My Family and Other Skaters

By Fiorella De Maria

With both realism and humor, this compelling and heartwarming novel describes, in first-person narrative, the joys and the challenges of a modern English family. They are unique in many ways—for one thing, all of the six children are competitive figure skaters, and for another, they have a pet alpaca. Yet, they weather the storms of life with the same, sometimes clumsy attempts at patience and understanding found in most families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9781639679997

Fiorella De Maria

Fiorella De Maria was born in Italy of Maltese parents. She grew up in Wiltshire, England, and attended Cambridge University, where she received a Bachelor’s in English Literature and a Master’s in Renaissance Literature. She lives in Surrey with her husband and children.  A winner of the National Book Prize of Malta, she has published four other novels with Ignatius Press: Poor Banished Children, Do No Harm, We'll Never Tell Them and the first Father Gabriel mystery, The Sleeping Witness.

Book preview

BK90081630.jpg

I dedicate this book to my very own crazy family,

who have taught me all there is to know

about life, love, and figure skating.

Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life.

—Albert Einstein

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

1

Hello. My name is Rosaria, but everyone calls me Rose. Before we begin the story, I had better tell you a bit about my family. If you’ve ever thought your family was crazy, don’t worry. They’re not. Not as crazy as mine anyway.

First, there are way more of us than you’ll find in most families: ten of us if you include our pets. Eighteen if you include the chickens. Infinity if you include all the people who take up residence in our House of Madness from time to time.

I’ll start with the children. As I said, I’m Rose, and I’m eleven. I’m in my first year of secondary school here in England. My big brother, Hugo, goes to the same school. He’s about eight feet tall or something and has his own studio at the bottom of the garden, where he makes stop-motion animations. His studio is a shed with cameras, really, but he practically lives there, making bits of plasticine come to life.

Then there’s Xavier, who’s nine but looks younger. He’s short for his age and has a massive head of hair. All the old ladies pat him on the head and say, Awww! He’s so adooooorable!—which really gets on his nerves.

Next there’s Evangelina, who’s six. We all have names like something out of an opera in my family, so everyone calls her Evi. Is she normal? Noooo. Of course she’s not. She’s what her teachers call a Math Whiz, which means she likes math. And I mean really likes math. When the rest of us are eating ice cream cones and bouncing on the trampoline (or talking to bits of plasticine), she’s working out square roots and drawing factor trees. For fun! I have a six-year-old sister who does math for fun! Oh well; it keeps her out of my very long hair anyway.

Younger than Evi are the twins, who are just about to start school. They’re called Amelia and Matilda, but everyone calls them Milly and Tilly. They don’t know yet, but they have a medical condition called dwarfism, which makes them very small for their age. Mum says they’ll encounter stigmas and unkind treatment when they get out in the world, so she’s training all of us to help others see the beauty in each person and not judge others on visible differences. Mum says we’re going to change the world one person at a time and help others look past the stereotypes. Milly and Tilly do all the same things as the rest of us, including skating. But more about that later.

Did I mention the pets? We have a great drooling, lolloping dog called Bernie. Yes, he is a Saint Bernard. For a family with quite an imagination for human names, we kind of ran out of ideas when it came to the dog. So, the Saint Bernard is called Bernie, but I call him His Holiness. We found him abandoned on the riverbank when he was a puppy. He looked really small and fluffy then. Mum said he wouldn’t grow up to be all that big. Mum says a lot of things she pretends later on that she never said. Ah well. We love His Holiness.

Now, the best pet of all is Paddy. Just in case we weren’t bonkers enough, we have Paddy. We won him at an agricultural fair where we were selling eggs. You see, we also keep chickens: Korma, Biryani, Goujon, Kebab, Fritter, Roasty, Oxo, and a little fluffy one called Lemony. We name our chickens after menu items because, truth be told, when they stop laying eggs, Mom cooks them for dinner. They are not pets, she is always reminding us.

Back to Paddy, though. We came home from that agricultural fair with empty egg boxes and Paddy. You see, there had been a raffle at one of the stalls, with lots of lovely prizes: free cinema tickets, a huge box of chocolates, a pass to a theme park... and a life-size toy alpaca. At least, we thought it was a toy alpaca. There was a picture of it on the stall: a fluffy alpaca wearing a red sombrero. I thought it might look funny in the corner of my bedroom. So, we bought a strip of raffle tickets and forgot all about it.

Just as we were getting ready to leave the fair, some official-looking person with a clipboard came rushing up to us, saying, Congratulations! You’ve won first prize in the raffle!

Now, we never win anything, so we were properly excited and ran over to the stall, where they had opened a horse trailer and were trying to coax out the world’s stubbornest alpaca. A real live alpaca, spitting and stomping! Apparently, he was not at all happy about being dragged out of his little house. It was almost worth it just for the look on Mum’s face.

But... but we can’t take an alpaca home! Mum protested. I thought it was a toy!

Think of all the lovely wool, madam, said the dodgy-­looking owner, who couldn’t look happy enough to be getting rid of the source of the lovely wool. You’ve plenty of space, haven’t you?

But… but! For the first time in her entire life, Mum was speechless.

I went up to the alpaca and patted his cream-colored, curly-furred nose. Straight away, the alpaca stopped spitting and stomping and nuzzled up to my arm. I like animals, so I don’t suppose it was much of a surprise that we got along, but this was love at first sight. He snuggled right up to me as though we were old friends... and suddenly we were. I looked at his big sad eyes and his crooked teeth looking like a hopeful smile. I reckoned we could find space in our crazy family and our even crazier house for one more.

Hugo wanted to call the alpaca Paddington, after the beloved bear by that name, because Paddington came from Darkest Peru and the alpaca was from South America. I didn’t mind because I’d always loved the Paddington stories, so the alpaca became Paddington. Then we called him Paddy.

I suppose I should tell you a bit about my ancestors, the parents of this crazy family of mine. Mum features quite a bit in this story. She’s a writer and spends much of her life pretending she’s somewhere else, getting attached to characters who don’t exist. Mum’s called Cordelia, after the girl in King Lear who is sweet, loyal, courageous, honorable… and gets hanged for her trouble. I asked her once why her parents had called her that, because they’re not even English, but she said that her father had learned all about England reading books and plays. Her ancestors came from a sunny island where everyone grew up believing that the British wear bowler hats, drink Earl Grey tea out of little china teacups, and recite Wordsworth poems to each other.

Mum must have figured out what the English were really like before her parents did, since she came to England when she was quite little, and her quirky upbringing doesn’t seem to have done her much harm. It’s given her plenty to write about in any case.

Dad builds things. To be honest, we don’t really know what he does for a living. Mum says he is a chartered accountant, but we thought that was boring and made up a story that he was really a spy on top-secret missions. Somehow the idea stuck. Every time Dad has to go away on business, we try to imagine him being James Bond, jumping out of planes and outsmarting criminals.

When Dad’s not traveling, he works from home most of the time in his office at one end of the garden. I say office, but it’s more like a man cave. He built it himself a few years ago to escape from the rest of us. It’s huge inside, with plenty of space for his desk and all that, and also for his inventions.

When I said that he builds things, I really mean he invents and builds stuff. Mum says he’s a genius. In spite of living in an enormous house, we never have any money, and Dad tries to make up for this by building us exciting things we can’t afford to buy from the shops. He built the boys a bunk bed that looks like a space rocket because Hugo was obsessed with space at the time. It’s a bunk bed that has built-in reading lights that change color, a climbing wall up one side, and a small helter-skelter at the other end so they can slide out of bed in the morning.

He ended up having to make bunks for Evi and me, and then slightly smaller bunks for the twins. Evi and I like ours best of all the bunk beds in the house. You see, we have a weirdly shaped room because we live in the part of the house that’s built like a tower. So, to make the best of a very high ceiling and an octagonal space, Dad built our bunk bed up against a wall, where it looks like a huge treehouse. My bed is right at the top. Evi’s is near the floor with a little green curtain around it for privacy; and in the middle, there is a big branch sticking out of the wall with a swinging seat where we can sit and read. Health and Safety might not like it, but I think it’s wonderful.

I’m not sure what you must be thinking about us all by now, but you are welcome anyway. Welcome to my crazy family and our crazy house.

2

I can remember the first time I knew I wanted to be an ice skater. Actually, it’s the first thing I ever remember thinking about. I was three-and-a-half years old, tucked up under my bright pink Tombliboos duvet with Mum showing me funny films on her phone. I’d spent the past two days throwing up, and Mum was trying to cheer me up. When she ran out of films of cats running away from cucumbers, she found a film about the famous ice-skating couple Torvil and Dean winning gold at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. I watched them gliding around the ice rink in their stunning purple costumes to the tune of Boléro, and then everyone cheering and throwing flowers and the judges giving them the best score ever: 6.0– 6.0–6.0–6.0… from all nine judges! I just thought, I’m going to do that.

Mum had other ideas. She said she took me to the rink, opened the door, and felt a blast from the North Pole hitting her as we stepped inside. Mum came from a hot country where the only ice they ever see comes in little cubes in glasses of lemonade. She said she just thought, No way am I spending the next ten years shivering at the side of an ice rink. So, she made me do ballet, pretending I needed to do ballet first to make my little legs nice and strong. Hmmph.

Every Saturday for six long months, we walked to Miss Hannah’s ballet school in a big building overlooking the river. And every Saturday I asked when I was going to start skating. Soon, said Mum, which means never.

Then we got to ballet school one Saturday and found the windows smashed in and the class cancelled. I have never been so thankful to a pair of naughty vandals. That was the end of Saturday ballet class. For ever and ever. Bye-bye shiny satin ballet shoes; hello Ice Champions rental skates.

According to Mum, she prayed when I first got on the ice that I’d hate it, but God was on my side and listened to me instead. I was so excited I jumped right onto the rink, which scared Nick the coach half to death, because he thought I was going to fall flat on my face.

She’s brave! he said, but I couldn’t stop. I skated round and round in great big circles. I wasn’t skating; I was flying. It was the most amazing feeling in the whole world, soaring like an eagle across the frozen wastelands… and straight into the side