A Dog Called Homeless. Sarah Lean
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Название: A Dog Called Homeless
Автор: Sarah Lean
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Детская проза
isbn: 9780007455027
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Then Mrs Brooks had my elbow and was taking me back to her office.
“I’ll deal with this, Mr Brown,” she called. “What on earth did you think you were doing, Cally? I think we need to have another chat.”
But there wasn’t time. Daniel Bird was standing in the doorway of her office poking bits of Blu-tack into the door catch while he waited for his session.
“What’s she done now?” he said.
I still had a picture of Mum and the dog in my mind, clear and bright and beautiful. And all I could think was that they’d both come to me, without me even asking.
I TOOK THE SPONSORSHIP FORM HOME. LUKE signed it. My brother’s thirteen. He looks like my mum; he’s got her thick brown hair and he’s just about as tall as she was. But he’s serious and boring.
I get on Luke’s nerves. I have to. He spends a lot of time in his room on his own, racing cars on his computer. His ambition is to beat someone called Sting who has the highest score. He tells me to shut up all the time; he can’t break records and reduce his lap times with me banging about in the background. Dad tells me to leave him alone. He says you have to give a man a bit of peace and quiet. I remember Mum used to say she liked noise in the house. She said, “When the kids are quiet, you know there’s trouble.” But Dad doesn’t seem to remember anything she used to say.
Luke calculated sponsoring me probably wouldn’t cost him much. But he said it would be worth every penny. “I wish it was forever,” he said.
Be careful what you wish for, that’s what Mum would have said.
“Dad, guess what?” Luke said, flinging the form miles away from my hands. “I’ve taken 1.4 seconds off my lap time.” He slid over the back of the sofa and sat next to Dad, slumping his feet on the table.
“Hmm?” said Dad.
“And that was in heavy rain.”
“Good for you,” Dad said, without looking away from the TV. “Take your feet off the table. And sit down, Cally. I’m trying to watch this.”
When Inspector Morse finished, I showed Dad the sponsorship form. He hesitated then read the details.
“Sponsored silence, eh?”
“Miss Steadman said I could do it.”
“She did?”
“And Mrs Brooks.”
“Good old Mrs Brooks,” he muttered. Which isn’t what he usually said about her. “Next Tuesday?”
“All day. Why?”
“Nothing. There’s a meeting at work. I’m going to be late home, that’s all.”
He wrote fifty pence in the box on the form that said how much you were going to pledge for each hour of silence. Then he looked at the telly again.
“Dad,” I said, “I saw Mum again. She came to school.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his eyebrows, shook his head.
“She brought a dog with her.”
Dad crossed out the fifty pence and changed it to a pound. “Time for bed,” he said.
I watched him flick the channels to find another detective programme. He liked mysteries; he liked to try to guess whodunnit.
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON TUESDAY MORNING I LAY in bed thinking about my mum and the giant silver dog. In my daydream I said, “Mum, where are you?”
And she said, Hello, Cally, I’m right here.
And I said, “Where?”
And she said, About an inch away.
I felt her nearness, but I couldn’t see her. I opened my eyes.
I watched the dust fairies trapped in a stream of sunlight between the curtains. Little pieces of almost nothing that disappeared when the sun went in. Slowly and silently they turned, undecided about which way to go. They coasted and floated. I whispered to them because they were small and fragile. “Make up your mind,” I said. Then I blew on them and soon they were whirling away.
Dad came in. Same old checked shirt with the ink stain on the pocket, same old crumpled work trousers. Same old messy hair and beard, dark and speckled with grey, like he’d been out overnight in a frost.
“You awake?” he said.
He picked my school clothes off the floor and put them on the end of my bed. He stood there a minute.
“You’ve got that charity thing today, haven’t you?”
“Sponsored silence,” I said.
It was nice that he remembered. He was so forgetful these days. He forgot he had to do the ironing. He forgot to shave. He forgot to pay the phone bill and it took weeks for them to connect us up again. He was just like a raggedy old bear still sleepy from hibernating over winter. Except winter was ages ago.
He used to be a different sort of Dad, always joking about with Luke, rough and tumbling on the sofa. He always helped me with maths homework, straight after tea. He’d show me how to do a question, then he’d do a bit and I’d finish it, until I could do it by myself. You could sit on his lap and he’d listen to you tell him anything.
I climbed out from under the bedcovers and stood up on the bed so I was as tall as him. I held his face in my hands, like he used to do to me. I wanted to say something about Mum, to say remember when … remember? Like I’d already asked a thousand times. I searched his eyes, looked to see if Mum was in there. But it was like the morning after there’s been heaps of snow and you can’t tell what’s underneath any more.
So I said, “Dad? What if I can’t help it and I say something?”
He squeezed me. “I won’t mind. You’ll be doing your best.”
He went off in a dream, opened the curtains, sent the dust fairies into the shadows.
So that was it. My best didn’t sound like much. He was just the same as all the others who didn’t think I could do it.
“I’ll mind,” I whispered to the invisible spinning dust. And those were my final words.