘WHAT?!’ she yelled.

  Mum was angry. I heard her march off across the landing. She stomped down the stairs, relief that she wasn’t screaming at me turning into a question: had the police caught them – the burglars? Pushing all my thoughts aside, I pulled the door back open, about to ask the policewoman if this was true. But she was following Mum, whose head was disappearing down the stairs.

  I went after her, pulling myself round the banister as she got to the bottom. When I got downstairs, she was already outside on the pavement, hands on hips and her chest heaving as she stared in horror.

  ‘WHAT ON EARTH DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!’ she thundered.

  But there was no reply, or at least not one that I could hear. So I sped up – as she screamed, ‘How could you possibly DO this?!’

  And I wanted to know the same thing. How COULD they have broken into our house?

  And smashed up my bedroom?

  And taken our things?

  The pure anger from before came back as I ran outside, where I immediately whacked into something big. It was a suitcase and there was another one beside it. Were they for carting our stuff off in? I wanted to ask, but instead I stopped in my tracks and just STARED.

  Because it wasn’t burglars who Mum was yelling at.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Dad? Are you okay? Dad!’

  I was kneeling by his head. Milly had gone after Mum and, when they both came back, Mum took over. She pushed Dad on to his side and tucked his left arm under his head. I just watched, like it wasn’t really happening, or it was but on TV or something and wasn’t real. I do remember Mum, though. She wasn’t Mum now: she was a nurse. What I also remember is that, when she first saw Dad lying there, she didn’t gasp or scream. She just got on with helping him.

  Like she wasn’t surprised.

  Mum held Dad’s wrist, glancing at her watch as she checked his pulse. She did it for what seemed like AGES, though it can’t have been – Benji spent the whole time in his sandpit, playing. He didn’t even notice there was anything different until the ambulance came. Then he just stared at us, his mouth open, a plastic spade in one hand and a stegosaurus in the other.

  It was weird then. I don’t mean because we were going to hospital (we were following the ambulance in our car). That’s not weird because I go there A LOT. I’m small because I was born early. I get asthma and things. I can’t eat a lot of normal food and have to have these special powders. Space Food is what Lucca calls them. He’s my doctor. He says it makes me like an astronaut, though if that’s the case then NEVER join NASA. You might get to walk on the moon, but the food would be DISGUSTING. Neil Armstrong should have said, ‘This is one small step for man, but a giant PUKE for mankind.’

  I see Lucca once a month. Sometimes I also go with Dad to pick Mum up because she works there too. What was weird was going to hospital BECAUSE of Dad.

  Was he going to be okay?

  I wanted to ask Mum, but I was scared of what her answer might be so I just stared at the side of her face. Once again, I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t panicking, she wasn’t screaming, and, once again, I knew that it wasn’t just because of her training. It wasn’t just because she was a nurse. It was also – I realised – because this wasn’t something that was as shocking to her as it was for me.

  She’d been prepared for this.

  I stared through the window, watching the city lights flick past, trying to spot the ambulance up ahead in the traffic. I tried to imagine Dad inside it, but I couldn’t for some reason, as if the ambulance wouldn’t let me in. I just watched the orange lines from the streetlamps sliding down the back window of the car in front, until Benji did a RAAAA at me with his stegosaurus, from behind. I turned round and made my hand into a T-Rex. We had a mock RAAAA conversation until Mum pulled up in the car park.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  We hurried across the brightly lit car park, the bold lines of the parking bays really standing out. We didn’t use our normal door, though. Instead, we went through a big revolving door that made me think, for some reason, of a really slow fairground ride. It had a sign above it: Accident and Emergency. I didn’t know if Dad’s fall was both. Or just the emergency part. What had happened? Had something hit him? Did he have a bad reaction to something?

  I had no idea and I just stared around, trying to spot him. All I could see were strangers, though, either walking slowly or sitting on lines of turquoise seats. Some had crutches. Others had bandages on, one man with a really bloody face that he was holding in his hands. Everything was lit up by this white, flat light so that, once again, it was hard to believe that it was real. It was like they weren’t actually hurt but dressing up, or making a film or something. Again I looked around for Dad, as Mum joined a queue that led up to a series of windows.

  I wanted Mum to barge to the front – because she’s a nurse herself. Wouldn’t she be allowed? Mum waited, though – for what seemed again like ages. She gave Dad’s name to a woman behind a computer, who tapped away, not seeming to realise that we were in a HURRY. Eventually she told us that Dad had been taken somewhere called ‘Bay Four’.

  ‘Are we going there?’ I asked, as Mum nodded her thanks and turned away from the window.

  But she didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up Benji and told us to follow (though we knew to do that). I looked for signs that would tell us where Bay Four was – but I didn’t see any. Soon, though, we came to a place I recognised.

  ‘He’s not in here, is he?’

  I meant the children’s ward, because that’s where we were. Mum just shook her head and typed the code to let us in. And only when we were inside the familiar waiting area did she tell us why we’d gone there.

  ‘You’re going to wait here,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Carmen’s behind the desk.’ Mum nodded towards her. ‘She knows you. I’ll ask her to keep an eye out.’

  ‘But I want to go with you,’ I said. ‘To see Dad!’

  But Mum wouldn’t let me. She said I had to stay there – with Benji and Milly. When I asked how long for, she turned away and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘I … don’t know.’

  ‘But what should we do?’

  ‘Play. There’s all sorts here. You know there is. Books. Toys. Just don’t leave, okay? Stay in here.’

  ‘But I’m hungry,’ I said.

  ‘Jess …’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me. But it means that Benji and Milly will be too.’

  Mum closed her eyes for a second, then dug in her bag for some pound coins. She pointed to a vending machine.

  ‘But how do I use it?’

  ‘You’ll work it out. Or ask someone.’

  And then Mum just turned and pressed the green button, and shoved the door open.

  And she left us there.

  Milly and Benji were looking at me.

  Play? Mum was right. We could do that. We’d spent ages in this room when Lucca wasn’t quite ready for me, or we were waiting for test results. So, before he could ask any questions, I took Benji over to the little soft-play area. Milly found some toy soldiers for him, all in different poses. It looked like they’d been frozen by a witch. I felt frozen too.

  By worry.

  Bay Four? What was it? And what was happening to Dad? I was so desperate to know that even though I did play with Benji, attacking his soldiers with mine, it was like I wasn’t really doing it. I was watching myself. The only time I did feel connected was when he turned his stegosaurus on its side.

  ‘It’s sick,’ he said.

  He got some soldiers to carry it away to hospital while I just watched him. So maybe he had been aware of what was happening to Dad after all.

  Benji got bored then and started to grizzle. He asked what we were doing there, but I didn’t answer. I asked if he was hungry and he nodded. I went over to the food machine, and Mum was right – I could work it. I put the
money in and typed the code, opting for some flapjacks with yoghurt on. Milly said she was thirsty so I keyed in the code for some water, jumping as it thumped down hard into the tray.

  Benji went back to his soldiers, but he soon got bored again. Once more, he started to whine, so Milly brought over some picture books. She started reading one to him while I watched, though I wasn’t really seeing them. Because I’d realised. I saw Dad, puffing up behind us at Cuckmere Haven. I saw Mum, really upset that he’d been running. I saw how Mum had looked at him, lying on the grass. Then I saw him telling us that he wasn’t going to do his job any more, which I’d always thought he really enjoyed. How he was happy that he was going to be spending more time with us ‘little monsters’. And I saw myself believing him. But he was ill. That was the reason. That was the reason for everything. I felt stupid. As stupid as STUPID: especially when I thought about Cuckmere Haven again – because we’d encouraged him to run. We’d got him all excited. It was our fault, and maybe that’s why Mum had wigged out. I hadn’t just ruined our day, I’d made Dad end up here. The knowledge was like a kick, right in the stomach, though I didn’t cry. I knew that would only set Benji off, maybe even Milly. So I took some deep breaths and noticed what book Milly was reading.

  The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

  It was a battered copy, probably because of us. It’s Benji’s favourite, and mine too, actually (though it’s far too young for me). I love the look on Sophie’s face when the tiger comes in. I love how the tiger drinks from the teapot and how he’s sort of scary and friendly at the same time. Mostly, though, I love the end: when Sophie’s dad comes home.

  ‘Please let that happen.’ I whispered the words, but they still seemed to come out really loud. ‘Please let that happen now.’

  How long did we wait? It must have been a while because I took Benji to the toilet twice, and had to buy some more flapjacks. But, when I turned and saw Mum looking at me, it felt like no time had passed at all. She was in the doorway and I blinked at her tired face, expecting her to come in.