Archive of Our Own

O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you’ve missed.

~W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

*

The cage is open. You can walk out anytime you want. Why are you still in there?

~Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly: Help, I’m The Loneliest Person In The World!

*

I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for.

~Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

“Can you please look and please tell me if it’s the right colour please?”

“Love, I’m busy at the—”

“Being busy is illegal on Sundays.”

“Says who?”

“Says the Bible and you ought to listen to books heavy enough to be murder weapons, also, pay attention to me, you shouldn’t have conceived me if you were going to ignore me.”

“You’re too young to know the word ‘conceive’.”

“I know worse words for it. I was being polite. Now look at this and tell me if I’m dying.”

Little is turning eight in a few weeks and he’s not at all prepared: he hasn’t trimmed his toenails in a month (three holey socks just this past week and, as Mum used to say, those don’t grow on trees), he’s still too scared to carry spiders outside on his own, and he’s caught a nasty cold. At the rate he’s going, he’s likely to sneeze his brains out before the joyeux anniversaire, and then Dad will get indigestion from eating the cake all by himself since Viola has all but renounced sweets.

“All right, all right, I love you, I’m not working anymore, hop on and you’re not dying,” says Dad, patting his lap. “There are some rules in this house and that’s one of them: I wouldn’t let you, all right?”

“Death is sneaky,” Little reminds him, just in case he’s forgotten. It’s only been three years, but Little has been to school, he knows that, sometimes, old people get the arts-hammer disease. At forty-two, Dad is practically ancient, and he’s definitely guilty of forgetfulness: why, just this week, he forgot to grab peanut butter when he went grocery shopping on his way home from work, and Little’s breakfast options have been limited to cereal, honey, and marmite, which is just barbarous. What will be next? Cream cheese? Sacré bleu!

“I’m sneakier,” Dad promises as Little climbs in his lap and settles in. He’s supposed to be too big for that, but one of the privileges of being the smallest kid in his class is getting away with stuff like this. He might be seven and ¹¹∕₁₂ but he looks –- and weighs –- about five.

“You’re the least sneaky person I know,” he reminds Dad because see? arts-hammer! “There’s a hole in the kitchen floor because you dropped an anvil that one time.”

“It’s a dent.”

“Hole.”

“Dent.”

“Hole.”

“Dent.”

“Hole, am I dying?”

He shoves the scrunched-up tissue under Dad’s nose, but not too close: if he is dying, he’d rather Dad didn’t catch it. Someone has to stay down here (or up here, in case they’re bound for Hell) and take care of Viola, especially since she’s become a basket case who won’t eat cake. Not even sponge cake. Not even chocolate, which is not cake at all. Not even candy, and Halloween’s just around the corner.

“Let’s see,” says Dad, carefully unwrapping the tissue and squinting at the yellowish goo inside. “Now, I’m not a medical man, but I’m pretty sure that you have the common cold and that there is no dying in your future.”

“Actually, there’s some dying in everybody’s—”

“In your near future,” Dad specifies before kissing the crown of his head, where Little’s hairline has been running rampant for the past month or so. It’s consistent with what he’s heard of puberty so far, but he rather hoped the bastard wouldn’t get him for a few more years. So far, he has no hair in weird places, no weird urges, and his fingers still don’t meet his thumb when he tries to wrap his hand around the coffee tin. He doesn’t like the taste of coffee, either, and, much like arts-whatsit, coffee drinking is supposed to be a grown-up, pubescent ailment.

“Are you going to drug me?” Little asks innocently, tilting his head back to flutter his eyelashes at Dad.

Dad, being Dad, pretends not to be charmed. “Stop calling it that, please,” he scolds, bumping Little’s nose with his finger. “Surey you don’t want our busybody neighbours to overhear and call the authorities on me over vitamin C?”

“No, I don’t,” Little admits. “I’m not cute enough to get adopted. Which, by the way, is totally your fault. You were very selfish during the conceiving bit: you didn’t pass down the dimples, or the smile, or the forehead.”

(Actually, Dad did pass down the dimples but Little’s don’t dimple as nicely as his own: they collapse like a stepped-on trampoline, rather, and Little would know because he’s spent half his childhood trampolining all over the place, making do even when there were no trampolines about.)

“I don’t think my forehead is all that cute,” Dad says slowly. “You, on the other hand.”

Which is when Little sneezes in his face because caring is sharing.

“Vitamin C?” he offers once Dad’s done making puking noises.

“Run along now,” says Dad, gently shoving him off his lap. “Work.”

But Little hangs around for a bit before running along and watches. Dad’s hair is still black (ish), but he's definitely going grey, and the grey is getting pretty prevalent: last year, Little could still count every individual grey hair, but now there are just too many even for him, math champion extraordinaire that he is.

At least Dad’s not going bald. Grey or not, his hair is as thick as ever, and it’s a good thing, too. It distracts from Dad’s –- sad but true! –- unshapely ears.

“Don’t slouch!” Little scolds because it’s only fair: Dad always does it to him. “Your back is like an S.”

“As long as it’s a nicely executed S,” sighs Dad, frowning at his computer screen. Actually, he might be squinting. Barely forty and blind as a bat already, my my my.

“It’s a pretty nasty S, actually,” says Little, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Less Shakespeare, more ssscurvy.”

“All right, all right,” Dad laughs, looking very very tired. Even the grey hairs seem to slump, defeated, and his skin looks distinctly undercooked, a lukewarm porridge of a visage. He hasn’t been outside since the peanut butter fiasco (going to work does not count), and boy, does it show.

Perhaps it is dads, and not dogs, that need to be walked.

“Go hiss elsewhere?” Dad suggests.

Little likes the sssound of that, oh yesss, he doesss. “I’m going to go hissssss at serpents.”

“I don't believe there are any in the neighbourhood.”

“I’ll go hiss at other kids, then.”

“That’s fine. Just don’t spit too much. We'll become pariahs if you go around infecting other kids.”

“They’ll never trace it back to me,” Little promises. “I'm a very discreet spitter.”

“I mean it, Little.”

“All right. Grandmother’s Footsteps, then. It's the As' favourite game.”

“Just don’t play anywhere near the road,” says Dad absently, busy typing something and squinting like there's no tomorrow. He needs a better pair of glasses or a better set of eyes or a better job.

“We won’t,” reassures him Little, like the good son that he is. “These days, we only ever play in Ghastly Vandergaster’s garden.”

Dad stops typing, blinks, and then rotates his head like an owl to stare at him. “Come again?”

Little sighs. “Because of Halloween? Surely you’ve seen all the pumpkins? And I hope you haven’t forgotten about my birthday?”

“Little.”

“Yes.”

“Who the he— ck is Ghastly What-Was-It?”

“Ghastly Vandergaster,” Little repeats patiently, wondering how long until Dad forgets his name, too. Soon, he’ll have to get himself a badge, even though, much like coffee and dementia, badges seem to be the domain of the pubescent. Oh, childhood, effervescent but fleeting, over before it had well begun: how quickly her fruits ripen, spoiling long before one reaches the height sufficient to pick them! “He lives down the road.”

“Surely,” says Dad sternly, angling the rest of his body Little’s way, too, “you don’t mean poor Mr. Vandergaster?”

Little rolls his eyes. “No, I mean the other Vandergaster we have in the neighbourhood.”

“You think you're being clever, don't you?”

“One of us ought to!” Little sighs. “Of course I mean Mr. Vandergaster, though I don’t know about the poor bit. That house of his is huge.”

Dad frowns, leaning back in his chair. The chair groans, probably at the dismal state of Dad’s back. Forget the S, it’s probably like a bunch of Zs by now, closer to an accordion than to something evolution would ever condescend to take credit for.

“Mr. Vandergaster’s name is not Ghastly.” Dad rubs his eyes. “Do you really call him that?”

“I’ll stop if you want me to, but I might get ostrichcised for it.” Little shrugs. “Kids are barbaric.”

“Clearly,” says Dad wryly. “It's ostricised, and I believe his name is Rupert.”

“No offense, but believing’s not enough when it comes to names.”

Dad crosses his arms. “Well, you’re to call him Mr. Vandergaster, anyway.”

“To his face?”

“Always.”

“But I’ll get—”

“And you’re too young to know what ‘ostracised’ means, too.”

Little puts the tip of his pointer finger in his mouth to make himself look younger than he is, which is to say even younger than he seems to be. “I’ll try to forget it, but I make no promises.”

“And you’re not to play Grandmother’s Footsteps in his garden. Why would you even—?”

“Well,” says Little, taking the finger out with a loud smack. “Presumably” – Dad makes a choked noise here and Little will have to look it up, because what if it’s his pancreas? – “it’s because he bathes in infant blood, eats children for dinner, warms up the leftovers for breakfast, has Satan over for tea every Friday, and puts curses on people left and right. Remember that storm last year? When that oak tree fell down? Rumour has it, Ghastly— Mr. Vandergaster’s extremely prejudiced against oaks.”

Dad groans, makes The Spider (The Spider is a gesture of despair where Dad windmills his arms above his head like a desperate, last-resort appeal to a deity), and buries his face in his hands. “Surely, you don’t believe all that.”

“Well, not the infant blood bit, just because an infant’s hard to come across these days, and not the Satan bit, just because I think Satan’s too booked up for the likes of Gha— Mr. Vandergaster, but the rest of it seems pretty plausible. What I can’t figure out is, why oaks? I can see why he’d hate people –- hermits tend to –- but oaks don’t really bother anyone, do they? Maybe someone he hates was passing under the oak at the time?”

“Little,” Dad groans hopelessly. “Gha—” –- The Spider again –- “GHAAAAAAA!” –- an encore –- “Mr. Vandergaster is a perfectly respectable young—”

“Respectable, all right, but I draw the line at ‘young’” Little cuts in. “Dad, he’s at least forty. That’s ancient.”

Dad bristles. “What am I, then? Primordial?”

Little considers saying ‘antediluvian’ just because he learned that word last week and has been waiting to use it in casual conversation ever since, but thinks better of it, seeing as Dad hasn't been casual for a while now.

In fact, he seems positively discombobulated.

“Advanced,” Little allows graciously. “Would I make a good politician, do you think?”

“You make a pretty poor neighbour,” Dad scolds. “Have you all been going down there, running up to his back door and snickering?”

“Also throwing sticks, also having spitting competitions –- I know you said no spitting, but the law doesn’t work backward –- there’s a smart word for it but I can’t remember it –- something like radioactive? –- also shoving each other and calling out his name, also trying to coax him out with nose bleeds, also getting nose bleeds in the first place.”

“That’s it. You’re on house arrest. And the word you’re looking for is ‘retroactive’.”

“No, I’m not! You won’t even pay attention to me, I’ll die of boredom and then you’ll be all alone!”

“FINE,” Dad explodes. Little chews on the inside of his cheek to keep the giggle in because it’s just too funny when Dad goes grizzly bear, especially since he looks more like an affronted meerkat every single time. “But you’re not to bother Gha— Mr. Vandergaster.”

“So that he doesn’t eat me?”

“So that I don’t eat you, because so help me God—”

“We leave him gifts so he won’t eat us,” cuts in Little, going for a reassuring tone. “Pebbles and pieces of clothing and—”

“Is that where my tie went?”

“It was your ugliest one,” Little points out. “It looked like old upholstery.”

“Also my sock?”

“It had no pair.”

“…Also my underwear?”

“No, I needed that for our treehouse flag.”

“Oh, thank God! Wait, what?”

“Nothing, never mind, shsh, shush,” Little recites. “How about I apologise to him? I could knock on his door and say ‘trick or treat’ and say ‘but it’s a treat for you’ and let him take a bite out of my arm? I could do without one elbow, I think.”

“Eric Zachary Pyne.”

“Oooh, am I in trouble?”

“You’re way past trouble, friend.”

“And all the way to greener pastures?”

“All the way to trouble-r.”

“That’s not a word.”

“You don’t know all the words.”

“I know a lot, though. Engine, pumpernickel, ephemeral, marmalade, kipuka, tambourine, dragonfly, everlasting, ichthyosaurus, cloaca, membrane, member—”

“Okay, that’s enough, that’s enough! Yes, yes, you’re very smart, but what’s all that smartness good for if you're bothering your neighbour and spreading nasty tales about him when you ought to know better?”

“You’re the one who raised me,” Little feels obliged to point out.

Dad scowls at him. It’s his ‘don’t try me’ look. It used to be more effective before the grey hair’s coup d'état.

“I don’t think he’d eat me specifically, though,” says Little after giving it a think. “Insects never bite me, so I must taste real bad, and he seems like a bit of a snob.”

“He can’t seem like a snob if he doesn’t leave the house.”

“Typical snob behaviour! Nothing outside is good enough to tempt them.”

“Little, that’s horrible. I’m very disappointed.”

“So am I,” Little nods eagerly. “You’d think he’d make the effort but it’s like he’s determined to scorn the whole neighbourhood, isn’t it?”

This time, The Spider is accompanied by a lengthy groan of frustration and looks more like the Giant Squid.

The Kraken, Little christens it in his head. The Spider’s eldritch elder.

“I wonder if he’d eat you. You’re old, but your bloodshake brings all the mosquitos to the yard, so you must be a real repas exquis.”

“The ‘s’ is silent.”

“Not when it’s your spine! You creak like an unoiled door, old boy.”

“Go tell people I feed you drugs,” Dad sighs. “The sooner they adopt you, the better.”

Little sneezes one last time and leaves, exit, stage left. He almost walks into the doorway, too, because he’s so busy wondering if Gha— Mr. Vandergaster would catch his cold if he ate Little now and whether cooking him thoroughly first would help with boiling out the bacteria at all.

*

What Little really likes about the neighbourhood is how most houses seem to take after their inhabitants’ personalities. Take Mr. Blackwood down the road: his garden is as unruly as his beard, he forgets to close the front door properly half the time so that it tilts open just like his shirt collars do, and the chipped rooftiles rather match his unfortunately receding hairline. Now, Miss Nickleby’s place up the road is just like its owner, too: her dresses always have frills that make her look like if an octopus and a jellyfish defied the odds and had a child together, and her house is always adorned with equally frilly seasonal decorations, regardless of the season in question. Miss Nickleby has repainted her front door at least four times this year alone, too, and she’s had five dye jobs as well, so that checks out. She’s a chatterbox, and her mailbox is always full like a piñata about to be— you get it yet?

With their own place, it’s much the same: the uncontrolled vegetation in the garden is all Dad (busy and forgetful), the window plant boxes are all Viola (shy but eager) and the doormat with a ‘welcome to our hum-bee abode’ written on it is all Little himself (wonderful, friendly, kind, funny, sweet, precious, clever, and capital.) The door is all Mum (half-lingering, half-gone) because she wanted it pink, she would have it pink, never mind that it’d clash with the red brick, she eventually did have it pink, and now, years later, here they are. The paint is chipped, it breaks Little’s heart every time he slams the door and some of it peels off, and, all in all, the door looks like a fingernail that’s been in desperate need of manicure for ages but – Little feels quite confident speaking for all of them on this – they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“And here,” he’d say if this was a proper tour, “is where I scraped my knee at the ripe age of four. If you look up at the sun without blinking for a bit and then look at the spot again, you’ll even see a bit of blood, I swear.”

Right at the bottom of their street, which is a dead-end if you don’t count a narrow shortcut, Rupert Vandergaster’s house sticks out like a sore thumb, or rather like a thumb that’s past sore and well into the necrosis stage. It’s not the grimy affair of cheap horror films, dripping black, oozing green, and radiating purple, and there are no gravestones lining the driveway, but it’s hardly a picture of suburban bliss: the amount of ivy is indecent (there’s ivy, and then there’s ivy), the curtains are always drawn in all the windows and they are black, the doormat has ‘welcome’ written on one half and ‘goodbye’ on the other and is facing the wrong way, the mailbox has been dismantled (as has the doorbell), the bushes grow tall enough to shield the ground floor windows from the scrutiny of those brave enough to peer in, the fence is spiky, the weeds are suspicious, the birds are weary, and there’s an ‘angry dog’ sign on the wicket even though, as far as Little knows, Mr. Vandergaster doesn’t have one.

“Every neighbourhood needs a weirdo,” is what one of the As (Abel, Arabella, Alan, and Agnes – siblings) told him. “It’s a law of physics.”

Little is quite brave – certainly brave enough to face the house from the relative safety of the other side of the road – and he swallows once, swallows twice, swallows, all right, many times, squares his shoulders and stares.

“A fortress,” he decides, squinting up at the house. “Impenetrable, inhospitable, rude, maybe, a little scary, even, a little rough around the edges, sure, prickly, prickly, prickly, yes, very prickly indeed but! Not bad looking at all.”

The ivy, he decides, contributes to the ‘fortress’ aspect and is not a reflection of Mr. Vandergaster’s appearance: he might be a hermit but he’s a neat one. Little has only glimpsed him briefly and from afar, but he’s pretty sure Mr. Vandergaster owns a comb and an ironed pair of slacks, if nothing else.

“I bet he colour-codes his socks,” he sighs, staring at where the mailbox used to be. “Colour-codes and mends them, too.”

*

“Let’s invite him over for dinner,” Little says halfway through dinner.

“Him?”

“Mr. Vandergaster.”

Dad spits Bolognese all over the table. Viola wrinkles her nose in distaste, closes her eyes, and starts counting down from ten as though she thinks the mess will have magically disappeared by the time she’s done.

“I don’t mean to eat him, though that would be a power move for sure,” Little says, wiping the Bolognese off with his sleeve before Dad can stop him. “I think something vegetarian would do nicely to start with.”

“How about we just don’t bother poor Mr. Vandergaster?” Dad sighs, pushing Little’s arm off the table. The cotton takes most of the Bolognese with it.

“Again, he’s not poor at all, I don’t think.”

“I know you think you’re special, but Ghastly Vandergaster wouldn’t leave his house if it was on fire, and he’s certainly not going to leave it to have dinner with you,” Viola says, scowling at him through her curtain of hair.

“Actually, he does leave sometimes,” Dad says. “And, et tu, Brute?”

Viola actually flushes red. Little watches, fascinated. He’s been growing up quite shameless himself and he finds it rather interesting, how some people don’t.

“He gets his food delivered,” Viola points out. “He never leaves.”

“He’s been known to leave,” Dad insists. “Once a decade at the very least.”

“I think we should invite him over,” Little tries again. “His complexion matches the dining room décor.”

“The dining room is white.”

“Exactly.”

“Little,” Dad groans.

“You said I should be nice to him.”

“I said you weren’t to bother him.”

“I’m a born bother-er, though,” Little sighs, reaching out to give Dad a consoling pat on the shoulder. “Can’t help it. We could do appetizers, call them hors d’oeuvres, pretend we’re worldly, all that jazz. We would play classical music because don’t you think he must be a classical music person?”

“Little, it’s a no.”

“Is it a proper ‘no’ or is it a ‘convince me’?”

“It’s always a ‘no’,” Viola says, kicking him under a table. “Never a ‘convince me’.”

“It’s a ‘please, don’t harass our neighbours’,” Dad sighs, rubbing his temples. “I did tell your mother that she shouldn’t do all that dancing when she was pregnant with you. It was always salsa Sunday, can-can Wednesday, and look how you turned out.”

“We could do dancing after dinner and a digestion break,” Little nods. “Tango?”

“Pass the salt, please,” Viola sighs, even though she’s done eating.

“Here you go, and what I’m wondering is did he eat Peter Mulinski and did he skin him first?”

“I wouldn’t have Peter, skinless or not,” Viola says with a grimace. “Also, he was sent to boarding school.”

“So they tell us.”

“He came back for Christmas, remember?” Dad says after The Kraken. To be fair, by now it’s evolved into a Cthulhu. “He came to say hi and gave you those magic cards, too.”

“What about Mary Anderson?”

“Divorce. Went down South to live with her Mum.”

“I imagine he had to shave her head first. She had a lot of hair, Mary.”

“Just a year till university,” Viola sighs. “Homicide is not worth it.”

“Unless you get to eat the victim,” Little points out. “I imagine they last long. Maybe a winter, if you preserve the meat well and ration sensibly.”

“Let’s sell him,” Viola says, turning to Dad.

“Let’s,” Dad nods soberly.

“Just make sure to get a good price for me,” Little says cheerfully. “I’m good stock. I wouldn’t like you to get anything less than your money’s worth.”

*

The list of things Little likes about Dad contains but is not limited to:

• how he sings Elton John songs in the shower when it’s a good day, George Michael songs when it’s a bad day, and nothing at all when it’s a funeral day
• how he made Little chew every bite of food thirty times until Little reached the age of six and Dad decided that he was old enough to maintain the habit without supervision or, alternately, old enough to refuse to maintain it
• how when he makes soup he’ll toss all the vegetables they have in the house in there, never mind if they go together well or not
• how his puttanesca is to die for but his carbonara is just deadly
• how he’s seen Bringing Up Baby thirty-seven or is it thirty-eight times now?
• how he still eats Viola’s bread crust for her even though he lets her cut it off all by herself now, bless him
• how he says ‘good morning, how do you do’ to all their neighbours and their pets
• how he always uses too much dish soap and turns the kitchen into Bubbleland after every dinner
• how he swears whenever he stubs his toe and remembers to turn the word into something acceptable halfway through only some of the time
• how he’s not an early riser but prefers sunrises to sunsets
• how his bedside stories never end in a conventional ‘happily ever after’ but comfort Little to sleep all the same
• how when he was five and not allowed to help with the harvest or dye his hair red or keep a pet hedgehog (“The hedgehog was the last straw, really, since Grandma told me to get a – can you believe this? – cactus instead”) he asked Grandma Eleanor – God rest her soul – to tie his shoes for him, please, because he’d decided to run away and was leaving for Neverland pronto
• how he would never do that thing parents do where they throw you up in the air when you’re small enough and catch you mid-air because “I’m just too scared I’d drop you! You’d be up in the air and suddenly it’d turn out I have carpal tunnel syndrome: I’d feel a stabbing pain and just miss you and what then? They’re madmen, all of them, letting go of their children like that, even if it’s for a second! No, thanks, I’ll save that for when you’re about to leave for university or prison, whichever it’ll be…”
• how, whenever he cuts his finger chopping vegetables, he automatically wipes the blood away with a dishcloth
• how he still thinks it’s okay to mix laundry and has made all of his white shirts either greyish, purplish, or pinkish over the years
• how he has thick tomes like Parenting 101 or How Not to Kill Your Kid OR Yourself on his shelves but always ends up reading his silly romance books instead anyway
• how, for Viola’s sixteenth birthday, he caved in and drove them all to a climate protest
• how he always wears two pairs of socks at a time because his feet get cold and treats himself to a third on December mornings
• how, as a kid, he wanted to be a lupinologist, a fulminologist, and a penguinologist, but is quite happy being a teacher instead (no ologies for him!) even if he gets involved in too many local projects, relies on sporadic naps, and ends up doing crazy stuff like trying to bite into a candy bar without unwrapping the plastic first
• how he owns three Hawaiian shirts, wears two of them, and can pull off only one
• how his hair makes him look almost handsome
• how last year he bribed Mrs. Gluttony to explain linear functions to Viola even though Mrs. Gluttony, despite the name, enjoys the reputation of being unbribable
• BUT WHAT DID HE BRIBE HER WITH is what he won’t spill and what Little is yet to guess
• how he doesn’t watch the Olympics but never misses Eurovision
• how he actually makes them do stretches in the morning – how, when it’s summer, he makes them do it outside where all the early joggers and dog-walkers can see
• how he likes whole milk but only ever gets semi-skinned because that’s the one Viola drinks
• how he tried to iron a raincoat once and almost burned the house down
• how he organises this ‘clean your neighbourhood’ thing with school kids every other weekend
• how, once, he said that his favourite fish was a dolphin
• how, whenever they go to Starbucks, he says that his name is Fitzwilliam and makes Viola says hers is Eureka but gives Little free rein
• how, when Viola’s The Raft of Medusa birthday puzzle set arrived and it turned out it was missing a piece, he searched everywhere and tried everything short of prying off the floorboards, emailed the company to supply the missing piece, and, when they received a strongly-worded refusal a few days later, cut the puzzle out of an old piece of cardboard and asked Mrs. Milne, the art teacher, to paint it the right colours for him, pretty please
• how he swears whenever he sees Hugh Grant on TV and never remembers to censor it halfway through
• how he can’t open jars and has to ask Viola to do it every time, all blushing cheeks and shuffling feet
• how he’s very lonely but tries very hard not to let it show
• HOW HE’S VERY LONELY AND WHAT IS LITTLE SUPPOSED TO DO, HUH? He already emailed Rachel Weisz about Dad to ask if she’d have him (with Dad’s best picture attached, of course) but she’s yet to get back to him
• how he loves finger-painting even though he’s spectacularly bad at it and makes rose bushes look like puke and birds look like floating semi-colons
• how when Viola announced that she wanted to make her own clothes last year he got her a sewing machine but refused to let her use it until he learned how to do it himself, just so he’d have the certainty it wasn’t dangerous
• how when he’s in a good mood he fist-bumps the fridge door to close it, and how he slaps it closed instead when he’s in a bad mood
• how, every Sunday night, he pours himself a little bit of red wine into his Husband of the Century mug and sips it while reading one of those Dolores Dragonfly romance novels of his (“I’ve read one,” Viola told him once after an intensely explicit vignette of gagging noises, “and it was a lot of disrobing discussions, but, somehow, they never even got to the disrobing. Instead, they did things like daffodil-planting and needlework and, at the end, no one chased anyone to an airport, or to a helipad, or to a— well, you get the picture.”)
• how he’s scared to go down to the cellar and always asks one of them to stand on top of the stairs and wait for him when he has to
• how he doesn’t believe in peeling fruit (“If you can’t eat the skin, don’t eat it at all, is all I’m saying”)
• how, in winter, unless Viola reminds him, he always forgets his gloves, and how he spends the whole season complaining about having perpetually chapped hands
• how he never goes anywhere without saying ‘I love you’ first and how he says ‘I love you’ when he gets back home, too
• how when they forgot their reusable bag once, he made them carry all the groceries in their arms even though it took them twice as long to get back home and they kept dropping everything (everything, unfortunately, included a carton of eggs, too)
• how he gets grumpy whenever the weather is bad, whenever aunt Rosalie calls, and whenever they’re out of coffee, which is a monthly thing (the coffee – the weather is bad most of the year, and aunt Rosalie gets bored enough to remember them every week or so)
• how he never hangs up when advertising people call and has those long conversations about the quality of carpets and the meaning of life with them
• how he promised he’d let Little paint his nails and dress up as a chanterelle for Halloween
• how he’s going to make them pumpkin soup even though he hates it himself
• how he tends to pace his study and argue with himself, spidering all over the place
• how, since Mum, he’s 50%, and not 33,3% Little’s, but how it always feels like a 100% anyway

The list of things Little doesn’t like about Dad contains and is limited to:

• how lonely he is, with no Rachel Weisz to keep him company and with the memory of Mum not substantial enough for a hug

*

“My October to-do list includes figuring out if Mr. Vandergaster is a cannibal and getting Dad a girlfriend,” he announces when he finds Viola and Clover under the willow tree they always choose for their outdoors dates. Normally, Little would devote a humble slice of his pie-chart of an afternoon to making fun of them for it, but the day deserves poets and inamoratas out and about: autumn has put on its best dress for them and it wouldn’t do to forget to compliment her on it. The river – its pearl necklace of the day – hums its tune a few feet away and it might just be the only thing in the area that doesn’t look like it’s been drenched in oil and set on fire. The season is an aglow love story in-the-painting, and it wouldn’t do to have it go unrequited and beat too hasty a retreat, so Little lets Viola and Clover be and makes a mental note to send the trees and bushes a few kisses on his way home, too.

“Girlfriend or boyfriend,” Viola corrects. “He likes Cary Grant enough to be fine with either.”

A lightbulb goes off in Little’s mind but he can’t see what it is it’s supposed to illuminate just yet.

“Girlfriend would probably clean after herself better,” Little says, chewing on his lips.

“Gender stereotypes,” Clover says in a sing-song voice. “Girlfriend would clog the drain with her hair.”

“That’s a gender stereotype, too,” Little points out. “Do you clog the drain with yours?”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” Clover says, inspecting her nails, which are painted pink. “Maybe I don’t shower at all.”

“Yes, you do,” Little crows triumphantly. “Viola always goes on and on about how you smell like macadamia and vanilla and honey and all that other crap.”

Clover raises her eyebrows so high that they disappear under her blonde fringe. Viola goes beetroot red and glares at him. Little feels a sense of accomplishment. He deserves a sticker.

“How do you force someone to seduce someone else anyway?” he asks, tilting his head at them.

“You don’t,” Viola sighs. “You have to respect people’s autonomy.”

“Don’t you want Dad to be happy?”

“He doesn’t need a significant other to be happy.”

“Says a significant-other-owner.”

“Owner?” Clover echoes. “No way.”

“You can’t hoard all the love for yourself,” Little tells Viola seriously. “Maybe Dad wants to go on and on about somebody’s shampoo, too.”

Viola chews on her lip. “I don’t think he’s ready.”

“Well, I’m not waiting for his retirement,” Little says with a scowl. “I’m busy and I have other things to do.”

“I say just leave him alone,” Viola insists. “Who would you even have him date, anyway? Remember the Rebecca fiasco?”

Last year, a Miss Rebecca Whittle invited Dad over to her place and promised to make him spaghetti, too. Dad – the dolt – assumed there’d be more people there and brought three wine bottles. Apparently, he and Miss Rebecca drank half of each before the second course and, by then, Dad was too out of it to remember about his shellfish allergy and had to be rushed to the hospital soon after because whatever Miss Rebecca had put in that spaghetti sauce sure had not come from land. A week later Dad – physically but not necessarily emotionally recovered – slipped an apology note under Miss Rebecca’s door. It said: I’m not a shellfish fan but the Keats was lovely, and I had no idea it was supposed to be a date but so are you. Miss Rebecca never replied and the romance ended before it well began – a Titanic voyage of a thing. Months later, they got a wedding invitation in the mail and, as of August this year, Miss Rebecca Whittle is a Mrs. Rebecca Cuttle instead.

“Fiasco is a stretch,” Little says even though when he remembers the knock on the door and how panicked Miss Rebecca looked when they opened it, he sort of feels like throwing up. “With love, you have to keep trying until you get it right.”

“But it has to be him trying,” Clover points out, tangling her fingers with Viola’s. “Not you.”

“No, it has to be me,” Little decides. “I’m better at wooing.”

Viola chokes on nothing and has a coughing fit.

“Bless you,” Little says generously before leaving so they can smooch in peace. They’ve chosen a weeping willow for their rendezvous for a reason, after all. Little’s seven and ¹¹∕₁₂, not stupid.

*

Autumn, Little decides on his way home, is a show-off. All that gold is already very baroque in and of itself, but then the season keeps adding to it and its other colours are hardly humbler: red is about the most obnoxious thing Little has ever seen, and October is really going all-out with orange this year.

He loves it and he’s had Dad gather leaves into heaps so he could roll around in them three times this year already.

“Halloween, Halloween, pumpkin spice,” he recites cheerfully, skipping along the pavement, “Someone to woo... Shall I roll a pair of dice?”

Mr. Vandergaster’s place is on the way home if you take that shortcut, and Little, who has, stops to gawk a little. The black drapes are still drawn but he’s pretty sure he’s just seen one twitch.

He deliberates. He might not be tasty, but he is a little sweaty, and that’s always appetising to carnivores, right?

“Carpe diem,” he decides, even though he’s still not sure what carps have to do with being adventurous, and rounds the house. “Whoa.”

The backyard is always full of weeds and bushes and weeds and bushes and even more weeds and even more bushes, but, now, there are pumpkins, too. They have eyes but they don’t have any mouths and they literally materialised overnight.

“Sneaky,” Little whispers, wishing he was playing Grandmother’s Footsteps and that the As were here.

He walks up to the back door – peeling green paint, most uninviting – and pounds on it with his fist, trying to look like he knows what he’s doing.

“I know you’re in there, Mr. Vandergaster!” he cries. “Would you like to come to dinner at our place?”

Silence.

“Huh,” Little says before trying the doorknob. To his surprise, it gives, and the door creaks open. It sounds like a very emphatic ‘run and save yourself while you can’. Little is not religious, but he crosses himself before stepping inside anyway, just in case.

The light is on in the room and it’s a warm yellow sort, too. Apparently, he’s inside a kitchen and, at first glance, there are no body parts all over the place. Just cookbooks, and herbs, and pots, and all that jazz. There’s a Gustave Moreau calendar on the fridge and the October page is Diomedes Devoured by Horses, which is the most disturbing element of the décor by far and does worry Little slightly, although, of course, it’s not cannibalism if it’s horses doing it. It would be if it was horses eating each other, like in Macbeth, which he knows about even though he’s ‘too young for Macbeth, Little, oh my God’.

“I don’t think I’m going to get eaten,” he whispers, rubbing a bit of garlic skin between two fingers the way he imagines a detective would do. “A little disappointing, but mostly reassuring.”

“You’ve yet to check the contents of the fridge, though,” a smooth-rough voice says quietly behind him as the door clicks shut. “Boo.”

*

Little wrote down his will when he turned four, just in case. He picked a purple pen and kept it short:

Everythink I have I leeve to DAD and VIOLA becauze they are al I have.

*

“Cookie?”

“No, thank you. I’m not supposed to accept sweets from strangers.”

“You know my name, don’t you? I’ve heard you shout it outside many a time.”

“Er, sorry about that. I don’t think you’re all that ghastly, not from up close.”

“Mmm.”

They’re sat facing each other at the kitchen table, with all those garlic skins strewn between them. The cookies are arranged on a plate like a five-petalled flower, and they look mouth-watering, but Little won’t cave in even though, by now, his mouth is like a swimming pool.

“It’s what happens in Hansel and Gretel,” he feels obliged to explain. “The witch fattens them up before eating the kids.”

“I don’t think I’d have the patience, personally,” Mr. Vandergaster says, nibbling on a cookie. Little watches, trying not to drool too much.

“You’re not very good at being a recluse if you leave the back door unlocked,” he points out. “Did you get lonely?”

“If there is no communal feeling between you and other people, try to be near to things – they will not abandon you,” Mr. Vandergaster recites with a gravity that suggests it must be a citation.

“I see,” Little nods gravely. “Does that mean you’re a hoarder as well as a hermit?”

Mr. Vandergaster props his chin on his hand and smiles. From up close he’s not only not ghastly, but rather handsome, too. His hair is maybe-brown, maybe-red, depending on the light, and it’s not greying or receding at all, he’s slim without looking underfed, he has a good nose and an even better forehead, and his fingers are long like a pianist’s. The only drawback is the advanced eczema, but no one is perfect.

“Cookie?” Mr. Vandergaster offers again, and, this time, Little is just not strong enough to resist.

“MMM,” he says emphatically once he’s done oohing, aahing, and licking his fingers. “It’ll have been worth it even if these are poisoned.”

Mr. Vandergaster raises his eyebrows with an amused smile. “Why, thank you.”

“You know,” Little says, squinting at him. “You’re quite the catch.”

Mr. Vandergaster snorts.

“I mean it,” Little insists, swinging his legs back and forth under the table. “Is the eczema why you won’t leave the house? Because I think you’re still at least an eight.”

“I’m touched,” Mr. Vandergaster says dryly. “Another?” he says innocently, pointing to the plate of cookies.

“Maybe later. I have a sister, you know.”

“Mmm. You have the same face.”

“Mine’s nicer and how would you know?”

“I have windows,” Mr. Vandergaster says, clearly amused. “Also, eyes.”

“And what nice eyes they are,” Little nods approvingly. “My sister likes crocheting, wants to be a marine biologist, and is a lesbian.”

“How nice.”

“I have a dad as well.”

“Most people do.”

“Mine is not like most people’s, though,” Little insists. “His name is Cecil.”

“I know.”

“How? Windows and eyes wouldn’t tell you that.”

“I just do,” Mr. Vandergaster shrugs. “Won’t your dad be worried about you, by the way?”

“He does worry but we’ve both come to terms with it,” Little assures him solemnly. “My dad has dimples.”

“I know that, too.”

Little frowns, disappointed. For some reason – most of the time, Little’s mind is a mystery box even to himself – he really wanted to surprise Mr. Vandergaster with that bit of information.

“Oh, I know what I’m after now!” he breathes because he finally gets what the lightbulb moment was all about. This lightbulb is even bigger. Really, it’s almost a chandelier. “I’m going to kill two doves with one stone.”

“It’s birds.”

“I know, but I like doves better.”

“Must be some stone.”

“Some doves, too,” Little nods, getting to his feet. “I’ll take one cookie for the road, please, thank you, see you later, goodbye!”

*

After Mum, Dad moved into his study because he kept waking up on the wrong side of the bed. At first, it was supposed to be temporary, and he restricted himself to a lazily made-up cot but, eventually, he shoved a fold-out couch in there and stopped pretending that he’d ever go back upstairs.

Now, the couch is quite sturdy, but Dad? Not so much.

Little pounces anyway.

“Oompf,” Dad mumbles from under the covers. “Is this hell?”

“Not according to Bosch,” Little says before finding a bit of skin and licking Dad’s stubbly – blegh – cheek in welcome. “Nowhere near enough butts.”

“You’re too young for Bosch,” Dad complains.

“Not for butts?”

“Get off, get off, get off.”

Little takes a moment to consider it but stays where he is. He bounces a bit and something groans. Little rather hopes it’s Dad’s mouth and not one of his ribs. He pats down his chest to check just in case and stops with his palms on Dad’s stomach. Dad’s quite slim but he’s a bit soft around the middle, which he insists is a late-thirties/early-forties thing and ‘you’ll see yourself, just you wait’. Little rather likes it: it makes for a nice pillow, if someone’s into sleeping on people, which Little certainly is.

Is Mr. Vandergaster, is the question.

“Dad,” he says, trying to sound as mischievous as he can, just because no one trusts it anymore when he plays innocent. “Are you into redheads at all?”

“Excuse me?”

“Actually, it’s more chestnut.”

“What’s chestnut? Little, it’s Saturday.”

“You’ll sleep when you retire,” Little says, patting his pectoral consolingly even though there’s nothing consoling about the lack of muscle definition there. “It’s only three more years.”

“I don’t retire in three years, you little devil,” Dad laughs. “I’m not even forty-five yet!”

“Yet,” Little nods gravely. “Let’s have pancakes.”

“As in, make us pancakes?”

“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” Little says, drumming his fingers on Dad’s collarbones. “Look, autumn’s thrown up all over the window.”

Dad obediently inclines his head to stare at the window, where a bunch of wet leaves have been slapped onto the glass.

“It happens to the best of us,” he sighs before shoving Little off himself. “What have you been up to?”

Little worries his lip, hums. Moves away when Dad’s cold foot brushes his calf, smiles. “Not much.”

*

“NOW, NOW, IT’S NOW, PAUSE IT NOW!”

“Jesus,” Clover says. “He’s like a tea kettle.”

“That he is,” Viola nods, glaring at Little. “There.”

They’ve been skipping scenes of 101 Dalmatians to get to the bit Little wanted and now the screen is finally showing Roger and Anita pressed together, their dogs’ leashes tangled around their knees.

“Perfect,” Little says, kissing the tips of his fingers. “Bellissimo.”

“Why are we doing this again?” Clover mumbles through the wool of Viola’s turtleneck, which she’s pulled all the way up to her eyes. She hasn’t bothered to put her arms through the sleeves, and it makes her look like a weird-shaped invertebrate. Admittedly, it’s a good look on her. “We had plans, Little.”

“Snogging doesn’t constitute plans,” Little says, jumping up and down to get some of the excitement over and done with.

Viola goes red.

Clover grins.

“We have conversations, too,” Viola says miserably.

“They’re very stimulating,” Clover nods innocently.

“I like you,” Little decides. “You can marry Viola if you want.”

“I think I’ll wait for her permission, but thank you all the same,” Clover says graciously and manages a little curtsy, too: quite the feat, what with the sleeves, and the sitting position.

“Anyway, this is exactly how you get two people to fall in love with each other,” Little says, pointing at the TV screen. “Personally, I don’t see what’s so romantic about adults falling over, running each other over, and spilling things all over each other, but who am I to argue with such a long-standing tradition?”

“It’s a Disney film, love,” Clover sighs. “It’s not supposed to be realistic.”

“Also,” Viola says, bringing her index finger up, “We don’t have a dog and Mr. Vandergaster, who also doesn’t have a dog, never leaves his house.”

“That is an obstacle,” Little admits because denial will get them nowhere. Well, apart from the Mediterranean. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”

“We?” Clover says, one eyebrow going up, up, up, even upper, like a mountain lift. “I assume it’s not the royal we you mean?”

“No, it’s the plural we,” Little assures her. “After all, you’ve both mastered the art of the meet-cute.”

*

With Clover, it happened like this:

At sixteen, Viola was an awkward, gangly oddity that had more limbs than she knew what to do with (Little gets that: he tends to find keeping track of all four of his own quite challenging as well), kept checking dusty poetry books out of the local library and forgetting to return them (the fees were enormous: if you owe your local library over five pounds, you’re either a chronic never-giver-back, or a confused pensioner who moved towns fifty years earlier and got an item mixed up with something belonging to their own collection), found meat abhorrent and mushrooms disgusting, and wore scarves big enough for Little – a hypothesis he’d tested many a time – to use as a blanket, a cape, or a trailing wedding gown for a crochet-themed ceremony where he’d have the starring role of the glowing bride. All these things were factors that contributed to Viola’s unexpected, middle-of-nowhere, out-of-the-blue, and so on and so forth, love story.

They were grocery shopping at the time, all three of them, and Viola, who hated grocery shopping because ‘things like food are a waste of time, I’m too profound for proper nutrition, put that aubergine away and check out this poem’ came out of her trance – she had an old volume of Auden in her hand – long enough to veto buying chicken breasts.

“Honey, darling, lovely, love, sweetie pie, pumpkin,” Dad said with forced cheer, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m not imaginative enough to feed you properly with greens alone. If you want vegetables for dinner, you’ll have to get them yourself.”

Which is how Viola found herself picking potatoes in the vegetable aisle. There is, perhaps, an alternate reality where it’d occurred to her that civilised people don’t block the way with a half-filled bag of po-tay-toes in one hand and an Auden open in the other and where she and Clover merely passed each other – ships in the night – and missed their chance, never to stumble into the right context for a romantic encounter ever again.

(“Romantic” being a word that describes the situation roughly but not exactly: the overhead lights were too glaring to hide pimples and blackheads, the muddy footprints all over the floor were still wet, and the audience of the meet-cute consisted mostly of disapproving ladies in lilac berets.)

Anyway, here’s what happened: there was Viola, engrossed in her Auden, following the poignant You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart bit with her wisdom-hungry and allergy-red eyes, when her grip on the bag of potatoes loosened and the treacherous beasts started tumbling out, one after the other until what started out as a tentative reconnaissance became a flood of truly Biblical proportions, with no Noah to save us all—

(The love of all things dramatic, dear reader, Little assures, is hereditary and therefore not his fault at all.)

By the time poor Viola realised that something had gone terribly wrong (even she wasn’t enough of a reader to miss the hail of potatoes wreaking havoc at her feet), it was already too late, but she tried to salvage what she could like the brave scout that she was anyway. That’s where the ungainliness comes in. In her attempt to keep the bag closed and pick up at least some of the unruly potatoes, she mis-stepped – stepped on one of them, as it was – and went sprawling on the ground, taking unsuspecting Clover – new to the neighbourhood and then engaged in searching a packet of shallots for an expiry date – with her.  

Now, applause for the scarf, please, for that’s hardly when the disaster ended. Oh, no, that was just the start. What happened was – and Little was actually there to witness that bit – that Clover ended up underneath Viola, they knocked foreheads, the Auden went flying one way and ended up in a banana box, the shallots went flying the other way and ventured as far as – oh, brave new world – the bakery section, and the potatoes all slowly rolled to a stop all around the future lovebirds, making the mise-en-scène a true minefield. Now, in hindsight, it’s more funny than tragic, but, back then, it was too early for a well-earned ‘all’s well that ends well’ and Viola, red and all in a panic, scrambled to her feet, or at least tried to: not much came of the effort, as the sneaky scarf had wound its way around several body parts and pulled her back down as soon as she made her desperate move up.

This time, they didn’t knock foreheads. This time, there were teeth involved and poor Clover has the scar to prove it on her cheek to this day.

“I’msosorry,” Viola gasped as she attempted – again, to no avail – to roll away. The scarf, apparently of the opinion that November was the month for romance, tightened its grip and made sure they ended up in an even cosier position. “SOsorryohGODiwanttoDIE.”

“You have an asparagus in your hair,” Clover observed with an amused grin, quite unperturbed. “Want me to get it for you?”

“Strangle me instead?” Viola whined miserably.

“I would, but I think your scarf’s got that covered.”

Somewhere around that time, Viola must have got her first whiff of macadamia-coconut-vanilla-and-what-not.

It was love at first potato, is what Little will begin his reception speech with years in the future, though there were dozens of those present at the time, actually.

“Oh, dear,” a bystander said.

“EXCUSE ME!” another wailed. “SOMEONE REMOVE THESE TWO TROUBLESOME LADIES OFF THE PREMISES, PLEASE.”

“Oh, dear,” Dad said, dropping their groceries from shock. Luckily they hadn’t grabbed any eggs yet.

“Shall we play golf?” Little suggested, swinging the rake they’d picked up in the home section. “Perhaps hockey, since it’s November. The potatoes are pucks, and the tills are the goal.”

“I’msosorry,” Viola screeched again, struggling like a fish that hasn’t quite realised there’s no escaping the net. “Sorry, was that your arm?”

“Oof,” Clover half-gasped, half-laughed. “My kidney, I think. Oh, shsh, it’s fine, I have one to spare.”

“No golf,” Dad said with a stern look before rushing to the rescue. “Girls, we’ll try to extricate you, but you’d best sit up first.”

“We’re like Siamese twins,” Clover observed with amusement as they both tried to struggle up without puncturing any organs. Little revised first aid rules in his head just in case and considered the merits of disobeying and going along with the hockey. After all, it’d count as cleaning up, in a sense.

“We’re nothing like twins,” Viola spluttered. “You’re too pretty for us to be related.”

“Hey!” Dad protested, apparently offended. Little rather thought he had no cause to be: he had good shoulders no matter what Viola said.

“Why, thank you,” Clover said with a charming smile as they manoeuvred themselves to relative safety with their backs pressed to the nearest shelf. “I think I’ll have a potato-shaped dent in my spine forever.”

“I’msosorry,” Viola mumbled again. “You can have mine?”

“Your spine, you mean?”

Viola blushed furiously and then proceeded to dig herself in even deeper. “Well, it’s not the best model, what with the scoliosis, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Honey, I think you might want to stop talking,” Dad advised, frowning at the scarf, apparently in search of one of its ends, which, as luck would have it, was nowhere in sight.

“Oh, please don’t!” Clover laughed. “I’m… touched. Possibly concussed, too, but touched all the same!”

“Well, at least you assaulted someone polite,” Dad said cheerfully. “I’m sorry, too. I should be stricter. No more reading in public spaces, kid. In fact, I’m thinking, for the next few days at least, no reading at all. Well, maybe with the exception of books on the laws of physics, hmm?”

Viola groaned. Little, still debating the hockey, caught the copy of Auden between the tines of the rake and deposited it in her lap.

“Ah!” Clover said, reaching for it before Viola could snatch it and hide it in the folds of her worst – what a shame it had to be the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer one – jumper. “So that’s the real culprit!”

“No, it was all me,” Viola said because, apparently, she’d rather spare Auden the blame even though it could hardly bother him, what with the dead-since ’73-thing. “Um. Dad. How are you getting on with that knot?”

“I think you’re both sitting on the ends of the scarf,” Dad said, the wrinkle between his eyebrows deepening until the depression there broke a record of some sort, for sure. “Either that or there are no ends anymore and we’ve got a charmed object on our hands.”

“You said magic wasn’t real!” Little protested. “I want a charmed scarf, too!”

“Younger brother?” Clover guessed. “I’m new here.”

“I’m old here but we’re moving soon,” Viola mumbled.

“Oh?” Dad said, arching an eyebrow.

“I’m thinking South Dakota.”

“Are we changing our name?” Little said, allowing himself two jumps. “How about Drosselmeyer, or Van Der Beek, or García Lopez? I’m too young to grow a moustache but I’m sure I can get a fake one by tomorrow.”

“I’d rather you stayed,” Clover said cheerfully. “You’re the first person my age I’ve met.”

“I bet you wish you didn’t,” Viola said miserably.

“On the contrary!” Clover tittered. “Oh, here’s one end! I have been sitting on it, Sir.”

“Well,” Dad said, clearly out of his depth. “Perhaps I’ll leave the rest to you.”

Viola shot him a panicked look. Clover grinned. Dad picked up a potato and smiled apologetically at an approaching shop assistant. Little swung the rake and smiled angelically.

“THIS IS SCANDALOUS!” the bystander from earlier screeched.

And that’s how, Little will say in the conclusion of the first part of his reception speech, my big sister got banned from that store forever and ever. She got the love of her life out of it, though, so, all in all, not a bad bargain, wouldn’t you agree?

After The Potapocalypse (the name took) they parted their ways and Viola attempted employing a head-in-sand tactic but Clover proved too persistent: she would ring the doorbell, nod through Dad’s awkward and clearly faked ‘she’s not home’s, and then toss bits of bark at Viola’s window because “I wouldn’t risk breaking it with pebbles, Sir, honest”. She was everything Viola wasn’t: confident, effortlessly charming instead of effortfully hopeless, blonde, fond of the colour pink, partial to fur coats (“only fake fur, though” she promised with her hand folded over her heart), and good at social interactions.

Why she chose to socially interact with the person who earned her a dozen bruises and wore Wellies even when it wasn’t raining, none of them knew, but such was the case, and, all things considered, it took significantly less time to coax Viola out of her fortress of mortified embarrassment than Little had expected. They’d only got through four milk bottles (and they were avid milk drinkers, all three of them) by the time Viola burst into the house one day, that dreaded scarf trailing to the ground, her cheeks apple-red, and pirouetted in the hall without knocking the mirror off the wall, leapt into an arabesque in the living room without toppling the ugly lamp over, and skidded to a stop in pointe in the kitchen without decapitating either of them.

She’d never done ballet in her life, either.

“Indigestion?” Little said, pausing in the act of spreading raspberry jam on his pancake.

Dad blinked at Viola as she actually hummed – teenage weltschmerz days over so soon? – while rooting through the fridge, and then he smiled a rather melancholic smile. “Worse.”

“Not croup?” Little said, more worried with every second. Whatever Viola was humming, it sounded suspiciously like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

“Worse,” Dad said again before leaning close and cupping his hand so Viola wouldn’t hear. “Love.”

“Oh,” Little said, staring at Viola as she swayed her hips to whatever was playing in her head, apparently oblivious to the awful weather outside, the tragic state of her tangled hair, and the impressive rip going all the way up her tights. “That is worse. Is it catching?”

“Let’s hope not,” Dad sighed. “I’m about done with love. If it is catching, she better cough on you. You still have your whole life ahead of you.”

But, even then, Little got stuck not on the ‘your whole life ahead of you’ bit but on the ‘I’m about done with love’, because that just wouldn’t do.

*

“Well, all right, I see your point, but that’s not how it usually happens in real life,” Clover says now. “We’re just special, Viola and I.”

“I don’t like it when people call themselves or others ‘special’,” Little says, trying to sound as tactful as possible. “It’s very exclusive because no one ever says it about working-class people.”

Viola and Clover exchange one of their Glances.

“Little,” Clover says slowly. “You’re about the special-est person to ever special.”

Little frowns, considers a scowl, gives the idea up, licks two of his fingers, and tries to pat down this one curl that just won’t obey. “It’s not my fault it sticks up,” he says mournfully.

“Not at all what I meant!” Clover says cheerfully. “But you’ve just proven me right.”

Little stares, uncomprehending, and then licks all over the rest of his hand, tilting his head at them.

“Please, don’t,” Viola says, hiding her face in her hands. “And do stop with the matchmaking. Nothing good will come of it, mark my words.”

*

Little doesn’t stop with the matchmaking and doesn’t mark Viola’s words because some good will come of it, he’s sure. Viola is biased anyway because she already has someone to be disgustingly in love with: people who have a significant other, Little has learned, are always the first to tell the single of the world that they need no man/woman/non-binary partner.

“Let me get this straight,” Abel, Little’s favourite A, says when Little calls an emergency meeting up in the treehouse, pushing his glasses up his nose. The nose is upturned, shaped like a slide, and the glasses, clearly in the mood for shenanigans, take advantage of that characteristic and immediately slide back down. “You want your father, the man who might end up grading our essays in the future, to date the murderer we’ve been bothering for the past month?”

“I want him to marry Mr. Vandergaster, actually, but dating would suffice to start with, I suppose,” Little confirms. “Also, Mr. Vandergaster is not a murderer. He eats cookies, not people, but he looks like he eats vegetables.”

“He’s green?” Agnes, Little’s second-favourite A says.

“He’s fit,” Little corrects. “Anyway, any ideas?”

“I have one,” says Alan. Little doesn’t have a single least-favourite A because he thinks it’d be too mean, so Alan and Arabella are tied for Little’s third-favourite. “How about you go hit your head on whatever you hit it on in the first place and see if it’ll knock the idea out just as it knocked it in.”

“Seconded!” Arabella says snottily, raising her right hand. Then, when no one joins in, she raises the left one, too. “Thirded!”

Little sighs. The thing with the As is that they’re just too geometrical. Symmetrical. Regular. Numerical. Numerous, too, why not. There’s something eerie about how they were born a year apart each, with a boy every other year and a girl every other year, and how there are four of them in the first place. Dad can’t even organise his socks but, somehow, the As’ parents managed to stick to a schedule, and with Mrs. A’s ovaries and Mr. A’s sperm (Little’s been doing some reading on conceiving, out of curiosity and just in case) apparently fully on board with the plan. Abel was first and he’s an intimidating ten years old now but refuses to tell them what it’s like because he insists that ‘the other side’ is not until you hit eleven. Arabella is nine and insufferable about it (“Nine and one third” she keeps saying, as if that’s even a thing!), Alan is eight and sits next to Little in class, stealing two of Little’s pens a week on average, and Agnes is seven and actually treats Little with the respect that he deserves. They’re all identical in terms of appearance (rosy cheeks, mousy hair and freckles) but their temperaments vary drastically, even if they’ve picked up some of each other’s habits over years of co-existence.

“I think it would be nice,” Agnes says, pronouncing each syllable with the care of someone who’s just learned their letters. “Mr. Vandergaster could cook for you, and you wouldn’t have to eat burnt pasta anymore.”

“It’s crispy,” Little sighs because it’s his life mission to make sure Dad never realises just how badly he burns food every single time. There are maybe five dishes he can prepare and get it right (get it godly, even) but everything else is just a safety hazard. “But yes, it would be very nice.”

“Oh, Little,” Abel says fondly. Little smiles because he loves it when people sound like they’re fond of him. “Have you thought this through? Because I’m not sure Ghastly— I’m not sure Mr. Vandergaster is the one.”

“The which one?” Little says, tilting his head at him.

“You know,” Abel says, scratching his cheek. “The one.”

“Mum says you are what you eat,” Agnes says thoughtfully. “If Mr. Vandergaster eats cookies, I’m sure Little’s dad would like him.”

“His dad wouldn’t be eating Ghastly, though, would he?” Arabella points out with an I’m-so-clever grin. “If anything, it’d be the other way around.”

“You’re all insane,” Alan pronounces, sticking his nose high up in the air. It’s the signature A nose, upturned and slide-like, but where on Abel it’s charming, on Alan it’s very charm-less. “I think we should, collectively, as a community, for the well-being of all locals, burn the man’s house down.”

“Then he’d have to leave,” Little says, frowning at the whirring and buzzing of thoughts in his brain. “He’d have to leave and stay somewhere safe and unburned, like, say, our house.”

“Um,” Abel squeaks.

“Oh, Alan, that’s brilliant!” Little cries. “I could kiss you!”

“Please don’t,” Alan says with a horrified grimace.

“No, I won’t,” Little says with a matching scowl. “I could, though. If you paid me.”

“How much?” Arabella says eagerly, like she’s just dying to see it.

“Thirty-four thousand.”

“Pounds?” Arabella says. Her face falls. “I only have four.”

“Four thousand?”

“No, four, period. Without the thousands.”

Little chances a glance at Alan, whose nose is sticking up snottily more than ever. “Maybe some other time, when I learn more about the value of money.”

“You are a bit young for prostitution,” Arabella nods. “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

“Don’t I get a say in it?” Alan screeches, scrambling backward over the wet leaves that sneaked into the treehouse. “Because I refuse to be kissed.”

“No one’s offering,” Little assures him.

“Please don’t burn Mr. Vandergaster’s house down,” Abel sighs. “That’s not legal.”

“But love,” Little points out wisely, “is.”

*

But Little never does end up setting Mr. Vandergaster’s house on fire, even though, as it soon turns out, the place could actually use a little heat.

*

“Hello again,” Little says, shoving his way past Mr. Vandergaster and inside, where it’s— “COLD!” he screeches, pulling his coat back on before he’s done taking it off all the way.

Mr. Vandergaster sighs and closes the door. He’s wearing a green bathrobe over a purple jumper over a beige turtleneck, he has gloves and a scarf on, and the very tip of his nose is cherry-red. “It’s cold for October, isn’t it?” he sighs before offering Little a cookie. “They’re not warm this time, for obvious reasons, but. It’s the last batch I managed to make Before.”

“What is ‘Before’ and why does it sound like you capitalised it?” Little says, reaching for the cookie. “It’s cold for October but we’re inside. I was going to ask you if you have an escape route planned in the event of a fire, but I don’t think it’d take here. It’s freezing.”

“What’s this about a fire?” Mr. Vandergaster snorts, before ushering Little deeper inside, where it’s dark and gloomy and still very cold. That last time, they stuck to the kitchen, and Little sadly can’t see enough of the room he’s been steered into to express an opinion, but it smells like lilies (a smell Little recognises well, what with them being funeral flowers), candle wax, and sadness.

“Never mind,” he mumbles, sinking into a suspiciously sinkhole-y couch. “Why is it so cold?”

“A cold front, I imagine,” Mr. Vandergaster says, collapsing into an armchair on the other side of what must be a coffee table. “Some years are like that. We’re quite up North, as well, so you should be used to it, really.”

Little glares.

Mr. Vandergaster clears his throat. “They cut off my energy,” he confesses, miserably but with some sad tatters of dignity mixed in there, too. “Everything else also.”

“Water?”

“Mm.”

“The internet?”

“Mm.”

For the first time in his life, Little finds himself performing The Spider. “WHY?”

“Wasn’t paying,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “Haven’t been for a while.”

Little does The Spider again. It’s at least a tarantula this time. “WHY?”

“Haven’t had the money,” Mr. Vandergaster says. This time, he sounds amused. Amused and bitter, but mostly amused.

“Adult stuff,” Little nods, trying to sound wise. “I have to go, but I’ll be back very soon. Ish.”

“Was that very soon or soonish?” Mr. Vandergaster says and now it’s pure amusement.

“Very soonish!” Little cries, struggling out of the couch’s clutches. “Boy, that’s some comfy furniture you’ve got here, shame it’s ice-cold, but worry not, I have an idea.”

“Oh boy.”

“And Hallelujah!” Little cries over his shoulder, stumbling towards the back door. “Don’t go anywhere and make sure the nose doesn’t fall off! It really suits the rest of your face!”

*

“Dad.”

“Kid, this sink won’t fix itself, and you need to learn a little patience.”

“Dad.”

“I mean, this is a priority, all right? So is Joe Mallory’s disaster of an essay, actually…”

“DAD.”

“Look, I’m almost done with this, so unless something’s on fire…”

“Something was supposed to be on fire but not anymore. Do you know who else has a sink that doesn’t work?”

“Little—”

“Mr. Vandergaster, is who.”

“Excuse me?”

“His sink doesn’t work either.”

Ha! Hallelujah again, hallelujah encore, mission accomplie, eureka and bon appétit! Finally, Dad looks up and meets Little’s eyes, which have been ready for the rendezvous for the past three minutes. It’s a good thing that he’s had so much practice as pestering goes because the little resistance Dad has put up to it is still no challenge for a botherer of Little’s skill.

“Say again,” Dad says with a foreboding frown. “I hope you haven’t done anything stupid.”

“Actually, it’s Mr. Vandergaster who’s done something stupid,” Little says, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet. “He really should manage his finances better, I think. Maybe you could do that for him, once he moves in.”

“Moves… in?”

“He hasn’t been paying and they cut him off.”

“They who?”

“Have you slept at all?” Little says, exasperated. “They cut him off: no light, no heat, no water. He sits in darkness and in cold and in… dryness, I suppose.”

Dad blinks. “Little, are you being serious now? Because if this is your idea of a joke—”

“Dead serious!” Little swears, hand folded over his heart. “With the emphasis on serious rather than dead.”

“How do you even—”

“He told me because we’re friends now!” Little interrupts, impatient. “You have to help me save him, also because we’re friends now!”

Dad puts his hands on his knees and worries at his lip with his front teeth. “If you’re telling the truth, then I agree that we have to do something about it, but Little…”

“Yes?”

“I’m pretty sure Mr. Vandergaster hates me.”

Little sighs. “Can he sleep on the living room couch?”

“Little, I mean it.”

“But you don’t even know each other,” Little reminds him, more and more confused with every passing second. “He doesn’t leave the house.”

Dad sighs, puts away the wrench he was holding by the wrong end the whole time, pats the tiles next to him, and, once Little has scooted close, tells him all about how he and Mr. Vandergaster do know each other, actually.

*

When Dad and Mum moved to the neighbourhood, they’d been together for five years and married for two of those. Before, they lived in a cramped London apartment but had since managed to put away enough money to purchase a slender grandmother (if not a cadaver) of a townhouse. They’d picked the town based on lucky job offers, the evenness of the cobblestones, and the amount of Halloween pumpkins in the street they were interested in and, when they arrived, they brought more hopes with them than they did boxes. Their first day in the neighbourhood, Dad had of those silly hats with a feather on the side on and Mum was wearing a sunflower-print dress. They both liked how, after the September rains, the curtain of ivy at the front of the house hung limp like an overlong fringe, and how the mailbox had a Winnie-the-Pooh sticker on it that’d managed not to peel away since their viewing some months prior.

They didn’t hurry with unpacking. After all, they had neighbours to meet.

“Your mother said that living in a flat was fine but a bit like living under an eave, something tiny attached to something bigger, temporary,” Dad says, temple pressed to the edge of the washbasin. “The house… She said it was ‘a proper place’. Grounded, you know? Like a burrow.”

They started knocking on doors their second day there, before anyone thought to knock on theirs first. They were eager, and cheery, and ‘obnoxiously happy, the local grumps simply couldn’t stand us’. Mr. Vandergaster, on the other end of the road, was mentioned in passing more than once: back then, he’d already more or less stopped leaving the house, and because little gossip could be manufactured from something as private and insubstantial without adding to it, they got treated to a number of silly stories that, while entertaining, especially right before Halloween, couldn’t have much truth to them, if they had any at all.

“They said he was some sort of a writer but what sort of a writer, that they couldn’t agree on. According to Mr. Wilcox, it was crime, but according to Mrs. Wilcox, it was erotica, which you’re so not allowed to look up later. Miss Shreve was ‘quite certain’ it was cookbooks, but Mrs. Melody stubbornly maintained that it had to — just had to — be horror, and of the gory sort, too, because why else stay inside the house for days on end like that, with only dust bunnies, spiders, and Schrödinger’s-human-remains for company?”

They’d both listen to the stories with indulgent smiles and speculations and assumptions kept piling up until they assumed the inconsistent, self-contradictory shape of the man they were yet to meet.

“Some — mostly the elderly — remembered him as a kid, and refused to spread rumours. ‘He was a perfectly sweet boy in my time, dear, all morning, Ma’am, and I won’t have a bad word said against him even if he’s never outside to say hello anymore’, that sort of thing.”

“So what happened?” Little asks, fearing the worst.

“Well,” Dad says with a wry smile. “What happened is we waited too long, and Halloween had snuck up on us before we could introduce ourselves.”

At the time, Dad was already teaching — it was his first month at the local school and he’d had a warm welcome with a few mishaps to recall fondly at a later date — and Mum would spend her time painting pictures that sometimes sold and sometimes didn’t and going on walks. She was pregnant with Viola at the time and maintained that ‘the kid’ loved those. She liked the wind even when it’d shove her hair inside her mouth and try to steal her scarf and she liked every colour the leaves were that autumn, too. She wasn’t picky about her routes (“for there is no lack for him who creates, and no poor, trivial place”) so she’d often wander down grey alleys but, that Halloween, she decided to follow the streams of orange-gold to where the colours concentrated in a nearby park, running there like paint towards the drain. There, she shared her baguette with the ducks living in the local pond and waited for Dad to finish classes. Allegedly, she was humming Autumn Leaves to herself when the man in the plague doctor costume appeared — “materialised, was the word she used” — next to her.

“Have you been feeding them?” he asked after they’d shared three minutes of companionable silence, producing a bun. “I wouldn’t want to spoil them.”

Mum smiled her winning smile (“she never did lose, not once”) and said that she was sure they could take some pampering, what with the cold.

“Now, here’s the important bit, Little,” Dad says with his chin pressed to the top of Little’s head (Little has taken advantage of the spontaneous storytime and climbed in Dad’s lap). “She was wearing gloves.”

“Why is that important?”

Little can feel it when Dad smiles. “Why, because of the wedding ring, of course.”

Mum complimented the stranger on his costume (“Will you be going trick-or-treating too?”) and they got to talking about duck plumage, and caramel lattes, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and Henri Rousseau, and Remedios Varo.

“I mean, I sure didn’t know about Remedios Varo when we met,” Dad sighs. “Anyway, he pretty much charmed the socks right off her.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, she told me as much. And besides, it was pretty obvious…”

Apparently, they were discussing Varo’s Constelaciones when Dad joined them, briefcase in hand. From afar, they looked like a picture: she with wind-blown hair, he with an equally wind-blown cape, leaves twirling all around like nature itself was trying to trick them into a waltz… “A postcard love story,” Dad smiles. “I wouldn’t dream of begrudging her that. Me and her, we’d already had a whole album of those.”

“This is—” Mum said when he joined them. “Oh, I actually have no idea who— I’m so sorry—”

“Not at all,” the man said, and it sounded like a smile. “What’s in a name, really?”

“We were discussing art and ducks,” Mum said cheerfully.

“And discussing art with ducks,” the man added. In the shade of the plague doctor hat, Dad couldn’t actually see his eyes through the holes in the mask, but he could feel them boring into his all the same. “As well as discussing art next to ducks.”

“Now, you’re a bit too young for this next bit,” Dad sighs. “See, I panicked and said something really awful.”

“I’m not too young,” Little protests. “I’ve seen American Beauty. Also American Psycho. Also American Pie. Also American—”

“You will never find my video store card again, and what I said was…”

“Oh!” was what Dad said — so far so good — and then: “Did you know that male ducks eject their penises from a sack in their body during sexual intercourse? They can reach up to 20 centimetres in length — that’s the penises and not the ducks — and they’re corkscrew-shaped, too.”

“Are they,” the man said after a loaded pause. “That’s certainly… hmm.”

“Sorry,” Dad mumbled, probably putting on the whole show, too: blushing, nape scratching, neckline pulling, forehead-sweating, and nervous-sniffing. The briefcase probably didn’t help: only in his mid-twenties, he must have looked like a tool. “So, you come here a lot?”

Mum blinked, practically vibrating discomfort.

“That sounded like a line, didn’t it,” Dad sighed. “Well, it wasn’t! Not that you’re not a handsome lad, what with the beak… Something you have in common with the ducks, though, hopefully, that’s where the similarities—”

Here Mum actually shoved a fistful of dead leaves in his mouth. The masked man laughed and “it just couldn’t sound like a suffocating hamster or a broken chainsaw, no, it had to sound like violins.”

“Sorry,” Dad said miserably after he’d spat out the last of the foliage. “I’ve had a challenging day.”

“It’s two o’clock,” the man pointed out, amused.

“Well, hopefully the rest of today’s challenges are taking an afternoon nap,” Dad sighed. “I mean, phew, what a day!”

“My husband’s first week at work,” Mum said, reaching out to pat his chest. “He’s been a bit twitchy.”

“Husband,” the man repeated. “Oh.”

Apparently, it was the most blatantly disappointed ‘oh’ Dad had ever (ever ever ever) heard in his life.

A week later, they got a dinner invitation in the mail, signed by one Rupert Vandergaster. It was addressed to Mum alone.

“And she went?” Little screeches, horrified.

Dad laughs. “Of course she did. She’d never met anyone who knew about Remedios Varo.”

“Like, on a date?”

“No, she insisted they weren’t.”

“THEY? As in, PLURAL?”

This time, The Spider is so expansive that Little almost takes Dad’s eye out.

*

After Mum, life became a collection of absences, and non-events took the place of events: in the morning, she wouldn’t wake Viola with a holler up the stairs, and wouldn’t make everyone omelettes, and wouldn’t remind Little to tie his shoes properly, and wouldn’t adjust his scarf, and wouldn’t kiss him goodbye, and wouldn’t adjust his scarf again, and wouldn’t smile at him. The spot on his cheek where her lips always used to land was waiting, like an empty parking space kept for someone who’d moved away.

“Life goes on,” aunt Rosalie said when she finally stopped camping out on their couch after the funeral.

“Well, I’m not going with it,” Little said and stuck his tongue out at her. Since then, he hasn’t got a single Christmas present from her. He hasn’t even got a card.

The worst thing was how Mum hadn’t been perfect at all. It was one thing to miss the cheek kisses, but to miss the occasional yelling, and the military regime of three-minute teeth-brushing, and the days when she’d curl up on the couch and refuse to speak to anyone, staring at their TV with vacant eyes?

It was too much for someone of Little’s stature. He’d need a wheelbarrow for all that grief, and he didn’t even have a basket.

Three weeks after the funeral, her Wellingtons, a carelessly kicked-off pair of high heels, and muddied boots were still in the hall, the tips inclined slightly towards the front of the house as if they were longing for familiar feet to slip into them and walk them out the door.

Four weeks after the funeral, Viola put all the shoes away, and that was that.

*

But, Little wonders as he pulls his coat on, was Dad wearing his gloves when he met Mr. Vandergaster on that memorable, wuthering day?

*

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Little says as Dad paces back and forth in Mr. Vandergaster’s driveway. “Also, can you do something about your eyebrows?”

“Leave my eyebrows out of it, and there are many things I’m not telling you.”

“I meant about Mr. Vandergaster specifically.”

“Little, do shut up.”

“That’s verbal abuse,” Little says, pulling on Dad’s tie to get him to stop pacing and also to get a good look at his face, and also why wear a tie in the first place?

“What are you doing now?” Dad sighs.

“Checking for nose hair.”

“Why would you— I don’t have any! And even if I did, it’s none of your business, young man!”

“It is, too. I have your DNA, so I think I’m entitled to know what I’m in for.”

Dad sighs. “Like I said, I don’t have any—”

Little just goes for it and shoves his finger up Dad’s nostril. Dad stares at him. Little shrugs. “I like to learn things empirically,” he says, pulling the finger out. “It’s what researchers do.”

“You’re on house arrest,” Dad tells him, very slowly. “Indefinite house arrest.”

“As in it’s not definite?”

“As in it’s forever.”

“Let’s ring the doorbell,” Little suggests, circumventing Dad to push at his back and get him to move. “Or knock, because I don’t think he has one.”

“I should have left you at home.”

“Should have done something about those eyebrows, too, but we can’t have it all,” Little says cheerfully, and then, before Dad can stop him, pounds on the door. Some of the peeling paint falls off in flakes, and some of it clings to his knuckles.

“Very realistic,” Little says, giving the green paint a lick. “I appreciate the dedication.”

“I don’t think it’s a Halloween decoration, kid.”

“Even more realistic! Cool.”

Little honestly doesn’t expect Mr. Vandergaster to open the door. He’s chronically shy, and a hermit, and possibly a block of ice by now, too.

But, to his surprise, open he does.

“I didn’t touch him,” Mr. Vandergaster says immediately, glaring at Little. “Whatever he told you, I didn’t lay a finger on him, all right?”

Little frowns. Dad makes a choking noise. Mr. Vandergaster starts closing the door in their faces.

“I’m here about the heating, actually!” Dad says, wedging his shoe in there. The door stops, a second before it’d have crushed his foot. “And the, er, water.”

Mr. Vandergaster’s eyebrows climb up. They’re good eyebrows. Much better than Dad’s, anyway. “Oh? I thought you were a teacher.”

“I… am?”

“Not a plumber.”

“Not a plumber,” Dad confirms, visibly frustrated. “Kid says they cut you off.”

Mr. Vandergaster glares again. Little waves.

“Kid,” Mr. Vandergaster says icily, “should mind his own—”

“He really should,” Dad nods eagerly. “But we wouldn’t want you to freeze to death. ‘We’ being the local, er, community. Yes, it’s er, a communal thing. Not to be mistaken with communism. That we don’t want. Socialism, though? That’s always good. Er. You should, er. We have, er. A couch? Yes, that’s what we… what we have. At our place. A couch. It’s very ugly but, er, functional. Mostly. We also have heating! That’s the selling point, really. Oh, and water. And all that. Jazz.”

“Usually, he’s quite good at sentence clauses,” Little says in a theatrical whisper. Dad steps on his foot. Little kicks him. Mr. Vandergaster leans on the doorway, looking very long-suffering and miserable and dead. His lips have a purple hue to them and the only part of him that’s even a little red, apart from the fortunately still-attached nose, is the eczema.

“Well,” he says after a very pronounced swallow (his Adam’s apple goes up like a lift, it’s a whole show). “I do appreciate the offer but I’m quite all right, thank you.”

Which is when he does shut the door in their faces. Because Dad moved his foot away to step on Little’s. Oh, karma.

“Well, now what?” Little sighs. “You were supposed to be charming.”

“I thought I was supposed to be persuasive?”

“PO-TAY-TO PO-TAH-TO!” Little says, throwing his hands up. “DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING MYSELF?”

Dad sighs and sits down on the front step. The doormat, apparently still soaked after yesterday’s rainfall, squelches under his butt. Dad sighs again and doesn’t budge.

“I think we should try blackmail now,” Little says, climbing in his lap.

“We have nothing to blackmail him with,” Dad says bitterly. “Maybe he won’t die? It’s only October, after all.”

“A positively December-ish one, though. Also, in case you’ve forgotten, you’re a good person.”

Dad smiles and pretends to shove Little off. Little clings to him but not too hard because it’s all play anyway, and he can tell that Dad wants him to stay right where he is.

“No, blackmail won’t work,” Dad decides, rubbing his hands together. “It’ll have to be force.”

Little grins and scrambles off Dad’s lap to knock on the door again. This time, it’s so vigorous that the door sheds enough green paint to make the front steps look like they’re overgrown with grass.

“Like I said,” Mr. Vandergaster says calmly as he swings the door open, “I do appreciate the offer—”

“Actually, it wasn’t an offer,” Dad says with his best smile, shouldering his way past him and inside. “Right. Do you have a suitcase?”

“Do I look like someone who goes on holidays?” Mr. Vandergaster snorts, following Dad inside. Little trots after him, wishing he had popcorn. “Why, just the other day, I was looking at flights to Mallorca! At least it’s warmer there, right? What are you doing, anyway? Whatever it is, I won’t stand for it.”

“Oh, you can sit down if you wish,” Dad waves him off. “Man, it’s dark in here.”

It’s actually better than Little expected: the part of the house they’re in now is all candles and there’s just enough light to see by. It’s a feast for the eyes, too, all old, heavy furniture, drapes, and weird objects like a huge mortar, a wax sculpture of what looks like a cross between Mozart and a toad, and an actual fountain, regrettably without any water or hot chocolate inside.

“I’m calling the police,” Mr. Vandergaster threatens. Little wisely doesn’t point out that he wouldn’t be able to call them anyway, what with the no-electricity thing.

“By all means!” Dad says, rotating slowly to take the room in with his hands in the pockets of his coat. “But I’m telling them all about your heating problem as soon as they arrive, make no mistake. Which shouldn’t take more than a week if you send them a messenger pigeon. Now, do you have some essentials that you can’t live without? A toothbrush, I imagine, though we can provide that for you, of course…”

“This is a human rights violation,” Mr. Vandergaster says. It’s even more half-hearted than the police threat. “What happened to personal freedom?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Dad nods. “I’m a huge believer in personal freedom myself.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs.

“Butt,” Little sniggers to himself.

“But,” Dad says immediately, “I’m also a believer in not letting people freeze to their deaths.”

“I have blankets.”

“So do we but feel free to grab yours,” Dad says, waving at the messy interior. “Surely you have a carpet bag at least?”

“I can just refuse to come, you know.”

Dad eyes him, up and down, up and down. “I’ll just carry you out, then.”

“You’re literally my size.”

“I’m very determined, though.”

“Oh, I can see that.”

“Can you? Great!” Dad says, rubbing his hands with a somewhat manic grin. “Cooperate then.”

This isn’t very romantic, Little realises. People always bicker on TV before getting together but this is a bit much. Too much hostility, not enough sexual tension, and maybe it’s the dust motes? This place, Little decides, really needs airing out. Well, maybe when the heating’s back on, so hopefully never, because he’s starting to think that it might take a bit longer than he hoped for these two to get all lovey-dovey through forced cohabitation.

“I’m an axe murderer?” Mr. Vandergaster tries hopelessly.

“Yeah, sure, and I’m Margaret Thatcher,” Dad snorts. “So how about that toothbrush, eh?”

Well. At least the lightning’s too bad to see Dad’s eyebrows by. Thank God for small mercies.

*

Viola bursts into the house the way she still always does after Clover dates: like she’s a spinning-top reluctant to slow down. When she stops in the living room, her skirts — which are actually Mum’s skirts — settle layer by layer, but her hair stays all over the place, as though it knows that there are more pirouettes in its future and that looking respectable is not worth the effort.

“Hello,” Mr. Vandergaster says after taking a small sip of his tea. “You must be the Twelfth Night girl.”

Viola stares, blushes, and makes as though to leap away.

“Oh, please don’t mind me,” Mr. Vandergaster says with a very elegant wave of his equally elegant hand. “Pretend I’m a piece of furniture, if that makes it easier.”

“You’re not stocky enough to pass for furniture,” Little protests, slurping his own tea because it’s not like they’re expecting the Queen to join them, Gee. “Maybe a grandfather clock?”

“One of those tall lamps, I think,” Dad says, entering the room with two steaming mugs. “Vi, I’ve made some for you as well. How’s Clover?”

“She’s good, thanks,” Viola says, chewing on her hair. “Why is there a strange man in our house?”

“That’s Mr. Vandergaster,” Dad says with a brilliant smile that’s at least 76.4% fake. “He’ll be staying with us for a while.”

“I… see,” Viola says, reaching for her mug. “It’s nice to, um, meet you?”

“The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure!” Mr. Vandergaster says with a somewhat dry smile. It reminds Little of smoked bacon, rather. “You look just like your mother, you know.”

Dad coughs. Viola is trying to meet Little’s eyes, but Little won’t let it happen: it’s a good thing he’s done, it is, and he won’t have anybody’s accusing gaze implying otherwise.

“Well, how about a round of charades?” he suggests cheerfully, clapping his hands. He forgot about the tea but apart from that — and what’s a little hot water and broken china? — he thinks they’re off to a great start.

“I’ll sweep,” Dad sighs. “Nobody move.”

“Isn’t this nice?” Little twitters, placing his chin on Mr. Vandergaster’s shoulder and batting his eyelashes at him.

“Easily the nicest hostage situation I’ve ever been in,” Mr. Vandergaster confirms wryly.

“It’s my birthday soon,” Little tells him seriously. “You are my present.”

“Delighted.”

“I thought you’d be,” Little nods, tilting his head until his temple is resting against Mr. Vandergaster’s collar. “Would you like some more sugar?”

Suddenly, there’s a high-pitched noise.

“Or more tea, I suppose,” Little adds.

“I don’t think that was the kettle,” Mr. Vandergaster says, throwing a worried glance Viola’s way.

“We’re a bit odd, in case you haven’t noticed,” Little nods, snuggling up. Mr. Vandergaster is wearing something warm and soft and Little can just bet that whatever the fabric is, it’s the stuff God’s socks are made of. “You’ll fit right in, I think.”

*

Little offers to give Mr. Vandergaster a tour. He starts with the bathroom (“usually, we’re pretty good at saving money, but we like to indulge in good toilet paper: three layers, always, and that’s at least!”), continues with the kitchen (“we keep snacks up there in that cupboard and it’s not because I’m too small to reach it so don’t hesitate to hand me some cookies if I ask”), and then leads him upstairs and through the bedrooms (“that’s Viola’s door but let’s not come in because you know what teenage girls are like: half-naked people all over the walls, underwear all over the floor, and cacti all over the windowsill”). They take a longer stop in Little’s room where Little shows Mr. Vandergaster the origami birds he hung on the lamp, and the dog-eared mycology books he’s been reading, and the marshmallow castle he’s been building (for months because he keeps snacking on the turrets and sometimes forgets himself, gets all the way down to the dungeons, and has to start all over again), and the Rokeby Venus puzzle set he’s been putting together (on hiatus because he got bored once he had the lady’s backside ready), and the harmonica he’s been practicing playing, and a lot of other ands. “That’s where they, before, with Mum,” he tells Mr. Vandergaster, lightly touching the door to his parents’ bedroom with the very tips of his fingers. “We don’t really go there, except to dust furniture once a week.”

The tour ends in Dad’s office which is decidedly not ready for the inspection. There are crumpled pages strewn all over the floor, darts all over Dad’s Napoleon picture, which, at this point, looks more like a colander, the couch is not made, there are at least five mugs of unfinished coffee on various flat surfaces, and the post-it notes he scribbles on when marking essays are all over the place, including the ceiling, where “DIGGORY SMITH IS A THREAT TO THE ESSAY FORM AND NEEDS TO FAMILIARISE HIMSELF WITH PARAGRAPH BREAKS ASAP!.”

“Your father reads a lot, then?” Mr. Vandergaster says, slowly making his way towards Dad’s bookshelf. His socked feet collect three stray post-its on the way.

“Mostly romance,” Little admits because there’s no hiding it: Mr. Vandergaster is already there, squinting at the spines. “The Dolores Dragonfly ones?”

“Oh boy,” Mr. Vandergaster says. “Oh my.”

*

The thing with Dolores Dragonfly books is that Dad loves them to pieces.

The thing with Dolores Dragonfly books is that they’re quite obscure, as romance goes.

The thing with Dolores Dragonfly books is that, if it hadn’t been for them, Dad and Mum never would have met.

“You don’t want to read these,” she told him when he walked up to the cash register with three Dolores Dragonfly novels under his arm and the off-kilter smile of an exhausted student on his face. He’d read only one Dolores Dragonfly book by then, but he’d loved it enough to immediately splurge on all the others.

“Excuse me?” was what he said, because, well. The girl behind the counter was roughly his age — eighteen, maybe nineteen — and she was supposed to be polite and encouraging. He was a customer and he was about to put a lot of money in the till.

“You just don’t,” the girl sighed, blowing her reddish fringe off her forehead. “They’re awful.”

“AWFUL?” Dad squeaked.

“Take this one,” the girl said, brandishing Strange Bedfellows. “The title is very misleading. They don’t even have sex in it. Ha, they don’t even share a bed.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s awful!” Dad sputtered.

“They’re just too weird and quirky and insane and there’s no sexual tension whatsoever in any of them,” the girl sighed. “If I wanted to read about a fifty-plus couple arguing over who gets the goldfish in the divorce only to fall back in love as they look back on their life together in order to decide who’s a better pet-owner… Well, I’d never want to read that, actually.”

Dad gawked.

“I mean, it’s your money,” the girl shrugged. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the newest Denielle Steel, though?”

A week later, Dad returned armed with insight and argued his points, holding up the queue.

Two weeks later, they went out for coffee to argue some more.

Three weeks later, they went out for coffee to argue again but forgot all about the arguing halfway through what was, for all intents and purposes, a date.

A year later, she got him the newest Dolores Dragonfly book (Buttered Side Up) for his birthday.

Three months after that, he proposed.

A minute after that, once she’d made him promise they would never get a goldfish, she said yes.

*

“If you like marmite, that’s fine, but please keep it in a separate cupboard,” Little tells Mr. Vandergaster over breakfast. “We wouldn’t like it to contaminate all the food that the Devil himself didn’t produce out of his snot.”

Mr. Vandergaster is clearly not a morning person: he’s clutching his slice of toast like it’s the last piece of driftwood on a stormy sea (of sleepiness), and his hair, usually elegantly combed down — apparently, hermits can be vain — is a rusty dandelion around his head. His eyes are slightly puffy, and he’s blinking with a 1.25 frequency. The sleeves of the pyjamas Dad lent him have already taken a dip in the marmalade and peanut butter both and he’s yet to lick off his milk moustache.

He’s adorable. Little rather hopes they’ll keep him.

“Morning,” Viola says, dragging her legs on the way to the fridge. It’s a wonder she doesn’t leave a trail of slime behind her, with how positively snail-ish her movements are. Or is it sluggish? It should be snailish, too, Little decides. Otherwise, it’s discrimination. Snail-mination. Snailphobia?

“Not a good one, though,” Viola adds sleepily. “It’s a bad, bad morning.”

“I like mornings,” Little tells Mr. Vandergaster. “I was born early in the morning, you see.”

“Which is precisely why I hate them,” Dad says as he folds his newspaper, behind which he’s been hiding for the past fifteen minutes, mumbling to himself, blushing, and doing God-knows-what. “You were a screamer from the start.”

“He’s lying,” Little says with a smile. “Mum says he cried.”

“Said,” Viola corrects before biting into a piece of raw leek.

“Did you sleep well?” Little asks Mr. Vandergaster like the good host that he is.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Vandergaster says. “I think my marrow unfroze overnight.”

He rolls up his sleeves, wriggles his fingers, smiles.

Dad makes a choked noise.

“Wrong windpipe?” Little says innocently.

“Sorry about the couch,” Dad mumbles sheepishly. It’s quite endearing, yellow goo in the corners of his eyes notwithstanding. “You can have the bed upstairs if you like.”

“Oh, thank you, that’s all right,” Mr. Vandergaster says with a hand gesture that Dad’s eyes follow like he’s being hypnotised. “I prefer not to sleep with ghosts.”

“How about teach—” Little starts, only for Viola to snap out of her snailishness and throw a piece of leek at him with such perfect precision that it lands right in his mouth.

“No, thank you,” Mr. Vandergaster says, smiling at him blearily.

“—ers?” Little concludes once he’s done chewing — blegh, leek — but, for better or for worse, no one’s listening by then.

“We believe in French music first thing in the morning,” he says before putting on a Bruel CD. “Well, maybe not first thing in the morning. First thing in the morning is pee.”

“Too much information, Little,” Dad sighs miserably.

Mr. Vandergaster smiles down at his toast but Little, like the master of interpreting body language that he is, decides that it’s really Dad he’s smiling at. “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.”

Dad blinks and grips his fork like it’s sanity itself on its tines and not a piece of egg.

“Latin,” Little  gasps, impressed. “Even cooler than French.”

J'sais bien que j'l'ai trop dit / Mais j'le dis quand même, Bruel purrs.

“Quite,” Viola mumbles.

Dad dabs at the corner of his mouth with the trailing end of the tablecloth in the absence of tissues. It’s the wrong corner but Little doesn’t have the heart to tell him that. He’ll lick it off for him later: someone has to since they don’t have a dog and Mr. Vandergaster is hardly forward enough to try it.

*

“Today is Saturday, also known as the Grocery Shopping Day,” Little tells Mr. Vandergaster over breakfast the next day. “I know that you’re used to your hermit ways, but we leave the house to get food here.”

“Little!” Dad snaps, glaring at him.

“Mr. Vandergaster’s not offended,” Little assures him. “Are you?”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Vandergaster smiles. Then, he glances at the bookmarked copy of It Takes Two to Crescendo, Dolores Dragonfly’s latest. “Do you really enjoy these?”

“Oh, not again,” Dad groans.

Mr. Vandergaster’s eyebrows go up so high that Little is tempted to crane his neck and try to spot them on the ceiling.

“Everyone seems to hate them,” Dad sighs, tapping the cover where an anonymous finger is pressing down on a piano key. Each word of the title is printed on a separate key, too, and Little — who’s apparently “too young for Dragonfly” (what horseshit!) — appreciates the design if nothing else.  

“I wouldn’t say I hate them,” Mr. Vandergaster laughs. “I’m just very… torn about them.”

Dad leans forward, intrigued.

Hook, line, and sinker, and Little’s not even the one doing the fishing.

“I’m surprised you’ve read them at all.”

“Oh, but I have,” Mr. Vandergaster smiles, with a wry twist to it. “Every single one.”

“Even the collected Christmas stories?”

“I like those the least,” Mr. Vandergaster says, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Too sentimental.”

“You’ll have to build up some tolerance,” Little advises gravely. “We’re very sentimental here.”

“That’s not the only thing he’ll have to build up tolerance for,” Viola mumbles from behind her curtain of hair.

“I think I’ll be fine,” Mr. Vandergaster says with a brilliant smile before returning his gaze to the book. “What I dislike about them in particular are the happy endings. I wish they were brave enough to write something that doesn’t end well.”

“I always thought of the author as a she,” Dad admits. “What with the ‘Dolores’?”

“I suppose,” Mr. Vandergaster nods. “That’s the pronoun they use in all those articles, don’t they?”

“Shame there are no interviews,” Dad sighs. “She’s — they’re? — very mysterious. Anyway, maybe they haven’t ever experienced a happy ending themselves.”

“Oh?”

Dad shrugs. “I think it must be hard to write something that ends badly if you’ve never had anything end well. Fiction is escapism even when it isn’t, after all.”

Mr. Vandergaster gapes, all shocked and open-mouthed. Little considers tilting his chin up for him, but he decides that they’re not there yet, and it’s too cold for flies anyway so it’s not like one will take Mr. Vandergaster unawares and fly right in.

“More tea, anyone?” Viola says, her voice a little more high-pitched than what Little is used to.

After breakfast, they get ready for grocery shopping, and Little, thanks to stealth and a talent for poking his nose both where it does and, according to Dad, Viola, his teachers, the neighbours, and ¾ of the As, doesn’t belong, catches Mr. Vandergaster thumbing an old ski mask.

“Are we doing a robbery, too?” he asks, curious. Mr. Vandergaster jumps and then smiles, half-apologetic, half-wry.

“You might have noticed that I don’t really show my face around the neighbourhood if I can help it.”

“Oh yes,” Little nods eagerly. “You’ve been able to help it ever since I can remember, too.”

“Is it because of the skin thing?” Viola says.

“VI!” Dad says with horror.

“Oh, shut up, please,” Viola says, which is so unlike her that Little, who was about to speak up, shuts up himself. “I’m asking only so I can tell Mr. Vandergaster that that’s ridiculous because he’s very good-looking and he should either know that by now or be told if he doesn’t.”

“Christ,” Dad moans, hiding his face in his hands.

“I really don’t mind,” Mr. Vandergaster assures him.

“Because he is very good-looking, isn’t he?” Little says cheerfully.

Mr. Vandergaster smiles. Dad blushes and it’s a bad one because Little can tell, even with the hands.

“I do appreciate your saying so but it’s rather irrelevant whether I’m good-looking or not,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “Still, might as well. There are worse things than a serving of small-town gossip. Supposedly. Hopefully. Maybe.”

“They’re okay, really,” Viola assures him. “A few people are quite obnoxious, but they’ve been all right about, oh, me and Clover.”

“Clover?”

“They’re dating-to-be-married,” Little explains. “Clover likes Viola’s personality and Viola likes how Clover smells like macadamia.”

“I like her personality, too, you dolt.”

“Groceries,” Dad reminds them after a long-suffering sigh. “Groceries?”

“Let’s,” Mr. Vandergaster says, rubbing at his cheek with the tip of his index finger.

“Let’s,” Dad nods, “But first!”

He digs through all the sleeves of all his coats until he produces his striped scarf. It’s Little’s favourite — very autumnal, all red and orange and yellow — and he happens to know that it’s Dad’s favourite, too.

“We’ve been scarf-trained already,” Little says pointing between himself and Viola as Dad awkwardly wraps the scarf around Mr. Vandergaster’s neck. “Dad takes pneumonia very seriously.”

The folds of the scarf spread forming an eye-shaped gap where Mr. Vandergaster’s skin is red, which is how Little learns that, when Mr. Vandergaster blushes, it starts at his collarbones and then slowly, slowly works its way up.

“Do let’s go,” he mumbles, into the fold of the scarf that he’s pulled up over his mouth.

When Dad is busy locking up the house, Little pokes Mr. Vandergaster in the side and grins. “So,” he whispers, climbing to his tiptoes so Mr. Vandergaster will hear him better. “Does it smell like macadamia, or what?”

*

Once, Mum and Dad had a Huge Fight (certainly worthy of the capitalisation!) and, between them, they broke: three saucers, two lightbulbs, one picture frame, and four cinnamon sticks. The whole ordeal lasted well over a week, and Little remembers feeling like a castaway waiting for a never-ending storm to calm. At the time, it was scary but, in hindsight, it’s both scary and hilarious: because the kitchen was a no man’s land, Dad, who’d temporarily moved out into their cramped garage (“Drama queen” Mum had said, “Just wants the neighbours to coo over him and bring him free pie”) he took the coffee machine with him but mercifully left the kettle inside.

And then it was over, and they loved each other all the more for having argued, and when Little congratulated them on it, Dad gave him a puzzled look and said, Just because I was angry with your mum, that doesn’t mean I stopped loving her. When you sprain your wrist, it hurts, but you wait for it to heal, don’t you? You don’t want the bones gone.

That, Little thinks, was the day he realised that even when the weather was stormy, it wasn’t a sea rocking him: at worst, it was a pool, wide but to shallow for him to ever be in any real danger, capricious but entirely free of sharks.

“Well, that’s family for you, isn’t it?” Viola said simply when he shared the thought with her. “What use is it if they’re going to let you drown?”

But what Little still can’t get over is how when first Viola and then him will be preparing to leave the family pool and brave an actual sea, Dad will equip them with life jackets, send them off on their way, and stay behind in that knee-high water, safe, sure, but, ultimately, all alone.

*

“Did you know?” Little twitters, tugging on Mr. Vandergaster’s sleeve, “that I’m the only eight-year-old in the neighbourhood that eats his vegetables?”

“You’re eight?” Mr. Vandergaster smiles, inspecting a courgette.

“Almost,” Little admits grudgingly. “We’re too close to the date for fractions.”

“Or it’s too advanced a math for you,” Mr. Vandergaster says innocently.

“Nothing’s too advanced for me,” Little assures him. “If I haven’t got to it yet, it just means that a future me will.”

“That’s a good attitude to have.”

Little preens.

“So, is this the place?”

“The place?”

“You’ve mentioned your sister meeting her other half in a grocery store.”

“Oh! Well, first of all, I should stress that I didn’t mean the ‘other half’ thing literally, since they’d have to be Siamese twins and a) Viola has only one head and b) that would be incest. And no, it isn’t, since she’s been banned from ever showing her face again there.”

“Oh, youth,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs wistfully. There are levels of irony to the statement but, advanced mathematician though Little might be, he can’t tell just how many.

“Are you a mushroom person at all?” he asks, pointing to a box of those. “I find them weird, and creepy, and weirdly creepy, and creepily weird.”

“I’m fond of them, yes,” Mr. Vandergaster nods. “Do you still think I’m a murderer?”

“No, not really, or I wouldn’t be trying to— No, not really!”

“I’m actually vegetarian, you know.”

“Oh. So that’s why you don’t eat people.”

Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “Yes, among other reasons.”

Mr. Vandergaster pushes their trolley past a couple of not-so-subtly-staring-and-whispering ladies.

Little doesn’t help him push the trolley because he’s sitting inside it.

“So, how much do you like Dad on a scale from one to ten?”

“I’m not in the habit of rating people like they’re waistcoats.”

“No, me neither, but then how much do you like him on a scale from Brussels sprouts to hot chocolate with cream on top? Boy, I hope it’s more than Brussels sprouts.”

“I thought you said you liked vegetables?”

Little sighs because adults never get it. “Yes, I do, but there are vegetables, and then there are vegetables.”

“Hmm. What if I like him more than I do hot chocolate?”

“…With cream on top?”

“…With cream on top.”

“Well, I suppose I’d have to ask if you like hot chocolate in the first place!”

“Who doesn’t?”

“So you do?”

“No comment.”

“Not fair!”

“C’est la vie, c’est la vie.”

“Hmm, I’ll have it out of you yet.”

Mr. Vandergaster wrinkles his nose. “No torture before dinner, please.”

“Oh, I would never resort to something as pedestrian as torture,” Little assures him. “No, I’d use charm.”

Mr. Vandergaster stops pushing the trolley and gives him A Look. “You know what, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s quite likely that you’d succeed.”

“Of course I would!” Little nods. “I’m practically an angel.”

“With the emphasis on practically.”

“With the emphasis on angel,” Little insists. “Push faster?”

“This isn’t a carousel, you know.”

“Of course I know. Then I’d be telling you to spin faster, wouldn’t I? This is a rollercoaster!”

*

“Dad!” Little whispers right in his ear, ten minutes before Dad’s alarm clock is about to go off. “Dad! Wake-wakey-wake!”

“Go away, spawn of the devil.”

“Now you’re just insulting yourself.”

Dad buries his head under his pillow and grooooooooooooooooooooooooans.

“Dad, Mr. Vandergaster is a vegetarian!”

“So?” Dad grumbles. “I haven’t served him bacon, have I?”

“So he won’t eat any of us,” Little sighs impatiently. “So if you ever catch him looking at you like he’d like to eat you, it’d be in a figurative sense only!”

“Too young to know what ‘figurative’ is…. Wait, what?”

“You’re so slow sometimes.”

Dad shoots up, almost breaking Little’s nose in the process. “ERIC ZACHARY PYNE.”

“Oh-oh.”

“Please tell me you haven’t been trying to do what I think you’ve been trying to do.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“I’ll give you more specific!”

“Um, yes? Please do?”

Dad grabs him by the shoulders and stares into his eyes. It’s like being drilled into. Little now knows, entirely against his will, what a quarry must feel like.

“He’s good-looking, he cleans after himself, and his blood type is the same as yours,” Little recites with a winning smile. “I just think it’d be swell.”

“I’ll give you swell!”

“Please don’t,” Little squeaks and bolts.

*

“I knew this would happen,” Alan says, even though he couldn’t have — he’s far too dumb and unimaginative. “You could see it coming from miles away.”

“Oh, shut it,” Little grumbles. Arabella gasps. Agnes’s eyes go big. Abel sighs.

“Did you really think your dad would thank you if you threw an axe-carrying nutcase in his lap?” Alan continues, his nose tilted up so high that, if Little squints, he can just make out some congealed snot in there. He congratulates himself on infecting Alan because if anyone deserved Little’s cold, it’s him.

“He doesn’t carry an axe and there was no lap-throwing!” Little protests. “I’m not crazy, you know!”

“I sure don’t,” Arabella says in a sing-song voice. “Know, I mean.”

“Maybe he’ll grow on him,” Agnes says shyly.

“Yeah, like fungus,” Alan snorts.

“I think they’ll have to grow on each other,” Abel sighs. “Isn’t that how love’s supposed to work?”

“But they’re already grown!” Little cries, throwing his arms up. “Mr. Vandergaster said Dad was better than hot chocolate!”

“Does he like hot chocolate?” Alan asks, raising an eyebrow, except he can’t do just one, and the other one follows soon after.

Little, who’s been practicing the art of meditation, does not strangle him. He doesn’t even consider it, ha.

“Who doesn’t?” Agnes says with a frown.

“Oh,” Alan says, and then, just as Little braces himself for another scathing remark: “I might have an idea.”

*

“Mondays are indulgence days just so we can get through the beginning of the week without committing homicide,” Little lies shamelessly before shoving a mug full of steaming hot chocolate Mr. Vandergaster’s — very sleepy Mr. Vandergaster’s — way. He’s made hot chocolate for himself and the rest of the household as well, partly so it’d be more convincing and partly because, well, hot chocolate. It’s his birthday in a little over a week anyway, and he’s probably used up all the squirrel energy the drink will give him when building a stool tower to get to the chocolate in the first place anyway.

“Oh, thank you,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs, wrapping his hands around the mug, and Little’s given him their best, too: gorgeously seasonal, with autumn leaves painted all over it by Mum herself.

He inhales, and Little is watching him like a hawk.

He sighs, and Little keeps watching him like a hawk.

He takes his first sip, and Little — okay, his eyes are starting to water from all the not-blinking he’s been doing but he is watching. Like a hawk. Hawkishly.

“Ah,” Mr. Vandergaster breathes as he breaks into a smile. “What a way to start a Monday.”

“HA!” Little cries, jumping up and then, because up is not enough, up on his chair. He considers hopping on the table, too, but decides against it because what if some of the hot chocolate spilled? “I KNEW IT!”

Mr. Vandergaster blinks at him in confusion. His hair is a red halo again — surely, what with Mum, Dad likes redheads? — and it takes him a moment to get there.

“Oh, you’re good,” he sighs once it clicks. “Quite the little mastermind, hmm?”

“That’s just the thing,” Little says, settling down in his seat and steepling his hands like he’s seen Important Men on TV do. “I’m a handful and too much for Dad alone to handle. He has been handling me, but — and make no mistake, this is all my stealth and Sherlock-Holmes-ing because he’d never admit it — it’s been a real strain on him and I think it’s about time for the world to send a helper along, you know? But since the world is much slower than Royal Mail, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. Truth is, I’m just too much for a single parent, okay? It’s part of my charm, it’s not anybody’s fault, etc., etc., but! It is, unfortunately, the case. I’m sure you understand: I mean, you have met me.”

Mr. Vandergaster blinks, takes a sip of his hot chocolate, licks off the moustache, sighs, clears his throat, attempts a stern look, ends up looking confused instead, and, finally, speaks.

“Kid,” he says seriously. “Have you been trying to set me up with your dad?”

“In my defence, the universe has been helping along,” Little points out. “I’m not powerful enough to cut off somebody’s heating yet.”

“Yet,” Mr. Vandergaster echoes with a half-smile. “Has it not crossed your mind that your Dad might not be interested in men?”

“It has, but Viola swears he’s bi.”

“Well, has it not crossed your mind that your Dad might not be interested in…” he waves his hand around his face “…people like me?”

Little squints at him. “…Vegeterians?”

“People with eczema,” Mr. Vandergaster corrects. “It’s hardly appealing.”

“Oh, no, sir — sir, because even I think it’s too early for me to call you Dad, or Papa anyway, since Dad might make it confusing — it hasn’t crossed my mind at all! Dad is not superficial at all. Also, he likes The Phantom of the Opera.”

“The Phantom has a scar,” Mr. Vandergaster points out. “Not a skin condition.”

“Dad has a heart big enough for you to be comfortable there, all your imperfections included,” Little tells him earnestly.

Mr. Vandergaster props his chin on his hand and takes a pensive sip of his chocolate. “And finally, has it not crossed your mind that I might not be into men?”

“It has,” Little admits. “I was hoping you’d clear that up for me.”

“You’ve hardly deserved it,” Mr. Vandergaster observes neutrally.

“This is not about what I deserve,” Little reminds him. “This is about what Dad deserves.”

Mr. Vandergaster’s eyebrows take another trip to the ceiling. “And you think that I am good enough for your dad?”

“That’s a hard question,” Little admits. “Sometimes, fresh-baked buns are so good that it’s a shame to put spread on them, right? But that’s a little selfish because what if the buns are lonely? And, all things considered, I think you’re the best spread we’ve had in years.”

Mr. Vandergaster drums his chin with his fingers. “He did lend me the scarf, so at least we know he doesn’t think it’s catching…”

“The vegetarianism?”

Mr. Vandergaster scowls. “Now you’re just doing it on purpose.”

Little beams.

*

“CAREFUL THERE,” Little yells before pouncing. He and Alan go down in a tangle and land in a muddy puddle with a truly spectacular splash.

Little laughs. Alan shrieks.

“JESUS AND MARY AND ALL THE ANGELS AND DEVILS IN HEAVEN!”

“There aren’t supposed to be any devils in Heaven,” Little points out. “Or maybe it’s like an exchange thing? Erasmus, all that stuff? Is Heaven Europe? Surely not, that’d be too exclusive…”

“GET OFF, GET OFF, GET OFF ME!”

Little plants a slobbering kiss on Alan’s forehead and gets himself out of the puddle. Alan follows, blinking water out of his eyes and — he definitely got the worst of it — dripping, or rather cascading, like the Niagara Falls.

“These are clean clothes,” he complains, already assuming a snotty expression.

“Were,” Little corrects innocently, and then, when Alan gives him a blank look: “Clean clothes.”

Alan does The Spider. Little jumps up and down.

“YOUR PLAN WOOOORKED!”

“I DON’T CAAAAARE!”

“This was the best birthday present,” Little proclaims seriously. “I’m getting you a unicorn for Christmas.”

“You’re not supposed to tell me, idiot! Also, unicorns don’t—”

Little slaps his palm over Alan’s mouth before he can speak the forbidden word. “I’ll invent one from scratch just for you.”

“You don’t ‘invent’ animals,” Alan says with a scowl. “That’s not how evolution works.”

“All right, Charlie Darwin,” Little snorts. “You’re getting one anyway.”

“I don’t want one!”

“Everybody wants one!”

“It’ll poop all over the place and I’ll have to clean it!”

“Unicorns don’t poop,” Little gasps, horrified.

“I see you two have made up,” says an amused voice. He and Alan both whip around. Little smiles when he spots Abel leaning on the As’ front door — weirdly, Little has never been inside the As’ house — and waves until he thinks his arm will fall off. He knocks Alan’s glasses off his nose while at it and they land in what’s left of the puddle with a less spectacular but distinctly elegant splash.

“No making up has taken place!” Alan protests. “I loathe him.”

“MY DAD IS GOING TO HAVE A BOYFRIEND!” Little crows.

“Well,” Abel smiles. “If anyone could manage it, it’d be you, I suppose.”

It’s just a smile but it makes Little so happy that if happiness was food, there’d be enough of it for the whole neighbourhood to survive off for months.

“I’m a serotonin power plant,” Little whispers as Abel returns his own return smile — at this point, it’s like they’re playing table tennis. Smile tennis. Table smile.

“Why are you red?” Alan says with a frown. “Things are supposed to be blurry without my glasses on, not the wrong colour.”

Little smiles, kisses his chin this time, and skips away, up the street and towards home, where, surely, only good things await.

*

“Eric,” Dad says, which is how Little knows he means business. Everything else is a giveaway, too: the folded arms, the furrow between his eyebrows, and the recently-chewed-on lip. Heck, the man has even put on a tie, though, to give dear Reader a fuller picture, he has not bothered with a shirt. “We need to talk about boundaries.”

“I’m too young to know that word,” Little says innocently. “Can I go now?”

“No, I’m afraid you cannot,” Dad sighs, rolling up the sleeves of the jumper he sleeps in. “Now, listen carefully.”

“I’m all ears. No limbs, internal organs, or hair whatsoever. Did you know that platypuses — ha, platypuses, what a word! — don’t have stomachs? I don’t know about you, but, personally, I think that’s kind of tragic.”

“Eric.”

“Father.”

Dad winces. “Oh, please, don’t.”

“Are you certain we can’t reschedule this?” Little tries, optimistically. “You haven’t exactly made an appointment.”

“You’re unemployed,” Dad points out.

“So’s Mr. Vandergaster and you don’t accost him…”

Dad sighs. “About Mr. Vandergaster. I am not going to date him, or marry him, or whatever it is you’re imagining will happen here. There. Anywhere. Wherever.”

“Boy, now you’re just digging yourself in deeper and dee—”

“Because, first of all, I don’t need to date anyone, this isn’t a romantic comedy about a single parent with bad luck and worse hair we’re living in, and, second of all, it’s very dangerous, what you’ve been trying to do: Mr. Vandergaster is our guest but he’s our guest out of necessity. He has nowhere to go and, therefore, any advances on my part would be very questionable, what with the power imbalance—”

“I mean, he could just go home,” Little interrupts with a frown. “It is cold outside, but it’s not like we’re in Alaska.”

“Anyway, I’m not going to behave like some sort of predator—”

“So, essentially,” Little interrupts again — it’s his birthday in a few days, he can get away with it, etc., etc. — “what you’re saying is that you’re not Sandra Bullock, this is not Practical Magic, and you’d actually consider dating Mr. Vandergaster if he wasn’t living with us out of necessity?”

“Except Sandra Bullock’s hair is great in Practical Magic and if Mr. Vandergaster wasn’t living with us he wouldn’t be available for a date, what with the secluded lifestyle.”

“Your hair is not so bad either,” Little assures him, wishing he was sitting close enough to Dad to be able to reach out and ruffle it. “And I think you’re the least predatory person in the world. The other day you fell over and almost broke your nose because you didn’t want to step on a slug.”

“They leave stains on the soles of my shoes.”

Little smiles. “Liar.”

“Anyhow, there’s going to be no dating, all right?”

“Mum would have wanted—”

“You can’t know what Mum would have wanted,” Dad says sharply.

Little stares at him and stares at him and stares at him and then blinks the tears away.

“Oh, love,” Dad sighs, burying his face in his hands. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I just think getting up in the morning must be easier when there’s someone sharing a pillow with you,” Little says quietly, staring at his socks. He wriggles his toes, and a hole reveals itself: later, Viola will mend the sock for him so that it won’t feel like they’re not coping without Mum.

Because they are. Coping. They have been.

“It is,” Dad admits, peeking through his fingers. “Is this because you think I’m lonely or is this because you’re lonely yourself?”

“The first one,” Little assures him. “But, by now, I quite like Mr. Vandergaster myself.”

The ‘myself’ implies that Dad likes Mr. Vandergaster too and Little has said it for a reason: he waits with bated breath but Dad never contradicts it.

“Promise you won’t matchmake anymore?” he sighs instead, and he looks so tired that Little finds himself nodding.

“Promise,” he says because, well, he’s already done enough: they’re sharing living quarters, the two of them, and maybe if they can’t make it happen without his help, it’s just not meant to be. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What are you going to call me once I’m not little anymore?”

Dad stares at him like the answer is something obvious and like he just can’t wrap his head around the fact that Little might not know it.

“Oh, kid,” he says eventually. “You’re always going to be little to me.”

Little nods because yeah. That sounds about right.

*

So.

This isn’t Little’s fault.

Not even a little. Not at all. Nuh-uh.

He only dived into the cupboard under the sink when he heard the approaching voices because he wanted to make sure the thing wasn’t flooded, and not because he wanted to eavesdrop, no sir!

“Please, stop apologising for being here,” Dad says as Little — oh, do shut up! like you’ve never eavesdropped! — presses his ear to the crack between the cupboard doors to hear better.

“I’ll be out of your hair as soon as possible,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “I’ve sent out some job applications.”

“There’s absolutely no rush!”

“Not that I’m unemployed as such, but…”

“You can stay as long as you’d— you’re not? I mean— God, forgive me, that was unacceptable, please don’t—”

“I work from home—”

“—answer that.”

“—have been for years.”

Little holds his breath. Everyone else seems to be holding theirs, too.

“So, did you think I just sat around in my house, leading a decadent existence and wasting away one wineglass at a time?”

“I mean… Well.”

“It just doesn’t pay that well, what I do.”

“Mmm.”

“You can ask, you know. Unless you don’t care, in which case… Well, I can’t really blame you.”

“No, I do! Do care, so, er, what is it that you…?”

“Oh, I write.”

“You… write.”

“Yes. I actually used to want to teach but… Well, this.”

“Forgive me for asking but how is that relevant?”

“Perhaps it wouldn’t have been, but my aunt was quite determined to keep me inside the house once it started. She figured it was something I’d ‘caught from the devil’, like a demonic STI.”

“That sounds… I mean… she what?”

“She kept a copy of the Old Testament under her pillow, and she slept like that every night. Difficult to say what was harder on her neck: the book or the pillow.”

“Had she never had acne, then?”

“Oh, sure, but I wasn’t just a kid with a skin condition, you see: I was a sinner with one.”

“How come?”

“Hmm, can’t you guess?”

“Not really? You sound like you’re over it, though.”

“I do, don’t I? It took a lot of practice, but I’m capable of being all blasé about the whole thing now. Truth is, when you shut yourself inside, it just keeps getting harder and harder to leave. After a while it’s all ‘whatever will the neighbours say?’ and, before you know it, it’s been decades, and you’ve worn holes in the carpet on the stairs because climbing up and down is the only exercise you ever get…”

“Well, you’ve left now.”

“Indeed.”

“Is the world scarier than you imagined?”

“Oh, no. It’s much less scary than I thought it’d be. Which — this is tricky — is really the scariest part.”

*

“I just can’t figure the cake out,” Dad says, slumped against the kitchen cupboard with a defeated expression on what Little can see of his face under all the flour and butter and egg.

“It’s been three years,” Viola says, licking something raw and unidentifiable off her fingers. “Just let it go.”

“No, don’t!” Little says. “You’ve been daydreaming about that cake for ages! You can’t quit now!”

“It’s not the baking attempts I’m quitting,” Dad says gloomily. “It’s life.”

Little squints at the yolk on the tip of his nose. “Was this going to be my birthday cake?”

“…Maybe.”

“You shouldn’t tell me, then!”

“It’s all right,” Dad smiles absently. “I’ll be dead by then anyway.”

“Oh,” Mr. Vandergaster says as he walks into the room and steps into a mess of goo and eggshell. “When exactly did the hurricane stop by?”

“Dad is trying to replicate a recipe he’s never seen,” Little explains, trying to Morse-code a ‘DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR HAIR, QUICK!” message at Dad in blinks. “We had it once, three years ago, and he pretty much fell in love with it.”

“Oh? How come you’ve never seen the recipe, then?” Mr. Vandergaster says as he locates a cloth and starts scrubbing. That’s just like him, too, Little has learned: for them Pynes, the mess is just too overwhelming, but Mr. Vandergaster will pick a spot, seemingly at random, and get cleaning like it can, in fact, be done one square inch at a time. He’s done it a few times by now, too: he’s put their CDs in alphabetical order, he’s washed the curtains, and he’s even tackled the cellar. It’s darling.

“After Fiona,” Dad says, brushing a hand through his hair and, to Little’s dismay, smearing egg all over it, “people kept bringing dinners and food baskets and what-not. There was only one cake. To be fair, cake’s probably not the first thing one thinks of when someone dies, but, strangely, it was just what we — just what I — needed at the time. Unfortunately, we have no idea who left it. It just appeared on our doorstep overnight, no note, no nothing. We still have the baking pan, too.”

“Hmm,” Mr. Vandergaster says, attacking a spot of dried something on the kitchen counter. “Have you tried asking around the neighbourhood?”

“We have, with little success,” Dad sighs, tilting his head back and blinking up at him. “It was the nicest dessert I’ve ever had.”

Mr. Vandergaster smiles. “Nicer than hot chocolate?”

Dad’s eyes grow wider. “Oh, easily! It was like… like… like… like if a cloud… no, not a cloud… like if satin… no, not satin either…”

“And this is why you’re not a writer,” Viola snorts under her breath.

“It was like having a slice of sunrise,” Dad says at last with a wistful smile. “It was like chewing happiness.” Then, quietly: “It was like having someone to share a pillow with.”

“What was that?” Mr. Vandergaster says sharply. At some point, he not only stopped scrubbing but dropped his cloth, too.

“Oh, nothing,” Dad mumbles, and is that a blush that Little can detect under all that flour? “It was something creamy and coconut-y, anyway.”

“I was just telling him he shouldn’t die without tasting it again,” Little says innocently. “What do you think?”

“I think,” Mr. Vandergaster says absently, staring at his hands, “that you’re probably right.”

*

“Little!” Dad hisses in his ear.

“NO,” Little hisses back. “IT’S EARLY!”

“This is revenge,” Dad laughs before stealing half of Little’s blanket and crawling under its folds. “God, you’re warm.”

“Well, you’re cold!” Little protests. “Can’t you go slide into Mr. Vandergaster’s bed instead?”

“Mr. Vandergaster’s bed is a couch,” Dad points out, snuggling close. “And you promised.”

“Aye, aye,” Little grumbles, graciously allowing the icicle-cold nose to bury itself in the crook of his neck. “Don’t you want to live through a love story for a change?”

“I’m quite happy reading them, actually,” Dad lies (it is a lie!). “And I have already—”

“But that’s not fair!” Little interrupts. “You said you wouldn’t begrudge Mum love! Shouldn’t that work both ways?”

“Oh, Mum wouldn’t mind, you’re quite right about that,” Dad laughs. “We were friends before we were anything else, which is why we were never just married.”

“Then?”

“In Dolores Dragonfly books, love always sneaks up on people,” Dad sighs, turning over onto his back and blinking up at the neon stars taped to Little’s ceiling. “It’s never orchestrated.”

“You and Mr. Vandergaster aren’t orchestrated, either!” Little insists. “After all, I didn’t burn his house down in the end!”

“What was that?”

“Nothing, nothing, shsh…”

“In Dolores Dragonfly books… Oh, but they’re just books,” Dad sighs. “According to Dolores, it’s never too late for love, but Little, love is like planting roses. You spend all that time tending to a bush and then it just…”

“Dies on you?” Little snorts. He debates kicking Dad but satisfies himself with turning away from him and closing his eyes.

“I’m not saying it’s not worth the effort,” Dad sighs.

“What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying that it’s a lot like food, actually. If you eat too much, it stretches out your stomach, and then you’re hungry all the time.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Mum stretched my heart quite a bit,” Dad whispers. “What you can do with hunger is you can stuff yourself full or you can wait it out until your stomach is all nice and tight again.”

“I don’t think that’s how love works.”

“No?”

“No,” Little says, crawling over Dad to squish his cheeks. “Because your heart never did tighten up after Mum. Because, from where I’m standing, it’s already full again anyway.”

“I don’t love—”

“You love me, and you love Viola, and you love birds, and you love worms, and you love Dolores Dragonfly, and you love Mum, dead or not, and maybe you don’t love Mr. Vandergaster because it’s only been two weeks, but, if you don’t, it’s a yet, and maybe you do love him a little, because hasn’t it actually been almost eighteen years?”

“Little,” Dad snorts. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how why were you nervous all those years ago, discussing duck penises and so on?” Little says. “I’m talking about how I can just bet that, for once, you were wearing gloves that day yourself.”

*

Here’s what Mr. Vandergaster said when Little asked him about that first meeting of theirs:

“What? No, it did not start with duck penises.”

“No?” Little said, confused.

They were drinking hot chocolate at the time, with cream on top.

“That’s just like your dad, huh,” Mr. Vandergaster sighed. “Well, if you care to know my side of the story, here’s how it goes…”

*

“Little, for the last time, me and Mr. Vandergaster are not — will not — just, ‘not’s all around! I’m a bad deal even by single-parent romantic-comedy standards, if Dolores Dragonfly was here, they wouldn’t touch this story with a ten-foot-pole, and it’s your mother Mr. Vandergaster wanted to date, not me! Granted, he was always a gentleman about it, but my point stands! Now, would you please, please, please just go to sleep?”

“I mean, you’re the one who woke me up in the first place.”

“GHAAARRRGH.”

*

“So whose gloves’ fault was it?” Little demands, jumping up and down, and, for good measure, sideways.

“I think you should try Marcus Aurelius,” Clover advises, watching him with a worried frown. “Specifically Meditations. Or just meditation. Or medication.” 

“Or all three,” Viola snorts. “Brother dear, when will you let this go?”

“When smiling stops being a Herculean task for Dad! It’s like he has weights hanging from the corners of his lips, haven’t you noticed?”

“Herculean,” Clover mouths, shaking her head. “Your family is insane.”

“You’re marrying into it so better watch what you’re saying,” Little says innocently. “Are you going to have an indoor or an outdoor wedding ceremony?”

“Boy, just you wait till you’re old enough to be the victim of this yourself,” Clover sighs.

“All that matchmaking in your future,” Viola nods gravely. “I can hardly wait.”

*

A bedside story of Dad’s, one of Little’s personal favourites:

Settle down and listen.

Are you listening?

Good.

So.

I was eighteen when I found my first Dolores Dragonfly book in a charity shop. It had an ugly, pulpy cover and it cost me a sad 99p. The reason I took it off the shelf in the first place was the colour — the kind of garish purple no one could get away with, and yet there it was. Now, the reason I bought it was the note someone had written on the first page with a red glitter pen. It said, word for word, Sweetness, some people want princes, and get frogs. You, I think, would have been quite happy with a frog, but got stuck with a toad instead. Here, then, is something about putting up with people’s leathery skin and other imperfections until love worms its way in.

I felt sorry for the book, and for whoever had written that note too. It’s always bittersweet, finding books with those inside in libraries and second-hand shops: someone had loved enough to write those lines and yet the book had been deserted despite that love, left behind to gather dust and wait for someone with a pound and an evening to spare.

Anyway, that Dolores Dragonfly book started with a:

Everyone’s playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with love. Some people just don’t realise they are. What’s funny, though, is that love keeps playing even when all the kids get bored and go get lemonade.

Then there was a list of things the main character — a tired retail worker — had done to prepare for love, and oh boy, she’d done it all: she’d got rid of all the hair caught in the shower drain, she’d shaved her legs, she’d eaten half a pack of mints, she’d dusted everything in her apartment including the tops of the picture frames she’d bought for the occasion, she’d used conditioner and blow-dried her hair, she’d set the table, she’d put some flowers in a vase, she’d eaten the other half of that pack of mints, and she sat down at the table, all ready.

But love, she realised when she checked her watch for the umpteenth time, was so late that it was safe to assume it wasn’t coming at all.   

And that’s something that always happens in Dolores Dragonfly books, though it’s rarely that literal: love comes, but it’s never on time. It comes too early, or too late, or unannounced. It brings friends with it — friends you might not like — or it barges in in muddy boots and doesn’t take them off in the hall. It tosses rocks at your window in the absence of pebbles and doesn’t care that they might break the glass. It comes bearing gifts but floods your cellar before you’re done unwrapping them.

It makes you dinner but forgets to ask if you’re allergic to shellfish.

Anyway, the thing with love is that, ultimately, rude or not, announced or unannounced, it is just a visitor: it’s supposed to stop at nothing, but, sometimes, a locked door actually does the trick.

So tell me, apple of my eye, if love came to you — came when you’re not ready, came even when it’s unwanted, came drenched and with foul breath, came when you’re baking and need to watch the oven, came when it’s your bad hair day — if love came to you, would you open the door and let it in?

*

“There’s just no way around it,” Mr. Vandergaster says after he’s chewed his pen into Christmas-tree-shaped submission. “I’ll have to sell all that crap.”

“When you say ‘all that crap’…” Little prompts.

Mr. Vandergaster levels him with a grave look. “The cherub fountain has to go.”

“So, no luck with the job applications?” Viola says as she starts tearing her toast to pieces and dipping those in milk — weird customs, weird people, Little can’t comprehend.

“Well,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “You do have to leave the house to work in the majority of cases.”

“What is it you write anyway?” Viola says as milk drips down her chin and why Clover finds that appealing, Little will never understand. He loves Viola himself but he’s her brother: it’s right there in the job description, and not even in fine print. “Dad wants to know but he thinks it’d be nosy of him if he asked.”

“Oh, bits of everything really,” Mr. Vandergaster says. His tone is suspiciously casual. His fingers drum the kitchen table as though they’re itching for some bread to tear, too. “…Novels.”

Viola chokes on bread. Even more milk drips. Yuck. “Say again?”

“Anyway, I’ll be selling the cherub fountain,” Mr. Vandergaster says after clearing his throat. “And the paintings, and the rocking chair, and the old grandfather clock, and the—”

“So like a local yard sale, then?” Little says, excited. “We’ll help!”

“Not local, no,” Mr. Vandergaster says with a frown. “The neighbours all hate me.”

“Not true,” Viola points out. “Mrs. Maylie thinks you’re — and this is verbatim —‘darling’.”

“Oh, I do remember her,” Mr. Vandergaster says as he leans back in his chair with a surprisingly warm smile on his face. “She used to sneak chocolate into my pocket whenever I’d walk past her house on my way to school.”

“That was before your crazy aunt locked you in, right?” Little says before he remembers that he’s not supposed to know.

“I wouldn’t say she locked me in,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs, thankfully oblivious. “Partly, it was that she wouldn’t let me leave the house but, partly, it was that I didn’t really want to leave the house myself.”

And then she must have died.

Like those animals, Little thinks, watching Mr. Vandergaster, that won’t leave their cage even once you open the door.

Mr. Vandergaster flexes his hands.

“Maybe all I need is that old tent that’s still up in the attic,” he sighs eventually. “Maybe it’s time I sold the house.”

Adulthood, Little decides, is a country he doesn’t particularly want a visa for.

*

“…And now he wants to sell the house and live in a tent God knows where!” Little concludes, highlighting the urgency with The Spider. They’re up in the treehouse again, and everything is fungi, moss, and rain.

“How much does he want for it?” Arabella asks like she’s suddenly into real estate.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Little screeches.

“There, there,” Abel says, patting him on the shoulder. “I don’t think anyone will buy the house, if that helps.”

“Not unless someone wants to start a business, anyway,” Alan snorts. “Vanderghastly’s Haunted House, only five quid for a visit!”

Little frowns.

Then blinks.

Then grabs Alan by the drawstrings of his jacket.

“Alan, I’m not going to kiss you because I still have nightmares after the last time,” he says slowly, “but I now owe you two unicorns.”

“Huh?” Alan says, trying to scoot away.

“And a Pegasus,” Little sighs before scrambling down the tree. “Wish me luck with my first business venture!”

*

“The kitchen is spotless,” Little tells Dad when he gets back from work and blinks at them owlishly, taking in the picture that they make: Little cross-legged on the couch and Mr. Vandergaster, miraculously, asleep with his head in Little’s lap. “You could probably lick the floor and, if anything, you’d be the one dirtying it and not the other way around.”

“I don’t like this,” Dad sighs. “He’s our guest.”

“I think he feels like he’s imposing,” Little whispers. “You should kiss him already.”

“There’ll be no kissing,” Dad says automatically, but he’s looking at Mr. Vandergaster like he might not mean it. “He’s like a kid, really. Doesn’t know how to take care of himself. Doesn’t pay his bills, doesn’t wear a scarf, doesn’t tell mean kids off when they trample his backyard…”

“He’s read all Dolores Dragonfly books,” Little reminds him. “It’s not just Remedios Varo that he knows about.”

“But it’s Remedios Varo fans he likes,” Dad says with a weirdly melancholic smile, staring at Mr. Vandergaster with his head tilted to the side. “I know that you wanted a pet, but I figured you’d settle for a cat.”

“He is a bit like one,” Little smiles before scratching behind Mr. Vandergaster’s ear. Mr. Vandergaster makes a noise and frowns in his sleep. “In class, we’ve learned that two minuses make a—”

“A plus?” Dad guesses with a wry smile. “Two loneliness don’t always make a love story, though.”

He glances left and right — because Little knows him, he knows it’s in search of a blanket — and then takes off his coat and gently folds it over Mr. Vandergaster.

“If you stay still until he wakes up, we’ll have pancakes for breakfast,” he whispers.

“I want ten quid, too.”

“Nice try.”

“I’m the one with all the leverage here.”

“Five quid, and please, don’t say ‘leverage’ again until you’re at least ten years old.”

“It’s a deal.”

Little smiles, expecting Dad to go right away, but it actually takes a while since he keeps glancing over his shoulder and staring at Mr. Vandergaster like he’s a math homework that’s due tomorrow.

Speaking of which….

Oops!

Little stays where he is, because he promised, but he thinks that ‘I didn’t do my homework because my Dad’s not-yet-boyfriend fell asleep on me’ is probably up there with ‘my dog ate it’ as excuses go.

*

“Is this a… No, I don’t dare venture a guess,” Dad says, holding up something that could be a funky candelabra.

Mr. Vandergaster gives Little a sideways glance.

“It’s fine,” Little assures him, rolling his eyes. “It’s one of those dildo things, isn’t it?”

Dad makes a choked noise.

Mr. Vandergaster grins and pats his back. Little squints because is he imagining it or does his hand linger?

“Aunt Zelda,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “A chronic hoarder.”

“Wasn’t she, er,” Dad mumbles. “Very, er.”

“Religious, yes. Although this does look like a very creative… well, what the kid said, she thought it was decorative. Apparently.”

“I don’t think it’ll sell,” Little says earnestly. “I certainly wouldn’t want it up my—”

…And Viola stuffs a feather boa in his mouth.

“This could sell, though,” Dad says appraisingly, tweaking the feathers. “It’s a nice colour.”

“Magenta always sells,” Viola nods seriously. “Is that a portrait of Catherine the Great over yonder?”

They’re inside Mr. Vandergaster’s house, dressed in their coats, armed in torches even though Mr. Vandergaster agreed to opening the drapes, and busy digging through heaps of stuff that ranges from priceless to worthless and that, occasionally, oscillates between the two.

Little is yet to run his — fine, Alan’s — haunted house idea by Mr. Vandergaster. He meant to do it right away — that’s the ‘running at breakneck speed with shoelaces undone’ kind of right away, too — but he’d chickened out because what if the idea really was good? Would Mr. Vandergaster — an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, an extra pair of shoes in the hall, an extra ‘good morning’ before breakfast even when the mornings are awful — move out?

He’s got used to Mr. Vandergaster, who is like the best kind of bread: crusty on the outside and full of soft goodness on the inside.

He’s got used to the turtlenecks, and he’s got used to the quiet irony, and he’s got used to the tapping fingers, and he’s got used to the scrubbing, and he’s got used to the gurgling with salt water every evening, and he’s got used to the actually sorted laundry, and he’s got used to the conversations Mr. Vandergaster has with their potted fern, and he’s got used to the homework assistance, and he’s got used to how Mr. Vandergaster hums bits of The Nutcracker when making crêpes, and boy, he’s certainly got used to the crêpes, too.

Somewhere in a yet-unexplored corner of Little’s mind, there might even be a by no means exhaustive list of things he loves about Mr. Vandergaster, and the cookies oh, the cookies! — are just the start.

“Must have been something,” Dad says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “A lifetime in this house.”

Mr. Vandergaster mirrors him, and Little decides that they’ll be okay. No matter what the two of them say, they’ve developed a strange sort of choreography over the past few days: they bicker over silly stuff but, when it comes to things that actually matter, looks might as well be letters, whenever Dad is about to head for a cupboard, Mr. Vandergaster moves out of the way just in time and just enough to accommodate him, and likewise, the other day Little caught them arguing over Shakespeare in the bathroom, both with toothpaste foam leaking from their lips, and, finally, by now Dad knows how Mr. Vandergaster likes his coffee and Mr. Vandergaster is the only person in the house who can boil Dad’s egg just right.

“I doused it in gasoline, once,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs after a moment. “I did all floors before I realised I’d run out of matches.”

Dad stares and there’s a whole essay in that look, though — Diggory Smith’s sinister influence? — it’s probably lacking paragraph-breaks-wise. “Were you… at the time…?”

“Inside, yes.”

Dad exhales. Little feels like he shouldn’t be witnessing this, which — is this growing up? — must be a first for him.

“I’m glad—” Dad starts hoarsely. “I’m glad about the matches, then.”

Mr. Vandergaster smiles and it’s peculiarly mellow: normally, his smiles are all rind, but this one is just like those soft chunks Viola dips in milk. “Do you know what,” he says, tilting his head back to stare at the enormous crystal chandelier above them. “So am I.”

“I have a business proposition,” Little blurts out because it’s about time.  

Halloween is almost here, after all.

*

“First of all, I first saw your dad on the way to the park, and not in the park,” Mr. Vandergaster told Little about that day eighteen years ago.

Apparently, Mr. Vandergaster had been preparing to leave the house on Halloween for weeks. It was the perfect occasion: he could wear a costume and the locals would be none the wiser. He was craving a walk — had been for years — something desperate. He’d buried his aunt two years prior and hadn’t spoken a word to anyone apart from the occasional ‘thank you’ thrown at a delivery driver from behind a closed door since. He missed the wind, and the cobblestones, and the trees — especially that one magnificent oak, oh but he just loved oaks — and, yes, he even missed the people, not that he intended to actually talk to anyone, oh no. He’d just wear his cloak, and his hat, and his mask, and take a well-deserved tour around the neighbourhood before creeping back into his lair of regret, misery, and ghosts.

He was walking past the local school when it happened: he stopped to tie his shoe and heard first a splash and then a very loud “MOTHER—”

“—cracker,” Dad finished hopelessly when he saw a girl in a school uniform watching him like a hawk, his shoe still submerged in the puddle he’d stepped into.

Which was when the girl burst into tears. Mr. Vandergaster, partially hidden behind somebody’s car, decided that it’d be best to wait it out since he didn’t much fancy storming past the two of them at a moment like that.

Five minutes later, he was still waiting, and all he’d gathered from all the weeping was that the back of the girl’s school uniform skirt had got caught by her rucksack and some other girls spent the rest of the day making fun of her strawberry-print underwear.

“Well, now,” Dad sighed. He perched on the kerb, presumably so the girl wouldn’t feel intimidated by all that looming he was doing, being an average-sized male and all, even though the kerb was wet and muddy and disgusting. “I can sort of see how moving to Essex and changing your name might seem like a good idea, yes, but I’m afraid mean girls are to be found all over the country. They’re like sheep that way.”

The girl sobbed miserably.

“If it makes you feel better, I personally think there’s nothing embarrassing about strawberries,” Dad assured her. “I myself am wearing underwear with a Kermit the Frog pattern. Now, that is a questionable choice, but strawberries? You’re good.”

The girl snorted. Mr. Vandergaster smiled.

“Kermit the Frog, honest,” Dad promised. “I’d show you, but they’d probably lock me up for public indecency. To tell you the truth, ever since I came here, I’ve been the butt of the joke a few times myself.”

“No way,” the girl said with wonder.

“Yes way,” Dad assured her solemnly. “They put super glue on the only piece of chalk in our classroom, they spilled honey all over my chair, and don’t even get me started on what they did to my tea…”

“Oh.”

“And that’s not counting all the embarrassing things I’ve done through nobody’s fault but my own!” Dad nodded cheerfully. “Anyway, what say you we go grab ourselves a hot chocolate? I reckon we both deserve it.”

“With cream on top?” the girl asked hopefully, playing with her braid.

“Double dollop,” Dad nodded eagerly. “We can have some a strawberry cheesecake, too, but only if you’re up for it.”

“Maybe,” the girl said, raising her chin bravely.

“That’s the spirit!” Dad laughed. “Only, are your parents picking you up or what?”

“I walk home after school. I have a key.”

“I suppose I’ll walk you home today, then, that is, if you can put up with me. Your personal escort or maybe even a mule if you get tired or if rain catches us unawares because these are not weather-appropriate shoes, Madam.”

The girl giggled. “I think I know what I’ll do,” she whispered theatrically, smiling up at Dad.

“Oh?”

“Tomorrow,” she said slowly, “I’ll wear my strawberry-print socks.”

“As they say! Sweet Hope! celestial influence round me shed, / Waving thy silver pinions o’er my head.”

They left arm in arm, one of Dad’s shoes making squelching noises and the back of his trousers soaked right through, and Mr. Vandergaster — a Keats fan since adolescence — stayed behind and only managed to tie that shoe on his third try.

“And that’s not the end of it, either,” Mr. Vandergaster sighed when telling Little the story. “See, me and your mother were discussing a Remedios Varo painting when I saw him at a distance…”

Dad was headed their way at the time, battling wind, but, before he got there, he stopped to:

• kick a football back to a couple of boys
• let somebody’s dog tackle him and make him even wetter as it both ground him into moist leaves and licked all over his face
• pet the dog when it just wouldn’t leave him alone
• spend a good five minutes searching all his pockets, unwinding his scarf, and even taking his shoes off in search of some change for a boy who was singing Nights in White Satin with an empty guitar case open on the bench next to him
• backtrack and pick up one among millions of fallen leaves, smile at it, and shove it into his pocket
• help a young mother carry her pushchair over a rather lake-ish puddle
• adjust his tie because, even then, he liked to look presentable for Mum — adjust his tie despite all the parts of him that, after the day he’d had, were quite unadjustable, and simply beyond hope

“Sometimes, you see someone and…” Mr. Vandergaster said absently, his eyes far far away, busy sneaking a peek at that afternoon that Dad seemed to have got everything wrong about.  “Sometimes, you see someone.”

*

“This is a bit…” Dad sighs miserably. “I mean!”

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs, equally miserably.

“Not your fault,” Dad assures him hurriedly. “It was just, you know, physics.”

Their noses are an inch apart. The fairy lights cable goes on and on and it’s wrapped itself around them like a boa constrictor. Little didn’t even plan it. It’s 101 Dalmatians and fate managed it without any actual Dalmatians to help things along.

“I feel responsible all the same,” Mr. Vandergaster says. His skin looks like it can’t decide if it wants to flush or assume a deathly pallor. “It is my house, and this can’t be pleasant for you.”

“Well, it’s not pleasant for my ribs but apart from that— I mean, what?”

“It’s not catching, I promise,” Mr. Vandergaster says solemnly.

“It?”

“Oh, don’t.”

“I know eczema is not catching,” Dad scoffs. “And even if it was—!”

“Even if it was?” Mr. Vandergaster says, all shocked.

“Hey, you two!” Dad crows, glaring at Little and Viola. “We could use a hand, you know!”

“Could you really,” Little says doubtfully. “From where I’m standing, there are already far too many hands involved.”

“Maybe it’s a family curse?” Viola ponders. “I’ll look for scissors.”

“Don’t hurry,” Little whispers and settles down to watch.

“Sorry,” Dad mumbles. “Was that your rib?”

“My liver, I think,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “It’s fine. If I end up needing a new one, I think there are still some spare body parts in the fridge.”

“But there’s no electricity,” Little reminds him. “And you’re vegetarian.”

“You can have mine,” Dad blurts out.

Mr. Vandergaster raises an eyebrow. “Your liver.”

“Wow,” Little gasps. “The déjà vu is insane.”

*

The sale is a success. The maybe-dildo-maybe-decoration thing went to the highest bidder (Mrs. Wilcox, much to Mr. Wilcox’s horror) for an impossible sixty quid, there was a fistfight over the cherub fountain, and people have been testing the sinkhole-ish couch for the past fifteen minutes. Catherine the Great has a new home and so do five other equally ugly, if not downright ghoulish, pictures, someone spent all their monthly savings on Mr. Vandergaster’s late aunt’s jewellery, and a pelican-shaped umbrella stand (apparently, you shove them inside the beak) was a real hit.

So were Mr. Vandergaster’s cookies but these, they’d all agreed, should be given out for free.

“Oh, but this must be hard on him,” Old Miss Maribel sighs, sidling up to Little and Dad and watching Mr. Vandergaster as he attempts to wrap a Leprechaun statuette in tissue paper five tables away, Dad’s scarf pulled up but only to his chin. “Poor dear, stuck in this dreary house with her things all those years.”

Little and Dad blink at her in unison.

She smiles, wrinkles spreading like ripples in water when you drop a pebble into a pond.

“Oh, I’m not surprised, no,” she laughs, right in their faces. “We older ones remember it all: how she first withdrew him from school, how she wouldn’t even let him sit in the garden, and, how he refused to leave the house when she finally croaked.”

“But the rumours?” Dad says slowly.

“Oh, that was to keep people from bothering him! That’s what he wanted, after all.”

“But everyone in the neighbourhood—”

“Of course it was everyone in the neighbourhood,” Miss Maribel waves him off. “He was such a darling boy, who wouldn’t? We old ladies especially have a bit of a reputation for spreading rumours, but, really, little Rupert — I’m allowed to call him little because he always will be, to me — is the best-kept secret in the county, I assure you.”

Dad gapes.

Miss Maribel cackles, then grows serious. “All those years ago, when Zelda died, I thought all he needed was time. I left an apple pie on his doorstep — everyone else brought dinners, but I wanted him to have something warm and sweet — and let him be, hoping he’d emerge eventually, but he never did show his face till now.”

“Maybe time was all he needed,” Dad sighs. “Just, well, a lot of it.”

“Time and bankruptcy,” Little pipes in. “Also, maybe, possibly, perhaps—”

“Don’t say ‘us’,” Dad interrupts. “Don’t say ‘you’.”

“Cake, then!” Little allows cheerfully before shoving the first forkful of his slice in Dad’s mouth. “I’m not sure who brought it, but it sure looks nice! Is it? Shake for ‘yes’, nod for ‘no’.”

But Dad doesn’t shake or nod: instead, he gasps, chokes, and falls over.

*

Before they left the house, Little checked all the coats for his missing glove and found a folded letter in the pocket of Dad’s jacket instead. It was an old sheet of paper: worn, once crumpled, once almost-torn, clearly re-read and re-folded over the… well, it must have been years.

Little locked himself in the bathroom and read it.

Here’s what it said in elegant, slanted handwriting:

Dear Sir  Mr  Sir  Cecil  Sir Mr. Pyne,

As you know, I have had the pleasure of having your wife over for dinner once a week this past month. I am writing this letter to say that I hope you do not hold not inviting you along against me: as you probably know, I would love to have you over as well, but I am sure you agree it just would not be appropriate. However would we get through the evening without someone tripping over the elephant in the room? In other words: I would not wish to make you uncomfortable. I hope you do not mind me taking up Fiona’s time too much: we drink more milk than we do wine, and I, who have very little to tell her, listen carefully as she tells me all about you.

It is rather perfect. After all, “quiet coves /His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings /He furleth close; contented so to look /On mists in idleness – to let fair things /Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.”

If you will allow me this one pathetic request: do try not to hate me.  

Sincerely,

Your Neighbour,

1. V.

“And he misunderstood it,” Little said after his third re-read. “He’s been misunderstanding it all these years, oh boy.”

*

Luckily, it was shock, and not shellfish.

“I can’t believe it was you all along!” Dad sputters, his face smeared with coconut cake. “And you never said a thing!”

Mr. Vandergaster’s blush has been gradually working its way up over the past few minutes and is now approaching his hairline.  

“Three years I’ve been trying to figure out the recipe!” Dad rails, wide-eyed. “Three years!”

“I can give it to you,” Mr. Vandergaster offers apologetically.

Or you could stay, Little wisely doesn’t say, and keep baking it yourself.

“Why would you even—” Dad says after The Kraken. “I mean!”

“She was my friend,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. It sounds like a half-truth. “She was my friend and so I baked you a cake when she… She was my friend.”

*

It was quick when it happened: She was riding her bike — “We’re not getting a car, Cecil! The town is small enough and we’re going to lead an eco-lifestyle, all right?”— down the street, spotted an Icterine Warbler, which they know only because a passer-by remembered hearing her cry the name, got distracted, and hit the bin lorry at breakneck speed.

The last thing she’d ever painted was, of course, a bird.

Love is good at coming unexpected, yes, but death? Death is better.

*

“You have to,” Little insists, trying to shove the paper plate into Viola’s hand. “You must.”

“Not eating sweets, remember?” she says, pushing her curls behind her ear, even though they won’t stay there for long.

“But it’s the cake!” Little cries. Three years ago, Dad wasn’t the only one to fall in love with it.

“I need to watch my weight,” Viola sighs. “I need to stay the size I am.”

Little sighs, too. Viola is wearing one of Mum’s shirts even now — when isn’t she? — and Mum… Well, Mum was tiny.

“She’d like you to eat it,” Little insists.

“You don’t get to go around telling us what Mum would like.”

“I’d like it, then.”

“It’s a no, Little! A no, and not a convince me!”

Little blinks up at her and wonders what an almost-eight-year-old like him could even say to make her see that she’s being silly, that she’s beautiful, and that she doesn’t need Mum’s clothes to be brave.

“Her Wellingtons will always fit you,” he says in a sudden stroke of brilliance. “Your feet are not growing anymore, are they?”

Viola looks down with a doubtful look. Her hair tumbles forward and hides the frown.

“Puberty is a bitch,” Little acknowledges. “Please eat.”

Viola gawks at him.

“Don’t tell Dad,” he adds. “Also, can’t you see that I love you?”

“How is that relevant?” she snaps but ha! She’s blushing.

“It is because when you eat, loving you is a pleasure, but when you won’t, it becomes a bit of a chore,” Little tells her earnestly. “When you won’t eat, I still love you, but it hurts.”

“Boy, but you have a way with words,” Viola sighs. “It’s a hefty slice, isn’t it?”

“We could share it.”

Viola smiles and grabs a fork. Little is so happy that he starts humming. It’s as he’s licking coconut off his fingers that he realises it’s Ode to Joy.

*

The sale is drawing to a close, the cake is just a memory, and Mr. Vandergaster is nowhere to be found.

Little finds him anyway.

He’s sitting in the bathtub with his arms around his knees and his hair is a little less perfect than usual. He’s staring at the cracked bathroom tiles with vacant eyes, and, in the white light squeezing its way inside through a tiny window, he looks like someone who’s just had their whole life turned upside down.

“This is where I’d hide whenever my aunt was in a mood,” he says miserably.  

“What did she think the eczema was punishment for?” Little asks, scrambling inside and settling down so that the two of them are facing each other.

“Sodomy,” Mr. Vandergaster says with a wry smile.

“Huh,” Little nods. “I don’t actually know what that means.”

“That’s a first,” Mr. Vandergaster snorts. “I made a Valentine’s Day card for a boy in my class once. She found it and that was that: I was infected by the Devil, or punished by God, take your pick. I wouldn’t leave the house until the physical manifestation of my sin — that’s the eczema and not any of the usual physical manifestations of the, er, ailment — went away and, since it never did, I wouldn’t leave the house period.”

“That’s harsh,” Little sighs. “What did you write on the card?”

Mr. Vandergaster buries his head in his knees and Little can just imagine what kind of a kid he was. He’s heard stories today, fond tales of a boy with an even part in his hair, wide-eyed and neat-collared, always in trousers secured with suspenders and with a book of poetry in his hand.

Apparently, even back then, it was Keats he liked best.

“It’s really scary,” Mr. Vandergaster wheezes, “how life just goes by, trickles through your fingers, runs past you and doesn’t ever glance back… doesn’t ever wait.”

“Are you having a heart attack?” Little asks, worried, and feels Mr. Vandergaster’s forehead to check his temperature.

“I might be,” Mr. Vandergaster chokes out. “Oh, God, kid, you have no idea! I’ve had no one to love for two decades.”

Little lets that sink in, but, to be honest, he can’t even begin to imagine it: he’s only been in the world for less than one decade and, so far, he’s always had someone to love.

“That’s what really kills you, I think,” Mr. Vandergaster laughs bitterly. “That’s what the gasoline was for. Having no one to love you, that’s one thing, but having no one to love?”

He buries his face in his hands, and Little wonders if a hug is in order. It’s Halloween tomorrow, Mr. Vandergaster has already agreed to decorating the house and giving tours for money, and Little hasn’t even learned if he likes hugs yet.

“They did me a huge favour, really, when they cut everything off,” Mr. Vandergaster goes on miserably. “They did me a huge favour, but I’ve certainly overstayed my welcome at your place, haven’t I?”

Because Little really does like learning things empirically, he tries the hug. Mr. Vandergaster goes very still and then makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a sob.

“Inside my heart, there are no bills to pay,” Little promises, petting his hair. “No rent, either.”

“A whole life without this,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs.

“Are you sure about that?” Little coos. “I’m only eight-in-less-than-twenty-four-hours, so what do I know, but, personally, I don’t think happiness has an expiration date.”

*

There’s a bookmark stuck in their Bird Spotting copy. It’s between pages 226 and 227, where the Icterine Warbler is described as ‘only a rare vagrant to Britain.’

Little spent three years wishing it’d never come.

*

There were six ghosts: three of the As (Abel volunteered, Alan and Arabella had to be bribed, and Agnes was voted too small), Viola, Clover, and Little himself.

They did splendidly, if Little does say so himself. Little rather loved swinging a plastic axe, dripping diluted tomato sauce, and yelling himself hoarse as local kids tripped over Mr. Vandergaster’s carpet.

“It’s eight,” he sighs, checking Dad’s watch. “Can I change into my chanterelle costume now?”

“Here,” Viola says, tossing it at him. She’s already dressed up as a sea slug (glaucus atlanticus specifically) and is waiting for Clover, who’s meant to be a dryad, to join them.

“Hurrah!” Little cries, struggling into the costume. “Aren’t I handsome?”

“The handsomest,” Dad assures him gravely, wrestling with his witch’s hat. “You look very tasty, too.”

“October is the month of cannibal jokes,” Little sighs. “What will we laugh about in November?”

“You better figure it out quick,” Mr. Vandergaster says, grinning around a plastic vampire fang. “It’s tomorrow, after all.”

“I’m eight years old now,” Little announces. “Have been for eleven hours, actually. Does this mean I’m old enough to watch Jaws?”

Dad deliberates. “No, not Jaws. Jurassic Park, maybe, but not Jaws.”

“Blimey,” Little sighs, giving a can someone left on Mr. Vandergaster’s doorstep a kick. “Actually, we should recycle that.”

“Tonight was a success, wasn’t it?” Dad says, picking it up and rattling it as though he thinks something’s hiding inside. “However! You must stay with us as long as you like.”

That last bit is addressed to Mr. Vandergaster, who pulls Dad’s scarf up with his ring finger — the only clean one — to hide his blush, with little success. It’s already dark outside, but they’ve got torches, and Little has had his directed at Mr. Vandergaster for the past five minutes.

“Anyway, can someone lock the door?” Mr. Vandergaster says. “I’ve still got fake blood all over my hands and I don’t particularly want the front of the house to look like someone’s been slaughtered here overnight.”

“I will, I will, I will!” Little cries. “Where’s the key?”

“Pocket. No, not this one. The one on the left. At least I think it is? Actually—”

But Little is not looking for the key anymore: instead, he’s unfolding a sheet of paper that’s even more worn than that letter he found in Dad’s pocket. He squints at what looks like a printed email and then gasps because—

“DEAR WHO NOW?” he screeches. “SIGNED YOURS WHO?”

Mr. Vandergaster’s eyes grow wide, and he instantly tries to intercept the email, but Viola snatches it away just in time, and then….

Well, then all hell breaks loose.

*

Little actually remembers the email. Years ago (three, to be exact), Dad got out of bed after a week of horizontal mourning, typed it out, and went to make himself coffee. Little, who’d been trying to breathe, live, and not flood the house with tears, was too small to read it, but, when they sneaked into the room, Viola read it to him.

It went like this:

Dear Dolores,

Is it okay to call you Dolores? I’ve never met you and I never will but — it’s the funniest thing — sometimes I feel like you’re the only person I have met.

I guess I’m just writing this to tell you that I love your books and I guess I love your books because they’re the only thing that make sense. I lost someone recently and, in a world turned nonsensical, they’ve been a foothold. I haven’t actually read a thing since it happened, but it helps having something you love under your pillow — thank God for soft paperbacks! — especially when your pillow is slowly losing the smell of that shampoo the person you’ve loved for ages would use for her hair.

Sorry. Oversharing, I know. God, I wonder how many of these you get weekly: lonely, desperate people who can’t afford therapy pouring their hearts out to a stranger that feels familiar just because she made their visit into one of her books worth their while.

But it’s more than that for me. I’m not a stalker — I swear I’m not — but I carry two lists around in my head: one is a list of things I want to tell my wife, and one is a list of things I want to tell you.

Well, as of last week, I won’t be needing one of those.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about dedications. I’ve been thinking about Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s “To Leon Werth, when he was a little boy”, and about Agatha Christie’s “To all those who lead monotonous lives, in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure”, and about E. M. Forster’s “To a happier year”, and, last but not least, about your “To the man I saw make a little girl laugh on my way past that one time.” To think that there is a bloke out there that goes about his life unaware that someone like you has dedicated her book to him!

It makes me think of this one Icterine Warbler, off somewhere and blissfully unaware of just what the flapping of its wings has done.

Well, I’m risking coming off as creepy here, but, as they say, carpe diem! My familiar stranger:  

I’ve been keeping the windows open because draughts calm me when blankets seem too much like hugs, I’ve been taking showers without undressing because it’s all the same, and I’ve been staring at things rope-ish enough to be tied into nooses, but it can’t go on: I have kids and there are shirts that need to be ironed, lunches that need to be packed, and foreheads that need to be kissed. There are ‘now’s that need to be taken care of and that I won’t stand made any grimmer than they already are.

Sometime in the future, I’ll figure out the whole surviving thing and go on living without having to resort to this, but, for now, only partly because we met through your books, me and her, from one host of love to another, please do let me dedicate my mornings to you, who have already got me through so much, because I’m afraid I simply won’t manage otherwise.

Yours truly,

1. P.
2. S. Not to sound ungrateful but how come people always bring you dinners when someone dies? I’m sure if this was one of your books, there’d be cake, but then, if this was one of your books, I suppose there’d be a happy ending, too.

*

They’re inside the house, outside, the wind is howling, and Dad has just finished reading that email he sent three years ago. Viola and Little insisted, despite Mr. Vandergaster’s protests.

“Oh, Jesus,” Dad says, actually fisting his hair. “You’re Dolores Dragonfly?”

Mr. Vandergaster looks like he’s about to bolt. Little blocks the living room door just in case.

“I mean, it had to be someone,” Mr. Vandergaster mumbles eventually, without meeting Dad’s eyes.

“And you knew I was…?”

“Fiona mentioned you were… a fan,” Mr. Vandergaster admits with a pained expression. “And then that email a week after she… Well, it had to be you.”

“You were surprised when you saw your books on the shelf,” Little says with a frown.

“I was surprised that all of them were there,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs. “I’m not a particularly good writer, but I am a prolific one. It comes with the lifestyle.”

“Careful,” Viola snorts. “Dad won’t let anyone insult those books, not even you.”

“Kids, how about you leave us alone?” Dad says through his teeth, glaring at the floor, probably because he desperately needs to glare at something but knows that glaring at Mr. Vandergaster wouldn’t be fair.

Little opens his mouth to protest but Viola grabs him by the wrist and drags him out of the room. She slams the door shut, too, stomps towards the kitchen, slides out of her shoes, and then tiptoes back to the door, pressing a finger to her lips.

Little grins because oh, she’s the best.

They both press their ears to the door and here’s what they hear:

“It’s unbelievable!” says Dad.

“It gets worse,” says Mr. Vandergaster.

“WORSE?”

“As you’ve probably guessed by now, ‘the man I saw make a little girl laugh on my way past that one time’ is you.”

“…Is who now?”

“Is you.”

“Is me.”

“Yes.”

“Me.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“But you never… but what? But even if! But why?”

“You make a good first impression.”

“I talked about duck penises!”

“That was a tenth impression, and you’re being too hard on yourself.”

“But I still don’t get why… Even if Fiona mentioned that I was a fan… and what do you mean, ‘as you’ve probably guessed by now’?”

“Well, who else would it be? What with the letter?”

“The letter?”

“Yes. The letter I sent you all those years ago. The one about how I was so very sorry I hadn’t invited you to dinner and how I hoped you’d understand that I just didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Oh. That letter.”

“Yes.”

“Er, how does that explain anything? Because, for all intents and purposes, it’s Fiona you should have dedicated a book to, not me…”

“How so?”

“Since you liked her? At first sight? Autumn leaves and duck-feeding and Remedios Varo? Does that ring a bell at all?”

“The leaves, and the ducks, and the art, sure. But not the liking her at first sight part, no.”

“Oh, don’t do that! I’m not mad, it’s been ages, it’s fine! You don’t have to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about because come on! That ‘oh’ all those years ago, when you learned we were married? That was the saddest ‘oh’ I’ve ever heard!”

“Well, guilty as charged.”

“All right, great! So what’s this nonsense about dedicating a book to me and implying I should have guessed, when it was Fiona you liked?”

“When it was Fiona I… What.”

“What?”

“Oh. Oh. OH.”

“What?”

“When I wrote you that letter about not wanting to make you uncomfortable… Did you think I was inviting Fiona over for dates and didn’t want you there to interrupt?!”

“Well…”

“Oh, Christ! That disappointed ‘oh’ wasn’t for her! It was for you!”

“…”

“For me.”

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“YES!”

“…”

“Oh my God,” Viola gasps.

“Oh my Satan,” Little agrees.

“Look, I’ll take my things and…” Mr. Vandergaster says in a muffled voice.

“No!” Dad protests instantly. “No, I— WHAT?”

“You need time to process this anyway—”

“Oh, I dare say, but if I let you leave now, God knows when, if ever, I’ll see you again!”

“Do you want to, then?”

“Do I want to what?”

“See me again?”

“Oh, it’s not even an again. It’s a ‘keep’. As in, I want to keep seeing you.”

“And, just to clarify, you mean the actual physical act of seeing—”

“I do, yes, but I might — HOUSE ARREST FOREVER, LITTLE! — actually want to be seeing you in the figurative sense, too. Damn it all to hell and back.”

“Really?”

“Well, yes, but you’re actually, you know, free to go. Even if I’d rather you didn’t. Go.”

“But I’m a recluse? And old? And weird?”

“Weird? Really? And I’m, what, two years older than you, so watch it with the insults.”

“But really?”

“Really, really, but please, stop, this is torture. I realise that just because eighteen years ago… I realise. You want to go, and I won’t stop you but please don’t freeze to death. I’m sorry about Little — all his fault when you think about it! — and I’m sorry about being a mess, and I’m sorry about the fairy lights and, most of all, I’m sorry about being happy about the fairy lights.”

“…”

“I’s fine. I’ll be fine. You can leave now. I’ll get over it and we’ll be friends because you won’t lock yourself in this time, right? You deserve the outside and — I don’t think this is a stretch — the outside deserves a you.”

There’s a prolonged silence and Little crosses his fingers. Viola mimics him and then they both close their eyes.

“I wrote all those books about how love doesn’t knock,” Mr. Vandergaster sighs on the other side of the door. “But do you know what, if it’d knocked eighteen years ago, I think I’d have let it in.”

“I’m glad,” Dad says miserably. He sounds like he’s about to cry.

“No, you’re misunderstanding,” Mr. Vandergaster says immediately. “It’s been almost two decades, but I don’t think happiness has an expiration date.”

Viola squeezes Little’s hand and, outside, despite the late hour, and the wind, and the cold, a bird starts singing.

*

“What do you want,” Alan sighs when Little pounces on him outside Tesco.

“This,” he says, shoving a unicorn statuette he found in Mr. Vandergaster’s house inside Alan’s pocket, “is for you.”

“Oh.”

“It doesn’t poop.”

“Oh.”

“Bye now!”

“Oh.”

Little runs up the street through a sea of yellow-orange-red-brown-purple leaves and laughs because oh, how no two ‘oh’s are ever alike!

*

“…And I’m thinking two more skeletons in the upstairs corridor because you can never have too many of those, am I right or am I right?”

Mr. Vandergaster sighs and blows on his hot chocolate. “When you use muscles you haven’t used in a while, they burn afterwards.”

“They sure do!” Little agrees eagerly. “What are we talking about?”

“Love, I suppose,” Mr. Vandergaster says as he frowns at his mug.

“Oh. Does this mean I can finally call you Papa?”

Mr. Vandergaster makes a pained face. “Please, don’t.”

“It’s a good ache, though, isn’t it?” Little asks, trying not to sound too anxious.

“It’s an ache,” Mr. Vandergaster says with a wicked grin, but Little knows he doesn’t really mean it: time has shown that Little might be a bit much even for two adults to handle but he knows that Mr. Vandergaster — it’s the smile, and how he stayed, and how he keeps staying day after day — wouldn’t have it any other way.

As for Little himself… Let’s put it this way: if he saw an Icterine Warbler now, he wouldn’t throw a rock at it, and if love knocked on the door—

But love has been inside since October, and it seems like it’s in no hurry to leave. Apparently, it’s rather fond of fold-out couches, and who would have guessed?

 (Little, that’s who.)