Neighbours (2 page)

Where the Floods live is a bit like them. From a distance it looks ordinary, but up close, it isn't. They don't live in a big dark menacing castle in Transylvania Waters like all their other relations. They live in a normal country in a normal city
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in an ordinary street in a house with a front garden and a back garden. Except the Floods' house is kind of different.

It isn't because the hedge tries to reach out and
touch you when you walk by, and it isn't because the garden is so overgrown you can't see the house. It isn't because there are three black clouds always hovering over it, even on a bright sunny day, or that huge black vampire bats hang in every tree. And it certainly isn't because the Floods are nasty to everyone. They aren't. If people weren't too scared to ask, the Floods would happily lend them their lawnmower (if they had one) or give them a cup of sugar.

When the Floods bought the house, it was the same as all the others in the street. It had a neat lawn at the front and back with beds of pretty flowers. The front door was red and the windows had bright white awnings and shiny clean glass.

The only thing the Floods didn't change was the front door.

‘A lovely shade of fresh blood,' Mordonna had said, ‘but the rest will have to go.'

They painted the window awnings black and added cobwebs and dead flies. They pulled up all the awful flowers and planted thistles and stinging nettles and made it quite clear to the lawn that if
it didn't stop growing, it was concrete time. They buried their various dead and semi-dead friends and relations in the back garden and trained the front gate to keep out unwanted visitors.

People usually cross the road rather than walk by the gate. The mailman puts the letters in the box with a long pair of barbecue tongs ever since the day the mailbox ate his watch.

Underneath the house, the Floods created a vast maze of cellars and tunnels that reach out in all directions for hundreds of metres. The lowest level is so deep underground, you can feel the heat from the centre of the Earth and actually fry an egg on the floor.

And around the edge of the garden, they planted a tall, thick, vicious hedge that keeps out most prying eyes, though not all, as we shall see later.

The Floods are a happy, loving family and they think their house is perfect. The problem is everyone else. Most people don't like things to be different. They want everyone to have the same things they've got – the same car, the same wide-screen television, the same barbecue and the same two-point-four children. Then they can go to the supermarket and all feel the same, and all talk about the TV programme they watched last night and where they're all going on their holidays.

In fact, it's not quite that simple. Secretly most people want to be exactly the same as everyone else – only a bit better. They want their car to be the one with the luxury bits and bigger engine and they want their children to be better at school, and they want to have more money and a spa bath that all their neighbours haven't got.

So really, everyone is jealous of everyone else.

Except the Floods.

They don't even have a car. If they want to go anywhere they either travel by turbo broomsticks that go so fast ordinary people can't see them,
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or else they walk or take a taxi. Apart from Betty, they never go on the bus because people complain about the smell – which isn't so much bad as weird, like roses mixed with pepper and wet dog. And if they want a spa bath, they take off their clothes and stand in the back garden while their three black clouds rain on them. Not cold rain like you and I would get, but warm rain that even has shampoo and conditioner in it. Until recently they didn't even have a television.

So while everyone in the street thinks the Floods are strange, scary and different and never invite them to their coffee mornings or Tupperware parties, the Floods are probably happier than all of them. Apart from the eldest son, Valla, they don't even go out
to work, because they have everything they need without having to.

Monday morning, 5.30 am

As the morning light peeped in through the blood-red curtains, the Floods' alarm snake bit Mordonna on the neck and woke her up. An alarm snake is like an alarm clock except it doesn't make any noise and it wakes you up by biting you on the neck. (Which means it isn't actually like an alarm clock at all, except it does wake you up and it does alarm you.) The big advantage of the alarm snake is that it only wakes up the person it bites, so someone else in the bed can stay fast asleep. If you are a normal human, it doesn't wake you up so much as kill you because it's very poisonous.

Nerlin was lying on his back with his mouth open, snoring like a hippopotamus that had just swallowed a rusty steam train. The alarm snake licked the sleep from Mordonna's eyes and slithered into the next room to wake Valla. Mordonna checked herself in the mirror to see that she was still as beautiful as she had been when she went to bed, and then went downstairs to start the day.

‘Come on, everyone,' she shouted as she went downstairs. ‘Time to get up, time to get ready for school.'

There were seven children and only one bathroom, so there were the usual fights over who got in first, just like in normal houses. Everyone tried to get there before Merlinmary because it could take her up to an hour to do her hair, on account of the fact that it covers every square centimetre of her body. She even has hair on her eyeballs and tongue. While she was in the bathroom, though, she charged up all the electric razors and toothbrushes.

Breakfast in the Flood house was probably a bit different from your house. Vlad the cat hung around under the kitchen table rubbing against someone's leg. No one ever discovered where the leg had come from or who it belonged to, but it was there every morning.

There was a lot more running around than in normal houses. Not because the children were out of control, but because their breakfasts kept trying to get away from them.

‘Morbid, Silent, would you stop juggling your breakfast and just eat it,' snapped Mordonna.

‘Yeah, but look, Mum – we can make it stick to the ceiling,' said Morbid. Silent simply nodded vigorously and grunted. He always thinks exactly the same as his twin and can't see the point in just repeating everything Morbid says.

‘Anyone can make slugs stick to the ceiling, dear. Just eat them up while they're still nice and slimy.'

Of course, there was always at least one slug that slid out of the bread and vanished under the stove.

‘Betty, stop teasing the sugar bats,' said Mordonna. ‘Just put them in the warm milk and eat them up, or you'll have to go back to baby food.'

The trouble was that Betty wasn't really old enough for sugar bats. She was only ten and her hands were too small to control them. She didn't actually tease them – that would be cruel – but every time she got one on her spoon and held it up to her mouth, it tried to fly off and hide behind the fridge. In the end she had to eat them with her fingers, even though it wasn't a very well-behaved thing to do.

Vlad, the cat, added to the general chaos by leaping about on the kitchen units trying to catch the bats, which of course he never did.

After breakfast Vlad always felt depressed for an hour or so. He had no problem ripping little birds to bits, but he had
never once caught a bat. No one had thought to tell him that sugar bats have radar and could see him coming.

Winchflat and Merlinmary didn't do much better. Their rats' brains were so slippery they kept falling on the floor and slithering off to join the slugs under the stove.

‘Oh, for goodness' sake, children, if you can't stop mucking about, I'm just going to make you eat cornflakes,' said Mordonna, tipping Satanella's accountant's entrails into her bowl by the back door. Satanella always had her meals right next to the cat-flap so she could make a quick exit into the garden. Quite often she had to throw her food up and eat it again several times before she could finally keep it down.

‘Yeuuuwww, cornflakes,' said Morbid.

‘Gross,' said Betty.

By the time the six youngest children had caught their breakfast and either eaten it or sucked its insides out, there was barely time to wipe the blood and slime off their chins
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before the wizard school bus materialised in one of the cellars.

‘Come on, kids, hurry up. The bus will be here in a minute,' Mordonna told them all. ‘Tangle your hair and do make sure you've got blood under every single one of your fingernails. I don't want the other parents thinking I don't bring you up properly.'

‘Mum, Satanella's eaten my homework,' said Merlinmary.

‘Well, she'll just have to bring it up again when you get to school,' her mother replied. ‘And Morbid, do remember to lock your school bag. I don't want your lunch crawling out and biting the bus driver again.'

(There are two reasons the bus appears in the cellar. Firstly, that's where the bus stop is; and secondly, the bus that takes five of the children to school is not an ordinary bus, so if it did appear in the street outside the Floods' house, it would scare the living daylights out of the neighbours.

The school is a special wizard and witch school, hidden away from the normal world in a secret valley right up in the mountains in darkest Patagonia. To reach the school each day, Satanella, Merlinmary, Winchflat and the twins have to cross several oceans, some of which can get very angry. They also travel over a desert or two, through fifty-metre snowdrifts, up a tall waterfall and across a bottomless lake. All of which, of course, an ordinary bus would find a bit difficult to do. In fact, an ordinary bus wouldn't get more than twenty metres across the sea before sinking.

The wizard school bus, on the other hand, covers all these vast distances in nine minutes. To call the wizard bus a bus is stretching the definition of the word ‘bus'. The wizard bus is not so much a bus as a dragon with seats and a toilet.)

Monday morning, 8.00 am

At last the Floods' house grew quiet again. Mordonna checked herself in the mirror.

‘Still staggeringly beautiful,' she said and sat down with a huge cup of strong coffee.

The remaining Flood child, Valla, finally came downstairs. He had the good sense to stay in bed cuddling his pet vampire bats, Nigel and Shirley, until the other kids were out of the house. Then he got up and spent a relaxed ten minutes in the bathroom bleaching his face, before going downstairs for a quick cup of milkman's blood.
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He would then take the unknown leg from under the kitchen table and give it to Nigel and Shirley to chew on while he was at work.

Valla was the manager of the local blood-bank. To him, his job was like he died and went to heaven.
He loved his work so much that he often took it home with him. Both his bedroom and his underground playroom were littered with bags of blood, labelled and catalogued like fine wines. His favourite blood was the rare type OOH+, which came from only one person in the whole world – a beautiful Australian singer with a very famous bottom. Valla had just one small bag of her blood, which he drank one drop at a time and only on very special occasions. To cover up the fact that he was taking more blood out of the blood-bank than people were putting in, he replaced it with fake blood made out of tomato sauce, frog's spit and a rare plant root from Tristan da Cuhna. Most of the time this worked fine and patients receiving Valla's fake blood hardly ever turned hyperactive or dropped dead.

Monday morning, 8.30 am

Peace had descended briefly on the house. The alarm snake, having recovered from the headache it always got after biting Valla, slithered back into the parents' bedroom to wake up Nerlin, who had just come to the best bit of his dream.
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‘Morning, handsome,' said Mordonna as her husband stumbled into the kitchen. ‘How are we feeling today? Good night's sleep?'

‘Mmmm,' Nerlin mumbled. ‘My mouth tastes like a very old washing machine full of dirty socks.'

‘That's nice, dear. Want some coffee?'

‘In a minute. I'm still enjoying the socks.'

‘Good dreams?'

‘Oh yes,' said Nerlin. ‘My favourite.'

‘Oh, the one with the, err …?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the big pink …?'

‘That's the one,' said Nerlin. ‘I just love that dream and, you know, it never gets boring.'

‘Well, it wouldn't, would it?' said Mordonna. ‘Was I wearing the shiny thing?'

‘Absolutely. Think I better have that coffee now.'

The peace didn't last long. A few minutes later the thump, thump, thump of disco music mixed with shouting and swearing drifted over from the house next door. Then the neighbours' dog started barking, a big thundering bark that made the cups rattle.

You know how when everything seems perfect and you think life just couldn't get any better, something always spoils it? This was the something that did that to the Floods.

The neighbours from hell – the Dents.

‘Mmm, not even nine o'clock. They're starting early today,' said Mordonna, getting up from her chair.

‘Yes,' Nerlin agreed. ‘We'll have to do something about it. It's really getting on my nerves.'

‘No point in phoning the police. They never do anything.'

‘No, no, we'll sort it out ourselves.'

‘Well, I'm off to do the housework,' said Mordonna. ‘See that the spiders are working properly.'

‘Yes, I'll do the mould and then do the pets. I suppose it's pointless me asking if the kids fed them?'

‘As if.'

With the Dents' noise echoing through the house, Mordonna went from room to room checking for cobwebs. Where there weren't any, she left fresh spiders with detailed weaving patterns and, to encourage them, she put a few juicy bluebottles in with them.

Nerlin went down into the cellars to check the damp and spray the walls with a hose to make sure the mould stayed nice and healthy. Down on the third level, he could still hear the Dents – a muffled blur of bangs and crashes. Then he fed the cellar pets: the night eels, the giant hipposlugs and Doris, the seven-hundred-year-old blind dodo. Of course, like most families, the pets belonged to the children, who always forgot to look after them, so their parents had
to. Cleaning out the litter tray of a seven-hundred-year-old blind dodo was not a job for the faint-hearted or anyone with a good sense of smell. By the time Nerlin had staggered outside and tipped the contents over the vegie garden he felt pretty faint and had to sit on Mordonna's mother's grave and breathe deeply for a few minutes.
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‘Morning, mother-in-law. How are the maggots wriggling?' he asked, and the mound of earth beneath him shivered in reply as Queen Scratchrot twitched her bones.

‘Oh well, better get on,' said Nerlin.

After the cobwebs, Mordonna went back through every room checking the dust was properly organised – not too thick on the table tops and nicely gathered into hairy piles in the corners. By the time she'd done that, the kitchen frogs had clambered over the dirty dishes and licked them clean; the crusty toad had nibbled all the hard burnt bits off the pans and the cutlery snake had slithered his tongue between
every prong of every fork. All Mordonna had to do was put everything back in the cupboards.