“This garden looks like the inside of your head,” Nat said to Dad.
Parked next to the house was a large black van with pictures of corpses playing musical instruments all over it. In big bloody red letters someone had painted the words:
My Filthy Granny
“Has the circus come to your house?” asked Dad.
Darius was very quiet. He didn’t seem to want to get out.
Dad thought for a minute and said: “You going to invite us in for a cup of tea then?”
Nat thought he’d gone mad. What was Dad thinking? No one went for a cup of tea at Oswald Bagley’s house. An evening of mayhem and animal sacrifices, maybe, but not PG Tips. But Dad was already walking down the path, arm round Darius. Nat followed warily.
Inside the small, dark sitting room it looked like a meeting of the Zombie Council of Great Britain. Five scrawny young men, all dressed in black with white faces, blood-red lips and green-tinged eyes, lolled around drinking out of cans. Oswald grunted when he saw his younger brother and nodded at Dad and Nat. He didn’t speak.
One of the creatures grabbed Darius playfully, though it was a bit rough for Nat’s liking. “Here’s our other little roadie. Where you been – school?” There was something sneery and unpleasant in his voice. Darius was smiling but Nat knew it wasn’t a real smile.
Nat saw a poster lying on the floor. It read:
On tour – My Filthy Granny. Heavier than heavy metal, blacker than black metal, thrashier than thrash metal, speedier than speed metal, deader than death metal.
There were a bunch of dates in towns whose names Nat didn’t recognise, but guessed were in Norway. So this is what Darius meant.
“A band, are you?” said Dad. The Grannies stopped throwing Darius about and turned bloodshot eyes towards him. “I used to play all the time …” Dad burbled on. “Course, I was a bit thinner in those days.”
Nat began to get that familiar nasty creeping sensation down the back of her neck and in her stomach – the sign that her dad was about to be horribly embarrassing.
“I’ve got something in the van you’ll like,” he said, jumping up and running out the front door. The Grannies turned their pale faces to Nat. She tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t get her eaten. She started with Darius. “You never said your brother was in a band.”
“He’s not,” said the drummer, who used to be called Simon but apparently was now known as Dirty McNasty. “Oswald’s our security.” Oswald cracked his knuckles. Nat thought that he was probably there to stop the audience leaving.
“Oswald AND little Darius,” said Mr McNasty. “You’re coming wiv us too, ain’t ya?” he said. “We all have a lot of – love – for little Darius.” He cuffed Darius round the head lovingly enough to make his eyes wobble.
“Don’t go asking for no autographs,” said the singer, Derek Vomit, to Nat, unnecessarily. “You don’t get no autographs, unless you get a tattoo of us. Shows you’re a real fan. We’re giving Darius one when we get to Oslo.”
“Listen to this,” said Dad, coming back in, holding a tiny, pink ukulele. It looked like a guitar that hadn’t grown up yet. Nat felt sick. “I wrote this song ages ago. It was very popular down the student union bar. I was quite the rocker.”
Nat wanted to hide under a cushion but it was unpleasant enough sitting ON a Bagley cushion; you would not want to be under one.
“Feel free to join in on the chorus, lads,” said Dad, plunking tunelessly away. He LOVED meeting fellow musicians. “You’ll probably want to use it at one of your gigs.”
Nat knew there was only one thing worse than Dad playing the ukulele. It was Dad singing. Dad started singing.
“I am a rocker,” he started, surprisingly loudly. And unsurprisingly flat. “I am a shocker. You be the door and I’ll be the knocker …”
Oswald and the Filthy Grannies stared at the warbling idiot, grinning. Nat immediately saw they were nasty grins, but Dad took it for encouragement and sang louder.
“Let’s have a go,” said the guitarist, whose mum knew him as Jason but who was now called Stinky Gibbon. Dad handed him the uke. Stinky played a couple of notes and there was a crunching noise as he deliberately broke the neck off. “Oops, sorry!” he said, laughing. He handed Dad the smashed instrument back. “That’s rock and roll for you.”
Dad took the mashed instrument and thought for a moment.
“You’re taking Darius with you this summer, are you?” he said to Oswald. There was a bit of steel in Dad’s voice that Nat hardly recognised. Oswald nodded.
“Well, you’re not,” said Dad. “He’s coming with us.”
Nat couldn’t be sure, but she thought that under his horrible black beard, Oswald Bagley smiled.
Dad wasn’t wearing a baseball cap; he thought baseball caps looked stupid. He was wearing an old T-shirt with ‘Little Monkeys’ written on it. Underneath was printed a photo of Nat, aged four, holding a monkey in a safari park. Nat was pulling a face because the chimp had just poked her in the eye. Dad thought the picture was cute, hence the T-shirt. Nat did not think it was cute, hence she’d thrown it in the bin fourteen times. But it still kept appearing. Next time, she thought darkly, I’m setting fire to it. Even if Dad’s wearing it.
But even worse than the T-shirt were Dad’s shorts. Dad wore shorts from June 1st to August 31st, because, he said, that was summer. He didn’t wear them at any other time, no matter how hot, and he never wore anything else in the summer, no matter how cold or rainy. Dad was very proud of his shorts because he’d had them AT SCHOOL and he could still get into them. They were red and shiny and very very short. Way too short. From a distance it looked like he’d just forgotten to put his trousers on. Old ladies walked past the drive tutting and shielding their eyes.
Dad had extremely thin white hairy legs and in these shorts you could see ALL of those thin white hairy legs, from ankle to unmentionable. He bent over in the van and made it worse. Nat heard shrieks from the other side of the street and had to hide behind the Dog.
To top it all, Dad had the radio on. Fighting over the radio was becoming what writers of modern classics would call: AN ISSUE. In the old days, Nat didn’t care what awful music Dad listened to, because she was still finding out what music she liked. But now she was older and had found out what she liked and it was the music they played on RADIO ZINGG!!! It was happy bouncy music you could dance to. Dad liked RADIO DAD. The songs on RADIO DAD went on for hours and if you tried to dance to them you’d break your legs. They were boring and miserable and now it was playing at full blast and all the neighbours would think that she liked Dave Spong and his Incredible Flaming Earwigs, or whoever it was.
Because of all this,