Читать книгу Mr Skip - Michael Morpurgo, Michael Morpurgo - Страница 6

I had to keep Mister Skip a secret. I didn’t want Mum knowing anything about him, not until I’d put him together, not until her birthday. So I used the lock-up garage. We didn’t have a car, but we did have a leaky lock-up where Mum never went, but I did. I went there whenever I wanted to be alone. It was my secret den, a bit smelly and dark and damp, but one end of it stayed dry, mostly. I’d made it as comfy as I could. I had a table in there under the window at the back and a chair and a bit of old carpet – all scrounged from the skip of course. So that’s where I hid Mister Skip. That’s where I planned to fix him up, and he needed an awful lot of fixing.

For a start there were some bits of him missing completely – one of his little hands and the top of his red bobble hat. I found the missing hand in the skip, in amongst someone’s disgustingly slimy rubbish bags. I looked and looked, but I never did find the bit of his hat. It took me a couple of days, but in the end I managed to borrow some glue from the art cupboard at school, and some paints and some brushes. I told my teacher, Miss Munroe, that they were for a project I was working on at home. She seemed a little surprised at my sudden enthusiasm for art, and asked if she could see whatever it was I was working on when it was finished. “Maybe we could have it in the art exhibition for Parents’ Evening, Jackie,” she said. But she soon forgot all about it – thank goodness.

So now I had all I needed to put Mister Skip back together again. But I had to work fast. It was now only twelve days till Mum’s birthday, and I wanted to make him perfect for her. I wanted him to look just how he must have done before he became all neglected and battered and broken in half.

First of all I scrubbed him down with a nailbrush. Then, when he was dry, I glued him back together, top half to bottom half, and I gave him back his missing hand. I filled his holes and cracks with Polyfilla and sanded down all his chips and scratches. Then I began to paint him, trying as best as I could to match the colours that were already there. His chubby cheeks had to be bright pink and his beard had to be white as white. He looked a bit like a mini Father Christmas, I thought, on a toadstool. His hat I painted bright red, his little boots too; and all his buttons had to be sparkling silver. I pinched some of Mum’s special nail varnish for that – she didn’t miss it. As for his trousers they should have been blue, but I couldn’t find any blue paint in the art cupboard, so I made them green instead. And I made the toadstool look more like a toadstool again. Then I varnished him all over so that the paint would never come off.

By the time I was finished he was without any doubt the smartest shiniest garden gnome in all the world. All that had to be fixed now was the missing bit of his bobble hat. In the end I decided the best thing to do was to cover it up with a real hat. I did a swap with Barry: my Harry Potter sweatshirt – the one Gran gave to me for Christmas that had a hole in it – for his Liverpool red woolly hat, also with a hole in it. It fitted Mister Skip perfectly, and he looked really pleased with it too.

That was the strange thing about Mister Skip. Every day I worked on him he seemed to look happier and happier, so happy sometimes that I thought he really might burst out laughing. He never did. I mean he couldn’t, could he? After all he was only plaster, I knew that. But sometimes after we’d been alone together in the lock-up for a while, I came to think of him almost as a real, live person. I suppose that was why I began talking to him – it just seemed natural somehow.

I told him all about Mum and me, our whole life story, about school, about Barry and Marty, about the Crazy Cossacks, about everything. He knew things about me I’d never even told Mum. He’d never say anything back of course. But once or twice I thought I heard a chuckling inside the lock-up when I left it to go home.

There were a couple of days still before Mum’s birthday, and after school I’d spend all the time I could in the lock-up with Mister Skip. I’d just sit there admiring him, admiring my amazing handiwork, and looking forward to seeing the look on Mum’s face when I gave him to her on her birthday. But then I began to think about him, about what was going on inside his head. I couldn’t help wondering how lonely and miserable he must be left alone in the lock-up most of the day and all night without me. I realised I was beginning to think of him not as a painted garden gnome at all, but as a friend who I liked to be with and who seemed to like being with me. Silly, I know, but that’s how I felt.

It was on the last evening before Mum’s birthday, and I was sitting there with Mister Skip in the lock-up just chatting away like I did, about how one day I would beat Barry and all the rest of the Crazy Cossacks out of sight, how I was going to wipe the floor with them. “I’ll show them,” I was saying. “I will too, honest. You watch me.”

As usual Mister Skip just sat there smiling at me and never saying a word. But that was the thing. Suddenly I found myself almost expecting he would say something. He didn’t. So I just went on gabbling. “Mister Skip, d’you know what Mum and I want more than anything else? First we want to build stables for all the horses on the estate, so they don’t get all cold and miserable in the winter. Then we want to get off this lousy place. We’re always on about it, always dreaming. We’d like a little house of our own in the country where there’s green fields all around and hills and big wide skies, and no high buildings. And she’ll keep chickens and ducks, and I’ll have my own horse. I don’t care what he’s like really. Four legs and a tail, that’s all I want. I’m not fussy, so long as he goes fast. I want to gallop out over the hills, splash through the rivers, jump the hedges.