And once, the two people who were going live in our house next came to look round. They were called Charlie and Tom and they didn’t have any children, but they did have cats. Charlie kept touching things and Tom wanted to look in all the cupboards. I didn’t want him to look in mine because it wasn’t as tidy as it was supposed to be.
Packing our stuff was really hard because we had to fit every single thing into boxes and not leave anything behind because we weren’t ever coming back. Mum gave Iggy and me four boxes each and we had to fit our whole rooms into them.
First I folded my clothes really small and then I crammed my teddies in so it was a real squish. I had to sit on that box so I could do it up with brown tape. Then I made a pile of things that maybe didn’t have to move house with me, like old pictures and lumps of Blu-Tack and some games where most of the pieces had gone missing because Iggy never puts anything away properly ever.
Iggy wasn’t very good at fitting her room into four boxes so I had to help her. She said she couldn’t put her teddies in a box because they wouldn’t be able to see. She said “How can I put all my clothes in there? I’ll have nothing to wear tomorrow.”
And there wasn’t one thing she wanted to throw away either, not even screwed up old bits of paper I found under her bed, or a lollipop that had been sitting on the radiator for ages and turned into a pool of stick.
“Mum!” I said. “Iggy won’t pack her stuff.”
“You do it for her,” Dad said. “Iggy, you can come with me and do the recycling.”
Iggy couldn’t get up fast enough. She loves doing that. She sits on Dad’s shoulders and posts the bottles in the holes, and she squeals every time they smash.
“My teddies need windows,” she said to me before she left the room. “Don’t put them in there. They don’t like the dark.”
I packed her clothes and her books and her drawings. I found my favourite hairclip in her knicker drawer, and a notebook I thought was lost under her pillow. I packed everything and I put all her teddies on her bed, and then I went to find Mum.
She was wrapping all the plates and cups and glasses in newspaper. The kitchen looked all upside-down and inside-out because the cupboards were empty and everything was everywhere.
Mum kept blowing the hair out of her eyes with her bottom lip. Her fingers were all inky from the paper. “This,” she said, “is such a hassle.”
I helped her for a bit. It was quite fun, like presents. We wrapped up everything apart from four plates and four cups and four knives and forks.
“One more meal in this house,” Mum said, which made me a bit sad.
Then she said, “It’ll have to be a takeaway,” which cheered me up again because we hardly ever have those.
She found me a see-through plastic sort of suitcase thing to put Iggy’s teddies in. I filled it up and I bumped it back downstairs into the kitchen to show her.
“Bet she makes me cut holes in it,” I said, “so they can breathe.”
When Dad and Iggy came back, the whole kitchen was in boxes on the floor and Mum had started on the sitting room. I was trying to watch TV and eat a biscuit, but she kept getting in the way.
“Go out and play,” Mum said, “or draw a picture or something.”
“I’ve packed all my pens,” I said.
“Well, find something to do,” she said. “Go and say goodbye to all the cobwebs.”
“Cobwebs?” Dad said. “Surely not darling,” and she stuck her tongue out at him.
I went upstairs and sort of wandered around because when all the rooms in your house are empty there’s a lot less to do. It was strange seeing the shapes on the walls where our pictures used to be. And the place by their bedroom door where Mum and Dad had measured Iggy and me. We’d been in that house since we were so small you could hardly believe.
I could hear Iggy downstairs talking and talking and talking. After a bit more wandering I went to find everyone. Mum was on the sofa. She said, “I can’t look at anything that moves without thinking about packing it.”
Dad said, “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
Mum said, “You can’t. I packed the kettle.”
I sat on Mum’s knee and we stared at where the telly used to be. “This time tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll be unpacking in your new room.”
I thought about the curtains and the strange bed and the ugly old wardrobe and I tried really hard to smile.
“It’ll be fun,” Mum said. “You’ll see.”
We had curry for supper. Iggy and me had rice and lentils and poppadoms, and we tried some of Dad’s, which made my eyes water and my mouth be on fire even after I’d gone to bed. My room was really empty. It wasn’t like my room at all.
In the morning, four men came from Australia with a big lorry and started putting our boxes in it. It was the biggest lorry I had ever seen and all the things we had packed looked lost inside.
Dad said Iggy and me were getting in the way so Mum took us to the playground near our house, which wasn’t going to be so near our house any more after today.
“Will there be a new one?” I said.
“A new what?” Mum asked.
“A new playground near our new house.”
“Of course there will,” Mum said. “Anyway, this one won’t be that far.”
After ages and ages Mum’s phone rang and it was Dad. We went home to meet him and say goodbye to our house and never come back. The lorry with all our things in had gone.
Our house didn’t look like our house any more. It looked like anyone’s. It looked like Charlie and Tom’s. Mum left them a note and a bottle of milk in the kitchen. It said, “We hope you have a lovely time here. We did.”
We got in the car and we drove to our new house. It was surprisingly quick. When we got there, the lorry was already parked outside and the men were carrying our things in.
I went up to the room that was going to be mine. The curtains had gone. There wasn’t a big scary wardrobe any more, or a bed, or an armchair. And it was all painted light blue, which is my favourite colour.
While I was standing there noticing, Iggy came rushing in. “Flo!” she said. “I’ve just seen your bed! It’s coming up the stairs!”
We squished ourselves into the corner so we didn’t get in the way. The men put my bed down on the floor.
“Where do you want it?” one of them said, and Iggy nudged me for an answer.
I thought for a minute and then I said, “Over there please,” and I pointed at the window.
Iggy’s room was painted yellow, which is her favourite colour. I went with her to see because she didn’t want to do it on her own. Standing in it was like standing inside sunshine, or an egg. It was bigger than her old room.
Mum and Dad came to find us with our boxes of things. “When you’ve unpacked your stuff,” they said, “it’ll feel just like home.”
They gave us surprise presents which were signs for our doors. One side said COME IN and the other side said KEEP OUT.
“I like moving house,” Iggy said, unzipping her bag of teddies.
I thought about the boxes in my new room filled with all my old things. I thought about sitting on my bed by my new window and looking out.
“So do I,” I said.
About the author
Jenny Valentine moved house every two years when she was growing up. She worked in a wholefood shop in Primrose Hill for fifteen years where she met many extraordinary people and sold more organic loaves than there are words in her first novel, Finding Violet Park, which won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Her second novel, Broken Soup, is currently garnering critical acclaim and is nominated for several awards. Her third teen novel, The Ant Colony, is published in March 2009.
Iggy and Me is her first book for younger readers.
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Copyright
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s B
ooks in 2009 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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FIRST EDITION
Copyright © Jenny Valentine 2009
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EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-38102-9
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