Up on Cloud Nine

The Boy Next Door

Millie sat perched on her bedroom sill. The view from her window was minimal, the same old same old. Cows, grass- general Yorkshire sights. However, today her attention had been captured by the house next door.

Number 24 Finsbury Drive had been vacant for at least 12 years. According to the locals, the house was haunted. Supposedly, Mr Burn’s ghost would still make an occasional visit to the property. (Mr Burn had lived next door for approximately 45 years prior to his death in the year of 1994).

Millie didn’t believe in ghosts and didn’t understand why the locals wished to scare themselves, as there were no such things as ghosts. She had told this to Maverick, after he had told her about the supposed ghost 4 years ago, and he had become very cross and stormed out of the room saying, ‘why have you got to be so literal about everything!’ As she stared intently at Number 24, she was surprised that this particular memory had come back to her after so many years.

Yet number 24 Finsbury Drive was no longer to be vacant. Millie watched the removal vans with awe. There was one green Eddie Stobart truck, which, if Millie was correct- which she often was- had been originally invented in the early 1940s.

She watched as a blue Renault Clio pulled up into next door’s drive. It was a battered car and looked as if it had been attacked by a nuclear missile of some sort. She soon became immersed in the car’s number plate. It read ‘LIBBY R0X.’ She read the words aloud to herself, ‘Libby Rocks.’ But who was Libby? And why did she rock? Millie twitched slightly and began to wring her hands. Was Libby unstable on her feet, is that why she rocked? Could she not properly maintain her balance?

She began to rack her brains, desperate to find out who this ‘Libby’ person was. She then recalled a conversation she had overheard earlier that week. Miss Lawson, their supercilious next door neighbour, had been talking to her father about the new family moving in. There were three of them according to Miss Lawson, Peter and Liberty Morten and their teenage son Danny. Millie felt as if her eyes were being opened. The number plate must refer to Liberty Morten; it must be a warning about her condition! She smiled to herself, she might like these new people, they were very precise.

Millie quickly, dashed to the shelf beside her bed and removed her dog eared dictionary from the top of the pile. She flicked through its pages feverously until she landed on ‘R’. She kept searching in the dictionary until she found the definition for the word rock, it read:

‘noun

1 [mass noun] the solid mineral material forming part of the surface of the earth and other similar planets, exposed on the surface or underlying the soil: the beds of rock are slightly tilteda piece of rock’

She shook her head after reading, unless Libby was a statue, this could not logically be the correct definition. The car's number plate couldn't have been referring to the noun mean of rock. She continued reading, frantically searching for an alternate meaning.

‘Verb

1 [verb] Cause (someone or something) to move gently to and fro or from side to side.’

This meaning seemed to make more sense to Millie however it still confused her. Why would a person want to refer to themselves as someone who ‘moved to and fro a lot.’ This behaviour deeply troubled Millie, she wasn’t sure she would like this Libby. Perhaps Libby was ill, and she was just issuing a warning about her poor health.

Her attention was snapped back to the car as she watched the new family exit through the door. There was a rather large balding man, a skinny woman with a short skirt, and a brown haired boy, who Millie guessed was around her age. She watched them for a while longer, carefully observing the skinny woman. Millie waited on her haunches keenly scrutinising her behaviour for any signs of ‘rocking’ however she did not spot any, perhaps this woman was not Libby- she must have been an imposter. She had warn somebody.