BENMORE:  BACK SIDE OF BEYOND

15 August

   The first thing I want to say is that none of this was my fault. It was all my Mom’s idea.

    Mom won’t admit that she’s made a big mistake. She keeps saying that we’re having an adventure. That being in an entirely new place will teach me to take more initiative. Mom’s big on initiative.

  We’ve been here a month and we’re still in sleeping bags on the floor in a place that has not gotten warm once – and this is summer. If we’re shivering now and needing to wear our coats in August, what’s it going to be like in January?

     In London, I was happy. In London, I had friends. I understood people. We lived in a nice house.

    Now we’ve moved. From London, a city with a cool factor of 99.9%. To Benmore. Which is in a place where the sun hasn’t been anywhere near for the whole month, in August. And the question is WHY?  Why move when things were fine the way they were?

   Well, because Mom says things weren’t fine for her. And now it is no longer just Mom and me, it is Mom and me and the three aunties and a Goth called Arnie. I won’t get into describing them just yet, ‘cause I don’t want to get really depressed.

    It’s 11:30 at night.  I’m sitting here at the computer which Mom and a woman I’m supposed to call Auntie Kathe got installed this afternoon after a lot of swearing and sweating. You wouldn’t think that two grown women would swear that much around a kid, but I’ve learned stuff just listening to them. So now I finally get to use the computer because everybody else has gone to bed. I’m not supposed to be up this late, but who’s going to stop me?

   The computer’s going to be my life line.  I’ve already e-mailed all my friends back home and I’m starting an e-journal, as of this very minute. What else have I got to do? (Besides installing the fire-wall and anti-virus software that it looks like Mom and Kathe – pardon me, Auntie Kathe – never bothered with.)

 My Mom’s American. Which is why I call her Mom and not Mum. When I was little I called her Mum, and she’d always tell me to call her Mom instead. So then at school, whenever we had to write stuff about our mothers, the teacher would always return my compositions with a big X through Mom.  I’d show them to my Mom and she’d just shrug and say Well, it’s not my problem if they want to be rigid and close-minded.  

Mom's weird about a lot of things. For instance, she hates to hear kids calling adults by their first names without using ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’ first. She’s also someone you don’t talk back to (well you can if you want, but I know better), partly because she’s from New Jersey and grew up tough, and partly because she’s just plain stubborn and kick-ass. So if she wants me to call people aunties, then aunties they will be. Anyway, just to show you the fun and interesting ways I am now spending my time here in beautiful Benmore I’m writing down what I did today. I’ll contrast it with a typical day in London, just to give you an idea.

 MY EXCITING NEW SCHEDULE!!! 

 7:30  Woke up to the sound of two women (one of them being my own mother) screaming and swearing. Turns out that Kathe fell through the rotten floorboards in the hall while examining the wiring in our “new” home. ( It’s not new, actually, it’s about 150 years old.  I mean the home, of course, but it’s probably true about the wiring too.)

   8:00   Got up and helped to clear up the plaster and rubble from the floorboard accident. Does that sound like something you’d enjoy doing at 8:00 in the morning during your summer holiday?

   9:00   Had a breakfast of burnt toast and sour milk. (The toast was burned because Arnie the Goth from hell made it and he freaks out if the toast is only a little bit toasted. Bread cannot look like bread if he’s going to eat it, so every time he makes toast, it has to be as close to charcoal as he can get it without burning the house down. The reason for the milk being sour is that nobody’s been to the store in a couple of days – too busy with all the rewiring and floorboard accidents and stuff.)

  10:00  Helped clean rubble out of garden. Cleaned mouse crap out of kitchen.

  11:00  Took a trip to the local tip to get rid of rubble and plaster dust. Came home. Loaded up car and visited tip two more times. This was probably the biggest thrill of my day.

  12:-00  Lunch break. Dined on cold left-over omelette and soggy chips from last night’s evening meal.

   Okay, that’s enough of that. You get the picture, I’m sure. Now compare that with a typical day in my life a month and a half ago, before we moved:

MY LONDON SCHOOL HOLIDAY SCHEDULE

   11:00  Wake up and make myself something tasty and edible for breakfast. (Mom’s already at work by this time, so I can spread as much jam on my toast as I like and leave stuff out of the fridge without her screaming at me.)

   11:45   Go meet friends and hang out with them.

      6:00    Go home and have dinner with Mom. Sometimes even eat out at places that have more on the menu than soggy chips and deep fried haggis.

       See the difference?  Okay, now I’ve depressed myself again. I’m going to bed and I may not get up at all tomorrow morning.

16 August

   Well, I’d have stayed in bed all day long if it’d been up to me, but Mom’s got a way about her. Put a cattle prod in her hand and she’d do fine as one of those high security prison wardens. In fact wipe that first part – Mom doesn’t need the cattle prod.

   Kathe and Mom have been clearing the rubble out of the garden all day long. Arnie got out of doing this for some reason. Weasel.

   So I got stuck with dragging these big bags of rubble to the car and one of them broke and leaked rubble and plaster dust everywhere. So Mom yells at me for dragging the bag instead of lifting it and guess who has to clean up all the mess?  Ever tried to get plaster dust off of loose gravel?  

   School starts in a couple of days and for the first time in my life I’m actually really looking forward to it.

17 August

   It has just occurred to me that I haven’t yet explained who everybody is. Might as well do it now and get it over with:

   First of all, there is Kathe, the mother of Arnie, the Goth.  Kathe worked as a florist in London and got tired of it. She says London has too much pollution and the chavs in Arnie’s school were a bad influence on him. Arnie’s got a couple of rings in his nose and dresses entirely in black. He walks around with this dead-eyed expression all the time and he won’t talk to anybody, so it’s kind of scary to imagine kids who are a bad influence on him.  Kathe and Mom have been singing the ‘Gosh-I’m-glad-to-be-out-of-London’ song ever since the first day we got here. Kathe talks baby-talk to houseplants and has quarrels with things like drains, table legs and the corners of cabinets.  She has this thing about spending money, too. She’s always going on about how you could have bought something for £2 but you went and bought it for £2.15 instead. Like, big deal! Mom went shopping and brought home tinned tomatoes and Auntie Kathe freaked out ‘cause Mom had bought the organic ones that cost 39 p a tin (on special offer, Mom kept pointing out), whereas the ones Auntie Kathe usually buys are only 18 p a tin and she can’t tell the difference. All that fuss over 21 p – is that pathetic or what?

 Next is Ellie. She can do anything. Cook meals, bake cakes with fancy icing on them, fix furniture, knock down walls, build things, sew stuff, repair machines – you name it, she can do it. She’s strong too, and bossy, and kind of a show-off.  The first day we were here, Mom complained that the hoover was heavy. So what does Ellie do? She picks it up – with her little finger (and it really does weigh a ton) – and carries it up the stairs. Okay, if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it either, but trust me, it happened. She scares me, she’s that tough (she says it’s ‘cause she grew up in Glasgow, which I think is kind of like New Jersey). She’s got a temper too. I’ve seen her lose it a couple of times already. Knowing about her temper makes me nervous, especially after seeing her with the hoover that time. I mean, if she can do that with her little finger what could she do with, like, her whole hand?

   Mom says you could set Auntie Ellie down on a desert island with a hammer and some driftwood and in a year’s time she’d have built her own town. If I saw her, say, build an airplane, hop in it and fly it around the house, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. That’s the kind of person she is.

  Last but not least of the aunties is Lorene. This is a woman who dresses like it’s still 1968. She wears long skirts and hiking boots, and she’s seriously into chakras and auras. She’s sort of bogus. You’d just have to meet her to see what I mean. Lorene talks a lot. Mom and the others have been doing stuff ever since we got here, but Auntie Lorene just seems to stand around and talk all the time.

 Finally there is Arnie, my new roommate. He’s a year older than me, but you’d think he was at least that much younger. He’s kind of dark, skinny and weasely, that’s the only way I can describe him. If you were a Martian and Arnie was the only person you’d ever seen, you’d assume that all humans had a mobile phone attached to their hands. I’ve never seen him without his. Not once.  And he doesn’t talk on his phone, either, he just presses its buttons all day long. In fact he doesn’t talk at all. Or at least not around me.

 That’s the lot. You know what Mom tells me? That they’re my new family. That we’re all going to work together and play together and bond into a family. Please.