The World of David Walliams: 7 Book Collection. David Walliams

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СКАЧАТЬ your napkin, Chloe?” demanded Mother.

      “You are always trying to get me into trouble!” snapped Chloe.

      This was true. Annabelle was two years younger than Chloe, and one of those children adults think are perfect, but other children don’t like because they are snotty little goody-goodies. Annabelle loved getting Chloe into trouble. She would lie on her bed in her bright pink room upstairs and roll around crying, shouting “CHLOE, GET OFF ME! YOU ARE HURTING ME!” even though Chloe was quietly writing away in her room next door. You could say that Annabelle was evil. She was certainly evil to her older sister.

      “Oh, sorry Mother, it just slipped into my lap,” said Chloe guiltily. Her plan had been to smuggle the sausage out for Mr Stink. She had been thinking about him all evening, imagining him shivering out there in the cold dark December night as they sat in the warm, eating away.

      “Well then Chloe, unroll it from your napkin and put it back on your plate,” ordered Mother. “I am so ashamed that we are even eating sausages for dinner. I gave your father strict instructions to dispatch himself to the supermarket and purchase four wild sea-bass fillets. And he comes home with a packet of sausages. If anyone called around and saw us eating food like this it would be hideously embarrassing. They’d think we were savages!”

      “I am sorry, my darling wife,” protested Dad. “They were all out of wild sea-bass fillets.” He gave Chloe the tiniest wink as he said this, confirming her suspicion that he had deliberately disobeyed Mother’s orders. Chloe smiled at him discreetly. She and her dad both loved sausages and lots of other food that Mother didn’t approve of, like burgers, fish-fingers, fizzy drinks, and especially Mr Whippy ice-cream (’the devil’s spume’, Mother called it). “I have never eaten anything from a van,” she would say. “I’d rather die.”

      “Right now, all hands on deck as we clear up,” said Mother when they had finished eating. “Annabelle, my precious angel, you clear the table, Chloe, you can wash up and Husband, you can dry.” When she said “all hands on deck”, what she really meant was everybody’s hands except hers. As the rest of the family all went about their duties Mother reclined on the sofa and started unwrapping a wafer-thin chocolate mint. She allowed herself one chocolate mint a day. She nibbled so infuriatingly slowly she made each one last an hour.

      “One of my Bendicks luxury chocolate mints has gone walkies again!” she called out.

      Annabelle shot Chloe an accusing look before returning to the dining room to collect some more plates. “I bet it was you, fatty!” she hissed.

      “Be nice, Annabelle,” chided Dad.

      Chloe felt guilty, even though it wasn’t her who had been scoffing her mother’s chocolates. She and Dad assumed their familiar positions at the sink.

      “Chloe, why were you trying to hide one of your sausages?” he asked. “If you didn’t like it, you could have just said.”

      “I wasn’t trying to hide it, Dad.”

      “Then what were you doing with it?”

      Suddenly Annabelle appeared with another stack of dirty plates and the pair fell silent. They waited a moment until she had gone.

      “Well, Dad, you know that tramp who always sits on the same bench every—”

      “Mr Stink?”

      “Yes. Well, I thought his dog looked hungry and I wanted to bring her a sausage or two.”

      It was a lie, but not a big one.

      “Well, I suppose there isn’t any harm in giving his poor dog a bit of food,” said Dad. “Just this once though, you understand?”

      “But—”

      “Just this once, Chloe. Or Mr Stink will expect you to feed his dog every day. Now, I hid another packet of sausages behind the crème fraîche, whatever that is. I’ll cook them up for you before your mother gets up tomorrow morning and you can give them—”

      “WHAT ARE YOU TWO CONSPIRING ABOUT?” demanded Mother from the sitting room.

      “Oh, erm, we were just debating which of the Queen’s four children we most admire,” said Dad. “I am putting forward Anne for her equestrian skills, though Chloe is making a strong case for Prince Charles and his unrivalled range of organic biscuits.”

      “Very good. Carry on!” boomed the voice from next door.

      Dad smiled at Chloe cheekily.

       3 The Wanderer

      Mr Stink ate the sausages in an unexpectedly elegant manner. First he took out a little linen napkin and tucked it under his chin. Next he took an antique silver knife and fork out of his breast pocket. Finally he produced a dirty gold-rimmed china plate, which he gave to the Duchess to lick clean before he set down the sausages neatly upon it.

      Chloe stared at his cutlery and plate. This seemed like another clue to his past. Had he perhaps been a gentleman thief who crept into country houses at midnight and made off with the family silver?

      “Do you have any more sausages?” asked Mr Stink, his mouth still full of sausage.

      “No, just those eight I’m afraid,” replied Chloe.

      She stood at a safe distance from the tramp, so that her eyes wouldn’t start weeping at the smell. The Duchess looked up at Mr Stink as he ate the sausages, with a heartbreaking longing that suggested that all love and all beauty was contained in those tubes of meat.

      “There you go, Duchess,” said Mr Stink, slowly lowering half a sausage into his dog’s mouth. The Duchess was so hungry she didn’t even chew; instead she swallowed it in half a millisecond before returning to her expression of sausage-longing. Had any man or beast ever eaten a sausage so quickly? Chloe was half-expecting a gentleman in a blazer and slacks with a clipboard and stopwatch to appear and declare that the little black dog had set a new sausage-eating international world record!

      “So, young Chloe, is everything fine at home?” asked Mr Stink, as he let the Duchess lick his fingers clean of any remnants of sausage juice.

      “I’m sorry?” replied a befuddled Chloe.

      “I asked if everything was fine at home. If things were tickety-boo I am not sure you would be spending your Saturday talking to an old vagabond like me.”

      “Vagabond?”

      “I don’t like the word ‘tramp’. It makes you think of someone who smells.”

      Chloe tried to conceal her surprise. Even the Duchess looked puzzled and she didn’t speak English, only Dog.

      “I prefer vagabond, or wanderer,” continued Mr Stink.

      The way he put it, thought Chloe, it sounded almost poetic. Especially ‘wanderer’. She would love to be a wanderer. She would wander all around the world if she could. Not stay in this boring little town where nothing happened that hadn’t happened the day before.

      “There’s nothing wrong СКАЧАТЬ