is a school hero ’cause of Tom. Nick said the Sheffield was just an unlucky fluke. Our anti-missile systems’ll be modified to knock out the Exocets from now on. So we should be getting our islands back pretty soon. The Sun’s paying £100 for the best anti-Argie joke. I can’t do jokes, but I’m keeping a scrapbook about the war. I’m cutting out stuff from the newspapers and magazines. Neal Brose is keeping one too. He reckons it’ll be worth a fortune twenty or thirty years from now when the Falklands War has turned into history. But all this excitement’ll never turn dusty and brown in archives and libraries. No way. People’ll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of the world.
Mum was at the dining-room table surrounded by bank papers when I got back from school. Dad’s fireproof document box was out and open. Through the kitchen hatch I asked if she’d had a good day.
‘Not a “good day” exactly,’ Mum didn’t take her eyes off her calculator, ‘but it’s certainly been a real revelation.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, doubting it. I got a couple of Digestives and a glass of Ribena. Julia’d snaffled all the Jaffa Cakes ’cause she’s at home all day revising for her A-levels. Greedy moo. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Skateboarding.’
I should’ve just gone upstairs. ‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Toad.’
One unsarky answer to one simple question, that’s all I wanted. ‘Doesn’t Dad usually do all the bank statements and stuff?’
‘Yes.’ Mum finally looked at me. ‘Isn’t your lucky old father in for a pleasant surprise when he comes home?’ Something vicious’d got into her voice. It pulled the knot in my guts so tight I still can’t loosen it.
Wish it had been toad for dinner, not tinned carrots, baked beans and Heinz meatballs in gravy. A plate of browny orange. Mum can cook real food, when relatives visit, say. She’s on a work-to-rule till she gets her rockery, I reckon. Dad said it was ‘utterly delicious’. His sarcasm didn’t bother with camoflauge. Neither did Mum’s. ‘I am glad you think so.’ (What Mum and Dad say to each other’s half a world away from what they mean, these days. Ordinary polite words shouldn’t be so toxic but they can be.) That was all they said, just about, for the entire meal. Pudding was apple sponge. The syrup trail from my spoon was the path of our marines. To forget the atmosphere, I bravely led our lads yomping over custard snow to ultimate victory in Port Stanley.
It was Julia’s turn to do the dishes but we’ve become sort of allies in the last couple of weeks so I dried for her. My sister’s not totally revolting all the time. She even spoke a bit about her boyfriend Ewan while we did the dishes. His mum’s in the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. She’s the percussionist and gets to crash the cymbals and play the thundery kettle drums, which sounds an ace laugh. But Hangman’s been giving me a hard time since Mum and Dad’s last barney when Mum smashed the plate. So I let Julia do most of the talking. The war’s become the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing at night, so it’s nice to hear about something else. Evening sunshine flooded the valley floor between our garden and the Malverns.
The tulips are black plum, emulsion white and yolky gold.
Mum and Dad must’ve called a weird peacefire while we’d been in the kitchen ’cause after the washing-up they sat at the table and seemed to be talking normally about the day and stuff. Julia’d asked if they’d like a cup of coffee and Dad’d said, ‘That’d be lovely, darling’ and Mum said, ‘Thank you, sweetheart.’ I told myself I’d misread the signs completely when I got back from school, and my gut-knot unworried itself a bit looser. Dad was telling Mum a funny story about how his boss Craig Salt’d let Dad’s trainee Danny Lawlor drive Craig Salt’s DeLorean sports car round a go-karting track on a team-building weekend. So instead of sloping off upstairs I went into the living room to watch Tomorrow’s World on TV.
That’s how I heard Mum launch her ambush. ‘By the way, Michael. Why did you take out a second mortgage with NatWest for five thousand pounds in January?’
Five thousand pounds! Our house only cost twenty-two!
In the future, according to Tomorrow’s World, cars will drive themselves along strips implanted in roads. We’ll just punch in our destination. There’ll never be