Читать книгу Feather Boy онлайн | страница 19

I fall backwards on to the bed. She re-set the alarm. She re-set the alarm! I don’t believe it. I pull the duvet over my head.

“Come on now,” she says, “seven-thirty. Chop chop.”

She leaves.

I wail, I moan, I thump the mattress. Then I get dressed.

“I’m on lates,” says Mum over breakfast. “Do you want me to walk you to school?”

“No,” I say. “No, thanks.” Niker says only girls and wusses are walked to school.

Mum notes what I eat (one slice of toast with strawberry jam), what I drink (nothing) and then she follows me to the bathroom and fiddles about while I clean my teeth. She watches me put my library book and football boots in my school bag and then I watch her as she takes them out again. She puts the boots, which are mud-free, in a plastic bag, examines the library book, remarks, “Haven’t you read this before?” and then replaces both items in the bag. After which she checks the time.

“You don’t have to go yet,” she says.

It’s twenty to nine. The journey to school – via The Dog Leg – is about five minutes. “I like being early,” I say. “I get to use the computers.” Actually Mr Biddulph doesn’t get in till nine-thirty and the computer room is locked like Fort Knox. But Mum doesn’t know that.

“I’ll get you a computer one day,” she says. “I’ll save up.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know you didn’t, love.”

“Mum…”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I peck her quickly on the cheek and go out the back way. As I shut the patio gate, I wave and then turn as if I was going in the direction of The Dog Leg.

Only the locals call it The Dog Leg. Its real name is the Cut, because that’s what it is, a zig-zag passage that acts as a short cut between The Lane and Stanhope Avenue. Some people say it’s called The Dog Leg because that’s how it’s shaped – like the back leg of a dog. Personally, I think that would make for one pretty deformed dog. The passage goes twenty yards east, then right-angles north for ten yards, then sharp east again for another ten and finally sharp north before coming out into daylight under the arch of two Stanhope Avenue houses, which are joined at the second floor level like some architectural Siamese twins. Other people say the passage is called The Dog Leg because that’s what happens there. Dogs lift their legs. At the lamp-posts. If only they knew.