The Suitcase Kid Read online

  Katie’s got the biggest bedroom so she has to share it with me. It’s not my fault. I don’t want to share with her. I can’t stick it. I can’t ever dress up or practise pulling silly faces or play a good game with Radish because Katie’s always there. I can’t even get lost in a good book because Katie turns her television right up or sings some silly song right in my ear to distract me.

  So do you know where I go when I need a bit of peace and quiet? I lock myself in the bathroom.

  There aren’t any really good places to sit. The toilet gets a bit hard after a while. The edge of the bath is too cold. I wouldn’t dream of sitting in the bath. I always just wash in the basin. The baboon has a bath every day and he leaves dark wisps of hair all over the place, and little crumbs of plaster and flakes of paint.

  I collected some of his foul scummy hairs in a matchbox, together with a nail clipping and a shred of one of his dirty tissues. Then I concocted an evil spell and threw the box out of the window. I waited hopefully all the next day for the news that he’d fallen off his ladder. But he didn’t. Magic doesn’t work. I should know that by now. I wished enough times that Mum and Dad and I could be together again in Mulberry Cottage and it hasn’t happened yet.

  Even when I’m locked in the bathroom I can’t always concentrate on my book. I used to read heaps and heaps and I got through every single story in the Book Box at school, and I went to the library too and I had my own collection of paperbacks, nearly fifty of them, some of them really big hard nearly grown-up books. But now my own books are shoved in a cardboard box somewhere and I can’t get at them, and all the books from school and the library suddenly seem boring. I can’t get into the stories. I just keep thinking about Mum and Dad and Mulberry Cottage.

  So now I choose really babyish books to read, stuff I read years ago, when I was six or seven or eight. I can remember reading the stories the first time round and sometimes I can kid myself I’m little again, and everything’s all right.

  Sometimes it doesn’t work, even in the bathroom by myself. So then I generally play a game with Radish.

  She loves the bathroom. It’s her favourite best ever place. Don’t forget she’s only four centimetres tall. The basin and the bath are her very own Leisure Pool. I generally fix up a Superslide by knotting Paula’s tights together and hanging them from the door hook to the bath tap. Radish hasn’t got a very slippery bottom so I soap her a lot to make her slide satisfactorily. This means Paula’s tights get a bit soapy too but that can’t be helped.

  Radish certainly doesn’t fancy a swim in the baboon’s hairy lair but she likes a quick dip in the basin, and she’s getting very good at dives off the window-sill down into the water. Sometimes she turns somersaults as she goes.

  When she starts to get a bit shivery I dry her in the towel, and then she warms up using the sponge as her own Bouncy Castle. When she’s tired of this she generally begs me to make her a snowman. I know this will get us into trouble but I don’t care. I take the baboon’s shaving foam and we make all the snowdrifts and then we start sculpting them into snow people. Last time I got a bit carried away. I made a snow girl and a snow rabbit and then I made a snow cottage. All right, it looked more like a big blob than a cottage, but the snow girl and the snow rabbit liked it a lot. I tried to do a tree too but the shaving foam went phut and I realized I’d used it all up. Nearly a whole can.

  The baboon beat his chest and bellowed in the morning, but Radish and I didn’t care.

  WE DIDN’T ALWAYS live in Mulberry Cottage. We used to live in this pokey flat in the middle of London when I was very little. It was noisy and there was lots of rubbish everywhere and we kept getting burgled. Mum and Dad used to talk about moving to a pretty little cottage in the country but it was always just like a fairy story.

  Then one day we went for a run out in the car and it was very hot and I got bored and started whining and they got cross with me so I howled and wouldn’t shut up and Dad stopped at a little corner shop to bribe me into silence. I stopped yelling and started happily slurping my way through an icecream. Mum and Dad had an ice too, and we all went for a little walk in the sunshine. And that was when we saw it. The cottage at the end of the road. A white cottage with a grey slate roof and a black chimney and a bright butter-yellow front door. There were yellow roses and honeysuckle growing up a lattice round the door and the leaded windows, and lots of other flowers growing in the big garden. In the middle of the garden was an old twisted tree with big branches bent almost to the ground. Mum and Dad were so taken by the cottage that they’d stopped keeping an eye on me. I toddled through the gate and made for the tree because it was studded all over with soft dark fruit. I picked a berry and popped it in my mouth. It tasted sweet and sharp and sensational. My very first mulberry.

  There was a For Sale notice on the fence. It seemed like we were meant to buy Mulberry Cottage. It wasn’t quite in the country. It turned out to have a lot of dry rot and woodworm and for the first year there was dust everywhere and we couldn’t use half the rooms. But it didn’t matter. We’d found our fairy-tale cottage.

  I found it. After all, I was the one who started yelling so they had to stop the car. It was my cottage. I was the one who called it Mulberry Cottage right from the start.

  Mum made mulberry pies the first year we were there. And then she made mulberry jam. It didn’t set properly but I didn’t care. It was fun pouring your jam on your bread. I didn’t mind a bit when it ran down my wrist and into my sleeve. I liked licking it off.

  When Mum went back to work she stopped doing that sort of cooking. Dad had a go at a pie once, but his pastry was all burnt and crunchy. It didn’t really matter though, because the mulberries softened it up. He didn’t have another go so I just used to eat my mulberries raw.

  Have you ever had a mulberry? They’re better than raspberries or strawberries, I’m telling you. You have one mulberry and you want another and another and another. They stain quite a bit no matter how careful you are. You end up looking like Dracula with mulberry juice dripping bloodily down your chin, but who cares? You also often end up stuck in the loo with a tummy upset but honestly, it’s worth it.

  My mouth is watering. I want a mulberry so much. I can’t stand to think that there’s someone else living in Mulberry Cottage now, picking my mulberries off my tree. There’s someone else in my bedroom with the funny uneven wooden floorboards. I kept trying to prise them up hoping that someone in the past would have hidden treasure underneath. And I was sure there was a secret passage because the walls were so old and thick. I know I’d have found the treasure and the passage if I could only have gone on living there.

  DAD CAME TO collect me on Friday evening. I got so excited and fidgety before he came that I couldn’t even sit still to watch Neighbours. I couldn’t wait for him to get here – and yet when he tooted his car horn I suddenly clutched Mum and didn’t want to go after all. It’s always like that.

  Dad doesn’t come to the front door any more. Dad and Mum still row a lot if they’re together for long. And once Dad and the baboon nearly had a fight. They both had their fists in the air and circled round each other. Mum yelled but they didn’t take any notice of her. I kept tugging at Dad but he just brushed my hand away. It was Katie who stopped them fighting.

  ‘Oh please stop, Daddy, you’re scaring me,’ she squeaked, blinking the famous blue eyes.

  I can’t stick Katie.

  There’s one really good thing. My dad can’t stand her either.

  ‘I had another fight with Katie,’ I told Dad when we were driving over to his place.

  ‘And who won?’

  ‘I did.’

  Dad chuckled. ‘Good for you, Andy. She’s a spoilt little brat if ever I saw one.’

  ‘Uncle Bill said I was spoilt the other day,’ I said.

  I’d made a fuss because I didn’t get the cream off the top of the milk for my cornflakes three days running. He said we all had to take turns. I said I never had to take turns in my old