The Nerve Centre

My family were featured on one of the first ever Grand Designs.
I was three and my younger sister, Chanelle, was only two months old when we ‘moved in’.
The inverted commas are there because we never actually moved in at all. We just squatted on the farmland in a tired old caravan for four years and then moved to somewhere else once the building was finished and the property was placed on the market.
Mum called the caravan the nerve centre because that was where all the decisions were made.
It still brings goose-bumps to my arms and legs when I hear the sweeping piano roll of that programme.
The presenter’s nasal voice sends a chill down my spine when I remember how Mum would cling onto his every word as I pulled at her dress for attention.
Before getting to that horrible farm, Mum and Dad had just dragged us back from France, where we’d doubled our money on an old chateau in two years. I’d been the Chanelle of that house, constantly breathing in dust from the debris and wondering if I was in some sort of film or cartoon. I cried and cried, but they just didn’t know what to do.
‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,’ Dad used to say as Mum inspected me before bed. I prayed for a cuddle but it never came.
Mum’s an expert on feng shui and Dad’s a freelance writer (he really works for a drug company).
The caravan stood half inside and half outside one of the stables. To say the least, Mum and Dad neglected our every want in pursuit of the farm’s completion. I had nightmares about walls falling on top of Chanelle and I all the time. Mum and Dad were so knackered they couldn’t hear our cries. At least that was what they said in the morning.
When we were sat around the table for food, it was all porous membranes at breakfast, septic tanks at lunch and oak frames at teatime. Now I think about it, I don’t know why they ever bothered having us at all.
Mum talked more to the cameras than she did to us while Dad pulled his hair out over whether to use concrete, mud or lime for the foundations. He was always at his desk and I always walked in when he had his head in his hands.
My sister, Chanelle Quattro, was born on the day Mum and Dad found out that they’d bought the farm and were going to be filmed by Channel Four for Grand Designs.
Significantly, on the last day of shooting at the farm, Dad bumped into Chanelle’s high-chair whilst talking to the presenter about brass knobs. This caused her to fall from her high chair and land headfirst on the newly cobbled kitchen floor. She lost six teeth and the fall fractured her skull.
I can still see Mum caught between the crew’s shock and her deadened maternal instincts as Chanelle lay unconscious on the floor. She only knelt down after I screamed my head off.
Dad wiped up the blood like his life depended on it. He was more worried that it would lower the price of the farm if Grand Designs aired the fall.
The old fart never thought about poor Chanelle. Mum thought it was nothing at the time, but I knew she couldn’t be bothered to go to the hospital.
Cameras were still rolling.
On most days since our arrival at the farm, I had tried to get Mum to take us down to the stream to see the fairies that I’d found with Chanelle. Her usual response was ‘I’ll shoot the damn fairies if you ask me again,’ and then she’d hoof it off to some pressing matter at the farmhouse and act all kind and decent for the team of builders.
I was upset the first time she said that, but after a while I realised she was mad and learnt to laugh off her jibes. It was a self-protective layer that I had to wear to keep my marbles.
Chanelle and I would go to the stream together and see the fairies, who lived beside a collection of rabbit holes about three foot from the water’s edge. We’d make little houses from sticks and leaves for them and bring fairy food that we knew they liked.
By the time they’d finished the farm and Channel Four were gone, Mum and Dad went into a morose mood and sold the farm to a lawyer.
Before we moved to our next ‘house’, Mum and Dad sold the caravan, which I thought would only mean that we’d actually be living in the house.
I was sadly wrong.
The next ‘house’ was a dilapidated, deconsecrated church with a graveyard for a garden. Mum said that all the bodies would be exhumed and hauled off to another cemetery but, two years later, she was livid when the council decided to keep the bodies there.
Grand Designs weren’t interested, too, which wound Dad up so much that he started to go to the pub every night and came back stinking like an old tramp.
We had to live in a mobile home in the cemetery while the building work was done. Again, once finished, we were packed off to the next ‘house’, this time an old Georgian mansion on the south coast.
It was riddled with rats and moths and smelt like ten thousand men had died there. Apparently, it had been a crackhouse for ten years and many people had died there, but that hadn’t put Mum and Dad off. They saw only pound-signs and fell in love with the place at the first viewing.
After staying in a grotty bed and breakfast for the first few weeks, we were put in the basement flat. Mum and Dad gave it a lick of paint before we arrived.
By this time, Chanelle and I made our own meals and took ourselves to school, which became a haven for us to play out our childhood dreams.
Then the real lunacy started. Dad’s surveyor got something really important wrong with the rebuild of the mansion and the council stopped all work until it was fixed. The surveyor called in his lawyers, citing Dad’s over-ambitious demands and constant bullying to get as much space as possible from the plans. Dad called in his lawyers, too, and after two years of wrangling and chivvying, Mum and Dad were ordered to take out the joist in the roof, which instantly made them bankrupt.
Mum was already mad and Dad had slowly become an alcoholic, dribbling, slurring fool, so social services decided that we should be given a new home with new parents, so we moved to a small house with a brilliant garden leading to our very own stream with more beautiful fairies to play with.
Our new parents, Linda and Reg, have been so good to us and never tell us off. They say that we’re the most wonderful children in the world and we’re so happy here.
Mum and Dad never call and we don’t miss them one bit.