Lily stopped fiddling with her nails, and started fiddling with her hair.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Bill?’ Carol asked, taking the kettle off the tiny gas ring. ‘No, I do bloody not. Tea bloody tea, that’s all we have,’ Bill growled. ‘Why can’t we have coffee?’

  ‘Because the dogs ate the coffee ’cos you left the lid off,’ Carol said wearily. ‘No coffee. Your fault. Dig?’

  ‘My fault! Ah, I see. I see now. Everything is my fault! The fact we have no money is my fault. The fact Poppy put the cat down the Portapot is my fault. The rain is my fault. Morag’s bread is my fault. Lily’s nose is my fault—’

  ‘Wassamarra with my nose? Wassamarra with my nose?’

  ‘—plays with divorced people on BBC2 are my fault! Maynard Keynes is my fault! The M25 is my fault! Everything is my fault! Well, why don’t you just kill me?’ Bill bellowed. ‘String up Bill and the world would be a better place! Is that what you’re telling me? IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE TELLING ME?’

  ‘No, I’m telling you you have to drink tea,’ Carol said placidly.

  ‘. . . if I died you could have a street party with streamers and, and, bunting—’ Bill broke off here and started to gasp, ‘I want a fag, I want a fag, I want a FAG.’

  ‘Don’t worry about your father,’ Carol said, calmly peeling potatoes. ‘He’ll be back to his normal, good-natured self when we get the Child Benefit and some—’

  ‘—fags, I want some—’

  ‘Fags,’ Carol ended. ‘I think we’ll be going home tomorrow, kiddiewinks.’

  All the Gonks closed their eyes and offered up a prayer of thanksgiving.

  ‘Is that my fault, that we’re going home tomorrow?’ Bill suddenly demanded.

  ‘NO!’ everyone shouted back.

  Day Five of the Narmo Holiday

  It didn’t rain.

  Carol cashed the Child Benefit at the tiny sub-post office in MacSpittoon, and wandered back to the Volky, breathing in the salty air and sucking on a humbug.

  She hadn’t slept all last night, planning how they would fill the van with petrol and be out of Scotland in three-quarters of a nano-second, but now she wasn’t so sure. The sea loch gleamed a rich, almost edible blue with little flashes of bright green; and the sky looked twice as vast as infinity, and then some.

  Carol wasn’t sure if she wanted to go home at all.

  Meanwhile, Bill was sitting in the driver’s seat, waiting impatiently for Carol to return with a packet of fags, and getting more and more worked up about Bjorn and Odessa.

  Bjorn had sprung from his tent at half past six that morning, and Bill had watched, bleary-eyed, as he strapped a canoe to his back, jogged down to the sea, paddled across the sea loch, landed on the other side, strapped the canoe to his back again and shinned up a cliff.

  Odessa had come out of the tent five minutes later, dressed in a teeny-weeny bikini and a pair of hiking-boots, and started assembling what looked to Bill like a gyrocopter, but he couldn’t quite tell as her deeply tanned buttocks got in the way quite a bit.

  The Gonks, meanwhile, had Gone On An Adventure. This involved wrapping towels around their heads, finding a good stick to hit things with, taking lots of food with them, and getting lost a great deal. They had found a secret path at the back of the campsite and were busy exploring it.

  ‘Nettles there,’ Morag sung out, pointing.

  ‘Nettles there,’ the rest of the Gonks repeated.

  ‘Brambles there,’ Morag said, pointing with her stick.

  ‘Brambles there,’ the Gonks repeated.

  ‘Impenetrable thicket there, ‘Morag observed, pointing. ‘Impenetrable thicket there,’ the Gonks repeated.

  ‘So you lot clear it away,’ Morag said, sitting down on a grassy patch and taking the Observer’s Guide to Spotting Birds out of her pocket and flicking to the chapter on Kites, Twites and Birds of the Night. ‘And call me when you’ve finished.’

  Bill was vibrating, dangerously near to breaking. He needed nicotine and he needed it now. He was being cool, he knew; chewing on a freshly whittled turnip cigarette, and squinting out of the window in a Bergerac kind of a way. He was waiting for Carol and, by God, she’d better hurry up.

  Carol balanced over the cattle grid, still sucking noisily on her humbug, and took another sniff of the air. You couldn’t do that too often at home, by golly. Carol had let her mind wander across the beautiful day, and was now pulling it back by its little silver thread.

  Bill waved to her from the Volky and she ran over to him.

  ‘Isn’t it a lovely day,’ she enthused. ‘Sun and a little light wind, and the sea is so blue Liz Taylor could make contact lenses out of it.’

  ‘ ’Snot a nice day,’ Bill mulched. ‘ ’Sbloody miserable day.’ Carol looked across at the Range Rover and Odessa, who was just tightening the last bolt on the beach buggy. It had the registration BUM 1.

  ‘Oh, never mind, Bill,’ Carol said. ‘You wouldn’t like to be a show-off like them anyway. Would you?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ Bill said gloomily, climbing out of the Volky and wandering around to the back of the van. He poked a small patch of Polyfilla with his toe. ‘ ’Sexactly what I’d like to be. “Bill Narmo, professional show-off.”’

  ‘But you’ve seen how obnoxious they are,’ Carol tried to soothe. ‘You wouldn’t really like to be like that and have a wetsuit for each day of the week, would you?’

  Bill privately thought that if he had the kind of money that bought a different wetsuit for each day of the week, he would definitely like to be that obnoxious. Possibly he would have a canoe for each day of the month, and, and, and—

  ‘Carol, where’s my fags?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I forgot.’

  ‘Blergh! Are these cooked? Are they actually cooked? I’m probably going to get raw sausage poisoning and die in my prime,’ Lily moaned, spitting out little fragments of half-charred, half-raw sausage.

  ‘Oh, sor-ry,’ Morag said.

  The Gonks had made their way up the newly cleared path, turned a corner and found the wide ocean rather than the sea loch. It shone like a piece of green cellophane with blue light under it, and mirrored the lazy white clouds that had no particular place to go. To celebrate the finding of this new Eden, the Gonks had lit a campfire with Bill’s stolen lighter, and started to tenderly burn sausages on long sticks.

  ‘What’s for afters?’ Josh asked, throwing his empty stick into a thicket.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Morag said, standing up and brushing from her skirt the bits of sausages that were so burnt that even the dog had rejected them. ‘Let’s go back to the Volky and see what’s lying around. Perhaps there might be a nice slice of my bread left.’

  *

  All was not well back at the Volky. Bill had exploded into a nicotine-starved rage about how thoughtless PEOPLE were and how brainless PEOPLE were and why couldn’t PEOPLE just do a simple little thing like buy a packet of fags.

  Carol had shouted back that it wasn’t her fault, she had a lot to think about, and why couldn’t Bill take a little walk and get them his own bloody self?

  Bill was just about to rip back with some scathing retort when the Gonks wandered back wearing the little wide-eyed, innocent look that each one of them had spent hours perfecting in the mirror.

  ‘Ah, the children,’ Carol said to Bill in a meaningful way.

  ‘I don’t care if it’s Angela bloody Rippon. I demand the continuation of this argument,’ Bill shouted back.

  ‘Tough,’ Carol snapped, wiping a few drops of the freshly falling rain from her face.

  ‘Right then,’ Bill said, jutting out his jaw. ‘Right, then. If you refuse to argue, I tell you what’s going to happen. We’re going home, right now.’

  ‘Why?’ the Gonks whined. ‘It was just getting good.’

  ‘Bill, Bill,’ Carol pleaded, ‘you only have to go into the village and buy a packet. We don’t have to go home.’

  ‘I want to,’ Bill said stubbornly. ‘I don’t care if you want to stay here. I want to go home.’

  The Gonks pushed morosely past the still-squabbling Bill and Carol into the van and sat down. They wound up the windows and looked at each other glumly.

  ‘Typical parents,’ Josh said.

  ‘Bickering all the time,’ Lily said. ‘All they do all the time is argue. I don’t know why we bother, I really don’t.’

  ‘I didn’t know we did,’ Aggy said, shaking the rain out of her hair.

  ‘Well, we don’t,’ said Morag easily, ‘but if we did, I wouldn’t know why we did.’

  ‘Why we did what?’ Aggy asked.

  ‘Bothered.’

  ‘I see,’ Aggy said, although she didn’t.

  The sliding door was shut in the middle of howling winds and driving rain, and the dogs had their travelling pills rammed down their throats. The cat hurtled around the interior of the Volky, mewling irritably.

  The Gonk mini-rebellion of Not Bothering was crushed by Morag suggesting a game of Spot the Three-Legged Cow, which guaranteed a lot of shouting. Bill ground the gears and made sure that each bump on the cattle grid was felt by every person in the van. Carol sat stonily in her seat and glared at the inane Thing on a String that bounced from the rear-view mirror.

  Bill drove all the way back to Wolverhampton through pelting rain without buying a single cigarette. He thought it was an effective protest.

  Everyone else thought he was being very stupid.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Aggy and Alison Discuss

  Aggy took Lily’s library ticket from behind a jar of interesting rocks, and slipped it into her coat pocket.

  Morag had lost her own ticket and ‘borrowed’ Josh’s; Josh had ‘borrowed’ Aggy’s, and now Aggy was maintaining the steady flow of things by ‘borrowing’ Lily’s. Everything worked out in a Zen kind of way.

  Bob, the least incontinent of the Narmo dogs, shuffled up to Aggy hopefully. Aggy smiled.

  ‘Yes, all right, you can come,’ she said. ‘I’ll just find your lead.’

  *

  ‘Farewell then, old friend,’ Aggy said, closing the last drawer she intended looking through for the lead.

  Bob whined resignedly. Aggy swooped to kiss his head, thought better of it, patted him, and left the house.

  ‘Helloa there,’ Alison said, shunting the Returned Books trolley away with her knees.

  ‘Hello,’ Aggy rejoined, dumping a huge pile of books on to the desk.

  ‘Did you walk all the way with those?’ Alison laughed, threading a spare paperclip into her hoop earring and starting to sort though the pile.

  ‘No, I collapsed once or twice,’ Aggy said, taking off her granny glasses and polishing them.

  ‘That book you ordered’s arrived,’ Alison remembered, dropping her light pen and bustling into the backroom. ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead,’ she called. ‘A little light reading, huh?’

  ‘It’s mainly about the living, actually,’ Aggy said, lolling on the edge of the desk.

  ‘“You’d better be good or a nasty colour’ll get you when you die,” as far as I can make out. We used to have a copy,’ she added, ‘but Morag spilt Vimto all over it.’

  ‘Not many people have had this out,’ Alison noted, removing the reserve card. ‘Do you want me to stamp it now for you?’ she asked.

  ‘OK,’ Aggy said, toying with some elastic bands. She gave a little snort of contempt. ‘Most of the books I have out no-one seems to have read much.’

  ‘Ugh,’ Alison said, struggling to make the computer accept Lily’s ticket.

  ‘I suppose it’s ’cos they’ve been at school all day,’ Aggy said. ‘I don’t suppose I’d want to learn anything if I’d been at school.’

  ‘Mmmmurf,’ Alison agreed, trying to stop the pious red light from flashing on and off.

  ‘Gup,’ Alison added, stabbing at various buttons on the keyboard. She gave a little frown, and looked up at Aggy.

  ‘Is this your ticket?’ she asked.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Jumble Sale

  ‘Anything and Everything a Truck Can Unload, Is Sold From the Barrow in Portobello Road.’

  Bedknobs and Broomsticks

  With jumble sales, particularly in Wolverhampton, this ‘everything’ can be taken to mean old Reader’s Digests and a lifetime supply of polyester blouses.

  It was a miserable late-November afternoon; all the buildings were so wet they resembled papier mâché models, and the only plant life still alive looked like overboiled cabbage.

  All the Gonks were sitting in the Volky, drowned in winter coats and woolly hats with obscene bobbles on. Carol was driving. There was a general smell of wet hair and aniseed balls.

  Bill had been left at home struggling on a little ditty called ‘Happy Menopause!’ that would hopefully pay for Christmas.

  ‘—take charge of Poppy, I don’t want her wandering off and biting someone again,’ Carol was saying over her shoulder. ‘Make sure she buys sensible things; no more pink girdles, please.’

  ‘Can’t Lily look after her this time?’ Morag moaned. ‘Poppy always comes up to me with something small, black and lacy and says “Wot dis?” very loudly.’

  ‘I looked after her last time,’ Lily said indignantly.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ Morag said. ‘You watched her. You watched her savage a stallholder, you watched her tealeafing an emu, you watched her—’

  ‘Shush,’ Carol said. ‘We’re here now. We’ll park round the corner and walk. I’m not backing into that poky space.’

  It was ten to two. A small sparrow picked at a discarded hamburger and wished it hadn’t. An irate husband left home for the last time, suitcase under his arm, and a small child picked up a discarded syringe and wondered what it was. A shaft of sunlight tried to struggle through the closely packed houses and tower blocks and fell, for an instant, on an old Coke can lying in the middle of the pavement. This was home to a family of slugs. Mother Slug was just regurgitating some mouldy newspaper she had mistaken for a frozen pizza, as supper for her seventy children and their friends who had come round uninvited. Father Slug was settling down with a piece of pizza he’d mistaken for an evening newspaper. The family ant was chewing at a slipper, and the kitchen clock ticked away quietly. Father Slug turned a page and noted a headline.

  ‘Mother,’ he said, rustling the pages importantly. ‘Mother.’

  ‘Woooolvf?’ she replied, her mouth full of sick.

  ‘It says here that there’s been another massacre in the Allotments; over six hundred, they think.’

  Mother Slug made sympathetic noises and passed the plates round.

  ‘My brother Alan lives over that way,’ he commented. ‘I wonder if he’s all right.’

  ‘I expect he’s fine,’ Mother Slug soothed.

  ‘I’ll pop over and see him tomorrow,’ Mr Slug resolved, and immediately felt better for it.

  Unfortunately, he was unable to do any such thing, for at that moment a foot in a scruffy trainer came crunching down, squashing the can flat, killing all the slugs and making life very difficult for the family ant.

  ‘Why do I have to pay for all her stuff as well?’ Morag groaned, kicking the squashed can to one side. ‘I mean, she always gets really stupid things and I—’

  ‘Oh Morag, shut up,’ Lily and Josh said in unison.

  The Narmos rounded the corner, and the Old-As-You-Feel Club loomed before them. The waiting queue snaked around the soggy fir tree planted outside and resembled a Chinese dragon made of bobble hats and blue rinses.

  The doors opened on the dot of eight minutes past two, the delay being caused by Mrs Harris’s walking frame getting stuck in the Ladies.

  A sudden surge from the back of the queue shunted those at the front forwards, causing several malfunctions of pacemakers on the Admissions table, as fifty hard-faced jumble-salers shot towards them, folding down plastic rain hoods and struggling with their loose change at the same time.

  Poppy found herself separated from the rest of her family in the panic and stood for a minute, wondering what to do.

  Then she wandered casually over to the Bras and Jars Stall.

  ‘Where’s Poppy?’ Morag bellowed across the seething hall.

  ‘What?’ Carol mouthed.

  ‘Poppy? POPPY? P-O-P-P-Y?’

  Carol signed back her non-comprehension. Morag sighed, and started looking for her littlest sister. She found her, busily stuffing black shiny nighties into her carrier bag.

  ‘Poppy!’ Morag said, pulling the nighties out of the bag and replacing them on the stall before dragging her sister away. ‘Not those things. Nasty. Urgh.’

  ‘They p’incess jessis,’ Poppy insisted, trying to charge back to the stall whilst Morag held her back by her hood.

  ‘No, Poppy, they’re not,’ Morag said, eyeing with fading hope the rapidly diminishing heap of shoes she had hoped to comb through. ‘Why don’t you buy some toys? Look, there’s still some left over there. Nice teddies.’

  ‘Oh, hotay,’ Poppy said condescendingly, and trudged over to the Toy Stall.

  ‘No, not that either,’ Morag said, taking the metre and a half high Smurf from under Poppy’s arm. It leaked a small puddle of polystyrene chips on to the floor.

  ‘I wot it,’ Poppy said, lowering her brows to the top of her nose.

  ‘No,’ Morag said, ‘it’s nasty and urgh.’

  ‘I luff it,’ Poppy pleaded, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. A few worn-out jumblers who were sitting on the unsold sofa started to mutter in sympathy with Poppy.

  ‘It’s got things living in it and things hanging off it,’ Morag said, regarding it at arm’s length.

  ‘It’s my best f’end,’ Poppy insisted, one fat salt-tear rolling down her face and landing on the floor in a sad little puddle.

  Morag looked at her in despair.

  Poppy gave a little sniff that indicated such a weight of misery that surely her tiny body would break.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh, how much?’ Morag demanded of the stallholder grumpily, rifling in her pocket.