My Nasty Neighbours Read online

  My Nasty Neighbours

  ‘I laughed so much I got the hiccups’

  THE IRISH TIMES

  ‘Full marks for originality and readability’

  BOOKS IRELAND

  ‘Such an enjoyable read … hilarious one-liners’

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS IN IRELAND

  WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT Cherokee

  ‘Original, beautifully fresh’

  ROBERT DUNBAR, CHILDREN’S BOOKS IN IRELAND

  ‘A major find’

  BOOKS IRELAND

  To Bob, with love

  Contents

  Reviews

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Happy Families

  Beauty is Only Skin Deep …

  … and So is Ugliness

  The Letter

  Plans are Drawn Up

  The Journey

  The Ship

  The Medal

  The Search

  The Party’s Over

  Farewell, Elm Close!

  Moving

  David: 1 Parents: 0

  Freedom

  Perfect Parents

  Triumph …

  … and Disaster

  Great Pretender

  The Fire Dims

  A Mess

  Illness

  Spend, Spend, Spend!

  A Blaze

  A Hero

  Another Hero and Another Win

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Happy Families

  There should be a law against people talking to you when you’re trying to watch TV.

  I’d just settled on my sofa when Mum began. ‘David, I have a distinct memory that twelve years ago I taught you to walk! All you seem to do nowadays is lie on that sofa and gawp at the television set.’

  Notice that word ‘gawp’. I gawp; you watch; they view. Mum was rattled, and I wasn’t going to get any peace.

  I patted the cushions around me. I like six for complete comfort – three under my head, one under my left elbow and two propping up my feet.

  ‘I’m just relaxing,’ I pointed out reasonably. ‘I am allowed to relax, aren’t I?’ There is no point sitting up to watch television when you can lie down.

  And I was just in from rugby practice so it wasn’t as if I hadn’t had any exercise. Take it from me, I am definitely the fittest member of the Stirling family, made up of Mum, Dad, my brother Ian, and sister Helen and myself! Mum and Dad look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Ian’s the original eight-stone weakling and although Helen makes a big deal about keeping fit – she puts on a leotard, trainers and a sweat-band to lift three-pound weights – I can still pick her up and put her on top of the wardrobe when she annoys me. At my school, St Joseph’s, the three Rs aren’t Reading, ’Riting and ’Rithmetic but Rugby, Rugby and Rugby. I’ve played since I started at St Joseph’s at the age of seven and I’d just got a place on the A side.

  So after lunch on that Tuesday I battled for every minute of the hour-long practice. I was thumped, winded and booted in the ribs; I deserved some peace and entertainment. I wanted to watch ‘Gladiators’ which I’d videoed from the previous Saturday. Mum obviously had other plans.

  She padded through to the kitchen in her boat-like sheepskin slippers, still complaining, but I could tell that she was just taking it out on me for something either Helen or Ian had done. Being the youngest member of the family I’m the punch-bag for the other Stirlings to hit at. Luckily I’m also the biggest member of the family.

  ‘What’s up?’ I called out, planning to follow up this sympathetic question with an order for hot buttered toast. Fortunately the roars of the ‘Gladiator’ audience drowned out most of Mum’s moaning.

  ‘… becoming impossible, David,’ I heard, ‘… untidiness, lack of consideration …’

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ I went on. Wolf was in good form. It took him just five seconds to whack his opponent off the pedestal. I wouldn’t mind having a go at that, preferably with Ian as my opponent.

  There was a time when Ian had seemed perfect. He’s blond and when he was a kid he had the angelic sort of looks that adults like. A fresh, open expression like a cherub.

  And if he’d whipped out a small harp and begun playing, nobody would have been surprised. He was always musical. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t playing at least two musical instruments. He was already playing the violin at four years old when I was born – and I bet he didn’t even stop playing to say hello. By the age of six he was playing the piano as well. He’s got a great singing voice too, so he won a scholarship to St Patrick’s which has a choir for the cathedral.

  By my age he had the best voice in the school, which probably meant one of the best voices in the country and he sang solo in the cathedral services. The choir even made a record with Ian singing ‘Ave Maria’.

  Mum and Dad always talked about him having a career in music and it looked as if they were right, but not in the way they intended.

  ‘… chance of a cup of tea?’ I repeated.

  ‘What? What?’ Mum stomped through. ‘He’s like a stranger,’ she said. ‘A hideous, intrusive stranger.’

  Well, he could hardly be expected to look like Little Lord Fauntleroy all his life, I thought, but I gave Mum a sympathetic nod and asked, ‘Got any hot buttered toast?’

  Mum gave me a fierce look and went back to the kitchen. But she kept on complaining, ‘… playing that dreadful racket all through the day when he should be studying.’

  When Ian was fourteen, his voice started to break which meant he couldn’t control the sounds he made and he would squeak and grunt when he was singing. Mum, Dad and the school knew this would happen eventually and anyway Ian was now playing the violin and piano brilliantly. He got top marks in his exams accompanied by comments like, ‘an exceptional talent – wonderful!’

  So when he asked for a drum kit for his fifteenth birthday, Mum and Dad were shocked.

  ‘You mean you want to study percussion – in an orchestra?’ Dad asked hopefully. He could boast to his fellow civil servants in the Data Protection Commission about that.

  ‘No, Dad, I mean I want to play the drums – in a rock band,’ Ian corrected.

  ‘But, darling,’ Mum wailed, ‘You’re a musician, not a drummer!’

  Nevertheless Ian got his drum kit. The walls shook as he practised. It was impossible to watch television, study, do anything when Ian was playing. Our house, 11, Elm Close seemed to be suffering its own localised earthquake.

  He formed a group called the Oily Rags and, as Dad put it, ‘promptly started to look like one’. He wore greasy black clothes, his face became a mixture of bristles and spots and he wore a razor blade in his left ear.

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ was Ian’s usual reply to Mum and Dad’s complaints that he was ruining his brilliant future.

  ‘… thinks he’s going to be a big rock star.’ Mum’s voice increased in volume as she thrust a plate of hot buttered toast into my hands.

  Perhaps she was trying to drown out the noise from Ian’s bedroom, where the house of Heavy Metal was tuning up, with a clash of cymbals and a drum roll.

  I turned up the telly and rewound the video. I wanted to watch again that bit where Wolf hammered his opponent across the head and shoulders.

  That’s the great thing about TV – it lets you escape from the harsh realities of life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Beauty is Only Skin Deep …

  Three cups of tea later and I was heading upstairs to the loo. This was when having one bathroom and a sister like Helen became a real liability. She was training to be a beautician which meant she ‘studied’ things like cuticles and revised eye-lash tint
.

  The door was locked. I heaved my right shoulder against it and yelled over the noise of Ian’s drums, ‘Helen, come out! I need to go in there!’

  Silence from within, apart from the slight sound of someone moving beauty products about. My eighteen-year-old sister has simple looks – long, blond hair, blue eyes and a figure like those ‘Baywatch’ girls. And at least she was getting qualified, and, with Mum and Dad qualifications are a must. A fully qualified contract killer would be better than an unqualified genius who played for Ireland and painted masterpieces on his day off. But Helen’s career choice was still a disappointment. There’d been huge rows about it.

  ‘You’re passing up an opportunity I would have died for!’ Dad kept saying. He was really clever at school, had won the Literature Prize every year, Gran kept on (and kept on) telling us – but there’d been no money for university. Now his daughter refused to go.

  I hammered on the door again. ‘Helen, hurry up! What are you doing in there?’

  ‘I’m nearly finished,’ came Helen’s unflustered voice. She never hurried.

  ‘Skip the last dozen products and Get Out Here!’ I yelled.

  About eighty products have to be applied daily. They fill our one and only bathroom and it takes so long to apply all these creams, gels, mousses, sprays and lotion that Helen’s ready to start taking them off just after she’s finished putting them on.

  Mum called from the bottom of the stairs, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s Helen, Mum. She’s hogging the bathroom!’

  Mum came up the stairs and knocked on the door. ‘Helen, show some consideration for others, please!’

  ‘I’ll be two minutes!’ called Helen, sweetness itself.

  ‘Which two minutes?’ I asked gruffly. ‘One minute now and another in an hour’s time perhaps?’

  Mum got wild and hammered on the door too, shouting, ‘Beauty is only skin deep!’

  The door opened and Helen glided out. As I rushed in I heard Mum interrogating Helen about her date that evening.

  ‘Who is he? Where did you meet him? Do we know him?’

  Helen remained calm until Mum asked ‘Who do we know who knows him?’

  ‘Mum! How should I know? What do you want – references?’ she said sharply and slammed her bedroom door.

  Mum sloped off down the stairs. ‘I’m just concerned for you, darling.’

  I looked into Helen’s room. She was painting her nails. ‘Are you going for a meal?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Where’s tonight’s dream date taking you?’ I asked enviously. Helen specialised in boyfriends with fast cars and large wallets. So it would be somewhere with great food and Helen would eat about three carrots and one bean. Food was wasted on her. I wished we had a dog so I could persuade her boyfriends to bring back doggy bags. Silver the cat never got offered anything.

  ‘His name’s Harry, and he’s choosing,’ Helen answered.

  ‘Get him to try that new place in Rathmines!’ I shouted, as I headed downstairs to the kitchen. Just the thought of all that food made me feel hungry.

  ‘What a waste!’ I muttered.

  Mum misunderstood me. ‘Of a wonderful mind,’ she added, shaking her head. ‘Helen got the second highest marks ever in Ireland in her Leaving Cert Latin exam,’ she told me. ‘Ever,’ she stressed. ‘In the whole country.’

  I took a packet of biscuits. ‘Yup! Remind me to tell Harry that when he turns up,’ I said, heading back to my TV. ‘That’ll impress him.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  … and So is Ugliness

  It was some time before the noise of the doorbell penetrated Ian’s drum roll. I let Mum answer the door, after all, she was already on her feet and I was still resting on the sofa. I recognised the voices of our nearest neighbours, nos 9 and 13.

  ‘Mrs Stirling, what’s going on in here?’ I heard Mr no 9 asking. ‘It sounds as if you’ve got a pile driver upstairs.’

  ‘That’s Ian. He’s an oily rag,’ Mum sighed.

  ‘Just because he goes to that cathedral school doesn’t make him more holy than the rest of us!’ snapped the woman from no 13.

  ‘Not “holy”, I said “oily”–’ began Mum but Mr no 9 wouldn’t let her get any further.

  ‘–and who keeps thumping on the bathroom door? It’s interfering with our TV reception.’

  ‘Not Helen, definitely,’ Mum answered.

  I sighed. It looked as if my exceptional diplomatic skills were needed. I joined Mum at the door. Mrs no 13 was off, ‘That drumming goes right through you,’ she explained, ‘like… like–’

  ‘–a dose of salts?’ I suggested, giving her a friendly smile.

  She shook her head, ‘–like a knife. It goes through you like a knife.’

  Piercing. Knives don’t go through you, and if they did you’d have more than a headache, but, tactful as ever, I didn’t point this out. And the charm offensive paid off because Mrs no 13 smiled at me and said, ‘David? My, you have grown.’

  I’d grown from four foot eight to five foot seven inches in less than a year so I had heard this comment before. Strangely enough, I’d also noticed for myself, but I just grinned back and was beginning to think that the mood of the mob was changing when no 13’s husband chipped in.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s why the stairs reverberate. It’s him leaping about.’

  I stood still, trying to look like someone who rarely moved.

  I can get up the stairs in three steps and reach the top before the sitting-room door slams, but I decided not to mention this and no 13 got the conversation back to the subject of the drumming. ‘That’s what brings on the migraine,’ she said. ‘They last about three days, after which I go completely deaf – and numb. No feeling in my ears at all …’

  A red BMW pulled up outside.

  ‘… then paralysis spreads down one side. First the right side, though you can still feel a tingling in your fingers …’

  A middle-aged man in a sharp suit got out and stared at the house. I hoped he might be a distraction, but the doorstep crowd was unstoppable.

  ‘This can’t all be due to Ian’s drumming, surely,’ Mum exclaimed.

  ‘Quite right, Mrs Stirling. Quite right,’ said Mrs no 13. ‘There’s also the thumping on the bathroom walls. Last Wednesday we couldn’t watch telly because our wall started to judder. What was going on?’

  ‘May I interrupt?’ came a new voice from the back. It was the man from the BMW.

  But no 9 got in first. ‘Now, look, Mrs Stirling,’ he said, using his I’m-a-reasonable-man type of voice. ‘I’m a reasonable man, but the noise has got to stop. It’s affecting my wife’s nerves.’

  Mum said in a small voice, ‘I am sorry. We’ll all make a determined effort to keep the noise down.’

  At that moment the hat stand in the hall corner that I was leaning against toppled over. As coats and hats fell around me, I made a grab for some of them and discovered I was holding on to the tracksuit top I’d lost three months before.

  ‘Great!’ I shouted. I looked up to find a circle of grim-faced neighbours glaring at me.

  The stranger looked even more care-worn than they did, though he attempted a smile. ‘I just wanted to say–’ he began.

  ‘Let me finish this first!’ snapped Mr no 9. ‘Here,’ he said, handing Mum an envelope, ‘this is for you.’

  Mum reached forward to take the envelope reluctantly, and I closed the door quickly. The chimes went again immediately.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ I said firmly.

  I could see Mum was worried about the letter. The neighbours had shaken her. I took the brown envelope from her. There was no number on it, just:

  Mrs C Stirling

  Elm Close

  Blackrock

  ‘I’ll open it for you, Mum,’ I told her. I was beginning to fear the worst. Nos 9 and 13 could have ganged up to take legal action against us.

  ‘What is it?’ Mum asked, her voice shaking.
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br />   ‘I’m not sure. It’s from Higgins & Stop, Solicitors.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Letter

  I followed Mum into the kitchen. She was turning the letter over in her hands, but not reading it. Dad, like Silver the cat, has an uncanny knack of knowing when to appear and when to disappear. He had missed the visit from the neighbours, now he came in followed by the man with the red BMW.

  ‘I met this …’ Dad started. But when he saw Mum’s face he left the man in the hall, closed the kitchen door and asked abruptly, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘No 9 just gave me a solicitor’s letter,’ Mum told him.

  Dad took the letter from me and read it through swiftly.

  ‘Are they suing us?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Suing? Who?’ Dad replied.

  ‘The neighbours.’

  Dad looked baffled. ‘Why should they? They didn’t know your uncle Albert, did they?’

  It was Mum’s turn to look baffled. ‘Uncle Albert wouldn’t complain about the noise we make. He lives hundreds of miles away in Waltham Abbey. Anyway he’s tone deaf.’

  Her face brightened for a moment. ‘He wouldn’t mind Ian being an Oily Rag. He’d be a wonderful neighbour!’

  Dad was re-reading the letter from Higgins & Stop. ‘Uncle Albert live next door? It’s a bit late for that, I’m afraid,’ he said, handing Mum the letter to read.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘And he’s left his entire estate to me,’ Mum said slowly, looking at the letter again as if she didn’t quite believe it.

  I’d only met my great uncle Albert a few times. He lived in Essex in the south of England, too far away for a day visit. And we never stayed overnight with him, Mum said it was too unhygenic. Great Uncle Albert was a miser. He kept deep within his house, surrounded by the junk that was stacked high all around him. Narrow corridors wound between the piles of newspapers, overflowing boxes and souvenirs from his travels. He had some brilliant things too. My favourite was a sailing ship woven out of glass. About a metre high, it stood on the mantelpiece in the sitting-room, covered by a glass dome. The sea was also glass, spun like white candy floss. Pirates – Long John Silver; sailors – Admiral Lord Nelson; all the swash-buckling films ever watched were compressed into that ship in my imagination.