The boy with a cone on his head

The boy found a traffic cone. He picked it up and weighed it in his hand – not too heavy, not too light. He looked around but it didn’t seem to belong to anyone in particular, so he put it on his head and continued on his way to the playground.

 

Along the way, past the shops on the High Street, he caught a glimpse of himself in a window of a shop selling old clothes and bits of crockery. The boy adjusted the angle of his cone and was pleased with the effect; rather like a magician’s hat, he thought. Only more orange and white.

‘I like your cone,’ said his friend Flo at the park.

‘It’s not a cone, it’s a hat,’ he said frowning at her. She obviously wasn’t looking at it properly.

‘OK,’ she said and scooted off.

The boy walked around the playground a few times and saw that people were staring at him in admiration. They were obviously the sort of people who appreciated a good magician’s hat. He picked up a stick and broke it in half to make a wand. That completed the picture.

Flo came scooting back with some of her friends. One of them was carrying a hula hoop.

‘Look!’ yelled Flo. ‘Alf’s got a cone on his head! Stand still Alf, and we’ll see if we can hoop you!’

The boy endured a few minutes of this before shouting at the girls and stamping off. This was not how wizards were treated. Nobody hoopla-ed Dumbledore. Or Gandalf.

On the way home from the park, the boy put the cone back where he found it. Someone else could have it. Magicians weren’t that great, anyway.

The Room of Odd

The rest of the house is perfectly normal, so you wouldn’t suspect what lies at the end of the hallway. Everything in it is something else. I’ve only been there once. When I asked if I could go again, I was told that that would be impossible, like it had moved away or something. A room can’t move itself out of a house, can it?

The sofa is a giant pair of red lips. ‘Oh, I’ve seen those before,’ scoffed a boy eating an ice cream, even though we were told not to enter the room with food or drink. “There’s nothing new about a sofa like this.” And to prove it, he sat down heavily in the middle of the lips.

There was a sucking noise and the boy disappeared. He wasn’t eaten or anything gruesome like that; he was found later on the street. But his ice cream had gone.

The mirror was the cause of a lot of bruised heads. You think it’s a window, because you can see out into the garden rather than back into the room. But then you see yourself in it, in the garden and feel very confused.

The table walks around on its stalky legs and rubs against you like a cat. If you put something on it, it remains stock still until you remove it, then it continues its journey to find something else to bear. The tea cups and mugs drink whatever you put inside them, the cushions squeal if you so much as touch them and the radio, an old-fashioned one that you don’t notice at first, breaks into compositions of its own making. It doesn’t have a very pleasant singing voice but you can’t turn it off.

I wanted the lips-sofa to swallow me too, but it didn’t. Perhaps you have to be really annoying. 

I wonder if it would swallow the radio?

Uncle Kaspar

When I tell people that we share our house with a ghost, their eyes widen and they usually gasp.  But there’s a lot of weird stuff in my house, and the ghost is one of the more normal things, in a way.

His name is Uncle Kaspar. He’s not my real uncle, but I’ve known him such a long time he feels like one of the family. It took my dog Green (I called him that because he’s green) a long time to like Uncle Kaspar but now they’re really quite good friends. Uncle Kaspar has said that he would like to take Green for a walk, but of course he can’t. Because if he leaves the house in daylight he won’t exist anymore. It’s like that with ghosts.

Uncle Kaspar doesn’t live in the attic, like other ghosts. He can’t stand attics, he says. Full of spiders. There’s a lot that Uncle Kaspar’s afraid of, which I think is funny, him being a ghost and all. Instead he lives in the downstairs cupboard where the boiler is, because he says it’s a fallacy that ghosts like cold damp places. When he was alive he spent quite a lot of time in Africa and he got so used to the heat and sunshine that coming back to England was hard to do.

When I have friends over, Uncle Kaspar likes to join in the games. He says that being with young people makes him feel young again. We play battleships and draughts. We play computer games and pool on my mini-billiards table. When new people come to our house they can get scared of Uncle Kaspar being a ghost, but once we’ve all sat down and had a drink and a biscuit and Uncle Kaspar’s told them about good bits (like walking through walls) and the bad bits (like not being able to eat the biscuits), they’re usually OK and we can get on with the games.

He’s very good at hide and seek.