Blue Like Friday Read Free

real name is Alec, but Hal never calls him anything except “Him.” As you can gather, Hal is not too fond of Alec.
    Alec and Hal’s mum weren’t actually married. I don’t know why—most people of that age seem to be—but Hal had this theory that they had something up their sleeves, because Alec had moved in with them only a few weeks before “on a trial basis,” and Hal said that meant they were probably going to get hitched, and he was desperate to make sure that they didn’t.
    Fat chance of preventing that, if you ask me. Grown-ups have their own ideas when it comes to who they want to marry, and there’s no point in kids having an opinion, that’s for sure, because it’ll only End in Tears, as my mum says. (My mum is not bad for an adult, but like all mothers, she has these maddening little sayings.)
    â€œYou put pebbles in Alec’s shoes every night?” I imagine you could have heard the surprise in my voice several miles (or knots or fathoms or whatever it is) out to sea.
    â€œYeah,” said Hal offhandedly, as if everyone did it.
    â€œBut that’s mean,” I said. “Also ineffective.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘ineffective’?”
    â€œWell, Hal, think about it. If you found there were
stones in your shoes every single morning, what would you think?”
    â€œI’d think it must be a poor, unhappy boy trying to give me the message that I am not welcome in his family.”
    â€œNo, you wouldn’t, Hal. What you’d think is: somehow or other, for some unfathomable reason, there are pebbles in my shoes every morning; therefore, I should shake out my shoes before I put them on.”
    â€œOh,” said Hal. “I never thought of that.”
    â€œSo there’s no point, is there?” I said.
    But I bet he went on doing it anyway.
    I asked Hal a few more questions about his home life after that, and it turned out he had a whole one-boy campaign going on to make life difficult for Alec. For example, he used to leave the hot tap running—on purpose— to waste the hot water. Also, he opened the windows in cold weather so that they would have to pay more for the central heating. This took the biscuit for weird behavior, in my view, as well as being environment-unfriendly in the extreme. Anyway, it was probably his mother who paid the heating bills, since it was her house, but I suppose he wanted to annoy her as well.
    â€œBut what about global warming?” I said, when he let me in on this fiendish little secret.
    â€œI don’t think the heat escaping from our windows is going to melt any icebergs,” he said loftily.
    â€œIt’s not icebergs, you dolt,” I said. “It’s the ice cap . But
that’s not the point. The point is that it’s terribly wasteful.”
    â€œExactly,” he said. “Of their money. That’ll teach them.”
    â€œNo!” I said in exasperation. “It’s a waste of oil, which is a scarce resource, and it means even more fossil fuel is burned, and that contributes to global warming. That’s very irresponsible of you, Hal.”
    â€œOh!” he said. “I never thought of that.”
    There are a lot of things Hal hasn’t ever thought of, you may have noticed.
    â€œHal, you are so weird,” I said.
    And not all that desperately intelligent either, I thought to myself, because if your plan is to make sure your mother doesn’t marry someone, putting stones in his shoes is really not terribly likely to work, is it? It might give you some small evil pleasure, sure enough, but as a master plan for influencing the future shape of your family, I’d say it scores about zilch.
    â€œAnyway, I don’t understand what is so awful about Alec,” I said.
    â€œIt’s hard to explain,” Hal said shiftily.
    â€œWell, look, is he mean to you? Does he, you know, hit you or … um …