My father and stepmother left me alone to climb the stairs to my stepbrothers’ room.  Alone, so alone I felt when they snuck into the dining room to argue about whether they could still use their Phantom tickets or not.  As I climbed, a small cry escaped my lips.  The carpet on the stairs was as thick as the moss on the windowsill of my dear grandfather’s shed, and exactly the same shade of purple.  In retrospect, his experiments with the weedkiller had always been a bit worrying.  Oh, poor Granddad!  If only he could have seen me in a house as wonderful as this!  Surely he would have wondered how his beloved shed would hold up in my memory, against such elegance.  Surely it must fade away, a dull, shabby thing, not worth remembering at all…

“I don’t care what wonderful things I see in this house!” I cried suddenly, “My heart will always belong to my dear Granddad’s shed, the place where it was formed!”

Just then, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and a boy poked his head out.  “Guys?” he asked, turning back into the room, “There’s some psychotic-looking girl out there yelling nonsense about sheds.  Do you think we should bar the door so she can’t get in and eat our brains?”

A voice from within said, “Dunno.  Is she hot?”

I reared myself up and barged through the door before they could bar it.  I reminded myself to be confident- after all, wasn’t I more or less an important member of…  Damn it, what was my dad’s last name?  I hadn’t thought to ask.

“Who the hell are you?” asked the boy who’d let me in.  I could tell by the slender lengths of his legs that he was tall, and by the yellowish hair growing out of his scalp that he was blond.  I stared at him, more than puzzled by the unexpected way my body responded just to the sight of him.

I began to tremble, threatened by his unwillingness even to say hello.  What would Tamsin do in this situation?  Certainly she wouldn’t let this boy intimidate her!  But I was….

“Um, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t let me intimidate her, seeing as how she’s my mum,” said the boy, “Do you realise that you’re talking out loud?”

…but I was just a poor, naïve girl from Pitsea, and as yet I hadn’t yet learned how to be arrogant.

“She’s freaking me out, man,” said another boy from behind him.  I turned and saw a very tanned, dark-haired young man with his jawline set in a firm, determined way.  My heart fluttered as I met his eyes, those dark blue orbs that seemed to promise a world that I’d never seen…

“Don’t excite yourself, Angus,” said the first boy, and I whirled around to find myself lost in his smile.  I saw for the first time how broad his shoulders were, how the definition of his muscles were just visible beneath his thin shirt…

“I bet she’s one of those MI5 agents,” said a third boy.  He was short and spotty with bad breath, so I didn’t pay him much attention.

The first boy sighed.  His golden hair curled around his earls like some beautiful pieces of macaroni.  “Look, do you want to sit down?  We’ve ordered a pizza- you can share it if you want.”

“We’re watching Shaft,” added his brother, those beautiful eyes glinting in the dim light.

My eyes filled with tears as I sat down.  Annabelle and I used to order pizza and watch 70s Blaxploitation movies every Friday night.  Maybe now, in this strange place, I had finally found a little piece of home.

“You’re sitting on my leg…” said the third boy.  I shrugged and stole his share of the garlic bread.

We drove up to my father’s estate just as the sun was setting.  Despite my trepidations, I tried to face it with my head held high and a smile on my face.  I’d always been an eternal cockeyed optimist, searching for a rainbow after every sorrowful storm, and that guitar-shaped swimming pool I’d just spotted in the corner of the garden would do nicely, thanks.  He was loaded!

A strikingly handsome couple appeared at the door.  The husband, a dark-haired man with long, strong, beautiful legs and firm, round buttocks, smiled down at me.  “You must be Ivy,” he said, before glancing up at my mother.  “Hello, Gigi.  It’s been a while.”

“Yeah, and it’s going to be a while longer if I have anything to do with it,” said Mama, her hands on her hips, “Now, look, I’ve spent the last fifteen years raising your kid, and it’s worn me out.  Time for you to do your bit, sunshine.  You can give her back when she’s thirty.”

The wife, an elegant beauty in a camel-fur coat, scowled down at us.  “She can’t stay tonight,” she snapped, her face twisting into a grotesque parody of a smile, “We have plans.  Clive and I have tickets to the opera tonight- we’ve been planning it for months.”

“Now, Tamsin,” said my father, his smile small and pleased, “Love Never Dies isn’t exactly an opera, per se…”

“We’re going, Clive!  I’m getting my Phantom fix, or somebody’s getting hurt, you hear me?”

“Tough titties, blondie,” said Mama, flicking V’s at her, “She’s on your doorstep now, and she’s your problem.”  And before Tamsin could say anything in response, she jumped back into Abelard Cephalopod’s Mini and the two of them drove off.

To lift myself above the despair I felt at her departure, I gazed with interest at that awesome pool I’d seen earlier.  I watched the pet dolphins they kept in the deep end perform a perfect dance routine to “Don’t Stop Believing,” and, for a moment, I felt less alone.

My stepmother let out a long, resigned sigh.  “I guess you’d better come in.  Damn it.”

As soon as I got through the door, I turned in slow circles, my breath caught, my eyes wide, staring, staring, until I got too dizzy and collapsed on the floor.  My stepmother prodded me with her shoe until I got up.

“I’ve never seen a house as beautiful as this,” I breathed in wonder.

“Nobody has,” said my father happily, “My parents had it built to their exact specifications back in the Seventies.  When I was a boy, I used to think there wasn’t a house anywhere in the world as fine as the one where I lived.”

“None with cocaine dispensers built into all the bathrooms, anyway,” grumbled my stepmother.  She turned on me like a vicious tiger protecting her young.  “Now, look here, missy.  If you’re going to be staying here, there’s a few things you need to understand.  I don’t want you telling anyone you’re Clive’s daughter.  It’s embarrassing enough to have everyone know he used to go out with that slapper Gigi Pratt, let alone that there’s some kid of hers knocking about.”

Oh!  How those cruel words tore at my heart!  No sooner had I been reunited with my father, the kind, handsome daddy I had longed for all my childhood, than…

“We’ll just have to tell everyone you’re a visiting MI5 agent,” she added, “They stay with us from time to time.”

Oh.  Actually, that sounded really cool.

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” said my father, with a hearty laugh, “Now come through and meet your stepbrothers.  I’m sure you’ll get along famously.”

Stepbrothers!  My heart fluttered in delight.  How I’d longed for a brother as a child!  The happy days we’d share… the walks in the park… the games of “fetch” and the trips to the vet…

“You’re thinking of a labrador,” said my father, “Brothers are different.”  But I was so enraptured that I barely heard him.

(There may or may not be a part three, depending on whether or not I come up with any ideas for it.)

Because my mother worked late, I would often spend the evenings after school at Annabelle’s house. Her family were a great deal richer than mine, and it always amazed me to see how grand her house was. I also liked to talk to Annabelle’s father- he was a well-known gourmet who was constantly cooking up wonderful concoctions in the kitchen. Annabelle wasn’t interested in food, and I could see he liked that I was. Usually I would just sit and watch him cook, but sometimes he’d let me help him measure out the ingredients, or taste the food to make sure that it was “just right.”

How lucky Annabelle was to have such a father! I didn’t have any at all. From what my mother said, he’d turned out to be a stern fundamentalist who saw potential evil everywhere, especially in Mama shagging the entire rugby team for a dare. “He was such a prude,” she would tell me, “Just because he’d never been good at sport.”

“I hope when I get married,” I told Annabelle as we sat down in front of the television, “I never have an argument with my husband.”

“Then make sure you marry a man who’s had his tongue cut out,” she said sweetly as she changed the channel so we could watch Mrs Brown’s Boys.

I frowned. She was annoying me. I sometimes wondered why I stayed friends with her. But then I remembered that she had a big flat-screen TV and a fridge full of ice-cream, so everything was fine.

Suddenly, we both looked up and listened. There was the sound of a car door being slammed, followed by a loud, piercing squawk, like a parrot being stuffed into a blender.

“Mama!” I cried, leaping up to open the door.

Annabelle’s father got there before me. “Gigi!” he cried, putting an arm around Mama’s shoulders, “What a nice surprise! Would you like to join us for dinner? We were going to have liver and…”

“Mama!” I started to cry. “What’s the matter?”

Mama’s face looked bleak and haunted. “It’s your bloody grandfather!” she whispered, “I told him not to drink weedkiller! I told him what happens when hydrochloric acid reacts with potassium! But oh no, he just had to have that banana for dessert, didn’t he? Now I’ll be picking his entrails out of the rosebushes for the next ten years!”

“What are you saying?” I asked through my sobs.

“I’m sorry, Ivy,” my mother said, “Your Granddad is… dead.”

“Nooo!” I screamed, shaking my head as if it might somehow alter things.

“I’m afraid so. He exploded and took the shed with him. I found his head in one of the flowerpots…”

I wailed piteously.

“And I think his intestines ended up in the old oak tree…”

“He planted that old oak tree himself,” I whispered. Strangely, it gave me some comfort to think that Granddad was still tending to the things he loved, even in death.

“They look a bit like tinsel…”

I shook my head again. Granddad couldn’t really be dead, could he? I’d always thought that we lived in a magical world- surely the fairies and the pixies and the mysterious fanged creatures wouldn’t let him die and leave me. Surely he must still be alive somewhere… Without his intestines… Or his head…

Hmm. On second thoughts, I was OK with letting him rest in piece.

“Anyway,” said Mama, “Come along home so you can pack your bags. I want to be on the motorway by seven, so we’ve got to hurry.”

“What?” I cried, “Where are we going?”

“We’re leaving!” said Mama with a laugh, “Now that my dad’s out of the way, I’m selling the house and moving to Amsterdam to become a lap-dancer! That nice Abelard Cephalopod said he’d take us.”

I gasped. Abelard Cephalopod was a binman who lived down the road from us. He had small beady eyes, slicked-back hair, and a long, curly moustache that he liked to twirl in his fingers. I never knew what my mother saw in him, but she said he was glamorous and had connections. “Gigi, knowing the number of the kebab shop off by heart doesn’t count,” Granddad would always say, to which Mama would let out a blood-curdling roar and throw the blender at his head.

“Mama, no!” I wailed, “He’s a total crook! And he looks like a weasel!”

“Oh, don’t be like that, Ivy,” said Mama, “Deep down, he’s a delicate flower.”

Just then, Abelard Cephalopod’s rusty Ford Focus drove into Annabelle’s driveway, crushing most of their flowerbeds and running over the cat. He got out, and pointed and laughed.

“See?” said Mama, “Not every man would take the time to cheer up a mortally-wounded animal.”

Soon we were on our way, with Abelard Cephalopod telling us story after story about all the cities he’d visited. Places with glamorous names like Scunthorpe and Dunstable. It made my head spin. To think that we were leaving the little town I’d lived in all my life, and heading out into the world! How could Mama have been so foolish? If she was going to run off with a creepy binman, she could at least have picked a hot one.

“I don’t care what glamorous places you show me!” I cried, “In my heart, I’ll always belong to this beautiful place, the place where I was born!”

Abelard Cephalopod gave me a horrified look, then turned to Mama and said, “You didn’t tell me she had Tourette’s.”

Mama shook her head. “Shut your trap, Ivy,” she told me, “You’ll have plenty of time for complaining when you meet your father and his wife. Strewth, what a pair of misery-guts. Misery-gutses? What’s the plural?”

“What?” I cried, incredulous, “You never said we were going to see my father and his wife!”

“Oh, sure I did!” snapped Mama.

“No you didn’t!”

She thought about it for a second. “Huh. You’re right. Maybe it was the postman I told.” She stared into space for a moment, then clapped her hands and smiled at me. “Fantastic news, Ivy! You’re going to visit your father and his wife!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what your grandfather would have wanted,” she said piously.

“No it isn’t!”

“Damn. I was really hoping you’d fall for that. OK, if you really want to know, it’s because we don’t want to take you to Amsterdam and we’re dumping you on them instead. I’ve got a life of my own to live, and I don’t need some whiny teenager scaring off my new boyfriends.”

“What new boyfriends?” wailed Abelard Cephalopod.

“Shut up and watch the road, you. Anyway, Ivy, it’s for the best. You don’t want to grow up moving from place to place. You need a stable home so you can put your roots down.”

I frowned. “So… Why couldn’t I have stayed in Pitsea? I’m pretty sure I had some roots there.”

“You just couldn’t. So there.”

(Note- I used to read far too much V.C. Andrews as a young ‘un.)

When I was a little girl, I believed that the world was a magical place.  In my mind, there were fairies at the bottom of the garden, pixies hiding in the woods, and mysterious fanged creatures at the bottom of our school swimming pool.  Actually, come to think of it, I turned out to be right about that last one.  Now that was an interesting lawsuit.  Anyway, I’ve never stopped believing that there were magical beings all around us, beings that can only be seen by the innocent and young at heart, or maybe those who’ve had too much vodka, and that, if we just believe, they will come to us in our hour of need.

If my mother heard me say such things, she’d tell me to take my head out of the clouds and come back down to earth.  That, or whack me round the head with a wooden spoon.  “There’s no such thing as magic,” my mother would say to me, “Life is nothing but a string of misery, horrible mistakes, and indigestion, so abandon all hope now.”

“But Mama,” I’d say to her, “If there’s no such thing as magic, how does the Tooth Fairy know where I live?”  I’d got her there.

“Pah!” said my mother, spitting into the sink, “Enjoy these innocent years now, me girl, because you’ll soon learn.  The world is a horrible place, full of war, and poverty, and disease, and men who say they’ll marry you but leave you two weeks before the wedding just because you were technically cheating on them, so you’re left with nothing but a baby that gives you stretchmarks and an empty bank account, and grows up to whine about her friends’ legs being bitten off during swimming lessons, honestly, like I haven’t got anything better to worry about, I have a life too, you know, Eastenders isn’t going to watch itself…”

At this point, I grew bored of marvelling at my mother’s impressive run-on sentence, and snuck out into the garden to talk to Granddad.

How I loved my grandfather!  He was always there for me, out in the garden among the trees and plants.  This was because he lived in the shed.  He’d been a famous naturalist in his youth, and he found that he didn’t feel at home unless he was surrounded by the beauty of Mother Earth at all times.  I respected his desire to live life in his own way, although I didn’t see why it meant he had to drink all the weedkiller.

“Don’t take what your mother says to heart, Ivy,” said Granddad, pouring me a cup of his homemade tea (specially brewed out of moss and dead beetles), “She’s had to put up with a lot of disappointment in life.”

“What kind of disappointment, Granddad?” I asked.

“Well, when she was a little girl, she wanted a pet unicorn.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that they didn’t exist, so I got a rhino, painted it pink, and hoped she wouldn’t notice the difference.  It gored five of our neighbours to death before she realised something was up…”  Granddad’s eyes twinkled as he told the story.  He was a sprightly old man with long white hair and apple cheeks, and I never felt safer than when I was with him.  Even if he did keep feeding me insects.

“Anyway,” he concluded, “My point is, don’t be too hard on your mother.  She’s like a beautiful, exotic bird that yearns to fly free.  And until she does, we have to put up with her squawking a lot and crapping on us from a great height.”  He poured himself another glass of Weed-B-Gone.  “Fancy a sip, Ivy?  It expands your mind.”

“Er…  I’ve got to get to school now,” I replied, backing out of the door.

When the day came that I fell in love and decided to marry, I wanted my husband to be just as wise and good as Granddad, although preferably not as full of dangerous chemicals.

I rushed to school through the roads of concrete and tarmac that we Essex folk called a dual carriageway, thinking how lucky I was to have such a beautiful home.  All the graffiti on the walls was spelled correctly, and sometimes, at night, you could look out of your window and see a pair of urban foxes, noisily shagging the night away.  Was it any wonder that I still believed that there could be magic around every corner, when I’d grown up in a place as wonderful as this?

My best friend, Annabelle Lecter, would always tell me that I was foolish to see the world around me in such a way.  “There’s nothing magical about this place,” she said in her usual pedantic manner, “Pitsea is where hopes and dreams go to die.”  Annabelle was nice enough, but unpopular because of her weight, her spots, her greasy hair, her crossed eyes, her irritating personality, and the fact that she gave off a constant smell of sardines.  However, my Granddad had always taught me to look beyond the surface to see the person within, and besides, it wasn’t as though people were exactly queuing up to be friends with the girl who still believed in pixies, either.

“Well then why is it,” I demanded, “that whenever there’s a traffic jam on the road outside my bedroom at night, I see the headlights light up the darkness like a constellation of earthbound stars?”

“I’d say it was because you’ve been licking the inside of the freezer again,” she said dryly.  “Just look at this school- boys staring at your chest all the time, popular girls laughing at your outfit, science teachers who dump piranhas into the pool and then don’t bother to tell anyone…”

I thought about it.  I agreed with Annabelle about the popular girls, the ones we both called hyenas– always grinning inanely, laughing at other people’s misfortunes, and dominating weaker members of the pack with their vestigial penises…  OK, the metaphor needed some work.  Anyway, the hyenas never included us in their gossip or invited us to their wonderful parties.  Fortunately, we were mature enough to rise about it.

“I bet they’ve all got crabs,” I said.

Annabelle giggled.  “Yeah.”