The 1,000-year-old Boy

And, in case you are interested, I did meet Charles Dickens, but not until many, many years later.

See? You do not believe me, do you? I cannot really blame you, seeing as I am the last remaining Neverdead on earth. And, now that Mam has gone, living forever is no life at all.

The trouble is, if you do not believe me, what chance do I have of convincing Aidan Linklater and Roxy Minto? I will need their help if I am to lift the curse of my endless life.

And if they do not believe me then I am, as you say these days, stuffed.

(#ulink_336fedbb-7b47-5f85-bd8f-f4d79e4cfd72)

I should probably start by telling you why I’m hacked off. Get it out of the way. Then we can get onto how I came to meet Alfie, and my life changed forever.

(#ulink_f0f2967b-3b9a-51c2-9630-677f84f0885c)

Whitley Bay, present day

For a start, we’ve moved house. That’s bad enough. But get this:

1. It’s a smaller house. Much smaller, with hardly any back garden – just a scruffy yard that’s way too small to kick a ball in. Mum has reminded me (more than once) that I’m lucky to live in a house with any outside space at all and, when she says that, I feel guilty, and sorry that I even mentioned it because I know why we’ve moved. Thing is, my friend Mo, who lives in a flat, used to come round to our old house because he had no garden, but now there’s no point, is there?

2. If people come to stay, I will now have to share a room with Libby who’s a pain at the best of times. She’s seven and likes My Little Pony.

3. Inigo Delombra, who’s in my year at school, now lives in my old house. I think he even has my old room. He smirks at me every time I see him, as if to say, ‘You sad loser.’

At least I haven’t had to move school, but, with the way things are going with Spatch and Mo, I might as well have.

Another thing: Mum and Dad are arguing all the time. They’ve always argued – ‘bickering’ they call it – but lately it’s become louder, and they think I don’t notice. It’s money – always money. I don’t know the details. All I know is that they made a ‘bad investment’, and Mum says it was Dad’s fault. Mum now works in a call centre and hates it. I found Libby listening at the top of the stairs the other night.

She said, ‘Are they going to get divorced, Aidan?’

I had to say, ‘No, of course not.’ Her chin wobbled but she didn’t cry. Not in front of me, anyway, which is just as well because it would probably have set me off too.

So with that lot out of the way …

Be honest. If some kid that you’d just met told you he was a thousand years old, what would your reaction be?

You’d laugh, maybe, and say, ‘Yeah, right!’

Or you might ignore him – you know: don’t provoke the nutter, and all that.

You could, I suppose, come back with a zinger, like, ‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

OK, so I’m not big on zingers, but you get the idea.

So when Alfie said to me, ‘Aidan, I am more than one thousand years old,’ obviously I didn’t believe him.

And then I had to because, although it was unbelievable, it was the truth.

But, for it to make sense, I’m going to have to rewind a bit.

(#ulink_2c67865d-bf9a-5c3d-b5e6-dc3dbb4b90c4)

We moved in – me, Mum, Dad, Libby – at the start of the Easter holidays, and everything was unpacked in three days. My Xbox was smashed in the move. I asked Mum if I could get another one, and she just gave this sad-sounding little laugh, which I suppose means no. She said we had ‘other priorities’ and that made me feel bad for asking.

I had the rest of the holidays stretching out before me.

‘Call up your friends, go down on the beach,’ said Mum every five minutes.

Problem with that was Spatch was away in Naples with his Italian grandparents, where he goes every Easter; worse – he’d invited Mo to go with him. And not me.

I pretended I wasn’t hurt when they told me, but I was. When I talked to Mum about it, she was all like, ‘Oh well – we couldn’t have afforded the air fare, anyway, so no harm done,’ but that’s not the point, is it? Spatch was a bit embarrassed, I think. He said it was because there wasn’t room at his grandparents’ farmhouse, but I’ve seen pictures and it’s huge, and besides I’d have been happy to sleep on the floor. I nearly said that, but I’m glad I didn’t.

To ‘put the tin hat on it’ as Dad says, Aunty Alice and Uncle Jasper came to visit. Aunty Alice is OK, but Jasper? Sheesh.

I know Dad wasn’t happy because I heard him moaning to Mum: ‘Can’t they stay in a hotel, for heaven’s sake? It’s not like we’ve got loads of space.’

‘She’s my sister, Ben.’

Dad just tutted and rolled his eyes.

So, day four of the holidays. Aunty Alice and Jasper had arrived that morning, and I had moved into Libby’s room, on an airbed. She was at Brownie camp for the next couple of days so at least I wasn’t actually sharing with her yet, but still …

We all sat in the kitchen among the boxes left by the removal firm. Dad’s not working at the moment, so he was at home and he made tea and asked about Jasper’s boat (it’s a ‘safe topic’, apparently). Mum fussed over Aunty Alice’s blouse. Aunty Alice is much older than Mum and Jasper is much younger than Aunty Alice, although – thanks to his beard – he looks older than both of them, if that makes sense.

After Aunty Alice had said how much I’d grown, just about the only thing directed at me was Jasper saying:

‘And what about you, son? Are you getting enough of the old fresh stuff? You look like a flamin’ ghost!’ and then he grinned, showing his long white teeth, as if he didn’t really mean it, but I could tell that he did.

Aunty Alice said, ‘Aw, Jasper, he looks lovely!’, and Mum said to him with the faintest edge to her voice:

‘He’s fine, Jasper. Aren’t you, Aidan?’

I nodded vigorously, as if by nodding I could show my uncle that I was – to borrow one of his phrases – ‘as fit as a lopp’.

He went hmphh, and added, ‘Sea air. A bit of the old ventum maris. That’s what you need, son,’ then took a noisy slurp of his tea (black, no sugar).

He talks like that a lot, does Jasper. So far as I can tell, he has no regional accent, and no foreign accent, either. At times, he sounds slightly American, and at others more Australian, when his voice goes up at the end of a sentence as if he’s asking a question? It’s hard to work out. He was born in Romania and has narrow dark eyes – almost black – behind tinted glasses, and he’s lived in lots of countries.

I asked him once where he was from. ‘Just call me a nomad,’ he said, baring his teeth. Between you and me, I’m terrified of him.

With my milk finished and having heard the words ‘prime minister’ come from under Jasper’s beard, I figured it was time to make myself scarce. Once anyone mentions the government, the conversation – so far as I’m involved in it – is not going to improve.

‘I’m going outside,’ I said, and I got a grunt of what might have been approval from Jasper.

(#ulink_87a90e47-ed45-58cd-b272-2cb61392c5d1)

It was good to get out of the house. I did that big breathe-in-through-your-nose thing and exhaled with a loud ‘Haaah!’

Our house is on the very edge of the old bit of the estate. There are about ten tiny houses in a row, and then the new houses start next door. Over our back fence is just woodland. The woods don’t even have a name, so far as I know. They’re just ‘the woods’ or ‘that bit of woodland beyond the golf course’.