Читать книгу Mr Stink - David Walliams - Страница 7

2 Icy Silence

“Mother?” said Annabelle.

Mother finished chewing her food completely, then swallowed it, before finally replying.

“Yes, my darling child?”

“Chloe just took one of her sausages off her plate and hid it in her napkin.”

It was Saturday evening, and the Crumb family sat at the dining room table, missing Strictly Come Dancing and The X-Factor as they ate their dinner. Mother had banned watching television and eating at the same time. She had decided that it was ‘awfully common’. Instead the family had to sit in icy silence and eat their dinner staring at the walls. Or sometimes Mother would choose a subject for discussion, normally what she would do if she ran the country. That was her absolute favourite. Mother had given up running a beauty salon to stand for Parliament, and had no doubt in her mind that one day she would be Prime Minister.

Mother had named the white Persian family cat Elizabeth, after the Queen. She was obsessed with Being Posh. There was a downstairs loo that was kept locked for ‘very important guests’, as if a member of the royal family was going to swing by for a waz. There was a china tea set in the cupboard that was ‘for best’, and had never once been used. Mother even sprayed air freshener in the garden. Mother would never go out, and not even answer the door, unless immaculately groomed, with her beloved pearls around her neck and her hair made stiff with enough hairspray to create its own hole in the ozone layer. She was so used to turning up her nose at everybody and everything, it was in danger of staying that way. Here’s a picture of her.

My word, she looks posh, doesn’t she?

Unsurprisingly Father, or Dad as he preferred to be called when Mother wasn’t around, opted for a quiet life and usually didn’t speak unless spoken to. He was a big powerful man, but his wife made him feel small inside. Dad was only forty, but he was already going bald and starting to stoop. He worked long hours at a car factory on the edge of the town.

“Did you hide a sausage in your napkin, Chloe?” demanded Mother.

“You are always trying to get me into trouble!” snapped Chloe.

This was true. Annabelle was two years younger than Chloe, and one of those children adults think are perfect, but other children don’t like because they are snotty little goody-goodies. Annabelle loved getting Chloe into trouble. She would lie on her bed in her bright pink room upstairs and roll around crying, shouting “CHLOE, GET OFF ME! YOU ARE HURTING ME!” even though Chloe was quietly writing away in her room next door. You could say that Annabelle was evil. She was certainly evil to her older sister.

“Oh, sorry Mother, it just slipped into my lap,” said Chloe guiltily. Her plan had been to smuggle the sausage out for Mr Stink. She had been thinking about him all evening, imagining him shivering out there in the cold dark December night as they sat in the warm, eating away.

“Well then Chloe, unroll it from your napkin and put it back on your plate,” ordered Mother. “I am so ashamed that we are even eating sausages for dinner. I gave your father strict instructions to dispatch himself to the supermarket and purchase four wild sea-bass fillets. And he comes home with a packet of sausages. If anyone called around and saw us eating food like this it would be hideously embarrassing. They’d think we were savages!”

“I am sorry, my darling wife,” protested Dad. “They were all out of wild sea-bass fillets.” He gave Chloe the tiniest wink as he said this, confirming her suspicion that he had deliberately disobeyed Mother’s orders. Chloe smiled at him discreetly. She and her dad both loved sausages and lots of other food that Mother didn’t approve of, like burgers, fish-fingers, fizzy drinks, and especially Mr Whippy ice-cream (’the devil’s spume’, Mother called it). “I have never eaten anything from a van,” she would say. “I’d rather die.”

“Right now, all hands on deck as we clear up,” said Mother when they had finished eating. “Annabelle, my precious angel, you clear the table, Chloe, you can wash up and Husband, you can dry.” When she said “all hands on deck”, what she really meant was everybody’s hands except hers. As the rest of the family all went about their duties Mother reclined on the sofa and started unwrapping a wafer-thin chocolate mint. She allowed herself one chocolate mint a day. She nibbled so infuriatingly slowly she made each one last an hour.

“One of my Bendicks luxury chocolate mints has gone walkies again!” she called out.

Annabelle shot Chloe an accusing look before returning to the dining room to collect some more plates. “I bet it was you, fatty!” she hissed.

“Be nice, Annabelle,” chided Dad.

Chloe felt guilty, even though it wasn’t her who had been scoffing her mother’s chocolates. She and Dad assumed their familiar positions at the sink.

“Chloe, why were you trying to hide one of your sausages?” he asked. “If you didn’t like it, you could have just said.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide it, Dad.”

“Then what were you doing with it?”

Suddenly Annabelle appeared with another stack of dirty plates and the pair fell silent. They waited a moment until she had gone.

“Well, Dad, you know that tramp who always sits on the same bench every—”

“Mr Stink?”

“Yes. Well, I thought his dog looked hungry and I wanted to bring her a sausage or two.”

It was a lie, but not a big one.

“Well, I suppose there isn’t any harm in giving his poor dog a bit of food,” said Dad. “Just this once though, you understand?”

“But—”

“Just this once, Chloe. Or Mr Stink will expect you to feed his dog every day. Now, I hid another packet of sausages behind the crème fraîche, whatever that is. I’ll cook them up for you before your mother gets up tomorrow morning and you can give them—”

“WHAT ARE YOU TWO CONSPIRING ABOUT?” demanded Mother from the sitting room.

“Oh, erm, we were just debating which of the Queen’s four children we most admire,” said Dad. “I am putting forward Anne for her equestrian skills, though Chloe is making a strong case for Prince Charles and his unrivalled range of organic biscuits.”

“Very good. Carry on!” boomed the voice from next door.

Dad smiled at Chloe cheekily.