Neighbours

by Colin Thompson

  ‘Three down, one to go,’ said Mordonna, cuddling up to Nerlin. ‘This couch is a bit lumpy. You know, I think it’s time we got a new one.’

  ‘As you said, one to go.’

  Mr Dent didn’t notice his wife had gone until the following night.

  Something wasn’t right. He could sense it, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. It was only a subtle change and Mr Dent didn’t do subtle. Then it dawned on him. It was the smell.

  As always, every single square centimetre of the house smelled of burgers, chips and beans. Over the years, layer upon layer of scented grease had built up until everything, even freshly washed clothes and Adolf the budgie’s feathers, smelled the same. The smell oozed out of every pore of the Dents’ skin. Even if they had used a deodorant – which was about as likely as finding intelligent life on Mars or Big Brother – their armpits would still have smelled of burgers, chips and beans. The only good thing about everything smelling of burgers, chips and beans was that it covered up the terrible smell of Mr Dent’s disgusting socks and bad breath. This endless diet of grease with bits of gristle and other rubbish added had covered Mr Dent’s back with so many angry pimples it looked like a map of Patagonia, except the mountains weren’t all green. Some were purple. If gross and disgusting had been in the Olympics, Mr Dent would have won triple gold.

  But that night, something was missing. The smell was slightly different. Instead of a new cloud of hot greasy mist hovering in the air, there was just the old cold smell like first thing in the morning. Except now it was the evening.

  ‘Oi,’ he shouted.

  ‘Oi’ was what Mr and Mrs Dent called each other when they weren’t fighting.

  ‘Oi, where’s me dinner? Get us a beer.’

  Silence.

  ‘I said, where’s me dinner?’ he shouted.

  More silence, interrupted by the sound of Rambo scratching at the back door. Mr Dent fell asleep again but ten minutes later the dog’s barking woke him up and he did something he hadn’t done for years, except when he was too drunk to know where he was. He went into the kitchen.

  ‘Blimey, what’s all this stuff?’ he said, looking at the kettle and the stove and the toaster. ‘Women’s toys, I suppose.’

  Mrs Dent wasn’t there. Nor was she in the bedroom, the bathroom or the back yard. Mr Dent didn’t look in the garage or his shed because women were not allowed in there. The more he didn’t find Mrs Dent the more angry he became. His neck got redder and redder, and even three beers didn’t help. Six more beers didn’t help either. Soon his neck got as red as a traffic light and Rambo, mistaking him for a gigantic frankfurter, bit his ankle.

  Mr Dent staggered back to his chair and fell asleep again while Pro–Celebrity Wife Swap USA started. This made him even more bad-tempered because it was his favourite programme. He would often daydream about swapping Mrs Dent for a big red sports car and then fall asleep and have a nightmare where he’d swapped her for her mother.

  It was dark when he woke up and his stomach was calling out for burger, chips and beans.

  ‘Oi, where’s me dinner? Get us a beer,’ he shouted.

  Silence.

  But he was not alone. There was a tall figure silhouetted in the glow from the television. She clicked her fingers and the TV fell silent.

  ‘Hello, Mr Dent,’ said Mordonna. ‘Mrs Dent isn’t here. Why don’t you come and have dinner at our house?’

  Mr Dent tried to get up but he was too drunk and there was a terrible pain in his right foot. Rambo, who hadn’t had any dinner either, had bitten off his big toe and was lying under the coffee table chewing it.

  Mr Dent started to sweat but Mordonna took off her dark glasses and he was totally hypnotised. Her eyes glowed like fire and Mr Dent was as feeble as a puppy – a drunk, ugly, stupid puppy, but a puppy nevertheless.

  ‘We’ve got beer, lovely and cold, in our great big new fridge,’ Mordonna murmured.

  ‘Beer?’ said Mr Dent.

  ‘Yes, and you can watch soccer on our massive new flat-screen TV,’ said Betty, who was standing next to her mother.

  Mr Dent opened his mouth, but no words came out.

  ‘Do you know what the time is?’ Mordonna asked him.

  Mr Dent could only shake his head.

  ‘It’s time for a change. It’s time for you to do something useful.’

  ‘Uhhh?’ Mr Dent managed to say.

  ‘Have you ever done any housework?’ said Mordonna. Then she clicked her fingers and gave Mr Dent back the power of speech.

  ‘Do I look like a woman?’ he snorted. ‘Of course I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, it’s time to start,’ said Betty. ‘This place is a pigsty, without the intelligent pigs. And you are disgusting.’

  Mr Dent had fallen off the chair. He was now crawling blindly around on the floor on his hands and knees while Rambo tried to bite off his other big toe.

  ‘Mr Piggy is a filthy little piggy, isn’t he, Betty?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Yes, Mother. He should be a cleaner –’

  Betty had intended to say, ‘He should be a cleaner piggy’, but as soon as she said the word ‘cleaner’, there was a flash of light that cut off her words.

  The pain in Mr Dent’s right foot vanished. It happened so suddenly he sat up and looked at his feet. Then he fainted.

  Mr Dent’s feet weren’t feet any more. They were wheels – small, round, shiny wheels. He woke up, became very suddenly sober and screamed.

  ‘Shhh, you’ll wake the neighbours,’ said Mordonna. ‘Oh, we are the neighbours, and we’re awake already.’

  Then Mr Dent felt himself shrinking and changing shape. His skin was changing too. Now it wasn’t what you’d call skin, it was what you’d call stainless steel.

  ‘Oops,’ said Betty. ‘Sorry, Mother. Think I got it wrong again.’

  ‘Don’t apologise, darling,’ said Mordonna. ‘The stainless steel matches the fridge and the TV surround. I can see a family resemblance.’

  Betty and Mordonna both collapsed on the floor laughing while Mr Dent sat there terrified. His legs seemed to have vanished up into his body and he couldn’t move.

  ‘Help,’ he bleated.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Mordonna. ‘We stopped your foot hurting, didn’t we?’

  Betty walked over to Mr Dent and patted him on the head.

  ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Just look on the bright side – and all your sides are bright now – we’ve cured your spots.’

  With that, mother and daughter fell about laughing again.

  A few seconds later the transformation was complete. What had once been a fat, lazy pig of a man was now the best vacuum cleaner in the world. Mr Dent was the ultimate vacuum cleaner. He was a cordless automatic robot vacuum cleaner that could back his bottom up to an electric socket and plug himself in whenever his batteries started going flat. While everyone was resting or out, Mr Dent went quietly and efficiently around the whole house, stairs included, sucking up dust. He even had an extra-long nozzle that got cobwebs off the ceiling and a special attachment for getting Satanella’s and Merlinmary’s hair off the furniture. And when his bag was full, Mr Dent went out into the garden and emptied himself into the bin, before starting the whole thing all over again.

  Now, in a normal house, getting all the dusting and cleaning done automatically would be great. But it wasn’t like that in the Floods’ house. The Floods had cobwebs that were old friends. Generations of spiders had lived in complete safety on the ceilings and windows, knowing that no one was ever going to come and sweep them away. They had dust collected in happy piles around the house that just moved to one side when anyone needed to go past.

  If Betty hadn’t made another mistake, Mr Dent would now be a big comfy sofa – though Mordonna had to admit, the thought of sitting in Mr Dent’s ex-lap was a bit creepy. With magic that was meant to happen, it was always possible to change your mind, but because Betty’s magic was so uncontrolled, no one knew the formula, which made c
hanging it pretty dangerous. If they made a mistake, Mr Dent could turn into something covered in mould that smelled like a bad drain and kept exploding. On the other hand, he could change into something awful.

  So once again Winchflat, the family genius, sorted things out. He took the Dent-O-Vac down to his special workshop in the cellars and made a few modifications. Basically, he made Mr Dent run backwards (which anyone who had known him as a human would have said he’d done all his life). Every morning Mr Dent trundled out into the garden and collected dust and flies. Then he spent the rest of the day spreading the dust around the house and feeding the flies to the spiders. At midnight, when his work was done, he would trundle into the kitchen and sit next to Dickie the fridge and the two of them would hum softly together in a very loving father and son bonding way, which they had never done when they were human.

  Once the final Dent had been taken care of, Rambo’s evil spell was broken and he became a cuddly, fluffy, happy little poodle. He went to live with the nice neighbours at number 15 – an old couple who spoilt him rotten with poached chicken, crispy liver treats and a red velvet cushion to sleep on.

  Mordonna turned the Dents’ other pet, Adolf the budgie, into a small solar-powered lawnmower, to trim the grass on Queen Scratchrot’s grave. That way he would always be close to Tracylene.

  When you are as dreadful as the Dents were, all your relatives pretend they don’t know you. Sometimes they move to another town and sometimes they even move to Patagonia. No one knew if the Dents had any relatives, but if they did, they were never found.22 There was a rumour that, rather than have anyone know they were related to them, their cousins had gone to live in a remote shack high up in the Andes. So when the final Dent had been ‘re-assigned’, as Mordonna described it, no one missed them. There was even talk of a big party in the street to celebrate.

  If a family of nice people disappeared, the place would be crawling with detectives with big torches looking for clues. They would fingerprint every square centimetre of the house, even inside the toilet bowl. They would scrape DNA out of the bottom of the garbage bin trying to find out what had happened. No stone would be left unturned.

  But when the Dents all vanished, the police raced into action by buying the biggest bottle of champagne they could find and celebrating for three days. They put the news in their monthly newsletter, in the ‘Good News’ section, and everyone kept their fingers crossed just to make sure the Dents wouldn’t come back.

  After a couple of months, the bank, who owned nearly all of the house, put up a ‘For Sale’ sign. The house would be auctioned in a week’s time.

  ‘I hope the next owners are all right,’ said Betty.

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘What?’ said Mordonna. ‘Have you got a plan?’

  ‘Well,’ said Nerlin, ‘there is a way to make sure we like the new owners.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We become the new owners,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘You mean, move next door?’ asked Betty. ‘But who will live here?’

  ‘We will,’ said Nerlin. ‘Look, there’s nine of us, not to mention the corpses and ghosts. We could do with more room.’

  So that’s what they did.

  If you went to an auction and saw a family that looked like the Floods standing there, you’d have to be pretty brave to bid against them. And if you saw how spooky and weird the Floods’ house and garden were next door, you probably wouldn’t want to live there anyway. Because of this, there were very few people at the auction outside number 11 Acacia Avenue. There was the standard property developer, who wanted to pull the house down and build a block of flats, and there were five people who had seen all the junk in the front garden and thought it was a garage sale.

  Mordonna went up to the property developer and whispered in his ear. But he just walked off in silence.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ asked Nerlin.

  ‘I asked him if he had ever thought what life would be like if he had sticky feet and could cling to glass,’ said Mordonna.

  The auctioneer climbed up on a box and held up his hand.

  ‘Who will start the bidding?’ he said.

  ‘Two hundred and fif –’ the property developer started to say, but before he could finish, Mordonna clicked her fingers. There was a gentle plop and the property developer decided that he’d rather spend the rest of his life eating flies and hopped off into the grass.

  Then there was silence.

  ‘Come on,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Who will give me three hundred thousand?’

  ‘Twelve dollars,’ Betty called out.

  ‘Twelve dollars? Twelve dollars?’ said the auctioneer. ‘Come on, people. This house has to be sold today.’

  ‘I’ll give you four dollars for the old washing machine,’ said one of the five bargain hunters.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said Betty. ‘Ten dollars.’

  More nervous silence.

  The auctioneer would have cried, except people who sell houses can’t cry, because the bits of their brains that have feelings have been removed.

  ‘Two hundred thousand, please?’

  Silence, followed by everyone except the Floods walking nervously back to their cars.

  ‘One hundred thousand … please?’

  A very long silence.

  ‘Who bid ten dollars?’ the auctioneer asked.

  ‘I did,’ said Betty.

  ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘Ten dollars and five cents,’ said Betty. ‘And if you check part III, subsection 18, page 735 of volume 47 of the house owning code, I think you’ll find that anyone over the age of two is allowed to buy a house.’

  This, of course, was completely made up, but the auctioneer didn’t know that. And anyway, he realised that ten dollars and five cents was better than no dollars and the disgrace of being the first auctioneer ever in the whole town to not sell a house at auction.

  ‘Okay, okay, any advance on ten dollars and five cents?’ he said.

  The auctioneer waited for fifteen minutes, shuffling his feet and trying not to cry onto his clipboard. He knew no one was going to make a better offer. He knew he was now in Auctioneer-Nightmare-Land.23 Finally he couldn’t delay it any longer. He lifted his shaking hand and said, ‘Ten dollars and five cents – going once, going twice, going three times … gone.’

  Betty gave him ten dollars and ten cents and said he could keep the change, and the Floods promised they would never tell anyone how much they had paid for the house.

  The Floods got back the ten dollars and ten cents by selling all the rubbish in the Dents’ front garden to the garage sale man for twenty-five dollars. The garage sale man came with a big truck and took away all the old cars, washing machines, fridges, bottles and other junk. He thought he’d got the bargain of the century. The Floods had got the bargain of the century and after the impromptu garage sale now had a tidy front garden and enough money left over for each of them to buy a lottery ticket which, because they could do magic, won them just enough money to be called ‘wow’ but not enough to make the newspapers interested.

  The school holidays began and the whole Flood family spent the next two weeks having a backyard and indoors blitz until the ex-Dent house was perfect. It took some very powerful magic to shift all the layers of burger grease that covered everything. It was impossible to make it vanish completely. The best they could do was gather it all up in one big ball of fat and send it across the other side of the world to a small tropical island where people still talk of the day the giant asteroid of lard from the great chip shop in the heavens landed on their beach. They see it as proof that they are the Chosen People.

  ‘Now we’ve got all this extra space,’ Mordonna said, ‘maybe I should have another baby.’

  ‘Err, umm, I’m just going down to my shed,’ said Nerlin. He had taken over Mr Dent’s shed and was discovering all the wonderful things that blokes did in their sheds, like sitting around in dirty old armchairs listening
to broken radios and drinking beer while they rubbed oil into lots and lots of spanners and chisels that they would never use for anything.

  The twins pulled down the fence between the two back gardens, giving the family enough room to bury several more dead relatives who had come with them from Transylvania Waters and had been stored in old jam jars in one of the deepest cellars with only the night eels24 for company.

  ‘Great idea,’ said Mordonna. ‘Mother’s been complaining that she’s got no one to talk to apart from the worms, and now that they’ve eaten the last bits of her skin, even they don’t visit her any more.’

  They decided to bring in one dead relative from each side of the family – Great-Aunt Blodwen and Uncle Flatulence. When they had settled in, they’d bury a couple more.

  ‘I’ve got a soft spot for Great-Aunt Blodwen,’ said Nerlin. ‘It’s over there by the new vegie garden.’

  Winchflat built another one of his brilliant machines – the iCellar, Dungeon and Moat Replicator25 – which photocopied all the tunnels and cellars under the Floods’ house, turned them back to front and moved them under the Dents’ old house and then joined the two sets up. Merlinmary connected everything up to her lead-lined bed and even strung some black fairy lights around Nerlin’s shed.

  They decided to keep both kitchens because everyone agreed they would be much happier if Satanella had somewhere to eat where the others didn’t have to watch, smell or hear her.

  As the school holidays came to an end, Valla gave the windows their final coat of dust and black paint, Betty planted the last patch of poison ivy in the flower beds and the other children spent two frantic days doing all the wizard school homework they should have done two weeks before.

  The last day of the holidays was, like it is everywhere, weird. It was still the holidays so you could do what you liked, but whatever you did never seemed that great because you knew tomorrow you’d be back at school.