Tiger Moth (3 page)

‘He wasn’t a security guard, Zack! He was a policeman! You can get into big trouble for that sort of thing, you know. Whatever would your dad say?’

That was the moment I swore at her. It just kind of came out really, really loudly. And it wasn’t just any old swear word, it was the worst kind. Mum stood there, staring at me, and
didn’t speak to me all the way back home.

That night I lay awake, thinking about the last holiday we’d all been on together. We’d flown to a tiny island which had white sandy beaches and turquoise water. The day before we
left we went sailing on a beautiful white yacht. The three of us ate a lunch of barbecued lobsters and afterwards Dad and I both jumped off the back of the boat to swim with the turtles. That was
one of the best and most fun days I’ve ever had, but thinking about it now just made me feel sad. Because I won’t ever get to do that again, will I?

When I had to go back to school, everyone was really nice to me, but for some reason that made me feel worse. It was a feeling that sort of hovered over me. It was a feeling that got worse when
I saw my friend’s dad cheering him on at our school football match. It was a feeling that made me want to shout or cry or something even worse when I saw all the other dads collecting my
friends on the last day of term. And when Mum took me to the cinema I noticed that all the other children were with both their mum and dad. It felt as though everyone had their dad but me. I wanted
the feeling to go away, but it just stayed and stayed.

A week after the Easter holidays I came home from school and Mum was sitting at the kitchen table with two very serious-looking men who I’d never seen before. They wore grey suits and grey
expressions, and I could see that Mum had been crying. They were talking about money and the house, and I heard Mum say, ‘That can’t be right. He would have remembered.’ Then she
turned round and saw me standing in the doorway and told me to go upstairs. I wanted to stay and see what they were talking about, but she just shut the door.

That night Mum made me my favourite dinner and as I slurped on the spaghetti and meatballs she told me the bad news. I looked up at her and watched her twist her black hair round her finger,
then she took a deep breath.

‘Zack, those men that were here earlier . . . well, the thing is . . . we’ve run out of money.’

I kind of frowned a bit. I didn’t get it.

‘We’re in a bit of a mess money-wise. We’re going to have to sell the house.’

She started to cry and turned to face the window so that I couldn’t see. I still didn’t understand. We didn’t have any money? We were going to have to sell the house? It
didn’t make sense at all. We’d always had plenty of money. We lived in a nice house on one of the best streets. We had three cars and nearly always had a holiday each year, and my
school was one of those that you had to pay to go to.

‘Zack, honey, it seems like your dad was . . .’

I waited. She sighed and rubbed her eyes so that she smudged the make-up down her cheeks.

‘Those men, well, they had some bad news. How can I explain this? When you work, when you have a job and earn a living, you don’t get to just keep all the money you earn.’

‘Why not?’ I said, frowning properly this time.

‘You have to give a bit, a rather big bit, to the taxman. For the rest of the country. So that we can have schools and hospitals and build roads and things. The more money you earn, the
more taxes you have to pay and your dad sort of forgot to do that. So now we owe the tax people money, a lot more money than we have in the bank.’ She sat down next to me and kissed my cheek.
‘Zack, we’re going to have to sell all the things we have. The cars, the house and even then we’ll be . . .’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Our life is going to be
very different from now on.’

And it was.

Our life was about to become completely different.

Over the next three months we sold everything we had. Firstly Mum sold all her jewellery. The diamond necklace she got for her birthday, the ruby ring she got for Christmas and
the special bracelet that Dad and I had picked out for their anniversary. She sold all the paintings in the house so that the walls were left with these big, square, empty patches. She sold all the
antique furniture so that we only had two mattresses and our clothes lay in piles on the floor. She sold Dad’s sports car, the jeep and the silver Mini Cooper so that we had to walk to
school.

Debbie the housekeeper stopped coming to the house so that it started to get messier and messier. The fridge that had always been bursting with my favourite food and drink became emptier and
emptier until last night I found one mini Babybel and a vanilla yoghurt. Our house had always been filled with colour and music and new people hanging out in the kitchen, but when they came and
took everything away we stopped getting any visitors and our home felt empty and strange.

It’s already July; it’s been months since Mum told me the bad news and next week will be my last week at school and I’m already dreading it. Mum doesn’t want anyone to
know what’s really happening, so I can’t tell anyone. She says that she doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her and that we have to start our lives again, but I don’t want
to start my life again. I want to go back to how it was before. Sixteen months ago, before Dad died.

Our house is filled with photographs of Dad and normally I look at one of the pictures and say hello to him. I’ll say hello to him bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower or goodnight to him
in a suit at a fancy party, but last night I didn’t bother. The day Dad died was really sad, but it felt as though he was still here. Now I really wish he was so I could ask him why. I wish I
could properly tell him off for leaving me and Mum in such a horrible mess because sometimes I can feel really angry with my stupid dad and his idiotic ‘forgetting to pay the
taxman’.

When I woke up this morning, I looked around at my bedroom which used to be full of cool stuff, but was now nearly empty. My computer, fridge, guitar, TV, model planes, they were all gone. I
looked at the empty walls, the piles of clothes on the floor and saw that Otter had made a new basket for himself in a mountain of towels. I leaned forward and stroked his ears; he loves that. He
loves being with me the most and he hates being by himself. The first time we left him in the house on his own he chewed the legs off Mum’s special sculpture, chewed the cushions on the sofa
and weed all over the new carpet. Dad used to say that Otter was just like me, that we both hated to be by ourselves for longer than five minutes. It’s kind of true, although I don’t
chew cushions.

I got up off my mattress and thought about the week ahead. The last week at school with all my friends. Louis is my best mate; we’ve known each other since primary school and we do
everything together, but since I told him I was leaving London he and Ed have been hanging out a lot more than they usually do. I phoned him last night, but the two of them had gone to the cinema
together. Part of me thinks that Lou will forget about me once I’m gone, but I’m trying not to think about that.

I’ve been wondering about what kind of school I’ll go to in September and what everyone will be like. I’ve never been the new kid before and it kind of scares me; it makes me
feel like that might be the worst thing about all of this. It makes me feel terrible. In fact, ever since I found out we were going to have to move, I’ve been pretty miserable.

When Mum told me about selling the house, I wasn’t sure where we’d go. Then she showed me a photograph of our new home, the little house where she had grown up.

Not only did I have to move out of my home, leave my school and all my friends, but we were going to leave London too and it made me so cross that I threw the last can of Diet Coke across the
room and kicked the bin on the way out. She told me to come back and sit down, but I wouldn’t; instead I just hovered by the door. She came closer and tried to put her hand on my shoulder,
but I just shrugged her off me, moved away and leaned against the fridge, folding my arms across my chest. She sat down at the kitchen table and opened a shoebox full of photographs that I
didn’t really recognise.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I was about your age when this was taken.’

I turned away and sighed, but she moved the photo right underneath my nose so I had to look. It was of a row of three white cottages with a group of people outside the middle one. There were two
fair-haired boys that looked so alike, both of them smiling in the sunshine; the younger one looked as though the other had just told him the funniest joke.

I recognised Mum straight away. She was sitting on the wall next to the tallest boy, her arm round his waist, a gap-toothed grin lighting up his freckly face. Standing on the wall next to Mum
was another girl with long blonde hair, her hands on her hips, her cheeks puffed out and her eyes tightly shut. Standing at the gate and looking back across at them was a tall man with a rounded
tummy. His black hair stuck out from underneath a cap, his hands were the size of dinner plates and resting on his foot was a tiny black dog. I turned away, not looking at the rest of the people in
the photo. I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t care.

‘That’s my dad,’ Mum said with a sad smile. ‘He didn’t have many things. He wasn’t interested in money, but when he died he left a will saying that he wanted
his only grandson, you, to have his cottage. It’s yours.’

‘Why?’ I said angrily. ‘I don’t want the stupid cottage! Can’t we sell it then we’d have some money? Then we could stay here!’ I shouted at her.

‘I can’t, Zack. At the moment that cottage is all we have and if I owned it, if it was my house, the bank or the taxman would take it away from me and sell it to pay off Dad’s
debts. But because it belongs to you it means that they can’t touch it. You can’t sell it until you’re eighteen.’

Eighteen! That was six years from now. That was forever.

‘Zack, please. Try and understand. We’re really lucky. Exmoor is a wonderful place to grow up. You’re going to love it, Zack. The cottage is right on the beach so you can do
lots of water sports; you’ll like that. If it wasn’t for Granddad, you and I would be homeless.’

Homeless? The word scared me. It made me think of those people you see outside the Tube.

Mum keeps saying how sorry she is, but I’m so cross that I’ve started being a bit mean to her. I can’t help it. I try and be nice, like when I saw her packing all of
Dad’s old clothes into big brown boxes I saw she was sort of crying. I went to get some tissues, but as my hand reached out to the tissue box I caught sight of my empty bedroom, the
miserable, lonely mattress, and I swiped the box on to the floor.

So I’m twelve years old and I own a cottage that I don’t even want to see, never mind live in, but I don’t have a choice. I have a right to be mad at Mum, don’t I? I have
a right to be mega-angry at Dad, don’t I? I’m starting to think I sort of hate him and I know I already HATE the stupid cottage by the sea.

Do you look a bit like your mum? Or does someone always tell you that you look just like your dad? Maybe there’s another relative in your family who has the same hair
colour or the same blue eyes? Perhaps you’re really good at playing the piano, just like your mum? I’m not. I don’t look anything like my mum or my dad. I don’t look like my
aunt or my uncle.

My mum has golden hair and eyes that are almost grey. Mine are not. My dad has reddish-blond hair and freckles all over his face, his arms, his hands, and his eyes are as blue as a swimming
pool. Mine are not. My mum has skin that is so pale you can see the veins in her arms, and every summer she has to wear a hat and lots of suncream. So does Dad. So does his little sister, so do my
cousins, but I don’t. I don’t look like them at all. My name is Alice Isabella Richardson, but I don’t look like anyone in the Richardson family.

My hair isn’t blonde or red or even brown, it’s black. Blackest black. My skin isn’t pinkish or pale or even freckly. My eyes aren’t grey, blue, green or anything in
between. They’re darkest brown. Dad says I have eyes that are shaped like large almonds and Mum says they’re the colour of melting chocolate. She says I have the thickest spidery
eyelashes that she has ever seen and that when I cry they sort of stick together like the bristles of a paintbrush. Mum is tall, very tall. They both are. Tall and skinny. And me? I’m the
smallest girl in my year and I once heard Florence say I was kind of chubby. So, even though I was chosen, even though I was the perfect fit for Mum and Dad, I don’t really match at all.

These days, every time I brush my teeth, I look in the mirror and wonder if my other mother has the same eyes as me. Once, when I was in town, I saw a lady with the same hair and wondered if it
was her. I followed her round the supermarket until she got to the frozen-food section, but when she turned round she wasn’t a she at all. It was a boy and it gave me such a fright I ran back
to the till to find my mum.

Which is sort of funny if you think about it.

I didn’t tell Mum though. I’m still not speaking.

This morning, after breakfast, my dad tried to get me to talk again.

‘What’s the capital of Portugal?’ he asked and I knew the answer. I like looking at maps or at the enormous globe in the library. I looked up at him, but just as the words were
about to come out my mum came into the kitchen with a screwdriver in her hand.

‘David, can you give me a hand? I can’t quite get the last screw to tighten on Alice’s old cot.’

I felt a chill run down my body and a frown appeared on my forehead. Dad looked down at me hopefully.

‘Do you want to help too, Alice? We’re putting your old cot back together so it’ll be ready for your little sister.’

My cot! I wanted to shout. MY COT! Why is she getting my cot? I stood up from the table and left the room, slamming the kitchen door so hard it sort of rattled for ages afterwards.

At dinner time no one said anything about it and I noticed again that Mum wasn’t eating anything. She’s got this thing where you feel sick all the time. Most mornings I hear her
throwing up, but Dad says it’s nothing to worry about. He says that pregnant women often get sick, but poor Mum has been sick every morning for months and I’m starting to think
it’s like my little sister is making her poorly and that can’t be a good thing.