Tiger Moth (2 page)

In the end Mum said, ‘Let’s make your daddy a carrot cake for his birthday instead. Why don’t you come and help me?’ And I did. I love carrot cake the most. I think
it’s my favourite food. That and watermelon. Mum always makes me and Dad a carrot cake on our birthday.

Even though my birthday is on November 8th, every year on December 6th we have a family celebration too. We call it our family birthday and I think it’s pretty great because I get presents
then and eighteen days later it’s Christmas. Everyone at school says I’m lucky, but one time my cousin Florence told me that no one else has a family birthday so I asked her why.

She looked at me and rolled her eyes. ‘Because, Alice, I live with my real family, silly.’

Then she sort of laughed and took a bite out of her apple. I wasn’t really sure I knew what she meant, but that night, when we all sat down for dinner, I looked up at Mum and asked her
where my real family was.

She spat out her drink, started coughing and Dad dropped his knife and fork so that they sort of clattered on to the plate. They looked at me and it was as if they were angry or really upset,
and when Mum spoke again she was sort of crying.

‘This
is
your real family, Alice,’ she said. ‘Your real family is the one that loves and cares for you the most.’

She looked so upset that I got up from my seat and gave her the biggest cuddle I could. I didn’t want her to be sad. I didn’t want her to cry any more. I wanted her to smile. And she
did. So, even though I sometimes have so many questions about my other mother that it feels as though my head will explode, I didn’t ask again. But I didn’t feel really sad or anything
like that because my family is the best family in the world.

Well, it was.

Everything was just perfect until it wasn’t.

Everything was perfect until February. Then something happened which changed everything. I remember the day really well because it had been raining all night and the wind was
so loud it kind of woke me up, but in the morning there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. We sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table. It’s a long rectangular one with a big wooden
top and, if you run your hand along the honey-coloured wood, it feels kind of warm. Mum says it’s really old, but I like it because it smells special. It makes the whole kitchen smell a bit
like a forest.

I sat down in my chair by the window that looks down across the garden and out to sea. The sea was dark blue that day and I could tell it was still windy outside because the waves were rolling
along the shore in white frothy peaks. Just as I took a big gulp of milk, my mum set down a plate of warm croissants and smiled at me.

‘We’ve got some amazing news,’ she said.

Dad took her hand in his and turned to me. ‘Alice, you’re going to have a little sister.’

I looked at them and grinned.

‘Really?’ I said, jumping up from the table. I’d always wanted a little brother or sister, like most of my friends had, and I immediately thought about the big house in the
country where Mum and Dad had collected me from when I was a tiny baby.

The special place where they’d chosen me from all the others.

‘Yippee!’ I shouted. ‘I’ve always wanted a sister.’

They smiled.

‘Mum, can I choose? Can I choose which one?’

They looked funny. They both tried to say something and then Dad leaned towards Mum and lifted up the bottom of her jumper and patted her rounded tummy.

‘No, silly. Mum is going to have a baby.’

I didn’t understand.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Mum opened up her handbag, pulled out a small white envelope and passed it to me.

‘Look inside.’

I pulled out a black-and-white photograph. It wasn’t like any picture I had seen before. It was sort of blurred and I could only see two roundish black-and-white shapes. I looked up and
frowned. ‘What is it?’

‘That’s your little sister. Look.’ Mum pointed at the larger round shape. ‘That’s her head and those,’ she said, pointing at the tiny white dots, ‘are
her hands.’

I looked down at the picture again. Now that I knew what it was supposed to be, I could almost make out the shape of a teeny-weeny body. I really could see a head, hands and feet.

‘By the end of August you’ll have a little sister,’ Mum said.

I watched Dad rub Mum’s tummy and they both smiled at each other again, but I felt funny. It wasn’t a good feeling. It made my stomach sort of twist and turn. Mum reached her hand
across the table to mine.

‘Well?’ she said, stroking my fingers.

I snatched my hand from hers.

‘Well, what?’ I said angrily.

They both looked shocked and I don’t know why, but I suddenly pushed my chair away from the table and stood up.

‘Alice, don’t you have anything to say?’

I sighed and looked down at my dad’s freckly face.

‘Is there anything you want to ask us?’ Mum said.

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come out. I didn’t have anything to say. In fact, I didn’t have anything to say that day or the day after that or the day after
that.

And I haven’t spoken since. Not a word. Not a yes or a no or a please or a thank you. I nod my head, I shake my head and most of the time I just sigh and frown at them. Since then I spend
a lot of time thinking about that black-and-white blurry picture of my soon-to-be little sister. I think about the day I was chosen and most of the time I try to imagine what my other mother looks
like.

After two weeks of not speaking, Mum and Dad took me to a special doctor’s, but he told them there was nothing really wrong with me. So I had to go to another kind of doctor. She spoke to
Mum and Dad while I sat in the waiting room. After a while, they opened the door and I had to go inside. I sat silently while she asked me lots of questions and then the doctor lady gave me a
notebook. She said if I didn’t want to talk, if I felt I couldn’t speak, perhaps I could write instead.

When we went back to school, my mum and dad had to have a ‘really big talk’ with the teachers. The children at school teased me for a bit. Actually, some of them were a bit mean, but
after a while they just ignored me.

It’s like I don’t exist.

My dad used to be a stuntman.

I’m not kidding. I don’t mind if you don’t believe me because at first I used to think he was joking. My friends at school thought I was making it up. ‘Zack,’
they’d say, ‘you’re talking rubbish.’ Then, one day in the school holidays, my dad took me to a place in London where they make movies. It was like an enormous garage and
inside there were lots of pretend rooms and pretend streets. Each one was different, but they all looked very real. It was awesome. I met a woman who does all the make-up. Dad let me sit in her
special chair and I was allowed to have a sort of monster face made. When Mum saw me, she said I frightened the pants off her, but I thought it was hilarious.

So, when I went back to school, I showed my friends the photographs I’d taken. I showed them the pictures of Dad so they could see with their own eyes that he really was a stuntman. He
really was the man who jumped out of planes, off the top of buildings and out of burning cars for none other than James Bond.

Which I think is probably the coolest and most interesting job that a dad can have. Ask your dad. I bet he’ll agree.

Mum says that Dad wasn’t scared of anything at all. Apart from rats. He hated rats. Which was why I wasn’t allowed a pet rat for my tenth birthday, but I did get something even
better. I got a dog. A chocolate-brown puppy with the biggest eyes you ever saw and we all decided that he looked just like an otter so that was what we called him.

The one thing my dad really loved to do was fly. He always said it was his first love. When he was sixteen, he flew across the English Channel all by himself. Sometimes I would go with him to
the airfield at the weekend and we would polish his little yellow plane so much that you could see your face in the wings. I loved that yellow plane. I used to sit in the cockpit and Dad showed me
how it worked. He took me up in it eight times and he told me that, when I was old enough, he would let me fly it myself and, if I could just learn how to hold the brushes more carefully, if I
could keep my hands still, I might be able to make the miniature planes like he could too. Mum said that the two of us spent so much time talking about planes and cleaning, polishing and fixing the
little yellow plane that I could probably already fly it all by myself with a blindfold on. Dad said that if I was anything like him I probably could.

Then, one day, almost exactly sixteen months ago on May 29th, we went to watch my dad perform his aeroplane tricks at a special show where lots of stuntmen and women came from all over the world
to amaze the crowds with their Daredevil Show. We drove from our house in London to Sussex in my dad’s brand-new red sports car which had one of those roofs that you can take down. By the
time we arrived, Mum’s hair was kind of blown in every direction so that it looked like a seagull was nesting in it. I remember that I was really excited and I just couldn’t wait to see
what sort of tricks my dad was going to perform. We watched the crowds getting bigger and bigger and, when they knew it was time for my dad, the James Bond stuntman, they cheered and cheered.

I heard the little yellow plane chug past the crowds and I watched as Dad sped up down the runway and took off. Do you know the song ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’?
If you don’t, ask a grown-up. I bet you anything they can sing it for you. It goes a bit like this:

That afternoon we watched as my dad went up, up, up. We shouted and waved as he went down, down, down. I shouted, ‘I love you, Dad!’ as he looped the loop not once but three times.
Then he went down, down, down, but the little yellow plane did not defy the ground. It went down, down, down, all the way to the ground, where it became a ball of yellow and orange flames.

That was how my dad died.

We didn’t have a funeral where everyone cries and dresses up in black. We had a massive party at our house which went on all weekend. Mum said it was a party to celebrate Dad’s
amazing life. The house was so full of people that you could hardly get up the stairs without having to climb over someone. And everyone kept telling me how great my dad was, how everyone had loved
him and that there was no one else in the world that could do stunts as good as he could. But it didn’t feel very amazing to me.

If he was such an amazing stuntman, why couldn’t he have landed the little yellow plane properly like he normally did? Why did he smash the plane into the ground? I want to ask Mum about
it, but I’m too scared. She gets a bit upset when I ask about Dad and I hate to see her cry. Sometimes I fall asleep to the sound of her sobbing, and quite a few times I’ve woken up and
she’s asleep in the bunk bed below mine, but I don’t mind. The last time she did that I went downstairs, made her a cup of tea and a piece of toast, although I did spill quite a bit of
the tea on the carpet and I forgot to put her three sugars in, but she smiled loads when she saw the breakfast in bed.

So far I haven’t cried at all. I keep waiting for it to happen. Mum says I have to be really brave, just like Dad was, but I don’t think I could ever be as brave as him. Really I
keep waiting for Dad to suddenly burst through the door, but that hasn’t happened either.

Mum says in a way we’re ‘lucky duckies’ because we have each other, and my mum isn’t like any of the other mums I know. She’s much younger than all my
friends’ mums, but sometimes I wish she’d wear less embarrassing clothes. She once told me that she hadn’t planned to have babies or anything like that. She wasn’t really
interested in changing nappies and stuff, so I was a bit of an ‘accident’. But then she told me that her and Dad always said that if all accidents were as wonderful as me they’d
fall over on purpose all day long.

After it happened, Mum wanted us to go on holiday to a tiny island in the Caribbean for Christmas. She said it might not feel so sad if we went away instead of being at the house without Dad
because, unlike all of my friends from school, I don’t have any grandparents. My dad never knew his mum and dad because he grew up in one of those homes where lots of children with no parents
live. My mum’s mum died before I was born and her dad died before I had learnt to talk. Mum says I did meet him, but I don’t remember. So, even though Mum has lots of friends, we
don’t have any family left now, and Christmas would have just been the two of us which would have felt a bit weird.

The trip sounded exciting and we were supposed to fly there on a massive plane, but the day before I started feeling weird. I kept asking Mum if we’d be safe in the big plane and she had
to keep telling me we’d be OK. I actually felt sick when I went to bed and every time I closed my eyes I saw Dad’s little yellow plane as it burst into flames. Mum let Otter sleep on my
bed that night, but I still had the world’s most horrid dream that our plane crashed into the ocean and we were surrounded by great white sharks. I woke up sweating and panting for
breath.

At the airport it got worse. The noise from the planes and the crowds of people rushing this way and that way made me feel dizzier and dizzier until I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.
I wanted to shout: ‘I don’t want to go! What if we crash too?’ I wanted to cry, but I wouldn’t let myself. Dad always said that you should always do the thing that scares
you the most, but I wasn’t as brave as him and I knew in that moment I never could be.

As we stood in the queue to board, I saw the burning plane once more and it was too much; the Coke bottle fell from my hand and I turned and ran. Well, I ran as far as a security guard would let
me which wasn’t that far really. He grabbed hold of my rucksack and I fell to the ground and banged my head. For some reason I kicked out at him and, even though I didn’t really kick
him that hard, Mum was more cross about that than us missing our plane. She was even angrier when I refused to say sorry.