Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 41

the surgical instruments to mend our wounded soldiers. The war, that killed so many, made my family rich.

‘Well, I want to be the daddy,’ Anna said. ‘It’s my house so I can say.’

‘Oh, all right then.’

‘Well, I’m off to work now,’ Anna said, ‘and when I come home you can have a baby.’

‘All right.’

I poured some water out of a jam jar into tin of earth and stirred it round and round with an old spoon.

‘I’ll get the dinner ready,’ I said.

‘OK,’ Anna said and walked off down the garden towards the blackcurrant bushes. I sat in the darkness of the air-raid shelter, stirring the mud. I stood up and rocked Anna’s doll’s pram backwards and forwards like I’d seen her do. The doll looked up at me with one eye shut and the other stuck wide open.

I could see cobwebs on the ceiling and thought of all the spiders hanging in the shadows looking down at me. They were all going to fall down the back of my neck and drop their cobwebs on my face.

My mother screamed at spiders and taught me to.

I dropped the spoon and ran out into the sunshine.

‘The baby’s crying,’ I told Anna, who was sitting on the grass stroking my cat Tigger.

‘Well, you’re the mummy,’ she said. ‘It probably wants its nappy changed.’

‘I think it wants to come out into the garden,’ I said.

‘It can’t,’ said Anna. ‘It’s got to have a sleep.’

‘I don’t want to play any more.’

‘But I haven’t come home from work yet,’ Anna said.

‘Well, I don’t like being the mummy,’ I replied. ‘I want to go home.’

‘I’ll show you my wee-wee,’ Anna said.

‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘You haven’t got one.’

Tigger wandered off across the lawn and jumped back over the fence into my garden and I went home after him.