Boys Beware. Jean Ure
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Название: Boys Beware
Автор: Jean Ure
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9780007439966
isbn:
Yessss!!! Needless to say, we pumped like crazy, trying to find out whether he was gorgeous or geeky, but Ali is just so unsatisfactory. All she could say was, “He’s got brown hair.” The only thing she noticed … brown hair!
“Well, that’s cool,” said Tash.
“Yeah, like really unusual,” I said.
We were being sarcastic, but sarcasm rolls right off Ali.
She said, “I only saw him for about two seconds.”
Well. Two seconds is all that me and Tash would need!
“Do you think you would recognise him if you saw him again?” I said. Still being sarcastic.
“I’m not sure,” said Ali. “I might do.” She was being serious!
Tomorrow is Sunday, so with any luck we shall manage to catch a glimpse for ourselves. We plan on going up and down the stairs quite a lot, and generally hanging about on the landing.
On the whole, it has been a good day. Promising, I think I would call it. It’s now eleven o’clock and I am going to lie down. Ali is tucked away in her broom cupboard, with her Star Treks and Fat Man, and I am here in the big bed with Tash. Tash is giggling and twitching her toes. She had better not twitch in the night!
Sunday
She did! She twitched! In the middle of the night I woke up to find the bottom of the duvet dancing a jig. I had to kick her before she would stop. When I taxed her with it, she said that I’d made whiffling noises with my mouth.
“Like this!” And she began blowing air bubbles through her lips, like a goldfish.
I don’t believe that I whiffled. She is just saying it to get back at me! She definitely twitched because why else would the duvet have been going up and down? We are not going to fall out over it, however; me and Tash never fall out. In any case, as Tash so wisely said, it’s good practice for when we get married.
Talking of marriage … we still haven’t seen The Boy. I went up and down the stairs seventeen times, and hung about like mad on the landing, but he never appeared. But we have discovered his name! It is Gus. Gus O’Shaugnessy. We got O’Shaugnessy off the downstairs doorbell, otherwise I most probably wouldn’t have known how to spell it. Auntie Jay told us that he was called Gus. A good name! We think it’s really neat. Far more promising than, say, Kevin or Shane. I’m thinking of Kevin Trodd who lives in our road and is the sort of boy that would cut worms in half, just to see if they wriggled and Shane Mackie who is Avril Mackie’s brother and a bit of a nerd. Gus sounds like … well! We shall see. He has to emerge at some stage. When he does, we shall be watching!
We went down to Auntie Jay’s again for dinner. Her friend Jo was still there. She is quite funny and sharp and ever so left-wing. Dad would most probably have had a seizure! But me and Tash like her as she makes us laugh, and also she is not at all patronising. Like Anne and Robert last night kept asking us these really dumb questions about which year we were in, and when did we get to take our GCSEs, and what subjects we were best at, and what did we want to do when we left school, yawn yawn. I know they were only trying to be polite but you could tell they really weren’t in the least bit interested. Jo doesn’t bother with questions, she engages you in conversation and actually listens to what you say. We like that!
Me and Tash, of course, were desperate to learn more about The Boy (which is how we referred to him before we found out his name). However, we didn’t want to ask Auntie Jay ourselves in case she got it into her head that we were interested and flew into a Mum-like panic, so we got Ali to do it for us. We gave her strict instructions.
“Don’t just go jumping in. Be discreet.”
“Like how?” said Ali.
“Like sort of … building up slowly,” said Tash. “You could ask about his dad, and what he does, and how long he’s lived here, and then you could just, like … slip it in.”
“I happened to bump into his son on the stairs last night. That sort of thing. ”
“Then what?” said Ali.
“Oh, well, then you could sort of very casually ask what his name was, and how old he is, and where he goes to school, and—” Tash waved a hand. “Stuff like that.”
We should have known better than to trust Ali. She has no idea how to be discreet! First off we had to kick her, quite hard, under the table before we could get her going; and then when she did get going she went at it like a mad creature. There wasn’t any stopping her!
“What does that man do that lives here? The one that lives underneath us? The one with the son? Has he lived here long?”
“Andrew?” said Auntie Jay. “He moved in last year, after he broke up with his wife. He’s a writer, he writes educational books. A very interesting man! He—”
“What about his son?” said Ali.
Oh, God! I nearly died. I saw that Tash had gone bright red.
“What about him?” said Auntie Jay.
“Well, like, what is he called and how old is he, and all that sort of thing.”
“Ali!” Tash was mouthing at her across the table. I was kicking at her.
“He’s fourteen,” said Auntie Jay. “His name is Gus. What else would you like to know?”
Ali shot an inquiring glance at Tash. Tash, deliberately, kept her eyes on her plate.
Auntie Jay seemed amused. She said, “How about where he goes to school? Whether he’s got a girlfriend?”
“Yes!” Ali beamed, triumphantly, at me. I squirmed. Tash concentrated very hard on shovelling food into her mouth.
“He goes to Simon Standish,” said Auntie Jay. “As to whether he’s got a girlfriend –” She was laughing at us! “ – I’m afraid I really couldn’t say. But I’m sure you’ll make it your priority to find out!”
At least she didn’t fly into a panic and remind us of the No Boys rule. Just to reassure her, however, we have stuck a big sign on the outside of our door:
Ali wanted to know what it meant. She said, “What peril? What would happen if they came in?”
“We’d jump on them!” СКАЧАТЬ