We’re leaving. Go and pack your things.
That’s what my father said to me, his suit crinkling as he knelt down onto the patio. I was in the middle of sorting out my ladybird colony and was rather cross about being interrupted. One of the dead members – Tiffany, who had been crushed earlier when I was building them a hut out of rocks – seemed not to be quite so dead after all, and I was enjoying watching her come back to life. Dad was interrupting.
‘Kitty, we need to go,’ he said, trying to get my attention. I kept looking at the ladybirds. ‘Leave that, please. We’re packing up the house. You need to come and help.’
‘Help?’
I said it as a question, but I didn’t really want to hear an answer. I said it like that to make it clear that the very idea was stupid. I wasn’t going to help us leave. My garden was my kingdom, even if it was a boring, straight, nearly-perfect square at the back of our house in Grays, Essex. Tidy, Dad called it. I measured it one Christmas, enjoying the crunch of my boots as the metre wheel I’d borrowed from our neighbour Mr Jeffers sliced through the snow drifts. Eight metres, then seven and a half, then eight, then the house taking up nine. So not quite a perfect square, but close.
‘Your help is required,’ he said, bluntly, before walking away. His blunt days used to be rare and not last long. But recently, he’d become like this more and more, telling me to do things more like a teacher at school. The rest of that afternoon and evening was spent packing up our things. One side of the lounge was for boxes of ‘rubbish’, the other for ‘keep’. Then we stopped for tea. Dad told Mum to order a pizza but she was crying too much to use the phone – her hand kept shaking and her tears went everywhere. He phoned them in the end. Three large pepperoni pizzas with extra cheese. We won’t eat it all, he explained. Just so we have some extra for the morning. For the journey.
I think he expected me to ask where we were going. Why we were going. What we were going to do when we got there. But I sometimes enjoyed doing the unexpected: it usually caused more interesting things to happen. Dad dropped a few hints: ‘You’ll need your wellington boots’ and ‘Bring your cassette tapes and your Walkman. It will be a long drive.’ I responded to all these instructions with my best blank face until he wandered away shaking his head.
The pizzas made us sleepy, but we hadn’t quite finished packing and Mum kept having her ‘moments’. The biggest came when Dad found her using a permanent marker to scribble over the faces of laughing women on the cover of a magazine. He was holding some wine glasses when he chose to confront her. ‘Put down the pen, Marjory,’ he said gently. Her reaction wasn’t gentle.
Once Dad had bandaged his hand and cleared up the blood, Mum had calmed enough to be settled down onto her bed. Sleep now, she was told, and she did, as if her off switch had been flipped. It wasn’t always that easy.
Once Mum had fallen asleep, Dad and I carried on packing in silence. I did it without making a fuss as I didn’t want to go to bed; he didn’t seem in any hurry to send me there. I think it was about one o’clock in the morning when he finally said we should stop. ‘We’ll be leaving at 5.30. Get some sleep.’
‘Why do we have to pack up and tidy the place? Are we never coming back?’
I didn’t think Dad was going to answer at first; he was staring at the floor, kicking the vacuum cleaner cord out of his way. ‘We will be, don’t worry. We’re just letting some people stay in our house for a bit.’
‘Who are these people?’ I asked.
‘People who will pay us money to stay here while we’re … away.’
I was about to tell him I didn’t understand, but he spoke again before I could: ‘Go to bed, now. We’ll load the car in the morning.’
I left him in the lounge. He was still wearing the suit he wore when he was at work selling his insurance stuff.
It would be the last time I saw him wearing it for quite a long time. But I didn’t know that then.