Boy Meets Hamster Read online

  ‘It’s a sweet, funny, moving and joyous delight of a novel, full of love and full of hope, with a great big (giant hamster-sized!) heart at its centre. It may be set on the caravan park from hell, but this beautiful LGBTQ+ read is positively heavenly.’ – Simon James Green, author of Noah Can’t Even

  ‘A warm, open and generous book with enormous heart, Boy Meets Hamster is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny while also effortlessly dealing with big, complex issues to do with love, family, friendship, and self-confidence & acceptance.’ – Maggie Harcourt, author of Unconventional

  ‘The writing is brilliant, the characters so vivid and likeable - even Margaret, who makes an excellent villain – and it made me laugh out loud several times. A really enjoyable book, and I can’t wait to read what Birdie Milano writes next.’ Sophie Cameron, author of Out of the Blue

  For Mum and Dad

  For being the truest example of true love.

  And,

  For Sid and Nancy,

  For being particularly great cats.

  CONTENTS

  Praise

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  The car got stuck in a traffic jam at the entrance to the caravan park, under a massive sign that read: ‘WELCOME TO STARCROSS SANDS – LET THE DREAM BEGIN.’

  ‘See, Dylan,’ Mum said, pointing through the open sunroof as Dad started leaning on the horn, ‘it’s going to be a dream holiday after all!’

  Every year I was promised a dream holiday, and every year I almost believed it. At least, just long enough to start thinking wistfully about where we might go. For example: New York would be a seriously prime location. I could easily dream up visions of myself checking out the view from the top of the Empire State Building, or taking pictures with the Statue of Liberty distant in the background, small enough to make it look like we were mates.

  Then, every year, Mum clipped out a load of ‘special offer’ tokens from the newspaper, and dragged us to another caravan park in ‘one of twenty-six stunning locations throughout the British Isles’ for the bargain price of £9.50.

  As if £9.50 could buy anyone a dream holiday. You wouldn’t be able to get a stale hot dog in New York for that.

  Dream holidays are the kind of thing you win on daytime TV shows by answering tricky questions like:

  Who sees you when you’re sleeping, and knows when you’re awake?

  A. The Easter Bunny

  B. Santa Claus

  C. My mum (no idea how; it’s like she’s got me hooked up to a breathing monitor).

  Then they show you footage of what you can expect on the prizewinning trip: a montage of happy people with great hair mooning round picturesque Paris. Climbing the Eiffel Tower, or laughing in art galleries, clutching baguettes.

  I’d love to go to Paris. City of Amour. I’m pretty sure you’d only have to step off the Eurostar and look lost for five minutes before someone elegant and bohemian would stroll by, happy to take a random boy from Woking under his wing and show him the mysteries of the Louvre.

  (Not sure what that is, exactly, but it sounds romantic.)

  After all, dream holidays are all about the chance for romance, right?

  Wrong.

  Last year, our ‘dream holiday’ in Wales involved finding out how long we could last without thinking about eating each other, while torrential rain kept us trapped inside a ten-foot-wide metal box that smelt of old farts. The TV was stuck on the local news channel – looping footage of grannies being airlifted off their roofs during the floods, and ‘youths’ paddling down the high street in recycling-bin canoes.

  Mum said it was ‘cosy’.

  This year our dream holiday was starting in a totally inexplicable, unmoving line of cars. It was like a scene from one of those disaster movies where everyone’s fleeing a zombie invasion, or an escaped dinosaur, or the meteor just about to crash to earth. Except, instead of running away screaming like any sensible person would, at Starcross Sands people were actually queuing to get in.

  Mum looked delighted, but she had spent all week telling me that this place had won the Caravan Monthly Park of the Year Award three times running. Like that made it any less tragic.

  Dad, less thrilled, was blasting the car horn over and over, as if he thought a headache might help the situation. Someone from the Skoda in front of us had got out and started gesturing angrily with a pair of barbeque tongs.

  In the back seat, my little brother, Jude, clambered across my friend Kayla’s lap and on to mine, seconds before announcing that if he couldn’t have a wee soon he would actually explode.

  I was just looking around to see if one of the criminally embarrassing rain ponchos Mum always packed for us was anywhere within reach, when the car started inching, slowly, forward.

  ‘I can see the sea!’ Jude yelled, as we got a glimpse of caravans, cliffs, and a strip of blue beyond.

  I could see the last week of my summer holiday disappearing down the chemical toilet. As usual.

  The thing about dream holidays (which you’ll know if you’ve ever been driven through a set of buzzing neon-lit gates, and found out that the traffic jam you’ve just been stuck in was caused by a dozen elderly Elvises in plastic quiffs and way-too-tight jumpsuits starting a dance-off with a giant orange hamster) is that dreams can be nightmares too.

  TWO

  ‘So, Dylan, tell our viewers: is this fabulous trip to Cornwall’s Crummiest Caravan Park really the summer holiday of a lifetime?’ Kayla thrust her straighteners under my chin like a microphone and gave me her best TV-host smile.

  This year, after I’d launched a campaign titled: Caravan Holidays Are Social Suicide, and predicted a future in which I’d become a traumatized recluse, spending every day on the computer training pixelated dragons to be my only companions, Mum had let me bring my best friend along for the ‘dream holiday’ experience.

  I flashed a cheesy grin right back at her.

  ‘Well, Miss Flores, not quite. In fact, I might even say it was a glummer holiday.’

  ‘A slummer holiday?’ Kayla countered.

  ‘A scummer holiday.’ I looked over to the window, where a gang of drunken Aussies in lifeguard jackets and shades were stumbling past, slurring their way through a seriously dubious version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  So far the trip was about as dreamy as expected.

  Apparently the Elvis lookalikes blocking the park entrance when we arrived had got lost on the way to Fifties Night. Mum and Dad hadn’t wasted any time in dumping m
e, Kayla and Jude at our ‘new home-from-home’, before throwing on some cringingly tight outfits of their own and dashing out to make public embarrassments of themselves at the Starcross Starlight Showhall.

  My parents are both paramedics with the ambulance service. They do everything at speed. They met when they started working the same shift, but had to be separated not long after because they fought over who got to do the fast driving and turn on the sirens.

  Sometimes I think they’re where Jude gets his childish behaviour from.

  We were left with nothing for entertainment but a delivery pizza (from this place on the park disturbingly called the Pie-O-Ria) and a tiny TV with a fuzzy, flickering screen. Definitely preferable to watching Dad twirl Mum round the dance floor in a miniskirt, but not exactly the thrill of a lifetime.

  On my dream holiday, we’d be fanning ourselves in a luxury tent, listening to the distant roar of lions on the Serengeti. Not spending it the exact same way I spend an average Saturday night at home.

  Our caravan wasn’t much of an improvement on my bedroom at home, either. It was called 131 Alpine Views, although as far as I could make out the only view we had was of a row of identical tatty beige rectangles across from us, one or two of them distinct from the rest because they had a barbeque outside, or some bunting in the window. The one opposite had a load of tacky garden ornaments too.

  Flipping through the TV channels, Kayla found a talent show where a dog was juggling sausages, and sat down in front of it with her phone. We’d only been here five minutes and she already had about a million messages from her always-anxious dad.

  I got started helping Jude with his stretching exercises. Sitting him on the fold-down kitchen counter, I held his feet and pushed his knees up against his chest: left then right, over and over.

  He didn’t mind the nightly routine, but whenever he was out of the wheelchair it was always 50/50 whether he’d do it properly or wait for a good chance to ‘accidentally’ kick me in the face. Today he was giggling madly and seriously determined to give me a black eye.

  Every time he managed to land a blow, he widened his eyes and gasped, before – a little too late – telling me to, ‘Duck!’

  ‘Forget ducks. Do that again and I’m taking you to the clifftop to get eaten by seagulls,’ I told him, catching his flailing foot after it slammed into the side of my head for the third time. Jude had been afraid of beaches and everything on them ever since one of the £5-a-ride donkeys in Brighton chewed on his towel while he was still sitting on it, then started on his trunks.

  Luckily there wasn’t much of a beach at Starcross Sands, despite the name – just some grassy cliffs and a sharp drop down to the ocean.

  After an initial yelp of protest, Jude took a moment to consider the gravity of the threat I’d made. Then he spotted the flaw in my plan.

  ‘Seagulls don’t eat people!’ he declared, though I watched his lip waver, unsure.

  Kayla broke off from sending reassuring texts and turned to look at us. ‘They do in Cornwall.’

  That kind of unconditional backup was why she’d been my best friend for the last four years, ever since we were cast as Aladdin and Jasmine in the Year Six panto. That had been a weird Christmas at school. I was more popular than I knew what to do with – everyone loves a main character – until we actually did the show and they found out that I can sing about as well as our hallway carpet can fly. I’d vowed never to get up onstage in public again.

  I’d sort of hung on to the Aladdin look ever since though. At least, Kayla said that my mop of untameable black hair meant I looked like the Disney version (without the ab definition). Meanwhile, she’d cut her long hair to skim her shoulders not long after the show, and it had been a different colour every few weeks since. Right now it was candy pink.

  Her phone beeped with another barrage of parental concern, and she paused to tap out a quick reply before shoving it back into a pocket. Kayla’s dad was the unofficial third wheel whenever we hung out – not usually in person, but a constant presence on her phone. My mum complains that I must have lost her number on my thirteenth birthday, because I haven’t used it since, but Kayla texts her dad almost as much as he does her. Then again, he’s way more accident-prone than she is. If my dad had managed to explode a microwave, twice, when left alone in the house, then I’d want to check up on him too.

  Kayla kept saying that coming away with us would be a chance for both of them to assert their independence, except now that she was several whole counties away the messaging was reaching critical levels.

  Wincing and flicking off the talent show, where someone had started butchering a boy-band ballad, she came over and grabbed a third slice of Pepperoni Passion. ‘We’re going to get to go out too, aren’t we?’ she asked. ‘Check out the Starcross Sands nightlife?’

  I huffed out a laugh. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere! If there’s any nightlife, it’s either grandads in fancy dress or the kind you see on nature documentaries: black and white and lives in a sett.’

  I’d been checking out the brochure Mum had left us, listing all the park’s ‘amusements and attractions’. It wasn’t a very long list. Jude was massively excited about hanging out at the kids’ club with a giant hamster called Nibbles, but the highlight of the week was meant to be something called the ‘Stardance’, at which the Park of the Year Award would be announced. Park of the Year? From the little we’d seen of it so far, I wouldn’t have given Starcross Sands an award for being Park of This Tuesday.

  I wanted nightclubs and exclusive boutiques, but it looked like I was going to be stuck with crazy-golf clubs and a tuck shop. Ever since the last Elvis-a-like had stumbled off towards the retro disco, the rest of the park had descended into the kind of deathly quiet I imagined was the sound of a thousand £9.50 holidaymakers going to bed early and wishing they’d booked Disneyland instead.

  So, ‘Touch my flamingo again and I’ll wedge it so far up your bum you’ll be spitting feathers for a week,’ wasn’t exactly what I expected to hear howled into the silence a few feet from where we were.

  I looked at Kayla, grabbed Jude, and made it over to the window in record time.

  THREE

  ‘I won’t say it again, Sandra. Put the flamingo down.’

  Two women were circling each other on the lawn of the caravan across the way. When I’d daydreamed about safari holidays and listening to the roar of wild beasts, this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.

  ‘You can have it back when you admit it was your Troy made our Alfie eat the urinal cake.’

  ‘Well if your Alfie’s thick enough to do it . . .’

  There were lights going on in every caravan in the lane, but one in particular was glowing brighter than the rest, with its doors wide open and a small crowd gathered around outside. It was the one with the gaudy selection of garden ornaments: flamingos, gnomes, a fake palm tree.

  A boy about Jude’s age, who I assumed must be Alfie, was puking into an ornamental birdbath.

  ‘Are those our new neighbours?’ Kayla asked, raising her voice to be heard over the screech of one lady in a floral nightie bull-rushing the other. A teenager in a leather-effect jacket pulled at one woman’s frilly sleeve.

  ‘Leave it, Mum – the flamingo’s not worth it!’

  ‘Crank up the Gorgeous Sirens, we need to put out a red alert,’ Kayla muttered to me, while Jude wriggled in my arms to get a better look over the sill.

  He was seriously hot. Blond hair, broad shoulders: he looked a bit like Freddie Alton, who’s Sports Prefect at our school and who would totally be my boyfriend if I wasn’t totally terrified of talking to him. And if he knew I was gay and didn’t majorly freak out about it.

  And if he was gay too, I suppose. That would help.

  Anyway, if we’re talking ultimate perfection in human form, it’s between Freddie and the blond one from the superhero movies with the shoulder-to-waist ratio of a Dorito. But the mysterious stranger trying to cool down his nightie-clad mu
m outside caravan 232 really wasn’t bad, either.

  His mum, though? She was terrifying.

  ‘Nobody touches my ornaments, Jayden-Lee. You know the work I put into the décor.’ Shaking her son off, she gave the other woman a haughty look, and sniffed. ‘Some people just want to live like pigs!’

  ‘Who’re you calling a pig, Eileen Slater? You’re the pig here, you . . . piggy pig.’

  Alfie’s mum might not have been that creative with nicknames, but she made up for it by plunging her hands into Mrs Slater’s hair and dragging her down on to the grass. It was like watching a WrestleMania bout, but with more genuine violence.

  Kayla had grabbed a chair to stand on for a better view – she’s four foot eight, and puts her height down to the Filipina side of her family tree. I’d been taller than her dad since I grew three inches last summer.

  ‘Mrs Slater’s definitely winning,’ she announced. ‘Alfie’s mum can’t hold on to her – her plastic fingernails keep popping off.’

  While that sounded like something I definitely wanted to watch, Jude was starting to squirm, and I didn’t think it was just the usual twitches.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ he complained, tipping his head back to look up at me. ‘I don’t want them to shout.’

  ‘I know,’ I told him, ‘but this fight’s not over you.’

  Usually our mum is the one getting into grudge matches, or her own version of them, whenever someone says something thick about Jude. He’s got cerebral palsy, which is a medical condition where his brain gets a bit muddled about telling his body what to do. He’s as smart as any other five-year-old who’s into ant farms and believes trains have secret lives – too smart for his own good, sometimes – but because he can’t walk well on his own and he talks a bit slurry, people assume he’s incapable of anything.

  Mum just gets furious when they do it out loud. She’s never violent about it. She just smiles. She’s got one particular smile that means she’s going to destroy everything that a person loves, slowly and systematically, while calling them ‘sweetie’. That’s how it starts.

  She’s verbally slaughtered people in the middle of the local shopping centre before, and once had to spend an hour in the Shopmobility reception cooling down before they let her back into Primark.