Читать книгу Starring The Sleepover Club - Narinder Dhami - Страница 7

So there we all were, sitting in a row on Mrs Sidebotham’s cream-coloured sofa, trying not to look bored out of our skulls. Which we were, actually.

“Oh, come on, girls.” Andy sighed from behind the camcorder. “Do something interesting, can’t you?”

We all looked down at our feet. Andy sighed again, and lowered the camcorder.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said, “You don’t usually sit here and do nothing when you come round for one of these sleepovers, do you?”

We all looked at each other. No, of course we didn’t usually sit there and do nothing when we had a sleepover. But today was different. Today we were being filmed, and although Andy wasn’t exactly Fliss’s real dad, he was still sort of like a parent. That meant that some of the things we might have done, we couldn’t do. So the safest thing was to sit on the sofa and do absolutely nothing. After all, as my grandma says, why go looking for trouble?

When we’d first arrived at Fliss’s, it had been fun being filmed. Fliss’s mum had made a great big tea, and we’d all sat down to eat, while Andy kept dodging around the table trying to film us all. It took us about ten minutes to get over the urge to wave and grin like an idiot every time he pointed the camera in our direction, and then after that we were OK.

It was after tea was over that things started to go wrong. If it had been a normal sleepover, there were lots of things we could have done. Sometimes we just used to sit and talk, until it was time to go to bed. But a lot of the things we talked about were Private and Top Secret, and we didn’t feel like talking about things like that with Andy and his camcorder sticking to us like glue.

One of the other things we do when we go to Fliss’s is think of ways to annoy her snobby neighbours. They’re called Charles and Jessica Watson-Wade (yes, really) and they have a baby called Bruno, which I thought was a dog’s name. The last time we slept over at Fliss’s, we had a killer of a time winding-up the Watson-Wades. Fliss’s mum went mad (and so did every other mum and dad), but it was worth it. The problem was, how could we play Winding-up the Watson-Wades when Andy and his camera were right behind us?

So Kenny had suggested that we played barging contests, one of our International Gladiators games. One person’s the horse, the other’s the rider, and you have to barge the other horse and rider off the lawn in the back garden. We always play barging contests when we sleepover at Fliss’s, because there’s not much else we can do. Fliss’s bedroom is too small for really tough stuff, and we can’t do anything inside because her mum is so house-proud. But the garden’s quite big, and we can play barging contests out there as much as we want to.

Not today, though. Fliss had gone pale at the very thought.