Earth to Daniel

by Gwyneth Rees

  ‘Mum, I’m sorry about before,’ I said now, as I fastened my seatbelt.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ Mum said. ‘Now … is this coming-out-of-the-library-with-no-book an act of rebellion, or could you just not find a good one?’

  I grinned and said that there just hadn’t been any good ones and she said, ‘What? In the whole library?’ But I could tell she wasn’t really angry with me.

  Then we both listened while Martha told us how one of the boys had made a bad smell in her singing class and everyone had had to hold their noses while they were singing.

  By the time we got home, I was feeling much more chilled about everything and I cheered up even more when I saw that Dad’s car was back in the driveway. (He had been to visit a couple of GP practices that afternoon to see about applying for a new job.)

  The chilled feeling didn’t last, though. It was while Martha and I were in the kitchen raiding the cupboard for crisps that Mum and Dad asked us to sit down because they had something important to tell us.

  ‘Good or bad?’ I asked, swinging my kitchen chair back on two legs and banging it down again.

  ‘Just sit still and listen for a minute, will you, Daniel …’ Dad said, sounding impatient, which made me stop fidgeting straight away, because Dad hardly ever sounds like that.

  And that’s when he told us that he was going to New Zealand for two months – and that he was leaving a week on Saturday.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘Daniel, you’ve been on that phone long enough!’

  It was the following morning and Dad was running a bath for Martha. Mum was at an outpatient appointment – her first since we’d moved. She’d been a bit nervous because she was meeting her new doctor. By doctor I mean psychiatrist. Dad says the only reason she still sees a psychiatrist is because her medication needs monitoring. He also says I shouldn’t tell anyone in case it gives them the wrong idea.

  I ignored Dad and carried on talking to my friend Mark from back home. If I was still living at our old place, I’d be down at the park playing football with him right now. We’d always played loads of football together at the weekends and in the holidays.

  ‘Daniel, did you hear me?’ Dad called again.

  I ignored him that time too. If Dad was so worried about me hogging the landline, he should persuade Mum to let me have my own phone. She’s dead against it because she thinks I’ll spend all my time playing games and texting my mates and that I’ll forget how to actually speak to people in person. (She says mobile phones are totally intrusive to family life.)

  I was in the middle of telling Mark what Dad had told us yesterday. Dad had decided to postpone starting a new job here in order to go to New Zealand to visit his mother one last time. Our grandmother, who I’d only ever met three times because she emigrated with my aunt the year before I was born, was diagnosed with cancer last year. We’d already been on this big family holiday to New Zealand last summer to see her, and she’d looked perfectly OK to me. I hadn’t expected her to look OK. I’d thought it was scary because it meant that lots of other people who looked OK could really have a cancer growing inside them. I kept asking Dad how I could tell if I had one and in the end he got really upset and shouted at me.

  Mum had come to talk to me afterwards. (Usually it’s the other way round – Mum shouts at me and Dad’s the one who comes to talk to me later.) Mum said he’d shouted because he was only just managing to bear the fact that his mother was dying and that right now he didn’t have any strength left to imagine me – his child – as anything but immortal.

  That set me off thinking, I remember. I thought about how when Dad and I had watched the DVD of Highlander together – where the guy is immortal and can’t ever die – Dad had said that being immortal would be the worst thing ever. He’d said he couldn’t imagine anything more awful than having to watch everyone you loved grow old and die while never getting to rest in peace yourself. So I seriously doubted that Dad would really want me to be immortal.

  But before I could say any of this, Mum had added, ‘Daniel, your father is hurting really badly inside right now. So don’t just blurt things out like you usually do. Think first. Please.’

  So I did think and I did my best to be really nice to Dad the whole of the rest of the time we were in New Zealand. I made him drinks with all different types of fruit juice in them and called them funny names like Bloody Malcolm (that was orange juice mixed with tomato juice) and Bogeyman Surprise (that was a green one with kiwis and bananas in it). And I made a special effort to be extra polite to my gran, even though I’ve always found her a bit strict and scary. I even pretended not to mind the fact that she said Martha could have her china doll when she died, whereas I wasn’t getting anything.

  Anyway, the doctors didn’t think my gran would last this long, but since she had – and it was going to be her seventy-fifth birthday at the end of September – Dad had decided he wanted to go and see her again. He’d talked it over with Mum, who was really supportive of him going. Mum’s an only child and so were both her parents, so she didn’t have any family left after they died when she was in her twenties and she’s always saying how she wishes she’d spent more time with them.

  Dad had booked his flight for the Saturday after we started at our new schools.

  ‘It’s a bummer you can’t go with him,’ Mark was saying.

  ‘I know,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ Mark added. ‘I promised I’d be at Billy’s house by half-ten …’ He sounded a bit awkward again, like he had at the beginning of our conversation. It had been fine once we’d got going, but somehow it had seemed to take us both a little while to start chatting as easily to each other as we always used to. I don’t know why. Mark had even said, ‘How are you?’, when he first came to the phone, really politely, as if I were a complete stranger. I mean, we absolutely never asked each other how we were – not unless one of us was off sick with chickenpox or something. And now he was in a rush to meet Billy, who Mark had always said got on his nerves before when he’d hung out with the two of us.

  ‘DANIEL!’ Dad shouted down the stairs.

  ‘See you, Mark,’ I said, slamming down the phone and instantly blaming my dad for our conversation having to end before I was ready. Feeling angry with Mark wasn’t an option. I missed him too much.

  ‘I thought it was just teenage girls who spent ages on the telephone,’ Dad said lightly as he came down the stairs towards me. He stooped to pick up my trainer, which had been lying on the stairs for the past two days, and handed it to me.

  ‘Mum stays on the phone much longer than that!’ I snapped.

  Dad looked surprised. ‘Mum is one of the people in this house who pays the phone bill. She can stay on the phone however long she likes.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll start paying the phone bill too then. You can take it out of my pocket money – there’s nothing else to spend it on here anyway!’

  ‘Daniel … stop being silly …’ Unlike Mum, Dad hardly ever loses his temper with me no matter how obnoxious I’m being. ‘Come on … It’ll be easier once school starts back. You’ll make some new friends …’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I snarled. ‘I won’t make any new friends once everyone finds out my mum is the new head! Anyway, you don’t like it here either!’

  ‘Huh?’ He put his hand out to stop me as I made to push past him up the stairs. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I heard you on the phone the other night to Uncle Robert. You told him you missed your old job much more than you thought you would and on a rainy day this has to be the dreariest little town you’ve ever encountered in all your forty-three years!’

  Uncle Robert is Dad’s best friend and he’s the nearest thing to a proper uncle we’ve got. Dad had been on the phone to him the other night for even longer than I’d just been on the phone to Mark.

  Dad let go of my arm, looking uncomfortable. He pulled a face, then gave me a weak grin. ‘Didn’t I say “dearest”, not “dreariest”?’<
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  ‘No, you did not!’ I snarled, darting past him to get upstairs, where I narrowly missed colliding with Martha in her pink Supergirl pyjamas.

  ‘Daniel, I thought I asked you to wash up the breakfast things before you phoned Mark?’ Dad shouted up to me, having obviously made it as far as the kitchen.

  Before I could respond my little sister let out a deafening shriek as if I’d just tried to murder her or something. ‘DAD-DY!’

  I glared at her. Then I saw that she was looking past me into the bathroom. Foamy water was gushing down the side of the bath on to the carpet.

  As Dad came thudding up the stairs, I decided this would be a good time to escape. I grabbed my favourite jacket from the floor of my bedroom and paused for a moment to look at myself in the wardrobe mirror. I used to have a much chubbier face when I was younger, but I reckon I look much better now that you can see my cheekbones. I’ve got dark brown cropped hair that I never think needs combing (though Mum always makes me anyway) and blue eyes like Mum’s. I reckoned I looked cool enough to go out and about on my own in my new neighbourhood.

  In the bathroom, Dad and Martha had turned off the taps and were attempting to mop up the flood with a whole heap of towels. Normally I’d have asked Dad before I took off anywhere but right then I felt like it was my decision, not his. They didn’t notice me as I trod lightly across the landing and down the stairs.

  At the very bottom, I yelled up at them as loudly as I could, ‘I’M GOING OUT! SEE YOU LATER!’

  Before Dad had a chance to reply I slammed the door and was gone. And I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about leaving the breakfast things for him to do. After all, he wouldn’t have to do any washing up for a whole two months when he went off without us to New Zealand, would he?

  I thought I might be in trouble when I got back, even though I’d only stayed out for an hour. I’d soon got bored, kicking about the streets on my own and, besides, leaving the house without my mum or dad knowing where I’ve gone is the one thing that’s pretty much guaranteed to get me grounded. The punishment varies with the amount of freaking out they’ve been doing in my absence, so today, after I’d calmed down, I reckoned it was best to get myself back home before Dad had time to get too imaginative about all the nasty things that might be happening to me. (I’ve tried pointing out that if I had my own phone they could phone me to check up on me whenever they were worried, but Mum says she doesn’t trust me to answer it.)

  When I got back, Mum had just got in too and I reckoned they’d probably forgotten all about me because the two of them were in the living room having a heated conversation about something else.

  ‘Yes … well, I resent you phoning up and speaking to my psychiatrist behind my back as if I’m some sort of child who can’t manage her own life,’ Mum was saying angrily. ‘I told him that too!’

  ‘Well, you’re not sleeping that well, Izzy … I was worried …’

  ‘I told him how you worried about everything. I told him you were more worried before my interview for head than I was! I told him how you said you were worried they wouldn’t give it to me on account of my health record. Such faith in me you had!’

  ‘Isobel, I always had faith in you. I knew you deserved to get it. I was just worried in case they held the medical reports against you, that’s all. I know they’re not meant to but –’

  ‘What did you worry about after that? I know. You worried about the school governors telling the staff about me. You wanted to phone them up and check they’d keep it confidential. You know health information is always kept confidential, but you still wanted to take over and make a big fuss about it. Well, I’m fed up with you … with you overprotecting me, Malcolm! I’m fed up with being the one reassuring you all the time that there’s nothing to worry about!’ She paused to take a breath. ‘And OK … I’m not sleeping well at the moment … but there’s such a thing as the normal stress of changing jobs and moving house, isn’t there?’

  ‘Of course there is,’ Dad replied, sounding tired. ‘I just wanted to make sure, especially with me going away next week …’

  I stood still in the hallway, feeling my stomach churn a little bit. I wished Dad wasn’t going away.

  Martha appeared at the top of the stairs then, holding her teddy in one hand and looking just like Christopher Robin in our Winnie-the-Pooh book, where he’s standing on the top stair, dangling Pooh before bumping him all the way downstairs. She looked really little standing there.

  I ran upstairs with my arms out in front of me doing my impersonation of Superman, which always makes her giggle. At the top of the stairs I pulled her down on to the floor with me and lay there on my belly with one arm stretched out in front and the other curled round my sister while she giggled and I made whooshing Superman-flying-through-the-air noises.

  When I’d stopped my Superman impression I still didn’t feel like going back downstairs, so I went into Martha’s bedroom and watched her playing for a while. She was making the dolls in her doll’s house talk to each other. I think it’s really cute the way she does that, so I stayed put and listened to the mummy doll shouting at the daddy doll because he had forgotten to turn off the taps in the bathroom and had flooded the whole house. Which meant that mummy doll then had to call the fire brigade.

  ‘You be the fireman, Daniel,’ she ordered me. Then she launched into a high pitched, posh-mummy voice, holding an imaginary telephone to her ear. ‘This is an emergency. We need you to come and pump all the water out of our house.’

  ‘Of course, madam,’ I said. ‘That extra water will come in very handy next time there’s a fire …’

  We went on like that for a bit until Martha got fed up with me coming out with smart-alec things in the middle of her story. By the time she chucked me out, I figured it was time to go back downstairs again.

  Mum and Dad were in the kitchen now, where Dad was making them both cups of tea.

  ‘Izzy, you have to stay on the same dose, even if it is stopping you from losing weight,’ he was saying. ‘We can’t take any chances, especially while I’m away …’

  ‘There you go again! You’re afraid I can’t manage my medication properly without you here to supervise me!’ Mum still sounded annoyed.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, joining them in the kitchen. ‘Umm … Do you still want me to do the dishes?’

  ‘Daniel …’ I thought Dad was going to tell me off again for not doing the washing up when I’d first been asked. But instead he said, ‘While I’m away I’d like you and Martha to help out more. Especially you. Mum’s going to be very busy with her new job and she’s going to need you to do your bit.’

  ‘OK, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ll help out. And don’t worry. I’ll make sure Mum takes her tablets.’

  Mum made a sort of choking noise and nearly spat out her tea, at which point I rushed out of the kitchen to escape the aftermath of the wrong thing that I had just blurted out.

  Because even though Mum had once been mentally ill, she was not a child and must not be treated like one. And now she was yelling all over again at Dad for putting the ridiculous idea into her twelve-year-old son’s head that he needed to worry about whether she took her medication or not.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Mrs Lyle seems very … pleasant,’ Mum had said when I’d asked her what my new head of year was like. I should have known that meant Mrs Lyle was an old dragon. If Mum likes a person when she first meets them, she calls them something other than ‘pleasant’. So far she’d called everyone here ‘really nice’ or ‘so lovely’ or ‘ever so friendly’ – except the butcher down the road who didn’t sell organic meat. When she’d complained about it he’d told her he didn’t intend to order in organic meat just for her and that he could do without her supporting his small local shop, thanks very much, if she was going to be so rude about his perfectly good lamb chops. Dad had got a bit worried when Mum had related that story to him when she got home. He never likes it when Mum gets into arguments with people.

&nb
sp; ‘None of the staff are going to mention to the children about you being related to me,’ Mum said the day before school started back.

  ‘Oh, great. Then nobody’ll find out. I mean, it’s not like we’ve got the same surname or anything, is it?’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘I just meant that none of the staff is going to draw attention to it. Look, Daniel …’ Mum sighed, sounding a bit impatient. ‘With this attitude, you’re just going to make things turn out badly for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, right! I get it! If I get picked on because you’re the head, it’ll be all my fault!’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Mum replied sharply. ‘I just meant that if you keep whining on about –’

  ‘Mum just means that if you let the other children see that you think it’s a big thing, then they’re much more likely to make it into a big thing,’ Dad interrupted firmly. He does that sometimes – interrupts Mum when she’s about to say something if he thinks she might not be going to put whatever it is as diplomatically as he could.

  I glanced at my dad. He was giving me a look that didn’t exactly invite me to keep on giving Mum a hard time. But I was too wound up to back down now.