3
I’m sitting with Digby in Coach’s black BMW with its smooth leather seats and open-shut sunroof and a talking computer that makes cool stuff happen. We’re super sweaty from soccer training but Coach says it’s best to keep the sunroof shut because he doesn’t like the creepy-crawlies flying into his car.
Coach’s car is way nicer than our van, which is a bit banged up now because Mum keeps bumping it into street signs and boom gates and sometimes even parked cars she’s forgotten are there. Mum’s so forgetful she has to carry heaps of lists around in her handbag to help her remember stuff, but I never forget anything.
It’s almost sunset and I’m going to Digby’s house to hang out anyway. I’m really excited because even though I’ve been at Queenscliff Public for five months, no one’s ever invited me back to their place. Coach is dropping us there because Digby’s parents work so hard they can’t collect him from the oval, even on a Sunday and even when it’s almost dark. My mum’s busy too, she had to go sing to the patients at Care Cottage for the Mother’s Day concert, which means I get to hang out at Digby’s for a whole hour before Nanna Pam picks me up.
My stomach feels weird, maybe because it’s almost dinner time, and suddenly I feel a bum-blurter coming and it’s going to be hard to stop.
‘Did you do a fart?’ Digby asks, and we both fall about laughing because the stink is rancid. Mum calls them pop-offs and Ruby calls them fluffs, but Nanna Pam just pretends they’re not really there, even though the smell is really real.
‘Here we are,’ says Coach, pulling into Digby’s driveway already. ‘Good effort at training.’ He turns and grins at me. ‘Lay off those curries, Jackson. And don’t go spending too much time on that device of yours, Digby. Soccer’s way better than any virtual game, boys.’
He leans over into the back seat and gives us both a high-five, then we hop out of the car.
Digby’s driveway is a silvery grey colour, with pebbles that glitter under the street lights, and his house has massive windows all lit up like shiny yellow eyes. Suddenly the front door swings open and this really tall dad steps out of it.
‘Thanks for bringing Digby home, Steve!’ he calls out to Coach, who toots the horn in a friendly sort of way, not like the way Mum beeps when she’s driving.
‘You must be Jackson.’ Tall Dad looks down from miles above me. ‘I just got home myself.’
He pats me on the shoulder. ‘What do you think of Queenscliff? Much nicer by the sea than in Erskineville, I imagine?’
It depends on what you call nice, but I nod anyway because I want to Be Polite. That’s one of our family rules.
Erskineville was nice with old Mrs Walker who lived next door with her five cats, because she always let me lick the bowl whenever she made chocolate brownies. It was nice for its big bookstore and the skinny man who stood outside it playing a golden French horn. He sometimes let me have a turn, as long as I never touched the valves. Erskineville was nice for its big grassy park at the end of our street and our old house and my old room that smelled just right. My bedroom in Queenscliff smells like mouldy old barnacles and it’s not even a real room. It’s part of the roof – an attic, Mum calls it – with these narrow spiral stairs leading up to a little door.
‘Come in,’ says Digby’s dad, waving us into his palace, which is even bigger than Nanna Pam’s old sandstone house in Balgowlah Heights. ‘The others aren’t home yet. Rory’s still at basketball training.’
‘Good,’ says Digby, because he doesn’t like his brother much.
‘How many houses is this?’ I ask, and Digby’s dad laughs as if I’ve just cracked the funniest joke.
‘We’ve got four laptops and two desktops, three tablets, an X-Box X-Treme, a PS11, NextGen Netflix and semi-automatic Nerf guns,’ explains Digby. ‘We’ve got a robot vacuum and a Shopbot called Shoshanna and you can say, “Okay Shoshanna, order me the ingredients for macaroni cheese” and she’ll do it for you. And we’ve got HAIR tech, I’ll show you that later.’
‘Whoooa,’ I say, wondering if Shoshanna will ever move into our house after the renovation. Mum and Dad didn’t have Shopbots when they were kids in the pre-internet era, which wasn’t long after the dinosaurs. Back in the old days phones were still connected to cables so you were tied to the wall whenever you wanted to talk to someone. And if you wanted to play music, you had to use these silver circles called compact discs and before that, these big black plates called records. Mum still has an ancient record player and clunky brown speakers to play songs by her favourite singers like Eartha Kitt and Liza Minelli and Mabel Mercer.
Mum’s a singer too, she studied music at a big old university a long time ago and became a cabaret lady who wore pretty dresses and feathery scarves on stage. Once she even had a show at the Opera House with four other cabaret ladies and a handsome man in a top hat, but when Milla started growing inside Mum’s tummy, she had to stop. There were too many early practices and late nights when Mum was sleep-deprived, which was all the time because Baby Milla didn’t like sleeping much at all.
So now Mum sings almost every day at Care Cottage for the Special Ps – that’s short for ‘Special People’ – which is what Mum calls the patients at Care Cottage. I used to think a hospice was a retirement village, but what Mum does inside is called music therapy, and the scientists have figured out that it helps make sick people feel better even when they’re dying. Mum’s voice sort of wraps up all the Special Ps in an invisible velvet blankie and helps them think nice thoughts while they’re waiting for the Otherworld.
‘Are you hungry?’ asks Digby’s dad, pointing at a plate of yummy-looking muffins sitting on the kitchen bench. ‘It’s almost dinner time, but shall we break the rules?’
I look around to see which family rule we’ll be breaking if we eat a muffin before dinner, but I can’t see Digby’s family rules anywhere. At our house, they’re written on a big piece of cardboard stuck against the kitchen wall:
Be Polite
Be Considerate
Gentle Voices
Remember Your Manners
Think First
We made those rules when I was six years old, after I fell out of the gum tree in the back yard in Erskineville for the fourth time and Mum found me all woozy near the trunk. Mum shouted a bit and told me to ‘think first’ before climbing so high, then she noticed heaps of blood just bucketing out of the back of my head, so she rushed me to the hospital where this really nice doctor gave me a lollipop and thirteen stitches.
When we got back, Dad called a family meeting and talked to us about ‘setting some ground rules for greater harmony at home’. I was a bit confused at first, because harmony is something Mum usually makes with her voice and her guitar. But this type of harmony gave us five family rules instead.
‘Would you like a muffin, Jackson?’ Digby’s dad pushes the plate towards me. ‘Miranda baked them before she took Rory to training.’
I smile to Be Polite, even though I’m wondering who Miranda is. There’s no one else around, so maybe she’s another Shopbot like Shoshanna? But how could a robot take Digby’s little brother to basketball training?