Читать книгу Sarah Lean - 3 Book Collection - Sarah Lean, Sarah Lean - Страница 19

I’D BEEN SAVING THE PIZZA FOR THE TRAMP, but the dog sniffed around my pocket. And even though I could see he was really hungry he took the pizza gently from the napkin. Then he licked my fingers. I patted him and stroked him. I couldn’t help loving him.

Then Dad called, told me and Luke to come over. The dog followed without me even asking. That’s the brilliant thing about dogs. They don’t say, Where are we going? They just come with you.

Luke ducked out of the way as the dog trotted beside me towards him, but was soon ruffling and patting him and looking impressed. But not Dad.

“Where the hell did it come from?” Dad said, pulling us behind him, like he was snatching us out of the mouth of a monster. The dog hung back, his head down, his tail still.

Dad tried to find the word that would make the dog go away, flapped his arms and said, “Shoo, go on! Fetch! Off with you! GO AWAY!”

He was just like the people at school. They were scared of the dog because he was so big. They didn’t stop to look into his soft eyes and see he wasn’t trying to do any harm.

I kept looking round, thinking Mum might be there, somewhere.

The dog’s ears went up, as if he heard something, and suddenly he bounded off in big lollopy gallops, like he was in slow motion. He disappeared behind the bushes.

Dad turned to me, shouted, “For heaven’s sake, Cally! What’re you playing at?” He paced and shouted. “You should know better than to go up to a strange dog without checking with the owner, or without checking with me first.”

He looked at me. He rolled his papers. I could see he was trying really hard not to blow his top. “Don’t do that again. D’you hear me?” He took a breath to calm down. “Are you all right?”

Obviously not now he’d shouted at me.

Dad sat down hard on the bench, curling the papers into a tight tube. He looked at his watch. He muttered sorry, and something about everything going to be fine.

I could feel something bad coming with those words. Why do people say everything’s going to be fine when they don’t mean it at all? It’s what the nurse says before she jabs you with a needle. Before she puts Savlon on your graze and makes it sting like crazy. After she tells you she’s very sorry that your mum’s never coming back. They are going to hurt you and then give you something stupid like a cherry lollipop. That’s how you know it’s not going to be fine.

Dad took a deep breath, sat us down either side of him. He unrolled his papers.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said.

He smoothed the sheets. The top one said, Second Floor Flat to Rent, Overlooking the Common.

He said, “We’ve got to move out of our house.”

Nobody said anything. When you don’t want to believe something, it’s like you get instantly frozen in ice. You can’t move and you can’t blink.

As we left the park, Luke was saying, “What do you mean? Why are we moving? Where are we going?” Hundreds of questions.

But Dad wouldn’t answer. He just said, “Don’t say anything until you’ve seen it.”

And I didn’t say anything. Because I was already sure by then that nothing I said would make any difference.

But what I remember most was that was the day I decided the big silver-grey dog’s name was going to be Homeless. And that was because Jed, the tramp, was standing on the other side of the road opposite the park. He was wearing a big pair of sunglasses. Mrs Brooks’s sunglasses. Next to him was the giant silver-grey dog with a cardboard sign around his neck. It said HOMELESS.