Blood Family by Anne Fine

Author:Anne Fine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RHCP

Eddie

My school might not have been as classy as the one Alice was sent to, but it was good at trips. It seemed to me that every other week a gang of us would pile into a minibus. Off we’d go, mucking about till one of the teachers stood up to tell us to behave ourselves. At last we’d settle down – until we reached wherever it was. A railway museum. An art gallery. A country meadow where no one had ever used a single chemical, crazy with flowers. Once we went off to see some iron bridge famous for something I’ve forgotten. Longest this. Highest that. Whatever. All I remember is how black and sturdy the thing looked, towering above us, and how annoyed we were when we were told that we’d be staying underneath.

As we got older, most of the trips became more dull, almost as if the teachers who arranged them were trying to warn us where we might end up if we didn’t knuckle down. We went to some enormous book storage hangar where giant robot arms picked out dull, tightly wrapped packages, and men and women in overalls scuttled along the stacks, sorting out what they called ‘glitches’. I missed the trip to the cosmetics factory. (Alice was livid with me since she’d known I had copped out that morning, pretending to feel sicker than I was, and everyone came home with buckets of free stuff for mums and sisters.)

Then, one day, we were divided into even smaller groups. It was a visit to the university, and we were dropped off outside different buildings. Department of Engineering. Modern Studies. Fine Art. Mine was the very last group to leave the bus. Our building didn’t even have a name outside, but in the hall there were some animal skeletons in large glass cases, like in a museum.

The five of us trooped up the stairs behind a girl in a white coat who had the longest ponytail I’d ever seen. Her name, she told us, was Stefania, and though her English sounded perfect to me she had an accent someone whispered was Romanian or Russian. She led us down a drab green corridor into a long laboratory which stank of some strange minty chemical.

She told us what it was, but I’ve forgotten.

Then we went through another set of swinging doors. Stefania told us we were now in Palaeoanthropology, and we had such a noisy laugh about that that she spun round and rather fiercely made us chant it about ten times over, till we could say it properly. (I still can.) The people there were working with fragments of bone. Some were spread out in separate rough circles, like jigsaw bits sorted before you start a puzzle. Some were just heaped in trays. At first, Stefania was interesting, talking about the things you could work out from faces. I do remember her telling us Neanderthal man’s great massive brow ridge (she had to explain to Justin which bit of the face she meant) was there to make him look even more threatening when he glared.

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