Читать книгу Boys on the Brain - Jean Ure, Stephen Lee, Jean Ure - Страница 16

Drove over to Wimbledon Dog Track with Mum and Harry. Not, alas, to see greyhounds but to look for vinyl at this record fair that’s held there.

Record fairs, it seems, are full of the weirdest people! Strange anoraky men clutching big bags and long lists of the stuff they’re looking for. They speak in these nerdy, high-pitched voices and they loom over you and breathe over you as you go through the records. And when they find one they think they might want, they take it out of its sleeve and hold it up to the light and peer at it this way and that way, sometimes through a magnifying glass. If they discover even the tiniest mark, totally invisible to the naked eye, they point it out, with great earnestness, to the person that’s selling it.

“Look at this,” they go, in their nerdy flutey voices. “There’s a mark about half a centimetre in. Can you see it? Just there, where my finger is… is it fly doings, or is it a scratch?”

I didn’t know that flies did things on records but apparently they do. And then it sticks and causes the needle to go thunk or to fly into the air.

I looked in vain, amongst all the anorakys, for anyone resembling Carlito. I look for boys who look like Carlito everywhere I go! They are very rare in this part of the world, though I did see a pizza delivery boy the other day who looked like him from a distance, only when I got close he turned out to be all nerdy and spotty. A big disappointment! But I live in hope.

Mum, meanwhile, lives in hope of finding this one particular album called Driftwood.

“If you come across it,” she told me, “buy it! No matter what the price.”

She gave me some money and sent me off, but I didn’t find it, and nor did she or Harry. I looked ever so hard! I mean, I do like to make her happy if I can. I waded through stacks and stacks of grungy old fly-spattered records, but it wasn’t there.

“What’s so special about it, anyway?” I said.

“It’s part of my youth,” said Mum. “Just imagine, Cresta! You’re missing out on so much! You won’t have anything to look back and remember when you’re my age.”

Oh, yes, I shall! I shall remember reading War and Peace.

I am now on page one hundred and forty-three.

Phew!