Josh and Roy both stuck their arms out and started to do the zombie walk towards us. Josh even began dribbling. Eew. Typical. Boys always take it too far.
Josh lumbered over to me. ‘Undead need warm flesh,’ he said, in a stupid droolie voice. ‘Give me your arm.’ He bent over to bite my arm while sticking his nose a little too near to my chest.
‘In your dreams, Tyler,’ I said and shoved him off. Unfortunately, I caught him off balance and he staggered towards Roy, lost his footing, toppled over and landed with a thud just at the moment that Tom, my love, keeper of my heart, stepped off the escalator. His hair was windswept and he had on a black jacket and jeans and looked every inch the teen movie star. He saw Josh fall, glanced at me and raced over. ‘You all right, mate?’ he asked Josh, who looked embarrassed and scrambled quickly to his feet.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘I was just telling Jess here that I didn’t fancy her. Some girls just can’t take rejection.’
‘As if,’ I said. ‘You are so not my type.’ I turned to Tom. It was the first time I’d seen him close up and now I saw that he had beautiful jade-coloured eyes with thick lashes and a gorgeous mouth with a plump bottom lip. I had to drag my eyes away from it. ‘I didn’t mean to shove him. We were being zombies. I’m Jess, by the way.’ My fantasy meeting with him flashed through my mind. What was it I was going to say to him? Oh yeah. ‘I’m the school’s best swimmer,’ I blurted. Oh noooo, I thought as soon as the words were out of my mouth, What have I said? I’m an idiot. Best swimmer! He’ll think I’m a show-off . . . And what was I doing? Being a zombie. He’ll think I’m mad. And Josh falling over! Tom will think I’m a bully . . .
Pia made a nervous tittering sound and linked her arm through mine to pull me away. She’d sensed disaster with a capital D.
Tom looked at me as if I’d just escaped from a mental hospital. He clapped Josh on the shoulder and led him away with Roy, who was sniggering. As they walked off, without looking round, Josh lifted his right arm and stuck the middle finger of his hand up.
‘Same to you,’ I called and made a rude gesture back. Sadly it was Tom who turned round and saw it, not Josh. He gave me a filthy look.
‘Oops,’ I said and grinned like an idiot, then waved. Waved! What was I thinking?
Tom shook his head like he couldn’t believe anyone as awful as me could possibly exist.
‘Well, um . . . at least you’ve spoken to Tom now,’ said Pia, as the boys disappeared round the corner.
‘Yeah. Big introduction. So much for making a good first impression. I finally get to meet the coolest boy in school and he sees me acting as one of the undead. I was wearing my jacket back to front, for heaven’s sake. Oh God! Talk about dressed to impress. Not. That couldn’t have gone worse if I’d planned it.’
Pia squeezed my arm. ‘Well, you did say you wanted him to notice you and um . . . well, he did. And um . . . he will surely see that you’re different.’ She giggled. ‘He’s not going to forget you in a hurry.’
‘No. I will probably appear in his nightmares eating warm flesh and crunching on eyeballs. Oh hell. Can this day get any worse?’ My phone rang.
I glanced at the screen. Dad.
2
Nooooo!
‘I don’t want to go,’ I said. ‘Why do we have to live there?’
‘Because you belong with your father,’ said Gran, ‘and this new job means that you can all be together.’ She said it in her firm ‘and-that’s-the-end-of-that’ voice, which didn’t give away how she felt.
‘Job as general dogsbody. It’s not much of a promotion.’ I knew I was being whiney and I don’t normally do the sulk act but I couldn’t help it.
We were sitting around the table having Sunday breakfast, a couple of weeks after the news that Dad had got the job. We being Gran, Charlie and my aunt Maddie, who had dropped by to stick her nose in. I was moaning because it was all feeling real now – Dad had started at Porchester Park on Friday and our moving-in date was all set.
‘Some people don’t have jobs,’ Aunt Maddie said as she tucked into the scrambled eggs that Gran had made. ‘Some people don’t have homes. Some people don’t even have water. You should be grateful.’
‘Oo-er, get her,’ I said. Aunt Maddie is so earnest about everything, always was, but more so since she met her new boyfriend, an Australian called Brian. Mr New Age Wonder from Down Under. Since she met him, she’s forever going on about feeding the hungry, homing the homeless, changing the world. It’s all very well but I don’t want to change the world. I’m fourteen. I like the world how it is. I want to enjoy it, but Aunt Maddie always has to make me aware of the underprivileged and how we should all be doing more. Plus she’s become vegetarian and gone green, stopped wearing make-up and had her lovely long hair cut into a shoulder-length bob that looks just like Gran’s. I don’t think it suits her shorter, it makes her look much older than her thirty-seven years. She could be a ten in the looks scale if she wanted. She and Charlie are like my mum and Gran, with their fine bone structure and honey-coloured eyes. I, on the other hand, am more like Dad, with his long nose and blue eyes. Aunt Maddie never had style, though, unlike Mum who had a great eye for making an outfit sassy and feminine. Gran has style too, but a different kind – more boho chic in her devore velvet tops and floaty scarves. Mum and her sister were such opposites. Aunt Maddie wears old jeans, T-shirts and fleeces. Fleeces! I remember Mum messing about once and saying, ‘Dahlings, always remember, wherever you are, you must never forget your sense of style.’ She never did. She was forty when she died but she always looked younger, until the end that is, when she lost her hair because of the chemotherapy, but even then she made an effort. She bought some brightly-coloured velvet berets instead of doing the wig thing and she always looked good in them. She loved to dress up for glamour or fun – like when she came to the swimming events I competed in. She’d show up with a daft bathing cap on and make Charlie wear one too. I think people at our school thought she was mad. She was a bit. I wince now when I think how embarrassed I was when she first turned up in one of her crazy caps. Now I’d do anything to see her sitting on the benches at the pool looking like a prize eejit, complete with a bucket and spade.
Aunt Maddie used to join in too, if she was persuaded, but now it’s like she’s lost her sense of humour and become Miss Mega Intense. The first thing she does when she comes over is turn off the TV if it’s on standby, switch off the lights, separate all Gran’s rubbish into individual recycling bags, and then she lectures Gran about not buying enough wholewheat bread or organic food. I think it’s insulting to Gran. It’s her house, not Aunt Maddie’s. Anyway, I was getting into all things green long before she began to hold the torch. I got it. Planet in trouble. We need to act. I’ve been doing my bit. I recycle my computer printer cartridges, pass on my mags, helped make a compost bin in the garden . . . yet Aunt Maddie makes out like she’s the only one who’s ever had a green thought or given to charity and the rest of us are evil, materialistic, devil-worshipping consumers. People like her who go on and on about it and lay a guilt trip on everyone in sight bring out the worst in me and I do whatever I can to wind her up.
‘Are you listening?’ she asked.
‘Yes, course. I was just thinking about the lack of water. I have a solution.’
‘What?’ asked Aunt Maddie.
‘Dilute it,’ I said. Only Gran laughed. ‘And tonight, I hope we’ll be having pasta so I can work on my carbonara footprint.’ I cracked up at my own brilliant joke and again Gran laughed with me. Charlie groaned. Aunt Maddie rolled her eyes.
‘I think you’ll love the place once you get there,’ said Gran, changing the subject, as always trying to keep the peace. Not that the subject of the move was much better.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. I’d seen the photos. Number 1, Porchester Park. It looked like a great concrete and glass tower. Really boring, with no history. I liked Gran’s house, with its familiar clutter in every room, its old-fashioned marble fi
replaces, the cornicing on the ceiling. It had been built in the Victorian era and I liked to lie on my bed sometimes and try and imagine the different families who had lived there before us. Once, when Gran was decorating, I helped her scrape the paint off a door in the hall and we went through about eight layers of it, down to a deep maroon colour. It was great to think that someone had put that paint there so many years ago; had actually chosen and applied that colour. After that, Gran and I got really into the history of the house and went on the net and looked up the names of the people who had first lived there. James Erstine, a solicitor, lived there with his wife Emma, his mother, Lily, and his three children – Rose, Estelle and baby Walter. I could almost picture them. I liked stuff like that, but there was going to be no chance of it in the new place. It was all brand spanking new.
‘We’ll see for ourselves soon enough,’ said Charlie. ‘Dad’s coming to take us over there later.’
‘And you won’t have to change schools,’ Gran added.
‘Yeah, it’ll just take me an eternity to get there, like a bus and a walk. I’ll have to get up half an hour earlier.’
‘Oh poor Jess,’ said Aunt Maddie. ‘In some countries, children have to go out and work at your age or younger.’
‘Yeah, well, this isn’t some country, this is England. Get a grip, Aunt Maddie. And if you feel so bad about it, why don’t you go and work in a third world country somewhere?’
‘I might,’ she said. ‘But honestly, Jess, you should be supporting your dad, not giving him a hard time. It’s a brilliant career opportunity for him at a time when work is scarce, so you should stop being selfish and acting like such a spoilt brat.’
As always, Charlie didn’t taken sides. Instead, he picked up his guitar and started to strum it. Moments later, he began to sing. OK, so he has a good voice, but I hear too much of it, morning, noon and night.
Aunt Maddie started making coffee. She likes to make it from coffee beans which involves this little machine that grinds them down and makes a din. She’d given one to Gran last Christmas, so she could always have her coffee the way she liked it when she came round.
Gran cleared away the dishes and put on Radio Four.
Sunday breakfast with my family. The noise level is enough to drive a person mad.
I went up to my room, where Dave had cleverly escaped the pandemonium and was snoozing, a mass of black-and-white fur on the end of my bed. He opened one sleepy eye.
‘All right, Dave?’
He meowed and lifted his nose as if to say, yeah.
I glanced at one of the photos on the bedside cabinet. It had been taken the Christmas before Mum got ill. It was of Mum, Charlie and me in front of the tree playing out another of Mum’s dressing-up ideas. We were all wearing Santa hats, baubles as earrings and big grins.
What would you think about this move? I wondered as I looked at Mum. As if she had heard, one of the last things she’d said to me flashed into my mind. It had been about a week before the drugs she was on made her too sleepy to talk, and even then when she did say anything, she didn’t always make sense, like she’d already gone into another world. This day, however, I’d been crying and she’d taken my hand and told me that she wanted me to promise not to waste time being miserable when she’d gone. ‘Life’s too short. I want you to be brave and to be happy, to have fun,’ she had said, and then she’d smiled. ‘Plus, frowning gives you wrinkles.’
‘I suppose there’s no getting out of the move,’ I told the photo, ‘so OK, for you, Mum, and so that I don’t get any wrinkles, I’ll try to be brave about it. Happy, I can’t quite stretch to at the moment but I’ll work on it.’
3
First Impressions
‘Welcome to your new home!’ said Dad.
Dad had picked up Charlie and me after breakfast to give us our first look at where we’d be living. Aunt Maddie had wanted to come too but, luckily for us, Brian was taking her off to some Hairy-Armpits-R-Us type demo in town.
I looked around Porchester Park’s vast lobby, with its pale marble floors and ceiling height glass walls to the front and the back. Hmm, cosy? Not.
The front of the building looked out onto a covered, curved driveway and beyond that to a broad courtyard paved with black slate tiles. In the middle, on a plinth, was a polished bronze sculpture of what looked, to me, like an enormous bum. A bum about six foot wide. Not really my taste in art, though it looked expensive.
‘Posh booty,’ I whispered to Charlie and he laughed.
Through the back wall, I could see a garden with a tree overlooking a pool. I knew it was a maple from when Charlie was a boy scout, back in the days when he talked instead of sang. He was forever going on nature trails then and telling us what he’d seen at every opportunity. I pointed at the tree. ‘Maple,’ I said. ‘Dib dib, dob dob, I know my trees.’ Charlie smiled, but his face wasn’t giving much away as he looked around.
Home is not a word I would use to describe this place, I thought, as I glanced over at Charlie. The place was smart, no doubt about it, but it looked cold and bland to me. In fact, it could have been an upmarket hotel lobby just about anywhere in the world.
A few men in smart suits like the one Dad was wearing hurried about looking important. One was talking into his mobile, another clutched a file in one hand. He glanced over at me and Charlie, probably wondering who these two scruffs were: Charlie in his ripped jeans and schizophrenic T-shirt (it says: ‘I used to be schizophrenic, but we’re OK now’), me in my jeans and blue tunic top.
‘Of course, it will all come to life when the residents move in,’ Dad enthused. ‘There’ll be a pyramid of fresh flowers every day and some fantastic artwork on the walls, a seating area over to your left, a uniformed doorman at the front and at least two parking valets, maybe three.’
‘Um,’ I managed to mumble. I didn’t know what to say although noooooooooo, came to mind. I’m really not sure how it’s going to be, living with Dad again after six years apart. I reckon he’s feeling much the same way, judging by his strained expression. Both of us seem on edge.
‘Want to see our place first?’
Charlie and I shrugged and followed Dad through a tall smoked-glass door at the back.
‘Conference rooms, the admin area, my office,’ Dad pointed out as we followed him through a long wood-panelled corridor with closed doors on the right, through another door and eventually out into a back area. Five modern houses had been built around a paved courtyard with a giant palm tree in the middle. Dad took a key out of his pocket and opened the door of the second one along. ‘This’ll be us,’ he said. ‘I’ll be moving in this week to get everything ready for when you two come and join me.’
Inside was just empty rooms, newly-painted if the smell was anything to go by. Upstairs were two medium-sized bedrooms and a bathroom and one smaller bedroom with its own en suite shower. All brand new and cream-coloured. Cream tiles, cream walls, cream carpets. No character, I thought. Gran’s house is a riot of colour: deep red in the hall; turquoise in the bathrooms; yellow in the kitchen; woven rugs and artefacts on every surface.
‘Which bedroom do you want? The smaller one with its own en suite shower or the bigger one which has to share the bathroom with me?’ asked Dad.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Charlie.
He shrugged. ‘You take the one with the shower – as long as I can use it sometimes.’ He knew I’d prefer that to sharing with Dad.
Downstairs was a featureless open-plan living room with a kitchen and breakfast bar at the back and a door that led out to the garden. Medium-sized. Same cream colour on the walls. Same cream stone tiles on the floor. All very clean, very boring. Through the back window, I could see a small patio area and a perfect lawn that ran thirty feet or so down to a large summerhouse with a porch in the corner. At least Dave has some outside space, I thought, as Dad explained that the summerhouse stored sunloungers for the residents to use.
‘Although I am tempted to use it as an escape fr
om work,’ said Dad.
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘Peace, pottering, my own space,’ he replied.
Space away from us, I thought, wondering again why Dad was making us do all this, when he obviously preferred having time to himself.
We spent the next hour on a tour of the main building. ‘Fifty apartments, six duplex penthouses . . .’ Dad droned on, sounding exactly like an estate agent. We trudged after him down one long wood-panelled corridor after another, until we arrived at some lifts.
‘Cedarwood,’ said Dad, about the panelling.
Whatever, I thought. ‘The decorators liked wood, didn’t they?’ I said. ‘What do you call a man with a tree growing out of his head?’
‘What?’ Dad asked.
‘Ed Wood. What do you call a man with two trees growing out of his head?’
Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Ed Woodward, and three trees would be Edward Woodward.’
Dad ignored us, and pressed the lift button to go up. ‘These are for staff and deliveries,’ he said. ‘The lift for the residents is round the front.’ It all felt so quiet, so lifeless. I couldn’t imagine living in such a heartless place. I thought about what I’d be leaving behind. At Gran’s house, there were books, paintings, things to do, people dropping by. It was lived in, as my mum used to say.
‘So, what do you think?’ asked Dad, as we stepped out after him onto the sixth floor and into yet another corridor.
‘It’s like a hotel,’ I said. ‘Anonymous.’
‘Only in the public areas,’ said Dad. ‘We keep them neutral but inside, each apartment will be totally individual.’
I glanced at Charlie again. He wrinkled his nose. In nose talk, that meant he was as unsure about the place as I was.
‘And you say “hotel”,’ Dad continued, ‘but actually it’s a very different kind of place. These apartments will be people’s homes, each one unique. Today’s Sunday, so it’s quiet, but you should have been here on Friday. It was like Piccadilly Circus. In fact, for the last nine months, the residents have had interior designers in practically non-stop, frantically remodelling their homes to make them into some of the most spectacular dwellings in London.’
Million Dollar Mates Page 2