by Nigel Smith
“Wait,” he said mysteriously. “Three … two … one …”
Just then Mimsy shrieked as a huge hole opened up at the bottom of her bulging schoolbag and all the contents spilled out on the floor. Everyone laughed as she scrabbled to pick them up.
For a second Nat thought maybe her suspicions had been right all along and Darius actually WAS the devil, but then she saw him folding up his little pocket knife.
And she remembered why they were friends.
Dad smiled when he saw Darius at the school gates, and the Dog leaped out of the van, scattering pans and boxes and all the other usual van rubbish out on to the pavement as he went. The Dog loved licking Darius as he was the stickiest and therefore the tastiest child he’d ever licked. Nat liked it when Darius got licked by the Dog; at least that got him clean.
Dad chatted about his Great French Holiday Idea all the way to Darius’s house. All Darius wanted to know about was the ghost. “Is it a strangling ghost, a restless spirit that throws things about, or a blood-sucking phantom?” he asked.
“Oh, a bit of all three I should expect,” said Dad cheerfully. “Which reminds me, did Nathalia tell you about the time she thought the kettle was haunted?”
“Shuddup, Dad,” hissed Nat.
Obviously he didn’t shuddup, and Nat had to endure the story all over again.
“… Turns out it was just a faulty plug!” laughed Dad, finishing his tale. “But she still won’t make a cup of tea after nine o’clock at night.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?” said Darius. Nat looked for something heavy to brain Dad with.
The van groaned to a halt as they pulled up in front of Darius’s little house. The garden, as usual, was full of rubbish.
“This garden looks like the inside of your head,” Nat said to Dad.
Parked next to the house was a large black van with pictures of corpses playing musical instruments all over it. In big bloody red letters someone had painted the words:
My Filthy Granny
“Has the circus come to your house?” asked Dad.
Darius was very quiet. He didn’t seem to want to get out.
Dad thought for a minute and said: “You going to invite us in for a cup of tea then?”
Nat thought he’d gone mad. What was Dad thinking? No one went for a cup of tea at Oswald Bagley’s house. An evening of mayhem and animal sacrifices, maybe, but not PG Tips. But Dad was already walking down the path, arm round Darius. Nat followed warily.
Inside the small, dark sitting room it looked like a meeting of the Zombie Council of Great Britain. Five scrawny young men, all dressed in black with white faces, blood-red lips and green-tinged eyes, lolled around drinking out of cans. Oswald grunted when he saw his younger brother and nodded at Dad and Nat. He didn’t speak.
One of the creatures grabbed Darius playfully, though it was a bit rough for Nat’s liking. “Here’s our other little roadie. Where you been – school?” There was something sneery and unpleasant in his voice. Darius was smiling but Nat knew it wasn’t a real smile.
Nat saw a poster lying on the floor. It read:
On tour – My Filthy Granny. Heavier than heavy metal, blacker than black metal, thrashier than thrash metal, speedier than speed metal, deader than death metal.
There were a bunch of dates in towns whose names Nat didn’t recognise, but guessed were in Norway. So this is what Darius meant.
“A band, are you?” said Dad. The Grannies stopped throwing Darius about and turned bloodshot eyes towards him. “I used to play all the time …” Dad burbled on. “Course, I was a bit thinner in those days.”
Nat began to get that familiar nasty creeping sensation down the back of her neck and in her stomach – the sign that her dad was about to be horribly embarrassing.
“I’ve got something in the van you’ll like,” he said, jumping up and running out the front door. The Grannies turned their pale faces to Nat. She tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t get her eaten. She started with Darius. “You never said your brother was in a band.”
“He’s not,” said the drummer, who used to be called Simon but apparently was now known as Dirty McNasty. “Oswald’s our security.” Oswald cracked his knuckles. Nat thought that he was probably there to stop the audience leaving.
“Oswald AND little Darius,” said Mr McNasty. “You’re coming wiv us too, ain’t ya?” he said. “We all have a lot of – love – for little Darius.” He cuffed Darius round the head lovingly enough to make his eyes wobble.
“Don’t go asking for no autographs,” said the singer, Derek Vomit, to Nat, unnecessarily. “You don’t get no autographs, unless you get a tattoo of us. Shows you’re a real fan. We’re giving Darius one when we get to Oslo.”
“Listen to this,” said Dad, coming back in, holding a tiny, pink ukulele. It looked like a guitar that hadn’t grown up yet. Nat felt sick. “I wrote this song ages ago. It was very popular down the student union bar. I was quite the rocker.”
Nat wanted to hide under a cushion but it was unpleasant enough sitting ON a Bagley cushion; you would not want to be under one.
“Feel free to join in on the chorus, lads,” said Dad, plunking tunelessly away. He LOVED meeting fellow musicians. “You’ll probably want to use it at one of your gigs.”
Nat knew there was only one thing worse than Dad playing the ukulele. It was Dad singing. Dad started singing.
“I am a rocker,” he started, surprisingly loudly. And unsurprisingly flat. “I am a shocker. You be the door and I’ll be the knocker …”
Oswald and the Filthy Grannies stared at the warbling idiot, grinning. Nat immediately saw they were nasty grins, but Dad took it for encouragement and sang louder.
“Let’s have a go,” said the guitarist, whose mum knew him as Jason but who was now called Stinky Gibbon. Dad handed him the uke. Stinky played a couple of notes and there was a crunching noise as he deliberately broke the neck off. “Oops, sorry!” he said, laughing. He handed Dad the smashed instrument back. “That’s rock and roll for you.”
Dad took the mashed instrument and thought for a moment.
“You’re taking Darius with you this summer, are you?” he said to Oswald. There was a bit of steel in Dad’s voice that Nat hardly recognised. Oswald nodded.
“Well, you’re not,” said Dad. “He’s coming with us.”
Nat couldn’t be sure, but she thought that under his horrible black beard, Oswald Bagley smiled.
t was the Saturday after school had finished and Nat and Dad were outside the house, packing the Atomic Dustbin. This first involved un-packing the Atomic Dustbin, as it was always full of junk. It was crammed with the stuff Dad liked that Mum wouldn’t let in the house. So anyone walking past their drive that morning would have seen a rubbish van parked next to a rubbish tip. Nat had a baseball cap pulled down as far over her face as possible, in case anyone who knew her walked by.
Dad wasn’t wearing a baseball cap; he thought baseball caps looked stupid. He was wearing an old T-shirt with ‘Little Monkeys’ written on it. Underneath was printed a photo of Nat, aged four, holding a monkey in a safari park. Nat was pulling a face because the chimp had just poked her in the eye. Dad thought the picture was cute, hence the T-shirt. Nat did not think it was cute, hence she’d thrown it in the bin fourteen times. But it still kept appearing. Next time, she thought darkly, I’m setting fire to it. Even if Dad’s wearing it.
But even worse than the T-shirt were Dad’s shorts. Dad wore shorts from June 1st to August 31st, because, he said, that was summer. He didn’t wear them at any other time, no matter how hot, and he never wore anything else in the summer, no matter how cold or rainy. Dad was very proud of his shorts because he’d had them AT SCHOOL and he could still get into them. They were red and shiny and very very short. Way too short. From a distance it looked like he’d just forgotten to put his trousers on. Old ladies walked past the drive tutting and shielding their eyes.
Dad had extreme
ly thin white hairy legs and in these shorts you could see ALL of those thin white hairy legs, from ankle to unmentionable. He bent over in the van and made it worse. Nat heard shrieks from the other side of the street and had to hide behind the Dog.
To top it all, Dad had the radio on. Fighting over the radio was becoming what writers of modern classics would call: AN ISSUE. In the old days, Nat didn’t care what awful music Dad listened to, because she was still finding out what music she liked. But now she was older and had found out what she liked and it was the music they played on RADIO ZINGG!!! It was happy bouncy music you could dance to. Dad liked RADIO DAD. The songs on RADIO DAD went on for hours and if you tried to dance to them you’d break your legs. They were boring and miserable and now it was playing at full blast and all the neighbours would think that she liked Dave Spong and his Incredible Flaming Earwigs, or whoever it was.
Because of all this, Nat was very keen to get the van cleared and packed so they could get out of there. But the more Dad chucked out on to the drive, the more there was still inside. It was like some evil van curse.
Normal families fly abroad on holiday, thought Nat sourly, dragging more cases to the van. But Dad kept telling them it would be ‘more fun’ (in other words, cheaper) to drive there instead.
“We’ll need a car when we get there anyway,” he had argued to Mum. “And this saves us the expense of hiring one. Plus, we’ll make a holiday of the journey. We can sleep in the van. Or there’s a big old tent in the back. You like camping!”
This was not true. Mum hated camping. Mum liked hotels and hot water and fluffy towels and chocolates on the pillow and room service. She did not like:
Tents, campsites, bugs, sleeping bags, burnt sausages, shared showers, smelly loos, rain, fetching water from a pipe in a field, cows, hippies, wet socks, and any of the four great smells of camping – plastic, burnt wood, damp dirt and wee.
This wasn’t the reason she gave though. Mum would have to miss the whole camping bit because obviously, she said, she couldn’t get a month off work. “Unlike your father, who rarely gets a month ON work.”
Mum usually got upset when she missed out on family time, but Nat was pretty sure Mum was relieved to be missing out on the camping part of the trip.
Instead, the plan was that Dad, Nat and Darius would take the van over to France, and when Mum could get away she would fly out to join them, probably towards the end, and once Dad had found her a nice hotel nearby.
“But you can just stay in the house! I’ll have it done up by the time you arrive,” Dad had argued.
“Now, I don’t mean to be critical, love,” Mum had pointed out, “but you’re not a builder. You write jokes for Christmas crackers. I have no idea why you’ve agreed to do all this work. The last time you tried to put up a bookshelf you nailed your head to a copy of Great Expectations.”
Dad had mumbled something about it being a bit quiet on the Christmas cracker-joke-writing job front at the moment and that it might be good for him to develop another skill or two. Mum had just smiled and kissed him and reminded him to take out extra health insurance and a first-aid kit.
“Do you think we’ll need this?” Dad asked Nat, emerging backwards from the depths of the van, waving an electric pencil sharpener.
“No idea, Dad, I’ve got my eyes closed,” shouted Nat, burying her face in the Dog’s warm fur. “Please change your shorts.”
Whatever Dad said next was drowned out by the roar of a huge motorcycle engine. Oswald had arrived with Darius sitting on the back of the bike. The Dog bounded up, sure of a treat. Darius hopped off and picked some flies out of his teeth. He was carrying a small tatty rucksack. It didn’t look big enough to hold a decent packed lunch, let alone anything else.
“Is that all you’re bringing?” asked Nat.
“It’s all I’ve got,” Darius replied lightly, before getting bundled over by the excited Dog. The two of them rolled around in the front garden. Oswald nodded to Dad, revved his motorbike and sped off without saying goodbye to his little brother. Dad watched him go for a moment, then turned to Darius. “Best say goodbye to the mutt,” he said, “we’re taking him to the kennels later.”
Nat was shocked. “Dad—” she began.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he said, cutting her off, “but he’ll hate that long drive and he won’t like strange places and Mum’s too busy to look after him. He’ll be better off in a kennel, trust me. I’ve picked a nice one.”
Nat wasn’t one to take no for an answer. “Mum …” she shouted, running indoors.
Mum was on her mobile and doing emails at the same time. Nat wanted to tell her why she HAD to have the Dog with her and that Mum HAD to make Dad understand but didn’t want to interrupt so, after hovering nearby for a few minutes, she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed in misery.
Which is where she was when Bad News Nan came looking for her.
“Your fasher said you washn’t feeling very well,” she said, showering Nat with biscuit crumbs. Her voice was muffled due to the addition of digestives and the lack of teeth. Bad News Nan often kept her false teeth in her pocket so as not to wear them out by over-use. Many an evening at home had been livened up by the sudden discovery of Nan’s gnashers under a cushion.
Or in the dishwasher.
Or in the biscuit tin.
Or in the butter dish.
“It’s just Dad,” grumbled Nat, “and this stupid holiday. It’s going to be a typical Dad disaster, I know it. And if I haven’t got the Dog, there’ll be no one to have a sensible conversation with.”
Bad News Nan had stopped listening after the word ‘disaster’. She liked nothing better than a good disaster. “Well, if you think your life’s bad …” she began, and proceeded to tell Nat about:
Edna Pudding – lost two fingers in the bacon slicer at Morrison’s.
Deidre Scratchnsniff – put winning lottery ticket through a hot wash.
Frank Mealtime – took a pedalo out too far at Camber Sands and was captured by Somali pirates. His niece had to put all her bone china figurines on eBay to pay the ransom.
Nat wasn’t too sure how true any of these were (especially the Edna story, because the last time she’d seen Mrs Pudding she was working on the checkouts, not the deli counter), but funnily enough, they did make her feel a bit better.
“I’ve told your father this whole expedition is stupid,” she droned on. “I said little Nat should just come and stay with me this summer. Would you like that?”
Nat hesitated. On the one hand, Bad News Nan was completely mad and never stopped talking or eating unless she was asleep, and even then kept going sometimes. Nat knew she would be forced to listen to all the hard-luck stories that Nan collected the way Mum collected parking tickets. On the other hand, having no Dad to show her up sounded pretty amazing, and she could hang out with Penny Posnitch who lived round the corner from Nan. She could make a few new friends and maybe move up the popularity ladder at least TWO RUNGS.
And besides that, there would be NOTHING TO DO at Nan’s except do what Nan did – get up at lunchtime, watch endless episodes of Judge Judy, and never eat a vegetable again. On balance – it sounded brilliant.
Only one problem.
“How about Darius and the Dog?” Nat asked.
“I’m not looking after them,” said Nan firmly. “They’d both have to go in kennels.”
Nat sighed and reluctantly pushed herself off the bed. France it was. But she was NOT putting the Dog in kennels. She just needed a plan.
t last the van was cleared of all its rubbish and repacked with slightly more useful rubbish, and it was time for everyone to say their goodbyes. Mum gave Nat an extra squeezy hug.
“Can I stay here and get a job in your office instead?” whispered Nat, only half joking.
Mum grinned. “Yes, I wish we could swap places. But look, you’re going to a foreign country with your idiot father and demon child Darius Bagley in a horrible van to rebuild a haunt
ed house. Think how lucky you are!”
Sometimes, thought Nat, Mum’s sense of humour is as bad as Dad’s.
“Right, let’s go. Where’s the Dog?” said Dad, looking sweaty and harassed.
Somewhere in the Dog’s tiny doggie brain he must have sensed something was up, because they found him trembling under a pile of dirty washing. Dad had to carry him out to the van, still tangled up in the sheets and looking utterly pathetic. He turned his sad brown dog eyes to Mum as he was carried to the van, as if to say, “Are you doing this to me too?”
“In, in, let’s go,” said Dad to Nat and Darius as he slammed the door and started the engine. Or rather, tried to start the engine. It coughed and banged and wheezed and went silent.
Mum waved her arms, exasperated. “You said you’d get this horrible old thing ready for the road!” she said. “How do you expect it to carry you across half of France if you can’t get it off the drive?”
“We can’t go! We have to stay here, what a shame, never mind,” shouted Nat as she scrambled out of the van, her heart leaping with joy.
“Nothing I can’t fix,” said Dad, hopping out. He lifted the bonnet and leaned right over to get at the engine. There was a scream from Mrs Possett opposite at number 26 who wished she hadn’t chosen that moment to stand at the window and take her net curtains down.
“You could stop Dad going,” Nat said urgently to Mum, out of earshot, “he does what you tell him.”
“No, he doesn’t,” said Mum, pleased at the thought all the same, “but anyway, it’ll be good for him to fix this silly house and prove to everyone round here he’s not totally daft and useless.”
But he is, thought Nat.
There was muffled clanging and swearing from under the bonnet for about five minutes, until Darius jumped out of the van, holding some kind of multitool he’d taken from his rucksack. “Let’s have a look,” he said to Dad. “I’ve fixed Oswald’s bike loads of times.”
Dad slapped him on the back and walked over to Mum. “See,” he said, “no problem. Darius is going to mend it.”