David Baddiel - Birthday Boy

Ruby would open her mouth and say:

“Actually” – she said “actually” a lot – “I fancy shep—” but before she got any further Sam would be saying:

“I’d like a telescope. And a skateboard. And new trainers. And a guinea pig. And a tool kit. And an iPod. And some of David Walliams’s books.”

“—herds pie,” Ruby would say.

“For dinner, I said, Sam,” his dad would say. “Not for your birthday.”

Obviously, Sam wouldn’t always say these things (and so, obviously, the people he was speaking to wouldn’t always say those things back). No. Sometimes it would be a different type of cake, a different style of party and a different list of presents (although always including a telescope: Sam was a big fan of S tar T rek , and sci-fi generally, and wanted to see as much of the solar system as he could from the window of his room in order to watch out for visiting aliens). Which did mean that he had ended up with a very long present list, and a very long selection of party-theme ideas. Which, in turn, presented a bit of a problem for his mum and dad, both in terms of choice and in terms of money, because they didn’t have a lot of that.

But the thing that never changed was Sam’s excitement about the day.

And then, finally, it came.

“Oh, Mum! Dad! That was amazing! What an amazing day!” Sam was saying as he undressed in his bedroom. It was 10pm on Saturday the eighth of September. The last of his friends, all of whom went to Bracket Wood, the local primary school, had left. Vicky and Charlie were smiling at him.

“So! Did you like your party?” said Vicky.

“Yes! Especially the sci-fi cake! In the shape of the S tarship E nterprise ! With six different gobstoppers for planets all round it! And candy Klingons and other aliens on the sides! Great idea, Mum!”

“Yes, well, it was your idea, Sam … I think it was cake suggestion number four – you made it last Monday …”

“And the film-theme fancy dress really worked, didn’t it, Dad? Everyone’s costume was great! Barry Bennett looked brilliant as Gru from D espicable M e ! And Ellie and Fred Stone as Minions! And Malcolm Bailey as the sloth from Z ootropolis ! And Morris Fawcett as Homer Simpson!”

“Well,” said Charlie, “that was your idea too. Party suggestion number seven …”

“And you looked great!” said Vicky, grimacing as she pulled off Sam’s Wall-E head and feet.

“Well, that’s why I won the Best Costume Prize …”

“No, actually, that’s because it was your party,” said Ruby, wandering into the room. She’d been allowed to stay up a little bit later as it was Sam’s birthday. Ruby had a tendency to be very direct about everything, in a seven-year-old way. But she was a very clever seven-year-old. “So everyone thought you had to win. In fact, Mum and Dad basically bribed all your friends to vote for you by giving them extra cake and—”

“Yes, all right, Ruby. Time to clean your teeth,” said Charlie, taking her hand, and leading her – a little forcefully – towards the door.

“Dad? Mum? For my birthday, can I have a kitten?” said Ruby as she was leaving the room, books tucked under her arm, to do extra homework as usual. This was another thing Ruby said a lot, as well as “actually”. Sometimes she combined them and said, “Actually, Mum and Dad, can I have a kitten?” Even when no one had asked her what she wanted.

“Well …” said Vicky.

“Um …” said Charlie.

Ruby didn’t look surprised. She was used to her mum and dad saying “um …” in answer to the kitten question. But that didn’t mean she was going to let it go, either.

“Sam got a guinea pig,” she said, pointedly. “Spock!” Which, indeed, was something else on Sam’s birthday list that his parents had managed to get him. They looked over to said guinea pig, in its cage on the floor. It was a brown-and-white one, with a little tuft on its head. Sam had decided to call the guinea pig Spock after the extremely logical, cold character in Star Trek . Spock looked back at them with quite a strong sense of, “I think that name is very unfair.”

“Ruby,” said Charlie, “you know what a kitten will become?”

“Yes, actually, I do, Dad. I’m seven, not an idiot. A cat .”

“OK, so a grown cat, unlike Spock, will need some outside space. We haven’t got any.”

“Yes, we have,” said Ruby, pointing to the window. “What’s all that stuff out there?”

“Oh right. I see. Is the cat going to go down by itself from the seventeenth floor? In the lift that smells of wee?”

Ruby sighed, as if that question was ridiculous. Which it kind of was.

“We’ll think about it,” said Mum.

“Um …” said Dad.

Ruby nodded, feeling her point had been made, and turned to go out of the room. “Night, Sam! Hope you had a great birthday!”

“I did!” he replied.

Sam looked up at his mum. She was buttoning his new pyjamas, which were covered in little UFOs. Sam, of course, being eleven, could do up his own pyjama buttons. But he knew it was something his mum still liked to do. “And I loved all my presents! The skateboard and the computer games and the new trainers and the DIY tool kit and the books …”

“Everything on your list,” said Vicky. “Well, apart from the iPod. Sorry about that, Sam. Maybe next year …”

“It doesn’t matter, Mum. You got me the telescope. That was my big present. I love it!”

They looked over to the window. There it was: the Star-Watcher Explorer. Sam’s dad had already set it up on a tripod, and angled it against the window, pointing at the moon. It was black and sleek and long, with a computerised tracker to allow Sam to find particular constellations.

Sam and his family lived in a tower block – Noam Chomsky House – on the seventeenth floor. So it was the best present ever! They were so high up that Sam had an uninterrupted view of the night sky, and all its stars.

“You should be able to see any aliens out there with that, eh, Sam?” said Charlie.

“I don’t think so!” shouted a voice from outside the room. It was Ruby’s. “Actually, the nearest planet capable of sustaining life is four light years away!”

“How far is that?” said Sam. “In miles?”

There was a silence. But only for a few seconds. “Two hundred and thirty-five billion billion. Give or take the odd mile.”

“Um … OK …” said Charlie. “But we don’t know how fast their spacecrafts travel, do we?”

“Well, anyway,” said Vicky, looking out of the window at the night sky above the city, “I just have a feeling that there is life out there somewhere.”

Charlie smiled: he knew that his wife had a lot of faith in her feelings. He loved that about her, even if he didn’t have so much faith in her feelings.

“Is that like the feeling,” he said, putting his arm round her, “you had yesterday, about how I shouldn’t walk under that ladder – and so I didn’t, and fell in that huge puddle instead?”

She pushed him away, but smiled as she did it.

“It didn’t cost too much, did it?” asked Sam, going over to the telescope.

Sam’s dad was a manager at HomeFront, a big building supplies store, and his mum worked at home, buying and selling stuff on the internet, so they weren’t exactly rich – though it did also mean that Dad had been able to get a staff discount on the tool kit, something Sam had really wanted, as he loved making and fixing things.