The Mysterious World of Yohan Finkel

By Anna Shone

11 year old Yohan Finkel is determined to solve some of the mysteries in his life, primary amonst them: What is a lesbian? What is the worst English swearword? and Where is Granddad Charlie?
He finds himself with a real life mystery to solve when 12 year old Sabrina Nicketts, who lives in his street, disappears. Three asylum seekers who have recently moved into the street are accused of her abduction. One of them, Du, is a 13 year old former Congolese child soldier. He has become a close friend of Yohan and been unofficially adopted by the Finkel family.
Yohan takes on the role of detective and investigates the girl’s disappearance in order to exonerate his new friend.
Narrated by Yohan in diary format, if you are a fan of Adrian Mole and like a crime to solve this is for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Shone
• Release date: Apr 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476225845

Anna Shone

Former English teacher, now full time writer. Brought my family up in France, now living near Cambridge in UK. I've written three crime novels, two classic British whodunits, the third non traditional using a child detective. I'm now working on the third in my Donaghue series.

Book preview

The Mysterious World of Yohan Finkel

By Anna Shone

The Mysterious World of Yohan Finkel

By Anna Shone

Published by Anna Shone at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Anna Shone

All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

For cover artwork:

Christina Curtin

*

For illustration The Boxer:

Rose Lockwood

*

For song: Birds in the Water

Letitia Shone

Part One

January

Monday 5th January

The mysteries in my life that I would like to solve are:

1) What is a lesbian?

2) What is the worst English swearword? (I already know the second worst.)

3) Why can’t we sleep over at Aunt Millicent’s?

4) Where is Granddad Charlie?

5) Parents: everything they do and everything they say.

Today is going to be officially The Worst Day of My Life. I have to face Mrs Deathray (real name Defray) at school for using the second worst swearword.

I wasn’t actually swearing. I was explaining to the Italian Twins what the F word meant. I quoted my nan (a retired English teacher): ‘The F word is a fine old Anglo Saxon word which comes from the Old German frichen that meant ‘strike’. It is a wonderfully suitable word to describe the sexual act which is its primary meaning, both as verb and noun, although of course it is commonly used as an adjectival intensifier and by no means always as a swear word.’

The Twins looked at me as if I was speaking Moldovan.

‘An adject… adject…? What the f***’s that?’ said Federico.

‘Instead of saying something was really great,’ I explained, ‘a lot of people say ‘That was fucking great.’

It was at that moment, of course, that The Deathray walked past. Naturally she hadn’t heard Federico swearing.

Another mystery in my life is why The Italian Twins are blessed with good luck while I am dogged with bad. Their surname is Ferrari; mine is Finkel.

I rest my case.

~

6th January

The Parents are jabbering away in French downstairs. They think we don’t understand when they speak in French but we do. When I say ‘we’ I mean Henrik (9) and me (11). Lotta (5) doesn’t understand anything in English other than: ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘want’ and ‘telling’. The conversation goes roughly like this:

Dad: (voice raised) That cow! If she puts him in a different class, I’ll … I’ll … find out where she lives and I’ll go and … and … I’ll slash her tyres!

Mum: (Shocked) Sam, just calm down. Keep cool. If she does it, we write to the school governors. That’s the procedure. It’ll be ok, Sam. Don’t let her wind you up.

Dad: (voice raised further) That cow! That hatchet-faced, hawk-nosed cow!

He keeps saying something about her being ‘malbaizay’. I don’t know what it means but it will be something gruesome. Thank God Dad is on my side. I’d rather face a pack of slavering Rottweilers than Mrs Defray. At least I’d have a one in a trillion chance of getting the Rottweilers on my side. You’ve got no chance of getting Mrs Defray on your side, not if you’re a boy and not if you’re a boy called Yohan Finkel!

Dad goes on: ‘She said she couldn’t tolerate foul language in her school, that she has to stick to her principles. You know what I’d like to do with her principles? I’d like to take her principles and stick them up her ‘koo’!’

I’m not one hundred per cent sure what ‘koo’ means but I can guess.

~

Later

I call Nan and ask her what ‘malbaizay’ means. She says, ‘Oh, malbaisé. It means … um … badly … er … effed.’ She won’t say the word itself as, despite being a freedom-loving child of the 60’s, she was brought up a Catholic in Ireland and cannot bring herself to swear.

I take the opportunity to ask her where Granddad Charlie is.

She says, ‘Oh … er … he’s working away.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Er … he’s … um … doing some work for a friend.’

Before I can ask any more questions she says, ‘Do your parents know that you understand French?’

‘Don’t think so,’ I say.

‘Mmm …,’ Nan says.

~

7th January

There’s been a lot of jabbering in French lately. When The Parents jabber in French it’s usually about a problem. This time it’s not Mrs Defray but the New Neighbour next door.

Dad: He’s a first class moron! He’s out there burning all his plastic rubbish ... says it’s to help the environment! The guy’s bonkers! And it’s no better the other side. She’s a junkie and he’s a dealer.

Mum: You can’t be sure about that, Sam.

Dad: She walks round like a zombie and he doesn’t work. They’re dealing … crack from the look of her. Of all the houses in all the streets in all the towns we had to choose this one!

Mum: You can say that again Sam.

There is a silence.

~

I have a strange suspicion that they’re kissing. It doesn’t happen very often. Nan says despite growing up in France, Dad is English to the core and doesn’t have a romantic cell in his body. Dad says he hasn’t got time for romance, not with two jobs, four kids and a Beagle. Nan says she and Charlie had four kids but they always found time for romantic moments together. Dad says he knows, he was in the next room.

The last time I saw The Parents kissing was when they got married. It was before Lotta was born. They had to get married so that Lotta could have a British passport. If they hadn’t she would have been Swedish (like Mum) and not British. Dad went ballistic.

‘Has the government gone completely stark raving mad?’ he yelled. ‘How can a child born on British soil to a British father be an alien?’

I asked Dad if Mum was an alien. He said only once a month.

~

At the wedding they kissed in front of everyone after Dad had made his speech. He said that he and Mum were students at Nice University and worked in a restaurant in the evenings. He said she was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when they first met. Everybody laughed when he said that. He was wearing a black suit and actually looked quite cool.

I’ve tried to imagine The Parents as students, with long hair and trendy clothes, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. It defies the imagination but I must remember what Nan says: absolutely anything is possible in this extraordinary universe

~

11th January

I’ve asked Dad if we can change our name. Rafaele and Federico Ferrari have got the coolest names on the planet. I’ve got the uncoolest. Ok, Yohan I can live with. It’s shortened to Yo and that’s ok – but Finkel! What rhymes with Finkel? Dinkle and winkle. What more could any rapper ask for, especially the ones who hate me ‘cause I’m faster than them on the pitch.

Henrik looked it up on the Internet and you can change your name for ten pounds. Ten pounds! I’ve got that saved. I’ve told Dad that I’ll pay for it but he won’t even consider it.

‘What’s in a name?’ he says. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. We might not practice the religion but your name speaks eons of Jewish history. If you reject your name you reject your heritage. It’s as much a part of you as the colour of your eyes and the texture of your hair. It’s part of your identity.’

‘That’s true,’ says Mum. ‘But a bad name can affect you as much as bad hair. (Mum’s name is Krustprik so Finkel is actually an improvement for her!) But her hair is fine!

‘Think about it, Sam,’ she says, ‘do you think Brad Pitt would be quite as charismatic if his name was Norbert Crump?’

Dad: Would you love me more if my name was Brad Pitt?

Silence

~

17th January

I have to stay in my room for an hour because Dad heard me trying to teach The Baby to say the second worst swear word in the English language. Dad says I should try to read and think about what I’ve done. I give up trying to read after two minutes and record my diary instead. Writing is as difficult for me as reading so I do all my communication by listening and speaking. Nan says I shouldn’t worry about being dyslexic, as reading and writing are very recent cultural developments, invented by tax collectors, and may well disappear as quickly as they came with the advance of technology.

I add another mystery to my list:

How does The Baby know when things are funny?

When I cluck like a chicken she goes into hysterics. How does she know the difference between funny and serious? She really cracks me up. Her name’s Amelie and she’s a girl but I can’t think of her as anything but The Baby. She’s just started to walk and talk. I wanted her first word to be the second worst English swear word as I don’t know what the worst one is. All I know is there is one worse than the F word. As for the F word, I hear it so much that I don’t know why it’s a crime to use it. Dad says it all the time and so do the Ferrari twins and all the Flynn kids down the road.

Thinking about what I’ve done leaves me with a heavy heart. When will adults learn the simple truth: we learn the language they give us. We swear because they swear. We don’t make the ****ing words up!

~

19th January

The dog’s yelping at the back door to come in. At the second yelp the New Neighbour yells from his garden, ‘SHUDDUP BUSTA!’

I dash downstairs and let Busta in. As I do so the New Neighbour shouts, ‘ABOUT FUCKING TIME TOO!’

‘Was that the neighbour shouting again?’ Dad asks. I nod and he says, ‘Right … that’s it! Time for a word with the moron.’

He goes round to the New Neighbours’ front door and knocks. I race up to my bedroom to listen.

Dad: Look … er … sorry … er … my name’s Sam, I’m sorry I don’t know your …

New Neighbour: Dwayne.

They must be shaking hands as there’s a pause.

Dad: Er … look Dwayne, if the dog yelps to come in and no one comes immediately it’s because we are otherwise engaged. We’ll be in the bathroom or changing the baby’s nappy or staunching blood from a child’s severed artery … something like that. There’ll be a reason. It’s not because we don’t care that he’s yelping. It’s because we can’t come right at that moment.

New Neighbour: But the dog barks all the time. It drives us mad.

The Neighbour’s wife, Sharon, must have joined them as I can hear her say, ‘Yes, it’s driving us round the bend. All day long it’s barking and yelping.’

Dad: (mystified) What are you talking about? Busta hardly ever barks!

Neighbour: He barks before you take him out.

Dad: But that’s only from excitement. It’s perfectly normal. He’s a six month old pup. He’ll calm down as he gets older. Even old dogs bark from time to time. It’s how dogs communicate.

Neighbour: Do you hear our dog bark?

Dad: (astonished) You’ve got a dog?

Neighbour: (proudly) And do you hear it make a sound? No you don’t ’cause it’s properly trained, that’s why!

Dad: (again astonished) But I’ve never seen you walk it.

Neighbour: No, we don’t walk it. It doesn’t like walking. It’s got bad legs.

There is a brief silence. I actually believe my father is stumped for words. Then he says, ‘Well … anyway … er … Dwayne, I’m sorry that Busta yelps and barks occasionally, but, as I said, he’s only a pup and I’ve no doubt he’ll grow out of it soon.’

Neighbour: The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got to train dogs you know.

Dad comes into the house fuming. Mum’s in their bedroom. They speak in French as they always do in private:

Dad: Did you know they had a dog?

Mum: No.

‘They’ve got a dog apparently, that doesn’t bark and doesn’t like going for walks. What the pootan kind of dog is that?’

‘Maybe they’ve got a cat but they can’t tell the difference.’

There is a moment’s silence then Dad says, ‘That was actually quite funny, Åsa.’

Another pause.

‘He actually thinks that we let the dog bark just to annoy him. Good God, he’s not only thick, he’s paranoid as well. And on top of that his name’s Dwayne. Dwayne! Does he look like a cowboy? Are cowboys fat, bald, tattooed, with an earring in one ear and an English flag girdling their loins? He smokes all day long and, with that beer belly, he’s got to down at least ten pints a night. As far as I can see he doesn’t work …’ Dad laughs sardonically, ‘… unless, of course, I’ve got it all wrong and he’s an IT consultant for Microsoft, working from home. Ha ha ! No, it’s not the dog that doesn’t like walking, it’s him, the great fat lard arse.’

‘You’re probably right, cheri,’ says Mum.

Dad: In any case, I don’t believe he’s got a pootan de dog. He’s just saying that. If there’s a dog next door I’ll change my name to Brad Pitt.

Is there a dog next door? This is a question I must now answer! Maybe there is a dumb dog with crutches next door …

Yohan Pitt … mmm … not as cool as Ferrari but a definite improvement on Finkel!

~

Later

I call Nan and ask her if pootan is French for the F word. She says, ‘Ah, you mean putain. It’s the equivalent but it doesn’t have the same meaning. The French word for the sexual act is baiser and it isn’t a swearword. I ask her what putain means. She says, ‘Prostitute.’ Then she laughs and says, ‘Doesn’t that speak volumes about the differences in our cultures?’

Are swearwords in all languages, I ask myself, related to sex and excretion?

Why?

~

20th January

I’m off school today with a cough. I have to go to Tesco’s with Mum.

I hate going shopping with Mum and she hates going shopping with us. Nan says supermarkets are the second greatest evil created by the human race after the car. Their managers, she says, are on a par with the worst fascist dictators when it comes to mind control and brainwashing. She says they create an environment that interferes with the normal functioning of the brain, particularly the brains of children.

The children scream, she says, the mothers buy them whatever they want and then go and grab things they don’t need because their brains are deranged. If this were not the case, Nan says, all supermarkets would have play areas with jolly child-minders to entertain children while their parents shop in peace.

‘It’s quite obvious,’ she says, ‘that an atmosphere of murderous hysteria results in greater profit than one of calm serenity.

I must remember to ask Nan what fascist mean.

~

23rd January

I’m up in my room again on reading detail. This time it’s because I wound Busta up by letting the cat, Kushka, eat out of his bowl.

Kushka leapt, hissing, across the kitchen and whacked Busta around the head with his paw. Busta yelped in pain and Kushka chased him into the garden.

Kushka is a massive, thickly-furred cat who considers our house and garden as his domain and Busta as an interloper. I watch him as he sits perfectly still, watching a bird that has had the temerity to land on his patch. He’s probably working out whether he can be bothered to kill it or not. I have absolutely no doubt that, if I was the size of that bird, he would look at me in the same way. Kushka is a seriously scary cat!

I’m supposed to be reading but if I look at a page of words my brain goes into meltdown. The words run into each other and I can’t tell one from another. I understand words perfectly well when I hear them but not when I see them.

I spend the time listening to the conversations wafting up from The Parents down below.

Dad’s starting to get irate about something. I think it’s the government this time.

‘What is all this about Iran? Why are they concerned about what the Iranian president thinks about anything? Are we going back to the ideological war of the cold war? Have they forgotten where that took us? To the brink of a nuclear holocaust … that’s where. The problem with politicians is that they get delusions of grandeur. Kennedy was as much an ideologue as Khrushchev, Thatcher thought she was the rightful queen, Blair thought he had the ear of God, Bush thought he was the voice of God. Sarkozy thinks he’s Napoleon and Cameron thinks he’s the messiah and the embodiment of all that is right and good.’

Mum: Sam, you’re sounding more like your parents every day.

Dad: Like my parents? What are you talking about Åsa? Please do not compare me to my parents. Am I a hippy, stuck in the sixties, thinking that the brotherhood of man is just round the corner, waiting to be ushered in the day the capital system crumbles and the six billion people on this planet sit down together, pass round a joint, then join hands singing, ‘We all live in a yellow submarine’?

Mum: They’ve never lost the ideals of their youth, Sam. You have to admire them for that.

Dad: Oh, great. That’s great. Keep your ideals but lose everything else. The way Charlie’s going he’ll lose everything they worked for in France. They? What am I saying … we … worked for. Does Charlie remember that I helped him renovate the house in Brignoles? I interviewed the tenants; I helped him restore the ancient tiled floor in the ground floor flat; I cleaned the ton of pigeon shit from the attic. Has he forgotten that? And now if he doesn’t watch out he’ll lose the lot. All that work for nothing. And on top of that he’s in …

Here Dad lowers his voice to a whisper. He obviously doesn’t want anyone else to know where Charlie is.

Why? I must find out where it is.

I get the distinct impression that Dad is bitterly disappointed in his parents.

~

24th January 11pm

On the way back to bed from the loo I hear the voice of a Chinese prostitute downstairs:

‘You wan’ nice time … fi’ dolla’. You wan’ velly nice time … ten dolla’ but fo’ you ‘cos you nice Blitish tourist, jolly good time … twenny dolla’!’

The voice is that of Aunt Yasmin who’s not Chinese but Turkish and who’s visiting with Uncle Tom and little cousin, Ozan. Yasmin is very good at impressions when she’s had two glasses of wine.

Everybody laughed, including Dad. I think they’d all been drinking wine.

I don’t know why The Parents don’t want me to hear sexually related swearwords. I know what sex is. I know how animals reproduce sexually.

The only thing I don’t understand about sex is how anyone can want to do it.

25th January

Dad’s been telling Uncle Tom about the New Neighbour.

‘You could move,’ said Tom. ‘A bit of bad luck finding yourself with neighbours like that.’

‘I’d move like a shot,’ said Dad, ‘but we can’t sell now. To be honest we bought this house as an investment. We planned to do it up and sell. How could we know the market would crash? Now we’re in negative equity. We can’t sell for God knows how long.’

He put his head in his hands and moaned. ‘And look where we’re stuck: with a BNP moron on one side, junkies on the other, a tribe of wild Irish down the road, small time crooks opposite, a weirdo next to them and the ‘ing Frobishers on the other side.’

‘What’s wrong with the Frobishers?’ asked Yasmin.

‘The Frobishers are your classic lower middle class, aspiring-to-be-upper class social wannabes,’ Dad said. ‘They think they’re better than everybody else and refuse to speak to anybody in the road. They walk past you in the street, keep their curtains closed and keep themselves to themselves behind locked doors. It’s obvious they only bought a house on this street to get on to the property ladder.’

Silence.

~

I went upstairs and looked across at the Frobishers’ house. Mr Frobisher had just locked his car in the garage and was opening his front door. I looked everywhere but couldn’t see a ladder against the property anywhere.

What on earth is negative equity?

~

26th January

Listening to another conversation in French, I discover that Granddad Charlie is in Amsterdam and that Nan has gone to see him and will be coming back with Ivan.

I am overjoyed! Ivan is the three year old son of their Dutch friends, Thijs and Saskia.

The Parents are not happy. They call Ivan ‘Ivan the Terrible’ because he is, they say, the worst child in the world. He’s only three and ‘too clever by half’ Mum says. Dad says he has the makings of a lawyer, an investment banker, a pope or a drugs baron and that, in view of the parents he’s been blessed with, it’s likely to be either the first or the last.

As far as I’m concerned you can’t get a greater three year old than Ivan. He can speak like me, he can spell better than me, he knows as much as I do about football and because he’s only three he gets away with things I can’t get away with. If he was here now, for instance I’d send him in next door to see if they have a dog.

‘Of course his parents have no control over him,’ Mum says.

‘What d’you expect with people in their line of work?’ Dad says.

‘I know,’ Mum says. ‘D’you think Charlie …?’

‘He’s in Amsterdam. My mother’s looking after Ivan. It can only mean one thing … Charlie’s working with Thijs … in Amsterdam.’

‘Oh dear!’ Mum says.

Why, I ask myself, do The Parents disapprove of Charlie working in Amsterdam?

What’s wrong with Amsterdam?

~

28th January

I told the Italian Twins that my Nan had gone to Amsterdam. They both sniggered. (They do most things at the same time.)

Federico said, ‘That’s where you see women standing in shop windows with nothing on.’

‘Why do they do that?’ I asked.

‘To sell their bodies for sex,’ said Rafaele and they both fell about laughing.

To be quite honest I can’t see what’s funny about grown-ups standing around naked. We Finkels are used to seeing people naked on the beaches we go to in the South of France (where Dad grew up). There’s absolutely nothing funny about it. As far as prostitution is concerned, I can’t imagine that women make much money out of it. Who on earth would want to pay for a disgusting thing like sex?

Federico said, ‘Is that why your Nan’s gone there? Is your Nan a lesbian?’

‘No of course not,’ I said. ‘That’s not why she goes there.’

‘Why’s she gone there, then?

‘To see her friends.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ said Rafaele.

‘What who say?’ I said mystified.

‘Lesbians,’ they both said together.

Then they both started chanting, ‘Your nan’s a lesbian, your nan’s a lesbian.’

I don’t know what a lesbian is but I do know that for kids of my age it’s an insult not a compliment. So I thumped Federico. He stopped chanting and looked in shock at the blood that trickled from his nose into his mouth.

‘And your granddad’s gay,’ chanted Rafaele, taking a step back to safety as he did so.

I know that gay is an insult as well so I thumped Federico again. As they do everything together I figured it wouldn’t make any difference which one you hit.

~

30th January

Our cat, Kushka, has none of the characteristics of a normal domestic cat. Imagine a Neanderthal cat – that’s Kushka. He neither wants nor gives affection. If you try to stroke him he’ll hiss angrily and swipe at you with his paw. I’m sure that he sees us humans, quite simply, as servants, our sole purpose to place his dishes of food and water on the same spot at the same time every day.

He refuses to eat from a dish that is not perfectly clean yet regularly brings to the doorstep the rotting carcasses of creatures he’s killed just for the fun of it.

On top of that he kills them in a horribly sadistic, slow, tortuous way, knocking them about and playing with them until they die, then brings their mauled but uneaten corpses back to the house as, I can only imagine, a warning that if we were that size he would do the same to us!

He kills the usual cat prey of mice, baby birds and the odd chick or even duckling but lately I’ve noticed that his kills are getting bigger. This morning, for instance, we found the battered remains of an adult bird that hadn’t fallen out of a nest. He must have stalked it.

Why would any creature go to such trouble for something it’s not going to eat? I asked Granddad Charlie once and he said, ‘Cats haven’t been domesticated long enough in evolutionary terms to lose the hunting instinct. Kushka has no choice but to follow that instinct. The question I would like answered, Yo, is why do we do the same thing?’

~

31st January

Nan’s come back from Amsterdam with Ivan. Yes! Yes! Yes!

I can now attempt to find out if next door have a dog by sending Ivan in there.

Mum put her head in her hands and moaned to Dad, ‘He’s bound to want to sleep over. It’s going to be mayhem. What’s the matter with Bridy? (Bridy’s my nan’s name) She has to have a badly behaved male to deal with, as if Charlie and Paddy (Dad’s brother) weren’t enough. Now she’s got a soft spot for Yo. And of course she’s the only person in the world who can deal with Ivan.’

Charlie, Paddy, Ivan – misbehaving males? What does that mean? All right, Ivan and me – it’s normal, we’re kids but adults, how do they misbehave? What have Charlie and Paddy done that they shouldn’t have?

Another mystery.

It seems that life is one mystery after another!

February

Sunday 1st February

The New Neighbours have just gone off in their beat up old Vauxhall. Now’s my chance to find out if they’ve got a dog. Nan’s busy so I call Ivan and tell him exactly what to do. I’ve promised to buy him a whole packet of chocolate digestives if he successfully carries out the mission.

I push him through the gap in the garden fence with instructions about where to look: utility room, under the stairs etc. I’ve taken the precaution of giving him Henrik’s mobile phone, just in case The Neighbours get back early and hold him hostage. I’ve told him that he has five minutes and no more as Nan will notice he’s gone and start looking for him.

As I can’t spell and he’s too young to read I’ve told him I’ll text him a scary face emoticon as a message to come back immediately. After five minutes there’s no sign of him so I text him the scary face. He texts back ok. I am amazed that a child of three knows how to spell ok.

True to his word he’s back at the hole in the fence within sixty seconds and he scrambles through.

‘Well?’ I ask. ‘Did you see a dog?’

‘No,’ he says.

‘Did you look?’

‘Er … yes.’

‘Under the stairs?’

‘Er … yes.’

‘In the utility room?’

‘Er … yes.’

‘Ivan,’ I say, ‘I don’t think you looked for the dog at all.’

‘I did,’ says Ivan.

‘Did you go into Kylie and Samson’s room? (Kylie and Samson are the New Neighbours’ kids.)

‘Yes.’

‘What did you do in there?’

‘Er … look for the dog.’

‘Did you spend the whole time you were in there, playing with Kylie and Samson’s toys?’

‘No,’ says Ivan.

‘I have the impression he’s telling the truth.

‘So, you looked for the dog?’

‘Er … yes.’

However, each time he says ‘er’ I have the feeling he’s not telling the whole truth.

‘Did you see any signs of a dog? You know, a dog’s bowl, dog’s toys, that sort of thing?’

‘No.’

I am bitterly disappointed in the failure of the mission. I am left with the same degree of uncertainty as before. I have no idea what Ivan got up to while he was in there but one thing I’m sure of: he didn’t do as he was instructed and look carefully for a dog. But just because he didn’t see one doesn’t mean there isn’t one there, does it?

I’m no closer to solving the mystery.

~

9th February

One thing is for certain: when Ivan is here life is never boring. The problem with Ivan (one of the problems with Ivan) is that he keeps disappearing. Mum says, ‘One day he’ll disappear and won’t come back.’ When she says this everyone goes quiet.

I don’t know if this is because they’re terrified that it might happen or hoping that it will!

I, personally, would be devastated if Ivan disappeared and didn’t come back but I don’t think it’s likely to happen because:

a) if anyone kidnapped Ivan they would discover quickly that they didn’t want to keep him and:

b) Ivan (who, in all probability, would be a lot cleverer than his kidnapper) would find a way to escape and come home.

Another problem with Ivan is that he looks like a girl and a very pretty, Snow White type of girl at that. He’s got big brown eyes with eyelashes that touch his eyebrows and a rosebud mouth and a mass of the prettiest ringlets you’ve ever seen on a girl let alone a boy. His mum, Saskia, says he’d look like a girl with his head shaved so she’s not going to cut his lovely hair.

Nan says, ‘What can you do? Sure, natural selection hasn’t had time to adapt to the arrival of a child like Ivan by growing eyes in the backs of parents’ heads.’

She doesn’t seem quite as worried about him as the others because she thinks that being kidnapped is one of the least likely things to happen to any child. ‘Most parents nowadays can’t cope with the kids they’ve got,’ she says. ‘They certainly wouldn’t want another one, especially one like Ivan! No, the greatest danger to kids is not on two legs, it’s on four wheels.’

What Nan means by that is cars. If Nan had her way all cars would be banned from the face of the earth. Curiously this is the one subject Dad agrees with Nan on. He gets more irate about the subject of cars than, I think, anything else.

‘What kind of a society are we,’ he yells, ‘that make our precious children walk along paths only centimetres … CENTIMETRES … from objects made of fire, highly combustible liquids and metal hurtling through space which can and do crush their precious flesh to pulp. We’ve put a man on the moon, we’ve read the human genome, we can grow a whole mouse from a single skin cell and yet we can’t find a way of keeping children and cars separated. If they’d banned the car in 1919 instead of alcohol the world would be very different from what it is now: no petrol lobby, no pollution, no Al-Qaeda, no Iraq war. Cities would be places of beauty with unpolluted air filled with the sounds of birds singing and children playing. If we can ban parents from smacking kids surely we can ban cars from killing them.’

I get a bit uncomfortable when Dad rants about the car like that. He’s probably right in everything he says but I’ve heard him say to Mum that they need to replace their VW this year and I plan to persuade them to get a BMW like the Nicketts across the road.

I just hope cars don’t get banned before then.

~

15thth February

Ivan disappeared this morning so we all went off to look for him. I went with Nan in one direction and Mum and Dad went in the other. Nan reminded The Parents to ask people if they’d seen a little girl, not a little boy. I heard Dad mutter, ‘Little fucking devil.’

I’m shocked that Dad should talk about a small, innocent child like that.

The plan was to search the street first, then if he wasn’t there to call the police. Nan and I started across the road at the Frobishers.

Mrs Frobisher answered the door. She looked Nan up and down with an angry look on her face. I looked Nan up and down. She was wearing her dog-walking outfit of jeans, wellies and a baseball cap. All right, the jeans had paw marks where Busta had jumped up at her and the wellies were covered in mud from the park so she didn’t exactly look like the Queen but I couldn’t see anything to get furious about.

‘Excuse me,’ said Nan politely. ‘Sorry to bother you but have you seen a little girl of tree (Nan can’t say ‘th’ because she’s Irish) playing in the street in the last few minutes?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Frobisher. ‘No, I haven’t,’ and she slammed the door in Nan’s face.

‘Good God,’ said Nan.’ ‘We picked the wrong time to knock on her door.’

I think I heard her mutter under her breath, ‘Stuck up old cow,’ but I can’t be sure.

Next door to the Frobishers are the Old Ladies. I don’t know their names because everyone refers to them as the Old Ladies. The Flynn kids call them the Lesbians. I’ve asked Seamus Flynn what lesbian means but all he does when I do is snigger and say, ‘They sleep in the same bed ... you know ... like your parents.’

I’m afraid that that simply doesn’t answer my question. It’s like when I ask The Italian Twins the same thing. They call everybody a lesbian but when I ask them what it means they fall about laughing and say, ‘Women who have sex.’ I know The Italian Twins have no idea what they’re talking about.

I asked Nan and she said that lesbians are women who, instead of living with a man as a wife, prefer to live with another woman.

Even Nan’s answer is not satisfactory. If a woman wants to live with another woman instead of a husband, like the Old Ladies, for instance, what is the big deal? Why does everybody fall about laughing?

One of the Old Ladies opens the door. She’s got white