‘That family’s been nothing but trouble since they moved here,’ Sergeant LeDouche said after he’d got off the phone. ‘The mum’s been done for dangerous driving. The dad’s been done for drunk and disorderly. The daughter’s been done for shoplifting and the boy’s always in trouble. They’re bad news.’
‘Maybe if we keep quiet,’ his assistant suggested, ‘they’ll all vanish one by one.’
‘We can only hope so,’ said the sergeant.
But Mrs Dent kept phoning every few days for the next month until the police could ignore her no longer. By the time they went around to number 11 Acacia Avenue, the kitchen table had forty-three plates of cold burger, chips and beans piled up on it. Mrs Dent had got it into her head that if she stopped putting Dickie’s dinner out every day, she might never see him again.
‘Okay, Mrs Dent, when did your little boy disappear?’ LeDouche asked her.
‘Um, one, two, three, four …’ Mrs Dent tried to count the plates of cold food but got stuck when she reached seven. The sergeant could count to fifteen, which he did three times and then took two away.
‘I haven’t put today’s dinner out yet,’ said Mrs Dent. ‘So that’s another day.’
‘Reumm, yurghhmm oh,’ said the sergeant with a mouthful of cold burger.
They took away the cold dinners for forensic examination, as well as all the beers in the fridge – just in case there were fingerprints on them.
‘Don’t you want to see Dickie’s room?’ said Mrs Dent.
‘Disgusting, untidy, smelly, red sports car posters, dirty clothes, wet towels, unmade bed, naughty magazines, broken toys, is it?’ said LeDouche.
‘Yes, don’t you want to check it for DNA?’
‘Mrs Dent, we don’t really do that. You’ve been watching too much TV.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Mrs Dent. ‘How can anyone watch too much telly?’
‘Whatever,’ said the sergeant and left.
He thought about getting a missing persons poster made for Dickie, but he was such an ugly boy he decided not to because it would frighten people.
In the meantime, the Floods were enjoying their new fridge. Betty thought she might’ve got into trouble for what she’d done, but everyone was delighted.
‘It’s much better than our old fridge,’ said Nerlin. ‘Top of the range, excellent.’
‘One less Dent in the world too,’ said Valla. ‘Nice one, little sister. High five.’
‘No, no, Valla – remember what happened last time?’ Mordonna warned him.
‘What?’ said Valla.
‘Your hand fell off, and it took me ages to sew it back on again.’
‘Isn’t that supposed to happen when you do a high five?’ Valla asked.
‘No, not usually.’
Even Vlad the cat loved the new fridge. As he walked past it, he could see his reflection in the doors and pretend it was another cat stalking him. Also, there was a special chilled fish tank inside full of Siamese fighting fish, his favourite meal, kept at exactly the right temperature to make them really angry and fight each other as they slid down his throat.
It really was a magic fridge, with something just right for every single one of the Floods.
‘I can’t believe how good this chocolate intestine roll tastes,’ said Merlinmary.
‘And these ballerina’s toes are out of this world,’ Winchflat added.
‘I never knew simple serial killer’s blood could taste so good,’ said Valla.
‘Well done, sweetheart,’ Nerlin said to Betty. ‘We’re all very proud of you.’
‘It’s the best sort of recycling,’ said Winchflat. ‘Take something broken and useless and turn it into something really useful. And I’m so glad you gave him that special finish so we never have to polish him. Stainless steel can be really hard to keep looking nice.’
Dickie said nothing. He was a fridge, and fridges, even the most advanced ones, don’t speak.15 He just hummed softly in his expensive I’m-so-happy sort of way.
And because Dickie was a magic fridge, no matter how much of the wonderful food everyone ate, there was always more.
The next one to vanish was Tracylene. She was out in the back yard one night, waiting in the bushes for her second-best backup replacement boyfriend. She was wearing her new purple mini-skirt with the split up the side and an incredibly bright red lipstick she had bought off the internet that was guaranteed to drive boys wild.16 On her feet, she wore a pair of shoes with such high heels that she had to stand on a box to put them on.
The boy, who had said his name was Jean-Claude but was actually called Graham, was lost in some bushes in a house over the road. Tracylene was getting so bored waiting that she’d actually started eating her nail varnish.17 As she nibbled at her nails, not realising they were false and highly toxic, she noticed the hole that Dickie had made in the fence through to number 13.
Maybe Jean-Claude’s through there, she thought and squeezed herself through into the Floods’ garden. It was quiet, very, very quiet, and dark. The moon was hiding behind the trees and the only light was from the eerie strange mushrooms growing on a mound of grass by the washing line. There were fifteen mushrooms and they glowed like the luminous letters on an old clock.
Tracylene tottered over to the mushrooms and looked down at them. There was a sucking, popping sound as the mushroom between her feet vanished into the ground. Tracylene turned to leave but it was too late. The mound of grass was Queen Scratchrot’s grave and she was having her dinner. The grave split open and a skeleton arm shot out and grabbed Tracylene around the ankle. She fell flat on her face, and before she could make a sound, a second skeleton arm stuffed one of the glowing mushrooms into her mouth and began to drag her into the grave.
While this was going on, Nerlin and Mordonna were sitting side by side on their back verandah, drinking blood-red Merlinot wine and waiting for the moon to appear. The children were all indoors watching The World’s Greatest Funerals IV on DVD while their parents relaxed in the cool of the evening.
‘Oh, look,’ said Nerlin. ‘Your mother’s caught something.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Mordonna. ‘I wonder what it is. Looks too big to be a cat.’
‘I think it’s a teenage girl.’
‘Oh, Mummy will be pleased,’ said Mordonna. ‘That’s one of her favourite meals. I think it’s that awful tarty girl from next door.’
‘Excellent,’ said Nerlin. ‘Two down, two to go.’
‘I hope she doesn’t disagree with her, though. I imagine that family would be a bit indigestible.’
The mushroom spread its glow through Tracylene’s entire body until she was shining like a big pink electric dolphin. She tried to speak, to say that she would never be a bad girl ever again if whatever it was that had hold of her would just let her go. She tried to say she would never steal any more undies from Target or go out with bad boys or steal her mother’s gin. She wanted to say that she’d always get her dad a beer when he wanted one and help her mum with whatever it was that mothers do in the kitchen room … But no sound came out. The juice from the mushroom reached right down to the tips of her toes and began to tenderise her. Queen Scratchrot had been dead a very long time and her teeth were not as good as they used to be, so she couldn’t eat anything she had to chew.
Tracylene grew softer and softer until she was like a great big human-flavoured jelly baby. She gave one final wobbly pink quiver before the ground opened up and Queen Scratchrot swallowed her. Then there was silence, followed by a very loud belch.
‘That’ll keep her happy for a while,’ said Mordonna.
‘Good thing too,’ said Nerlin. ‘It’s getting harder and harder to catch cats for her. Even with Vlad luring them into the garden for us.’
‘We can always get her another postman. She hasn’t had one for ages.’
The moon rose high over the Floods’ back garden. Nigel and Shirley, Valla’s two pet vampire bats, went out to visit all the dogs sleeping outsid
e in the neighbouring back yards.18 Nerlin and Mordonna rocked gently back and forth on their verandah swing while Queen Scratchrot digested Tracylene with a chorus of burps and farts. Eventually the smell got too much.
‘I’m going indoors,’ said Nerlin with his hand over his nose. ‘I don’t know what that Dent girl has been eating but it seems to have upset your mother.’
‘Do you think I should water her grave with some indigestion medicine?’ Mordonna asked.
‘Good idea, but whatever you do don’t strike a match.’
Mrs Dent didn’t put a plate of burger, chips and beans out for Tracylene each day like she had for Dickie. She didn’t like her daughter and was quite glad she was gone.
‘Great useless lump,’ she said. ‘She’ll be back.’
‘Who?’ asked Mr Dent. ‘Tracylene, get me another beer.’
‘She’s not here,’ said Mrs Dent.
‘Well, you get me one.’
‘If there was any beer, I’d be able to say “Get it yourself”, but the police took it all,’ said Mrs Dent.
‘What, you mean they stole it?’ said Mr Dent.
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I’m going to report them to the police. They’re not going to get away with it.’
Mrs Dent wasn’t listening. Pro–Celebrity See How Many Burgers You Can Eat in Five Minutes While Sitting in a Bath of Beans Championships had just started and it was the finals. When Mr Dent rang the police station they said he could come and collect his beer, except it had mysteriously evaporated in the bottles and someone had stolen all the bottle tops.
An ad for a range of super-healthy frozen pre-cooked one-hundred-per-cent-taste-free dinners came on and Mrs Dent grabbed the phone off her husband.
‘Now my daughter’s gone missing too,’ she told Sergeant LeDouche.
There was a silence. The sergeant was one of Tracylene’s many boyfriends and he couldn’t decide if he was glad she’d disappeared or if he missed her. Their relationship had always been a bit strange and difficult. For example, one night they’d been to the movies together and the next day he’d had to arrest her for shoplifting. LeDouche decided that life would be a lot less complicated if he didn’t look for Tracylene too efficiently.
‘Now, now, Mrs Dent,’ he said. ‘Don’t upset yourself. I’m sure she’ll turn up.’
‘I’m not upset,’ said Mrs Dent.
‘I’ll be around shortly,’ he told her.
‘Oh, you needn’t bother,’ said Mrs Dent. ‘I don’t particularly want you to find her.’
‘Why did you phone us then?’ asked the sergeant, getting suspicious.
‘Well, I don’t want you to think I done her in. You know, when you find her horribly mangled body somewhere.’
‘Why do you think she’s been horribly mangled?’ said the sergeant, getting even more suspicious.
‘Well, er … I don’t. But when a teenager goes missing on telly they usually get horribly mangled,’ said Mrs Dent, sounding more and more guilty. ‘She’s probably just done a runner, gone off with one of her boyfriends.’
‘I think you’ve been watching too much TV,’ LeDouche suggested.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Mrs Dent. ‘How can anyone watch too much telly?’
The sergeant arrived two minutes later and went over Tracylene’s bedroom with a fine-tooth comb. He didn’t find any fine teeth, but he did retrieve what he had come for: Tracylene’s diary. He read the first few pages, learnt two new rude words and read some stuff that made him feel very strange. He was going to tear out the pages that contained any stuff written about him, but instead, he took the diary away to read in bed later with his cocoa.
‘When did you last see your daughter?’ he asked Mr and Mrs Dent.
‘Dunno,’ said Mr Dent. ‘Get me a beer, will you?’
‘I’ll have one too,’ said the sergeant.
‘Get them yourself, my programme’s gonna start,’ said Mrs Dent.
The sergeant went back to the station and wrote his report in the special missing persons book. Not the ordinary missing persons book, but the special one with the code word on the front: CLASS (which stands for ‘Complete Losers And Serial Scumbags’, a special police code that meant anyone trying to find any of the people in the book would be arrested). Tracylene Dent’s details were written on the page after Dickie’s.
It didn’t take Mr and Mrs Dent very long to forget their two children, because that was the sort of people they were. They still shouted and fought a lot and filled their garden up with more old cars and rubbish and threw empty bottles over the fence into the Floods’ back garden. Even with half the family gone, the Dents were still the neighbours from hell.
‘Two down, two to go,’ said Valla, after Nerlin had told everyone about Tracylene.
‘Which one first?’ asked Mordonna. ‘Him or her?’
‘Well, he makes the most noise,’ said Merlinmary.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Winchflat. ‘She has the TV blaring out all day and night.’
‘True,’ agreed Nerlin.
‘Well, we’ve got three choices,’ said Mordonna. ‘Him first, her first or both together.’
Events decided who was to be next a few weeks later. Mr and Mrs Dent had just had their usual Saturday night fight, the one where Mrs Dent ended up locked out of the house in the back yard in her underwear in the rain while Mr Dent stayed inside with the TV up so loud he couldn’t hear her. This was the only way Mr Dent ever got to watch stuff on TV that he wanted. He did have a TV in his shed at the bottom of the garden, but it was fifty metres from the house and the walk tired him out so much he fell asleep as soon as he got there.
Mrs Dent had done her usual screaming, throwing a brick through the window, screaming some more, beating on the back door and wailing, and now she was doing her falling down drunk in the grass and crying that no one loved her. Quite who she was trying to tell this to was a mystery. Everyone already knew that no one loved her – not even Rambo the poodle, who, at that very moment, was attempting to kill her left slipper.
Mrs Dent tried to stand up again, landed face down in a puddle and fell asleep under a bush, with her head poking through the hole in the fence that Dickie and Tracylene had vanished through. Midnight came and went, while Mrs Dent snored like a pig with a bad sinus problem.
Apart from Betty, who slept through the night like ordinary people, the rest of the Floods barely slept. Night-time was when they did the secret special things that witches and wizards do all over the world. Spells, curses, transforming themselves into huge black bats, sucking blood, watching the shopping channels at 3 am and travelling about on broomsticks are just a few of the things that magic people prefer to do under cover of darkness.
Mrs Dent’s snoring interrupted the magic flow. Mordonna’s broomstick turned into a dustpan and brush. Valla spilt a glass of his finest blood all over his book of spells, with disastrous results, and Nerlin started phoning up the shopping channel to buy a hand-carved crystal mobile phone stand with 24-carat gold filigree inlay.
‘Is someone trying to saw a tree down out there?’ said Mordonna, relieved she had only been a metre in the air when her broomstick had changed.
‘No, it’s Mrs Dent snoring,’ said one of the children.
‘Well, it’s enough to wake the dead,’ said Mordonna. ‘And in our back garden that is not a good thing.’
‘Oh, God no,’ said Nerlin. ‘It would be bad enough if your mother woke up, lovely and wonderful though she is, but if it woke Uncle Cloister, all hell would break loose.’
‘Not to mention Great-Grandmother Lucreature,’ said Mordonna. ‘Winchflat, go out and shut the woman up, there’s a good boy.’
‘Temporarily or permanently?’ asked Winchflat. ‘With pain or without?’
‘Surprise us,’ said Nerlin.
Winchflat went out into the garden and found Mrs Dent’s head sticking through the fence. She was now lying on her back in a patch of stinging nettles with her mouth w
ide open. As usual her lipstick was smeared all over the place, looking as if it was trying to escape. Winchflat picked up two handfuls of earth and dropped them into Mrs Dent’s mouth.
Mrs Dent choked, spluttered and opened her eyes. The skinny, sickly figure of Winchflat towering overhead scared the living daylights out of her, and she screamed as loud as someone with a mouthful of earth can scream. Which is not at all. She rolled onto her front, spat out the earth and escaped back into her own garden. The last thing she saw as she wriggled away was something red and shiny. It was half hidden by Winchflat’s long spindly legs, but there was no mistaking what she had seen.
It was one of Tracylene’s red high-heeled shoes.
She had a brief flash of nearly being almost-but-not-quite intelligent and said nothing. She wriggled backwards through the fence, but it was too late. Winchflat realised she had seen the shoe.
‘She’ll have to go,’ said Mordonna when Winchflat got back inside.
‘How on Earth did we miss the shoes?’ said Nerlin.
‘I don’t know. Mother must have regurgitated them,’ said Mordonna.
‘I thought she liked shoes.’
‘Not red ones,’ said Mordonna. ‘They give her wind.’
Mrs Dent staggered towards her back door, spitting out the earth and crying. It wasn’t knowing her daughter was probably dead that made her so hysterical. Nor was it the terrifying experience she’d just had with Winchflat. No, it was the realisation that she’d been asleep for three hours and had missed the final ever episode of Mega-Extreme Celebrity Really Dumb Fat Ugly Stupid Idiot Loser Makeover, where they were going to replace someone’s entire brain with a silicone implant. She had been looking forward to it all week, and now, quite simply, her life was ruined.
As it was Saturday night, she did what she always did after the big row with her husband and began wailing at the back door until Mr Dent, who was passed out under the kitchen table in his usual Saturday night pool of sick, woke up and let her back inside. Then Mr and Mrs Dent spent half an hour crying and telling each other how much they loved each other and how they would never be horrible to each other ever again until next Saturday.
Neighbours Page 4