Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

We live in a car park. It’s a really nice one. There are swings and toilets with locking doors and the showers are wooshy and warm every time. Dad says we can stay here until me and my sister Eliana go to big school. He says we can move to a car park nearer to wherever that is if we need to. When he talks about that Mum looks sad, but that’s alright because we hug her and sing the silly song until she laughs.
I like it here. There’s lots of trees and stuff. Our last car park only had buildings and railway yards. People there were mean to Dad. Some of the kids at the school picked on my sister but after I hit a couple the playground monitor called me up in front of the classes to explain myself, so I told them all off.
A teacher told me I should apologise. I asked them why I should do that when we did nothing wrong? The proper jobs went away. Mum and Dad did lots of different jobs after that. That’s when they decided to take us on a super road trip instead of living in one place. Like a long holiday with jobs in-between. It was fun most of the time, but jobs got less and less. The car parks and other places we stayed had big fires and lots of shouting. It scared us.
One night, Dad and Mum had an argument, one of their bad ones – the ones they try to hide from us, but we know because they’ve both been crying and are being super nice. The day after that, Dad sat us down before teatime and said he’d done something to stop Mum crying every night. He said the company that owned the country were paying people to be nice, and since we always were, it was only fair we got paid too. I wasn’t sure but Mum was sort-of smiling so me and my sister clapped and cheered. That made Mum smile properly. I heard Dad tell her later that the money would let us choose our car parks. I thought we always did that, but it’s adult stuff so I won’t understand until I’m older.
This is our third car park since then. It’s the nicest. I hope we get sent to a big school near here so we don’t have to move again.