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him then. He growled, “He is not a freak. He is normal. But tall.”
    “It wasn’t just his height. It was the fact that he seemed to have a daughter.”
     
    Dad’s got this little statue of St. Christopher stuck to his dashboard. When he was shoving me into the taxi on the way back from the town center I bumped against it and it rolled onto the floor.
    “Pick that up,” snapped Dad.
    “Okay, okay. You’ve knocked the baby Jesus off his back.”
    “Just don’t talk to me, Liam.”
    I said okay, but there was something I wanted to ask him. I waited till we were on the Dock Road, then I said, “How did you know where we were?”
    “I’m your dad,” he said. “If you act funny, I notice. If you get on an unexpected bus instead of going home, I follow you, even if that means turning down fares and having the boss bawling at me on the radio. I’m your dad. It’s what dads do.”
    Thinking about that now makes me wonder if you’re out there, somewhere behind us, charging after us through the wastes of space in your taxi. But no. No taxi would be able to generate the necessary escape velocity.
     
    In case you are interested, by the way, this is how Dad located us that day. When he gave me his old phone, he bought himself a new one but he kept his old number. So there were two phones—phone one (Dad’s) and phone two (mine)—with the same identity. So, if he was ever worried about me, he could fire up DraxWorld and request “present position of phone two,” and that would tell him where I was.
    So my phone looked like a phone but it was really an electronic tag.
     
    Because we shared a phone number, I used to get all Dad’s messages from Pine Planet, telling me that my new kitchen units were ready for collection, and Dad used to get messages from members of my World of Warcraft guild saying stuff like, “Been attacked by dragons—need yr healing powers now!” and “Captured fifty goblins. Kill? or hold for ransom?” A nervous person might’ve thought, Blimey, we’re being invaded by mythical creatures, and maybe gone and hidden away in the woods behind the golf course. Dad just thought, This phone’s gone funny. I’ll turn it off and turn it on again.
    That’s Dad’s solution to any technological problem. Microwave, satnav, computer, dishwasher—turn it off and back on again and it’ll be okay. To be fair, it usually works. I’d try it now, but I’m not sure this rocket has an Off switch.

My Planet Panda Pop
    The school-assembly incident was bad. The Porsche-showroom incident was like being killed and sent back to Level One with no spare lives. “All we wanted,” said Mom, “was for you to learn some social skills.”
    “Social skills?” said Dad. “Well, let’s see—he got a little girl to pose as his daughter, and he persuaded a salesman to lend him a Porsche. He’s got social skills. He’s got too many social skills. We asked him to learn some and he learned too many. That’s the problem.”
    It turned out that Dad was right about visible friends being different from cyberfriends. If someone doesn’t turn up on Warcraft, you can always just recruit someone else. But when I walked through the New Strand Shopping Center on Saturday mornings, even though there were thousands of people there, it was really noticeable that none of them was Florida.
     
    Mom got really stressed about the whole thing. “Liam,” she kept saying, “what are we going to do with you?”
    Dad looked on the Internet for self-help groups for people with unusual problems. About an hour later he came back and said, “What about this—popular coastal resort, Tunisia? A hundred and fifty pounds a head.”
    “Tunisia’s a bit far,” said Mom. “I was hoping there’d be a group in the library.”
    “No, I’m talking about a holiday. That’s what we need, isn’t it? The three of us. Go somewhere no one knows us. And just unwind.”
    I was completely excited about this. I’d never been abroad before.