The Parent Problem

by Anna Wilson

I don’t know what to say. Has my best friend gone as insane as my mum? What is happening to the world as I used to know it?

  ‘So tell me about him,’ Aubrey says. She nudges me. ‘Stop gawping like a goldfish – you said Harris had been spying on him. What did he find out?’

  As if summoned by telepathy, Harris bursts through the door, shoots into my room and launches himself at my bed. ‘He plays the drums!’ Harris shouts, getting up and bouncing on my bed, which causes the mattress to bow dangerously close to the ground.

  ‘Hey! Were you listening at the door?’ I say.

  ‘Of course,’ says Harris. ‘How else would I know that you were talking about our new neighbours?’

  ‘GET OUT!’ I shout.

  But Aubrey steps in front of me, eyes shining. ‘The drums?’ she says. ‘Cool! Tell me more, Super Spy Harris.’

  Harris giggles. ‘I am a cool super spy, aren’t I?’

  ‘NO!’ I say. ‘Do not say another word. And stop wrecking my bed. And GET OUT! Did I not just say that?’

  Mum appears in the doorway. Still in her shocking ballroom outfit.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asks, hands on hips and trying to look stern. She takes one look at Harris leaping in the air playing imaginary drums, however, and her mouth twitches into a smile. ‘Harris . . .’ she says, in her hopelessly unimpressive ‘telling-off’ tone of voice which she reserves especially for him. ‘Stop bouncing, sausage.’

  ‘Maybe he’s in a band.’ Aubrey is still talking about Boy Next Door. ‘I wonder if he’ll come to our school? How old is he, do you think?’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, squaring up to Mum. ‘Will you please leave and take that –’ I point to my bouncy brother – ‘THING with you?’

  Mum sighs. ‘Harris,’ she says again. ‘I get the feeling we are not welcome. Come and help me sort out something for tea – I have to leave for the dancing class at 6.30, so we need to eat early.’

  ‘You are not really going tonight?’ I ask.

  ‘Aubrey,’ says Mum. ‘Don’t you think ballroom dancing would be fun?’

  ‘MUM!’ I say, before Aubrey can think of a suitable answer. ‘Please, just GO!’

  Mum shoots me a despairing glance and then grabs Harris by the waist and flings him over her shoulder in a fireman’s lift. ‘Come on, “Thing Two”,’ she says to a squealing Harris. ‘ “Let’s leave “Thing One” to be grumpy. There’s just enough time for a bath before tea.’

  Harris protests and kicks his legs, but he is loving every minute of being carried like this.

  My insane family leave the room and at last we have peace again.

  Aubrey says, ‘I wonder if Boy Next Door will join The Electric Warthogs. That would be awesome!’

  ‘The who?’ I ask.

  Aubrey looks as me as though I have just crawled out of a swamp. ‘No, not The Who – they are an ancient group of wrinkly old men that my dad likes. Boy, are they lame.’ Aubrey gives a dramatic puff and shakes her head to emphasize this point. ‘The Electric Warthogs are way better.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know,’ says Aubrey. ‘The band that some of the Year 9s are in. They need a drummer.’ She picks up my pencil case from my desk and croons into it. ‘I’m just not that into you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Babeeeeee.’

  ‘What was that?’ I say.

  Aubrey makes an exasperated noise. ‘It’s one of their songs. Flip, Skye, where have you been since September? They were playing at the school Christmas disco. Oh . . .’ She stops herself, her hand flying to her mouth.

  A rush of heat fills my head. ‘I thought we decided not to go – in fact, I thought you were ill at the end of last term?’ I say.

  Aubrey’s cheeks have gone pink. ‘Yeah. I was. But I sneaked out and went along. Just for half an hour. It was lame. You didn’t miss anything.’

  I don’t know what to say.

  She went to the disco without me. But we never go to school discos. Aubrey says they are for losers. So . . . what does this mean?

  ‘Hey,’ Aubrey says, her voice false and bright. ‘What about if I stay to help you babysit Harris while your mum goes to ballroom dancing? I know you hate that woman Milly What’s-’er-face coming round and eating all the custard creams.’ Her laugh is shrill and fake too. ‘Maybe your mum would let you stay home alone without a babysitter if I was there too? I could call Mum now and ask her if it’s OK? I’m sure she won’t mind: I am thirteen now after all.’

  Yeah, and don’t I know it.

  I shake my head. ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘I’m going to tell Mum we don’t need Milly any more. After all, I am nearly thirteen too,’ I add. There have to be some perks to getting older.

  Aubrey’s smile fades and her shoulders drop: she looks like an inflatable toy that has had a pin stuck in it. ‘Whatever,’ she says. She starts to gather her things. ‘I had better get going anyway – school tomorrow!’

  I walk her down to the hall. Normally I would offer to walk her home, and more often than not, the minute we got to her house, she would offer to walk me back to mine again so that we could carry on nattering. We have been doing this since forever. Our record for walking each other home on one night was twenty-six times.

  Not tonight, though. I don’t want to risk bumping into Boy Next Door. I open the front door and swiftly check the road for signs of him hanging around. Looks like he’s gone.

  Goodness knows what Aubrey would actually say to him if she met him – especially now that she has decided he has to join our school band. Fingers crossed he won’t even be coming to the same school as us.

  ‘So. See you tomorrow then,’ I say. ‘New term. Boring.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Aubrey. ‘Boring as the most boring bore in Boringtown.’ She laughs and flicks her hair back over her shoulders. As she does so, I see her glance at next door.

  It is pretty obvious that Aubrey thinks this term is going to be the exact opposite of boring. Especially if Boy Next Door has anything to do with it.

  I felt sick with worry once Aubrey had gone. A million and one questions began whizzing around my head, like this:

  Why did she lie about going to the school disco? Does Aubrey not want to be my friend any more? Is this why Mum said I should make new friends? Does she know something I don’t? Is it something to do with Aubrey turning thirteen and becoming a teenager? Do people dump their life-long friends at this stage in their lives? Is it necessary to completely reinvent yourself?

  I mean, I’m not exactly one hundred per cent happy with the way I am, but I am not dead keen on the idea of having to reinvent myself either. What would I reinvent myself as? Although, the way I am feeling right now, I wouldn’t mind being able to shapeshift into, say, a cat. Looking at Gollum curled up on my bed, I can safely say I would rather be her than me.

  The questions are still swirling even now. It’s like I have a tornado in my mind. I am actually feeling quite dizzy. I think I might lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I’m sure that’s what writers do when they need to sort out problems or search for inspiration . . .

  Oh great, now Gollum is lying on my stomach. She is purring loudly, which normally makes me feel happy and safe, but I feel the exact opposite right now. Plus, it is difficult to hold a pen and write straight when you have a cat lying on top of you.

  Back to the brain-tornado . . .

  Why should turning thirteen change anything? About Aubrey, I mean. It is not changing anything about me, that’s for sure. I am nearly thirteen (well, OK, four months to go) and I don’t feel any different from how I have always felt. I still love building dens in my room and reading under a duvet by torchlight and pretending I am one of my favourite characters in a book and watching cartoons and . . . basically doing all the things I have always loved doing.

  All the things that Aubrey used to love doing with me.

  Aubrey and I used to be able to spend a whole day in each other’s
company talking about stories we’d read and making up new ones. We went through a Paddington phase together when we were eight, a Harry Potter phase when we were ten and a Twilight phase last year. We did endless quizzes along the lines of ‘Which Harry Potter character are you?’ (I always came out as Hermione, obviously), and we even used to go on some of those FanFic sites and upload our own invented chapters for Twilight. (Actually, when I say ‘used to’, I might be still doing it . . .)

  We used to pretend that we were Half-bloods and that was why no one understood us. They were all Muggles and had no idea of our special powers. We had secret Harry Potter nicknames for pretty much everyone in our school and spent our break-times plotting what spells we would cast on people we didn’t like: hence the Voldemort Twins, Izzy and Livvy.

  Aubrey doesn’t like doing this any more. She says it is bad enough living in a household full of Lord of the Rings nut-heads.

  In fact, just the other day she was moaning, ‘Books are so last century! Who needs stories when you have YouTube?’

  I realize now that I am on my own and, thinking back over the past few months, that Aubrey has not wanted to do the same things as me for a while. Instead she has started reading magazines and blogs and watching vlogs and doing personality quizzes – all stuff linked to celebrity and beauty and fashion and, well, stuff I’m just not that interested in, to be honest. To be fair to Aubrey, she has tried to get me excited about the same things as her. She says ‘it’s really important to know what’s hot and what’s not’. But I just don’t get it.

  Talking of what’s most definitely NOT, Mum has chosen this moment of precious peace and quiet to barge in on my thoughts, calling, ‘TEA-TIIIIME!’

  I will never write a whole novel at this rate. I bet Jacqueline Wilson never has problems like this to deal with.

  Mum bursts into the room. I sit up and take in the scene of horror that stands before me.

  ‘Oh my actual life,’ I mutter.

  ‘Ta-DAA!’ Mum says, spreading her arms wide and turning round so that I can have the full benefit of the disaster area that is her outfit. She is wearing the silver-sequinned top that is too tight for her and which shows far too much of her cleavage.

  Harris appears from somewhere behind the swathes of material that make up the satin skirt.

  ‘Isn’t it GORGEOUS?’ he breathes.

  ‘Do you like the top, at least?’ Mum asks me.

  I am lost for words. Luckily Harris isn’t.

  ‘I love that top,’ Harris gushes. ‘Can I borrow it for dressing up?’

  Give me strength.

  ‘I’m glad you like it, little bean,’ says Mum. ‘This is not going into the dressing-up box yet, though.’ She holds out the purple skirt, which seems even swishier than when she first showed it to us, and does another tottery twirl on her shiny high-heeled shoes.

  Harris gasps and rushes to take Mum by the hand. She holds his arm up high and lets him pirouette under her, then they both crease up into a fit of red-faced giggles.

  ‘What is wrong with you two?’ I say.

  Harris glares and sticks his tongue out. ‘You’re just jealous because Mum looks beautiful,’ he says. ‘Unlike you.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I am soooo jealous of Mum looking like she’s about to go to a fancy-dress party,’ I say.

  Mum beams. ‘How funny – I actually did find this top in a fancy-dress shop!’ She looks so ridiculously happy that I feel a little bit sorry for her. Surely she doesn’t enjoy looking through second-hand clothes rails and fancy-dress shops? If we had more money, she would shop in nice places with beautiful things and then maybe she would look like a normal mum. Even Aubrey’s mum doesn’t go out in public in her Lord of the Rings stuff. She saves it for conventions. Also, her outfits are obviously a costume, so people know she is really dressing up as a character. But Mum is always getting this wrong. She thinks it is funny to parade around in weird clothes and that I should ‘get a sense of humour’.

  ‘Mum, please at least put a cardigan on before Milly comes round?’ I plead.

  Not that Milly can comment on what other people wear. She is usually covered in cat hair from her thirteen cats. Pongo always goes crazy when she comes round. It is so embarrassing. Milly, of course, doesn’t like Pongo because, as she says, she is ‘not a dog person’.

  Mum’s smile fades and she opens her mouth to speak. Then the phone rings, so she simply shakes her head and goes next door to her bedroom to answer it.

  ‘Oh, hellooooo, Milly!’ I hear her say in her talking-to-batty-old-cat-people voice. ‘Awwwww. Awwwwww. Really? Awwwwwww, noooo! That is a shame.’

  What’s this, I wonder? Sounds as though there’s a problem. Most likely a cat-related one, as Milly only ever talks about her cats. But why is she phoning to tell Mum when she was supposed to be coming round here in a bit to ‘babysit’ me and Harris?

  Mum comes back into my room. She is frowning and her face has gone pink. ‘That was Milly,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Harris. ‘We heard you say “Hello, Milly”. Then we heard you say “Awwwww” a lot of times. What’s wrong?’

  Mum sighed. ‘She can’t babysit because Fluffball, or whatever his name is, has got a poorly tummy so she has to take him to the emergency vet clinic.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Harris cries. ‘Not Fluffball! He’s the white one with the pink nose and the black splodge on his tail.’

  ‘You mean the one that’s so fat and so fluffy that he looks like a huge ball of fluff?’ I add.

  Mum and Harris look at me as though I am the idiot. ‘Obviously,’ they say in unison.

  ‘So I guess this means I can’t go ballroom dancing,’ Mum says. She pulls at her swishy skirt and stares down at her shoes.

  At this, I feel even more sorry for her than I did when was thinking about her wearing second-hand clothes. She looks likes Cinderella being told she can’t go to the ball: she must have been looking forward to this evening more than I had thought.

  Then I remember what Aubrey said about babysitting earlier.

  ‘I could babysit instead,’ I say, beaming. ‘I am nearly thirteen, after all. It’s Harris that needs the babysitting, not me. And it’s not as if Milly ever does anything when she comes round. She just spends all evening trying to get Gollum to sit on her lap and eats all the best biscuits and tells Harris what a lovely boy he is and makes me go to bed at eight o’clock.’

  Mum looks at me with a thoughtful expression. ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I don’t know, Skye, you are still very young. What if you and Harris started fighting?’

  ‘Of course we won’t fight. If you pay me to be a responsible babysitter, I will do the job to perfection.’ I say.

  I watch Mum’s mouth twitch into a smile.

  Was it cheeky of me to ask to be paid? So what? If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

  ‘PAY YOU?’ Mum explodes into laughter. ‘You must be joking!’

  Turns out you still don’t get, even if you do ask.

  ‘But you would have been paying Milly—!’ I begin.

  Mum holds up a hand to stop me and I can see that babysitting money slipping through my fingers when . . .

  BRRRIIING!

  The doorbell goes.

  Mum fixes me with a patronizing look and says, ‘Looks like I’ve been saved by the bell. Good try, Skye.’

  Mum goes down to answer the door, her skirt billowing out behind her like a ship in full sail. I can see through the wobbly glass that there are two people standing outside. Which means that two random people are about to see my mum in a too-tight sequinned top and a shiny purple skirt. Which means I wish the ground would open up and swallow me whole.

  Mum opens the door, and for a moment she is blocking my view, so all I can see is the top of a man’s head.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing anything . . .’

  ‘Oh no!’ Mum says. Her voice is high-pitched and ultra-cheery.

  No, you’re not disturbing us, I think. This is just a regula
r evening in our looney-tune household.

  ‘Right, er . . .’ I can sense the man taking in Mum’s outfit. I am torn between wanting to creep up the stairs to see who he is and wishing that I had my own Invisibility Cloak so that I cannot be seen to be linked to Mum in any shape or form.

  Mum gives a little giggle. ‘So, do you want to come in?’ she asks him.

  WHAT? She is asking a strange man into our house and she doesn’t CARE that she looks like a bag of recycled wrapping paper?

  ‘Erm, OK,’ says the man.

  Mum steps back to let him in – and a boy who, it turns out, is standing just slightly behind him.

  They are, of course, our new neighbours.

  I am sure I see the man look Mum up and down in a surreptitious way as he steps inside. That’s it. He thinks she is a weirdo. We haven’t even properly met our new neighbours yet, and already they have made up their minds about us.

  Mum is wittering on about Pongo, who has rushed out of the kitchen and is trying to shove his nose at the boy in the MOST embarrassing place, and Harris is shouting ‘Down, Pongo, down!’ and jumping around as much as the dog, which of course makes the dog even more excited. Gollum meanwhile has sensibly retreated upstairs and is hissing at everyone through the banisters. I am tempted to join her.

  ‘So, er, hi!’ the man says, edging around Pongo and Harris. ‘I’m Rob Parker and this is my son, Finn. We’ve just moved in next door—’

  ‘Of course!’ Mum says, flapping her hands and giggling again. ‘I thought I recognized you. Not that I have been spying on you,’ she added, which made it sound as though she totally had.

  ‘Skye has!’ Harris pipes up. ‘I have seen her looking out of the window at you.’

  Cheek! He’s the one who’s been looking over the garden fence.

  ‘Harris,’ I hiss. I pinch him on the back.

  ‘Ow! Wha’-you-do-tha’-for?’ he whines.

  ‘Stop it, you two,’ Mum says, fixing her features into a scary, toothy grin. She laughs again and blushes, then, holding out a hand, says, ‘I’m Hellie Green, and this is Skye and Harris. And you’ve met Pongo!’