Neighbours (9 page)

When you are as dreadful as the Dents were, all your relatives pretend they don't know you. Sometimes they move to another town and sometimes they even move to Patagonia. No one knew if the Dents had any relatives, but if they did, they were never found.
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There was a rumour that, rather than have anyone know they were related to them, their cousins had gone to live in a remote shack high up in the Andes. So when the final Dent had been ‘re-assigned', as Mordonna described it, no one missed them. There was even talk of a big party in the street to celebrate.

If a family of nice people disappeared, the place would be crawling with detectives with big torches looking for clues. They would fingerprint every square centimetre of the house, even inside the toilet bowl. They would scrape DNA out of the bottom of the garbage bin trying to find out what had happened. No stone would be left unturned.

But when the Dents all vanished, the police raced into action by buying the biggest bottle of champagne they could find and celebrating for three days. They put the news in their monthly newsletter, in the ‘Good News' section, and everyone kept their fingers crossed just to make sure the Dents wouldn't come back.

After a couple of months, the bank, who owned nearly all of the house, put up a ‘For Sale' sign. The house would be auctioned in a week's time.

‘I hope the next owners are all right,' said Betty.

‘Mmmm,' said Nerlin.

‘What?' said Mordonna. ‘Have you got a plan?'

‘Well,' said Nerlin, ‘there is a way to make
sure
we like the new owners.'

‘How?'

‘We become the new owners,' said Nerlin.

‘You mean, move next door?' asked Betty. ‘But who will live here?'

‘We will,' said Nerlin. ‘Look, there's nine of us, not to mention the corpses and ghosts. We could do with more room.'

So that's what they did.

If you went to an auction and saw a family that looked like the Floods standing there, you'd have to be pretty brave to bid against them. And if you saw how spooky and weird the Floods' house and garden were next door, you probably wouldn't want to live there anyway. Because of this, there were very few people at the auction outside number 11 Acacia Avenue. There was the standard property developer, who wanted to pull the house down and build a
block of flats, and there were five people who had seen all the junk in the front garden and thought it was a garage sale.

Mordonna went up to the property developer and whispered in his ear. But he just walked off in silence.

‘What did you say to him?' asked Nerlin.

‘I asked him if he had ever thought what life would be like if he had sticky feet and could cling to glass,' said Mordonna.

The auctioneer climbed up on a box and held up his hand.

‘Who will start the bidding?' he said.

‘Two hundred and fif –' the property developer started to say, but before he could finish, Mordonna clicked her fingers. There was a gentle plop and the property developer decided that he'd rather spend the rest of his life eating flies and hopped off into the grass.

Then there was silence.

‘Come on,' said the auctioneer. ‘Who will give me three hundred thousand?'

‘Twelve dollars,' Betty called out.

‘Twelve dollars?
Twelve
dollars?' said the auctioneer. ‘Come on, people. This house has to be sold today.'

‘I'll give you four dollars for the old washing machine,' said one of the five bargain hunters.

‘I've changed my mind,' said Betty. ‘Ten dollars.'

More nervous silence.

The auctioneer would have cried, except people who sell houses can't cry, because the bits of their
brains that have feelings have been removed.

‘Two hundred thousand, please?'

Silence, followed by everyone except the Floods walking nervously back to their cars.

‘One hundred thousand … please?'

A very long silence.

‘Who bid ten dollars?' the auctioneer asked.

‘I did,' said Betty.

‘You're too young.'

‘Ten dollars and five cents,' said Betty. ‘And if you check part III, subsection 18, page 735 of volume 47 of the house owning code, I think you'll find that anyone over the age of two is allowed to buy a house.'

This, of course, was completely made up, but the auctioneer didn't know that. And anyway, he realised that ten dollars and five cents was better than no dollars and the disgrace of being the first auctioneer ever in the whole town to not sell a house at auction.

‘Okay, okay, any advance on ten dollars and five cents?' he said.

The auctioneer waited for fifteen minutes, shuffling his feet and trying not to cry onto his clipboard. He knew no one was going to make a better offer. He knew he was now in Auctioneer-Nightmare-Land.
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Finally he couldn't delay it any longer. He lifted his shaking hand and said, ‘Ten dollars and five cents – going once, going twice, going three times … gone.'

Betty gave him ten dollars and ten cents and said he could keep the change, and the Floods promised they would never tell anyone how much they had paid for the house.

The Floods got back the ten dollars and ten cents by selling all the rubbish in the Dents' front garden to the garage sale man for twenty-five dollars. The garage sale man came with a big truck and took away all the old cars, washing machines, fridges, bottles and other junk. He thought he'd got the bargain of the century. The Floods
had
got the bargain of the century and after the impromptu garage sale now had a tidy front garden and enough money left over for each of them to buy a lottery ticket which, because they could do magic, won them just enough money to be called ‘wow' but not enough to make the newspapers interested.

The school holidays began and the whole Flood
family spent the next two weeks having a backyard and indoors blitz until the ex-Dent house was perfect. It took some very powerful magic to shift all the layers of burger grease that covered everything. It was impossible to make it vanish completely. The best they could do was gather it all up in one big ball of fat and send it across the other side of the world to a small tropical island where people still talk of the day the giant asteroid of lard from the great chip shop in the heavens landed on their beach. They see it as proof that they are the Chosen People.

‘Now we've got all this extra space,' Mordonna said, ‘maybe I should have another baby.'

‘Err, umm, I'm just going down to my shed,' said Nerlin. He had taken over Mr Dent's shed and was discovering all the wonderful things that blokes did in their sheds, like sitting around in dirty old armchairs listening to broken radios and drinking beer while they rubbed oil into lots and lots of spanners and chisels that they would never use for anything.

The twins pulled down the fence between the
two back gardens, giving the family enough room to bury several more dead relatives who had come with them from Transylvania Waters and had been stored in old jam jars in one of the deepest cellars with only the night eels
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for company.

‘Great idea,' said Mordonna. ‘Mother's been complaining that she's got no one to talk to apart from the worms, and now that they've eaten the last bits of her skin, even they don't visit her any more.'

They decided to bring in one dead relative from each side of the family – Great-Aunt Blodwen and Uncle Flatulence. When they had settled in, they'd bury a couple more.

‘I've got a soft spot for Great-Aunt Blodwen,' said Nerlin. ‘It's over there by the new vegie garden.'

Winchflat built another one of his brilliant machines – the iCellar, Dungeon and Moat Replicator
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– which photocopied all the tunnels and cellars under the Floods' house, turned them
back to front and moved them under the Dents' old house and then joined the two sets up. Merlinmary connected everything up to her lead-lined bed and even strung some black fairy lights around Nerlin's shed.

They decided to keep both kitchens because everyone agreed they would be much happier if Satanella had somewhere to eat where the others didn't have to watch, smell or hear her.

As the school holidays came to an end, Valla gave the windows their final coat of dust and black paint, Betty planted the last patch of poison ivy in the flower beds and the other children spent two frantic days doing all the wizard school homework they should have done two weeks before.

The last day of the holidays was, like it is everywhere, weird. It was still the holidays so you could do what you liked, but whatever you did never seemed that great because you knew tomorrow you'd be back at school.

The whole family sat on the back verandah drinking warm blood slurpies as the ice-cold moon
rose over the trees and cast its peaceful light over the two fresh graves.

‘Listen to that,' said Mordonna.

‘What? I can't hear anything,' said Nerlin.

‘Exactly.'

Life, at last, was perfect.