MY FATHER AND HIS HOUSE

Sometimes I wonder if my father loves his moustache more than he loves me. He's had it longer. He grew the thing before he met my mother. I know because I've seen it in the pictures that she used to show me when I was smaller and not as shy about asking awkward questions.

My father doesn't brush me with a special comb twice a day, or anoint me with a specialist pomade that he orders off the internet. (Not that I'd want him to. Because eww.)

My dad's house – the house where I live now too – is big and old and fancy. The people that he bought it from must have spent a lot of time restoring it – this is what my father says anyway – so that modern people who like to pee indoors could live in it. They must have really loved it, those people; all the walls were beautifully coloured, with stencilled silhouettes and little painted flowers, wild and hothouse; really, really beautiful to see.

'Girly,' declared Captain Moustache, and immediately he hired a team of men to sit around drinking tea I'd made and eating breakfast rolls in between spurts of painting everything in various shades of white, with names like 'Lily of the Valley', 'Ermine', 'Baby Teeth' and 'Miscellaneous Clouds'.

I made the men leave the walls of my room alone. I threatened them with biscuit withdrawal and then cried down the phone to my dad, who was in the middle of an important meeting (I checked his appointment diary before I made the call), as leather sofas and glass-topped coffee tables replaced cosy rocking chairs and furniture with claws instead of stumps.

My room is gorgeous – in an old-fashioned kind of way. It makes me feel like a 'domestic'. (You know, a little olden-days servant girl straight out of a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Someone who gets up at five in the morning to light the fires for 'them upstairs'. Although I suppose 'them downstairs' would be more accurate, because my room is upstairs at the very tiptop of our house, in the attic.) It is stuffed with bits of furniture left behind by the people who used to live here. I like this. It feels like I have company. Company apart from Roderick, that is.

RODERICK

Roderick's house is in my room. It balances easily on my big sturdy bookshelf, halfway between floor and ceiling. It's more of a cage than a house really, but I always call it his house because I don't like to think of Roderick living in a cage. Even if it is a purple and white two-storey rat paradise, with a small fleecy hammock and a chewable wooden tunnel where he can go for privacy, to scheme his ratty schemes and plan his ratty plans and ... um ... poo. I also keep a box of tissues cage-adjacent, because he loves to pilfer them greedily. (It stops him nibbling other more valuable things like my CD cases.)

He is a terrible scamp. Mum called him 'the inimitable Roderick', or sometimes 'Señor Roderigo' when he was being particularly dashing.

We got Roderick from this guy my mum was seeing last year, when he was only a small and baldy fellow. Roderick, I mean. (My mother's boyfriend back then, Dave, was man-sized and had lots and lots of hair.) Roderick was only tiny the first time I saw him, wriggling like a maggot into his mother's warm tummy. There were lots of little rat babies, but he was definitely the boldest one, and I picked him out as mine on that very first day.

Me and Mum went to the pet shop together and got all kinds of fancy rat-paraphernalia for when we were allowed to take him home. He was an absolute terror right away, all courage, staging complicated breakouts and nibbling his way right into one of the sofa cushions. Mum wasn't sure we could handle such a criminal mastermind in our lives, but I thought he was only fantastic, and he soon melted Mum's heart by balancing on things that were very high up, wearing what Mum called his 'You'll never catch me, copper!' face. He always came down eventually, especially after we learned to ignore him and eat delicious food pointedly until his inevitable surrender. 'They always come crawling back,' Mum would drawl, in a fancy-pants British accent. I'd roll my eyes at her and happily scratch my little rat-man's ears.

My father is not gone at all on my furry roommate. He doesn't like Roderick, and for that reason he will almost never venture into my room. Which is one more thing I love about having a pet rat. Initially I worried that my father's negativity would have a dreadful effect on poor Roderick's self-esteem. But he seems happy enough to chomp down all the rat food and fancy two-ply tissues that the moustachioed one's money can buy, and that's the main thing, I suppose. Anyway, the old man doesn't seem to care much about me either, and I'm absolutely grand.

Moving house can be difficult for an animal, but I suppose his little house is still the same, just in a different location. I'm keeping an eye on him, though, in case he gets rat-depression, which I read about online one day when he wasn't touching his food. I think we'll be okay.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

I don't know if I'm ready to go all the way to 'big girl school' yet. I don't have all my books and Mum isn't around to get them for me. Plus my hairy-faced father is always working, except when he is out for dinner with his stupid, boring friends or his girlfriend, Hedda. I call her Hedda Lettuce and sometimes Hedda Cabbage. But not to her face because I haven't met her yet.

I left the booklist that came in the post from my school on Dad's desk, but he hasn't mentioned it yet at all. He probably wouldn't even know what it is. I'll need a new uniform too, in a bigger size. I'm getting wider, spreading out and changing (I'm what they call a late developer, which is kind of irritating because I am developing fine, thank you very much. I quite like being able to jump up and down without getting walloped in the face by things that are both soft and womanly. Sadly, those days are almost behind me). I don't feel any bigger, though. If anything I should be getting smaller. Less important. More intangible and strange, like how I feel.

My Catholic schoolgirl costume (ooh-er) is not overly bad as uniforms go, although the black tartan skirt and/or trousers are a bit creepy and unflattering. There's also a plain white shirt and a dark greyish V-neck jumper with the crest on it which says something in Latin, which is the school motto and probably means 'Sit down and shut up'. It'll be a nice change from the navy gymslip etc. that I've worn since time began. Well, since time to go to school began, so for, like, eight years. Since I was but an innocent flower of five, full of hope and joy and wonder and a longing to impress my teacher with my mad finger painting skills. Needless to say, those days are a long, long way behind me.

I think I need a feisty new look to go with my new uniform and brand spanking new levels of academic pressure. The Old Man of the 'Tache has already made noises about this being the first year of the Junior Certificate cycle, which is the practice run for the Leaving Cert, and how I'm not to be slacking off at all but am to keep my nose to the grindstone, which sounds painful and kind of creepy. He should keep his nose to the grindstone; it's longer and infinitely less attractive than mine, like a cliff jutting out of the middle of his face.

I'm thinking about dyeing my hair – well, getting it dyed for me, so I...