Spies, Dad, Big Lauren and Me

by Joanna Nadin

  Joanna Nadin is a former journalist and government speechwriter. She has written several award-winning books for younger readers, as well as the best-selling Rachel Riley series for teens. She lives in Bath with her daughter.

  Visit www.joannanadin.com to find out more.

  For Sarah

  First published in Great Britain in 2011

  by Piccadilly Press Ltd,

  5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR

  www.piccadillypress.co.uk

  Text copyright © Joanna Nadin, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  The right of Joanna Nadin to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 84812 122 5 (paperback)

  eBook ISBN: 978 1 84812 183 6

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, CR1 4PD

  Cover design by Simon Davis

  Cover illustrations by Sarah Kelly

  Contents

  When I Grow Up by Billy Grimshaw

  Saturday, 31st May

  Sunday, 1st June

  Monday, 2nd June

  Tuesday, 3rd June

  Wednesday, 4th June

  Thursday, 5th June

  Friday, 6th June

  Saturday, 7th June

  Sunday, 8th June

  Monday, 9th June

  Tuesday, 10th June

  Wednesday, 11th June

  Thursday, 12th June

  Friday, 13th June

  Saturday, 14th June

  Sunday, 15th June

  Monday, 16th June

  Tuesday, 7th June

  Wednesday, 18th June

  Thursday, 19th June

  Friday, 20th June

  Saturday, 21st June

  Sunday, 22nd June

  Monday, 23rd June

  Tuesday, 24th June

  Wednesday, 25th June

  Thursday, 26th June

  Friday, 27th June

  Saturday, 28th June

  Sunday, 29th June

  Monday, 30th June

  Tuesday, 1st July

  Wednesday, 2nd July

  Thursday, 3rd July

  Friday, 4th July

  Saturday, 5th July

  When I Grow Up

  by Billy Grimshaw

  When I grow up I want to be a spy, like Zac Black, or my dad. Zac Black is a secret agent with superpowers and special gadgets and he’s in four books, three films and a TV series and was my dad’s favourite when he was my age.

  My dad’s already a spy. Except he doesn’t have superpowers like x-ray vision, or a laser beam biro. But I know he’s a spy because last time I saw him, which was on Boxing Day when he picked me and my brother Stan up to see Granny Grimshaw, he was always on his mobile saying things like, ‘The big cheese says just one more week and then it’s all over,’ which is exactly what Zac Black said in the episode when he caught his mortal enemy Dr Van Fleet trying to poison the water supply in New York with truth serum. Plus that’s why Dad lives in London now, so he can be closer to MI5. I haven’t been to London yet, but I know what it’s like. I’ve seen it on TV. Everyone lives in loft apartments, which is where everything is in one room. Except for the toilet because that would be disgusting having to see someone poo while you’re watching Millionaire, for instance. I’m going to go and stay there soon. Mum’s checking a weekend with him when he’s not too busy (i.e. at MI5 headquarters). Stan says he’s not going because he’ll miss Doctor Who, but he’s mad because they have Doctor Who in London, and anyway Mum can record it. Mum says Dad moved to London because he got a job on a bigger newspaper than the Broadley Echo, but that’s just his cover. All spies have a cover story. Like Zac Black pretends to go to work every day at Global Bank but instead of going up to the third floor where the bank is, he goes down to the basement which is his headquarters, and uses his supersonic sonar radar and his x-ray vision to track down Dr Van Fleet and his minion Vespa Morris.

  I’m already training to be a spy. I’ve got binoculars, and a James Bond box set and the Zac Black Annual 1985, which has the Top Ten Tips for Junior Spies. I don’t have a mortal enemy yet, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled, which is Tip Number 5.

  On the MI5 website it says you have to be at least eighteen to be an Intelligence Officer, a.k.a. a spy. But, when I’m good enough, Dad will just come and pick me up and I’ll be his assistant, like Angelica Drew in Zac Black, except not a girl, and we’ll live in the loft and have orange juice on a tap in the fridge and beds in the air. Maybe they’ll make a TV series about us one day.

  Saturday

  31st May

  Something Bad has happened. The kind that Nan says is spelt with a capital B.

  Mum was all quiet on the way home from school yesterday. Miss Horridge, who’s my teacher, went up to her in the playground at home time while me and Stan and his best friend Arthur Malik were on the wooden pirate ship, and Miss Horridge was showing Mum the essay. I knew it was my ‘When I Grow Up’ essay because I was at the top of the mast and I could see the swirly letters spelling Billy Grimshaw on the front that Big Lauren did with her gel pens. And I saw Mum nod and then put her hand over her forehead like when she has a headache or Stan has wet the bed again, and when she came to get me and Stan her eyes were shiny and wet. And all I could think while we walked up Brunel Street was that I should have said I wanted to be a footballer, like Stephen Warren and Kyle Perry did. Or Leona Lewis, like Big Lauren next door. I told her she can’t actually be Leona Lewis because she’s not even a bit black, she’s ginger, and also Leona Lewis is Leona Lewis, but Big Lauren said she can be anything she wants to be. She read it in a magazine.

  When we got home, Mum told Stan to play outside on his scooter and made me sit at the table. And then she said the same stuff as before, that Dad isn’t a spy he’s a reporter. And that he’s not coming to get me to take me to work in MI5 or anywhere else for that matter so I might as well forget about it.

  But she’s still ‘in the dark’ about his real job, so it’s not her fault.

  But that wasn’t the capital B bit. We found out in Doctor Who. Mum actually turned it off to tell us. Even her boyfriend Dave was a bit annoyed because he was watching too. It’s his third favourite programme after Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG-1. Anyway, everything was excellent up until then because the Doctor had just sealed the pilot inside his suit to stop the meat-eating Vashta Nerada devouring him alive, and Stan was scared and felt sick so I got to eat his half of a Milky Way Ice Cream. But then Mum came in and switched it off just as the creatures got inside and started eating him and said she had something to tell us both. Dave said, ‘Now’s not a good time, Jeanie.’ And I thought he meant because of the Vashta Nerada, but Mum just said, ‘It’s never a good time, Dave.’ And then I knew it wasn’t about Doctor Who at all. Because Dave got out of the green chair and put his arm around Mum. And I got that funny feeling in my stomach and my legs when they get sort of electricity inside them, and I tried to concentrate on something else like Dr Singh, who’s our doctor and who has really big hands, said to do. So I concentrated on Dave’s arm and stared at it really hard to make it move by the power of my mind (which is called telekinesis, I saw Derren Brown do it on telly). But it didn’t work. Instead the arm squeezed around Mum’s waist and her face went a bit red and she said, ‘We’ve got some very exciting news and –
Stan put that remote down please’ because Stan was trying to turn the telly back on to see if the pilot was eaten completely. ‘The thing is, we’re going to get MARRIED, isn’t that amazing?’

  And then everything went totally quiet. And the word MARRIED sort of shone madly and hung there in the air like it was an actual thing and you could touch it. And I could see it all red and hot and alive in front of me. And it was like all the excellentness had been sucked out of the room by that word MARRIED, like it was a Death Eater or a Vashta Nerada. And I didn’t want to be in the room any more with a Death Eater so I just ran.

  Mum didn’t come upstairs straight away. I heard Dave say, ‘Leave him, Jeanie. Let him calm down.’ But I didn’t calm down. I got out my logbook.

  A logbook is kind of like a diary, but for more important things than dentist appointments or which celebrities you fancy, which is what Big Lauren puts in hers. Tip Number 7 in the Zac Black Annual is Don’t trust anyone and Tip Number 8 is Put it on paper, i.e. you should write down the things that happen all around you, even stuff that doesn’t seem unusual at the time, because, according to Zac, villains DO NOT go round twirling moustaches like in cartoons, they’re all around us, disguised as ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs. Like his mortal enemy Dr Van Fleet, who’s a doctor. And Vespa Morris, who’s a nurse. Like Dave. So I’m keeping a record of everything Dave does, just in case. Like the time he took Mum away for a night to Wales and didn’t take me and Stan even though we begged him to because they were going to the beach. And like when he shouted at Stan for spilling Fruit Shoot on his mobile phone so that the keys stuck and he couldn’t do any phoning for a day until his friend Dave Two, who’s also a nurse but has a tattoo of Daffy Duck on his arm and comes from Bolton, lent him his old Nokia.

  And like him saying, ‘Leave him, Jeanie.’

  After I’d written it down, I hid the logbook again up the chimney bit in the fireplace in my bedroom. But I still felt weird, so I had to lie down on my bed and count my glo-stars on the ceiling, just to make sure there were still fifty of them. (There were fifty-three once but Stan climbed on the wardrobe and picked part of Orion off.) But, when I got to twenty-seven, I could hear the door opening, then I felt Mum sit down next to me on the blue duvet. But she didn’t say anything, she waited for me to get to fifty, because otherwise I’d have to start again from one. Then she stroked my hair until the electricity feeling stopped, like Dr Singh told her to.

  ‘It’s going to be fine, Billy,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. It’ll be fun. Just a big party, like at Nan’s birthday.’ But Nan’s was just for her seventy-fifth. Nan didn’t say, ‘I do’ and wear a big white dress. She wore blue trousers and a cardigan. And Nan didn’t have to go home with Dave until death do them part.

  Mum said, ‘Nothing will change.’ But she’s wrong. Everything will change. It already has. It was OK when Dave lived on Pilkington Street. Then we only saw him when he came to pick Mum up, and Nan babysat for us and she let us eat Sugar Puffs for tea and stay up until the news at ten. But now he’s here all the time, in Dad’s black chair, and he eats all the Sugar Puffs and kisses Mum with tongues, which is gross, and she could catch glandular fever or MRSA off him. Big Lauren says she has seen an MRSA once, it was green and the size of a Rolo. But she also says she has met a vampire, which I know for a fact is a total lie. Anyway, the point is, he will never not be here now. Every time I come home from the park or from school, he’ll be here. Just sitting in Dad’s black chair. And if Dave’s in the black chair, it means Dad can’t come home.

  So now I know who my mortal enemy is. It’s Dave.

  Sunday

  1st June

  Stan is totally happy about the wedding. At breakfast he asked if he could call Dave ‘Dad’ once they’re married. Mum said we could call him what we like and I said, ‘Mental Dave’ and she said no. Then Mum asked us if we wanted to be double-barrelled, i.e. Billy and Stan Grimshaw-Jones. I said not likely. Stan said yes. It’s because he thinks it will make him more like Jake Palmer-Thomas who’s second toughest in Year 1. Also he likes Dave because Dave gave him a Millennium Falcon off eBay, only one of the cargo jaws fell off last Thursday. I said he should ask our dad for a better one for his birthday but Stan said Dad didn’t even send him a card until two days late last year. I said it was because he was on an undercover mission in the field but Mum did that thing where she rolls her eyes, and said it’s because he’s got his priorities wrong.

  Then I asked Mum when the wedding is and she said five weeks, yesterday. Which is only thirty-four days. So I said, ‘Are you pregnant?’ Because Big Lauren’s mum Paula, who works in the betting shop on Whitehawk Road, got married to Alan and three months later Lauren got a baby brother called Jordan. Mum laughed then and a cornflake flew out and stuck on the Great British Buildings calendar. She said she wasn’t pregnant but that they didn’t want to wait around because ‘when you know, you just know’. I said, ‘Know what?’ She said, ‘You’ll find out one day.’ Which is what she always says when she thinks I’m not old enough.

  Nan came over for lunch and Mum told her about the wedding and then about not being pregnant, because that’s what Nan thought too because Mum has put weight on. But Mum says it’s just back to normal after the divorce, not actual fat (like Big Lauren, who is supposed to lose two stone and is on a special diet, i.e. no McDonalds).

  Nan said, ‘Well, congratulations, Jeanie. That’s lovely.’ But I could tell she didn’t think it was lovely at all, because when she’s annoyed she clacks her false teeth in her mouth when she’s thinking and they were clacking the whole way through pudding. Sometimes you think they’ll actually fall out, but they never do. Anyway, today they were clacking because she doesn’t like Dave because a) he’s a nurse and b) he supports Rovers not City and Grandpa Stokes was a City man and c) he’s not Dad. Even though Mum says Dad left her, and it’s totally Nan’s fault that Mum even met Dave. It was because Nan was in hospital to have part of her cut out because of the cancer in it and Dave was supposed to be doing her bed bath. But Nan said no man was coming near her women’s bits and Mum had to do it instead and that’s how they met and he asked her out afterwards and they went to Slice O’Heaven Pizza Parlour on Mason Road and she had a Pepperoni Dream and he had Vegetable Feast because he doesn’t eat meat or fish, or snails because he says snails are living creatures as well. But he’s happy to put salt out to kill the slugs in the back garden, which is called hypocritical.

  Nan says she doesn’t trust Dave. She says he’s after her money. Nan has one hundred and seventy-nine pounds in pound coins in three coffee jars in the larder plus more than five thousand pounds in the Post Office from when Grandpa Stokes died. She thinks that once Dave is married to Mum he’s going to use his nurse skills to overdose her with morphine. She said she saw it on Murder She Wrote once. It was actually for nearly a million dollars then, but Nan says money is money. Mum doesn’t know that Nan doesn’t like Dave. Nan made me swear not to tell, so I haven’t. I’m excellent at keeping secrets. Like I still haven’t told anyone about the time Big Lauren accidentally killed the school guinea pig by giving it chewing gum. Then Nan said, ‘There’ll be tears before bedtime anyway, mark my words.’

  So I did mark them. I wrote them in the logbook.

  Monday

  2nd June

  I told Big Lauren about the wedding today. I didn’t tell her in school because we sit in the desk in front of Kyle Perry, who has shaved hair and one gold earring and a dog called Killer. Kyle already laughs his head off that I’m friends with Big Lauren, even though I said I was only doing it because she gives me free Snickers. But if he heard me tell Lauren my mum’s marrying a nurse he’d say stuff like, ‘Is your mum a lezzer, Grimshaw?’ Or ‘Dave’s a stupid name for a girl, Grimshaw.’ Dave says it’s a common misconception that all nurses are women. But I don’t think Kyle Perry knows what a misconception is. Anyway, me and Lauren went to Mr Patel’s on Beasley Street, and I bought a packet of Hula Hoops and she bought Su
gar magazine and a Mars Bar. I said there were two hundred and ninety-four calories in a Mars Bar but she said she lost half a stone at half-term because of getting the runs in Benidorm.

  Lauren said Dave must be the ONE. I said, ‘What one?’ She said it meant true love, like David and Victoria Beckham. I said but how can he be The ONE? He’s dead short and a nurse, and reads sci-fi comics, even though he’s thirty-seven. Plus he’s vegetarian.

  Mum says she’s thinking of becoming vegetarian too. It’s because Dave is brainwashing her like in the episode of Zac Black when Dr Van Fleet captures Zac’s assistant Angelica and turns her against Zac and she nearly kills him but at the last minute Zac realises what’s happening and uses his special powers to reverse the brainwaves.

  Lauren says love is just mental and is something to do with chemistry and I could fall in love with Rosie Hoon in Mrs Holloway’s class who has a hairy back and everyone calls her Wolverine, or even with Lauren, and there would be nothing I could do about it.

  So I said what about Bald Graham who’s the man Mum met when she went speed dating with her friend Stacey at the Liberal Club and who was an accountant and had no hair on his head, not even eyebrows. Or what about Dad? He was the ONE first. And he’s more than six foot tall and eats loads of dead animals. And then Lauren got excited and said it was just like in the film The Parent Trap, except without twins, and not in America, where two Lindsay Lohans make their mum and dad fall in love again, and I should tell Dad and then he might drive back down the M4 and declare his love for Mum because he is the ONE after all and Dave’s just a pretender.

  And then I had a brilliant idea. It was to send Dad a letter in secret code to tell him about the emergency. It had to be in code because if I wrote it in actual words, Dave might intercept it and be able to read it and thwart the plan. But when I got home I couldn’t find my book on codebreaking and Mum said she thinks Stan might have spilled Fanta on it and it stuck together and had to go in the recycling. I could feel the electricity starting again but Dave said, ‘Is this for school? I know some code from WarRaiders’ – which is his favourite game on the computer – ‘How about I help you?’, but I said no thanks. And I wrote that down in the logbook, because knowing code is the sort of thing mortal enemies would do and could be a vital clue. And I had an even better idea anyway. It was invisible ink, which is on the MI5 website. It’s not ink at all, it’s actually lemon juice, and you dip a paintbrush in it and write your message and then to read it you just hold it up to a lightbulb or a radiator and the words go brown. So I got Mum’s Jif Lemon out of the fridge and one of Stan’s brushes out of his WHSmith art set and did the letter. It said: