by Murray, Lee
“Somnambulists. Sleep-walkers.”
It did seem that way. Even Ava had said Dad was sleeping. I glanced at Dad, who was mesmerised by whatever he was watching. He didn’t look up.
Tipping a puzzle of coloured shapes on the floor for Ava, I said, “I thought Dad might be tired from looking after Ava.” I stood up. “You know, it could still be that, because Jason was up all night…”
“It doesn’t explain my mum though, does it?” Darren said. “Or Mr Davies. Not everyone can have sleep deprivation.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” I said again, as Ava mashed the yellow circle into its space, pushing it from side-to-side until it fit. “We’ll figure it out.”
CHAPTER 4
“I could call Mum,” I said, more to hear the idea spoken out loud than anything else. I didn’t really think I should call her, and I wasn’t certain that I would, but it was an option that had to be considered. “But I’m not allowed to call Mum at work, except in an emergency.”
Darren sat upright and hugged a sofa cushion to his chest. “It is an emergency,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure. Mum and I had different ideas about what an emergency was. Running out of chocolate milk didn’t qualify. Neither was asking her to pick up a new inner tube for my bike.
“Life or death, Seb,” she’d said the last time I’d called the office to ask if she’d seen where I’d put my hockey kit. “If it’s a matter of life and death, then you can call me. Or if the Rest Home calls about Grandma. Anything else, get your father to deal with it, or it can wait until I get home.”
I thought about what I could tell her if I called:
Darren’s mum was addicted to social media.
Jason had stayed up all night obsessing over his music.
It was the middle of the afternoon and Dad was in his pyjamas and dressing gown watching television, and, Ava had a pongy nappy.
Nothing on my list was what you would call a life and death situation. I glanced at Dad. Still at the table, he was sucking the last drops out of Ava’s breakfast juice box. The droplets rattled through the straw like someone drawing their last breath.
“This is stupid. I’m going to call her,” I said.
I tipped the puzzle pieces out of the tray for Ava to play again and went to the kitchen to fish my cell out of my school bag. Back in the family room, where I could keep an eye on Ava, I selected Mum’s number.
Dropping the cushion on the sofa, Darren stood up. “Is it ringing?” he said.
Impatient, I waved my hand at him. I wouldn’t be able to hear her answer if he was rabbiting on in the background.
Darren looked up. He shook his head. I pulled the phone from my ear.
“What?” I said.
He raised his index finger to the ceiling. That’s when I heard it—the faint and familiar wim-a-ways of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
“Hello, Mummy,” said Ava.
My heart sank. Mum’s ringtone.
We charged up there and into Mum and Dad’s room. It was tidy. The curtains were pulled back, the bed was made, and the cushions were piled neatly on the bed, the big ones at the back and the little sparkly ones at the front the way Mum likes it.
“There’s no one here,” Darren said, stating the obvious.
I went to the bedside table where Mum’s phone was performing its little song and dance number. She must have forgotten it when she left this morning. But even as I turned off the phone, I knew it wasn’t likely. Mum used her phone a lot. I checked the hook on the back of the bedroom door where she kept her handbag.
“Noooo!”
“What now?”
I rushed across the hall to Mum’s home office. The door was closed. I threw it open.
Mum wasn’t at work at all. She was home at her desk!
But Mum didn’t move. She didn’t raise her head the teeniest bit, not even to growl at me for interrupting her while she was busy working. At least, she’d got dressed in her work suit and combed her hair. She looked the way she always did, only something wasn’t quite right. Like a pie not properly baked. I didn’t need to speak to her to know she would be just like Dad and Jason.
Out to lunch. Out of her head. Out of it.
“Your mum, too?” whispered Darren, from behind me.
“Yes.” I hated saying it.
Darren heaved a sigh. “This isn’t just the apocalypse, it’s a fully-fledged dystopia.”
Apocalypse. Somnambulist. Dystopia. Darren was really getting on my nerves with all his fancy words.
“Look,” I said, swinging about to face him. “Hang on, where’s Ava?” I scanned the hall, the office.
“Ava? I thought she was with you.”
“I’m not allowed to carry her on the stairs in case she wiggles and I drop her.”
“Well, if she didn’t come up with us, then she must still be downstairs,” Darren said.
We hurried downstairs to the family room. Ava’s puzzle was on the floor, the pieces snug in their spaces. Ava was nowhere to be seen. I bit my bottom lip. Ava could be a pain, but I didn’t want anything to happen to her.
“Dad!” I rushed over to the table. “Have you seen Ava?”
“Hmmm?” Dad murmured.
“Ava, where is she?” I gave him a rough shake. But, eyes wide, Dad pulled away from me. He cradled his tablet in his arms.
Panic bit me.
Ava was missing and Dad was playing Gollum with his tablet? Up until yesterday, Ava was his precious. What was going on?
“You better help me look for her,” I said to Darren.
Darren clapped his hands together. “Right. We should probably conduct a systematic room-by-room search,” he said, going into detective mode. “The doors are closed, so she has to be somewhere inside.” It was a relief to have someone else take charge.
We started downstairs, checking all the places Ava might hide. We dragged aside curtains and swam through the clothes in Mum’s walk-in wardrobe. We upturned the pile of dirty washing in the laundry, tossed the junk under Jason’s bed, and tunnelled into the mountain of soft toys in Ava’s room. I even checked behind the bath, although her chances of being in there were pretty low. She wasn’t anywhere.
“Ava. You win, you’re the best at hiding,” I called. “Time to come out now. Darren has a lollipop for you.”
Beside me, Darren’s head whipped around. “What? I haven’t got a lollipop.”
“Shh, will you? I’m trying to get her to come out.”
“Oh.” His shoulders slumped. “Sorry.”
I felt a bit stink. Darren didn’t have a little sister. He didn’t know what it was like.
“That’s okay,” I said, shrugging. “I’m freaking out a bit. Dad says Ava’s in her Terrible Twos. It only takes her two seconds to get into terrible trouble.”
Darren rubbed his nose. “Okay so we’ll start over. From the beginning,” he said. “Go room-by-room again.”
We were on our way to do that, heading through the family room past the sliding door, when I caught a flash of pink. Stopping, I gazed through the glass. “Look.”
Ava was in the yard, trying to spray Cody with the hose.
“But the doors are all closed. How did she get out there?” Darren said.
I slapped my hand to my forehead. I was an idiot.
“Cody’s dog door,” I said. “It’s too small for Cody now, but Dad hasn’t got around to putting in a bigger one. Ava must have crawled through it.”
Cody was dripping wet, so we left him in the yard. Ava was slightly damp too, but I carried her in and gave the little escape artist a juice box. I gave one to Dad too, pushing the box into his hand. He guzzled it, without saying a word.
Darren and I sat on the sofa and shared a packet of BBQ chips. Ava toddled over the minute she heard the packet crinkle. “A
va chip,” she said. I handed her one.
“Do you think all the grown-ups in town are like this?” Darren said, throwing his eyes towards Dad. “In the world, maybe?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know. It was a possibility. I gazed out the window at the empty street, straining for the whine of a lawn mower or the roar of a motorbike revving. All I could hear was the crunch of potato chips.
“Chip,” said Ava. She held out her hand.
“Say please.”
“Peas.”
I rustled in the bag and gave her another one. She licked all the salt off it and smushed it into her mouth.
“What do we do now?” Darren said, cramming a handful into his mouth.
I wasn’t sure. I’d pinned all my hopes on Mum, but she was as spaced out as everyone else. Who did you call when your mother had checked out?
“I’ve got it.” I stood up and thwacked my hands on my trousers, dusting orange BBQ salt off my fingers. “Grandma.”
CHAPTER 5
For the first time since lunch, I felt a surge of hope. We had a plan. We’d go to Sunnynook Rest Home, a few blocks away, and speak to Grandma. She’d know what to do. Grandma was old. As old as Methuselah, she said. I think Methuselah was someone she went to school with. Anyway, you didn’t get to be as old as those two without learning some things.
“Chip,” said Ava, interrupting my thoughts. There were none left. I showed her the empty bag. She peered inside, shook it a few times and checked again. Then she threw the bag on the floor and went to investigate something in the toy box. Cody dashed in to lick the empty packet.
“We’ll have to take Ava to the rest home with us,” I said.
I went to the wash-house and got Ava’s pushchair. It wasn’t very heavy. I carried it through to the family room and laid it on the floor. Folded down, the designer buggy was the size of a skateboard, but where the deck should be, there was knot of tubes and fabric.
“Right, all we have to do is open it,” I said.
“How does it work?” asked Darren, stepping around it.
“Simple. It’s 3D. It folds in half and then in half again, like a Transformer.” Dad had researched buggies before ordering this one online from Europe. Ultra-quick and easy-to-use was what the website had said.
“Okaaay.” Darren eyed it as if it were a suspicious package left at the library. “So, how do we get it open?”
I put my hands on my hips. I had no idea. I’d seen it unfolded of course. I’d even pushed Ava in it, but I’d never actually worked it myself. I shrugged. Dad used it nearly every day. Surely it couldn’t be that hard?
We peered at the tubes.
“Maybe here?” I suggested. Crouching, I twisted the thick black plastic cog. It swivelled and spun, but the pushchair remained tightly folded.
We turned it over.
“No, that can’t be right,” Darren said. “Now the wheels are facing up. What if we stand it on its end?”
We stood the contraption up and jiggled some sticky-out bits that might have been levers. They weren’t.
“What about there?” Darren said.
Nope, that didn’t work either.
“It must be broken,” I said finally.
Darren nodded. “Looks like it,” he replied. “We’ll have to find some other way of getting your sister to the rest home.”
“Mum has a shopping cart,” I said.
I dragged it out from under the stairs. I didn’t bother to dust it off. It was obvious it wasn’t going to work. We’d have to stand Ava up in the bag part. Even if she was tall enough to look over the flap, her feet would be resting on the metal cage at the bottom. You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to know the bars would hurt. Ava would grizzle all the way there.
Darren must have realised the shopping cart was a dead-end too, because he said, “We could sit her on Cody’s back. He’s big enough.”
I shook my head. “Too unpredictable. The first sign of a cat and we’ll lose them both.”
“Good point,” said Darren. “We need something that rolls. Something inanimate. What about her high chair?”
It was a great idea. We didn’t need an all-terrain vehicle or anything. The high chair would be perfect. Not only did it have rollers, it came with a safety belt. If we lifted the little brakes, we’d be able to push her all the way to Sunnynook on the pavement.
I picked up Ava and carried her to the high chair.
“In we go,” I said. It was a mistake. Ava kicked and bucked and like rodeo bull. After being in her high chair half the day, Ava refused to go back in. She shrieked at the top of her lungs. It was worse than trying to get her into the bath. Darren took the other side of her, and we managed to lift her up over the seat, but she went as stiff as a hockey stick.
“Noooo,” she wailed. “No chair.” She wouldn’t bend her knees. It was her screaming-iron-girder-trick.
“Darren.” I sighed. “Forget it. This isn’t going to work.”
We put her down again.
Darren took Cody’s leash from its hook by the back door. “How far is it exactly? Could she walk? We could attach her to a leash so she can’t escape.”
I frowned. “It’s only a few blocks, but too far for Ava. She’ll get grumpy and we’ll have to carry her. And we can’t put her on a leash. She’s my sister, not a puppy.”
Cody nuzzled Darren’s thigh. Darren pushed him away gently. “Yeah, sorry. I’m a bit short on ideas.”
Suddenly, I had one of those light-bulb moments. “Watch her for a sec, will you?”
I sprinted upstairs to my room and grabbed my computer chair. Made of orange plastic, it was an old one—it’d been Jason’s before mine—and the plastic was scratched and battered, but that didn’t matter. It had what we needed: wheels and a seat.
It took a bit to get it down the stairs. I might have scraped the wall in a couple of places, but this was definitely an emergency. A few nicks in the walls didn’t matter.
Darren’s eyes widened when he saw the chair. “That’ll do it,” he said. “But how are we going to stop her falling off?”
“No worries.” I rummaged in my school bag for my hockey shirt, which I slipped over Ava’s head. I pulled her teeny arms through the armholes. It was miles too big for her, the shirt hanging below her knees, but as Dad always says, ‘Life isn’t a fashion parade.’ Lifting Ava onto the seat, I slipped the shirt over the seat back.
There. Ava wasn’t just belted in, she was t-shirted into the chair.
Darren grinned. “That’s awesome,” he said.
My tablet and my maths book were still in my bag. I ditched the maths book and slipped it over my shoulders. “Okay, let’s go.”
“I’ll be right there,” said Darren, “just let me put the leash back.”
But Cody had already seen him holding it. He looked first at Darren and then at me with his big brown Labrador eyes. He did a little moonwalk on the floorboards with his paws. I’m kind of telepathic when it comes to Cody. My dog was begging me to bring him too.
“Let’s take them both,” I heard myself say. “Cody’s been cooped up all day. He could do with a run.” Taking the leash from Darren, I attached it to Cody’s collar and slipped the loop over my wrist.
I took one last look at Dad, and we set off. Darren went first and I pushed the computer chair out the sliding door and around the side of the house.
The street was spookily quiet. There was no traffic at all, no cars or people. Probably just as well because the castors on the computer chair were insisting we go one way, while Cody wanted to go another, and neither of them had any intention of going to Sunnynook.
“Fat way, fat way,” Ava said, the t-shirt seat belt straining as she leaned forward and pointed towards Sunnynook. The chair wove from one side of the path to the other and back again. For a second, it got away from
me, banging into the back of Darren’s legs.
“Ow, watch it,” Darren wailed.
“Whoopsie,” said Ava. She grasped the seat with her hands and tucked her knees up by her chin. “Whoopsie-daisies.”
“Sorry,” I muttered to Darren, pulling the chair back as best I could, but Cody chose that moment to swing off, following a smell, his nose to the ground. He yanked on the leash and my arm nearly dropped off.
“Cody! Heel!” Keeping one hand on the back of the chair, I tried to haul him back. I was in the middle of a tug-of-war between Cody and the chair, and Cody was winning. But the castors had minds of their own too. The chair spun, Ava on it, and ripped from my grasp. I was dragged behind Cody as he chased after a whiff of something. I couldn’t get free. My hand was stuck in the leash. I glanced over my shoulder. Ava’s chair rattled over the curb and onto the road. “Ava!” I shrieked helplessly.
What if the chair toppled? Or worse, a car came?
Darren came to my rescue, his arms stretched wide to create a roadblock. Cody ran around him, charging forward. I had no control. I hurtled straight into him. We landed in a heap on the grass verge.
“Ooof!”
Scrambling to my feet, I checked my wrist. Still attached, Cody had stopped for a sniff of dried up poop. I let go of the leash and spun to face the road. Blood thundered through my veins. I feared the worst.
“Seb!”
I blew out a long breath. We’d been lucky.
Ava stretched her arms out in front of her as the orange chair spun like a merry-go-round. It had puttered out when it hit the pothole outside Number 36.
Ava curled her fingers inwards in a tickling motion, a sign to come and get her. I looked both ways. No cars. I ran into the road and grabbed the chair, forcing it up the driveway and back onto the path. Puffing, I picked up Cody’s leash.
“Just as well you’re wearing your football gear,” I said.
Darren was busy brushing the grass off his pants. “I probably should’ve kept my bike helmet on too,” he replied.
“Sorry about that. Maybe you should take Cody,” I said, “and I’ll push the chair.” I held out the leash. But Darren’s attention was on something further up the path. I followed his eyes. It was his coach, Mr Davies. He was walking towards us, his head down while he checked his phone messages.