Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [19]
My sister and I would not only be battling our mum for more sweets and toys, but also be in competition with each other for various childhood perks.
‘I want to go first.’
‘No, I want to go first.’
‘Let your sister have a bite.’
‘No, it’s mine.’
‘I want the window seat.’
‘No, I want the window seat.’
‘I want to sit in the front.’
‘No, I want to sit in the front.’
Which is why it came as a surprise when we got bunk beds, and I said, ‘I want the top bunk’ and my sister answered, ‘OK.’
‘No, I want the top bunk,’ I replied automatically.
‘I don’t want it,’ reiterated my sister.
I couldn’t believe this. The top bunk is where it’s at. Elevated sleeping is the Holy Grail of child slumber. I can see our room, indeed the world, from a new perspective from up there, like the students in Dead Poets Society standing on their desks. ‘Are you sure, Lucy?’
‘Yes, Michael, I don’t want to sleep on the top bunk.’ Carpe diem, I’m taking it. That night our dad read us a story, kissed us goodnight and dimmed the light, leaving us just enough illumination not to be scared.
On the top bunk with my sister Lucy, where she correctly predicted the ceiling would fall down.
‘Lucy?’ I said from my upper berth.
‘What? Don’t interrupt me, I’m drifting off to sleep,’ came the reply from beneath. Like all little girls, she was articulate and advanced beyond her years.
‘Why didn’t you want the top bunk?’
‘Because the ceiling is going to fall down in this room, and it’s safer down here,’ she answered factually.
‘No it isn’t,’ I said.
‘Do you see that crack in the ceiling? That will worsen and the ceiling will fall,’ she insisted.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, before losing consciousness.
Every night, without fail, my sister would go to bed muttering about how the ceiling was going to cave in. I thought she was mad. And then, one day, the ceiling fell in. I remember my dad coming home from work with a smile on his face, which soon disappeared when he saw my mum and me standing in the front porch in tears with bits of ceiling in our hair. We weren’t hurt, although I received a glancing blow from one of the Junkins’ Lucozade bottles. (Luckily, it was a 125ml, and in the days before the ‘25% Extra Free’.)
Lucy was at the kitchen table combing the hair of a My Little Pony, rocking backwards and forwards, saying, ‘I told you’, looking like a character from a Japanese horror movie. For a while after her disaster prophecy, I was quite fearful of Lucy, especially when she became best friends with Annabelle Junkin from upstairs. Annabelle had fiery red hair and fair skin. Lucy and Annabelle standing together at the end of a corridor looked like a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I would spend days hiding behind plants in the out-of-bounds living room. Was my baby sister some kind of modern-day Nostradamus? Soon we settled back into a relationship typical of siblings with a two-year age gap. We fought with each other and loved each other. We slept in the same room, had baths with each other, ate with each other and went to pre-school together.
In my garden in Hampstead, trying to get away from Lucy and our neighbour Annabelle in a scene not dissimilar to The Shining.
My pre-school, Stepping Stones, the scene of the Poo-gate incident that scarred me for life, was a stone’s throw from our Hampstead flat. Mum would drop us off in her Capri every morning, although sometimes she let me drive. Lucy would go to her class and I to mine. I certainly didn’t enjoy it there, but what I hated more than anything else in my life, then