Millions (17 page)

‘It’s not an unusually large amount to spend on a car, I can tell you.’

The supervisor was busy. The red-faced woman went a shade redder. I started to bounce up and down on my heels. I tugged at Dorothy’s sleeve. She snapped at me, ‘What? What do you want?’

‘I need a wee.’

‘Oh, brilliant. We queue for half an hour, finally get to the window and now you need a wee.’

‘I can’t help it.’

The red-faced woman had her back to us now, waving at her supervisor. Dorothy knocked on the glass and pointed to me. I was up and down like a yo-yo now. ‘Have you got a toilet? A customer toilet?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, you must have something. Where do you go?’

‘I go on this side. It’s secure, this side. You can’t come through without clearance. There’s toilets in Marks & Spencer’s, just up the road.’

‘So am I supposed to go to Marks & Spencer’s, come back and go to the back of the queue with my hard-earned savings and just hope that I get to the front of the queue before you close? I need this car for work. If I don’t change this money I’ve had it. I can’t . . .’

‘All right. All right.’ She stacked the money in a counting machine and gave Dorothy 7,042 euros in a long brown envelope.

Dorothy was flustered and edgy. She almost dragged me along the street. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘M & S, where’s M & S?’

I said, ‘I don’t really need a wee.’ It took her a minute to understand. ‘I just thought it would put a bit of pressure on her, you know.’

‘Well, you little belter,’ she whooped. I took that as a compliment. ‘You 100 per cent blinder.’ I took that as a compliment too. ‘You cunning little crook.’ I wasn’t so happy with that.

We ran to Barclays. It worked there as well. And in the Halifax, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland and in Lloyds. The only place it didn’t work was the Co-op, because they had a customer toilet. By four o’clock we’d changed 62,000 pounds. The banks were starting to close.

‘There’s got to be somewhere else.’

‘There’s a bank inside Kendal’s.’ As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. She took hold of my hand and nearly dragged me back up Deansgate and in through the main door. The main door leads in to the make-up department, where Mum used to work.

The last time I came here . . . Well, it doesn’t matter. She worked on the Clinique counter, that’s all you need to know. It’s over by the lifts.

I used to like it that when we came to collect her, we could see her before she saw us. You could watch her chatting to a customer, or to the other woman on the counter, or tidying up, and she wouldn’t know you were looking at her. She wore a white overall with a black name badge on it. All the women who worked there had skin like hers – skin that was shinier and smoother than everyone else’s. And they were all so clean, immaculate really. There was always beautiful music playing. There was now. And all the immaculate women were still here. Except for her.

One of the immaculate women – the one from the Chanel counter – stared at me, as if she was going to say something. Which was bad. Then she looked as though she couldn’t think what to say. Which was worse.

I decided to get out quickly. I said, ‘The bank’s upstairs,’ but when I turned round, I saw my own reflection in a big mirror. No sign of Dorothy. I looked around and saw the Chanel woman looking at me again. Only now I could see that her skin wasn’t smooth. It had some kind of paste over it to make it look smooth. She’d missed a bit round her ear. It looked silly. I wondered if Mum had ever done that. I looked behind me. No Dorothy. Just a big cutout of a thin brown sweaty woman in a bikini. To be medical about it, my breathing was irregular.

Someone touched me on the shoulder and I swung around. Dorothy. I had to swallow to stop myself crying.

She looked around, then looked at me. ‘How do you know about the bank?’

I still couldn’t catch my breath.

‘Is this is where your mum used to work?’

She didn’t wait for me to answer. She just said, ‘I’ve had enough of queuing up now, let’s go and have a bit of a spree.’

I didn’t actually want any worldly goods, but I thought it might be rude to say so. I followed her up the escalator. She was rooting in her bag. At the top she took something out and dropped it in the bin. I saw that it was the train ticket.

Dorothy didn’t take me to the toy department or the electrical goods. She took me to boyswear, picked out a bright-red duffel coat and held it up against me. It had a hood that pulled right up over your head so it looked like a Franciscan habit. She said, ‘Paddington Bear!’ which was another way of putting it. As far as worldly goods go, it was the best I’ve seen in ages.

It was probably the only thing in the shop that I really liked. She bought it for me. ‘I bet he hasn’t bought you a coat in ages. Coats and cutlery, they’re the things that dads never buy.’

She bought herself a bag.

On the way back up King Street we saw an amusement arcade that had a sign up saying ‘Still Accepting Sterling Silver’. It was fantastic! I’ve never been in one before. There’s a thing where you drop coins on to a kind of tray that goes backwards and forwards and the idea is to get your coin to tip all the others off. I won twice!

‘Just what we needed,’ said Dorothy, ‘another bag of old money.’

You could spend it in there. We bought a fantastic Egyptian vase and some candyfloss, the kind that comes in a bag.

We met Dad and Anthony back at the car. Dad said, ‘Did you change it all?’

‘We lost interest, didn’t we, Damian? Want some candyfloss?’ Dad tugged a big wad out of the bag. ‘How much did you get?’

‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘we had this brilliant idea that we’d take the money to the building society and pay off the house.’

‘Fantastic. Were they OK about it?’

‘They were shut.’

‘Oh.’

‘We got seventy grand.’

‘We got sixty-two. Sorry.’

‘So we’ll just have to make do with 132,000 grand.’

‘And a new Previa.’

‘And a Gamecube Flight Simulator. Plasma-screen TV. And dishwasher, which was Anthony’s idea.’

‘Oh, well, then.’

The car was crammed with stuff.

They were really happy. Even Anthony was happy. I think I was even happy too for a minute. Then my phone buzzed. It was a text message. It wasn’t from him. It was from Anthony, saying, ‘We R W8ing’, over a picture of Dad by the new car. He must have sent it a few minutes before. It was nothing to worry about, but it reminded me that I had plenty to worry about.

Guardian angels are supposed to look after you, but they know when you’re going to die, obviously. It must make them sad, watching you playing footie or having your tea or whatever and knowing exactly when it will all end. That’s how I felt that evening. The others were that happy. They bought an Indian takeaway and ate it round the coffee table, with the bags of new money on the floor, and they talked about what they were going to do with it all.

Dad was still big on holidays. He made a list of faraway names – Acapulco, Bondi, Barcelona – and Dorothy came back with her own – Capri, Sardinia and Greenland for the Northern Lights.

Anthony was still on about real estate. He’d seen an advert for barn conversions in the Lleyn Peninsula. ‘You could rent it out – so it would be generating a stream of income while at the same time increasing its capital value.’

‘They must be very small barns,’ said Dad.

‘Why?’

‘Lleyn Peninsula, it’s all sheep, isn’t it? No cows. You’d have to rent it out to midgets.’

‘Or sheep.’

They were so happy, they were just looking for an excuse to laugh. Sheep kept them laughing for about five hours. I tried to join in, but I was just thinking, one more sheep joke and then it’ll all be gone. It was eight o’clock.

Sometimes something starts as a joke but no one wants it to stop so it just keeps going until it turns real. I don’t know whose idea it was, but half an hour later Dad was mixing a bucket of wallpaper paste. They were going to paper Anthony’s room with the rest of the old money.

Anthony was spreading newspaper out on his carpet. Dorothy put the trestle table up on the landing and started singing ‘Money, Money, Money’. She and Dad started slopping all the old tens and twenties with glue and Anthony placed them carefully on his wall, smoothing out each one with a brush and making sure they were all nicely lined up, as though they were bathroom tiles. They were covering up the footballer wallpaper with old banknotes.

Dorothy was the most out of control. She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this’, and in between she’d tell jokes. ‘I saw three Barbies waiting for the toilet and I thought, hello, it’s a Barbie-queue. Barbecue. Get it?’ She didn’t wait to find out if we did or not. ‘What d’you call a deer with no eyes? No-eye-dear. No idea! What do you call a deer with no eyes and no legs? Still-no-eye-dear. Still no idea!’

Then I noticed something strange. I was laughing too. I didn’t care any more about Glass Eye. What did it matter about the money? Dad had a new car. He’d had a great day. He had a new friend. He was laughing. My dad was laughing. I got so I was worried that she’d run out of jokes and it would all be over. So I went and got my copy of
The Ha Ha Bonk Book
– which has thousands of jokes in it – and every time she couldn’t think of one, I’d read one out. And when I read one out, that would remind her of another one. And it went on until we all sounded like penguins on laughing gas.

‘What d’you call a man with a spade in his head?’

‘Doug. Dug!’

The jokes were actually funnier when everyone knew the punchline, because then we could all shout out together.

‘What do you call a donkey with three legs?’

‘A wonky!’

And all the time the wall was more and more covered with portraits of the Queen or Florence Nightingale or Charles Dickens or whoever, and the glue was getting everywhere.

‘What do you call a donkey with a drinking problem?’

‘A plonky!’

I noticed that Anthony didn’t join in on this one. Maybe he just didn’t know the punchline.

‘A panda goes into a pub and orders a sandwich . . .’ said Dorothy.

She wasn’t looking at anyone. She was concentrating on the wallpapering. She didn’t notice Anthony slip out of the room.

‘Panda eats the sandwich, shoots the barman and goes. The police catch him and say, What did you do that for?’

Anthony would have gone to his room except we were all in there redecorating it.

‘Panda says . . . I’m a panda; that’s what I do. Look me up in the dictionary. So they do and it says, “Panda bear, from China, eats shoots and leaves.” See? Eats, shoots and leaves.’

‘Very good,’ said Dad.

But he didn’t laugh. He was fixated on the wallpaper now and so was she. They could’ve stopped any time but they were hypnotized. It wasn’t a laugh any more. It was a job. They wouldn’t stop until every old note was on the wall. I could just see a footballer’s head sticking out above the twenty I was pasting up, and I suddenly remembered how much Anthony had loved his footballer wallpaper. I sneaked out after him.

Anthony was in my room, squatting on the end of the bed, like Glass Eye, only angrier.

‘This is all your fault,’ he hissed.

‘I know.’

‘You don’t know. You don’t know what you’ve done.’

In the next room, Dad suddenly burst out laughing at one of her jokes.

‘Hear that? He’ll be laughing on the other side of his face when she goes and leaves him, won’t he? Remember what he was like when Mum went?’

‘Maybe she won’t go? You said she was going to go yesterday but she came back. Maybe she . . .’

‘Is that what you want? Her here instead of Mum? Her in this house? With her stupid jokes and lasagne with no sweetcorn. Do you want her here instead of Mum?’

I hadn’t thought of that.

‘You did it all. It’s all down to you. You and your bloody weird stuff. Chucking money away, talking to yourself, seeing things. You are not normal. You are a problem.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Wherever she is, you’re not going there, because you are a nutter. You’re a nutter and you should be locked up.’

There’s a lot of confusion about angels. Like when we were in the best place and the nurses were supposed to be angels. Or in the graveyard, there were stones that said ‘Little Angel’ or ‘Now with the Angels’. People are not angels. And when you die, you do not become an angel. Angels are a completely different species. For instance, they’ve got no bellybuttons, obviously as they weren’t born. You’d need totally different bone structure and DNA and everything if you wanted to be an angel. So no one becomes an angel to watch over you. Ever. No one. It’s a biological impossibility.

Also, there are different kinds of angel – e.g. cherubim, seraphim, powers and dominions – and some of them are HUGE. Like your guardian angel is about six metres high. It’s embarrassing when you think about it that you need all that celestial power and wingspan just to keep you out of trouble. And it doesn’t even work a lot of the time.

I lay in my bed, looking up at the ceiling, wishing it would open up and suck me into the pitch black and leave me behind the water tank. I had the mobile in my hand, set to vibrate so it wouldn’t wake the others.

My phone shook. I held it up over my head. Glass Eye was looking down at me from the video screen. He whispered, ‘Ten minutes,’ and flashed the fingers of one hand at me twice. I nodded and went down to get the money.

As I passed the front door, I could hear voices outside. It must be him. He must have someone with him. It sounded like more than a few. Maybe he’d brought the whole gang. I could hear one of them saying, ‘Ring the doorbell.’ I was scared they’d wake Dad. I was scared full stop.

I opened the door. It wasn’t Glass Eye.

It was a man with three little girls. Before I’d even asked him who he was, he’d started, ‘See these little girls, my girls, these are the girls that Santa Claus forgot. D’you see what I’m saying?’

I didn’t. I looked over his shoulder to see if Glass Eye was coming, but it was too dark.

‘You’re our last hope. We haven’t even got the bus fare home because there’s no point going back if you don’t help us. The landlord’ll chuck us out. Come on, we don’t want much. If you could see us through . . .’