encouragement and sang louder.
“Let’s have a go,” said the guitarist, whose mum knew him as Jason but who was now called Stinky Gibbon. Dad handed him the uke. Stinky played a couple of notes and there was a crunching noise as he deliberately broke the neck off. “Oops, sorry!” he said, laughing. He handed Dad the smashed instrument back. “That’s rock and roll for you.”
Dad took the mashed instrument and thought for a moment.
“You’re taking Darius with you this summer, are you?” he said to Oswald. There was a bit of steel in Dad’s voice that Nat hardly recognised. Oswald nodded.
“Well, you’re not,” said Dad. “He’s coming with us.”
Nat couldn’t be sure, but she thought that under his horrible black beard, Oswald Bagley smiled.
Dad wasn’t wearing a baseball cap; he thought baseball caps looked stupid. He was wearing an old T-shirt with ‘Little Monkeys’ written on it. Underneath was printed a photo of Nat, aged four, holding a monkey in a safari park. Nat was pulling a face because the chimp had just poked her in the eye. Dad thought the picture was cute, hence the T-shirt. Nat did not think it was cute, hence she’d thrown it in the bin fourteen times. But it still kept appearing. Next time, she thought darkly, I’m setting fire to it. Even if Dad’s wearing it.
But even worse than the T-shirt were Dad’s shorts. Dad wore shorts from June 1st to August 31st, because, he said, that was summer. He didn’t wear them at any other time, no matter how hot, and he never wore anything else in the summer, no matter how cold or rainy. Dad was very proud of his shorts because he’d had them AT SCHOOL and he could still get into them. They were red and shiny and very very short. Way too short. From a distance it looked like he’d just forgotten to put his trousers on. Old ladies walked past the drive tutting and shielding their eyes.
Dad had extremely thin white hairy legs and in these shorts you could see ALL of those thin white hairy legs, from ankle to unmentionable. He bent over in the van and made it worse. Nat heard shrieks from the other side of the street and had to hide behind the Dog.
To top it all, Dad had the radio on. Fighting over the radio was becoming what writers of modern classics would call: AN ISSUE. In the old days, Nat didn’t care what awful music Dad listened to, because she was still finding out what music she liked. But now she was older and had found out what she liked and it was the music they played on RADIO ZINGG!!! It was happy bouncy music you could dance to. Dad liked RADIO DAD. The songs on RADIO DAD went on for hours and if you tried to dance to them you’d break your legs. They were boring and miserable and now it was playing at full blast and all the neighbours would think that she liked Dave Spong and his Incredible Flaming Earwigs, or whoever it was.
Because of all this, Nat was very keen to get the van cleared and packed so they could get out of there. But the more Dad chucked out on to the drive, the more there was still inside. It was like some evil van curse.
Normal families fly abroad on holiday, thought Nat sourly, dragging more cases to the van. But Dad kept telling them it would be ‘more fun’ (in other words, cheaper) to drive there instead.
“We’ll need a car when we get there anyway,” he had argued to Mum. “And this saves us the expense of hiring one. Plus, we’ll make a holiday of the journey. We can sleep in the van. Or there’s a big old tent in the back. You like camping!”
This was not true. Mum hated camping. Mum liked hotels and hot water and fluffy towels and chocolates on the pillow and room service. She did not like:
Tents, campsites, bugs, sleeping bags, burnt sausages, shared showers, smelly loos, rain, fetching water from a pipe in a field, cows, hippies, wet socks, and any of the four great smells of camping – plastic, burnt wood, damp dirt and wee.
This wasn’t the reason she gave though. Mum would have to miss the whole camping bit because obviously, she said, she couldn’t get a month off work. “Unlike your father, who rarely gets a month ON work.”
Mum usually got upset when she missed out on family time, but Nat was pretty sure Mum was relieved to be missing out on the camping part of the trip.
Instead, the plan was that Dad, Nat and Darius would take the van over to France, and when Mum could get away she would fly out to join them, probably towards the end, and once Dad had found her a nice hotel nearby.
“But you can just stay in the house! I’ll have it done up by the time you arrive,” Dad had argued.
“Now, I don’t mean to be critical, love,” Mum had pointed out, “but you’re not a builder. You write jokes for Christmas crackers. I have no idea why you’ve agreed to do all this work. The last time you tried to put up a bookshelf you nailed your head to a copy of Great Expectations.”
Dad had mumbled something about it being a bit quiet on the Christmas cracker-joke-writing job front at the moment and that it might be good for him to develop another skill or two. Mum had just smiled and kissed him and reminded him to take out extra health insurance and a first-aid kit.
“Do you think we’ll need this?” Dad asked Nat, emerging backwards from the depths of the van, waving an electric pencil sharpener.
“No idea, Dad, I’ve got my eyes closed,” shouted Nat, burying her face in the Dog’s warm fur. “Please change your shorts.”
Whatever Dad said next was drowned out by the roar of a huge motorcycle engine. Oswald had arrived with Darius sitting on the back of the bike. The Dog bounded up, sure of a treat. Darius hopped off and picked some flies out of his teeth. He was carrying a small tatty rucksack. It didn’t look big enough to hold a decent packed lunch, let alone anything else.
“Is that all you’re bringing?” asked Nat.
“It’s all I’ve got,” Darius replied lightly, before getting bundled over by the excited Dog. The two of them rolled around in the front garden. Oswald nodded to Dad, revved his motorbike and sped off without saying goodbye to his little brother. Dad watched him go for a moment, then turned to Darius. “Best say goodbye to the mutt,” he said, “we’re taking him to the kennels later.”
Nat was shocked. “Dad—” she began.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he said, cutting her off, “but he’ll hate that long drive and he won’t like strange places and Mum’s too busy to look after him. He’ll be better off in a kennel, trust me. I’ve picked a nice one.”
Nat wasn’t one to take no for an answer. “Mum …” she shouted, running indoors.
