What I Did Read Free

he’s there too so it’s impossible not to say it.
    â€” Hey Dad, you do it too. Go on, flap your arms.
    He doesn’t join in or even pat the top of my head and say not now, Son, or even do the ignoring, but grabs me by one wing and grips it.
    â€” Don’t. I’m not in the mood, he says.
    It’s hard to think then but albatrosses along with other seabirds are sometimes lost flying into storms. And when they’re lost what do they do? They just keep on flapping, of course, until they die. The storm doesn’t mind. I would prefer not to flap but I can’t and it’s annoying, I know that, and Dad sees my free arm flapping.
    â€” Don’t ignore me, he growls. — Stop waving that arm about before I . . .
    He lets go and shakes his head and I run off up the road with my wings held tight to my sides, controlling my tragedy with tiny movements of my finger feathers only!
    â€” Don’t go too far ahead! Dad shouts after me.
    Don’t, don’t, don’t. Very boring. And it’s going to get worse because look, look, here’s a cat flap.
    â€” Don’t!
    It’s not a real cat flap, but a cat-flap sign hanging on a square stand that they stick outside shops to make you buy ice cream and newspapers. Very entertaining!
    â€” Don’t!
    I won’t, but I will, because I’m far enough ahead. He might be saying don’t about something else and even if he isn’t I have to do it anyway. I have to duck down and push my way through the cat-flap sign to pop out the other side. Victory! But oh no a bit of paper slips out of the sign as it flaps back down again. This is the problem. I jump up and down near it until he catches up with me.
    â€” What part of DON’T don’t you understand? he growls.
    I pick up the bit of paper and try and push it into the slot between the two plastic halves of the cat-flap sign thing but sadly they have suction. Imagine if you had to put sandwiches together like that, by posting the ham in edgeways between the two bits of bread that were already stuck together with butter. It is too tricky and the paper tears and falls onto the ground again. It has some words written on it. Horse, I think, and Pies.
    â€” Give me that.
    Dad bends over to pick up the paper. Some grapes are green but his face goes like the other ones, red grapes. Ribena doesn’t come from them but I like it. Even with only one good hand he manages to stick the sign back together again. Prime-apes have posable thumbs too.
    â€” I’m not in the mood today, Son. Not. In. The. Mood.
    â€” Okay I know okay.
    He’s still at my level. When I grow up I too will have sharp hairs in my chin.
    â€” Are you cross? I ask.
    He puffs out his cheeks and slowly shakes his head. — Let’s just carry on, he says. First-time rule, understand?
    I nod.
    Â 
    The first-time rule is that you have to do what you’re told the first time you’re told to do it, not the second or third. It is quite boring but worse than that it is sadly impossible to do right the whole time because it only works if you think about the exact things you are being told and not about other things as well, and the thing about other things is that it is extremely hard not to notice them because they are massive and everywhere. At school in Reception Miss Petit said God is like that but she made a sad mistake. God does not exist. He is a segment of the imagination.
    Â 
    â€” Come on. Hold my hand, he says.
    We walk along the pavement a bit more and I think hard about nothing. It’s hard. Cracks in the pavement. Cracks.
    Then Dad’s hand stops so I stop too. We’re outside the café and this is why we walked this way round to the park, the slightly longer up-hilly way.
    â€” Look at that. Barely seven o’clock. Corporate tenacity. Shall we?
    â€” Yes, I say. — Yes.
    We go in. Dad orders a coffee and I do my best to stand still which is