What I Did Read Free Page B

it wants me to eat it but I don’t because he is cross so I put it in my pocket instead. We walk along the pavement. The white bits could be chewing gum which you should not drop or guano which is an excellent word for bird poo. Birds make whole islands out of it and they don’t know any better so don’t blame them. He is holding his arm with the plaster cast away from his body a bit as if it is still hot but it can’t be. Perhaps he is drying it. I don’t know and I can’t speak yet but I do know this: his arm is making me feel bad.
    When somebody makes you feel bad what should you do? Sadly there is no answer to this question, or rather wherever you are the answer is different. If you are in a game of chess the answer is that you should attack back because attacking back is the best form of defense. But school is a different cuttlefish. At school Miss Hart says the first thing you should never do when somebody is mean to you is retaliate back because Jesus wouldn’t. If you hit Jesus he just kisses your cheek. Or rather that is what he used to do. He is dead now but some people don’t think so because when he was alive he was excellent. The animal kingdom is different from the kingdom of heaven. When a warthog is cornered by a pride of lions it uses its razor-sharp tusks to infect slashing wounds. I found a dead cuttlefish washed up on the beach last summer and it was quite razor sharp, too, but I am less excellent than Jesus because here’s what I would do if I had that cuttlefish now: I would jab Dad’s bad hand with it.
    I walk behind a bit. Then I walk farther behind so that when we reach the zebra crossing — lie down there, zebra, we’re all going to drive over you unless somebody wants to walk on you instead — he has to wait for me to catch him up. The flashing-ball lights are pelicans which isn’t very realistic because you don’t get zebras and pelicans with the same habits in the wild.
    â€” Hurry up.
    I slow down a bit more.
    â€” Come on, stop dawdling.
    Dawdling is a gentle word when he says it like that and, look, he’s holding out his hand to me as I arrive. But do you know what, I am not ready yet, I’m just not, so I don’t take it, and he whips the hand back down to his side and says something I don’t hear because he says it in a quick quiet un-gentle way, so that although I know that it is mean I don’t know what it is exactly, and that’s exactly the effect he’s striding for.
    I walk straight past him onto the stripes.
    â€” Hey! He grips my shoulder hard and spins me around, jerking me back a step in a way that is not nice at all even before he makes it worse by shouting, — You don’t just walk out into the road, Billy! Hear me? No matter what!
    â€” But it’s a zebra—
    â€” Don’t talk back to me! How many times do I have to . . . You wait for me. We look both ways. We cross when I say.
    And on say he jerks me forward again so that my feet are scrabbling to keep up and you know what, this is very complicated. Shall I tell you why? I will, because you will never guess. There are two things. The first thing is that he hates roads. Or rather he hates the cars that go on the roads because the cars, he says quite often, to get it into my head, and normally he rubs my head when he says it, are modern-day top predators. Saltwater crocodiles, Siberian tigers, Great Whites. They’re out to get you so you have to be on your guard because there’s no way I’m going to lose you to one of them, okay? That’s the first thing. And the second thing is the even more complicated thing and it is this: he is actually quite pleased that I stepped into the road because now he has a proper reason to be cross with me. Spilling the coffee and running ahead and ducking through the sign thing and going too slowly and not putting on my shoes and waking him up early were all bad reasons to