Neighbours (3 page)

The noise from next door always faded a bit after lunch. That was when Mr Dent, after a hard morning shouting and swearing and a thick greasy lunch, fell asleep and Mrs Dent settled down to watch an American reality show full of people that made even her look good.

Nerlin and Mordonna took advantage of the temporary peace by having an afternoon sleep, doing a bit of gardening and trimming Grandma's toenails where they grew out of her grave by the clothesline. Then it was teatime, followed by another short snooze before the kids came home from school.

If it hadn't been for the wretched Dents next door, life would have been perfect.

When the Floods moved into number 13 Acacia Avenue, there had been two nice old couples in the houses on either side. Life had been peaceful. Their neighbours had brought them cake, and in return the Floods had given them crispy fried cockroaches. One of the advantages of having old people for neighbours is that they often can't see very well, so when the Flood children gave them bowls of crispy fried cockroaches – which are delicious, by the way – they thought they were bits of crispy bacon.

The disadvantage of having old people for neighbours is that they die a lot. Even after Winchflat, who was the scientific brains of the Flood family, had used his Massive-Electric-Shock-Dead-Person-
iReviver
⁹
on the old couple at number 11, they only came back to life for a few weeks.

That was when the Dents moved in and shattered the calm of the whole street.

They were the neighbours from hell. Not real hell where some of the Floods' best friends lived, but hell-on-Earth – which isn't actually a real place, more a state of mind. If you think of the worst person you've ever met or seen on TV, the Dents were much worse than that.

The Dents fought each other and swore a lot in very loud voices. They filled their front yard with rusty old cars and broken machines and their back yard with thousands of empty bottles and other garbage, which often ended up in the Floods' garden. In one of the old cars out the front, they kept a ferocious dog called Rambo that tried to bite everyone.

All their clothes were made of shiny nylon and Mr Dent had a terrible moustache and a big gold chain. Mrs Dent had lumpy legs you could see
way too much of and her hair looked like cushion stuffing that had been soaking in a bucket of bleach. Mr Dent's job was making sure he never had a job – which there wasn't much chance of anyway. When he was eighteen he had been sent to work cleaning out the pipes at the sewerage works, but they sacked him after two days because the pipes were more disgusting after he'd been inside them than they had been before. That had taken a lot of sneaky skill on his part, but to make extra sure he was never given a job again, he slipped in the sludge and hurt his back just enough to get a pension.

Mrs Dent's job was avoiding Mr Dent and anything that kept her away from the TV.

They had two vile children: Tracylene, who had way too many boyfriends, way too much eye-liner and way too few brain cells, and Dickie, who was ten, but should never have been allowed to become one, never mind two, three, four, etc. Dickie's hobby was breaking into other people's houses, peeing on their furniture and putting Barbie dolls in their microwaves.

Dickie was in the same class as Betty Flood and, when he wasn't stealing other kids' dinner money, he used to sit behind her and pull her hair and call her names.

The only Flood child who didn't go to the wizard school was Betty. To try to make her less wizardy, Mordonna sent Betty to the normal school a few streets away. Betty would have preferred to go to the same school as her brothers
and sisters. Normal people, if you could call Dickie Dent and all the other dumb kids in her class ‘normal', were so dull and boring and stupid and ugly. None of them could see in the dark or even make a pencil move without using their hands, or in Dickie's case, his nose.

When she had started school, Betty decided that no matter how many lessons her parents made her take, she would stay different. Not that she had any choice in the matter. Boring facts went in her left ear and rushed out of the right one as quickly as they could. Betty couldn't even learn her nine times table. This was not because she was stupid, but because Betty knew that these things aren't important.

‘You're a witch, you are,' Dickie hissed at Betty when the teacher wasn't looking.

‘You needn't think that saying nice things like that is going to make me like you,' said Betty, and she made six huge pimples swell up on his forehead.

‘Miss, Miss,' Dickie cried, ‘she's made me come out in spots.'

‘Dickie Dent, don't be such a stupid little boy,' said the teacher. ‘People can't give you spots.'

Betty put on her best sweet little girl face, which always made the teacher want to cuddle her. Then she made Dickie's six spots burst and run down his face.

‘Miss, Miss, look what she done,' Dickie cried.

The teacher got so angry she made Dickie stay in during break and she wrote an angry letter to his parents – which was a waste of time really, because neither of them could read.

Betty would probably have stood out less if she had eaten ordinary school dinners instead of pickled lizards and toads' knees. She did try eating the school meat pies and turkey twizzlers once, but it only made her throw up.

‘You're weird, you,' the other kids said to her, but Betty thought that was a compliment.

‘Why's that, then?' said Betty, looking all innocent. She knew she was ten times brighter than any of the other kids would ever be and that she could get them every single time.

‘Eating lizards and frogs, that's gross, that is,' they said.

‘See your burgers?'

‘Yeah?'

‘This is what they're made of,' said Betty, and a huge smelly pile of gross animal bits appeared on the table. ‘Look: cows' bottoms and eyelids, sheep's nostrils and chicken beaks and chemicals and scum.'

Then the children all felt that retching thing in their throats where you try really hard not to throw up, but know that nothing will stop it – and they did, all over the floor.

‘Oh, look,' said Betty. ‘Your sick looks
exactly
like your lunch.'

Which made the kids throw up again.

‘You are all so dumb,' said Betty, and for good measure gave every child three big uncomfortable angry purple pimples on their bottoms, so no matter
how they sat down, it hurt. She gave Dickie an extra couple just to keep him on his toes – which of course it did, because it hurt too much to sit down.

‘See,' she added. ‘All that dreadful food gives you spots too.'

Lots of people hate their jobs. It's a part of their lives that is necessary to make money to buy food and houses and clothes. While they're at work they dream of the time when they won't be at work, when they'll be with their loved ones having a life. They dream of their hobbies, which are often like work, except people enjoy them.

Some lucky people actually enjoy their jobs – or to put it another way, some people actually love what they do all day. Mrs Dent loved being hypnotised by TV. She had a TV at the foot of the bed that she turned on as soon as she woke up. She had a waterproof TV in the shower and a tiny TV to look at as she went downstairs. Mr Dent loved what
he did all day, which was nothing plus eating plus drinking plus sleeping. Mr and Mrs Dent were even happy screaming at each other, which they did every day. As for the Floods, they would have been happy all of the time if it wasn't for the Dents.

Like most families, the Floods had hobbies that they loved. Under their house in the vast network of cellars, each Flood had a few rooms of their own where they could play or experiment to their heart's content. When the Floods were doing their favourite things, and even on the rare occasions when there was not much noise coming from the Dents' house, the Dents were still there, niggling away at the back of everyone's mind. Even when the family was down in the deepest cellars, seven floors below the house, the Dents managed to spoil things.

Winchflat, the family genius, had a whole floor of cellars jam-packed with incredible equipment where he invented things that normal people would have shouted about and got very rich as a result of. Winchflat made a tiny pill that you put into water that would make a car go. He hadn't bothered to tell anyone about it because he always knew he could invent something better – like the car he was working on that could hover just above the ground, read your mind and take you to wherever you wanted to go, and not actually need the water with the pill in it to make it work because it was all powered by one single bumblebee and a dandelion. If it hadn't been for the endless drone of Mrs Dent's TV in the background, he would have had the whole thing finished. But that niggling noise just took the edge off his concentration.

In another cellar Merlinmary was
charging the batteries. Her hair was so full of electricity that at night she had to sleep in a lead-lined room with her fingers pushed into a special socket that charged up a huge bank of batteries, enough to run the whole house. She was born with this talent because the night Nerlin made her in the laboratory down in his cellar, using a recipe he hadn't tried before, there was a terrible storm like you get in the Frankenstein movies. The difference was that Nerlin did not need a bolt of lightning to bring Merlinmary to life, he only needed a teaspoon of Vegemite. So when the lightning had hit the house that night fifteen years before, racing down into the cellars and up the legs of the laboratory bench
¹⁰
at the very moment Nerlin was bringing Merlinmary to life, it filled the child with enough electricity to run the whole of America for seventy-five years.
¹¹

In fact Merlinmary had so much electricity inside her that she made the meter run backwards – which meant that every time the Floods got a power bill, the electricity company had to give them money.

Because of the distraction of Mr Dent revving up his clapped-out motorbikes, Merlinmary sometimes lost concentration and put her fingers in the socket back to front. This used to make her hair all frizzy and sometimes give half the town a power cut. With the Dents getting louder and louder, this was happening more and more.

Morbid and Silent bred beautiful moths in one of their rooms. They fed the baby caterpillars on the finest orchid petals and tucked their chrysalises up in tiny beds of cotton wool. They helped the baby moths emerge safely into the world and then pulled their wings off and ate them. (The wings, that is, not the moths – that would be disgusting.) Sometimes the Dents would start a shouting match and the twins would throw away the wings and eat the moths, which made them very sick.

Betty spent many happy hours making false wings for all the damaged moths that kept crawling under her door. She made them by boiling up cockroaches, spreading the sticky liquid out on a sheet of glass and cutting it into little wings.

When Mrs Dent threw saucepans around, Betty would lose her place and forget how many times she had wound up the rubber band to make the wings work, and the moths would snap in half.

Valla, even though he was obsessed with blood – so much so that he often took his own blood out to look at it under a microscope – had a soft spot for cockroaches and had a cellar with a tiny orphanage for all the baby cockroaches who had lost their parents in Betty's saucepan. His favourite bit was trying to give the cockroaches blood transfusions, which required complete silence and very great concentration. Once again the noise from the Dents' house distracted him and a lot of cockroaches exploded.

Winchflat loved the stars and planets and spent hours looking at them, which was very difficult from a cellar seven floors below ground. Instead of doing
the obvious thing like you or I would – which is to go outside or up on the roof – Winchflat got around the problem by actually bringing the stars down to him. He invented a fantastically powerful space vacuum cleaner that could suck whole galaxies out of the sky and into a bottle on his bench. He was a well brought up, tidy child so, naturally, when he'd finished looking at the galaxies, he always put them back. Always, that is, except Sunday, when a sudden explosion from the Dents' back yard – Dickie was playing with matches in the shed after eating three tins of baked beans – made Winchflat press button B
before
button A. The result was that a galaxy that should have been in the Milky Way was now on the opposite side of space, and it was upside down too.

Even Satanella had a cellar. In the middle of the floor there was a tree. First she would go and sniff it, then she would chase a cat up it. This was not Vlad, of course, but a special cat from Rent-A-Scaredy-Cat. Satanella then sat by the door waiting for the cat to try to escape – which it always did when Satanella got distracted by a sudden noise such as
the sound of Dickie Dent exploding again.

Mordonna kept offering to turn Satanella back into a little girl, but Satanella always refused, saying, ‘Life is so simple when you're a dog. Eat, sleep, chase cats. That's it. Oh, and a bit of a tickle behind the ear, and of course stick and ball chasing. It doesn't get any better than that.' Although there were times she wished she was a girl again, so she could go and thump Dickie.

Winchflat made his little sister a Stick-And-Red-Rubber-Ball-Throwing Machine, which she kept in a very long narrow dungeon. No one else would admit it, but every single one of her brothers and sisters and her parents had played with the machine when they thought no one else was looking.
¹²
It was one of those family secrets that everyone else knew about but all pretended they didn't. I suppose it proves that it's true when people say, ‘There is a bit of dog in all of us.'
¹³

Nerlin and Mordonna shared a cellar, but you're not old enough to know what it's for. Orange jelly, chains, socks, mugs of hot chocolate and a big armchair were involved (though not necessarily in that order), but even their hobby was spoilt by the Dents' noise.

Sunday afternoon, 3.42 pm – family meeting

‘Something has to be done,' said Nerlin. ‘Something permanent.'

‘Yeah,' said Satanella. She liked the sound of ‘permanent'. It made her think there might be a lot of blood involved.

‘You can see why their name is Dent,' said Valla. ‘They are a dent on the face of humanity.'

‘Yeah,' everyone agreed.

‘And what do you do to dents?' Betty asked.

‘You fill them in,' said Winchflat.

‘But not before you've bashed them as flat as you can first,' said Morbid. Silent nodded.

‘Grrrr,' said Satanella, thinking how nice it would be to chew on a Dent leg bone.

‘Couldn't we just put a “be nice” spell on them?' said Mordonna.

‘That's boring,' said Betty. ‘Anyway, they're ugly and stupid and we want them out of our street.'

‘Actually, we want them out of our town,' said Winchflat.

‘Galaxy,' said Valla.

‘I think you should go and talk to them, before we do anything,' said Mordonna.

‘Okay, my darling, but it won't do any good,' said Nerlin. ‘You can't reason with people like that.'

‘I'll come with you, Dad,' offered Merlinmary. ‘If there's any trouble, I can give them an electric shock.'

The Dents had turned their front yard into a pigsty, except no decent pig would ever have wanted to live there. There were three rusty old cars – one where Rambo the dog lived, another where Tracylene locked up her boyfriends to stop them running away,
and another where Mr Dent fell asleep when he was too drunk to find his own front door. In between the cars, the grass grew a metre high, burying all the rubbish that never quite made it to the dustbin.

As Nerlin and Merlinmary walked through the hole in the wall that had once been a gate, Rambo lifted his head over his windscreen and growled. He had a thick spiked collar around his neck and a heavy chain padlocked to the steering wheel. His eyes flashed like burning coals but it was hard to be sure he was looking at you because he was seriously crosseyed. His sight was so wonky that he'd bitten his own leg quite a few times when he thought he was attacking the postman.

‘What do you lot want?' said Mr Dent as Nerlin and
Merlinmary stood on his front step. ‘Get lost, freaks.'

‘There's no need to be like that,' said Nerlin. ‘We'd just like to have a talk.'

‘I said get lost, you weirdoes, or I'll set Rambo on you.'

‘I wouldn't do that if I were you,' Nerlin warned him.

‘Oh yeah, oh yeah,' said Mr Dent. ‘Why not?'

‘I just wouldn't,' said Nerlin.