How To Be a Boy (14 page)

Everything fell apart that summer, after Dad moved into the Nest; but the strange thing is that I remember being very happy most of the time. In my memory, it never rained or got cold, although I suppose it must have done. I think of it as a gold and green time. I had breakfast with Mum most days, and she was usually chirpy and busy like a nervous bird. Then the phone would ring and she’d say “Hi” in a warm voice and take it into the hall, leaving her cereal to go soggy in the bowl. Fool that I was, I thought at first that Dad had secretly rigged up a phone in the tree-house. Then I started hearing her say “Steve”.

A routine established itself. Mum would leave for work, leaving a trail of instructions in her wake. Then I’d get dressed and carry the Sugar Puffs and a carton of milk over to the Nest. Sometimes Dad would be awake, sitting up in the sleeping bag and reading one of my comics. Sometimes I’d have to wake him up. While he slurped the sweetened milk I’d tell him the things that Mum wanted us to do. Some mornings he’d say, briskly, “Right. Right.” Other mornings, he’d say, “Aw, do we
have
to do that, Benjie? I don’t really wanna do that.”

Dad stopped cooking. He’d used to be really keen, watching food programmes on the telly, making notes, sometimes going all the way to Exeter to buy exotic stuff from the Lebanese shop or the market. He’d take for ever fussing over pans on the stove. He bought a set of square plates and put the food on them like it was an abstract painting or something. He gave all that up after he moved into the Nest. At five o’clock or thereabouts Dad and I would go into the kitchen and make beans on toast with a fried egg on top. Or fish-finger sandwiches, or cheese on toast with crispy bacon. We’d scuttle across the lawn and carry these greasy feasts up into the tree-house as if somebody was out there trying to stop us. The Essentials box now contained brown sauce and ketchup, and always, mysteriously, at least one bottle of wine.

One evening, the sun a red bubble sinking towards the horizon, Dad lifted his egg-and-ketchup-smeared plate to his face and licked it clean like a dog. I was shocked and thrilled.

He looked at me and said, with a serious smile on his face, “Don’t try this at home.”

The winter loomed in and slowly faded away. One morning in spring, when the mud in the lane had more or less dried out and the verge in front of the house was crazy with daffodils, a man in a suit and wellies came and put up a
TO LET
sign on a post just inside the railing. By the time I got home from school Dad had sawn the post off close to the ground and thrown the sign over the hedge into the field opposite. I made two mugs of tea-bag tea and carried them over to the Nest. Dad was sitting on the balcony with his legs through the balusters, reading a book and chuckling. He turned and looked up, showing me. The book was old and its dust jacket was torn but I could read the title:
Biggles and the Cruise of the Condor
.

“I read this when I was your age,” Dad said. “I’d forgotten how brilliantly mad it is.”

He hadn’t shaved for about a week. His hair was quite long now, and his face had got harder and sharper. His nose was beaky.

“Mum’ll play hell when she sees what you did to that sign,” I said.

He stuck his bottom lip out and shrugged.

“See if I care,” he said.

Mum did play hell. She parked fiercely on the gravel and didn’t come into the house. I heard the boot lid of her car slam. I went to the living-room window. Mum was marching across the lawn with a torch in her hand, following an oval of light that made the grass white. At the foot of the beech tree she aimed the beam up at the Nest.

“Sean!
Sean
!
”

It was a screech.

“Sean, you pathetic
bastard
! Come down from there!”

The Nest remained silent.

“Sean! I know you can hear me, you shit! How long do you intend to maintain this, this fucking
charade
?”

I pulled the curtains across the window and turned the volume on the telly up. After a while I heard the door slam and a chair scrape on the kitchen floor. I went through and Mum was sitting with her hands flat on the table either side of the big black rubber torch.

She looked up at me and said, “I’m sorry, Benjie. I’m really sorry.”

I shrugged and said, “It’s all right.”

“I never meant this to happen. I love this house.”

I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t imagined that what was happening was to do with the house. I thought it was something else.

The phone rang. Mum sort of jumped but didn’t answer it. After eight rings the answer machine clicked in. A man’s voice said, “Helen? Call me. I’m worried.”

“Was that Steve?” I asked her.

Mum took a deep breath as if she was smoking an invisible cigarette.

“Yes. You’d like Steve. He’s very normal.”

“What does he do?”

Mum looked at me as if I’d asked a very weird question. Then she laughed, sort of.

“I’ll tell you what he doesn’t do, Benjie. He doesn’t live up a bloody
tree
.”

The next day, the man from the estate agents came and put the sign up again. Dad didn’t cut it down this time, but when I got home from school he’d carefully painted the letter
I
between
TO
and
LET
so that it read
TOILET
.

Over the next few weekends people came to look at the house. Some of them brought their children. Most of them were impressed by the Nest and wanted to go up into it.

“Sorry,” Mum would say. “I know it’s lovely but the floor isn’t safe, and we’re not insured if someone went through it and got hurt. Mind you, it would only take a
little
bit of attention if you were to take the place on.”

And half of me wanted my mad dad to hurl the door open and throw his dirty underpants down at the strangers, and half of me was praying that he wouldn’t because it would be so awful for Mum.

We packed everything back into the same boxes we’d come with. The removals men were like a comedy act. They couldn’t say anything that wasn’t a joke. When they’d gone, Dad was still up in the Nest.

Auntie Jan poked her half-smoked ciggie into the gravel with her toe.

“Right then,” she said.

She and her partner, Joe, a big, bearded man, and my dad’s two brothers, Uncle Liam and Uncle Frank, walked across the lawn towards the big old beech tree. They looked like a showdown gang from an old western. Liam had a crowbar, brand new from B and Q, in his hand. Dad didn’t answer them when they called up to him, so Liam climbed the curved steps round the tree-trunk to the door of the Nest and forced it open with the crowbar.

I sat in the back of Steve’s BMW, watching.

They brought him down. He looked all around as though he was considering flight but couldn’t think how to manage it. When he got his feet onto the ground his knees buckled and Joe hoisted Dad’s left arm round his shoulder and sort of carried him over to the drive.

Dad didn’t look that upset. His beak poked out between the curtains of his hair and his eyes were wide, like someone who’d woken up somewhere surprisingly beautiful. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops and a T-shirt with a Snoopy cartoon on the front. They took him to Joe’s car, passing the BMW. Mum sobbed and fell sideways onto Steve’s shoulder.

He reached an arm around her and said, “It’ll be all right, babe. It’ll be all right.”

I twisted to look through the rear window and saw Uncle Frank put his hand on the top of Dad’s head, like a policeman, to guide him into Joe’s car’s back seat.

*  *  *

I stood in the lane staring at the neglected Nest for, I don’t know, five minutes, maybe longer. The roofing felt had split and peeled and the plywood underneath was rain-stained and buckled. The wall-boards had gaps between them, and were greeny-black with slime and something like soot. The whole structure had slumped, tilted. It looked accidental, half-hearted. The bottom four steps had gone and the rest were skewed and rotten. It was a disgrace.

For the first time ever I felt ashamed of my dad. Or of myself, or both. It made me angry. I’d marched up the short drive and knocked on the back door before I’d thought about what I might say.

A woman about my own age opened the door. She had one of those nice, harmless faces that you forget soon afterwards. She was very pregnant, which put me off my stroke a bit. It took me several seconds to get my first words out. Anger makes my stammer worse, anyway. I suppose it would have made things easier if I’d introduced myself but I was too worked up to think of it.

When the words eventually came, they came in an ugly blurt. About how I used to live here I was just passing my dad built the Nest he lived in it for a year I was shocked to see the state it was in.

I could see she hadn’t understood. And that she was a bit frightened. Maybe I sounded aggressive. She put her hands over her big bump.

She said, “The nest?”

“Yes,” I said, and pointed meaninglessly towards the lawn. “The Nest. The tree-house.”

“Oh,” she said. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she turned her head slightly towards the hallway behind her and called out, “Gareth? Gareth!”

I looked down at my shoes for a bit and when I looked up there was a man standing behind her. He had a child, a boy, three years old perhaps, hanging off him. The boy had his arms hooked around his dad’s neck and his bare legs clamped on his dad’s hip. The kid was whingeing quietly: Dad-dee, Dad-
dee
.

The man said, “Hi. Can I help you? Are you selling something? We don’t want any plastic windows.”

And right then I knew what I wanted to tell them. Which was, that I’d come and fix the Nest up for them. In my summer holidays. I’d like to. For free. No strings attached. It would be nice for the kid. Kids. A place like this cries out for a tree-house. I’d bring my own food and everything. I wouldn’t bother them.

I was looking at Gareth’s face while the pictures of all this came into my head. I’m not good at telling people’s ages, but I’d’ve said he was a bit older than his wife. I saw that there was tiredness in and around his eyes. I saw that he was jigging the little boy up and down automatically, unconsciously, the way that animals in a zoo do the same thing over and over.

Something inside me gave up, folded.

“No,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

I went back to the van and picked the junk-food carton and the two cans out of the puddle and put them in the plastic carrier bag that contained the remains of my lunch.

I sat quietly behind the steering-wheel for a minute or so until I felt OK then I made a three-point turn in the lane and went back the way I’d come.

IAN BECK
was born in 1947. He published his first book for children in 1982 and has since written and illustrated well over sixty titles. He published his first novel,
The Secret History of Tom Trueheart – Boy Adventurer
, in 2006. He has since written two more books in the Tom Trueheart series. In 2009 he published his first book for young adults,
Pastworld
. Both the Tom Trueheart books and
Pastworld
are due to be made into feature films.

TONY BRADMAN
has been involved with children’s books for over thirty years as a writer for all ages, a reviewer and an editor of anthologies. He has edited over thirty anthologies of poems and short stories, among them
Skin Deep
, a collection about racism,
Give Me Shelter
, a collection about asylum seekers, and
Under the Weather
, a collection about climate change. Tony’s own books include the Dilly the Dinosaur series, the Happy Ever After sequels to famous fairy tales and picture books such as
Daddy’s Lullaby
and
Through My Window
.

KATIE DALE
loves nothing more than creating characters – both on the page and on stage. She studied English Literature at Sheffield University, followed by a crazy year at Mountview drama school, a national Shakespeare tour and backpacking through South-East Asia. She loves all genres and is busily working on a variety of projects – from novels to picture books – whilst playing the odd princess/assassin/zombie in between!

JAMILA GAVIN
was born in India but moved to the UK as a teenager. She has written numerous books for children of all ages, many of which have been inspired by her Indian roots. Her novel
Coram Boy
won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and was subsequently adapted for the stage.

KEITH GRAY
mainly writes books for boys about boys because he’s got no idea what being a girl is all about. His books include the Smarties Prize-winning
The Runner
and the Carnegie Medal shortlisted
Ostrich Boys
. He lives in Edinburgh with his girlfriend and their parrot.

FLINT KELLER
is raising five children, has taught over a thousand and aspires to write for millions. A teacher and writer, Flint has a Master’s degree in education and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. He wrote this story voicing the scenes into a tape recorder while commuting by bike. Want to know more about Flint? Visit
flintkeller.com

MAL PEET
is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels
Tamar
, which won the 2005 Carnegie Medal,
Keeper
, winner of the 2003 Branford Boase Award, and
The Penalty
. His latest novel,
Exposure
, won the 2009 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. He lives in Devon with his wife and fellow writer, Elspeth Graham.

BALI RAI
grew up in Leicester, where he returned after studying in London to do a variety of jobs before writing his first acclaimed novel,
(un) arranged marriage
. Published in thirteen languages to date, he is now a distinctive voice in young adult fiction and is invited all over the world to talk about his work. Bali likes cooking, talking and is a devoted Liverpool FC fan.