Majestic

It was April thirteenth, 2018. A Friday. I should have made some link between that day and the rest of my life, but I was a younger nine, and not intelligent enough. I’m sure Dawson, my big brother, made the link much sooner.

We packed all our belongings into Coco, Dad’s poo coloured car and got in. Aunty Agnes was ready to wave us goodbye. Her face was frowning, and her eyes were all tearful. I had never seen her cry before. Inside my head, I wrapped my arms tight around her. I gave her a massive energy hug. I held onto the hug until Dad said, ‘Right!’

Then, in such a hurry, he rolled his window all the way down, causing the chilly air to woosh in alongside the sound of Aunty Agnes’s sniffles.

‘What?’ I said, with my shoulders raised and my palms facing the ceiling.

I was sitting behind Dad on a booster seat, with my favourite rat teddy, Dundee, in the middle of the back seat, buckled in. Dundee’s pointed face was looking at mine. I stared at Dad’s reflection in the rear-view mirror, and Dawson, who was riding shotgun, turned to look at Dad as well. Usually, when Dad says “Right!” it means he’s about to do something completely loopy. So, when he lowered his window and looked up to our third-floor flat with an unfaltering gaze, the only home I can remember living in (we had three before it), I imagined jumping out of the car, unpacking everything, and calling off moving day. It’s what I imagined Dad would do. My heart sank. But that didn’t happen. I know now. Moving was the loopy thing. Not moving itself, but moving to Riversdale. A town with perfect gardens, perfect schools, coordinated hairstyles, proper spoken English, and perfect children, among many other perfect things. Can you imagine it? The most perfect place in the universe multiplied by perfection. I bet you can’t. But you can imagine how annoying it would be to live in perfection. That’s easier, isn’t it? It’s easier for me to be annoyed than to reach the standard of perfection that Riversdale expects from its residents. But until we moved, only Dad knew that Riversdale was perfect and that we were imperfect in comparison. Only Dad knew how loopy his decision was.

‘Dad!’ I said.

Dad took his eyes off the flat and saw my interrogatory eyes in the mirror. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Are we still moving hoose?’

Dad’s eyebrows furrowed. ‘Take a wild guess, Sherlock.’

We had been planning our moving day for over a month. The car was full of everything we owned, and new people were moving into our flat the next day. Dad doesn’t realise that he does loopy stuff right after he says ‘Right!’, so I realised how weird my question was. Oh, and I’m not Sherlock. Sherlock Holmes is a funny TV detective. Dad was being sarcastic. My name is Super Ratman, or Jessica when I’m not wearing my cape and mask. Which is more often now that we’ve moved, but not all the time.

‘I guess...We’re still moving.’

Dad smiled and then took his camera off the dashboard. He leaned out the window to get one last photo of our flat. Aunty Agnes frowned at him. ‘You little brat!’ She said, thinking he was taking a picture of her crying face. Everyone looks a little less pretty when they cry. I laughed. It was always funny when Aunty Agnes called Dad a brat like he was a naughty kid. Dad already had a bunch of photos of Aunty Agnes. She loved to pose for the camera. One time, she put her leg over the lowest part of the stair railing and slipped down, holding her hand in the air and yelling, ‘Take it now!’ She didn’t realise she had reached the bottom of the stair so went shooting off the end, straight onto her bahookie. That’s what she calls her butt. Dad and I went downstairs to make sure she was okay. She cracked a joke about how much padding her bahookie had and then howled in laughter. I laughed so hard that my knees bent. I couldn’t straighten them again until I stopped laughing a whole three minutes later. Dad never took a photo. He got the video! You can hear him laughing as well. Sometimes, when I’m in a bad mood, I watch that video. I laugh my head off until my stomach muscles hurt. I’m not often in a bad mood, though. Last year, I had three bad moods. I think that’s okay for an eight-year-old. I was aiming for only two bad moods this year, and I hadn’t had any yet. I was saving them for when I really needed them. By the time I’m a teenager, I won’t have any bad moods. When I do get in a bad mood, you’ll know it. I stamp my feet like a toddler and raise my voice a lot. I always regret my bad moods because when I think about them later, they seem very unnecessary.

Auntie Agnes is not really my aunt, but I wish she were. If you counted how many photos we have of her, you’d think she was, but she’s not. She’s just the lady who lived across the hall from us. When we first moved to the flat, I was playing very loudly on the stairs. My ball bounced off Auntie Agnes’s door a couple of times - okay, a lot of times. It was the best door to play football against; it had a big space in front of it for long kicks. Dad’s door was too shaky and didn’t return the ball. I knew I was being naughty because Dad had already told me not to kick the ball on the stairs. Suddenly, Auntie Agnes’s door creaked open. I just stood there and looked up at this angry face. Her eyebrows were so low that they transformed into one very long eyebrow. She was as tall as Dad but older - not free bus pass older, but the exact same age as Intel (the biggest computer microprocessor company). Like Intel, Auntie Agnes gets better as she ages. She told me she did. I think it’s true, but Dad thinks the jury’s out. She had a wooden spatula in her hand with cake mixture on it. She was baking something sweet. I could smell the delicious chocolate brownies (or whatever) rising in the oven.

‘Well, well, well. What do we have here?’ Auntie Agnes said.

I took a step back. I had no idea if she meant me. I had just turned five years old, and adults were very confusing to me when they talked. When I was just five, I pretended to speak in adult language. It’s called Gobbledygook. I would invent words and talk very fast. I never realized that adults were fluent in English until I was at least five and a half. I thought they only spoke English some of the time. I said something like ‘Goobi doo if be woo. Dagoowee me see ooh,’ which in my mind translated to ‘It wasn’t me.’ Auntie Agnes chuckled and opened the door wider. She stopped it from closing by placing a red building brick against it. For some reason, I thought Auntie Agnes was related to Bob the Builder. Her face was the same colour, her ears poked out, and she wore blue dungarees, just like Bob. I mistook that Bob was a cartoon character and didn’t have real human relatives.

Eventually, Aunty Agnes turned away and waddled her bahookie down a blue-carpeted hallway into the kitchen at the end. She waved her hand towards herself. Before graduating from nursery school, I had been taught about stranger danger. So, regardless of the delicious smell that made me think she was a nice person, I didn’t step into her flat. I shook my head. When she came back to the door, she leaned over at my eye level and held a bourbon biscuit in front of me. Stranger danger had also taught me not to take sweets from strangers, so I shook my head again, but my hand grabbed the biscuit anyway. I really loved bourbons when I was five. What kid doesn’t like two biscuits stuck together with chocolate cream? I turned around fast and ran away with the biscuit already in my mouth, but I ran right into Dad, who was at the door of our new flat. ‘What do you say to the nice lady?’ Dad asked. He placed his hands on my shoulders and spun me towards the lady.

‘Tank you, nice lady.’

When I was five, I couldn’t pronounce my “th” sounds. I can now! Aunty Agnes tilted her head back and laughed as if I had said a very funny joke. ‘Please call me Agnes. And very well done for not coming into my home.’

After that first meeting, Aunty Agnes became a very good neighbour. I never kicked my ball against her door again, and sometimes, when Dad was busy, she took care of Dawson and me. And I discovered maybe the best thing in the world: unlimited internet. I could ask her computer anything, and it would give me the answer in no time. We didn’t have a computer or the Internet, but Dad promised us both at our new home in Riversdale. My excitement was off the scale because every day, so many questions popped into my head. How does the postwoman know where we live? Am I real, or am I dreaming that I’m real? If somebody shook the earth, would we all fall off? If there are more than ten million rats in the UK, how come I haven’t seen one? Why do colours look like their names? Why do I dream about faces I’ve never met? Dad guessed the answers, and occasionally he invented them. That’s why I needed internet service. Grownups are not reliable. They may not want to be unreliable, but they are.

Aunty Agnes also taught me how to kick bahookie like a ninja on blueberry and banana muffins, and how to pivot on my back foot, so I don’t lose power when I kick. If Henry Ducard was the mentor of Batman, I should recognise Agnes Rebecki as mine. When Aunty Agnes was younger, she was a martial arts instructor. She now has lots of cushioning all over her body, but she can still roundhouse kick like Van Dam. Van Dam is an actor and martial artist. He can do flying kicks and everything. The roundhouse kick is my favourite move. It’s when you swing your back foot all the way around—super fast. I can kick taller than my own height when doing that kick.

When I talked to other kids about Agnes, they always asked, “Who is Agnes?” So, I ended up calling her Aunty Agnes. The whole world knows what an aunty is.

I asked Dad if Aunty Agnes could come with us. He said she was welcome to visit at any time. I bet you like the sound of Aunty Agnes. Do you know somebody like her? Well, moving day was the last time I saw her. I suppose I only told you about her because you wouldn’t understand what I left behind if I hadn’t. Now you get it.

I rolled down my window. ‘I love you, Aunty Agnes,’ I shouted.

Aunty Agnes cried her eyes out. She was trying to make words come out, but they just scrambled with her crying. She reached in through the window and grabbed my waving hand and let go only when an unknown woman consoled her by putting an arm straight over her shoulders, while holding a bag of chips in the other hand. I laughed cause Aunty Agnes’s face went so funny. Like it was being licked by a Great Dane. I inhaled the smell of vinegary brown sauce on hot chips. That smell will always remind me of Edinburgh, and everything I had before moving home. Trust me. Sometimes less is more. Even when it’s a lot less.

‘Ready?’ Dad asked.

‘YEAAAAH!’ I shouted.

‘Seatbelts on?’

‘YEAAAAH!’

‘Let’s hit the road then.’

‘TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!’

The chip shop, located at the bottom of our block of flats was always busy at lunchtime, and that’s when we set off on our very long journey. We only knew Aunty Agnès, but it’s nice when people you don’t know wave too. They were just being funny, but it made me feel famous. I waved to everyone, but especially to Aunty Agnes until I could no longer distinguish her from the red post-box (she wore a long red coat). My eyes were still dry. I didn’t even think about crying. It was like the day before Christmas. I’d never lived in a house before, with a front and back garden and three bathrooms, and that’s where we were going. To a house with all that stuff. I didn’t mind if Great Uncle Willis McNoble had died in the house. He fell asleep in his bed but didn’t wake up. I never knew he existed until Dad told us about him. But a part of me would have loved to know him. I like to know people, to understand them, even if they’re old-fashioned, or something I don’t agree with. Great Uncle Willis was old-fashioned. That’s why he hadn’t spoken with Dad since their fallout nine years ago (when I was born). Except for Dawson and me, Great Uncle Willis was Dad’s last surviving relative. I think that’s rather sad.I didn’t know if Dad was sad about Great Uncle Willis’s death, or if he was sad about moving home. I never saw him cry. But I’ve never seen Dad cry about anything. Except when he laughs and cries at the same time. He does that sometimes.

Dawson never cried either. His eyeliner would have smudged and ruined his white powdered face. He was a Goth, but not anymore. Riversdale changes people. It changed my brother and Dad. And I think I’ve changed too. I’ll let you decide that.