Millions

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

‘Fantastic. Were they OK about it?’

  ‘They were shut.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘We got seventy grand.’

  ‘We got sixty-two. Sorry.’

  ‘So we’ll just have to make do with 132,000 grand.’

  ‘And a new Previa.’

  ‘And a Gamecube Flight Simulator. Plasma-screen TV. And dishwasher, which was Anthony’s idea.’

  ‘Oh, well, then.’

  The car was crammed with stuff.

  They were really happy. Even Anthony was happy. I think I was even happy too for a minute. Then my phone buzzed. It was a text message. It wasn’t from him. It was from Anthony, saying, ‘We R W8ing’, over a picture of Dad by the new car. He must have sent it a few minutes before. It was nothing to worry about, but it reminded me that I had plenty to worry about.

  Guardian angels are supposed to look after you, but they know when you’re going to die, obviously. It must make them sad, watching you playing footie or having your tea or whatever and knowing exactly when it will all end. That’s how I felt that evening. The others were that happy. They bought an Indian takeaway and ate it round the coffee table, with the bags of new money on the floor, and they talked about what they were going to do with it all.

  Dad was still big on holidays. He made a list of faraway names – Acapulco, Bondi, Barcelona – and Dorothy came back with her own – Capri, Sardinia and Greenland for the Northern Lights.

  Anthony was still on about real estate. He’d seen an advert for barn conversions in the Lleyn Peninsula. ‘You could rent it out – so it would be generating a stream of income while at the same time increasing its capital value.’

  ‘They must be very small barns,’ said Dad.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Lleyn Peninsula, it’s all sheep, isn’t it? No cows. You’d have to rent it out to midgets.’

  ‘Or sheep.’

  They were so happy, they were just looking for an excuse to laugh. Sheep kept them laughing for about five hours. I tried to join in, but I was just thinking, one more sheep joke and then it’ll all be gone. It was eight o’clock.

  Sometimes something starts as a joke but no one wants it to stop so it just keeps going until it turns real. I don’t know whose idea it was, but half an hour later Dad was mixing a bucket of wallpaper paste. They were going to paper Anthony’s room with the rest of the old money.

  Anthony was spreading newspaper out on his carpet. Dorothy put the trestle table up on the landing and started singing ‘Money, Money, Money’. She and Dad started slopping all the old tens and twenties with glue and Anthony placed them carefully on his wall, smoothing out each one with a brush and making sure they were all nicely lined up, as though they were bathroom tiles. They were covering up the footballer wallpaper with old banknotes.

  Dorothy was the most out of control. She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this’, and in between she’d tell jokes. ‘I saw three Barbies waiting for the toilet and I thought, hello, it’s a Barbie-queue. Barbecue. Get it?’ She didn’t wait to find out if we did or not. ‘What d’you call a deer with no eyes? No-eye-dear. No idea! What do you call a deer with no eyes and no legs? Still-no-eye-dear. Still no idea!’

  Then I noticed something strange. I was laughing too. I didn’t care any more about Glass Eye. What did it matter about the money? Dad had a new car. He’d had a great day. He had a new friend. He was laughing. My dad was laughing. I got so I was worried that she’d run out of jokes and it would all be over. So I went and got my copy of The Ha Ha Bonk Book – which has thousands of jokes in it – and every time she couldn’t think of one, I’d read one out. And when I read one out, that would remind her of another one. And it went on until we all sounded like penguins on laughing gas.

  ‘What d’you call a man with a spade in his head?’

  ‘Doug. Dug!’

  The jokes were actually funnier when everyone knew the punchline, because then we could all shout out together.

  ‘What do you call a donkey with three legs?’

  ‘A wonky!’

  And all the time the wall was more and more covered with portraits of the Queen or Florence Nightingale or Charles Dickens or whoever, and the glue was getting everywhere.

  ‘What do you call a donkey with a drinking problem?’

  ‘A plonky!’

  I noticed that Anthony didn’t join in on this one. Maybe he just didn’t know the punchline.

  ‘A panda goes into a pub and orders a sandwich . . .’ said Dorothy.

  She wasn’t looking at anyone. She was concentrating on the wallpapering. She didn’t notice Anthony slip out of the room.

  ‘Panda eats the sandwich, shoots the barman and goes. The police catch him and say, What did you do that for?’

  Anthony would have gone to his room except we were all in there redecorating it.

  ‘Panda says . . . I’m a panda; that’s what I do. Look me up in the dictionary. So they do and it says, “Panda bear, from China, eats shoots and leaves.” See? Eats, shoots and leaves.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Dad.

  But he didn’t laugh. He was fixated on the wallpaper now and so was she. They could’ve stopped any time but they were hypnotized. It wasn’t a laugh any more. It was a job. They wouldn’t stop until every old note was on the wall. I could just see a footballer’s head sticking out above the twenty I was pasting up, and I suddenly remembered how much Anthony had loved his footballer wallpaper. I sneaked out after him.

  Anthony was in my room, squatting on the end of the bed, like Glass Eye, only angrier.

  ‘This is all your fault,’ he hissed.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t know. You don’t know what you’ve done.’

  In the next room, Dad suddenly burst out laughing at one of her jokes.

  ‘Hear that? He’ll be laughing on the other side of his face when she goes and leaves him, won’t he? Remember what he was like when Mum went?’

  ‘Maybe she won’t go? You said she was going to go yesterday but she came back. Maybe she . . .’

  ‘Is that what you want? Her here instead of Mum? Her in this house? With her stupid jokes and lasagne with no sweetcorn. Do you want her here instead of Mum?’

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘You did it all. It’s all down to you. You and your bloody weird stuff. Chucking money away, talking to yourself, seeing things. You are not normal. You are a problem.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Wherever she is, you’re not going there, because you are a nutter. You’re a nutter and you should be locked up.’

  18

  There’s a lot of confusion about angels. Like when we were in the best place and the nurses were supposed to be angels. Or in the graveyard, there were stones that said ‘Little Angel’ or ‘Now with the Angels’. People are not angels. And when you die, you do not become an angel. Angels are a completely different species. For instance, they’ve got no bellybuttons, obviously as they weren’t born. You’d need totally different bone structure and DNA and everything if you wanted to be an angel. So no one becomes an angel to watch over you. Ever. No one. It’s a biological impossibility.

  Also, there are different kinds of angel – e.g. cherubim, seraphim, powers and dominions – and some of them are HUGE. Like your guardian angel is about six metres high. It’s embarrassing when you think about it that you need all that celestial power and wingspan just to keep you out of trouble. And it doesn’t even work a lot of the time.

  I lay in my bed, looking up at the ceiling, wishing it would open up and suck me into the pitch black and leave me behind the water tank. I had the mobile in my hand, set to vibrate so it wouldn’t wake the others.

  My phone shook. I held it up over my head. Glass Eye was looking down at me from the video screen. He whispered, ‘Ten minutes,’ and flashed the fingers of one hand at me twice. I nodded and went down to get the money.

  As I passed the front door, I could hear voices outside. It must
be him. He must have someone with him. It sounded like more than a few. Maybe he’d brought the whole gang. I could hear one of them saying, ‘Ring the doorbell.’ I was scared they’d wake Dad. I was scared full stop.

  I opened the door. It wasn’t Glass Eye.

  It was a man with three little girls. Before I’d even asked him who he was, he’d started, ‘See these little girls, my girls, these are the girls that Santa Claus forgot. D’you see what I’m saying?’

  I didn’t. I looked over his shoulder to see if Glass Eye was coming, but it was too dark.

  ‘You’re our last hope. We haven’t even got the bus fare home because there’s no point going back if you don’t help us. The landlord’ll chuck us out. Come on, we don’t want much. If you could see us through . . .’

  He was pushing the girls towards me and I saw now that one of them was Gemma. She whispered, ‘Sorry about this. Tricia Springer told us you gave her three grand for carol-singing. We are on the bones of our, you know. Don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘What do you want? I mean, how much?’

  ‘Oh, thanks a lot, son,’ said her dad. ‘A couple of hundred. Maybe three would get us through . . .’

  The bag was behind the door. I grabbed a handful of notes from the top and handed it over, thinking, I wonder if Tricia told anyone else.

  The man said, ‘Yes!’ and punched the air as he led the girls away. When they stepped back out from the door, they triggered the reactive halogen light. And then I saw it.

  The whole close was packed with people. Hundreds of people all pushing and shouldering their way down the path towards the door. Each and every eye was staring at me. Each and every eye was full of want or need. There were hundreds. It felt like millions.

  I remembered what St Peter had said about putting our address on the back of the envelopes. He’d been right. Well, he was infallible. We were besieged. Hoping it was a dream, I shut the door too quickly. It woke Dad. From upstairs, he shouted sleepily, ‘Damian, who are you talking to?’

  ‘No one. Just checking.’

  Then the doorbell rang. I froze. It was him. It must be Glass Eye. I had to answer. The others were just a dream. While I was thinking, Dad was coming downstairs, muttering, ‘Who is it at this time of night.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ He yanked the door open and a woman in a smart suit stepped right in, saying, ‘Some 50 per cent of families with a chronically ill child break up. Long-term care is stressful and impoverishing. We aim to give people a break and to help them over the hardest times with simple things like train fares and overnight expenses for as little as . . .’

  ‘What the . . . Do you know what time it is? This is a private house. There’s kids.’

  ‘Exactly. Kids. Kids are what it’s all about. Kids with chronic illness, as if that wasn’t hard enough to deal with in itself, but all too often that illness leads to the break-up of the child’s family.’

  ‘Look, it sounds great, but come back in the morning, eh?’

  Dad was trying to push her back out, but the minute he did, a tall man with sticky-up hair was standing in his way, holding up something like a tiny ladder. ‘This may look like a tiny ladder to you, but to a hedgehog it’s a lifeline. It’s the difference between life and death.’ It was a little ladder actually. It was for helping hedgehogs out of cattle grids and drains. ‘They cost eight pounds a time to manufacture and install. With your help we could save hundreds of hedgehogs.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Oh, come on, everyone knows. Why not give us a handful. This delightful ceramic hedgehog will be yours to keep.’

  ‘In the morning. We’ll talk in the morning. Now, come on. Please. There’s kids . . .’ and he pointed at me.

  But it was no good. Everyone just started shouting and waving leaflets and pictures. The reactive halogen light snapped on and off like lightning. It felt like the whole population of the world was trying to get through our front door.

  ‘Look, this is that same donkey after only three months in our care!’

  ‘You may be asking yourself, why does Waterloo Station need friends?’

  ‘I know that irritable bowel syndrome isn’t sexy . . .’

  ‘. . . and if you gift-aid your donation, then it’s worth 30 per cent more to us without costing you a penny. I’ve got the forms here.’

  ‘Yoga for prisoners . . .’

  While Dad was shouting at them, I quietly picked up the bag of cash and took down my new red duffel coat. I slipped into the living room. There was someone banging on the window. He was pressing a photograph of a woman in a head-scarf up against the glass, yelling, ‘They want to send her back tomorrow. They say I can appeal, but how to appeal with no money? She have no one back home. They all dead.’

  He hadn’t finished when someone shoved him out of the way and started knocking on the glass too. It felt like the whole house was about to crumple under the weight of people’s needs. They all looked angry and desperate. Dad was shouting, ‘Anthony, shut the door,’ as though he thought that they were going to just burst in and take the money. I could see he was scared, just like he’d been scared of Terry from IT. I made my decision.

  I opened the back door. There was no one there. At the bottom of the garden, I dropped the bag over the fence and climbed over after it. I could still hear them shouting. I could hear them all the way to the railway line. When I got to the holly bushes, the phone buzzed. Glass Eye was growling at me through the video screen. ‘Where are you, you little bastard. What the hell is going on?’ I dropped the phone. He carried on yelling into it. The screen glittered as I walked away, like a talking raindrop. Looking back towards Cromarty Close, I could see a pale blue light flashing on and off and I knew the police had arrived.

  It was Anthony who told me what happened later. Lots of police had come because the neighbours had complained about the noise. The police got everyone out of the house and then Dad had to try to explain to them why all these people thought he had a load of money. Dad just said, ‘I don’t know. Someone must’ve been saying things about us.’

  ‘Untrue things, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  But the community policeman was there by then. He picked out the new plasma-screen TV and the dishwasher right away and said, ‘So has the Good Lord been pouring out his comforts and consolations on you and all, then?’

  Dad said, ‘What?’

  ‘Mind if I take a look round?’ said the copper. And off he went upstairs.

  Dad hissed at Anthony, ‘Where is it? Where is it all?’ because he couldn’t see the bag of money anywhere. It was Anthony who noticed that my coat was missing as well. He didn’t say anything. He knew where I’d be. He sneaked the back door open. And there, on the patio, was Glass Eye.

  He leaned down right into Anthony’s face and hissed, ‘You’re the clever one, aren’t you? You were clever with me last time. Don’t try to be clever with me this time or I’ll drown you. OK?’

  Anthony stood back to let him in.

  ‘Where is it?’

  Anthony said it was upstairs. Glass Eye pushed him forward. Anthony led him up to his bedroom. And the first thing Glass Eye saw, before he was inside the room even, was the wall completely covered with old money. They don’t take the glue very well by the way, so they’d started to bubble a bit. It looked like the money was crawling up the walls. Glass Eye walked in there and stared at it up close, like he couldn’t believe it. He touched it. It was only then he realized the community policeman was in the room already. ‘Did you know,’ said the policeman, ‘that 70 per cent of British banknotes contain traces of cocaine? Some 40-odd per cent contain traces of gunpowder. You know, from guns. It’s all on there. If you could read it. That’s the thing, isn’t it, you can’t read it. Them notes. People have sweated for them, stolen them, wasted them, died longing for them, and what do the notes care? Not a thing. Now. Who are you?’

  Glass Eye put his head on one side to look at th
e man with his good eye. ‘Who am I? Who the hell are you?’ he said.

  ‘We’re the police,’ said the community policeman.

  19

  I was next to the track by then. The up-train went screaming past in a mighty rushing wind of diesel and noise. It blew away the sound of the shouting from the Close and tossed my hair around. Even the big fat white moon seemed to shake as it went by. When it had gone, I had thirteen minutes till the next train came. I stepped on to the track. The rails were shining blue. They looked like a long metal ladder leading all the way to the moon and the moon looked like the entrance to a tunnel full of light.

  I tipped the bag of money out on to the track. I had taken a box of matches from the kitchen. I tried to light one. It blew out before it lit properly. I put a ten-euro note between my teeth and lit that from the next match. It burned really quickly. I dropped it on to the pile. I thought it was going to blow out right away, but another note caught fire first and then another and then another, and soon dozens of them were blazing. As they burned they rose into the air, carried up by their own heat. Soon they were dancing all around me, like a confetti of fire. I started to laugh and out of nowhere a charm of zebra finches flew through the middle of them, twittering madly. The gust of their wings seemed to make the fire brighter and more and more sheets of flame whooshed into the air. I put my arms out and spun around, whirling the flames higher and higher.

  When I stopped, that’s when I saw her. She was sitting down, which surprised me. She obviously had been there a while, watching me.

  I said, ‘I know you’re only a dream, but I don’t care. It’s nice to see you, even in a dream.’

  She smiled. Then she looked past me at the fire. Its rosy glow spread over her cheek. Her skin was shiny and perfect. She wasn’t wearing foundation or a tinted moisturizer. She just had better skin than other mothers.

  I said, ‘I tried to be good with it, but the money just makes everything worse.’

  She stood up and for a minute I thought she was going to walk away. I shouted, ‘Talk to me,’ and then more quietly, ‘please.’