Shining On Read Free

good night to us, a little like a fond auntie, and sometimes we hung around and did our homework in her office because every place in the whole house seemed to have something messing up the surfaces where you might want to put a book. And she didn't seemto mind us coming in as long as we didn't bother her or leave wrappers on the floor. Which was tricky, given that all our meals seemed to come in wrappers these days. She was on the phone a lot, and having meetings with her partner and smiling more than we'd seen in ages.
    Which was great.
    Only, after a few weeks of this, us kids were starting to look at each other and think, hey, fun's fun, but there are no clean clothes in the whole house and we've run out of cereal for breakfast and tea, and speaking of tea, there's only one manky box of teabags that came free from Tesco about a hundred years ago and Dad's taken to drinking in-stant coffee, which puts him in an even worse mood than he is naturally. Also, the dog needs brushing, the radiators make a horrible noise, and every envelope that arrives has
For Your Urgent Attention
written on it in red.
    So we sat down that Saturday at what had once been the breakfast table but now looked like that exhibit at the zoo, filled with half-eaten meals and
Rattus norvegicus
proba-bly written on a brass plaque somewhere. I noticed the two goldfish in the bowl on top of the fridge for the first time in ages, and it was clear no one else had noticed them either, considering that they had given up swimming some time ago and taken up floating on the surface. Moe was wearing the cleanest of his shirts, which had ketchup spilled down the front and a chip actually stuck to it, Dad had gone out to have breakfast alone with the newspaper at Starbucks, and Alec and I were drinking blueberry cordial, which wasthe only thing left to drink in the house since we ran out of teabags and the milkman stopped coming.
    OK, guys, I said. I think it's time to start begging.
    Moe looked annoyed. But we're doing perfectly well without any help, he said, digging into a bowl of recently thawed peas from the freezer with some week-old takeaway curry mixed in.
    Alec said he was going to be sick and Moe should be taken into care, and they began to shout at each other and Alec stormed out, but I called him back because it was so obvious to all of us that something had to be done. We managed to be civil to each other long enough to write a letter setting out our terms of surrender. Here's what we wrote:

    I typed the letter up on Dad's laptop, set it in a nice curly font, and after I printed it out we all signed it and drewhearts on it and so forth to suck up, and then we slipped it under the door of the studio and went back into the house and got to work.
    It took all day, so it wasn't a bad thing that we didn't hear back from her right away. We scrubbed the floors and the walls, the kitchen and the bathroom, we swept off all the junk piled on every surface and separated out the bills and left them neatly stacked, and Dad paid them when he got home. Moe cleaned out the refrigerator and Alec and I went up to the shop with a lifetime's supply of pocket money and bought food—not the stuff we'd been eating all month, like chocolate breakfast bars, but proper food, like chicken parts and green beans and granary bread and cheddar cheese. We cleaned out the fishbowl and flushed both the fish down the toilet, which wasn't inhumane considering their advanced state of fatality, put clean sheets on all the beds and did about fifteen loads of laundry, and even folded it up afterwards. Alec got out the Hoover, but mira-cles have to end somewhere, and when the phone rang and it was his girlfriend, I ended up doing it myself.
    It was a not entirely unsatisfying day, if I say so myself. Even the house itself seemed less bad-tempered, like it pre-ferred being clean.
    Well, Mum may have suspected something was up when she saw all the black rubbish bags stacked outside by the front