The Twelfth of November Two Thousand and Eleven. Saturday.
Mum was going to kill me. Even though a drunk with a cone on his head that shot green lasers was trying to evaporate me I was more worried about the fallout when she saw that her Elvis picture with the little LEDs that spelled out V-E-G-A-S had been destroyed. She was going to be livid. I could see this weighed on Amber's mind too because she flung herself at the cone drunk in a rage.
'You pillock! You've damned us all to a living hell!' was her battle cry. She leapt on to the back of the drunk and attempted to pull the cone off his head. She succeeded – sort of. The cone came off but so did the head. It wasn't gory or anything. It popped off as if it was a bit of Lego, causing Amber to go flying onto her back. Whatever this creature was, it wasn't flesh and blood. She still had the cone in her hands until the headless body, seemingly undeterred by being decapitated, snatched it back off her. Amber scrambled away in the confusion.
'How can it see where its going with no head?' she yelled at me.
'The same way it can see with a cone over its eyes – I don't pigging know!' I looked over at Cabriatti to see if he had any explanation. He gave me a Renaissance shrug.
Back to the pressing matter of not being evaporated. The drunk now held its cone head in its hands and pointed it toward whatever target it chose. Either it was unable to reattach it or it had realised that it would get a better aim this way. I hid behind the kitchen door. Cabriatti and Amber had retreated to the living room. The deadly cone swung between the two extremes before finally deciding to come my way. Typical.
I ran for the back door and was grateful to find I'd left the key in even though Mum and Dad had made it quite clear not to do that. I fumbled to unlock and open it just as a blast of greenness streaked across the kitchen and disintegrated the penguin cookie jar on the windowsill. There was definitely an element of psychological torture about this – that was a favourite of Mum's too. I burst out into the back garden, momentarily disorientated by it being bright as day. I'd forgotten about that – there was, after all, enough to be going on with. There wasn't really much of a plan forming, I'm ashamed to say. I didn't fancy trying to get over the fence into one of the neighbour's gardens. I'm not really built for climbing, having been defeated by the spider-web in the park playground and the apparatus in the school gym. Without a strategically placed bin those sheer creosoted slats might as well have been the north face of the Eiger.
That left the shed. Funny how in the heat of pursuit holing yourself up in a tiny space with no escape routes seems like a good idea. In fairness, since the only other option was to stand on our tatty patio – or 'tattio' as my Dad likes to call it – and pretend to be invisible it seemed more inviting at the time. I bolted toward it.
Straight into the night.
The first thing I noticed was the sudden drop in temperature. Then it dawned on me (or should that be 'dusked'?) that it had suddenly gone dark. I looked back toward the house. It looked like an ordinary building at night with drawn curtains dimly illuminated by the light behind them. Even the cone drunk looked like someone holding a green torch in the dark kitchen. It had become night-time again. Hiding from the creature seemed a little more possible now and with that in mind I moved away from the dead end of the shed and started to inch back toward the house, pressing myself against the fence between us and number 22. I had only taken a couple of steps when everything burst into daylight again, the house, the garden and me as a crouching target. I jumped back in surprise and night immediately fell again.
The washing line was doubling as an international date line, night time in Eccles one side of it and left over day time from Renaissance Italy on the other. To complicate matters further, the time of day appeared to be consistent from the point of view of whoever was looking. While I was in the night-time zone all I could see of the conataur was an indistinct shape in the darkness. To him, however, I was standing out in the open in broad daylight. I had to do something to get him into the darkness too. Another green blast, obliterating one of mum’s shirts that she’d forgotten to take off the line (more misery when the news got to her!) reminded me I hadn’t much time.
The shed it was then. I yanked open the door and found a suitable corner to cower in, amongst the abandoned tools and half full paint tins. Great. I had the cover of darkness but that was it: no plan, no idea, nothing. I closed my eyes and awaited my imminent demise.
As well as fate and destiny, luck was another thing that I didn’t believe in. Stuff happens and there are coincidences but in a rational universe there was no way the odds of something occurring could be affected by supernatural means. Which is why I completely accepted the news that the conataur got his cone knocked out of his hands when he ran under the washing line and was decapitated a second time (is it still decapitation when the head in question isn’t sat on someone’s shoulders?) The deadly cone somersaulted through the air and landed with a ‘whump’ a good three feet inside the night-time zone. I knew the creature didn’t need eyes to see – I expected it to recover its peculiar head in much the same way it had done from Amber – but I was relieved to see that it didn’t have infra-red body vision or something. In the darkness it was having difficulty finding its head again. It stumbled about – was it actually drunk or was that a disguise? – all the while its head was letting off random bursts of that unpleasant green light. Smelled funny too – if light can smell – like overcooked sprouts (yes, in our house that is a smell I am familiar with). So whether it was luck or not I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity like this.
‘Oi, sprouty!’ I shouted. Rubbish insult, but I was under a bit of pressure. I just wanted a reaction. ‘Over here!’
No ears either, of course, but he definitely heard me. He swung round in my direction, took three stomps toward me and took a big green blast to his derriere as he stepped over his own head. Instantly, his body was consumed by green flames, shrivelling away in a cloud of sprouty smoke. I went up to the cone with a mind to investigating it, but it disintegrated in front of me leaving a horrible plasticky dust that I remembered from a previous encounter with one of these cones (oh, I forgot to mention it here but I had had a run-in with a strange traffic cone before, but that’s another story).
Amber remembered it too because when I went back inside – the daylight and the house – she was treating this as if it was somehow my fault.
‘That business with the cone – the one that followed me home from town – this has got something to do with this, hasn’t it?’ she shouted at me.
‘No,’ I calmly replied. ‘This is an entirely different strand of cone weirdness taking place. I can’t see there being any connection between the two incidents.’
‘What? You sarky little toad, Mum and Dad are going to kill us. Come here, I’ll save them half a job.’ I don’t know how serious she was but fortunately Signor Cabriatti interrupted before she got the chance.
‘Are these your parents?’ he asked. He was pointing to a photograph, a family portrait, framed and mounted above the mantelpiece. I quite like that photo. It’s of Mum and Dad with me, Amber and May. I sometimes think it’s a bit of a fib, the way we’re all calm and relaxed and even smiling a little bit. I mean, we’re never like that, certainly not all together. But it is still us. It’s difficult to explain, but I like the fact that it is us.
Compared to Elvis it was almost tasteful.
‘Yes, why?’ I answered, happy to seize upon any means of delaying my execution.
‘There are three of you,’ he said. ‘Three children, I mean. You have another sister?’
‘Yes,’ we both said.
He fixed me with one of those stares that meant he already knew the answer but was going to ask me any way. You know, the one teachers use all the time.
‘So you are not the second born of Nicola Thorpe?’
I’d thought it was an odd question when he’d asked me the first time, but I was in a bit of a daze back then so I’d answered as precisely as I could.
‘My mum? Yes, I’m her “second born”. May’s actually my step-sister – she’s got a different mum to me and Amber.’
‘Hold on, why has your mum got a man’s name?’ I think Cabriatti was genuinely confused by all this. Time travel was a doddle, but the English versions of names was clearly beyond him.
‘Are you calling my mum a man?’ This was Amber’s useful contribution to this discussion.
Cabriatti was muttering away to himself. It went something like:
‘When the Scrolls of Time mentioned a Nicola (there are a lot of scrolls, aren’t there? I’m not sure if he did say scrolls, but it did seem to be all a bit “Scrolls of This, Scrolls of That” so let’s roll with that) we assumed that was the name of your father. But you are your father’s third child!’
‘Dad’s name is Declan,’ announced Amber. ‘No relation to “Ant and Dec”.’
This is the sort of stuff that drives me round the bend!
‘Why would it be any relation?’ I asked her, very reasonably I thought considering the circumstances. ‘It’s only his first name that’s the same!’
‘That’s what I’m saying!’ replied Amber. ‘They’re not related!’
I’m glad I didn’t scream at that point because I wouldn’t have had anything in reserve for a few seconds later.
Cabriatti was on his knees again. Only this time he was in front of Amber.
‘You! You are the Chosen One,’ he cried up at Amber. ‘You will save us all.’
That's when I screamed.
With perfect timing we heard the rattle of the front door being unlocked and opened.
‘Hello, we’re home!’ came Dad’s familiar voice. I tensed, waiting for the reaction to the mess in the hall, or the daylight, or just the general atmosphere of oddness that seemed to be hanging around.
Mum’s voice soon followed. ‘I’m putting the kettle on. Does anybody want anything?’
All very calm and unperturbed and as a consequence very perturbing. Gingerly, we went to the kitchen to see what was – or wasn’t – up. It was worse than I could have possibly imagined.
Mum and Dad were still in their coats, Dad looking in the cupboards for teabags, Mum filling the kettle at the sink. It might have appeared perfectly normal, except...
The pair of them had traffic cones where their heads should have been.
More soonliest
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