Millions (11 page)

‘Dad bought a house by the railway line. So did everyone else in the street.’

‘My dad is not three blokes all wearing identical shirts and talking in a phoney foreign accent, is he? My dad is not dodgy. They are dodgy, as we’ve established, and they’re in the right place. And . . . and . . . they put that camera up. Why?’

‘To keep an eye out for burglars.’

‘Maybe. Or maybe to keep an eye on us.’

‘Why would they want to keep an eye on us?’

‘They know someone round here’s got the money and they need to know who. They are the gang who stole the money and they’re trying to get the missing bag back. It’s obvious.’

‘Are you sure it’s obvious?’

‘And now they know we’ve got it.’

‘How?’

‘Because we’ve just given them 3,000 pounds. Duh. They know it’s us. They know we’ve got loads of money we shouldn’t have. And now they’re going to come after us for it.’

‘The Mormons under the leadership of John Doyle Lee massacred 137 poor migrants for entering their territory in 1857. You shouldn’t mess with them.’

‘That’s the whole point. They’re not Mormons. They’re robbers in disguise.’

‘Robbers or Mormons, they’re both dangerous. Couldn’t we just give them the money?’

‘Then we’d know too much. We’ve got to hide it where they won’t find it and then pretend to know nothing about it.’

‘Where?’

The answer was obvious. A bank.

The next morning, instead of going to school, we jumped the Widnes bus. The bus driver said, ‘No school today?’ suspiciously.

Anthony said, ‘Dentist.’ And he opened his mouth really wide and pointed to his back tooth, saying, ‘Look.’

‘No thanks. Got enough problems of my own,’ said the bus driver.

So now we were playing truant and telling lies in a public place and all for the money.

There were five days left to € Day. All the banks were crowded with people carrying carrier bags, boxes, socks and freezer bags, all stuffed with change, all to be turned into euros. The cashiers poured the coins into weighing machines and then into big bins under the counter. It sounded like being inside a big tin during a hailstorm. The bank clerks were wearing orange earmuffs with little € signs on to keep the noise out. It took us half an hour to reach the counter.

‘We want to open a bank account,’ said Anthony.

‘What?’ said the woman in the orange earmuffs. Anthony pointed to his ears and she took them off.

‘We want to open a bank account.’

‘Okey-dokey. Is your mummy with you? Or your dad?’

‘No.’

‘I really need an adult signature. And some kind of ID.’

Anthony had thought of this, obviously. He gave her his leisure pass from the baths. It had his photograph on and his address, but it wasn’t enough. ‘You really need to ask your mum to come in.’

‘We can’t.’ Anthony looked her in the eye and said, ‘She’s dead.’

She looked at him. She looked at me. I tried not to look too sad because I didn’t want to contribute to Anthony’s errors. But it was hard to look actually happy. And then she did what everyone else always did when we mentioned Mum – she gave us something. An €-shaped money box and two free euros.

We hauled the bag of cash out again. It was heavy and we were nervous that something would happen to it. And that’s the thing. We thought the money was going to take care of everything but we ended up taking care of the money. We were always worried about it, tucking it in at night, checking up on it. It was like a big baby. And now we were carrying it round the precinct in a carrycot.

Anthony said, ‘I told you we should’ve bought a house.’

We carried it all the way to Toys ‘
’ Us. If Anthony couldn’t hide it, he was going to spend it.

We put the cash in a trolley and pushed it down the first aisle. The top end was ‘Barbie’ so we didn’t even slow down. The bottom end was ‘Action Man’. Anthony was delighted.

I said, ‘A doll by any other name.’

‘What?’

‘Action Man’s a doll.’

‘Do
not
start that again.’

‘He’s in the same aisle as Barbie. Doesn’t that tell you something? Look, you can buy clothes for him, like Barbie. And little bags.’

‘It’s not a bag, it’s a tool kit.’

‘OK, buy it, then.’

‘I don’t need it.’

We left the Action Man aisle and went into the Gameboy aisle. There were stacks and stacks of boxes, all plastered with bright monsters and women, their eyes bulging and their arms out. The boxes were noisy to read. I’ve never seen so many exclamation marks.

Anthony stood scanning them and scanning them. ‘We can have any we want,’ he said. ‘Any. Or all.’ Then he said, ‘And we don’t want any.’ He pushed on into weaponry. They had everything – guns, lasers, grenades, knives, spears, swords and mortars. Anthony said, ‘If they were real I’d want them.’ And moved on. He was getting panicky and quick. ‘We’re depressed. There must be something here that will cheer us up.’

We were now in a whole aisle entirely full of lunch boxes. There was another aisle full of gel pens that smelt of different fruit. There were over 100 to collect. You could also collect plastic poodles with different hair colours and styles, each with their own birth certificate.

Then Anthony spotted something that he thought was fantastic. It was a castle shaped like a big angry skull. The eyes opened and closed, and when they opened warriors shot out on flying black horses. ‘Now that, that is fantastic,’ he said. ‘Look at that. We’ve got to have that.’ It was €166.99

We unwrapped it greedily on the grass over in the car park. It was smaller than it looked on the box and it was made of a brittle grey plastic. When you launched the flying warriors, they mostly fell into the skull’s nostril. Unless you pressed really hard and then the spring shot out. We tried to fix it but I cut my finger.

‘The world is crap,’ said Anthony. ‘We could have anything in it but everything in it is crap.’

On the way home, we binned the castle and stopped at The Carphone Warehouse and bought two video phones and 200 euros’ worth of credit each. We put all the credit on them on the bus and rang each other. My ring tone was the theme from
Harry Potter
. It was good that we could see each other’s faces on the screen, but we couldn’t think of anything to say.

When we got home, something was standing at the bottom of the stairs. It was the bin. ‘Hello, Damian. Hello, Anthony,’ it said. ‘My, my, what a massive bag!’

Anthony tried to push the bag behind his back out of sight, which was a bit like trying to push a school behind you out of sight. It was never going to work. And anyway it was pointless, because the bin couldn’t actually see. It wasn’t the bin who was watching us. I knew who it was. It was the smart lady from school. When I looked at her, she lifted her hand and waved, with just her little finger. I’ve never seen anyone else do this before or since. It’s unique. She said, ‘Hello, Damian.’

I said, ‘Hello, Bin.’

‘Is that really your school bag? You’ll give yourself a hernia,’ said the smart lady.

For once Anthony was stumped. Luckily, she took his silence for a question. She said, ‘The speaker on my bin was broken. Your dad offered to fix it for me.’

‘Well, it’s fixed now,’ said Anthony. And he kept the front door open, as if she was going to leave.

‘My name’s Dorothy, by the way,’ said Dorothy. ‘And yes, your dad did a great job.’

She took her coat down from the coat rack. Dad came out of the kitchen, still carrying his screwdriver. He said, ‘Oh, you’ll stay and have a cup of tea?’

‘Well, maybe just a cuppa.’

She followed him into the kitchen with a backward glance at Anthony, who scowled and then hauled the bag upstairs.

In the kitchen Dad put the kettle on and pulled a bag of mince out of the fridge.

She said, ‘Couldn’t I do a bit of chopping or peeling while I’m waiting for the kettle?’

‘No need. Honestly, we know what we’re doing,’ said Dad.

‘I’ve been living on Pot Noodle for weeks. I just fancy a bit of chopping.’

Dad passed her an onion and a sharp knife. She split the onion in two and gave me half. ‘Just do what I do,’ she said. She turned her half over so it looked like an igloo, then cut it across the middle and looked at me. I copied her. She said, ‘Good.’ Then she cut it again, three times. I did the same. She said, ‘Good, good, good.’ Then she cut the onion into hundreds of tiny pieces, going, ‘Good, good, good, good, good, good . . .’ and I did the same until we were out of breath.

She looked at Dad and said, ‘Pan?’

He said, ‘The tea’s ready. We’ll take over now . . .’

But she’d spotted a pan. She put some oil in it, heated it up and we both dropped handfuls of onions into the oil. She gave me the wooden spoon and said, ‘Keep stirring these.’ I used to always stir things before we moved house. When everyone had a big craze on porridge, for instance, I used to stir that, and when we were making jelly, I used to stir the cubes in the boiling water until they disappeared. So I had experience.

Dorothy drank her tea and said, ‘That was lovely. I suppose I should go now really.’

Dad said, ‘I suppose you should stay now really. Since you did practically cook the supper.’

‘No. Thanks all the same,’ said Dorothy. ‘Unless you’ve got a couple of tins of tomatoes.’

Dad looked puzzled, but he did have some tins. She put the meat in with the onions and then emptied the tins on top of it. Then she asked for another pan. It took ages to find one, because we only used one and that was just for beans. Then Dad found a whole nest of them, one inside the other. He put them on the side. ‘The time has come for us to embrace multi-saucepan-ness in our life.’

Then she wanted milk, then a casserole dish, then cheese, then a cheese grater, then pasta . . .

‘Pasta? I’m not sure . . . What exactly are we doing here?’ said Dad.

It turned out she was making lasagne from scratch. I had no idea it was so complicated. You can’t just go off and watch the television while the oven warms up. The meaty bit is a sauce you make with mince and the tinned tomatoes plus herbs, and you have to let it simmer for a long time to reduce. You could just thicken it if you liked, but reducing makes the flavour more intense.

The white bit is another sauce, which is all in the timing. You make a paste of flour and butter, then very slowly, almost a drop at a time, you add the milk. You have to do it slowly or it goes lumpy. And you have to keep stirring. So I was stirring two pans at once while Dorothy dribbled the milk. Someone rang at the doorbell and she howled, ‘Oh, no!’ but then we heard Anthony answering it. The last of the milk splashed in and I stirred it with a regular and consistent movement. Dad dropped in the grated cheese. I continued to stir until the cheese was all melted.

Dorothy came and looked over my shoulder and laughed. ‘Look at that, not one lump. You could pour that through a sieve. You could drink it from a glass.’

As she bent closer I could smell her hair. It was kind of orangey. Then we heard singing. Anthony had opened the door to carol singers. We all went through and listened to them. It was a family – a mum, a dad, a boy and a girl. The girl was Tricia from Year Five. She gave me a little wave but didn’t stop singing.

Dad joined in when they sang ‘Silent Night’. I say he joined in. He sang the same song, but not in the same key.

Dorothy laughed and said, ‘Do you know “The Holly and the Ivy”?’

Anthony said, ‘They don’t do requests,’ and tried to shut the door on them, but she stopped him and gave them two euros.

Then we ran back into the kitchen and started to assemble the lasagne. You pour the meat sauce into the oven dish, then pave it with the lasagne. The sauce seeps up through the gaps in the pasta like red moss. Then you pour on the rest of the meat sauce and half the white. Then you pave that. Then you pour on the rest of the white and some grated cheese.

Anthony came in and snarled, ‘Why is the kitchen so messy?’

‘Because,’ said Dad, ‘we’re cooking in it.’

Anthony said, ‘It’s not like this when I cook.’

‘You don’t cook. You warm. And if you feel so strongly about it, you can help clear up while the lasagne is cooking.’

Even Anthony’s eyes lit up a little bit when he heard it was lasagne.

I washed the pans. The kitchen started to fill up with lovely, appetizing smells. From inside the oven, you could hear the cheese whistling as it cooked.

I said, ‘Pasta’s Italian, isn’t it? Is this what St Francis would’ve cooked, then?’

Dad said, ‘No. He was from the north. It’s rice in the north – risotto and that. Pasta in the south. Also there was no pasta until Marco Polo brought it back from China in 1295. Pasta’s a Chinese invention really. It’s designer noodles.’

Dorothy said, ‘Rubbish. How could pasta be invented by people who don’t use forks?’

And Dad went on to explain about forks and how the first person to bring them to England was Thomas à Becket.

I said, ‘Thomas à Becket (1118–70), Archbishop of Canterbury, martyred in the cathedral sanctuary.’

‘What are you two like? A pub-quiz team, that’s what.’