Creepy Christmas

CHAPTER 1

Friday nights are rubbish now.

They used to be my favourite nights of the week.

Every Friday when I got home from school, I would cook dinner for our family—that’s me, Mum, Dad, my little sister Pippa, and even our dog Harry would get a small plateful, but his opinion of dinner doesn’t count because he would eat the dust out of the vacuum cleaner if he could get the bag open. I love to cook. And on Fridays, because Mum finished work late, and my homework could be put off until the weekend, Mum and Dad would let me cook the whole dinner and dessert as long as I left the kitchen door open, Dad came in to supervise occasionally, and Pippa wasn’t allowed near the oven or the kettle.

Mum said that nothing would change after the divorce, and that I could still cook for her, Pippa and Harry, and we could make up a plate for Dad and take it to him the next day. I argued that the food would be spoiled by the next day, but Mum insisted that it wouldn’t. She even said that maybe Dad could come over on a Friday night to eat with us, but that hasn’t happened. And my Friday nights of cookery… well, I cooked a few times at first, but one time I automatically set a plate for Dad, and Mum got upset about it. Since then, I’ve really given up on the Friday night dinners. What’s the point in cooking for your family when you don’t have a proper family to cook for? It’s never been the same without Dad here. Sometimes I bake a batch of cookies at the weekends, and we put some in a bag and take them to Dad, but he never gets them hot and fresh out of the oven like he used to, and they just don’t taste the same when they’ve gone a bit soggy in a bag overnight.

Hi, by the way. My name is Kaity. Yes, spelled like that. I like it. It gives my bog standard boring name something different from the millions of other ‘Katies’ out there. We live in a small village called Chelferry. I’m ten-years-old and I’m in J6 class at school with my best friend Tammy and our teacher Mrs Platkin.

I live in a small house with my mum, Pippa, and Harry. And since last week, Mum’s new boyfriend seems to have taken up occupying our basement. But he has to go. As soon as humanly possible. Really, the less said about the new boyfriend, the better. Dad not living here anymore is a temporary situation and I intend to fix things before the year is out.

Dad moved out in the summer. He got an apartment in a huge block of flats across town. He lives so many storeys up that you get vertigo from looking out of his window. The elevator to his floor smells of pee and the stairs are smeared with an unknown and very unpleasant looking brown substance, so you have to walk up carefully while trying not to touch anything. It’s very disturbing. The only night that Mum did let me stay over with Dad, something happened to his hot water heater and there was no hot water at all in his whole flat. And I had to sleep on his lumpy bumpy, uncomfortable pull out sofa bed.

I haven’t stayed with Dad since then. Mum says there’s no need to until he gets a better place. Then she mutters something about how unlikely that is on his salary. At least my dad has a job, unlike the stupid layabout that Mum says she’s dating. She uses that word like she thinks I don’t know what it means. Of course I know what it means, I just don’t see how you can date someone you met on the internet a couple of months ago, and whom you only met for real last week, when he moved into our basement to carry on his laying about there.

There’s no way Mum is really dating this guy. She and Dad love each other. They do. This divorce is just a temporary glitch. Just as soon as I can get rid of the internet boyfriend and get Mum and Dad back on speaking terms, they’ll realise that as well. I know they will.

Right now they’re just mad at each other. Once they’ve had a chance to cool off, they’ll see how much they really love each other. Dad moved out in the summer, which was a whole six months ago now. You would have thought six months was more than enough time to cool off, but it turns out that my parents are really stubborn.

The day Dad left was right at the beginning of the summer holidays. I’d had an unexplainable sick feeling in my stomach all morning, and in the afternoon, Mum and Dad called me and Pippa into the living room and explained that they were separating.

Pippa was really too young to understand and all she wanted to know was where Harry was going to go, but Harry was to stay with us of course. Dad said his new place wasn’t as big as he had hoped, and besides he wasn’t allowed to have animals in his flat.

After Pippa had gone to bed that night, Mum asked if we could have a grown-up chat. She made us a cup of tea each and gave me a plate of toast because I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and I took my tear-stained, puffy, red face down to the kitchen. Mum sat at the kitchen table, and didn’t tell me off for sitting on the counter like she normally would, and I sipped my tea and nibbled my cold toast and tried to pretend I didn’t feel like I was breaking apart inside. Mum said that she and Dad had been having problems—those were her exact words. Problems. Everyone has problems, even me. Even Pippa probably and she’s only five. A few problems are no reason to break up a fifteen-year marriage. Parents are supposed to deal with their own problems, not give them to their kids. But, apparently, Mum isn’t very mature on that front because she kept insisting that she and Dad had been trying to fix their problems but that it just wasn’t working. I said Couldn’t he just have moved into the spare room or something, and she laughed and asked where we would pile all our junk and exercise equipment that we buy every New Year and never end up using. I didn’t find that very funny, and when Mum got serious again, she said that it would never have worked. I wanted to cry again and ask how she would know if she never tried, but I controlled myself. I wanted Mum to think of me as a mature adult and crying and screaming doesn’t seem very mature. I took some deep breaths and tried to concentrate on what Mum was saying, that it would be for the best, and that Pippa and I might even like having two homes to go to. In all fairness, Mum hadn’t seen the rabbit hutch of a flat that Dad had moved into then.

Now it’s nearly Christmas. Christmas is the best time of the whole year, and Dad still hasn’t come home.

And I have to do something about that.

CHAPTER 2

Things are strange now that Seth has moved in. Seth is… Well, I wish I didn’t have to talk about Seth, but he’s a part of our lives for the time being so I have to. My mum met Seth on the internet earlier this year. A couple of weeks ago, completely unexpectedly, he told her he was going to be in town in December and he needed somewhere to stay. She said it would be lovely to spend time with him, oh and by the way, we can clear our basement out and would he like to stay there for a few weeks? Of course, he said yes. So for the past couple of weeks, Mum has been cleaning the basement out. I refused to help at first because I didn’t think it was a good plan to invite a complete stranger into your home, but she bribed me with extra pocket money and chocolate. No one can resist money and chocolate.

Seth came on Friday night and Mum has spent the weekend with him, but I have tried to avoid him. I spent Saturday at Tammy’s house and Pippa was sent to one of her friend’s houses so Mum could have some time alone with Seth, and then Pippa and I spend Sundays with Dad anyway.

Seth arrived at our house on Friday night in a limousine. Yes, a limo. A sleek, black, shiny limo. At first I thought there was someone important coming, but it was only Seth and he was just the driver. Pippa wanted to have a look inside but he wouldn’t let her in case she got it dirty when he’d just had it cleaned. Seth says he’s a chauffeur for a very important man and that his boss is coming to town for the month of December. I asked him who his boss was but he wouldn’t say. This morning when I was having my cornflakes for breakfast, Seth was standing in the kitchen dressed in a vest and jeans (A vest! In December!) And I asked him when he was going to work and he said his boss hadn’t arrived yet so he didn’t have to work today. It all sounds a bit fishy if you ask me. I tried to talk to Mum, but she has the googley eyes for Seth and won’t hear a bad word about him.

Dad, however, flipped his lid. When Mum told him that her boyfriend was temporarily moving in, Dad went totally mental. He yelled and screamed at her about how could she trust someone she’d never even met, and that this man could be a serial killer or a rapist or worse. How dare she bring him into a house with two young children, and that he was going to call his solicitor and see what he could do about this. Mum insisted that he was a perfectly normal human being (I’m pretty sure that Seth has way more nose hair than a normal human being) and that she knew him and trusted him after months of online conversations. Besides, it was only temporary as Seth and his boss would be leaving after Christmas. Dad stormed out in a temper and slammed the front door so hard that all the windows rattled in their frames.

It isn’t fair that Dad is living across town and working all hours of the day and night to pay for a flat which smells worse and is smaller than an actual rabbit hutch, while this stranger has been installed in our basement which is bigger and much cosier than Dad’s flat. Dad was mad and I was mad, and Dad phoned Mum later with a few conditions—the main one being that Pippa and I are never allowed to be left alone in the house with Seth. Dad says that if Mum does that he’s taking her to court and getting custody of us. Although I don’t think that’s very likely because when all three of us are in Dad’s flat you have to breathe in to walk past each other.

Mum said that it could be difficult as Seth doesn’t work any set hours and only goes to work when his boss wants him so she doesn’t know if he’ll be in the house or not when I come home from school. Dad said that he doesn’t want us left with Seth for even a second, and Mum got really mad and started yelling into the phone that we’re his kids too and if he cares so much he should take us. Which, apart from making me feel really wanted, made Pippa cry because she doesn’t like it when our parents fight.

Pippa wasn’t a problem as she stays after school until Mum comes home anyway. I, however, was a problem. So instead of my peaceful afternoons coming home from school and watching TV on my own, now I have to walk over to the mall where Dad works and spend a couple of hours with him instead of going home when Seth might be there. It’s an okay solution as I’m not very comfortable with Seth around anyway even when I’m not on my own.

I like the shopping centre where Dad works. I like watching his CCTV cameras. I have to go straight to his office, which is an awesome office—floors above the main mall floor, so you can look down out of his darkened windows and watch all the people milling around below and it feels kind of powerful because they don’t know they’re being watched. Dad says I have to sit there quietly and do my homework because he’s working and he’s not supposed to be distracted. But as long as I’m mature enough to sit there calmly and not cause any disruptions, his boss won’t mind him having his daughter in work with him. Pippa is too young to come, she’d just get bored and run around screaming or changing the channels on Dad’s CCTV screen. She’s tried before, Dad got really mad.

So now I get to go hang out with Dad for a couple of hours after school every day and he’ll drop me off at home when he finishes his shift and make sure that someone besides Seth is in. It’s not the worst solution they could’ve found, I suppose. When Dad first said that I couldn’t go home on my own anymore while Seth was around, I half expected them to book a babysitter or something, which is downright embarrassing for someone my age. But I like being home alone and I don’t like Seth and it’s not fair that he has stolen my house, even if it is only temporary. And it is only temporary because I have a new mission in life. I’m going to get rid of Seth. I am. I mean, I’m not going to kill him or anything like that, but I figure it can’t be that hard to drive him away. He’s only staying for a bit. If I annoy him enough, he’ll get fed up and go to stay in a hotel.

Besides, how am I ever going to get Mum and Dad back together if Seth is in the way? Mum can’t have