Henry runs with me along the side of the cricket pitch.
‘I can’t believe they’ve done that – I mean, who would vandalise a beautiful pitch like that? I was hoping to be the opening batsman. No chance now, it’ll be called off.’
I think of Mum and Miss Primrose and Mr Dent. Any of them would be capable of it at the moment.
‘Sorry, Henry. It’s a shame,’ I say, kicking through a mess of crumbled polystyrene surrounding a half-carved polystyrene torso.
‘And Ursula, is she always that rude?’ Henry shakes his head. ‘I could have thumped her – although of course I wouldn’t thump a girl, but really.’
I can see him blinking back tears.
‘She’s rude to me too,’ I say. ‘In fact she’s almost never not rude.’
‘Yeah, but she was rudest to me,’ says Henry, swallowing. He’s right. She was much nastier to him; it’s as if she’s got no feelings while he’s got loads. ‘Thanks for standing up for me, Sam.’
‘S’all right,’ I mutter. ‘Sometimes, she’s just…’ I run through the millions of words I could use to describe her. ‘…impossible.’
We pause for breath; I lean down with my hands on my knees, and pant. A strange strangled sound floats across the common. ‘Someone in trouble?’ asks Henry.
I focus on the distant trees, but I can’t really see anything. ‘I think it’s an instrument. A horn?’
We listen. It reminds me of the music in Dad’s car, and the tape that Miss Primrose inflicted on the girls. Not really music at all.
‘Do we need tinfoil? For the movie?’ he asks, pointing at the Grocery Basket Ever Open Convenience Store, across the road.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But I haven’t got any money.’
‘I have,’ says Henry. ‘I’ll pay.’
I hate to take advantage of Henry; just because everyone else does doesn’t mean I should too, but we always use shed-loads of tinfoil to make Ursula’s films. That and Derf guns.
‘That would be kind,’ I say.
‘No probs,’ says Henry, stopping outside the Grocery Basket and peering in through the open door. Normally, Mrs Mytych is busy sorting the shelves, but today she’s nowhere to be seen.
We search for the tinfoil, and pick up three bumper family turkey-sized rolls. Henry puts a packet of mints on the counter along with the tinfoil and two banknotes and we wait.
There’s rustling behind the counter, and Mrs Mytych’s eyes appear over the top. She’s wearing a motorbike helmet and holding a long wooden stick. She looks from side to side, studying the rest of the shop, and shoots a glance out of the door. She sighs and stands up, ringing the rolls of tinfoil through the till and reaching out for Henry’s money.
‘Just you boys?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘No…’ she begins, opening her battered Polish/English dictionary to find the words, ‘…grown-up?’
‘Are you all right, Mrs Mytych?’ asks Henry.
She leans forward, her bike helmet almost touching the counter. ‘I is OK. But boys, be careful. The world is upside down here,’ she says. ‘They are doing fancy dress.’ She points out of the window towards the cricket pitch.
‘Right you are,’ says Henry, offering me and Mrs Mytych a mint.
I take one, stuff the tinfoil into my backpack and we leave the shop, running.
I slip in through our front door and catch an odd smell, chemical, like petrol stations.
That and coffee.
I don’t think the policeman could have been; it’s only ten to five.
In the sitting room, Marcus is shooting things on the TV. But nothing else looks at all like it did last week. The sofa’s gone; so have all the lights. Loose cables hang from the walls, torches burn on the mantelpiece, Finn appears dressed in a towel and socks, eating more chocolate. Dad’s sitting in the chair he took from the museum, holding a pair of walking sticks across his chest.
‘Hi, Sam,’ he says. ‘Shoes off in my presence.’
Marcus rolls his eyes at me and points at his bare feet, so I take off my shoes and socks.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say, going upstairs to my bedroom. I close the door and lean against the inside, trying not to panic, but even my room’s changed.
Where my pillow and my rocket ship duvet should be, is half a wooden salad bowl, and nothing else. The sheet and the mattress have gone too.
‘Sam, my revered second son,’ says Mum, stepping into the bedroom, clutching a large mug and a carrier bag.
‘Mum, where’s everything gone? Where’s my pillow?’
‘Pillow?’ She looks at me oddly. ‘You mean the filthy bag of feathers?’ She pulls a sheet of blue sacking from the carrier bag and lays it on the bed.
I wouldn’t have called my pillow filthy, but she’s probably right. If you looked under a microscope, there’s probably a universe of bugs living in there. Nothing compared to Marcus’s though.
‘Yes?’
She points at the wooden bowl. ‘This, oh my revered son, is a head rest. Much cleaner. And more in keeping.’
‘In keeping with what?’ I say. But Mum’s already heading out of the room, leaving a burning oil lamp on the floor as she goes.
Apart from anything else, it’s only a matter of time before the house burns down.
BAM!
I stick my head out of the window.
BAM!
Outside on the street, is a thing like a catapult. It’s mostly made of wooden pallets and an old Mini, and surrounded by thickset men with unusually brown legs. The rugby club? Only they’re not really the rugby club because they’re all wearing skirts, or kind of skirts. They’ve fired a load of rubbish in carrier bags at our front door.
Leading them is the policeman; he’s wearing his uniform with a skirt on top.
‘What on earth?’ I shout down to them.
‘Ah – lad,’ says the policeman, putting his hand up to the others. ‘Come to sort out your Egyptians.’
I race down and open the door. The policeman’s got that distant look in his eyes. ‘Why’ve you brought that with you?’ I ask, pointing at the catapult.
He picks his way over the rubbish. ‘Always does to be prepared,’ he says. ‘Now – let’s have a look at them.’
I’m tempted to shut the door in his face, but decide to let him in. The other men push their catapult on down the street, looking for another house to attack.
He stops in front of Dad. ‘Ave!’ he says, raising his arm in salute.
Dad leaps to his feet and waves a walking stick in the air like a propeller. ‘Out!’ he shouts. ‘Out of my house! Vandal! Colonialist! Roman!’
I stare at the policeman. He’ll arrest Dad for sure now, won’t he?
‘Now, now, sir, no need to talk to me like that, let’s be civilised…’
But he doesn’t get a chance to be civilised, because Mum appears behind him with a short plank of wood and brings it down on his head.
The policeman folds to the floor.
‘MUM!’ I shout. ‘What’ve you done?’
‘She has most excellently defeated the Roman,’ says Dad, clapping his hands. ‘Now we will have a slave; top work, my queen.’
Mum does a kind of bow, picks up the policeman’s legs and drags him out of the French windows. I follow, just in time to rescue his head from a pile of cement.
‘But, Mum, he’s a policeman, you can’t do this, you’ll be in real trouble.’
Mum drops his feet, and ties his hands together with washing line. ‘Fear not, esteemed second son of Lloyd, this is the way of the pharaohs.’
I stand, letting the policeman’s head fall gently back to the ground, and look around.
Now I’m out here, I can see what they’re doing. They’re building a pyramid. An Egyptian one. It’s actually very good; there are no lumps of mortar sticking out of the joins. It’s completely smooth.
‘Second son,’ says Dad, behind me, switching on the cement mixer. ‘Behold the great pyramid of Lloyd.’
‘Dad?’ I say.
‘We have built this in anticipation of our deaths, and secured it against the lowly tomb robbers of the desert. See here, the secret of the tombs.’
He points to a tiny slit cut in the side of the pyramid.
‘In there?’
‘Oh yes, second son, we will fit, one after the other, and be sealed inside; forever. Buried properly according to the laws of the pharaohs.’ I can’t see his face properly, but he doesn’t sound like he’s joking.
Dad shovels more sand into the cement mixer.
‘So are you thinking of dying sometime soon?’ I ask, as Mum ties the policeman’s feet together with his bootlaces.
‘The moon.’ Dad points at the sky. ‘She is nearly at the zenith. When she is, the gods will take her away, and then it is foretold that I, Lloyd the first, shall die, and in my place shall rule Lloyd the second.’
‘Marcus?’
‘And under his reign, the crops will prosper and the famines will cease. This…’ He points at next door’s greenhouse. ‘All this will be gone and the desert will return.’
‘And I will die too, oh second son,’ says Mum, cheerfully. ‘So you will need to know how to bury according to the rules of the pharaohs.’
‘Will I? Couldn’t Marcus do it?’
‘He will be taking on the mantle of kingship, you will be his priest. Come, follow.’
Mum opens the kitchen door. Inside, the preserving pan’s bubbling on the gas and the room’s full of noxious smoke.
Some deep memory jumps into my mind. When I was Finn’s age, we must have gone to the museum for a ‘hands-on exploration day’. Somebody was there making something that smelled just like this stuff. He had a little gas burner, and a vat of stinky chemicals. He talked about salts, and preserving things.
Embalming fluid.
Yikes!
‘You empty the organs into the canopic jars.’ She points at the coffee, tea and sugar pots. ‘And you will stopper the orifices…’
‘Mum! Stop! I’m Sam, I’m eleven. I’m not a high priest. I play with Derf guns and make things out of cardboard.’
She blinks.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea about mummification, or embalming or any of that stuff.’
For a moment, something shines in her eye, a little fragment of Mum, but it clouds over and she says, ‘You will learn.’