Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 8

Ali dropped me off in his cab and even though everyone was about to get up at home I went straight to bed. Mum walked past my room a couple of times in her pyjamas, giving me her special “You stayed out too late” look, but I pretended not to notice.

I lay there for ages but I couldn’t sleep. Jed had Saturday morning telly on too loud. Mum was joining in with something really lame on the radio. Mercy had found my coat on the stairs and was slamming doors and ranting about the money I spent getting home, but it wasn’t them keeping me awake. All that’s quite normal for a Saturday and I usually sleep right through. Every time I closed my eyes, the urn was there on its crappy shelf, glaring at me, which was unsettling and made me open my eyes again. It was the strangest feeling, being reproached by an urn.

I got out of bed and put my clothes back on and went for a walk on the heath. It was a beautiful day, all vast blue sky and autumn colours and a clean breeze that made me forget I’d had no sleep, but I couldn’t relax into it. That part of the heath is covered with enormous crows. They’ve got massive feet and they walk around staring at their massive feet like they can’t believe how big they are. They all look like actors with their hands behind their backs, rehearsing the bit in that play when the king says “Now is the winter of our discontent …”

I watched them for a while and then I walked up to the top of kite hill and ate an apple. You can see the whole of London from up there pretty much: St Paul’s, the Telecom tower, the buildings at Canary Wharf and the docks. There were a few runners on the athletics track just below me and plenty of dog walkers and little kids, but not many old ladies and that set me wondering what all the old people who live in London got up to with their time.

What did the old lady in the cab office do before she did nothing all day in that urn?

Did she get up really, really early in the morning like most old people? Mum says that’s their work ethic, the same reason old men wear suits and ties instead of tracksuit bottoms, and old ladies queue up outside the post office half an hour before it even opens and have really clean curtains and stuff. But doesn’t getting up that early just mean there are more hours to fill with being old?

Before then I’d never thought what it was actually like to be a pensioner. I’d just weaved in and out of them on the pavement, and smirked with my friends at their funny hair and high-waisted trousers, and the way they make paying for something at a checkout last for ages just to have someone to talk to. One minute the thought never crossed my mind, the next I was really and truly concerned about what it was like to be old and stuck in London, where everyone moved faster than you and even the simplest thing could end up taking all day.

It was her. I know it was. It was my old lady, the dead one in the urn.

I remember sitting there on the hill with kites whipping through the air behind me and the thought occurring to me that she and I might actually be having some kind of conversation. A dead old lady was trying to educate me about the over-sixties from her place on the shelf. It was a good feeling, a hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling, like when you hear a wicked bit of music, or when you’re high and someone you’re really into is sitting next to you. I suspected I was making it up but that hardly mattered. I make a lot of things up that are important to me, like being irresistible to girls, or being moody and mysterious like my dad, or what my dad might be up to at any moment, even this one.