Millions Read Free Page B

down at the shoulder. He was looking at the scratches. When he finally got up to go, I whispered, ‘Dad, are you OK?’
    ‘Are you awake?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Go to sleep.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Damian . . .’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘What happened to your back?’
    ‘Just some holly, you know.’
    ‘Damian. Be good, won’t you? Be really good.’
    ‘That’s what I’m trying to be. That’s what I’m trying to be all the time.’
    ‘I know it is, son. I know that.’
    Then he went. After a while I heard the toilet flush. Then I got back on to the floor.

4
     
    It’s not as easy to be good as you might think. For instance, on the Monday the doorbell rang just after Dad had gone to work. Now, we’re not supposed to answer the door when Dad isn’t there. On the other hand, it was time to go to school. So it was a moral dilemma – answer the door (disobedient) and be on time for school (good), or don’t answer the door (good) and be late for school (bad). Anthony doesn’t think about these things. He just headed for the door, pulling his blazer on. I stopped him.
    ‘Dad said not to answer the door.’
    ‘It’s twenty to,’ he said. ‘ We’re going to be late.’
    Then whoever it was rang the doorbell again.
    ‘But Dad said not to!’ I was shouting now. It was making me panicky. ‘Dad said not to do it and we’re supposed to be being good!’
    Anthony took a deep breath and said, ‘OK. This is what we do. Get your bag. We’ll leave for school. If there’s someone outside, then they’re just a coincidence. We’re not answering the door. We’re going to school. All right?’
    ‘All right.’ Anthony is very good at sorting out moral dilemmas when he tries.
    The coincidence was a man in a white shirt with a South Park tie and a plastic name badge saying, ‘Terry – IT’. ‘I’m from that one there,’ he said, and pointed at the house on the bend.
    Anthony looked at the house. ‘The corner position gives you extra garden, which is an asset, but you’ve no off-road parking, which is a definite disadvantage in this market.’
    ‘Is your dad in?’
    ‘Gone to work.’
    ‘Your mum?’
    ‘Dead,’ said Anthony.
    ‘Oh.’
    Terry put his hands in his pockets, as though he was looking for something to give us. Anthony watched the pockets expectantly, but Terry didn’t seem to be able to find anything.
    ‘Can you give your dad a message?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘We haven’t met. I leave for work before most people get up, but tell him if he wants to come over tonight, about seven o’clock, then cool. Most people will be there.’
    ‘Can we come too?’
    ‘Yeah. Sure. Hey, look at this.’ He fiddled with his tie and it played the South Park theme tune, which was quite surprising.
    ‘Who the hell is Terry?’ Dad was getting agitated.
    ‘Terry – IT over the road. He said to come at seven.’
    ‘Come what for? A party? Supper? A game of Monopoly? Help him move a wardrobe?’
    ‘He’s got a tie that plays tunes and he said, “Cool.” We think it’s a party.’
    ‘Meet-the-neighbours type of thing.’
    ‘What time is it now? I’ll have to go and get a bottle.’
    ‘No need. We’re baking a cake. Is that OK?’
    ‘I’m surprised.’
    ‘Surprised and pleased? Or surprised and disappointed?’
    ‘Surprised and pleased that you’ve taken this opportunity to be excellent.’
    It was my idea to bake the cake. When we got in from school, I’d said to Anthony, ‘This is an opportunity to be excellent. Let’s bake a cake.’
    He was against it on the grounds that we didn’t know how. But I remembered baking cakes loads of times in the past. It was one of the things I remembered a lot. Sometimes I even dreamed about it. I said, ‘Put the oven on to 200º,’ and we got cracking. We’d taken 110 grams of flour with 50 grams of margarine, two spoonfuls of water and a pinch of salt, mixed them and put them in the fridge to rest for twenty minutes, and that’s as far as we’d got. The patron saint of