Hurricane Wills

by Sally Grindley

  Chapter Three

  Dad doesn’t live with us anymore. He left three months ago. He didn’t say it was because of Wills, but I bet it was. Dad just can’t cope with him. He tries. He tries really hard. He’s not very patient though. He explodes like a volcano. You can just imagine it: Volcano meets Hurricane—WHAM, BAM, POW!—everything destroyed in their paths, including Mom and me, if we don’t dive for cover quickly enough.

  When Dad told me he was going, I didn’t believe him first of all. I couldn’t believe him. I thought he just wouldn’t do that to us. Then when I realized he meant it, I begged him to stay. I hugged my arms around his waist, and held on as tightly as I could to try to stop him from going. He stroked my hair and I felt him sort of shudder and I looked up. I’d never seen Dad cry before, and he turned away so that I wouldn’t see him then, but I knew that’s what he was doing because he wiped a hand across his eyes.

  “Don’t go, Dad,” I pleaded. “Please don’t go.”

  “It’ll be all right, Christopher,” he said. “I won’t be going far, just around the corner, so you’ll be able to come and see me as often as you like.”

  It was like he had cut himself off already when he called me Christopher, because he never calls me Christopher unless he’s angry with me.

  “Don’t you love us anymore?” I asked, and he said that of course he did, but that it would be better like this. I couldn’t see how it would be better, but Mom came in with Wills then and I didn’t have a chance to ask.

  Wills went berserk. He screamed and threw himself under the kitchen table and said he wouldn’t come out until Dad changed his mind. Mom pleaded with him, and I thought Dad was going to lose his temper but he didn’t. He crawled under the table, which is difficult when you’re shaped like a bowling pin, and sat there talking to Wills until he had calmed down. Mom and I looked at each other and sort of smiled—though it wasn’t really a smiling matter—because all we could see were four feet sticking out from under the tablecloth. We went and sat in the living room until the storm had passed. Mom put her arm around me and asked if I was all right. I said that I was, but I didn’t really know because Dad hadn’t gone yet, and I thought that he might have to stay because of the fuss Wills was making.

  When at last they came into the living room, Dad was bright pink and sweating all over the top of his head. Wills had a big grin on his face.

  “Dad’s going to take us motor racing,” he said.

  “When?” I asked, even though I knew what the answer would be.

  “When I can sort something out,” said Dad, dropping into an armchair and mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.

  That’s typical Dad. He’s always making promises. But he’s not very good at the sorting-something-out part of it. I don’t think he does it on purpose. He just forgets, or he doesn’t get around to it, or other things get in the way, or he doesn’t know how to make it happen. And sometimes he promises something just to shut me or Wills up. Like then. Except it didn’t shut Wills up. Wills began to run around the room making racing car noises. Mom put her fingers in her ears and frowned at Dad. Dad told Wills to stop, but he kept going—“NYEEEAHHH, NYEEEAHHH, NYEEEAHHH”—until Dad stood up and yelled at the top of his voice, “STOP IT, WILLIAM, NOW!” Volcano meets Hurricane. “STOP IT THIS MINUTE. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  Wills heard him all right. He stopped in his tracks and glared at Dad.

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” he hissed. “You’re not my dad anymore. You’re going away and leaving us.”

  “Don’t, Wills!” cried Mom. She jumped up from the couch and tried to put her arms around him, but he pushed her away and ran upstairs to his room. Music on LOUD.

  Dad looked as if he had been punched in the face. He took a deep breath, squeezed me on the shoulder, kissed Mom on the cheek, then walked out through the door and out of the house.

  Wills refused to come down for dinner that evening, even though Mom tried to tempt him with exaggerated descriptions of the lemon meringue pie she had made, which is his favorite apart from jam donuts.

  “I’m not eating till Dad comes back,” was all he would say.

  Mom and I picked at our spaghetti Bolognese, listening for his bedroom door to open, and sort of listening for the key in the front door.

  “Will Dad ever come back?” I asked Mom.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know, Chris. But try not to blame your father. It’s not his fault that he finds it difficult.”

  I did blame my father then. He should have been stronger, should have been tougher, should have been able to cope. He was supposed to look after us come what may, not run away because he found it difficult.

  “He’s made it more difficult for you now, Mom,” I said. “I can blame him for that.”

  “He thinks it’ll help, because when you and Wills go to stay with him I’ll be able to have a break.”

  She tried to tell me then that there were lots of reasons why Dad was leaving and that I wasn’t to think it was because of Wills. There were grownup things that I wouldn’t understand. I didn’t believe her though. And I could tell from the way she looked so sad that she wanted Dad to be there, volcano or no volcano.

  “Maybe he’ll miss us so much he’ll have to come back,” I urged. Surely he would miss us so much he would have to come back. Would he though? What if he found he liked the peace and quiet of his hurricane-free zone?

  “You’re right,” said Mom brightly. “Of course he’ll miss us.”

  I looked at her. She may have sounded bright, but her eyes were sort of dull and I knew that she didn’t really believe it. I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept wondering where Dad was and when I would see him again. I wondered if he was thinking about us or whether he had already shut us out of his mind. I wondered how we would manage without him, how Mom would manage without him.

  In the middle of the night, I heard Wills’s door open. I heard him go downstairs into the kitchen and raid the fridge. I must have dropped off asleep, because I didn’t hear him come back upstairs again. I was startled by a light joggling across my eyes.

  “Chris—are you awake?”

  “What in the world are you doing, Wills? You frightened the pants off me. What time is it?”

  I heaved myself up against the pillows. Wills sat down on the bed and laid his flashlight on his lap.

  “It’s three o’clock,” he whispered. “Dad hasn’t come back yet.”

  “He’s not coming back, Wills, he told you that. Not for the moment, anyway.”

  “Bastard,” spat Wills. He chewed at the inside of his mouth, then moved on to his fingernails.

  “We’ll still be able to see him,” I said. “Just not every day.”

  “I don’t want to see him ever again,” Wills hissed. “Never, never, never.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “He’s our dad.”

  “Was our dad,” said Wills.

  I didn’t want to hear him say that again. “Go back to your room, Wills,” I ordered. “I want to go to sleep.”

  Wills hesitated, then whispered, “Do you wanna see something?”

  Before I could answer, he jumped up from the bed, went into his own room, and came back clutching something big and round.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s an ammonite. Look, it’s a perfect round. No bits missing, no chips, nothing.”

  I took it from him and looked at it. It was bigger than the whole of my hand. I traced the swirls with my finger, before Wills grabbed it back.

  “Where d’you get it?” I asked.

  “None of your business,” he said sharply. He turned and ran his fingers across the bars of Muffin’s cage. Then, “A friend gave it to me,” he said. “It’s cool, isn’t it? It’s the best one I’ve got.”

  I could tell Wills was lying. He had this look about him. Then he said, “Don’t tell Mom about it, will you? She’ll think I stole it, but I didn’t.”

  I didn’t know what to say then. I
was sure Wills was lying, but I didn’t think he would steal something.

  “Promise you won’t tell Mom,” he insisted.

  “I wish you hadn’t shown it to me now,” I retorted. “I promise, now let me get some sleep, will you?”

  “I wish I hadn’t shown you, misery guts,” fired Wills.

  He trudged off back to his room, leaving me to wonder why he couldn’t have kept his ammonite to himself, especially since he didn’t want Mom to know that he’d got it. I supposed it must be that he couldn’t keep it to himself, because there was no point in having something precious if no one else knew about it. I always told Mom or Dad if I’d read a really good book, or got ten out of ten, and I always wanted them to be watching if I came first in a race or scored a good goal, which didn’t happen very often. That was the same thing really as Wills wanting to show off his ammonite, except that he’d chosen to show me and not Mom. And Dad wasn’t there now.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep after that. Muffin had woken up and was spinning around on his wheel. The rattling got into my head. I lay there, hoping that Wills wouldn’t tell me anything else he didn’t want Mom to know. I didn’t want to know things that I wasn’t supposed to tell her.

  The next day was a Saturday, which made it worse that Dad wasn’t there. Dad always made a big breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays. It was his weekend treat since he didn’t have to go to work. Mom cooked the breakfast instead, but it wasn’t the same. With Dad, we would sit at the kitchen table and he would read bits out of the newspaper in between slurps of tea. He’s good at finding the funny bits, like the story about a man who was sent to prison because he kept stealing cars in order to clean them, and the one about a boy who wrote in an exam that you can stop milk from going sour by keeping it in the cow. Or Dad would look at the sports pages and tell us what a foolish game soccer is and how the players are all overpaid crybabies and that THE ONLY GAME IS FOOTBALL, which is a man’s game and not for namby-pambies. We argue with him about football being THE ONLY GAME, because Wills and I like soccer, except that we agree with Dad about soccer players hugging and kissing each other and pretending to be hurt when they’re not. And we agree with him that they get too much money, though we wouldn’t mind if we were soccer players ourselves.

  So we sat there, Mom, Wills, and me, all quiet and just eating. Then Mom told us not to worry about things, and that Dad loved us very much, and that we would go and stay with him as soon as he was settled. Wills made a face and said that he didn’t want to go and stay with him and that Mom couldn’t make him. Mom said Dad would be very sad if Wills didn’t go, but Wills said he didn’t care. I told him to shut up and that he was making it worse for everyone.

  He stood up then and shouted, “You shut up, Mr. Goody-goody,” and stormed out of the house.

  Mom and I washed up, with me thinking the house would soon be empty if everyone kept walking out, and Mom saying that Wills would be all right once he’d gotten used to the idea. I didn’t even know if I’d be all right once I’d gotten used to the idea, but I was so angry with Wills for making everything worse, and I was upset too because I’d made things worse by shouting at him, even if he did deserve it.

  “I wish Wills didn’t always have to be so extreme,” I grumbled.

  “I know, love,” said Mom, “but Wills is Wills, and that’s how he deals with things.”

  “Never mind us,” I muttered.

  “I know he has his moments, Chris, but his heart’s in the right place and he doesn’t mean any harm.”

  Only when he’s using me to entertain his friends, I thought.

  When we’d finished, Mom asked if I would stay in the house while she went to the supermarket, “in case Wills comes back,” she said. I offered to go out on my bike to look for him, but Mom wanted me to stay put.

  I sat and watched the television, even though there was nothing on. I sat there and missed my dad, because after breakfast on a Saturday we usually threw a ball around in the backyard, which was Dad’s bit of exercise for the week, and we helped him to wash his car, which is his pride and joy. Wills never lasted very long throwing a ball or washing the car. He always wound up throwing the ball so hard that he bowled Dad over—STRIKE!—or he got carried away with the dish liquid, and Dad’s pride and joy would disappear under a mountain of froth. Then it would just be me and Dad throwing the ball and washing the car, which was good for me, even when Wills yelled rude things at me from his bedroom window, and Dad threatened to wash his mouth out with the froth.

  I sat there until the game started, and Mom came home with the groceries and looked worried because Wills wasn’t back. I said I’d go and look for him on my bike, because watching sports without Dad wasn’t the same. This time Mom didn’t argue.

  I bicycled everywhere. Up and down: the roads near our house, down to the canal and along the side of it, up through the main street and back again. I might easily have missed him there because it was so crammed with people who were wandering up and down, in and out of stores, as though nothing unusual or sad or threatening was happening to them, which perhaps it wasn’t but it was to me. It made it more difficult to bear that life was going on as normal when there was nothing normal about it.

  I spotted some of Wills’s horrible friends. He wasn’t with them and I wasn’t going to ask if they knew where he was. I bicycled past them quickly. I went into the library to ask Penny if she’d seen him go by, but I forgot that she didn’t work there on a Saturday. So I bicycled back home again.

  “Wills?” Mom called when she heard me open the door. She looked a bit disappointed when she saw that it was me.

  “Ive searched everywhere, Mom, but I can’t find him. He’ll be all right though. He’ll be back soon.”

  Mom nodded. “As long as he’s not getting into any trouble,” she muttered.

  We had lunch, then Mom did the ironing in the living room while I watched the football game on the television. It was so quiet without Dad there. When Dad was there he would perch right on the edge of the couch whenever someone came close to scoring a try, and he would yell at the television as though just by yelling he could make it happen. Wills would join in, leaping on and off the couch and getting in my way, so that if someone did score a try I would often miss it. At least I wouldn’t miss anything today—except my dad, and even Wills a bit, if I was honest, because nothing was the same.

  Wills still wasn’t back by dinnertime, and I could see that Mom was beginning to get really, really worried. She kept looking out of the window and jumping at every sound that might have been the front door. I was so angry with my dad. He should have been there to help Mom; he should have been there to go and find Wills. But if he had been there, Wills wouldn’t have disappeared in the first place, would he? So it was all his fault. The door finally banged when we were washing the dishes and Wills’s food was becoming overcooked in the oven. He came into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and said, “What’s for dinner, Mom?” as though nothing had happened.

  “Where’ve you been, Wills?” Mom asked. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “What’s there to worry about, Mom?” laughed Wills.

  “I didn’t know where you were, that’s all,” frowned Mom, “and I knew you were upset.”

  “Nothing to be upset about,” Wills laughed again. “I just went down the canal with some friends. Come on, Mom, I’m starving.”

  “It’s probably ruined by now,” Mom scolded.

  “I didn’t see you down the canal,” I said, while Mom fetched Wills’s food from the oven.

  “You weren’t looking in the right place, then,” said Wills. “Anyway, we went to the stores as well.”

  I didn’t bother to say that I’d been to the stores too. I just wished Mom would tell Wills off for disappearing like that and worrying us, but I supposed that she didn’t want to upset him again, that she just wanted to keep the peace, what with Dad not being there to help and Wills being in a good mood.

  A loud crack of
knife-against-plate was followed by a piece of pork skimming across the kitchen and on to the floor. Wills cackled loudly.

  “Did you see that, Chris? Did you see that, Mom? Is that what they mean by ‘pigs might fly’?”

  “Don’t play with your food, please, William,” said Mom.

  “I wasn’t playing,” retorted Wills. “It just leapt off my plate when I cut it. It’s because it’s so hard. Watch this.”

  “I’ll cut it up for you,” Mom said quickly, grabbing hold of Wills’s knife and fork.

  “Are you going to feed me as well?” giggled Wills. “Pretend it’s a train going into a tunnel.”

  He opened his mouth wide and flapped his arms like a baby. I couldn’t help laughing, he looked so funny. Mom stifled a smile and told me not to encourage him, while Wills made googoo ga-ga noises then blew up his face, pretended to fill his napkin, and farted loudly. “William, that’s enough!” cried Mom. “Not at the table.”

  “Goo-goo ga-ga,” chuckled Wills. “Dadadadadada, Dada gone. Goo-goo ga-ga.”

  Mom’s face changed and I could see she was getting tearful. Why couldn’t Wills just leave it alone?

  “Do you want to play on the computer with me?” I asked him. I didn’t really want to because playing computer games with Wills makes me go crazy, but at least it would take his mind off Dad and give Mom a break. Wills leapt down from the table and ran into the front room.

  “POW, POW, P-P P-OW! Let’s shoot ‘em up, kiddo!” he yelled.

  “You all right, Mom?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “You go off and play.”

  Wills had bagged the best controller and had pulled an armchair right up in front of the screen. There wasn’t room for another chair, so I had to perch on the arm of his. A race game was on hold—GROAN!